The Only Good Priest

by Mark Richard Zubro

  Two tiny old women in cobbler aprons met us at the door. The one with blue-rinsed hair clutched a mop in her right hand. The one with tightly curled gray hair carried a can of Lysol in her left hand. With some reluctance they agreed to let us in to see the secretary. We found her pacing a luxurious first-floor office: deep, soft, wine-red rugs, leather-backed and cushioned chairs, polished wood, six-foot-by-three-foot desk. Gold-embossed spines of books looked at us from floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  Constance Madison, the secretary, shooed the other two women out and demanded to know what we wanted. As I explained about Jerry being missing and the questions surrounding Father Sebastian’s death, she twirled her wedding ring with long thin fingers. She was gray-haired, with oversized glasses on a sharp pinched nose. Her plain black dress draped the thin figure of a woman in her late fifties. When we asked to speak to Clarence, she told us to get out and slammed the front door after us.

  As I started my truck, the little old woman with the blue rinsed hair peeked around the back of the house. She poked her nose furtively in several directions, then gestured frantically for us to come over.

  We leaped out of the truck. Our feet left indentations in the recently thawed earth on the side of the house, perhaps a garden in summer. The woman clutched a faded red babushka around her head but wore no coat. She spoke in a crackly old voice. “Quick, follow me.” She led us back into the house. We stopped in a cluttered entryway. Winter coats hung on racks to our left, a row of boots under them. A window in the door let in the winter light. “Harriet,” she whispered.

  From the door opposite emerged the other little old woman. They faced us with their arms entwined. We towered at least a foot above them.

  “We must be quick, Mildred,” Harriet said.

  Mildred gulped. “Yes, if Constance knew we’d talked to you, she’d yell at us again.”

  They might have been twins. Mildred had removed her babushka and clutched it in one hand, occasionally dabbing at the side of her face with it.

  Harriet patted her tightly curled gray hair and said, “We listened at the door.”

  “We usually don’t,” Mildred said. “It’s rude and none of our business, but we heard you talking about Father Sebastian’s death. We couldn’t let you leave. He was so wonderful, and Harriet’s a baseball fan so she recognized Mr. Carpenter.” She tittered. “You’re both such good-looking young men.”

  Harriet said, “We want to help. I can tell you Father Clarence isn’t here. We don’t know where he is, do we?” They looked at each other for confirmation.

  Mildred said, “Such a handsome and well-spoken young man.” She sniffed. “At least he doesn’t treat us cruelly like that”—she hesitated, then finished—“that beast, Constance.”

  Harriet said, “But no one was nicer than Father Sebastian.” They chirped together about his kindness for several moments.

  I controlled my growing impatience. “You wanted to see us,” I said.

  Eventually Mildred told the story. Ever since Father Sebastian died the rectory had been in chaos. The temporary assistant wanted to change too much. They’d worked there for over twenty-five years together. They would never repeat gossip, but they knew secrets.

  They knew all about Clarence’s nocturnal comings and goings. “Priests are supposed to stay in the rectory,” Mildred said. “Sometimes he’s out every night of the week.”

  Harriet arched an eyebrow, “Sometimes for weeks in a row.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “We live over there.” Mildred pointed out the window and across the street. I saw a little rectangular box of dirty red bricks, two front windows, and a screenless front door. A 1951 Packard in mint condition sat in the driveway. “I’m awake very late every night,” she said.

  “And I wake up early every day,” Harriet said. “I’m up at five every morning. I see him sneaking in.”

  “Maybe he’s got an apartment somewhere,” I said.

  They gave me pitying looks. “He lies about where he goes,” Mildred said. “We’ve heard him tell people he slept in the rectory. Nobody knows he leaves except us.”

  “Father Sebastian knew,” Harriet amended.

  “Yes, such a saint.” Mildred sighed. “He covered up for Father Clarence. Young people make so many foolish mistakes, and Father Sebastian helped him so much.”

  “But Father Sebastian knew?” I asked.

  Mildred glanced at the door, leaned toward us, and whispered, “Yes, but he didn’t approve.”

