The Day's Heat Page 18

  Ray, on the other hand, had no walls, hid nothing, told without telling: “This cute guy, great body, but he never called back. My day really starts around noon, kiddo. I just got in this morning. You have to try some herb, honey, when you’re not pregnant.” What would Ray think if Lee told her everything? Would it penetrate her sister’s self-absorbed, detailed monologues?

  “I left Jack’s apartment at three, and Angel was waiting in the parking lot. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  “Maybe it’s like you said the last time—he really cares. You said you loved him, too,” Lee lied, “that maybe you’d get married.” There was silence from Ray’s side.

  Lee stretched out as straight as she could make herself on the cool tiles, giving her great belly more room. “The last big fight you had, remember? You said it convinced you to marry Angel.”

  “Kiddo, you’re dreaming! You’re inventing things, ’cause you want me married, too, caught in the same trap as you.”

  Lee wasn’t sure if she was making the marriage thing up or not, but Ray forgot a lot lately. “What’s wrong with you?” Lee questioned each time they talked. “I’m worried. You don’t sound like yourself, and you’re not working. How are you making all this money?”

  “Don’t ask, kiddo, don’t ask. I’ll explain the next time I see you, but not on the phone. You never know.”

  “You’re a prostitute?”

  Laughing, Ray’s rough, lazy voice dropped down another octave, “Not that I couldn’t—I spend a lot of time on my back. But that’s too much work. I’ll explain when I see you. Coming that way soon. Ciao, baby.”

  Hearing the click, Lee hung up and used the counter to pull herself up from the floor. Talking to Ray was like watching a grade B movie on TV: a run of bright costumes and fast exchanges that made the actors and the plot seem easy. You could turn it off in the middle because you really didn’t care about those characters, or how the story came out. Ray’s descriptions of her friends, her lovers, her life, they were cut off in the middle somehow: quick, easy, she’d forget who she was talking about. And who really cared?

  Even if I told Ray everything now, she wouldn’t be interested, Lee thought.

  She changed into shorts and an old green smock, faded and shrunk, and cleaned out the refrigerator. Told herself she should have done it while half-listening to Ray. By noon, the rusted racks and walls were scrubbed as bare as the cupboard in the nursery rhyme, and Lee took a shower and put on a pale lilac dress, an unexpected gift from her mother-in-law. Claire often came around with these surprises, like the dress, but Lee suspected the item was probably just an excuse to shop. In the new clothes, she and Lill went to pick up Cassie, and from there, she drove to the old school to see Father Kennedy. She glanced across at the rectory, saw David Palmer’s tan car in the garage, but turned the other way and pulled into the parking lot. The old school was a three-storied building of blistered, peeling paint, gone gray in the south Georgia sun.

  “Impossible. I can’t believe Sister Ellen’s gone. She was always in a hurry,” Lee whispered the phrases, climbing the three flights of narrow stairs that led up to Father Kennedy’s room. She’d never been beyond the second floor, knew it only from the old priest’s descriptions: “Full of my mess, my books and papers.” Cassie and Lill clomped behind her, a damp, sour odor rising from the carpet under their marching steps.

  “It’s me,” Lee said loudly, tapping on the cracked paint of a half-open door and looking in.

  The old priest, still in his black soutane, with a dead cigarette between his lips, sat in a rocking chair by a dormer window. In the slanting light, he seemed to be wearing a brown monk’s hood, but it was only an odd-shaped throw that he’d pulled off a chair to cover one shoulder and part of his head. Now, he threw the cloth off and visibly shook himself. His eyes were sunken and bleak, his skin sallow, the hair of his head and beard all matted and tangled.

  He’s been hit hard, Lee thought, biting the inside of her cheek to hold back the tears that had been wanting to fall all morning, even while she was talking to Ray.

  “Ah, there you dear lasses are,” Father Kennedy said, his voice shaking, sounding older than ever before.

