Where the Dark Streets Go (3 page)

He sat at the piano improvising softly while the girls filed in, the long and the short, the skinny and the squat, the black and the white, the knock-kneed, the piano-legged. Though they sang with the voices of angels, they came in like a herd of elephants. When Sister Justine had them in their places, he warmed them up with a few minutes of folk rock. He enjoyed the anachronism it made of him in their eyes. He was a stern disciplinarian and his tastes in music were as severe. Yet he loved to shake them loose this way, to set their breasts and buttocks bobbing, all of them letting go. Or almost all of them. Some of them were pretending. There was the sadness, the pretense. To please him? To fit in? It was a kind of self-denial, the kind he did not like, and he caught an image of these pretenders marching into their futures, into marriage, motherhood, or into maidenhood, treading the heels of these very shadows they were casting now before them. He realized that beneath the musings he was thinking of Priscilla Phelan and the marriage he had been trying to mend although he deeply felt it should be dissolved.

He ended with a kind of
Eulenspiegel
fillip. The groans and laments were shut off by the staccato snaps of Sister Justine’s frog. The snapper was as familiar to her fingers as the beads of her rosary. He got up from the piano and gave over the bench to sister who would play such notes as he needed to structure the
a cappella
.

“
The Bells
,” he said, while the music was being passed. “We shall work only with sounds today. Forget the words. For most of you that won’t be any hardship. All the sopranos: Bell, bell, bell. First altos, bong, bong, bong. Second altos, boom, boom, boom…”

Throughout the rehearsal his mind kept going back to the man in the cellar and to the child, Carlos, who took the word of his death as philosophically as the going away of someone he had known, his own father, for example. Carlos’ sisters, Anita and Fran, were in the choir, and after practice McMahon detained them and spoke to the elder of the two.

“Did you go home to lunch today, Anita?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Was Carlos there?” He had told the boy to remain at home until his sisters came. His mother was away at work.

“Yes, Father. There were policemen. They came looking for Pedrito. Everywhere they looked like he was hiding and they asked us questions.”

“What questions?”

Anita looked to her sister for help, but Fran was shy. A homely, awkward girl, she never expected to be called upon, and he wished then that he had addressed her first.

“About where Pedrito worked. What time he went to work. My mother. And about Mr. Muller.”

“Mr. Muller,” McMahon repeated.

“He was killed with a knife. They asked did Pedrito have a knife. I would not tell them. Pedrito does not like the police. Nobody likes police in our house.”

“Did you know Mr. Muller?”

“Yes, Father. He was a very nice man. He came to Carlos’ saint’s day.”

“And he sings songs he makes up for Carlos, for my mother so she laugh, for everybody.” This was Fran. Muller had obviously been able to draw even her out.

“You both liked him, did you?”

The girls nodded.

Anita said, “The police, they want to know who did not like him. And Mrs. Vargas tell them, Mr. Phelan. She don’t like Mr. Phelan, you see, Father. Otherwise, she don’t tell anything.”

McMahon did not like gathering gossip from the girls. Nor did he want to make them late for their next class. “Did you take Carlos to school this afternoon?”

“Yes, Father. He don’t want to go, but we made him go. Otherwise…” Anita gave herself an uninhibited slap on the rump by way of illustration.

M
CMAHON FINISHED HIS SERMON
when he got back to the rectory. He did not like it at all now: brotherhood and closeness, a sentimental myth. He found himself testing each phrase in the light of the dying man’s challenge, and he wanted to cross out more of what he had written than he wanted to retain. He was annoyed with himself. Or with the dead man? See here, he wanted to say, perfection is a luxury. But faith is a greater luxury. Where the latter thought had come from he did not know. He had provided his antagonist with dialogue. Perfection should be a goal, and to a priest faith was a necessity. The only marks he put on the paper in the end were the dashes with which he always marked his breathing places, and while he tested these, his mind slipped comfortably off to the parish priest of his childhood, upstate, who seemed not to take a breath from the first word to the last of his sermon. At the breakfast table after the eight o’clock Mass when Father Dunne had preached, the family would piece together what it was he had said. McMahon could remember now his father’s saying: “It may seem like a great joke, but stop and think about this: you’ll remember years from now some of the things we’ve figured out here at the table, and some of the mission priests with their fire and brimstone you’ll forget forever.” And it was true: many a sermon he had himself built on a few words caught from Father Dunne’s whirlwind.

