"Honey, people get tired," she answered Regan tenderly.
"Why does God let them?"
For a moment, Chris stared. She was puzzled. Disturbed. An atheist, she had never taught Regan religion. She thought it dishonest "Who's been telling you about God?" she asked.
"Sharon."
"Oh." She would have to speak to her.
"Mom, why does God let us get tired?"
Looking down at those sensitive eyes and that pain, Chris surrendered; couldn't tell her what she believed. "Well, after a while God gets lonesome for us, Rags. He wants us back."
Regan folded herself into silence. She stayed quiet during the drive home, and her mood persisted all the rest of the day and through Monday.
On Tuesday, Regan's birthday, it seemed to break. Chris took her along to the filming and when the shooting day was over, the cast and crew sang "Happy Birthday" and brought out a cake.
Always a kind and gentle man when sober, Dennings had the lights rewarmed and filmed her as she cut it. He called it a "screen test," and afterwards promised to make her a star. She seemed quite gay.
But after dinner and the opening of presents, the mood seemed to fade. No word from Howard.
Chris placed a call to him in Rome, and was told by a clerk at his hotel that he hadn't been there for several days and couldn't be reached. He was somewhere on a yacht.
Chris made excuses.
Regan nodded, subdued, and shook her head to her mother's suggestion that they go to the Hot Shoppe for a shake. Without a word, she went downstairs to the basement playroom, where she remained until time for bed.
The following morning when Chris opened her eyes, she found Regan in bed with her, half awake.
"Well, what in the.... What are you doing here?" Chris chuckled.
"My bed was shaking."
"You nut." Chris kissed her and pulled up her covers. "Go to sleep. It's still early." What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night.
CHAPTER TWO
He stood at the edge of the lonely subway platform, listening for the rumble of a train that would still the ache that was always with him. Like his pulse. Heard only in silence. He shifted his bag to the other hand and stared down the tunnel. Points of light. They stretched into dark like guides to hopelessness.
A cough. He glanced to the left. The gray-stubbled derelict numb on the ground in a pool of his urine was sitting up. With yellowed eyes he stared at the priest with the chipped, sad face.
The priest looked away. He would come. He would whine. Couldjya help an old altar boy, Father? Wouldjya? The vomit-flaked hand pressing down on the shouder. The fumbling for the medal. The reeking of the breath of a thousand confessions with the wine and the garlic and the stale mortal sins belching out all together, and smothering... smothering...
The priest heard the derelict rising.
Don't come!
Heard a step.
Ah, my God, let me be!
"Hi ya, Faddah."
He winced. Sagged. Couldn't turn. He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In absent gesture, he felt at his sleeve as if for an unseen band of mourning. He dimly remembered another Christ.
"Hey, Faddah!"
The hum of an incoming train. Then sounds of stumbling. He looked to the tramp. He was staggering. Fainting. With a blind, sudden rush. the priest was to him; caught him; dragged him to the bench against the wall.
"I'm a Cat'lic," the derelict mumbled. "I'm Cat'lic."
The priest eased him down; stretched him out; saw his train. He quickly pulled a dollar from out of his wallet and placed it in the pocket of the derelict's jacket. Then decided he would lose it. He plucked out the dollar and stuffed it into a urine-damp trouser pocket, then he picked up his bag and boarded the train.
He sat in a corner and pretended to sleep. At the end of the line he walked to Fordham University. The dollar had been meant for his cab.
When he reached the residence hall for visitors, he signed his name on the register. Damien Karras, he wrote. Then examined it. Something was wrong. Wearily he remembered and added, S.J.
He took a room in Weigel Hall and, after an hour, was able to sleep.
The following day he attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. As principal speaker, he delivered a paper entitled "Psychological Aspects of Spiritual Development." At the end of the day, he enjoyed a few drinks and a bite to eat with some other psychiatrists. They paid. He left them early. He would have to see his mother.
He walked to the crumbling brownstone apartment building on Manhattan's East Twenty-first Street. Pausing by the steps that led up to the door, he eyed the children on the stoop. Unkempt.
Ill-clothed. No place to go. He remembered evictions: humiliations: walking home with a seventh-grade sweetheart and encountering his mother as she hopefully rummaged through a garbage can on the corner. He climbed the steps and opened the door as if it were a tender wound. An odor like cooking. Like rotted sweetness. He remembered the visits to Mrs.
Ghoirelli and her tiny apartment with the eighteen cats. He gripped the banister and climbed, overcome by a sudden, draining weariness that he knew was caused by guilt. He should never have left her. Not alone.
Her greeting was joyful A shout. A kiss. She rushed to make coffee. Dark. Stubby, gnarled legs. He sat in the kitchen and listened to her talk, the dingy walls and soiled floor seeping into his bones. The apartment was a hovel. Social Security. Each month, a few dollars from a brother.
