Requiem for a Realtor (15 page)

“The best.”

Having canonized the late Marian Janski, the stage was set for discovering what had brought Wanda to the rectory. To block one possible avenue, Marie made a point of saying how committed they were to Mrs. Sharp, the current organist, even though she couldn't hold a candle to Wanda's mother.

“I play piano and sing for a living.”

“You do. Tell me about it.”

“In a nightclub. I like it well enough, I guess. But what's the point, really?”

“You never married?”

The eyes, heavy with mascara, did not meet Marie's. And then Father Dowling stood in the parlor door.

“I thought I heard voices.”

Marie jumped up. “Father, this is Wanda Janski. Her mother was the parish organist, before your time.”

“And you've come to see Marie.”

“I had hoped to see you.”

“Any objection, Marie?”

Marie avoided looking at Wanda. That was as close to scolding as Father Dowling ever got.

“I couldn't resist talking about old times,” Marie said.

“Of course not.”

He let her go back to the kitchen before he turned to Wanda.

18

Talking with Marie had helped, but Wanda was visibly uneasy when she was alone with Father Dowling.

“I feel like a phony, talking about my mother like that. Father, I haven't been to church in years.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“It was mainly my job at first. Entertainment doesn't give you a chance to lead a regular life. I traveled with a group for a couple years and then did this and that and ended up singing in clubs, but it's all night work and when morning comes you're out like a light.”

“Including Sunday morning?”

She nodded.

“I suppose that's one reason we have the Saturday evening Mass.”

Wanda didn't know about that. So she had been away a long time. Most of her adult life as it turned out.

“I'm forty-seven.”

“Not many women mention their age.”

“Not many have to.”

He smiled. “Never married?”

There was a long silence. “Can this count as confession, Father?”

In answer, he closed the door and took a stole from a drawer of the desk.

“I suppose it's been a while since you did this.”

“A lifetime. But do you know, I still remember the formula the sisters taught us.” She closed her eyes. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was…” She opened her eyes. “I don't remember. I do remember my first confession, though. I was so eager to tell the priest all my imaginary sins.”

“Imaginary?”

“They seem so now,” she said wistfully. “Why do we have to grow up?”

“Most of us just grow older rather than up.”

“Father, I've committed just about every sin there is.”

She was an improbable Magdalene, with her mountain of blonde hair, the make-up, what he imagined was a very expensive dress, but the distress in her eyes was unmistakable. He helped her examine her conscience. She was in a mood to admit to every capital sin; he suspected she would confess to murder if he asked her.

“You said you never married,” he said, easing into that department.

“No. But I might have. There was a man…”

He was about to cut her off. He didn't want her waxing nostalgic about her past, but she went on.

“He was married, so there was that, too, adultery. And not for the first time. But he was going to get a divorce and then we would marry.” She looked at him pathetically. “That sounds like a line, doesn't it? But he meant it, I know he did.”

“What happened?”

“He's dead.”

Perhaps the dashing of her dream explained as much as anything her coming to the rectory. What courage that must have taken. Again he was grateful that Marie had waylaid Wanda and put her at ease. Would she have been able to do this if she hadn't talked about her mother with Marie?

“He was Catholic, at least he had been, but he hadn't been married in the Church. He told me we could have a real wedding when we married, in the Church, the whole thing. The way you dream of it when you're a kid. Not that I would have worn white.”

“But he died?”

“He was killed.”

Of course, he could not ask her the man's name. He realized he didn't have to. Wanda was the woman Phyllis had come to complain about. Where this certitude came from it would have been difficult to say. And then she said he had been struck by a car.

“I think I read about that.”

“Then you read my obituary, too.”

He got her back to her sins and when he gave her absolution her expression had softened.

“Is that it?”

“That's it. Your sins are forgiven.”

“It was easy.”

“Don't let so much time go by before next time. And look into that Saturday afternoon Mass. It counts for Sunday.”

“Do you have one here?”

He nodded. “Five o'clock.”

“My mother did play the organ here.”

“So I guess St. Hilary's is your parish.”

“He said we would get married here.”

Father Dowling let it go.

After she was gone, he went down the hall to the kitchen.

“Don't come in. I just scrubbed the floor.”

“As a penance?”

But Marie was beyond any sheepishness she had felt about detouring Wanda by the front parlor.

19

Gerry Janksi was an accountant at the
Fox River Tribune,
specializing in the swindle sheets of reporters who were always trying to supplement their salaries with inflated expense claims. But Gerry insisted on receipts. Not that he didn't sometimes accept collateral evidence of expenditures. Bob Oliver just could not acquire the habit of keeping receipts, but his stories made it easy to reconstruct what he had spent in the line of duty. Bob was nuts about Sylvia Woods, the photographer he always insisted on for his stories, but Sylvia was Gerry's girl, their little secret.

“Why can't I tell him, Gerry? It would get him off my back.”

“I told you my goal.”

Gerry had been saving and investing. He intended to retire when he married and take Sylvia to Florida and never add another column of figures for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, they would remain secretly engaged.

“We're both getting old.”

Sylvia was thirty, twelve years younger than Gerry, but she could have been twenty. All he had to do to placate her was tell her what a great wedding they would have, at St. Hilary's where he had grown up.

“You still a parishioner?”

“That doesn't matter anymore.”

“You still practice?”

For a minute he thought she meant the violin. He had kept the damned thing until a few years ago. Now all he played was the mouth organ, a far more versatile instrument than he would have believed. And you could carry it around in your pocket. On dates, he would sometimes play it for Sylvia, and she was enthralled. Apparently she did not realize that Wanda was his sister, the toast of the town, at least some of the town. It broke Gerry's heart to think of Wanda singing at the Rendezvous. But if that was bad, her running around with a married man, Stanley Collins, was worse. She should be playing the organ in church like their mother.

