Brutal Youth (15 page)

After the meeting, the other teachers scurried away to fret and worry over Father Mercedes’s threat, but Zimmer lingered in the library and, once it was clear, put one of his big claw hands on the priest’s shoulder. “Father, I was wondering.… You ever hear about how Sister Maria got picked to be the principal?”

The priest looked at the hand, but not at the teacher it belonged to.

Zimmer spoke softly: “It was a long time ago, a couple years before you came on as pastor. Not a lot of people know this story, but there was this kid, an okay student, not great, not failing. He wasn’t popular. Wasn’t good at sports, but he was a good kid.

“Gradewise, he got a lot of A’s, and had a couple B’s, but only one C-minus. One day when the kid was a sophomore, his dad started to get fanatical. He
insisted
the boy get
perfect
grades—‘Straight A’s, or I’m pulling you out of that expensive school.’”

The priest was looking at him now, and the teacher kept his hand on him.

“So the kid worked hard, got some extra credit—and lo and behold, pretty soon he was scoring straight A’s. And the father says to his son, ‘You’re not in any activities. What kind of school only focuses on grades?’ So the kid joins the yearbook committee and volunteers to help organize the prom. Then the dad says, ‘Anybody can do that.’ So the kid gets involved in basketball, but the dad says, ‘This team loses half the time. What’s the point?’”

“What
is
the point?” Father Mercedes said.

Zimmer’s pockmarked cheeks stretched back in a sad smile. “The point is, the kid’s dad was setting impossible standards. But … why? It turns out the old man had lost his job, but nobody knew. The family was short on money, but the dad was afraid to tell his wife and son. He
wanted
the boy to fail because the tuition was eating him alive, and all he wanted was an excuse to pull the kid out of St. Mike’s.”

The priest said, “Whatever you’re trying to say—”

Zimmer cut him off. “It wasn’t about the money. He could have withdrawn his son at any time. It was
pride.
”

A silence passed, and Zimmer waited for the priest to reply. When Father Mercedes didn’t, Mr. Zimmer sighed. “So, these threats about investigating the school … shutting it down. Why do I get the feeling you are
trying
to make us fail, Father?”

The priest pushed Zimmer’s hand off his shoulder. “I assure you that’s not the case.”

Zimmer nodded. “You know something? Eventually the truth came out—about the unemployed father, I mean,” he said. “The wife found out her husband wasn’t working. They had to pull the kid out anyway. You know what Sister Maria did, what made Sister Victor put her in line to be her successor? Sister Maria convinced a group of parishioners to give the kid a tuition scholarship.” Zimmer laughed. “He finished out his last two years, no problem. Graduated right up there near the top of his class. Straight A’s and B’s.”

“How sweet,” Father Mercedes said.

Zimmer bobbed his head. “The dad wouldn’t come to the graduation. How about that?”

“You can stop accusing me in metaphors, Mr. Zimmer,” the priest said. “My intentions here are pure. St. Michael’s simply
must
begin to function in a way that conforms to basic Christian values.”

Zimmer shrugged. “All right, Father. No hard feelings.”

The two shook hands, hard. Both of them smiling, neither of them meaning it.

*   *   *

After the meeting, Father Mercedes walked outside, where the autumn winds tugged at his black topcoat and flicked his thin gray hair. His feet carried him along the edge of the parking lot until he stood at the far end of the empty church lot, looking back over the yawning emerald lawn toward the school, a solitary figure with his satchel in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other.

Father Harold Mercedes didn’t think of himself as a warm man, but he knew he was not cruel. He didn’t wish for others to suffer, or to torment those who didn’t deserve it. But he had decided more than a year ago—been
forced
to decide—that St. Michael the Archangel parish could no longer support a high school as part of its normal operations.

The question he feared above all was the obvious one: Why?

None of them would understand. Because nobody truly knew him. Not one of them.

The people of St. Mike’s knew his name, of course, knew his background—with a dozen years under his belt, he was the parish’s longest-serving pastor. The people here knew it was his childhood church, that he had been a student at the school long ago. They knew his birthday, knew he had a dog who died three years ago, which broke his heart, and some of them even knew his parents, though they had been deceased for close to twenty years.

