That is a good thought, my dear boy: Satan does not sleep till noon. No no no. Keep that uppermost in your mind before retiring each night and you will find that in a surprisingly short time you will be bounding out of bed in the morning. Rising will become, not a chore, but a positive joy.

This story at no point becomes my own. I am in it—good heavens, I’m in it to the point of almost never being out of it!—but the story belongs, all of it, to the Carmodys, and my own part, while substantial enough, was never really of any great significance at all. I don’t think this is modesty; it seems to me a simple fact. Because now that it’s all over, and I can look back on all those weeks and months—not with detachment, of course, but with a somewhat colder eye than before, I have the feeling that whatever happened would have happened whether I had been on hand or not, whether I had spoken or been still, whether I had known the Carmodys all the days of my life or had met them for the first time one sun-lit afternoon in the middle of last week.

Still, there is this: I was at least there. The friend of the family, the invited intruder, the small necessary neutral cushion against which all belligerents might bank their shots in turn—I was there, as I say, and there I stayed. I stayed with the Carmodys and their story from the first—from that Sunday in June when old Charlie Carmody, saluting the one day of the year which could be counted on to move him deeply, gave himself a birthday party.…

The story begins, really, some days before that Sunday: it begins with an early morning telephone call. Even now, months later, I can recall that morning with a special vividness, for it was the first such morning in a long time. There had been a heat wave, a severe one and the first of the summer, and on this morning I woke to find that it had broken at last. The wind was sweeping in from the sea, and even here—here, in this old rectory, set in this soiled and airless slum—it was possible to smell and feel the morning, the sunlight and salt air. It was the start of one of the great dazzling days that sometimes break unannounced over this city, cool and shining and full of light, and I knew that if I got up and walked to the rectory roof and looked out through the scoured and cloudless morning I could see for miles and miles to the muted bluish outlines of the hills far to the north.…

Which, I should say at once, I did not intend to do. I was in bed and fully awake: I had awakened shortly after six o’clock. In recent months I’ve been saying the seven o’clock Mass, and I wake at this same hour each morning, usually without the alarm. Which is fine, but is only half the battle, for to wake up is one thing, and to get up quite another. And this, for me, is one of the old, long-standing problems; I can remember, years ago in the seminary, speaking of it to old Father Condon. Overscrupulous, to be sure, but there it was and there he was, my spiritual counselor: a marvelously serene old man with the face of a happy rabbit and almost no voice at all. It was said that he had worn it out, giving advice.

“Oh my goodness,” he whispered, his upper lip twitching away at some invisible carrot. “Oh my goodness me. Why, that is a very slight problem, my dear boy. It is almost not a problem at all. It is a mountain made out of a molehill: perhaps you know the expression? A little discipline, a little self-sacrifice, a little remembering each day of just what it is we get up for. We are doing God’s work, are we not, and Satan does not sleep till noon. That is a good thought, my dear boy: Satan does not sleep till noon. No no no. Keep that uppermost in your mind before retiring each night and you will find that in a surprisingly short time you will be bounding out of bed in the morning. Rising will become, not a chore, but a positive joy. Oh yes yes yes. I have lived a very long time and I have seen it happen again and again. Why, I recall that once, many many years ago now, of course, I…”

And then his voice, as it had a habit of doing, faded off entirely, and he, poor simple kindly old man, all unconscious of this, kept on talking for some time, smiling all the while, his lips moving rhythmically, his long old hands feathering the air, presumably pointing up inaudible anecdotes. I stayed for the pantomime—young seminarians are not encouraged to walk out on the performances of their superiors—and considered the advice. I found that I had listened dutifully but had not believed. Seminaries are peppered with occasional doubts, but mine were secular rather than theological: I could not believe in the joyous morning bound. It was disbelief well-founded: thirty-five years between then and now, and while I rise punctually I do so grudgingly; each morning brings its own renewal of the battle.…

All of which has nothing whatever to do with the problems of the Carmodys, into which I was brought suddenly as the telephone by my bed rang, at six-fifteen in the morning, and surprisingly the caller was old Charlie Carmody.

“Well, well, Father,” he said, “good mornin’ to you.” He had a queer, old man’s voice: strong enough, yet every word came out wrapped in some sort of powdery cocoon, as if he had a permanent dustbin in his throat. “I hope, now, I didn’t get you up out of bed, Father? It’s not too early for you?”

The question was solicitous enough, but then I had been brought up on Charlie Carmody; I thought I knew what he was really saying. My father had been a great expert on Charlie. They had been boys together, and my father—who never became successful in business—seemed to spend most of his time studying Charlie—who became very successful indeed—watching him with incredulity, some amusement, a certain amount of rather reluctant admiration, and a somewhat larger amount of positive dislike. He had collected hundreds of stories about Charlie and told them all; sometimes his analysis of Charlie’s character took the form of a curious defense.

“The man is misunderstood,” he would say. “There are people in this city who think that Charlie’s the meanest man that ever drew on a pair of trousers. He’s no such thing. In his whole life he never did anything mean just for the sake of being mean. One, there’s no money in it. Two, it’s not his style at all. Charlie’s not the lad to jab his thumb in your eye just so’s your eye will sting. But say you went into his real estate office one day to buy a little piece of land worth maybe ten dollars, and Charlie was good enough—you being an old friend—to sell it to you for a hundred. And say you went to go out of the door with your little bargain under your arm, and Charlie ran around from behind his desk to help you on with your hat—just to keep on being friendly. And say just at the moment he had your hat in the air, ready to slip it on your head, you twisted your head around of a sudden and got his thumb smack dab in your eye—well now, that’s the sort of thing that makes the day for Charlie. He’s not only cheated you deaf and dumb, but you almost go blind in the bargain! What sensible man could ask for more? I tell you, it’s the little bonuses that count the most with Charlie. They go to prove, don’t you see, that God’s on the right side. That He’s up there smiling away in Heaven, whipping up the frosting to put on the cakes that his partner Charlie bakes!”

This was my father on the subject of his boyhood chum. Not a calm and measured judgment, exactly, but not without its truth, either; I discovered that as over the years, and from one source and another, I came to know a good deal about Charlie. Enough, for example, to know that while he would never have called me simply to wake me—a practical joke which put no money in your pocket was, to Charlie, simply not practical—still, if he could have wakened me en route, so to speak, to his main purpose, why, so much the better! Just one more little bonus. And so, still lying on my bed, I said, “No, no, I’ve been up for some time, Mr. Carmody.”

But Charlie was a veteran campaigner; his disappointment, if there, did not show.

“Ain’t that grand!” he said instantly. “Is that a fact, now? Well well. Up for some time. I tell you, Father, nothin’ does me more good than to hear a thing like that. Nothin’ makes me feel better than to know there’s somebody besides myself ain’t afraid to get up in the mornin’. Specially when he’s a young feller like yourself.”

This was Charlie’s brand of flattery. Or else it was simply that to the really old all others are young. In any case, on my last birthday I was fifty-five.

__________

This essay is taken from The Edge of Sadness. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “Tremont & Boylston Streets, Boston” (1915), by Arthur Clifton Goodwin, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.