The City Below

by James Carroll

  He kissed her. She kissed him back. He slipped his ungloved hand inside her coat, into the crevice between her belt and her blouse. She pressed against him.

  Moments later he stopped, pulled back, made her look at him. "Is this okay?" he asked. She nodded. He removed his second glove and dropped it He unfastened the buttons of her coat, carefully, as if something might spill out, then the buttons of her blouse. It was cold; each understood that the parted shirt was as far as this undressing would go. His hand inside her bra, he found her breast. The palm of his hand had never seemed so sensitive as when it pressed the small, hard nub of her erect nipple. He kissed her again. When she opened her mouth now, he sucked as if her tongue would give him milk.

  ***

  The only Young Democrats to show for the party at Georgetown were the ones staying on campus, plus a few who dragged themselves through the storm from GWU. Sixty or seventy kids in the huge McDonough Gymnasium, with beer and chips enough for ten times that many. The band did not make it either, but some local genius hooked up a record player to the PA system, and the randy voices of the Everly Brothers began to bounce off the towering empty bleachers. The panicked refrain of "Wake Up Little Suae" echoed across the vaulted space, vibrating the red-white-and-blue streamers and the poster photographs of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. For a long time that song alternated with "All I Have to Do Is Dream," because apparently they were the only records that could be found.

  The Young Dems weren't complaining. They jitterbugged to the one song, slow-danced to the other. Eventually someone arrived with other records, but by then the night belonged to Don and Phil.

  Terry and Didi were not the only couple to drift up into the dark privacy of the vacant stands, but the gym was so big, and its nooks so numerous, that they might as well have been. They were both half blitzed, but they moved purposefully, holding hands. They found an isolated corner in deep shadows behind the highest row of seats. There were barbells arranged neatly by a bench. Exercise equipment was attached to the wall. The cement floor was covered with vinyl mats, which both took as absolute permission, an act of fate that obliterated what few of their inhibitions remained. They faced each other, kissed tenderly, then went slowly down.

  Given all that they had to overcome, their lovemaking was a first-time success rare for their kind. It was passionate, but without the usual pretense that they were being swept away. Perhaps because he was drunk, Terry felt freed from the obsessive self-awareness that had always undercut him. He was focused instead on Didi, on her wondrous body, her breasts, her mouth, her tongue, her thighs, the deep cavity between her legs; his fingers swam in it As for his own body, in its nakedness and freedom, it felt like someone else's.

  Didi helped by seeming so unlike the virgin he knew she was. When he stopped at the crucial moment to say, "Jesus, should I get a—?" she covered his mouth with her hand. "Never mind," she said. "Where would you get one now?" And she smiled with such abundant acceptance that he put the thought of birth control aside. With her other hand she guided him in, and then they began to move together so naturally, it seemed they'd been joined like this before. She bridged up under him and suddenly began saying, "Good, good, good!" How did he know to do this? "Good," she said, "Oh, sweet T, good!"

  A loudspeaker blared above them, "All I have to do is dream ..." If Didi Mullen had any sense of doing something wrong, it was in thinking, even while Terry caught the rhythm of the music inside her, what a perfect memory this would make someday. To leave the present for the future, that's what is sinful.

  Terry allowed the idea of wrong nowhere near his mind until the next morning, when he awoke under a suffocating blanket of it Despite the frigid air around him, he was wet with perspiration. He found himself on the couch in the lounge of Healy, with no memory of how he got there. On furniture and mattresses around the room, boys slept He realized he had slept. He had dreamed.

  When he sat up, a mass shifted in his chest, like a bubble in a bottle. Not air, panic. The bends. The hangover clangbird clawed at his head. He looked at the mound on the couch across from him, softly falling, rising, falling again. He saw the black arm protruding from the blanket McKay.

  Without thinking, Terry tossed his own blanket aside. He saw that he had slept in his shirt and trousers, like a drunk He went over and shook his friend. "Bright Bright."

  McKay came to slowly, bewilderment in his one eye. His patch was in place. "Huh? What? What?"

