Empire Falls (34 page)

“That’s right, Ma,” Janine said, heading for the door. It was her mother’s chuckle that stopped her.

“Read it and weep, little girl,” Bea said, holding up the napkin between her thumb and forefinger for her daughter’s inspection.

Suddenly Janine didn’t want to look, aware from her mother’s triumphant expression that somehow she’d managed to betray herself. And there in plain sight was the evidence, scrawled in triplicate in her own hand.

Janine Louise Roby
.

Janine Louise Roby
.

Janine Louise Roby
.

CHAPTER 12

“T
HERE
have
been times,” Father Mark admitted, “when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother.”

Late in the afternoon, he and Miles were sitting in the rectory’s breakfast nook, drinking coffee, Miles having just confessed a petulant doubt about God’s wisdom. Earlier that afternoon, at his daughter’s behest, he’d hired a new busboy. They needed one, so that part was fine, and one thing Mrs. Whiting was good about was giving him free rein with regard to personnel, for which he was particularly grateful in this instance, because he couldn’t imagine how to explain today’s hiring to his employer. In fact, he wasn’t even sure how he was going to explain it to David and Charlene, who’d both looked at him as if he’d lost his mind when he introduced John Voss. What?—they clearly wanted to know, when the boy seemed equally incapable of speech and meeting any adult eye—you hired a mute? Miles could tell from his brother’s body language that he considered this merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to Miles’s bizarre behavior since returning from Martha’s Vineyard. David hadn’t raised the issue of the liquor license after Miles returned from his meeting with Mrs. Whiting, but Miles knew the subject wasn’t dead. Nor was the necessity of hiring a replacement for Buster, whom Miles could find neither hide nor hair of. While they did need another busboy, hiring a backup fry cook was far more urgent if Miles didn’t intend to continue opening the restaurant himself every day of the week, which he’d done now for nearly a month. If he got sick, that was that, since David only worked evenings and seldom rose before noon. So at the sight of John Voss, David shook his head as if Miles had sent in a flanker to replace an injured interior lineman.

“Ours was a large family,” Father Mark was explaining, “and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever the same amount.”

Miles nodded. “Well, maybe there’s a hell.”

Father Mark smiled. “It’s pretty to think so. Of course, none of this had anything to do with the grandchildren at all. She was punishing and rewarding her own grown children according to her own mean-spirited sense of justice. Those who stopped by to see her during the week, who did her bidding and fawned over her, were rewarded. Those who didn’t got coal in their stockings. My Aunt Jane was among the favored until her husband took a job in Illinois. My grandmother warned her not to move, and when they did anyway, she wrote Jane out of the will.”

Miles nodded. How did the world come to be run by power-mad old women? he wondered.

“Driving all the way back to New Jersey for the Christmas holidays didn’t win Janey any points, either. With my grandmother, when you were out, you were Old Testament out, buried like Moses in a shallow grave. But it was her kids who took the worst of it. I can still see my cousin Phyllis’s face when she opened her Christmas card and saw that crumpled dollar bill. I don’t think she cared about the money, but she believed what my grandmother had said about being able to look into her heart. How she sobbed, poor child.”

Naturally, Miles was curious. “How did
you
do that year?”

“Me?” Father Mark smiled. “Oh, I got that crisp new fifty. You could still smell the ink on it.”

“Did you share it with your less fortunate cousins?”

“No, as you might expect, sharing was strictly forbidden. I did tell my cousins the truth, though.”

“Which was?”

“That I hated my grandmother with a fierce passion, which proved that she was lying about being able to look in our hearts. I told little Phyllis that if Grandma’d ever seen into mine the old bat would’ve seen someone just waiting for her to die.” When Miles didn’t say anything right away, Father Mark became sheepish. “In telling that story, it occurs to me that I’ve never forgiven her.”

“I’m not sure it’d work as a homily without some retooling,” Miles conceded, though he himself had instigated the story by trying to explain why he’d hired the new busboy. If what Tick had told him was true, the boy’s parents had abandoned him, one after the other, and he was now the butt of practical jokes at the hands of the school’s lunchroom bullies. Which had caused Miles to question God’s wisdom, if He arranged things so that children so often were given burdens far too heavy for them to bear.

As his “date” with Cindy Whiting approached, Miles had been thinking a lot about life’s inequities and his mother’s tendency to take them to heart and to act upon her belief that we were all put on earth to make things a little more fair. It was Tick who’d made the request to hire that hopeless, bedraggled boy, but it was his mother, no doubt, who’d whispered in his ear when his instincts had argued against doing so.

“It’s a good story with a bad lesson,” Father Mark admitted. “Maybe I’ll work on it. I
do
get some of my better homilies from our afternoon chats. I always feel guilty after we’ve talked, like maybe I should pay you back with a recipe for the restaurant. Actually, I don’t really think God’s anything like my grandmother, but I can’t help wondering if the situation isn’t instructive, seen from the child’s point of view. I mean, what if we assume our relationship to God to be one thing, and it’s really something else? What if there’s something central to the equation that we’re leaving out? Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we’re not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren’t really the issue.”

