William H. Hallahan - (18 page)

As he reached the far end of the dormitory, Father Joseph pushed
several numbered buttons on the telephone. It would have been so easy
to make a phone call. Were Jesus alive today, would he refuse to use
the phone?

Through the steamy mirror in the lavatory his lathered face was
frightening. He was aware that he'd lost a great amount of weight The
face that looked back at him, partially hidden by shaving lather,
told him he was still gravely ill. The steam pipes in the walls
banged. The radiator hissed the odor of rusty plumbing. Outside the
winter wind rocked the frozen sticks of a bare sumac tree. He had to
go out into that weather. It made his skin contract.

He told himself he must eat. He was dangerously weak. The flu and
the fever had stolen his precious store of strength. He still had a
slight fever. For the last three days he'd been unable to remember
his given name. Father Joseph, yes--but also Michael Dunovan, wasn't
it? Wasn't he born Michael Dunovan? It was a long time ago.

He sighed at the razor. It seemed so heavy. Father Joseph, born
Michael Dunovan, was far away from his monastery in Ireland. . .much
nearer to heaven. He sensed he would not see Ireland again.

When he'd dressed, he went down the stairs and walked toward the
glass front doors. The deskman said, "Snow. Six to ten inches
predicted with high winds, Father. Why don't you wait until
tomorrow?"

Father Joseph began the long slow walk to find Brendan Davitt, now
aged twenty-four.
 
 

Under a gray sky that promised snow, Brendan Davitt strolled up
Ninth Avenue with a container of coffee and a danish in a brown paper
bag. He was a counselor with the Wandering Child agency for runaway
children, and as he walked he was groping in his pocket for the
office key. His hand located a piece of paper and he pulled it out.

The note was in Aunt Maeve's handwriting: "Don't forget
You're bringing Anne home with you tonight for dinner. At six. It's
her birthday." The last three words were heavily underlined.

He reminded himself that he was also having lunch with her.

Brendan was the first to arrive at the office, and even from the
bottom of the stairs he could hear all the phones ringing
already--each a cry for help, each a bleat of pain. And they would
ring like that all day and well into the night long after everyone
had gone--callers from across the country, looking for runaway
children. And already there were more than two dozen teenage
derelicts on the broken steps, most of them either asleep or floating
on drugs.

Brendan started each day feeling overwhelmed: Wandering Child was
absurdly understaffed. Located on Ninth Avenue in the mid-Fifties,
the old paint-worn walls were almost hidden by the cartons containing
manila folders on missing children from all over the country and
Canada. And every day the mail brought dozens more. The phone would
never stop ringing and the adolescent derelicts would never stop
appearing on the stairs, sitting on benches in the office, waiting to
be interviewed, wanting to go home, and not knowing how to break the
ice, make the advance, ease the way. Many were rebellious wrongheaded
spoiled brats. Many others had been beaten, robbed and raped at home,
then beaten, robbed and raped on the road. Most were sick,
malnourished, alive with lice and looking out at the world with the
furtive eyes of hunted animals on their last reserves of strength.
Many were drug addicts, alcoholics or both. Many of them were broken
beyond repair, lackluster, filled with hostility and distrust. Not a
few were suffering from psychoses. The counselors counseled many of
the strongest not to go home.

He stepped around them on the stairs, unlocked the office and
answered the nearest phone. The day had begun.

"Hello. Yes. Davitt. Yes, I plan to bring him in for
identification around ten. Yes. He has a partial set of her
fingerprints and her dental charts." The morgue treated him as a
fellow employee. It had made tentative identification of a small
Caucasian girl, (91 pounds, 60 inches) approximate age 14, and Davitt
was to bring to the morgue a terrified man from Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, who might be her father.

The first derelict in line was a boy about fifteen or sixteen.
Without invitation he slouched into the chair beside Brendan's desk.
He had a familiar expression on his face. Brendan had seen it
hundreds of times.

"What can I do for you?" Brendan asked.

"I want to go home."

"You want half a danish?"

"No."

"You want a whole danish?"

"No."

Brendan gave him half. "You want some coffee?"

"No."

