There were housekeepers who complained that a rectory was a boring place where nothing much happened, but Marie Murkin was not among them. She sat now in her kitchen having a cup of tea with Stella Morris, who had worked at a string of rectories, never yet finding one to her sufficient liking to remain. When possibility called elsewhere she was ever ready to respond, but within months her disappointment began again.
“I feel that life is passing me by, Marie.”
“Then get married, for heaven's sake.”
“Don't talk to me about marriage. I may be dissatisfied at Sacred Heart but I haven't lost my mind.”
“You never thought of it?”
“Thinking doesn't get you married.”
“Or much else.”
“How long have you been here, Marie?”
“I was already here when Father Dowling was given the parish.”
“That doesn't answer my question.”
“It's all the answer you'll be getting. Next you'll be asking me my age.”
“I wish I had your stamina and contentment.”
Marie wished that Father Dowling could hear this unsolicited testimonial.
The truth was, she had little sympathy for Stella's wanderlust. What had it got her after all? She might have been a woman changing husbands again and again in hopes of finally getting the one she wanted. Life was what you made it, Marie thought, and she was content with her lot, having brought the parish near the mark she had set for it.
“Of course, here you are in a place where excitement never stops.”
“âExcitement'!”
“I know all about it, Marie. Aged men fighting for the favors of an equally ancient woman. Everyone is talking about it.”
“They should find a more useful way to occupy their time.”
“Marie, I have come here for the real dirt and you have to tell me.”
“âDirt'! What a thing to say. It is all perfectly innocent and silly. The problem is the woman, the flirtiest little seventy-year-old you ever saw in your life. She acts as if she were sixteen, and of course these old goats are enthralled by it. In that particular area of life, men are the greatest fools.”
“Women aren't much better.”
“I am talking about the men. Neither one of the men in question would have given a nod to Maud when they were in their prime. Of course, both were married then, but so was Maud. Honestly, it makes one wonder if it is wise to pray for a long life when you see what it does to so many.”
“I'm told that one of them is Jack Gallagher.” Stella had a way of slurping when she took her tea and she had just lowered her cup and not quite swallowed.
“Are you drooling?”
“Marie, I used to hurry with the dishes, get my kitchen spick-and-span and then go off to my room to listen to that man.” Stella closed her eyes and swayed. She began to hum.
“I know all about it,” Marie said impatiently. She herself had been a Gallagher devotee for years, a secret pleasure she had kept from the friars and from Father Dowling when he came. What would a pastor
say if he knew his housekeeper was swooning over the songs of her girlhood while the soft and intimate voice of Jack Gallagher spoke in her ear or sang along with those immortals that once had been? Marie had been reminded of these things the night of the dance, but she had wondered if she had felt as foolish as the old women who oohed and aahed over Jack Gallagher. Desmond O'Toole had been, in his way, better, using his own voice at least, and if his interpretations were echoes of familiar ones, they were not mimicry as Gallagher's were.
“If I had known he was to be here I would have bought a ticket to the dance myself.”
“Stella, it was a very successful affair. We actually made money on it.”
“Did you charge extra for the fight?”
This was unworthy of Stella. Marie preferred her going gaga over Jack Gallagher than constantly alluding to the way the evening had ended. Thank God there had been no word of it in the newspapers, as there surely would have been if the prosecutor had decided to act on the matter. Jack Gallagher's stock had plummeted in Marie's estimate when it became clear that he had taken the matter to the police. But Cy Horvath had come and satisfied himself that there was nothing serious enough to merit attention. Nor had Jack Gallagher put in an appearance at the parish center since that memorable night. And Austin Rooney, though a frequent presence, seemed to have distanced himself from Maud, putting Desmond back in the running.
“Are you thinking of leaving Sacred Heart, Stella?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I'm just asking.”
Stella had sat forward. “Are you thinking of retiring?”
“Retiring! At my age? Don't be ridiculous.”
After that, the visit was not what it had been and Marie was not at all sorry when Stella sighed and said it was time to get back to the salt mines. The suggestion of retirement took Marie upstairs to her little apartment where she tried to surprise her reflection in the mirror,
walking past it and throwing a quick glance, as if she might catch herself not looking. How old did Stella imagine she was? But the truth was that Marie Murkin was the age of many of the regulars at the parish center. Nonetheless, in her own mind she was fifty-five and she meant to remain that age forever. Her joints ached and her limbs were not as agile as they had been but she prided herself on keeping these signs of age hidden from the pastor and all others. Retirement! She intended to die with her boots on. The only way she would leave St. Hilary's was in a box.
It was in this testy frame of mind that she came downstairs and found the ineffable Tuttle at the door.
“Is the boss home, Mrs. Murkin?”
“How may I help you?”
