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The priest was sitting coatless at the kitchen table, fresh out of the seminary and maybe forty pounds overweight, and Atticus couldn’t remember his name. Marilyn put through a telephone call to her husband and was handed over to his secretary, her cousin Cassie, while Frank finished his talk with a friend in the State Department. Marilyn dipped the mouthpiece. “You’ll have to go through the American consul in Resurrección. She’s getting me the number.”
“I have it,” Atticus said. “Look on that pad there.”
Marilyn gazed at Renata Isaacs’s home telephone number and then at Atticus as Frank’s secretary gave her the American consul’s number. “We have it, Cassie. Thanks.”
Cassie handed her back to Frank and there was talk about a funeral home. Atticus crossed his arms by the coffeepot, watching the light brown explosions in the glass thimble on top. The percolating coffee was becoming important to him. Marilyn was put on hold again. She looked at Atticus and said, “You ought to go down, Dad.”
“I expect.”
The priest asked, “You know Spanish?”
“Word or two,” Atticus said. “Mexican workers used to head up to Antelope after the cantaloupe harvest in Rocky Ford, and I’d usually have a job or two they could help me with. About all I remember now is hammer is el martillo but a sledgehammer is el macho.”
“I could give you my Spanish phrase book if it’s any help.”
“I have one. Anyway, it’ll probably come back to me.”
The priest stared at him and then his face seemed to freshen. “Wasn’t Atticus the name of the father in To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“Oh? I hadn’t heard that.”
“Dad!” Marilyn said, and then turned to the priest. “Of course he’s heard that. He’s just putting you on.”
“You know the boy in that book? The girl’s only friend? That was Truman Capote.”
“You don’t say,” Marilyn said. “Wasn’t he charming?”
“Capote? Yes, he was.”
Atticus stared intently at them both.
The priest rolled up the left sleeve of his red plaid shirt. “You haven’t asked, but the Church presumes some profound mental upset in the case of a suicide. Especially when it’s committed in this manner. Your son wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. And there’s the problem of our prejudgment, too. We can’t put limits on God’s forgiveness.”
Atticus got out a straw broom and swept up the milk pitcher that was in pieces and chips on the pantry floor. “How’d that happen?” Marilyn asked, but before Atticus could answer she was on the telephone again. She jotted further information on the notepad and hung up when she heard her husband’s call-waiting tone.
The priest said, “I say that because you probably grew up in an age when a person who killed himself was denied Christian burial on the grounds that he was showing contempt for God’s law.”
“I see.”
Atticus tapped cream into Serena’s pink Dresden cups before pouring the coffee, and Marilyn sat across from the priest with Adam on her lap. She sipped a little coffee and rocked her boy and smelled the baby shampoo in his scalp. She said, “It doesn’t seem possible, does it.”
Atticus said, “She told me he went out to his studio to paint about one or so last night. And he seemed okay to her, a little frazzled and drifty, but not so she’d pay any extra attention. You know how Scott could be.” Atticus stopped. His lips trembled and pulled down at the corners, and he held his mouth with his hand as he squinched his blue eyes closed.
“You go ahead, Dad,” Marilyn said. “You’ve got every right.?
?
Atticus wiped his eyes with a navy blue handkerchief. “Embarrassing myself here.”
“Don’t think about me,” the priest said.
Atticus sipped his coffee, putting the cup on the saucer with care. “This morning,” he said, “Renata took his Volkswagen out to the house he worked in, I guess to find out if he was okay. She yelled in to him and Scott didn’t yell back, so she just naturally went inside. You know, to see how things were. Scott—”
Atticus couldn’t go on for a second and then the telephone rang and Marilyn gave it a second thought before getting up to answer it. Atticus got up from his spindle chair and limped over to the stoop window. More good people were expressing their sympathy. Marilyn said she knew Atticus appreciated their caring and their prayers. Atticus spied the outside temperature gauge: just twenty. Hotter in Mexico by fifty degrees or more. As soon as she hung up there was a telephone call from Cassie, and Marilyn asked, “Could you go down tonight, Dad?”
Atticus turned. Marilyn had covered the mouthpiece. “I guess I ought to,” he said.
“You fly first-class, don’t you?”
