“About Bob Comeaux? He wants Mrs. LaFaye’s place, her horses and probably her money, and will even take Mrs. LaFaye to get them.”
“You told me that. What does he want from Father Placide?”
She explains patiently. “It’s no secret. Bob Comeaux wants to buy old St. Margaret’s — you know, where Father Smith’s hospice is, or was. He wants it for a private nursing home, a real moneymaker, you know. Actually that building would be a marvelous investment. Imagine a hundred nuns living out there! And it just so happens the hospice has folded up and Father Smith has too, he’s not at all well. The bishop would like to get rid of it, he needs the money. Placide would like to get rid of it so Father Smith can come back and help him with the parish. You’re supposed to talk Father Smith out of the fire tower and into coming back to St. Michael’s. Then the bishop can sell the place to Bob Comeaux and everybody will be happy. Do you understand?”
“No.” I am thinking about the déjà vu. I think I know what it was about. It was about cars, women, girls, youth, the past, the old U.S.A., about remembering what it was like to be sitting in a car with a girl swiveled around to face you, her bare knee cocked up on the vinyl, with four wheels under you, free to go anywhere, to the Gulf Coast, to Wyoming. It, the déjà vu, came from the smell of hot Chevy metal and vinyl and seat stuffing tingling in the nostrils and radiating up into the hippocampus of the old brain and into the sights and sounds of the new cortex, which gathers into itself a forgotten world, bits and pieces of cortical memory like old snapshots scattered through an abandoned house.
I rise. She takes hold of my lapel again. “You come on out to Pantherburn later. I have something to show you. I know you can come. Your wife’s gone.”
I laugh. “I’m not surprised. You know everything else.”
“You don’t have much luck with women, do you?”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Only that you could use somebody right now to look after you.”
“And you’re going to look after me.”
“Somebody had better.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re a mess. Look at you. You may be smart, but you’re a mess.”
“That’s true.”
“Eat your BLT. I put it and the Coke in your car.”
“All right.”
“Eat.”
She grabs my lapel again, both lapels. We are almost face to face.
“You’re coming out to Pantherburn later?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“What?”
“How many cases have you got of this — ah — syndrome?”
“Oh, a dozen, I guess.”
“Could you bring the case histories with you?”
“I know the case histories.”
“Okay. Then bring their social security numbers.”
“What for?”
“Trust me.”
“All right.”
5. I FIND FATHER PLACIDE in the rectory of St. Michael’s. Mrs. Saia, the housekeeper, lets me in. It is his living quarters, but the living room looks like an untidy business office. There are desks, file cabinets, typewriters, a photocopier, a computer, stacks of bulletins and collection envelopes, and a coin-counting machine.
A man dressed in a business suit, probably a deacon, is seated at a desk in the hall sorting out different-colored cards. He greets me amiably. I try to remember his name.
St. Michael himself is still there, a three-foot bronze archangel brandishing a loose sword, bent at the tip, which I used to fiddle with while attending meetings of the St. Vincent de Paul Society years ago. The sword got lost. They must have found it. I seem to remember that—
Father Placide is nowhere to be seen. The next room, connected by an arched doorway, is a kind of parlor furnished with old-fashioned mohair sofas. Half a dozen women are sitting there. It is some kind of meeting, perhaps the altar society, perhaps the Blue Army, perhaps the Legion of Mary. I recognize three of them: Mrs. Saia, a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman with perfect dark satiny skin; Mrs. Ernestine Kelly, wife of councilman Jack Kelly, an old fisherman friend of mine and sometime barmate at the Little Napoleon, a very pretty grayhaired woman with a solemn, even sad, expression, whom one thinks of as pious in the old sense, who still observes the old Catholic devotions, still makes First Fridays, sends vials of Lourdes water to sick friends, and from time to time mails me a holy card with a saint’s picture and always the same note: Praying for you and your intentions, on which occasions I always wonder what she is praying for, my doing time in Alabama? mine and Jack’s drinking? my loss of faith? Ellen’s neglect of me for duplicate bridge? And Jan Greene, a youngish, intense blade of a brunette, ex-New Orleanian, wife of a gynecologist colleague and an old-style Catholic who wants to rescue the Church from its messing in politics and revolution, from nutty nuns and ex-nuns, from antipapal priests and malignant heterodox Dutch theologians, and so revive the best of the old Church, that is, orthodox theology, without its pious excesses, meaning Ernestine’s holy pictures and First Fridays.
The women see me and give me guarded greetings, with half nods, smiling. They can’t decide how disgraced I am, so charitably give me the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps Father Placide is at the meeting, but no, here he comes breezing in behind me. He greets me cordially, paying no attention to the meeting.
Father is a thin, young, pale, harassed priest. Except for his black dickey with clerical collar attached, which he wears over a T-shirt, he looks like an overworked intern. His face has a greenish pallor and the speckling of a stubble, the look of a man who has forgotten to shave. There is a rash where the collar irritates his neck.
Though I hardly know him, he greets me as warmly as if I were a faithful parishioner, but it may be that he is too harried to remember. He takes the easy confidential tone of one professional consulting another: Look, Dr. More, we have a little problem here—
We are sitting side by side at a broad table holding the coin counter and covered by papers and cloth coin bags. He speaks easily, alternately rubbing and widening his eyes like a surgeon who has finished a six-hour operation and has flopped in a chair to discuss the case.
The women in the parlor resume their meeting.
The case is Father Smith. He, Father Placide, has his troubles. The main trouble is that the pastor, Monsignor Schleifkopf, has departed, returned to the Midwest, some say to join the conservative schismatics in Cicero, some say to join the liberal Dutch schismatics in South Bend. St. Michael’s Church here is still Roman Catholic; that is, it still recognizes the authority of the pope as the lawful successor to St. Peter. Young Father Placide was left with the burden of running the parish until a replacement could be found. This would not have been a problem since the other assistant, Father Smith, though not a young man, was a vigorous one. And he seemed well when he came back from Alabama, no longer a boozer. Between the two of them they could and did take up the slack. Father Smith ran the hospice out by the fire tower and the little mission “under the hill” and helped out at St. Michael’s with Masses, meetings, confessions, CYO, and such. Now, it seems, Father Smith has conked out, leaving Placide holding the bag.
“Doctor,” says the priest, his hollow white eyes not quite focused, “I can’t do it all. We’ve been promised a pastor this month. We were promised a pastor last month and the month before. It would be very helpful if Father Smith would help out here. I understand y’all are old friends, so I was wondering if you might see him, talk to him, give him — ah — whatever therapy he might need, tell him I need him. The deacons here, they’re fine, they’re doing a tremendous job, but they can’t do Masses, confessions, funerals, weddings, and suchlike. Doc, I’m going to tell you something, listen: I’ll serve the good Lord and His people as long as I can, but, Doc, I’m going to tell you, they ’bout to run this little priest into the ground.”