“I go to Mass, of course,” Gerry said in answer to Sylvia's question.

She smiled. “I like that ‘of course.'”

“It's the way I was raised.”

“Me, too.”

His was a staid life while Wanda's seemed to be the kind they had been warned about by the nuns. The primrose path of dalliance. The sweet siren song of the world leading you farther and farther from God. The funny thing was that Wanda agreed with him when he told her this.

“Gerry, it's not what you think.”

“What do I think?”

“You know. But when we marry…”

“He's already got a wife.”

“They weren't married in the Church. It wasn't a real wedding.”

“Come on.”

“Ask anyone. A civil marriage, not a sacramental marriage.”

“Did he explain all this to you?”

“Gerry, don't be so hard on me. If we marry in the Church everything will be all right.”

“If.”

Her face fell, as if she found it as improbable as he did. Stanley Collins, Gerry had learned, was a real Romeo. Wanda was just the latest girl on his list. Had he told them all he really wasn't married? Gerry did not believe for a minute that Stanley Collins intended to marry Wanda. Neither did Willie Boiardo.

“The guy's in real estate. He's a stranger to honesty.”

Boiardo wasn't in the phone book, but Gerry had learned where he lived by calling the manager of the Rendezvous, claiming he was a fellow musician anxious to see old Willie. He could have said he was Wanda's brother and would have if the first excuse hadn't worked, but he was told Willie had a room at the Frosinone. The Frosinone! When Bob Oliver had mentioned doing a story on local architecture that would feature the Frosinone, Gerry had kept quiet. Bob was no idiot, and one visit to the Frosinone would be enough for him to figure it out.

“It's part of the Pianone operation,” he told Sylvia.

“A hotel?”

“They have women who work out of there. They call them escorts.” He showed her the full-page ad in the Yellow Pages.

“You mean they're…”

Gerry nodded. Sylvia laughed. “It was the run-down condition of the place that turned Bob off.”

Telling Sylvia about the Frosinone stirred Gerry's curiosity about the hotel. Who was the British prime minister who had cruised London at night, talking with streetwalkers, telling himself he wanted to help them extricate themselves from their fallen lives? Gerry felt a bit like that the afternoon after work when he strolled from the
Tribune
to the Frosinone and went inside. He had half expected the bar to be teeming with available escorts but it was deserted except for a little guy who had to be Willie Boiardo.

“I'm Gerry Janski.”

Willie squinted at him, tipped his head to one side, then nodded. “Sure. I see the resemblance. Pull up a pew.”

He listened to the long sad story of Willie's life, told with such evident pleasure it was hard to tell whether the pianist saw it as tragedy or comedy. He noticed Gerry's confusion.

“You're still young enough to think that there is a lot of difference between success and failure. They're not the same, granted. But they're both temporary. Know what I mean? You'll never get out of this world alive.”

“Isn't that a song?”

“Country western. How come I never met you before?”

“I work for a living.”

A barking little laugh. “Wanda said all her family is musical.”

Gerry displayed his harmonica.

“Play something.”

Gerry played “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” “Lavender's Blue,” and “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.” People began to come into the bar while he played but it was Willie's response that gratified Gerry. Willie led the applause when Gerry had finished.

“I wouldn't have believed you could get all that out of a mouth organ.”

Several girls had come into the bar and one came sailing over to their table.

“Hi. I'm Flora. That was wonderful.”

She was joined by a swarthy frowning man who might have been her father. It was Primo Verdi, the manager. Gerry thanked Flora, and Verdi led her away.

“He should put a chastity belt on her,” Willie said.

“Is he her father?”

“He used to be her husband.”

“Used to be?”

“It's a long story, and I'd rather tell you mine.”

“How long have you been with Wanda?”

Gerry had a pretty good idea of the answer to that, but he wanted to get Willie talking about Wanda. And Stanley Collins. That was when he learned Willie's estimate of the Realtor who had taken up so much of Wanda's time.

“She thinks he's going to marry her.”

“Over my dead body.” But his expression softened. “Gerry, without Wanda I'm through.”

20

Edna Hospers had lived in St. Hilary parish ever since she married Earl, and after he ran afoul of the law and was sent to Joliet, she had stayed on with the kids. She might have left, out of shame, if Father Dowling had not suggested she turn the parish school into a meeting place for older parishioners. The effort had prospered and now there was a solid group of daily regulars as well as less frequent oldsters. Edna kept it simple, not wanting to make things too busy. People were content to play cards, talk, and, from time to time, go on one of the shuttle runs to a mall. Edna wanted it to be a place where old people could just relax and do what old people do, which seemed for the most part to be talking about their grandchildren.

Given the age difference, Edna hadn't known the parish seniors before she got to know them in her capacity as director of the center. Of late, conversation had turned on what had happened to Stanley, the son of the Collinses.

“He was a late baby,” Mrs. Maguire said.

“Now he's a late man.” Charley Schwartz was the wit of the group that played hearts every day. Edna was sitting in for the absent Peggy Wilson.

“What a thing to say.”

“How would you put it?”

“I wouldn't. Deal.”

Hands were distributed and silence reigned. They played a serious game. After five minutes, Mrs. Maguire, triumphant, was prepared to be more indulgent to Charley Schwartz.

“I had my last baby when I was thirty-one.”

“Well, don't look at me,” Charley Schwartz said.

She didn't. “Jessica Collins must have been nearly forty when she had Stanley,”

“Thirty-seven,” said Molly Berg.

“You're sure?”

“I was working in Maternity when he was born. In those days, that was considered a late birth, and special care was taken. Now grandmothers have children.”