Everyday Ghosts (2 page)

Brother Walter screamed and hopped on the table and began running in place.

“These last years have been paradise,” Brother John went on. “Such freedom!”

“Because he was drunk all the time,” said Pete. “That's no solution.”

“Brother Peter, I don't believe it has been decided whether your voice will be heard,” said Brother Matthew.

“Oh, let him talk,” said Brother Walter, a little out of breath. It had been
a brief fit. He climbed off the table and took his seat.

“It was a fine idea while it lasted,” said Brother James with a sigh, “but now he has built up a tolerance. We should be thankful it took this long. The drink doesn't keep him happy any more, that's all there is to it. We'll have to think of something else.”

“A fine idea?” said Pete. “Do you mean to say you
gave
him the liquor?”

“A little with his coffee at first, perhaps, until the seed was planted. There was twice as much every week as I needed for my cakes. He wasn't one to turn it down. It was so good for his temper, we let it be known we would look the other way.”

Brother Dominic sat in a corner filing
his fingernails. His eyes were as calm and blue as a dove. He did not look at Pete when they were among others. If he had anything to say, he kept it to himself.

It was agreed that this was a more complicated question than that of the juice. It could not be resolved in a single session. As the meeting came to a close, Pete spoke up again. “He needs help,” he said. “Father Gabriel needs help.”

This gave Brother Frederic his chance to chime in. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said.

They took their meals in silence, side by side at tables for two, each one facing the crucifix at the front of the room. One day Pete felt Brother Dominic's knee pressing against his under the table. He thought it had gone on too long to be an accident, but he couldn't be sure until Brother Dominic came to his door after midnight. He kept coming every week or two. It did not feel like sin. Brother Dominic never sat at his table again. There was no way of knowing when he would appear at night, or when he would not. Once there was a commotion in the hall outside Pete's cell and they thought they had been found out, but it was only Brother Walter streaking past.

Brother Dominic had a right to be vain, and he was. He had been a movie star as a teenager, playing a boy genius in a series of popular films two decades before. Years of drug abuse followed, but he looked no worse for the wear. He seemed vexed that Pete had never heard of him, but his disappointment was short-lived. Pete tried to make him feel better by telling him that anyone could see he was still handsome enough to be a movie star. In fact, the word Pete used was
beautiful
. Brother Dominic ignored him. The only compliments he accepted were the ones he paid himself.

They did not talk much, but when they did, no matter what the subject, Brother Dominic brought it back to his past career.

“I feel like I've been waiting for something my whole life,” Pete remarked one night, in a philosophical mood. “But I don't know what it is.”

“Try working in Hollywood,” said Brother Dominic. “An hour a day in front of the camera and the rest of the time sitting around your dressing room waiting for your call. Now that's waiting.”

This sort of thing made him difficult to talk to.

They were what Pete had been running from, these feelings, yet here they were again. He should have been more afraid of them here, for if they followed him here, even here, it must mean they would never go away. But somehow he was less afraid, not more. He even got
up the courage, one night as Brother Dominic was leaving, to ask, “Do you love me?”

Brother Dominic finished pulling his robe over his head and stood staring into what would have been a great distance, if the walls of Pete's little cell had not closed it off. Finally he answered. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

That was when Pete knew he would have to return to the world.

As a boy, Pete thought his faith had saved him, but if anyone had asked what it saved him from, he would not have known how to answer. Nobody ever asked. He grew up in a mansion on a hill overlooking the bay. His father was often away on business and his mother was cheerful and vague. She was never without a smile even though most things appeared to puzzle her. Whenever she caught sight of Pete, she looked surprised. “Oh, there you are!” she would cry, as if she thought he'd been lost, even when he had been there all along.

Pete's father called his banker every morning to find out how much money he had to spend that day. Then he spent
it all before nightfall. By the time he was ten, Pete understood that not everyone lived this way. He knew it meant his parents were not true believers. Nobody was. If they were, they would sell what they had and give the money to the poor. If they were, they would not be hunched at mass like tired workers, murmuring under their breath. They would stand and sing.

