Such Is My Beloved (2 page)

“He can't stay here. What are you going to do with him?”

“I didn't bring him. Maybe the poor guy wants to stay.”

But Father Dowling had gained confidence in the one moment while the girls were abashed, so he waited to see what they would do. Starting to laugh, Ronnie said, “Don't get nervous, Father. It's all the same to us, you know,” and her brisk, efficient manner returned, the grin settled on her face and she reached out in a hurry and took hold of his arm. Midge, who was slower to speak, had stepped back, frowning and timid; then she, too, grew bolder and she began to shake her shoulders till her full breasts swayed, and coming closer to him, she said, “Are you going for Ronnie, or do you want to leave it to me?”

“I'm sorry you didn't see I was a priest in the first place. I wanted to talk a while with you. After I left you I started to think about both of you. Please don't be impatient. If you're
not going any place, I mean if you're in for the night let's sit down and talk.”

“If you just want to talk why don't you hire a hall?”

“I'm not even anxious to talk, but I'd like to be friendly, and I won't tread on your toes either.”

“Do you want to listen to his tall talk, Midge?”

“Oh, sure. Talk pays the rent. Let him talk himself right out the door and downstairs.”

Then they stopped talking. They stared at him, half sneering. When he kept on waiting so patiently, they grew sullen and swung their heads away from him in disgust.

“Could I sit down a minute?” he asked. But still they would not answer. He sat down on one of the chairs, and then they looked at each other and Ronnie whispered, “Somebody may have tipped him off to come here, else he's a bit daffy,” and since they could think of nothing else, they sat down on the bed. “We'd throw you out only you're the kind of guy that would start to holler,” Midge said.

Father Dowling wiped his wide forehead with his handkerchief. His face, which was very young, pink and soft after the night air, still retained an expression of surprised innocence and still showed some of the eagerness that had brought him there. Grinning with embarrassment, he moistened his lips and said, “You'd let almost anybody else come here and talk to you. What's the matter with me? Can't we be friends?”

“I wish you'd get out quick, that's what I wish,” Ronnie said. “Go on, Father, please,” Midge said.

“You don't have to be so harsh,” he said, pleading with them and pleading with such earnestness that they began to feel tongue-tied.

“What's eating you, what's on your mind, Father?” Midge asked uneasily.

“It works out like this,” he said. “You both looked mighty wretched standing there on the corner. It just struck me in such a way that I couldn't put the sight of you out of my mind, I guess. I never felt so much sympathy for anybody in my life. I wanted to do something to help you so you wouldn't want to stand on the streets like that.”

“Say, are you going to sit here and listen to stuff like that, Midge?”

“You don't see the point, Ronnie,” Midge said. “Father wants to keep us off the streets and if we don't listen to him he goes and calls a cop and then we're off the streets. See?”

“I won't call a cop.”

“Aw, I'm tired,” Ronnie said. “Go and peddle your pills next door. The lady of the house isn't in here.” Ronnie waved her long thin arm threateningly. “Look here. We've got our own way of living just the same as you got yours.” While Ronnie was speaking Midge got up and picked the priest's hat and coat and scarf off the chair and tossed them at him, saying, “Here, Father. Now get out of here quick before there's trouble.”

“I had a great deal to say, don't be mean…”

“Run along, Father, and sell your papers,” Ronnie said. Then she, too, got up and rushed over and took hold of the priest by the arm. Midge was reaching up trying to balance his coat and hat on his shoulder. The hat fell off on the floor. Father Dowling was humiliated, but the eagerness was so strong within him that he would not go and he said desperately, “Just one minute, one minute can't make any difference to you. Let me sit down just that long and then I'll go and there'll be no trouble.”

“What do you want to sit down for?”

“Just to say a little prayer.”

“For how long?”

“About a minute.”

“And you'll get out then and not raise a noise? Go ahead.”