Monsignor Casey came to the study door. “Mrs. Phelan is in the parlor asking to see you. She says it’s important.”

“She might have phoned first,” McMahon said. His eyes went to the windows as though in search of escape.

“Let me talk to her then. I’m an old man with some of my troubles past me, thank God.”

Which could only mean, McMahon thought, that he had taken the measure of Priscilla Phelan. “I’ll go, I’ll go,” he said.

He saw a difference in the woman the minute he walked into the room. Her red hair was drawn back and bound in a clasp behind her head where normally she let it go, a wild mane she tossed from around her face while she talked. Nor had she made up her face in the usual way, her eyes shadowed wells, her lips a wounded pucker. Now, wearing no makeup at all, she revealed herself a woman with good natural features, and he wondered which face she wore for Phelan, trying to coax him into her bed, for this was the problem about which she had been coming to him off and on for several weeks.

“You ought to have called before you came,” he said.

She made no apology. Nor did she bat her eyes or go through any of the phony posturing that had so put him off her. He had suspected from the beginning that she came to him because he was the best-looking priest she could find. There were times during their sessions when he thought she was getting sexual enjoyment out of describing to him her husband’s hangups. “Father, I’ve lied to you.”

“Well,” he said, looking down at her, his arms folded, “you’re not the first person who has lied to me, and I don’t suppose I’m the first person you have lied to.”

“That’s true, Father. I’ve also lied to Dan.”

“To your husband.” He said the words to curtail the intimacy implicit in the use of the name instead of the relationship, man and wife.

“I’ve been with another man.”

“For how long?”

“Several times.”

“Over how long a period?”

“Two weeks or so. Please, Father, don’t keep looking at me. If I came to you in the confessional you wouldn’t.”

“It was your choice of where you came to me, Mrs. Phelan,” he said, but he went to the window. In their previous conversation it had taken an act of will on his part not to flee her eyes. “When were you here last?”

“Wednesday night.”

“Why did you come if you knew you were gong to lie to me?”

“I still wanted to help Dan…my husband.”

McMahon tried to remember how this conversation had gone on Wednesday night. He could not sort it out from their previous meetings. “I don’t quite understand that,” he said.

She got up and with a stride the very self-assurance of which he could feel disarming him, walked to the parlor door and closed it. She came and stood beside him. “It’s your fault I’m in this mess, Father McMahon. I don’t mean you did anything on purpose. God forbid! But the more we talked, it made me wild. Is that a sin? I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made, that’s all.”

“You should not have come to me then,” he said. “There are other priests in the parish.” He retreated to the little table with the Donnegal shawl over it, angry with her, angrier with himself. He was sure she still was not telling the truth. But that she was trying to tell it now, he had to admit and to deal with. “Or better—most women in your position would have gone to someone in another parish entirely.”

“Most women wouldn’t go to the priest at all. They’d be ashamed. I like being a woman. I like what I feel.” The color had come into her cheeks, a color that made the eyes eloquent as no makeup could.

For the first time he felt a sincere compassion. Perversely, this enabled him to deal with her more severely. “Sit down here at the table and listen to me for a minute.” He waited and then seated himself opposite her. “Let’s try to be honest with one another. Why did you come to me? Let’s dispose of that first.”

“Because I thought, he’s a priest who would understand.”

“Is that the whole truth of it?”

She rested her elbow on the table, her hand, scrubbed clean and without the nail polish, at her cheek so that briefly he was reminded of the hand of the dying man—just in the sensitive use of it. “I’m pretty well educated, Father. I read a lot. There’s a bar I used to go with Dan to. Now I go alone when he goes off on his own, promoting some scheme or other, God knows. I sit there and talk with people I’ve got a feeling for, people who can’t get where they want to go. I mean they want to be writers, they’re taking polls on the telephone. They’re painters…” She made a gesture as though to brush the hair away from her face, forgetting that she had fastened it at the back. “I forgot what I started to say.”

