Silent Retreats Read online

  She stood there insistently as he went back to peering in the window. He sensed that she was impatient with him. "Listen," he said, "you seem like a pleasant enough lady. Why don't I just break the rules and take a look at my boy for about another thirty seconds, and then I'll head out the same door I just walked in, no problem."

  "This, sir, is a city school. We have to control who comes and goes. Besides they have a visitor's packet for you in the office, and they can call your son from there, on the intercom. Or you could wait," she said. "In a few minutes, they'll be coming to the gymnasium for lunch." She was still smiling, perhaps a little more forcibly. Martin wanted to punch her in her soft little jaw. "The PTA worked very hard on the packet. It's got their newsletter and the financial report."

  "Please," he said. "I don't want the PTA newsletter. I want a moment's peace, looking at my little boy. I don't want to mess over school policy, but this is a little thing, perhaps even microscopic. I'll be out of here in a minute." Martin leaned down to whisper something in the lady's ear. "I'm just not in the mood for the visitor's packet," he said in a loud whisper. He winked. "In fact, I'm afraid it will piss me off." He stood back and looked at her, his arms up. "I might go berserk right there in the principal's office."

  The woman turned and hurried down the hall to tattle. She wore black-heeled shoes that clacked as she went. At one point as she hurried, she looked back over her shoulder.

  A wave of restlessness seemed to sweep through the school. The big round clocks were signaling to everyone that the morning segment of confinement was close to over. Then Martin noticed another lady coming down the hall, approaching somehow warily but with a big smile.

  "Good morning," she said. "Can I help you? I'm Dr. Cousins—Alberta Cousins—I'm the principal here. Is your boy in this room?"

  "Yes," Martin said, looking through the window. "I was just looking at him."

  "Which child is it?" She came close to look through the same small window as he pointed.

  "The white-haired boy with the pencil in his mouth. Chews the erasers."

  "I hear you just encountered our librarian, Mrs. Redding."

  "Yes." Martin continued to look through the window.

  "She probably seems like an old biddy to you, but she's a real pro in the classroom, I can tell you."

  "That's good," Martin said. "Very loyal of you to mention it."

  "Want me to get your boy out here?—it's no problem at all." Before he could answer, she ducked past him and opened the door. She signaled to Mrs. Rudolph, a very tall, made-up woman, straight-backed, perhaps forty-five. "Jeff's father has come to see him—could we have him a moment?"

  Then Jeff was out in the hall, a little bewildered. He grinned up at his dad, cheeky face, eyes like his mom. "Hey," Martin said to him.

  "Hey," the boy said back.

  "If you don't mind," the principal said to Martin, "would you take your walk out the north door? In four minutes the halls will be filled with masses of children, marginally controlled and very hungry." She smiled warmly. "And," she said, "I don't know whether our librarian mentioned it, but when you're finished we have a visitor's register for you to sign and a packet of materials for you, in the office."

  "She mentioned it."

  The lady faded off, back down the hall.

  "How you doin'?" Martin said to Jeff when they were alone. Jeff was in the first grade.

  "Fine," he said. As they walked toward the north door, they were holding hands, both looking at the floor. Martin was fighting another swell of emotion. "We goin' home now?" Jeff asked.

  "What're you studying in there?" Martin said in a low voice.

  "Nothin'."

  "C'mon."

  "Vegetables."

  "Vegetables, great. Which ones?"

  "We had to write our favorite ones."

  "That must have been tough. Which ones are your favorites?"

  "Carrots, root beer, and grape juice."

  "Love it, man. Root beer's the best. I saw Daren—he's almost as tall as you are now."

  "We had a army guy today." They arrived at the north door.

  "Yeah? A real one?"

  "He let us sit in his jeep. Army guys aren't to kill people—they under-arrest 'em."

  "Did you sign up?"

  "Sign up for what?" Jeff said.

  "Hey, Jeffrey. I just thought of something." They were sitting on the north step in warm sunlight. "Remember when we played baseball last spring? When we played together in the park where the ducks are? Remember?"

  "Yip."

