Thomas M. Disch

by The Priest

  The priest had no reply.

  Bing let the silence lengthen, and then, since there was nothing to be gained by further pussyfooting, he said, “Is it all starting to come back, Father Pat?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by continuing this discussion. Obviously, you did not come here to confess.”

  “For goodness sakes, what would you call what I’ve just been doing if not confessing!”

  “I’d say you were playing a game of cat and mouse.”

  “Well, there’s been that side to it. But now here we are out in the open, so to speak. And I’d appreciate the opportunity of having a serious discussion.”

  “If you like. But not here.”

  “Here is best for me, Father. Here and now. Let me ask you something. Do you know who I am at this point? Do you remember my name? Or have there been so many of us over the years, as there were for Father Porter, that we’ve all just blended into a single generic fifteen-year-old altar boy? I like to think that I was special. I was pretty cute back then. And short for my age. I looked more like thirteen at the point we had our fling. Maybe even twelve. Is that enough to go by? Can you answer the riddle and say who I am?”

  Another silence.

  “It’s a blow to one’s pride, of course, not to be remembered. But in all fairness, I’ve had my share of tricks that I’d be just as hard-pressed to assign a name to.”

  “Please,” the priest whispered earnestly, “if you insist on speaking, try to whisper. There is someone who’s entered the other side of the confessional.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Father. Open the window on their side and tell them to come back later. But leave this window open. I want to hear what you say. I wouldn’t want you asking them to send for the police.”

  “Believe me, there’s no danger of that.”

  “That’s as may be. In any case, do what I said. Get rid of them. We’ve got more to talk about.”

  While Father Pat was explaining to the other penitent that it would be some while before he could hear anyone else’s confession, Bing slipped out of the confessional and hastened to the side door of the church, which was now (he was pleased to see) entirely deserted.

  However, just as he put his hand on the brass handle of the door, it was opened by someone on the other side, an elderly priest, who stepped back when he saw Bing and said, with a smile and a nod of his head, “Madam.”

  Bing favored the old priest with a grateful smile and murmured a tremulous “Thank you, Father” without breaking stride. He resisted making any gesture that might have called attention to his clothing, which was always a dead giveaway. Real women did not run their hands over their haunches to enjoy the feel of layered silk. They didn’t keep patting their coiffure. A true drag artist should seem as oblivious of what he’s wearing as a bird is of its feathers, a fish of its scales.

  Once seated behind the wheel of the car, Bing took off his heels. He had no difficulty walking in high heels—indeed, he enjoyed it—but driving was something else again. He backed the car out of the parking space and waved a mocking, unseen bye-bye toward the side door of St. Bernardine’s.

  He must be shitting in his cassock, he thought with satisfaction. He must be in a state of total panic.

  Is revenge sweet? Revenge is sweet.

  11

  As a young woman, in the late forties and early fifties, Hedwig Ober had hoped to become a Servant of the Blessed Sacrament, the order of nuns that served at the Shrine of Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, but that privilege was denied her. Like her namesake, Saint Hedwig of Dalmatia, she had submitted to her father’s authority and married young—at the age of eighteen, to her second cousin, Wolfgang Ober, who was then a vice president in the Ober and Ober Chemical Corporation, the Midwest’s largest manufacturer of fertilizer and pesticides. Her life also resembled that of her patron saint in that she had borne six children to her spouse, but there the similarity ended, for Hedwig Ober’s children had been a source of sorrow rather than of joy in her life. All of them had died within a few months of birth due to severe myotonic dystrophy, a disease they had inherited from their father, though in Wolfgang’s case its symptoms had been inconsequential: a tendency to be unable to relax his grip when shaking hands and, later in life, cataracts. The six infants simply could not breathe, and they’d been born in an age when respirators were still uncommon in delivery rooms.

  After the second child, Wolfgang junior, died, Hedwig’s gynecologist advised her to practice birth control if she did not want to experience the same tragedy again. Dr. Vogelman explained that the disease was “dominant” in a hereditary sense, and that all her children by Wolfgang would be afflicted to some degree or other. Hedwig, as a good Catholic, did not oppose herself to God’s will or her husband’s, and she continued to fulfill her conjugal duties without violating natural law. Four more children were born and baptized and taken directly to heaven, and so, at last, was Wolfgang, who died of a stroke on the golf course of the Minnetonka Athletic Club in 1975.

