The Man Who Loved Birds (23 page)

Meena rolled down her sleeves. “In India people grow what we call
ganja
. When I was a girl, my father took me to the cinema to see American Westerns. I saw cowboys and outlaws and I decided that American men must be like
ganja
growers.”

“This I got to hear,” Zack said.

While Flavian cleared the basins and towels she told them about Queen Postomani, who had been born a mouse but could not be satisfied with her humble fate. “So her guru, a great holy man, transformed her, according to her wishes, into a cat, a dog, an ape, a boar, an elephant, and finally into a beautiful woman who married the great king. But then her ambition led her to fall into a pond and she drowned.” Her hands grew animated as she spoke, two small fluttering birds. “The king was devastated with grief and so he sent for the guru and begged:
You who can do so much, bring her back!
But the guru said:
What is fixed by fate must come to pass. Let her body remain at the bottom of the pond and fill it with earth. Out of her flesh and bones will grow a tree that will be named the poppy tree, after Postomani. From this tree you will obtain a drug called opium, which will be celebrated through the ages as a powerful medicine. The opium smoker will
have one quality of each of the animals into which Postomani was transformed. He will be mischievous like the mouse, quarrelsome like the dog, filthy like the ape, savage like the boar, intelligent like the elephant, regal like a queen.”
Meena smiled. “That is how I thought of American men.
Ganja
smokers. Cowboys.”

“That could be our Johnny Faye, all right, if you listen to the women in the kitchen,” Zack said. “Imagine the woman it would take to handle a man like that. A wild woman.”

By the time Flavian and Meena finished, Zaccheus was snoring. An hour remained before Vespers and so the monk and the doctor walked to the statues, to find them littered with pine needles and twigs. Flavian had tucked a broom behind a tree and now he took it out to sweep them clean. Meena bent to pick up the small round stone marking the center of the clearing. She returned to the bench, rolling the stone between her palms. “That bird we hear singing—I have heard it here before but I have never thought to look for it.”

Flavian cocked his head sideways and watched. “Something’s different about you. Something’s changed.”

Meena peered into the trees. “I have discussed the boy with Johnny Faye, as well as the fate of the cows.”

“You sure seem to know that man awfully well.”

“Oh, dear—it flew away.” She sat back. “If only they would sit still!”

“Like a good patient.” Flavian pointed to the plaque set into the base of the stone apostles. “Do you know the story of the man the grove honors? He was a seminarian—Episcopalian—who worked for civil rights. A white guy pulled a gun on a black woman registering voters. The seminarian threw himself in front of her and took the shot. Martyred. The ultimate
unreasonable
act.”

Meena stood and walked to the engraved memorial and ran her fingers over its letters. “Thank you for telling me that. I have always been drawn to the stories of such people. When I was young I was told I had a special destiny.”

“Like Queen Postomani.”

“Indeed. Though I hope I may avoid her fate.”

From across the fields the bells tolled Vespers. Flavian returned the broom to its hiding place. “And so you have had no success with finding a safe home for the boy.”

“And you have not saved the cows.” Meena returned the angel ball to the center of the clearing. “I am not the only one to have changed. Once you told me that keeping the cows was a simple matter of dollars and cents. Now you defend the seminarian’s
unreasonable act
. To keep the cows—surely that would be
an unreasonable act
.”

“That’s is a whole different order of magnitude. They’re just cows. The boy is a suffering human being.”

She waved her hand, an angry flick. “What can you know of suffering? You are protected by your citizenship. You are protected by your whiteness. Even in your monastery, you are protected by your money.”

“To refrain from acting can be as wrong as an evil act,” Flavian said.

Meena stood, brushing pine needles from her skirt. “Brother Flavian. What you call evil I define as the consequences of our actions. You have said that you became a monk to avoid going to war.”

“Not the reason people like to hear, but essentially yes.”

“Very well. I became a doctor because it was one of the few careers available to a penniless, intelligent woman from the provinces that might enable me to come to America. Now you propose that I place those years of work in jeopardy.