“I meant the other boss.”
“Father Dowling is making a day of recollection.”
“A day of recollection. How I envy the man. Most of us could use a day of forgetfulness.”
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Tuttle.”
Once, the little lawyer had had the gall to entertain an amorous interest in Mrs. Murkin, which suggested he would have lost his shirt guessing ages in a carnival. For all that and for all her starchy manner, Tuttle's lapse into romance had softened the housekeeper toward him. It gave credence to her view that her remaining single had been a matter of refusing a series of offers. Not that she could forget the absent Mr. Murkin, gone God-knows-where so many years ago, without so much as a note of farewell. Sometimes Marie imagined that he had been shanghaied and had been serving all these years as a slave on some communist vessel. He had been in the Navy when Marie met him. Or had he fallen into the Fox River the worse for drink and been swept away by the tide, eaten by fish, his bones scattered along the riverbed from here to Aurora? These macabre thoughts were preferable to the apparent truth that he had simply tired of her and, there being no children, decided to be absent without leave indefinitely.
“Actually, I was hoping to make these preliminary inquiries with you first.”
She had opened the inside door before Tuttle said this, and now she felt like closing it on him.
“What preliminary inquiries?”
“Could we sit in the parlor?”
“If you take off that hat.”
Tuttle wore an Irish tweed hat in all seasons, pulled low over his face, as if he feared recognition. But the hat was what everyone recognized. He swept it from his head, and his hair seemed to rise into free air, then settled softly on his round head. He had pulled out a chair from the conference table, but waited for the housekeeper to be seated first.
“It's about the assault on Jack Gallagher.”
“âAssault'? What nonsense.”
“I gather you weren't a witness.”
“I saw the whole thing.”
Tuttle pulled out what looked like a schoolboy's spiral notebook and licked the tip of his ballpoint, leaving a little dab of purple on the tip of his tongue. “If you keep that up, you'll look like a chow dog.”
“Speaking of which ⦔
“Speaking of what?”
“Chow. You wouldn't have a cup of tea for a weary man, would you?”
“I just threw it out.”
But she took pity on him. She rose and told him to follow her. They could carry on this conversation in the kitchen as well as in the parlor. There she put the kettle on and Tuttle pulled up to the table as if he expected a meal. She put a plate of cookies on the table and he sat staring at them as if he had just been released from obedience school.
“Have some, for heaven's sake.”
“I thought I'd wait for the tea.”
“Now, what is this nonsense about an investigation?”
“Mrs. Murkin, I am not even sure that I will take the case.”
“Case? What case?”
Tuttle rubbed his chin. “There you put me on the spot. There is professional confidentiality involved.”
“Keep up that kind of double-talk and I'll take the kettle off the fire.”
“Let me just say a word or two and whatever surmises you make are your affair. The victim of assault was Jack Gallagher?”
Marie just looked at him.
“Jack Gallagher took the matter to the police,” Tuttle said. “The prosecutor considered the matter and decided not to proceed.”
“I already knew that.”
“And you considered it to be a thing of the past?”
“Of course.”
“As it is, taken as a criminal case. Civil law is another thing. The matter can be pursued in the form of a suit.”
“Has Jack Gallagher hired you?”
Tuttle shut his eyes and bisected his pursed lips with a fat little finger.
“You're not denying it.”
“I told you your surmises were your own.”
Marie was stricken. She had indeed considered the matter to be over and done with, as well it should be. No one could possibly gain anything from publicity about such a ridiculous episode. It made matters worse that Gallagher had selected a lawyer as inept as Tuttle, for whom publicity, good or bad, was food and drink. Tuttle loitered about the courthouse to pick up just such tidbits as this and it would have been like him to suggest a suit to Jack Gallagher.
“I will go further,” Tuttle said. “When the prosecutor came to meâ”
“Came to you?”
“While the case had not risen to the level of their concern, there were those in the prosecutor's office who thought that such an attack
on an elderly person, even if by another elderly person, should not go unpunished.”
“Mr. Tuttle, everyone you talk to will tell you that Gallagher provoked Austin Rooney. He was repeatedly rude on the dance floor, cutting in on Rooney and then, dance after dance, refusing Rooney the right to reclaim the silly woman he had brought to the dance.”
“That does not sound like reason enough to strike a man.”
“And later in the parking lot, he sneaked up on Austin and threw a punch at him. And missed. Austin didn't, and down went Gallagher again. If anyone is guilty of anything, it is Jack Gallagher.”
The kettle was singing and Tuttle was drawn by its music. Marie made him his cup of tea, and it and the cookies soon disappeared. She did not offer him a second cup. She wanted to warn Edna Hospers what was afoot.