  Now might Hedwig have fulfilled her lifelong wish and become a Servant of the Blessed Sacrament, but once again it was ordained otherwise, for the Church had disbanded the order after a long controversy concerning the alleged antiSemitism of its founder, Blessed Konrad Martin, the Bishop of Paderborn (in Germany). The good Bishop was noted for his pious life and especially for his devotion to the Eucharist, and so when it was discovered that the Jews of Deggendorf had stolen and tortured a consecrated wafer and that, when this abomination was committed, a lovely little child had emerged, miraculously, from the wafer, it was natural for the Bishop to have preached against the perpetrators of the deed. It was also natural, albeit a sin, for the townspeople of Deggendorf to have risen up against the Jews of that town and slaughtered them, which they had done on September 30, 1337. But Blessed Konrad could scarcely have been held responsible for the crime of those avengers of the honor of the Eucharist, given the considerable distance between Paderborn and Deggendorf. Despite this, Jewish protesters had made such a fuss about the efforts of the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament to secure the canonization of Blessed Konrad, who had founded their order, that instead of declaring him a saint, the Vatican had stripped the Bishop of his beatification— an almost unprecedented action and one that had caused Hedwig and others who’d hoped for Konrad’s canonization grave distress.

  Indeed, she had come close to leaving the Church over the matter.

  Providentially, she had been strengthened in her faith at that moment by the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize the crime of abortion. Hedwig could scarcely leave the Church at such a juncture, when the souls of thousands of innocent unborn children were in peril. It took humility to ignore the slight that had been done to the honor of Blessed Konrad, whose beatific status—indeed, whose sainthood— would never be questioned by Hedwig Ober.

  And now—such are the mysterious ways of Providence—here she was, just as she might have been if she had joined the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament all those years ago, the chief caretaker, in a day-today way, of the Shrine of Blessed Konrad. Of course, it was no longer officially his shrine. After he had been de-beatified, it had become the property of the neighboring Etoile du Nord Seminary. Then, because of diminishing vocations, the seminary had been closed down, and for a while the Shrine had served the few Catholic families in the area as their parish church, with a single Sunday Mass conducted at eleven a.m. by a visiting priest. But the patience and humility of Blessed Konrad’s devotees were ultimately rewarded, and now his shrine, because of its peculiar physical character, was to serve in the vanguard of the fight against the forces of abortion.

  For the Shrine had been built by its founder, Monsignor O’Toole, as literally a bastion of the Faith, its crypt dug so deep into the earth that those taking refuge within it could survive the shock of a nuclear blast. It had been among the first bomb shelters of the Cold War era, and was still one of the largest to be owned by a religious denomination. Ever
y ton of concrete had all been paid for by the contributions of millions of viewers of Monsignor O’Toole’s television program, broadcast nationally for years every Thursday evening at seven p.m. The Ave Maria Hour commended itself not only to the religious faith of the TV audience but to its patriotism as well. In the heyday of The Ave Maria Hour, from 1949 to 1958, the threat of Communism had been taken seriously, and the Shrine—with its enormous ferroconcrete dome (the fifth largest in the nation) and its immense subterranean complex of crypts, chapels, catacombs, and nuclear contingency command centers—was arguably the most imposing nonmilitary monument of the Cold War era.

  Monsignor O’Toole had been a good friend of the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in the years of the Senator’s decline from public favor, the Monsignor’s Nielsen ratings had suffered a similar fate. The Ave Maria Hour was canceled. Contributions to the Shrine dried up, and the work of construction ground to a halt. The Bishop of Minneapolis was quoted in the press as saying that he was happy that “O’Toole’s Folly,” as he called it, had finally stopped draining the wells of legitimate charity. Monsignor O’Toole had replied, in a spirit of humility, “All the great Gothic cathedrals were the work of many centuries—and Rome itself was not built in a day. Others will come to complete the work this servant was able to begin.” These words, cast in bronze, could now be read on the plaque mounted on a rough-hewn boulder that stood before the west portal of the Shrine.

