Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

“Now?”

  “I’ve been there before.”

  “That’s the last line in Huckleberry Finn.”

  “What a curious girl you are, Jessica.”

  “Girl?” Jessica squealed, and kissed Eleanor on the cheek. “I am in my fourth decade.”

  “You are not!”

  “I am thirty-one.”

  “Well, put it that way, for heaven’s sake, if you have to mention it at all. And don’t forget my offer.”

  “Offer?”

  “The inventory.”

  15

  Andrew had let Raymond know what the problem was. “He refuses to see a priest. Imagine Mom’s reaction to that.”

  The hospital chaplain had dropped by after Father Dowling had struck out.

  “He ordered him from the room. She’s counting on you.”

  “Me.”

  “A big reconciliation, you know.”

  The reunion with his mother had been easy. He took her in his arms, and wordlessly they were reconciled. No questions, no accusations, her son was home in a moment of crisis, and she thanked God for it. He hadn’t remembered how cluttered the house was with religious bric-a-brac, statues, paintings with vigil lights flickering before them, his mother’s rosaries everywhere. Or was it just the absence of such things from his own place, his and Phyllis’s? Entering the house in which he had been raised, sleeping in his old room that night, everything he had been seemed to return. Of course he believed all these things. Lying in the dark, on his back, he raised his right arm and tried to make the sign of the cross, but his hand would not move to his forehead in order to begin. Was this superstition in reverse? Recent years seemed less real than memories of his boyhood. It was in this house that Father Bourke had made such a great impression on his father, as he had earlier on Raymond.

  I shouldn’t have come. Now that he was here, the urgency had drained from the whole scene. Andrew all but apologized for the panicky message he had left on the machine.

  “You’ll have to go,” Phyllis had said when they’d listened to it several times as if seeking for some escape clause.

  “Would you?”

  “I have no living parents.”

  “You have me.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  There was always the erotic to fall back on. What was their creed except pleasure now, pain never, be positive, and don’t think about dying? Had sex once seemed the meaning of it all? The difficulty was that the pleasure principle demanded variety, impermanence, no binding ties. No, that wasn’t true, not for real people. “If sex were all, then any hand could make us squeak like dolls the wished for words.” He had often used that line of Wallace Stevens’s with patients. He and Phyllis were bound together by what they had fled, but the power of that to haunt had lessened; hence Julia, maybe. Did Phyllis think he needed a new load of guilt in order to find her his indispensable cohort?

  When he came down in the morning, his mother wasn’t there. Gone to Mass. My God, it’s Sunday. Would he have gone with her if she had asked? He told himself he would have. But she would have gone to communion and expected him to. Or would she? What exactly did she imagine his status was?

  “We can go see Dad after breakfast,” she said, when she bustled in, taking the green babushka from her head. He imagined that the smell of the church clung to her.

  “I’m starved.”

  “You should have made your breakfast.”

  He hugged her. “I wasn’t complaining of the service.”

  “You’ll have to drive.”

  “You still don’t drive?”

  “What’s the need?”

  “When you have me for a chauffeur, none at all. The house doesn’t seem to have changed a bit.”

  “I hope not.” She put on coffee, began bacon and eggs. “I want it to stay just as it was when you kids were here.”

  “I was always away at school.”

  “That isn’t how I remember it.”

  Again he took her in his arms. My God, how good she was. Not even her expression betrayed what she must think of him. What he could too easily imagine they all thought of him now that he was back in the gray world of Fox River. Was there really less color? It was the sense of being shut in, indoors.

  “How I’ve missed you, Mom.”

  It just came out, and it seemed the first genuine thing he had said in years. I love my mother. I love this self-effacing little woman, busy in her kitchen, whose heart I have broken and who will not break mine by letting me know it. He spoke into her hair.

  “I didn’t know how to explain.”

  “Would I have understood?”

  “I could have tried.”

  “You must hug your father and speak like this to him.”

  As if it could possibly be the same. “I’ll try.”

  “He’ll make it hard. Raymond, he hasn’t been to church in years.”

  “Because of me.”

  “What kind of a reason is that?”

  She wouldn’t blame him even for that.

  “Will you talk to him, son?”

  “Why else am I here?”

  The family car was ten years old and had twenty thousand miles on it. Keep it another ten and it would become a classic and double in value. He had to follow her directions, and since she never drove they were hard to follow.

  “I never pay attention when your father’s driving.”

  The hospital looked dingy, no place you’d want the ambulance to take you from a tollway accident. He left her at the front entrance while he parked the car. She waited for him and took his arm as they went inside.

  “He was so rude to Father Cronin, the chaplain.”

  Raymond had not known many local priests who were in the archdiocese of Chicago. His clerical circle had been Edmundites, and they had never been big for ecumenical relations with the secular clergy. There was no reason to think he would know Cronin. He didn’t know Father Dowling either. They just went up to the room, no need to get permission, and then they were there.

