Dark Debts (28 page)

“And I'm angry,” she said. “Because I just have to sit and wait until you're ready to deliver the verdict.”

“I realize that,” Michael said. “But this isn't a
job
you're asking me to give up. It's my
life
.”

“In exchange for a better one!”

“I didn't vow to do this until something better came along.”

“Then why are you even here?”

He had no answer.

“And this is going to delay you making up your mind.”

“No, it won't. I think it will help.”

A
t the airport, she let him off at the Delta curb. He kissed her, chasing away the thought that it might be the last time. Neither of them said good-bye as he got out and slammed the door behind him. He didn't look back as she drove away.

T
he wake service lasted for almost two hours, and the wake itself didn't get under way until almost nine thirty. That didn't dissuade anyone from heading to Vincent's house with casserole dishes. The irony, Michael thought, was that what would
really
feel like consolation to him would be for everyone to go home and leave him alone. But since none of them were there for his sake, he knew that he and Barbara would be throwing them out at midnight, bar or no bar.

The gathering was rife with miseries Michael hadn't even anticipated. On top of everything else, Monsignor Graham appointed himself Michael's emotional guardian for the evening and dragged Michael all over the house, introducing people, telling stories that had been only mildly amusing the first dozen times Michael heard them. Now he had Michael and a couple of other hapless victims trapped in a corner, with no way out short of flagrant rudeness.

Michael scanned the crowd and found Barbara, who was positioned near the kitchen, directing the flow of incoming food. It took him a few minutes of diligent effort to catch her eye, but he finally succeeded. Using his hand to shield the side of his face, he mouthed
“Help.”
She nodded, excused herself from the cluster around her, and came over to him. Along the way, she picked up speed and a convincing look of urgency.

“Excuse me,” she said, in the general direction of Monsignor Graham. “Michael, your housekeeper's on the phone, she says she has to talk to you. I tried to take a message, but she said it's an emergency.”

Bless you, Barbara.

He excused himself and made his way quickly through the crowd and into the sanctuary of the kitchen. Barbara followed.

“I had to get away from Tom Graham for a few minutes,” he said.

“I know. You're starting to get that nailed-to-the-cross look.”

“Other than him, everything is fine. Thank you.”

“You're welcome. And don't get me wrong, I want them out of here as much as you do.”

Someone across the room caught Michael's eye. A guy who had just come in the front door and was talking to Graham. A guy in clerics.

“Who's the priest?” he asked.

“Oh, I meant to tell you about him. He was Vincent's new best friend. They spent a lot of time together at the villa. He lives there.”

“The Jesuit villa?” Michael asked. Vincent had restored an old estate north of Atlanta for the Jesuits from the region to use as a getaway. Vincent had his own room out there, for when he wanted to escape the city.

“I think he's originally from Chicago,” Barbara said. “Do you know him? His name is Gabe—”

“Novak,” Michael finished.

“Do you know him?”

Michael nodded. “He makes himself known.”

“What do you mean?”

Michael ignored her question. “Vincent spent time with him?” he asked.

“I think they played chess, mostly. And went bass fishing at the lake. Why, what's wrong with him?”

“He's a narrow-minded, abrasive, pre–Vatican II, self-righteous, holier-than-God papist ass.”

“So you know him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know—”

“I'll find you some articles he wrote before his superiors wisely gagged him.”

“No thanks. I'll take your word for it.”

“Is he the minister?”

“I thought you were all ministers.”

“Is he the guy who calls the plumber, makes sure there's beer in the refrigerator?”

“That sounds right.”

“You see? Any time you have a guy with two PhDs who speaks seven dead languages, and he's handing out towels at a villa, it's because he can't get along with anyone.”

“Vincent was very fond of him.”

“Vincent could get along with anyone. Gabe Novak is proof.” Michael grabbed his jacket from a hook on the wall. “I'm out of here. I'll be back later to help you clean up.”

He was out the back door before Barbara could voice an opinion.

M
ichael drove around aimlessly for an hour, ending up in downtown Atlanta. He found a parking place on Ellis and walked up the hill to Peachtree. There was a fair amount of traffic; a couple of limos were pulling in and out of the Ritz-Carlton. The glass tower of the Westin Peachtree lit up the sky for seventy-four floors; he could see the glass elevator, currently on its way to the top. The downtown area was putting forth a gallant effort, but between its legitimately respectable crime rate and the equally crippling plague of white paranoia, it was still just an echo of its former self. Michael turned away from the nightlife and walked uphill, stopping directly across Peachtree from the building that had been the Winecoff Hotel. (The builders had been right about one thing. The
building
hadn't burned. Just the furniture, the carpet, the drapes, and the guests.)

The building was dark now, deserted, except for a Chinese restaurant on the first floor. Half the windows were broken out and there was a large
FOR SALE
sign above the door. In spite of the broken windows and peeling paint, the building was still beautiful. Michael felt some strange affection for it. Like an abused child gravitating to the offender parent, he returned again and again. And now that Vincent was gone, it seemed, somehow, the right place to remember the dead.

He thought about the first night he had stood on this spot. The night Vincent had told him about the fire. Up until then, Vincent had told him that his parents and grandmother had died in a car wreck while out Christmas shopping, and that Michael had survived because they'd left him at home with Vincent. One warm spring evening, a week before what would have been his First Communion, Vincent drove Michael downtown, parked, and led him down the hill to stand where he was now standing. By then the hotel was the Peachtree on Peachtree retirement home. As they stood there and looked at the building, Vincent told Michael the true story for the first time. He said he hadn't wanted to tell him the truth until he felt Michael was old enough to deal with the visions it would inevitably conjure. Michael had been too stunned to feel much of anything at first; he had been embarrassed by his lack of feeling—felt he should be crying or something, and that his reaction would disappoint Vincent. He covered by asking questions: which window had been theirs; how, exactly, had his parents died; how, exactly, had he and Vincent managed to escape. Vincent answered everything, and did not sugarcoat it.

