Where the Dark Streets Go (17 page)

Nim said, “Professor Broglio, please tell us everything you can about him.”

The old man grunted and scratched the top of his head. “Everything. Even that has a beginning. It was the first and last time I was ever political and I would say the same for him, the Adlai Stevenson campaign. It was in the old Marcantonio district, First Avenue on the edge of Harlem. We worked in an empty store, artists and writers for Stevenson. It was quite insane, ladies in mink, painters in dungarees, a classless society. Ha! All that does not matter but that’s where we met. It was afterwards I got to know him, his rage at the frightened intellectuals, that was the time. Everybody playing it safe—afraid to think anything new, much less to teach it on the campuses. So I said, you are not afraid: teach. Teach what? What you know, how to paint, how to draw. He was a fine craftsman. And I got him a class a week to teach drawing, here where everything is new, experimental.” He spoke ironically, hardly lifting his heavy-lidded eyes. He got up from the desk then, moving slowly with difficulty in straightening up at first, and McMahon thought he would have spent years in damp places to have become so arthritic. He moved a chair out of his way and took a picture down from the wall leaving a white space where it had hung. “I had forgotten this. It is his.”

He brought it back and put it in Nim’s hands. McMahon looked at it over her shoulder: a sketch of a market place such as he himself knew from the Italian section on Ninth Avenue—the stalls and baskets, and an aproned man putting something in the scale: a simple drawing of a complex scene, but the shape of the man told it all, the rhythm of his lifetime was in the line of his back.

“He did not sign it,” Nim said.

“But it is his all the same.”

“He must have had a body of painting,” McMahon suggested, “for you to have been able to judge his work.”

“I do not judge work, only how people go about it. Judgment I leave to my superiors. That is survival and he came to hate me for it. To answer your question, Father, there was a body of work. I took the head of the department to his place, a loft on Amsterdam Avenue, and the boss agreed. There was an opening that February. He was given the assignment on condition that he try to get a gallery and show within a year. Backwards, you say, but the boss had that kind of confidence in himself—and his contacts. Some painters are born, others are made.”

“And was there a showing?” McMahon asked.

“Never to my knowledge. But his contract was renewed for a year. The serious students liked him. The others were in the majority, and before the year was out, he walked out on his contract. They were studying for credits, you see, and he did not approve of working in the arts for credit. He was hopeless, pursuing the absolute. Anarchy. And now you tell me what happened to him—and you, Miss Nim—what he was like when you knew him, and I repeat, hopeless. He was always running, even when he was standing still. But we did enjoy life together, wine…and women. We enjoyed, and that is the thing. Maybe it is the only thing.” He reached out a gnarled hand and patted Nim’s. “Do you know, Miss Nim, when your father brought you to see me, how long ago?…”

“Eight years,” Nim said.

“I almost told you both about him then, what it is like to want everything so that you settle for nothing. But it was too complicated for me to try to explain in the presence of a scientist.”

“A scientist,” Nim said with a touch of derision.

“You are still at war with him,” the old man said.

“No. It’s an armed truce, if it’s anything.”

“But you are painting?” He turned her hand over and exposed the fingernails.

“Yes, thanks to him.” She set the drawing on the desk.

“No. Thanks to yourself only. You may have the drawing.”

“I do want it very much,” she said.

“Then it is yours.” He turned to McMahon. “Does she paint well, Father?”

“I think so. Do you know a man named Wallenstein?”

“I know the name very well. David Wallenstein is an important collector, mostly in the Impressionists.”

“I think this man’s name is Everett,” McMahon said.

“That would be the son. A dilettante—so I have heard. I forget in what connection.”

“He also collects—Tchelitchew among others.”

“Ah, yes. There is a show, or was recently. Tchelitchew is not my dish.”

“Mr. Wallenstein thinks I’m good,” Nim said, with that characteristic thrust of the chin.

Broglio leaned back in his chair. “Who is to say a dilettante does not know? It is only himself he does not know.”

McMahon asked: “Do you have the address where Chase had his loft, professor?”

While the old man got a ragged address book from the bottom drawer of his desk and groped its pages, Nim said: “Was there anyone else, professor—anyone who might have known him later?”

