by Declan Finn
“Genital herpes is related to cold sores the way smallpox is related to cow or chickenpox, only closer. It is contracted by sexual contact and it seems to be one of the few benefits of being poor – because of a natural resistance. I suspect it probably cross-related because the fact is that poor kids get more colds and cold sores, so that they wind up as carriers of herpes but not victims. There is no cure and the visible sores are permanent. There is a reason the cops are so eager to get a physical on a middle-class prig like Neuhaus. And I didn’t tell you because I saw no reason to upset you further after the uproar on Thursday.”
The silence thereafter was so hostile that James went upstairs, he gave serious thought to packing up and moving out that same night.
Why in hell did I promise to stay the two weeks? I like to think that my impulses are sound, that my instincts are good. The trouble is that they are still impulses, and as I come closer to completing three decades, I should be more thoughtful.
Once James started anything, for better or worse, he stuck with it, no matter how much he bitched and moaned during the process. The only thing ferocious about him was his determination. He was proud of giving his word and always keeping it. His only problem was his inability to do most things twice. His sabbatical in 1975 had resulted in the publication of four books from four manuscripts derived from the four courses he taught the most often. There had been no postpartum authorial depression; no one had had to trick the ever-perfectible manuscripts from his hands. They had been workmanlike jobs, completed just like any other craftsman’s task when sale is the object. Not the best craftsman, not the best handiwork, surely not the work of genius (MENSA eligibility notwithstanding). They did hold their own in an over-published philosophy market. Little books for little freshmen. That was the problem: he was tired of fighting at Cambridge College, the nonexistence of a philosophy major, the necessity of being a popularizer fighting with each class meeting to sell his courses. If only I had more contact with the outside world... more conferences... how the hell do you do that on so few dollars a year?
The mood swung from anger to… nothing. There would be no more books because nothing interested him. He granted the less noble notion that his generosity towards Gus was partially fueled by the desire to get out of the claustrophobic cycle of commuting, classes, three isolates in the same house calling themselves a family, and once a week with Abby.
So he had broken through this quotidian round, and found he hadn’t liked this alternative either.
Suddenly he realized that he had been more than two full days without a book to read. Like a junkie looking for a fix, he rummaged through his books. He found a copy of A Menken Chrestomathy and submerged himself in H. L. Menken’s delightful nastiness. Being by nature a Jesuit, as are most single men who are not outright Machiavellians, his one nonfiction book for every ten novels was his way of getting out from under Cardinal Newman’s suspicion that excessive novel reading was probably a mortal sin of escapism. That his sophistry evaded his act of hiding in reading eluded his attention as he read himself to sleep.
Too much people contact makes me envy the hermit, was his last conscious thought.
Sleep also eluded Father Sadowski.
Late night TV, walking the dog, all the rest of the bedtime rituals, all failed their task of emptying his mind of the day’s cares. After fitful tossing and turning, he put on his bathrobe and went downstairs, threw the bolt, and let himself into the church by way of the sacristy. Taking out one of the folding chairs, he set it out in the church, closely facing the repository altar where the Blessed Sacrament was accompanied only by its vigil candle.
“Dear God, where do I go from here? It’s been a week of betrayal: I’ve lost two ‘brothers in Christ.’ I’m dependent on an amateur, running a church on volunteer labor. What do I do?”
The first thing that crossed his mind was that Tim would have laughed if he had ever caught his pastor talking to God. The Guareschi books of Don Camillo were popular during his first years of ordination, every priest got them as harmless Christmas presents. Even if that was a different world he had come to appreciate how audible prayers centered his thoughts.
He was silent for a long time and then laughed. “I’ve just described the church You started, didn’t I? Well, that will teach me to talk to a God who talks back!
“Dear God and Father, let Father Pedro prosper at his new parish. Please let Father Lessner’s death be an accident. Get me through the Mass with the Bishop on Monday. Thy Will Be Done. Amen.”
Then he put the chair away, turned out the lights, threw the bolt on the rectory side of the sacristy door, went upstairs, locked himself in, turned off his lights, and went to sleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17
James assisted at the 7 AM. Mass for the First Sunday of Lent. Father Sadowski had retained the pastor’s traditional right to say the first Mass of the day in order to do so while his mind was still clear and uncluttered, before he had to turn his attention to the numerous ‘walk-ins’ who sought to fulfill their Sunday duty as well as take care of business at the same time.
After Mass, James discovered that Luraleen had Sundays off.
“That was the only way to get her out from underfoot.”
James frowned, thinking. “Aren’t there a bunch of Women’s Societies?”
Gus gave a dry, sardonic laugh. “I once tried to do that. She used to ‘improve’ their coffee, assume she was entitled to free samples from the bake sales, and swiping stuff from the rummage sale. Why do you think they store the rummage materials in my front room, under lock and key?”
James sighed. It was time to ask the question that had bothered him since he first tasted Luraleen’s cooking. “You said something about ‘inheriting’ her the first morning I was here. How?”
