The Prudence of the Flesh Read online

  Gloria did not want her photograph displayed along with her paintings. Instead, she offered a self-portrait. Madeline studied it.

  “I’m in there someplace. Let me take you to dinner.”

  This was an unexpected pleasure. Madeline’s life had become a parody of itself. Daytime in the library; after work, home to fuss over Marvin. When he was younger, there had been visits to museums, to the zoo, now and then a movie, but that was all behind them now. For Marvin, weekends meant hours and hours before the television watching sports—golf, basketball, football, hockey, it didn’t matter, any contest could mesmerize him. He drank beer as he watched. Meanwhile, she sat in her rocker in the kitchen reading the kind of book that had drawn her into the library work and listening to NPR and the delightful program called End Notes.

  That first time, she and Madeline had gone to a small trattoria where Gloria was obviously well known. Madeline let Gloria order for her. It was almost like a date. Madeline couldn’t get enough of it when Gloria began talking about her husband.

  “Gone to God, at least I hope so. He was killed in Iraq.”

  “Then we have that in common.”

  “You lost your husband?”

  “He was in the navy.”

  “What I think now is, what if I had gotten pregnant.”

  “I did.”

  “Really.”

  So she told Gloria about Marvin, an account that bore as little resemblance to her son as Gloria’s self-portrait did to her. It turned out that they had NPR in common.

  “I have it on all day. Flaky liberals, most of them. It brings back my youth,” Gloria said.

  “I suppose you listen to End Notes?”

  “Oh, that voice!” Gloria shivered and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I know him.”

  “You do!”

  “Well, I did. A long time ago, when he was a priest.”

  Gloria sat back. “I knew you were Catholic.”

  “But I’m not. Not anymore.”

  “Wait until you see my favorite usher.” Her brows danced. Honestly, she was so much fun to be with.

  When Gloria came to the house and met Marvin, she flirted with him shamelessly. He loved it, his chest expanding like a pouter pigeon’s under her flattery. How had Madeline’s memories of Father Barrett fused with all the publicity about wayward priests?

  “I lied about my sailor, Gloria.”

  “You weren’t married?”

  “Priests can’t marry.”

  How easy it had been to say and how impossible to take back, particularly when Gloria was so excited about it. They talked for hours, and Madeline just nodded when Gloria attributed to her the business about suppressed memories. She agreed to write the letter to Mr. Barfield, the archdiocesan lawyer whose name figured in local stories about accused priests. The worst thing had been to telephone Barrett at home, but by then Madeline almost believed the story herself.

  Madeline did go to church at St. Bavo’s, where Gloria nudged her arm when the tall, imperious usher strutted up and down the aisle. Then she met Ned Bunting at Gloria’s.

  “I’m a writer,” he had told her.

  “Art has brought us together,” Gloria simpered.

  On that occasion, Madeline told herself that Gloria was just being flirty, as she had been with Marvin, but she found it hard not to resent Ned Bunting a little.

  “So who’s your squeeze, Madeline? The four of us could go out.”

  “Oh, there’s no one in particular.”

  There had been no one all her life long. Once burned, twice shy.

  “Just so it isn’t Gregory Barrett.” Gloria’s eyes widened.

  “That bastard,” Ned said. “I sent him a story, and he sent it back with a nasty crack.” He seemed about to say more but didn’t.

  “Maybe he isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. Madeline knew him when he was a priest.”

  “You did!”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The story developed over several occasions. It seemed a dreamlike sequence, the movement from talking with Gloria to accusing the archdiocese of letting a predator like Gregory Barrett loose on innocent young women. Lawyers had come to her, suggesting that her grievances could be answered with money. Madeline affected shock. How could she have sustained the story without Gloria’s support? Ned, it turned out, was writing a book on the clerical scandals that were rocking the Church. Madeline was impressed when his article on Father Dowling appeared, despite the terrible job of editing. It was to Gloria that she had first confided—obliquely, not quite saying it outright—that Gregory Barrett was Marvin’s father.

  “Good God. You have to tell Ned.”

  Madeline panicked. After all, Ned was writing a book. With great reluctance she allowed herself to be interviewed by him, again and again, his tape recorder going. He seemed reassured, more than anything else, by the fuzziness of her memories. He explained the theory of repressed memory to her. It had become a commonplace. Under his urging, the past lost its vagueness. She told him how Father Barrett had arranged for her to have her child.

  It angered Ned that when Barrett had left the priesthood he had not married Madeline. “Ran off with a nun, of course.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Madeline said.

  Gloria told Ned about the photograph of the sailor in Madeline’s living room and about the garage sale.

  “I had to provide Marvin with a father,” Madeline explained.

  “Oh, you poor thing.” Gloria took her in a plush embrace. How good it was after all these years to feel again the sympathy and compassion she had felt when she talked with Father Barrett.

