The Stories of Richard Bausch (45 page)

Tarmigian looked up, then smiled, held up the bandaged hand. There wasn’t time for the two men to speak. Father Russell nodded at him and went on, following the nurse, feeling strangely precarious and weak. He looked back over his shoulder at Tarmigian, who had simply gone back to reading the magazine, and then he was attending to what the nurse had brought him to see: she pulled a curtain aside to reveal a gurney with two people on it—a man and a woman of roughly the same late middle age—the woman cradling the man’s head in her arms and whispering something to him.

“Mrs. Simpson,” the nurse said, “here’s the priest.”

Father Russell stood there while the woman regarded him. She was perhaps fifty-five, with iron gray hair and small, round, wet eyes. “Mrs. Simpson,” he said to her.

“He’s my husband,” she murmured, rising, letting the man’s head down carefully. His eyes were open wide, as was his mouth. “My Jack. Oh, Jack. Jack.”

Father Russell stepped forward and touched her shoulder, and she cried, staring down at her husband’s face.

“He’s gone,” she said. “We were talking, you know. We were thinking about going down to see the kids. And he just put his head down. We were talking about how the kids never come to visit and we were going to surprise them.”

“Mrs. Simpson,” the nurse said, “would you like a sedative? Something to settle your nerves—”

This had the effect of convincing the poor woman about what had just taken place: the reality of it sank into her features as the color drained from them. “No,” she said in a barely audible whisper, “I’m fine.”

Father Russell began quickly to say the words of the sacrament, and she stood by him, gazing down at the dead man.

“I—I don’t know where he is,” she said. “He just put his head down.” Her hands trembled over the cloth of her husband’s shirt, which was open wide at the chest, and it was a moment before Father Russell understood that she was trying to button the shirt. But her hands were shaking too much. She patted the shirt down, then bowed her head and sobbed. Somewhere in the jangled apparatus of the room something was beeping, and he heard air rushing through pipes; everything was obscured in the intricacies of procedure. And then he was simply staring at the dead man’s blank countenance, all sound and confusion and movement falling away from him. It was as though he had never looked at anything like this before; he remained quite still, in a profound quiet, for some minutes before Mrs. Simpson got his attention again. She had taken him by the wrist.

“Father,” she was saying. “Father, he was a good man. God has taken him home, hasn’t He?”

Father Russell turned to face the woman, to take her hands into his own and to whisper the words of hope.

“I think seeing
you there—at the hospital,” he said to Tarmigian. “It upset me in an odd way.”

“I cut my hand opening the paint jar,” Tarmigian said. He was standing on a stepladder in the upstairs hallway of his rectory, painting the crown molding. Father Russell had walked out of his church in the chill of first frost and made his way across the little stone bridge and up the incline to the old man’s door, had knocked and been told to enter, and, entering, finding no one, had reached back and knocked again.

“Up here,” came Tarmigian’s voice.

And the priest had climbed the stairs in a kind of torpor, his heart beating rapidly and unevenly. He had blurted out that he wasn’t feeling right, hadn’t slept at all well, and finally he’d begun to hint at what he could divine as to why. He was now sitting on the top step, hat in hand, still carrying with him the sense of the long night he had spent, lying awake in the dark, seeing
not the dead face of poor Mrs. Simpson’s husband but Tarmigian holding up the bandaged hand and smiling. The image had wakened him each time he had drifted toward sleep.

“Something’s happening to me,” he said now, unable to believe himself.

The other man reached high with the paint brush, concentrating. The ladder was rickety.

“Do you want me to hold the ladder?”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you want to know if I wanted you to hold the ladder?”

“Well, do you?”

“You’re worried I’ll fall.”

“I’d like to help.”

“And did you say something is happening to you?”

Father Russell was silent.

“Forget the ladder, son.”

“I don’t understand myself lately,” said the priest.

“Are you making me your confessor or something there, Reverend?”

“I-I can’t-”

“Because I don’t think I’m equipped.”

“I’ve looked at the dead before,” said Father Russell. “I’ve held the dying in my arms. I’ve never been very much afraid of it. I mean I’ve never been morbid.”

