The Exorcist (6 page)

Early in the evening, Chris took Regan out to a movie, and the following day they drove around to points of interest in Chris's Jaguar XKE. The Lincoln Memorial. The Capitol. The cherry blossom lagoon. A bite to eat. Then across the river to Arlington Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Regan turned solemn, and later, at the grave of John F. Kennedy, seemed to grow distant and a little sad. She stared at the "eternal flame" for a time; them mutely reached for Chris's hand. "Mom, why do people have to die?"

The question pierced her mother's soul. Oh, Rags, you too? You too? Oh, no! And yet what could she tell her? Lies? Slue couldn't. She looked at her daughter's upturned face, eyes misting with tears. Had she sensed her own thoughts? She had done it so often... so often before. "Honey, people get tired," she answered Regan tenderly.

"Why does God let them?"

For a moment, Chris stared. She was puzzled. Disturbed. An atheist, she had never taught Regan religion. She thought it dishonest "Who's been telling you about God?" she asked.

"Sharon."

"Oh." She would have to speak to her.

"Mom, why does God let us get tired?"

Looking down at those sensitive eyes and that pain, Chris surrendered; couldn't tell her what she believed. "Well, after a while God gets lonesome for us, Rags. He wants us back."

Regan folded herself into silence. She stayed quiet during the drive home, and her mood persisted all the rest of the day and through Monday.

On Tuesday, Regan's birthday, it seemed to break. Chris took her along to the filming and when the shooting day was over, the cast and crew sang "Happy Birthday" and brought out a cake. Always a kind and gentle man when sober, Dennings had the lights rewarmed and filmed her as she cut it. He called it a "screen test," and afterwards promised to make her a star. She seemed quite gay.

But after dinner and the opening of presents, the mood seemed to fade. No word from Howard. Chris placed a call to him in Rome, and was told by a clerk at his hotel that he hadn't been there for several days and couldn't be reached. He was somewhere on a yacht.

Chris made excuses.

Regan nodded, subdued, and shook her head to her mother's suggestion that they go to the Hot Shoppe for a shake. Without a word, she went downstairs to the basement playroom, where she remained until time for bed.

The following morning when Chris opened her eyes, she found Regan in bed with her, half awake.

"Well, what in the.... What are you doing here?" Chris chuckled.

"My bed was shaking."

"You nut." Chris kissed her and pulled up her covers. "Go to sleep. It's still early."

What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night.

CHAPTER TWO

He stood at the edge of the lonely subway platform, listening for the rumble of a train that would still the ache that was always with him. Like his pulse. Heard only in silence. He shifted his bag to the other hand and stared down the tunnel. Points of light. They stretched into dark like guides to hopelessness.

A cough. He glanced to the left. The gray-stubbled derelict numb on the ground in a pool of his urine was sitting up. With yellowed eyes he stared at the priest with the chipped, sad face.

The priest looked away. He would come. He would whine. Couldjya help an old altar boy, Father? Wouldjya? The vomit-flaked hand pressing down on the shouder. The fumbling for the medal. The reeking of the breath of a thousand confessions with the wine and the garlic and the stale mortal sins belching out all together, and smothering... smothering...

The priest heard the derelict rising.

Don't come!

Heard a step.

Ah, my God, let me be!

"Hi ya, Faddah."

He winced. Sagged. Couldn't turn. He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In absent gesture, he felt at his sleeve as if for an unseen band of mourning. He dimly remembered another Christ.

"Hey, Faddah!"

The hum of an incoming train. Then sounds of stumbling. He looked to the tramp. He was staggering. Fainting. With a blind, sudden rush. the priest was to him; caught him; dragged him to the bench against the wall.

"I'm a Cat'lic," the derelict mumbled. "I'm Cat'lic."

The priest eased him down; stretched him out; saw his train. He quickly pulled a dollar from out of his wallet and placed it in the pocket of the derelict's jacket. Then decided he would lose it. He plucked out the dollar and stuffed it into a urine-damp trouser pocket, then he picked up his bag and boarded the train.

He sat in a corner and pretended to sleep. At the end of the line he walked to Fordham University. The dollar had been meant for his cab.

When he reached the residence hall for visitors, he signed his name on the register. Damien Karras, he wrote. Then examined it. Something was wrong. Wearily he remembered and added, S.J.

He took a room in Weigel Hall and, after an hour, was able to sleep.

The following day he attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. As principal speaker, he delivered a paper entitled "Psychological Aspects of Spiritual Development." At the end of the day, he enjoyed a few drinks and a bite to eat with some other psychiatrists. They paid. He left them early. He would have to see his mother.

He walked to the crumbling brownstone apartment building on Manhattan's East Twenty-first Street. Pausing by the steps that led up to the door, he eyed the children on the stoop. Unkempt. Ill-clothed. No place to go. He remembered evictions: humiliations: walking home with a seventh-grade sweetheart and encountering his mother as she hopefully rummaged through a garbage can on the corner. He climbed the steps and opened the door as if it were a tender wound. An odor like cooking. Like rotted sweetness. He remembered the visits to Mrs. Ghoirelli and her tiny apartment with the eighteen cats. He gripped the banister and climbed, overcome by a sudden, draining weariness that he knew was caused by guilt. He should never have left her. Not alone.

Her greeting was joyful A shout. A kiss. She rushed to make coffee. Dark. Stubby, gnarled legs. He sat in the kitchen and listened to her talk, the dingy walls and soiled floor seeping into his bones. The apartment was a hovel. Social Security. Each month, a few dollars from a brother.

She sat at the table. Mrs. This. Uncle That. Still in immigrant accents. He avoided those eyes that were wells of sorrow, eyes that spent days staring out of a window.

