Why was Coogan leaving the room. Why?
Concentrate, he told himself.
Resting by itself to one side of the tabletop was something that appeared to be a silver fountain pen. But—no! It was a holy water sprinkler! How very American!
Young Coogan was returning now carrying a purple stole and a white surplice across his outstretched arms. The man who played Father Samozvanyetz watched him as he threaded his way through the kneeling priests.
“Your vestments, Father,” the lad whispered.
He allowed himself to smile at the young man, so solemn and reverent and dependable. He slipped into the surplice, took the stole from Coogan’s arm, kissed the thin purple cloth and draped it around his neck.
The room was packed now, not a space left. A full house.
The Rector cleared his throat and the room became still.
So, the curtain is about to rise. The man who played Father Samozvanyetz took a deep breath and brought himself under control.
The Rector glanced at him and nodded. He took his cue and opened the Rituale Romanum.
Damn it! The idiot priest had not marked the place!
He fought to keep his hands from trembling and his countenance composed. Remember, he told himself, you are the one who is setting the pace. Time is not rushing by so quickly for them! Only for you! Take your time!
He paged through the book of rituals, thumbing through the Latin prayers for the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, past the Form of Absolution in the Sacrament of Penance, past the prayers for Reception of a Convert, past the Instructions for Distributing Holy Communion, past the prayers for Blessing of a School!
Damn it! There was an even more solemn Blessing of a School! Psalms and Canticles, and the Litany of the Saints! He shifted the book to his right hand, going backward now, the pages flipping rapidly from under his left thumb.
Was he sweating? He must be.
He was aware of slight coughs and the rustling of cassocks. All eyes were upon him.
He turned the pages even more rapidly. Blessing of the Five Scapulars, Setting up the Stations of the Cross, Blessing of Altar Cloths, Blessing of a Processional Banner, for God’s sake! And the damned Blessing of that School again!
Matrimony! Penance! Confirmation! He reached the front of the book and started back again. Baptism! Confirmation! Penance! Matrimony!
Where the Hell was the damned Extreme Unction?
“Alex!”
The dying man’s eyes were open now. John Beck was staring at him, struggling to speak.
Go ahead, Beck, he thought, suddenly calm. Do your worst, Beck. Get it over with. Speak!
“Alex,” whispered Father Beck.
“Try the Index, Alex.”
The man who played Father Samozvanyetz could not move. He saw John Beck’s slight smile fade as his eyes closed. He watched John Beck’s head sink back into the pillows.
∗ ∗ ∗
“Oh, my God,” he heard Father Thornton saying, “I think he’s gone.”
The Rector was struggling to control himself.
“Try the Index, Alex!” croaked Father Thornton. Young Coogan giggled. One of the priests guffawed.
The room erupted with laughter.
The man who played Father Samozvanyetz dropped the Rituale Romanum on the bed. He turned away and buried his face in his hands. He stood at the foot of John Beck’s deathbed and laughed until he cried.
C H A P T E R • 13
The day after Father Beck’s death was celebrated as a First-Class Feast Day at Milford Novitiate, as festive as Christmas or Easter. That morning after meditation, electric bells sounded throughout both wings of the building, not once but twice: a signal that a Jesuit had died during the night and that the regular order of the day had been suspended.
All classes in the novitiate and juniorate were canceled. Only necessary manualia would be performed. The rule of silence was suspended. English would be permitted all day long. There was laughter and spirited conversation at breakfast and, at the noon meal, ginger ale for the novices and beer for the juniors with pie and ice cream for dessert.
It was one of those rare occasions when the novices, juniors, brothers and priests were encouraged to mingle. Teams of novices and juniors competed in hardball and softball while the older Jesuits shouted encouragement. When the celebratory games ended late that Thursday afternoon, the novitiate again fell silent.
The morticians returned with Father Beck’s body late Thursday evening and rested the plain pine coffin before the altar in the center aisle of the main chapel.
Friday and Saturday were solemn days with simple meals and deep silence as the Jesuit community used the occasion of Father Beck’s death to contemplate Man’s last end.
Twice on Friday, in mid-morning and mid-afternoon, the Jesuits gathered in the chapel to chant the Office of the Dead, that simple liturgy drawn from the Psalms and the Book of Job and the prayers of medieval monks.
The Gregorian chant came easily to Charley Coogan. Plain song required no great vocal range and, at this tempo, most of the Latin was comprehensible to him. The chanting alternated from right to left in the chapel as the juniors led and the novices responded.
Back home, on cold weekday mornings, he had always been moved when the organist at Saint Clement’s Church intoned the Dies Irae at Masses for the Dead. Like the aroma of incense and the smell of damp wool, it was part of his boyhood’s religious experience. But here in the Main Chapel at Milford, Charley felt himself lifted up by the force of the solemn male chorus of which he was now a part.
Saturday morning, after the Office of the Dead had been chanted once more, three priests offered a Solemn High Requiem Mass.
Once again, Charley was caught up in the surging waves of music. Mister Kleinschmidt’s dispassionate baritone on dreary winter mornings could not compare with the voices of a chapel full of young men chanting the antiphon celebrating Christ’s victory over Death.
