Last Things (4 page)

Read Last Things Online

Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Last Things
2.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Andrew took Jessica in his arms in the waiting room of intensive care, and she assumed the worst had happened. Andrew began to weep. She rocked him in her arms and wanted to whisper in his ear “It is the fate man is born for, it is Margaret you mourn for,” but he might have thought she meant their mother.
“Where's Mom?”
“With him.”
With him? “Where is he?”
He nodded at the open door. “But when did it happen?”
He didn't understand. “How is he?” Then she brushed past him and went into a room where her father dressed in a silly gown lay on the bed, her mother seated at his side, staring into nothingness. But Margaret's lips moved mechanically in prayer. She held a rosary. She looked up at Jessica as if surprised to see her. Jessica put a hand on her mother's shoulder and looked for the first time at her father. A bag of fluid on a stand dripped slowly into his arm, and he was wired to a device beside him that monitored his vital signs, conveying them to the nurses' station. His breathing was heavy and irregular. A nurse all in blue with a bag over her hair came in on little cat's feet.
“How is he?”
An enigmatic look. “It's serious.”
Stupid question, stupid answer. Great vague thoughts invaded
her mind. This was the hospital in which she had been born. Somewhere her father had been born, then lived into his eighth decade, and now he was dying. Birth, copulation, and death. Human duration seemed gathered in a point, the tenses that give life meaning gone. All flesh is grass. We have here no lasting city.
“Has Raymond been called?” she asked her mother.
“I think Andrew told him.”
And? And then Father Dowling arrived. Her mother scrambled to her feet, all deference, but the thin priest with the aquiline nose eased her back into her chair. He went around to the other side of the bed and laid a hand on her father's forehead. A simple gesture, priestly. Immediately Jessica liked him. This was the pastor her mother gushed about. The priest leaned over the bed and spoke in her father's ear, and incredibly her father's eyes opened. He looked almost wildly at the priest and shook his head. A priestly nod. What had he asked him? Her mother stood and leaned over the bed.
“Father Dowling is here, Fulvio.”
He glared at her, and she looked imploringly at the priest. If her mother's faith could have sufficed for two everything would have been well, but nothing had been the same for Fulvio since Raymond left. Her brother's defection had shaken Jessica as well. Did nothing last anymore? Marriages fell apart, priests went over the wall, nuns deserted their convents. “All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” Father Dowling went to her mother and led her into the corridor. Jessica took his place and reached for her father's hand, but what she grasped was the tube that admitted the contents of the plastic bag to her father's veins. She leaned over him.
“I love you, Daddy.” Tears welled in her eyes. She felt ten years old, a little girl frightened at what was happening to her father. He nodded and made a kissing sound. She sobbed openly.
She had never felt the equal of her brothers in his eyes—she was just a girl—but somehow she felt he loved her best. He was trying to say something.
“What is it?” She leaned over him, ready for some great revelation, some message she had waited for all her life.
“Raymond.”
She laid her hand on his forehead as the priest had done. “Raymond's coming.”
Was he? What harm could it do to say so? The nurse was back with a doctor, and they shooed her from the room. She was almost relieved to go and hated herself for it. Andrew, dry eyed now, sat silently with their mother and Father Dowling in a little waiting room with pastel walls and inane pictures on the wall but over the door a crucifix. Jessica stared at it. Once the hospital had been staffed by the nuns whose order had founded it; now it was part of some national chain of nominally Catholic hospitals.
Andrew asked, “Should I go in?”
“A doctor and nurse are with him.”
“They come and go.”
Like Michelangelo. How professorial Andrew looked: blue sports jacket, open collar, chinos, and massive tennis shoes. She had stopped minding that he resented her success as a writer. His own stuff was impossibly self-indulgent, mannered, “look Ma I'm writing.” Is that what he taught his students? Jessica had avoided writing courses like sin and took the bare minimum of courses in English in which pompous young men treated fiction as grist for their critical mills. She had majored in chemistry and now worked in a pathologist's lab, testing tissue like that they had taken from her father some years ago. Did she ever think her findings related to someone waiting here for the bad news?
“He asked for Raymond.”
“I left a message on his answering machine,” Andrew said.