  It was to the little flower plot encircling this boulder that Hedwig came each morning at precisely six a.m. to water the petunias, pansies, and marigolds she had planted here. Then she would raise the flag to the top of the flagpole, offer a respectful salute, and retire within the vast Shrine to pray at the modest side altar devoted to the memory of Monsignor O’Toole. It had not always been so modest. At the Shrine’s inauguration in 1954, a precious reliquary containing the hair, the metacarpals, the cranium, and three ribs of the Blessed Konrad had stood here in all its glory. Hedwig and Wolfgang had been joined in holy matrimony at this altar. But then the Blessed Konrad had suffered his posthumous disgrace, and the reliquary had been removed at the order of the Bishop. When Monsignor O’Toole died, the Bishop compounded Konrad’s dishonor by decreeing that the altar that the Monsignor had erected in anticipation of Konrad’s sainthood should be rededicated to the memory of the Monsignor, which was accomplished by the plainest of marble plaques cemented to the wall behind the altar.

  On the same wall, some few feet to the left, another plaque (which had not been placed there by the direction of the Bishop) quoted from Isaiah, chapter 66, verses 5, 6, and 7:

  Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble at His word: Your brothers who hated you, who cast you out for My name’s sake, have said—Let the Lord be glorified.

  But the Lord will appear to bring you joy,

  and your brothers will know their shame.

  There is an uproar in the city and a tumult in the Temple—

  it is the sound of the Lord dealing retribution to his enemies.

  A woman brought forth issue without travail;

  without the pain of labor she gave birth to a Son.

  It was a never-ending source of wonder to Hedwig that there could be such directly and unmistakably prophetic words set down, and that their import was simply lost on ninety-nine out of a hundred people. She’d known tourists to visit the Shrine and stand before this altar and read these verses aloud, and then profess to be puzzled as to what they might mean. Of course, even those tourists who were aware of the tragic past history of the Shrine, even those who knew how Monsignor O’Toole had been set about by enemies in his last days, even those faithful souls could not be aware of the Shrine’s appointed future, and so the peculiar relevance of the final verse escaped them.

  After saying a rosary before this side altar, she crossed the nave—

  each footstep was wonderfully magnified by the remarkable acoustical properties of the dome—and then took the elevator down to the third subbasement, where she began to prepare a wholesome breakfast of oatmeal, bran muffins, and hot chocolate for the four young women under her charge. She cut two grapefruits in half and sectioned them carefully. Then, loading these things onto the serving cart, she took the elevator down one floor deeper. For security reasons the prenatal ward was not directly accessible from the main corridor. There were further doors to be unlocked, and relocked behind her, but when she did reach the row of individual cells where the girls were lodged, their breakfasts were still piping hot.

  In Cell 1, Mary Tyler was still in bed, though the PA system had been playing an LP of peppy polkas ever since reveille at six a.m. She was given to apathy and listlessness, but she was not really troublesome, and she never left any food on her tray. It seemed certain that Mary, now in her seventh month of pregnancy, would be the first to bear a child here—a child who would have the Shrine of Blessed Konrad of Paderborn to thank for the gift of life.

  Hedwig retrieved the tray that had contained last night’s dinner and replaced it with the breakfast tray, which she slid into the cell through the security hatch. When the hatch was opened on Hedwig’s side, it was automatically locked on the inside, and vice versa. Hedwig’s brother Gerhardt had designed and installed the security system, which occupied that part of the underground complex that had originally served as a convent for the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament. As a result, Hedwig never felt the least concern for her own safety. As Gerhardt had said, even if the cells had housed wild animals, Hedwig would not have been in jeopardy.

