Ash Wednesday

by Ralph McInerny

  Hyacinth said, “The doctor thinks that with radiation and chemotherapy it could be brought under control.”

  “But for how long?” Placidus wanted to know. “It would only be a postponement, not a cure.”

  Eavesdropping, hovering around the table, keeping the kitchen door ajar, Marie had followed it all, trying to decide whose side she was on. She sympathized with Florence. She told herself that Florence was doing what she herself would do in the circumstances. Cancer spelled a death sentence, and Marie had known of parishioners who went through months and months of treatment and died anyway. That view was represented at the dining room table.

  “Everyone’s going to die sooner or later,” Hyacinth said.

  “Not everyone has cancer,” Placidus observed.

  The topic had not diminished the appetite of the friars, and Marie was in and out of the dining room, half tempted to join in the discussion but not sure what tack she would take.

  “What would you have said, Father Dowling?” Marie asked.

  He tipped his head to one side. “It would just be a general problem for me now. The friars were confronted by a concrete case.”

  “Oh, come on. Does someone with cancer have a right to refuse treatment?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me the story, Marie. Did she refuse treatment?”

  “Finally she left it up to her husband.”

  “And?”

  “The treatments began,” Marie said.

  “Would the doctors recommend that if there was no hope?”

  Marie dropped her chin and looked at him over her glasses. “How many oncologists do you know?”

  “Oncologists?” Father Dowling said.

  “Isn’t that a weird word? It’s scarier than ‘cancer specialist.’”

  “So Mrs. Green began treatments. What was the effect?”

  “Apparently good. Then she had a relapse, and Father Hyacinth gave her the last sacraments.”

  “She asked for them?”

  “Nathaniel did!” Marie leaned forward. “It was part of his plan.”

  The treatments had seemed to work. Florence’s cancer went into remission, and her depression lifted. Shortly before, she had been certain death was imminent, and then she was told she had a future, maybe years of life. Despair gave way to cautious hope. Father Hyacinth became an I-told-you-so at the rectory table, and who could blame him? Then the relapse, and Nathaniel Green asked him to give Florence the last rites.

  Marie sat back for dramatic effect. “That day he killed her.”

  “How?”

  “He pulled the plug,” Marie said. “She was on a life support system. He was always at her bedside. After the last rites, he pulled the plug. He was still sitting beside the bed when the nurses came in and found Florence was dead. They asked what had happened. He said he had killed her.”

  “And?”

  “Hyacinth was sure it could be hushed up, but Nathaniel wouldn’t have that. He went to the police and confessed to murder. They checked it out, and eventually he went to trial.”

  The judge had insisted that Nathaniel had to have a lawyer, and he had chosen Tuttle.

  “Tuttle?” Father Dowling was surprised.

  “It was like a death wish, Father. Tuttle’s defense was that it was a mercy killing. Nathaniel Green was convicted of manslaughter.” Marie made it sound like Al Capone’s conviction for income tax evasion.

  “And sent to prison.”

  Marie nodded. “Yes, and now, obviously, he’s out.”

  Marie fell silent, wondering what she expected Father Dowling to say. Serving lunch to a man who had killed his wife had required iron discipline on Marie’s part. She had leapt at the suggestion that she take Nathaniel Green over to the senior center and then had hurried back to tell Father Dowling this story.

  “‘There are eight million stories in the Naked City,’” Father Dowling murmured. “Do you remember that program?”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “I’m glad I met him.”

  “Glad?” Marie asked.

  “The poor fellow.”

  Marie just stared at Father Dowling. He sounded like Father Hyacinth.

  “What about his wife, Father Dowling?”

  “May she rest in peace.”

  Marie rose, her lips a thin line. She crossed her arms. Then she turned and marched back to her kitchen.

  Well, what had she expected Father Dowling to say? Tuttle had argued that Nathaniel was merely carrying out his wife’s wishes. The trial had engrossed the friars. Hyacinth had been called as a witness, offering the theological opinion that what Nathaniel had done was not murder.

