The Prudence of the Flesh

by Ralph McInerny

  Amos had never dreamt he would be professionally involved in this tragedy, but when Robert Barfield asked him in the bar of the University Club if he would help the chancery in this case, he could scarcely refuse.

  “My first thought was to include his in a cluster of cases we are negotiating.” Barfield spoke into his brandy as if a microphone might be hidden in the balloon glass.

  “Negotiating.”

  “It is surprising how money soothes the victims. But Madeline Murphy was not interested in money.”

  No wonder Barfield was known as Bartering Bob. His idea of law was to avoid court as much as possible, and a jury like the plague. In the case of abusive priests, this might have seemed the counsel of prudence.

  “What did Barrett think of negotiating?”

  “He refused. He didn’t even hesitate. Maybe he is innocent.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Doesn’t the accused always protest his innocence?”

  “Would you?”

  Barfield allowed a slow smile to form on his wide mouth. “That’s a logical trap, isn’t it?”

  “A variation on the Liar’s Paradox?”

  Barfield sent him what he had on Gregory Barrett, and then Amos met the accused. In the meantime, he had listened to a number of his radio programs and had been surprised by the tone of his oral essays on authors and books he loved. The program was unashamedly personal. If Barrett always offered the basis for his likings, he never elevated this estimate into an absolute standard. “De gustibus,” he once began, and then quickly corrected himself, putting the thought into English. On another occasion, when he might have said corruptio optimi pessima, he offered a beautiful poetic equivalent: Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds. Before he met him, Amos wondered if Gregory Barrett had found the appropriate motto for himself and other shepherds who had turned into wolves.

  “How long were you a priest?” Amos had begun, all business.

  “Oh, one is always that, you know.”

  “You believe that?”

  “It’s not a personal opinion.”

  “And yet you left.”

  “You must remember what it was like, after the council. It was hard not to be influenced by all that commotion. Nuns were leaving, classmate after classmate left, it became a flood. I began to wonder if I would be the last one left and have to turn out the lights.”

  Amos thought about that. It was difficult not to see the parallel with his own misgivings about the legal profession. The thought of retiring to his cabin on the shores of a Wisconsin lake was powerfully attractive. Cicero would have been well advised to do what Horace did: get out of town, away from the wicked city. Horace managed to die a natural death. Barrett made his leaving sound like something less than desertion.

  “Now, this woman, Madeline Murphy. You don’t remember her?”

  “I am certain I never so much as knew her.”

  “She was a parishioner at St. Bavo’s when you were an assistant pastor there.”

  “I must have been shown a recent photograph.”

  “How so?”

  “I thought she must have been a child all those years ago.”

  “She was sixteen.”

  “Sixteen!” Barrett sat back.

  The woman had said it all began when she went to confession to then-Father Barrett. That would have added sacrilege to mere moral turpitude. Many of the current accusations against the clergy made Boccaccio seem deficient in imagination.

  “And I am guilty until proved innocent?”

  “It is difficult to prove a negative.”

  “Then all it takes is an accusation. The chancery lawyer actually advised me to come to terms.”

  “I know. Apparently the woman was unwilling.”

  “I would have thought that was all she wanted, money.”

  “I understand Barfield’s suggestion. Keeping such things out of the media is a way of protecting the Church.”

  “And of encouraging blackmail.”

  “It isn’t always blackmail.”

  “Well, it is this time. You say my innocence can’t be proved. At least it can be asserted. Even if she were paid off, there is no guarantee of future silence.”

  “She would have to agree to that in any settlement.”

  “And what penalty if she later broke that agreement?”

  Amos found Barrett difficult to understand, but, of course, there was the enormous obstacle of realizing that the expensively dressed and distinguished middle-aged man was in fact a priest, a status that could not be removed by laicization. Thou art a priest forever. That made Barrett as much a priest as Father Dowling. It turned out that they had been classmates.

  “So you know Roger,” Barrett said.

  “I thought of him because he is a canon lawyer.”

  “You don’t imagine that this accusation will be tried by the Church?”

  Once, of course, that would have been the proper venue of such a charge, but the churches had long since appealed to the civil courts to adjudicate internal matters, and that had made the civic arm less reluctant to look the other way when clerical misbehavior became known. He told Barrett that he would consult with Father Dowling and then they would meet again. “Maybe I’ll go see Roger myself.”

  “I was about to suggest that.”

