The Prudence of the Flesh

by Ralph McInerny

  She had a bad habit of talking about how wonderful it had been with her first husband. “God, what a man he was.”

  “How many were there?”

  “How many what?”

  “You said your first.”

  “First and last, Tuttle. First and last. They broke the mold.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Cancer. He was gone in a month. You don’t know what it’s like for a woman to be left alone.”

  Tuttle had an idea what it was like for a man to be alone with a woman who has been left alone. “You should marry again.”

  “And leave you?”

  There are modalities of female laughter, and Hazel’s registered somewhere around the adolescent giggle. Since she had the build of a lady wrestler, this was incongruous.

  “Good coffee.”

  “I am thought to be an excellent cook.”

  “You do Chinese?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “It’s my favorite.”

  “Stamp out rodents, eat Chinese. Do you know what they put in that stuff?”

  It was four o’clock. Hazel left at five. If he sat here with her for an hour she would end up having him in a half nelson.

  “I have been down to headquarters to check the effects of Ned Bunting.”

  “He never came to the office.”

  “He already had a girl.”

  She tried to punch him in the ribs, but he got out of range. “Those his tapes you want to hear?”

  He laughed. “You think the police would let me walk off with something like that?”

  “No. Did you walk off with them?”

  “Hazel, I don’t have to remind you that everything said in this office is under strict confidentiality.”

  “Give them here. I’ll put them on.”

  So it was that Tuttle heard Bunting’s last tapes. The first was a lengthy memo to himself, in which he seemed to be giving himself a pep talk about the book he hoped to write. Several old foes were mentioned, naysayers who would have to eat their words. “Or rather mine,” Ned Bunting’s recorded voice said. He repeated the phrase, obviously liking it. “Item. The ineffable Universal Literary Agency, a scam into which I sank five hundred useless dollars. Item. The moronic editor Max Zubiri, raking in money under false pretenses, exacting a fee to insult me. And then the superpompous Gregory Barrett, who acts as if he owns the authors he talks about. Who is he to dismiss my efforts? Quirk. Well, at least he took the piece on Dowling.”

  “I’ll make a transcript for you,” Hazel said. “In case the police notice they’re missing.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Tuttle, you’d be surprised what I can do.”

  6

  Because encountering Tuttle of Tuttle & Tuttle posed such delicate problems of conscience, Amos Cadbury kept those encounters to a minimum. Should the little lawyer loom on the horizon in the courthouse, skating across the great granite floor beneath the cupola, doubtless having descended the great spiral staircase that did not interfere with the ground-level view of the allegorical depiction of justice up among the painted clouds—should Tuttle surprise him there, a simple nod from Cadbury sufficed. If he intended to enter an elevator, he made certain that this was not Tuttle’s intention as well. Needless to say, Tuttle did not come to Cadbury’s office or, if he did, was told some white lie that sent him away. Was this uncharitable or, as Amos wanted to think, a laudable shunning for the sake of the profession? If Amos had been truly vindictive, he would have pressed for Tuttle’s disbarment on the two occasions he chaired the committee looking into Tuttle’s activities. The few disbarred lawyers Amos Cadbury knew filled him with compassion. Oh, he believed in punishment for misdeeds, and he did not think life imprisonment was too severe a penalty for certain crimes, but for a man to be cut off from the knowledge and skills he had acquired in order to earn his bread, ah, that must be a veritable hell. So he had been lenient in judging Tuttle, hoping that the threat of disbarment would prove a stimulus to reform.

  Now, dressing formally on the evening of the Fox River bar’s annual spring banquet, Amos stood before his dressing room mirror and remembered times when his late wife’s arm had lain on the arm of this dinner jacket. By half closing his eyes, he could conjure her up at his side, a replica of a photograph in his den of the two of them formally attired, taken by the ship photographer on the cruise that had marked the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage. The cruise had been aboard a Holland America vessel bearing the same name, Statendam, as that on which they had sailed to Europe on their honeymoon. There was another photograph of them with the pope, his bride now veiled in black, when they had attended the private papal Mass with a handful of others who had powerful friends in Rome. Why with his heart so full did he now think of the redoubtable Tuttle?

  The reason occurred to him as he was driven to the hotel where the banquet would take place—in the Loop, there being no hotel adequate for the purpose in Fox River. In St. Peter’s Square one was constantly accosted by men selling postcards and trinkets, men who would not take no for an answer and trailed along until defeat was certain. They seemed the very model of Tuttle seeking legal business by whatever means was effective. The annual banquet of the bar was the supreme test, since it would never do to snub a fellow lawyer on that occasion. He only wished that Tuttle were selling postcards and rosaries so he could make a purchase and be done with it.

  The hour before the banquet was devoted to milling about and drinking in a huge room adjacent to the one in which they would dine. Amos’s firm had, of course, reserved a table, and once there he would be surrounded by congenial colleagues. The social hour, though, was a time of maximum vulnerability, the more so because now Tuttle would not be wearing his trademark Irish tweed hat, which would have been sufficient warning even across the crowded room.

