She started crying, not hard, not dramatic, and put her head on my shoulder, her tears warm on the side of my neck.
After a time, she raised her head and said, “You want another drink?”
“Not right now.”
“Me neither, I guess.”
She eased herself onto my lap again and I slipped my arms around her.
After a time she said: “I meet with this group of women who’ve had the same kind of surgery.
There’re some men who can’t handle it.”
“Then they’re not men worth knowing. You’re still yourself. That’s what matters.”
“Please don’t lie to me, Sam.”
“I’m not lying. I’m not saying it was easy here tonight. I really was afraid I’d do or say something wrong. But a lot of times the fear is worse than the reality. I’m just happy I finally got to see one of those breasts you used to flaunt at me down at the railroad bridge.”
“Oh, yes, I’m the flaunting type, all right. Roger Darcy was the only boy I would’ve flaunted myself around.”
“Roger Darcy? The kid who used to call in all those false fire alarms?”
“I felt sorry for him.”
“Roger Darcy. He’s probably an arsonist by now.” A merry kiss of her doing, and once again we went at it, determined to find out just how much you could get away with within tonight’s rules.
You’d be surprised how much fun you can have within those rules.
Twenty
As you’re breathing your last, say a quick prayer that the priest who buries you is Father Mulcahy and not Father Fitzpatrick.
David Egan had always claimed to be unlucky. And his unluck held right to the end.
Father Fitzpatrick presided over his funeral mass and burial.
Father Peter Fitzpatrick was once a real sharp priest. This was probably sometime around the Civil War. He’d served in several larger cities and then gotten himself sent here instead of retiring. He always said he didn’t want to retire. He was a priest on the model of Mgm central casting priests-white-haired, pleasantly overweight, with a radiant smile for everybody.
The problem was he’d never bothered to get to know anybody here. He mostly played golf in the warm months and went to movies in the cooler ones.
He’d found a way of retiring without retiring.
Since there were only two priests, he had to take his share of funerals and his words on the deceased were always masterpieces of ham-bone rhetoric.
In Father Fitzgerald’s Generic Speech for the Recently Departed, everybody had led an exemplary life, had been universally beloved and was certainly, even as we sat squirming in our pews, sitting next to God and enjoying a Western on the celestial Tv set, Father Fitzpatrick being partial to Westerns.
Of David Egan, he said: “People always knew they could come to David Egan if they had problems of a spiritual nature. And with them he shared his knowledge of right and wrong, and how to survive these troubled times with hope and humility.”
Sounded just like the David I knew.
I couldn’t listen to the rest. I’d heard this same sermon applied to a wife-beating drunk, a twenty-year-old girl of saintly soul and beauty who had died of a brain aneurysm, a crooked and vicious cop, a kind and gentle man who ran a flower shop and was the subject of much rumor because he was unmarried at age fifty, and a decent old bullshitter from County Cork who’d lost both legs on Guam in the worst days of World War Ii.
Hell, Father Fitzpatrick would’ve repeated those same words-? he shared his knowledge of right and wrong” and taught “them how to survive these troubled times with hope and humility”-if he’d been burying Heinrich Himmler.
The back rows of the church were packed with young people who were angling for a role in Danger Dolls! about hot-rodding girl gangs. David’s friends.
The ones he’d taught about right and wrong.
The front rows were crowded with the more reputable friends he’d made in his high school days. The girls cried, the boys looked bored, though there was one boy who managed to cry and look bored at the same time, no easy feat, believe me.
But the people I spent the most time watching were the Kelly sisters, sitting in the front pew on the right side of the aisle, and the two girls sitting a mere row apart on the left side of the aisle, Molly Blessing and Rita Scully. They both wore dark suits and looked quite pretty and young and forlorn. The Kelly sisters used Kleenex to daub their eyes; the girls used delicate handkerchiefs.
Father Fitzpatrick droned through his sermon, dragged through the rest of the mass, and then walked down to the communion rail to commence escorting the coffin out to the waiting hearse. The rows emptied from front to back. I was near the middle so I didn’t get out in time to actually see it. But I heard about it, of course.
Sunny day. Cars whipping by, the drivers indifferent-or frightened by-th death in their midst.
Small clutches of mourners on the sidewalk, talking, a smile dared here and there, and then the shout.
I had just reached the center of the front steps when Rita slapped Molly or Molly slapped Rita and the fight ensued. I’ve heard the story told both ways. Personally, I’d put my money on Rita as the instigator, but then you can’t automatically dismiss the quiet ones like Molly, because sometimes they have tempers worthy of Charles Starkweather.
I did get to see the last few seconds of it, the part when Rita reached over and grabbed the shoulder of Molly’s suit and started ripping away. Which was when about 673 guys jumped in between them and the bell sounded, officially ending the fight.
Talk about your town legends. This would be talked about for generations. And it was just the sort of thing Egan would have loved, two very attractive girls battling over him this way.
They were both red-faced, sweaty, and thoroughly disheveled by the time I got over there. I didn’t get to talk to either of them. They were both dragged away by their friends.
I’m happy to report that there were no fisticuffs at the burial site, though Father Fitzpatrick did get confused once and talked about “David’s courage in fighting in Korea.” David would’ve been about eight back then. Well, at least he hadn’t put him back in World War I.
I’d hoped to see Andrea Prescott. At the moment the person I was most curious about was Jack Coyle. I’d wasted our little confrontation because I hadn’t pushed any specifics at him.
I wanted to know where he and Sara met when they got together.
Andrea Prescott was in Iowa City, in class all day, her mother told me. The mom was much nicer than the daughter. I told her I’d try her later.
I spent two hours in the office trying to make some real money. I was finishing up with a probated will when I thought I might learn something from Kenny Chesmore.
“How’s it going, Kenny?”
“Two more chapters, man. Lesbians are a lot easier to write about than three-ways.”
“Those damned three-ways. They can wear a guy out.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry here, McCain.
What’s up?”
“If you wanted to take an eighteen-year-old girl to a motel within driving distance of town here, where would you take her?”
“Eighteen? She’s legal, anyway.”
“Barely,” I said.
“That’s a pun but I’ll let it pass.”
Kenny knew how much I hated puns.
“What you’re really saying is where could you take her where nobody at the motel would talk, right?”
“Right.”
“Nowhere.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means they all blab. All the owners, all the night clerks. When I get stuck for ideas sometimes, I call them up and they tell me about some of the kinky stuff their customers d.”
“So you can’t think of any place?”
“I’d go private. If it were a steady thing, I’d have a little apartment stuck away somewhere.
Something like that. Or I’d take her along with me on business trips. But no way would I start jumping her anywhere around here. Somebody’d spot you for sure.”