  "I need to talk to you. Something happened."

  McKay sat up. "What's wrong?"

  "Jesus Christ, man, I think I made a huge mistake last night I'm not sure what I—"

  A sly smile came across McKay's face. "You mean you and Didi?"

  "Yes."

  McKay freed his hand from the blanket to slug Terry's shoulder. "Don't be a jerk, Doyle. It's about time you got laid. You said it was great You said you never felt better." A cheesy grin had transformed his friend's face into something awful, and Terry saw, as if reflected in McKay's one good eye, an image of his own ridiculousness. Didi was one issue, Bright was another.

  "I wanted to tell you I was sorry."

  "Sorry for what?"

  Terry just stared at his friend, unable to say it For your eye. Finally he managed, "Just sorry for everything."

  "Can the self-flagellation bullshit, Terry, will you?"

  Is that what this was? Self-flagellation about his first girl? About a black man with one eye? "Sorry I woke you, I meant" But Bright had rolled over and seemed asleep again. Jesus Christ, Terry thought, he's blind. Blind in that eye—it only fully hit him now—for life.

  Terry stumbled back to his couch and fell on it, but he faced the window now instead of the room. The sky was blue above the snow-crested college buildings, the storm had passed, but not the one inside Doyle. John Kennedy's inauguration would go on as scheduled, to be followed by a splendid parade, more parties, and a new day in America. But not for him. Where was this misery coming from? Getting laid? Altar-boy guilt' Making Didi think he loved her? Not even the first clear recognition of Blight's fate accounted for the feeling. Terry asked, and asked again, What? What have I done?

  Across the quad, Georgetown students were trudging through the snow toward the chapel. Puffs of vapor came out of their mouths, only to disappear instantly in the cold. Some walked with hands covering their ears, a sight that made Terry want to block his senses too. His mind. He got up again, found his shoes and coat, and stumbled to the bathroom, where for a long stretch of moments he stooped over a toilet bowl expecting to vomit.

  In the corridor outside the lavatory was the phone booth. Terry went into it He dialed the long distance operator and asked for Mass. General.

  The ward nurse told him his brother wasn't there, and neither was his grandfather. When he asked how his mother was, the nurse did not answer. The silence seemed unending. Finally she said his mother wasn't on the ward any longer. She asked him to hang on while she paged the doctor, who would talk to him.

  He hung up and dialed the operator again, to call home. Nick answered on the first ring.

  "It's me," Terry said. "What's going on?"

  And again, that silence.

  "Did Ma come home? They let her out already?"

  "No, Charlie. They didn't let her out"

  "What then?"

  "She died. She died last night We called down there. They said they couldn't find you. You were supposed to be at some dance, but they couldn't find you."

  "She what?"

  "She died. She died, Charlie."

  "How? She was over the hump. What—?"

  "She fell out of bed, okay? She hated the fucking bedpan, and she wanted to go to the bathroom, and she fell."

  "She fell? Wasn't anybody watching her?"

  "Yes. I was. I was watching her. She fell, and the blood clot broke and killed her. Because I went to sleep, okay? In the chair beside her bed I fell asleep. Okay? Because I couldn't watch her alone."

  "What?"

&nbs
p; "I fell asleep, didn't you hear me? And she fell out of bed, get it? And you didn't even fucking call. You said you'd call."

  "She's dead?"

  "She's dead, Terry." Suddenly Nick's anger dissolved in stifled sounds of weeping. After a moment he managed to ask, "Are you coming home?"

  "Of course, I'm—"

  "I can't handle this alone, Terry. Gramps is useless. We need you."

  "I'll catch a plane. I'll get there as fast as I can. Jesus, Nick." It struck Terry how far from weeping he himself was. "I'm sorry, Nick."

  "Me too. Oh, me too." And then Nick hung up.

  ***

  Terry pushed through the drifted snow, crossing the campus toward Visitation. There, a nun answered the door. He asked for Didi and the nun showed him to a bench in the cold vestibule. When Didi appeared, he saw in her face that she knew. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Ma's dead."