So the two girls stood in front of Father Dowling on the threadbare carpet while he sat down on the chair, sighed and then looked up at them anxiously. The girls were motionless and wondering, for they couldn't understand his eager anxiety to be with them, nor could they understand his patience and gentle tolerance; and besides, he looked so much like a big awkward boy sitting there with his face smooth and pink, and somehow an expression of love in his eyes they had never seen before. He was calm, almost unaware of them, it seemed, as he made a small silent prayer. And when he had finished, he took a deep breath, smiled up at them and patted the back of his head with the palm of his strong right hand. “See there,” he said. “I didn't do anybody any harm, did I? I just prayed that the grace of God will make things easier for you and you won't want to go out on the streets.”

Thrusting her little black head forward so her full neck arched out of her plain black dress, Midge said suddenly, “What were you saying to yourself sitting there? Your lips weren't even moving. I was watching them.”

“I wasn't talking to myself. In a way I was talking for you.”

“You think you're doing a good turn for us, is that it?”

“I'd try very hard to help you.”

“So you think we're pretty hopeless, eh, Father? Go on now. Say so.”

“No, you don't seem low and you don't seem hopeless to me.”

“Then why are you sitting there praying for us?”

“Maybe you're having a harder time than you imagine,” he said timidly. “And without realizing it you may go from day to day making things harder till you yourselves lose all hope. That would be a dreadful time. There must be times now when you get up in the morning feeling full of despair, aren't there?”

“How about yourself in the mornings? Or is there always a little blue bird going tweet tweet tweet?” Ronnie said sharply.

“You're right. I need just as much help as you do. I'd love both of you to pray for me. To-night, when I get back to the Cathedral, I'll think about both of you and pray for you too.” He smiled so charmingly that both girls felt ashamed of jibing at him. It was as though they both suddenly felt they could not help liking him, as though the warmth and eagerness that was in him had in some way reached them. His concern for them was so real that he stood there, worrying, wanting to say something, yet afraid of offending them. Midge, who was unable to take her eyes off his face, began biting her lips, and then she put the tips of two fingers up to her eye and she looked as if she might cry.

“What's the matter, child? Have I hurt you? I didn't want to say anything to offend you.”

“You didn't. I guess I just feel a bit soft. You didn't hurt me.”

“What's the matter, then?”

“Maybe it's the way you say things,” she said.

The more stubborn and angular Ronnie glanced contemptuously at Midge, walked the length of the room and glanced bitterly at the priest. She had been holding her breath and now she released it noisily and she went over and sat beside Midge with her arm around her and said, “Never mind, kid.
Don't get the jitters. What's got into you?” But she, herself, was looking worried.

When Father Dowling saw the girls moved in this way, he was so thankful his whole face beamed with gratitude. He moved his chair closer to the bed. He put his hand lightly and shyly on the little dark girl's head and stroked her hair softly and in him was a joy he had never known before. As he tried to smile at the two girls who had been moved by his presence, he felt more love for them than for any one he had known in his parish, a curious, new love that gave him a strange contentment. “Just let me sit here till you feel easier in your minds,” he said. “Maybe you might tell me a little about yourselves.”

Gradually he coaxed them to talk to him, drawing them out by showing a comradely interest in many practical matters. Ronnie answered briefly, with the gloomy expression still on her face. Almost everything this big awkward girl said seemed to hurt the priest so that he longed to say something witty or amiable that would make her more cheerful. Words began to come more readily from Midge. She was a French-Canadian girl with a kind of flirtatious charm and many ridiculous, affected little mannerisms.

Finally he said, “We're friends now. Aren't we friends?”

“Yes, Father,” they said. “We're good friends.”

“That's splendid; that makes me feel fine. Don't you think I could help you to keep off the streets? Couldn't I try?”

“All right, Father,” Midge said.

“How about you, Ronnie? It's a dreadful life you're leading.”

But she shook her head gloomily, staring down at the floor as if she did not know how to abandon one way of living when she could see no way to turn afterwards.

