Bishop's Man (35 page)

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Authors: Linden Macintyre

BOOK: Bishop's Man
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“It depends.”
“This is embarrassing, but did we go out together for a while?”
“Once,” I said, feeling the blush on my cheeks.
“Young and crazy,” she laughed, and left the room.
This can’t be so bad, I thought.
I didn’t remember the colour of her eyes, a pale blue, or her hair, which had become a rich auburn over time and with the attention of beauticians. She has kept her shape, I thought. Breasts actually larger than I remembered. Do they grow in middle age?
When she returned with drinks, I said, “You’ve done well for yourself. You and Don. It’s a lovely place you have here.”
“We get by. It was hard for a long time, with him travelling and the kids young.”
“Don said you had two boys, I think.”
“Yes,” she said brightly, then fetched two framed portraits from the mantelpiece. Sat beside me. “Donnie and Michael. Both working away.”
She was close, our thighs and elbows in contact. The boys were handsome in a rugged way. One of them had his father’s boyhood face, even the trace of mockery that was never far from the mouth.
A giddy shiver passed through me. The memory or her thigh. Maybe both.
“He told me what they did,” I said. “One’s in Toronto?”
“Donnie is at the Ontario Food Terminal, for one of the big companies. Mike’s the creative type. Designing websites in Boston, whatever that means. Wants to be a writer, if you can imagine.”
“Fine-looking boys.”
“They take after their father,” she said, then returned the photos. “And yourself? I think I heard you were away somewhere. In the missions, was it, for a while?” She returned to the large chair a mile away across the room. Her brow was creased.
“Two years,” I said. “In Central America.”
“That would have been different.”
“It was.”
A momentary silence, both thinking back.
“I think it was probably only once or twice we went out,” she said. “I don’t think it was very serious.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The reason I remember is that they teased me a lot about you, after you went to the san.”
“The where?”
“What did I say?”
“The san.”
“Oh God,” she said. “I’m sorry. Last week was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She passed away in Kentville. Forty years ago exactly. At the sanatorium there. I meant the
sem.
My head, these days.” She shook it, smiling privately.
“San, sem. I suppose when you think about it, there isn’t much difference.”
Her head rolled back as she laughed. Her throat was white and the skin became as smooth as if she were still a teenager. And the words came back:
I guess you’re mad at me.
She was studying my face, perhaps remembering too. “Your mother also … if I remember rightly.”
“Yes. Point Edward. Or St. Rita’s, actually. They took her there at the end. She’s buried in Sydney. Whitney Pier, to be exact.”
“I didn’t realize we had so much in common.”
I smiled.
“But I guess it wasn’t so unusual then. There was a lot of it around in the fifties. Not like now.”
“Yes,” I said.
She took our glasses to the kitchen.
“The strangest thing just came back to me,” I said after the third drink.
“What’s that?” she asked, head cocked to one side. She had refreshed her lipstick in the kitchen.
“You seemed to know that I was thinking of becoming a priest, even though I wasn’t absolutely certain at the time. Maybe you felt safer, being with me.”
“Oh, no,” she said, clapping her hand over her mouth and blushing. “I doubt that. I was awful back then. I can’t imagine what you thought, me bringing that up. Trying to tempt you, I suppose.”
“Well … I still remember it.”
She was blushing and looked away—toward the photos on the mantel, I imagined. “I can’t believe I brought that up.”
I realized then that we were holding hands. When did that happen? When she’d brought the third drink, she sat beside me. And asked about when my mother died.
“I don’t remember much about it,” I said.
“Neither do I, mine. But I was only twelve.”
She is fifty-two, I thought.
“I have vague images,” I said. “Adults telling me she was happier dead and that I should pray to her.”
There was true sadness in her face. “It would have been worse for you,” she said. She shrugged and squeezed my hand.
“My mother died in 1951,” I said.
There was music somewhere. There was another drink. The light was fading in the room. Now she was sitting with legs folded beneath her, studying the contents of her glass.
“After you went to the seminary,” she said, slurring slightly and laughing, “you wouldn’t believe what some of them were saying. The girls.”
The gurrels.
“Try me.”
“That we … No. I’m not going to say it. You’d die.” She put her drink down and caught her face between her palms, blushing and shaking her head. Her laugh was childlike. “They were saying that we had …
gone all the way,
as we used to put it. Can you believe it?”
I laughed, surprised by my calmness.
“Somebody went spreading that around!”
“I can’t imagine who.”
“You must think I’m terrible, remembering something like that how many years later. God.”
“It doesn’t feel like so many years.”
“No,” she said seriously.
“The years have been good to you. You haven’t changed.”
She blushed again. “But I don’t think we did … did we?”
“No. We didn’t. I’d certainly remember.”
She was moving around the room, tidying up, when I returned from the bathroom. They have this instinct for tidying up. What would that be like? Somebody in the house with a natural urge to pick up and to clean up? A soft voice murmuring on an unseen stereo. This is the kind of place real human beings live in. Music in the background. I should have a stereo.
“It seems that we have met before and laughed before …”
“You’re back,” she said. “I was wondering.”
“I really should go.”
“… who knows where or when.”
“No, stay,” she said quickly, then smiled. “I mean, there’s no rush.”
The phone rang. She chatted into the telephone briefly, then, looking my way with a wink, said, “You won’t believe who I’ve got for a visitor.”
I studied the floor.
“No. Father Duncan. Remember Duncan MacAskill? Yesssss. He was looking for you. So we were just having a drink, reminiscing. Yes. I’ll tell him … There,” she said, putting the phone down. “That was Don. He’s going to be late.
Again.
”
I relaxed. Everything is okay, I thought, amazed. There is no deception. My car in front is now explained. Whatever happens in here is now conventional. Totally above-board. There is full disclosure. She waltzed across the room with an imaginary partner. I noticed that she had taken her shoes off. She had slender ankles, long, delicate feet. Red toenails.
“I love this song,” she said.
I stood. “It’s been years since I danced,” I said. My feet were suddenly too large for the room. I was moving them slowly, deliberately. I could only think of her bare feet and my heavy shoes.
I stopped, stood still. I should take my shoes off. She misread my hesitation. Then she was full against my chest, face snug below my jaw. Pressing herself closer against me. Her forehead was hot. And then we were kissing.
She stepped back and sighed, tilted her head. There is beauty there, I thought. She has mysteries that are dark and rich.
“That just happened spontaneously,” she said. “I hope you didn’t mind.”
“On the contrary.”
“It must get lonely,” she said.
Suddenly I couldn’t speak.
“I know about lonely too,” she said. She was holding both my hands. Then she put her arms around my waist and pressed her face against my shoulder. Then looked up. “I don’t know why they automatically assume letting priests get married will make them … happier. Marriage is a lot of work.”
“I think I should go,” I said, fighting sorrow and confusion.
She nodded. “I don’t blame you. Some old woman putting the make on you.”
“You’re lovely,” I said.
She shook her head.
“Yes, you are. It’s true. This isn’t about you.”
“The years are unkind to women,” she said.
“On the contrary.”
“You don’t have to be nice.”
I shook my head firmly. I wanted to reassure her further, that I was leaving because of fear—my fear of the voice I knew would occupy my head thenceforth, the fear of what the voice would say if we proceeded one step further than this.
I drew her to me. Sheltered from her searching eyes, I whispered, “I suppose you’re mad at me.”
“God, no. Why would you think that? Promise to come back?”
“I promise.”
“I’m in the book.”
I meant it, too. It will not be like the last time, I thought. And suddenly the sorrow came with the memory of Jacinta.
 
