by J.F. Powers
“No?”
“No. You see, it’s more or less a pet project of mine. Hardly make a cent on it. Looking out after the fathers, you might say, so they’ll maybe look out after me—spiritually. I call it heavenly life insurance.”
Slightly repelled, Father Burner nodded.
“Not a few priests that I’ve sold the Plan to remember me at the altar daily. I guess prayer’s one thing we can all use. Anyway, it’s why I take a hand in putting boys through seminary.”
With that Mr Tracy shed his shabby anonymity for Father Burner, and grew executive markings. He became the one and only Thomas Nash Tracy—T. N. T.. It was impossible to read the papers and not know a few things about T. N. T.. He was in small loans and insurance. His company’s advertising smothered the town and country; everybody knew the slogan “T. N. T.. Spells Security.” He figured in any financial drive undertaken by the diocese, was caught by photographers in orphanages, and sat at the heavy end of the table at communion breakfasts. Hundreds of nuns, thanks to his thoughtfulness, ate capon on Christmas Day, and a few priests of the right sort received baskets of scotch. He was a B.C.L., a Big Catholic Layman, and now Father Burner could see why. Father Burner’s countenance softened at this intelligence, and T. N. T.. proceeded with more assurance.
“And don’t call it charity, Father. Insurance, as I said, is a better name for it. I have a little money, Father, which makes it possible.” He tuned his voice down to a whisper. “You might say I’m moderately wealthy.” He looked sharply at Father Burner, not sure of his man. “But I’m told there isn’t any crime in that.”
“I believe you need not fear for your soul on that account.”
“Glad to hear it from you, a priest, Father. Ofttimes it’s thrown up to me.” He came to terms with reality, smiling. “I wasn’t always so well off myself, so I can understand the temptation to knock the other fellow.”
“Fine.”
“But that’s still not to say that water’s not wet or that names don’t hurt sometimes, whatever the bard said to the contrary.”
“What bard?”
“‘Sticks and stones—’”
“Oh.”
“If this were a matter of faith and morals, Father, I’d be the one to sit back and let you do the talking. But it’s a case of common sense, Father, and I think I can safely say, if you listen to me you’ll not lose by it in the long run.”
“It could be.”
“May I ask you a personal question, Father?”
Father Burner searched T. N. T..’s face. “Go ahead, Mr Tracy.”
“Do you bank, Father?”
“Bank? Oh, bank—no. Why?”
“Let’s admit it, Father,” T. N. T.. coaxed, frankly amused. “Priests as a class are an improvident lot—our records show it—and you’re no exception. But that, I think, explains the glory of the Church down through the ages.”
“The Church is divine,” Father Burner corrected. “And the concept of poverty isn’t exactly foreign to Christianity or even to the priesthood.”
“Exactly,” T. N. T.. agreed, pinked. “But think of the future, Father.”
Nowadays when Father Burner thought of the future it required a firm act of imagination. As a seminarian twenty years ago, it had all been plain: ordination, roughly ten years as a curate somewhere (he was not the kind to be sent to Rome for further study), a church of his own to follow, the fruitful years, then retirement, pastor emeritus, with assistants doing the spade work, leaving the fine touches to him, still a hearty old man very much alive. It was not an uncommon hope and, in fact, all around him it had materialized for his friends. But for him it was only a bad memory growing worse. He was the desperate assistant now, the angry functionary aging in the outer office. One day he would wake and find himself old, as the morning finds itself covered with snow. The future had assumed the forgotten character of a dream, so that he could not be sure that he had ever truly had one.
T. N. T.. talked on and Father Burner felt a mist generating on his forehead. He tore his damp hands apart and put the napkin aside. Yes, yes, it was true a priest received miserably little, but then that was the whole idea. He did not comment, dreading T. N. T..’s foaming compassion, to be spat upon with charity. Yes, as a matter of fact, it would be easier to face old age with something more to draw upon than what the ecclesiastical authorities deemed sufficient and would provide. Also, as T. N. T.. pointed out, one never knew when he might come down with an expensive illness. T. N. T.., despite him-self, had something . . . The Plan, in itself, was not bad. He must not reject the olive branch because it came by buzzard. But still Father Burner was a little bothered by the idea of a priest feathering his nest. Why? In other problems he was never the one to take the ascetic interpretation.
