Brother Carnival Read online

  Felix’s woman gripping his midriff, the horse perspiring under her thighs.

  The two brothers locked into each other’s gaze.

  A splinter of wistfulness marred the cleric’s severe demeanor. The bouquet of incense is impotent to satisfy a man’s need to scent a woman, he sighed. Felix feels the drumming of her heart, her hot breath against his neck. And for a single blasphemous second, he envisioned her splayed against the basilica’s apse, a thousand votive candle flames rising up to illuminate her. Stephen blinked, removed his steel-rimmed frames, and rubbed his eyes, praying the image that returned would be the worthy one.

  But she mouthed his name, beckoning for him to veil her nakedness with his peacock robes.

  His malicious brother, Felix, taunting him about women when really all he ever yearned for was salvation.

  Felix flashed a sardonic grin, gesturing to the weighty crucifix that hung about his brother’s neck.

  “He suffered a big letdown, too, Steve.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WINDOW HARP

  Now, when Westley looked at himself in the mirror, he saw me lurking in the shadows, and the priest and the clown knew why.

  The references were too many to be ignored.

  I returned to his story “The Window Harp,” in which Peter, the young narrator, gifts a silver ring with a Sacred Heart crest to Jeremiah, his kid brother. Early on, it was sent to their father by his sibling in the hope of influencing the eldest boy to follow in the cleric’s footsteps. Peter speaks of having taken comfort in the gift especially when he was feeling “vulnerable.”

  Wouldn’t that experience be compounded if one was having difficulty finding an identity to which one could claim title?

  So I began to wonder if my brother might have followed in the footsteps of the mysterious monsignor uncle he never met.

  And if he had, the irony that each of us had committed to serve God in some higher capacity—surely to save ourselves—was affecting. Could he have entered the priesthood? Was he still active in the faith, or had he, like me, abandoned it?

  St. Boniface Seminary of Sewickley had been established in the 1850s by a Benedictine monk to serve the Pittsburgh diocese in preparing candidates for the clergy. With the pretext that I was compiling information on a deceased relative, I made an appointment to visit.

  “It’s an effort for the benefit of his surviving brother—my father,” said my appeal.

  I was introduced by a Father Hinchey, a dour prelate in his seventies, to a lay staff woman who had assembled a folder with numerous photographs of Stephen A. Mueller, his high school transcript from our hometown of Hebron, and various articles he’d written for the seminary’s biweekly newspaper. Poring over the material in St. Boniface’s library and taking notes in the expectation of sharing them with Westley when we finally met, I was surprised to learn that he had been a tennis star and won numerous trophies in a league of East Coast theological schools.

  Thanking the secretary, a kindly woman attired in an unornamented, liturgical-blue dress that contrasted severely with her coiffed, feathery white hair, I said I’d one more favor to ask of her.

  Father Hinchey had excused himself much earlier.

  “I’ve a boyhood friend of whom I’ve sadly lost track for a couple decades now. I recall how enamored he was of the mass while growing up and often when we were together alone in either his house or mine”—I hesitated, and began to laugh in a self-deprecating manner—“we’d play priest.”

  “Oh?” she said, uncertain as to what might follow.

  “Yes. We’d set up an altar and place the Host on a plate—God forgive us—and, dressing in sheets and paper miters for the occasion, mime the Eucharist. We took ourselves quite seriously and never intended our actions to be blasphemous, mind you. One time he would be the priest and I’d be the altar boy. Then next occasion we’d switch.

  “Occasionally his little brother would wander into our service, and we’d appoint him as the parishioner who had come forth to partake in the bread and the wine.”

  She held her pale fingers against her lips as if in shock but couldn’t disguise a suppressed grin.

  “Well, I beg your forgiveness, but this is all a prelude to inquiring if my dear friend ended up here at some point in his life.”

  “I’m a bit surprised you both didn’t,” she countered. “What’s his name?”

  “Christopher Daugherty.”

  In essence, Westley Mueller, upon leaving home, had been declared dead. Moreover, he wouldn’t have wanted to be traced. I guessed he may have persuaded the authorities to permit him use of a pseudonym—perhaps, say, the one he later used in crafting his stories.

  She said that she’d search the archives covering the years in question.

  Watching her return shortly with a bound ledger, I was hopeful, except her mien suggested otherwise.

  “There is no Christopher Daugherty, I’m sorry to say.”

  “All the possible years?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I rose to leave, thanking her, and handed her Uncle Stephen’s folder.

  “But there is this,” she said, opening the register and pointing to a photograph of one J. Ethan Daugherty.

  “Could he possibly be related to your friend?”

  Ethan Daugherty, in wire-rimmed glasses, had glistening dark hair combed back and wore a thin-lipped smile that could easily have been a smirk. The eyes, luminous, and ruddy angular face aped Papa’s and mine. Despite my never having seen him in person or happened upon his photograph, I felt I’d known how he looked from childhood.

  But why had he taken my birth name?

  Flustered as to how to respond, I muttered, “He’s my friend’s kid brother. The one who partook in our Eucharist offering.”

