by Declan Finn
Bishop Lousini’s private response, behind closed doors, and after the conference with the raving vultures of the press, was rather different: “Clancy, where is she?”
“The order had her on leave of absence,” Clancy explained, as though it were a foregone conclusion. “Once the celebrating died down, she was uncomfortable remaining in the neighborhood so close to the scene of the crime. She considers Sadowski’s continued existence as much a criticism of her as the older nuns in the house who saw nothing to celebrate about her vindication.”
“Sadowski isn’t doing anything to harass her, is he?”
Clancy scoffed so violently, the Bishop couldn’t tell if his head of Personnel was laughing or disgusted with him. “Of course not. Gus is too busy to remember she exists. It’s his continuing as pastor that she considers a reproach. She won’t think of herself as a winner unless she has a scapegoat as a clear loser. You know these people: life is a zero-sum game where ‘I can’t be just wrong all by myself. It’s gotta be somebody else’s fault for me to be an official victim.’ We should be grateful that she has a family to go home to.” Clancy named a moneyed suburb that was simply away. “Personally, I never expect to see her back in the convent.”
“Please God, let that be the outcome. I don’t need her infecting the rest of the clergy any more that I need that fairy nice guy who almost VD’d the seminary class out of existence.”
“Lou, such an illiberal sentiment,” Clancy noted with only faint traces of amusement.
The Bishop narrowed his eyes. “Pat, you know that I’ll always remain a good Liberal Democrat in public, as long as those idiots continue to give us ninety cents of each dollar that we spend through Catholic Charities. If they think I’m on their little liberal lefty agenda, they’ll pay through the nose.
“On the other hand: what can we do for Gus Sadowski?”
Clancy shrugged. “I think I have something sufficiently low key to get the word out on the ecclesiastical grapevine without media coverage. Gus is in his third year of his six-year term as the pastor of St. Columcille’s. We never had a formal installation of him as the pastor of the combined churches because of those pickets from St. Rocco’s. Let’s send his area’s vicar to install him at the noon Mass Labor Day Sunday.”
Bishop Lousini chuckled, “In a half-empty church in a deserted city. And they talk about Machiavellian Italians! O.K., Pat, I’ll let you go ahead with the low-key pat on the back, but he goes on the short list for the next crop of Monsignori.”
Since the short list was two years away, Clancy nodded his approval. It wouldn’t rock the boat too much.
The bishop continued, “I’m also going to make that installation Marty’s last act as vicar. He should have warned me about that whole situation earlier. I’m thinking of giving him Our Lady of Lepanto, with Mike Barry as his curate.”
Clancy cocked an eyebrow. “Nice. Marty gets a parish like Sadowski’s, and a curate worse than Sadowski’s for failing to back up Gus over the past year. I like it.”
“Thought you would.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
SITUATION NORMAL?
Since that compulsive known as “the workaholic” seeks the solution to all his problems by seeking more work to do, James found the summer very satisfying, especially since it meant he had to work on himself. Gone were the distractions of classes at Cambridge, the distractions of the trial, and the threats of Tim Lessner’s sister, Jessica Whatshername.
At last James could see the Parish for just what it was, Gus’s poor parish. Poverty and Gus made it what it was.
Being both intelligent and deeply educated, James was, of course, a political conservative: a liberal read Marx, but a conservative Understood him. His experience in the parish assisted him in realizing that the poor were more conservative than himself, but about different things. Dominoes played at a card table on the sidewalk were a tradition to be conserved, likewise using the church as a social center for grocery vouchers, first aid, marriage crisis intervention, and the infamous summer program which was needed to keep the children occupied and out of trouble.
James had had very mixed feelings about surrendering the parish to the replacement priest and coming himself only one day a week. It did provide him with a few small achievements of which he was inordinately proud. One of those achievements was creating a way to keep: 1) the off-shift cops from the local precinct; and 2) the elderly Blacks, 3) Hispanics, 4) Irish and 5) young Italians coming to the first morning Mass after the old Italians asked that the Mass be said in Italian. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that funeral Masses were still said in Roman chasuble of startling black for their sense of what a Mass for the dead should be, or that Sadowski heard confession in English, Spanish, Haitian French, and Sicilian Italian. It just wouldn’t do that there weren’t enough priests or languages for everyone to have one Sunday Mass each in every conceivable tongue.
James found the one thing which they all had in common, and the next Mass at dawn on Sunday was celebrated in Latin. It made them happy and it made him happy to see that the oldest international language could still work wonders.
Talking the barefoot acid-head back to reality also made for a sense of accomplishment. James would never figure out how she made it through the streets at two in the morning, barefoot, without being assaulted. She gave a whole new meaning to the concept of the “urban campus” and another rise in the incredible respect he felt for Sadowski. He had to put up with this crap regularly.
On August 15th, 1976, thirty days after leaving the rectory residence, twenty days after his victory of the lingua latina, and ten days after deciding that his most significant contributions to philosophy were already written and were of very little value, James proposed marriage to Abby. She accepted.
