The Day's Heat Read online

  After what seemed a much longer wait than it was, Dr. Obermon walked into the lobby. “Well, Mrs, Bettlemain, he’s about to wake up. Fill this prescription on the way home and give him two tablets right away with a Coke. Make sure he lies down before you leave. He says the housekeeper is off at noon and he’s there by himself.”

  Lee took the square of paper, slipping into the role Dr. Obermon was prescribing for her: responsible mother. At least these actions were something she could do: get Father Palmer’s medicine, take him back to the rectory, and be out of this anxious, bewildering, overblown feeling.

  And that’s exactly how the trip to the drugstore and back to the rectory appeared: everything back to ordinary, everything over and done with. Except that, groggy, muffled-voiced, and half-awake, the priest, scarcely two blocks away from the drugstore, demanded that Lee pull the car to the curb.

  “Please,” Father Palmer insisted, “Please.” He opened the door and vomited, heaving, saying between large clotted sounds, “Excuse me. I’m so sorry. What was in those pills?”

  Lee stopped repeating, “It’s all right,” stopped the timid pats she was giving to the priest’s left arm as it held on to the car seat for support. She pulled the brown plastic bottle from its little white sack. “Codeine, of some kind; it has that ‘eine’ spelling in the name.”

  From under the seat, she took a paper napkin and dipped it into the soft drink still in Father Palmer’s hand, the one holding onto the seat. She placed the cold, sticky compress on the back of his neck, and with a sudden intake of breath he stopped gagging. (Lee’s mother knew all the cures for nausea.) Another wet napkin. “Here, wipe your face and hold it on your throat,” she said. There was a supply of napkins under the seat for the girls’ emergencies: spills and worse. Thank god the priest, unlike her daughters, had managed to make it outside the car.

  He did as he was told and, finally under control, closed the door and leaned his head back, ashen-faced, against the seat. “Thank you, Mrs. Bettlemain,” he said weakly. “Thank you again. It’s the codeine; I can’t take it. I forgot to tell Dr. Obermon.”

  Lee dared not park on the side street this time; Father Palmer probably couldn’t walk that far. She pulled her green car up into the carport next to the tan one, and not allowing herself to feel Father Kennedy’s eyes on her back, helped the still shaken priest out. A trickle of fluid lay on the front of the new plaid shirt and ran onto the pants. Oh the sadness, the humanness. Had he, too, like her, made something more out of this appointment, made an adventure out of a trip to the dentist?

  Lee took his elbow, but the man staggered, so she placed his arm over her shoulders. At the door, he was able to find his keys and show her the one that fit, but he did it with his right hand, his left arm staying where it was, his hand dangling just above her breast. This arrangement was disquieting, yes, but better than the wretched, distant conversations in the car earlier. She could handle this: emergency, illness, nausea, even closeness.

  The door swung open and in contrast to the bright November light outside, inside the rectory even the air seemed quiet and suppressed. Everything was cool and dim, secret and hidden away. Two stiff mahogany benches sat against the walls and matching dark brown shutters, halfway up the windows blocked out the light. Lemonoiled wainscoting, the same wood as the shutters was halfway up the walls, and the rest, up to the carved moldings in the ceiling, was hunter’s-green wallpaper with an indistinct pattern. It was an arcane, old-fashioned house of halls and doors and glimpses of wide sweeping rooms, the interior like a Dutch painting, every line etched and gleaming.

  Some loyalty to Father Kennedy had kept Lee from attending the housewarming given over two years ago by the Catholic Women’s Club for the parish, so she only knew of the rectory’s remodeling, the furniture, the cost, through the old priest’s complaints. Also, the praise in the church bulletin of the parish ladies who had donated items: a Duncan Phyfe chair, a Primitive oak cupboard, Persian rugs to go over the varnished floors. The Catholic doctors’ wives of Strickland had made the remodeling of the rectory their pet project.

  For months, Father Kennedy had been unable to stop grousing about the different stages of the renovations of the new rectory. “Oh, it’s only the finer things of life to suit His Eminence. A matched set of dishes, are you believing it? A matched set? The old dishes thrown out for a matched set? And the carpets pulled up and thrown away, and the floors refinished. Something about the width of the boards being ever so grand. The nuns lived there for fifty years, and plain old carpet suited them well enough, but for His Eminence, the Reverend David Palmer, it won’t do at all. And on top of the fine boards only oriental rugs.”

