Rabid (57 page)

Dante’s face was a slim, soft smile, empathetic, practiced. “And he asked again why I had sex with the women, what in me was so empty that I pursued women, women in plural, needing a different woman every night, staying out all night getting drunk and screwing the women when it was ruining my theological studies and my practice of medicine. He asked me what was driving me so hard that I could not sleep alone or sober or in my own bed. He asked what I was looking for. I laughed at him.” Dante’s face remained serene with that slight, superficial smile. “He asked what I wanted that these women couldn’t give me, that I needed so much that I was destroying myself.”

Leila’s hands were clamped over her own hollow chest, and she pushed her hands down onto the table. “What did you tell him?”

Dante splashed back the last of his dilute scotch and tapped the highball glass down on the table. “I did not tell him anything. It was as if I was flailing in deep water. He had stripped me until I was not anyone, anymore. I spent a week in my apartment, dead drunk.”

Leila’s hands pressed over her boxing heart. She probably would have done that, too.

“I knew there was something, something I needed, and that the women were not it.” He rotated the empty scotch glass between his thumb and index finger.

“And the priesthood gave you that,” she prompted.

“I took Orders.”

“And you found your answer.”

Dante slid sideways and stood up. “I should go,” he said. “You look like you have some reading to do.” He dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table and set the glass on it. He hitched his coat collar up over the nape of his neck and walked up the gloomy stairs. He stumbled, nearly fell, but righted himself and walked up.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul must wear the brows of grace, Yet grace must still look so.

Shakespeare meant that angels and fallen angels, devils and demons, are bright and beautiful because they are both, at their core, angelic.

A third of the Heavenly Host fell into Hell with Lucifer.

This bright, beautiful priest was either angel or demon, for Leila.

~~~~~

Chapter Eighteen

The Daily Hamiltonian:

Wife to Stand Trial for Killing Doc

By Kirin Oberoi

At the preliminary hearing yesterday, prosecution attorneys sketched their case against Mrs. Beverly Maria Sloan, accused of murdering her husband Dr. Conroy Sloan on February 14th in his recently rented townhouse near UNHHC.

Prosecutors presented forensic evidence showing that Mrs. Sloan’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, a steak knife, and that Mrs. Sloan’s clothes bore traces of Dr. Sloan’s blood. The defense offered no evidence or rebuttal.

The judge determined the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial.

The trial date has not been set.

~~~~~

At Mass, Dante stood at the front of the communion line and listened to the light hymn while Bev played one-handed chords. He presented wafers to the long line of women and watched their eyes.

Most of the women muttered “Amen,” as he presented them with “The body of Christ,” but some of them did seem to look into his own eyes a little too long, and their eyelashes fluttered over brown or black or green or blue irises as he laid the wafer in their palms or on their tongue.

“The body of Christ,” he said each time.

“Amen,” the all said in return.  

Their flashing eyes disturbed Dante, and he handed out the wafers more gingerly.

John the deacon assisted Father Dante with the sacrament of Holy Communion. Bev Sloan’s music drifted down on John and them all from the loft, sweetly, angelically, even with one arm broken to pieces.

John thought that a woman like Bev Sloan couldn’t kill her husband, no matter what he had read in the paper that morning. Maybe Beverly’s fingerprints were on the knife because she had tried to pull it out of Conroy’s chest.

There were a thousand possible explanations.

Herman Burkett received Holy Communion from John the deacon in his cupped hands and ate the wafer himself. He liked Beverly Sloan’s choice of light, fluffy hymns lately. They were easier to sing along to. He wondered who was going to take over the choir when she went to prison because, as everyone knew, she murdered that cheating bastard of a husband and, if she got away with it, every wife would murder every cheating bastard and then where would we be?

Up in the choir loft, Bev picked out a majestic E-major with her right hand and bobbed her head to conduct the choir. Ever since the hearing, everyone had stared at her, and she worked hard at holding her cringing head up. Dignity was all she had left.

