There’s no use even standing at the back of the church. They all know and they’ll be giving me looks, so I might as well leave and add another sin to the hundreds already on my soul, the mortal sin of not going to Mass on Christmas Day. At least God will know I tried and it’s not my fault if I wandered into a happy family from Park Avenue pew.
I’m so empty now and hungry I want to go mad with myself and have a feast at the Horn & Hardart Automat but I don’t want to be seen there for fear people might think I’m like the ones who sit there half the day with a cup of coffee, an old newspaper and nowhere to go. There’s a Chock Full o’ Nuts a few blocks away and that’s where I have a bowl of pea soup, a nutted cheese on raisin bread, a cup of coffee, a doughnut with white sugar and a read of the Journal-American that someone left behind.
It’s only two in the afternoon and I don’t know what to do with myself when all the libraries are closed. People walking by with children by the hand might think I have nowhere to go so I keep my head up and walk up one street and down the other as if I were rushing for a turkey dinner. I wish I could open a door somewhere and have people say, Oh, hi, Frank, you’re just in time. The people walking here and there on the streets of New York take it all for granted. They bring presents and get presents and have their big Christmas dinners and they never know there are people walking up one street and down the other on the holiest day of the year. I wish I could be an ordinary New Yorker stuffed after my dinner, talking to my family with Christmas carols on the radio in the background. Or I wouldn’t mind being back in Limerick with my mother and brothers and the nice goose but here I am in the place I always dreamed about, New York, and I’m worn out with all these streets where there isn’t even a bird to be seen.
There’s nothing to do but go back to my room, listen to the radio, read Crime and Punishment and fall asleep wondering why Russians have to drag things out. You’d never find a New York detective wandering around with the likes of Raskolnikov talking about everything but the murder of the old woman. The New York detective would nab him, book him and the next thing is the electric chair in Sing Sing, and that’s because Americans are busy people with no time for detectives to be chatting with people they already know committed the murder.
There’s a knock on the door and it’s Mrs. Austin. Mr. McCourt, she says, would you come downstairs a minute?
I don’t know what to say. I’d like to tell her kiss my arse after the way her sister talked to me and the way she talked to me herself this morning but I follow her down and there she has all kinds of food laid out on the table. She says she brought it from her sister’s, that they were worried I might have no place to go or nothing to eat on this beautiful day. She’s sorry about the way she talked to me this morning and hopes I’m in a forgiving mood.
There’s turkey and stuffing and all kinds of potatoes, white and yellow, with cranberry sauce to make everything sweet and all this puts me in a forgiving mood. She’d give me some glug but her sister threw it out and it’s just as well. It made everyone sick.
When I’m finished she invites me to sit and watch her new television set where there’s a program about Jesus that’s so holy I fall asleep in the armchair. When I awake the clock on her mantelpiece says twenty past four in the morning and Mrs. Austin is in the other room letting out little cries, Eugene, Eugene, and that proves you can have a sister and go to her house for Christmas dinner but if you don’t have your Eugene you’re as lonely as anyone sitting in the Automat and it’s a great comfort to know my mother and brothers in Limerick have a goose and next year when I’m promoted to busboy at the Biltmore I’ll send them the money that will let them stroll around Limerick dazzling the world with their new shoes.
10
Eddie Gilligan tells me go to the lockers and get into my street clothes because there’s a priest in Mr. Carey’s office who met me coming over on the ship and now wants to take me to lunch. Then he says, What are you blushing for? It’s only a priest and you’re getting the free lunch.
I wish I could say I don’t want to meet the priest for lunch but Eddie and Mr. Carey might ask questions. If a priest says come to lunch you have to go and it doesn’t matter what happened in the hotel room even if it wasn’t my fault. I could never tell Eddie or Mr. Carey how the priest came at me. They’d never believe me. People sometimes say things about priests, that they’re fat or pompous or mean, but no one would ever believe a priest would interfere with you in a hotel room especially people like Eddie or Mr. Carey with sick wives always running to confession in case they die in their sleep. People like that wouldn’t be surprised if priests walked on water.
Why can’t this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That’s what priests are for. It’s four months since he went off to that retreat house in Virginia to beg forgiveness and here he is still on this side of the continent with nothing on his mind but lunch.
Now Eddie comes to me in the locker room and tells me the priest had another idea, meet him across the street in McAnn’s.
It’s hard to walk into a restaurant and sit down opposite a priest who came at you in a hotel room four months ago. It’s hard to know what to do when he looks at you directly, shakes your hand, holds your elbow, eases you into your seat. He tells me I’m looking good, that I filled out a bit in the face and I must be eating right. He says America is a great country if you give it a chance but I could tell him how they won’t let the Puerto Ricans give me leftovers anymore and how I’m weary of bananas but I don’t want to say much in case he might think I’ve forgotten the Hotel New Yorker. I don’t have any grudge against him. He didn’t hit anyone or starve anyone and what he did came from the drink. What he did was not as bad as running off to England and leaving your wife and children to starve the way my father did but what he did was bad because he’s a priest and they’re not supposed to murder people or interfere with them in any way.
And what he did makes me wonder if there are any other priests wandering the world going at people in hotel rooms.
There he is gazing at me with his big gray eyes, his face all scrubbed and shiny, with his black suit and his gleaming white collar, telling me he wanted to make this one stop before returning to Los Angeles forever. It’s easy to see how pleased he is to be in a state of grace after his four months in the retreat house and I know now it’s hard for me to eat a hamburger with someone in such a state of grace. It’s hard to know what to do with my own eyes when he gazes at me as if I were the one who went at someone in a hotel room. I’d like to be able to look right back at him but all I know of priests is what I’ve seen of them on altars, pulpits and in the darkness of confessionals. He’s probably thinking I’ve been up to all kinds of sin and he’s right but at least I’m not a priest and I never bothered anyone else.
He tells the waiter, Yes, a hamburger is fine and no, no, Lord no, he won’t have a beer, water is fine, nothing alcoholic will ever cross his lips again, and he smiles at me as if I should understand what he’s talking about and the waiter smiles, too, as if to say isn’t this a saintly priest.