Flight Dreams (25 page)

“Because some children on the street told me I should see you when I asked them for directions to ‘Mrs. O’Connor’s’ house.”

“I see.” The priest picks up and begins to mangle a fresh paper clip. He looks Manning in the eye to ask, “Why do you want to see Helen?”

“I think you know,” Manning says. “Or are you asking me to lie to you?”

“You needn’t bother,” says the priest with contempt. “Money…” He exhales the word with distaste. “I don’t know which is worse, the greed that produces it or the selfishness that spends it, fritters it away on a cellar full of cats—
cats,
my God—when there’s so much of His holy work that could be accomplished with it. Greed and selfishness! I thank the Lord almighty that at least
I’m
not obsessed with the reward.”

“Neither am I,” Manning says calmly, sidestepping the priest’s insult.

Father McMullen breaks into laughter, a snide chuckle of disbelief that quickly blossoms into rude, convulsive guffaws thundering through the dreary house and spilling out through the windows onto the street. When he at last regains his composure, he asks through the spasms that still contort his face, “Then what in the name of heaven are you
doing
here?”

“You could never understand my purpose,” says Manning with an even voice, staring at the priest through unflinching, truthful eyes. “The world you’ve created for yourself is so alien to the one I know, you could never think the thoughts I’m thinking now.”

Father McMullen’s laughter halts with a jerk of breath that sticks in his throat. Aware that he does not—
cannot
—understand Manning, he feels a sudden and intense awe of the unknown, an awe that verges on fear. Finding his voice, he says, “You may be right, Mr. Manning. I’m sure I don’t know. Nor do I care.” His arrogance turns pious. “I see no point in imperiling my faith by engaging with you in games of the intellect—in the workings of the merely ‘rational’ mind.”

In a brusque tone declaring an end to their discussion, Manning asks, “Where does Helen O’Connor live?”

“Just a short walk from here, a block past the square.” He points the direction. “It’s a cottage—stucco, the best-looking house on the street. The mailbox is marked, and there’s a statue of a cat crouching under it.”

“Thank you,” says Manning with a curt bow of his head. He closes the notebook that was folded open on his knee, flipping its cover past the empty page where he has written nothing. He rises from his chair.

The priest rises with him, his face visibly blanched, looking faint. He falls forward to support himself, smacking both palms on the glass top of the desk. Manning watches, unnerved, as one of the priest’s hands lands firmly atop the jagged end of an unfolded paper clip. Through a desperate choke, the priest says, “Don’t, Mr. Manning … please
don’t
take her from me.” An oily pool of blood begins to spread on the glass from between his splayed fingers.

They have pierced my hands and my feet, Manning remembers, they have numbered all my bones. Manning’s eyes shoot back and forth from the desk to Father McMullen’s face. For an instant, he sees the priest’s golden mane surrounded by a tangled ring of thorns. Barely above a whisper, he asks, “Are you all right?”

The priest falls back into his chair. His wounded hand smears a trail across the top of the desk and disappears in his lap. The paper clip drops to the floor. “Just please don’t take her,” he repeats.

“I can’t ‘take’ her. I’m not here to ‘deprogram’ her. Let’s not forget about her
free will
—that’s a concept you people taught me when I was six—surely it’s familiar to you. There’s not a thing I could say or do to make her leave this place if she’s made up her mind to stay.”

“But she …” the priest begins, then his voice breaks off as he dismisses Manning with a wave of his good hand.

There is nothing else to say. Manning walks from the room through the front hall and out the door. He darts from the porch to the car at the curb—almost sprinting, no longer fearful of shattering the facade of serenity that hangs over the town like a shroud. He jumps into the car, starts the engine. Though he could easily, quickly walk to the stucco cottage, he does not want to return to the rectory for the car, does not want to leave it as an annoying reminder to the priest.

He finds the cottage within seconds; he sees the mailbox, the statue of the cat. Getting out of the car, he finds that the late morning has turned hot, so he removes his jacket and tosses it through the open window onto the seat with the road map. He hesitates, wondering whether he should close up the car and lock it, then dismisses the notion as ridiculous—of all the dark and dirty sins that may lurk in Assumption, thievery is surely low on the list.

