Page 308 - Some Dance to Remember

278 Jack Fritscher

that tell me?” Thom was not yet in the ground. “My brother betrayed me.”
He harbored that thought accompanying Thom’s body all the way back to
Peoria. By the time the plane landed on the bone-hot runway, Thom had
died of natural causes.
“Remember that.” Ryan towered over Sandy and the triplets in their
seats.
“Who decided that?” Sandy was indignant.
“Kweenie and I decided that,” he said. “Only Annie Laurie knows
what really happened.”
Sandy Gully smirked. “Except for me,” she said. “I’m the one who
knows what really happened.”
“Shut up,” Ryan said. “Just shut up!”
“He killed himself because you made him think he was a fag!”
“He killed himself,” Ryan said, “because you never made him feel
like a man.”
They deplaned in silent detente. Annie Laurie greeted them all with
hugs and kisses. Holding her arm was their own priest, her brother-in-law,
Ryan’s uncle, the Reverend Leslie O’Hara. Father Les had held his good
looks, but he was older. They all were suddenly older. From Les’s smile
and warm handshake, Ryan was sure his uncle remembered their summer
mornings of sex in the sacristy.
“I’d like to talk,” Ryan told his uncle. He wanted to ask how he could
remain a priest in a Church that despised homosexuals, but the chance
never came, because neither took it. What was to say? Was the priesthood
no more than a good living and a better cover? Ryan guessed that Father
Les was the same kind of priest he would have become himself. We do
what we must and call it by the best name possible. Ryan could not have
known then that Death’s long slow march would claim the Reverend Les-
lie Michael O’Hara two weeks after his fifty-first birthday. He was Ryan’s
uncle and godfather, and when he died, Ryan said, “The men in my family
don’t seem to be survivors. They may be lucky.” He looked distressed. “As
God is my witness, I predict I’ll probably live too long.”
The mortuary drove Thom’s body from the Peoria airport to the
funeral home where he lay in an open coffin for two days. Sandy bitched
he was rouged and powdered all wrong. She wanted to touch him up with
Mary Kay. Ryan threatened to break her fingers. The family pasted smiles
on their faces. They all stayed with Thom, standing on aching feet, greet-
ing relatives and old friends arriving with their condolences. One, if not
all of them, said, “Thank God, Charley didn’t live to see his own son die.”
His own son!

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