The world would be a different place.

But the world was what it was. Pete had nothing to sell. None of it was his, and he was glad. He learned to live among the trappings of prosperity while always looking beyond to the true splendors of divinity. His father noted a certain
absence about him. “Damn it, boy, where's your head?” he yelled.

When Pete became an altar boy, his father told him to beware of the priests. “Don't you ever let them get the better of you,” he said. Pete had no idea what he was talking about. The priests were less godly than Pete had hoped. They dozed off when they should have been mindful. Many were unkind. One of them always had a head cold. They were all very human. Everyone was. That was all they had going for them, and Pete was supposed to love them for it.

“That boy is just like his mother,” Pete heard his father telling his friends. “Always with his head in the clouds.” They decided to send him to a boarding
school where religion was kept in the proper perspective. Maybe that would break him, his father said. Pete begged his mother not to send him. She only smiled and shook her head and turned away.

The feelings were already there by the time he left. It seemed they always had been. At school he met a boy named Michael who wore big glasses that gave him the look of an owl. Michael read philosophy and poetry and said it proved there was no other life than this one, and this one wasn't all it was cracked up to be. They talked and played chess, together all the time. One afternoon Michael grabbed Pete by the arm and they fell across the chessboard, rolling on the scattered pieces. One way to worship,
and to cast off selfishness, was in overwhelming love for another human being. Pete knew that. What scared him, apart from everything else, was that he had never felt more like himself before.

His father must have got wind of this friendship, because when Pete went home for holidays all his father talked about were queers. The house was always filled with company, and they all sat and listened, nodding as he ranted. “It's bad parenting,” he said. “Do you think anyone would turn out queer if they had the right discipline? You beat it out of them, that's all. No kid of mine, I'll tell you that. They'd know better. You can bet your bottom dollar. They'd know I wouldn't stand for it. I'd run them off. I'd run off the whole damn brood!”
What brood? thought Pete. He was the only one.

When his glasses came off, Michael was beautiful. His eyes were clear and steady. They seemed to see everything without having to judge it. His eyebrows were smooth and soft, a shade darker than his soft blond hair. If there was beauty, Pete thought, that was where it could be found, underneath. But some time later it struck him that Michael was beautiful with his glasses on, too.

Pete and Michael decided to run away together. They would hitchhike south to where it was warmer, because they thought they would have to live on the streets for a while. Before they could leave, Pete was called to the headmaster's office and told he was being sent
to a different school. He had an hour to pack. He couldn't find Michael. He sent him letters from the new school, but he could not be sure they were ever delivered. No answers came.

He had only a year left of school. He spent it reading scripture. He had more questions than before, and he wanted them answered more than ever.

It had been a military school so it was natural that he go from there into the army. When he was home on leave, his father clapped him on the back and told him he was proud of him.

“You spend your life cheating people,” said Pete, “and you call it business.”

His father turned pale with rage. “That's it,” he said. “That's the end.”

Pete was no more surprised than his
father was when he was discharged after two years. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. He moved to the city where he and Michael had planned to live together, and he got a job in a shopping mall. He sat in a back room watching the video screens, looking for shoplifters. What he saw stunned him. All the lost souls, all the lonely and desperate, wandering by, across these screens. It was amazing what people would do when they thought no one was looking. But why should they ever think so?

There was a divinity school nearby. Some of the teachers allowed Pete to sit in on their classes. He heard there about a place in the hills where he could go for a retreat. He sent a letter to Father Gabriel. “I feel like I have been waiting
for something all my life,” he wrote. “And now I think I know what it is.”

