Empire Falls (9 page)

An idle, daydream deity, this, Miles had to admit. In truth, when God looked down upon His mischievous children, they were usually up to far worse than climbing trees.

If there were such a deity, though, and if He’d ever feared that Miles would hurt himself, He could quit worrying anytime now. For all his early promise, Miles had scaled no heights, and now, at forty-two, he was so afraid of them that he cowered near the steel doors of glass elevators, reluctant to move back away from them and let others step on.

“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to attempt the steeple,” Father Mark said.

“We did, I guess.” Originally, Miles had imagined that by painting the church himself, he could save the parish a lot of money, but both contractors he’d spoken to about painting just the steeple wanted to charge nearly as much for that as they would have for the entire building. Annoyed that he proposed to do the safe, easy part himself, they let him know that the part he didn’t want was the part
nobody
wanted, and that was the part that cost you. The truth of this stung. “The trouble is,” Miles told his friend, “every time I look up there, it’s an accusation.”

“So don’t look up.”

“Fine advice for a man of the spirit to give,” said Miles, looking up and feeling at that moment a drop of rain.

Father Mark had also looked up and also felt a drop. “Let’s go over to the Rectum and have a cup of coffee,” he suggested. “You can tell me about your vacation.”

Ever since Miles had confessed his boyhood confusion about the words “rectory” and “rectum,” Father Mark—as delighted by the mistake as Grace Roby had been—had preferred this nomenclature, even though it sometimes slipped out when it shouldn’t. Such as earlier that summer when at the end of Mass he invited the parishioners to join him and Father Tom for lemonade on the lawn behind the Rectum.

St. Cat’s rectory was one of Miles’s favorite places. It was bright and sunny in all seasons, warm in the winter, breezy in the summer, but probably it had more to do with the fact that Father Tom—now retired but still living in the rectory—had never allowed children there. Nor had Miles’s mother ever been invited in, for that matter, so perhaps it was the exclusion that added to the attraction. All of the rooms on the bottom floor were large and high-ceilinged, with tall, uncurtained windows that allowed passersby a glimpse of the privileged life inside. The Rectum’s dining room, which fronted the street, had an oak dining table long enough to seat twenty guests, though when Miles and his mother walked by late on Saturday afternoons after having had their confessions heard, the room was occupied only by Father Tom, seated regally at one end, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Dumbrowski, hovering in attendance. Back then there had been two, sometimes three, priests in residence, but on Saturdays Father Tom liked to take his evening meal early and would not wait for the younger priest, who invariably drew the late confessions. Miles’s mother always remarked when they passed on how sad this seemed, but Miles didn’t see anything so very odd in the practice and couldn’t help wondering why it so upset his mother. By the time they’d returned home, his father would already have finished eating his sandwich and departed on foot for the neighborhood tavern.

To young Miles, the forbidden rectory, so full of warmth and light and wood and books, seemed otherworldly, and he imagined that a man would have to be very rich to be a priest. The romance of the profession had stayed with him for a long time. He’d seriously considered Holy Orders well into high school, and there were still times when he wondered if he’d missed his calling. Janine had wondered too. To her way of thinking, any man with no more sex drive than Miles Roby possessed might better have just gone ahead and embraced celibacy and been done with it, instead of disappointing poor girls like herself.

Father Mark and Miles never had their coffee in the dining room he’d admired as a boy, preferring instead the kitchen with its cozy breakfast nook, a booth not unlike those along the front windows of the Empire Grill. Father Mark put a plate of cookies on the Formica table, then poured each of them a cup of coffee. Though it was only the first week in September, already autumn was in the air, rustling the lace curtains of the open window. The drizzle had stopped as soon as they entered the Rectum, but the sky remained dark. The daylight was dwindling early, giving Miles less time to work on the church. Most afternoons he managed to leave the grill by three, but by the time he changed clothes and set up the ladder, it was at least three-thirty. By six, on cloudy days, the light was failing and it was time to quit. Of course the real culprit wasn’t the abbreviated day so much as the lengthening coffee conversations with Father Mark, who now slid into the booth opposite Miles. “You look like your vacation did you some good,” he observed.

