Songs in Ordinary Time (17 page)

Howard laid down the hose and went to turn off the water. When he came back, he found the new priest rolling up his sleeves.

“Thought I’d give you a hand,” the priest said in his funny accent. Mrs.

Arkaday said he was from New York. Howard had overheard her telling Monsignor this morning that the new priest didn’t act like any priest she’d ever known.

“I love washing cars,” Father Gannon said, taking the sponge out of the pail and sloshing suds all over the hood.

Howard watched the priest wash the same places he had just done. New people were hard for Howard. Change confused him. Like now; his head buzzed. The priest didn’t like the job he’d done.

“Where I come from, hardly anybody has their own car,” the priest called over the rumble of an approaching truck. He lifted the wipers and scrubbed the windshield. “The last car I washed was my old…my dad’s.” Father Gannon wrung out the sponge. “All his life he wanted his own car. So he bought this old Dodge and washed it….”

Howard stared at the garbage truck cruising slowly down the street. He saw Carson peering over the wheel up at the Fermoyle house.

“And the next morning it was gone.” The young priest laughed.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 79

Howard closed his eyes, certain the garbage truck was stopping, certain he’d see his sister fly out of the house and into Carson’s arms.

“Howard?” the young priest said. He tapped Howard’s shoulder.

Howard opened his eyes. The truck was at the corner and Jozia wasn’t in it.

“Father Gannon!” barked the Monsignor from an upstairs window. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m trying to help Howard,” Father Gannon said with a wave of the dripping sponge.

“I told you yesterday! Mrs. Arkaday doesn’t need your help. Howard doesn’t need your help. But I do!” the Monsignor said.

Father Gannon looked at Howard and shrugged.

“Now!” the Monsignor growled.

The young priest ran into the rectory. Mrs. Arkaday came to the screen door and shook her head in disgust at Howard. He turned on the water, and while he rinsed off the gleaming black car, a terrible pain clutched his heart and he was sure a piece of it had just broken off and was spinning loose in his chest. Now everyone was mad at him.

S
am Fermoyle’s head pounded. He sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. What had Benjy wanted? Marie must have sent him.

They never came to see him. Three kids, and they never came, unless
she
wanted something: the kids need school clothes; they need shoes, boots, books; they need their teeth fixed. But what about him? Nobody gave a good damn about his needs. She’d probably sent him over here to pick his pockets. Once he’d found the kid going through the box of old pictures he kept under his bed. Little thief, goddamn little thief, always after something, scrounging around. Jesus Christ, he thought, she’s ruining those kids, training them to shake down their own father. If he had any gold fillings, he’d probably wake up some morning to find one of his kids sitting on his chest with pliers in his mouth.

He scratched his arms, then his chest and legs. It felt like he was crawling with bugs. What if the DT’s were starting; it had been over twenty-four hours since his last drink and if he didn’t get one soon, he’d be climbing the walls. Goddamn Hammelwitz calling the cops on him.

“Goddamn Hammelwitz, chickenshitlittlefuckingjewbartender,” he muttered, cringing with the blast of sound coming down the hallway. It was Jozia’s eternal vacuum sucking the brains right out of his skull. The vacuum banged against the door, then banged again before rolling off, its tanklike drone subsiding in the distance.

He looked wearily around this narrow room he had always lived in, except for the bittersweet eight-year limbo of his marriage. There was a mahogany bed with high carved pineapple posts, an old wooden radio he had once set for a moment on the rosewood chair brought in from the dining room and then never moved, and a tarnished brass floor lamp that didn’t work anymore. Three pictures hung on the wall over his bed. One was a photo 80 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

of his mother smiling from her crib and, next to her, Alice in her First Communion veil; the second, Marie and the children in front of a Christmas tree; and the third, a smeared number painting of the Last Supper that Alice had given him one Christmas.

He groaned. His tongue was furry and dry and his throat was raw. He felt sick to his stomach. It was this constant stink, mothballs and cedar, and in every drawer lilac bars and lavender to mask the smell of his mother’s long, diapered dying.

He got up slowly and opened the window, squinting dizzily away from the sun that bobbled atop the cross of the steeple. In the rectory driveway the Monsignor’s long black car floated in a sea of soap bubbles. Howard Menka squatted down, scrubbing a whitewall tire.

Sam knelt beside his bed and felt underneath as far as he could reach.

