by Declan Finn
“WHAT?”
So much for Sadowski’s tales of his own unflappableness. James shook his head as if to pop out the thought as it had popped in.
“Don’t get cute with me, sambo. Timmy was a spoiled rotten kid for his whole fucked-up life. Nothing was too good for baby brother, after all, he was going to become a priest! Don’t waste your time telling me about religious people. After twenty years of hauling hash, lemme tell ya, I been propositioned by priests, ministers, and rabbis, or at least that’s what they said they were, and even they can’t deliver heaven in the sack. That’s nowhere. Look, I know he was a selfish little boy. BUT HE WAS MY BROTHER AND I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU GET AWAY WITH KILLING HIM, YOU MOTHERFUCKER.”
Now that sort of speech should be accompanied by leaping, clawing, female tiger-type behavior. In fact James had started to position himself in order to be able to fend her off from Sadowski. He found it even more disturbing that she hadn’t moved an inch. She was crude and ignorant, but not stupid, realized James. This whole visit had some sort of agenda he couldn’t figure out. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait.
She coldly eyed his posture. “Don’t sweat the small stuff, doc. I’m not going to do anything. I’m gonna let the cops do it. Right after the autopsy.”
She ground out her cigarette into the plastic wood of the table and brushed past them. “I’ll let myself out. I saw your faces when I told you. I got what I wanted, and now at least have hope that you are going to get whatever the cops will have in store for you.”
She stormed out.
James chased after her to secure the chain on the outer door after she left.
After the door was bolted, James breathed a sigh of relief, enjoying the blessed silence.
Then the negative fact registered. He looked over his shoulder. “Why has the phone stopped ringing?”
Gus shrugged. “I had what you would undoubtedly call a sudden attack of common sense. The nursing home exports their sick and dying to an area hospital—which has its own chaplain in residence. Last year, I had all of six extraordinary sick calls. An hour or two of being unreachable shouldn’t matter. I left the phone off the hook,” he concluded sheepishly, admitting the obvious.
“Father!” responded James in mock horror. “You are showing all the signs of premature intelligence.” Before Gus could explode, James shifted topics, “What did Father Clancy want?”
Gus sighed and waved James towards him. “Come back to the common room. I’m going to turn off the doorbell as well. I cannot imagine anyone actually being in danger of damnation for lack of holy water.”
“Obviously you never saw The Exorcist,” James said dryly.
“No, but if I remember the real case, the exorcism ended with the little boy, now a grown-up, still in need of a shrink,” Gus shot back.
After they resettled in the backroom, Gus lit a new cigar and James set up his pipe as a counter-irritant.
“If Clancy had called up fifteen minutes later, his choice of words would have been even more startling. Ostensibly, the call was to inform me of the usual arrangement: that the Bishop in charge of a diocese says the Mass for the deceased priests of the diocese, that in this case Louie will be here on Monday morning. His final words were the clincher that something is going on. ‘Don’t get upset by anything that happens between now and then. The Chancery and the Bishop will back your pastoral judgment.’”
James arched an eyebrow at the buzzwords. “What does that mean?”
“‘Pastoral Judgment’ is one of those terms that doesn’t translate well from the Latin. In simple American there is ‘right’ and ’wrong’, but in Latin there is also ‘it is not-right-but-merely-the-best-course-under-these-circumstances.’
“For example, I might, as confessor, encourage a stable homosexual relationship because it is stable and it is the best that the penitent can hope to do under the circumstances at the moment. What they need is the encouragement to keep doing whatever good they are doing and not give in to despair over their own hereditary inclinations and ingrained habits.
“The average, simpleminded American might then want us to bless that homosexual’s ‘marriage’ as if it were something good in itself instead of the best modus vivendi we could generate under the circumstances.”
James lost his battle for patience. “Would you please explain what the phrase might mean under our present embattled circumstances, instead of quoting me some example from a seminary textbook?”
“It means that, in the present context, there are certain things I can get away with and not have it second-guessed on review my superiors. Call it the ecclesiastical equivalent of ‘command prerogative.’ I am the here-and-now pastor who must make concrete decisions concerning the spiritual welfare of particular people within my clearly defined area of four blocks long and five blocks wide. Unlike the police review board, my spot decisions as they apply to individuals may be rough and ready, may be closer to swerving across a solid line to miss an oncoming car than having the mathematical exactitude of an algebra problem. You can’t have mathematical certitude on the highway, so the lawyers have a defense for crossing the white line that they call ‘last-clear-chance.’ You can’t have rule-book precision in running a parish, so you have ‘pastoral judgment.’ I think Clancy’s call was intended to be a vote of confidence.”
James’ eyes narrowed. “About fucking time.”
“Of course,” continued Father Sadowski, with more bitterness than James had ever heard, “what in hell can they do to me? By their lights, there isn’t a worse parish to send me, even if I did grow up in a parish much like this during the depression, even if I am the tar baby and this is my brier patch. The poor scared frightened bastards: Father Greeley has gone after Cardinal Cody of Chicago for racism, Jerry Ford is running against a Georgia pickup truck with neither very friendly to organized religion, and their token black priest has a murder in the house. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten my PhD?”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Gus waved the hand holding the cigar. “I don’t play golf. I don’t frequent Confirmations and Priest Funerals as social sacerdotal get-togethers. I paid for the degree out of my own pocket, and then refused to teach at the seminary. I’ve got to be on somebody’s hit list.”