  Ned thought he was introducing her to the funny little lawyer in the tweed hat, Tuttle, describing him as his collaborator.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  Tuttle had looked Ned up, praised his account of Father Dowling, and given Ned his business card.

  “I’ve told him everything, Madeline,” Ned said.

  “Everything.”

  “About Marvin’s father.”

  18

  “She wouldn’t give her name,” Marie said. “She just wanted to know if the priest would be home this afternoon.”

  “And you told her yes.”

  “No, I told her you had joined the foreign missions and were now in Nigeria.”

  Marie stomped back to her kitchen. She did not look kindly on anonymous visitors, unless they were drop-ins, and then she would quiz them before letting them see the pastor.

  Father Dowling assumed it was Madeline Murphy. Tuttle had called to say that he had set the ball rolling, and Roger Dowling felt something of the unease Amos Cadbury did at this suggestion of collaboration. Still, when he had formed the resolution of seeing the woman who had made such serious charges against Gregory Barrett, he could think of no one other than Tuttle through whom he could broach the matter. He could simply have found out her address or where she worked and shown up, but he wanted some assurance that she was receptive to a meeting.

  He closed his breviary on his finger and shut his eyes. Veni sancte spiritus. It was an occupational hazard to make prayer so routine it ceased to be prayer. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” It was no pro forma prayer he prayed now, asking for the grace to handle the situation well. Whatever the situation was.

  When Gregory Barrett had first come to him, he had accepted his classmate’s assurance that the charges against him were fantastic and that he had no memory whatsoever of his accuser. It was ironic that a man who had left the priesthood and had been living a useful, indeed successful, life since should be swept up in the current scandals. A first anomaly of the case was that the accuser did not agree to be a recipient of the archdiocesan settlement with victims of clerical abuse. Barrett’s going to Tuttle when he was already a client of Amos Cadbury had seemed a faux pas, but the little lawyer had discovered things that had prompted Barrett to remember his accuser. The help he had
given her when she came to him in trouble was just what a priest should have done, even though, in the present atmosphere, such pastoral help could be made to seem ominous: He had smoothed the way for her when she decided to have her baby, and when she changed her mind about giving it up for adoption, he had supported her decision. The woman’s further claim that Barrett was the father of her child had changed everything, though. Barrett might have forgotten the help he had given a troubled young woman years ago, but he could scarcely have forgotten that he was a father. Roger Dowling believed his classmate’s denial, even as he sympathized with Barrett’s anguish at having to deny such a thing.

  He heard the front doorbell and then the passage of Marie Murkin down the hall to answer it. He could hear two voices, one the businesslike voice of Marie, another muted, diffident. Then Marie opened the door, and the woman appeared beside her.

  Father Dowling rose. “It is so good of you to come.”

  “I was told you wanted to see me.”

  “As I do, as I do. Please come in and sit down. Would you care for anything, coffee, tea?”

  “I would like some water.”

  Marie nodded and withdrew. The silence was not uncomfortable as they waited for her to return with the water.

  Madeline Murphy looked around the room and smiled. “I am a librarian.”

  “At the Benjamin Harrison branch.”

  “I have been there over twenty years.”

  “So you must like it.”

  “I do. Not that I have any alternative. It’s the one thing I’m trained to do. Have you been there?”

  “The Benjamin Harrison branch? No.”

  “You don’t look as if you need any books. Not that the frothy stuff we feature would interest you. Do you know we don’t even have a complete set of Dickens? Not that it matters, Nobody asks for him.”

  “And what is popular?”

  “Movies on video and CD. Music discs. The computer.” She shuddered. “Our branch has become a haven for derelicts. They commandeer the computers and spend hours looking at garbage.”

  “And you yourself love Dickens?”

  “Just recently I read The Pickwick Papers. I thought I was rereading it, but if I ever had read it I had forgotten.”

  “Memory is a strange faculty.”

  “I know why you want to talk to me.”

  “Good. I should tell you that Gregory Barrett was a classmate of mine. When I saw him recently I realized I hadn’t seen him since he left the priesthood.”

  “He was a priest when I knew him.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “I think you already know.”

  “Only what others have said. You should know that my desire to see you is completely unofficial. Gregory Barrett does not know you’re here, either.”

  “I wouldn’t care if he did.”

  “Did you ever consider talking with him?”

  “What would be the point?”

  “Each of you might remember things. He said he had no memory of you until the record of your bearing your child connected him to you. He remembers now.”

  “He should.”

  “How old is your son?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “What does he think of all this publicity?”

  “What I would think if I were he, I suppose.”

  “Tell me, what brought all these things back to you? For Barrett, it was the records. They make it clear that he sponsored you at the place where you had your baby and supported your decision to keep your son.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And you had forgotten it?”

  “If he could, why couldn’t I?”

  “And now you have both remembered.”

  “Does he admit that he is the father of my child?”

