Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

“I guess he did.”

  Trying to restore or create some cheer, O’Gorman asked Mick what he had done in the marines. Getting nothing but surly monosyllables, O’Gorman soon gave up. That left no one but Father McAvoy. He began talking to him about Maynooth Seminary and the church in Ireland.

  “I almost went there myself,” O’Gorman said. “My best friend at Clongowes was going and almost succeeded in talking me into it.”

  “Really,” Father McAvoy said.

  “Yes. He’s now the bishop of Galway.”

  “Oh, yes. Monsignor Finnegan. A wonderful man.”

  “He is indeed. But not terribly bright, Father. It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Maynooth. I think I could have beaten him out for a job like that. It must be a pleasant life, with hot and cold running cooks and butlers and your car and chauffeur.”

  Father McAvoy nodded and smiled feebly, granting him the jape. It was all perfectly jolly, but behind the smiles Dick O’Gorman’s cold brain was at work. The correct name of the bishop of Galway was Flanagan, not Finnegan. Wasn’t it a bit odd that a priest would forget the name of the bishop who had probably paid his tuition at Maynooth?

  Joey Zaccaro had been killed and his money stolen by someone who had recently arrived in Paradise Beach. Father McAvoy had been there exactly ten days.

  Maybe Billy Kilroy would have some use for his Zastava after all.

  SPIRITUAL TRANSACTION

  “If you weren’t in Paradise Beach in the fourth week in March, I’d swear you had malaria,” Dr. Vincent Butler said to Father Hart.

  “It isn’t just the flu?” Father Hart said, wiping the sweat from his streaming neck.

  “It must be the flu. It can’t be malaria. But the way you’ve been sweating, the way it goes away for about eight hours and then returns … .”

  Butler had been a doctor on Guadalcanal during World War II and had seen a lot of malaria. He was a big, gruff man, married to a Monahan cousin. Something of a hypochondriac, Father Hart had gone to him four or five times over the previous ten years, convinced he was dying of illnesses as various and fatal as nephritis, cancer of the bladder, and a tumor on the brain. Dr. Butler had briskly dismissed Hart’s symptoms and told him he was the healthiest priest in the diocese. Nevertheless they got along fairly well as fellow professionals who shared a common task with the local sick.

  Butler had surprised Hart by approving his attempt to launch a healing ministry at St. Augustine’s. But only a handful of people showed up at the Wednesday-afternoon service, and they soon dwindled to eighty-six-year-old Emma Murtagh, who wanted God to heal her arthritis of the spine to prove Dr. Butler did not know what he was doing. Father Hart had prayed fervently for her, but by the time Emma died she was bent almost U-shaped.

  Dr. Butler left Father Hart to the gentle ministrations of his nurse, Father McAvoy. For dinner he served Hart a delicious clam broth and well-fried scallops. Hart dutifully consumed the food, even though his appetite was nil. “Can you believe it?” Father Hart said. “Dr. Butler says I’ve got malaria. We need a decent doctor down here.”

  “Maybe you can get one from Ireland. They have a surplus there, along with priests. It’s the sweepstakes money. They put so much of it into medicine, there’s a saying, if someone in Connaught sneezes, they build a hospital around him.”

  A violent hand seemed to be crushing both sides of Father Hart’s skull. Never in his life had he had such headaches. He found himself wondering if he really wanted to go to the tropics and actually get malaria, if this flu was an imitation of the real thing.

  He turned on the television to listen to the McNeil-Lehrer report. At least he would try to keep up with the state of the world. Downstairs, he heard a thump and a strange cry. Heavy feet pounded up the stairs and along the hall to Father McAvoy’s room. Hart heard angry masculine voices. Clutching a blanket around him, he opened the door of his room and found himself face-to-face with the lecturer on Irish culture, Richard O’Gorman. He had a gun in his hand and an enraged expression on his face.

  Father Hart recoiled. “What’s going on?”

  “Your friend Father McAvoy is a fraud, Father. He’s a British agent. You haven’t got the flu. You’ve got malaria—and he gave it to you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Come take a look.” 0’German half dragged Hart down the hall to McAvoy’s room. The man was sitting on the bed, blood streaming from a gash beneath his eye. Kilroy, the little Belfast freedom fighter, was holding a snub-nosed gun to McAvoy’s head. Police Chief William O’Toole was going through McAvoy’s suitcase. Mick O’Day stood by the window, watching the street. He too had a gun in his hand.