  He followed his mother in. His father was in a bed placed almost in the center of the room, lots of space on both sides, windows at head and foot, on the wall a crucifix behind which was stuck a dry piece of palm. A Catholic hospital. But the art of medicine is neutral, areligious. He realized he was looking into his father’s eyes. He put his hand on his father’s arm and patted it. His mother stepped back. He was being examined now as he had not been by his mother. She left the room.

  “Well, you look good.”

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  “I’m a goner.”

  “I don’t believe it. If you do, maybe you shouldn’t have thrown the chaplain out.”

  His father’s eyes fixed on him. Waiting.

  “Talk to him, Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Just talk to him.”

  “That isn’t why he wants to see me.”

  “Do it for Mom.”

  “Not for you?”

  “Do it for yourself.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  The time had come to lie, but he found he just couldn’t, not even now. It had all slipped away, the creed dissolving article by article, repealing the early councils, receding into past quarrels that no longer made any sense to him. It was unreal. He had not thought of it, not really, for years, but it seemed part of the gritty atmosphere of Fox River. Still, he could remember believing here as he could not in California.

  “Have you ever heard of Pascal’s bet?”

  His father did not encourage him. He told him anyway. Either Christianity is true and accepting it gains you eternal bliss, or it is not true and you will never know it. “You can’t lose; that’s the idea.”

  “That argument should have kept you here.”

  “Let the chaplain talk to you. Whatever happens, happens. For Mom.”

  The first try at a smile, and he realized his father did not have his dentures in. How it robbed him of authority, made him old. The hand with the tub
e stuck in it moved on the sheet. How gray his skin was, stubble on his face, hair just sprouting from the head, a pattern of freckles on the skull. Memento mori. This is how he would look one day, even in California.

  “Are you in any pain?”

  “Why don’t you give me absolution, Ray?”

  The request shocked him. The old man wanted him to act the role of priest.

  “You want to go to confession?”

  “Only to you.”

  “You never did that before.”

  “Things were different before. You can’t refuse me. I am a dying man.”

  “Priests are getting in line to see you.”

  “You’re my priest.”

  “Are you sorry for your sins?”

  For a moment the old man looked frightened. Was he counting on being refused? Raymond felt a slight advantage. “Let me get the chaplain.”

  “No!”

  “You want a stranger as your confessor, not your son.”

  “You’ve become a stranger.”

  “You had no trouble recognizing me.”

  “I have thought of you every day.” Tears filled his eyes and ran down the side of his face. Raymond wiped them away. Here was a small sign of the pain he had caused, the knife he had slipped between his father’s ribs. How had he learned that his son was gone, off to the West Coast with a nun from campus ministry? What a cliché it seemed. Had they called and asked for him and learned like that? It seemed awful that he had not told them and had no way of knowing how they had gotten the news. The Order could have put out a bulletin claiming the car was missing; they could have stopped payment on the credit card. That would have been scandal enough to make the papers. But everyone had been so damned good about it, everyone but himself. He leaned over the bed and kissed his father’s forehead. As he lifted slowly away the eyes stopped him.

  “Judas,” his father whispered.

  16

  Father Dowling, in his study, picked up the phone and called Cronin, the hospital chaplain. He was paged, and when he came on seemed to be speaking in an echo chamber.

  “Roger Dowling. Any luck with Fulvio Bernardo?”

  “Nope. The son Raymond has been in to see him.” A pause but not silence, crowd noises, garbled announcements. “Nothing doing there either.”

  “Did you talk with him?”

  “The son? No. Mrs. Bernardo told me. That was yesterday.”

  He thanked the chaplain and left him to his busy rounds. Men like Cronin were what made the whole thing work, priests going about their jobs, doing what they could. But Cronin seemed to have had the hope drained out of him.

  But there were more proximate concerns for the pastor of St. Hilary’s. It seemed a morning to telephone chaplains. He put through a call to Joliet and got Mike Dolan’s answering machine. After the beep he said who was calling and that he would like to talk with Mike about Earl Hospers. Almost immediately, Mike came on the line.

  “Roger, how are you?”

  “Is this still a machine?”

  His classmate laughed. “I use it for caller I.D.”

  “Avoiding bill collectors?”

  “No, parole officers. I dread hearing that one of the boys has misbehaved and is being sent back to serve out his full sentence. What about Earl Hospers?”

  “Mike, you must know that technically he is innocent.”

  “He wouldn’t be here if he weren’t. All my boys are innocent.”

  “Tell me his status.”

  “He is one man I would really like to see leave here. Prison is not exactly a school of virtue, you know, but I think he has really become a better person for being here.”

  “So what about parole?”

  “The board expects me to plead for the applicant, of course. And I could be eloquent in Earl’s behalf. But he has the nutty idea he should serve the time he was given.”

  “That’s pretty hard on his wife and kids.”

  “Well, it’s no picnic for him either. Have you talked to him about it?”

  “First I wanted to have a better idea of what’s possible and what I might do.”

