Relic of Time

by Ralph McInerny

  “You haven’t taken vows,” Lowry had said to him not long before.

  If Clare couldn’t join him, why didn’t he join Clare? George was almost shocked to hear this from the man he regarded as his Peter Maurin. Did he think of himself as Dorothy Day? After the shock of the suggestion, it became his greatest temptation. Just walk away from all this and live like everybody else. Why not? Lowry was right. He had not made any solemn promise to God to go on like this forever. George plunged once more into the writings of Dorothy Day, looking for indications that she, too, had been tempted by the thought of just getting out, away from the drunks and addicts and woebegone losers, ladling out soup and clothes and trying not to preach to them. But the fact of the matter was that she had lived her long life without deserting. And she’d never married again. When George had told Clare that some houses were run by married couples she had not reacted as he had hoped.

  “I couldn’t live like this, George.”

  “One day at a time.”

  From her expression he might have been describing the way prisoners under a life sentence reconcile themselves to the endless time ahead.

  “Go see her,” Lowry said now, when George kept expressing concern for Don Ibanez. “Take a few days off. You’ll be easier to live with.”

  IV

  “I have a great devotion to Saint Juan Diego.”

  Catherine had insisted that she would like to visit one of the wineries but she really didn’t pay much attention as the vintner gave them a royal tour befitting the daughter of Don Ibanez. Afterward, they sat outside in the shade sipping wine, the leaves rustling pleasantly in the slight breeze, the whole valley giving off a variety of perfumes.

  “You’ve lived here all your life?”

  Clare nodded. “I was born here. I mean, at home.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I scarcely remember her. I was only three at the time she died.”

  “So you are your father’s daughter.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  Catherine’s remark had seemed to be a leading one, and so it proved to be. She wanted to talk about Jason Phelps. She wanted to tell Clare of the professor’s attitude toward the Virgin of Guadalupe. Did Clare realize that the whole thing had been disproved?

  “Of course he would think so.”

  “It’s not just his opinion. He showed me a book, a book by a Catholic, who claims that Juan Diego never existed.”

  “Leoncio Garza-Valdés?”

  “You know it?”

  “Catherine, my father has every book ever written about the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

  “But have you read it?”

  “Have you?”

  “I don’t read Spanish. Jason summarized it for me.”

  “It is a very serious book.”

  “But it doesn’t convince you?”

  “No. Oh, I can believe that not every bit of the image is miraculous. Others have touched it up. If nothing else, it is the eyes that would remove any doubt I might have.”

  “The eyes?”

  Clare explained the images that had been found in the eyes of the Virgin, that they displayed optical laws unknown at the time of the vision or any later repainting. “One of the images is of Juan Diego, whom Garza-Valdés says never existed.”

  “And the pope canonized him!”

  “That is a strong confirmation of the vision, isn’t it?”

  “But if he didn’t even exist . . .”

  “Not even Garza-Valdés goes quite that far. He says Juan Diego’s existence is doubtful. So would be that of any ancestor of his of five or six hundred years ago.”

  “Would anything shake your belief in that vision?”

  “Catherine, we don’t have to believe such visions—none of them—Lourdes, Fatima, whatever. I would be perfectly free to ignore them all.”

  “But if the pope canonized someone who may not even have existed?”

  “I have a great devotion to Saint Juan Diego. Would you like more wine?”

  “I would.”

  Meaning she didn’t want the conversation to stop. “Is Professor Phelps trying to undermine your faith?”

  “My faith? Clare, I don’t have any.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. You really don’t know anything about me. The reason I came to Jason . . .”

  Clare listened but what had caught her attention was the use of Professor Phelps’s first name. And then out tumbled again the story of Lloyd Kaiser, with whom Catherine had been having an affair. When they parted he went off, apparently in remorse, to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She seemed to think she was telling Clare this for the first time.

  “He was the American who was shot there.”

  “The martyr.”

  And then Catherine remembered their previous conversation about this. She tossed her hand as if in apology.

  “Obviously his pilgrimage has made a deep impression on you,” Clare said.

  Catherine put down her glass.

  “I regard it as a temptation.”

  “A temptation?”

  “You wouldn’t know how seductive faith can seem after you have lost it.”

  Clare thought of George and his idealism, of the way she had longed to be like him, but just couldn’t.

  “Oh, I can imagine that.”

  But poor Catherine. Didn’t she know that people even wrote books trying to prove that Jesus never existed? And God?

  She dropped Catherine off at Jason Phelps’s. Catherine scampered across the tiled porch and inside. Clare looked toward the house as she followed the circular drive to the road. Catherine seemed to have run into the house and into Jason Phelps’s arms in one motion. At least she has that, Clare thought wistfully.

  She found her father behind the house, on a bench beneath a trio of palm trees. George Worth was with him! Clare stopped, remembering the way Catherine had run into Jason Phelps’s arms. The two men rose as she approached.

  “I will leave you two alone,” her father said.