“You must be between thirty-five and forty, Father.”
“I’ll never see forty again.”
“I’d never believe it from anyone else. You sure don’t look it, Father.”
“Maybe not. But I feel it.”
“Worries, Father. And one big one is the future, Father. You’ll get to be fifty, sixty, seventy—and what have you got?—not a penny saved. You look around and say to yourself—where did it go?”
T. N. T.. had the trained voice of the good and faithful servant, supple from many such dealings. And still from time to time a faint draught of contempt seemed to pass through it which had something to do with his eyes. Here, Father Burner thought, was the latest thing in simony, unnecessary, inspired from without, participated in spiritlessly by the priest who must yet suffer the brunt of the blame and ultimately do the penance. Father Burner felt mysteriously purchasable. He was involved in an exchange of confidences which impoverished him mortally. In T. N. T.. he sensed free will in its senility or the infinite capacity for equating evil with good—or with nothing—the same thing, only easier. Here was one more word in the history of the worm’s progress, another wave on the dry flood that kept rising, the constant aggrandizement of decay. In the end it must touch the world and everything at the heart. Father Burner felt weak from a nameless loss.
“I think I can do us both a service, Father.”
“I don’t say you can’t.” Father Burner rose quickly. “I’ll have to think about it, Mr Tracy.”
“To be sure, Father.” He produced a glossy circular. “Just let me leave this literature with you.”
Father Burner, leading him to the door, prevented further talk by reading the circular. It was printed in a churchy type, all purple and gold, a dummy leaf from a medieval hymnal, and entitled, “A Silver Lining in the Sky.” It was evidently meant for clergymen only, though not necessarily priests, as Father Burner could instantly see from its general tone.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“My business phone is right on the back, Father. But if you’d rather call me at my home some night—”
“No thanks, Mr Tracy.”
“Allow me to repeat, Father, this isn’t just business with me.”
“I understand.” He opened the door too soon for T. N. T.. “Glad to have met you.”
“Glad to have met you, Father.”
Father Burner went back to the table. The coffee needed warming up and the butter had vanished into the toast. “Mary,” he called. Then he heard them come gabbing into the rectory, Quinlan and his friend Keefe, also newly ordained.
They were hardly inside the dining room before he was explaining how he came to be eating breakfast so late—so late, see?—not still.
“You protest too much, Father,” Quinlan said. “The Angelic Doctor himself weighed three hundred pounds, and I’ll wager he didn’t get it all from prayer and fasting.”
“A pituitary condition,” Keefe interjected, faltering. “Don’t you think?”
“Yah, yah, Father, you’ll wager”—Father Burner, eyes malignant, leaned on his knife, the blade bowing out bright and buttery beneath his fist—“and I’ll wager you’ll be the first saint to reach heaven with a flannel
mouth!” Rising from the table, he shook Keefe’s hand, which was damp from his pocket, and experienced a surge of strength, the fat man’s contempt and envy for the thin man. He thought he might break Keefe’s hand off at the wrist without drawing a drop of blood.
Quinlan stood aside, six inches or more below them, gazing up, as at two impossibly heroic figures in a hotel mural. Reading the caption under them, he mused, “Father Burner meets Father Keefe.”
“I’ve heard about you, Father,” Keefe said, plying him with a warmth beyond his means.
“Bound to be the case in a diocese as overstocked with magpies as this one.” Father Burner threw a fresh napkin at a plate. “But be seated, Father Keefe.” Keefe, yes, he had seen him before, a nobody in a crowd, some affair . . . the K.C. barbecue, the Youth Center? No, probably not, not Keefe, who was obviously not the type, too crabbed and introversive for Catholic Action. “I suppose,” he said, “you’ve heard the latest definition of Catholic Action—the interference of the laity with the inactivity of the hierarchy.”
“Very good,” Keefe said uneasily.
Quinlan yanked off his collar and churned his neck up and down to get circulation. “Dean in the house? No? Good.” He pitched the collar at one of the candles on the buffet for a ringer. “That turkey we met coming out the front door—think I’ve seen his face somewhere.”