  Mike Dolan sounded more like a lawyer than a priest during the five-minute disquisition that followed. Earl had never gone before the board, which in its way was an advantage. There was no previous refusal.

  “He needs a good lawyer, Roger. But there isn’t much point if Earl won’t play ball.”

  “What if I came down and had a talk with him?”

  “Anytime. I’ll set it up.”

  “Today?”

  “You are serious, aren’t you?”

  All the more serious because he felt he had been delinquent in the matter. He told Mike he would be there in a few hours.

  “I’ll skip my nap.”

  He said the noon Mass and afterward asked Marie to make him a sandwich.

  “A sandwich!”

  “To eat on the trip.”

  “The trip? Are you leaving?” In Marie’s eyes danced the dreadful possibility that the bishop had called, Father Dowling would be reassigned, the Franciscans would return.

  “No, no, it isn’t that. I’m going to see a classmate.”

  Her manner changed. Marie often expressed concern for what she considered the excessive solitude of the pastor. How could he explain to her that there was nothing he preferred to the parish? His assignment there had been widely regarded as consignment to Siberia, all the bright hopes of his ecclesiastical career dashed when he had crumbled under the pressure of the marriage court and had sought solace in drink. Eventually that had led to the stay in Wisconsin, where his pride was put to the severest test. Did he really belong there among the other casualties of the priesthood? Learning to answer that question affirmatively had been the beginning of his recovery. When he emerged and had his interview with one of the auxiliaries, the sense of humiliation returned, but he almost welcomed it now.

  “St. Hilary’s in Fox River is open. The Franciscans have been running it, but they are pulling out.”

  “Fox River.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “Not yet.”

  Bishop Brizec beamed. “So you’ll take it?”

  “Gladly.”

  “Roger, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that things have turned out this way for you.” The bishop’s face was a mask of anguish as he thought of himself in Roger’s shoes. Once it had been tacitly understood that Roger was destined to be in such shoes as Brizec wore, an auxiliary, putting in a few more years in Chicago, then a diocese of his own. Now Roger felt that he had escaped that fate.

  Within months in Fox River he had shed the notion that he was in exile and disgrace. St. Hilary’s provided all the scope he needed to fulfill his priesthood and save his soul.

  So content with his lot had he become that it almost took an effort to get into his car and set off for Joliet. Even a day away from the rectory, other than on his monthly day of recollection with the Athanasians, seemed a species of desertion. But he was on parish business, not on a lark. There was a four-lane highway dropping southward like a plumb line from Fox River, and the drive took scarcely an hour, but it was long enough for him to ponder the different lives his classmates led. Mike Dolan had been a very good student but begged off when the prospect of further study was offered him after ordination. He had been assistant here and there, and when the time came that he was eligible for a parish of his own, the chaplaincy at Joliet opened and he applied for it.

  “They thought I was crazy,” he said to Roger, when they spoke of this.

  Roger had been let through the gate, parked his car in the parking lot, and been escorted to Mike Dolan’s office.

  Roger Dowling had assumed that Mike would want to indulge in a little clerical gossip before they got down to business, but to his surprise Earl Hospers was with the chaplain.

  “I’ll leave you two,” Mike said. “We can talk later, Roger.”

  Earl rose and shook Father Dowling’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for w
hat you’ve done for Edna and the kids.”

  This was not the woebegone young man who had stood trial. Mike had said that Earl had become a better man in prison, and Father Dowling believed it. Physically he was trim, and calm resignation occupied his deep-sunk eyes, the wisdom of one who was expiating his sins.

  “There’s something else I’d like to do. I want you to apply for parole.”

  “I’d be turned down.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I should be. This isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

  “Isn’t it? Your family needs you, Earl. It’s worth a risk. There’s nothing to lose.”

  “I don’t want to beg.”

  Roger Dowling smiled. “Is it all right with you if I talk to a lawyer about your case? Mr. Amos Cadbury.”

  “Cadbury? How could I afford someone like him?”

  “He may be more reasonable than you think. Do I have your permission?”

  Earl looked out the window at the expanse of sky beyond, at freedom. “My permission? Father, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”

  How easily it was settled. They talked for half an hour, Father Dowling describing the great job Edna was doing in the center.

  “Janet will work with her next summer.”

  Earl’s eyes grew moist as they talked of the wife and children from whom he was separated.

  “About a parole, Father. I don’t really expect it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I don’t want Edna to get her hopes up.”

  But Edna too had toughened and grown during these awful years of separation.

  “She can handle anything.”

  There were tears in Earl’s eyes. “She is the best thing that ever happened to me. When I think what I have done to her …”

  “You must know that she does not blame you.”

  “That’s the hardest part.”

  Afterward Mike Dolan wanted to hear about St. Hilary’s, but he had another interest as well. “What do you know about the Athanasians, Roger? I’m told Marygrove is a good place to make a retreat.”

  “It’s where I made mine last year. And intend to again this year.”

  “I thought they were dead in the water.”

  “Don’t you believe it.”