Where the Dark Streets Go (20 page)

They came up from underground at Astor Place into a virtual star of possible directions. On Sunday there were not many people, mostly students from NYU, heading back to their digs, and a few stray drunks cast up from the Bowery. Following Nim’s lead, they walked past the old Cooper Union. His grandfather had gone there to classes soon after he arrived from Ireland. He thought of his mother again: how when things turned out badly she would say, “Man proposes, God disposes.” Which was wrong: it was the other way around.

“Do you like pizza?” Nim said.

“Yes.” Pizza was a very good thing to think about at the moment.

“Pizza with sausage?”

“Yes.”

“Or anchovy?”

“Sausage.”

Actually he did not care much for either pizza or sausage.

But carrying the box up the long flight of stairs a few minutes later, he breathed deeply of the pie’s fragrance. Nim turned on the lights. “I don’t have window shades,” she said. “No neighbors up this high, unless they use a telescope. Besides, I need all the morning light I can get. I get up at six, you know, and work till ten.”

“I get up at six most mornings,” McMahon said, “but I don’t quite like it.”

“You would if your work was going well. Put the pie in the kitchen. There’s a light switch just inside the door.”

They were strangers, McMahon thought. He was in an alien world. He snapped on the light and caught sight of a cockroach just before it disappeared beneath the stove. He put the pie down carefully in the center of the white-topped table.

Nim had brought a lamp and set it next to the piano. “Beautiful,” he said. The old wood had been brought up to a high gloss, its scars stained out. He could smell the furniture polish.

“I’m afraid to get it tuned,” she said. “This way I don’t seem to play so badly.”

McMahon lifted the lid and struck a chord, the notes going off in all directions. “This way I don’t play so goodly,” he said.

Nim’s eyes caught his and held them. “I want to say this, Joe. It’s all right, your being here. I don’t expect anything of you—just talk and company.”

He held his arms out to her and she rushed into them. “Talk and company,” he said at her ear, holding her close against him. She would be standing on tiptoe.

“I said expect, I didn’t say want.”

Such lies we tell to prime the truth, he thought, and then thought no more, just holding her tightly, kissing her hair, then her forehead, her cheek, her lips. The moment of self-repossession came when, to balance herself, Nim reached out and by inadvertence touched the piano keys. They drew apart and after a moment, McMahon said, “We’ve imported a chaperon.”

Nim looked down at the piano and struck one note, then another. She gathered her fingers into a fist and sprung them open again. “Of all the things I didn’t need—was to get hung up on a priest.”

“What about the priest?”

“Yes. What about him? I want to know. I have a thousand questions.” She walked away from him, hugging herself. “Please, turn on the electric heater. It’s cold in here and I want to be comfortable. I want to talk. I want you to talk. I’m twenty-nine years old, and I know quite a lot—about men, about a lot of things. Have you ever been with a woman?”

“Yes. But…” He couldn’t say it.

She said it for him. “I know. The other women weren’t like me. What’s his name…Tim Ryan’s place?”

McMahon went to the small space heater in the middle of the room, a string of extension cords linking it to the wall outlet. He snapped it on and, squatting, watched the gradual rise of the orange glow.

Nim changed her suit jacket for a pullover sweater. She came and stood beside him. “And afterwards, what?”

“Guilt. An agony of guilt, confession, penance, starting over.”

“Starting over what?”

“Trying to live up to my vow. Prayer, work, more work, walking, walking, music…and trying to keep Christ alive in me.”

“Whatever that means,” Nim said. She lit a cigarette and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, near the heater.

“It means…” He went to the daybed and sat on the corner of it, groping his mind for something she would not put down out of hand. “It means trying to be His representative on earth, to teach, to help people live decent lives, to encourage them when they fail, to assure them of forgiveness…” It sounded so hollow to him, so thin against the monstrous clamor of his own heartbeat.

“It’s playing Christ,” she said, “it’s forgiving sin and jangling the keys to heaven. I’m not making fun of it, Joe. I know what it’s like to get rid of guilt, to hurt somebody and then make up for it. And I think I dig what it means to kneel in church and say, ‘God, I need you.’ And if a man comes down from the altar and says, ‘Go in peace,’ and I know he’s a good man, I’ll go in peace…I think. In other words, I’m trying to say I know what a priest is to people who believe in priests. But what is he to himself?”

