The Prudence of the Flesh Read online

  “What’s going on, Greg?”

  “You saw what he did,” Bunting cried from the floor. “He assaulted me, a writer!”

  Sinclair laughed. “I saw you throw yourself down on the floor.”

  Bunting had a little trouble getting to his feet. He looked at Barrett as if seeking appropriate words and, finding none, glared at Sinclair. Then he was gone.

  “What was that all about?”

  “He wanted to write a story about me.”

  Sinclair’s brows went up. “What’s wrong with a little publicity?”

  “Did you see that piece in the Tribune about the parish priest?”

  “I couldn’t read it.”

  “Now you have part of my reason for throwing him out.”

  Sinclair supplied the rest of the reason without saying it and laid his hand on Barrett’s arm.

  “What is your topic today?”

  “Willa Cather. Shadows on the Rock; Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

  “Sounds good.”

  It did, but the feeling that was usually his when he recorded his program did not accompany him to the studio. He loved Willa Cather; she had written two of the best Catholic novels in American literature but was not herself a Catholic. What would Willa Cather have thought of a man who left the priesthood? A man who had murderous thoughts about a would-be writer like Ned Bunting? Incompetent he might be, but the Tribune had run that piece on Roger. Imagine what he would do with Gregory Barrett.

  The accusation by Madeline Murphy had the strange effect on Nancy and himself of returning them to the days when they had both changed their lives, marrying and going far from any reminders of what they had been, he a priest, she a nun. Over the years, the memories faded and it was as if they had never been otherwise than as they were. Then they had returned to the Chicago area, and within a year the accusation had come. It had begun when Madeline Murphy telephoned and talked with Nancy.

  She told him of it, and they both verbally dismissed it, but how could Nancy fail to be affected by a call that accused her husband of taking advantage of a young parishioner long ago?

  “I don’t remember such a name.”

  He wanted to deny it, to declare his innocence, to assure Nancy that he had never seduced anyone. That would have been absurd, though, and for the first time he saw the effect of such an accusation: Any denial conferred on it some kind of reality.

  “Well, you can’t remember them all.” Nancy smiled and came into his arms. She was right. Humor was the only defense.

  He prayed that the phone call would be a single event, some madwoman deriving satisfaction from seeing herself as a victim. Had he prayed so fervently in years? How had the woman chosen him to harass? There must be some connection between his priestly life and the girl. She knew that he had been a priest. Of course, there would be many who knew that. Amos Cadbury’s suggestion that he talk with Roger Dowling was inspired.

  15

  “Of course I know Father Dowling,” Gloria said in reply to Tuttle’s question. “I’m surprised you do.”

  Almost as surprising was her knowing Tuttle, but Madeline had mentioned the lawyer, and Gloria wondered if he would like some paintings to hang in his office and managed to run into him at the courthouse. Now he had stopped by.

  “My walls are filled with awards.”

  “I have some small ones.”

  She offered to come by his office to see which of her paintings might fit, but the suggestion filled him with alarm. It turned out that he was nagged by his secretary.

  Gloria got to know him better. If nothing else, it might make Ned jealous.

  “I’m full of surprises,” Tuttle said in answer to her remark about his knowing Father Dowling. “The good father would like to meet our friend Madeline Murphy, and I want you to set it up.”

  “Meet with her?” Like Ned, Gloria had come to like Father Dowling—seen from the pews on a Sunday, that is. Of course, they were comparing him with Monsignor Sledz, “the martinet of St. Bavo’s,” in Ned’s phrase, which sounded better than it meant because she wasn’t all that sure of the meaning of “martinet.” (“Some kind of bird?”) Maddie’s quarrel was with Gregory Barrett, but no doubt the clergy rallied around one of their own.

  “Gloria, he may be the only one who gives a damn about her.”

  “Well, thanks a lot.”

  “He has talked with Gregory Barrett, sure. They were classmates back in the Ice Age. Maybe we shouldn’t handicap priests, but if we did I’d put Dowling way out in front of those I know.”

  “Who’s that in the car?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “He’s a cop. Peanuts Pianone.”

  “Pianone!”

  “The family’s ambassador to the Fox River Police Department.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Peanuts is harmless. So what do you say? Do you talk to Madeline or do I?”

  “Why didn’t you just go ask her?”

  Tuttle hesitated, about to lie. “I think this needs a woman’s touch.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Time is of the essence.”

  It was going on noon. Ned would be coming by for lunch. “Call me in an hour or so.”

  “I’ll come by.”

  “Call me first.”

  Tuttle hurried out to his car and hopped in, slamming the door. The Pianone ambassador slept on, but when the car lurched forward, so did he. Then the car went out of sight.

  Ned didn’t like the idea. “Madeline is putty in the hands of a priest,” he said significantly.

  “Ned! You know Father Dowling.”

  “Sure, and I thought I knew Monsignor Sledz.”

  “This is different.”