  Boniface was outraged. “So if someone asks me to shoot him it’s all right?”

  “You’d probably miss,” Placidus said.

  It was their merry laughter that made the friars hard to take. Of course, priests dealt with death and other tragedies all the time, so who could blame them for getting used to it? “The poor fellow,” Father Dowling had said. Marie had to admit that the somber Nathaniel seemed to be carrying his punishment around with him.

  “Did you love your wife?” the prosecutor had demanded of him.

  “More than myself.”

  “You didn’t kill yourself.”

  “Oh, yes, I did.”

  Captain Phil Keegan unscrewed the plastic tube and let a cigar slide into his free hand. He moistened it, struck a match, and soon Father Dowling’s pipe smoke was joined by the acrid smell of Phil’s cigar in the pastor’s study. Phil rotated the cigar in his fingers and nodded.

  “Sure I remember Nathaniel Green, Roger. The guy couldn’t wait to be found guilty and sent off to prison.”

  “Guilt would have that effect.”

  “Ha. People with blood on their hands usually claim to be innocent of even original sin.”

  “Murder was the original sin. Original actual sin,” Father Dowling corrected himself, as if a theologian were listening in.

  “If it was murder,” Phil said.

  “Wasn’t he found guilty of manslaughter?”

  “Labels. Green killed his wife.” Phil spoke with the contempt of a widower who still half hoped that his wife would be waiting for him when he went home at night. A sentimentalist with a gruff exterior.

  “How?”

  “He shut down her life support system. He admitted right away what he had done.”

  “And went to trial, Phil.”

  “With Tuttle as his lawyer.” Phil’s tone required no comment. Tuttle was the bottom-feeder of the local bar.

  “How did he plead?”

  “Guilty, of course, but everyone goes into court on the assumption of innocence.”

  “But he confessed?”

  “That doesn’t count, Roger. Tuttle argued that it was a mercy killing. I suppose that is what prompted them to call it manslaughter.”

  “That didn’t leave you much to do,” Father Dowling said.

  “Oh, we investigated it. Cy Horvath interviewed everyone at the hospital, friends of the couple, everyone even remotely involved, but all it did was seal Green’s fate. Finding out that everyone liked the guy and thought him a devoted husband couldn’t trump the nurse’s testimony that when the monitors at the nurses’ station went haywire and she ran into the room, Green was sitting there with the tubes still in his hand.”

  “He showed up in the church on Ash Wednesday,” Father Dowling said.

  “I got mine at St. Hedwig’s,” Phil said hastily. He meant the blessing with ashes. St Hedwig’s was downtown, an old church dwarfed by the buildings around it, not far from the courthouse.

  “Marie took him over to the parish center.”

  “He’s old enough,” Phil said.

  “Well, he paid the price for what he did.”

  “His wife’s still dead.”

  Phil might have been drawing attention to the paradox of remorse. Not that he would ever call it that. It was a paradox Father Dowling faced in the confessio
nal. A person repented of his sins, confessed them, and received absolution, but even when the penitent was returned to the state of grace, the effects of his sins did not go away. This was dramatically true in such a case as Nathaniel Green’s. It was clear that he felt remorse. Had he confessed to a priest? His remark that he was no longer a Catholic seemed the answer to that. Certainly he had paid the civic penalty for what he had done. Nonetheless, as Phil said, his wife was still dead. Nothing he or anyone else did could change that, not prison, not contrition.

  Nathaniel Green had continued to come to the noon Mass, staying in his pew at communion time. He had continued to come to the senior center as well, but in church he knelt alone in his pew and afterward went back to the school building alone. Father Dowling, on his way to the rectory after Mass, often saw Nathaniel shuffling slowly down the walkway to the school, a solitary figure carrying his invisible burden.

  In the meantime, Father Dowling had been reading up on what Nathaniel had done, puzzling over the distinction between killing and letting die. He was most interested in a distinction Pius XII had made between ordinary and extraordinary means of medical help. The pope had decreed that no one was under an obligation to make use of extraordinary medical means when death was inevitable. It seemed a spoor worth pursuing. Had Florence Green’s life support system amounted to extraordinary means to keep her alive? Whom should he call?

