The Case Against Satan (3 page)

The music was now so furious that he almost did not hear the doorbell ring.

The housekeeper was asleep, so Gregory arose to answer the door himself. First, he turned off the eruptive, whirling music. As he walked to the door—passing into a vestibule cluttered with halltrees and umbrella stands—he could only think this late caller must be Father Halloran, who had perhaps forgotten something.

He unlatched and swung open the heavy door.

“It's awful late I know, Father,” said the large man who stood before him, “but it's about the girl here.”

The girl, of high school age, would not allow her blue eyes to meet Gregory's.

“That's all right,” Gregory found himself saying, “if it's really important.”

“It is,” said the man. “Sort of an emergency.” Gregory led them into the parlor, offered them chairs—the girl would not sit down—and quickly struggled into his jacket again.

“Now then,” said Gregory. “Don't tell me. You're the Garths, aren't you? Susan and—”

“Robert,” said the man.

“Of course. I'll get all these names straight soon. You know, it's odd, but Father Halloran—he just left—was speaking about you and your daughter only a moment ago.” The oddness of the coincidence was more of a conversational opener for Gregory than a true expression of personal bemusement. He had lived too long, and been on the receiving end of too many coincidences, to feel other than mere intellectual surprise. Emotionally, it was old stuff and he was used to it. He had but to ask himself “What ever became of Father John Doe?” in order to
receive a letter or phone call from Father John Doe the following day; or to suddenly remember a long-forgotten Bible verse and then, beginning to search for it, have the Bible fall open to the exact page and the verse leap to his eyes. And yet Gregory was not so vain as to think himself unique in this: coincidence, he knew, occurred in the lives of everyone with such frequency that it seemed almost the norm, and was met by most people not with the blink of astonishment but with the half-smile and casual nod usually accorded a regular and welcome visitor. Gregory asked Garth, “What can I do for you?”

Garth told his daughter to sit down; she did; then he said, “We been walking up and down in front of the rectory. I could see Father Halloran was here. I didn't want to bust in, so I thought we'd wait until he left. When Father Halloran introduced us to you today, Susie took a shine to you, and I sort of did too. And then later, something happened that—” He interrupted himself: “You say Father Halloran told you something about her?”

“Well, a little, yes,” said Gregory.

Nodding, Garth said, “See, Father Halloran he said she should go to a doctor. A specialist. He said she needed, you know, help, mental help. He said
he
didn't know what to do for her. I guess he figured she was—well, crazy.” Quickly, he added, “Not that I'm blaming Father Halloran. I mean, he sure had plenty of reason to think she was—not right—after what happened.”

“What exactly did happen?” Gregory asked.

“Didn't he tell you?”

“He only told me—” Gregory felt the girl's eyes on him, and said, “Perhaps Susan would rather wait in another room while we talk.” And, saying this, he turned to find her eyes looking into his own, no longer evasive. Yet her voice—she spoke now for the first time—was soft and shy:

“No, Father. I want to stay here. You don't have to keep things from me.”

A bit surprised by her directness, Gregory only said, “Fine, fine,” then turned again to the girl's father. “Well, Mr. Garth, Father Halloran only told me that Susan was very—disturbed—and had these seizures every so often, and that he recommended she see a doctor.”

“A psychiatrist,” amplified Susan.

“Well, yes.”

“And that's all he told you?” asked Garth.

“That's all. Did you take her to a psychiatrist?”

Susan said, “No.”

“Oh, she wanted to go,” said Garth, “but—well, in the first place, Father, those guys cost an awful lot of money. I just don't make that kind of money.” He frowned. “And in the second place—”

“Dad,” said Susan.

“In the second place, my daughter is not
crazy
. Why, there's never been anything like that in my family. Or in her mother's either, rest her soul. So how could she all of a sudden be crazy? Now, those fits of hers—that's something else again. I thought maybe it might be this epilepsy? I had an uncle, on my mother's side, my mother's brother he was,
he
used to take fits like that. Epileptic fits. So I figured, well, could be it turned up again in Susie. So we went to a doctor—not a headshrinker, a regular doctor, went to two of 'em in fact—and they both examined her, put her through some kind of electro something or other—”

“Electroencephalograph,” said the girl, quietly.