  Lee and the girls weaved their way through island stacks of books and magazines that stood around odd chairs, on small tables, and next to a narrow bed in the barn-like room. Several over-full ashtrays dotted the floor by the bed and were on the tables, and every surface was dusted in cigarette ash—a volcanic smell.

  “Are you all right?” Lee asked, seeing the bed covers smooth, realizing that Father Kennedy must have spent all night there in the rocker in front of the side window.

  Speaking to him, even those few words, made a single tear roll out of her eye and down her nose, but she pinched it off between two fingers, the way one puts out a candle.

  The old priest saw but pretended not to, looked at Cassie and Lill instead, bent forward and took their hands. “Have you come to give me some wee bit of comfort, little ones?”

  The girls, at eye level, looked solemnly back into the old man’s face, and Lill reached and touched his stained beard. They were used to the priest’s incomprehensible questions, his doting on their goodness, their beauty.

  “You are angels, angels come to earth, to ease our tired auld eyes,” he told them. Cassie with her free hand tried to smooth her hair, as if trying to live up to her angel image.

  “Go back downstairs now, loves, angels, and play. There are books in one of the rooms, still some old desks, too. Play school. When I was young, my sisters never tired of making me play school. I was their best, their prisoner student.”

  Lee was surprised. Father Kennedy never spoke of his family in Ireland. Years ago, when she wheedled the barest facts out of him, he had named a father, a mother, brothers and sisters, and ended with, “As boring as Genesis with all those begats.” And then after a moment, as if in afterthought, he’d added, “All many years gone from this dear earth, many years asleep.”

  Lee pulled up a chair so she could look out the window herself and not at him. “Have you caught my disease, insomnia?” she asked.

  “Well, last night was a night for being restless for sure.”

  Lee nodded, silent, holding back what she had been practicing on the stairs, what she knew someone else would say: that Sister Ellen was always in too much of a rush, that it was no one’s fault. But she couldn’t speak, could only look at her hands for a few seconds and then out the window for a few more. In the silence between her and the priest, fresh as the colors of life, lay the old nun on the gurney, at last no longer in a hurry, at last silent and still.

  Eventually, Father Kennedy said, “It’s strange, love, what one can see from out a three-story window.”

  For an instant Lee thought: a green car last October and yesterday. But in the same instant, she saw that there was no way from this side of the room for the old man to see the rectory’s garage. The dormer window in front of them jutted out high over the deserted playground with only a board fence and other weathered houses beyond for a view. The window facing the rectory was blocked by Father Kennedy’s bed, and between it piles of books on a table and the floor. He couldn’t have seen her car; he’d have had to climb over his bed and over stacks of books that filled the narrow window alcove.

  All those months of thinking he might have seen her leaving the new rectory, that burning on her cheek that she felt were Father Kennedy’s eyes. They were only God’s.

  The old priest lit his cigarette and talked with it still in his mouth. “I sit here by this window and for the most part watch squirrels. They run along that fence down there, hop to the ground and back again. They seem to be signaling each other with their tails: straight up, straight out, quivering. It all seems to mean something.” He flicked his nicotine-stained fingers in explanation, showing the movement of the tails. “For a time there, after the Bishop let me go, I thought of keeping a record, like those National Geographic people, you know. I thought
I’d sit up here and chart the tail movements of squirrels: Learn what it meant when they quivered, what it meant when they stuck up straight. I even thought of making an artificial tail myself, on a wire that would draw the squirrels to that doorstep down there. Communicate with the little beggars, you know. I could see my fame and fortune, a few years down the road. Someone would do a program: ‘Retired Ancient Priest Makes Zoological History.’” He paused, a pleased yet pained smile reaching his eyes. “Well, I tried it, love—the watching, that is. Took notes for a few hours. But talk about deathly dull, boring! Unbelievably boring.

  “They say she drank a lot.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The woman who watched the monkeys for so long. What was her name? They said she drank a lot. Maybe it made the watching easier.”

  “Well, she’d have need of a drop, if it was as dull as watching squirrels.”

