Stained Glass

by Ralph McInerny

  It had certainly meant a new day for Roger Dowling. Freed from any remnant of clerical ambition, able to see where he was as where he was, the place where his soul would be saved by giving his all to what most of his fellow priests would have regarded as a Mickey Mouse assignment, that was the grace he had been given. So, on this day of recollection at the seminary where he had studied, his heart was full of thanksgiving. That failure should be its own kind of success seemed the essential message of Christianity.

  In midafternoon, he lay on his bed for forty winks. It was a day to refresh the body as well as the soul. But he could not sleep. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling, aware of the stir of trees at the window and the song of birds everywhere, full of a euphoria that almost frightened him. We have here no lasting city, he reminded himself, not even Fox River, Illinois. At the time it seemed merely a pious reminder. When he got home to his rectory the thought seemed almost prophetic.

  The first surprise was the sight of Amos Cadbury’s automobile in the driveway. When he pulled in beside it and looked toward the school, there seemed to be a cluster of old people watching him.

  Then the front door opened and Marie Murkin, with a stricken expression, came running toward him. “Have you heard?”

  “Good Lord, what is it?”

  “Mr. Cadbury will tell you.” Marie burst into tears. Father Dowling took her arm and led her into the house, full of foreboding.

  Amos Cadbury came out of the study, apologizing for invading the inner sanctum. “Marie insisted, Father Dowling. Besides, I wanted to smoke a cigar.”

  Amos’s manner calmed Marie. Edna Hospers looked out of the kitchen, her hand to her mouth, eyes wide with anxiety.

  Father Dowling went into the study, and Amos followed, shutting the door behind him.

  “So what is it, Amos?”

  For answer, Amos handed that morning’s Chicago Tribune to Father Dowling, indicating what he should read.

  The story was by the religious editor of the paper and began with a sweeping account of the altering character of the archdiocese, changes that were characteristic of other large cities as well but especially visible in Chicago, the largest diocese in the country, some said in the world. The writer described with some unction driving from the Loop to O’Hare and seeing on either side of the interstate massive churches, only a few blocks apart. A dozen at least, maybe more. He had not counted them. Those churches, larger than most cathedrals, were monuments to the ethnic groups that had built them, clustering around their parish plant, a little world of their own in the wider world of Chicago. A few blocks away, a similar little world, and another and another. The question the archdiocese faced was what to do with these huge churches and parish plants now that their parishioners had deserted them for the suburbs. Their schools were now open to any children in the neighborhood but could scarcely be called parochial schools anymore. They represented a significant contribution to the education of the young of the city, but who was to bear the financial burden?

  The conclusion to this overture seemed obvious. It was unrealistic to imagine that such parishes would know a rebirth. The expense of keeping them up was now borne more by the archdiocese than those living within the parish confines. The financial burden was becoming too much. There would have to be a closing of some churches, a consolidation of parishes, a more justifiable use of resources. Then came a list of churches to be closed, based on “authoritative sources.”

  Father Dowling looked at the name of his parish on the list.

  He realized that Amos was waiting for his reaction. He sat forward and rummaged around on his desk. The day’s mail was still bundled together and enclosed in a rubber band. He slipped it off and shuffled through the letters. There was no letter from the archdiocese.

  “It’s all speculation, Amos. I wonder who his ‘authoritative sources’ are.”

  Amos was not a man given to expressing surprise—he had seen too much over a long life to find anything truly novel—but Father Dowling had surprised him. “You don’t think it’s true?”

  “Amos, the only authoritative sources I know would communicate with me directly and give their names. There’s no point in getting upset by a newspaper story.”

  That was the line he took, and he stuck with it. Amos, Marie, Edna, and Phil Keegan, when he arrived in time to be asked to supper, fell in with him, or pretended to, but he sensed that they thought he was deluding himself. Perhaps he was. Thank God he had a day of recollection behind him when he received the news. In the end, it proved to be an almost convivial occasion. When they rose from the table and Edna and Marie went into the kitchen, the men repaired to Father Dowling’s study. Cigars were lit, and the pastor’s pipe. Phil Keegan mentioned that the Cubs were on, but that was that. Getting interested in a ball game would have required more pretense than Father Dowling was capable of.

  After Edna left to go back to her family, Marie brought Phil a beer and handed Amos a glass of Courvoisier. The pastor was content with coffee. The great topic was forgotten when Phil brought them up to date on current crimes and murders, and both the lawyer and the priest showed professional interest. Of course, it was Phil’s phlegmatic account of a woman’s body that had been found hanging in a garage that particularly caught their attention.

  “What a horrible thing,” Amos said.

  “Horvath is on the case,” Phil said. “He and Agnes Lamb.”

  When his guests rose to go, Father Dowling went with them to the door.

  “I don’t think the Deveres will take the threat to the parish as philosophically as you do,” Amos said.