  “He’ll try to talk her out of going after Barrett.”

  “What if he did? You have your story.”

  Ned frowned. “Quirk wants me to work with a reporter from the Tribune. A double byline.”

  “Did you tell him what the story is?”

  Ned looked shrewd. “Of course not. They’d cut me out entirely if they had any inkling there’s a child in the case.”

  Child. Gloria thought of Marvin. The son of a priest? Much as she liked Maddie, she found Marvin a little weird. What did he do all day while Madeline was at the library?

  “He’s pursuing his education,” Maddie said, her tone defensive.

  “At home?”

  “By correspondence. On the computer. There are online universities.”

  Well, apparently she wanted to believe it. As far as Gloria could see, Marvin was a bum, prematurely retired in his midtwenties. Now he had taken an interest in his mother’s grievance.

  “You’ve told him about himself?”

  Maddie’s hesitation gave the answer to that question, but Marvin had told his mother she was crazy not to take the money offered to her by the archdiocese.

  “He may be right.”

  “I thought you understood.”

  “Maddie, what is your best-case guess as to the outcome of all this?”

  “Vindication!”

  “You mean revenge?”

  “Call it that if you like.”

  To Ned, Gloria said, “Sometimes I could kick myself for helping her remember her past.”

  “I wonder what else she’s going to remember.”

  They were sitting after lunch in Gloria’s studio, pictures in various stages of completion cluttering the area, the smell of turpentine and gesso and paint. She was back to oils, if only because they took longer, and her inventory was filling the house. Madeline had told her that Pasquali, the head librarian, thought that her exhibit had gone on long enough.

  “Give me another week.”

  “Gloria, if it was up to me, they could stay there forever.”

  Maybe that was the solution. She would donate them to the library. Ned could write it up. They went together to the library. By agreement, they did not stop at the desk to talk to Ma
ddie but went directly to Pasquali’s office.

  “This is Ned Bunting, Mr. Pasquali.”

  “Of the Tribune,” Ned added.

  Pasquali’s wariness went. “What can I do for you?”

  Gloria said, “It’s about my paintings that have been on display here.” The brightness dimmed. Apparently he had not made the connection. “I intend to donate them to the library.”

  “It will make a great little story,” Ned said.

  “You mean a permanent gift?”

  “As an expression of gratitude for what libraries have meant to me in my life. Especially this branch.”

  “How do you spell your name?” Ned asked. It had been on the door and it was on a plaque on Pasquali’s desk, but the librarian obligingly spelled it out for Ned. The prospect of publicity, of his name in the paper, had obviously driven out the negative judgment he had made of Gloria’s paintings in telling Maddie he wanted them out of here.

  “Those creeps looking at porn on our computers could paint as well as that,” he had grumbled.

  “I don’t think you would want to hang any pictures they might paint.”

  Maddie had been proud enough of that retort to pass it on, but the sting had remained in Gloria’s soul. Now her own vindication had come, with Pasquali babbling away into Ned’s recorder. Ned had brought a camera as well, and he took a picture of the artist and benefactor at the side of the grateful future custodian of a dozen precious paintings by Gloria Daley.

  16

  Pasquali came out with Madeline and Ned Bunting, intent on giving Ned a tour of the place.

  “Maybe a shot of the exhibit?” Ned suggested.

  “Of course, of course.”

  Pasquali led them off to the little windowless lunchroom to which the paintings had been removed. Maddie heard him calling it a temporary home for the paintings while he decided on their permanent disposition. Madeline fluttered her fingers as they went by the desk and winked. In a few minutes, Gloria was back.

  “Do you know where he put my paintings?”

  “In the lunchroom.”

  “Ned gave him hell about that. Where can we talk?”

  “The lunchroom?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Can we go out for a smoke?”

  In back of the building was a loading dock, and it was there that the addicted among the employees of the Benjamin Harrison branch of the Fox River library withdrew to smoke, in good weather and bad. They were more likely to die of pneumonia than of any ailment connected with smoking.

  Gloria shook two cigarettes free and offered one to Madeline. “Father Dowling wants to meet you.”

  “What for?”

  “Ned and I have been attending Mass at his parish. He’s heard about your awful experience and wants to talk with you.”

  “It’s a trick.”

  “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure it isn’t. Do you know what I think? He may be the only one who really gives a damn about you.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Maddie, he’s a priest. The kind of priest we used to know.” That was a mistake, but Gloria hurried on. “A straight shooter.”

  They talked about it for three cigarettes apiece. Gloria was about to light a fourth when Madeline said, “Where?”

  “Here? At the rectory? Your place?”

  Having a priest come to the library was out of the question. Madeline was ashamed of the dirty old men who spent the day calling up pornographic sites on the bank of computers. At home was Marvin, presumably continuing his education in the privacy of his own bedroom. That left the rectory.

  “I could go with you,” Gloria offered.

