Free Ash Wednesday by Ralph McInerny Page B

losses; she had set him up in business time and again. She herself lived a simple life. How many women with that kind of money would spend their days at the St Hilary parish center?
    “Nathaniel can always change his will,” Jason said.
    “After making a public announcement?”
    “He didn’t make it. I know Tuttle, Madeline. What kind of lawyer would reveal work he had done for a client?”
    “Well, you’re certainly philosophical about it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Whatever your mother has will go to you.”
    Jason thought a minute, then looked sad. “I’d just gamble it away.”
    “Jason, what in the world attracts you to gambling?”
    “I wish I knew. It ruined my marriage.”
    Madeline thought drink had been the major cause, but gambling had certainly played a role. “Do you ever see Carmela?”
    Jason shook his head, then looked at her. “Do you?”
    “Infrequently.”
    Jason sat forward. “When’s the last time you saw her?”
    Madeline found this an unwelcome turn in the conversation; she wasn’t sure why. The three of them had been in the same class at St. Hilary’s years ago, she, Jason, and Carmela. Jason had been sent off by his mother to a military school in Wisconsin, then to another in Indiana; next she managed to get him into Jesuit prep; after that, giving up, she let him finish at Fox River High. Madeline and Carmela had gone on to an all-girls Catholic high school in Chicago and then to Loyola. In those years, there were still school dances, and when Carmela broke up with the boy she had been going with just before the big spring dance, Madeline, asked if she knew a substitute, thought of Jason. Who would have thought it would be a fatal meeting?
    Jason’s hair was already thinning, and he was overweight, but he could dance like a dream. His checkered school career had lent him a certain devil-may-care dash, and an enlistment in the navycontributed an exotic veneer. Carmela was smitten by her former grade school classmate. Flattered, Jason had danced away the night with Carmela while Madeline looked on with foreboding. Should she tell Carmela about Jason?
    It wouldn’t have mattered. That was what she always told herself later. The attraction between the two—it was soon mutual—would have been impervious to cautious reasonableness. Fulton, the boy Madeline was with, thought he had a vocation, and that pretty well defined their relationship. Over Cokes, Fulton asked Jason what he did.
    “I’m getting acclimated to civilian life.”
    “Were you in the service?”
    That was when Jason talked about his time in the navy—he called it the Battle of California—and soon he had Carmela in stitches.
    “Then what?” Carmela asked.
    “I may rob banks.”
    Who would have seen an omen in his tales of payday card games in the barracks where a month’s pay could be lost in hours? He had a flask with which he bolstered his Coke. The others put their hands over their glasses. Alcohol was strictly forbidden at these interschool dances. Madeline found herself as fascinated by Jason as Carmela clearly was. Her cousin had been transformed into a dashing charmer.
    “Don’t you just love him?” Carmela had asked Madeline in the powder room.
    “I could, you know. We’re not first cousins.”
    A silly answer. How could you have a crush on a cousin, second, third, whatever Jason was? From then on Carmela treated Madeline as a rival rather than the friend who had come through in a fix with a date for the big dance.
    It was a month later when Madeline learned that, unbeknownst to her, Carmela was seeing a lot of Jason. Fulton had just told her that he would indeed be entering the Dominicans after graduation. Madeline felt abandoned, and now she found that Jason and Carmela had become inseparable.
    “Have you met his mother, Carmela?”
    “I don’t think she likes me.”
    Madeline was on the point of saying that Aunt Helen didn’t like anybody, but she let it go. Her aunt now seemed an