  Lee listened and nodded her head and sympathized with the old man’s criticisms, although she knew all about the appeal of, and need for, matched things. Hadn’t she insisted on moving out of the Bettlemains’ rental house, used her wedding money, the $500 her father had given her, for the down payment on Sterling Street, promising Charles she would make the $70 monthly payment out of her sewing money. Hadn’t she insisted on dark-blue rugs, the same blue as in the kitchen tile, and pale-blue walls, which she’d painted herself, and draperies, which she’d made, and the real extravagance, a large mirror, charged at Sears—which Charles had to pay for in three consecutive payments—across from the window to catch the sun? All the ways she’d planned and contrived to make the diminutive living space of her home seem grander and full of light.

  But in the rectory there was no need for invented grandeur. The wide, highly polished boards of the hallways led to immaculate rooms, full of tables and chairs and sideboards and couches, with the edges of the wonderful floors showing all around the red and black rugs. In two rooms leading off to the sides, chandeliers hung from ornate ceilings and, even unlit, seemed to glitter and refract, pompous gold twistings in their shadowy realms.

  Awkwardly, Lee and Father Palmer moved down the hallway, with Lee taking his hand at her shoulder and slipping her arm around his waist to steady them both. At the foot of the staircase, she asked, “Is your room up there?” He nodded. “You have to go up and lie down. Dr. Obermon ordered you to take it easy and stay there for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Yes,” Father Palmer replied, and looking down at himself, caught sight of the damp on his shirt front. He tried, flat-handed like a child, to wipe it away.

  “I’ll get that off upstairs. Come on, now.”

  All the while staring at his shirt, the priest placed a foot on the first step, and one by one started the ascent—step, pause, step, one riser at a time—his arm still across her shoulders, her arm still around his waist. Midway, at a landing that turned the staircase at a sixty-degree angle, she had to encourage softly, saying again, “Come on now.” And at the top was another landing, fenced by a curved wooden rail, opening on four matching wood doors with recessed carved panels.

  “Which one?” she asked, and Father Palmer motioned to the right, to a door slightly open.

  Feeling like she was entering Bluebeard’s chamber, Lee helped the priest across the threshold into a large stately room. Tall narrow bookshelves stood between equally tall narrow half-shuttered windows. It was as if an archive room from a library, one reserved for genealogy records or historical research, had been taken out and placed here. But in the middle sat a large king-sized bed and a wide squat dresser on a thick red and dark blue oriental rug. Still all the rest was library: bookshelves and more bookshelves, two green brass-studded leather chairs, a brass reading lamp on a table between. Even the paper-mite and book smell of a library seemed left intact.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lee said under her breath, not sure the priest could hear. For without a word, Father Palmer took his arm from her shoulders, pushed forward five steps, turned, sat heavily on the bed, closed his eyes, and fell backwards, his feet still on the floor. Lee leaned, following his movements, at first afraid that he would stumble, but then when he made it, she stood looking down at the man. The priest lay im
mobile, silent, so unconscious in his waxy pallor, that he seemed dead or at least not there at all.

  Good, he’s completely out, she thought and looked around.

  And then, unaccountably, in this shadowy elegant house and impeccable room, and with the man so completely asleep, suddenly Lee felt at ease, at ease and at last free: free of his arm, free of his presence, free of whatever had been pulling inside her ever since she’d touched his face and beard at the school, ever since she’d first looked into his eyes.

  It was the fantasy of a frozen world and she the only one able to move through it. With slow measured steps, she walked beside the bookshelves—glanced over to make sure the priest was still drugged—and then traced the shelves’ edges with a finger, and with the same finger lifted the dark wooden slats of the shutters in between. Outside, through the pines and blackjack oaks that surrounded the rectory on three sides, were glimpses of the glaring afternoon they’d just left, an autumn sun shining on a mixture of weathered houses and square, commercial buildings. With one flick of her finger, she closed the shutter and returned to the spell of the house. She didn’t lift the slats on the windows that faced the old school. She didn’t want to see the red and yellow Buick in the driveway across the street, didn’t want to know if Father Kennedy were over there, looking out his third-story window as he often said he did.

