Thursday, January 1st
6:12 am
1976
-
The
first day of the New Year began as any other, and in an odd way, because of the shocking events in only twelve hours, could
have been said to have ended in the ‘usual way’ given the odd life he’d craved for himself as an ordained
minister serving primary the needs of the homeless and the broken in spirit. The extra care he’d taken at last night’s
gala celebration worked wonders, his diabetes didn’t demand most of his waking hour, which was usually his ‘reserved
time’ for the Almighty, to put on the strength he’d need when he donned the brown robes of a monk following after
the example of Saint Frances de Assai and took a step out of that door. But if he thought today should somehow have the weight
and importance due it as the first day of a new and unwritten year, someone forgot to tell his tom cat Shiloh, for the slender
white Siamese emitted a low but intense yowl that preceded the alarm clock’s jangling summons by a full
two seconds!
His quick rise to stop the clock from its vengeful competition with the slender white wraith startled the cat and he
fled his perch on the back of the highboy and hid under the massive weight of the old chest of drawers until he could be sure
his tall, dark haired master wasn’t in active pursuit of him! Although Georgiana and the kids had thought almost as
much of him as he thought of himself, they’d been a great deal less tolerate toward these early hour serenades and it
was a mixed blessing to have him back in a small set rooms he could think of as his own, Brother John thought to himself with
a smile as he reached for the softly braided rug on which he knelt each morning since his mother Gabriella gave it to him
two years ago.
A light knock on his closed door and a soft voice calling his name, assuring herself of his safe arising deepened the
small on the six-foot-five man’s face.
“ I’m fine, Ma. “
He
called and he heard the slight scuff of her slippers as she continued back down the hall of the former estate house. Almost
as much as having her returned to him so late in his life, the forty-five year old man marveled at her quiet spirit. Through
the years he thought himself orphaned, traveling from Lebanon to Israel, and eventually to the United States, she had been
remained in the Near East, imprisoned as a slave to Muslim masters, but it had only deepened her faith in the GOD he learned
to love at her knee. Whatever his mixed feelings toward the late Father Andres Smirnov, his mother’s release had eased
so much of what had hardened within him that he now felt an exaggerated obligation to repay the Greater Unseen.
He’d felt so well he was going to skip the painful poke to check his blood glucose levels, wondering what harm
a few hours could do? He felt fine. But with his Fail/Safe sentry’s alarm, he decided to undergo the necessary delay
and resistance and he wasn’t too surprised to find his blood sugar had spiked at 320. That was when he usually had the
illusion of ‘feeling fine’ because he’d had the disease unguessed for so many years before a routine physical
for his insurance through the Church chanced to reveal the stealthy onset. He resented the intimate remainder of his mortality
but after nearly five years, the measures and precautions had become second nature to him. Only twice had he gone into so
deep a coma that mental confusion kept him from remembering why he was stirring sugar into water and ‘chugging it’
but he felt this was the Hand of GOD overriding his impatience and impulsive nature in the same reverence for life that they
shared.
Taking the required dose of fast acting ‘Novolin
R’ to offset the difference until he could eat, he found a new and deepening pleasure in the small cat’s company
as he showered and knelt at the side of the plain bed. Shiloh leaped up to the trim neat bed and lay near the man’s
folded hands as he leaned over. Washing a place on the clasped hands before completing his own tidy morning rituals with great
feline precision and care.
As Brother John lingered over the remnant of his thoughts from his last minute good-byes to his partner Al Hoag and
Georgiana Rowan’s oldest boy Lonnie, he found himself circling around the same thought, and he idly wondered if that
was an aspect of having corrected too or was something inside him trying to make itself heard over the gaiety of the New Year’s
celebration?
Oddly he missed the small rooms he had in the Church Annex, even while he’d conceded how difficult it was for
his neighbor Harry Bates, who’d taken such an intense dislike to the small white cat that he’d tried to poison
him. There had been a sense of purpose knowing that he could walk right out to the over-sized community kitchen where Vi Dickerson
was usually already fixing breakfast for them and Al was slouched behind his cluttered desk, sipping on the gourmet coffee
that was one of his few vanities. In ten minutes they could be out on the wind swept streets where they belonged, helping
place body and souls back into the same container!