“Is Ronnie your right name?” he asked.

“No. Veronica.”

“Ah, that's a splendid Catholic name. I'm sure now that you were baptized. That's a great help. God bless you both, and this night, too.”

As he put on his hat and coat he kept smiling with a kind of cheerful radiance, so happy he was, and by the time he placed his black hat firmly on top of his head, they too, were smiling shyly. “I'm coming back to see you, remember,” he said. “I'll be back soon,” and he went out the door leaving them standing side by side in the room.

This time, going down the stairs, Father Dowling almost forgot he was in a hotel, and he did not look at the proprietor, Mr. H.C. Baer, who was still reading the paper at the desk. But Mr. Baer, jerking his glasses rapidly up to the bridge of his nose, saw the white priest's collar which Father Dowling thought was still hidden by the woollen muffler, and he grinned so broadly that the corners of his wide mouth seemed to shoot up to his skull, he glanced up the stairs, and he made a loud sneering noise with his heavy wet lips.

Outside it had got much colder. The weather had been very changeable all over the East this last week. It was now starting to snow. Walking had become difficult because of the frozen ruts in the slush on the sidewalk. But Father Dowling was in no hurry. His feeling of great joy was so astonishing that he wanted to hold on to it and meditate upon it till it was completely understood. He began to walk much slower, putting first one hand then the other up to his tingling red ears. As he turned the corner and saw first the spire of the Cathedral and then the dark mass of the old weather-beaten structure, hemmed in closely by office buildings and warehouses and always dirtied by city soot, and with the roof now
covered with snow and moonlight shining on the white slope, Father Dowling felt a fresh full contentment.

In the hall of the rectory where he was kicking off his rubbers for the second time that night, he heard only one sound, a cough coming from old Father Anglin's study at the head of the stairs. The other priest, young Father Jolly, was in bed. As he started to climb the stairs, Father Dowling wondered if he ought to discuss the girls with Father Anglin, and as he deliberated, he could see in his thoughts the old priest turning slowly from the desk and listening patiently. Father Anglin was, of course, a very pious old priest, white-haired, fresh-faced, vigorous too, although a bit settled in his habits and way of thinking. Everybody in the neighborhood, storekeepers, Italian fruit dealers, Jewish tradesmen, Protestant business men and the policemen on the corners all knew the old priest. Every afternoon he walked out in his gray and shabby coat and his big body rolled along the street with his wide black hat square on top of his white head and bobbing up and down like a cork on a wave. Bits of hair stuck out at the sides of his hat, his face was always red as if he couldn't get his breath, and half the time his eyes seemed to be closed. At four o'clock in the afternoon he went forth to his favorite coffee-shop where he sat down without removing his hat and ordered and ate with a deep expansive relish a club sandwich containing dainty bits of chicken breast and bacon and tomato and lettuce and toasted bread and two dill pickles. Everybody in the place stared at him because he looked so sober. He felt just as sober as he looked. At a marriage time in his church he was hostile to what he called pagan celebrations because he said marriage was a sacrament and therefore a serious business and so he was opposed to having rice thrown frivolously at the
door of the church. Moreover, no marriage ceremony was performed later than eight o'clock in the morning.

When Father Dowling reached the top of the stairs, he was seeing Father Anglin so vividly in his thoughts that he stood still, pondered a bit longer, lapping his lower lip over his long upper one, and said to himself, “Father Anglin has a beautiful Christian character, no doubt, but somehow I don't think he would like to hear me talking about those girls.”

So he went to his own room, and before he went to bed he prayed for a long time for the souls of Ronnie and Midge. He prayed that he might have the full care of their souls so he could safeguard them. But the best part of his prayer was when he was absolutely silent and very calm, and he could see Ronnie and Midge standing close together in the hotel room, dogged and puzzled. And he was so moved that when he got into bed he felt that his feeling for the girls was so intense it must surely partake of the nature of divine love.