  By now Miss Vincent and I had become allies. “I’ve got grown sons myself,” she said, “who once loved taking up the collection from assembled family members in baskets they’d jury-rigged to look like those used at St. James.”

  “Do you suppose I could borrow this overnight?” I asked. “I’ll return it to you in the morning.”

  “Please. Father Hinchey I don’t think would approve.”

  “You have my word.”

  That evening, I sat opposite the open yearbook, euphoric that he was in fact real, for I had been haunted by the dread that he never was.

  That perhaps all the stories I’d read were in truth mine.

  And I’d forwarded them home in an effort to save myself. A consciousness deeper than my own wasn’t prepared to call it quits . . . so it was acting in its own self-interest.

  Anything is possible, I thought, sitting across from Westley. Except it’s undeniably you. You followed Uncle Stephen to St. Boniface.

  The following morning, Miss Vincent and I perused the material she’d assembled on J. Ethan Daugherty. Not surprisingly, he, like our uncle before him, had been the captain of St. Boniface’s tennis team. In our section of town, tennis was viewed as an upper-class sport. Yet, outfitted in tennis whites, Westley stared unflinchingly at the camera. I also learned that upon being ordained, his initial placement was the Sacred Heart parish in Pittsburgh’s East End.

  “The diocese office should be able to help you,” she offered.

  I promised Miss Vincent I’d drop her a line if I located Christopher.

  But something troubled me: the uppermost buttons of his tennis shirt were undone, and a fine chain bearing a man’s ring adorned Westley’s neck.

  THE WINDOW HARP (excerpt)

  He kept eyeing me while opening the box, uncertain whether I was teasing him.

  It was a container I’d borrowed from Mother’s jewelry drawer. Inside lay a silver ring.

  “But why? It belongs to you, Westley.”

  “No longer,” I said.

  The ring had been sent along with several religious texts to our father years earlier from a younger brother who’d entered the priesthood. A note instructed Papa
, “Pass these on to your eldest in the hope that someday he will choose to follow in his uncle’s path.” The ring had etched on its face a crimson Sacred Heart and Uncle’s initials, S. M.

  On days when I felt especially vulnerable, I wore the ring about my neck, often not understanding why. I prayed that Father Stanley Raymond Mueller was protecting me.

  I threaded the chain through the ring and placed it over Jeremiah’s head.

  “I wear it for you, Westley. For you looking out for me.”

  That’s when Mother came through the door with empty arms. “Is your father home?”

  We shook our heads.

  As if she knew better than to inquire, she climbed the stairway and closed their bedroom door behind her.

  Jeremiah folded our theater. I blew out the candles. We followed her up the stairs to our room on the other side of the hallway.

  From our window, our backyard creek—it originated at the old stone quarry up our road—refracted the moonlight to ripple across the ceiling above our bed. We didn’t dare fall asleep until we were certain she had.

  Perhaps a half hour had passed when we heard the doorknob turn and her shuffle barefoot out into the hallway.

  The hallway window looked out onto Widow Colucca’s house. We could hear Mother put her face to the glass. It’s what she often did when in distress, as if the glass were her cage. She would hum or moan into it, creating a kind of a glass harmonium.

  A sound that terrified us to our core.

  And once she started to slur with her watery lips, Jeremiah grabbed my hand.

  Then the window music ceased.

  She shuffled—it sounded like dance steps of her own choreography—to our door.

  We could hear her heavy breathing against it.

  Jeremiah clutched Father Raymond’s ring.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered. “I’m off now, boys. Westley, always remember what I told you. You are your brother’s conscience. Don’t try to follow me. I know my way.”

  She paused. A stifled sob rose from deep inside her. Then silence. We could picture her composing herself.

  “When he comes home . . . you tell him.”

  Cement Dam was up our road a distance in what is now the woods. Our county once intended to divert the meandering Big Run River through the flatlands, where they constructed a towering dam to create large camping and fishing grounds that would attract folks from as far away as Cleveland and Pittsburgh. There’d be a huge open-air dance pavilion that would feature famous bands every summer weekend.

  Except Big Run continues to flow in its centuries-old path, while the dam sits mysteriously deep in the forest like some mythic wall, inviting the sick at heart and feeble of mind to plunge from it to their deaths, mostly around religious holidays.

  Jeremiah kept sobbing into my chest. “Momma, please don’t.”

  And then we heard her pad down the stairway.

  Waiting until the kitchen door slammed shut, we opened ours. From that hallway window—death’s musical instrument—we could see her handprints on the upper pane, then spotted her between our house and the widow’s; she was ambling nude past her rosebushes and lilac tree out into the street.

  Her pace quickened as she headed up toward the quarry.

  Back in my rented room, I sat staring blankly out the window, conflicted by having spotted the Sacred Heart ring. Years after that photograph of Westley in tennis whites was taken, the narrator of “The Window Harp” had gifted it to his younger brother.

  Who, of course, would be me.

  Was he not looking out for me in my absence?

