The Unspeakable (15 page)

Marbury said that he would have succeeded if not for the intervention of a judge. It was a first offense, this crime, a sweater that he lifted from a nearby department store. When he was taken to court Marbury said that he was full of the hatred that was welling up inside. But the judge sensed this, and instead of coming down hard, a fine or some probation, he suggested college classes in lieu of a criminal record.

“I wanted to tell the judge to stick it. But the wrong words came out.”

“What happened?”

“I said OK.”

And so Marbury found himself on the campus of Fairfield University, a Jesuit school located not far from his aunt's home in Connecticut. A whole world opened up to him there. He studied everything that he could, trying out classes by the handful. Philosophy and literature, economics and art. Marbury popped from class to class, an intellectual pinball, before settling on his love, which wasn't anything in school but a girl.

“She was an archaeology major. A subject I hated, all those bones and missing teeth, but I took it anyway.”

The woman's name was Jill. She was several years older than Marbury and much more worldly, despite his sordid background. Jill had already been married and divorced, and she was struggling with going to school while she worked nights as a checkout for a local grocery store. He was drawn to her at once, although he
couldn't say exactly why. Jill was attractive but not overtly so. She was thin, almost emaciated, said Marbury, as though all the fat had been sucked from her body. Marbury often saw only bones jutting out from her tight jeans, like the hips from one of those medical skeletons, all pointed and obvious. But she had a sense of humor and he liked that.

At least he believed he liked it.

Marbury explained that he began to follow Jill around but not in a pathetic or dangerous way. He just shadowed her. He took the same classes as Jill, attended the same lectures and debates. When she went to the library, he followed her. If there was a football game, Marbury went as well. Everywhere she went Marbury was there. Not in her face but more like a comforting background, eventually a background that she got used to seeing. And one day that background actually spoke to her, making a pitch for dinner, which she accepted with some reluctance.

Marbury said,“Hardly dinner. More like tacos at the commons .”

“I take it she went along.”

“She hated tacos but she went.”

“Lucky for you,” I said.

But Marbury shook his head.“Lucky for neither one of us.”

Marbury grew tired with the story and began to fish around in his desk drawers. The sound of scurrying paper clips and pencils, coins sliding against wood, drawers banging open and closed. Finally he found it.

The Rolling Stones.

He plucked the cassette from its box and popped it into a tape player, adjusting the volume only one way. Louder. The sound of Mick Jagger's voice, his verbal scowl more like it, the scowl of Altamont, of protests in cities without protests before, poured out,
and I felt myself back in seminary again, begging Marbury to turn down the music, which he never did.

“I see your tastes haven't evolved any,” I said over the music.

“Why would they? I'm a man of my times.”

He said this with such a grandiose air, even through sign language, as though mocking the famous words of some statesman or Revolutionary War hero, that I had to laugh. The one thing that I never saw Marbury as was a product of his environment, his times, as he called it. And the more that I learned about him, stories that I never knew from all those years back, the less convinced I was that he was a product of any times, much less these.

The story about Marbury's father and the fight at the bar, though disturbing, struck me as odd. It just seemed to materialize out of thin air or out of Marbury's imagination with the retelling. No emotion was attached. And yet his father was in prison, I've confirmed as much. Even this new story about Jill, Marbury's phantom fiancée, who seemed to crawl out from a past that I had no idea of, bothered me. I'd never heard her name before this. And the more that I thought about it, the less confident I was that the Marbury I remembered, at least the Marbury that I once knew, and this one were the same item. He was like the moon, the phases of which I saw from one angle and one angle only, which didn't constitute the whole but only an aspect.

“Why didn't you tell me about Jill earlier?” I asked.

“People talked about it in seminary. Where were you?”

Obviously not believing any of it. There were so many rumors about Marbury that just keeping them straight required a full-time job. And after a while I just quit listening to them.

He smiled. “I guess you should have cocked a better ear.”

I thought about all the useless energy spent on talking. Rumors and gossip, but also about what we wanted to do with our lives back then. Endless conversations about how we wanted to serve the
church. Our dreams. I had a secret dream at the time that I told only to Marbury. My desire to write, never realized.

“Did you think things would turn out this way?” I asked him.

“Maybe you should answer first.”

“Well, I'm not Walker Percy yet.”

“Words find you anyway, Peter. It's OK.”

“But I'm not writing.”

“So do it.”

“It isn't that simple. My job—”

“What?”

“—I'm just saying it isn't like in seminary.”

The sound of crunching glass.

I glanced at the address again and double-checked it against the mailbox, which was filled not with letters or old catalogs but with bits of used tinfoil. Drug paraphernalia.

The door opened as I pushed it, broken at the lock, and I followed a skinny staircase up to an apartment above. I thought about Marbury, working on his sermon that afternoon, and wished that he were here with me. That anyone was with me. But I was alone. I heard someone scurry to the door like a scared mouse. Except that it wasn't a mouse, just a woman in orange flip-flops.

I said, “I'm looking for Tricky.”

She gave me the once-over and grinned. Several of her teeth were missing and those that were left looked ready to join the others.

The door went ajar.

I saw a man sitting in a chair watching TV. The channel was mostly black-and-white static but he didn't seem to care. He was massaging a beer with his fingers, oblivious that nothing was in front of him.

“Never heard of him,” she said.

“I'm here from St. Francis. Nathan Stone sent me.”

The man stood up but he didn't see me. He looked like he had been drinking all afternoon. His hair was unkempt and dirty, with a thin mat circling a bald spot. Grease and ketchup stains marked his shirt. And he walked around in his stockings, which were sliding off his feet. The place smelled of rotting bodies, except bodies that passed as being alive.

“I don't talk to cops.” Slurring words.