 

TWO

T
he second time Father Dowling went to see the two girls in the hotel was the evening of the first Thursday in February. All evening he had been hearing confessions. He sat in the confessional with his elbow on the rail by the grating, with the faint musk-like priest odor pervading the confessional box, listening tirelessly to girls and old men, and giving himself sympathetically to their sorrow for the slightest sin. But after an hour and a half he grew very weary. The last confession he heard was from a young hysterical girl who seemed to him to be making up a chain of small sins so that she could imagine herself full of remorse. Growing exasperated, he thrust his face against the wire grating and said sharply, “My goodness, child, you're entitled as a human being to certain judgments about your fellow creatures. Every time you have an opinion about your neighbor you're not committing a mortal sin. Don't you understand that?” The girl was startled by his face and breath and moving lips so close to her, and dropping her head down in the darkness she whispered, “Yes, Father, I understand.” Then she seemed unable to lift her head. Father Dowling, giving her absolution very quickly,
wondered whether he should explain that a priest ought not to be worried by such trifles, but he smiled as he saw her standing up hurriedly, and when she swung aside the curtain and went out he leaned back with relief.

For a long time he waited and no one entered the confessional. He waited and reflected on the young girl's imagined sorrow, her fictitious sin and her fancied penitence, and he suddenly remembered the two girls, Midge and Ronnie. It seemed to him sitting there silently in the darkness, with one hand twisting the end of the purple stole around his neck, that there had been something very beautiful and real about their regret that night in the hotel room, with Midge biting her lip and crying and Ronnie's face full of dogged despair. It seemed astonishing yet consoling that human beings so fettered in degradation could rise so swiftly when moved by simple friendliness. Father Dowling was suddenly eager to see them again.

After waiting twenty minutes longer, he went out to the aisle and looked up and down at the almost empty church, where a few women were saying their penance up at the front by the altar rail. No one was sitting on the penitent's bench waiting to go into the confessional. He walked rapidly up the aisle and across the altar, genuflecting before the tabernacle, and then crossed through to the sacristy.

When he was dressed and out on the street, he felt a peculiar exhilaration and joy in life and his work in the parish. It was a very clear, cold night, with a brilliantly starred, faraway winter sky. His feet scrunched on the snow. All of his work since his ordination, as he thought of it, seemed groping and incomplete unless the way he had helped Midge and Ronnie was included, too. It seemed to him now, going along the street with a long swinging stride and his hands in his
pockets, that his prayers for these girls would never be unheeded. He smiled very happily to himself.

He was on the other side of the block, walking more slowly and wondering if it would be better to pull his scarf up high around his neck so he would not be recognized as a priest when he came in sight of the hotel. In one way he hated any such deception. Yet he knew that he ought to avoid giving scandal in the presence of ignorant stupid people, who were ever anxious to sneer at the Church. For a moment he stopped on the other side of the street, opposite the barber shop, giving himself a little more time to decide whether he would conceal his collar, while he looked at the dimly lighted hotel entrance. Then he saw a girl coming up the street and when she passed under the light he knew it was Ronnie with her red coat and the bit of gray fur on the collar, but he stood there without moving because he noticed her glancing over her shoulder twice at a short, wide-shouldered man in a peak cap who was following her, and when she got to the hotel, she made a slight motion with her head toward the door, waited till he got closer, and then went in with the man in the peak cap right behind her. This happened so very quickly, so furtively, that Father Dowling, who was across the street, did not seem to understand its meaning. “That was the tall girl, Ronnie, all right,” he thought, while his heart beat heavily and he grew dreadfully uneasy. “God help her for her shamelessness,” he thought, growing angry. Up and down and back and forth he paced, feeling a rage within him. It seemed terrible that a mortal soul that he had loved and prayed for was being degraded almost within reach of him while he stood helpless on the street. It was this helplessness, so much deeper within him than his anger, that he could not understand, and bit by bit this helplessness possessed him till soon his anger was completely submerged.

