Think of Marie Louise with her big breasts beneath the starched white uniform blouse, reading her missal at Mass. And Rita Mae Dwyer, who had looked like a grown woman at fourteen. She wore very high heels and huge gold earrings with her red dress on Sunday. Michael’s father had been one of the men who moved down the aisles with the collection basket on its long stick, thrusting it into row after row, face appropriately solemn. You did not even whisper in a Catholic church in those days unless you had to.
What did he think, that they would have all been here, waiting for him? A dozen Rita Maes in flowered dresses, making a noon visit?
Last night, Rita Mae had said, “Don’t go back there, Mike. Remember it the way it used to be.”
Finally he climbed to his feet. He wandered up the aisle to wards the old wooden confessionals. He found the plaque on the wall listing those who had in the recent past paid for restoration. He closed his eyes, and just for a moment imagined he heard children playing in the school yards-the noontime roar of mingled voices.
There was no such sound. No heavy swish of the swinging doors as the parishioners came and went. Only the solemn empty place. And the Virgin under her crown on the high altar.
Small, far away, the image seemed. And it occurred to him intellectually that he ought to pray to it. He ought to ask the Virgin or God why he had been brought back here, what it meant that he’d been snatched from the cold grip of death. But he had no belief in the images on the altar. No memory of childlike belief came back to him.
Instead the memory that came was specific and uncomfortable, and shabby and mean. He and Marie Louise had met to exchange secrets right inside one of these tall front doors. In the pouring rain it had been. And Marie Louise had confessed, reluctantly, that no, she wasn’t pregnant, angry for being made to confess it, angry that he was so relieved. “Don’t you want to get married? Why are we playing these stupid games!”
What would have happened to him if he had married Marie Louise? He saw her big, sullen brown eyes again. He felt her sourness, her disappointment. He could not imagine such a thing.
Marie Louise’s voice came back again. “You know you’re going to marry me sooner or later. We’re meant for each other.”
Meant. Had he been meant to leave here, meant to do the things he’d done in his life, meant to travel so far? Meant to fall from the rock into the sea and drift slowly out, away from all the lights of land?
He thought of Rowan-not merely of the visual image, but of everything Rowan was to him now. He thought of her sweetness and sensuality, and mystery, of her lean taut body snuggled against his under the covers, of her velvety voice and her cold eyes. He thought of the way she looked at him before they made love, so unself-conscious, forgetting her own body completely, absorbed in his body. In sum, looking at him the way a man looked at a woman. Just as hungry and just as aggressive and yet yielding so magically in his arms.
He was still staring at the altar-staring at the whole vast and gorgeously ornamented church.
He wished he could believe in something. And then he realized that he did. He still believed in his visions, in the goodness of the visions. He believed in them and their goodness as surely as people believed in God or saints, or the God-given lightness of a certain path, as truly as they believed in a vocation.
And this seemed as foolish as the other beliefs. “But I saw, but I felt, but I remember, but I know … ” So much stammering. After all he still couldn’t remember. Nothing in the entire Mayfair history had really brought him back to those precious moments, except the image of Deborah, and for all his certainty that she had been the one who had come to him, he had no real details, no truly remembered moments or words.
On impulse, his eyes still fixed on the altar, he made the sign of the cross.
How many years had it been since he’d done that every day, three times a day? Curiously, thoughtfully, he did it again. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” his eyes still fixed on the Virgin.
“What do they want of me?” he whispered. And trying to reinvoke what little he could of the visions, he realized in despair that the image of the dark-haired woman he had seen was now replaced by the descriptive image of Deborah in the history. One had blotted out the other! He had lost through his reading, not gained.
After a little while more, of standing there in silence, his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, he went slowly back down the aisle, until he had come to the altar rail, and then he walked up the marble steps, crossed the sanctuary, and found his way out through the priest house.
The sun was beating down on Constance Street the way it always had. Merciless and ugly. No trees here. And the garden of the priest house hidden behind its high brick wall, and the lawn beside St. Mary’s burned and tired and dusty.
The holy store on the far corner, with all its pretty little statues and holy pictures, was no more. Boards on the windows. A real estate sign on the painted wooden wall.
The little bald man with the sweaty red face sat on the rectory steps, his arms folded on his knees, eyes following a gust of gray-winged pigeons as they flew up the dreary peeling façade of St. Alphonsus.
“They oughtta poison them birds,” he said. “They dirty up everything.”
Michael lighted a cigarette, offered one to the man. The man took it with a nod. Michael gave him the near empty matchbook.
“Son, why don’t you take off that gold watch and slip it inside your pocket?” the man said. “Don’t walk around here with that thing on your wrist, ya hear?”
“They want my watch,” Michael said, “they’re gonna take my wrist with it, and the fist that’s attached to it.”
The old man just shrugged and shook his head.
Up on the corner of Magazine and Jackson Michael went in a dark, evil-looking bar, in the sorriest old sagging wooden clapboard building. In all his years in San Francisco, he had never seen such a run-down place. A white man hung like a shadow at the far end, staring at him with glittering eyes out of a cracked and caved-in face. The bartender too was white.
“Give me a beer,” Michael said.
“What kind?”
“I don’t give a damn.”
He timed it perfectly. At three minutes before three he was crossing Camp Street, walking slowly, so the heat would not kill him, and soothed once more by the sweet shade and random beauty of the Garden District. Yes, all this was as it had always been. And at once he felt good; at once he felt he was where he wanted to be, and maybe even where he ought to be, if one could chart a course of one’s own.
At three P.M. exactly he stood at the open gate. This was the first time he had seen the house in the sunlight, and his pulse quickened. Here, yes. Even in its neglect it was dignified, grand, merely slumbering beneath the overhanging vines, its long shutters caked with flaking green paint yet still hanging straight on their iron hinges. Waiting …
A giddiness overtook him as he looked at it, a swift delight that for whatever reasons, he had come back. Doing what I am supposed to be doing …
He went up the marble steps, and pushed at the door, and when it opened he walked into the long broad hallway. Never in San Francisco had he been in such a structure, had he stood under such a high ceiling, or looked at doorways so graceful and tall.