“Morbidity is an indulgence.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Simply refuse to indulge yourself.” “I’m forty-three—”

“A difficult age, of course. You don’t know whether you fit with the grown-ups or the children.” Tarmigian paused to cough. He held the top step of the ladder with both hands, and his shoulders shook. Everything tottered. Then he stopped, breathed, wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

Father Russell said, “I meant to say, I don’t think I’m worried about myself.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“I’m going to call and make you an appointment with a doctor.”

“I’m fine. I’ve got a cold. I’ve coughed like this all my life.”

“Nevertheless.”

Tarmigian smiled at him. “You’re a good man—but you’re learning a tendency.”

No peace.

Father Russell had entered the priesthood without the sort of fervent sense of vocation he believed others had. In fact, he’d entertained serious doubts about it right up to the last year of seminary—doubts that, in spite of his confessor’s reassurances to the contrary, he felt were more than the normal upsets of seminary life. In the first place, he had come to it against the wishes of his father, who had entertained dreams of a career in law for him; and while his mother applauded the decision, her own dream of grandchildren was visibly languishing in her eyes as the time for his final vows approached. Both parents had died within a month of each other during his last year of studies, and so there had been times when he’d had to contend with the added problem of an apprehension that he might unconsciously be learning to use his vocation as a form of refuge. But finally, nearing the end of his training, seeing the completion of the journey, something in him rejoiced, and he came to believe that this was what having a true vocation was: no extremes of emotion, no real perception of a break with the world, though the terms of his faith and the ancient ceremony that his training had prepared him to celebrate spoke of just that. He was even-tempered and confident, and when he was ordained, he set about the business of being a parish priest. There were matters to involve himself in, and he found that he could be energetic and enthusiastic about most of them. The life was satisfying in ways he hadn’t expected, and if in his less confident moments some part of him entertained the suspicion that he was not progressing spiritually, he was also not the sort of man to go very deeply into such questions: there were things to do. He was not a contemplative. Or he hadn’t been.

Something was shifting in his soul.

Nights were terrible. He couldn’t even pray now. He stood at his rectory window and looked at the light in the old man’s window, and his imagination presented him with the belief that he could hear the faint rattle of the deep cough, though he knew it was impossible across that distance. When
he said the morning mass, he leaned down over the host and had to work to remember the words. The stolid, calm faces of his parishioners were almost ugly in their absurd confidence in him, their smiles of happy expectation and welcome. He took their hospitality and their care of him as his due, and felt waves of despair at the ease of it, the habitual taste and lure of it, while all the time his body was aching in ways that filled him with dread and reminded him of Tarmigian’s ravaged features.

Sunday morning early, it began to rain. Someone called, then hung up before he could answer. He had been asleep; the loud ring at that hour had frightened him, changed his heartbeat. He took his own pulse, then stood at his window and gazed at the darkened shape of Tarmigian’s church. That morning after the second mass, exhausted, miserable, filled with apprehension, he crossed the bridge in the rain, made his way up the hill and knocked on the old man’s door. There wasn’t any answer. He peered through the window on the porch and saw that there were dishes on the table in the kitchen, which was visible through the arched hallway off the living room. Tarmigian’s Bible lay open on the arm of the easy chair. Father Russell knocked loudly and then walked around the building, into the church itself. It was quiet. The wind stirred outside and sounded like traffic whooshing by. Father Russell could feel his own heartbeat in the pit of his stomach. He sat down in the last pew of Tarmigian’s church and tried to calm himself. Perhaps ten minutes went by, and then he heard voices. The old man was coming up the walk outside, talking to someone. Father Russell stood, thought absurdly of trying to hide, but then the door was opened and Tarmigian walked in, accompanied by an old woman in a white woolen shawl. Tarmigian had a big umbrella, which he shook down and folded, breathing heavily from the walk and looking, as always, even in the pall of his decline, amused by something. He hadn’t seen Father Russell yet, though the old woman had. She nodded and smiled broadly, her hands folded neatly over a small black purse.

“Well,” Tarmigian said. “To what do we owe this honor, Reverend?”

It struck Father Russell that they might be laughing at him. He dismissed this thought and, clearing his throat, said, “I—I wanted to see you.” His own voice sounded stiffly formal and somehow foolish to him. He cleared his throat again.

