Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

Prodigal Father (15 page)

BOOK: Prodigal Father

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Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.

âPsalm 127

Lars Anderson had started in cement, contracting to replace the sidewalks for which the residents of Fox River were personally responsible. And liable. Broken pavement and pocked surfaces making footing unsure opened the possibility of lawsuits of an annoying kind. Anderson had prospered. There had been a popular tune at the time whose recurrent line was, “Cement mixer, putsy putsy,” and it had become his theme song. A voice was not among the few gifts God had given him, but he sang nonetheless, repeating that line as if it were a mantra. He had been drafted into the Korean War, and ended up in the Sea Bees where construction in its various forms became known to him and suggested his postwar career. Throwing up overnight dozens of temporary dwellings for servicemen inspired him.

He began small, Roosevelt Heights, put up in a former cornfield two miles outside Aurora. The houses were built on slabs, had no attics, and might have been intended for the Army. But they were inexpensive, convenient, and sold like popcorn. Anderson became the darling of the banks. Loans were his for the
asking. With success, he aimed higher. In his middle period, what might have been called the mansard roof phase, he had put up dwellings for dentists and rising young salesmen and teachers. The billboards announcing new sites, as well as the notices in the metropolitan newspapers, called them Bedrooms for Chicago. And white Chicagoans, fleeing the social engineering that was turning the cities of the nation into war zones, snapped up Lars Anderson's houses. In this third and final phase, he catered to the affluent. He built great brick castles with four-car garages around artificial lakes. The earth was shaped and undulated by bulldozers and, when the carpenters and plumbers and electricians and all the other tradesmen who sang Anderson's praises moved on to his next site, the bleak setting was transformed overnightâsod was laid, trees planted, ducks set afloat on the lake, and at the entrance to the development, in a castellated building that would house security and control entry, salesmen greeted the prospects, many of whom were moving up from another Anderson settlement.

A lesser man would have rested on his laurels, retired to his seaside place in Baja California and watched the waves come in, satisfied with a long and productive life. Anderson was now seventy-one years old. But the juices still flowed in his old veins. He had had open-heart surgery and though some joked that the purpose of the operation had been to see if he had one, he had emerged from it with the sense that his life was beginning anew. For he had acquired enemies as well as grateful (more or less) occupants of his homes. Environmentalists regarded him as a menace. They spoke of the wet lands he had despoiled, how flora and fauna once indigenous to the area had been ruthlessly extinguished by the greed and avarice of Lars Anderson. The great man took little notice of this. He longed to undertake the final and crowning phase of his career. And that required his getting
possession of the land occupied by the Athanasians, the erstwhile estate of Maurice Corbett in whom Lars saw a prefiguring of himself.

Anderson had himself flown by helicopter over the grounds, photographs in abundance had been taken, his architects had presented him with a multitude of plans, he had settled on one. The Corbett mansion would be left untouched. The architecture of this ultimate effort would be inspired by that of the Corbett mansion. Anderson himself intended to take possession of the mansion and thus seal the continuity of his career and Corbett's. But the Athanasians had reacted to his overtures with horror. They had no intention of selling their property. The satisfaction with which Lars Anderson read the Tetzel series in the Fox River Tribune was immense! His one regret was that he had not thought of the idea himself. He instructed his administrative assistant, a disarmingly petite thirty-year-old named Charlotte, to locate Leo Corbett and bring him to headquarters. Charlotte all but saluted when she went on her mission.