It was a question he had not been able to ask himself. A priest should be nothing to himself, God’s mirror…bump, bump, bump. “A vessel, a vehicle…No. He’s like a doctor in a way.”

“But a doctor’s a man first. And he doesn’t deny his nature to become a doctor.”

“Nim, there is only one answer to your logic: if a man has to deny his nature to become a priest, he shouldn’t be one.”

“That makes more sense than some other things you’ve said. Do you think celibacy makes you a better priest?”

“No, but once I believed it. Once I believed everything the Church taught. Immutable truth, which, it turns out now, is somehow being muted. And I sometimes wonder what will happen if the forms are taken away, one by one.”

“They won’t need priests any more—just man and God.”

McMahon tried to smile. “You make me sound obsolete.”

“Do you really believe you have the power to forgive sin?”

“In God’s name, yes.”

“And so of course you believe in sin.”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t think I do. Or maybe one sin—dishonesty.”

“You just spoke of another,” McMahon said, “hurting people.”

Nim, moving away from the heater, put her cigarette out slowly, determinedly. “That’s not sin—that’s a condition of being human.”

“Believe me, so is sin.”

She laughed and got up. “Would you like a drink? I bought some Scotch.”

“Thank you, I would.” McMahon followed her to the kitchen door. “I suppose we ought to eat that pie before…soon.”

“Before what?”

He caught at the least false excuse available. “I saw a cockroach.”

“Only one? They generally come in tandem.” She opened the refrigerator door and then closed it again. “Joe, do you want to go to bed with me?”

“Very much.”

“Then let’s turn out the lights and see what happens.”

“I love you very much, Nim. So let’s leave the lights on.”

“You do sometimes surprise me,” she said, going toward him.

M
CMAHON WASHED AND WASHED
again his hands in the sacristy before putting on the Mass vestments. Guilt was one thing, but guilt with joy, how manage that? His mouth should be filled with ashes, but it was the taste of apples on his tongue. I will go unto the altar of God: the Mass was the Mass if said by a priest, however guilty the man…to God who gives joy to my youth.

He did not intend to go again to Nim. That had been implicit in their parting. But neither could he yet confess those moments to be sin. God have mercy on us. Christ have mercy on us. God have mercy on us. And in the front pew sat Priscilla Phelan who had never come to weekday Mass before to his knowledge. What angel roused her from her bed, what demon? She kept staring at him as though to read the gospel of hypocrisy whenever he raised his eyes. Poor child of pain, he thought, who comes to steal vengeance from the Lord. What are we at all, frail creatures of flesh pretending spirit, and compensating our grief in the torture of one another? Our father…lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…Tell us what is evil, or silence the voices that accuse.

But Priscilla Phelan had not come to accuse. She waited for him in the courtyard outside the sacristy, and when he came out, she said, “Father, I am sorry for what I said to you on the stoop the other night.”

“It was said in anger, and I don’t blame you. I tried to help and made a mess of it.”

“I made the mess, not telling you the truth in the first place. Now I’ve done something else, Father.”

McMahon drew a deep breath and tried to put down the feeling of nausea rising in his throat.

“I rented the back room to a policeman. Don’t ask me why. I guess because I didn’t want Dan going any place he’d get in trouble. But now I don’t know how to tell him.”

“I don’t think I can advise you in this, Mrs. Phelan. Except…Dan is sick in several ways, and you can’t just set about healing him yourself no matter how much you want to. Let him see Dr. Connelly, and me. I’m not much help, but he talks with me.”

“He won’t talk to me at all. He keeps watching the door, like I was a policeman too. I made myself come out this morning. I gave him a sleeping tablet. I told him it was a tranquilizer. And I locked the door.”

“Then for God’s sake go home and unlock it and leave it open. He tried to kill himself. That’s the easiest way out for him, don’t you see?”

She covered her face with her hands. “What have I done to the man? What have I done to him?”

“It was done long ago, the worst of it—and the rest you’ve done to one another. With my help.”

“Come home with me, Father, I’m afraid.”

Down the same street they walked quickly as he had walked with Carlos, but when they reached the Phelan apartment, the man was sleeping like a child. They stood and looked down at him in the bed, the lines in his face all but vanished and a gentle smile on his lips. His wife stood, her arms folded, and out of the corner of his eye, McMahon saw the little cradling motion of her body.