  After making the rounds of shutters and shelves, Lee inspected the books themselves. She touched the spines and slipped some of the volumes partway out. It was a library. Some authors she knew: Twain, Hawthorne, Melville; more she didn’t: Greene, Walker Percy, O’Connor, and encyclopedias, atlases and textbooks, a whole shelf of Bibles. Every few seconds, she cast a look back at the prone figure of the priest, just to make sure. Then she paced off, heel to toe, the edges of the red-and-blue-fringed carpet. She liked the combination, Ray’s neat black pointed shoes on the gold fringe, so straight and orderly it could have been combed. The carpet was genuine, Lee was sure; what an oriental rug should be, its blue-red, blue-black knotted surface thick and wooly under her feet. She bent to stroke it as one would a cat. She sat in one of the green leather chairs; it was cushiony but uncomfortable, molded to another’s shape—his. She rose and crossed the room to run her finger along the top of his dresser, which was bare, a polished plane of varnished wood. Everything so spare and neat. Where did Father Palmer keep his change, his keys, his bits and pieces?

  At last, when there seemed no place else to walk, nothing else to look at, nothing else to touch, she went to the bed: its brass head and footboard and shining fittings, the bedspread a dull black and gold tapestry. The priest still lay as one dead, except for his feet on the floor. The posture looked uncomfortable, so Lee took his heels and pulling, lever-like, straightened the man out into a more comfortable position, the way a person should lie on a bed. Then she took off his black shoes, noting their similarity to Ray’s—they had perforations, too—but left the black ribbed socks in place, also noting the sameness to Ray’s knee-high silken hose. Neither the shoes nor socks nor the dark pants seemed to fit with the burgundy shirt, its stylish colors.

  The stain still lay on the shirt front, although now it had mostly sunken into the material. Lee went out on the landing to search for a bathroom, which proved to be the first door she tried. And here, too, all was order and decorum, ancient black and white miniature tiles on the floor, the white sink and counters gleaming. What did a housekeeper have to do in this house, she wondered, besides dust the surfaces and fold these neat stacks of white towels and wash cloths in the bathroom closet? After wetting a cloth with cold water and wringing it, she made her way back to the priest’s bedside. She dabbed at the trickle on his clothing, first hesitantly and then, when he showed no signs of waking, she rubbed harder, removing the trickle but leaving a wide dark splotch of dampness from the pocket, past the belt, to the side of the fly. As she rubbed the washcloth across the shirt front and down, there was a bothersome awareness of the male body beneath the clothes, of the slight swell of muscles, ridges, parts that her mind tried to keep from seeing under the shirt and pants.

  She remembered, as if giving herself other things to think about, remembered the wet Coke napkin she’d handed him in the car. Gingerly, she touched a finger to his cheek; it was sticky. She went back to the bathroom to rinse the cloth.

  Out on the landing, she paused, peered down the deep stairwell. Something, almost another voice, whispered that now was the time to leave, that a grown man could wash Coke off his own face when he woke up. Something else, another voice, whispered that it was much nicer here in this cool dark house than it would be at Gillburg’s under the fluorescent lights, examining material she couldn’t afford to buy. Nicer than at home, regardless of Willie Mae’s cleaning; nicer than minding the girls and catching up on the sewing.

  What would be so bad, so dreadful, about spending the afternoon, sitting in the green leather chair, reading one of those many books, or perhaps wandering the labyrinthine, lemon-smelling rooms and passageways of the rectory below while its pastor slept upstairs? If worse came to worst, if a parishioner called or rang the doorbell, she could explain that Father Palmer’s unconscious condition, his greenish-gray color, had convinced her to stay, that she had to keep watch until she was sure he was awake, aware.

  The common sense of it answered itself.

  Back in his room, with a warm washcloth this time, she gently wiped the priest’s forehead and pale cheeks, the full, high-colored lips, wiped them just as she had his shirt and pants, first unsurely and then with more confidence, for his slow, even breaths said that here, too, all was safe, she was unheard, unseen. She could take in his coarse dark eyebrows, his deep-set, straight-lashed eyelids, the wide unsmiling mouth without cost, without being observed back. She could touch the shaved cheeks above the beard, let the tips of her fingers feel the catch of whisker stubble, reminding her of his jaw in her bare hand, the blood down her arm.