“Thomas Nash Tracy,” Keefe said. “I thought you knew.”
“The prominent lay priest and usurer?”
Keefe coughed. “They say he’s done a lot of good.”
Quinlan spoke to Father Burner: “Did you take out a policy, Father?”
“One of the sixth-graders threw a rock through his windshield,” Father Burner said. “He was very nice about it.”
“Muldoon or Ciesniewski?”
“A new kid. Public school transfer.” Father Burner patted the napkin to his chin. “Not that I see anything wrong with insurance.”
Quinlan laughed. “Let Walter tell you what happened to him a few days ago. Go ahead, Walter,” he said to Keefe.
“Oh, that.” Keefe fidgeted and, seemingly against his better judgment, began. “I had a little accident—was it Wednesday it rained so? I had the misfortune to skid into a fellow parked on Fairmount. Dented his fender.” Keefe stopped and then, as though impelled by the memory of it, went on. “The fellow came raging out of his car at me. I thought there’d be serious trouble. Then he must have seen I was a priest, the way he calmed down, I mean. I had a funny feeling it wasn’t because he was a Catholic or anything like that. As a matter of fact he wore a Masonic button.” Keefe sighed. “I guess he saw I was a priest and ergo . . . knew I’d have insurance.”
“Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor scrip,” Quinlan said, “words taken from today’s gospel.”
Father Burner spoke in a level tone: “Not that I still see anything wrong with insurance. It’s awfully easy,” he continued, hating himself for talking drivel, “to make too much of little things.” With Quinlan around he played the conservative; among the real right-handers he was the enfant terrible. He operated on the principle of discord at any cost. He did not know why. It was a habit. Perhaps it had something to do with being overweight.
Arranging the Dean’s chair, which had arms, for himself, Quinlan sank into it, giving Keefe the Irish whisper. “Grace, Father.”
Keefe addressed the usual words to God concerning the gifts they were about to receive. During the prayer Father Burner stopped chewing and did not reach for anything. He noted once more that Quinlan crossed himself sloppily enough to be a monsignor.
Keefe nervously cleared the entire length of his throat. “It’s a beautiful church you have here at Saint Patrick’s, Father.” A lukewarm light appeared in his eyes, flickered, sputtered out, leaving them blank and blue. His endless fingers felt for his receding chin in the onslaught of silence.
“I have?” Father Burner turned his spoon abasingly to his bosom. “Me?” He jabbed at the grapefruit before him, his second, demolishing its perfect rose window. “I don’t know why it is the Irish without exception are always laying personal claim to church property. The Dean is forever saying my church, my school, my furnace . . .”
“I’m sorry, Father,” Keefe said, flushing. “And I’ll confess I did think he virtually built Saint Patrick’s.”
“Out of the slime of the earth, I know. A common error.” With sudden, unabated displeasure Father Burner recalled how the Dean, one of the last of the old brick and mortar pastors, had built the church, school, sisters’ house, and rectory, and had named the whole thing through the lavish pretense of a popular contest. Opposed bitterly by Polish, German, and Italian minorities, he had effected a compromise between their bad taste (Saint Stanislaus, Saint Boniface, Saint Anthony) and his own better judgment in the choice of Saint Patrick’s.
Quinlan, snorting, blurted, “Well, he did build it, didn’t he?”
Father Burner smiled at them from the other world. “Only, if you please, in a manner of speaking.”
“True,” Keefe murmured humbly.
“Nuts,” Quinlan said. “It’s hard for me to see God in a few buildings paid for by the funds of the faithful and put up by a mick contractor. A burning bush, yes.”
Father Burner, lips parched to speak an unsummonable cruelty, settled for a smoldering aside to the kitchen. “Mary, more eggs here.”
A stuffed moose of a woman with a tabby-cat face charged in on swollen feet. She stood wavering in shoes sliced fiercely for corns. With the back of her hand she wiped some cream from the fuzz ringing her baby-pink mouth. Her hair poked through a broken net like stunted antlers. Father Burner pointed to the empty platter.
“Eggs,” he said.