In a surprisingly short time there was a shadow in the hotel door across the road. The man with the peak cap came out, looked up and down very carefully, stood long enough to light a cigarette and then began to loaf down the street with a slow contented rolling gait and an air of complete well-being. Father Dowling hated him, feeling big and strong enough to beat him. All his mixed-up anger and disappointment grew into a steady hatred of this man who loafed along lazily till out of sight. Father Dowling thought of rushing into the hotel and speaking to Ronnie, but the notion of going into the room so shortly after such a man had glutted himself and left disgusted him. “I'll wait just a little longer. I'll walk up the street a bit and maybe she'll come out,” he thought, pretending he was not cold and that the weather was very mild, when his ears were actually red and tingling and even his hands thrust deep in his pockets felt cold. His feet, too, were chilled, and hurt him when he moved and the blood began to circulate again.

He had almost decided it would be better to return to the church and possibly visit the hotel the following afternoon when he saw Midge crossing the road. There was just enough light slanting from the broken sign over the hotel door to shine on her tilted face, which was smiling up coaxingly at the very heavy, respectable, sober-faced man of middle age who was on her arm. She did not go into the hotel furtively. She did not walk ahead of the man as Ronnie had done. She was hanging on his arm as if she had known him intimately for years, and had always given him an abundant happiness out of her own deep love. If it had not been for the anxious expression on the gray middle-aged man's face they might have looked like a pair of lovers.

Father Dowling felt a little weary. Midge and her man passed not twenty feet away from him. At first he thought the
disgust in him was for this mean hotel and the girls, but then it became, too, a weariness and disgust for himself as he remembered how he had felt sure that his presence and his eagerness had meant very much that other night to the two girls. It seemed now like a kind of rare conceit that had been making him, even in his prayers, feel joyful and sure of himself. At most he ought only to have dared to hope and prayed very humbly. Instead he had been going around smiling happily at everybody as if he had a secret that neither other priests nor parishioners would ever understand.

But he waited till he saw the middle-aged man in the gray coat come hurriedly out of the hotel, pull his hat down far over his eyes and start to walk furtively up the street, gradually increasing his pace and almost running as if expecting to be arrested at any moment, or to have some one touch him on the shoulder and point back at the hotel.

Father Dowling crossed over and entered the hotel. He did not even look at the man at the desk. He went straight to the stair with the bits of brass on the edges. His face was full of sober earnestness and there was a peculiar dignity about the way he carried his head. His scarf was high up around his neck, though he was so little concerned he never wondered whether the desk man noticed him. But Mr. Baer's glasses were thrust up on the bridge of his nose, the head with heavy woodenly arranged hair shot forward, and grinning with his thick underlip tight against his teeth, he said to himself, “There goes the lamb of God again. I wonder which one he likes. Probably the little one. I'll ask her about him. He's the best-looking customer she ever had. More power to her good right arm.”

Father Dowling rapped on the white door at the head of the stairs, and when it was opened a few inches, he said mildly, “May I come in?”

“Lordy, it's Father. Hello, Father.” He could just see the lower part of Ronnie's jaw, the lighted tip of a cigarette and a cloud of smoke. “Come on in,” she said.

He nodded gravely. Midge, who was sitting on the chair where he had sat the other night, had on a very loose blue dress, like a slip. Her hair was done in curls on her neck. As soon as she saw the priest she stood up, making her little bow and putting out her left hand with the elbow extended from her body. “Hello, Father, how are you?” she said.

“You won't mind sitting on the bed, will you, Father?” Ronnie said. Both girls were feeling good-humored, almost exhilarated, with their rouged cheeks flushed and their eyes full of animation. Ronnie, standing up with a good-natured grin on her stubborn face, pointed to the bed. “Sit down. How've you been, Father?” she said. He dreaded sitting on that bed, but finally he sat down, and was unable to do anything but stare at them severely. His big strong hands were lying heavily on his knees. His face looked white and full of uneasiness.