Manning walks up to the front of the house. Raising his fist to rap on the screened door, he pauses. He feels his heart pulsing in his chest, his neck, his hands, as his mind races to recall the long string of events that has led him to this spot, this moment—a situation that any other reporter in the country could imagine only as a fantasy, the crowning moment of a life’s work. He has not yet knocked.

“I
thought
I heard someone come up the steps,” says a woman’s cheery voice from behind the door.

Snatched from his thoughts, Manning feels foolish as he lowers his poised hand, struggling to focus on the woman who stands in the darkness behind the screen. His lips curve into a smile as he discerns the vivid henna hair, the friendly features so much like those of Margaret O’Connor. Manning opens his mouth to speak—there is only one thing to say, and he wonders how the woman will react. Will she scream? Slam the door? He says, “Mrs. Carter? I’m Mark Manning.”

“Oh!” It’s not a scream, just a squeak. She doesn’t seem frightened—merely surprised or embarrassed, as though she has failed to recognize a celebrity standing at her door. “Of course, Mr. Manning,” she says with an apologetic laugh, swinging the door open. “Please come in.”

The house is small, simply furnished, lacking the expected rummage of advancing years. Manning wonders if the sparse decoration is a reflection of the woman’s taste or if her stay in Assumption has not been long enough to assemble fussier surroundings.

A large Abyssinian enters from an adjacent room to inspect the newly arrived visitor. A stately cat of elegant bearing, it moves with slow assurance, thoroughly in control of its household domain. It is without question the most strikingly beautiful cat Manning has ever seen. It leans forward to brush against his leg.

Manning tells the woman, “I’ll bet this is Abe.”

“You’re as clever as I thought you’d be, Mr. Manning. Yes, this is Abe. Here, baby.” She picks up the creature, many times a champion, sire to many others, and hands him to Manning. “He’s getting on in years, but still, you’ve never seen an Abby quite like this one.”

Manning takes hold of Abe, handling the cat like a long sausage, as he saw the judges do at home. Lanky and muscular, Abe stretches in Manning’s hands, purring with a loud, unbroken rumble. “You’re right,” says Manning, “he’s one of a kind.”

Manning and the woman sit down and settle into a long, chatty conversation, addressing each other as Mark and Helen. They speak with a candor and humor that would lead an onlooker to assume they were old friends exchanging gossip, as if Manning popped in every weekend to bring her up to date on things back home. Helen asks about her sister, Margaret, about Father Carey, Arthur Mendel, Jerry Klein—grateful for the information Manning supplies, laughing dreamily as she recalls her former life. Abe has hopped into her lap and nested there, preparing for a nap.

At a lull in their banter, Manning finally says, “When you met me at the door, you welcomed me as though you’d been waiting for me. Why?”

“Eventually
someone
would come. But you were the only one who understood—the only one who hadn’t written me off as dead.
That
was reassuring—to know that someone saw my disappearance as anything more involved than waiting seven years to divide the pie. I’ve read everything you’ve written about me, but it wasn’t till I caught a glimpse of you on TV and saw that determined, calculated look in your eyes—that I knew
you
would be the one to solve this silly mystery, if anyone could. To tell the truth, I’ve been sort of anxious to hear what you’ll have to say about me when you testify at the Houseman Trial next week.” She chortles at her own vanity, dismissing the vice as a concession to her age.

Manning laughs with her, then a quizzical look crosses his face. He asks, “What’s this all about, Helen? Why did you leave? It’s never been clear to anyone—that’s why so many people are willing to assume you’re dead. It’s never been clear to
me.”
He uncaps his Mont Blanc.

Helena Carter smiles, then exhales a long sigh. “So we finally get down to it. The story? No wonder it’s not clear to you—I’m not sure how much sense I can make of it myself. But I’ll try.

“I was looking for something. To be honest, I was running away from something too. Imagine that—a woman turning fifty with no kids, a dead husband, and a hundred million dollars—suddenly starting to question …
everything.
Life and death, success and failure, faith itself—faith in all those things we’ve always been taught were good and pure, unchanging and real. Life really seemed to be
over,
so it was time to turn to God.