  "Know what that made me think of?"

  "Nope."

  "I thought of when my dad first played baseball with me." Tears.

  "How come?" Jeff said. He squinched up his nose.

  "How come what?" The handkerchief.

  Jeff laughed at that.

  "Once Dad and I were playing burn-out—you know?—when you throw back and forth real hard trying to make the other guy say ouch. And I threw this one real hard and it skipped off his glove and gave him a black eye. Playing baseball with you, it made me think of playing with my own dad and it made me happy. Back then, when I was playing with him, I never knew there'd be a you."

  "Your dad died, right?"

  "That's right, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about before that. When I was little like you are. Little kids don't realize you were little once too. It just . . ." Martin could feel the point evaporating, but he wanted to say something magic. "It just seems real . . . real interesting to me that my dad played baseball with me and then I played it with you years and years later. And you and him, you never met. You're flesh and blood, but you never met. I'm the bridge between you."

  Jeff was looking out toward the playground. "Hey, Dad . . ." Martin waited. "Wanna see the gym? It's time for lunch."

  Martin stood up. "Nah. I gotta go to work." He kissed Jeff on top of his blond head and squeezed him a good one. "I love you, boy," he told him, and Jeff's eyes wandered back toward the north door.

  "I love you too, Poppsy," Jeff said, still looking away. "I don't get it. Why did you come to school?"

  Martin was heading back toward the car. "I needed to know about vegetables. Grown-ups don't know everything, you know."

  "Hey, Dad," Jeff shouted as he pulled open the door to the school, "guess what?"

  "What?" Martin spoke over the top of his car and across part of the school yard.

  "Daren's got poison oak."

  "It'll go away." Martin smiled, getting into the car. When he looked back that way, Jeff had gone into the school.

  What an odd state of mind, Martin thought, to wander through the suburbs in broad daylight, drifting with the radio and the flow of traffic. These disc jockeys, they had the city mood perfectly calibrated with their rattling jokes and timed, practiced chaos. At the stoplights, he watched the other drivers. How many of them too were wandering? He came across the northside, all the way to Lake Michigan, and drove a short distance south on Lake Shore Drive until he came to Belmont Harbor.

  He parked at the far end of the parking lot and, in the wind and long shadows, sat motionless. There was a woman he knew and he thought of her now, because she always talked to him about being lonely and maybe she was alone now for all he knew, and she had talked to him about keeping a bottle of gin under the bed for nighttime, whether because she was afraid or because she was bored or because she needed love and had no chance of ever having it. It had been a revelation to hear her talk about being alone. She'd been in every kind of therapy known to woman, she'd even been Rolfed in a motel room in Danville, all for the company of it, because other possibilities seemed to have expired. She'd raised her children—they were gone from her except for desperate phone calls they'd make to her in the night, the kind that brought up the heartbeat and made sleep impossible; because she was nearly forty-seven and alone, she felt she was about to slip into the hole.

  Today Martin knew how she felt, as he watched the October waves on the lak
e. The sun dropped just behind the tall bank of apartment buildings west of Lake Shore Drive, and a chill sat him up. He'd met her, this woman, in a strange town. In a Mexican restaurant they talked with their heads close so even now he could remember the glitter in her makeup, the slightly caked mascara in her eyelashes when she'd cried a couple of times, the warning she gave him about being unfaithful, voice of experience: "I'm not married anymore because of something like this," she said to him. "I found out he was seeing someone else and I left him inside the hour. I took the kids." She was staring right at him. She knew what she was saying to him, the sign she was giving. "If you love a person and the person isn't faithful, there's no hurt like it."

  There was a phone booth in the lobby of the Drake Hotel, not far from Belmont Harbor.

  "South Ridge Legal Services," a voice said at the other end of the line.

  "I'm calling a guy named Skidmore."

  "I'm sorry," the voice said, "we're closed. Can I take a message?"

  "Closed?"

  "Yessir," said the voice, flat, bored, unapologetic.

  "I just wanted to tell this guy Skidmore . . . I wanted to tell him what to do with a red hot poker."