  George seemed almost as uneasy with the remark as she was. On the way to the house, her father stopped to pick up some fallen leaves.

  “Lowry insisted I get away,” George said.

  “And here you are.”

  She took her father’s place on the bench and George, too, sat. An enormous silence formed, out of which, finally, he said, “How well you look.”

  The mad hope that he had come to her at last leapt in her breast, then died. She knew George too well for that. Catherine had her temptation, the threat of the faith, and Clare had hers. If she could not live as George did, perhaps he could . . .

  “How is the house?”

  “The point of getting away is to forget it.”

  She doubted that he would be able to do that.

  “Your father seems very calm about all these recent events.”

  Clare realized that this was true. Others, whose devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe was intermittent, certainly not the steady devotion of Don Ibanez, had reacted to the theft with rage and rallies and noise. And calls to arms. By contrast Don Ibanez seemed serene, confident that all would be well. Not even the thwarted exchange at the San Francisco airport seemed to have disturbed him greatly. Afterward, he had been the spokesman—calling Vincent Traeger his driver!—recounting the events as if he were not describing what amounted to a second theft of the sacred image.

  “He has put everything in the Virgin’s hands.”

  George nodded, his eyes going over the grounds, to the replica of the basilica, to the hills beyond.

  “The house certainly can’t compete with this,” he said.

  Was that how he saw her dilemma, the poverty in which he chose to live and this lovely tranquil place, she seemingly without a care in the world?

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I thought I’d take you out.”

  She turned to him, smiling. “A date?”

  They had never had dates, the usual out
ings of young people in love. Side by side on the soup line was the best they could do.

  “I saw a Mexican restaurant when I came through the town.”

  They sat at an outside table, eating enchiladas and drinking Corona beer with slices of lime stuck in the necks of the bottles. The table was in a little courtyard behind the restaurant, on crushed rock, but the table didn’t wobble. George put his hands on the edge to make sure it was set solidly. He looked at her. Their table in the common room at the house had wobbled. It was seated at that table that she had told him she could not stay.

  “I miss you.”

  She nodded. The thought of going through all the anguish of denial again was more than she could take.

  “I haven’t taken vows,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a monk. I could leave in a minute if I wanted.”

  “And come visit me?”

  “Are you sorry I came?”

  “Why did you come, George?”

  “I love you.”

  “And I love you.” She put her hand desperately on his. “But I can’t love the house.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do not!”

  “I wonder what else I could do.”

  Clare had the feeling a woman must have when a wavering priest finds her attractive and begins to talk about leaving. What power George was putting in her hands. He could work for her father, he could . . . But no!

  “You could never leave it, George. Don’t even think of it.” She took away her hand. “I wouldn’t let you.”

  She could not bear that responsibility. Imagine some great lady long ago having a conversation like this with Francis of Assisi.

  “I’ll come back with you, though. For a time. Like before.”

  A bird had come to peck at crumbs that dropped from the tables there in the courtyard, getting bolder as he neared them.

  “And leave again.”

  She said nothing. She had never seen George like this, divided, anguished.

  “How is Lowry?” she asked.

  V

  “Go to hell.”

  Paul Pulaski was wounded in an ambush and dragged to safety, and now he lay in a hospital in reoccupied Tucson, not quite believing the peace and quiet. Nurses, all starch and efficiency, came and went, bringing him endless cups of water he did not want and food that was tasteless, but it was the absence of danger that settled over him like another sheet.

  His wound was not severe; the bullet had gone through the calf of his right leg, with lots of torn cartilage and bleeding, but it had missed the bone. He felt like you-know-who and his phony Purple Hearts when they whisked him away from his men. It was hard to believe, lying in a hospital bed, that out there in the desert and in the mountains, men were still shooting at one another. His wound could have been more serious. He could have been killed. Now he could let the thoughts come that he had been able to drive away while commanding his men.

  What the hell were they doing anyway? Paul had joined the Minutemen in Indiana, a second-generation Pole who got fed up trying to explain the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. Of course he was all for legal immigrations. That was how his grandparents had come into the country. Now he was told that Poles were flying into New York without papers, working for a year or so, and taking the money back to Poland. Polish wetbacks. But who gave a damn about them or about the Latinos coming in by the truckload, day after day?

  Once the shooting began, such thoughts had become luxuries. The objective was to seal the border and keep it that way. And that was what they had accomplished, at least for a stretch of a hundred miles or so. But how can you fence just part of a border and call it secure? Within a year he was commander of the unit. Not everyone could devote full time to the effort, but Paul could. He was twenty-eight, unmarried, and still lived with his parents when he wasn’t in bivouac. His father thought he was nuts.

  “Why do we have a National Guard? Why do we have an army, for God’s sake?”

  “You want me to join the army?”

  “Hell no.” That would mean the Middle East, where the contest kept producing heroes but was pretty hard to understand. Keeping illegal immigrants out of the country was a straightforward objective compared to that. As straightforward as his father’s machine shop. A punch press knew its job and did it.