  “He doesn’t believe me. Show him,” O’Gorman said.

  O’Toole picked up a small bottle of clear fluid. On the label was written in precise script Falciparum Malaria. On several other bottles more grisly words were written: Doexpin, Resorcinol, Nitroprusside. “There’s enough germs in these bottles to wipe out the state of New Jersey,” O’Toole said.

  “I still don’t believe it,” Father Hart said. “Can you explain these bottles, Father?”

  McAvoy just looked at him. It reminded Hart of the contemptuous stare he had received when he had tried to defend his antiwar sermons and marches to the archbishop. “Is your name Dennis McAvoy?” Hart asked.

  “I’m Captain Arthur Littlejohn of the Yorkshire Rifles, Father, on detached duty with the Secret Intelligence Service. Your Irish friends here aren’t using their real identities either. You’ve been talking to Black Dick O’Gorman, one of the leaders of the Provisional IRA. His little friend Billy Kilroy is wanted for at least a dozen murders in Belfast.”

  “Is that true?” Father Hart asked.

  “Pay no attention to him,” O’Gorman snarled.

  “If you want to obey the law, you will go to the telephone and call the state police to report a conspiracy to smuggle drugs and guns into this country,” McAvoy/Littlejohn said. “You might also report a soon-to-be-committed murder.”

  O’Gorman smashed Littlejohn in the face with the back of his left hand. He hit him on the other cheek with his right hand. Littlejohn made no attempt to evade the blows. “Not murder, you limey son of a bitch. An execution. You will be tried and executed, according to the international code of military justice, which stipulates death for spies and traitors.”

  “Are you going to let him stand there and mouth such nonsense, Father?” Littlejohn said. “He has no claim to being a soldier. His army is a vile fiction, a collection of Marxist thugs.”

  Billy Kilroy smashed Littlejohn in the face with his pistol. “That’s for me pal Brian Slattery you killed with his gun in his hand last month. Show me a fookin’ limey who died better than him.”

  Littlejohn fell back on the bed semiconscious. O’Toole grabbed Kilroy by the back of the neck and threw him across the room. “I told you not to do that! You can’t find out where the money is from a dead man.”

  “He’s a long way from being dead. But he’ll soon wish he was,” O’Gorman said.

  He turned to Hart. “Who’s side are you on, Father? We can’t stop you from calling the state police. If you call them, Billy and I will simply disappear. Chief O’Toole can do what he pleases with this limey scum. The men he’s assassinated in Ireland—I have personal knowledge of at least three—will go unavenged. The weapons we came here to smuggle to Belfast will be dumped into the sea.”

  Father Hart’s head pounded with pain; sweat soaked his pajamas; his fever was rising again. He stared down at McAvoy/Littlejohn on the bed. This was another imperialist killer, the same loathsome tribe he had risked his career in the Church to attack in 1969. This killer had given him a possibly fatal dose of malaria and simultaneously tricked him into humiliating gullibility.

  Suddenly all the hours Father Hart had spent reading liberation theology, dreaming of himself as a leader of the poor, committing terrible but necessary acts of violence against the rich, all his theorizing about p
ersonal and collective guilt, converged in this small room full of angry men with guns in their hands.

  “You can do whatever you want with him,” Father Hart said. “What you have to do.”

  “Can we work on him here?”

  “Of course you can.”

  Father Hart stumbled back to his bed and shivered and shook through the long night. From the room down the hall came unearthly cries of agony as O’Gorman and Kilroy attempted to persuade Littlejohn to tell them what he had done with the money. At first they did not believe him when he told them that he had mailed it to London. Then O’Gorman wanted the address in Dublin where the money was being laundered. Father Hart heard only fragments of this contest between a man who was prepared to suffer the worst torture and men who were ready to inflict ingenious pain on his flesh.

  More than once as Hart sweated and trembled with alternating bouts of fever and chills, he imagined himself rushing into the room to gather McAvoy/Littlejohn into his arms like a lost tormented sheep. Was that what Jesus would have done? Or was the real Jesus the infuriated guerrilla leader who drove the money changers from the temple?