Her mother said to Father Dowling, “He hasn't been to the sacraments for years.”
Good God. But the priest only nodded. “I'll talk to him again.”
“It won't do any good,” Andrew said. He might have been defending their father against what?
“We'll see. I'm Father Dowling.”
She nodded. “Jessica.”
“The novelist.”
A little leap of pleasure. “How did you know?”
“Your Aunt Eleanor told me.”
“Eleanor?”
He nodded. That was all. Why did she feel she could bare her soul to him? Because she was flattered he knew she had published novels? No, that wasn't it. There was a serenity about him she liked. She looked at Andrew. “Did you call Eleanor?”
He hadn't. Should she? She wanted something to do. “I will.”
“What for?”
“Andrew, he's her brother-in-law.”
She went outside the waiting room and called Eleanor on her cell phone. “Daddy is in the hospital, in intensive care.”
“Oh my God.”
“He's being looked after.” Intensively. “He's awake.”
“I'll come.”
“St. Mark's?”
“Of course.”
Father Dowling had come out to talk to the doctor, nodding as the doctor spoke. He turned to Jessica, and she went to him as the doctor scampered away.
“He has had cancer for years.”
“Is this his first heart attack?”
“Heart attack?”
“Didn't you know?”
She looked at him. “I didn't even ask. He has prostate cancer …”
She had assumed the cancer was his reason for being here. “He is stabilizing, they tell me. Is Raymond the priest?”
“The former priest. He's why my father …”
“Ah. Is he coming?”
“Yes.” She said it firmly as if that committed her brother to come from California to be at their father's bedside. “If he is in danger,” she added.
“If he were younger, they would operate.”
The priest knew more than any of them, made privy to it all in moments by the staff. Of course it would be easier for them to talk to a stranger. “Let's go in.”
She followed the priest into the cubicle where her father lay. Her father's eyes tracked him to the side of the bed. In a slurred voice he said, “I don't believe in God.”
“Well, he believes in you.” Again the hand on her father's forehead. His lips moved like her mother's in prayer.
“I want Raymond.”
As a priest? Was that the condition of his faith, that his son should regain his?
“I understand he's coming,” Father Dowling said.
Her father smiled.
“You are not in immediate danger, but the prospects are not good.”
The old man's eyes were fixed on the priest.
“I am dying?”
No need to say it, the priest's expression conveyed the answer. The old man's eyes closed and then immediately opened as if he did not want to shut out the light.
“There's a chaplain on duty,” Father Dowling said when they were again outside the cubicle making way for the fussy nurse
with the bag on her head. “I'll make sure he knows.”
“It wouldn't matter.”
“His name is Fulvio?”
“Yes.”
“Lei parla Italiano?”
She shook her head. “Neither does my father anymore. He's second generation. His father came from Palermo and wanted instant assimilation.”
“Yet he named his son Fulvio.”
“Bernardos aren't very consistent.”
“Almost no one is. That's why we mustn't give up hope for your father.”
He assumed she shared her mother's faith. Did she? Her life too had been changed when Raymond ran off to California with the nun he later married. The only thing worse would have been if her father deserted her mother.
After the priest left she got out her phone and put through a call to California.
“Can you make the meeting this afternoon?” Anne Gogarty, the chair, asked when she heard that Andrew's father was in the hospital. “Appointments and tenure.” Her tone was significant.
“He's improved.”
“So you'll be there.”
“I wouldn't miss it.”
She took that for reassurance. “I need your vote.”
There were five on the committee, the chair ex officio and four elected members. Andrew was the default member of every departmental committee, someone everyone trusted, or at least did not distrust. Everyone, that is, but Cassirer. And Cassirer was the main item of business at the afternoon meeting of the A&T. He had applied for early promotion to tenure after only four years on the faculty, his argument, scarcely disguised, that he was so manifestly superior to everyone else in the department that it was unjust that he should be untenured. All departmental committees were only advisory committees, their decisions going to the dean as recommendations. Holder, the provost, actually made the decisions, but as a matter of practice dean and provost merely endorsed the departmental committees. Alloy, the president, probably learned of promotions from the printed menu distributed at his annual dinner for the faculty. Cassirer had lobbied for votes like a candidate for the French Academy—minus the obsequiousness, of course—thereby solidifying the opposition. Anne wanted the slot for another woman, a reasonable enough objective in these days of affirmative action, not that Anne needed her gender for her position, and Mike Pistoia loathed Cassirer with all the passion of a lover of literature. Whenever Cassirer mentioned Foucault, Pistoia warned him not to speak like that in the presence of a lady. “With a name like his, he should talk,” Cassirer retorted, out of earshot of Pistoia. Lily St. Clair leaned toward Cassirer, in every sense of the term, but if he was aware of her décolletage he gave little evidence of it. Besides, she was inclined to take the opposed position to Anne Gogarty as a matter of habit. Zalinski had a weakness for critical nonsense and was firmly for Cassirer.