Gus shrugged. “Call it reverse racism. My predecessor was scared by the race riots of the ’sixties and figured that black labor made him an ‘enlightened employer providing jobs to the locals.’ He just would not listen when I told him that blacks in position of petty authority were just as oppressive to Hispanics as whites had been to them, and that Luraleen would be sending the wrong signals to the people in the pews. Hell, go to the bank branch so you can see black tellers disrespecting their ‘inferiors.’
“We have a faithful black community in those pews, even if their numbers are declining now that we no longer have a school. To bring in a slovenly old Aunt Jemima who goes to the local ‘jump-up’ church and runs numbers the other six days is not telling people that the parish is here to take care of its own.”
James rolled his eyes. He knew this next question would work as well as all the others, but he had to ask. “If she’s this much of a problem, why not just retire her?”
“Before Tim that might have been possible. But we were taught certain rules of management in the seminary: if you follow a bad pastor, clean house quick; if you follow a popular one, make changes slowly. Take your pick: Harry was either a nice guy or I was too slow to assert myself.”
James shook his head, trying to track the clerical logic. “What did the existence of Tim have to do with anything?”
“Can we have breakfast first?”
They settled down to a simple breakfast of tea and toast, both black. Neither one of them had skills in the kitchen much beyond simple survival.
Between bites, Sadowski allowed that Tim had had him buffaloed with his coterie of trendies from the now-closed school. Despite his own wide erudition in back intellectual history in the United States, Tim and his cohorts seemed to be more in tune with the perceptions of the diocesan newspaper, and the new movements in sensitivity training—Cursillo, Pentecostalism—and Gus just didn’t want a media skirmish with his own people.
Gus had started to contrast Langston Hughes and Marcus Garvey, the only black leader endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, when the morning traffic began.
The mid-morning Spanish Mass was bracketed wi
th pre- and post-society meetings, and this prevented Father Merino from:
Chasing away the stray dog which scared some people from entering the Church;
unlocking the school hall for a third society’s fundraiser;
chopping melted but refrozen ice from the front of the rectory steps;
and the usual mass requesters and/or holy water bugs…
Those glamorous activities fell to Father Sadowski and Dr. James, both of whom were overheard as saying, “For this we got our PhDs?”
James did manage to get Gus to speculate on Tim’s death. Both lamented that there was so little information to go on. James wanted to talk through an analysis, nevertheless.
“Tim got herpes from somewhere,” James insisted. “Either Mary Jane Bughouse has it or not. If not, then he contracted it elsewhere. Having seen her, let me assure you that her sex life interests me not at all.”
Gus lit another cigar, his first since morning coffee two hours earlier. “We don’t know how he spent his weeks, how he lived or where. I don’t know his associates other than the guests he had upstairs, usually in groups and never very late. He was here for four years. He ran the youth club for the Anglos, subbed for Pedro with the Hijos on occasion, taught those sex courses, fell apart when his mother died, became a drunk, and got adopted by Mary Jane. What more is there to tell?”
The buzzer rang. The buzzer was attached to the confessional. It was Gus’s compromise with the decline of confession. (“Why sit out there in the cold when no one comes?”)
Between the end of his own Mass and the start of Father Raoul’s, Gus Sadowski went out into the church an average of once every 6.7 minutes. Given the freedom of poor Latin children of God to make themselves at home in their Father’s house, and given the numerous children in such families, was it any wonder that Father Sadowski’s services were apparently required only once in all those calls? Even the James noted that was a short confession, more like the kind of quickie of “be brief, be blunt, be gone” rather than an extensive and exhaustive examination of the state of one’s conscience and a complementary amount of moral guidance. Just the sort of thirty-second car wash for the soul that James himself preferred.
Smartest thing the Church has done in ten years, James decided, was keeping the old rite anonymity with the face-to-face forgiveness of the new ritual for, what were they calling penance nowadays, reconciliation.
Monsignor Leary came back to say the last Mass.
With no baptisms, silence fell at 1:40. There were no Sunday evening masses in neighborhoods where the mid-afternoon Sunday Dinner was also a sacrament.
To celebrate the end of the triduum, Father poured the Scotch and even James unbent enough to have a light Scotch rocks. Gus Sadowski had known James’s father—and his drunkenness—well enough to rank this as a special act of sharing.
James, just to be perverse, had decided to have the drink because he was rapidly coming to dislike his environment and was more interested in obtaining some general anesthesia. His sociability did increase with his blood alcohol level and he cast around for some neutral topic to talk about.
Gus expressed no interest in any of James’s courses except “Professional Ethics.”
“Isn’t that title over-blown?” protested Gus. “Are there some professional programs connected with your liberal arts college? You’ve never mentioned a law school or a medical school in the area.”
“True.”
“Then which profession’s ethics do you teach?”
“Professions plural, not profession’s possessive,” replied James, emphasizing the sibilant plural. “When I can get ten different types of majors, I have to go all over the place. Thanks to Watergate, each professional association will eventually pass its own code of ethics—”
“That’s professional conformity, not ethics,” objected Gus.