“Yeah. And nothing.”

“Nothing?” asked Gregory.

“That's right. She's not an epileptic. Two different doctors said so.”

“I see. And did they say anything else?”

“No, that was about all.”

“They said,” Susan insisted, “that I should see a psychiatrist.”

Gregory had an idea. “Mr. Garth,” he said, “I realize the economic factor can be an obstacle . . . I mean, money doesn't grow on trees and, as you say, psychiatrists do run pretty high. But what if that part of it were taken care of? You see, I have a very good friend—a brother-in-law, in fact—who is also a very good psychiatrist, and—”

“No,” Garth said flatly, “nothing doing.”

“But I'm sure I could persuade him to take the case for next to nothing.”

“The money is only part of it. Don't you see, Father? How
can I send my own daughter to a—to a nut doctor, someone who treats loonies? She's not crazy!”

“It's not a question of her being crazy. A psychiatrist can—”

But it was a sore point with Garth. His lips and eyes went tightly closed and he shook his head vehemently. “No. No. I know what they do in their offices, these head doctors. They drag everything out of you. They get you to talking and talking—about everything. They don't have any sense of what's decent or proper or . . . They just want you to talk about every nasty, filthy thing that ever passed through your mind. I sure wouldn't allow a girl her age to go through something like that. I just won't buy it. I don't believe in it. And I'm surprised you do, Father. Isn't the Church against all that stuff?”

“No,” Gregory said simply. “The Church doesn't endorse it all, I must admit, but—”

“There, you see?”

“—but it does
not
dismiss or condemn it.” Gregory wanted to tell him about Father Devlin of Chicago, a Catholic priest who was also a practising analyst; he wanted to say that the Church does not make snap judgments, that it sifts and examines evidence for years, sometimes for centuries, before it accepts or rejects a thing; he wanted to tell Garth it took the Church four hundred years to recognize Joan of Arc as a saint and it was as recent as 1954 that it made the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a definite dogma. So it couldn't be expected to come out for or against something as comparatively brand-new as psychiatry—but he knew these arguments would fall upon heedless ears, for Garth was shaking his head stubbornly again, his mouth and eyes closed. So, instead, he said: “What's the difference, Mr. Garth, between the psychiatrist's office and the confessional box?”

“Why—”

“A great deal of difference, to be sure—I'm not trying to pretend they're one and the same or that psychiatry can replace the Church, but when you speak of—”

“Father,” Garth cut in, “I guess I should tell you why I brought Susie here.”

“Yes,” agreed Gregory, “I guess you should.”

Garth cleared his throat and began. “Tonight, soon after you
and Father Halloran left our place, I walked into her room—and do you know what I caught her doing?”

“What?”

“Packing!” cried Garth. “Packing a suitcase! Getting ready to run off! ‘Where do you think you're going,' I says. ‘Anyplace,' she says; ‘anyplace you can't find me.' ‘Why,' I says. ‘Because I want to see a psychiatrist,' she says, ‘and you won't let me!' How do you like that? No money, not a dime to her name, gonna run off and
walk the streets I suppose
to get enough money to pay some headshrinker—” Garth stopped for breath. “I finally got her to agree to come here and talk to you. I know it's late, and I wouldn't bother you like this if it wasn't an emergency, but I think she'd listen to you.” Turning to his daughter, he said sternly, “Now you listen to the Father here.
He'll
tell you I'm right.”

Those direct blue eyes again. “
Is
he right, Father?”

Gregory smiled at her. Garth was about as unright as a person could be, but it would accomplish nothing to say so now. “He certainly is right,” Gregory therefore said, “about this business of running away. With no money, all alone, it
would
be pretty silly, wouldn't it?”

“But somebody has to help me, Father,” she said.