“Ego sum,” intoned the priests. The four notes lingered in the air.
Then came the response of the entire community: “Resurrectio et Vita . . .”
“I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live: and every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die forever.”
∗ ∗ ∗
When the Mass ended, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz joined the long black line of Jesuits who followed Father Beck’s coffin, chanting psalms as they walked along the path to the cemetery on the hill overlooking the playing fields. When they reached the freshly dug grave, he stood with them among the grey headstones.
“In Paradisum deducant te Angeli,” Father Thornton sang out. “May the angels lead thee into Paradise . . .”
The Jesuits, young and old, responded in Latin: “At thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee to the holy city, Jerusalem.”
He tried to join the chanting, but his voice broke part way through the hymn and so, on this sunny October morning, he could only watch while the Jesuit brothers lowered Father John Beck, S.J., into his grave.
An autumn breeze passed through the cemetery. By afternoon, he thought, it would be quite warm. Nothing at all like the cold and rain-swept day in Siberia where he watched the zeks of the burial detail dump the corpse of Alex Samozvanyetz, S.J., into the soggy tundra and trudge back to the camp leaving his grave unmarked.
He gazed across the playing fields to the rolling hills beyond. A killing frost during the night had transformed the distant trees. Their trunks were as dark as the cassocks of the men who stood beside John Beck’s grave. The elms had turned yellow overnight. The maples, which far outnumbered the elms, had been turned crimson. They were as red as the vestments worn for a Martyr’s Mass. How fitting, thought the man who played Father Samozvanyetz.
He picked up a handful of earth and let it fall into John Beck’s grave. He heard the dirt strike wood.
“Good bye, John Beck, you gallant fool!” he said
in Russian.
He joined the silent procession down the cemetery hill path, back along the roadway to the main entrance of the novitiate. He looked up at the statue of the Sacred Heart and remembered the first time he had seen John Beck, the day of his arrival.
He could almost see Beck standing alone on the concrete steps again, welcoming his old friend with open arms. Beck had unconsciously assumed the posture of the statue of Christ, arms parted, hands open, heart exposed and vulnerable, ready to accept whatever suffering was to come.
He had condemned John Beck to death, but he had not misjudged him. He was the kind of man who would refuse a cigarette or a blindfold before being shot.
It was too damned bad the Jesuits would never know how John Beck kept sacred his Seal of Confession. If they knew, they would make him a saint tomorrow.
Beck showed courage and loyalty to the death, the man who played Alex Samozvanyetz told himself. He could have done me in with a word right there at the end. And yet he did not. He had the breath for it, no mistake.
“Try the Index, Alex.” You had to respect him for that! But that last look he gave me! What was he saying to me?
Oh, he knew something, all right! But what? And why did he find me so damn amusing?
Perhaps Beck thought he had discovered some great truth before he dissolved into oblivion. Well, fair enough. The man deserved some consolation at the end, some hallucination to help him pass peacefully through the door to nothingness.
Was that a Jesuit phenomenon, he wondered? Some anticipation of eternal life right at the very moment of annihilation? If so, it might be consolation enough. And certainly John Beck deserved a happy ending.
Too bad there was no eternal life beyond the grave. In a way, he wished there were, for Beck’s sake. The way he sometimes wished there was a Heaven for his wife and son.
C H A P T E R • 14
That Saturday, the day of Father Beck’s burial, was also Moving Day at the novitiate. Every six weeks, the novices were ordered to pack up their belongings and move from one dormitory room to another, lest they become too attached to any one place or any one group of people. Moving Day was a reminder that a Jesuit should never get too settled in any situation or activity. Obedience might require him to turn his life upside down quite suddenly.
But this Moving Day had a more specific purpose. The first-year novices who would be making the Long Retreat were being sequestered from the rest of the community. For most primi anni, that meant several hard climbs up the Magnae Scalae Novitiorum. They bundled up their books, clothes, sheets and towels and mattresses, and hauled all this impedimenta up to the dormitory rooms on the third floor near the Novices’ Chapel.
The project, which involved the second-year novices moving down to the lower floors while the first-year novices moved up, was conducted in silence, with only necessary conversation in Latin permitted. Even so, the move was completed in just forty minutes.
At recreation that evening, one of the secundi anni pointed out the educational benefits of Moving Day.
“It’s not just a physical and spiritual exercise,” he said. “It’s also a vocabulary builder! Who among the primi anni will ever forget the verbs we used today? Sublevare: to hoist. Trahere: to drag. Ascendere: to climb. Demittere: to drop.”
“Not to mention: Cavere, cave, cavessi-much!” said another. “To beware, beware! And beware, for crying out loud!”
“And don’t forget those Etruscan interjections!” said a third. “Like Ow! And Ouch! And Oops!”
But about the Long Retreat, which would start Sunday evening, the secundi anni had little to say. Questions from the anxious primi anni were deflected with knowing smiles.
“It’s something you have to go through yourself to understand,” they would say. And then they would change the subject.
∗ ∗ ∗
The man who played Father Samozvanyetz was more anxious than the novices about starting the Long Retreat. He did not trust his understanding of the words and expressions he was encountering in the Spiritual Exercises. Even the scholarly translator had confessed in his Preface that it was not easy to render Ignatius Loyola’s Spanish in present-day English.
