Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor Page B

he’d been sitting on earlier into the last of the sun, and felt it warm on his face. He didn’t blame himself for being angry, for becoming upset because he’d been repelled by what was said to him. He didn’t blame Donal Prunty because you couldn’t blame a hopeless case. In a long life a priest had many visits, heard voices that ages ago he’d forgotten, failed to recognize faces that had been as familiar as his own. ‘See can you reach him, Father,’ Donal Prunty’s mother had pleaded when her son was still a child, and he had tried to. But Prunty had lied to him then too, promising without meaning it that he’d reform himself. ‘Ah sure, I needed a bit of money,’ he said hardly a week later when he was caught with the cancer box broken open.
    Was it because he clearly still needed it, Father Meade wondered, that he’d let him go away with every penny in the house? Was it because you couldn’t but pity him? Or was there a desperation in the giving, as if it had been prompted by his own failure when he’d been asked, in greater desperation, to reach a boy who didn’t know right from wrong?
    While he rested in the sun, Father Meade was aware of a temptation to let his reflections settle for one of these conclusions. But he knew, even without further thought, that there was as little truth in them as there was in the crude pretences of his visitor: there’d been no generous intent in the giving of the money, no honourable guilt had inspired the gesture, no charitable motive. He had paid for silence.
    Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subterfuge as any of his visitor’s. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland’s priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people.
    Father Meade remained in his garden until the shadows that had lengthened on his grass and his flowerbeds were no longer there. The air turned cold. But he sat a little longer before he went back to the house to seek redemption, and to pray for Donal Prunty.
    Prunty walked through the town Gleban had become since he had lived in it. He didn’t go to the church to make his confession, as he’d been advised. He didn’t go into Steacy’s bar, but passed both by, finding the way he had come in the early morning. He experienced no emotion, nor did it matter how the money had become his, only that it had. A single faint thought was that the town he left behind was again the place of his disgrace. He didn’t care. He hadn’t liked being in the town, he hadn’t liked asking where the priest lived, or going there. He hadn’t liked walking in the garden or making his demand, or even knowing that he would receive what he had come for in spite of twice being told he wouldn’t. He would drink a bit of the money away tonight and reach the ferry tomorrow. He wouldn’t hurry after that. Whatever pace he went at, the streets where he belonged would still be there.

Cheating at Canasta
    It was a Sunday evening; but Sunday, Mallory remembered, had always been as any other day at Harry’s Bar. In the upstairs restaurant the waiters hurried with their loaded plates, calling out to one another above the noisy chatter. Turbot, scaloppa alla Milanese , grilled chops, scrambled eggs with bacon or smoked salmon, peas or spinaci al burro , mash done in a particularly delicious way: all were specialities here, where the waiters’ most remarkable skill was their changing of the tablecloths with a sleight of hand that was admired a hundred times a night, and even occasionally applauded. Downstairs, Americans and Italians stood three or four deep at the