Thomas M. Disch by The Priest Page A

another tape as a kind of keepsake. Possibly he might play it at her memorial service, assuming there was one, and that he’d be attending it, which lately had come to seem a more and more unwarranted assumption.
    After she’d hung up, he rewound the tape and poured himself another rum and Coke so as not to waste the last half of the can, his third of the evening. There was just enough Bacardi left in the second halfpint bottle.
    Then he replayed the answering machine tape and used his Walkman to add tonight’s message to the anthology of her other messages. Tonight’s was surely one of her finest, especially the suggestion that he was the only one who could reveal her dark secret, her Alzheimer’s having wiped the slate of her
    memory clean. Neat.
    He wondered if elderly lifers in penitentiaries came down with Alzheimer’s and had to ask guards or cellmates what they’d done to be there.
    He also wondered, as he had other times, if his mother was quite as fuzzy-headed as she made herself out to be. Sometimes she just seemed devious.
    Of course, it was possible she was both fuzzy-headed and devious. Devious could become a habit, like drinking, that a person maintained in a variety of circumstances. Richard III was devious and physically challenged, so why not devious with Alzheimer’s? Peter was devious himself, and as he approached the end of his rum and Coke he had a genuine brainstorm of deviousness.
    If he’d been sober he wouldn’t have succumbed to the temptation. But he wasn’t sober and he did succumb. He dialed his brother’s number at the rectory. He knew Pat’s habits, which weren’t that different from his own, and sure enough, instead of his answering the phone himself, the answering machine came on.
    “Hello,” said Father Bryce in a tone of professional warmth, “and thank you for calling. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number and a brief message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Meanwhile, why not get in touch with God—and say a prayer for me while you’re talking with Him. We all need each other’s prayers. God bless.”
    After the beep, Peter played the tape he’d recorded on his Walkman into the phone receiver. If Pat was by his phone monitoring his calls, Peter was sure he would not pick up the phone but just let their mother go on talking, and he’d assume that she’d dialed the rectory by mistake. She regularly confused her sons’ phone numbers, or else she’d simply forget which of them she’d meant to talk to when she dialed.
    As soon as the tape reached Mrs. Bryce’s “Bye,” Peter hung up. Now, what would Pat make of that? Would he believe Margaret’s story about their father not being, after all, their real father? For that matter, did Peter believe it? He would have liked to. He couldn’t remember that much about Paul Bryce, who’d died when his sons were in kindergarten, and even the little Peter could remember bore the impress of his mother’s recollections, which had varied from maudlin to embittered according to her mood and her narrative purpose.
    Sometimes Paul had been a model Catholic layman, a regular Sunday communicant and keeper of Lenten fasts; other times he was a drunken brute who’d given his wife black eyes and overturned Christmas trees. Peter could dimly remember a wrecked Christmas tree, though he hadn’t witnessed the event. In either case, whether a Knight of Columbus or a standard-issue Irish drunk, Paul Bryce was no prize as a father from Peter’s point of view. A mystery father was a much more exciting idea.
    The drollest part of the situation was that Peter had no way of knowing whether or not Margaret had told him who his mystery father was, as she claimed, because he’d blacked out the entire three days of his grandfather’s wake and funeral four years ago. That had been his first sustained blackout and a very scary experience; though not scary enough to have stopped his