SIX
He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn't realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing is raising her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn't even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face .
"Go on and look at him ," she says. "Because guess what ? This is my brother's other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks - you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn't want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It's his liver that's killing him. They poked a hole in that, too, and it's dying ."
"Miss Magruder, I - "
"It's Mrs. Rawlings," she tells him, "not that it's anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you've done to him."
"I was in California... I saw it in the paper ..."
"Oh, I'm sure," she says. "I'm sure. But you're the only one I can get hold of, don't you see! The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer's Disease, and the rest aren't here. They're eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes them feel. Well, Reverend Callahan - or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself - let me tell you how this makes me feel. It... makes... me ... FURIOUS. " She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk, why not? It's been years since he's heard a confession, but some things are like riding a bicycle .
"He graduated from NYU cum laude," she says. "Did you know that? He took second in the Beloit Poetry Prize Competition in 1949, did you know that ? As an undergraduate! He wrote a novel... a beautiful novel... and it's in my attic, gathering dust."
Callahan can feel soft warm dew settling on his face. It is coming from her mouth.
"I asked him - no, begged him - to go on with his writing and he laughed at me, said he was no good. 'Leave that to the Mailers and 0'Haras and Irwin Shaws,' he said, 'people who can really do it. I'll wind up in some ivory-tower office, puffing on a meerschaum pipe and looking like Mr. Chips .'
"And that would have been all right, too, " she says, "but then he got involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and from there it was an easy jump to running the flophouse. And hanging with his friends. Friends like you. "
Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the word friends invested with such contempt .
"But where are they now that he's down and going out?" Rowena Magruder Rowlings asks him. "Hmmm? Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where's Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on the Today show, you know. Twice! Where's that f**king Mother Teresa? He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she ?"
Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god . Not enough arms, he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh.
"They're not here. There's just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature. Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he's lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they'll have to take up a subscription from his f**king flophouse to pay for his last illness - if you call getting cut to pieces an illness - and his coffin, and his burial."
She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.