American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (28 page)

  “Twins,” Galtier repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before. “Yes, I can see how he would have to resign after that.”

  No one was surprised when priests had lady friends. They were men of the cloth, yes, but they were also men. A lot of women, down through the years, had sighed over Father, later Bishop, Pascal. Lucien didn’t understand it, but he’d never been a woman, either. And few people were astonished if the lady friends of priests sometimes presented them with offspring. That, too, was just one of those things. Life went on, people looked the other way, and the little bastards were often very well brought up.

  “But twins!” Lucien said. “You can’t look the other way at twins. By the nature of things, a bishop’s twins are a scandal.”

  “Exactly so,
mon beau-père
,” Leonard O’Doull said. “And that is why Bishop Pascal is Bishop Pascal no more, but plain old Pascal Talon.”

  “Pascal Talon!” Galtier exclaimed. “That’s right—that is his family. I hadn’t thought of his family name in years, though. No one has, I’m sure.”

  “Of course not, not when he belonged to the Church for all those years,” Dr. O’Doull said. “That’s what belonging to the Church means. That’s what it does. It takes you away from your family and puts you in God’s family.” He laughed again. “But, now that he’s gone and made God’s family bigger . . .” Galtier laughed, too. He asked, “Since you are in town and hear all these things the moment they happen—and since you don’t bother telling your poor country cousins about them—could you tell me what M. Pascal Talon plans to do now that he is Bishop Pascal no more?” Whatever it was, he had the nasty feeling the man would make a great success of it.

  And, sure enough, his son-in-law said, “I understand he’s decided Rivière-du-Loup is too small a place for a man of his many talents. He will be moving to Quebec City, they say, where he can be appreciated for everything he is.”

 
  A snake, a sneak, a worm, a collaborator, a
philanderer—yes, in the capital of the Republic he
should do well for himself,
 Galtier thought. He found some more questions: “And what of the twins? Are they boys or girls, by the way? And what of their mother? Is Pascal now a married man?”

  “They’re a boy and a girl. Very pretty babies—I’ve seen them,” O’Doull replied. Being a doctor, he’d seen a lot of babies. If he said they were pretty, Lucien was prepared to believe him. He went on, “I am given to understand that Suzette is now Mme. Talon, yes, but I don’t think she’ll be going to Quebec City with her new husband.”

  Marie heard that and let out a loud sniff. “He made himself a member of God’s family. If he cheated on his vows to the Lord, how can anyone think he won’t cheat on his vows to a woman? Poor Suzette.”

  “Yes, very likely Pascal will cheat on her, but she must have known he cheated when she first started her games with him,” Lucien said.

  “Why do you always blame the woman?” his wife demanded.

  “Why do you always blame the man?” he returned, also heatedly.

  “Excuse me.” Dr. O’Doull made as if to duck. “I’m going somewhere safer—the trenches during the war were probably safer.”

  “It will be all right,” Galtier said. “We’ve been married this long. We can probably last a little longer.” Marie didn’t argue, but her expression was mutinously eloquent. And, as a matter of fact, Galtier wondered why he did take the former Bishop Pascal’s side. It wasn’t as if he liked the man. He never had. He’d never trusted him, either. Pascal had always been too smooth, too rosy, to be reliable. That was what Lucien had thought, at any rate. Plainly, a lot of people had had a different opinion.

  But was Suzette, the new Mme. Talon, such a bargain? Galtier also had his doubts about that. After all, if she’d let Pascal into her bed, what did that say about her taste? Nothing good, certainly.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  “All right,” Marie answered. Her voice had no,
We’ll come back to this later,
 in it, so he supposed this wouldn’t be a fight that clouded things between them for days at a time. They’d had a few of those, but only a few: one reason they still got on so well after thirty years and a bit more besides.

  “Why do you dislike Bishop Pascal so much?” Jeanne asked on the way back to the farm.

  “Well, just for starters, because he tried to get us to collaborate with the Americans during the war. And when we wouldn’t do it, he got them to take away our land and build the hospital on it,” Galtier replied.

  “You were just a little girl then, so you wouldn’t remember very well, but he alienated our patrimony.”

