Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “What would I think of Siri?”

  “You would like him, Carlo. He is a nice man, though he doesn’t speak English or any other foreign language. He has been in Genoa for thirty-four years. Very fatherly, very pleasant, a little outspoken, powerful preacher, not very sophisticated, gentle with people.”

  “Theology?” I asked.

  “The very best of the years before the War.”

  “Would they elect a pope who didn’t know English or French or German?”

  “Or Spanish,” I added.

  “Hardly. You will notice that certain papers will report this problem starting tomorrow. You see, the Siri people have a little less than thirty votes … The coalition of the Benelli men in the Curia and the northern Europeans have perhaps forty-five. The rest of them, including your North Americans, have no idea what’s happening. They know neither the issues nor the personalities. They want to be able to go home and say that they have voted for the new pope before the final ballot. They will think that the Holy Spirit has inspired them, when in fact they will be responding to such questions as whether a man can speak their language.”

  “You don’t believe that the Divine Wind blows through the Sistine Chapel?” Chucky said.

  “We have had popes who raped women coming to St. Peter’s on pilgrimage, we have had popes who were thieves, popes who had mistresses and produced children while they were pope, even popes who murdered their enemies, usually by poison. Must we credit that to the Holy Spirit?”

  Some of Adolfo’s smooth exterior had slipped aside. How could he stand to work in this place?

  “There have been no truly bad popes,” he continued, “since 1700. However, though none of them were bad men, they were often not very good at their job. All your Divine Wind does is guarantee that the Church survives us poor priests who are responsible for it.”

  “Can we quote you?” I reached for my notebook.

  “Certo … Not by name, prego.”

  “Experienced Vatican watcher?”

  “Bene.”

  Two days later we did portraits of Cardinal Suenens, Cardinal Lorscheider, and Cardinal Benelli for Chuck’s exhibition. I remembered that he had brought proofs of many of his pictures along. We gave them to Adolfo as evidence that it would be a serious show. They were impressed and agreed to the shoot. We found Suenens at the Belgian College. He is a handsome, charming man, former rector of the University of Louvain, and active in the resistance during the War. In a properly run Church, he should be pope and we wouldn’t have this silly conclave.

  We had to wait a long time for Lorscheider at the Brazilian College. He swept in with a warm smile and a gracious apology. He told us how much he admired Chuck’s pictures. He was a tall German, blond and handsome. His family had lived for generations in Brazil. I decided that his smile qualified him to be a successor to the smiling September Pope.

  Benelli was waiting impatiently for us in Adolfo’s office somewhere in the bowels of the Vatican.

  It looked like we would face one of his famous temper tantrums, then he saw me. His face relaxed into a broad grin. He bowed and kissed my hand.

  He was short, bald, intense, quick of movement, with dancing eyes and a mobile face whose expressions changed constantly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said with an expressive shrug, “that my Brazilian colleague kept you waiting.”

  All right, I thought. If I had a vote, this guy might just get it, though sometimes he looks like a Sicilian thug.

  Now as I look back on the pictures in the People exhibition, I think that they were three remarkable men and that Chucky’s Divine Wind had done a pretty good job finding some decent leaders for the Church.

  “You will photograph Siri?” he asked, as Adolfo was showing us out.

  “Non, Eminenza,” Rae said with a sweep of his hands.

  All of us laughed.

  I thought that maybe we would make love that night. Poor Chuck was wiped out from the portrait shoots, too tired even to wonder about the results.

  The next morning the bad news was that some of the American cardinals were praising Siri’s “long pastoral experience.” Another name had surfaced, Giovanni Colombo, the seventy-six-year-old Archbishop of Milan. Some reporters said that he was a year younger than Pope John when he was elected Pope. Others said that the election of a man twelve years older than Papa Luciani would be an insult to the Church. Cardinal Suenens was quoted as praising Colombo as a man who had been very open to change at the Second Vatican Council.

  We had given up on our shoots in the Vatican. Chuck continued to be very tired.

  Adolfo called in midafternoon when my poor husband was napping.

  “I cannot believe that your American cardinals are so dumb.”

  “The system doesn’t produce many bright ones,” I replied, as if I knew anything about the system. “Do you know this man Colombo?”

  “Certo. They are trying to find an Italian compromise candidate. He is their last hope. Siri is gaining still. Benelli tells me that he will not be pope, but neither will Siri. I think he knows something.”

  I turned on RAI to witness an interview of an American cardinal who said that while John Paul was a great man, he lacked the administrative skill and experience to be a pope. The Church needed in these troubled times a strong man, an able administrator, and a firm anti-Communist. Someone who was not Italian should not be elected, he insisted, because such a person would not understand Rome. Rome after all was the center of the Church, in a certain sense, the Church itself.

  “Idiot!” I screamed at the screen.

  “Mark his name down,” Chucky mumbled. “We’ll get a picture of him and put the quote in our book.”

  “Go back to sleep, Chucky,” I snapped.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I was losing it. The constant elation and disappointment of this very peculiar political campaign had captured and infuriated me. These dumb American cardinals who were ready to believe every lie the Curia would tell! I was playing nursemaid to a sick little boy, negotiating over rights to our pictures, damn, his pictures, getting film developed and printed, making notes for my commentary, and taking care of a family from a long distance.