Brendan handed him the container and the boy drank some eagerly.
The rest of the danish disappeared in two bites and the boy washed it
down with the rest of the coffee.

"It's cold," he said to Brendan. "The coffee, I
mean."

"How could you tell?" Brendan asked.

The boy poured out his story. He was noble and good and all-wise
and understanding; his parents were mean, unfeeling, stupid, shallow.

"Dreadful," Brendan said. "You're a terrible
victim. Why do you want to go back? Think they've learned their
lesson by now?"

The boy answered by dabbing up all the danish crumbs with a wet
forefinger.

"What's the number?" Brendan asked.

The boy told him, a Nebraska area code--401.

"Hello," Brendan said. "This is Wandering Child, a
social agency in New York City. Do you have a son named--"

"Bobby," the boy volunteered.

"Bobby? You do. Have you heard from him recently? Yes. My
name is Brendan Davitt. Davitt. On the staff of the Wandering Child
agency. Yes. This is a bona fide phone call. This agency handles
cases of lost and runaway children."

"I will pay anything for news of my son," the woman's
voice said. It now had a high tremolo in it. "Dear God. Is he
all right?"

"Would you like to get him back?"

"Yes, Oh, yes. More than anything in the world. We've been
searching for him for weeks and weeks. Is he all right? Do you know
where he is?"

Brendan held the phone out to the boy, who put it to his ear.

"Mom? Yeah. It's me. Don't cry." And then he started to
cry. He curled over the phone like a comma and rocked back and forth
as he talked, murmuring and weeping, his hand gripping the phone like
a lifeline.

Brendan had timed these phone calls many times. And there came a
moment when the deal was struck--usually after five minutes: The
parents would want to speak to the "social worker." ("Can
you put him up somewhere until we get there? We'll catch the first
plane.")

If the phone conversation lasted less than five minutes, it was
usually a failure. The parents would hang up. And Brendan would have
another abandoned adolescent to find a bed for. If he said the right
things he could talk the youth into trying a foster home for a while.
If he said the wrong thing, though sick and tired and dirty the boy
or girl would walk out. Brendan rarely saw any of them again.

As the boy talked to his mother, the man from Chapel Hill entered,
his eyes mutely pleading with Brendan as if Brendan could make the
dead girl not his daughter.
 
 

Father Joseph shambled along Bowery past Hester Street. Not the
finest Irish wool could keep his bones warm in that wind. He paused
in a doorway of a shop. Used Sewing Machines, the sign said: detritus
from the sweatshop days of the old Lower East Side. Machines, long
disused, slept in the window covered with dust. Inside by a glowing
electric heater an old man napped in a chair, his head fallen back
and his mouth open, looking as if he'd been shot. The shimmering red
elements bathed him with abundant heat.

Father Joseph stepped back onto the sidewalk. The traffic was
heavy and pedestrians went hurrying by, heads down, eager to be out
of the wind. The sky, was darker; the snow closer. Before Father
Joseph got to the corner, a policeman stepped from a patrol car and
gripped him by the shoulder.

"Are you all right, Father? You seem kind of wobbly. How
about a cup of hot tea?" He steered the old monk toward a
delicatessen, got him a hot cup of tea and a danish. "Eat it in
good health, Father."

Father Joseph held the policeman by the wrist "I'll remember
you in my prayers."

"You do that, Father. I need all the help I can get."

The tea was scalding hot and Father Joseph tried to drink it with
the tea bag still in it. He burned his mouth but he felt the heat
flow down his throat and spread through his torso. He didn't want the
danish. He had no appetite and his jaw was trembling. He put his
hands around the hot mug and felt the heat flow up his wrists. When
he nearly finished the cup, the waitress brought a hot kettle and
poured more steaming water into his cup.

"Eat the danish," she said softly. "Dip it in the
tea. Eat."

He fed it to himself in broken pieces, dripping from the hot tea.
He felt his appetite return. The heat restored him. He became
stronger and felt grateful. He bowed his head and said a belated
grace. He knew he would be all right now: He remembered his name. It
was
Michael Dunovan. He stood up and moved toward the door. He
would be all right now. It was less than five miles to Brendan
Davitt's home in Brooklyn. Most of all he feared the exposed walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge. Thoughtfully he watched a city bus at an
intersection: Wheels made things so easy.
 