  Shouts of anger now; the torturers were arguing among themselves. “I’ve had enough of this shit!” Mick O’Day roared. He stormed out of the house; his uncle Bill O’Toole pursued him to the stairs snarling curses at him.

  Then it was almost dawn and Bill O’Toole was snarling at the Irishmen, “Look. He ain’t gonna tell you. The money’s gone. I don’t give a goddamn where he mailed it. Let’s kill him and get him the hell out of here.”

  “Father Hart!” Littlejohn cried. “I want to see Father Hart.”

  Hart stumbled out of bed again and down the hall to the room where Dennis McAvoy, the wan, humble Irishman who had somehow given Father Hart renewed confidence in his priesthood, once lived. Richard O’Gorman met him in the doorway. “Stay out of here, Father. You’re not ready for this.”

  The room smelled of burnt flesh. Over O’Gorman’s shoulder Hart could see McAvoy-Littlejohn tied to a chair. Blood was all over his face. “Father,” he gasped. “I’m a Catholic. I would like to confess my sins before I die.”

  “Go back to bed, Father,” O’Gorman snarled.

  Billy Kilroy had another gun in his hand, with a strange bulge in the bottom of the barrel. He was looking at it with something close to joy on his wizened face.

  Yes, Hart thought. Yes. Go back to bed before you look at the awful meaning of the word necessary. Go back to bed before you disappear into the depths of McAvoy/Littlejohn’s mournful eyes, which were unchanged. The sorrow you saw in them belonged to both men, the priest and the secret agent. What did that mean?

  O’Gorman pointed to the gun in Kilroy’s hand. “He doesn’t deserve absolution. You see that? It’s the gun he used to kill God knows how many innocent Irishmen. Now we’re going to use it on him. That’s all he deserves.”

  Wasn’t that decisive? Wouldn’t that persuade Jesus, the guerrilla leader? The fever burned in Father Hart’s body, the pain slammed in his head. Yes. It would convince Him. It would convince anyone.

  As he stumbled away, Littlejohn cried out, “Father!”

  Hart looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing but O’Gorman’s saturnine face in the doorway, surmounted by Bill O’Toole’s heavy cheeks, sagging his mouth into a caricature of a tragic mask from Aeschylus.

  “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Littlejohn said.

  Father Hart fell into his bed and drew the covers up to his chin. He lay on his side, curled into a trembling fetal ball, waiting for the blast of the pistol. It never came. Instead, a new kind of cold seemed to gather in his body, a cold deeper than the chill of malaria. It seemed to be in his body and in the room too, an intense, pervasive heatlessness that extinguished his fever like a hand snuffing a candle.

  “We’re just going, Father,” O’Gorman said at the door. “Going to bury him in the Pines. I’ll speak to you later in the day.”

  “He’s dead?” Hart cried, sitting up. Why didn’t O’Gorman notice the cold in the room?

  “He’s dead—without telling us what we wanted to know. Billy’s cleaning up the mess in the room.”

  Hart lay there listening to the footsteps on the stairs. O’Gorman said something about Mick O’Day. “I’ll calm him down, don’t worry,” O’Toole said.

  The priest heard Billy Kilroy cursing to himself as he went down the hall to the bathroom. He returned, still cursing, and a scrub brush soon slithered back and forth on the floor of the room where Father McAvoy had slept in supposed celibate sanctity. The cold gathered beside Father Hart’s bed like a hooded presence, a being with zeros for eyes, an empty triangle for a nose, a larger zero for a mouth. Was this Jesus the guerrilla leader? Have mercy on us, Father Hart prayed.

  A waste of spiritual energy, that prayer. Mercy was not in this god’s vocabulary.

  POSSESSION

  “Father. I missed you on our jogging route and heard you were sick,” Jackie Chasen said. “Here’s the Jewish equivalent of penicillin—chicken soup.”

  “Oh—thank you,” Father Hart said, taking the plastic container. “Come in, come in.”