  “They had angry words,” Harriet said. “Father Sebastian didn’t approve of his caterwauling all night.”

  I asked them when this was.

  “About two years ago, soon after Father Clarence arrived,” Mildred said. “Father Clarence had a lot of modern ideas. He’d only talk to people during business hours. He made Father Sebastian get the answering machine. Father Clarence wanted to run the parish like a corporation.”

  “No heart or soul,” Harriet said. “No people dropping by just to visit. Everybody had to have appointments.”

  “Did the priests quarrel often?” I asked.

  “No. Father Sebastian wasn’t a fighter. I think he lost his temper that one time in a moment of weakness. He had the flu that week. I remember because I had to make a trip to the old neighborhood in Chicago to get the proper ingredients for an old family cure,” Mildred said.

  Harriet smiled. “It always works.”

  Mildred continued. “They yelled while he was sick, but I heard Father Sebastian apologize a week later.”

  Harriet nodded agreement. “Most of the time they got along very well.”

  The nodded their heads in unison at the end of each sentence as a kind of visual punctuation.

  Worry about Constance seemingly forgotten, I let them run on about life at the rectory. Most of it was of little use. They did tell us that chancery officials had been crawling all over the rectory for two weeks. For the first few days after Sebastian’s death, Clarence had stayed in almost every night.

  I asked if we could see Father Sebastian and Father Clarence’s rooms.

  They exchanged nervous looks, tittered behind their hands, and nodded simultaneous agreement. They took us through the door, with rapid peeks in all directions including behind us, then into the kitchen, down the main hall, and a quick left up a sweeping grand staircase. From the office area on the main floor came the soft thwack-thwack of paper exiting a copying machine.

  Upstairs they led us to the left past closed doors, two on the left, three on the right. Harriet fumbled rapidly through a set of keys and unlocked the last door on the right. “Father Clarence’s room,” she announced as she led us in. After we entered, Mildred stood guard at the door. Father Clarence obviously didn’t believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. Several pairs of sweat socks and a jock strap formed a small mound in front of the closet. A blue dress shirt had strayed several feet from this pile. A heap of bed linen fought with numerous pillows for the right to center stage on the bed.

  The dresser had a framed portrait of a family. A young Father Clarence smiled at us along with an older male and female and several teenagers, at a guess his parents, brother, and sister. From the dresser top I took a small heap of mail, all ads and bills.

  Suddenly Mildred hissed, “Someone’s coming!” She whisked the door shut and joined us.

  We held our breaths in the middle of the floor, but the footsteps never approached our door. They faded, returned, moved deliberately down the stairs.

  We breathed again and resumed searching. Scott checked the closet. I looked rapidly through the materials in the dresser. In the top drawer rested the largest, most jumbled collection of bikini briefs I’d ever seen. In my quick look through it seemed as if Clarence hadn’t duplicated one color or pattern. Nothing incriminating or even remotely interesting jumped out of any of the drawers.

  I finished the dresser and began hunting through the bathroom. Toothbrush, aspirin, vitamin C, C
entrum multivitamin, two different brands of suntan oil, a jumble of fingernail and toenail clippers. All in all, no hidden passage, stash of illegal drugs, or secret note admitting to murder or kidnapping.

  Again at the door, the women repeated their searching looks, concluding with nods to each other, and off we tiptoed down the way we came, past the stairs and into the first door on our left.

  “Sebastian’s old room,” Harriet whispered.

  The older priest merited a suite. The first room had dark gold wall-to-wall carpeting interrupted only by a rectangle of tiles in front of a fireplace in which sat a neat pile of logs on a grate, but no ash underneath—lack of use or incredible tidiness. Light gold drapes matched the carpet. Brown leather love seats faced each other in front of sliding glass doors that led to a small balcony. We’d taken several steps toward the bedroom when Mildred sounded her warning. This time as we huddled together the door opened. Constance Madison stared angrily. In obedience to her command we marched downstairs. The three of them stayed behind. Downstairs in the kitchen we heard loud shouts from upstairs, the voices making remarkably loud and distinctly unchristian comments back and forth.

  While we paused to listen, Father Clarence walked in. He stopped abruptly when he saw us. “What the hell are you two doing here?”

