Where the Dark Streets Go (22 page)

Brogan said, “To think you brought Wallenstein in to us, Father, and I let him go. Drummond Island—and all the time he was skipping the country.”

“Where’s Drummond Island?”

“It’s away out off the coast of Maine. His old man owns it.”

McMahon gave Traynor the crumpled note.

When the police were gone he sat down again with Phelan.

“I’d like to go to confession, Father.” He looked around the small, bare room with its smoke-grayed walls. “I don’t think I can make it to the church.”

“It’s a long ways in your condition,” McMahon said.

Phelan closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s funny, you saying that, Father. I was thinking this morning of my own father, a tough brute of an Irishman. He was always trying to squeeze a dollar out of my mother, and she’d say, ‘It’s a long ways to payday, lover.’ Always lover. And he’d say, ‘It’ll be a longer one, Tess, if you don’t give me the dollar now.’ Why do the Irish drink so much, Father?”

“I’m not sure they all do,” McMahon said, “but I drink too much myself.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long ways to payday.”

Phelan managed a crack of a smile. “I can’t get over that family in the hospital with me. Love, it’s the only word for it.”

“They’re real,” McMahon said.

“Oh, yes. They know what it’s about. No dark corners. You know, they’d kill for one another, Father. They wouldn’t say it was right. But they’d say it was love.”

McMahon drew a long breath. “Dan, I want to tell you something that’s on my conscience: I was with Detective Brogan in the bar on Eighth Street when they picked you up. I’d gone out for a few drinks with him. I didn’t know why we’d wound up in that particular spot until I saw you. You were informed on by a priest, Dan.”

“I wasn’t running away. Just staying away—in a place I felt comfortable.”

“I know.”

After a minute Phelan said: “It’s all so rotten, so crooked, getting sex out of pictures.”

“Dan, it’s a very common thing. Dr. Connelly will tell you that. That’s why I want you to keep seeing him.”

“He can’t change me.”

“He can help you live with yourself—whether it’s with Priscilla or not.”

“Does it come with a guarantee?”

“No. Only confession comes with a guarantee. And even that is on your own bond.”

“‘Nothing is given to man’: I like that song.”

“He’s given some choices if he’s got the guts to make them.”

Phelan put his hand to his breast, to where the knife wound was scarcely healed. “I chose—and I couldn’t even do that right.”

“I’ve written a draft letter that might be some help to you. I’d suggest you write the Franciscan Brothers if it turns out that’s still what you want when you get things straightened out.”

Phelan gave a dry little laugh. “It was a dream—lying in the nice white sheets of the hospital. I should’ve done it long ago if I was going to. I’m not going to give the Lord back this rotten lump of clay.”

“He made it, Dan, and he’d have known what was going to happen to it—even as you and I don’t know now. Do you remember the story of St. Ignatius? A soldier, a dissolute man in the days when even the pope was corrupt.”

“I don’t feel corrupt. I say it, but I don’t feel it. Another sin?”

“You are the judge of that.”

“The new church again. I want the old one!”

“Then I’m not your priest, Dan,” McMahon said quietly.

“Take me home,” Phelan said. “I don’t think I could find it on my own.”

“Home is in you. And you’ve got to find it yourself.”

“All right, all right, Father. She’ll be waiting for me, and maybe that’s all right—if we can stand the dark corners.”

“Dear man,” McMahon said, “you are not the only one with the dark corners. They’re in every mortal one of us. Which is strange, if in the beginning—if there was a beginning and God said it…Let there be light.”

Phelan looked at him. “You don’t want to hear my confession, do you, Father?”

“No, I don’t, but I will if you want it.”

Phelan shook his head and lifted himself carefully from the chair. “Let’s go.”

M
CMAHON, WITH POLICE PERMISSION
to visit it, left the next day for Drummond Island. The Coast Guard ferried him and the local police officers out. The caretaker, a part-time lobsterman, agreed to put McMahon up for a few days in his own cottage. After they had sealed and padlocked the big house, the police returned to the mainland.

There were no long beaches on which to run, only sandy coves when the tide was out, sheltered half-around by cliffs where the scrub pine was bent by the gales of centuries. But there was the sea and the sky and the stillness except for the gulls and the wind and the wash of the waves which were in themselves a kind of stillness. And the sun on his naked body. It ought all to have healed him, but it only salted the wound. He saw Nim everywhere. Sometimes he would look for an instant into the sun, and the afterglow against his eyelids became a golden cross, then the monstrance at the moment of elevation. To him now sign without substance, ceremony without worship, man without God.