“I think of Matthew Mark every day. I park my car where it cannot be seen from their house so that the father cannot know when I am at home and when I am away. I leave a light burning in my office so that both the father and the mother may see it. I hope that it serves as a warning for him and a comfort and invitation for her. And yet if I act more boldly, I may well lose my position, and
who benefits from that? The question is not whether what we saw was evil, but what is the best course of action. Every day I think that if I put my wits and intelligence to the problem long enough, I will arrive at a solution. The problem is that there is no solution. We are living out the solution.”

“So what do we do? Live with the evil we know, but can’t do anything about? Or try to do something about it, knowing that anything we do has a chance of making the situation worse?”

“You are a monk. Your duty is to contemplate those questions.”

“And you’re a doctor, and your duty is to figure out their answers and make them happen.”

On the drive back to her office, through hills verdant amid drought, the questions deviled her. Why had this boy come into her life? Could not one single thing that she desired arrive without complication and challenge?

Throughout Vespers Flavian was a confusion of emotions, so much so that he had to take up the book to read prayers that had long ago etched themselves in memory. What was this tightness in his chest, dogging his every step? In the midst of the responses Flavian thought,
Is this what they call being in love? But with whom? The doctor?
A strange but not unpleasant thought—appealing, even. Such things had happened to his brother monks—he had heard stories,
murmuring
. Maybe his time had come.

Flavian returned to his cell and lay on his bed. Across his years in the monastery he had come to rely on the voices and visions he had in that numinous place between waking and sleep, and on this particular evening this is what came to him: He would broach the subject with Johnny Faye, who at least in Flavian’s life was the greatest expert on love.

Harry Vetch sat nursing his whiskey on the ratty couch that Maria had covered with some kind of polyester throw that would give him a prickly rash if he weren’t careful. “We need to talk, Maria, and not about the weather.”

She took up her wine and rolled her eyes. “That’s easy for you to say. You work in an air-conditioned office. But then so do I, as of today.”

“I have central at home, but my courthouse office is an oven. We were supposed to get window units last week. According to the judge. I’m not holding my breath.”

“Well, we beat you to it. Nineteen of them showed up on the loading dock the other morning. Nobody knows where they came from but the timing couldn’t be better.”

Vetch had been on the verge of standing to give himself a clean path to the door but something Maria Goretti said snagged in his brain. “Wait a second. The hospital just got nineteen brand-new air conditioners?”

“Well, yes, that’s what I just told you.”

“And you don’t know where they came from.”

“No, but that’s not such a big deal. Rich Catholics are forever dumping stuff on us.”

“But we’re talking nineteen brand-new, completely serviceable air conditioning units.”

“That’s right. We used them to replace some of the old ones in the patients’ rooms.”

“And they just materialized out of nowhere and nobody asked any questions.”

“Never look a gift air conditioner in the mouth is what I say, especially when it arrives in the middle of the hottest summer in anybody’s memory.”

Vetch considered this with a growing suspicion, the specifics of which he did not care to face . . . but something about that odd number—
nineteen
air conditioners . . .

He called the judge, who had just come in from watering his cannas and was relaxed and jovial. Quickly enough they established that he had approved a work order for twenty air conditioning units from Sears and they were at least a week overdue and he had been planning to look into that—“Twenty, you say. Not nineteen.” Vetch covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned to Maria. “You don’t happen to remember the brand name.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, my lab table is right next to the window so I watched the guy install it. It’s that generic Sears brand. Kenwood, I think. No, Kenmore.”

Vetch ran a finger around his collar. “If I were the sort of man who cursed . . .”

“Harry.” She snuggled next to him.

He phoned the Sears in the city, where after throwing some weight he was connected to the loading dock, where the supervisor told him that twenty air conditioners had been signed over to a state policeman named, let me check the invoice, Officer Smith.

Vetch hung up. A moment’s indecision, then he turned to Maria Goretti and said, “Maria, you know how much I respect you.” On his words she stood and pulled him into the kitchen and shut the door. “Let’s not make this harder than it has to be,” Vetch said. He took her hand.