  Jackie had never been inside a Catholic rectory before. A new experience. She was in search of new experiences. Last night, Mick had turned up at her house drunk again, trying to tell her he was sorry for being such a bastard that night in Atlantic City. She had thrown him out again. Obviously the magic was gone from that relationship. Maybe the magic was gone from Paradise Beach. The little Irish creep Kilroy called her two and three times a day. He was getting nastier and nastier, calling her a fookin’ capitalist cockteaser and other charming names.

  Father Hart invited her into a living room that looked as if it had been decorated by Bob Cratchit: faded brown wallpaper full of butterflies, harps, and birds, ancient stuffed chairs with lace doilies on their arms, a red rug with a flowered pattern that was almost obliterated by age, over the fireplace a portrait of Jesus ascending into heaven. The priest looked almost as blah as the room. His smile was forced and dim, his eyes lackluster. He wore a red sweatshirt with BEAUTIFUL NEW JERSEY in white letters across the chest.

  “What’s wrong, the flu?”

  “Yes—the flu. You might call it the flu.”

  “What did the doctor call it?”

  “Flu. But he said it reminded him of malaria.”

  “In Paradise Beach?”

  “A lot of strange things come to Paradise Beach.”

  “Like me, for instance.”

  “Yes. You did seem strange to me at first. I’d never known a Jewish person before, believe it or not. We all live in ghettos in America. Sometimes golden ghettos, but still ghettos.”

  “Yes,” Jackie said, not sure what was coming.

  “But we grow—less strange, we even become friends—through gestures like this. Through … learning about each other. Your enthusiasm for Dylan Thomas, for instance. I got out some of his poetry and read it for the first time. Magnificent stuff.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad.”

  “I told you I was familiar with him. I was ashamed to admit I wasn’t. I’d only heard one of his poems sung by Joan Baez at a peace march in 1970.”

  “You marched against the war?”

  “Yes. Did you?”

  “I did everything against the war. Including some things you wouldn’t approve, Father.”

  “How do you know? I hope you don’t think I believe in that insipid figure over the fireplace, ascending into a heaven that makes a mockery of the real world. I believe in another Jesus, a guerrilla leader who pledged himself and his followers to a revolution on behalf of the poor, the victims of imperialism.”

  Amazing things began happening to Father Hart as he said this. His slumped chest vanished, his shoulders seemed to expand to fill the sweatshirt to its full dimensions. His head no longer drooped, the line of his profile acquired Roman nobility, which his high forehead and balding head accentuated. He was still not handsome, bu
t Jackie suddenly found him attractive—incredibly attractive.

  When was the last time she had loved a man whose mind she admired? Jackie asked herself.

  The word love seemed to flip automatically into her head. It was not forbidden in these sacred precincts. Yet it was illicit, a word that always stirred warmth in Jackie’s body. She listened while Father Hart told her how he sat here through the long, lonely winter nights—his visiting priest had apparently departed—and thought these revolutionary thoughts that he could not express to the Irish-Americans of Paradise Beach.

  He poured her a glass of Chablis and one for himself and asked her to describe Chicago in 1968. He had been locked in his seminary, hearing, reading about it from a frustrating distance. Jackie left out nothing. The marijuana and the sex in the park, the stoned crazies charging the helmeted police, the smashed windows of the days of rage. Father Hart’s face grew flushed; he confessed his secret wish to go to Guatemala and launch a revolution there, in the name of Jesus the guerrilla, to be the Che Guevara of his time.

  “Go,” Jackie said.

  “Would you come with me?”

  “Sure,” she said, sensing for the first time in years what she once called a flow. The wine, the conversation, was unreal, surreal. It was rushing toward an exquisite moment, a desire that was a marvelous mixture of sex and politics and poetry, the way she had always imagined love and so seldom found it.

  “I’d need someone like you—to give me the courage,” he said.

  “I’m not brave,” she said, remembering her terror the night Joey Zaccaro had visited.

  “Yes, you are. You’ve proven it. I know—what you did the night those mobsters attacked you. I know what happened.”

  “Everything?” Jackie said, remembering the wild lust with Mick in the Pines. Was that where she had lost the girl in white?

  “I mean, helping to bury the mafiosi. Helping the Irish gunrunners. I’m helping them too.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. The other priest who was here … was a British agent. They killed him here … last night.”