Thomas M. Disch (23 page)

“Well, I’m not sure,” Mrs. Sanders said, not so much because she wasn’t sure—Alison could tell she was delighted at the idea of having her pregnant and unmarried daughter shipped off to limbo for the next many months—but because she had a feeling that Father Cogling was applying sales pressure. Her instincts as a consumer told her that if she showed a little resistance to his sales pitch, he might sweeten the deal with a rebate or some kind of premium.

“And can you say why you’re not sure?” the old priest persisted. “Do you count on Alison for helping with the upkeep of your home? Is that it?”

Mrs. Sanders succumbed to his lure. “That’s part of it,” she fibbed, with a nervous glance toward her daughter. When Alison showed no inclination to contradict her, Mrs. Sanders voiced her age-old grievance. “It’s been years since I’ve seen a dime from Alison’s father. He owes me thousands of dollars by now, but I doubt I’ll ever see any of it. And now she’s going to be in the same damn situation.” She heaved a sigh and examined the lighted tip of her cigarette, as though the answer to her dilemma might be there, coded into the smoke.

“We understand that an unexpected pregnancy often entails hardships, and not only for the young mother. For everyone. If it would be any help, BirthRight is willing to offer you a small monthly gratuity.”

“Such as?” Mrs. Sanders asked.

“Fifty dollars?” the priest suggested.

“Fifty dollars doesn’t go very far these days.”

“That’s true. But our resources are limited.”

“It’s not just the money.”

“Of course not. The main consideration is Alison’s welfare. And the child’s.”

Mrs. Sanders could see that she wasn’t going to be able to strike a better deal. “It would be a help. And I can use any help I can get these days.” She looked up at Alison, but then her eyes shied away from making contact. “You’re sure you want to do this, honey? I don’t want you to think you’re not welcome in your own home.”

“I know that, Mother. And I’m sure. It’ll be like a long vacation. I never get out of the city. There’s woods, and a big lake.”

“You’ll be missing your classes. And graduation.”

“If the baby’s coming around Christmas, I would be anyhow.”

Mrs. Sanders stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the Bic pen that Father Cogling had placed on top of the papers she had to sign. She signed each of the three copies without bothering to read them. Once, drunk, she’d bought a set of the
Junior Universe of Knowledge Encyclopedia
the same way.

They’d been a present for Alison’s eighth birthday, and they’d sat at the foot of Alison’s bed, in their own walnutveneer bookcase, for six months, until the salesman came back to repossess them. Mrs. Sanders hadn’t been able to meet the “easy-tomeet” $25 monthly payments. Alison had known she wouldn’t, even at the age of eight. She’d missed the walnutveneer bookcase. It had been the nicest piece of furniture in the trailer.

Alison didn’t think she’d miss her home life either, such as it was. For as long as she could remember, she’d felt ashamed of living in a trailer. She didn’t know what the place was like where she was going, but she figured it had to be an improvement. She’d asked Father Cogling if he had pictures of it, and he’d shown her a postcard of a weirdlooking church you wouldn’t have thought was a church at all. It looked more like the top part of a castle.

Father Cogling explained that where she’d be living was underneath the church, but it wasn’t like a basement, more like a luxury hotel. Each of the girls at BirthRight had her own apartment, he told her, nicely furnished and roomy.

She liked the idea of “roomy.” She’d never lived anywhere that could have been called roomy. The only thing she didn’t like was that it was all underground, and there wouldn’t be windows anywhere. But then what did the window of her room in the trailer look out on? An alley with the old Oldsmobile that hadn’t been driven anywhere since her mother’s license was revoked two years ago. All four tires were flat. No, she wouldn’t miss being away from home.

The papers were signed, and then it was time to go. That came as a surprise. She’d thought she’d have a week or two to get ready, but no, Father Cogling wanted her to pack a suitcase and be ready for the car that was coming to pick her up in half an hour. “I don’t
have
a suitcase,” she’d protested, but her mother said, “You can use the trunk.” There was a trunk in her mother’s bedroom, beside the bed, that she kept old clothes in. So they took the old clothes out of it, mostly her mother’s, from when she’d been at Weight Watchers, and Alison packed her own things into it.