“Sure, I’d been ‘religious’ all my life, but what does that mean? The religious folks you know—the ones who go through all the motions and recite the creeds about what they believe and where their lives are headed—what does their faith actually mean? It’s just a badge they wear, another label they slap on their chests with all their other identities: American, liberal or conservative, widow or married, Catholic or whatnot, breeder of champion Abyssinians, maybe even vegetarian. The list goes on and on. You become the sum of your parts.

“Since some of my parts seemed to be missing, I tried to compensate by working on some of the others. And I turned to God—seriously, for the first time. My life seemed to be waning, and I figured it was high time to get acquainted with the old guy, so I turned to Him. But, Mark”—her voice drops to a whisper—“He wasn’t there.”

“Of course not,” Manning answers softly, shaking his head with the knowing smile of disappointment that accompanies the discovery of a fact that was long suspected and at last admitted.

“So I came to Assumption as an act of faith.” She resumes her story with a clear, unemotional voice. “Were you raised Catholic? Remember the ‘Act of Faith’? It was a prayer—one of many we memorized—they had one for Hope, too, and another for Charity. For a child, an act of faith is the recitation of words. You feel good and holy when you finally get those words letter-perfect. But for an adult, it’s different. Acts of faith have to be
acts,
not words, so I
came
here—simply because I believed that life in Assumption would restore the peace and certainties I knew as a child. It has not. It has slowly begun to confirm my doubts.”

Manning tells her, “Confirmation of a doubt is another kind of certainty, isn’t it? There’s greater peace of mind in truly
knowing
something than there is in merely
believing
otherwise.”

“You seem to take comfort in shattered beliefs, Mark—I wish I could. Have you ever felt a label slipping away? Have you ever known the kind of torment that makes a person want to flee—to fly—to take flight from the confusion in search of a dream?”

“I flew to Phoenix just as you did,” Manning tells her. “And believe it or not, when I got on that plane in Chicago two days ago, it never crossed my mind that I might be sitting here talking to you now.”

“Then why did you come?”

“I flew here for many of the same reasons that you did. I, too, was fleeing doubts and uncertainties of the past. I, too, felt a label slipping away and came in search of something.”

“I hope you find it, Mark.”

“I already have.”

“Then you’re a lucky man.”

“I know I am.”

Manning radiates an infectious joy. In the quiet moments that follow, Helen gazes at her visitor with a wondering stare. Manning finally says to her, “I can understand why you came here, but why all the secrecy? Why the disappearance, the new identity?”

“You’ve met Father Carey back at Saint Jerome’s,” she says. “I’m sure he told you that our friendship was rocky by the time I left. I’d convinced myself that the greed I saw in him—which was probably unfair of me—was a symptom of all the changes the church had been through. So I was intrigued by the community that was forming out here in Assumption, thinking that the return to our old ways of worship would automatically bring with it a purity—an escape from materialism.”

Manning asks, “How did you first learn about Assumption?”

She pauses uncomfortably before telling him, “It was in the papers a bit at the time, but I first heard about it in a letter … from Jamie.” Her body tenses. Abe, snoozing in her lap, opens a cautious eye.

Manning looks up from his notebook. “Who?”

“I suppose this will come as news to you, Mark. Jamie—Father James McMullen—is my brother.”

Stunned, Manning thinks aloud, “Margaret
said
there were twins at home …”

“There were,” Helen assures him. “James and Bertrand. They went away to high school, to the seminary, to study for the priesthood together. But something bad happened, and Bertrand died. Jamie changed schools—even his last name—it was such a scandal at the time. Margaret and I never got the whole story; it was all hush-hush at home.”

Abe stands, stretching. With his rump aimed at Helen’s face, he swipes his tail beneath her chin.

She continues, “I knew that Jamie was later ordained, but then many years passed without hearing from him, until Ridgely died. The inheritance was in the news, and I was starting to get some publicity myself as a breeder. Jamie wrote to express condolences about Ridgely and to tell me of his involvement with Cardinal L’Évêque and The Society. This interested me—because of my troubles at Saint Jerome’s—so I struck up a correspondence with Jamie and eventually bought into the whole idea. I decided I wanted to come here, as if ‘on retreat,’ hoping to nourish my faith.”