  Basil Spritzer, a Jesuit at Loyola, was often consulted on medical ethical problems by the local media. No. Spritzer put one in mind of the Jesuits Pascal had caricatured in The Provincial Letters. He seemed to find a way of justifying any convenient course of action. Father Dowling decided to go out to Holy Angels Home and have a talk with Father William Nolan, who had taught him moral theology at Mundelein. He had been known as Willy Nilly by the seminarians and was famous for his rigorism.

  Holy Angels Home was up the Fox River Valley just below the Wisconsin border, a pleasant drive even if Willy Nilly could not provide him with information that would be useful when he had a talk with Nathaniel Green.

  Is there any scenery more beautiful than the Fox River Valley, even in late winter? Father Dowling went north on minor roads, enjoying the rolling snow-covered hills, the copses of beeches and fir, the shimmering river visible from time to time as he drove. An hour and a half later he turned into the drive that led to the main building of Holy Angels.

  At the reception desk, he was directed to the cottage in which Father Nolan was living out his twilight years. He found the old priest sitting on a glassed-in porch, his breviary on his lap, dozing. The sound of the car door stirred him into life. He sat forward, brought his glasses down from his bald head, and peered at his unexpected guest.

  “Come in, Father. Come in. That door’s not locked.”

  “Roger Dowling, Father. I hope you remember me.”

  “Of course I do. Sit down. This must be a visit. You’re too young to be thinking of joining us.”

  “Not yet,” Father Dowling said with a smile. “It seems pleasant enough.”

  “I always swore I would never end up in such a place. Chaplain in a convent or weekend work, anything but being put on the shelf. Vanity, of course. As it happens, although I was brought in kicking and screaming—metaphorically—I love it here. Let me show you my little house.”

  The brick cottage contained a bedroom, a study, a living room with fireplace, a dining room, and a diminutive kitchen. The window blinds were tilted and laid bars of winter sunshine on the furniture and floors. Every available wall space contained bulging bookshelves. It was as if Father Nolan had reproduced his suite of rooms at Mundelein.

  “This is wonderful,” Father Dowling said. Did such a future await him?

  In the study a laptop computer nestled among books and papers and dozens of framed photographs. A statue of St. Thomas Aquinas looked down from atop a bookcase.

  “You use a computer?” Father Dowling asked. He himself had resisted learning how to use this wondrous device.

  “A very useful gadget. I am writing my memoirs.”

  “I can hardly wait to read them.”

  “Autobiography is the best revenge,” Willy Nilly said. “Let’s have a beer on the porch.”

  “Not for me, Father.”

  The old priest drew back in mock surprise. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t golf. What kind of a priest are you?”

  “Do you know Dr. Johnson’s remark? ‘I find abstinence easier than moderation.’”

  The old priest chuckled. “The one I remember is ‘Marriage has its pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.’”

  Father Dowling accepted a glass of iced tea, and they went out to sit on the porch where he had found Father Nolan. It was there, surrounded by Christmas cactus, a large potted impatiens—“My middle name, Father”—and other plants, that they talked. Willy Nilly sipped his beer and nodded as Father Dowling told him the saga of Nathaniel Green.

  “I came upon the distinction Pius XII made between ordinary and extraordinary medical means,” Father Dowling said.

  Father Nolan shook his head slowly. “That statement has been the cause of lots of arrant nonsense. Unintentionally, of course. Our friend Basil Spritzer considers water extraordinary means when a patient is in a coma.”

  “What would count as extraordinary means?”

  “That is the problem,” Willy Nilly said. “What were extraordinary means a generation ago have become ordinary. You mustn’t think that I have become a relativist.” He glared at Father Dowling.

  Father Dowling laughed. “That would be extraordinary.”

  “Your thinking it or my becoming it?”

  “In the case that concerns me, the means were a life support system.”