He walked miles around the island, groping through the tangle of fallen timber and new growth, toward and away from the sea. The wild flowers of spring, violets and Mayflowers, and those with names he had forgotten bloomed toward the sun, and jack-in-the-pulpits came out in the shade. Jack-in-the-pulpits: the name went round and round in his head. One night before the fire after the lobsterman had gone to bed, he got up and took an old encyclopedia down from among the musty books. “Jack-in-the-pulpit:…the part that looks like the preacher is the slender stalk…enclosed in a leaflike growth which resembles the pulpit…a sounding board that extends behind and over…The plant grows from a root filled with a burning juice…” My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? But you’ve got it wrong, Joseph. My son, my son…

And from here Muller-Chase, loaned this refuge by his friend, young Wallenstein, had fled, according to the lobsterman. “He couldn’t take it somehow. He’d pick up a tangle of seaweed from the shore and say, ‘This is more like it, the slime of the earth and the sea, and the little faces looking out, making mouths for help.’ And you know, neighbor, I’d look and I’d see those faces, just for the minute, mind you. But I understood him and I knew why he always had to go back to the city. It was lonesome when he went, but I said to myself, I’d be more lonesome where he’s going.”

McMahon knew that for all his longing for the sea and the shore, for the salt air and the birds flying, forever flying, he too had to go back to the city, to the little faces looking out of windows and making mouths for help. On the plane back a week later he decided he would see Nim once more and tell her about the island and the lobsterman. And then he knew it would be better to write to her. And finally he knew that silence would be the best of all.

The monsignor embraced him, and Miss Lalor put on her hat and went out to buy a steak. Purdy and Gonzales between them bought a bottle of wine for dinner, and Purdy, on the monsignor’s instructions, took it from the slanting shelf of the liquor store and carried it home like a baby. All this they laughed at at the table, and Miss Lalor grew as red in the face as the monsignor. She had had but a sip of the wine. One of the Irish who did not drink, McMahon thought, and he wondered about Phelan.

After dinner, while the other priests went about the parish work, the monsignor and McMahon went into the study. The old man brought out a bottle of cognac. “Napoleon, Joseph. I’ve had it since Christmas. You look fine—as brown as one of themselves. Did you spend all the money?”

“Most of it on the fare,” McMahon said.

“Good!”

“But I saved the ten dollars I owed you.”

“Keep it till payday. You’ll want plenty of work now, Joseph. You’ll need it, hard work that will tire you out. I’ve got it for you. I’m not giving up on remodeling the school myself. I was thinking of a bazaar in the summer maybe…”

McMahon sipped the cognac.

“No toast, Joseph?”

“To peace,” McMahon said. He could think of no other.

“Exactly. It’ll come to you after a while. I know from experience. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now. But the good Lord knows there’s times he has to wait on the frailty of man. Sure, it’s all he has to make priests out of, mere men. And he needs them.”

“Why?”

“The people need them and he needs the people or there’d be none of us on earth at all.”

“We need one another,” McMahon said. “That’s all.”

“That’s the way you feel now. When you’ve started your penance and with your morning mass you’ll feel different. You weren’t asked to say Mass while…you were away?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I was alone on an island, Monsignor—except for a lobsterman.” He looked the old man straight in the face. He saw the change in expression, the little shadow of doubt in what he had believed of McMahon. Or was it that he doubted McMahon was telling the truth now?

It was the latter, for the old man said, “Well, I’m glad you’re back.”

“No scandal,” McMahon said with deliberate provocation.

Again the old man was not sure. “What do you mean, Joseph?”

“I gave no scandal.”

“You don’t have to say it out to me.” The old man, reassured, poured himself a drop more brandy and was about to add to McMahon’s.

McMahon covered his glass.

“Why won’t you drink, Joseph?”

McMahon pushed the glass a little farther from him on the table. “You know, Monsignor, it has just occurred to me, I may never drink again.”

“It’s better than some things. A priest needs a drop now and then.”

McMahon could feel the crawling urge to move in his neck, in his spine. “I think I’ll go into the church for a few minutes, Monsignor, if you’ll forgive me.”

“Go, by all means. As the kids say nowadays, that’s where it is. I’m beginning to catch up. But at my age, Joseph, you never catch up. You just step aside. I’ll be doing that soon. I’d do it now—if I knew who was taking my place. I suppose they’re right, not letting us know or having a say in the matter. There’s an instinct in all of us—father and son. Go. I wish you felt like talking. I’ve missed our talks, but I was missing them before you went away, a long time before, even before that artist’s death and that girl. There, I’ve said it. It’s out in the open and we’ll both feel the better for it. Go. The Lord’s waiting, and I’m waiting on the Lord.”

McMahon got as far as the sacristy door, but he did not go into the church. He took the subway downtown and walked through the West Village to the East Village on Eighth Street, then down to Fifth. Though he got no answer when he rang Nim’s bell, he went up the stairs where the light was as frail as that in Mrs. Phelan’s tenement. He knew, reaching the top floor, that she was gone, goods, pictures and all, for in the corner outside her door was the one piece of furniture she could not take with her, the piano.

He stood and looked at it for a long time, and then out the window to the Orthodox church, its simple façade with its complex cross, in the great hulking shadow of the old school building, and he began in his mind to compose a letter: “I will find you, Nim, so you may as well help me. There will be a place. I can teach music, you know…”

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

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