  So it was that Amos Cadbury got involved in a scandal that had caused him and the laity so much anguish. The bishops seemed to have but two recourses in dealing with accusations against priests: to the civil law and to psychological counseling. It was the latter that had prompted them to cover up for erring clerics for so long, sending them off to clinics to be talked to and redefined in therapeutic terms. That many of the offenders returned to active duty and their old practices did not seem to dim the confidence of many prelates that a wayward priest was simply a mind in need of a few adjustments through counseling. No wonder the whole sad business had finally ended in the criminal courts. Now the bishops spoke of civic prosecution as if it were an arm of their own governance. The one word that was never mentioned was “sin.” Nor did the bishops seem to realize their own responsibility for what had happened. However small a percentage of the priestly population these sexual predators were, one of them was too many, yet some of the most egregious seemed enabled by the treatment they had received from their spiritual superiors. The bishops’ response was now something called zero tolerance. This policy effectively put all priests under suspicion and elevated bishops high above the fray. Yet there had also been a few bishops whose pasts turned out to be vulnerable to accusation—a few, but was the percentage of bishops lower than that of the priests? No wonder it was tempting to imagine a flying squad of Swiss Guards swooping down and carrying all the offenders off to the Castel San Angelo, where oubliettes awaited them.

  3

  Those who saw Ned Bunting prominent in the aisles of St. Bavo’s Church on Sunday at the ten o’clock Mass, imperiously signaling latecomers into the front pews, taking up the collection with something of the insistence of the IRS, would scarcely have realized that this restless usher was an aspiring author. It was, of course, a well-kept secret. The only person Ned had ever confided in was fellow parishioner Gloria Daley.

  “What have you written?”

  “I doubt you would have read it.”

  “That dirty?”

  He winked and looked away. Being thought of as a racy author was better than not being thought of as an author at all. Should he show Gloria some of his stuff? He frowned away the thought. It wasn’t only that she might expect steamy fare and be disappointed. Ned’s experience of letting others read his things was not encouraging.

  Fifteen years ago, when he had decided that he would stop just thinking about it and get to work writing, he had sent a manuscript off for evaluation. For a fee, of course. The first evaluation simply paraphrased what he had written and advised him to read Faulkner, and that was that. No suggestion at all that they would try to market the story, although that promise had s
eemed implicit in the advertisement that had induced Ned to enclose a fifty-dollar check with his manuscript. The evaluation ended with the suggestion that a deeper and more technical evaluation could perhaps be helpful. Ned took the bait. Before he was done, he had spent five hundred dollars and his manuscript was no nearer to being published. He had rewritten the story four times, following different and conflicting advice. Now when he looked back at his original version, he was sure it was better than any of the revisions. He swore never to be taken in again.

  During the long disappointing years, he had kept his promise. He only broke it last spring when the notice of a writers’ meeting announced that evaluations of one’s work by editors and agents attending would be available. Ned looked over his collected works—he now had thirty-one completed stories in his files—picked what he considered the best, which was also the most recent, and sent it to the conference organizers with his check.

  At the meeting, he was scheduled for an hour with Max Zubiri, an editor who had been on the staffs of a dozen magazines and was now a book editor in a famous old house. For a half minute after Ned sat across from him, Zubiri stared at him silently.

  “This your first story?” he finally said.

  “First! There are dozens more where that came from.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this was your first try, it would be easier for you to face the fact that you will never be a writer.”

  Ned was more stunned than angry. “You call this an evaluation!”

  “Oh, we’ll go over what you’ve written.”

  Maybe the Last Judgment will be like that, but Ned was sure it would be easier than the clinical way in which Zubiri pointed out the deficiencies in what he had written. The pages of the manuscript were covered with the editor’s comments.

  “But that’s just technical stuff. Maybe someday you could learn what the hell a story is. It won’t matter. Is English your native tongue?”

  Ned managed to get to his feet, but no appropriately crushing response came to mind. His brain seemed to be on fire, all his hopes going up in the flames of his anger. He turned and got to the door of the room.

  “Take this with you,” Zubiri called after him. He was waving the curled and commented-on pages of Ned’s story. Then a response came, arising out of the basement of Ned Bunting’s soul, where bric-a-brac from his army days jostled with crude messages from rest-room walls. He flung it back at Zubiri, whose only reaction was to stuff the manuscript into the wastebasket beside him rather than into his ear.

  Ned thought of complaining to the conference organizers. He listened to two authors who had known success in a tenth of the time Ned had devoted to failure. Persistence. Keep at it. Their advice came down to that. Ned could have wept. When the young woman of the pair spoke of her eternal gratitude to Max Zubiri, her editor, Ned left the talk, checked out of the hotel, and drove home to Fox River, a journey of which he retained no memory at all. It was like coming home drunk, only what he was was sober. It took him a week before he convinced himself that Zubiri’s word could not be the last. In his search for a way of proving himself, he hit on the idea of writing a brief column for the Sunday parish bulletin.

  “Not as long as yours, of course,” he told the pastor, Monsignor Sledz. “Maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty words.”

  “How long would you say mine is?”

  “Five hundred words.”

  “I never count them.”

  “It’s pretty good.”

  Monsignor Sledz had one of those Polish baby faces. His cheeks turned a little pink, but Ned did not like the gleam in the monsignor’s blue eyes.

  “And you want to write a column.”

  “I could show you some samples.”

  “A few words from the usher?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t refer to what I do in the parish.”