In the living room McMahon said, “Tell him I came and that I’m working on his project. That will give him a kind of peace.”

“A kind of peace,” she repeated. “And where do I go for mine?”

“I just don’t know.” He left her sobbing quietly to herself in a corner of the sofa in the darkest part of the room.

During the morning he worked out a letter of inquiry to the Franciscan Brothers which might serve Phelan as a guide in writing one of his own. He tried not to think of Nim, of the hour she would arrive at the precinct headquarters, where she would give her statement and how she would sign it. Nana Marie Lavery, he supposed. He had never even seen her handwriting. He tried not to think of her, but his mind would not stay servant to his will. He was going to have to get out of the city somehow.

He heard the front doorbell ring and Miss Lalor thump down the hall from the kitchen. A couple of minutes later she knocked on the door and handed him a special delivery letter. He dreaded to open it and yet the beat of his heart bade him make haste: the neat handwriting and no return address. Then he saw that it had been postmarked the day before so that it could not be from Nim. He tore open the envelope.

The invitation was engraved. It read:

“You are invited to an exhibition of paintings from the collection of David Wallenstein at Mr. Wallenstein’s home, 1090 Fifth Avenue on Monday, the fifth of May, at 4
P.M.
”

Along with the invitation came the personal card of Everett Wallenstein on the back of which had been written: “Do come. It will be to the interest of our protégée. My father has invited the most important people of the art world.” Wallenstein had initialed the note.

And Nim would have gotten the same invitation. McMahon cleared his calendar for four that afternoon.

He saw her the moment he stepped from the bus. She was walking up and down in front of the building; the green suit again, the lovely green suit with the orange scarf at the throat, and the dark hair shining in the sun.

“The fates,” she said with a wry smile when he walked up to her. “What is it all about?”

“We’ll know soon.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I don’t think I’d have gone in if you hadn’t.”

“That’s why I came.”

“That’s why I came too,” she said, responding to her own notion of his real reason for coming. “One wants to know—in spite of everything.”

People were going into the mansion, not many and mostly men, but people you would identify with painting; at least, knowing of the invitation, you would, McMahon thought.

She gazed out over Central Park for a moment. “You see, Joe, I don’t think I believed for a minute that Mr. Wallenstein was really interested in my work.”

“In you, yes,” McMahon said.

She turned toward the building and they started in. “No. Only in Stu…that’s what I think now anyway. We’ll see.”

The old gentleman opened the door to them himself, offering his hand to McMahon. “I am David Wallenstein.” He had a cherubic look, the plump pink cheeks that would have rarely needed shaving, mild gray eyes with none of the son’s hauteur in them. One could associate him with painting, with collecting, with money, McMahon thought, but not with the making of money. “You are the personal friends Everett invited. I have been curious, I must admit. A priest…” Then he looked at Nim. “…And a maiden.” The sensuous mouth puckered just a little while he gazed at her. He continued to gaze unashamedly even as he suggested that they join the other guests. McMahon had the identical reaction to him he had had to the son, possibly stronger. Where the son had looked at her with an aloof appraisal, the father’s eyes grew indulgent, as though by grace of association with young Wallenstein she became a household intimacy.

In the living room beyond the foyer a dozen people had gathered, only two of them women. They stood, highball glasses in hand, in easy camaraderie. When Wallenstein left Nim and McMahon at the door they were accorded the cool glances of nonrecognition.

“I don’t like him much,” Nim said of the elder Wallenstein.

McMahon did not want to talk of his reaction. “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own,” he murmured.

“Exactly,” Nim said.

The walls were hung with the Impressionists which had made the collection famous. It was, someone said, the first time to his knowledge the old boy had opened his doors to the public. He would lend a painting now and then, but never any number of them at a time. Someone else reminded the speaker that the present company could hardly be called the public. Nim and McMahon accepted drinks and went from Monet to Redon. They were waiting as no one else there seemed to be waiting. Two more people arrived, also well known to the others, and then the elder Wallenstein came to the wide doors and spoke from the foyer. “Finish your drinks, gentlemen—and ladies. Then I would ask that you leave your glasses here…”