  "I see. That doesn't sound too nice, sir. May I say who called?" The man on the other end spoke in a monotone.

  "Tell him this is your old pal and worst enemy from when you were twelve."

  "I see. That's nice. That sounds very nice, I would say." Skidmore would not sound surprised nor break character. "What shall I tell him you are up to these days?"

  "Tell him it's none of his business."

  "I see," Skidmore said. "That doesn't sound very nice. Where shall I tell him you are calling from?"

  "Las Vegas, on the strip."

  "Nice. That's nice. Say hello to Wayne Newton for him." They both laughed. "Shall I tell him you were drunk when you called, like you usually are?"

  "I don't recognize the accent," Martin told him. "It isn't quite British."

  "Kind of a mix, I'd say," Skidmore said. "Sophisticated, don't you think?"

  "Not really."

  "You were in a religious thing last time you called. Drunk and very religious. We talked about baseball and the absence of an afterlife."

  "I don't remember," Martin said.

  "Drunk." Skidmore mumbled it away from the phone.

  "Your letters," Martin said, "are meaner than usual lately."

  "Don't start it. I'm not mean."

  "I'm not the only one who thinks it."

  "I know. So what else is happening?"

  "How's legal services for the poor in Nebraska?"

  "Terrible. I'm not such a great lawyer, I'm afraid. McFarland says I hate Indians and won't admit it."

  "I expect he's right."

  "Cut the crap. You don't know me anymore. Every cell's turned over since way back the hell whenever it was."

  "Some things don't turn over with the cells," Martin said.

  He heard a resolute sigh on the other end.

  Skidmore changed the subject. "I'm living in this trailer—in my office, you know? And I've got this Indian woman around here somewhere. Fifty years old. I just saw her go by the window here a minute ago, chasing a blue jay with a god damned tomahawk." The low familiar mean laugh.

  "Fifty," Martin said.

  "Nothing like it. We like to rassle," Skidmore said in his best boys-will-be-boys central Illinois idiom, but with the subsequent affectations of Australia crowding in.

  Martin laughed in spite of himself. The wires buzzed. Maybe this would be the last time they would ever talk. Letters were easier than phone calls. Nowhere in this world could Martin quite find the Skidmore he knew a long time ago, but the handwriting, it had never changed. Always, on the brink of making a call to Skidmore, he noticed his motivation. It was always a wave of feeling alone, wanting to be friends again. "Ken Boyer died."

  "Yup," Skidmore said. Cardinal third baseman, their old common hero. "How's the wife and kid, Rod or whatever his name is?"

  "His name is Jeff."

  "Right. How's he? Gonna have a bunch more?"

  "Everyone's fine. Thanks for asking," Martin said.

  Again the phone line buzzed.

  "Rough world," Martin said. Maybe he could convey something by suggestion.

  "Plenty rough," Skidmore said. Silence. Then he said, "God, you're nuts."

  Quiet again.

  "I always think, if I could just put together the right set of words," Martin said.

  "Yeah, then what? outgrow it."

  Martin let the phone call die. The buzz in his ear remained, and there was nothing from Skidmore to stop it. Trying to keep his voice flat, Martin said, "There isn't any friendship anymore."

  "Go home. Vegas is no place for a man in your frame of mind."

  "I'm in Chicago."

  "I gotta go. I'm an attorney. Time is money. Get off the sauce and go home, is my advice. Play catch with Rod." Skidmore hung up.

  Martin responded to the operator by feeding in the change, and then opened the door just a little to shut the ceiling light off. Across the lobby, through the front doors, he watched a Mercedes being unloaded by two bellmen. The sun was almost down.

  Nine o'clock. The hotel lobby's colors seemed faster when he was coming out of the smoky lounge than when he went in. The phone booth was still in approximately the same place. The floor sloped in a way Martin hadn't noticed earlier. For three hours he'd hung suspended in a vision of himself in a mirror, through some upside-down glasses hanging in a rack behind the bar. This time he called collect.

  "Hello," she said.

  "Hello."

  She paused, recognizing the voice. "Well. Where might you be?"