  Below a door shut and heavy steps could be heard coming up the stairs, then a male voice speaking to Cassie and Lill.

  Father Kennedy started up out of the rocking chair. “Saints preserve us. His Eminence has come back to the slums!” The old priest pushed a stack of papers aside with his foot as if that movement were somehow going to tidy up the room.

  “There,” he said, pointing to Lee, almost causing her to get up herself and begin some sort of cleaning. But instantly, she realized that throwing all the books and papers out the window in front of them would have been the only answer.

  “No. Stay,” the old priest whispered, and sat back down, resigned.

  The two sat immobile then, hesitant and alert, hearing the voices in the rooms below, and then the steps resumed, coming up the stairwell.

  David Palmer knocked on the door, opening it still further, and his great pale eyes found the two figures there before him. “The girls said you were up here.”

  This must be the way one looks at comrades after a battle, Lee thought, searching the younger priest’s face as she had Father Kennedy’s earlier, seeing him search theirs. David was unshaved, his thick hair damp and dark, brushed back from his forehead.

  How tired he looks, she thought. Like the day we first went to the dentist.

  Whatever the three of them had witnessed, experienced the night before sat in David Palmer’s expression: the realization that life is short and death seeks you out in your safest place.

  Lee glanced away. She didn’t want to see that suffering, that realization. She looked back to the window, to the incoming flood of sunlight. She said, “Father Kennedy has just been telling me how he watches the squirrels from this window. How they keep him entertained.” Her voice sounded artificial, light and nervous in her own ears. She spoke to the window but then caught a quick but fading apprehension from the old priest that she might make a joke of his National Geographic dreams. “Squirrels can be interesting.”

  David Palmer came closer. “May I watch, too?”

  Father Kennedy gestured to a chair and said, “Most surely, most surely, though there seem no squirrels out and about today.”

  The younger priest slid a chair, a ladder-back of indeterminate age, next to Lee’s, in between her and Father Kennedy.

  Then, still talking, the old priest bent and covered his wrinkled face with both hands. Muffled words came through his fingers. “It’s almost summer, and maybe they take a vacation. And you’re very kind to come, David. I was only just now a-thinking that I should rally myself to cross the street and call on you.”

  Lee had an impression that the street, which separated these two men, implied more than she could ever imagine. Forced to be roommates for that year before the nuns moved from the convent, without even the impulse of liking or need between them, what had happened? It was probably worse than a marriage.

  “Sister Ellen was always in a hurry,” David Palmer said. “It was no one’s fault.”

  God, Lee thought, we all have the same script in our heads. If he says she had a good life, I’ll give up.

  But Father Palmer didn’t. In a softer tone, he said, “I tried to get you this morning, Lee, but your phone was busy. I shouldn’t have let you go to the hospital with us last night. It was too much of a strain, in your condition.”

  With us? Lee wanted to ask, I went with you, but she didn’t. She was glad that Father Kennedy’s eyes were covered with his hands, or so she thought but when she looked back, one of the old priest’s palms had lifted to form a visor above his eyebrows. The deep-set eyes, flecked with gold from the window’s light, were those of a watchdog, moving back and forth between her and David Palmer.

  “How are you feeling today?” David asked, touching Lee’s forearm lightly and with way too much care in his voice, as if they were in the room by themselves.

  “Fine, fine,” Lee said too quickly, silently begging him to stop. Go back to safe ground, she thought. Go back to the platitudes about Sister Ellen.

  Father Kennedy’s gaze held her eyes.

  “When is the funeral?” she asked, not daring to turn and look at the younger priest. If I don’t move a finger, she thought, if I don’t breathe, if I don’t blink.

  “The rosary’s tomorrow night, and the funeral’s the day after at ten,” David said. “But I don’t think you should attend, Lee.”

  Why couldn’t Father Palmer say her name in an ordinary way? If he keeps on, Father Kennedy will guess, she thought, consciously placing her hand on her stomach. Make the old priest see how pregnant she was.

