Read Online Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw - Free Book Online

roof—everything appeared to be suspended in anticipation, waiting like me for my life to begin. Sparrows and pigeons provided scant back action, flitting above the rubbish bins. When I clapped my hands to scare them away, I noted that this glen had no echo.
    It dawned on me that this might be what Maury did every day in prison—kill time so that it wouldn’t kill him. Pay strict attention to the fleeting minutes so that he’d have power over them rather than let their randomness rule him.
    Then a shadow swept over me and Monsignor Dade lowered himself onto the bench. He tried to make small talk. That wasn’t easy with a kid who had had it dinned into him that he should never discuss family business with outsiders. Dad’s murder, Mom’s mood swings, Maury’s crime—there were so many things I was compelled to stay mum about.
    A pink-cheeked, talcum-scented man of late middle age, the monsignor soon zeroed in on the subject that obsessed him—my vocation. “To receive the call of God,” he said, “is the greatest honor that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself.”
    He concluded by promising to pay my tuition to Catholic high school and on through university if I’d give prayerful consideration to becoming a priest.
    Heightening the drama of the moment, the air at Glen Echo started to throb. Throughout the amusement park, engines coughed and the PA system shrieked. The metal facades at the ring toss and the shooting gallery thudded up, and the roller coaster took a thunderous trial run without riders. Rolling my lunch bag, I slammed it between my cupped hands with a loud pop. Monsignor Dade flinched, perhaps believing I had rejected the deal. But ruthless little schemer that I was, I recognized my ticket out, and in a masterful impersonation of earnestness I agreed to do what he asked of me. Son of a single impoverished mother, I agreed that in return for an education I could never have afforded, for an opportunity available to no one else in my family, I would pray over my vocation. And as good as his word, the monsignor continued to cover my college tuition even after it turned out that my vocation was to be an actor.
    My reading at Burgh House prompts a polite round of applause, loud and long enough to persuade me that I’ve done well by British standards. The inevitable few people linger to have a word. Only one person fully engages my attention, and as I speak to the others, I’m aware of playing to this ravishing brunette. Tall, lean, and as self-possessed as a fashion model, she’s dressed like an impecunious grad student in unbecoming corduroys and a loose-fitting sweater. A jumper, she’d call it. When it’s her turn to talk, I complacently expect compliments. Instead she says, “Don’t you think you should footnote the quote you stole from Joyce?”
    “Afraid I don’t remember Joyce. Are you a friend? Her sister?”
    “James Joyce. What the priest said is verbatim from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .”
    “You’re kidding. Are you accusing me of plagiarism?” I joke it off. “You need to speak to Monsignor Dade.”
    “Maybe I should,” she says with a taunting smile.
    “Afraid he died decades ago. Thank God I didn’t fall for a sales pitch he cribbed from a novel. He might have tricked me into taking vows of chastity and obedience.”
    “Like you tricked him into paying for your schooling.”
    “And thank God I have you to keep me honest.”
    Having met “cute,” as every romantic comedy demands, she and I go for a drink at Toast, a restaurant improbably located above the Hampstead tube station. Her name is Tamzin—“that’s with a zed,” she informs me. As I suspected, she’s a graduate student in literature at University College London and works part-time at the British Library. With no false modesty, she swears that