  Siobhan Marie was acting up, her patience stretched out beyond all reason. She wanted her daddy!

  Daddy, was it? She could have him in his present useless condition.

  “She’s just tired, Rosie,” Moire Meg assured me. “She does miss you guys. When you coming home?”

  “Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. What’s new with Seano?”

  “I am tired of hearing what a wonderful person Esther is. He’s got it real bad. Soapy. I think he’ll want to discuss his love with you and Chuck as soon as you return.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I sighed.

  “I miss you, Rosie.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Oh, yeah, him too.”

  I pondered the end of the conversation. Was Moire Meg trying to make up for her slip of the tongue which hinted that the baby missed her father more than her mother? And what kind of a neurotic idiot was I to be worrying about such things?

  We had to get out of this insanity. Soon. Maybe a portrait of a new pope wasn’t all that important.

  On Friday the thirteenth (the day before the conclave was to begin) Siri’s luck ran out. An Italian newspaper ran a devastating interview with him which it had promised to withhold until the conclave began. The paper argued that he had said the same thing on several radio interviews. It was rumored that Cardinal Benelli was behind the leak, which his staff vigorously denied.

  Cardinal Siri lost his temper apparently several times in the interview. He said he was the most maligned man in the world, that he was neither a liberal nor a conservative, but a supporter of the Gospel. He made fun of Pope John Paul and ridiculed the notion of collegiality. He warned against the evils of Communism, which were even more dangerous to the Church than recent foolish reforms.

  “Communism” was a big issu
e in Rome because of the kidnapping and murder of the ofttimes Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the “Red Army”—a bunch of crazy professors and graduate students whom, as Chucky remarked, the real Communist party would line up against the wall and shoot if they ever took over.

  I translated the RAI story for Chuck, who was beginning to show some signs of life, though his cough was still terrible.

  “I figure,” he said, “that Benelli probably had someone else lean on the paper. No need to involve himself. Anyway, to lay down a barrage like that which would land only when he was safe inside was a sneaky trick. They had to print it. Imagine what it would be like if he emerged as the next pope with a story like that in the headlines.”

  “This is a rotten, sick place, Chucky.”

  “Yeah. Jesus would have been better advised to turn the Church over to angels—or some other creatures who don’t cheat and lie and catch colds at the wrong time. Maybe to the timber wolves.”

  “You didn’t choose to get sick, Chuck.”

  “That’s true … Are they still playing the Communism card?”

  “For all it’s worth. It’s in every paper. Someone arguing that the most important criterion for the next pope is that he will be strong in the face of Communist attacks on the Church.”

  “Have there been any such attacks while I’ve been out of it?”

  “No.”

  “I guess facts don’t matter now.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “Somewhere between better and terrible.”

  “Remember that the depression now is physiological.”

  “I’m too depressed to feel depressed … What’s the weather like?”

  “Lovely Indian summer weather.”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  So we went for a walk, hand in hand. I felt young again. We found a nice little gelateria off the Via Veneto and ordered two double scoops of chocolate ice cream.

  My husband was recovering.

  “Just like dropping into Petersen’s back in the old days.”

  “Ice cream isn’t as good, Rosemarie.”

  “Nothing is as good as Petersen’s.”

  Chuck could only finish one scoop.

  “Eyes bigger than my stomach,” he sighed.

  “You’re getting better, Chuck … Can’t waste good gelato. I’ll finish it off for you.”

  He had several fits of coughing on the way back to the hotel. I gave him cough medicine and put him to bed. No romance for Rosemarie again tonight.

  Saturday morning, the day the cardinals would go into conclave for the second time in seven weeks, he was more chipper.

  “It all starts this afternoon, doesn’t it, Rosemarie?”

  “Starts or ends. Your Divine Wind will have a hard time getting in.”

  “Sure will. We’d better go over there. I want to get a shot of that American who said that it couldn’t be someone who was not Italian. If they elect a straniero, we’ll print his picture with the quote.”

  “You are one very angry West Side Mick, Charles Cronin O’Malley.”

  “Maybe it’s just the cold.”

  It was a glorious day, warm, gentle, benign like a loving mother—which I had been once a long time ago. We wandered up and down the Conciliazione and pretended that we were tourists. We gaped at every nasty little nun and porcine pompous prelate we encountered. Chuck’s Nikon banged away.

  Dear God, these men and women have given up home and family to serve You. Could You not have organized a better, happier way for them to do it?

  We ate a late lunch in the Columbus Hotel. Chuck destroyed the pasta plate and asked for another. His coughing fits were infrequent. He was coming alive again. Poor dear man. He’d be all right eventually. The midlife crisis, really a crisis of mortality, could no more keep him down than would this terrible cold.

  Or so I hoped and prayed.

  We then walked over to the entrance from the Piazza to the Sistine Chapel. The press were already seizing positions from which to hurl questions at the cardinals as they entered for the conclave. The usual crowd was filtering into the Piazza. They had forgotten the September Pope. There was new pageantry to consume and soon a new pope to cheer.