 

The agency car was an old Chevrolet that complained of its hard
life. It emitted a quintet of squeaks and squeals as Brendan drove it
downtown toward the morgue. The man sat beside him, staring straight
ahead, eyes fixed, hands holding in his lap the envelope with the
dental records and partial fingerprints of his daughter.

When Brendan led him to the viewing room, the man looked through
the window at the girl. Her body lay covered with a white sheet. The
face was small and thin with heavy mascara and worn-away lipstick.
Her hair had been bleached. The man was weeping expectantly and he
couldn't see well through the tears. He stared bewildered at the
face.

"So thin," he cried.

"She may have lost a lot of weight," Brendan said. "She
was on drugs. Heavy stuff."

"There was a mole on her left wrist," the man said.

The attendant inside pulled back the sheet and lifted the left
arm, showed the dirty hand, chewed fingernails and the needle tracks.
On the wrist above the thumb was a small mole and the man spun away
and raised his fists.

"Oh, God." He settled into a bench. "She wasn't
bad. She was just a child. Oh, Cissy. Cissy."

Brendan watched the familiar scene. Oh, Cissy, Debbie, Mary, Edie,
Dory, Kathie, Missy, Susie, Nancy, Patty, Regina, Margie, Shirley,
Sandy, Rita, Tammy, Vicky, Wendy, Yasmin. He sat beside the man and
put his hand on his shoulder. "You could be wrong. You should
look again. Be positive."

"I can't. It's terrible."

"You'll wonder for the rest of your life. Make sure."

"I can't."

"Yes. You can."

"I don't want to know. It's her. I know it."

Brendan helped him to his feet. "Look again. Is that the
mole?"

The man wiped the back of his hand across his wet cheeks. Panting,
he leaned over and stared at the mole again. "It's--oh, I don't
know. It seems too high, too small." He looked again at the
drawn face through squinting eyes. "I can't tell with that stuff
on her eyes."

The side door of the viewing room opened and the sergeant from the
police I.D. division stepped through. He shook his head. "The
teeth don't match."

"Positive?"

"Unless he brought the wrong dental card."

"How about the prints?"

"They're not very good. But they don't seem to match either.
Come on, Davitt. It's not his kid. Tell him."

"You'd better be sure."

"I'm sure."

Brendan turned the man away from the window by the shoulders. "The
police say it's not your daughter. Understand?"

The man nodded and almost collapsed. Brendan guided him back to
the bench and let him down slowly.

"Not Cissy?"

"No."

"I have to call her, mother." The man dried his tears
and began slowly to gather himself. He smiled at Brendan. "Son
of a gun. It's the best day of my life. I have to tell her mother.
Where's the phone?"

The curtain on the viewing window closed. Not his daughter. No
more tears. Then who would weep for the dead girl?
 
 

Anne O'Casey had loved Brendan Davitt ever since that summer on
Long Beach Island when he'd written the play for her Puppet Theater.
Today she had decided she was going to tell him. She had it all
planned.

In the delicatessen everyone was talking about the impending
snowstorm. But she had no time for chat: The motor home that she'd
borrowed from the studio was parked illegally at the curb, and there
was a policeman up the street giving tickets. She picked up her lunch
order and hurried out of the shop. No ticket: She drove away feeling
victorious.

The motor home was the property of the photography studio she
worked for, and it was used as a portable dressing room for models
and sometimes a portable photography lab. And sometimes it was used
as a portable casting couch.

She rehearsed what she was going to say to Brendan. But it still
didn't sound right. The thought of doing it made her palms wet. Maybe
her mother was right. Some things are better left unsaid. Her
mother's life had been ruined by telling a man that she loved him.
Whenever Anne thought about her childhood, the first thing she
recalled was the sound of her mother's weeping. Secret weeping. Her
father was a thief, a con man, a philanderer, an absconder, a
self-server, a clotheshorse, a conscienceless user of people and one
of the handsomest men in New York. And her mother made the mistake of
loving him. "I was sixteen and he was twenty-nine going on
twelve, a permanent selfish evil boy."