  “Amos.” A hand touched his elbow, and he turned to see, almost with relief, that it was Barfield. The two men exchanged greetings, and Barfield, who now had a grip on Amos’s elbow, led him off to relative privacy. “So you’ve seen Gregory Barrett.”

  Amos nodded.

  “I had hoped that you would enlist his support in having that woman included in the arrangements the archdiocese is making for victims.”

  “Would persuasion work? In any case, he thinks it would be blackmail.”

  “Who’s to say? But surely the aim must be to get such things behind us and out of the press.”

  “I can certainly say amen to that.”

  “His innocence in the matter is not to be taken for granted, you know.”

  “Proving that one has not done something is never an easy matter.”

  “You would let the charge go before a judge?”

  Amos did not attribute the question to Barfield’s well-known habit of bringing about mutually acceptable solutions without having recourse to a trial. Trials there must be; charges must be faced, a judgment awaited, that was the nature of the law—but in the case of wayward priests, the very accusation was a stigma on their whole order, and a swift resolution of the Barfield kind was a desideratum.

  “That seems to be what Barrett wants,” Amos said.

  “He can be linked with the woman.”

  “Surely not in the way she charges.”

  “Do you know Tuttle, Amos?”

  Amos winced.

  “I know, I know. But the rascal has turned up records that you should know of before you proceed.”

  “What prompted him to seek such records?”

  “That you must hear from him. I asked him to call on you tomorrow. You won’t regret it.” Off Barfield went, mission accomplished, squeezing elbows as he disappeared among the crowd.

  If Tuttle was at the banquet, Amos did not see him. Several members of the firm were called up to receive awards and recognition. There was a shamelessly long talk by a politician, allegedly expert in legal matters. There were blessedly brief appearances by a rabbi, a monsignor, and a well-known evangelical prea
cher. Amos saw a number of dear old friends before calling for his car. On the drive home, the one memorable event of the night seemed to be Barfield’s remark about Tuttle.

  When he told his secretary, Miss Sullivan, that if Mr. Tuttle came by he would be in to him, she reacted as if he had announced that he would be meeting with a member of the Pianone family to deliver or receive a bribe.

  “Mr. Barfield has sent him to me.”

  Like many legal secretaries, Miss Sullivan could doubtless pass the bar exams, argue a case in court, and do almost everything else a lawyer does except conceal her true estimate of people. Barfield was not one of her favorites, perhaps more because of the amount of publicity he managed to get than for the bargaining that had made him famous.

  “Father Dowling called.”

  “Ah.”

  “Should I get him on the line?”

  “Later.” Into his office he went. Something told him that Tuttle would be here bright and early—well, say ten o’clock—and that he wanted to see the man before he talked with Father Dowling.

  Tuttle arrived at 9:45 and was announced in frosty tones.

  “Send Mr. Tuttle in.”

  Tweed hat in hand, Tuttle entered. He still wore a topcoat; his necktie was knotted several inches below his open collar. His smile was tentative.

  “Barfield felt that I should bring you up to speed on what I have learned of the woman who has accused Gregory Barrett.” All this before Tuttle sat on the edge of a chair, leaning toward Cadbury.

  “May I ask why you are interested in the matter?”

  “Mr. Cadbury, we share a client.”

  “Do we?”

  “Gregory Barrett. He came to me after he had met with you and asked me to find out what I could about the woman accusing him.”

  Here was a situation in which Miss Sullivan would have failed. Indignation, anger, a sense of having been betrayed—these surged up in the Cadbury breast, but his expression did not change. “And you found something.”

  Tuttle took a crumpled sheaf of pages from his inner pocket, explaining that his secretary had typed up and printed out his notes. “Maybe I should just read this.”

  “Do.”

  Tuttle sat in the chair Gregory Barrett had occupied when he came to Amos with his problem. He had been persuasive in denying the charge against him. Now Tuttle, the ineffable Tuttle, while working on Barrett’s behalf, had turned up what in the new cliché was called a smoking gun. Barrett had advised and counseled the woman when she was expecting a baby. He had made arrangements for her confinement. “It’s all on the record, Mr. Cadbury.” He had been further involved when the woman decided against giving her child up for adoption. All this could be explained in terms of pastoral care, but it was also susceptible of another and damning interpretation.

  “Have you conveyed all this to Gregory Barrett?”

  “Barfield advised me to talk with you.”

  “But Barrett is now your client.”

  “Oh, only for this.”

  “Detective work?”

  “No detective could have found out what I have.”

  “You may be right.”

  “There is more. Ned Bunting, the man who wrote a piece on Father Dowling, was writing one on Barrett and the girl.”

  “The man who drowned?”

  Tuttle decided against the tangent of talking about Bunting’s death. He nodded.

  “Had he found out what you have?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Well, you have given me a great deal to think of. It was good of you to make these things known to me. What they portend, what I will now do, I cannot say, but I thank you for coming.” Amos rose and extended his hand to Tuttle.

  “What are friends for?”

