He passes the rectory on his way downtown. He tells himself that he wants to walk through the park, though in fact he barely notices when for a quarter mile grass replaces pavement beneath his feet, and when he comes to the park’s other side, there’s Lombard Street just a stone’s throw away. He turns onto it automatically, unthinking, drawn there by a force that is irresistible, powerful as he believes God is meant to be: bottled salvation.
The rectory is a small clapboard building, indistinguishable from the other houses that line the residential street except for its coat of paint, which, though no longer fresh, isn’t peeling, as the paint on most of the other houses seems to be. Hannigan follows the walkway across the small, dry lawn to the front stoop, where he squints at his ring of keys, searching for the small silver one. Before he opens the door, he pauses and looks at the street around him. Some evenings, there are children out on the pavement, but tonight the street is empty. Only a few cars are parked along the curb, one of them his own, provided by the order. It’s an older car—a Ford station wagon with wood siding, wire wheels, and an external horn that no longer works. Inside are traces of the priest from whom Hannigan took the parish over three and a half years ago—his rosary beads in the glove box, and his pair of driving gloves in the well of the driver’s side door. Hannigan has left these things where they are, as if that priest might yet return from his new mission in Ceylon and relieve Hannigan of his duties here.
The only person Hannigan sees tonight is the old man who lives several houses down from the rectory. He is sitting on his porch as he always is, oblivious to Hannigan’s presence. Hannigan has visited him once before. He sat by the man’s feet, on the top step of the porch, and spoke about the weather, and music, and how time passes, and a little bit about God, but the man was silent, and after a while, Hannigan stopped talking. He could smell bacon and something sweet cooking inside, could hear a woman humming, but she never came outside, and he wasn’t invited in.
Hannigan salutes the man tonight, but his gesture goes unnoticed, or ignored. He unlocks the rectory door and steps inside, and he’s greeted immediately by the distinct smell of the place, an unnamable scent which if pressed to describe he’d say was a curious combination of rain, dirt, and basil. When he first moved here from Madagascar, he found the smell irksome and distracting, but he’s come to take comfort in it, its sourcelessness and mystery.
He puts his hand on the switch of the lamp by the door, then hesitates, imagining the sudden yellow that will spring forth from the bulb when he turns it on. Now, the room around him is blue with evening: the small sofa, the coffee-table trunk, the white walls, the wood floor. Particles seem to spill from the hazy borders of different objects and mingle in the blue air, as if with night everything will slowly become one. His mother called this hour the gloaming, and when he was a boy, the word frightened him. It’s one of the odd and precise things he remembers clearly of his mother. He also remembers the smell of scallions on her breath, and a red cotton blouse. He remembers the tune of a song she sang, and has a notion that it had to do with strawberries.
He drops his hand from the light switch without turning it on and crosses the room to the kitchen. His coffee and the soggy remnants of this morning’s cereal are still out on the small table, where he’d been eating when Jason Biggs came knocking at the door, frantic, his baby stillborn. This morning seems like days ago. Hannigan rubs his eyes, thinking of that tiny dark creature in his palm, the shriveled skin, the fragile bones, and Della Biggs dumb with grief. And what was Hannigan supposed to say? What comfort could he give? His thoughts turn again to his mother, how her grief when his brother died had been too much for her to bear. Five years old, Hannigan had been unable to give comfort then, either, and one death became two, though of each death he remembers nothing but the knowledge that it had occurred. And so his mother exists as the smell of scallions, the tune of a song, and his brother lives in a single vivid image: a boy, crouched on the dusty ground before glass marbles, sunlight catching in each.
Hannigan puts the bowl and mug into the sink, then takes a long drink of milk from the bottle in the icebox. He’s eaten nothing since the cereal, and he knows he ought to eat, but when he opens the pantry door and scans the offerings—crackers, canned sardines, onion or tomato soup, peanut butter, applesauce—nothing appeals. Nothing aside from the Old Crow straight rye at the very back of the cabinet, a housewarming gift from the pastor of St. Peter’s, still corked and sealed with wax, often thought of and never thrown away. He reaches for it, looks down at the smooth bottle, the little village on the label nestled in some Kentucky valley, the brown liquor inside, for him both poison and saving grace. He considers the bottle, then puts it back, and shuts the pantry door.