  Then from “The Window Harp” I read aloud the following:

  Jeremiah, like our phantom uncle, entered the seminary upon graduating from high school and for nearly a dozen years served a working-class parish outside Pittsburgh while I taught high school English in a couple of East Coast preparatory schools. On the few occasions we saw each other, I never broached my suspicion about his not being truly wedded to the clergy. We’d laugh a bit, nervously recalling a dark incident or two of our childhood but seldom more. Mostly it was small talk. Despite my effort to defer to him more often than I naturally might, at some level I sensed Jeremiah still suspected I was playing the role of the older brother and seeing through him.

  So I wasn’t all that surprised when I received a phone call from him late one winter night and, after tentative greetings . . . he ceased speaking.

  What I heard on the other end of the line was the hallway window glass harmonium. “What is it, Jeremiah?” I cried, struck with the fear of that recollection. “What’s going on?”

  “Mother’s come back,” he said.

  “She’s dead.”

  “No, Christ no. Can’t you hear her? She’s handed me those crocheted undies we used to fuck with in our Punch and Judy skits. We’re headed out, Ethan, to you-know-where.”

  I lived several hundred miles away. Nuns from a nearby convent would periodically look in on him and tend to his spartan needs in the parish house.

  “Are you alone, Jeremiah?”

  “I’m sorry, Ethan. But the body of Christ tastes like stale Wonder Bread. His blood—rancid Welch’s. And my soul is more foreboding than our bedroom when she would stand outside it, taunting us with death. Making us savor it . . . to lift it up like the heavenly host to our Westinghouse bed lamp. Well, she’s returned in all her naked glory. Good-bye, dear brother.”

  The phone line went dead.

  By the time I was able to get somebody to enter the parish house, he’d disappeared.

  Having just returned from St. Boniface, I felt the parallels couldn’t be more revealing. Westley joined the priesthood, became an assistant pastor at the Sacred Heart in Pittsburgh’s East End, was assigned to other parishes over several years, and then dropped out.

  Jeremiah, the kid-brother persona, uncannily mirrored me.

  Jeremiah and I had shared the same bed for eighteen years. There was no hiding the truth, even in a darkened room that overlooked a creek whose water eventually flowed into the magnificent Ohio.

  Even though I was more cowardly than he, I was convinced much of his bravado was mere bluster to disguise his having to look up to his older brother. There were instances when he became truly frightened and sought my assurance that everything was going to be okay. I was as frightened as he, but swore that it would pass. In effect, we lied to each other and were under no illusions that we hadn’t.

  The distressing truth is that Jeremiah was alive—yet I wasn’t.

  A veritable construct of her piety and fear of living, I, Ethan, was the embodiment of our mother. But I preferred Westley’s, for Jeremiah and he were constrained to explain the window harp’s nocturnal plaint that accompanied her demoniac choreography outside their bedroom door.

  How could they not lie to each other to save themselves?

  Yet as a child I swore never to prevaricate, nor to despair. And the nights that I awoke inchoately fretful, I called upon God to ask Why?

  Now I envied Jeremiah’s life, his relationship to Westley.

  At times I felt as if I were squirreling my way into his stories so that I might discover myself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOTEBOOK FOR ANNA MAGDALENA BACH

  Records at Father J. Ethan Daugherty’s last pastorate, St. Vitus in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, indicated that he’d abruptly departed. Was there speculation as to why he’d left? Most of those with whom I spoke weren’t puzzled by it at all. “We have little say. The diocese decides.”

  A secretary within the parish office gently reminded me that over two decades had transpired. “I didn’t know him.” But she directed me to a parishioner who might be of some help: Elizabeth Andrews, a widow and a faithful member of St. Vitus for years.

  I phoned, explaining that Father Daugherty was an acquaintance and that I hoped to meet up with him again.

  At first Ms. Andrews seemed chary of confirming anything more than yes, she remembered him. When I presse
d for greater detail, she asked, “How well did you know him?” Once I indicated that we’d grown up together in the town of Hebron and had been the closest of friends, she began to open up, recalling his conducting high mass. “How precise he was, his sacerdotal attire, the manner in which he approached the sacrament of the altar, the sweeping of the censer—all of it spoke to an ecclesiastical choreography of his own design. He performed as if it were a dance for our Holy Father.”

  Lost himself within the ritual, I mused.

  “Did the parishioners like him?”

  “Despite an apparent aloofness, he was actually a very caring priest. They were quite fond of him and felt bewildered when he left.”

  “Do you know why he did?”

  She offered a curt “No.”

  Our conversation looked to have come to an abrupt close.

  “Please don’t take offense at what I am about to ask you, Miss Andrews,” I said.

  “Of course not.” Her tone was more circumspect now.

  “Was there another?”

  “Another?”

  “A parishioner.”

  Once again . . . dead air.

  “Apologies. I mean to inquire if, say, his involvement with a member of the church might have led to his leaving of his own volition . . . a lady, perhaps.”

  “I saw no such evidence,” she quipped. “Why do you ask?”

  I could have ended the conversation there, but her discreet manner, and now benign curiosity, allowed me to continue.