  “You find seats for people at Mass. You take up the collection.” There was an edge to the pastor’s voice.

  “That’s what an usher does, yes.”

  “You could call it ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’

  “The monsignorial smile was mean. Ned might have been facing Zubiri again. “Sure, send me a sample. Why don’t you ask the other ushers to do the same?”

  Ned quit as an usher. He would have liked to submit his resignation, but the truth was, it was a voluntary position. Sometimes they just invited people out of the pews to help take up the collection. Quitting meant not going back to St. Bavo’s. Maybe he would quit going to Mass altogether. Who was tormenting him here, Zubiri and Sledz, or God himself? Why had he been plagued by his ambition to be a writer only to open himself to such crushing humiliation? It was during those dark days that he met Gloria.

  She was behind him in the checkout line at the supermarket and twice ran her cart against his ankles. The second time, she circled the cart and squeezed his arm when she said she was sorry.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “You like it? I’ll do it again.”

  And she did, gently, and they both laughed. He waited while she paid for her own things.

  “Watch it,” she said. “I still have my cart.”

  He took over from her, offering to push her cart to her car.

  “Once an usher, always an usher,” she replied. He stopped and stared at her, ready for anything after Zubiri and Sledz, but her smile was not cruel. “Sundays you look so goody-goody. I bet you’re a terror on weekdays.”

  “Word gets around.”

  At her car, she took bags from the cart and handed them to him so he could put them in the trunk. It doubled the work, but he was sorry when the cart was empty.

  “Now show me to my pew.”

  “Did I ever do that?”

  “I’m not that kind of girl.”

  What was she—fifty, late forties? No, fifty at least. He felt he would have remembered her face if he had noticed her before: pretty, surrounded by ringlets because she pulled her winter cap tight on her head, but it was the lips Ned noticed, and the eyes.

  “What kind are you?”

  “Give me a ring and find out.” She jabbed him in the side with her mittened hand. “I mean a phone call.”

  “I don’t have your number.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” She scrawled it on one of the grocery bags and tore it off, sending oranges running around in her trunk. They made teamwork of correcting that, too. “I even know your name. I asked another girl who that good-looking usher at ten o’clock was.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gloria. Bye-bye.”

  It was ridiculous. She drove away before Ned realized he had emptied his groceries into her trunk as well. Would he ever have called her if it weren’t for that?

  4

  Marie Murkin couldn’t believe it the first time she saw Ned Bunting at Mass in St. Hilary’s. She was so surprised that she didn’t confront him and ask when he had stopped going to St. Bavo’s. A few months ago, Marie had filled in at St. Bavo’s while the housekeeper was on vacation, adding that task to her work at St. Hilary’s.

  “Can’t they cook for themselves for a week? Or eat out?” Father Dowling asked.

  “If you don’t want me to . . .”

  “There are three priests there, you know. Polish parishes haven’t been hit as hard.”

  “Well, they’ll have to eat American if I cook for them. I explained that to Barbara.”

  “They’ll try to hire you away from me.”

  Marie was frowning lest a silly smile break out. It was nice to know she was appreciated. She meant it, too: One more remark and she would call Barbara and tell her Father Dowling had vetoed the idea. She couldn’t let her old friend down like that, though. For an anxious moment, she wondered if Father Dowling was teasing her. He was always teasing her.

  “Oh, go. I suppose it’s far more likely that some man will sweep you off your feet and take you away.”

  If any man could hav
e, and of course the idea was ridiculous, it was someone like Ned Bunting, the chief usher at St. Bavo’s. Not that they had ranks, but anyone seeing Ned at work would know he was in charge. Barbara had mentioned him to Marie before leaving on her Warsaw trip, a gift from the pastor. Of course, Barbara was her age; well, close—in any case, older than Ned Bunting. Imagine Marie’s reaction when she herself began to go gaga over Ned. She didn’t have to imagine the teasing Father Dowling would give her if he suspected she was smitten by a man, and by such a young man.

  The second time he came to Mass at St. Hilary’s there was a woman with him.

  Marie called Barbara at St. Bavo’s and asked her to come for tea on her next afternoon off. They had a wonderful time at the kitchen table. Barbara was full of stories about Monsignor Sledz and did not expect Marie to reply in kind.

  “Why are your ushers now coming to Mass here?”

  Barbara sat back and puffed out her cheeks. “You mean Ned Bunting. Sledz drove him away. He had them all laughing at Ned Bunting’s idea that he write a weekly column for the parish bulletin. I haven’t seen him in church since I heard the story.”

  “He and his wife were here a week ago.”

  “Wife? He’s not married.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Such a fine figure of a man. He’s half Polish, you know.”

  “I wonder who she is.”

  “When you find out, let me know.”

  So much for that avenue. Barbara did not seem reluctant to let the subject drop. Two days later, though, she called.

  “The woman you saw with Ned Bunting? Her name is Gloria Daley. Our organist knows her.”