Reborn

1

Bill was reading his daily office in his room when the phone rang, startling him. Only a handful of people had his private number, and when they called, it was usually with bad news. So he was especially worried when he recognized Jim's voice.

"Jim! Is something wrong?" he said in a rush, remembering Carol's anxious call on Tuesday and Jim's vaguely hostile reception of his offer of help. Was Carol all right?

"No. Everything's fine, Bill. Really fine. I just wanted to apologize for acting so weird when you called me the other day."

"It's okay," Bill said, feeling his muscles uncoil. "We all get uptight now and again."

It was good to hear Jim sounding like his old self.

"Yeah, well, the will, the inheritance, the mansion, everything sort of combined to do a number on my head. Got me all bent out of shape. But I've got everything back in perspective now and I feel a whole lot better."

During the small talk that followed, Bill noticed that Jim danced away from anything that had to do with Hanley or the inheritance or who his mother might be. He gathered from Jim's too casual air and uncharacteristic use of jargon that he hadn't climbed completely out of the pressure cooker yet. He was dying to ask if he had learned anything about his mother but remembered how coolly that subject had been received on Tuesday, so he kept mum.

After hanging up, Bill sat by the window thinking how sad and ironic it was that just as he was reestablishing contact with an old friend, he was preparing to move a couple of hundred miles away.

And he was moving away. Old friend or not, Bill wasn't going to let anyone keep him here at St. F.'s. Nothing was going to delay his departure now that the Provincial had found a teaching spot for him.

He sat a while longer at the window, feeling unaccountably blue. What was wrong? Certainly he wasn't going to miss this place:

Then he realized that this was the time he usually played chess with Nicky. It seemed empty without him here scratching his misshapen head and picking his blackheads. But that was soon to be a part of the past. Nicky would be adopted by the Calders and Bill would be on his way to Baltimore.

He was about to return to his breviary when he noticed a late-model blue Dodge pull up to the curb in front of St. F.'s. It looked familiar. Just like—

Oh hell!

Nicky got out of the car and ran up the front steps, disappearing from view. Professor Calder got out of the driver's seat and followed him at a much slower pace. Bill quickly shrugged into his cassock and hurried downstairs.

Professor Calder was already on his way out when Bill arrived.

"What—?"

The professor waved him off. "It's not going to work," he said over his shoulder.

"Why not? What happened?"

"Nothing. He's just not right."

And then he was out the door and gone.

Bill was stunned. He stared at the slowly closing door in mute confusion, then turned to Nicky who was leaning against the far wall, looking at his shoes.

"What did you do this time?"

"Nothing."

"Bull! Let's hear it!"

"I caught him cheating at chess!"

"Oh, come on, Nicky! Give me a break!"

"It's true! Everything was going great until we started playing chess. I was winning with that bishop's gambit you showed me. He sent me out to the kitchen for another cup of hot chocolate, and when I came back, he had moved his queen's knight one square to the left."

"And you accused him of cheating?"

"Not right away. I just told him that the knight wasn't where it was when I'd left the room. He got all huffy and said, 'I'm sure you're mistaken, young man.' "

"Then what?"

"Then I called him a cheat!"

"Damn it, Nicky!" Bill felt his anger shooting straight to the boiling point, but he kept a lid on it. "Did it ever occur to you that you could be mistaken?"

"You know I don't make mistakes like that!" Nicky said, tears starting in his eyes.

That did it. Bill picked up Nicky's duffel bag and shoved it into the boy's arms. His jaw ached as he spoke through his teeth.

"Get out of the good clothes, put them back in the dress-up closet, then go to your room and stay there. Don't show your face till dinner."

"But he cheated!" Nicky said, his lips quivering.

"So what! Are you so damn perfect you can't overlook that?"

Nicky turned and ran toward the dormitory.

Bill watched him go. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he headed for his office. Once there, he lifted the blotter, pulled out the letter from Loyola High School, and sat there staring at it.

Damn, damn, damn!

He felt like a heel for yelling at Nicky like that. If there was one thing you could say about that kid, it was that he didn't lie. Another thing you could say was that his memory was damn near perfect—eidetic, in fact. He could picture entire pages of a book in his mind and read the text back verbatim. So Bill knew that if Nicky was concentrating on a chess game, he would have the position of every piece etched in his mind.

Which meant that Professor Calder had cheated.

So… the prof was a pompous toad whose ego wouldn't allow him to be defeated in chess by a bright ten-year-old kid, and Nicky was stupid for not letting the guy have his petty, tainted victory. And Bill had promised to stay on at St. Francis until Nicky was adopted.

What a screwed-up mess!

In spite of himself, he had to admire Nicky's intellectual honesty in calling Professor Calder out. Maybe he didn't want to be adopted by a phony and a cheat, but for chrissake, everybody made compromises in life! Nicky could have looked the other way!

His frustration finally reached the overflow point. With an angry growl Bill balled up the letter from Loyola High and bounced it off the far wall of his office.

I'm never getting out of here!

Which might not be an exaggeration, he realized. If he turned down this post, who knew when he'd get another offer of a teaching job?

There was only one thing to do: Take the job.

He scouted the floor of his office, found the letter, and flattened it out on the desk. He knew he had made a promise to Nicky, but he couldn't be bound by it if Nicky wasn't going to hold up his end. Maybe Nicky didn't want to leave St. F.'s. Okay, that was fine. But Bill Ryan wasn't going to rot here in Queens when there was so much to be done out there in the real world.

He began composing the letters he would have to write.