Was he right about you?’ All in that pleasant voice. Like a woman making conversation at a cocktail party.
And Rowan lying there with his head covered in bandages. If he’d been wearing sunglasses, he would have looked like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.
“I came in. I said I’d once been a religious man, yes, but that was all in the past. She put out her hand. I put out mine. Because, you see, I thought…”
SIX
He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn’t realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing is raising her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn’t even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face.
” Go on and look at him,” she says. “Because guess what ? This is my brother’s other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks—
you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn’t want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It’s his liver that’s killing him.
They poked a hole in that, too, and it’s dying.”
” Miss Magruder, I— ”
“It’s Mrs. Rawlings,” she tells him, “not that it’s anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you’ve done to him.”
” I was in California… I saw it in the paper…”
” Oh, I’m sure,” she says. “I’m sure. But you’re the only one I can get hold of, don’t you see! The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer’s Disease, and the rest aren’t here. They’re eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes them feel.
Well, Reverend Callahan— or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself— let me tell you how this makes me feel.
It… makes… me… FURIOUS. ” She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk, why not? It’s been years since he’s heard a confession, but some things are like riding a bicycle.
” He graduated from NYU cum laude,” she says. “Did you know that? He took second in the Beloit Poetry Prize Competition in 1949, did you know that ? As an undergraduate! He wrote a novel… a beautiful novel…
and it’s in my attic, gathering dust.”
Callahan can feel soft warm dew settling on his face. It is coming from her mouth.
” I asked him— no, begged him— to go on with his writing and he laughed at me, said he was no good. ‘Leave that to the Mailers and 0’Haras and Irwin Shaws,’ he said, ‘people who can really do it. I’ll wind up in some ivory-tower office, puffing on a meerschaum pipe and looking like Mr. Chips.’
“And that would have been all right, too, ” she says, “but then he got involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and from there it was an easy jump to running the flophouse. And hanging with his friends. Friends like you. ”
Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the word friends invested with such contempt.
” But where are they now that he’s down and going out?” Rowena Magruder Rowlings asks him. “Hmmm?
Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where’s Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on the Today show, you know. Twice! Where’s that fucking Mother Teresa?
He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she?”
Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god. Not enough arms, he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh.
” They’re not here. There’s just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature.
Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he’s lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they’ll have to take up a subscription from his fucking flophouse to pay for his last illness— if you call getting cut to pieces an illness
— and his coffin, and his burial.”
She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.
” In his previous other life, Father Callahan, he was the Street Angel. But this is his final other life.
Glamorous, isn’t it? I’m going down the hall to the canteen for coffee and a danish. I’ll be therefor ten minutes or so. Plenty of time for you to have your little visit. Do me a favor and be gone when I get back. You and all the rest of his do-gooders make me sick.”
She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It’s not until they’ve faded completely and left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he’s trembling all over. He doesn’t think it’s the onset of the dt’s, but by God that’s what it feels like.
When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.
“She’s given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of folks. How you doing, Don?”
The diction is bad, the voice driving it little more than a rasp, but it’s Rowan, all right. Callahan goes to him and takes the hands that lie on the counterpane. They curl over his with surprising firmness.
” As far as the novel goes… man, it was third-rate James Jones, and that’s bad.”
“How you doing, Rowan?” Callahan asks. Now he’s crying himself. The goddam room will be floating soon.
“Oh, well, pretty sucky,” says the man under the bandages. Then: “Thanks for coming.”
“Not a problem, ” Callahan says. “What do you need from me, Rowan ? What can I do?”
” You can stay away from Home,” Rowan says. His voice is fading, but his hands still clasp Callahan’s. “They didn’t want me. It was you they were after. Do you understand me, Don ? They were looking for you. They kept asking me where you were, and by the end I would have told them if I’d known, believe me. But of course I didn’t. ”
One of the machines is beeping faster, the beeps running toward a merge that will trip an alarm. Callahan has no way of knowing this but knows it anyway. Somehow.
” Rowan— did they have red eyes ? Were they wearing… I don’t know… long coats? Like trenchcoats? Did they come in big fancy cars?”
” Nothing like that,” Rowan whispers. “They were probably in their thirties but dressed like teenagers. They
looked like teenagers, too. These guys’ll look like teenagers for another twenty years— if they live that long—
and then one day they’ll just be old. ”
Callahan thinks, Just a couple of punks. Is that what he’s saying? It is, it almost certainly is, but that doesn’t mean the Hitler Brothers weren’t hired by the low men for this particular job. It makes sense. Even the newspaper article, brief as it was, pointed out that Rowan Magruder wasn’t much like the Brothers’ usual type of victim.
“Stay away from Home,” Rowan whispers, but before Callahan can promise, the alarm does indeed go off.
For a moment the hands holding his tighten, and Callahan feels a ghost of this man’s old energy, that wild fierce energy that somehow kept Home’s doors open in spite of all the times the bank account went absolutely flat-line, the energy that attracted men who could do all the things Rowan Magruder himself couldn’t.