Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
Part I
Part II
"So Father M.," said Mrs. P as she re-entered the room, "just exactly how do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Bury the mafia?"
"Let's see, if there's enough of a body to be buried, the standard procedure is to send it to a funeral home. If the mortician has to, he'll super glue the head back on. Any holes are usually filled in with Silly Putty and..."
"Father M., I'm talking about how do you, as a man in the long line of Melchizedek, bury a guy who has made his money off of drugs, prostitutes, gambling and charging his neighbors weekly protection fees? Not to mention the pouring of concrete kimonos for people who didn't agree with him?"
"Mrs. P, I have never knowingly buried a member of the mafia." responded Father M.
"You mean mobsters don't even come clean with you, the guy in the collar they need to give them the Apostolic send-off to the Great Beyond? Are they that delusional? Do they really think old St. Peter has no idea of what goes on down here? The mafia always lives dangerously but this is playing with fire."
"Literally." said Father M, hoping his hostess, like the conversational rottweiler she so closely resembled, would start barking up another tree. To his intense relief, she did, though it was a tree just to the left of the one she had been preoccupied with.
"Father M. did you know my mother once bought a mafia squad car?"
"She did?" asked Father M., wondering if even a turkey tea sandwich with dried cranberries and fresh tarragon was worth all this.
"She bought it for my brother to drive himself to prep school. Funny, huh? She got it from a woman she knew of Sicilian descent. It was always thought, but of course never said, that the woman's family were low level mob members. You know, the ones who have to wax the limmos, fetch the Chinese take-out, and whack the occasional rude waiter. But the woman herself wasn't mafia anymore. She had married a popular hairstylist."
"A daughter of a low-level mobster married a popular hairstylist?" asked Father M, trying hard not to visualize their children.
"Yes. If you think about it, back then marrying a popular hair stylist really was about as far from the mafia as you could get. These days young mafia maidens have so many more avenues open to them. Why, a smart one with the right kind of clothes could marry a bishop in the Episcopal Church. Think of that? In one action, she'd be an apostate from The Family and from The Church at the same time."
"That's a thought." said Father M. trying hard to conceal a wince.
"The hairstylist was always affectionate with his wife in public. But it was over-the-top phony kind of affectionate. He was like that mortician in The Loved One. The one who showed his affections for the cosmetician by giving her stiffs with bright smiles to work on."
"Mr. Joyboy?"
"Mr. Joyboy. How could I ever forget that one? Evelyn Waugh is so wonderfully dreadful. Remember how Mr Joyboy called the cosmetician his honey-baby? Then you found out Mr. Joyboy lived with his mother and an old fouled-mouth parrot. After his honey-baby offed herself in his work-room, Mr. Joyboy incinerated her at the Happy Hunting Grounds crematorium and buried her alongside his mother's parrot so his career wouldn't be ruined."
"But" interjected Father M., "surely Mr. Joyboy's displays of affection were cloistered compared to whatever this hairdresser was doing in public?"
Like the Mississippi River, Mrs. P rolled on, unvexed to the sea. "Well, this hairstylist called his wife his honey-baby all the time. Ugh. But it turns his honey-baby really was like honey. She spread herself..."
"Mrs. P," interrupted Father M. "do I need to know this?"
It was a question his hostess had heard before and she was ready for it. Her husband, a great reader of military history, had noticed over the years how her tactics had changed. Once, Napoleon-like, she'd try to outflank the query, These days, Weremacht-like, she simply rolled over it.
"Need to know? I don't know. But here is the point. Sometime when Mr. P was off in the City with Fiendish and that blighted Andrew, my mother and I took the children out to of our favorite restaurants for dinner. It's a seafood restaurant that has been around forever. We always go there when Mr. P isn't around. The middle westerner in him makes him totally deaf, dumb, and blind to the charms of bivalves and bottom-feeders.
"Even mermaids?" asked Father M. trying to derail Mrs. P's train of thought.
"No. Thankfully, he does appreciate them. Immunity to the charms of mermaids should be a big red flag to any girl during the courtship, don't you think?"
Father M's mind flitted back over the couples he had counseled before marriage. Somehow mermaids never seemed to come up in those discussions. But seeing his attempt of derailing Mrs. P had only sent her off on an even more uncomfortable tangent, Father M. returned to the restaurant motif. "So what happened with you and your mother at the seafood restaurant?"
"Happened? Nothing happened. What? Did you think something happened?" asked Mrs. P
"I thought there had been a mafia hit."
"A mafia hit at a restaurant in Connecticut? Why Father M., the mafia gave that sort of stuff up years ago. They're respectable now. They wear Burberry and drive Mercedes. Only the Chinese mob does any open-air whacking these days. They'll whack someone just before closing time and the whole town will be frightened. Until it gets out that it was just an Chinese illegal immigrant from the kitchen who was always hopping the train into Chinatown to play Mahjong. No one ever wins at Mahjong. The Chinese illegal got to owing too much money to Chinatown's Mr. Big --who is not big at all. They say he tops out at 5'1". So Mr. Big's thugs are packed into the limmo and sent to the back door of the restaurant. They tell the restaurant to pay up. For whatever reason the restaurant didn't pay up. So the thugs handed the Chinese illegal a fortune cookie because his meal was over. To see mobsters dress and behave like respectable mobsters you have to drive over to New Jersey. And really, considering the traffic over the George Washington Bridge these days and the children's early bedtime, it's totally unfeasible for my mother and I."
"Mrs. P, I wasn't suggesting you and your mother witness a mob hit," said Father M., "I'm just trying to figure out what any of this has to do with me?"
"What any of it has to do with you? Well, if you look at it that way Father, almost none of it has anything to do with you. Except that my doctor said it was the morality of his patients that caused him to do things that are not right. But you don't have that luxury, do you? You can't let the morality of your patients cause you to do or teach things that are not right, can you? This is, ultimately, what makes the Catholic Church different, isn't it"
Stunned at the sudden quickness with which all these disparate strands came together, Father M. said, "Yes."
"Father, one more question please?"
Father M., braced himself and nodded.
"Have you ever considered, in your free time naturally, becoming a doctor? The apostle Luke was a doctor."
"He was also a Saint. No."
Recent Comments