Bishop's Man by Linden Macintyre Read Free Book Online Page B

you’ve had a head start,” Effie said.

     
    She broiled steaks, assembled a simple salad, and as we ate, we rode the currents of wine back through time to places that were safe. John, who drank only water, was mostly quiet.

    Once, he asked abruptly: “Is this the same old table?”

    Effie said: “The very one.”

    “If it could talk,” he said. And grunted.

    After that we all went quiet for a while, each drawn back to memories best not compared. I think there was music somewhere, instrumental music with haunting undertones. Irish, I think.

    Then Sextus broke the silence. “You didn’t tell them, did you?” He was speaking to John.

    “Tell them what?” he asked.

    “My news. I’m staying around, for a while at least. Moving into an apartment in town. John is devastated.” He pointed a finger at his cousin and laughed.

    After a few more glasses of wine, I returned to the Scotch. Effie at some point proposed a toast. “So here we are,” she said. “Here’s to the birthday boy. And the best years still to come. Here’s to fifty. They say it’s the new forty.”

    We drank.

    “And to all my boys,” she continued, smiling toward her two ex-husbands, raising her wineglass daintily. She too was a little drunk by then. They both sat with slightly foolish expressions on their faces.

    And I remember blurting to Sextus later on, “You don’t find any of this strange?”

    “Of course it’s strange,” he said softly, leaning close. “It’s twisted. So fucking what?”

    I nodded, grasping the simple logic the way that only alcohol makes possible.

    “Hey,” he said, “twisted is the new normal.” Then he laughed and grabbed me in a headlock. My drink splashed my lap.

    I struggled. “Don’t do that,” I said, the anger like a jolt.

    “No matter what,” he said, releasing me, “we’re family, for God’s sake.”

    And I felt the unwelcome surge of cheap reassurance.

    The rest of the birthday is blank.

    But I know that the kitchen was tidy and filled with a pale blue light when I came to on the lounge. It took a moment to remember where I was and then it was as if the old man was there again. A shadow hovering near that door on the far side of the kitchen, where her bedroom used to be.

    I found shoes. Carried them into the blaring morning light.

    Outside, the air was cool and moist and loud with early birds. Somewhere in the distance, the resolute sound of a large truck, tires ringing on the cold asphalt.

    Backing out of the yard, I realized there were still two vehicles parked there. Effie’s rental and the red half-ton that Sextus drives.

     
    August arrives on chilly mornings but softens in the afternoons. On a sunny Sunday, just after lunch, relaxing on the veranda with a Bloody Mary, I was reviewing the words of my morning homily with some satisfaction. A parish, I’d discovered, is a platform. Article Four, Presbyterorum ordanis: “ … apply the perennial truth of the gospel to the concrete circumstances of life.”

    Pat approached me after Mass and clasped my hand a bit longer, I thought, than she should have. Pat is divorced. People talk. But I didn’t really mind the warmth, the graceful touch of a woman’s fingers.

    “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

    I saw sincerity in her eyes and it touched off something close to pleasure. I even asked myself: Dare I believe that I’m beginning to feel more positive? Maybe that’s what happens in your fifties.

    That morning, working from parables about graven images, I was able to make some points about community. How in the absence of community we become strangers to each other, part of the universal alienation (without using that exact phrase). Alienated from ourselves, we seek to find our identities in what I called the Super Strangers, the phony personalities and fashions of commerce and celebrity. The false idols of the modern world. I took shots at Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan and a lot of other Michaels.