It only took five minutes, and by the time she was done, the car had come for her.

“It’s a Cadillac,” her mother said, parting the curtains of the front window.

Alison wanted to say, “Maybe
you’d
like to go there,” but she didn’t.

She knew that her mother was as embarrassed about this whole thing as she was.

And right then, as Father Cogling was folding up the papers her mother had signed and putting them in the inside pocket of his black suit coat, Alison thought, I don’t want to do this! But it was too late. Just as it had been too late when she’d had the same thought the night that Greg had knocked her up.

The machinery was in motion. She kissed her mother, once on each cheek, and they exchanged guilty looks, a different guilt on each side, but enough to go around. Then she took up the trunk by its plastic handle. Father Cogling asked, “Could I help?” and she smiled and said, “No, it’s not that heavy. I can manage just fine.”

Father Mabbley had not one drink during the entire nightlong flight from Las Vegas to Minneapolis, including an unscheduled two-hour layover in St.

Louis. Not a single complimentary glass of wine—despite his terror of airplanes, despite the fact that the flight had taken them through a thunderstorm that had rocked the plane about dreadfully, and despite the further fact that the young woman sitting beside him was consuming Cuba libres in a spirit of abject, apocalyptic panic. Not that rum-and-Cokes had ever been Father Mabbley’s undoing. He considered them beyond the pale, the alcoholic equivalent of Cheez Whiz. If he
were
to succumb to a drink before breakfast (though he might as easily have thought of his personal time zone as afterdinner rather than prebreakfast), it would have to be something more tempting than a Cuba libre. So he did his best to tune out the young woman beside him and tried, without a headset, to figure out what was happening in the movie that was being projected, blurrily, onto the pull-down screen on the wall of the cabin, a low-intensity, low-budget shoot-‘em-up with a cameo part for Mickey Rooney, who was evidently still alive and making movies. It was like seeing dear old Bing fast-forwarded into old age, and Father Mabbley had a nice, quiet cry in the dark.

The plane landed just as the sun was coming up on a summer morning that had forgot all about bad weather. Father Mabbley hadn’t booked into a hotel, and was hoping he wouldn’t have to, but that meant he had three hours to kill before he met with Reese Wiley, the lawyer who’d called to tell him about Bing Anker’s death and to announce that he stood to inherit most of Bing’s estate, which, it turned out, was not inconsiderable. How not-inconsiderable Wiley could not say when they’d spoken on the phone, nor did he have any information about the murder investigation. Father Mabbley for his part had said nothing to the lawyer about his last phone call with Bing and was feeling a little uneasy about not having already contacted the police. Bing’s vendetta against Father Bryce would obviously be relevant to any investigation, and from what he’d heard, eavesdropping on their conversation, Father Mabbley had no wish to
shield
Bryce, who had come across as every bit as unsavory as Bing had painted him. Though, in fairness, who would look their best when they’re being put through the wringer by a blackmailer? And that had been the name of the game Bing had been playing. Father Mabbley had even warned Bing, after Bryce had hung up, that he might be putting his life at risk. Now he could address an I-told-you-so to Bing’s soul in purgatory.

If Father Mabbley was not immediately volunteering all he knew to the police, it wasn’t out of consideration for Bryce but, rather, for the sake of the Church. He had benefited more than once himself from the Church’s policy of avoiding any scandal that could be discreetly smoothed over. It was only fair to return the favor, at least till he had more knowledge of the situation. It was Father Mabbley’s dearest hope that Bryce had had nothing to do with it. Bing might have brought home a piece of rough trade, though Father Mabbley had a hard time imagining that sort of thing happening in Minneapolis, which he thought of as the Little Megapolis on the Prairie, the hometown of Betty Crocker and Mary Tyler Moore and all things bright and homebaked.

Three hours was not an eternity. He would sit down in the coffee shop, dawdle over an overpriced breakfast, and read a book. Fortunately, he had the ideal book for the purpose:
A Girl of the Limberlost
, by Gene Stratton Porter, which, some incalculable number of Christmases ago, Bing had given him in a mint-condition first edition sealed in Saran Wrap. Inscribed on the flyleaf, in what was intended to be calligraphy (but what calligrapher ever used a ballpoint pen?), Bing had written: “A guaranteed five-handkerchiefer!