  The detainee in Cell 2, Janet Joyner, seemed to Hedwig no more than a child, though obviously in a biological sense she was a woman. How Janet, who was only twelve years old, had become pregnant was not something Hedwig wished to discuss. Indeed, she often had to ask herself which was more shocking: that a child so young should be pregnant, or that she should have, on her own initiative, tried to secure an abortion? Fortunately, the girl had called the Abortion Information Hotline, which she and Gerhardt had set up, and so it had been possible to intervene by having Father Cogling approach the girl’s parents. They had been horrified when they’d been informed of their daughter’s condition and of her sinful intention, and had agreed at once to Janet’s transfer to the facility at the Shrine. Not all parents were so immediately cooperative.

  Temperamentally, Janet was the opposite of Mary. She was a kittenish child, pathetically eager to chat, or play games-or even to say the rosary along with Hedwig, though she had obviously not been brought up with a proper sense of her religious obligations. Hedwig felt sorry for the poor little creature. No girl of twelve wants to spend all her time with no companion but a woman of sixty-three. Later, when there was a larger staff at the Shrine, and other girls as young as Janet, it should be possible to allow the more trustworthy girls to spend a certain part of each day together in the recreation room on the floor above. But with only Hedwig here through most of the week, that was not yet feasible. For now, little Janet would have to learn to develop her own inner resources. There was a wide choice of good books from the library that had belonged to the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, not to mention that most sustaining inner resource, prayer. The times that try our souls most sorely are also those that give us the greatest strength. Hedwig had learned that lesson as often as she had brought her own unfortunate children to birth, then seen them taken from her. Now she could be at hand to help others learn the same lesson and to show them by precept and example how to embrace their own crosses joyfully and with thanks.

  Of the four detainees, Hedwig was fondest of the girl in Cell 3, Tara Seberg, who appeared to feel a sincere remorse for the sins that had led to her forcible detention. She prayed a great deal, and often wept while she was at her prayers. Many girls possess the gift of facile tears, of course, but Tara wept when she supposed herself unobserved, so it wasn’t likely that she was feigning. She had read the books Hedwig had urged her to read, Unto Us a Child Is Born! and Accepting the Gift of Life, and she had
taken their message to heart. While the other three girls fretted about the constraints of their life at the Shrine, Tara’s most urgent concern was that she might see a priest and be able to go to confession. It did Hedwig’s heart good to be able to minister to Tara’s needs, not just her physical needs but her spiritual needs as well. For man lives not by bread alone, and woman doesn’t either.

  It was the girl in Cell 4 who was the bane of Hedwig’s existence. Her name was Raven Peck—an absurdity, but it was actually her legal name and appeared on her birth certificate. Not only was the girl wholly unrepentant, but she seemed determined, even now, to induce the miscarriage of the five-month-old child in her womb. Consequently, she had to be kept almost completely immobilized, with padded leather restraints buckled around her wrists and ankles and a kind of harness about her shoulders and rib cage that kept her confined to her bed. She had to be spoon-fed and, what was nastiest, assisted in going to the bathroom. And all the while Hedwig would be caring for her in these intimate ways, the girl would say the most blasphemous and insulting things, using such foul and abusive language that sometimes Hedwig could not even comprehend the meaning of the obscenities.

  Christ commanded us to love our enemies, and to do good to those who intend us ill, and to turn our other cheek, but had Christ ever had to deal with Raven Peck? That was a foolish question, of course. He had been reviled, and whipped, and crowned with thorns by His tormentors, while Raven Peck had done nothing more harmful, physically, than to spit gobbets of warm oatmeal into Hedwig’s face. And Hedwig did return good for evil. She read aloud to Raven from Accepting the Gift of Life, ignoring the girl’s jeers and blasphemies and simply wearing her down until she listened, unprotesting, to the message that must, eventually, change her life. Hedwig fed her—and the life within her—anything she asked for that was within Hedwig’s power to prepare. And Hedwig prided herself on her cookery. If Raven had an urge for gingerbread with mounds of whipped cream, Hedwig made fresh gingerbread. If she fancied Belgian waffles, Hedwig made Belgian waffles. Lentil soup? Hedwig had an excellent recipe for lentil soup. Raven only had to ask, and each time she did ask, Hedwig felt she had won another small victory. She was the rain and Raven was the stone, and gradually the rain will wear away the stone.