Her family sighed relief, with replies of:
“It’s about time.”
“Took them long enough.”
“At last.”
The date was set: on April 2, 1977—Abby refused to be married on April Fool’s Day, as James had suggested. The priest was set: Sadowski would officiate at the event. But first all three of them would have to survive the installation of Rev. Augustine Sadowski as Pastor of St. Rocco-St. Columcille Parish.
On Sunday, September sixth, 1976, the Very Reverend Martin J. Heaney, on behalf of His Excellency Louis Alberto Lousini, dominated the first forty-five minutes of the 12:30 Mass, usually a service of 23 minutes long under the care of Hubert Grante‑Scarfe. He would have turned the short service into a two hour ceremonial, but was deterred by a four-year-old in the front pew.
The monsignor had just paused for breath in his thirty‑five minute sermon on Sadowski’s virtues (“Made me feel like a corpse,” Gus told James afterwards). The little cherub—in one of those clear childish sopranos which can be heard a block away—stood up on his pew bench and asked, “Are you fru yet?”
Sadowski, in the chair of the presiding priest behind the low table altar, covered his mouth with his hand and his cheeks swelled under the pressure of contained laughter. Abby left her lector’s chair on the right side of the sanctuary and escaped into the sacristy. James, at a prie-dieu behind the pulpit, put his forehead down on the cushioned bar in front of him and thus missed seeing the three elderly nuns behind the child who passed the cherub little candies, patted his head, and whispered compliments to his parents.
The Monsignor concluded his speech in a rush and the two celebrants concluded the Mass in record time. James found the Great Amen at the end of the consecration the best part of this particular mass: the black organist leading a Baptist AMEN, a la Lilies of the Field: a-amen, a-a-amen, a-amen, a-men amen, sing it over, a-amen, a-a-amen, ah amen, a men, amen.
* * *
James and Abby locked the church, counted and recorded the collection, and had settled into the sofas in the common room when Gus returned.
“Is His Lordship gone?” James asked.
Gus nodded. “Oh, yes, he excused himself fifteen minutes in
to the reception. At least he created no threat, not even the possibility, that I might like him—despite all those pompous things he said in church.”
James sighed, “What did he do now?”
“He could tolerate a full church and an even fuller reception. I think he even tolerated how warm the people were to me and how indifferent they were to his presence. But when he saw that little kid down the line, he ignored the child, was frosty to the parents, and then excused himself. That pompous, overbearing, egotistical SOB.”
Abby just smiled, “Just who was our little savior?”
“Johnny MacBride is one of our new gentry. His mother is an attorney in the Affirmative Action section of the Justice department out of the Federal Building downtown. His father is a junior partner in the firm of Fino, Gilhooley, and Lefkowitz, who offices are just across the street.”
“Doesn’t that make for conflict of interest,” asked Abby, “MacBride versus MacBride?”
“No, because she’s Louise de Bourgos and he’s Dennis MacBride for purposes of professional practice. Furthermore, she’s the anti-affirmative action advocate in the local office.”
“Sheesh,” responded James in mock street patois, “but you are one stee-range nigger!”
”James!” Abby was shocked
”Don’t you be offended now,” responded Gus in a courtly Southern tone. “It’s not racist when it’s said in friendship.”
Abby nodded, “Like my Sicilian father calling someone a gafone.”
“Precisely,” agreed Gus. Turning to James, he expressed some measure of puzzlement, “I don’t understand your problem with her position?”
“Isn’t it rather like a Jew in the Nazi party?”
“You don’t know Tom Sowell’s work, do you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He’s the black economist who has shown how our welfare system is creating and keeping our underclass in existence. Like the political camp-followers said in ’64, ‘Get into poverty, that’s where the money is.’”
”Isn’t she working against your people?” asked Abby.
Gus scoffed, and James tried not to laugh as the priest explained, “My ‘people’ are my parishioners, black, white, yellow, green, pink, or purple. Under Canon Law, that means even the people who are not Catholic are people whose welfare, physical and spiritual, I am supposed to worry about. The good ones, the one with drive, family, values, are just moving through. The losers will be here forever and it’s my job to take care of both groups. The decent ones without the energy to hit escape velocity are the ones who get crushed by the officious buggers at welfare or parole or Immigration.”
“The BICS,” James added.
Abby glanced at him. “Explain.”
“Bureaucrats, Interest Groups, Congressmen, and Senators: the Iron Triangle of legislators who pass the laws, bureaucrats who administer the laws and get paid to do so, and the victims, clients, what-have-you, who receive the government services and in turn elect the legislators. It sounds like Louise is trying to break the Iron Triangle all by herself.”
Gus nodded. “Count on it; she’s just the one to do it, as you’d know if you’d stop ducking Parish Council meetings in order to take care of the collection. Come on the 27th and watch her in action.
“You do recall that with a parish that’s white, black, and Hispanic, each perish council has four months a years for Gettum Father Sadowski Parish Councils.”
“OK.”
* * *
The months spent in residence would have faded if they were not refurbished every Sunday from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. Customers at the door after each Mass, paperwork, collections, then house-sitting or dinner out depending upon Gus’s mood.
