Silent Retreats (2 page)

"Thanks," Martin said. He didn't have a pen.

"I have to tell you, though," the priest said with something in his tone that indicated to Martin he wanted to level with him, "if you aren't going to mass and taking the sacraments, a retreat won't help."

"Help what?" Martin said.

"Help."

"Well." Martin stared up the road. Traffic was relenting. "Thanks a lot for the numbers."

"I mean, a retreat might take some pressure off you, but what have you done for the Almighty lately, is my point." Martin had the feeling the priest was playing to the audience, this somebody who had come to the door and was now at least partially listening to the other end of the conversation while waiting. Martin pictured the rectory, holy water founts and gaudy sacred-heart renderings, crucifixes everywhere with small painted elaborations of Christ's blood and pain. "You see what I'm saying?"

"I get it."

"I mean you can retreat all the way to Milwaukee and back, you get me? But if you aren't going to mass, if you aren't with the program, you aren't pointed in the right direction to solve anything."

"I get it. I said I get it and I get it." Martin clawed at his tie.

"Do you have children?"

"Is this some kind of pitch?"

"It's all we've got. Sorry."

"Don't apologize," Martin said, and he popped the phone back onto its cradle, the bell inside singing from the impact. "Think about it, you jerk," Martin said to himself, and left the booth, stuffing his handkerchief in his back pocket.

He pulled up in front of the school. He was self-conscious because the windows on this side of the building provided him with a cross section of all elementary grades in the school, each of which was partly distracted by him when he pulled up and parked in the drop-off zone. He was trying to remember his son's teacher's name, Solomon, Lamb, Kennedy, something like that.

The school was low-slung, brick and windows. He walked in the north end, hoping that as he walked by the classrooms a name would hit him. The teachers' names were in little frames on the blond classroom doors. He wanted to see his little boy through the narrow windows, watch him a minute just to watch. The long, narrow yellow-tile hall depressed him even worse, Bauhaus education. Gone the bell tower and the tower clock and the small teacher-student ratio of his own Catholic elementary school days. Back to basics, walls and halls, floors and doors. Cut-out autumn leaves were taped to the blond bricks. Each leaf had a name on it, scrawled in a hopeful hand. He heard a child coughing as he passed one room, low murmur of the teacher as he passed another. His child, Jeff—pressed into this mass process. This was where he learned reading and writing, and, out on the playground, the recently unveiled revision of "Yankee Doodle" (". . . stuck a feather up his butt and called it . . ."). Martin noticed a sign on a door. Mrs. Rudolph, that was it, his son's teacher.

He peered through the window, and all he could see were the backs of children's heads as they bent over their seat work in the beige light. Despite all the windows, at nearly noon on this clear day the whole idea of the out-of-doors seemed to evaporate in this building. The teacher at the rear of the classroom was grading papers at her desk. Occasionally a child would lean over to sneak a comment to a friend across the aisle. There was Daren, his son's friend, and there was his son, blond boy, blessed. Martin watched him, and the tears were there again, unexplainable.

"Excuse me," somebody said from behind. "Have you been to the office yet?"

It was a little lady with dark gray hair, tightly bound. "You have to go to the office and check in—it's right down there, take a left." She smiled.

"I have to what?" Martin said, hastily. They were talking just above a whisper.

"To check in," she answered. "Down there." She turned and pointed down the hall. "My sister-in-law has allergies, too," she said, observant.

"I was hoping to . . . my son wasn't feeling well this morning and I thought I'd just look in on him," Martin said. "I don't want to bother him in class . . . I just wanted to lay eyes on him."

"Of course," she said. "They have an intercom in the office."

"No need for any of that," he said.

She stood there insistently as he went back to peering in the window. He sensed that she was impatient with him. "Listen," he said, "you seem like a pleasant enough lady. Why don't I just break the rules and take a look at my boy for about another thirty seconds, and then I'll head out the same door I just walked in, no problem."

