The Case Against Satan Read Free Page A

and said, “Her name is Susan.”
    â€œWhose name?”
    â€œThe Garth girl. The one with the fits.”
    â€œOh yes. Susan. I’ll remember.”
    â€œI wish I had time to go into her problems in more detail. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help to her. But you’re a smart man, Father,you’re versed in psychology and such things. I’ve read some of those magazine articles of yours . . . I think you are more qualified than I to help the child. Be very kind to her. Please.”
    â€œI will.”
    As Father Halloran shook hands with Gregory for the last time, Gregory gently ribbed the more eccentric parishioners, and Father Halloran managed to summon a flinty smile. They parted on a key of ersatz joviality.
    But when the door clicked shut, Gregory’s gay mood dropped from him like a cape. He tossed off the remainder of his brandy in a gulp, and fell into a chair, his face buried in his hands.
    Then he raised his head and looked about with distaste at the parlor of his new rectory. He took in its scattering of vases and ash trays and doilies, its aggressively middle-class wallpaper, its bad holy pictures, its obtrusive pillars of dark wood. Sighing, he lifted himself from the chair and fetched his breviary from a nearby table. Before settling down to read his Office, he removed his jacket, for the weather was oppressively close.
    He found it hard to concentrate on his Office. His mind kept drifting, his eyes wandering from the pages of the book. He found himself again taking in the crushingly bourgeois look of the rectory. He couldn’t help comparing it to the rectory of St. Francis, with its large, beautifully appointed rooms, its décor a tasteful balance between traditional and contemporary design. He remembered his friends of the other parish: men and women with lively minds, writers, architects, stage directors, actors, musicians, teachers. He remembered his select little rectory dinners and after-theatre suppers, the fine cuisine, the old wine, the hours of stimulating, satisfying talk. The plans to collaborate with a psychoanalyst friend on a book.
    Gone, all gone.
    He was starting from scratch again, in a small parish, among good gray people whose simplicity and warmth could not replace the vigor of the people he had known. Starting from scratch at forty-five.
    Music, that might help. Gregory rose from his chair and snapped on the hi-fi set. He poked desultorily among his record collection. Respighi was not among his favorite composers—indeed,Gregory found him to his taste only in his arrangements of old Italian tunes—but now he pulled out a recording of the
Vetrate di Chiesa. “Church Windows,”
Gregory said drily, aloud. Perhaps it would be salutary, he told himself, slipping the record out of its liner and over the turntable spike.
    He sat down and opened the book again. Respighi’s first movement,
The Flight into Egypt,
lulled him into a receptive state with its gentle, nocturnal blandishments. The strains were almost Gregorian, a kind of music which Gregory (not, he hoped, because of the accident of his name) found peaceful and from which he was able to draw profound serenity. The flight into Egypt.
The little caravan proceeded through the desert, in the starry night, bearing the Treasure of the World
. Gregory, his Office read, closed his eyes and let the tension seep slowly out of his body. He floated on the music and his mind was mercifully empty. The movement quietly ended.
    A howling whirlwind smote him: a rising and falling whine of immense size. He frowned, jolted out of his calm. The second movement,
St. Michael the Archangel
,
had begun with a surge. The spiral of sound—at once divine and infernal—reached high, plumbed low, dizzily spinning and twisting.
And a great battle was made in the heavens: Michael and his Angels fought the dragon, and fought the dragon and his angels. But these did not prevail, and there was no