Waking the Dead (21 page)

You are my darling. Oh Jesus, if you were here right now. The things I would do. You’d be screaming for mercy, pal.

So. Get off the boat. Get off the boat and come home.

Please!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“
HERE’S MY DREAM
,” she said, leaning over to my side of the bed, her chin in her hand. “Do you want to hear it?” Naturally I did, though my eyes would not open. “You’re a young senator and I’m your wife and we’re at a big fancy Washington party. Everyone’s there—senators, the prez, the secretary of genocide, you know, the works. You’re in a tux and I’m wearing a very expensive gown. Low cut, with little spaghetti straps. And all I can think of is I have to keep my hands down, my elbows close to my side, because I haven’t shaved under my arms and if anyone sees, your career is ruined.”

W
E MOVED TO
Chicago together, a night flight upon which we celebrated the exact second-year anniversary of our becoming lovers. They didn’t serve champagne, so we mixed bourbon with club soda. Lots and lots of drinks, but we knew how to behave. She was wearing blue jeans and a red shirt; I was still in my uniform, my last half-price flight. All the lights beneath us seemed enshrouded in mist.

Through friends at the Catholic Action Project, Sarah had arranged for work in Chicago. She was going to run a recreation program at a priory on the northwest side, a place calling itself Resurrection House. When we got off the plane it was ten o’clock at night in Chicago. You could feel the September heat right there in the airport. We already had an apartment waiting for us, the top floor of a three-story limestone building on Blackstone Avenue.

We had budgeted money for a taxi but there was a surprise in store. We were met at the gate by a priest. Father Mileski. He was thirty-three years old. Long black hair, a bushy, apocalyptic beard. He was massive and if he wanted to look like Christ, then it was after the Savior spent a year or two pumping iron. You could see his muscles beneath his black clothes. His eyebrows grew together and his small brown eyes beneath them seemed always to be moving, even as he stared at you. “Sarah?” he said, coming up to us. “Sarah Williams?” He had a deep bass voice, slow movements, a giant oppressed by his own size.

“How’d you guess?” she asked him. I was raised never to admit who I was to strangers, but I suppose that already this man was no stranger to her—she was, of course, mad for priests, especially if they looked like misfits.

“You were …” He gestured. He seemed to be struggling for words. He smoothed his beard. “I knew what you looked like,” he said finally.

“What a great way to start,” Sarah said, taking my arm.

“I thought you’d need a hand,” Father Mileski murmured, shifting from foot to foot. “I hope I made the right decision. I have a car. I can take you to your new apartment.”

“It’s just wonderful,” said Sarah. She tugged at me and looked up into my face, smiling. Her eyes seemed dazed with happiness, as if the appearance of this thick and towering priest had somehow anointed us, blessed our beginnings in Chicago with a promise of good luck and purpose. Whatever misgivings she had about tagging along as I followed the tracks I’d laid before I’d even met her were instantly dispelled by Mileski’s coming to meet her. Now she belonged in Chicago, too. She was longing to be needed and now she was. Her happiness was so quick and so complete that I was glad for the priest’s coming, too.

But as the saying goes: Little did I know.

“
YOU’RE DRINKING TOO
much,” she said. “It’s not funny.”

“When was it funny?” I asked. A drunk loves to be hassled when he’s pouring; I gave myself a little extra.

“Don’t run it around in circles,” she said.

“No, no, I’m curious. When was it funny? If we can trace it back, then maybe I can make it funny again.” I pointed the bottle in her direction, offering her a bit. An unlikely proposition. It was midnight. She was in her domestic-looking terry cloth robe, the one with coffee stains on the sleeve, the one that always smelled like buttered toast.

“Are you nervous?” she asked. “Are you having trouble sleeping? School?”

“Yes, yes, yes, everything.” I took a drink. It felt as if I’d sloshed a little on my chin, but when I felt it with my palm I was dry.

“Don’t do this to me,” she said, in a low, even voice.

“What am I doing to you?” I asked, with a cool grin, Johnny Darkness off on a toot.

“I don’t want to look after you this way. It’s a pain being the girl in her bathrobe telling the boy to be careful.”

“Then don’t.”

She stepped toward me and knocked the glass out of my hand. There was bourbon on my shirt, ice cubes in my pocket. The glass rolled back and forth on the little Oriental carpet and then off the edge and onto the gray wooden floor.