It had seemed so ideal when
they talked about buying this property in the Santa Cruz mountains and establishing a retreat for those remaining Vietnam
Vets, or other homeless men, who were ready to transition off the streets, but that left so many who were still tied to it:
by fear, drug use, even the need for anonymity. On the streets you only had to be accountable to a small core of people, but
on the negative side, you only had to be accountable to a small core of people who viewed drug use and theft the same norm
you did. Prison was just an expected bump on the way to the grave He was grateful to have
this spacious house and acreage for his mother’s sake, even little Shiloh, for they could come and go with a freedom
multiplied several hundred times over the restricted lives they’d lived to this point, but he was being buried alive
under the serenity, the spaciousness, and the silence! And after Lonnie Rowan’s excitement last night, he couldn’t
see a way to bring it up to Al and Georgie without seeming like he wanted to tear apart the foundation of their dream? And
that was certainly the last thing he wanted to do!
He didn’t catch his mother’s
odd silence in time, in fact it wasn’t until Shiloh bowed up at the unexpected intrusion of a person who routinely walked
over doggie dung that he even noticed their unexpected visitor seated at the end of the butcher block sipping coffee from
a chipped mug but choosing to fold her ninety yards of slim, nylon encased leg to its fullest visual advantage. He felt a
momentary spurt of hormones, then resentment, at much at his own lack as her deliberate provocation. It was out of character
for a woman responding to Mother Mary Harriet’s call for a Christian Retreat for Singles such as he assumed her to be
since she’d driven over the mountain from San Jose while it was still dark enough to require headlights to warn away
the deer trying to cross the four lane concrete highway.
Apologizing
without waiting for introductions, Brother John chose to take the heaping plate out to the sunroom to eat, although he caught
the quick squint of disapproval from his mother at his rudeness to their ‘guest’. The last thing he wanted right
now was to complicate his life by some semi-religious woman’s romantic interest in him; supposing him ‘less of
a man’ for wearing the cloaking dark cloth of humility.
Clearly the woman took his
retreat as an insult and a challenge, following him out to the glassed in enclosure to watch him as he ate from the
china plate with the Devlon crest-of-arms.
“
I heard so much of ‘the Great Father Carbasian’ from your friends..
“
She challenged as soon as he reached for the napkin to wipe the remnants of the egg and hash browns off his lips, idly
wondering if growing a beard or a mustache would help calm female interest? Although they might mistake him for a Greek Orthodox
priest if he grew a long white beard. He smiled inspite of himself and barely had time to move the plate before Shiloh jumped
to his lap possessively.
“ Not from my friends. My friends call me Brother John. “
He sat down the cat and the plate on the floor but when he looked up, he was immobilized by the sight of tears in her
eyes and he wanted to fling her away, to violently disavow any clinging emotions she might have trudged up the hill to lay
on him, but he couldn’t. All he could do was to accept the small body of the cat as Shiloh determined reclaimed his
place in his lap.
Petting the cat, who demanded ‘the ledge’, the right to be pressed against his chest and be held on the
lean, sinewy warm that invariably appeared to meet his needs, he watched the woman struggle to retain her control over her
emotions, pretending a sudden interest in the large doe and new fawn that nibbled its way across the freshly moved grass beneath
the glassed in enclosure.
“ My name is Kathleen Turner. “ She began,
in an explanation he didn’t want to hear. “ I’m a reporter. “
“ I know who you are, Miss Turner. “ He said in
his best imitation of Bing Crosby as a parish priest.
“ Then you
know more than I do, Father Carbasian. “ She said in a soft, sad voice, as he
stifled the automatic need to correct her. “ Didn’t this use to be Harold Devlon’s house?
“ She inquired as he placed the reluctant cat to the carpet and used the remainder of the
standing movement to seize up the emptied plate and return it to the other room.
It was a reporter’s question, already knowing the answer, and he simply wasn’t interested in the inevitable
course of conversation from her grandfather Harold, to Loraine Devlon Lovich, and ultimately, the man she’d shared her
life and Al’s son with. For those questions, she’d be better off speaking to the dour Scotsman first hand.
Kathleen Turner gave an instinctive cry of fear as something warm and wet grazed her hand and the doe fled, her tail
raised high in alarm, her spindly legged newborn able to keep up with her fright.
She
looked at him, as if expecting to be scolded like a naughty school girl, but he didn’t have the heart. But neither could
he allow her to use this moment to squeeze into that narrow space reserved for the goodness of women that remained a part
of him despite the cruelty he’d seen from both sexes. She’d only use it, and he didn’t want to be used again.
Loraine Devlon had done that far too well!