The people of St. Mike’s knew many little facts, but facts aren’t a person. They didn’t know his heart or what he thought, or what he felt, what his philosophies were, what his ambition was. Least of all, they did not know the pressures he faced.

Pressure,
that was it. Let Andrew Zimmer stand there in the hallway and rattle off tearjerker anecdotes to make him feel guilty. Let Sister Maria try to put a happy face on every degenerate act that happened in her halls. Let them call him the villain. They didn’t understand the forces converging from all sides. After the church fire, St. Michael the Archangel had borrowed heavily, at crushing interest rates, when the insurance settlement was contested and less than expected. Meanwhile, the diocese had increased funding requirements across the board, and parishes that couldn’t adequately pay to support the larger church were dissolved, folded into stronger neighboring parishes that could. The diocese was nailing boards over the windows of St. Mike–sized churches all over Pittsburgh, cannibalizing whatever assets were left behind.

If St. Mike’s fell prey to weakness, what would the diocese’s accountants find in St. Michael’s financial holdings?

They would find Father Mercedes’s sins.

Everyone in the Valley knew his family as wealthy, but only because his father had lied, claiming they were distant relatives of the German automotive engineering family, and still major stockholders.
Yes,
the
Mercedes-Benz family,
they bragged. (Never mind that around 1910, more than a decade before the priest would be born, his father had simply switched their surname from the too-Woppish sounding Marcedi.)

The lie about his heritage helped explain Father Mercedes’s enjoyment of cars, watches, jewelry, and travel—luxuries he couldn’t possibly afford as a humble parish priest. The churchgoers assumed he had inherited immense personal wealth, and Father Mercedes encouraged people to believe that.

Except there was never enough money in the church coffers. Bake sales, pledge drives, in memoriam donations from fat Last Wills and Testaments. Where did it go? Father Mercedes had become good at making excuses.
There are new wheelchairs in the vestibule! We spend more than you can imagine on electricity and water! Pipe organ repairs don’t come cheap.…

But those weren’t the real reasons St. Mike’s languished in perpetual debt. The real reason, which nobody knew … was quite simple.

Father Mercedes had been stealing.

Not technically stealing, of course—borrowing. He always repaid it. Always. Except for when he didn’t. Or couldn’t.

The weekly collection plate came directly to him, but not all those neatly sealed envelopes and wads of loose bills made it into the parish accounts. Father Mercedes had dedicated himself to God, to the Holy Roman Church, to serving the people of this parish in their brightest and darkest moments. He pledged his celibacy, his independence, his freedom—his life. Didn’t he deserve some temporal pleasures in exchange? He drove a nice automobile, but it was just a Benz. The parishioner who quibbled with him about the furnace repairs was a lawyer who drove a silver Porsche. Did the priest have to get to and fro on a bicycle, like the ascetic Father Henne from St. Joe’s, pedaling around like a fool in the hardscrabble neighborhoods of lower Natrona? And whose business was it if he had filet mignon in his refrigerator? He ate alone most nights—did it have to be bread and water for him, too?

Meanwhile, the parishioners had become ceaseless nags: When would St. Mike’s finally rebuild its church and move out of that horrible gymnasium?

Father Mercedes had sinned … as all men sin. And some of the sins he wouldn’t admit, not even to himself, were deeply grave. But he hadn’t harmed any person. He had never done
that.
But he had done damnable things.

Father Mercedes’s worst flaw was one he had learned from his father: gambling—a thrill like lighter fluid in your veins, the rush of
winning.
Harness racing at the Meadows in Washington County. A few hundred, or a thousand, placed on the Steelers at the Crow Bar in downtown New Kensington, or just playing the numbers at that little barbershop across from the water authority. High-rolling vacations to Atlantic City, Vegas … When the good times spiraled, Father Mercedes was a hard loser, and hard losers kept trying and trying. That’s how they convinced themselves they’d become winners.