“How very persuasive,” I said.

“You talk like a college boy,” she said, turning away. “You didn’t talk like that when you were in the Coast Guard.”

“I can’t do very much right with you, can I?” I said. I picked up the glass, took the ice out of my shirt pocket and put it back into the glass, and then poured myself another drink. It felt as if I were winning an incredible victory. The cold wet spot on my shirt touched directly onto my heart.

F
ATHER
M
lLESKI
B
ECAME
her best friend and I found myself in the cosmically stupid position of becoming jealous of a priest. There was a lot of attention that year being paid to priests leaving their orders to marry. Nuns were going on talk shows to announce they planned to have children. I never really suspected her, but I pretended to, trying, I see now, to cover up a deeper, more painful jealousy: a meeting of souls that excluded me. They worked ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours at Resurrection House, while I sat around with sharpies and sellouts and ambitious up-from-under boys like myself, studying contract law, the warp and woof of the Constitution. It was hard to compete with the emotional rush of life at Resurrection House, with its crises, its incandescent moments of passionate friendship: the little boy who finally talked, the rapacious landlord forced to cough up a little heat, the shootout across the street. My conversation seemed anemic next to what Sarah and Mileski—Steven, now, by his own insistence— talked about daily.

Their clients were largely Mexican.They had small, smooth faces, stiff blue jeans, socks with bright silver threads. There were a few furious white holdouts who used the settlement house because there was basketball, a Coke machine, but the whites in that neighborhood were Appalachians and as distrustful of the Catholics as they were of the browns and blacks.

Sarah lost weight. She developed purple half moons beneath her eyes. Her breath stank of cigarettes. Something savage entered her lovemaking and at times this vehemence was hypnotic, catching, and at other times it was merely scary. I am remembering her now on top of me, thrusting up and down, wildly, like an angry man, with her fingernails digging into my shoulder so that when she was finished and took her hands away she’d dug eight little frowns into my skin.

One night, she brought Mileski home for dinner, along with a new addition to the priory named Father Stanton, and Sister Anne. Stanton had come to Chicago from Rhodesia and his nerves were shot. He’d seen torture, fire fights; the headlights of his Land Rover skittered over the thorn bushes, behind any one of which could be lurking a man with an automatic rifle. He’d lost favor with both sides—with the blacks because of his color and with the whites because of his sympathies. He was tall, with gray hair, large ears. He was a shattered man. His hands shook; sometimes he opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out but a dull, gagging noise. Sister Anne taught English at Loyola but put in her twenty hours a week at Resurrection House. She was a large-boned, red-faced woman with thick, steely hair, a man’s jaw, pale eyes that split in two behind her rimless bifocals. Stanton brought a bottle of red wine; Sister Anne brought a salad of green beans and chick-peas. Mileski came with a package of sugar doughnuts. Stanton was attempting to tell us about sidewalk etiquette in Salisbury—how the blacks would have to leave the pavement if a white person was using it. We drank the wine, with me leading the charge. Sarah sat next to Father Mileski and when she wanted him to comment upon something she patted his leg. Suddenly, the very unlikelihood of their becoming lovers seemed proof of its inevitability: Sarah liked nothing more than a nice stiff swim upstream. She was a sucker for painfully unconsummated love affairs. (I was remembering that window in her bedroom back in New Orleans and those steamy charades for the boy a million miles away across the street.)

Sister Anne was asking me what contribution I could make to the priory and its work, once I had my law degree.

“You’ve got some of the oiliest, most corrupt lawyers in the city working for the diocese,” I said.

“Yes, but what we’re trying to accomplish is something very different,” she said. “We’re a church inside a church.” And now her eyes narrowed and behind the thick, distorting spectacles they looked like those flat little fish the light shines right through.

“Are you Catholic?” she asked me.

“Half,” I said.

“You can’t
be
half Catholic,” said Sister Anne.

“Watch me,” I said, and drew an imaginary line with my finger, starting at my forehead and going down to my belly.

“Don’t argue with him,” said Sarah. “He likes it too much.” She got up from her seat next to Mileski and sat on the arm of my chair. She did a takeoff of someone shaking her lover by the shoulders.

