Chapter 12

The moments on the footbridge proved to hold the last of the year’s mild weather. Soon harsh west winds flayed bare the shedding trees. Hance listened with disdain as people raised in central heating bewailed winter as an affront to their comfort. He had lived in a time when, if they were cold, men simply donned an extra shirt; women, an extra petticoat. Every room had a fireplace or a stove. At night, beds were warmed with covered pans filled with embers. Hance found the 21st-century need for constant warmth pitiful, laughable, and the font of endless harassment by Dario, who used the approach of winter to pressure him into holding a benefit concert for the proposed homeless shelter. “The municipality wants to freeze us out,” he said after following Hance to the latter’s office one morning. “They postponed another hearing on variances needed to build the shelter.”

“Oh, that’s a bother,” Hance said, slapping together books and files for the morning’s classes. He supposed the postponement would douse his colleague’s enthusiasm and end the badgering about the concert. But Dario was not to be doused.

“We’re going to build separate men’s and women’s restrooms and showers,” he continued. “They’ll be made from donated lumber and contain shower stalls and toilets like what you see in recreational vehicles.”

“I’ve never been inside a recreational vehicle,” Hance said as Dario added, “For heat, we’ll use wood-burning stoves.”

The details promised an extravagant expense. “I thought you were trying to keep costs down.”

Dario shrugged. “Basic human needs must be met. It’s wrong to hold people’s dignity hostage. I’m considering a full fundraising campaign to cover the cost of whatever isn’t donated.”

“No, it’s your deeds that will hold people’s dignity hostage—by making the homeless rely too much on others to provide for them,” Hance said as Dario regarded him with what Hance sensed was repressed disbelief and repugnance “Believe me, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I don’t think I can help you. I’m a department chair, and as a chair I represent the school. Giving a concert in support of the shelter would signify that the college approves of the housing when in fact the administration has shown no support. It would be imprudent to inflame the community and alienate the college by raising money for a cause the administration prefers not to make its own.”

“I’m disappointed, John.” The reply emerged with a speed that suggested Dario had anticipated his refusal and concocted the rebuttal in advance. “I’d have thought someone in our line of work would be willing to do what was right, not cowering behind the possibility he would anger people, especially people who were not doing right. Your lack of charity astonishes me.”

“How charitable would it be if I deliberately did something against the wishes of the administration and was fired for it?” Hance challenged. “Who then would I be able to help?”

“Anyone you damn well please.”

The rebuke was as effective as a blow to the face. Hance’s mind reeled; he could think of nothing to say as Dario, who had never raised his voice, made a silent, yet huffy, exit.

For several moments, Hance forgot his schedule. He couldn’t get over what had just happened. It made no sense. Dario knew he didn’t share that silly obsession over the homeless; he trusted he had made himself clear without speaking in anger. He hadn’t shown any emotion at all, except, perhaps, the regret of one friend in his inability to oblige another. He was certain he had acted rationally, as anyone would expect of someone in his position. Why, then, was he feeling wronged and punished?

A sharp, loud clatter smacked the walls in the hallway. Hance, unaccountably shaken by the noise, saw music books splattered across the floor. Emmy Kydd knelt beside them, trying to scoop all of them up in her arms.

“You’re late,” Hance said, though he knew he was the one behind the clock. He made no attempt to help Emmy retrieve her things but hurried down the hallway. He could hear the girl behind him, trying to catch up in a rush that was half stumble, half stagger. She said nothing as they crossed the bridge, which an early morning sleet had left wet and slippery.

Like a horse too late seeing something it preferred not to run over, Hance bolted sideways, circling the last in a line of long black cars in front of the church. It wasn’t the hearses, or not realizing the chapel might be in use that threw him off. It was the realization that he was at the church. He had crossed the campus not knowing where he was going or wanted to do. He wasn’t even wearing an overcoat. Emmy had on that faded violet thing, but she shivered, anyway, and sniffled as the raw damp air excoriated the inside of her nose. Why doesn’t she use a handkerchief? Hance wondered. He didn’t know what they were doing in that place.

The sniffling grew louder as Emmy stepped to his side. “This is why poverty is evil,” she said to the ground, as if afraid to look him in the face. “It makes the poor ugly because they can’t take care of themselves, and it makes everyone else ugly because they don’t do anything to help the poor when they know they should, and their refusal makes them look selfish, and they don’t want everyone to know how selfish they are, but they still don’t do anything, and they get mad at the poor and say they’re lazy and would rather let other people take care of them than find work. I guess it’s easier for people to be mad at the poor than at themselves.”

Hance was too aghast at his loss of reason to be astonished at the girl’s brazen attempt to scold him. He said nothing, believing his silence would signal the depth of his dismay, which might or might not be topped with anger that foamed atop his emotions like spray on a raging sea. What was she to speak to him like that? What did she know about him to think she was entitled to lecture him? She should go away and let him be.

She dared (so he felt) to speak to him again, though her eyes were still directed to the earth. “If you don’t do the concert, Father Hance, who will? Just as, if I don’t teach those children, who will?”

As Emmy spoke, it occurred to Hance that while Dario might not be Marsden, and Emmy Kydd might not be Mary Guaire, the attachments, the enmities, and the obsessions were all intrinsically the same for no other reason than that they were attachments, enmities and obsessions. In his mind, he once again threw that candelabrum on the floor. This time, though, the corpse he was destroying wasn’t Mary. It was Emmy.

He returned to the music building. She followed. He knew. Her footsteps stopped in the foyer. Hance glanced back long enough to see her sitting atop one of the old steam radiators, blowing on her fingers, trying to warm up. Like a gardener pursued by demented hornets but afraid of enraging them more through the scent of panic, he made straight for the safety of his office deep in the department, and closed the door, and locked the door, and leaned against the door, trembling so much that he didn’t trust his legs to carry him another two steps to the chair.