He had lost a great deal of money that didn’t belong to him. He wasn’t doing it anymore, but it had happened. And when he couldn’t repay, he covered it up with a single, shameful, drastic measure. But he intended to fix that, too. A man could sin, but he could also be absolved. If he turned something like the school, which
cost
money, into something else, like a nursing home or a hospice, which
made
money, he might be able to fix the woes of this parish, the ones he had created through his own weakness. He had to make people hate the school. Then they would want it gone. But first he had to take out its protector—the naïve and gutless Sister Maria, who really had allowed the high school to become a festering embarrassment.

When Father Hal Mercedes came to the end of his days, he intended to face his maker and say:
Yes, I have sinned, and sinned terribly. But I made it right.…

Fuck Andrew Zimmer, the know-it-all teacher. And fuck his insinuations.

Father Mercedes stood alone, staring across the shaggy green grass of the church field, which felt like a great void, yawning open, eager to swallow him.

He raised his cigarette to his lips and took a deep drag, but the ember had long gone out.

PART III

Hannah

THIRTEEN

The day after Father Mercedes issued his threats, Sister Maria instituted the Brother–Sister Code. “The hazing tradition can go on,” she told an assembly of students in Palisade Hall. “But seniors may no longer indiscriminately terrorize any given freshman. Each individual senior has four weeks to choose one freshman to adopt as a little brother or little sister, which will last until the Hazing Day picnic. You can have your fun, and good-natured teasing is acceptable, but from that point forward, you will be a mentor—not just a
tor
mentor.” After some initial grumbling, the upperclassmen seemed to accept it, though Sister Maria worried when she overheard some of them referring to it as the new “Master and Slave” program.

Afterwards, Mr. Zimmer expressed doubt they could successfully tamp down unrest in the school by “turning the freshmen into pets.”

“The idea is to transform potential abusers into protectors,” Sister Maria said. “It’s one thing for large groups of seniors to pick on large groups of freshmen, but if they can see each other as individuals—”

“Do we have a fail-safe if an especially cruel senior chooses an especially weak freshman to be a personal punching bag?” Zimmer asked.

“Then we intercede,” she said. “But in the meantime, at least he will have only
one
punching bag.”

*   *   *

Carl LeRose was furious. He pulled Davidek and Stein into one of the stairwells leading down to the lunchroom and slid his feet from side to side, like someone trying to figure out how to dance. “What’s with you guys?” LeRose snapped. “Ain’t you got no
brains
? Father Mercedes told the parish council you two told him the whole story about the parking lot fight. So he has the council members calling parents, telling them to question their kids about what really went on. The teachers got bitched out the other day. My dad is on the council. He’s pissed.”

“Fuck your dad,” Stein said, and outrage flared on LeRose’s face.

“When the teachers start cracking down even harder on us, everybody will blame
you
two dipshits.”

“Yeah, but they can’t hurt us if we’re somebody’s ‘little brother,’ right?” Davidek said.

LeRose chewed on a fingernail. “Okay, smart guy. How’d you like to end up with Hannah Kraut as your big sister? That’s what’ll happen if everyone else in the senior class freezes you dumb-asses out.”

“Who’s Hannah Kraut?” Davidek asked.

LeRose closed his eyes in a prayer for patience. “You’ve never heard anyone talk about Hannah Kraut?”

“We’re not exactly on anyone’s need-to-know list,” Stein said.

LeRose ran thick fingers over his face. “Let’s just say if you got a mentor who beat the crap out of you every day, life would be bad for the next few months. But if you get Hannah … Jesus, man, I don’t know what to say. Life’s gonna be bad for you
permanently.
”

Stein asked, “She one of those Sasquatch-looking girls hassling Lorelei for cigarettes?”

“She doesn’t, uh, hang with a group,” LeRose said. “She’s nobody, you know?… She’s
nothing.
She’s a
void.
She’s fucking
antimatter.
Do you get what I mean?”

Davidek nodded obediently, although he had no idea. Stein was more direct: “That’s nice poetry, fat boy. Can you translate what the hell you’re talking about?”

LeRose looked around nervously. “Hannah has this thing she does.… She’s a listener. An eavesdropper.” The sophomore lowered his voice, like she might be hearing them right now. “She’s been doing it for years. You’re standing there talking with your friends, or your girlfriend or something, and all the sudden you realize she’s been hovering around and picked up the whole conversation.”