Narcissus and Goldberg by Barry Rachin (great novels to read TXT) 📕

Beatrice Goldberg located her son lying on a single bed at the retreat center run by the missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. The claustrophobically small room reeked of phisohex. A crucifix hung on the far wall alongside a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pulling up a chair, the big boned woman sat beside the bed. In her forties, Beatrice was still a strikingly attractive woman with a mass of platinum blond hair tied back in a bun. The boy smiled and kissed his mother warmly when she bent down. "I don't understand what you're doing, Brett," she spoke petulantly, “and need you to explain what's going on in that uncharted territory between your ears."

The young man’s ribs were bandaged and, on the left side of his head, a jagged row of nine stitches meandered across a shaven area of the scalp. "There are days when I ask the same question and come up blank," he quipped. The humor falling flat, the young man reached out and grabbed his mother's hand. "I got mugged. They stole my money and a cheap wristwatch. It’s not the end of the world."


An hour later, wandering back out into the bright, New England sunlight, Beatrice located Father Nicolas seated on a wooden bench by the duck pond. A good third of the water had evaporated with the intense heat of the previous month, most of the waterfowl and fish having retreated to middle of the shallow pond. A sooty brown mallard was bobbing for succulent water plants. The funny little bird would alternately tip vertically with its tail feathers jutting straight up to the heavens and beak buried in the muddy bottom then ease back to a floating position. The comical process repeated endlessly. "Father Nicholas?"

Prematurely bald except few a few wisps of brown hair at the temples, the squat man rose to his feet. A brown cassock was gathered at the waist with a leather cord. Despite the doughy face and flabby physique, the middle-aged, Franciscan cleric greeted her with youthful exuberance. "How was your flight from California?"

"Uneventful."

Father Nicholas gestured with a pudgy finger at the throngs of people heading away from the chapel toward an open field. "You came on the busiest weekend of our summer calendar." Every year in mid-July, the shrine held a summer festival with amusement rides, carnival games and entertainment. Even as he spoke, a bus with Connecticut license plates pulled into the lower-level parking lot.

A twenty-foot statue of Our Lady of LaSalette overlooked the entrance to the pond, which nestled just down from the new chapel. A small rock garden bordering the statue contained a scattering of tiger lilies, stately larkspur, garden amaryllis and foxglove with pinkish centers fading away to porcelain white. "When you telephoned,” Beatrice said, “you mentioned that Brett has been living here since his mishap."

The priest began strolling slowly around the perimeter of the duck pond. "The boy was severely beaten and robbed. As hospital chaplain, I sat with the boy until he regained consciousness." They emerged onto a central concourse leading to the main structure. Taped to a metal stanchion, a placard trumpeted a series of upcoming events:

Portuguese Healing Service,
Charismatic Mass for the Unborn,
Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament,
Hispanic Right to Life Vigil
Extreme Youth Prayer meeting

"Brett has been mending nicely, but I don't think he's going to be with us too much longer. They've decided to try their luck elsewhere and travel cross country in another week or so."

"They?” Beatrice became mildly flustered. “He's traveling with someone?"

"The Cambodian girl," Father Nicholas clarified. "A very serene, delicate creature." He shook his bald head thoughtfully. "The twosome are so devoted to one another. Reminds me of that lovely Chagall painting…the Kiss, I believe it’s called." Suddenly, the cleric turned a sharp angle and stared at the woman as though seeing her for the first time. "But you didn't travel three thousand miles to listen to my idle blather. Did you enjoy your visit?"

"No, not especially." She had no intention of humoring the chatty cleric. "I’m trying to understand why a boy who graduated top of his class at Princeton was living in flop house on the south side of Providence."

"It's complicated." Father Nicholas had reached the entrance to a building with a line of people stretching twenty feet from the entrance. "Have you seen our collection of crèches from all over the world? It's one of the most extensive displays in the country. There's artwork from Africa, all the South American countries, Europe, Russia… even the Inuit Eskimos sent an offering carved exclusively from walrus tusks and whalebone. As a testament to the faithful, it draws huge crowds from all over New England, especially during Christmas and festival week."

"I’d rather hear," Beatrice dropped all pretense of trying to be civil, "what a nice, Jewish boy who studied at Princeton was doing in a rat-infested, three-decker tenement in South Providence, Rhode Island?"

In an open field behind the duck pond the summer festival was in full swing. Carnival rides for the youngsters had been set up alongside games of chance and a mishmash of greasy food concessions. An adolescent with a wad of pink cotton candy protruding from her lips shuffled past. Only moments ago, they had watched an elderly woman with a shawl over her gray hair light a devotional candle, one of hundreds at the perpetual prayer shrine. From the outset, Beatrice had noticed that the parishioners huddled together near the chapel were more conservatively dressed and infinitely more respectable-looking than the scruffy types strolling about the carnival attractions. "You make it sound, Mrs. Goldberg," the monk responded, "as though somehow we are to blame."