He should never have left her.

He wrote a few letters for her later. She could neither read nor write any English Then he spent time repairing the tuner on a crackling, plastic radio. Her world. The news. Mayor Lindsay.

He went to the bathroom. Yellowing newspaper spread on the tile. Stains of rust in the tub and the sink. On the floor, an old corset. Seeds of vocation. From these he had fled into love. Now the love had grown cold. In the night, he heard it whistling through the chambers of his heart like a lost, crying wind.

At a quarter to eleven, he kissed her good-bye; promised to return jest as soon as he could. He left with the radio tuned to the news.

**********

Once back in his room in Weigel Hall, he gave some thought to writing a letter to the Jesuit head of the Maryland province. He'd covered the ground with him once before: request for a transfer to the New York province in order to be loser to his mother; request for a teaching post and relief from his duties. In requesting the latter, he'd cited as a reason "unfitness" for the work.

The Maryland Provincial had taken it up with him during the course of his annual inspection tour of Georgetown University, a function that closely paralleled that of an army inspector general in the granting of confidential hearings to those who had grievances or complaints. On the point of Damien Karras' mother, the Provicial had nodded and expressed his symphathy; but the question of the priest's "unfitness" he thought contradictory on its face. But Karras had pursued it:

"Well, it's more than psychiatry, Torn. You know that. Some of their problems come down to vocation, to the meaning of their lives. Hell, it isn't always sex that's involved, it's their faith, and I just can't cut it, Tom, it's too much. I need out. I'm having problems of my own. l mean, doubts"

"What thinking man doesn't, Damien?"

A harried man with many appointments, the Provincial had not pressed him for the reasons for his doubt. For which Karras was grateful. He knew that his answers would have sounded insane: The need to rend food with the teeth and then defecate. My mother's nine First Fridays. Stinking socks. Thalidomide babies. An item in the paper about a young altar boy waiting at a bus stop; set on by strangers; sprayed with kerosene; ignited. No. Too emotional. Vague. Existential. More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil. And much of the evil resulted from doubt; from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not reveal Himself? Not speak?"

"Lord, give us a sign...."

The raising of Lazarus was dim in the distant past. No one now living had heard his laughter.

Why not a sign?

At various times the priest would long to have lived with Christ: to have sin; to have touched; to have probed His eyes. Ah, my God, let me see You! Let me know! Come in dreams!

The yearning consumed him.

He sat at the desk now with pen above paper. Perhaps it wasn't time that had silenced the Provincial. Perhaps he understood that faith was finally a matter of love.

The Provincial had promised to consider the requests, but thus far nothing had bees done. Karras wrote the letter and went to bed.

He sluggishly awakened at 5 A.M. and went to the chapel in Weigel Hall, secured a Host, then returned to his room and said Mass.

" 'Et clamor meus ad te veniat,' " he prayed with murmured anguish. " 'Let my cry come unto Thee...' "

He lifted the Host in consecration with an aching remembrance of the joy it once gave him; felt once again, as he did each morning, the pang of an unexpected glimpse from afar and unnoticed of a longlost love.

He broke the Host above the chalice.

" 'Peace I leave you. My peace I give you....' "

He tucked the Host inside his mouth and swallowed the papery taste of despair.

When the Mass was over, he polished the chalice and carefully placed it in his bag. He rushed for the seven-ten train back to Washington, carrying pain in a black valise.

CHAPTER THREE

Early on the morning of April 11, Chris made a telephone call to her doctor in Los Angeles and asked him for a referral to a local psychiatrist for Regan.

"Oh? What's wrong?"

Chris explained. Beginning on the day after Regan's birthday--- and following Howard's failure to call--- she had noticed a sudden and dramatic change in her daughter's behavior and disposition. Insomnia. Quarrelsome. Fits of temper. Kicked things. Threw things. Screamed. Wouldn't eat. In addition, her energy seemed abnormal. She was constantly moving, touching, turning; tapping; running and jumping about. Doing poorly with schoolwork. Fantasy playmate. Eccentric attention-getting tactics.

"Such as what?" the physician inquired.

She started with the rappings. Since the night she'd investigated the attic, she'd heard them again on two occasions. In both of these instances, she'd noticed, Regan was present in the room; and the rappings would tease at the moment Chris entered. Secondly, she told him, Regan would "lose" things in the room: a dress; her toothbrush; books; her shoes. She complained about "somebody moving" her furniture. Finally, on the morning following the dinner at the White House, Chris saw Karl in Regan's bedroom pulling a bureau back into place from a spot that was halfway across the room. When Chris had inquired what he was doing, he repeated his former "Someone is funny," and refused to elaborate any further, but shortly thereafter Chris had found Regan in the kitchen complaining that someone had moved all her furniture during the night when she was sleeping.

This was the incident, Chris explained, that had finally crystallized her suspicions. It was clearly her daughter who was doing it all.

"You mean somnambulism? She's doing it in her sleep?"

"No, Marc, she's doing it when she's awake. To get attention."

Chris mentioned the matter of the shaking bed, Which had happened twice more and was always followed by Regan's insistence that she sleep with her mother.

"Well, that could be physical," the internist ventured.

"No, Marc, I didn't say the bed is shaking. I said that she says that it's shaking."

"Do you know that it isn't shaking?"

"No"

"Well, it might be clonic spasms; he murmured.

"Who?"

"Any temperature?"

"No. Listen, what do you think?" she asked. "Should I take her to a shrink or what?"

"Chris, you mentioned her schoolwork. How is she doing with her math?"

'Why'd you ask?"