  “No. But neither admission nor denial matters anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the charge were simply that he had acted improperly with you, it would be your word against his. If he denied it. Now all that has changed. Now we can be certain whether he is the father. There are tests . . .”

  Her eyes widened. “Is that why you asked me here? Is that what you want me to do?”

  “What I might want or not want doesn’t matter. No, my interest is you.”

  She sat regarding him in silence, wary, curious, perhaps a gleam of trust.

  “Let me tell you how all this seems to an old pastor.”

  He spoke softly, finding the words easily, not looking at her but, as it were, consulting the spines of the books he stared at without seeing. What must it be like for a woman who had kept and raised her child suddenly to remember something that put her in a very bad light? Oh, times have changed, of course. Statistics tell us of the number of children born of unmarried mothers. He doubted that she considered herself like one of those. “I am sure you thought of what you had done as a sin.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you confess it?”

  “How could I go to another priest after . . .”

  “You have come to me.”

  “This is different.”

  “One priest is very much like another.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  “If you had come to me as you did to Gregory Barrett, I hope I would have done what he did. Thank God you had your baby.”

  “I do. He is all I have.”

  “Have you raised him Catholic?”

  “I stopped all that.”

  “To punish God?”

  “What has God ever done for me?”

  “What he did for all of us. He died for our sins so that we could put them behind us. You believed that once, didn’t you?” She nodded. “I wonder what your son thinks life is all about.”

  She smiled. “Some friends of mine have been attending your Mass. I can see why.”

  “I won’t say that I would like to be your friend. The best friend you can have is God.”

  She had sat there, holding the glass of water Marie had given her, not tasting it. “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you?”

  “God forgive me if I am. I think that what you really want is for a mistake you made long ago to stop being a mistake. Your son is not a mistake. What is his name?”

  “Marvin.”

  “Is he baptized?”

  She hesitated. “I did it myself.”

  “And you knew how to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know?”

  “I never told him.”

  “Yet you knew why you baptized him. Don’t you think he has a right to know? I wish I could talk to him.”

  “And turn him against me?”

  “Quite the opposite. He should know what a wonderful mother he has.”

  “Thank you.” Her eyes were moist now, and she took a sip of water.

  “I hope he understands the sacrifices you’ve made for him.”

  “I don’t know what he understands.”

  “He must understand that. And it is important that he does, whatever lies ahead. If your accusation proves true, as now it could well do, you will want your son firmly at your side. You will be subjected to all kinds of publicity.”

  “I don’t want publicity.”

  “And you didn’t want money, either.”

  “No!”

  “It was when I heard that you had refused money that I wanted to meet you.”

  “I am not going to take back what I have said about Father Barrett.”

  “Have I asked you to?”

  “So why did you want to see me?”

  “I’ve been trying to explain.”

  “So I could go to confession?”

  “That’s up to you. I would like you to remove any barriers there are between you and God.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good. And I’ll pray about it. Maybe you could come to Mass here with those friends of yours.”

  “Maybe.”

  He stood, and she seemed almost surpr
ised that it was over. He took the glass from her.

  “I will think about it.”

  “Come back and see me, whatever you decide.”

  He went with her to the front door and watched her go out to her car. He was filled with a sense of inadequacy. Gregory Barrett would survive what lay ahead, he was sure of that, but what did that poor woman have but her son? And some friends who had come to Mass at St. Hilary’s.

  19

  Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned. Ned Bunting was furious at the treatment he had received when he visited the cultivated voice of End Notes. The bum’s rush. It occurred to him that the Tribune would be interested in the way one of its writers had been treated.

  “It happens all the time,” Quirk told him. “Don’t call yourself one of our writers, by the way.”

  “But my piece on Father Dowling . . .”

  “Well, we all make mistakes. I should have had someone put that into better shape.”

  “Listen, I have a real scoop.”

  “A piece on the housekeeper at St. Hilary’s?”

  It was all Ned could do not to blurt out that Gregory Barrett was the father of the child borne by the woman who had accused him of sexual misconduct. Here was proof positive of her charge. But if he told Quirk, he would be giving away the story. His dream of being a published writer would be nipped in the bud.

  “And if I write the story and give it to him, he would steal it,” he said to Gloria later.

  “So keep it for your book. That was the original idea, wasn’t it? Write that book and publish it and no one can steal it from you.”

  He was the victim of his own bragging. Apparently Gloria believed that he had written much already, meaning published much. She had asked him why none of his books were at the Benjamin Harrison branch of the Fox River library. Various answers occurred to him. Censorship? No, she would tell him about Madeline’s complaints that the branch was a conduit of pornography.

  “This will be the first book I publish under my own name,” he said, treading a fine line between fact and fiction.

  “Ned, I want to see some of your work.”

  So he picked up in a used bookstore a novel by an unknown writer and gave it to her as his own.

  “Why Harry Austin?”

  “Why not? A pen name can be anything.”