“This is Father Russell,” Tarmigian said loudly to the old woman. Then he touched her shoulder and looked at the priest. “Mrs. Aldenberry.”

“God bless you,” Mrs. Aldenberry said.

“Mrs. Aldenberry wants a divorce,” Tarmigian murmured.

“Eh?” she said. Then, turning to Father Russell, “I’m hard of hearing.”

“She wants her own television set,” Tarmigian whispered.

“Pardon me?” “And her own room.”

“I’m hard of hearing,” she said cheerfully to the priest. “I’m deaf as a post.”

“Irritates her husband,” Tarmigian said.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman, “I can’t hear a thing.”

Tarmigian guided her to the last row of seats, and she sat down there, folded her hands in her lap. She seemed quite content, quite trustful, and the old minister, beginning to stutter into a deep cough, winked at Father Russell—as if to say this was all very entertaining. “Now,” he said, taking the priest by the elbow, “Let’s get to the flattering part of all this—you walking over here getting yourself all wet because you’re worried about me.”

“I just wanted to stop by,” Father Russell said. He was almost pleading. The old man’s face, in the dim light, looked appallingly bony and pale.

“Look at you,” said Tarmigian. “You’re shaking.”

Father Russell could not speak.

“Are you all right?”

The priest was assailed by the feeling that the older man found him somehow ridiculous—and he remembered the initial sense he’d had, when Tarmigian and Mrs. Aldenberry had entered, that he was being laughed at. “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said.

“I’m a little under the weather,” Tarmigian said, smiling.

And it dawned on Father Russell, with the force of a physical blow, that the old man knew quite well he was dying.

Tarmigian indicated Mrs. Aldenberry with a nod of his head. “Now I have to attend to the depths of this lady’s sorrow. You know, she says she should’ve listened to her mother and not married Mr. Aldenberry fifty-two years ago. She’s revising her own history; she can’t remember being happy in all that time, not now, not after what’s happened. Now you think about that a bit. Imagine her standing in a room slapping her forehead and saying
‘What a mistake!’ Fifty-two years. Oops. A mistake. She’s glad she woke up in time. Think of it! And I’ll tell you, Reverend, I think she feels lucky.”

Mrs. Aldenberry made a prim, throat-clearing sound, then stirred in her seat, looking at them.

“Well,” Tarmigian said, straightening, wiping the smile from his face. He offered his hand to the priest. “Shake hands. No. Let’s embrace. Let’s give this poor woman an ecumenical thrill.”

Father Russell shook hands, then walked into the old man’s extended arms. It felt like a kind of collapse. He was breathing the odor of bay rum and talcum and something else, too, something indefinable and dark, and to his astonishment he found himself fighting back tears. The two men stood there while Mrs. Aldenberry watched, and Father Russell was unable to control the sputtering and trembling that took hold of him. When Tarmigian broke the embrace, the priest turned away, trying to compose himself. Tarmigian was coughing again.

“Excuse me,” said Mrs. Aldenberry. She seemed quite tentative and upset.

Tarmigian held up one hand, still coughing, and his eyes had grown wide with the effort to breathe.

“Hot honey with a touch of lemon and whiskey,” she said, to no one in particular. “Works like a charm.”

Father Russell thought about how someone her age would indeed learn to feel that humble folk remedies were effective in stopping illness. It was logical and reasonable, and he was surprised by the force of his own resentment of her for it. He stood there wiping his eyes and felt his heart constrict with bitterness.

“Well,” Tarmigian said, getting his breath back.

“Hot toddy,” said Mrs. Aldenberry. “Never knew it to fail.” She was looking from one to the other of the two men, her expression taking on something of the look of tolerance. “Fix you up like new,” she said, turning her attention to the priest, who could not stop blubbering. “What’s—what’s going on here?”

Father Russell had a moment of sensing that everything Tarmigian had done or said over the past year was somehow freighted with this one moment, and it took him a few seconds to recognize the implausibility of such a thing: no one could have planned it, or anticipated it, this one seemingly
aimless gesture of humor—out of a habit of humorous gestures, and from a brave old man sick to death—that could feel so much like health, like the breath of new life.