Requiem for a Realtor Read Free Page B

Stanley’s visit, but doubtless she would counter with what she had already said. Had Stanley’s visit been a preemptive strike?
    â€œMy big mistake was telling him what David told me.”
    â€œJameson?”
    She nodded. “About Church law. He knows all about it.”
    Father Dowling said nothing. There was no canon law against lay people reading the code of canon law, and they could talk about what they read, why not? But it sounded as if David Jameson was impersonating a canon lawyer.
    â€œI gather he’s a friend of yours,” he said.
    â€œHe’s my dentist.”
    â€œThen he can’t be a friend.”
    Perhaps ten seconds went by before she smiled. Did her smile owe something to Dr. Jameson’s skills? “Oh, he’s a friend, too. I don’t know why I began to confide in him about Stanley. But he wasn’t a friend then, just a dentist.” Another smile. “He was explaining an X-ray to me, showing me why I didn’t need a root canal, and suddenly I burst into tears. What was the point of trying to keep my looks if my husband didn’t care?”
    Her words evoked a tender scene. She supine in the dental chair, a bib under her chin to guard against drooling and perhaps concupiscence as well, David Jameson in his pale green dentist coat, holding the X-ray to the light, and suddenly she is in tears. Not an ideal spot for a dentist to be in, a sobbing woman in his chair, her pain obviously more emotional than physical. It seemed extenuating. Jameson’s comforting, at least initially, might have been prompted by professional panic. For that matter, Phyllis Collins’s manner of dress and the streaked hair and the rest of it might be part of a pathetic effort to keep her husband.
    â€œAnd you became friends?”
    She nodded. “I could talk to David. Relatives, women friends, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them about Stanley. My mother never really forgave me for not marrying in the Church. And my brother Bob always hated Stanley.”
    â€œDoes he live in town?”
    He did. Bob Oliver.
    â€œAnd Dr. Jameson told you about canon law?”
    â€œAnd I, like a fool, told Stanley. But two can play at that game, can’t they? If we were divorced I could get really married in the Church, couldn’t I?”
    â€œDo you have someone in mind?”
    â€œYou know David, don’t you?”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œWe’ve kidded about it is all. But sometimes it seems the solution. I want so much to have children and Stanley has vetoed that.”
    Did she dream of a little line of Jamesons, all with enhanced smiles? Did he? It is a temptation for the celibate to find the amorous complications of the laity amusing, but, of course, they seldom really are. The statistics on unchurched marriages in the Archdiocese of Chicago were alarming. Not that sacramental marriages represented the solid rock they once had, but at least in them the vows made for some kind of check against folly. The Collinses were at a dangerous age—perhaps all ages are dangerous, but when forty comes and youth seems to be slipping away, there is an impulse to want to return to square one and begin all over again, as if life were a game that can be played and replayed over and over. But marriages can weaken when only one spouse wanders, and that puts the other in a tragic position. Still, Father Dowling had difficulty seeing Phyllis Collins as such a tragic figure.
    One of them, Stanley or Phyllis, had come to him to get some kind of endorsement to dissolve their wobbly union, but which one was it?
    â€œPerhaps if I talked with you and your husband together.”
    â€œHe would never talk to a priest.”
    â€œBut he has.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œHe was here on Monday.”
    â€œStanley!”
    â€œYes.”
    Her eyes widened, more in fright than surprise. “What did he tell you?”
    â€œYou don’t expect