“It did. And there’s a nice chapel in Vineyard Haven. I drove in to Mass most mornings. Tick came with me, and that was even better.”

The one good thing about her parents’ breakup, Tick was on record as observing, was that at least she didn’t have to go to church anymore now that her mother had replaced Catholicism with aerobics. In fact, Tick considered herself an agnostic, a philosophical position that allowed her to sleep in on Sunday mornings. Miles knew better than to force her to go, and had not done so on the Vineyard, which made him even more pleased when she dragged herself out of bed, still half asleep, in the mornings to accompany him. By the time Mass was over, she was fully awake and they would enjoy a muffin together at an outdoor café before heading out-island to Peter and Dawn’s house and the rest of their lazy day at the beach. Back in Maine he’d asked whether she thought she’d start going to church again now that she was back in the habit, but she didn’t think so. It was easier to believe in God, she said, or at least the possibility of God, on Martha’s Vineyard than it was in Empire Falls. Miles knew what she meant, understood the bitter irony. Half the cars in the Vineyard chapel’s lot were either Mercedes or Lexuses. No surprise that their owners believed that God was in His heaven.

“And of course,” Miles added, “Peter and Dawn spoiled her the whole time.”

“Worse than you do?”

“By a mile,” Miles said, chewing a cookie. Oddly, his appetite was never better than in the late afternoon here at St. Cat’s. Surrounded by food all day at the restaurant, he often forgot to eat, whereas here, if he didn’t pay attention, he’d finish the entire plate of cookies. “Or about as badly as I’d spoil her if I had the means. They spoiled us both, actually. Good food. A twenty-dollar bottle of wine with dinner every night.”

“Must’ve been strange not having Janine there.”

“She was invited,” Miles said, surprised at the note of defensiveness in his voice.

“Never said she wasn’t, Miles.”

“There was plenty to occupy my thoughts without her. Their place is on a stretch of private beach, and every other woman was sunbathing in the nude. When we’re not there, I suspect Peter and Dawn do too. If she had a tan line, I sure couldn’t see it.”

“How about Peter?” Father Mark asked. “Did
he
have a tan line?”

“Didn’t occur to me to look,” Miles said, smiling.

Father Mark smiled back. “Miles, you’re a true Manichaean. You seek out Mass in the morning and your friend’s wife’s tan line in the afternoon. Anyway, what is it they do again?”

“Write television sitcoms. By next week they’ll have shut everything up and flown back to L.A. You should see the house that just sits there vacant ten months out of the year.”

Father Mark nodded but didn’t say anything. Given the priest’s political leanings, Miles knew that he didn’t approve of personal wealth, much less conspicuous consumption.

“Peter said an odd thing, actually,” Miles continued, even though he’d made up his mind not to tell anyone about this. “He said he and Dawn were astonished Janine and I stuck it out as long as we did, considering how miserable we were together. They’d been admiring for years the way we kept trying to work through our problems.”

Father Mark smiled. “Remember, though, people from L.A. have pretty minimal expectations when it comes to coping with marital difficulties.”

Miles shrugged, conceding this. “I guess I was just surprised that people saw us that way.”

“Mismatched, you mean?”

Miles considered. “Not really that so much. More that people saw us as unhappy. I
wasn’t
all that unhappy … or I didn’t know I was. So it’s strange to have friends conclude something like that. I mean, if I was so unhappy, wouldn’t I know?”

“Possibly,” Father Mark replied. “But not necessarily.”

Miles sighed. “Janine knew. I have to give her that. At least she knew how she felt.”

At this point both men heard the shuffling of slippered feet in the hall. Father Mark closed his eyes, as if at the advance of a migraine. A moment later Father Tom, his gray hair wild, his collar askew, entered and fixed Miles with a particularly menacing glare.

“You want to join us, Tom?” Father Mark suggested, no doubt hoping to head off trouble. “I’ll make you a cup of hot cocoa if you promise to behave.”

Father Tom usually loved hot chocolate, especially when he didn’t have to make it himself, but it appeared he was thirstier for a good confrontation. “Where did
that
evil bastard come from?” he growled.

Miles, also eager to placate the old priest, had been trying to get to his feet so he could offer to shake hands, but standing up proved no easy maneuver, since both the booth and the table were stationary.