Charlotte Priebe had been a slattern as an undergraduate at Chicago, a woman of the left, a Green on every day but March 17 when the Chicago River was contaminated and turned into one of the lime drinks Walgreen's had once been noted for. In an earlier day, she might have become a Communist. There was little left now but environmentalism and antiglobalism. In her senior year, Charlotte was mugged by reality when her father lost his job thanks to a successful campaign in which she had participated. She sat in Rockefeller Chapel one afternoon and reviewed her life. Were bugs and birds and plants and trees more important than her father? In any case, this was a false choice. It was that heretical realization that began her conversion. People were compatible with the environment. Industry was compatible with the
environment. She gave her kindred spirits credit for having raised the consciousness of capital. For whatever motive, companies now considered themselves the custodians of the environment in which they located their plants. Of course there were laws and federal agencies. Too many laws, as Charlotte came to think, and agencies run by zealots such as she herself had been. She had her hair shampooed and cut. She began to wear skirts. She made a heroic effort in her senior year, changing her major to economics, fulfilling all the requirements in a marathon effort to retool herself for what she now saw to be the true crusade of the modern world. She began to listen to Rush Limbaugh, albeit with a headset, and laughed aloud to the surprise of fellow passengers on the bus when he spoke of wacko environmentalists. She read with interest and admiration of the career of Lars Anderson and, upon graduation, she presented herself to him and won his heart with a completely sincere recitation of her new creed. He put her in his office, within a year she was his private secretary, now she was his administrative assistant. Among her many assets was the fact that the register of her voice was perfectly audible to his hearing, which had long ago succumbed to the assault of cement mixer, putsy putsy. This was the emissary Lars Anderson sent to Leo Corbett.

“Your grandfather was one of the giants of this area,” she told him on the veranda of the country club where they sipped iced tea. Leo had been taken back into the golf shop at the insistence of a majority of the members. His grandfather's membership in the club was bestowed on him in reparation for the indignities he had suffered and the prospects that now seemed his.

“He cut me off without a dime.”

“That must be rectified.”

Charlotte was dispassionately sensible of the attraction her feminine endowments exercised on the male of the species. That
these had played their role in her swift rise at Anderson Ltd. had not been lost on her, nor had she been beneath showing a little leg for the benefit of her admiring but harmless employer. Her skirts were dangerously short, and when she crossed her legs on the veranda of the country club, Leo Corbett all but gasped in alarmed admiration. But the operation was accomplished without any pornographic display. She brought her iced tea to her mouth; plush red lips closed around the straw. Her cheeks hollowed as she drank. Half the battle was already won. An hour later, they were on their way to the corporate offices in Barrington in Charlotte's olive-green Mercedes.

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God.

âPsalm 59

The man named John Sullivan who had been placed in the third floor of the lodge in which the Georges lived was said to be on retreat, but he seemed to do little other than show himself about the grounds and sit at the laptop computer he had installed in his room. And speak Spanish to Rita. And not just
Como esta usted?
He rattled away in a manner that brought Rita's milk-white teeth on display in her warmest smile, the smile Michael had imagined only he elicited.

“What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing.” But she smiled shyly when she said it and turned away.

This distraction slowed Michael's appreciation of his father's concern at the stories in the local paper about Leo Corbett and, the culminating blow, the description of the former Corbett estate with the interview with Father Nathaniel, the bearded deserter who had returned to sow discord among his former confreres.

“He is in the employ of Anderson,” Andrew George decided. “He is a Trojan horse in the community.”

Father Nathaniel had certainly proved a godsend to the journalist Tetzel, mocking the pretensions of Leo Corbett, talking of how the Athanasians had taken a promising site and turned it into a garden spot.

“Does he propose to come back here and live in the selfish luxury his grandfather did?”

“But he was your benefactor.”

“And his benefaction has served its purpose.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me tell you about the present condition of the Athanasian Order.”

MORIBUND COMMUNITY CLINGS TO ESTATE ran the leader over Tetzel's story detailing the amazing revelations of Father Nathaniel. A once-thriving Order had, in the manner of so many religious communities in recent years, gone into decline. Buildings that had once burst with candidates for the priesthood, from high school through novitiate and on to philosophy, theology, and ordination, men who had played a significant role in the work of the Catholic Church, even taking responsibility for several parishes in the Chicago Archdiocese, were now the echoing habitat of a handful of
aging priests. Buildings were entirely or partly shut up. The community, whose members took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, were now living in the gorgeous mansion Maurice Corbett had built for his second wife. Under her influence, Corbett had become a Catholic and in his waning years had deeded the property over to the Athanasians. Whatever merit there had been in that ideaâand the noble history of the Order sketched by Father Nathaniel told how muchâthe Athanasians were not what they had been, nor were they likely to become so again. Meanwhile, the property was there, attractive, extensive, all but useless.