“He ain't the heat, baby.”

“Then who are you?”

“I'm a priest.”

He stopped and looked at me square on, noticing my clerical collar. The woman started to laugh as though they had an inside joke between them.

“Well, you look like a priest,” he said.

I brushed off his comments and told him that I had a few questions for him, but he didn't seem to hear me. Instead he made me repeat over and over where I had come from, who sent me, and what I was looking for. When I finally mentioned Marbury's name he perked up as though he recognized it. So did the woman.

She said, “You mean the preacher.”

I asked her if she knew him.

“Yeah. He gave us some money once.”

“You mean, he gave me some money,” he said.

“Why did Marbury give you money?”

“I was living on the streets, man.”

“We were both on the streets, Tricky. Both of us. Don't forget it,” the woman said.

“That's the story. We were both on the fucking streets.”

I glanced around the apartment. A real dump. Tricky and his woman had only a few pieces of furniture between them and those seemed like they were taken from the garbage. In a back room I could see a mattress just lying on the floor, their bedroom. Sheets
and blankets were rolled up into a ball. Next to the bed were beer bottles and half-empty glasses of liquor, and clothes piled over chairs or just dumped on the floor. Absolute squalor.

The whole scene depressed me.

I asked them, “You found this apartment then?”

Tricky laughed at my discomfort. So loud that he started coughing.

He said, “What would I find? My girl got a job, more like it.”

Two arms made a pumping motion to his groin.

“She gives great head, Father. Twenty bucks.”

“Tricky! He's a goddamn priest!”

“Once a man, baby, always a man. Fifteen bucks.”

I declined but the price went down.

“Ten and I can't go no lower. I have expenses.”

“I believe we already gave you enough,” I said.

More laughter and coughing. I felt like an idiot.

“We enjoyed your charity. Ain't that right, baby?”

But the woman didn't say anything. She just hovered behind me.

“What happened to the money, Tricky?”

“Threads for an interview. What do you think? I just needed it.”

“You mean you spent it.”

He sniffed twice, trying to hide a wide grin. I knew what he was trying to tell me.

I said, “It wasn't meant for drugs.”

But Tricky didn't care.

He said, “Hey, you're the priest. Go collect more.”

I reported to the Bishop's office early the next morning. We talked about the celebration of that afternoon's Good Friday Mass
and other things, until the topic landed squarely on Marbury. He listened patiently as I recounted, in varying degrees of detail, the story that Marbury had already told me. In particular, the trip to Pennsylvania up to that point and the story about Helen and Barris. But the Bishop seemed especially interested in Marbury's relationship with his father, and I showed him the newspaper article, which he read without comment.

“I'm in the process of checking it out. But it looks solid.”

The Bishop nodded and played with his cigar. I noticed that he wasn't smoking and I offered him a light, but he declined. He said that he was cutting back, which I knew would only make him more irritable. And he was. I certainly didn't tell him about Tricky and his girlfriend.

The Bishop: “Did you mention the job?”

“Yes. He said that he wasn't interested.”

“I'm not asking him to choose.”

“Marbury seems to think that he still has a choice,” I said.

“And what did you say?”

“I told him that he couldn't stay there.”

“Then you explained to him our position. He knows.”

“Not fully.”

He peered at me from over his bifocals. I knew that he was debating about lighting his cigar, but he didn't. Instead he just twirled the cellophane wrapper through his thick hands until it slowly came off.

“You didn't tell him?”

“We've discussed other things.”

“But not the money.”

I didn't say anything.

“You're not stalling because you two were friends?”

I could literally feel those words. Heavy like snow chains.

“He'll have every chance to clear himself, Peter. I'm hoping that he does.”

“I don't think he believes that,” I said.

“Tell him to forget this business about Easter and we'll talk.”

The Bishop was talking about the Easter service. The service that the landlady told me was a healing service only in disguise.

I said, “He won't. I know him.”

I heard the sound of a striking match. Then another.

“What if he can really—?”

“Don't say it, Whitmore. He can't.”

“But some people believe it. They have faith.”

“People also believe in ghosts.”

I protested, “I have reports. One woman—”

“Reports? Do you have pictures? Medical records?”

I just shook my head.

“Then what? Hearsay? Innuendo?”

He had me cornered.

“I don't know what to think, Tony.”

I have felt, and still often do feel, that the Bishop and I were born at the wrong time. Our influence outside the church is limited, the Bishop knows that. We cannot control the minds of politicians and governments the way members of the clergy could only a few centuries ago. Nor can we control the production run of large presses, casually squash ideas with a rolling sweep of the hand. And despite perceptions to the contrary, we can neither mount an army of recruits to do our bidding, whatever that bidding is, nor stop the ones that are opposed to it. Yet it is assumed that we can.

That I can.

In a sense, I am much like my brothers. They toil away on the farm of my father, toiling away at an earth exhausted by pollution and pesticide. And yet, they continue to work. Plowing the land, seeding, reaping their rewards or bad luck in the future. If the skies are too wet or too dry, prices rise and people complain. They never complain when crops are plentiful, when the larder is full, but only
when it's empty. My mother always said that's when you see people at their worst, when facing their darkest fears.

The Bishop struck up another match, this time igniting his cigar. I could feel the smoke wash across the room, like emotional relief and comfort, except that it stung my eyes. No comfort for me.

Through a smoke ring I heard a voice. “You have nothing, Peter. As for the rest, whether he can heal or not, you'll find that out on Sunday, won't you?”

I walked into Marbury's church later that morning and found him praying. He looked perfectly natural. His head was bowed but I couldn't see his lips moving. He was silent even deep within himself, a fact that made me more disturbed than any other. For the change, at least in his mind, was real.