He wrote the address in a painfully neat, almost exquisite script, and writing it, seemed to ignore her question. He gave the card to McMahon. Then he said, “Is it that important to you, Miss Nim?”

“Yes.”

He drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “The truth brings its own kind of pain—to teller and listener. Yes, my dear, there was someone else, a woman by the name of Andrea Robinson, and I ought to tell you, her husband was a trustee of the university, a connection not unimportant to my protégé—and myself.”

Nim took it face on, not so much as flinching at the name, Robinson, by which she had known the man. “Mrs. what Robinson, professor?”

“Mrs. Alexander Brewer Robinson, and I would think the address is still Park Avenue.”

Afterwards they sat, Nim and McMahon, on a bench and looked down from Morningside Heights. Neither of them had anything to say for some time. “Well,” Nim said finally, “I do like that touch, Stuart Robinson—where his mind went when he made up a name to give me. It gives things a kind of continuity. This one I shall take on myself, Joe. Andrea Robinson, Park Avenue.” She looked at the sketch. “I’ve just realized: Miss Chase would probably pay five hundred dollars for this. Did you see
The Times
this morning?”

“No.”

“I must say the story brightened up the obituary page.”

McMahon took the card Broglio had given him from his pocket. “I’ve got to get back,” he said, “but I’ll go down by way of Amsterdam Avenue.”

“Confessions, visits to the sick, things like that?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nim said, much too brightly for the way he knew she felt. “Good luck with the concert.”

McMahon left her sitting on the stone bench. He looked back before he turned the corner, but she was not watching him. She was staring out over Harlem, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, the framed drawing under her arm. He stood for a moment looking at her, and thought that this was how it was going to be, as though every parting might be the last.

The address on Amsterdam Avenue had long since become a number in a vast red brick housing complex.

P
HELAN, PROPPED UP ON
pillows, the bed slightly elevated, his hands folded on the white sheet looked serene as a saint who had banished his demons, a picture, McMahon realized, out of romantic, holy-card lore. Neither saint nor sinner was free of demons so long as he was mortal. All of El Greco’s saints were tortured men, the fugue of the artist’s violence on himself.

McMahon stood a moment, reluctant to waken the man, and thought of Broglio’s comments on Muller-Chase. He was wrong about him, however right he had made it sound. He had thought at the time, watching the painfully exquisite hand in which the professor had written the Amsterdam address, this old man has exhausted himself in perfectionism, but he has perfected the wrong things: he is half-blind, having never looked into the sun. Muller might have blinded himself, but he had looked it in the face.

Phelan opened his eyes. “I wondered if you’d given me up to Dr. Connelly, Father.”

“I’ve been busy,” McMahon said. It had taken an act of will for him to have come that afternoon at all.

“Well, I’m going home tomorrow,” Phelan said without enthusiasm.

“Good. What happened to your neighbor?” The other bed was empty, stripped, the fresh linens in a heap, yet to be spread.

“They went out of here like an Easter procession. Father, if I was given my choice, I’d like to be like them. They came and kissed me good-bye, all of them, the children, the women, even the uncle. A lifetime couldn’t have made us closer, and you know, I started out hating every mortal one of them—noisy, busy, and so damned happy. About what? Life, I guess. And I said to myself, Dan, my boy, these are God’s children—the way he made them, and if you want to be God’s deputy, you’d better find out what they’re about.”

McMahon, troubled at the ease with which he had allowed himself to be drawn into Phelan’s fantasy of the priestly life—using the situation to compensate the Lord for his own backsliding—wanted to break in on the reverie. But that, he felt, would also be a kind of wickedness. He listened him out.

“Like a miraculous conversion, I was with them. Like a hand lifted a veil from my eyes. The hand of God?” He thought about it for a second or two. “Or was it just the police finally going away? Or me seeing Dr. Connelly…I don’t know whether I like him or not.”

McMahon was glad to get on the subject of Dr. Connelly. “You’ve only seen him what—twice?”

Phelan nodded. “It’s important that I do like him though, isn’t it?”

“You have to get through to one another. It won’t be as easy as it was with your neighbors.” McMahon indicated the empty bed.