  “I thought I was taking it theologically.”

  Amos smiled a wintry smile and followed Phil down the front walk.

  Father Dowling watched them drive away. Marie had gone up to her apartment, reached by a staircase in the back of the house. Father Dowling returned to the study, sat at his desk, and looked bleakly about. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, he murmured. For the first time he confronted the real possibility that his days as pastor of St. Hilary’s could be coming to an end.

  5

  Hugh Devere in the last few days before returning to school felt pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand there was the undeniable attraction of immersion in his family, his siblings, his parents, his grandmother Jane, the matriarch of the family, as old as the hills, as she seemed to her grandson, and yet with an almost mystical connection with a past he had never known, the past of the Deveres. It was impossible to sit with her and not feel the contagion of that family pride. On the other hand, of course, was the eagerness to return to South Bend, complete his studies, and become established as an architect. He was, there was no other way to put it, a disciple of Duncan Stroik and Thomas Gordon Smith, two men who while still very much professors were supervising the building of their architectural dreams across the country. Ecclesiastical architecture. Smith had designed the magnificent church of the newly founded Clear Creek monastery outside Tulsa; Stroik was responsible for the church rising on the campus of Hugh’s alma mater in Santa Paula, California. A young man needs models, and these two men were his models, a fact he manifested by refusing to show them any servile deference. There was also, though, the undeniable fact that he was a Devere.

  Jane Devere dwelt in matriarchal splendor on the third floor of the Devere home, by and large out of sight but never out of mind. In the great house below, there was only Mrs. O’Grady, the housekeeper, cook, and whatever, and the intermittent presence of Mrs. Bernard Ward, Jane’s widowed daughter. Jane’s son, James, after his wife died, had come back to the old house, too, bringing two of his children with him. The wonderful old woman was the genius loci, and, with more docility than Susan, his sister, Hugh visited her often and sat quite literally at her feet in her sitting room, where she was surrounded by photographs and other artifacts that recalled her long life.

  After his round of golf, he went home and climbed to the third floor.

  “They’re goin
g to tear down St. Hilary’s,” Hugh said.

  “Nonsense.”

  “It was in the Tribune this morning.”

  “The Tribune!”

  “Why did Mom and Dad move out of the parish?”

  “For that they will have to answer to God. Of course, your father brought you back.”

  Grandma Jane insisted on being driven to St. Hilary’s each Sunday, and during the summer vacation that happy task had fallen to Hugh. A month ago, after the church had emptied, they had stayed on, and his grandmother had gone slowly up and down the aisle drawing his attention to the stained glass windows.

  “I trust you do not find them ordinary, Hugh.”

  “Who did them?”

  “Good heavens, you don’t know?”

  “Tell me.”

  She sank into a pew, resting her hands on her cane, and looked from him to the windows. “Does the name Menotti mean anything to you?”

  “I wish it did.”

  The old woman sighed. “Hugh, it is the bane of age to live into a time that one was not perhaps meant to see. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Here you are, at the dawn of life, intent on doing great and significant things. It would not occur to you that, if you were fortunate enough to do those things, time would pass and eventually no one would know or care that you had lived. Let alone that you were the creator of a beauty that would have become commonplace to them, because of familiarity. These windows, Hugh, are works of genius.”

  She rose once more, took his arm, and then began to discourse on the theme of the windows, those on the left commemorating great figures of the Old Testament, those on the right events of the New Testament. Those along the left featured prophetic scenes from the Old Covenant.

  “Do you see the thematic unity of those on the right?”

  All he had to do was wait. The seven windows depicted the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin. The prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child Jesus in the temple at twelve, and then, as if fast forwarding, Mary encountering her son as he carried his cross to Golgotha, Mary at the foot of the cross (Stabat Mater dolorosa, his grandmother fairly crooned the hymn), Jesus taken down from the cross—the Pietà—and finally the burial of Jesus. Grandma Jane’s eyes were moist as she recalled those great moments in Mary’s life that linked her indissolubly to her son.

  Before they left the church, Hugh’s grandmother led him to a small octagonal chapel entered from the apse. “We had this added after August died.”

  Inset in the floor was a pale marble slab on which was engraved AUGUST DEVERE.

  “Is he buried here?”

  She nodded. “So is your grandfather.”

  A family mausoleum as part of the parish church. Did Jane plan to be buried here herself?

  Now he was in her sitting room telling her of the newspaper story about the closing of St. Hilary’s. He might have been telling her that key articles of the Creed were being discarded. He tried to redirect the conversation he had started. “Tell me about Menotti.”

  The old woman stirred in her chair. “What do you mean?”

  “The man who designed the stained glass windows.”

  “They were a special gift to the church from the Devere family.”

  “Grandfather?”

  An impatient noise. “His father. August Devere.”