  Apparently the gesture worked. Father Kennedy rocked back in his chair, scattering gray ashes over his lap. “He’s right, lass. These ceremonies are a trial for the hearty, and she was your friend.” And then with a crack in his voice, he added, “And my good enemy.”

  At last, this admission drew Father Palmer’s attention away. “No, no, Patrick. You mustn’t say that. She never thought of you in those terms.”

  “No, I’m quite assured she didn’t,” Father Kennedy said, and then with some irritability. “She thought of me as an old relic left over from the Dark Ages. An old bone she would just kick aside with those infernal shoes and be on her way.”

  “No!” Lee protested. “She didn’t see you like that at all. How can you be so mistaken? You were partners in starting the school, in everything.” Lee didn’t add, in everything but integration.

  “Well yes, we were,” Father Kennedy agreed. “We do have the land and the school to our credit. But don’t rob her of her power, love. I was the opposition, always. I suspected her of English blood.”

  At this unexpected absurdity, Lee and David had to smile. And it felt like the old priest had brought in the English for just that purpose.

  He went on, rocking now, as though he’d found some consolation in remembering their battles. “What I forgot was that opposition affects as well as agreement in moving the Lord’s work along. I forgot that! Are you a-believing it? The devil is forced to work for the Lord. I forgot that law.”

  “Maybe you should stay away, too, Patrick,” David began, “at least for the rosary. Give yourself some time to adjust.”

  “No, I’m fine now. I’ll see it through,” Father Kennedy said. “The hardest part was last night—the dying. Feeling the life run out of the old girl’s hand, seeing she was afraid. That was the hard part. Who would have thought it?” he whispered. “Who would have thought that fierce old girl, who was always so sure, could have been afraid, there at the end?”

  The younger priest put one hand on Father Kennedy’s shoulder and the other on Lee’s. “We will all be afraid when the end comes. You know that, Patrick. The fear of the unknown. So God helps us change our lives, mend our ways. Gives us new strength and new wisdom. Amen.”

  David Palmer’s hand felt like a stone on Lee’s shoulder. He’s praying for himself, she thought and bowed her head.

  In the silence, she could hear Cassie and Lill running out onto the empty playground, pulling at the few chains left on an abandoned swing set, and then they called up to the windows above them that they w
ere ready to leave. Glad for the excuse, Lee got up quickly, dragging her shoulder out from under the weight of David Palmer’s hand. “Duty calls, gentlemen,” she said and, without another word, she left the old man’s room. No one made a move to stop her, although she did feel a slight clutching in the younger priest’s hand just before she pulled away. But no one called out after her.

  God help me, she thought on the landing. She was leaving those two men together, those two priests, and what would David Palmer do? Caught up in his sorrow and guilt, he might give their secret away, the secret and the lie.

  What am I going to do? she asked, coming down the stairs slowly, feeling the silence she’d just left, hoping it would last, tempted to stand halfway down and listen. Then thinking, Oh, hell, let those two men deal with it, with the guilt and with God, the metaphysical. I’m here, stuck in the flesh, stuck with real children and the real world. She stomped as hard as she could the rest of the way down the stairs.

  Chapter 13

  “No, no! the adventure first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful long time.”

  C. S. Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The end of June and a full nine months and one day pregnant, by her calculations, Lee looked into the bathroom mirror. An old child, face as round as a moon in a black fright wig, looked back. She turned away. Nine months and one day, yes, but please God, not one minute more.

  It was a prayer she’d been saying the last month as the baby pressed against her backbone, sending slivers of pain down her legs; pressed against her bladder, making her dash to the bathroom to squeeze out two drops; pressed up against her lungs at night, which three pillows propped on end did nothing to relieve. Pictures in The Mother’s Handbook suggested lying with a leg and an arm over several pillows, but try that on a hot June night in South Georgia. More and more often, Lee slept sitting up on the couch, tilting her head back, waking to sew a few inches in a hem. The last three nights were disjointed fragments of dreams, bits of Charles’s television shows, and four hems sewn as if by a fairy godmother.