  “But . . .” His youngest daughter seemed to have trouble putting her thoughts into words. At last, she said, “But my sister married an American. We’re paid rent, and a good one, for the land the hospital sits on.”

  Georges laughed. “How do you answer that one, Papa?”

  That was a good question. Galtier did the best he could, saying, “At the time, what Father Pascal did seemed wrong. It worked out for the best. I can’t quarrel with that. But just because it worked out for the best doesn’t mean Pascal did what he did for good reasons. He did what he did to grab with both hands.”

  “Suppose the Americans had lost the war,” Marie added. “What would have happened to Pascal then?”

  “He would have come out ahead of the game, and convinced everyone everything was somebody else’s fault,” Georges replied at once.

  He was probably right, even if that wasn’t the answer his mother had been looking for. Lucien sighed.

  The farmhouse wasn’t far now. “Quebec City had better watch out,” he said, and drove on.

 
S
ylvia Enos stood in the kitchen of her flat, glaring at her only son. She had to look up to glare at him.

  When had George, Jr., become taller than she? Some time when she wasn’t watching, surely. He looked unhappy now, twisting his cloth cap in his hands. “But, Ma,” he said, “it’s the best chance I’ll ever have!”

  “Nonsense,” Sylvia told him. “The best chance you’ll ever have is to stay in school and get as much learning as you can.”

  His face—achingly like his dead father’s, though he couldn’t raise a mustache and they were falling out of style anyhow—went closed and hard, suddenly a man’s face, and a stubborn man’s at that, not a boy’s. “I don’t care anything about school. I hate it. And I’m no . . . good in it anyhow.” He wouldn’t say
damn
, not in front of his mother. Sylvia had done her best to raise him right.

  “You don’t want to go to sea at sixteen,” Sylvia said.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” he said. “There’s nothing I want more.”
 Till you meet a girl. Then you’ll find something you want more.
 But Sylvia didn’t say that. It wouldn’t have helped. What she did say was, “If you go to sea at sixteen, you’ll be doing it the rest of your life.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “What else am I going to be doing the rest of my life?”

  “That’s why you go to school,” Sylvia said. “To find out what else you could be doing.”

  “But I don’t want to do anything else,” George, Jr., said, exactly as his father might have. “I just want to go down to T Wharf and out to sea, the way Pop did.”

  All the reasons he wanted to go to sea were all the reasons Sylvia wanted him to stay home. “Look what going to sea got your father in the end,” she said, fighting to hold back tears.

  “That was the Navy, Ma.” Now George, Jr., just sounded impatient. “I’m not going into the Navy. I just want to catch fish.”

  “Do you think nothing can go wrong when you’re out there in a fishing boat? If you do, you’d better think again, son. Plenty of boats go out from T Wharf and then don’t come home again. Storms, fog, who knows why? But they don’t. Even if they do come home, they don’t always bring back everybody who set out. If you’re tending a line or hauling in a net and a big wave comes by . . . Do you really want the crabs and the lobsters and the flatfish fighting over who gets a taste of you?” Most fishermen had a horror of a watery death, and of the creatures they caught catching them. But her son only shrugged and answered, “If I’m dead, what difference does it make?” He was sixteen. He didn’t really think he could die. So many sailors had, but
he
wouldn’t. Just listening to him, Sylvia could tell he was sure of it.

  With a sigh, she asked, “Well, what is this big chance you’re talking about, son?”

  “I ran into Fred Butcher the other day, Ma,” George, Jr., said.

  “He’s got fat the last few years, hasn’t he?” Sylvia said.

  George Jr., grinned. “He sure has. But he’s got rich the last few years, too. He doesn’t put to sea any more, you know. He hires the men who do.”

  “I know that.” Sylvia nodded. “He’s one of the lucky ones. There aren’t very many, you know.” Butcher wasn’t just lucky. He’d always driven himself like a dray horse, and he had a head for figures. Sylvia wished she could have said the same about her son. But, as he’d said himself, he didn’t like school, and he’d never been an outstanding scholar.