Back home, Vincent had taken out a scrapbook he'd made of newspaper clippings about the fire. He'd been waiting to give them to Michael when the time was right. They sat down together and went through the book. It was overwhelming that night, but Michael had returned to it time and again, and was deeply grateful that Vincent had put the book together. At least he'd had something tangible in front of him—a place to search for answers, even if there were none to be found. He read the names over and over, including several accounts of how his father had saved Michael's life. There was even a picture of Michael—at least, the caption said it was Michael—being carried by a fireman. The baby in the picture was smiling and playing with the fireman's mustache, oblivious to the agony around him. Michael could not connect himself to the photo, no matter how hard he tried.

The tears had come as he and Vincent looked at the book, as Michael read the gruesome details and saw the pictures, and it had all started to become real. Vincent just held Michael in his arms and let Michael cry for as long as he needed to. Vincent cried with him. The night had lived vividly in Michael's memory ever since. It had cemented the bond between them that had never weakened. But it had also created their first rift.

In Vincent's mind, there had been a healing significance to Michael's hearing all this a week before his First Communion. In Michael's mind, the juxtaposition had been jarring.

“Grandpa, how many people were in the hotel?”

“Two hundred and eighty.”

“How many died?”

“One hundred and nineteen. God saved me so that I could save you.”

“If God saved us, why couldn't He save everybody?”

It was the first time Michael had ever asked Vincent a question that he couldn't answer. Not only couldn't he answer it—he admitted that he didn't know.

Michael, making his first “adult” decision, had refused his First Communion. He couldn't go through with it, given this huge question in his mind that no one could answer. He spent the following year asking Father Donahue over and over. He heard a lot of rambling about God's will and acceptance, but nothing ever made sense. It was just words. Almost a year from the night Vincent told him the real story, he got sick and “saw” his mother, and the questions were answered, on some level that went far beyond words.

Now here he stood again, with a lifetime's accumulation of questions that couldn't be answered.

Okay, run it down. Remove the emotion from it. What's the bottom line?

I'm a priest and I've fallen in love with a woman. (That last part being, in fact, the problem. If I'd fallen in love with another priest or a twelve-year-old boy, the Church would be much less horrified—but I digress.)

What are the options?

Stay a priest and leave Tess. Stay with Tess and leave the priesthood. No troublesome gray areas there.

What are the issues?

Vocation. I've always been so thoroughly convinced I had a divine calling. If it's all dissolving before my eyes, what does that mean? I was deluded? God had the wrong number?

His friend Larry's predictably nonchalant answer: “First of all, if you did have a calling, who said it had to be permanent? You've done a lot of good work here, now you'll go do a lot of good work somewhere else. And secondly, there is the possibility that God is and always has been as silently indifferent to your occupation as He is to most people's.”

What about Tess's “real world” accusation? Is it true that I don't want to live in the real world? The temporal world?

What would that look like? Everyday stuff. Mortgage, or at least rent. Bills. Some kind of job. Cocktail parties. Car trouble. Income taxes. Friends over for dinner. Sex. Guilt free.

What was the alternative? Spending the rest of his life as a priest, knowing forever what he'd given up. Dying of old age in some home for senile priests. Alone.

And it's not like everything was perfect until Tess showed up. You've been having problems with the Church for a long time.

There were a lot of things that had been bothering him for years. He'd always minimized their importance, tucked them away in the back of his mind, in a file marked “Things to Worry About Later.” Over the years, the file had gotten fatter and fatter. When it became too large to ignore entirely, he'd just stepped over it whenever it got in his way. Lately he'd bundled it with Tess. The Priesthood vs. Tess and All This Other Stuff That's Been Bothering Me Anyway.

When did it start?

The first seeds of doubt had been planted in his mind in 1967, while he was a scholastic at Saint Louis University. He had written a rather blistering antiwar editorial for the
University News
, which had resulted in his being hauled before the university president.

“It is not the university's place to take sides in a political matter.”

“It's a moral matter. People are dying in an unjust war.”

“Who are you to declare it an unjust war? Has the bishop said it's unjust? Has the pope said it's unjust?”

Michael was then informed that there had been complaints from four members of the board of trustees, not to mention several “routinely generous” alumni. While no one disputed the fact that Michael was quite talented and had been making a valuable contribution to the paper, the president was left with no choice but to remove him from the staff. (Thus establishing a lifelong career pattern—people telling him how talented he was while they were getting rid of him.) Furthermore, anything Michael wrote for publication while he remained a student must first be approved by the president himself.

On the heels of all that came
Humanae Vitae—
Pope Paul VI's encyclical on birth control, which had destroyed, in one fell swoop, Michael's hope (and the hope of all liberal Catholics) for reform on that issue.

Celibacy.

His own personal peccadillo. Hard to analyze it with anything approaching objectivity. Maybe it would have been easier if he'd been a virgin going into seminary. If he hadn't known what he was being asked to give up. But he'd had far too much curiosity (not to mention far too many raging hormones) to commit himself to abstinence and ignorance. He'd just see what it was like, he'd thought. So he wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life not knowing. But “just this once” hadn't worked. Neither had “just a few times” or “just until I enter the novitiate.” It had been a battle from the beginning; it was a battle still.