  They stared at each other, not moving.

  Terry said, "I got to leave right away, and I didn't want you to think—"

  "What? Wait a minute. What?"

  "Ma died last night They looked for me at the dance, but they couldn't find me."

  "Your ma?" Didi closed the distance between them, instinctively ready to embrace him.

  But Terry put his hands up, stopping her. "It's because I wasn't there."

  His statement jolted her. "What do you mean?" she said.

  "She fell because Nick and Gramps couldn't take care of her alone."

  "That's ridiculous. She was in the hospital. That's what nurses are for."

  "You don't understand. I didn't call her. I was going to call last night, but then—"

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Last night? Are you saying your ma died because last night ... you were with me?"

  He didn't answer her. He didn't have to. He just shook his head. No. And then he left.

  Outside again, approaching Healy to get his stuff, he had to cut through the line of Georgetown students, a throng of them now, heading into the chapel. It was the mandatory Friday Mass. Without thinking, he joined them.

  Inside the church, his eyes failed for the moment it took to adjust to die dim light Intending only to step out of the way, Terry found himself standing behind another student near the purple curtain of the confessional. He was in the line.

  He heard the murmur of the priest behind the curtain, and he wondered, How had this happened? If every move he made was wrong, what of this one? His first impulse was to flee. But he could not trust it. He could trust no impulse if it was his.

  He had not been to confession since May, when he'd decided against entering the seminary. He knew he had not caused his mother's death. And he knew he had not blinded Bright Or deliberately lied to Didi. Or abandoned Nick. Yet moments later, on his knees, curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church, he whispered dryly to the shadowy ear a few inches from his mouth, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

  And for the first time ever, he knew, it was true.

  1968

  6

  FORTY-TWO YOUNG MEN on their knees, arrayed along the gleaming brass Communion rail. Across an apron of polished marble and up sue steps at the high altar itself, a priest on the ceremonial chair, the cathedra from which faith and morals were proclaimed and from which the building took its name. The priest was garbed in cassock and collar, not a bishop but a professor of theology and, today, an instructor in the liturgy. The acolytes and servers posted here and there around the sanctuary, and the seminarians themselves, were all dressed in mufti: the ubiquitous black shoes, but also khakis and sport shirts, cord trousers and sweaters, since this was a rehearsal and not the sacrament itself.

  They were an impressive-looking group of men, although with their trim haircuts and clean-shaven faces, a not altogether typical one in that year. From appearances they could have been a class of newly commissioned army officers or incoming management trainees at a brokerage house. In feet, they were men who'd worked hard through most of that chaotic decade to root themselves in another age—an age, above all, of order.

  Order: the name of the sacrament they were to receive. Order: the word from which the cardinal took his ecclesiastical title of Ordinary. Order: the unifying principle of the architecture of the very building around them, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, in the South End of Boston. Seminary rituals until now—those mini-ordinations beginning with tonsure, initiating them into a succession of arcane clerical states—had all taken place at the modest chapel at St. John's Seminary, on the far side of Boston. But this ordination to the diaconate would be different, and the massive setting told them so.

  They let their eyes drift up the soaring walls to the ribbed, groined vault in the apex of which the late Cardinal O'Connell's red hat hung rotting; to the pointed arches; to the luminous windows and their diffusing filters of colored glass through which common daylight was transformed; to the coarse stonework across which it splashed. What the seminarians saw was an example of the harmony they knew to be the source of all beauty and all truth, the ultimate expression of the laws according to which divine reason had ordered the universe. Orders. The sacrament. The place. The people, the strict geometry of their lifelong relationships not only to authority but to those they would serve, and to each other. The shadowy vault, immense as the night sky, timeless as the ancient silence, efficiently aroused the sacred feeling on which they all depended absolutely now: the Church!