Frankly, the Pastor was becoming tiresome. The same stories over and over again. Each Sunday, James heard Sadowski’s stories about the events of the past week, and the events always seemed the same. The husband who killed his wife in the heat of August gave way to the autumnal OD, the police carted away from a deserted building across the street, and finally to the policeman’s wife who relieved the holiday stress of Thanksgiving by using her husband’s service revolver to shoot her husband in the head when he fell asleep after the Feast of All Gluttony.
The theme of deception ran through what James classified as the “sex stories.” There was the gentleman who came in for his wife’s baptismal certificate. He had intended to give her a trip to Europe as a twenty-fifth anniversary present. He simply could not believe that the girl he married was sixty and not fifty. “You mean she was thirty-five when I married her and not twenty-five? But we have a twenty-three year old son!”
“Well,” Gus explained. “Forty-year-old mothers are not unknown…You were married at St. Rocco’s…Mm…the old pastor in those days had a kitchen cabinet who had the run of the rectory, old cronies of his. One of them must have decided that your bride looked young and therefore should be young. So your wife took the clerical error on the year as a happy accident and ran with it.
“Go home, sir. Never tell your wife that you were here. Take her on that vacation and just be grateful that she does look ten years younger. Candor will serve no purpose. She loves you enough to be what you want—now you must just love her enough to show her that you appreciate the gift.”
The first time he heard the story, James thought it would be a perfect short story, something done by O. Henry. By the twentieth repetition, James rather began to hope that the gentleman had gone home to strangle the lying broad just so James wouldn’t have to listen to the story again.
And James could not stop Father from telling “pater ignotus” stories. Once again he heard the story of the grandmother who passed her granddaughter as her change-of-life daughter. The father who was willing to staple his affidavit into the baptismal book personally so as to wipe out the “pater ignotus.” “I don’t care if he’s a little bastid. He is MY little bastid.”
And then there was the Vasquez game of baptizing the child twice in two different parishes in order to change the child’s name canonically. Over and over and over again.
The only bright spots were Father Grante-Scarfe and Dominique Aristides.
Hubert always had a new weird and wonderful tale from the marriage tribunal. James’s all-time favorite was of the English priest who was convinced that two of his parishioners were too young and immature to marry. Said clergyman agreed to officiate at the wedding on condition that he make up a list of all the grounds for annulment and had it signed by the couple and notarized before the ceremony. When the marriage fell apart six months later and London requested an affidavit from the officiating priest, he just mailed them the prenuptial statement and set the new speed record for an annulment within the diocese.
James found himself as horribly fascinated by Church Law as some motorists are by car crashes. All marriage cases seemed to be works of intellectual elegance or horror depending on the person administering it.
But Hubert defended the nightmarish process: “At least we aren’t bureaucrats under American law. If they can perform their function without fear or favor, that also means doing it without caring or thinking. No, thank you, I much prefer to hate a malignant young bigot in a miter to an indifferent, interchangeable unit of your criminal justice system.”
“You mean an old bigot,” corrected James.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“Almost old enough to know better. Wait a few more years. In my lifetime, I have seen ‘liberal’ used to defend free-trade and protectionism, interventionism and isolationism, fighting communists and helping communists. In short, ‘liberal’ means whatever it means today, and yesterday’s truths are no longer operative. The only surety I have found is that today’s truths are held with greater fanaticism for all their transitory impermanence than the consistent principles of some old Whig.”
Dominique was much more cheerful on those Sundays when she visited. She had
that happy facility for throwing herself into her loves and hatreds with an equally zestful freedom which James, quite frankly, envied. If her passing references to overnights at Deke’s didn’t bother Gus, then it was none of James’s business—except for a little emerald-green envy at the football player’s good fortune.
The whole damn situation in the parish made James restless and fidgety.
There was still the unresolved death of Father Timothy Lessner.
James refused to believe it was an accident, but no one else cared any more. Yet he could not explain how the killer could have entered or left. Gus had chained the front door that now-infamous night. The door to the church through the sacristy still had the bolt on it when he opened up the church the morning of the death. The deadbolt lock on the back door could only be operated by a key, and all the keys were accounted for.
James’ curiosity was overwhelming but expressed itself as a persistent, subcutaneous itch. Somehow, the missing element was back at the rectory but that period of his life was over, marriage was on the way like an oncoming truck, and yet…and yet…
But by September, as agreed, Gus had his parish-assigned assistant, Juan Mendez, and James was free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.
And then the call came in December.
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
WINTER, AGAIN
Gus called in December.
“Remember Juan Mendez?” the priest began.
“Your new associate?” James asked. “The one who replaced me?”
“The same. A cute piece of work, that man. Decided he hates the cold. He informed me this morning that he intends to take his thirty days of vacation from the 20th of this month until the 19th of January.”
James flinched, anticipating where the story was going. “Can’t you stop him?”
“And lose him entirely!? I’ve got no strings on him. If I say no, then he could just quit altogether.”