  It was not Tuttle that annoyed Amos now, but Gregory Barrett. Imagine going from this office to Tuttle! But would he himself have had someone look into those records? Perhaps Tuttle was the kind of lawyer needed in such a situation. Still, that could not excuse the duplicity of Gregory Barrett. Or had the man assumed that anything Tuttle turned up would be beneficial to him?

  7

  His parents’ revelation of what they had been gave Thomas Barrett much food for thought. In the various Orthodox churches, priests have children and one might be the son of a priest without causing comment. The marriage had to be entered into prior to ordination, however, and a married priest could never become a bishop. On his father’s shelf, Thomas Barrett had found a novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly called Un prêtre marié and tried to read it, but his shaky French did not permit it. Italian or German would have presented less problem: Tom’s area of concentration was modern languages.

  “The classics would make more sense,” his father had said. “English has become the lingua franca of the world, so how much use will modern languages have for you?”

  “It’s the literature I’m interested in.”

  Any opposition his father felt dissolved after that remark. If there was anything Thomas had absorbed from his upbringing, it was his father’s bookishness. The move from Cairo had involved the transfer of the vast Barrett personal library and the building of shelves in almost every room of the new suburban house; mere furniture was a lesser problem. It was after they settled in Chicago that his parents had sat Thomas down and told him what he had vaguely suspected for years: His father was a priest and his mother was a nun.

  There was an undeniably guilty note to the narrative. Both his mother and father expected him to see what they had done as needful of explanation.

  “You have to understand what it was like, Tom. What I had been educated for, what I had looked forward to doing, was changing radically. A classmate of mine put it well. ‘This is not the cruise I signed on for.’ There was an exodus from the priesthood, and I was part of it. Your mother’s case was even more compelling.”

  “My community decided to disperse, to live in apartments, to take jobs. What was the point of being a nun in such circumstances?”

  Thomas found that he was trying to make it easy for them to tell him their story. If they had deserted their vocations, they had not lost the faith, and they had passed it on to him. He thought of all the Masses they had attended and wondered if his father ever thought that it could be him at the altar, vested, performing the altered but still ancient rite. When the great revelation was made, both his father and mother insisted that they had never regretted what they had done. Nor, of course, could he. His existence had followed from their decisions. They had known one another in their previous roles, they had discussed together what they intended to do, and they had done it together, and that formed a bond perhaps as binding as their marriage vows. Could they have repudiated those later promises as easily as they had the others? He doubted it.

  “We have agonized over not telling you, Tom. But now that we are back in Chicago, you have to know.”

  What did they want from him—approval, censure, curiosity? He didn’t know. Still, he was glad it was all in the open now. As for themselves, in Chicago they might at any time meet someone who had known them before, and that carried the threat that Tom would learn of their past in an accidental way. No, they were right to tell him, and he told them so.

  Then there arose the question of his education. Would he continue in the school where he had a year to go? Already they had talked of where he would go to college. His parents favored Notre Dame. When his father was taken on at Loyola, it was decided that Tom would finish high school at Loyola Prep. A month after they made the move, they visited the campus at Notre Dame. After that, Tom’s greatest fear was that he would not be admitted. Both his parents had visited the South Bend campus years ago. No need to say that it was when his father was a priest and his mother a nun. Not that they had been there at the same time.

  There was no greater fan of End Notes than Thomas Barrett, not least because many of the programs developed from conversations he had had with his father. He was the only child they would ever have, and the
y doted on him, but not in a spoiling way. At least that was his judgment. His mother had been in her late thirties when she bore him and was warned against another pregnancy.

  “You came into the world with a struggle,” his mother said.

  In the final semester of Loyola Prep, waiting to be accepted by Notre Dame for the following fall, the great blow fell. His father was accused of sexual misconduct during the years he was a priest. Discussing that was far more difficult than telling him of their previous lives. The chancery called, and the lawyer Barfield came to talk with his father. The woman had refused to become part of a group of victims the archdiocese was prepared to compensate for their traumatic experiences.

  “What does she want?” his father asked.

  “Do you have any memory of her?”

  “As far as I know, I never met her.” Barfield had brought a photograph, and his father studied it with puzzlement.

  “Of course, that is a recent photograph,” the lawyer said.

  Barfield left it with his father, and Thomas later went into the study and looked into the photographed eyes of the woman who wanted to destroy his father. If it is possible to hate a stranger, Tom hated the woman. The mere accusation jeopardized the life his father had built during the years since he left the priesthood. NPR would not want to continue a program by a man considered guilty of taking advantage of a young woman while he was a priest. In the bio prepared by NPR, his father’s education was recorded, but there was no spelling out of the fact that Mundelein was the major seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago, graduates of which were ordained to the priesthood.

  One Sunday they went to Mass at St. Hilary’s in Fox River. His father wanted to get a sense of the classmate he had decided to consult about the problem he faced. He returned from his visit to the rectory encouraged, as if a cloud had been lifted. The further development of the charge against his father was discussed in whispers by his parents, and it was days before they could bring themselves to tell him that the woman was now ready to claim that Gregory Barrett was the father of her child. A son. It was clear to Tom that even his mother was shaken by this new charge.