“Why you came to me in the first place.”

“Because you’re a musician.”

McMahon felt both stunned and humbled.

“Oh, that isn’t the whole truth either. Who knows the whole truth about anything, about anybody including yourself? Myself, I mean. I told you the first time I came to see you that I loved Dan, that I wanted him. I know, you don’t want to hear that again.” Her eyes had caught his in flight.

“You are wrong,” he said. She was not wrong: he could feel himself tensing against the repetition of futile intimacies, but he said what he thought was now necessary. “If that’s the way you can get at the problem, tell it again.”

“No, I won’t. I won’t talk about Dan. I think I know now what I was doing here though I didn’t mean to at first, I was trying to get you going. But that was because I needed to know if I could. Can you understand that?”

“I think so,” he said quietly.

“You’re a funny one, you know. I got the idea you liked it.”

“That was an unwarranted assumption,” he said and stared her down. Many a female he had stared down, but most of them were adolescent schoolgirls and easily frightened out of—or into—their fantasies.

“The man I was with is dead,” she said flatly.

McMahon let the words rest in silence. He had expected them. What silenced him within himself was that both he and Priscilla Phelan had talked these few minutes as though the death had not occurred.

“The police came. I went with them and identified him as the person I’d rented a back room to. I gave them my extra key. Do I have to tell them, Father? They’ll be asking. About me and him, I mean.”

“You will have to judge its relevance.”

“It’s not only me—it might hurt Dan.”

He refrained from saying that she should have thought of that earlier. “In what way? Does your husband know of the relationship?”

“I’m not sure, Father. He could have been guessing. When I stopped trying to do what you told me to do…”

“Helping him make love to you,” McMahon said out.

She nodded. “When I stopped all that—when I just lay there like a whore last night, that turned him on.” She broke then, open as even she had never been and spewed out the bitterness. “When I didn’t want him he was like a bull. Christ, Father! What’s the matter with us?”

“Something I don’t think I’m capable of healing,” McMahon said. “Maybe, just maybe, it will heal itself—your marriage, given a chance now. It’s much too simple for me to say. And I could have been wrong in counseling you the way I did. By trying to provoke his manhood, you may have been taking it away from him.”

“It sure is simple that way, Father. But what’s inside me isn’t simple any more. It’s closed up like this.” She clenched her fist.

“Time, time,” he said, “and prayer. That’s the greatest opener I know.”

“Maybe for you. For me it’s like sucking my thumb. Or something else I won’t go into now. It makes me forget for a while, but it doesn’t settle anything.”

“You said Dan suspected the affair you were having with this man.”

She smiled a little and sounded almost wistful. “You make it sound so important.”

“Wasn’t it important to you at the time?”

“No, Father. I’m sorry, but I’m trying to tell you the truth. You want even sin to be romantic.”

“Especially sin,” he snapped to cover his chagrin that she should mock him.

“It wasn’t love. It was just plain sex. I seduced him. You won’t have any trouble believing that, will you? You know, most of the tenants in my building don’t buy this business of going to the priest every time somebody gets into somebody else’s bed. They talk about it on the stoop, in the kitchen. It’s the way they are. Maybe that’s why I can’t live with them.

“Last night after Dan got through proving himself, he got up and dressed again. He said to me, ‘Now you got something new to tell your friends.’ ‘I don’t tell them anything,’ I said. ‘That’s not the message I get from them.’ ‘Then they’re lying,’ I said. ‘Are they, Pris? About the bearded gentleman in the back room? Who is he? What is he?’ ‘He’s a man,’ I shouted and Dan said, ‘So now you have two men, lucky girl.’ He went out then, Father, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Have you told any of this to the police?” McMahon said after a moment.

“Not much, except about Dan not being home. They’ll start asking. It was mostly Gus they wanted to know about.”

“Your husband has been away overnight before, hasn’t he? If a job took him out of town?”