In the choir, Gomez Hererra sang the deep bass line of the hymn and watched Bev Sloan. Her head snapped back, and they all stopped singing, right on cue. It was amazing she had figured out how to play the pipe organ and conduct at the same time using only one arm. He appreciated amazing. He appreciated Bev Sloan, who was a stalwart, staunch Catholic when lesser people would have begged off. He appreciated Bev’s strong soul and her suffering, like now, when she thought no one was looking, and she bowed her head and her face creased with grief and pain.

~~~~~

On a Wednesday, Dante held sobbing little Dinah Sloan on his lap in the library.

He patted her back with a staccato, unpracticed rhythm. “There, there. Your mother, she will be here soon,” he intoned and prayed that Bev would hurry because nothing consoled this weeping child and he did not know what to do.

Bev slammed open the library door, which had been left open the proscribed hand’s breadth, and she crouched beside him, resting her broken, plaster-casted arm on the chair. She smoothed Dinah’s dark hair. “Did someone say something to her?”

“I do not know,” Dante said. “I can’t understand her. She ran in here and threw herself on me, something about the football game. There, there.” He patted Dinah on the back again. The girl had clambered onto his lap and clung to him even as he tried to untangle her from his limbs because he didn’t like the children to be so physical with him. “It is all right now. Your mother, she is here.”

Dinah twisted like a beartrap and grabbed her mother, dragging her closer. Bev’s head thunked Dante’s skull, and they both muttered, “Ouch.”

“I knew I should have changed their school,” Bev whispered near his ear, just by his neck and above his Roman collar. Her breath warmed his skin. “Honey, did someone upset you?”

Dinah wailed “Football!”

“What about the football, honey? Honey?”

Dinah cried, “They all kept singing it! They wouldn’t stop!”

Dante cringed. Children were cruel, uncivilized creatures. He would put a stop to this. “What song, Dinah? Tell us the song.”

“They kept singing it!”

“Tell us what they said,” Dante said. “Whisper it in my ear, here.”

Dinah choked and hiccoughed. “I don’t want to.”

“It is not your fault. Just whisper it to me.”

Her tiny body felt like a toy in his arms, a mini-skeleton covered with fuzzy, flower-petal skin. She squirmed. “Kill, kill, hate hate,” she chanted and sucked in a shuddering breath. “Murder, murder, mutilate.”

Bev leaned against Dante’s arm, and her new plaster cast slipped around him and the child.

Dinah said, “God is love. God is love.” She cried anew on his shoulder.

“What?” Dante leaned around the back of Dinah’s head. “I don’t understand.”

Bev’s relieved expression gave him some hope. “It’s not personal,” she said. “It’s a cheer. Like at a soccer match to encourage your team, you yell slogans. It’s an old parochial school cheer. I remember it from Catholic school in Chicago.”

“I do not understand it.”

“It wasn’t about us, Dinah,” Bev smoothed her hair and crooned to the child. “They weren’t saying anything about us.”

Dinah sobbed, “Why do they think that’s funny? It’s not! It’s not funny!”

Dante wrapped his arms around the child, and Bev curled around them, crooning, “It’s all right, Dinah. It’s all right.”

~~~~~

Three weeks after Conroy’s funeral, Leila stood by the bed while Danna suffocated.

The paralysis had seeped inward and paralyzed her diaphragm, and a ventilator prolonged her deeply medicated life.

Eventually, when the virus had swum up her peripheral nervous system and adequately eaten her brain, her parents acquiesced to the ventilator’s removal and signed a DNR.

Her father proselytized that she was seeing Jesus as she died.

Leila didn’t tell him that rabies victims don’t have near-death experiences, that there are no welcoming relatives or bright, friendly lights.

For Danna, the screen faded to black.

~~~~~

Tuesday night, Bev rehearsed the choir.

Dante sat in a pew several rows behind her.

He might be watching her or he might be watching some other woman in the choir. She didn’t turn to look.

Mary, Laura, and Lydia sat on the risers while the tenors sang their part.

Lydia motioned at the church pews in general and whispered, “I think he’s just tired. Look at how much he’s slumped over.” She hoped he didn’t ruin his looks with overwork.

Laura said, “I’ll bet he is tired. He does everything here, now that Father Samual is gone. He celebrates Mass every day, goes to the other churches to give their Masses, and he does other stuff, too.” Luke, her baby, her angel, had begun coloring again, just two weeks ago. His pictures were dark, angry, and she had taken some of them to Father Dante during counseling, worried.

The priest’s eyes had lit up, and he had asked Luke slowly and carefully about them.

Luke talked, animatedly, about the weeping crucifixes and smoking ruins.

The priest had told her, later, after they had sent Luke to Sister’s room, that he had been worried because Luke still had no method of expressing himself, and this was
bene, bene
.

Sure enough, as Luke crayoned more pictures, his appetite improved, he played outside more, and he hadn’t had a stomachache worthy of skipping school for a week.

Mary said, “I don’t know.” His face seemed puffy to her. “I think something’s wrong with him. Look at how he lays his forehead on his hands, like he’s praying, like he’s so sad.”

Bev left the piano and joined them on the risers during the break.

Lydia bent her head toward Bev and whispered, “What do you call that flabby bit of skin around a penis?”

Air dove into Bev’s lungs.
Caught
. She was caught. Lydia knew Bev had been sleeping with Dante, and that was why she was asking about
foreskin
. She even knew the
particulars
. She had to warn Dante. She was a widow, but he was still a priest. “Pardon me?”