“He infuriates the philosophers.”
“Everything infuriates the philosophers,”
“They don't understand a word he says.”
“Neither do the students.”
“The students!” Like Cassirer, Zalinski despised students. His notion of an ideal college was one in which students were on vacation, all books available on their shelves in the library, and he free to do the
New York Times
puzzle in the office he shared with Cassirer. A straw vote taken at the last meeting was two to two, leaving Gogarty with the deciding vote. Of course Zalinski passed this confidential information on to Cassirer, prompting an immediate visit on Cassirer's part to Andrew's office. He was driven back to the doorway by the presence of Foster.
“Can we talk?”
“You seem to be.”
“I mean in private.” Cassirer put his handkerchief to face and glanced at Foster.
They went to the cafeteria, where over coffee Cassirer said hoarsely, “My fate is in your hands.”
“In what way?”
“My promotion to tenure.”
“You have years before a decision need be made.”
“Come on. You know I have applied for early consideration. God knows I deserve it.” There was a yellow fleck in Cassirer's right eye. He wore a bristly beard, the better to look older; and had a heavy gold chain around his neck.
“Is that a St. Christopher medal?”
“Ha. It's my sign. I am a Pisces.”
“You realize I can't talk about the proceedings of the committee.”
Cassirer glared at him. “Is that your position?”
“No, it is departmental policy.”
“If you had any concern for the department, you would vote for me.”
“I hope concern for the department will motivate us all,” Andrew said, feeling prissy. He found himself enjoying this.
“I have just had another article accepted by
Theseus
. I will be on the program of the MLA. I have made St. Edmund's known to people who never heard of it.”
“It is a small pond for a Pisces.”
“In this job market one has to take what's available. Of course I don't plan to end my career here.”
Was this meant to soften Andrew up, tenure merely as springboard to another job elsewhere? “You say you've applied for early consideration.”
“Come on. You know I have. It has already been discussed. I know your vote can make the difference.”
“Surely Anne didn't tell you that.”
“Look, the committee represents the past. When did you get tenure, by the way?”
“After the usual number of years.”
“And you don't even have a doctorate. That's my point. What has Gogarty published? What has Pistoia done to deserve tenure?”
“About as much as Zalinski.”
“Exactly. All this talk about excellence, yet mediocrity is entrenched. My application should be a foregone conclusion.”
Cassirer had an odd way of soliciting support, belittling those whose votes he needed. Andrew was thinking of Mabel Gorman's remark that Cassirer had ridiculed him in class.
“Tell me about your new article in
Theseus
.
”
Cassirer confided that he had exposed Saussure to withering criticism and offered an alternative to Derrida. One had to realize that a literary text was not about anything, not about the writer's ideas, not about the world. It was a thing in itself, without analogues, and must be spoken of only in terms of itself. He had hunched across the table, causing a faint olfactory memory of
Foster, and the yellow fleck in his eye seemed to pulse like a harbor light.
“It's hard to explain in a few words.”
“I think I get the idea.”
“It's not an idea! That's the point. Criticism too is without analogues.”
“Interesting.”
“You're being condescending.”
No wonder students hated the man. That was the objective basis for opposing his application for tenure. St. Edmund's was not a research university—its main task was teaching—and Cassirer's contempt for their students made Zalinski seem Mr. Chips.
“Can I count on you?”
“You can count on us all.”
Cassirer sat back. “I understand. I threaten you, don't I?”
“Horst, I teach creative writing. I have published a few stories. My time is largely taken up with my students, some of whom are very promising.”