Passing the church in town, I noticed the police car in my rear-view mirror.
{23}
J
ohn didn’t stay long after we retrieved my car from the roadside. He came immediately when I called. I offered him a drink, but he was still on the wagon, he said. “I don’t have to tell you what I’m like when I’m on the sauce.”
I said nothing.
“But it’s your lucky day,” he said. “The Breathalyzer’s no laughing matter anymore. The papers don’t hesitate to nail a fella, even priests. You see their names from time to time, even judges.” He was standing near my book-case. “Maybe a fella really should be writing things down, but then again, if you’re anything like me, you’ve got an awful memory.”
I thought: Perhaps a blessing. “Thanks for coming over. I didn’t know who to call.”
“I owe you. For last year, putting up with … whatever …”
“No.”
“I can be an arsehole sometimes.”
“You weren’t.”
“Another reason for avoiding diaries. Best to let the past just disappear.”
After John was gone, I noticed the Mountie’s business card where I’d left it on my desk. I picked it up.
Cpl. L. Roberts.
For an instant I considered calling him, to ask him what he knew. I laughed at myself, tossed the card aside.
The Mountie and MacLeod got nothing wrong. I’m the one who got it wrong.
“I’ve been shafted,” I said aloud, and the words made me feel a little better.
 
The situation was straightforward. Father Roddie went to Ontario for treatment. Red carpet treatment, by the sound of it. A place called Orangeville. It was funny, almost. Red carpet treatment in Orangeville. I see tall maple trees and red brick buildings with Red Ensign flags. Many churches. A place where the clergy still retained some of the respectability of long-gone days. Something stirred in the memory about controversy in Orangeville a few years back. Something about the ordination of gay people by the United Church.
I can see Father Rod nodding sympathetically with his U.C. pals, counselling moderation and compassion. Lead by example, he’d say, and they’d listen to his wise words because he looks and sounds exactly the way moderate Protestants want to imagine R.C. priests to be. Like kindly bachelor uncles.
Old bastards, I thought. I struggled to banish the image of Father Roddie and the bishop bent over their cards, discussing their strategy. No thought given to the wreckage-strewn pathway old Rod had trod before that point. Apparently the suicide victim in B.C. came from Nova Scotia—somebody from before the banishment to Orangeville who fled to the west coast to escape his demons. But the demons followed. They tend to do that.
Rod was versatile. Retarded girls and frightened boys.
Briefly, the gallery of miserable faces assembled in my mind once again. Wretched. Embarrassed or angry or defiant. But always wretched.
“You don’t know the whole story,” Brendan Bell said quietly when I first gave him directions to Port Hood. Cross the causeway, turn left. After turning left, keep straight. I winked. Keeping straight is key.
He stared, then shook his head slowly. Smiled sadly.
“I’m sure I don’t know the whole story,” I conceded.
He seemed to brighten. “But I know what you’re thinking, and I agree. ‘The whole story’ isn’t really relevant, is it? I messed up. I’m glad it’s out. Now I can get on with things.”

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