"Did they ever catch the hooligans who beat my son?"

The priest shook his head from side to side. “No. It was a crime of opportunity. They knocked him unconscious, grabbed his wallet and ran off.” Several skinheads wearing combat boots trudged by. One youth with a chipped tooth and shaven head sported an Aryan tattoo on the side of his neck. He burped loudly and flung a lit cigarette butt on the pebbly ground. "Narcissus and Goldmund,” the priest said, shifting gears. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“No, not at all.”
“A novel by the German existentialist, Hermann Hesse, it was all the rage among hippy-dippy, college kids back in the psychedelic sixties. Brett read Hesse in his junior year at college and felt an affinity for the protagonist, who wandered through Medieval Europe during the Black Plague."
Up ahead a group of fleshy Hispanic girls dressed in halter tops and gaudy jewelry approached. They were speaking loudly in Spanish. The bronze-skinned girl on the far right wore no bra, an exceedingly large derriere squeezed into cutoff jeans.
"This Cambodian girl you mentioned," Beatrice had no interest in the priest’s musty esoterica, "where did Brett meet her?"

They were standing next to the Ferris wheel which, grinding to a halt, was letting riders on and off. "There's a large Hmong population in South Providence. They came here after the fall of Saigon. You see their produce markets and nail salons up and down Cranston Street."

"My husband's a lawyer. We thought our son might go on to law school and eventually join him in the family firm. Traipsing around South Providence with Hmong refugees in search of God-knows-what... it's not a life."

"Brett has an inclination to savor new experiences - people, philosophies, religions… new miseries, even." Father Nicolas chuckled as though at some private joke. "There’s an elderly monk here at the cloister, a rather timid man, who’s afraid to switch shaving creams."

"Very clever," Beatrice muttered sourly. "Clearly, you share my son’s fondness for reckless endangerment."

A shrill bell sounded and a row of contestants with water pistols commenced shooting a stream of pressurized water into the mouth of a plastic crown, filling balloons directly above. A few seconds passed and a balloon popped signaling the end of the game. "You're missing the point," Father Nicholas brought her up short. "Brett feels things at a much deeper level.”


They had navigated the perimeter of the carnival and the monk veered away from the festivities back in the direction of the shrine, where he showed Mrs. Goldberg a grotto carved into the side of a hill. Nearby, terraced flagstones arranged in wide, stair-step fashion climbed to the summit of a shrine where the devout offered up their petitions. Several nuns near the base of the structure, were inching forward on their knees, clutching rosary beads and intoning a singsong mantra of Hail Marys at each, designated Station of the Cross.

A convoy of motorcyclists arrived, rumbling onto the parking lot in a convoy that stretched two hundred yards out onto the main highway. Many of the new arrivals were decked out in full Harley Davidson regalia with biker boots and studded leather trappings. Between the salacious Chicano girls, skinheads, elderly nuns crawling up the incline on their swollen knees, biker broads strutting about like dominatrix queens, somber, salt-of-the-earth, blue collar Catholics and Franciscan missionaries it was the American melting pot gone haywire, a parody of good taste and sensibility. “That book you mentioned earlier… whatever happened to Goldmund?”

Father Nicolas crooked his thick neck to one side, considering the question. “By the end of the story, he was reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot, and the two reflected upon the different paths their lives have taken - hedonistic mystic versus rational contemplative.” The priest waved his hand at the throng of religious zealots surging up the blue-black flagstones. “Your classic dichotomy of Apollonian versus Dionysian temperaments.”

At the summit Beatrice cupped her hands over both eyes and began to cry noiselessly. Misconstruing her private grief as religious supplication, nobody paid the pretty Jewish woman any attention. "The bastard raked a pair of brass knuckles across my son's scalp!"

"Yes, I know. The metal tore an ugly gash clear to the bone."

After a while, Mrs. Goldberg pulled her emotions back under control. "These people frighten me… the nuns doing penance for negligible sins,… the skinheads who wouldn't seek salvation if this was their last day on earth… the slatternly sluts with boobs on public display."

"For what it's worth," Father Nicolas lowered his voice several decibels, "in my weaker moments, I can't fathom the metaphysical freak show either."

It took them a good five minutes to traverse the last few Stations of the Cross emptying out onto the lower landing."I thought I might take Brett out to supper tonight. Would you join us?" Father Nicolas blinked several times and stood pigeon-toed with his pendulous gut protruding from the robe. "You've been honest to a fault," Beatrice noted, anticipating his confusion, "and I'll need somebody to run interference when I feel the urge to say something thoroughly regrettable."

The priest glanced at his watch. "What time were you planning to head out?"