  "I'm downtown at the Drake Hotel, case someone asks. I'm okay."

  "Sure you are."

  "I am."

  "This is getting to be a regular thing."

  "I wouldn't say that," Martin muttered.

  "You what?"

  "I took a drive," he said. "Just ended up down here."

  "You took a drive? Is that what you want me to believe?"

  "You don't know shit about men," he said.

  "I see."

  He didn't think she did see yet. "Do you understand what I'm saying? You don't know shit." His voice banged against the wall of the phone booth, banged back into his own ears. "I've been meaning to tell you that."

  "I think I've pretty much got it," she said. She didn't say anything for a moment and neither did Martin. Finally she said, "What's to understand? I missed a meeting tonight because of this and I'm in a lousy mood. Stay downtown 'til you either get it straight or sleep it off. You got somebody to drive you?"

  "I'll be home in an hour or so."

  "Who'll drive?" she said.

  "Look, I'm alone and shall do the driving."

  "Delightful."

  The phone line was quiet for a while. "Do you understand me, about what I was saying?"

  "Which was?"

  Martin momentarily forgot.

  She said, "Jeffrey finally mentioned around bedtime that you'd been to school to see him. So I called Charlotte Rudolph and she said you'd terrorized the librarian in the school hall at lunch—threatened to tear the principal's office to pieces. Do you ever think about anyone else?"

  "Like who?"

  "Like your son."

  "He was fine. We had a nice chat. Don't use him—he was fine. Don't use him on me because you missed a sales meeting. You miss those all the time. You hate those goddamned sales meetings."

  "He was embarrassed. He told me so."

  "He did not. He wasn't embarrassed."

  "He was," she said. "You embarrassed him." All was quiet for a few seconds. "Look," she said. "I've been worried. I need to know what's going on so I can make some plans for myself. What's going on? Is this the great midlife crisis?"

  "That would be the easy conclusion, my dear," he said. "Or the pre-midlife fore-crisis. I called them about silent retreats. He asked me what I've done for the
Almighty lately."

  "Are there any silent retreats anymore?"

  "Yes, but they ain't silent and they ain't retreats. I told him I can have an encounter any time I want one, but I can't get silence when I need it. He said silence is self-indulgent, something like that."

  "What's wrong with self-indulgence, or did he say?"

  "We didn't talk very long." He took a deep breath. He was buzzing, the line was buzzing, the colors in the hotel lobby were buzzing. "I'll drive with maximum carefulness and caution."

  "To the extent you can differentiate," she said.

  Martin hung it up. "I'm having a willful adventure here," he said to the hung-up phone. A lady in a glittering gown and jewelry buzzed across the lobby. He opened the door of the booth just enough to let the ceiling light go out and from the dark observed her. He could imagine what her aloof, urbane arms would feel like around him, what look in her self-absorbed eye there would be if they were together.

  It was ten-thirty when he pulled up in front of the rectory at St. Michael's in Wheaton. The front-right tire of the car jumped the curb. Martin, accepting chaos as a way of life, left it that way. He crossed the wide amber-lighted street, walked into the shadows up the front walk, felt the chill around his ankles as he carefully climbed the shadowed front porch steps and knocked on the door. The porch light came on, yellow. A Franciscan priest cracked the door and looked out, then flipped the chain lock and opened it wide. "Yes, can I help you?" he said, his hands deep in his long brown habit, the white ropes dangling far down.

  "Bless me, Father—for I am drunk."

  "Funny," the priest said. "But I've heard funnier. You must be Mr. Silent Retreats himself. I recognize the voice."

  "I doubt it. Every cell in my body has turned over since this morning."

  The priest gestured for Martin to come in, and Martin bowed past him, walking carefully so as not to fall or break something. The priest indicated a parlorlike room off to the right, and Martin went in there.

  "Looks like you've been trying to work out your own redemption."

  "Are you going to keep saying things like that all the time I'm here?"

  "Sorry. Have a seat."

  When Martin sat down, he noticed that the priest was pulling a pistol out of his habit and setting it on the umbrella stand behind the front door.