“That's my job. If we talk this over, all three of us, maybe we can come to an understanding. My brother-in-law, for instance—”

“There'll be none of that!” said Garth.

Gregory fought down an impulse to insult the man. Soothingly, he said, “Mr. Garth, I'm just trying to help . . .”

But Garth did not permit him to finish. He had gone crazy on the subject. “I tell you that's the one thing she don't need!” he said. “There's been enough filth—” He caught himself and stopped cold.

But Gregory had heard the word. “Filth? What do you mean?”

“Never mind . . .”

“Dad,” Susan quietly said, “I think you'd better tell him. If you don't, I will.”

“How can you?”
Garth asked with astonishment. “How can you tell it yourself?
I
can't even tell it, and I'm a man, a man fifty years old. How can
you
tell it—a little girl?”

“I'm not so little. Tell the Father.”

Garth's face was flushed and glistening: he wiped it with a handkerchief. “Oh God,” he said, and then, in a toneless voice, he told the story.

He told of the whiteness of Father Halloran's face—“People talk about faces turning white, but they don't really mean white,” he said. “But that time in the rectory here, Father Halloran's face was
white
. White as his collar.” He told of Father Halloran's difficulty in speaking, of how he kept swallowing, of how his voice shook, of how his hands shook, of how he looked out the French windows of the parlor, looked at the walls, looked at the floor, looked at his fingernails, looked at Garth's necktie, looked everywhere but at Garth's face.

“And when he was through talking,” said Garth, “he just sort of stood there for a second, and then he walked out of the room. Just like that, no handshake, no good-bye, just out. A few weeks later, we heard he was going to be transferred. Something about an orphanage, and how he had always wanted to take charge of an orphanage, but I knew better. I told myself I'll just bet he asked to be transferred. Because he thought he'd failed, I guess. ‘I cannot help her,' is what he told me. ‘Only the grace of God can help her.' But the way he said it was like he was saying, ‘
Not even
the grace of God can help her.'”

Gregory assured Garth Father Halloran couldn't have meant that. Then he asked Susan, “But what kind of help? From what do you want to be saved, my dear?”

The blue eyes were clouded, the soft voice hollow. “From Hell. From being damned forever to Hell.”

“I read in a book once,” she went on, “that the fire of Hell is black and gives no light, and damned souls burn forever in darkness, heaped one on top of another so tight they can't move even to brush away the worms that eat their eyes . . . and there's nothing but terrible noise and pain and stench and darkness forever and ever and ever . . .”

“Don't worry about Hell, my dear,” said Gregory. “Nobody has said you are damned to Hell.”

“I will be. For what I did. For what I do.”

“You see,” Garth continued, “I'd been having this trouble with her . . .”

The trouble concerned church. Apparently, Susan had been until recently a devout girl who attended Mass regularly. On an otherwise ordinary Sunday morning, she started out with her father, dressed in her Sunday best, a picture of purity with her starched cotton dress, old-fashioned pigtails and pretty, unpainted face. They lived within walking distance of the church, and when they turned a corner and came in sight of the spire, Susan stopped. She turned around and began to walk home. Garth asked her what was wrong, had she forgotten something? She said no, she just wanted to go home. Was she sick? No. Further questions yielded no further answers, so Garth wisely let her have her way. They returned home. The following Sunday, she again donned her Sunday dress, and again went out with her father. When they reached the crucial corner and saw the spire of the church, again she stopped.

This time her father became angry. “Don't start anything funny with
me,
young lady!” he said. “
You
are going to church!” He took her arm and led her along. She pulled back. “Come
on,”
he ordered. And then she began to weep. But Garth, relentless, continued to drag her along the sidewalk, closer and closer to the church.

She screamed. “Don't make me go in there!
Please
,
Daddy, don't make me go in that place!”

Garth snarled, “This is just
church!
You've been here hundreds of times before! What's the
matter
with you?”

Other parishioners, powdered and pressed for Sunday morning Mass, had begun to turn and look, frowning with disapproval at this sullying of the quiet. Garth, self-conscious, released her arm.