“No one need tell us of our obligations,” Nathaniel had said.

“Meaning what?”

“Some of us are willing to talk to Lars Anderson about his hope to develop the property into a tasteful new community, mindful of the environment.”

“How many?”

“Not yet a majority.”

“More than there were?”

Nathaniel nodded.

“Because of my articles.”

“But you are the champion of Leo Corbett.”

“Surely he has a claim.”

“A claim to enjoy these acres by himself, to stand in the path of progress? Nonsense.”

Andrew George cried out with pain as he read this account, as he did several times, always aloud, as if he wanted God to hear and do something about it. Mr. Martinez heard about the series and Michael was shaken by Rita's account of his reaction.

“He wants to know what kind of work you'll do now.”

“All this will blow over. The Georges have lived here for years and aren't going anywhere.”

“But if the priests sell?”

“Tell your father that Nathaniel ran away years ago and married in California. He came back just to cause trouble. But they won't listen to him.” Michael said this with such conviction that he almost believed himself.

“He ran away and got married?” She was deeply shocked.

“That's right. Ask my father.”

Michael decided that he had to marry Rita before anything further happened. He would marry her in front of a priest, maybe Father Boniface would do it in the community chapel; that would cushion the blow to his father.

“He would regard it as the deepest betrayal,” Boniface said, almost in alarm.

“Can you promise me that I will live here as my father and his father did?” Michael asked, adding, “Father?”

Gone was the round and merry face that Michael had known all his life. He remembered when he had been enrolled in the dwindling Latin class that Father Boniface taught. He had surprised the priest with an aptitude for classical tongues that Michael himself had been too youngâthirteenâto find surprising and which had led him, at fifteen, to pagan poet Catullus, much to the old priest's dismay. Boniface had given him Augustine to read that his mind might be cleared of the pagan hedonism, which could be redeemed only by the love poem addressed to his dead brother,
Ave atque vale.

“That might be Nathaniel's motto. He has come back to greet us with a final farewell.”

“Now, now. Everything is in God's hands.”

How could he explain, without sounding like Catullus singing of his Lesbia, that he wanted to be in Rita's hands and have her in his. Even in the sanctum sanctorum of Father Boniface's office his breath caught at the prospect. He had respected Rita too much to take advantage of those moments when she as well as he found postponement a physical pain, but such restraint had been an investment, proof that he wanted her in the only way that would leave her conscience untroubled. And his? There was Mediterranean blood in his veins, as there had been in Augustine's, and it was the early Augustine that tempted him now: Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.

“You were meant to be more than a gardener, son.”

“Horace and his villa.”

“He had slaves to take care of the farm at Tivoli.”

“Is my father your slave?”

“You know he isn't. Oh, Michael, I wish I could promise you that things will go as your father and I wish. I am the superior here, but in such matters I have but one vote.”

“There was no need to take a vote until he came back.”

“No.”

“Send him away.”

He could see that he touched the deepest desire in the old priest. And why not? Nathaniel, as he insisted on being called again, was a renegade. He did not deserve to have a vote equal to the others. He was on probation. And that meant that his staying was still undecided.

“Send him away, Father. He is destroying us all. What he said to the reporter â¦”

The old priest winced.

“My father read it aloud, again and again.”

And Michael remembered his father only that morning, trimming the hedge when Nathaniel passed and when his back was to him, gesturing at him with the whirring blade, as if he would like to trim his beard, and his head as well.

“The poor man.”

“My father?”

“Of course. Michael, let me promise you this. No matter what happens, you will be taken care of. Perhaps this is God's way of insuring that your talents will be developed. The order will finance your education, you can continue your study of the classics, become a teacher.”

“No.”

“It has been the consolation of my own life, son.”

But it was the prospect of living in the lodge after they were married, to have it to themselves eventually, filled with their children, that had removed all resistance Rita had previously shown to his impetuous desire that they marry. Now, waiting was a sin if their love need be no sin. Her response to the man Sullivan, with his Spanish fluency, made him see how tenuous his hold on her was.

“I want to be a gardener here and Nathaniel won't stop me.”

And he stormed out of the office as if his dilemma was of Boniface's doing.

BOOK: Prodigal Father

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