"This, sir, is a city school. We have to control who comes and goes. Besides they have a visitor's packet for you in the office, and they can call your son from there, on the intercom. Or you could wait," she said. "In a few minutes, they'll be coming to the gymnasium for lunch." She was still smiling, perhaps a little more forcibly. Martin wanted to punch her in her soft little jaw. "The PTA worked very hard on the packet. It's got their newsletter and the financial report."

"Please," he said. "I don't want the PTA newsletter. I want a moment's peace, looking at my little boy. I don't want to mess over school policy, but this is a little thing, perhaps even microscopic. I'll be out of here in a minute." Martin leaned down to whisper something in the lady's ear. "I'm just not in the mood for the visitor's packet," he said in a loud whisper. He winked. "In fact, I'm afraid it will piss me off." He stood back and looked at her, his arms up. "I might go berserk right there in the principal's office."

The woman turned and hurried down the hall to tattle. She wore black-heeled shoes that clacked as she went. At one point as she hurried, she looked back over her shoulder.

A wave of restlessness seemed to sweep through the school. The big round clocks were signaling to everyone that the morning segment of confinement was close to over. Then Martin noticed another lady coming down the hall, approaching somehow warily but with a big smile.

"Good morning," she said. "Can I help you? I'm Dr. Cousins—Alberta Cousins—I'm the principal here. Is your boy in this room?"

"Yes," Martin said, looking through the window. "I was just looking at him."

"Which child is it?" She came close to look through the same small window as he pointed.

"The white-haired boy with the pencil in his mouth. Chews the erasers."

"I hear you just encountered our librarian, Mrs. Redding."

"Yes." Martin continued to look through the window.

"She probably seems like an old biddy to you, but she's a real pro in the classroom, I can tell you."

"That's good," Martin said. "Very loyal of you to mention it."

"Want me to get your boy out here?—it's no problem at all." Before he could answer, she ducked past him and opened the door. She signaled to Mrs. Rudolph, a very tall, made-up woman, straight-backed, perhaps forty-five. "Jeff's father has come to see him—could we have him a moment?"

Then Jeff was out in the hall, a little bewildered. He grinned up at his dad, cheeky face, eyes like his mom. "Hey," Martin said to him.

"Hey," the boy said back.

"If you don't mind," the principal said to Martin, "would you take your walk out the north door? In four minutes the halls will be filled with masses of children, marginally controlled and very hungry." She smiled warmly. "And," she said, "I don't know whether our librarian mentioned it, but when you're finished we have a visitor's register for you to sign and a packet of materials for you, in the office."

"She mentioned it."

The lady faded off, back down the hall.

"How you doin'?" Martin said to Jeff when they were alone. Jeff was in the first grade.

"Fine," he said. As they walked toward the north door, they were holding hands, both looking at the floor. Martin was fighting another swell of emotion. "We goin' home now?" Jeff asked.

"What're you studying in there?" Martin said in a low voice.

"Nothin'."

"C'mon."

"Vegetables."

"Vegetables, great. Which ones?"

"We had to write our favorite ones."

"That must have been tough. Which ones are your favorites?"

"Carrots, root beer, and grape juice."

"Love it, man. Root beer's the best. I saw Daren—he's almost as tall as you are now."

"We had a army guy today." They arrived at the north door.

"Yeah? A real one?"

"He let us sit in his jeep. Army guys aren't to kill people—they under-arrest 'em."

"Did you sign up?"

"Sign up for what?" Jeff said.

"Hey, Jeffrey. I just thought of something." They were sitting on the north step in warm sunlight. "Remember when we played baseball last spring? When we played together in the park where the ducks are? Remember?"

"Yip."

"Know what that made me think of?"

"Nope."

"I thought of when my dad first played baseball with me." Tears.

"How come?" Jeff said. He squinched up his nose.

"How come what?" The handkerchief.

Jeff laughed at that.

"Once Dad and I were playing burn-out—you know?—when you throw back and forth real hard trying to make the other guy say ouch. And I threw this one real hard and it skipped off his glove and gave him a black eye. Playing baseball with you, it made me think of playing with my own dad and it made me happy. Back then, when I was playing with him, I never knew there'd be a you."