“Agreed, or concedo, if you prefer. All codes are part manners and only partially morals. I find it interesting to watch each of our professional tribes trying to generate a unique solution to common problems. Take secrecy: in engineering and business, the issue is ‘whistle-blowing,’ but in medicine you would have to subpoena a physician. You can’t even do that to a clergyman: under American law, they cannot be made to testify against a church member to whom they have given religious advice.”
“And both terms will become a problem,” predicted Gus.
“Both?” James, puzzled.
“Nuns will go after clergy status wherever they can get it, in civil law if not canonically, and priests are going into marriage counseling with sufficient vigor that I wait for some of them to be sued for misrepresenting their psychological credentials, and getting sued as a profession distinct from clerical credentials,” predicted Gus.
James smiled. He was already ahead of Gus. “Too late. Some women religious have already been jailed for contempt of court after asserting just such a clergy right. As for clerical marriage counselors, there is probably enough of an overlap with the sacramental theology of marriage and the pastoral theology of the confessional to immunize them against a lawsuit… and, that is one point where you can help me.”
“Oh?”
“If the seal of the confessional is so bloody absolute, how do you ever teach priests how to hear confessions properly? There’s no internship that I ever heard of.”
Gus laughed. “I can just imagine my seminary prof trying to fit into a confessional with me!” That image set him off again in a fit of those giggles usually associated with Friday afternoon at the end of a hard week.
Not a bad comparison, thought James, only his week ends on Sunday afternoon.
When Gus calmed down, he explained, “I learned like many things are learned—out of a textbook. Though in my undergrad days, the fictional penitents weren’t named John or Mary, but Bertha and Titius.” That set him off with laughter again.
“Of course the books were in Latin and some of the translations my classmates recited were gems,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “In one case, the author so thoroughly explained the problem that when he cited a case as an example, he simply wrote ratio est clara. Instead of translating it as ‘the reasoning or the solution is obvious,’ one poor guy translated it as ‘The Reason is Clara.’ Since the matter dealt with the confession of a sexual sin, the class roared, while the professor turned red to the top of his bald pate! And ‘the poor dummy’ was the future head of Personnel!”
James checked again. Whether it was that second triple scotch Gus had poured while talking or just the relief brought on by that active case of giggles, Gus was visible decompressing.
“In fact,” continued Gus, “there was a similar translation foul-up in the sessions on priestly formation. The author, and I forget his name, offered a helpful hint: since spicy foods can be an irritant for the urinary tract, a good celibate does not need that kind of self-induced stimulation before bedtime. So the advice was to abstain from overly spiced meats at the evening meal. The text said carnis in vesperis. Do you want to know the worst translation I ever heard reported?”
James winced. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“That one should avoid sexual intercourse in the evening.”
James glowered. “You’re makin’ that up.”
“No. In fact, the same day someone told me that story, one of my classmates asked at what age a priest could stop praying for the grace to remain celibate. Then the prof pursed his lips, like all the good thoughtful priests we had, lay faculty being unknown, pursed his lips, then rumbled, ‘About three days after you’re dead.’”
James laughed. “OK, I’ve heard that one. Plato starts the Republic with an old geezer praising the gods that he’s no longer impelled by the lusts of his youth. But that was before that horny old goat Douglas on the Supreme Court allegedly sired children past age 80.” He shook his head. “God help us if we ever get a pharmaceutical solution to that. We can have 90 year olds who die in the middle of coitus from a heart attack.”
; That was a good note to adjourn to dinner on.
They went out to another place for dinner and even though the anecdotes showed more discretion for the sake of any eavesdroppers, it was still the best companionship Gus had been all week.
James almost ruined it all by asking about Tim’s requiem.
Father Sadowski leaned in. “Could you serve at the Mass? It would be nice to have a friendly face on the altar.”
James glowered. Enough was enough. “No can do, Gus. I do not need Sister Ivan the Terrible on my case for missing class again because I have a second job here.”
“OK, just a thought.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
ARRESTED
MONDAY FEBRUARY 18TH
MONDAY OF THE FIRST WEEK OF LENT was a day when James departed early for class. His commutation and class were routine and he wondered if the funeral mass for Tim would still be going when he got back.
The schoolyard was full of cars at the part nearest the front door of the church. James parked on the street.
At the sidewalk in front of the church, he stopped. Startled. Picket signs?!
A dozen pickets walked in a circle in front of the main doors with signs in dripping red screaming: “THE CHURCH HATES THE POOR” or “FATHER LESSNER, MARTYR FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE” or “THE BISHOP HATES BLACKS.”
James walked over to an on-looker and feigned casual curiosity. One black matron told him “It’s a shame that nuns should carry on like that.”
Her companion wondered “Why don’t they have jobs? Like teaching my kids?”
A “super-fly” pimp passing by on his way to bed asked James if “all those bimbos” were part of the dead man’s “stable.”
When James made the mistake of asking why, he responded, “Because they is so ugly only a priest would be desperate enough to fork them.”
The pimp laughed and wandered off as James cringed. James had not given serious personal thought about nuns since Sister Ivan beat him up in the eighth grade. Even the nuns he worked with were just colleagues in funny outfits, about whose extra-college lives he neither knew nor cared about, nor wanted to.