“Get real! This isn’t the 1350’s, this is 1976. Not Spain, America.”
Gus just looked at his young friend and realized that there wasn’t a prejudiced bone in his body. He decided not to pollute his amazing naivete with anecdotes of six decades of personal victimhood, which at this moment felt like they were happening all at once… and there was still a parish to run.
* * *
Yamamoto, in a totally subdued condition, came, said Mass, muttered something to James about a change in Grante-Scarfe’s schedule, and left as quickly as he came.
After a Friday night fish dinner, accompanied by a heated but good-natured argument on the continued value of doing without meat on a regular schedule, James met the weekend priest.
Merino came after dinner, unpacked his bag in the empty back rooms on the third floor (over the pastor’s bedroom and study), and went directly down to preside over the Mass and meeting of the Spanish Men’s Society held every Friday night.
Reverend Raoul Merino was a quiet, soft spoken, slight built man with a touch of gray in his short black hair. James was reminded of nothing so much as his childhood memories of Perry Como falling asleep in the middle of his own television show on his family’s black-and-white Dumont television.
When the phone was put back on the hook at eight, it remained strangely silent. It was as if the media hive had been distracted by other, more colorful flowers.
Gus kept up such a running monologue in his attempts to describe the usual ‘Saturday madness’ that James used the monologue itself as his excuse to go to bed early: to prepare for the madness and escape from the monologue.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
SATURDAY MADNESS
SATU
RDAY, FEBRUARY 16TH
SATURDAY morning proved to be all that Sadowski had promised. Rectories and churches, like movie houses and amusement parks, did a bumper crop of business on the weekends.
Between breakfast (unspeakable) and lunch (best left undescribed), James took the door, booked baptisms, weddings, masses, and diluted the Holy water almost according to schedule. “Almost” because one little girl with a gallon plastic milk jug depleted the font beyond hope. However Gus took the news with good grace and a touch of his usual belief that Murphy’s Law was written by an optimist. He took his Roman Ritual off the shelf, amid sighs and cross looks, and went to bless another five gallons.
The pastor ran one-on-one convert classes from nine to noon while Raoul ran a multi-media Spanish-English group presentation in the parlors for the parents of babies about to be baptized. Luraleen was drafted to mind the door while the three of them had lunch.
After her tread was heard overhead, James remarked on Luraleen’s amazing docility and out-of-character quietness.
Gus helped himself to a double portion of mashed potatoes while he explained his conversation with the housekeeper early that morning before Mass.
“One of the nice things about having Southern Baptist in my family is the number of hellfire sermons I heard as a kid. I just trotted out a modern version of Jonathan Edward’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ sermon and put the fear of God into her. That plus the fact that she lied about being over the retirement age—and I know it—guarantees that her only public statements from now on will be ‘I doan knows nuttin’ ’bout nuttin’.’”
Gus bared his teeth in a most unpleasant smile.
James changed the subject. He was delighted when he got Raoul to discuss his homemade cassette-and-slide presentation. The priest talked ten minutes on his collection. “Tomorrow I will start rote-training the Spanish Mass on new hymns. I’ll play the cassette music I’ve taped at other parishes. After hearing it before and after Mass for a month, it should be muy, how do you say, most easy to teach then the words,” he concluded.
“Why not do that with your convert classes, Father? Put them on tape and let the converts listen?” James asked Gus. “I’ve heard that Fulton Sheen even had them made into a set of records.”
Gus began to tick off the reasons one at a time on his fingers.
“One, Uncle Fultie is up there in years. Two, his vast number of convert candidates makes personal tutoring impossible to fit into the schedule. Three, the liberals find convert-making an embarrassment in our age of ecumenism.”
James stifled the urge to retort “As if that bothered you,” because he could not yet figure out whether the chemistry between the pastor and the new weekender would be successful.
“Fourth,” concluded Sadowski, “I want to slow them down.”
“Why?”
“Because each of these three are planning to marry Catholics in the next month. I am sure they love their betrotheds; I am not sure about their religious intentions. It’s much more prudent to admit them into full Church membership after, rather than before. Pastoral Judgment,” he concluded with the smile of one sharing an in-joke.
Father Merino probably thinks it’s one joke that’s not meant to include the layman.
James spent an afternoon (which was much like his morning) while Father Raoul taught the preparation for marriage class. Gus helped the Spanish ladies change the trappings in the church to those more befitting the purple colors of the First Sunday in Lent.
At 4:30, Gus asked James to don jacket and tie to lector the evening mass at five. The celebrant was a tall, distinguished priest with a full head of wavy gray hair.
“Dr. James, let me present Monsignor Leary of—”
“The Diocesan Society for the Propagation of the Faith,” concluded James as he shook Leary’s hand. “I get your Society’s Journal. Would it be rude of me to say that you don’t talk down to your membership and you make us feel like we are real contributors to the work you coordinate?”