  They were forty-two Americans who loved show tunes, jazz, the Beatles, and all kinds of sports. They were fiercey dedicated, even if at an enforced remove, to the politics of peace and civil rights. They knew their Camus and their Flannery O'Connor, their Kazantzakis, their Frantz Fanon even; their Daniel Berrigan and their Camillo Torres. But all that was peripheral now. They had been trained for this feeling, conditioned to maintain it—a mystic revelation, the beatitude Thomas wrote of, Saint Augustine's holy intuition, the cloud of unknowing within which all comes clear—the Church!

  They had been, in the argot, "formed"; formed every bit as much as the space around them had been—the ribbed, groined vault of their souls. The soon-to-be deacons recognized themselves in the Gothic verticalism of Holy Cross, their cathedral, a stone emblem—for them, proof!—of God's existence, God's nearness, God's real presence. They'd been taught to believe that the Church was the Body of Christ, and as such it was more real to them at that moment—this was conditioning too—than their own bodies.

  "Terence Michael Doyle."

  The priest intoned the name with a curling of vowels that hinted at self-mockery; he, for one, could not go on taking this lifeless rehearsal all that seriously.

  "Adsum," Doyle answered, as if this were the real thing. He stood, entered the gate of the Communion rail, crossed the marble apron, and began to mount the stairs. As tall as ever, still a fine-looking man, he was twenty-six now. He had shed the last vestige of boyishness and carried himself nimbly, with the grace of one who'd learned to move in a sanctuary. When he answered, his voice rang with authority, and as he went up to the altar platform, his affirmation echoed in the dense air overhead. He wore trim-cut corduroy pants and a navy blue cotton windbreaker, clothing that emphasized his leanness. His classmates watched him, as if they would learn now how this part was done.

  At the top step, in front of the priest, Doyle went down on his knees again. This is only rehearsal, he told himself, but his hands still shook slightly as he placed them inside the priest's. He thought, despite himself, of his brother Nick kneeling before Gramps in the crypt of this very building years before. Terry Doyle would be a squire now too, but God's.

  Father Joe Collins, the cardinal's stand-in, was bald and stout-faced. Sixty years old, his once powerful body had softened and begun to fold down on itself. His cloudy blue eyes contained an aura of resignation, and the faint aroma of whiskey poured off him, as always. But as he squeezed Terry's hands in a way the cardinal never would, he conveyed the strength of his particular affection, a
nd Terry once again felt grateful that this priest had been his spiritual director.

  Over the years, Doyle had come to understand that he'd entered the seminary, deciding on the priesthood after all, because, beginning that winter of his mother's death, he'd lost the capacity to believe in himself or trust his own impulses. In the Church he could account for such feelings of unworthiness and, with Father Collins's help, had learned to make the most of them. In relation to Didi and Bright, and even his brother, Terry had felt doomed to failure, but here such an emotion seemed a kind of qualification. "We are broken servants," Father Collins loved to say, "to a broken world."

  But now what he said was, "In the presence of God and the Church"—he looked at Terry intently as he recited the prescribed questions without any hint of his former levity—"do you solemnly promise, as a sign of your interior dedication to Christ, to remain celibate for the sake of the Kingdom and in lifelong service to God and mankind?"

  "I do," Terry answered, but his mind was blank.

  Now Father Collins smiled. "May the Lord help you to persevere in this commitment."

  And Terry answered, a bit overly firm, "Amen." Some of his classmates tittered nervously.

  Father Collins silenced them with a glance. "And my son, do you solemnly promise respect and obedience to your Ordinary?"

  Without having planned to, Terry blurted his answer: "Ordinarily."

  And behind him the young men exploded in laughter.

  Even Father Collins chuckled, his eyes rolling above his jowly face and collar.

  Periodic outbursts of tension-relieving but puerile laughter were a long-standing seminary tradition, but when such a thing occurred in chapel, the men were adept at stifling their reactions quickly. This time, though, the laughter grew, especially once they saw that Father Collins had discreetly joined in. The noise rolled back across the large empty space, swelling in the shadows, and the echoes coming back only made them laugh louder.