“My neighbors,” Phelan repeated thoughtfully. “I’m going home a different man than I came. Another thing—Pedrito Morales came in to see me yesterday. He said it was his fault, what I did.” Phelan laughed. “A Puerto Rican heart—pride, temper, honor. You might say I am now an honorary Puerto Rican. And Lord, how I hated those people until this fiasco. He apologized for what happened that night in his house. And I’ve been thinking, Father—what it takes to gain respect. A knife or a gun. It isn’t right.”

“We’ve all got violence in us, Dan. It depends on what we do with it.” And he told Phelan what Muller had said of the artist’s violence.

Phelan grinned. “That’s great, you know. Really great. Remember one of the first things I said when you came to see me—I thought he was a holy man? I’m not as stupid as I thought I was. Or even as crooked inside.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. “They don’t know yet who killed him?”

“No.”

“Funny, young Morales coming here. Maybe they think I killed him—which, in a crazy way, is what I wanted them to think when I pulled out the knife upstairs. Priscilla knew it. How I’ve hated her for seeing through me all these years. No, I’ve hated myself for what she saw.”

“For what you thought she saw,” McMahon suggested.

“All right. For what I saw.”

“Did you tell that to Dr. Connelly?”

“Something like it. Understandable, he said. To him, everything is understandable. That’s what scares me. I’d rather go to confession.”

“And tell as sins the things you don’t understand?”

“That’s what you’re for, Father. Whose sin you shall forgive, they are forgiven. Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”

“Dan, it’s not that simple being a priest today. Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and pray to the Holy Spirit just won’t do any more.”

“I’m a Holy Ghost man myself,” Phelan said, again with a smile.

“I’d like to be myself, sometimes. But that’s a copout. The young people want to know what is sin and why, and the answer that the Church says so is not enough. It’s not even enough for me in my own confession.”

“It’s enough for me,” Phelan said.

“Then you’d better do some more thinking about this change you want to make in your life.”

“What I’d like you to do for me, Father—it’s asking a lot but I’m going to ask it: go and see Priscilla and tell her what we’ve been talking about, that you think maybe I have a vocation…something like that.”

“I didn’t say I thought you had a religious vocation. I don’t know whether you do or not, and I don’t think you know it yourself.”

“Tell her something!” Phelan’s agitation was sudden, and it revealed the instability, the fear beneath the dream of serenity. In a word, he was a desperate man.

“Are you afraid to go home, Dan?”

“Yes!”

“You’re still a sick man. She won’t make any demands on you.”

“You know all about those demands, don’t you, Father? You could give her advice on how to get me into bed. One more expert on how to fix a marriage. I don’t want it fixed!”

“Easy, Dan…there’s time, and there’s Dr. Connelly. I’ll tell her about him if you want me to.”

“I’ll get out of here,” Phelan said, “and I’ll run, believe me, I’ll run, and the cops will bring me down then for sure. And there’ll be one nice clean thing about it that way—you can give me a Christian burial.”

McMahon, heavy with helplessness, said, “I’ll go and see her tonight. What time do you go home tomorrow?”

“By eleven-thirty. That’s check-out time. Or check-in time, whatever way you look at it.”

“I’ll be here if I can and go home with you.”

“Morales said he’d borrow a car.”

“I’ll check up on the arrangements tonight, Dan. Just rest and make your plans the way you think you want them now. A few prayers may help.”

“I know one thing I’ll pray for—just that they don’t make any goddamned fiesta over me coming home.”

Miss Lalor had all her priests home to supper that night, amiable as a hen with chicks even if she had never laid an egg. And McMahon had been wrong about the menu: he had forgotten it was Saturday night. By way of her pattern of association, Irish with Boston, and Boston with custom, and the custom of baked beans on Saturday night, she had made it her own tradition. Even the monsignor could not change it, and no longer tried, for it was no longer a matter that troubled him. But the other priests: what was more painful than sitting cramped with gas in the confessional box? McMahon ate bread and butter. Food no longer interested him anyway.

Phelan had rightly anticipated the fiesta plans for his homecoming. The women were hanging balloons and pinning flowers of papier mâché to the curtains. The amplified guitar was going strong again, vibrating through the building. Happiness was a loud noise. McMahon had a glass of beer with the women, and then managed with no great grace to tell Priscilla Phelan that he wanted to talk with her. He suggested the room she had given Muller.