  When that showboat Grady called a press conference in El Paso and claimed to have the stolen icon or whatever it was, Paul hadn’t believed a word of it. He believed Grady even less when he learned that the Rough Riders had all decamped, disappearing who knew where. That press conference had intensified the fighting. Now they had found Grady and the son of a bitch admitted he didn’t know where the supposed picture of Mary was. The whole damned thing was a game for him, strutting around like Teddy Roosevelt, or Patton. It was those silver revolvers on Grady’s belt that convinced Paul the guy was a phony. The Minutemen had volunteered to protect the border and now they seemed involved in some kind of religious war.

  “What if someone stole Our Lady of Czestochowa?” his mother had asked in horrified tones.

  “Let God punish them,” his father said.

  But God seemed to be punishing the Minutemen. The National Guard had been put on alert in Arizona, but within twenty-four hours there was a stand-down. More than half the state was on the side of the invaders. And then they had enemies at the rear, but that pressure had been relieved when all kinds of ragtag bands arrived at the scene of action. The Minutemen were disciplined; they had been trained; they were a fighting unit. The newcomers deserved the name of vigilante.

  There was a television in the room and Paul watched whenever a politician came on to rant and rave. Gunther wanted the army called out, but it was pretty clear his was a minority voice. The White House seemed determined to keep attention on the Middle East. Paul turned off the set.

  On the second day, reporters came to interview him. It was obvious they considered him some kind of nut. Maybe he was. If he had been killed, if he couldn’t have been identified, he would have ended up in the Tomb of the Unknown Nut.

  “Didn’t your family come from Poland?”

  “My grandparents.”

  The point of the question seemed to be that he wanted to deny others the opportunities his family had had. It was pointless to try to explain the difference between illegal and legal immigrants. Then the priest came. Not the hospital chaplain—some guy from Seattle who wanted to straighten Paul out. Father Jim. Just call me Jim. He seemed to think they had a religious obligation to open the borders.

  “You know the legend on the Statue of Liberty.”

  Father Jim seemed to think that boatloads of undocumented Polacks had slipped past the statue and landed on the shores of Manhattan.

  “You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve seen the chaplain.”

  “A good man.” If Father Jim had talked to the chaplain he wouldn’t have gotten much satisfaction from it. “Have you read what the pope said about immigration?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Trying to get killed keeping poor Mexicans out of the land of plenty.”

  “Father Jim?”

  “Yes?” He moved closed to Paul’s bed.

  “Go to hell.”

  The chaplain got a laugh out of it when he heard what Paul had said. “No way to talk to a priest, Paul.” But he was smiling when he said it. And then Gunther came.

  He wore a seersucker suit and sailed his straw hat at the stand in the corner when he entered the room. He missed. He left the hat on the floor. He had the smile of a man who had just made a hole in one.

  “A sense of the Congress resolution, Paul. I tacked it onto a bill that went through like shit through a goose.”

  It was the sense of Congress that Paul Pulaski was a hero. A wounded hero. Gunther smiled with triumphant slyness. The sense of Congress, hidden away where no one knew they were voting for it? That summed up what a screwed-up mes
s this was—skirmishes all over the place, oddballs shooting at other oddballs—no wonder the administration could consider the matter little more than an annoying distraction. But by God, the border was being protected.

  “I want you to come to Washington. I want you to talk to the press. I want you to hit the circuit and explain things to your fellow Americans.”

  “No.”

  Gunther took this as the humility of a wounded hero. Paul had read Sons of the Fathers, about the Iwo Jima flag raisers who had been put on the circuit to sell war bonds and had lost their bearings in the process.

  “You owe it to the country, Paul.”

  “The country doesn’t seem to feel in our debt.”

  “There you’re wrong. You are a certified hero, by act of Congress.”

  He let Gunther talk. He got rid of him only by saying that he would think of it. No reason to go on about what he thought of the crazy idea.

  VI

  “There are videos of the funeral.”

  Neal Admirari’s agent hadn’t thought much of the idea but when several publishers expressed interest, Hacker got to work, playing one publisher off against the other. Neal did a one-pager, Hacker circulated it in an auction, and Mastadon Press came in with the winning bid. Lulu had been dubious about the idea of writing a book about the immigration wars that would emerge from the story of Lloyd Kaiser, but the contract softened her skepticism.

  “Want to be coauthor?”

  “Just because you stole the idea you’d given me?”

  “You want it back?”

  “I’m no Indian giver.”

  They were in the place in Connecticut when Hacker phoned with the good news.

  “I told them six months at the outside, Neal,” Hacker said. “This is hot, but it could cool.”

  Neal accepted the deadline. He knew all about deadlines. Besides, he might end up with nothing more than the hefty advance. Hot projects do cool. He left Lulu at the summer place and flew off to Indianapolis to talk with Judith, Lloyd Kaiser’s daughter.