  “I don’t care. I
want
to go to sea,” he said now. “And Mr. Butcher, he said he’d take me on for the
Cuttlefish
. She’s one of the new ones, Ma, one of the good ones. Diesel engine, electricity on board, a wireless set. A fishing run on a boat like that, it’s almost like staying ashore, it’s so comfy.” Sylvia laughed in his face. He looked very offended. She didn’t care. “You tell me that after you’ve put to sea, and I’ll take you seriously. Till then . . .” She shook her head and laughed some more.

  But she’d yielded ground, and her son took advantage of it. “Let me find out, then. I’ll tell you everything once I get back. Mr. Butcher, he says he’ll pay me like a regular sailor, not a first-timer, on account of he was friends with Pop.”

  That
was
generous. Sylvia couldn’t deny it. She wished she could have, for she would. Tears came to her eyes again. She was losing her little boy, and saw no way to escape it. There before her stood someone who wanted to be a man, and who was ever so close to getting what he wanted. She sighed.

  “All right, George. If that’s what you care to do, I don’t suppose I can stop you.” His jaw dropped. Enough boy lingered in him to make him take his mother’s word very seriously.

  “Thank you! Oh, thank you!” he exclaimed, and gave Sylvia a hug that made her feel tiny and short. “I’ll work as hard as Pop did, I promise, and save my money, and . . . everything.” He ran out of promises and imagination at the same time.

  “I hope it works out, George. I pray it works out.” When a tear slid down Sylvia’s face, her son looked alarmed. She waved him away. “You’re not going to get me not to worry, so don’t even try. I worried about your father every day he was at sea, and I’ll worry about you, too.”

  “Everything will be fine, Ma.” George, Jr., spoke with the certainty inherent in sixteen. Sylvia remembered how she’d been when she was that age. And it was worse with boys. They thought they were stallions, and had to paw the ground with their hooves and neigh and rear and show the world how tough they were.

  The world didn’t care. Most of them needed years to figure that out. Some never did figure it out. The world rolled over them either way: it ground them down and made them fit into their slots. If they wouldn’t grind down and wouldn’t fit, it broke them. Sylvia didn’t think it intended to. But what it intended and what happened were two different beasts.

  It had rammed her into a slot, all right. Here she was, coming up on middle age, living from day to day, wondering how she’d get by, worrying because her only son was quitting school and taking up a dangerous trade. If there weren’t ten thousand others just like her in Boston, she’d have been astonished.

  But then savage anger and pride shot through her.
I killed the son of a bitch who sank the
Ericsson.
I
shot him dead, and I’m walking around free. How many others can say the like? Not a one.

  She’d take that to the grave with her. Most of the time, it wouldn’t do her one damn bit of good, not when it came to things like catching a streetcar or dealing with the Coal Board or going to the dentist. But it was hers. Nobody could rob her of it. For one brief moment in her life, she’d stepped out of the ordinary.

  George, Jr., brought her back into it, saying, “I’ll go right on giving you one dollar out of every three I make, too, Ma. I promise. It’ll be the same with this as it’s always been with the odd jobs I’ve been doing. I’ll pay my way, honest.”

  “All right, George,” she said. He was a good boy. (She didn’t think of him as a man. She wondered if she ever would, down deep where it counted. She had her doubts.) He asked, “What do you think Pop would say about what I’m doing?” That was a good question. After some thought, Sylvia answered, “Well, he always did like going to sea.” God only knew, that was the truth. Whenever the
Ripple
went out, she’d felt as if she were giving him up to the arms of another woman—the Atlantic had that kind of hold on him. She went on, “I think he’d have wanted you to stay in school, too. But if you got this kind of chance, I don’t think he’d have stood in your way.”

  His face lit up. “Thanks!” Almost as fast as it had appeared, that light faded. “I wish I would have known him better. I wish I could have known him longer.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I wish you could have, too. And I wish
I
could have.” On the whole, Sylvia meant that. She’d never quite forgiven her husband for having been about to go to a Tennessee brothel with a colored whore, even if he hadn’t slept with the woman and even if being about to had saved his life. If he hadn’t been on his way to the whorehouse, if he’d gone back aboard his river monitor instead, he would have been on it when Confederate artillery blew it out of the water. But if he’d come home from the war, if he’d been around every day—or half the time, as fishermen usually were—and if he’d kept his nose clean, she supposed she would have.