Act of Deceit

Chapter 42

D onnally hadn’t worn a suit since his grandmother’s funeral nine years earlier. He felt like a clown at a wake as he sat in the Holy Names Church library after services among the screaming Hispanic kids who’d been herded inside by their Sunday school teacher.

But it was worth the awkwardness.

The 1986 church directory he located on a shelf with others had a color photograph of Father Phil and a last name: McGrath. There wasn’t a picture of him in the directory for the year before or the year after.

Father Phil looked to Donnally more like a man who’d spent most of his fifty-five years sitting on a barstool drinking neat bourbons, rather than in a confessional, with his cheeks becoming more ruddy and his eyeglasses becoming less fashionable in the eternal semidarkness of a neighborhood bar.

Donnally wasn’t sure how he’d pry Melvin’s last name out of the priest when he tracked him down, but he hoped that with the passage of time, the demands of confidentiality would give way to an old man’s nostalgia.

The church secretary’s eyes turned to glass when Donnally spoke the father’s name. The beatific afterglow of the morning service that had greeted him when he walked through her office door vanished just as fast. It was replaced by a waxen face and a defensive stare.

“He’s no longer here,” she said, looking up at Donnally, her voice even. “He left many years ago.”

She didn’t use his name. Just “he,” spoken as if she’d used the word “it.”

“Do you know where he might be now?” Donnally asked, guessing that the answer would be some form of a snide for me to know and you to find out.

The secretary’s voice was not at all singsongy when she answered; it was shaky, as if she’d already used up her allotment of self-control.

“I… I don’t know where he is.”

“Don’t you have some sort of directory of priests?” he asked. “Or somebody I can call?”

She reached for a message pad and wrote out a telephone number.

“You can call the diocese. Maybe they’ll help you.”

Donnally accepted the slip of paper, then thanked her and turned away. It wasn’t lost on him that she’d said “maybe” rather than “can.” Even before he reached the threshold, he grasped that the answer from the diocese would be “won’t.”

Moments after the door closed behind him, he heard the secretary’s muffled voice.

“I’m sorry to bother you on Sunday, Mr. Pagaroli, but a man was just here asking about Father Phil… I didn’t give him your name or the name of your law firm… I’ll let the monsignor know… sure… I’ll do that.”

Donnally smiled like a former altar boy at two elderly women walking past him and down the hallway, their short, plump bodies shrouded in black. But he wasn’t smiling inside as he drove away, for he now understood that whatever Father Phil McGrath had done twenty years earlier lived on in the present like a cancer in remission.

A half hour after leaving the church, Donnally walked into Fort Miley and asked the receptionist to page Charles Brown. A few minutes later, Brown walked unescorted into the lobby. He was still clean shaven, his hair was trimmed, and he was wearing a brown sweater and black pants. His face aimed at an earnest expression, but his eyes betrayed him. Donnally followed Brown’s leer toward a young woman sitting alone along a wall, then he stepped in front of her, so she wouldn’t be forced to see herself in Brown’s predatory reflection.

Brown finally looked up and greeted Donnally, then led him to the visiting room, where they sat facing each other across a metal table.

It seemed to Donnally that the medications Janie had put Brown on were now working, or at least he was at a lucid mid-point between the extremes.

Donnally opened the church directory and pointed at the photo of Father Phil. Brown squinted at it, then nodded.

“He came to see Anna.” Brown grinned. “He was drunk and Anna made him go away. But he came back, even more drunk. He said that Anna was going to ruin him.”

“Why would Anna want to ruin him?”

“Because of Melvin. He was Anna’s student. Melvin was unhappy with that man.” He pointed at the photograph. “That’s why Dr. Sherwyn came, because of him.”

“Was the father a patient of Dr. Sherwyn?”

“I thought so, but Anna didn’t say. She didn’t talk to me much.”

“When was the last time the father visited Anna?”

Brown shrugged. “I don’t remember. I get confused.”

Donnally heard the click of high heels pass behind him, then watched Brown’s eyes track the woman, left to right, below waist level, as if he could see her crotch through her skirt. Donnally now suspected that this was the real reason Brown played the role of Rover the Mascot. He could sit on the sidewalk and look up between the legs of women walking by. He wondered whether Anna’s endurance of this creature was a form of penitence, or maybe repentance in the old, biblical sense of returning to sorrow, returning to her own sexual abuse by her father.

“What about Artie and Robert?” Donnally asked.

“I don’t know,” Brown said, forcing himself to look back at Donnally. “Anna liked Artie, but didn’t trust Robert. I heard her tell Trudy that Artie felt guilty all the time and Robert used drugs. I didn’t understand what she meant. I thought it would be the other way around.” His eyebrows furrowed. “Maybe Janie can explain it to me.”

“Do you know Melvin’s last name?”

Brown shook his head. “He was just Melvin.”

A s Donnally walked through Janie’s living room toward her office to run Internet searches on McGrath and Pagaroli, it struck him that she hadn’t made much progress in packing. The bookshelves were still half full and her photographs remained propped at their oblique angles, half looking at one another, half looking out into the room. The resignation to which he’d become accustomed lifted for a moment, then he realized that her preemptive boxing of books was more symbolic than pragmatic, since it would take her a month or two to find another house to rent.

Maybe that was the problem all along, he said to himself as he sat down at her desk. Somehow we started communicating only through symbolism.

He paused and looked around at the walls and windows and doors, and it struck him that the house, which could’ve been a home in some people’s lives, had devolved into just a way station in which both of them had gotten stranded.