  Without meaning to, as she did her children after she wiped their faces—and she thought of this many times later—she bent and touched her lips to his.

  Father Palmer’s eyes were closed and stayed closed, but his hands raised and settled on her shoulders, settled and pulled her down toward him. She turned her head away. He held her loosely, but firmly, as if unknowing but determined. He pulled her closer. She was bent double, her face buried in the crumpled tapestry bedspread beside his head. She was half-resting, half-standing, the way she did when her daughters refused to sleep, when they held on and would not end their goodnight hugs. In this uncomfortable, improbable position, questions and suppositions, like birds, flew in and out of her thoughts—time enough, since he held her there for what seemed a good five minutes. Was Father Palmer so drugged that he’d embraced her as one would a pillow? Would her back finally give out so that she would flop down on top of him and he would wake up and think, what’s happening? Was he being violated? This final thought, that she would fall from being smothered, her nose pressed flat there in the tapestry, and Father Palmer would wake up to find her a corpse on top of him, without explanation, seemed in the moment the most likely scenario.

  So that she wouldn’t fall or suffocate, she raised her knee up onto the edge of the bed, reasoning that in time, if she remained absolutely still, he would let go, as he would a pillow, and she could leave. But with the movement of her leg, the priest moved, too, and with little change in his hold on her, he shifted, turned, making room on the bed, bringing her to lie beside him, face against face. Was he awake, under those closed eyelids? Had he been awake all the time?

  Still without opening his eyes, he breathed against her mouth, “I can’t kiss you,” he said. Yet with those words, he began pressing his warm lips, closed, barely pressing, on her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks; more breathing her in than kisses. “It hurts.”

  “I know,” Lee said—knowing nothing—not fully understanding, making a stupid connection that somehow all this pressing would be okay if he didn’t actual
ly kiss her on the mouth, but then realizing he meant it hurt if he pressed his lips, in a real kiss, to hers. Just as quickly came the rationalizing question: Was this touching permissible if all he did was press her, with those tingly, barely touching, breathing-in touches? No! was the immediate answer; no, of course not, for his arms and hands on her back were already ever so slowly moving up and down, alternately pressing her breasts into his chest, touching her hips, almost but not quite sliding against her. “You feel so good, so good,” he whispered through half-parted lips that smelled faintly of anesthetic, of Coke—and of sourness.

  And then, as though he’d never been sick or weak or staggering just thirty minutes earlier, David Palmer sat up. He rose, walked to the bathroom, and she could hear him turning on water and brushing his teeth. He returned to stand beside the bed and started unbuttoning Lee’s blouse with a slow, practical air. He unbuttoned and folded the garment beside her, very much as Lee herself took off her children’s clothes. Then, without a word, he lay back down, held her again, reached behind, and unsnapped her bra. He slid one strap down and bunched the rest of the bra under her left breast, his hand lingering under its fullness, hefting its weight.

  “Is this all right?” he whispered, his head bent, his eyes fixed on where his hand was cupping her breast. And then he glanced up and Lee nodded.

  Everything else was done in silence except now to Lee a shocked hush seemed to fill the room, impossibly seeming to come from the furniture and bookshelves around them, the very walls paying attention.

  Awkwardly, he kissed her in the hollow of her collarbone. And then, without words, he sat up and helped her take off the rest of her clothes: pants, underpants, shoes, and stockings. With every article of her clothing off: Ray’s handsome black shoes and socks, even her special lace underpants, folded and placed on one of the green leather chairs, he stood and quickly, as if undressing alone, took off his own clothes. Then, he lay back down, turning towards her. Lee had averted her eyes, afraid to see David Palmer, a priest, naked. Instead, she looked down at her own familiar body: full breasts, dark nipples, almost flat stomach, nest of curling black hair between her legs, which suddenly, even to her own eyes, looked inviting, like that nude in the High Museum, “The Naked Maja” that the nuns had rushed the students past without discussion.