  “My great-grandfather?”

  “Of course.”

  “So you must remember the building of the church?”

  “Your great-grandfather, as I suppose we must call him, visited the building site every day. I accompanied him. The architect was not without merit, but you could find the twin of that church in half the towns of Illinois and Wisconsin. No, it was the windows that made it special.”

  “I suppose Menotti was Italian.”

  She dipped her head and looked at him over her glasses.

  “Did he live in Italy?”

  “His studio was in Peoria.”

  “Peoria!”

  “And what is wrong with Peoria?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “You should go.”

  “When did Menotti die?”

  “Die? Did I say he died? He is scarcely older than I am.”

  Hugh observed a moment of silence. How old would Jane Devere have been when St. Hilary’s was built? She must have been a young wife then, newly swept into the Devere family and acquiring an unrivaled pride in it.

  “If I ever go to Peoria, I will look him up.”

  The old woman looked away, as if searching among the bric-a-brac in the room for some other subject. Hugh rose, leaned over his ancient relative, and pressed his lips to her cheek. When he straightened, he was surprised to see that her eyes were filled with tears. He bent to kiss her again, but she waved him away.

  “That’s enough of that, young man.”

  6

  After spending half an hour urging Father Dowling to make an appointment with Bishop Wilenski, Marie Murkin went out the kitchen door and headed for the church. It was her intention to spend at least an hour on her knees before the Blessed Sacrament, praying to the Lord to put some fight into the pastor.

  “We’ll see, Marie” had been his final word, and she knew what that was worth.

  Her pace slowed as she neared the side door of the church. She pondered her decision. She didn’t want to be a show-off. When she reached the walk that led away to the school, she took it. God would understand. She would drop in on him after she had visited Edna Hospers. After all, if God had intended her to be a contemplative nun he would have issued her a veil. At the moment, she just had to talk things over with someone who would talk back.

  On one of the benches beside the walk a figure sat. Willie, the alleged maintenance man, who occupied an apartment in the basement of the school. He gave Marie a tragic look.

  Marie stopped. To say that she did not approve of Willie would have been an understatement. He was the most recent in a line of parolees for whom Father Dowling had found employment in the parish, making St. Hilary’ a kind of halfway house between Joliet and the wider world, not that he had ever got much work out of any of them. On this score, Willie was a clear-cut winner. According to Edna, for an hour or so each day he pushed a broom around the area of the school used by the seniors, and that was about it. Willie had brought the broom with him to the bench.

  “I knew it couldn’t last,” he said.

  “You need a new broom?”

  Willie shook his head sadly. “Don’t try to spare me.”

  “I never have.”

  “Is it true we’ll soon be out of a job?”

  That her plight could be compared with Willie’s filled Marie with anger. She was about to say something cutting, something cruel, but suddenly she was drained of rancor and collapsed on the bench beside Willie. “Father Dowling is seeing the bishop now.”

  “Will it matter?”

  “How can we know? You might say a prayer about it.”

  “I already have,” Willie said, moving the brush of his broom from one shoe to the other. The handle he gripped firmly in his left hand.

  “Good.” Marie found herself doubting Willie. Good Lord, what a trial the man was. A minute in his presence and she felt like a pharisee. She remembered the story of the rich man entering the temple to thank God that he was not like the rest of men, the contrast was with the poor wretch who barely entered and prayed, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” The parallel was too close for Marie’s comfort. “Your prayers will go right to God’s ear.”

  “He doesn’t need ears,” Willie said.

  Once more anger flared up in Marie. Was this parolee presuming to instruct her in such matters? “I had no idea you were a theologian.”

  “I’m not, but I studied a bit in Joliet. With the chaplain.”

  “Father Blatz?”

  “This guy was a Baptist. He knew the Bible backward and forward.”

  “I thought you were a Catholic.”

  “That’s what it sa
ys in my records.”

  “Have you forsaken the faith?”

  “You mean quit?”

  Marie inhaled. “Did you become a Baptist?”

  “What was the point? You don’t have to be a Baptist to read the Bible.”

  Marie gave up. She stood. Impulsively, she took Willie’s broom and began to shake it vigorously. Little puffs of dust and lint flew away in the slight breeze. She tightened the handle before giving it back, twisting it into the brush.

  Willie looked on with admiration. “You must have worked as a janitor once.”

  “My aspirations never rose that high.”

  Inside the school, the former gym, which was the chief meeting place for the seniors, was strangely quiet. No one played shuffleboard; no cards had been dealt for bridge; the television set was a gray eye in the corner. There were groups clustered about, whispering as if they were at a wake. At the sight of Marie, they surged toward her.

  “What’s the news, Mrs. Murkin?”

  Marie just waved in what was intended to be a reassuring way and continued to the staircase. Edna’s office was on the second floor, what had once been the office of the school’s principal, when it had been a school.