Monsignor Leary turned to the Pastor. “Did you ghost that little speech for him, Gus?”
James was amused at Sadowski’s response of “N-no, Monsignor.”
Leary’s laugh was a full, rich baritone as he put his arm around Sadowski’s shoulder from his added height of three or four inches. “Gus was my altar boy when I served his parish.”
The Mass went off like clockwork, and even James admired the sermon. Monsignor Leary excused himself right afterwards.
Dinner was a miracle: roast chicken, flavored Spanish rice, and broccoli with some life still in it. The pastor gloated, “When Luraleen is on target, she’s superb.”
“Blind men with machineguns eventually hit a target,” James muttered. “By the way, what’s with all of these preparation classes? Because I don’t remember this much adult education when I was growing up in the ’fifties.”
James hadn’t realized that this was an invitation for Gus to discuss his doctoral dissertation on the role of Christopher Dawson in the development of the history of ideas.
The pastor had taken the ball and ran with it.
“That’s because there wasn’t. Christopher Dawson said it best when he pointed out that the difference between Rome and Constantinople was that the first had a captive audience for a full millennium while Byzantium barely had enough time to baptize one wave of invaders when the next wave hit them. We live in a Byzantine neighborhood by that definition, and it amazes me that we haven’t yet resorted to their solution of doing baptism, confirmations, and communion all in infancy.”
James paused for a moment for Gus to explain. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning that the achievers in this parish move on the first time one of the family lands a good job. Then the move out of the neighborhood and we never see them again. In fact, the preparation classes are the only reason we’re still on the Roman sequence of sacraments. For that group of people who only come to church for baptism, marriage, or requiem—”
“The hatched-matched-dispatched set,” interjected James.
“—we have to update them on how the church has changed whenever we can catch ’em. Nine thousand families in the parish, and nine hundred come each Sunday. And you wonder why I get so pissed at people who ask ‘Why doesn’t the church do this or that?’ How would they know? How can we do anything with them if we can’t get then to stop long enough to listen?”
Raoul excused himself to set up for the evening Mass in Spanish. James and his friend adjourned to the common room. Once the Scotch was poured and each had lit up, both sat in companionable silence and savored the first relaxed moments of the day.
Then the doorbell rang. James stared in disbelief as Father Sadowski took the drink into the bathroom.
“Yes, my people know I drink Scotch: they give me enough of it during the Christmas season. But what if it’s a penitent with a drinking problem? He—or she—doesn’t need it waved in their face. I haven’t had a drink while Tim was in the house.”
James jumped up. “Let me get it.”
He was not expecting to find Detectives Washington and Brennan at the door. He hesitated.
“May we come in?” asked Brennan. The Irish cop looked tired.
“Of course. Right this way.”
Father Sadowski rose to greet them and they made themselves comfortable on the sofa. James chose to make himself more of an authority figure by sitting behind the desk with his jacket and tie still on.
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news, Father,” began Brennan with true regret in his voice. “Mrs. Saleski demanded an autopsy.”
“Yes, she came here to tell us.”
James found it interesting that Brennan reacted but Washington’s face showed nothing. Had she gloated to one but not the other?
Brennan continued.
“The prelim not only showed an extensive variety of tranquilizers, but a near-comatose alcohol level. He could not have moved up the stairs and it is highly unlikely he could have gott
en down them. The police department has had the death classified as suspicious. Could you account for your time on Thursday night?”
James started to object but Sadowski waved him into silence. “No trouble. I was visibly present to five hundred people at bingo from eight until eleven. Then I went out for a late supper with ‘Deke’ Kaminsky and my bookkeeper from bingo. They dropped me off at one or so. I went right to bed and was awakened by Dr. James not long before seven.”
“And you, doctor?” asked Washington.
James told him of his quiet night, even adding the times of the transfer of bingo money into the safe.
“Ever meet the deceased?” the Detective continued.
James shrugged. “We were never actually introduced.”
“You look able bodied,” pushed the black detective. “You were alone in the house. You’re looking better and better to me.”
“Why me?” yelped James, all authority games vanishing.
“You have opportunity and means. Motive we can always dig up. Maybe Father Lessner was gay. We had reports of him demonstrating for gay rights in front of the cathedral last year. The ME found a strong case of genital herpes on the body. He came on to you and you pushed him.”
Only after he exhaled in relief did James realize that he had been holding his breath.
Then he laughed in their faces.
“I think you’d have a better case if you talked to his girlfriend.”
It was Washington’s turn to looked startled. James narrated the events of late Wednesday night, except for describing the sounds of overhead sex in a more polysyllabic and circumlocutory terms. At this point, Father Sadowski mentioned the name of his best guess for the lover: Mary Jane Neuhaus. Brennan took down the name of the nun and the address of her convent, and the detectives departed with the usual phrases.
After both Washington and Brennan left, Gus Sadowski took his drink out of the bathtub and added a stiff freshener to it. “Why didn’t you tell me this on Thursday? And what is herpes?”