Then, cursing, he got up and yanked the bed out from the wall. All that he found was a newspaper fuzzed with dust, a sweat-stiffened sock, and a pair of soiled undershorts. On Helen’s orders, Jozia was not to clean his room when he was drinking. “Some goddamn housekeeper. Takes my bottle and leaves the dirt!” he muttered as he lurched from the room toward the howl of her vacuum.

Jozia pushed the big upright past him. He followed her into the crowded front parlor. When the table and chairs had been moved in here years ago to make space in the dining room for his mother’s crib, all the other furniture had to be pushed back against the walls, so that now, if you sat on the sofa, you couldn’t see over the dining-room table to the Morris chair on the opposite wall. But it had never mattered, because in all these years there had been few guests to sit in the parlor and none to dine at the table.

Jozia was trying to get around the table with the vacuum, but she was running out of cord.

“Better tell me where you put it,” he warned over the drone, poking the hump in her back to to get her attention.

Her cord caught; she turned, staring at the door. She would speak to him only in his sister’s presence. She knew who the boss was in this house, as well as she knew the fragility of his tenancy here, and this enraged him.

“Where’d you put it, feeb?” he snarled, jerking his fist inches from her face.

She continued to stare past him.

“Shit!” he cried with a savage kick at the vacuum. It fell on its side, whining and whirring, its wheels spinning like a tantrum of angry little feet. Without a word, Jozia reached down and set it upright. He kicked it again, and the bag fell off, spewing dirt onto the rug.

“Crazy man,” she muttered as she attempted to reattach the bag. “Goddamn crazy man. I’m getting awful sick of it….”

He stepped back, both indignant and a little sobered by the dark clutch of her voice. Her, the dimwit, calling him crazy.

“Grondine’s right,” she was muttering, “thirty years is just too long….”

He tiptoed over the worn carpet, wincing as the floorboards creaked. He SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 81

came into the dining room, where his mother huddled in her crib, her head turned to the window. The room reeked of talcum powder and dry urine.

Every morning Helen and Jozia bathed her from pitted metal bowls of tepid water and antiseptic soap, but there was still this smell. He started past her, suddenly feeling as giddy and lightheaded as a thieving boy. She turned with a feathery rustle, and her hands flew toward the wooden slats. “The yoke is broken!” she cried out.

He darted into the kitchen and opened the door next to the stove. He knelt down and felt along the cracked linoleum for the change that sometimes fell from Renie’s pants, which hung overhead. This was his brother-in-law’s wardrobe, as well as the mop and broom closet. Renie never seemed to mind wearing clothes that reeked of onions, fried fish, boiled cabbage.

For several years now Renie had slept in the small windowless room that in Sam’s youth had been the pantry. Banishment from Helen’s bedroom had been triggered by Riddles, a stray dog Renie had taken in one stormy night and the next morning would not relinquish. “I cannot bear deceit,”

Helen had sniffed, convinced he had lured the dog home, though brother and sister both knew the most heinous deceit of all had been the vile commingling of her dry chaste flesh with the coarse loins of a man who had proffered love, when her deepest desire had been satisfied with the sacrament of matrimony, that blessed and bewildering ligature to a man who snored and farted between her ironed sheets.

Sam stood up, chuckling at the thought of Renie letting one break, ripe and warm, against Helen’s rigid back. He groped along the tacky shelves.

Renie had once been easy pickings for Sam until an IRS audit a few years ago had cost him eight hundred dollars in back taxes and penalties. Now Renie distrusted everyone, particularly Helen, his own wife, who he suspected had turned him in for the reward.

Sam stood on a chair and probed the back of the highest shelf. All it held was more of Renie’s displaced junk: dusty cigar boxes stuffed with sales slips, a framed bowling certificate for perfect attendance as a substitute, and a Good Citizen citation from the Elks. He was climbing down when his eye caught on a book of rent receipts. Opening it, he smiled at the elegant script, the blank inviting lines. He shoved it into his pocket at the sharp approach of Helen’s heels.

She watched from the doorway. She was a small woman, her thin frame curiously contradicted by the large drooping breasts, no more than clumsy hindrances now as she tried to fold her arms.

“Jozia tells me you lost something and you think she stole it,” she said slowly as if to a child. “What did you lose, Sam?”

He edged toward the back door. “Nothing,” he said. “She’s just trying to start trouble.” He waved his hand in disgust.