Toujours l’amour! Bing.” Father Mabbley had never managed to get past chapter one: “Wherein Elnora Goes to High School and Learns Many Lessons Not Found in Her Books.” In her heyday, almost a century ago, Gene Stratton Porter had been accounted, at least by her publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, “America’s most beloved novelist,” but now she was a camp classic at best and intolerably mawkish at worst. When he’d learned of Bing’s death, Father Mabbley’s first irrelevant and irrational thought was “Oh dear, now I’m going to
have
to read that book.” It had been sitting on the shelf specially devoted to books toward which he owed a similar guilty debt, some the gifts of well-meaning friends like Bing but just as many his own stalled good intentions. A garage full of cars whose batteries had gone dead and tires were flat, undriven and undrivable. More than one visitor coming upon this one anomalous shelf (in a library that was otherwise a paragon of rational order) had wanted to know what John Ashbery, C. S. Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, Grace Paley, Daniel Defoe, and Gene Stratton Porter all had in common. “They are my guilts,” he would explain, “my little aviary of pet albatrosses.”

So now, at a table in the airport’s coffee shop, in a spirit of penance and remorse, he would actually sit down and read
A Girl of the Limberlost
.

He would
not
buy a newspaper or magazine. He would not work yet another crossword puzzle. (Was there a recovery group for crossword puzzle addicts?

There should be, and he should be in it.) He ordered Breakfast Number 3, The Paul Bunyan, and started reading. Despite its years in Saran Wrap, the old paper had a powdery feel, as though the pages were self-destructing as he turned them. But he did turn them, and by the time he’d finished the last syrup-sodden pancake on his plate, he was actually caught up in the plot. Gene Stratton Porter had been a pro, and for all its goopy, goody-two-shoes sentimentality,
A Girl of the Limberlost
was a genuine page-turner. You could almost see Lillian Gish doing the role of Elnora, pluckily smiling down each new adversity, charming every stony heart, always winning through and, despite her poverty, always looking radiantly beautiful. Porter’s idea of a major life crisis was not having appropriate and pretty clothes, so Elnora, like Cinderella, was forever getting into the right frock in the nick of time.

Father Mabbley could see the special charm the book must have had for Bing—the only middle-aged man he’d ever known who still went shopping for his Barbie doll.

Two chapters after his plate had been bussed away, the nice young waitress with elaborately fizzed hair came by with the carafe and asked if he’d like more coffee.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, sliding his cup toward her for a fourth refill.

“That must be a good book,” she said.

“It’s a real page-turner,” Father Mabbley agreed.

“It looks like an antique.” She turned her head sideways to read the cover. “Gene Stratton Porter? I never heard of him.”

“Her,” Father Mabbley corrected. “Though you wouldn’t think so from the spelling. She was the Stephen King of her time. Though that time was… let me see…” He looked at the title page. “Nineteen-oh-nine. The age of innocence.”

The waitress blushed and wished him a nice day and fled with her carafe.

The collar affected some people that way. Or had it been the tone of his voice, the suggestion that this was an age of something other than innocence?

The clergy were assumed still to be living in the world of Gene Stratton Porter, a world of positive thinking and happy problems, a Brigadoon sort of world that existed only once a week, on Sundays, when everyone was nice to each other and dinner had to be special.

And really, wasn’t that the primary reason he’d become a priest—to live all week in Brigadoon? It
was
a nicer world. When people saw the collar, they switched into Sunday mode—those who didn’t just seize up or run away, like Eileen (which was the name sewn on the waitress’s uniform). Of course, it made one a magnet for sanctimony and false piety, but it also served as a talisman against muggers. Once, when he’d been impaneled for jury duty, Father Mabbley had been the only person who hadn’t raised his hand when the judge wanted to know if any of the prospective jurors had ever been the victim of an armed robbery. There was something to be said for living in Brigadoon, even if it was ninety percent wishes, dreams, and lies. Pretend to be nice for long enough, and you might become a genuinely nice person. Jesus, of course, had thought otherwise. Jesus had no use for whited sepulchers.