“This is no evil bastard, Tom,” Father Mark said calmly. “This is Miles, our most faithful parishioner. You baptized him and you married his parents.”

“I know who he is,” Father Tom said. “He’s a peckerhead and his mother was a whore. I told her so too.”

Miles sat back down. This wasn’t the first time the old man, inspired by only God knew what, had taken one look at Miles and offered a poor opinion of his moral character, though he’d never before insulted the memory of Miles’s mother. This was clearly an old man’s dementia talking, but for the second time that afternoon Miles fleetingly considered how satisfying it would be to send another human being into the next world. This time, a priest.

“Look at him. Look at that face. He knows it’s true,” the old man said, taking in Miles’s paint-spattered overalls. “He’s a filthy degenerate is what he is. He’s tracking his filth into my house.”

Father Mark sighed. “You’re wrong all around, Tom. First, it’s not your house.”

“Is too,” he said.

“No, the house belongs to the parish, as you’re well aware.”

Father Tom seemed to consider the unfairness of this arrangement, then finally shrugged.

“And Miles isn’t a degenerate,” the younger priest said. “He’s covered with paint because he’s painting the church for us, remember? For free?”

The old man squinted first at his colleague, then at Miles. Always a frugal man in the extreme, Father Tom might have been expected to be mollified by this news, but instead he continued to glare fiercely, as if to suggest that no good deed could disguise the fundamental evil of Miles’s heart. “I may be old,” he conceded, “but I still know a peckerhead when I see one.”

Father Mark, his patience exhausted, slid out of the booth and took him by the shoulders, rotating him gently but firmly. “Tom,” he said, “look at me.” When he continued to glare at Miles, Father Mark placed the tips of his fingers on the old man’s stubbled chin, turning his head. “Look at me, Tom.”

Finally he did, and his expression instantly morphed from disgust to shame.

“Tom,” Father Mark said, “remember what we talked about before?”

If so, he showed no sign, as he studied Father Mark through red, rheumy eyes.

“I’m sorry you’re not feeling well today, but this sort of behavior is intolerable. You owe our friend an apology.”

To Miles, Father Tom resembled nothing more than a scolded child, convinced against his better instincts by a loving parent that he’d been a bad boy. He glanced back at Miles to see if it was possible to owe such a man an apology, then returned to Father Mark’s stern gaze. The two men stared at each other long enough to make Miles squirm, but finally Father Tom turned to Miles and said, “Forgive me.”

Miles didn’t hesitate. “Of course, Father Tom. I’m sorry, too.” And he
was
sorry. Satisfying or not, it wouldn’t have been a good thing to kill an elderly priest, which also suggested it was not a good thing to wish for.

“There,” Father Mark said, “that’s better. Isn’t it nicer for all of us when we’re friends?”

Father Tom appeared to consider this extremely dubious, again studying Miles for several long beats before shaking his head and shuffling out of the room. Miles couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard one more “peckerhead” escape the old man’s lips out in the hallway.

Father Mark continued to stare at the doorway as the sound of shuffling slippered feet receded. The expression on the younger priest’s face wasn’t quite as tolerant as one might have expected of a clergyman.

“It’s okay,” Miles assured him. “Father Tom and I go way back, you know. He’s not himself.”

“You think not?” Father Mark asked.

“It’s not his fault that stuff comes out.”

“True,” Father Mark said. “Interesting that it’s there to begin with, though. I understand why it’s coming out, but how do you suppose it got
in
there?”

“Well …”

“I know.” Father Mark grinned. “An eternal question, answered in Genesis. Still, I’m sorry he said what he did. I have no idea where he comes up with such things. He probably doesn’t even remember your mother.”

Miles forced himself to consider this possibility. True, the old man’s mind was gone. The problem was, it wasn’t completely gone, and Father Tom’s eyes, especially when he was angry, often appeared to be ablaze with both intelligence and memory. “Actually, she’s been on my mind lately,” Miles said, adding, “I have no idea why.” Though he did know. It was the Vineyard that had done it, just as it did every summer.

Outside, the rain had begun again, steadier now beneath the low sky. Miles pushed his empty coffee cup toward the center of the table.