Jozia’s face constricted over Helen’s head. “Yes he did, Miz LaChance.

He said I stoled his bottle and I should tell him where I put it or else he was gonna kick my teeth in. And then he kicked the Hoover and then the bag fell off and I been all this time tryna get it back on right….”

82 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Turn the feeb off,” he moaned and, opening the door, stumbled into the trapped heat of the back porch.

“Crazy man! You crazy man!” Jozia spat over the safety of Helen’s shoulder.

“Jozia!” Helen hissed, afraid someone would hear.

“I don’t have to take that. I don’t have to take his mouth. No sir! I can work a lot of better places. A lot!”

“Oh Jozia, please Jozia, just get back in,” Helen said. She leaned over the railing and called down shrilly, “Where are you going?”

“I’m running away from home,” he called back and then, seeing Mrs.

Clarke, their next-door neighbor, peeking out from her bedroom window, he bellowed, “That’s right. At the tender age of forty-eight, Samuel Fermoyle is running away to find fame and fortune and bright lights and horny broads, and anyone who wants to come along is sincerely invited.” He staggered down the driveway’s incline to the street, his right arm crooked at the end of an imaginary bindle and his other hand tipping an imaginary hat, first to Howard Menka hosing the Monsignor’s hubcaps, then to the three little Clarke girls, who cringed with giggles as their black terrier nipped after his frayed cuffs.

“Come with me, Howard,” Sam called. “Lay down your hose and follow me…. Get out of here, common cur…. Put aside those menial tools, Howard, and follow me, you stupid son of a bitch.” His heedless voice streamered behind as he crossed Main Street on his way to perform that most guarded of Helen’s rituals, her weekly descension into the Gut, where she collected the rents from her mother’s decrepit tenements.

I
n the rectory dining room Monsignor Burke sat at the table, head bowed, hands clasped over his plate. “Amen,” he whispered, crossing himself, his eyes on the kitchen door. Because of graduation tonight, he was eating dinner early. His stomach growled at the smell of frying fish. Mrs. Kilpatrick had sent over trout her husband had caught. Well, not caught, really. Mr.

Kilpatrick was a fish-and-game warden whose job it was to stock the lake with trout.

The doorbell rang. A woman spoke; then Father Gannon spoke. The Monsignor winced. It was that god-awful pest, Mary Squire-man, president of the Sodality. Her husband owned Squireman’s Press, which printed the Sunday bulletins free of charge. “It’s just been too hot for a bake sale,” Mrs.

Squireman was saying. “I just told Ann Brody we should wait for fall, but now that she’s treasurer all she cares about is being the best—”

“Hey now, no back-stabbing!” Father Gannon cut her off. “Maybe we should get Ann Brody in here, too. That way it’d be an honest, face-to-face—”

The office door banged shut and the Monsignor groaned. A catfight in the rectory, that’s all he needed. This new priest had no polish. His table manners were vile. Even freshly shaved, he had a coarse, swarthy look that embarrassed the Monsignor. As far as he could see, Gannon was a thug SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 83

whose erratic personality veered between frantic intensity and cold distraction.

The Monsignor tensed with the sound of flatware clanking and tinkling in the kitchen. Now came the scrape of metal as Mrs. Arkaday shook the sputtering fry pan back and forth over the burner. His mouth watered with the hot buttery smell. He was tired of late dinners, and sick calls in the middle of the night, and six a. m. Mass every single day. The Bishop had promised that this new curate would be as young and energetic and ambitious as his last curate, who was pastor now in Glens Falls. A young man could go places from here. Saint Mary’s could be a real springboard for a curate willing to pay his dues and learn the ropes.

Mrs. Arkaday backed through the swinging door with the golden trout still sizzling on its bed of buttery rice. The glazed baby beets glistened like jewels.

“Beautiful,” the Monsignor sighed. Mrs. Arkaday thanked him, then returned to the kitchen. At least he had an excellent housekeeper. He had eaten in other rectories and had seen how deeply the poorer quality of meals could affect morale. After he had eaten only a few forkfuls, he felt calmer and stronger. He picked the tender flesh carefully from the bones. He would be patient with this young priest. He would guide him. Management, he would tell him. That’s what it took. And a good ear. Nodding, he chewed thoughtfully, his rapturous gaze on the plate. He would explain that it takes more than prayer. Today’s clerics needed a pious heart and an astute mind.