“So, Steven,” Stanton said, finishing his wine with a manly flourish, and then crossing his legs, “what are we going to do about getting these two decently married?” His accent was Rhodesian, fancy yet blunt.

“It’ll happen,” said Steven. He had a modish sense of fatality, a strain of passivity that he could carry because of his sheer physical power.

“She has a genius with children,” Stanton said to me. His teeth seemed to lack a protective enamel; they were bruised from just one glass of burgundy. “She’s just so lovely with them. It’s a comfort to see it.”

“I don’t think I’m her type for that sort of thing,” I said. I really did say this in a high style and I’d meant it to be somehow amusing— as if I were so confident of Sarah’s and my perfect love that I could play at trashing it in public. But they didn’t know me well enough to get the joke and I probably didn’t deliver it with half the aplomb I’d intended. My heart began to race as my words hung like smoke in that small, poorly ventilated room. Our dinner guests in black looked at me with their exhausted, sympathetic, yet strangely cool eyes—for, of course, they were not thinking how I would survive the awkwardness of this moment so much as they were wondering if this sack of blood they saw before them held within it a soul destined for heaven or for hell.

A S
UNDAY AT
the lake. We were at that place people in Hyde Park call the Point, a promenade of huge, colorless rocks encircled by the gray, slightly sinister busyness of Lake Michigan. It was a hot summer day and people were sprawled out on the rocks like lizards. Sarah and I were with Father Mileski. He wore a brief, iridescent bathing suit, such as a swim racer would wear, and his legs looked massive, like brown, furry trees. Sarah was wearing a pale green bikini that was a little small for her. She kept fiddling with the elastic around her legs, tucking her pubic hair in at the sides. I was the only one who wanted to swim. There’d been talk in the papers about the water’s being polluted, and though the city insisted the problem had passed, it seemed that Sarah and Mileski stayed dry for political reasons.

I watched them as I trod water; they were each propped on an elbow, talking away as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. When I returned, I leaned over for a towel and saw Sarah’s eyes: they seemed to be holding back torrents of tears. I asked her what was wrong. I crouched down and put my hand on the side of her face.

“Nothing,” she said. “Steven was just reminding me what Jesus said to the Pharisees.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Then, trying to cover the callousness of my incredulity, I asked Mileski what in fact Jesus had said.

Mileski shrugged modestly and seemed reluctant to go into it. “This was when the Pharisees wanted to curry favor with him. And Jesus explained why he was going to keep his distance and he said, When I was hungry you would not feed me and, you know, when I was naked you would not clothe me, and … and when I had no place to live you offered me no shelter. And the Pharisees said, Wait a minute. We never had a chance. We never saw you hungry or naked or without a place to live. And Jesus said, Every time you saw a hungry man and didn’t feed him—that was me. And every time you saw a naked man and did not clothe him—that was me. And every time you saw a homeless man and did not give him shelter—that was me too.”

I looked down at him. The sun, like a dumb animal, was trudging toward the west and it was slightly behind Mileski now. I had to squint to look in his direction. A half dozen wisecracks gathered within me and the pressure of not saying them felt like the suppression of an enormous sneeze. What if it really was that simple, I thought to myself. What if all we were required to be was
good
, what if there really was a guide, a standard upon which to measure our actions, and by doing so we could serve both heaven and earth far more valuably than we could ever hope to through a life of calculation and compromise?

Sarah rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head. She crossed her legs and I looked at the bottoms of her feet, pale and creased as ancient hands, and I felt a warm river of sentiment going through me, and then I thought: They’re right. We must
do
something.

T
HAT NIGHT
, I was sitting at my desk, reading the
Harvard Law Review
by the light of a green glass lamp. I could hear the dull roar of the shower and when Sarah stepped into the spray the difference in the sound seemed to suggest the exact shape of her body. The pipes changed and then she moved away from the spray. The water hit the tiles in an undifferentiated rush and when she stepped forward again she carved in silence another replica of herself. A few minutes later she emerged from the shower. She was naked except for a yellow towel she’d wrapped around her hair like a rooster’s comb. Her body was blotchy from scrubbing. I glanced up and then went back to my reading. I don’t know why I was being so difficult. It was my awful way of flirting, daring her to court me. She came to me. She leaned over my back and put her arms around me. “I want to have a child,” she whispered into my ear.