Mother Superior Mary Harriet instinctively coaxed the other three nuns behind her, and approached stiffly like a mother
hen ready to defend her own.
“ What are you doing here, Miss Turner? I thought I made myself perfectly clear? ”
“ Bishop Walker at the Diocese, saw it a little differently, Sister Bahraini!
“
The slim reporter demanded, pretending to feminine coquettishness. At the old nun’s deep set snort of disgust,
it crumbled slightly, but she had little else with which to protect herself, and so she clung to the faint tracing of legitimacy
the familiar name afforded her project.
The
tall man of Lebanon stepped into the doorway of the opulent appointed kitchen, afraid to turn his back on them for fear they’d
be on one another’s throats like two dogs, both claiming the right to supremacy, grateful to hear the sliding door rattle
as Al Hoag walked up from the smaller house on the edge of the cliff.
“
Happy New Years, everyone. “ He called cheerfully in the Scots stained
accents of the language he spoke in his youth, but his smile froze on his face as soon as he recognized the well dressed form
kicking surreptitiously at the possible threat to her nylon pantyhose.
“
What are you doing here? “
“ Making
myself a ready target for everyone who doesn’t know to say, “Good Morning. How can I help you, Miss Turner?’
“
“ Gud morning. How can I help ye, Miss Turner? “ Al
answered, as close to mockery as Brother John ever heard him, and it set his teeth on edge with the fear that National Bi-centennial
or not, Nineteen Seventy-Six was going to be as full of wrath and hardship as all the years preceding it!
“ I came to see if Matthew was here, or not. Obviously, that makes me an enemy! “
The tears were a threat in her voice, but they didn’t fall, as Brother John allowed the ex-cop to take control
of the interview, dispensing roles and duties for all of them, which they were only too happy to fulfill. But he wouldn’t
let her speak in depth until his wife Georgianna stumbled up the hill, still sleepy and content with last night’s explosive
celebrations.
Having raised seven children on her own, Georgiana Hoag had a depth to her he’d found in few other women except
those molded by hardship, whatever the nation where they were raised, and Brother John found himself relying heavily on her
assessment of the well dressed but bitter young reporter. Her son Lonnie, a former drug addict, sat beside her protectively
while Al remained apart from them at a discrete distance, as if able to absorb the larger picture and place each player within
it with unerring accuracy, belied by his apparent lack of interest in the heated leap of the debate between the main characters.
When little Sister Mel approached him, he was almost annoyed, but at her quiet whisper he was profoundly grateful that
he hadn’t indulged his anger on her as the least likely woman to resist his impatience as a male authority figure. He
rose and followed without attempting to break into the heated conversation or to excuse himself.
Matthew
Lovich looked up from the opened car door, as if poised for flight till he saw it was the tall, dark skinned man he was more
comfortable with than his own sire. They embraced, overlong, as the twenty-one year old drew in a strength lacking him these
last three days.
“ I need a place to stay where Dad or Mom can’t find me. I mean, Samuel’s lawyers.
Not Dad, dad. “ Meaning Al Hoag.
“ Let’s
go inside and talk. “
He suggested with such urgency that
the exhausted youth looked at his duty car.
“ Should I drive it around back? If we put it in the garage, it won’t be spotted by
air? “
In a heartbeat, he knew what Matthew had been unable to say. The slender television reporter from san Francisco wasn’t
the only representative of powerful forces seeking him out for their own use!
“
Good Idea. I’ll drive. “ Then seeing the lack of space behind the
wheel of the small sports car, changed his mind. “ I’ll go open the garage, don’t drive
by the side of the house! “
Matthew Lovich blanched so violently
that only the car door held him upright. This was the one place he’d thought he be safe and they were already here!
It was in the back of his mind to gun the motor and flee down the Hill the same way he’d come, but there wasn’t
any place else left to go, not now. But he didn’t breathe easier until the automatic door slid shut against the front
bumper. He’d backed in, incase he had to leave in a hurry!
“
I didn’t know where else to go, Brother John. “
He
sobbed as the manly arms pulled him into a needed embrace of comfort and promise.
“
Will you stay this time? “
“
Yes. “ He promised at last. “ Yes.
“ This was a promise to himself, as the first had been a promise to his lifelong friend.
“ But what it? “
“
Let’s wait till we know what we’re dealing with. have you eaten? “
“ I haven’t eaten or slept in the last couple of days. I was holding my breath that
I’d even have enough gas to make it here. I couldn’t find anything open in town. I forgot what a hick place this
is! “
John Carbasian nodded, but kept his thoughts to himself.