He thought of boney little Mabel. “I am beginning to hate him,” she had said with cold intensity.
Andrew said to Cassirer, “I haven't read the French authors who are your passion.”
“I have read your sister's novels.”
“I will tell her.”
“They are quite good of their kind. You can tell her I said so.”
“I will.”
“I have not read your stories.”
“I will lend you copies.”
Cassirer shook his head. “I really don't care for fiction.”
Then what in God's name did he do in his course on Victorian novelists? Unfortunately, Andrew already knew, from Mabel. Dickens was a pamphleteer, George Eliot repressed, Trollope a wordy
joke. Students had wept in Anne Gogarty's office when they told the chair of Cassirer's comments on their enthusiasm for the novels assigned.
“We have to stop him now,” she said to Andrew. “It's providential that he has offered us an early chance to cut him down.”
“But he will still have his job.”
“For another year.”
Their tête-à-tête confirmed Cassirer in his surmise that Andrew would not vote for him. He went to Arachne, the dean, and to Holder, the provost, and said the committee was incompetent to judge his work. He demanded an outside review. He was told he would have that in any case. He meant a committee made up of someone other than his colleagues. Holder called in Anne Gogarty and asked if there was any chance that insufferable young man would be voted tenure. She told him how matters stood.
“I will exercise my veto if he slips through.”
“That shouldn't be necessary.”
“I almost wish it were.”
But Cassirer's animus was directed at Andrew. He found the issues of the defunct journals in which Andrew had published and analyzed his stories in class, as Mabel reported. (“I do hate him now.” Dear girl. She would trouble no one's concupiscence, but she was brilliant.) Cassirer had hired a lawyer named Tuttle to represent him, and the little man in a tweed hat came to Andrew's office. He seem unfazed by the aromatic Foster.
“Nice room. Very homey.”
“Cassirer hired you? What for?”
Tuttle fluttered a faculty manual. “To make sure correct procedures are followed. The days of academic confidentiality are over. There is the freedom of information act. There will be no secrets, no star chamber, justice will prevail.”
Tuttle took some chips from the open bag on Foster's desk:
Here was another sign of the times. Now disgruntled faculty regularly sued their institutions, often with success. But that took time.
“So what can I do for you?”
“Resign from the committee. You are prejudiced against my client.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
The little lawyer pushed back his tweed hat and winked. “I told you there are no secrets.”
“I suppose I could countersue for libel.”
“Are you asking my professional advice?”
“Would you give it?”
“Not in the present circumstances. But if circumstances changed, let's just say you'd have a strong case. Is Fulvio Bernardo your father?”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful man. I was sorry to hear about his illness.”
Tuttle seemed genuinely sorry and Andrew warmed to the man. “He's a little better.”
“Thank God for that. A man only has one father, you know.”
“You really ought to tell Cassirer to let matters take their course.”
“Now you're advising me.”
“No charge.”
Tuttle laughed. He did not seem a formidable opponent, if that is what he was. “I am anxious to get into academic law, it's a growing field.”
“I'll keep you in mind.”
Tuttle took off his hat and fished a card from it and put it on Andrew's desk. “You might let your colleagues know. Why do you have that machine running?”
“It records conversations.”
Tuttle thought he was serious. He got up and went to study the air freshener. He looked at Andrew. “You're kidding, right?”
“Yes.”
“That's quite a little breeze it puts out.”
But Cassirer decided to take the fight to the enemy camp. He published an article in the student paper about tenured mediocrity, a mistake. Dozens of students, not all of them anonymous, wrote at length about Cassirer's incompetence in the classroom. Mabel Gorman wrote that he was simply the worst teacher she had ever had in her life. Word got to Andrew that Cassirer was sure Andrew had orchestrated the campaign. One night he went out to his car and found both rear tires were flat.

Other books

Bone Deep by Randy Wayne White
The Finishing Touches by Browne, Hester
Stung (Zombie Gentlemen) by Merikan, K.A.
The Lioness by Mary Moriarty
Ode to a Fish Sandwich by Rebecca M. Hale
Dead on the Level by Nielsen, Helen
Strength in Numbers by Hawk, Reagan