drinking. So it was quite possible she had told him and that he’d thereafter dealt with her confidence with perfect discretion, never mentioning it or passing along the information to his twin brother, because it had got misfiled into that part of his memory he couldn’t access. There were card files on his hard disk where the same thing had happened. By some glitch in his software he got a message that said IRRECOVERABLE PROGRAM ERROR anytime he tried to access those particular files. They were there, but they couldn’t be reached.
The mind was like a computer. It consisted of an infinite number of on/off switches. The cartoonist’s cliché of ideas as lightbulbs was not far off the mark. And just as, with a faulty switch, a bulb would sometimes be turned on and sometimes not, so with the switches of memory. You see a face and think, I know who that is, but memory won’t yield the name until too late.
And some of the switches were faultier than others, for reasons not completely understood, although it was pretty obvious that alcohol did not improve the operation of any of the switches. Somewhere he’d read—was it in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone? —that a person who hides something when he’s under the influence of opium can only hope to find it when he is once again under the same influence.
Therefore, another rum and Coke? Why not.
Father Cogling was on his knees before the statue of the Virgin in his office at the rectory, and was on the third decade of his third rosary of the day, when the telephone in Father Pat’s office began to ring. Although he knew the answering machine was on, he could not resist the temptation to interrupt his prayers and monitor the phone call. It might, after all, be an emergency that ought to be addressed immediately.
It was, instead, Father Pat’s mother, calling from her nursing home, and calling (it gradually became clear) a wrong number. For she’d dialed Father Pat’s number, thinking she’d dialed her other son, Father Pat’s apostate twin, Peter.
The message she left wqappalling. If Father Cogling had known how to operate the machine so as to erase the filth that Mrs. Bryce had spewed out against her husband and herself, he would have done so, but playing back what the machine had recorded was the furthest extent of Father Cogling’s capabilities. That much he did: He played back Mrs. Bryce’s message, which seemed even more dismaying a second time. The woman was perhaps not responsible for what she said. She was deranged by the disease that had put her into a nursing home. But for that very reason her words might seem more credible to her son, because we tend to suppose those who are deranged have some special relation to the truth, when in fact the contrary is often the case. An exorcist would often be of greater benefit to the insane than socalled mental health professionals.
If only there were some way to spare Father Pat the needless pain of hearing his mother’s message. It wasn’t, after all, intended for his ears.
And there was a way. Really quite an easy one. If the tape were rewound to the beginning, which it was, and someone else were to call and leave another message just as long, or a little longer, the later message would replace Mrs. Bryce’s. Father Cogling might make such a call himself, from his own phone line in the rectory, but how could he explain his doing such a thing? No, it would be better to have someone leave a call about ordinary parish business. But whom to ask for such an odd favor? Who wouldn’t want to be given some reason for what he was doing?
Gerhardt Ober.
Of course.
6
Even in a state of mortal sin, which was surely his condition this morning, Father Bryce found a familiar, antidotal comfort in celebrating Mass.
As he lifted the chalice at the moment of consecration, his body felt a single integrated ache that was his hangover, his penance, and his dread, and when he drank the wine from the chalice, his usual
The mind was like a computer. It consisted of an infinite number of on/off switches. The cartoonist’s cliché of ideas as lightbulbs was not far off the mark. And just as, with a faulty switch, a bulb would sometimes be turned on and sometimes not, so with the switches of memory. You see a face and think, I know who that is, but memory won’t yield the name until too late.
And some of the switches were faultier than others, for reasons not completely understood, although it was pretty obvious that alcohol did not improve the operation of any of the switches. Somewhere he’d read—was it in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone? —that a person who hides something when he’s under the influence of opium can only hope to find it when he is once again under the same influence.
Therefore, another rum and Coke? Why not.
Father Cogling was on his knees before the statue of the Virgin in his office at the rectory, and was on the third decade of his third rosary of the day, when the telephone in Father Pat’s office began to ring. Although he knew the answering machine was on, he could not resist the temptation to interrupt his prayers and monitor the phone call. It might, after all, be an emergency that ought to be addressed immediately.
It was, instead, Father Pat’s mother, calling from her nursing home, and calling (it gradually became clear) a wrong number. For she’d dialed Father Pat’s number, thinking she’d dialed her other son, Father Pat’s apostate twin, Peter.
The message she left wqappalling. If Father Cogling had known how to operate the machine so as to erase the filth that Mrs. Bryce had spewed out against her husband and herself, he would have done so, but playing back what the machine had recorded was the furthest extent of Father Cogling’s capabilities. That much he did: He played back Mrs. Bryce’s message, which seemed even more dismaying a second time. The woman was perhaps not responsible for what she said. She was deranged by the disease that had put her into a nursing home. But for that very reason her words might seem more credible to her son, because we tend to suppose those who are deranged have some special relation to the truth, when in fact the contrary is often the case. An exorcist would often be of greater benefit to the insane than socalled mental health professionals.
If only there were some way to spare Father Pat the needless pain of hearing his mother’s message. It wasn’t, after all, intended for his ears.
And there was a way. Really quite an easy one. If the tape were rewound to the beginning, which it was, and someone else were to call and leave another message just as long, or a little longer, the later message would replace Mrs. Bryce’s. Father Cogling might make such a call himself, from his own phone line in the rectory, but how could he explain his doing such a thing? No, it would be better to have someone leave a call about ordinary parish business. But whom to ask for such an odd favor? Who wouldn’t want to be given some reason for what he was doing?
Gerhardt Ober.
Of course.
6
Even in a state of mortal sin, which was surely his condition this morning, Father Bryce found a familiar, antidotal comfort in celebrating Mass.
As he lifted the chalice at the moment of consecration, his body felt a single integrated ache that was his hangover, his penance, and his dread, and when he drank the wine from the chalice, his usual
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