  No one is as dead as a dead priest, Msgr. Packy had once said.

  Especially, I reflected, if the dead priest had been a pope.

  “You must be feeling better, Chuck.” Msgr. Adolfo appeared behind us, as he often did, like someone from another world.

  “I’m not long for this world,” my husband protested. “I’m dying with me boots on. Someone has to take pictures of the cardinals.”

  “Anyone special?”

  “That American idiot who endorsed Siri the other day.”

  “A stern crusader against atheistic Communism? Is there any content in that?”

  “Nope,” said Chuck. “It’s a mantra. Makes them feel good.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Siri won’t be pope. Neither, I fear, will my former boss.”

  “Colombo?”

  “I doubt it … Probably a compromise foreigner.”

  “Like?”

  “Koenig of Vienna. Wojtyla.”

  “Who’s he?” Chuck demanded.

  “Cracow. Very gifted man, poet, playwright, actor, intellectual, wit. Man of the Council and from Poland. There’d be no question about anti-Communism. Probably too young, only fifty-eight. I don’t think they want a man who might be pope for a quarter century.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Strong, perhaps too strong. Has spent most his life under enemy occupation. That means a perspective very different from Western Europe or America. One advantage that he might have is your Cardinal Krol, not exactly a dazzling light, is also Polish. He might bring the American cardinals along as a group, which could tip the scales.”

  “A Polack Pope!”

  “Chucky!”

  “No problem here with that word, cara, the Italian adjective for Polish is Polacco.”

  “And in Hamlet,” said my husband, triumphant in his phony little triumph, “does not the Polish king announce that he is the Royal Polack?”

  “You’re terrible!”

  My feisty little lover was returning to me at last. I had missed him.

  “The Divine Wind still locked out?” he asked Adolfo.

  “Certo. Yet when they come out they will be confident the Spirit swept them along to His chosen decision.”

  “Hers,” I said.

  Adolfo drifted away.

  “Will he ever be a cardinal, do you think, Chucky?”

  “Too important.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cardinals are a dime a dozen. Invisible men who get things done smoothly are few and far between. There aren’t many lawyers in Chicago as slick as Vince.”

  The journalists crowded around us were speculating on the outcome of this very peculiar election. A gaggle of Brits was arguing for their man George Basil Hume. Their logic seemed to imply that because Hume was eminently qualified he would certainly be elected.

  “Not a chance,” Chuck said to me. “Do we have any pictures of him?”

  “Some good shots. He’s one of the few that doesn’t look like a degenerate creep.”

  A wild cheer went up from the crowd. The crimson tide had appeared at the portico of St. Peter’s and was winding its way in somewhat disorderly fashion toward the entrance to the Vatican Palace.

  “He’s that little man”—Adolfo was suddenly behind us—“with the rimless glasses and the pious little acolyte smile. Don’t worry about missing it, the expression never goes away.”

  Chucky blazed away with his telephoto.

  “I am ashamed,” I said, “that he is the best my country can do.”

  “As my Irish friends would say, he’s not the worst of them.”

  I handed Nikon magazines to Chuck as I often had. We didn’t want to miss a shot. I wondered again what instinct it was that gave him the uncanny a
bility to see a perfect shot coming a moment before it was there. I’d never understand. Neither would he. My Chuck just saw the shot as it was forming.

  Genius?

  I never doubt it, though he never believed it.

  Then the procession was over and the sun setting behind St. Peter’s. We were almost a month into autumn and light was vanishing quickly from the European sky.

  We walked around the corner and into the Borgo Pio for an early-evening dish of pasta. My husband was silent, melancholy, not typical moods for him.

  “What thinking, husband mine?”

  “Just that it’s a long way from Galilee.”

  “It sure is.”

  We walked back to the Piazza, ambled over to the obelisk and looked up at the Vatican Palace. There were a lot of lights up there, some of them bedroom lights of men who had been crowded into offices and storerooms until they could elect a pope. Others corridor lights. As we watched some of the lights flicked off. Arm in arm we stood there, and wondered and prayed silently.

  There were a couple of hundred people in the immensity of the Piazza, mostly tourists, cameras in hand. We had a couple of cameras slung over our shoulders but we didn’t feel like tourists. We were Vaticanologists. A couple dozen cops were scattered around, mostly lounging and relaxing. The Dome of St. Peter’s loomed radiantly in the background. Over our left shoulders a full moon shone down. The Sistine Chapel stood vaguely in the shadows.

  Full moon over conclave, maybe we could get the jazz group to put together a piece when we went home. I’d do the vocals. April on the piano.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on up there?” I asked.

  “We’re probably better off not knowing.”

  Chuck was already half-asleep when we reached our suite at the Hassler. I told him that I didn’t think we needed the NyQuil because his cough seemed to be cured. He agreed and promptly climbed into bed.

  I had set aside a moderately sexy nightgown, which now seemed a waste of time. Nevertheless, I put it on and slipped into bed next to him. He was sleeping peacefully. I turned off the lights.