The Sign

Father Varnet stood to offer his hand, shrugged when it was refused, sat down again.

"I know why you're here, Mr. Kranach," he said. The words ran together, flat and fast, "Iknowwhyyou'rehere." Who used to talk like that? Kranach tried to remember. Father Donnelly, back there in St. Sebastian's. Years of blistering through the Latin of the Mass. Some of the kids said that Donnelly could give you an Our Father in two and a half seconds and you'd hear every word of it, too. They were all famous for something at St. Sebastian's if you were an altar boy long enough--Father Delgado, who wanted practically all water and no wine in the chalice, and Father Mack, who was the other way around, vital stuff like that.

Kranach didn't say anything. He'd come in not knowing how he was going to put it. His hands lay in his lap. The priest's face was round and red.

"My daughter Margaret," Kranach said. "She told me tonight you won't marry her and Pete Toburn."

"That's right," Father Varnet said. "Margaret has been a member of this parish all her life. The Toburn boy is a professed atheist. Marriages like that are undesirable. They don't work out. It's a practical matter."

"You told her her children would be bastards, if she married him anyway."

"Illegitimate in the eyes of the Church."

"Bastards."

The priest said nothing. Kranach knew he was bored. Situation A. Response B. Next case. Boredom. He wasn't afraid of Kranach, that Kranach had a gun or whatever; he was too shrewd for that. And he was big, probably strong, fat or not, and brave. Most priests are all balls, Kranach knew that; a coward priest is uncommon.

"They will not be married in the Church," Father Varnet said, "and not by a priest."

"These kids have waited for two years now, all the time Pete was in Vietnam," Kranach said. "Something bad could happen."

"The marriage itself would be bad," the priest said, "and a bad thing cannot have a good result."

Kranach said more, but he knew it didn't matter and he gave up and went home.

Everybody was sitting around in the kitchen. They all looked at him as he came in. Margaret got him a cup of coffee. He wanted a doughnut out of the heap on the platter in the middle of the table but, for some reason, he thought it wouldn't be right to take it, and in his own house.

"I didn't get anywhere with him," he said. "They don't argue about a thing like this, smart-ass ones like him, they just tell you. Old Poshkin was a son of a bitch, but you could argue with him. Poshkin would boot this smart-ass down the front steps. Anyway, he says he won't let you get married in the Church, and he won't."

"My God, there has to be some way," Margaret said.

"Sure, there's a way," Kranach said. "Peter goes back to the Church, he goes to confession, he goes to Communion, he goes back, then it's OK."

"Peter," Margaret said, "I never said this before, but look, what the hell, you could walk through it, if that's what they want, let them have it, nobody has to know what you really think...."

"Peter," Margaret's mother said, "more people believe than don't, you know that."

"Let him alone," Kranach said. "Goddamn it, don't you know a man when you see one, you two?"

"Look, Mom," Peter said, "if I could believe in it like I used to, I would. I can't, so I don't. That's all there is to it."

"Go see a movie or something," Kranach said. "Get in the car, don't sit around here moping. Maybe I'll think of something. But not tonight. I've had it for tonight." He took two doughnuts and went into the front room and turned on the TV.

In the morning, he said to his wife, "I thought of something."

That night on his way home, he stopped at the church. He went up the steps two at a time, glad it was dark. His hand closed on the thick bronze ring and he thought, well, it's been 22 years, that's damn near forever, and went in. Memories battered at him, riding on the colors, golds and whites shining out here and there in the gloom, yellow 40-watt bulbs in the black-iron chandeliers, stub candles in banked red and green glasses at the altar, the smell of burning wax, flowers, thick blue incense smoke hanging forever high in the beams. Nothing had changed that he could see. Halfway down on the right side, there it was, the confessional Poshkin had come roaring out of, and dragged him out of, that June night, and they fought right there, head to head, like longshoremen; it took three men apiece to get them apart. That was where he got his flat nose, rolling on the blue stone floor in front of the confessional, and there was blood all over the place at the end. They threw Kranach out for good for that, excommunicated him, finally. Well, hell, he thought. Long time ago, all that.

He walked softly along to the altar, knelt, dropped his quarter down the slot and put the taper to a butter-yellow candle in a red glass. Then he bent his neck and prayed earnestly and for a long time, but not to God, to Poshkin; or, if to God, then God was wearing Poshkin's face.

He came a few minutes late to the eight-o'clock Mass the next morning. He sat in the back on the dark side of a pillar. There were 30 or 40 people scattered in front; there was no one near to see him or to notice that he wasn't kneeling or standing, just sitting there.

Probably no one in the church saw it as clearly as Kranach; after all, he was watching and waiting for it. Father Varnet coming down the steps, just having carried the chalice up after Communion, when he seemed to trip; he half caught himself, then he really went, ka-boom, all the way to the altar rail, where he fetched up with one foot in the air and the other one under him. It was as funny a fall, Kranach thought, as he'd ever seen, leaving out people like Buster Keaton, and, by God, the only time he'd ever seen a priest go on his head in the middle of a Mass. The altar boys had Varnet under the arms, trying to get him up, but it would be no good, Kranach knew: Varnet had a thoroughly sprained ankle, ordered, he thought, or petitioned, anyway, by me and delivered by Poshkin, the old son of a bitch, who had loved the chance to do it, you could bet on that for sure.

Kranach drove down the street and stopped at a pay phone. Peter was still eating breakfast. "You can tell Margaret it'll be all right now," he told the boy. "You said you could believe if you had a reason to, and that goes for me, too."

"What in hell are you talking about?" Peter said.

"You can go back to the Church, sincerely and like a man," Kranach said. "Anyway, for long enough to get married. I had a sign this morning, I saw a miracle. My faith came back. I believe now, and when I tell you, so will you. Come around to the store at lunchtime."

"Anything you say, Pop," the boy said.