  “That’s too vague, Father. Say it means just oxygen. Would you consider that extraordinary?”

  “You’re the moral theologian, Father.”

  The old priest sighed. “Medical ethics has become the last refuge of the scoundrel. ‘Extraordinary’ could characterize most of the stuff written in the field. Extraordinary nonsense.”

  Father Dowling presented the details of his problem to the moralist.

  Willy Nilly sighed. “I don’t think I could responsibly encourage you to believe that what that man did does not amount to depriving his wife of ordinary medical care. The circumstances are extraordinary, no doubt. I can sympathize with the wife’s fear and the husband’s anguish. But what he did, as you describe it, was kill her.”

  Father Dowling realized that this was the answer he had expected. He could not regret not having consulted Basil Spritzer.

  “Tell him to pray for his wife,” Willy Nilly suggested. “As she is undoubtedly praying for him. That is not sentimentality. I can give you a reference in St. Thomas.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He thought he knew the passage in the Summa theologiae his old professor had in mind.

  Willy Nilly nodded. “It was the realization that whatever I said in the classroom would become gospel for the men I taught that made teaching such a weighty responsibility.”

  “I think you bore it well.”

  “That is my hope,” Father Nolan said.

  So Father Dowling drove back to Fox River unable to enjoy the beautiful countryside on the return trip. Still, despite what Willy Nilly had told him, or not told him, he looked forward to talking with Nathaniel Green.

  Back in the rectory he called Edna Hospers.

  “Has Nathaniel Green become one of your wards, Edna?”

  “I want to talk to you about him, Father.”

  Natalie Armstrong, a handsome widow in her early sixties, came reluctantly to St. Hilary’s senior center, not considering herself a senior, but lonely and bored. Helen Burke’s enthusiasm made her hesitant. The description in the parish bulletin held her attention, but she was certain she was not old enough for that. To her surprise, she found that the age range of the regulars included half a dozen her own age and then rose choppily up the scale until it reach
ed such denizens as Leon Bartlett, pushing ninety, hunched over his walker as if it were a motorcyle threatening to get out of control, and Marlys Logelin, who would never see ninety again and was confined to her motorized wheelchair, in which she zipped around the former gym as if she were engaged in one of the basketball games that had been played there when she was a girl. Watching her, Natalie felt in the full flush of youth.

  The very first day, Eugene Schmidt introduced himself. He was at least her age, with a head full of hair that might have been cotton wool and a dapper little mustache to match. His eyes twinkled at her over his half-glasses.

  “You look lost,” he said, as if he meant to do something about it. He did. He squired her around, introducing her—how on earth had he known her name?

  “I asked.” He actually squeezed her hand.

  They kibitzed at bridge; they followed a shuffleboard match with Eugene whispering critical comments in her ear; they watched a little television, which was what Natalie had come to the center to escape.

  “I found myself turning it on at breakfast and not turning it off until I went to bed.”

  Eugene shook his head, but there was sympathetic understanding in his bright blue eyes. “I know what you mean. Oh, do I know what you mean.”

  “How long have you been coming here?”

  “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

  At noon they went together up the walkway to the church and attended Father Dowling’s Mass. To her surprise, Eugene sat through the Mass and did not go forward to receive communion. Afterward, he explained.

  “I’m a heretic.”

  “A heretic!”

  He made even that seem fun. “I mean I’m not Catholic.”

  “Then why would you come to the center?”

  “Until today I wondered that myself.”

  Honestly. Natalie hadn’t been at the center a week and she seemed to have acquired an admirer.

  That night, she alternated between being pleased and being half ashamed. She had been a widow for three years; her children, both of them, were gone. One a Maryknoll missionary and the other a Poor Clare. She resolved that the following day she would avoid Eugene Schmidt. Then another thought came. Eugene wasn’t a Catholic. Everybody should be Catholic. Perhaps God had thrown them together so that Eugene would come into the Church. The next morning she went off to the center with some of the zeal that had sent her daughter to a convent and her son into the priesthood.