“The first difficulty is to make sure of the exact meaning of St. Ignatius,” Father Mullan wrote. “This is obscured, at times, by his language being that of nearly 400 years ago and being not pure Spanish. Occasionally, in fact, the Saint makes new Spanish words from the Latin or Italian, or uses Spanish words in an Italian or Latin sense, or employs phrases not current except in the Schools, and sometimes even has recourse to words in their Latin form. To be sure, then, of the meaning, one must often go to other languages and to the terms adopted in Scholastic Philosophy or Theology. The meaning clear, the further difficulty comes of finding an exactly equivalent English word or phrase.”
To his actor’s ear, the prose of Saint Ignatius had a musty, distant tone. Time had made even the intentionally florid passages seem quaint. Had Father Mullan succeeded in finding the right words and phrases? Was his own English good enough to understand the choices Father Mullan had made so many years before?
“St. Ignatius of Loyola,” Father Mullan noted right at the start, “was a man without any great pretensions to education at the time he wrote this book. His native language was not Spanish, but Basque. His lack of education and his imperfect acquaintance with pure Spanish are enough to make it clear that a refined use of any language, and more especially of the Spanish, or, in general, anything like a finished or even perfectly correct style is not to be expected in his work.”
Could not the same be said of Father Mullan’s prose? It probably was grammatically correct, but his style was daunting. Such punctuation! So many commas! What a battle it must have been between this meticulous Jesuit scholar and the blunt, unlettered soldier-saint.
“After considerable study of the matter,” Father Mullan wrote, “it seemed best to make this translation as faithful and close a reproduction of the Spanish text as could be. To do so it was necessary at times to sacrifice the niceties of style, but it was thought that those who would use the book would easily forego the elegances of diction if they could feel sure they were reading the very words of St. Ignatius.”
Going beyond that, Father Mullan noted, would have resulted in a commentary as well as a translation. That he had left to others.
“Perhaps,” he had written, “some may even find a charm in the consequent want of finish, seeing it reproduces more completely the style of St. Ignatius.”
So to hell with charm and style! The man who played Father Samozvanyetz had been looking for answers and he had found very few in Father Mullan’s little book.
The most useful was the reminder that, before Ignatius Loyola became a saint, he had been a soldier. That, at least, was something he could work with. He knew what it was like to be an infantry officer in a war.
“In conclusion,” wrote Father Mullan, “it is well to warn the reader that the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are not meant to be read cursorily, but to be pondered word for word under the direction of a competent guide. Read straight on, it may well appear jejune and unsatisfactory; studied in the actual making of the Exercises, the very text itself cannot fail to yield ever new material for thought and prayer.”
The man who played Father Samozvanyetz closed the little book and rubbed his eyes. “The direction of a competent guide,” he repeated to himself. “And who would that be?”
He stood up. With hands clasped behind his back, he paced back and forth, six measured steps one way and six steps back, over and over again.
∗ ∗ ∗
Across the continent at Edwards Air Force Base in California, a pilot of the Strategic Air Command was responding to his wake-up call, beginning his workday and his pre-flight routine as obediently as any Jesuit novice. The Air Force major had a half hour to shower, shave, use the toilet and get dressed. He made it handily. He always did.
A blue Air Force sedan carried him to the
flight line where the mechanics were fussing over his aircraft. There was no air of urgency in the hangar. The ground crew knew that it would be several hours before their pilot would be ready to take off.
First came the flight surgeon’s exam: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, weight, some simple coordination tests, some questions about his state of mind. No, he was not apprehensive. He was not even particularly excited. As usual, he was physically and mentally okay. Just a tad dopey from the regulation pill that had helped him sleep through the daylight hours. A couple of cups of coffee would straighten him out.
His “low-residue” breakfast consisted of a couple of eggs, a steak with all the fat trimmed off, toast and jam, plenty of coffee. When he had finished, he signed a chit. The government charged the pilot forty cents for breakfast.
The plane ride over Cuba would be free.
∗ ∗ ∗
The man who played Father Samozvanyetz stopped pacing and looked around his room: the bed, the wardrobe, the desk and chair, the sink. He had decided to maintain this illusion of poverty rather than move into the Master of Novice’s living quarters. But he was not going to find a “competent guide” in this bare, monkish setting. He needed to consult John Beck or rather, whatever he had left behind. No one would think it odd that he would be going now to the Master’s office even at this late hour.
Once inside, he turned on the lights. He knew there was nothing useful in the desk or file cabinet because he had been working there during the daytime, but he had never entered the adjoining room. At first glance, it seemed to be just as John Beck had left it. But he found no clothes in the closet or the bureau and no toilet articles in the bathroom. The medicine chest was empty. He could see no personal items or pictures anywhere.
The dead priest’s reading lamp stood idle beside his upholstered easy chair. But the bookcase had not been cleaned out. There, on the second shelf from the bottom, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz found John Beck’s notes on leading the Long Retreat. They would be his “competent guide” through the Long Retreat.
Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy Page 28