When he checked on the youth an hour later he was asleep, his arms unconsciously cradling the small white form that
he had given as a present back in Seventy-six, when he was still a boy living his life shadowed by two powerful if corrupt
public figures. So much had changed, for so little to have altered!
After
the morning worship, seventeen year old Lonnie had gone down to the motor pool despite his loving mother’s grim threats
that this was a ‘holiday’ and he was in danger of becoming a workaholic, ‘like your Dad’, remained
unspoken between them but the fear of it filled Georgie’s eyes as she saw Zee Rowan’s compulsive nature in their
youngest son. He was becoming a driven man, and even if compassion was the force motivating him, she worried that he’d
fail in his impossibly high standards for perfection, like his Dad, and turn back to drugs.
Mother Mary Harriet and her tiny band put on street clothes and left for the hike and picnic Al promised them and Gabriella
Carbasian along the tidal pools last week. Although the threat of rain made any estimate of their return uncertain, and a
phone call from Vi in the city limited his potential rescuers from the impassioned woman reporter.
The
rest of the Staff had been given the week off to be with their families so it seemed a safe bet to take her out-of-doors for
a walk through the winter drowsing garden to answer her questions. If he seemed to be cooperating, he reasoned, she’d
have less of a reason to insist on staying. Although he’d had to hold his breath when his mother impulsively invited
her along and would surely have invited her to stay the night if she had! He was beginning to feel like he had a giant sized
bull’s eye target pasted on his back instead of ‘kick me’!
“ If you’d ever met Samuel Lovich, you wouldn’t call him ‘Sammie’.
And nobody ever did, not to his face. he outlived Al Capone and ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, that should tell you something
about the man! “
“ Now whose falling back on nicknames? “ She taunted,
“ This man could get you very, very dead. And Loraine Devlon, a lot worse that dead.
“
“ What could be worse than dead? “
“
If you don’t know, I’m not the one to tell you. But there’s rumors of places hidden where torture
against those suspected of doubling dealing La Costa Nostra are systematically reduced of their humanity. If its true or not,
I don’t know. But I believe it accurately portrays the kind of minds and men you’re playing with, Miss. Turner.
“
“ Why do you assume that because I’m a woman, I’m playing? “
“ Aren’t you attempting to toy with me right now? “
Her silence embarrassed her, and she turned her face back into the salt tainted wind.
-
*
Thursday, 1st of January
4:56 am
1976
-
It
was so late in the day when Al returned with the exhausted but cheerful women that Brother John had already called to make
them dinner reservations on the Wharf. He half considered wearing one of the business suits that’d hung in his closet
for the last two years, because of the relaxed and informal attitude of the small resort town where he
was frequently mistaken for one of the hippies who lived quietly in communes in the back of the steep, metropolitan based
hills. But the luxurious two story restaurant was filled to capacity with other men and women in fancier clothes than he possessed,
and seeing Georgiana look so lovely at her bearded husband in his new tux he was actually grateful he hadn’t attempted
to compete.
While they waited for their place on the upper deck, Brother John wandered out to the rain damped deck, enjoying the
release from the overheated air indoors, and needing to drain off some of the voices and coarse laughter he’d absorbed
in last three quarters of an hour. The darkness seemed to curve in layers that had little to do with the discrete attempts
at lighting on the huge deck and its aging wood. Out here a few weathered remnants of a long extinct past of whalers and ocean-going
voyages of two and three years duration huddled against the intense onslaught of the rain that had been no more than a fine
mist when they yielded Tray’s van to the parking valet.
Against his will, visions from the
past walked across the stage of his mind as he looked out at the darkened shadows of the great house. It stood alone from
the others, as its builder had. In the distance he could hear the faint tolling of the cast bronze bell stripped from a Chinese
monastery that the young Harold Devlon had purchased in an effort to make himself more cultured and worldly than his humble
beginnings in Oklahoma. As he watched the story Lorrie once told him, when she was too stoned to know how much of her pain
she was revealing, she watched as the two old antagonists sat under a striped green umbrella on that deck, then filled with
liquid sunshine, and closed the business deal that would give the pregnant girl and her future commodities inheritance into
the hands of a man her grandfather’s contemporary for all his lithe looks and dyed black hair.