“Eggs!” she cried, tumbling her eyes like great blue dice among them. She seized up the platter and carried it whirling with grease into the kitchen.
Father Burner put aside the grapefruit. He smiled and spoke calmly. “I’ll have to let the Dean know, Father, how much you like his plant.”
“Do, Father. A beautiful church . . . ‘a poem in stone’—was it Ruskin?”
“Ruskin? Stones of Venice,” Father Burner grumbled. “Sesame and Lilies, I know . . . but I never cared for his style.” He passed the knife lovingly over the pancakes on his plate and watched the butter bubble at the pores. “So much sweetness, so much light, I’m afraid, made Jack a dull boy.”
Quinlan slapped all his pockets. “Pencil and paper, quick!”
“And yet . . .” Keefe cocked his long head, brow fretted, and complained to his upturned hands. “Don’t understand how he stayed outside the Church.” He glanced up hopefully. “I wonder if Chesterton gives us a clue.”
Father Burner, deaf to such precious speculation, said, “In the nineteenth century Francis Thompson was the only limey worth his salt. It’s true.” He quartered the pancakes. “Of course, Newman.”
“Hopkins has some good things.”
“Good—yes, if you like jabberwocky and jebbies! I don’t care for either.” He dispatched a look of indictment at Quinlan.
“What a pity,” Quinlan murmured, “Oliver Wendell couldn’t be at table this morning.”
“No, Father, you can have your Hopkins, you and Father Quinlan here. Include me out, as Sam Goldwyn says. Poetry—I’ll take my poetry the way I take my liquor, neat.”
Mary brought in the platter oozing with bacon and eggs.
“Good for you, Mary,” Quinlan said. “I’ll pray for you.”
“Thank you, Father,” Mary said.
Quinlan dipped the platter with a trace of obeisance to Father Burner.
“No thanks.”
Quinlan scooped up the coffeepot in a fearsome rush and held it high at Father Burner, his arm so atremble the lid rattled dangerously. “Sure and will you be about having a sup of coffee now, Father?”
“Not now. And do you mind not playing the wild Irish wit so early in the day, Father?”
“That I don’t. But a r
elentless fate pursuing good Father Quinlan, he was thrown in among hardened clerics where but for the grace of God that saintly priest, so little understood, so much maligned . . .” Quinlan poured two cups and passed one to Keefe. “For yourself, Father.”
Father Burner nudged the toast to Keefe. “Father Quinlan, that saintly priest, models his life after the Rover Boys, particularly Sam, the fun-loving one.”
Quinlan dealt himself a mighty mea culpa.
Father Burner grimaced, the flesh rising in sweet, concentric tiers around his mouth, and said in a tone both entrusting and ennobling Keefe with his confidence, “The syrup, if you please, Father.” Keefe passed the silver pitcher which was running at the mouth. Father Burner reimmersed the doughy remains on his plate until the butter began to float around the edges as in a moat. He felt them both watching the butter. Regretting that he had not foreseen this attraction, he cast about in his mind for something to divert them and found the morning sun coming in too strongly. He got up and pulled down the shade. He returned to his place and settled himself in such a way that a new chapter was indicated. “Don’t believe I know where you’re located, Father.”
“Saint Jerome’s,” Keefe said. “Monsignor Fiedler’s.”
“One of those P.N. places, eh? Is the boss sorry he ever started it? I know some of them are.”
Keefe’s lips popped apart. “I don’t quite understand.”
Quinlan prompted: “P.N.—Perpetual Novena.”
“Oh, I never heard him say.”
“You wouldn’t, of course. But I know a lot of them that are.” Father Burner stuck a morsel on his fork and swirled it against the tide of syrup. “It’s a real problem all right. I was all out for a P.N. here during the depression. Thought it might help. The Dean was against it.”
“I can tell you this,” Keefe said. “Attendance was down from what it used to be until the casualties began to come in. Now it’s going up.”
“I was just going to say the war ought to take the place of the depression.” Father Burner fell silent. “Terrible thing, war. Hard to know what to do about it. I tried to sell the Dean the idea of a victory altar. You’ve seen them. Vigil lights—”