  Madeline found that tempting, but only momentarily.

  “But I can tell him you’re coming?” Gloria persisted.

  “Gloria, I am perfectly capable of making arrangements myself.”

  That seemed unkind given their close friendship. Who else would have helped Madeline elicit the memories of events that had scarred her soul?

  “I don’t want Marvin to know,” Madeline explained.

  17

  Madeline Murphy, occupation librarian, lived with her son, Marvin, in a small bungalow not far from Dirksen Boulevard in Fox River. Her day was spent chasing derelicts from the computers on which they called up pornographic sites. Unbathed, with open mouths, barnacles on the ship of decent society that provided gratis this opening into hell, they awaited their Dante. Her zeal often brought her on the carpet of the head librarian’s office. Tetzel of the Tribune had written of the assault on the First Amendment in the branch library, ringing all the accepted changes on untrammeled liberty. He gave his reader to understand that wars had been fought to secure the right of derelicts to peruse pornography at public expense.

  “They commandeer the computers. They sit there for hours,” Madeline complained to Pasquali.

  “I know, I know.” He had once loved books and had become a librarian with the sense that the profession would connect him with the Bodleian, with the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, with the great library at Alexandria. Now he presided over a branch that contained few books even twenty-five years old, with shelf upon shelf of the ephemeral fiction called romances, carrying on a brisk trade in videos and rock music on disks, as well as large-print mysteries.

  “I did not become a librarian in order to run a sex shop,” Madeline said.

  “Now, now. That is too strong.”

  “Would you want your wife to patronize this library?”

  It was for Marvin she really feared. He had dropped out of high school with the intent of joining the navy and failed to pass the physical. There had been some months of desultory employment in various fast-food franchises. Fast food! The phrase had false Lenten connotations. Twice he had walked away in disgust from the smell of grease, the aroma of hamburgers and french fries, the dumbos who came and stared at the pictured offerings in an agony of indecision. Who could blame him?

  They had sat and plotted, mother and son, on how he could earn his high school diploma without going back to school. There were promissory ads in books of matches. Nothing came of them. Still, years later, he lolled around the apartment during the day, at the keyboard of his computer. Her experience at work stirred her motherly concerns. She was what is called a single mother, a category that aimed at rationalizing the irregular. Marvin had never had a father to model himself after. It was Madeline’s shame that for years she had been in doubt as to who his father was. In the past into which for years she had been reluctant to peer, there had been a sorority party, the house full of men, soft lights, strong drink, and pulsating music that stirred the loins. In some haze of warmth and momentary pain she had given herself to someone. She had, in the old joke, taken a chance on a mattress and lost by winning.

  The advice she was given at Student Health was lofty and moralizing. She could not responsibly bear the child. Nor need she. Relief was just an operation away. Whence came her resistance to this compelling counsel? Her whole being revolted at the idea. Mingled with her shame was the wonder that within her a new life was forming. She thought of going to the Newman Club, certain she would get different advice there, but she could not risk being seen there. So she went to a church several blocks from campus and talked with a young assistant, Father Barrett.

  Had she expected threats of divine retribution? She had come like the woman taken in adultery, but her reception had been biblical. His compassion in her time of need was balm to her soul. He arranged for her to go off where she could have her child. She could give it up for adoption.

  But, as she had resisted abortion, so she resisted adoption. The baby she bore was hers, and she resolved to raise it. Father Barrett had supported her decision. Her aging parents gave financial help, so she could continue school and earn her library degree. Did they believe her story that she had assumed the care of a child born of a straying sorority sister? In any case, they did not question it—but neither of her parents had ever seen Marvin.

&n
bsp; She lied to her parents, and she lied to Marvin when inevitably he asked about his father. By then she had supplied herself with photographs from a garage sale: The young sailor smiling into the camera, his hat at a jaunty angle, was on her dresser for years, then transferred to a prominent place in the living room. She invented a heroic death for Marvin’s putative father. Eventually he wanted to see the medals, the discharge papers, other photographs. Alas, she had given them into her parents’ keeping, and in the confusion after their deaths—an accident on 101 near Santa Barbara in which eight others had lost their lives—their effects were dispersed. The imaginary had become so vivid to her that she was almost surprised by Marvin’s skepticism.

  “Sometimes I think I was just left on your doorstep.”

  Sometimes she wished she had settled for such a simple explanation.

  The photograph of the unknown sailor was behind Marvin’s attempt to enlist in the navy.

  She met Gloria when Pasquali asked her to accommodate the local artist who was offering to lend some of her paintings for display in the library. They hit it off immediately.

  “I always wanted to paint myself.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are too many of us already.”

  The paintings Gloria brought were certainly colorful. Madeline supposed they were abstract. After hours of indecision, they hung the paintings in various places, not wanting to group them. Seen side by side, they seemed to resemble one another too much.

  “You certainly love yellow,”

  “The color of cowardice.”