The story of how Allen MacKendrie Hoag held his infant son in his arms for the first time, hearing the story of her
marriage and knowing as he looked at the sleeping boy in his arms, that Matthew Allen Lovich was as much his soul as he was
his blood. And he longed to weep for their pain, to mask his tears with the sting of chilled rain and perhaps escape it at
last. Escape them! He had as much chance of waking up tomorrow in a new body as do that! Remembering how he and Al met when
he chanced to trip on an exposed nail and dropped a cup of scalding milk and coffee unto his lap, calling him ‘Ma’am’
and almost dying of humiliation! He’d been following Sam Lovich that day, and many days thereafter,
until he realized that his best instincts as a cop could only harm the woman and the child he loved.
Now, that boy was twenty-one, his ‘father’ was on trial for a murder his mother’s twin Orin Devlon
probably commuted before his own suicide, and an ambitious woman’s desire to make a name for herself was pushing them
into the whole bloodied and ugly mix! It’d been a very long time since he survived the violence
of his youth that took his parents and his innocence from him in a war torn Lebanon village and questioned what Kathleen Turner
scornfully called ‘That GOD stuff’ this afternoon. But he found himself questioning it now, if God was allowing
them to be brought back into that vicious cycle swirling around Sam Lovich and his ex-wife. What good could be gained of this?
He was shocked by a fragment of memory almost two years old. When ten-year old ‘Gabby’ Ulrich first came
into their lives. As Vi Dickerson called it, ‘another stray’ that’d found instinctive shelter near his bulk.
“ Your cat’s wet. “ She’d said in shock,
gulping the last sip of coffee then making room for Shiloh to get up on her lap and start grooming the moist leaves and
mud from his feet.
“ It must be raining. “
“
Mom loved the rain. She used to get this old blanket and wrap us up in it and we’d sit on the couch and just
look out of the rain till my brother fell asleep, and then she’d tell me stories about life for her on my grandparents
farm when she was a little girl? We couldn’t do that when he was awake, he was artistic. “
“ Autistic? “
She
nodded and looked across at the empty portion of the room. “ But my Mom died and they took my brother
away and they won’t let me live with him. I’m the only one who can understand him, and I can get him to calm down...but
they won’t let me. “
-
At the time, there hadn’t seemed anything wholesome that could come out of such mindless and unnecessary tragedy,
but gradually a pattern had emerged. ‘Charlotte’ had been found by her older sister Serena Ulrich and given the
name and the home of her own that she so desperately needed and deserved. And a rich pattern was evolving which drew strands
from each of their lives, even Mother Mary Harriet who’d known him when he was that age. His mother had been
bought out of slavery and returned to him by his dead wife’s sister, as a means of severing any connection between them,
but each day with the gentle woman simply made them both more dear. From God’s point of view, couldn’t he better
serve him by returning to the Middle East and attempting to woo back his wife’s family? Wasn’t that more in ‘The
GOD Stuff’ realm than attempting to help self-destructive men find their way back to...He stopped short, finding his
own answer in his sense of shame. He was a better tool here, where he was making a difference, then
a needless martyr simply because that idea appealed to his dramatic nature. And yet... ‘
He didn’t hear Kathleen call his name until she actually touched his arm. He jerked back instinctively; forcing
himself into the chill pelt of the storm laden wind. Her smile was tentative, yet welcoming, and he returned it, stepping
back under the dripping awning. He prepared himself for the needless chit-chat people use to comfort themselves in uncomfortable
social situations, but she simply leaned back against the wood which had drawn in fresh water because of the layers of salt
dried against its faded paint.
“
On nights like these, I almost believe there’s a Great Spirit, like my grandfather used to talk to me about.
I wonder why I can only think of home when it’s raining? “
He
looked at her in interest. But she stopped as quickly as she began, confronted by ghosts he could almost feel.
“ Did you know there were two men watching Al and the little nuns this afternoon?
“
“ I wonder why they’d do that? “
She smiled, without looking up at him, and yet it included him in an intimacy he welcomed.
“
Now you sound like a reporter! “ She teased. And there was
invitation to find out, rather than mockery to her tone. “ By the way, the man
they were talking with is attempting to seat himself at the next table to your friends. Just a head’s up, Padre.
“
He winced at her inadvertent use of the code name Al used when he was hot on the scent of a suspect, but as he watched
her walk back into the crowded and jeweled group inside the glassed windows, he was watching the unfamiliar man she referred
too, and oddly, he knew exactly who she meant. If only by the look he gave until he sensed he was being watched too closely
and quickly began to scan the crowd indoors.
-`
End Chapter 1