Father Gabriel read the letter late one night by the dim light of the lamp at his desk. He could not accept just anyone, but it had been years since he had turned anyone away. That was mostly because so few came. It was a different world, and from what he heard, Father Gabriel was glad to be out of it. Still, something about the letter wrenched his heart. He knew nothing about the writer, this Pete, but he knew the type. Only a boy, and with nowhere else to go.

Pete brought Father Gabriel his tea. “What's this?” asked Father Gabriel.

“It's your tea, Father.”

Father Gabriel slammed shut the thick book on his desk. A wisp of dust puffed up from it. “So,” he said, “now you're in on it too!” He had begun using words like “it” and “they” with little sense of what the words referred to. “They're poisoning the water,” said Father Gabriel. “I won't drink it.”

“But Father, nobody can do without water.”

“I can do without anything.”

Sometimes “they” meant Hindus. Father Gabriel had become convinced that the Hindus were trying to make everyone
else look bad. He professed this belief in his sermons. “They think they're so all-fire holy,” he said with a sneer, “living on nothing but a few grains of rice and some orange seeds. And when they get old they go off with nothing but a begging bowl and sit by the side of the road until the cows come home. God wants us to do with little in this world, yes, but he does not ask us to be bums and hobos. But what do they know of God—they, who do not believe in one God? They think birds are gods. Imagine—birds! And what do you expect from people who think it makes them holy to go around without shoes? Their clothing consists of nothing but turbans and little swatches of fabric they throw over themselves that might slip off at
any minute. That's not being modest, it's being pagan. What else would you call it—the gurus with their devil smiles, and the wild dances with the drums and the pipes and the snake-charmers. It's pagan, I tell you.”

Father Gabriel's behavior grew stranger by the day. His ill tempers gave way to bouts of joy, then shifted back again. During the happy periods, one would often find him trying to stand on his head. Whether dark or light of mood, he paced back and forth without stopping, even when he was presiding over services. He ran up and down the stairs to the steeple at odd hours and swung with glee on the ropes that rang the bells.

Pete found Brother James in the bakery. “Can't you see I'm busy?” said
Brother James. “These cakes bring in money. You might think they're nothing, but if it weren't for my cakes you would starve.”

“Father Gabriel thinks you're putting something in the water,” said Pete. “I would like to tell him that is not true.”

“Thank you for your concern, Brother Peter. You may rest assured that matters are in hand.”

“I know you have all been meeting without me. What are you up to?”

“How dare you speak to me in this way. You will have to answer for it. Don't think you won't.”

Neb was Pete's great comfort. He spent as much time as he could in the barn, brushing her coat. She accepted all and wanted nothing. She brought him such peace. Her stillness was beautiful. The only real love was the love that was not given or taken. It just was, without condition. He hoped he loved her with no thought of the peace she gave him. But even when he prayed, he felt he was demanding something. Give me devotion, give me knowledge, make me see. Neb demanded nothing.

Her eyes were clear and dark and steady. Pete knew she saw him truly even though she seemed always to be looking beyond things, never at them. That
was her way of being present, and she was only present, thought Pete. She had no past.

Only when he forgot that she liked to stand in the doorway while he was with her would she nudge him and tilt her graceful head. It was the gentlest of demands. Then he would let her out of her stall and lead her forward to where she could feel the breeze. She loved how it ruffled her mane, even when the wind was hot.

He stayed with her until they heard the bells calling him away.

Soon after dark one night, Pete was lying in his cell when he heard someone whistling. He rose and went to the window. The moon was out, so he could see that there was a figure standing at the gate. He stood in a pale moonbeam but his face was wreathed in darkness. Even so, the whites of his eyes shone through, as bright as stars. His whistle came in short, tuneless bursts, a few loose notes and then a long silence, over and over. It was no song Pete could name. After a long while, the man lit a cigarette. When he struck the match, Pete saw his face in the light of the flame. He wore a full black beard, and his hair was long and tangled. As he drew on the cigarette, Pete
heard the rattle of his breath carrying across the distance. Pete shivered.