Joseph Caldwell - Lazarus Rising

She opened the refrigerator, the freezer, and took out the ice. Father Dunphy was crossing the carpet. Now he was in the kitchen area, just at the far side of the table. The ice cubes were rattled into a zip-lock bag, the bag secured on the third try, her fingers running along the hard tubing that finally joined to seal the opening.

The priest was watching her, closely. Of that she was sure. Now he was looking out the windows. How she knew all this, she had no idea. She just knew it. Now he was looking at her again. He was staring at her hair. To take his eyes off her, he was now looking back through the loft, contemplating the distance he’d come from the elevator to the kitchen. She heard a chair scrape. He was sitting down at the table. She was relieved to remember that she’d put the snifter of pills on the dresser in the bedroom, out of view.

“You’re very kind to let me interrupt your work like this.”

“I was only cleaning brushes.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“A break won’t hurt. They can use the soak.” She picked the dish towel up off the rack but decided it would be too thin, not enough padding around the plastic bag. The hand towel was better but maybe she should get a clean one—for a priest. Then she remembered: this was a clean one. She’d put it there a few hours before after smudging the other one with stains from the raspberries she’d eaten for her lunch. And, it occurred to her, she no longer needed to worry about infecting people, not that she could with a hand towel.

The towel now was neatly wrapped, the feel of the ice coming cold through the nubby cloth. Dempsey turned and held it out to the priest. Father Dunphy was eating grapes, the ones she’d bought along with the raspberries that morning. He seemed to savor the taste, his lips pushed forward as he moved a grape around in his mouth. Then he swallowed it, seeds and all. “Moscato grapes,” he said. “Not easy to find.”

“On Thompson Street, just above Canal.”

“When I was studying in Rome I developed many tastes—or maybe I developed all my tastes, but Moscato grapes are near the top of the list, changing places from time to time with grappa.”

“Help yourself.”

The priest giggled. It was meant to be a chuckle, but it came out a giggle. “I seem to have anticipated your offer. I couldn’t resist.”

He took the icepack and moved it around on his forehead, then back farther, then to the side, then to the middle again until he found the bump. “Can we sit somewhere away from the grapes? I want to leave at least a few for you.”

“I can get more.”

“No, the seeds probably aren’t good for me. But I always swallow Moscato seeds. I don’t want to stop eating the grapes.” He got up, the pack secure against his wound, and started toward the couch. “When you were a kid, were you given the notion that if you swallowed a seed—like a watermelon seed—a watermelon would grow inside you?”

“Of course. And I think I still believe it.” She, too, managed a small laugh.

“When you think about it,” the priest continued, “it was probably the beginning of our sex education—except we didn’t know it.” He paused at the couch. “May I sit here?”

“Please.”

“I can only stay a few minutes.” He sat down, but didn’t lean back. “I knew I’d be in the neighborhood, more or less, when I phoned you. I’m picking up an absentee ballot at Voter Registration on Varick Street. On my way back. Going on retreat but I don’t want to lose my vote. That young man coming up from Arkansas is obviously a rascal, but better a rascal than a Republican, as my mother would say. Don’t let me stay too long. They close at five.”

“Is that too cold?” Dempsey asked.

“Perfect. Especially on a warm day. If I were a Freudian, I’d suspect myself of having done the injury on purpose, just to get the cooling effect, to say nothing of the attention.”

Dempsey sat down on the ladder-back chair and folded her hands on her lap. Father Dunphy was busy taking another look at the workspace and the canvases turned to the wall. “You’re a painter, Johnny told me.”

“Yes. A painter.”

“And those are your paintings.”

“Yes. My paintings.”

“And you prefer not to have them seen?”

“Maybe you should just thank me for being spared the experience.”

He laughed, then said, “All right. I do thank you.”

Dempsey parted her hands then brought them together again, a gesture she hoped was sufficiently noncommittal.

“Since I’ve so little time,” the priest said, “is it all right if I don’t waste any of it pretending this is just a social call?”

“I hadn’t thought for a moment that it was.”

“Johnny told me about—your cure.”

Dempsey waited a moment, then said, “I wish he hadn’t.”

“I can’t say I’m sorry he did.”

“Oh?”

“I really wanted to come here to—well—to ask you if there’s anything I might do for you.”

“It seems a great deal has been done already. But thank you.”

The priest looked at her a moment. He shook his head. Some form of sympathy had relaxed his face, drawing down the corners of his mouth and allowing his cheeks to hang in small jowls along the line of his jaw. He looked away, toward the worktable. “I phoned Doctor Norstar. I hope you don’t mind.” Dempsey resorted again to the gesture: the two hands lifted, parted, as if releasing a bird into the air, then the hands lowered to her lap. Father Dunphy clamped the icepack more firmly on his head. “Doctor Norstar, when I talked to her, told me that because of confidentiality laws, she could not discuss your case. But she quickly added that, even if she could talk, she had no time. She added that the whole business was under continuing review and she didn’t know when—if ever—there would be a final disposition of the case—” He was trying to gesture with his left hand but found it awkward, the movements angular when, it seemed, he’d intended them to be more flowing. He finally switched hands, leaving the right hand free to weave in and out, back and forth, as he talked.

Dempsey listened. She sat up straight and did what could never be less than appropriate in response to what the priest was saying, the parted hands, the return to her lap. “Nothing is ever certain, Doctor Norstar finally told me—apparently having decided to ignore the confidentiality law—until the patient is dead and there’s an autopsy. And even then, according to her, the doctors could be wrong. She seemed somewhat exasperated by the whole business.”

Dempsey, not wanting to repeat the gesture too often, decided to speak. “She’s kept quite busy.”

“I don’t doubt it. But she became even more impatient— abrupt is the better word—when I used the word miracle . She very distinctly told me the word had no interest for her. It was none of her concern, she said. She would stay as far away from the subject as possible and could cooperate only in strictly medical matters, and reluctantly even then.”

The icepack had slipped to the right and was no longer covering the bump. He moved the towel back farther on his bald head, but again it centered.

“What I want to do, I wouldn’t want to do without your permission, without your cooperation, so I’m hoping you’ll agree.”

“Agree? To what?”

“I intend to go to the cardinal. I’d tell him about the cure—the possible miracle.”

Dempsey’s instinct was to lean forward but she didn’t want her spine to lose contact with the back of the chair.

“Miracle?”

“Your cure. Your inexplicable cure.”

“Who said it was a miracle?”

“The doctor—Doctor Norstar—said there was no known explanation—”