At the front door, hat in hand, Tuttle thanked her profusely. “For your candor, but even more for your hospitality.” He had a look in his eye that suggested there was another suit he would like to pursue. She pushed him out the door.
“Your heart is in your belly.”
“You're a poet, Mrs. Murkin. A poet.”
And he hurried away in the direction of the school. Marie ran to the phone to warn Edna.
Colleen had told her fiancé that she had confided their fears about her brother Tim and Aggie to her uncle Austin, so she thought it was only right that she tell him that now her father had taken the matter in hand.
“What did your uncle do?” Mario asked.
She described for Mario the scene in the crowded bar when Tim had looked at her uncle with guilt and shame on his face. “He couldn't
do more at the time, but he was sure that their meeting of the eyes would do it.”
“But it didn't?”
“Not if Aggie can be believed.”
“Ah, that's the question. So now your father has talked to her?”
“Yes.”
Mario looked thoughtful; perhaps he was recalling her father's age. That seemed to reassure him. “I wouldn't rely on shame in her. Your father is a well-preserved and good-looking man.”
“Once, he was a celebrity.”
“My sister in Milwaukee remembers our mother swooning over his program. Was he ever on television?”
“He preferred radio. It wasn't always easy to repeat on television the success one had on radio. When am I going to meet your sister?”
He had told her things about this married sister, but there always seemed to be a point where reticence took over. Colleen began to sense that his brother-in-law, whose name was Kane, was the explanation for this.
“What does he do?”
Mario had hesitated a moment. “He has an insurance agency.”
Now he told her more, perhaps prompted by the fact that he was learning things about her family that seemed to give him an unfair advantage.
“Every city has the type. Jimmy Kane has been indicted any number of times but never convicted of anything.”
“What was he accused of?”
“Colleen, he is little better than a gangster. The irony is that my sister, by marrying a non-Italian, thought she was entering the American mainstream. It's more like mainline.”
“Drugs?”
“Of course he would never use them himself.”
Meaning that he dealt in them, or was thought to deal in them. “I
wish they would get sufficient evidence and put him away. At least, I would wish that except for what it would do to Lucy. She lives her life under a Sword of Damocles. Sooner or later, it will drop.”
A trip to Milwaukee no longer had its former attraction for Colleen, though she did long to meet Mario's sister. “Does she ever come to Chicago?”
“I could ask her.”
“Oh, would you?”
“That might be the best way. If you never met Jimmy Kane, I wouldn't be sorry. He is the reason I would never practice law in Milwaukee.”
One morning Lucy drove down from Milwaukee and they had lunch in the Loop. Lucy was pretty, with olive skin like Mario's, her hair worn long, but her wide eyes had the look of a deer caught in headlights. She held Colleen's hands and looked at her and then the frightened look went and she smiled a lovely smile. “So you are going to be Mario's wife.”
There were no children nor, Colleen gathered, would there be. The great irony, as Mario called it, was that his macho brother-in-law was impotent. “He blames Lucy, of course, knowing it is false and she tolerates it.”
It is not easy for a woman on the brink of marriage to preserve the exaggerated hopes and dreams of the years ahead when all around her marriages are not what they should be. Tim's weakness had come to Colleen as an earthquake. How completely irrational it was for him to find Aggie anything other than repulsive compared with Jane and the kids. Would he risk all that for some fleeting excitement with a woman like Aggie? The incredible answer seemed to be yes. Poor Jane. But if that marriage could be jeopardized, it seemed that any could. And now the story of poor Lucy and her unsavory husband who, if justice was
done, would apparently spend the rest of his life in prison. It was not easy in these circumstances for Colleen to retain the conviction that she and Mario were different and their marriage would be perfect.
“Like my parents',” she promised him.
“And like my own. We will visit them on our honeymoon.”
It was while they were lunching with Lucy that Mr. Mallard dropped by their table and was introduced to Lucy.
“Just âLucy'?” he asked affably.
“Lucy Kane,” she added. “We live in Milwaukee.”
Colleen could see that Mario would have preferred that she not mention Milwaukee along with her married name, but what else could Lucy have done?
At the office Aggie, the cause of so much anguish to Colleen and the frequent topic of conversations with Mario, became subdued. Her skirts were as short as before and she still leaned toward men as if to give them a chance to verify the effects of her décolletage, but less frequently now. Colleen thought that the young lawyer had decided to make a serious play for Albert Fremont. They had quarreled once, but still they must work together, and they seemed almost as friendly now as before. And then one night Colleen heard Aggie suggest to Fremont that the two of them have a drink somewhere and she could have cheered. She called her father to thank him.
He was embarrassed by her gratitude but took it in good grace. And then he begged off when she suggested dinner that very night.
“My dear, I am with my lawyer.”
“Your lawyer!”
“It's a long story, but of course I cannot tell it now.”