"Your dad died, right?"

"That's right, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about before that. When I was little like you are. Little kids don't realize you were little once too. It just . . ." Martin could feel the point evaporating, but he wanted to say something magic. "It just seems real . . . real interesting to me that my dad played baseball with me and then I played it with you years and years later. And you and him, you never met. You're flesh and blood, but you never met. I'm the bridge between you."

Jeff was looking out toward the playground. "Hey, Dad . . ." Martin waited. "Wanna see the gym? It's time for lunch."

Martin stood up. "Nah. I gotta go to work." He kissed Jeff on top of his blond head and squeezed him a good one. "I love you, boy," he told him, and Jeff's eyes wandered back toward the north door.

"I love you too, Poppsy," Jeff said, still looking away. "I don't get it. Why did you come to school?"

Martin was heading back toward the car. "I needed to know about vegetables. Grown-ups don't know everything, you know."

"Hey, Dad," Jeff shouted as he pulled open the door to the school, "guess what?"

"What?" Martin spoke over the top of his car and across part of the school yard.

"Daren's got poison oak."

"It'll go away." Martin smiled, getting into the car. When he looked back that way, Jeff had gone into the school.

What an odd state of mind, Martin thought, to wander through the suburbs in broad daylight, drifting with the radio and the flow of traffic. These disc jockeys, they had the city mood perfectly calibrated with their rattling jokes and timed, practiced chaos. At the stoplights, he watched the other drivers. How many of them too were wandering? He came across the northside, all the way to Lake Michigan, and drove a short distance south on Lake Shore Drive until he came to Belmont Harbor.

He parked at the far end of the parking lot and, in the wind and long shadows, sat motionless. There was a woman he knew and he thought of her now, because she always talked to him about being lonely and maybe she was alone now for all he knew, and she had talked to him about keeping a bottle of gin under the bed for nighttime, whether because she was afraid or because she was bored or because she needed love and had no chance of ever having it. It had been a revelation to hear her talk about being alone. She'd been in every kind of therapy known to woman, she'd even been Rolfed in a motel room in Danville, all for the company of it, because other possibilities seemed to have expired. She'd raised her children—they were gone from her except for desperate phone calls they'd make to her in the night, the kind that brought up the heartbeat and made sleep impossible; because she was nearly forty-seven and alone, she felt she was about to slip into the hole.

Today Martin knew how she felt, as he watched the October waves on the lake. The sun dropped just behind the tall bank of apartment buildings west of Lake Shore Drive, and a chill sat him up. He'd met her, this woman, in a strange town. In a Mexican restaurant they talked with their heads close so even now he could remember the glitter in her makeup, the slightly caked mascara in her eyelashes when she'd cried a couple of times, the warning she gave him about being unfaithful, voice of experience: "I'm not married anymore because of something like this," she said to him. "I found out he was seeing someone else and I left him inside the hour. I took the kids." She was staring right at him. She knew what she was saying to him, the sign she was giving. "If you love a person and the person isn't faithful, there's no hurt like it."

There was a phone booth in the lobby of the Drake Hotel, not far from Belmont Harbor.

"South Ridge Legal Services," a voice said at the other end of the line.

"I'm calling a guy named Skidmore."

"I'm sorry," the voice said, "we're closed. Can I take a message?"

"Closed?"

"Yessir," said the voice, flat, bored, unapologetic.

"I just wanted to tell this guy Skidmore . . . I wanted to tell him what to do with a red hot poker."

"I see. That doesn't sound too nice, sir. May I say who called?" The man on the other end spoke in a monotone.

"Tell him this is your old pal and worst enemy from when you were twelve."

"I see. That's nice. That sounds very nice, I would say." Skidmore would not sound surprised nor break character. "What shall I tell him you are up to these days?"

"Tell him it's none of his business."

"I see," Skidmore said. "That doesn't sound very nice. Where shall I tell him you are calling from?"

"Las Vegas, on the strip."

"Nice. That's nice. Say hello to Wayne Newton for him." They both laughed. "Shall I tell him you were drunk when you called, like you usually are?"