“You don't look so cheerful, so chirpy to-night, Father,” Midge said. She seemed really concerned. “You look as if you'd been working at something too hard,” she said.

“What's the matter with you, Father. You're sitting there like an extra bed-post,” Ronnie said irritably.

“Tell me this,” he said with sudden anger. “Didn't my coming here the other night mean anything to you at all?”

“It sure did,” Midge said. “Do you know, Father, I couldn't get to sleep at all that night. Honest to God I couldn't. I kept wanting to talk to Ronnie. I'd keep waking up and nudging her till she wanted to crown me.”

“Didn't you regret the life you were leading?”

They didn't answer him. The sullen dogged expression was on Ronnie's face and Midge kept shifting her glance away,
trying to avoid the priest's angry eyes. But they did not look like persons aware of guilt. They were merely uneasy and resentful, as if they did not want to listen. Sometimes Midge looked directly at him with a bold impatience and he saw she was pretty, and remembered how she had taken the middle-aged man into the hotel half an hour ago. “I was on the street and I saw you both come in here with men,” he said quietly, without any anger, just as if stating a fact. “I stood there, waiting till the men came out. I know both of you. You don't understand the anxiety a priest can feel for two girls like you. It was terrible to have to stand out there and know what was going on up here.”

“You might as well get off your high horse, Father. There's no use talking to us like that,” Ronnie said.

“I'm on no high horse. I'm not talking down to you. I'm talking about something that happened.”

Ronnie was now sitting on the arm of Midge's chair with her hand on the smaller girl's shoulder. There was something Father Dowling admired in the direct and simple gestures of this big girl with the businesslike manner and the blunt speech. “Now see here, both of you, I'm not trying to be harsh,” he said. “Only I have been praying a lot for you and I thought I had really touched you in some way the other night….”

“Oh, don't keep nagging at us,” Midge said. “Why do you come here if you want to nag us?”

“What's that, my child? I don't want to nag you.”

“You have a good time talking about praying for us, don't you, but prayers won't pay for our room, prayers won't help me get my hair curled. You can't eat prayers. How do you think we're going to live? Did you ever stop to figure that out?”

“There are millions of girls with decent jobs. You seem full of bitterness.”

“There are more girls than jobs. What are you going to do with the girls left over? And this is the middle of a cold winter, too.”

“Isn't it better to starve than lose your…”

“If that's what's worrying you and if it will buck you up and make us seem like tin saints, we're just about starving now. Look around this dump. See all the silks and satins. What do you see? See that old brown coat of mine over there? I've been wearing it for three years. I have to take it off like it was tissue paper or it'll fall to pieces. Isn't this a lovely room? Don't you hate to put your wet boots on that lovely rug? It's filthy, filthy, filthy, but I'd rather be here than out there,” she said, pointing to the window. The little dark girl was pouring the words out of her as if she had become full of hate. “We're not even high-class whores, see,” she said. “We take what comes our way and mighty glad to get it.” She was speaking with all the fury of an indignant, respectable woman and the mingling of her strange humility and her passion was so convincing that Father Dowling began to feel doubtful, as if there might be many things he did not understand. He could see the twisted heels on Ronnie's shoes, the broken toe-cap, and the stockings with the sewn-up runs. A long time ago he had heard a Redemptorist priest preaching a sermon about the luxurious life of vice which was always a temptation to poor girls. Somehow, he himself had always thought of vice as yielding to the delights of the flesh, as warmth and good soft living and laziness. But as he looked around this room and at these angry girls he felt close to a dreadful poverty that was without any dignity. He felt, too, that Ronnie and Midge worked far harder than almost any young women he knew. Bewildered, he said, “I don't want to seem stupid. I don't want to abuse you, either. There's no more degraded an existence than yours, but, listen,
don't be impatient with me. I'm not sure I'm wise enough to blame you. Perhaps there are many things I don't altogether understand. I know it's hard to be hungry and be a Christian. I understand that.”