She took it back and folded her arms. “And exactly how hard does it have to be? Have you calculated damages with appropriate
compensation charts? Here’s what I’m wondering: Why now? Harry, you wouldn’t lay down one fishing pole unless you had a fish on another line or at least saw a good twitch on the bobber.”

“That is not correct,” he said with conviction. “I was a happy workaholic bachelor when you insinuated yourself into my life.”

“There’s the doctor.”

He turned away. “Whatever you need to believe.”

“So it
is
the doctor.”

Vetch paced the kitchen, flinging his hands about, his eyes fixed on the floor—pink and green linoleum. “Look, Maria. From the first—
from the first
I laid out the landscape. You remember that, yes? Yes. Short-term fling, company for the road—I made all that very clear, yes? Yes. But I just don’t feel right, stringing you along while I’m keeping one eye on the rest of the room. And I’ve dedicated my life to doing the right thing. I have to do it here. You’re an amazing lady. You deserve somebody who really loves you.”

“Love,” Maria said. “Harry. You want the doctor, you are
desperate
for the doctor for one reason, which is that she is
not
desperate for you. Everything—every
one
has come easy for you. Until now. I’m interested to see how it turns out, but not so interested that I’ll just shut up and watch. Not my style. You know that.”

He moved to the door. “Unless you have more to say—”

She blocked his way. “Yes, I suppose I do have one thing more to say.”

A long pause. “Maria,” he said, resting his hand on her arm, “don’t—”

She stopped, started to speak, stopped herself, started again. “Harry. You’re not a fraud. Really, you’re not. You’re a politician. It’s in your nature. You’re an actor—I don’t know if politicians were ever any other way but that’s what they are now and you’ve got a future.

“And you know, I like that about you or at least I’ve made my peace with it.
Love
—we’re in our thirties, we’re past love, soon enough we’ll be past sex. Take my word for it—I work in a hospital,
I know what’s coming.” She held out a stiff forefinger, then let it droop. “And every politician needs a wife. You need somebody who’s going to scope out a roomful of people and whisper in your ear the names of the ones whose hands you need to pump
and
the names of their wives and children and pets. You don’t need a lover, you need a wife. And I’m the perfect candidate. You need somebody to take care of you. I need somebody to take care of. I won’t be your doormat—you know me better than that—but I’m happy to be your partner in crime. Which in politics, sooner or later is what it will come to. You’re old enough to understand the difference between what you want and what you need. The question is—my question is, have you grown up enough to give up a little of the first for the sake of the second?”

“You do what you have to do. Just know that it’s over.”

“The answer to my question, evidently, is no.”

He stepped around her and into the living room. He was at the door when she said, “You forgot something.”

He patted his pants for his wallet and keys. “I don’t think so.”

“You forgot the part about being friends. ‘This is as hard on me as it is on you but I hope the time comes when we can be friends.’”

“If that’s what you want.”

“What
I
want, as you know perfectly well, isn’t worth a shit. But since you raised the subject, what I want is for you to come to your senses,” but he was out the door and in his car and down the drive. Only when he had arrived at the judge’s house did he surprise himself with a word of comment. “Gosh. She’s
tough
.”

The judge was sitting on his veranda in an avocado green metal glider that screaked when he shifted his bulk. He had a whiskey in one hand, a funeral home fan in the other. He pointed at a wicker chair. “Have a seat. I can’t handle the air. Ginny Rae says it helps her arthritis so I had it put in, but nothing worse for your health than walking out of a freezing house on a hot day. But what do I know? They’re her knees. What can I do you for.
How are things going with that Shaklett woman? You popped the question?”

“Do me a favor and don’t mention Maria Goretti Shaklett to me again,” Vetch said. “Who, for your information, I just broke up with, but keep that to yourself. It’s none of your business and anyway it’s not why I came. I’m not in the mood to sit. I’m too mad.”