“So feeding the hungry isn’t important?”

“Not exactly. Maybe it’s important, but not quite in the way we think. Maybe, to God, it’s our way of expressing the ‘something else’ that passeth beyond all understanding. Something we aren’t meant to understand.”

“Nonsense.” Miles grinned. “I understand your grandmother perfectly, and so do you. You’re trying to make a mystery out of selfishness.”

Father Mark chuckled. “Yeah, I guess. She
was
a mean, self-centered old harridan. Still, we’re attracted to a good mystery. Explanation, no matter how complete, isn’t really that satisfying. Take those two, for instance.” He pointed out the window at Max and Father Tom, who were seated in the gathering dusk beneath a big weeping willow. To Miles they looked like a pair of old hobos who couldn’t decide whether to get up and catch the night freight south or let it go and hop a train in the morning. With each gusting breeze the thin brown willow leaves swirled down upon them, some settling in their hair. Neither man seemed to notice. “Part of me wants to know what in the world they find to talk about, yet I doubt I’d feel much wiser for knowing.”

In the week since Max had started helping Miles with the church, he’d struck up a surprising friendship with the old priest. At first Miles had thought that Father Tom, slipping ever deeper into his dementia, didn’t recognize Max as someone he’d long known and despised utterly, but this was apparently not the case. When questioned, he recalled quite well that he’d always held Max Roby in the lowest possible esteem as a blasphemer, a shiftless charmer, a drinker and general ne’er-do-well. What he seemed less clear about was why he’d objected to these qualities. While neither Miles nor Father Mark wanted to deny the codgers their friendship, both agreed they bore watching.

And on Miles’s advice, Max was still not allowed in the Rectum, as the old man was notoriously light-fingered; if Father Mark didn’t want the church’s valuables turning up for sale at Empire Music and Pawn, Max had best be kept outside.

“He’d steal from God?” Father Mark had wondered, the question tinged with the priest’s usual irony.

“He’s pretty fearless where God is concerned,” Miles answered. “I can’t tell whether he’s a genuine atheist or simply believes in a God who’s lost His grasp of the details.”

“A God you could bullshit?”

“Exactly,” Miles agreed, shrugging. Bullshitting God would be Max’s plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father’s opening gambit. He’d point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better character to work with, instead of sending him into battle so poorly equipped.

However, as much as Miles hated to admit it, the painting
was
going a lot faster. Probably it had something to do with the fact that they got to work right away, instead of Miles wasting an hour with Father Mark over coffee. And it was also true that even at “sempty” Max
could
still climb like a monkey. He also could paint from either the ladder or the platform, and being twenty feet off the ground didn’t rattle him at all, whereas Miles was distrustful of his footing and unwilling to lean. Max’s fearlessness worried him at first, but the truth was that the old man never fell unless he was drunk, so Miles just checked his breath before letting him set foot on a ladder. As a result, the west face of St. Cat’s was nearly finished, thanks to a stretch of bright, sunny late-September days. If he and Max were smart, they’d let it go at that, then pick up the work again in the spring, assuming that St. Cat’s hadn’t turned into an art gallery or a music hall by then.

One thing Miles had decided for sure was that he wouldn’t attempt the steeple, nor would he allow his father to, though the old man was game. Miles
had
hoped maybe he might summon the courage to do it himself if he went slow, and earlier that week, after sending Max home, he’d borrowed the key from Father Mark and climbed up the narrow stairs into the belfry. Miles could feel the dread welling up as he climbed, but he was okay as long as he remained in an enclosed, windowless space. Once he pushed open the trapdoor and tried to stand in the belfry, though, he knew that painting the steeple was flatly out of the question. He knew he’d never be able to climb a ladder this high, or stand on a platform either, not without hanging on to whatever was handy with both hands. In fact, he’d not been able to rise further than his knees there in the steeple, knowing that if he stood it would be possible to tumble over the waist-high railing. Even from this penitent posture he’d caught a quick glimpse of the landscape below, extending all the way across the river to Mrs. Whiting’s house and beyond, and suddenly he wondered whether Cindy Whiting, if she could see him frozen in this cowardly posture, clutching the railing with both hands, might not be able to rid herself of her lifelong affection. It had taken him half an hour to find the courage to back down into the hole and pull the trapdoor shut over his head.

“Max is the one doing most of the talking,” Miles observed in response to his friend’s question about what the two old men could possibly be talking about.

“Confessing his sins, do you think?”

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Miles, though it made immediate sense. Max was a terrible braggart, and the old priest deeply resented being barred from the confessional. The one would prove a treasure trove of stories of the very sort the other seemed to hunger for. Max’s confessions would be colorful, dramatic, various and educational, lacking little save repentance, but, Miles wondered, were demented priests still vested with the power to forgive sins anyway? Max had always been blessed in his ability to pass through life without ever suffering consequences, and it’d be just like him to find a loophole now in the form of a priest willing to forgive his myriad sins without requiring contrition.

“You may be on to something,” Miles admitted, now studying the old men more carefully. Max was talking and gesturing, the priest nodding enthusiastically.