  “Jerry’s been kidnapped,” I said.

  “Your nephew? That’s outrageous.” His surprise and shock didn’t seem fake. “You think I had something to do with it because of what he said.”

  “Cut the crap,” I said. “He didn’t lie. He heard something. You’re the direct link. We want answers, explanations, and alibis, if you have them.”

  We all heard renewed raised voices from upstairs at the same time. We explained, then followed as he hurried through the house and up the stairs. We stood in the doorway while he straightened out the mess. Turned out Mildred and Harriet’s last name was Weber. After he’d established a truce he told them we needed to talk.

  The Weber sisters managed to trip and chirp over every object in an unhurried trek to the hall. I imagined Constance would keep them from listening at the door.

  We sat opposite him on the leather couches. From there I could see out the sliding-glass double door beyond the balcony to a cloudless day and a few remaining patches of snow on the ground.

  He couldn’t have done the kidnapping, he said. He’d been with his wife since noon yesterday. It was his day off, and they’d driven to Rockford for shopping. They tried to socialize in distant cities and suburbs to avoid accidental encounters with parishioners.

  “You could have organized it,” Scott said.

  “With an alibi I couldn’t use except to people like you?” he said. “That makes no sense.”

  “Somebody did it, and you had the best reason,” I said. “We want to know whom you were talking to the other day after Mass and what was said. If you don’t tell us, we blow the whistle on your sex life. A little nooky is one thing. A full-blown marriage, and a kid is another.”

  He got up and paced the room, touching the fixtures, adjusting his Roman collar. He wound up at the sliding doors, tapping his knuckles against the pane.

  “I thought I could stop by becoming a priest.” He turned to us. “Girls have thrown themselves at me since before puberty. I learned about sex fast, but I knew it was wrong.” He held out his hands to us, pleading. “I honestly believed as a kid that when I had intercourse outside of marriage, it was a mortal sin. It got so I’d have sex with a girl, then run to confession. I couldn’t stop either habit. I liked being popular, and the girls turned me on. I never told them about my horrible guilt feelings, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

  He returned to the couch, sat back, and closed his eyes.

  “You’re the first ones I’ve told this to outside of confession.” He sighed deeply, reopened his eyes, and resumed his story. “At each confession I’d tell only the individual sin. I’d switch from priest to priest at different parishes. Even with the seal of confession I was petrified. I was afraid the priests would recognize my voice. I think one guy did.” He winced. “I prayed and repented, but the next week I’d do it again. I thought as a priest it’d get easier. In the seminary they kept us away from most outside influence, so I didn’t have much of a problem. I didn’t have any trouble fending off the fags.”

  “Gay people,” Scott reminded him.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Clarence said. “Anyway, being away from women helped. I’ve never been into jacking off. I’d always had an outlet. I might have beat off five times in my life.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I got out of the seminary, and it started all over. My first day of office hours in my first rectory, I met my future wife.”

  He gave us chapter and verse of his fairly ordinary double standard. He even told us about cheating on his girlfriend with a number of flings each place he’d been stationed.

  Once she got pregnant, he agreed to marry her. They moved down to the Manhattan area after he got assigned to St. Joseph’s.

  He talked for nearly fifteen minutes, maybe glad for a chance to finally tell somebody a little ordinary truth. I held myself in check while he unburdened himself. Oddly enough, while I thought he was a sexual idiot, I felt a little sorry for him, torn as he was between pleasure and punishment.

  “Tell us about the fight with Sebastian,” I said.

  “Who told you about that?” he asked.

  I glared. “We ask the questions. You give the answers.”

  His right fist clenched a moment, and he threw a string of unpriestly epithets at us, but he didn’t get up to leave or try to throw us out.

  After he ran down, I said, “I want your entire relationship with Sebastian, honestly detailed.”

  After a few more spurts of wounded pride, he told us. He and the old priest had existed in tenuous truce. For two years, they had agreed not to tell the chancery about each other. Sebastian had questioned Clarence the morning after he stayed out all night from the rectory for the first time. Clarence knew he needed a cover, so instead of denying his sexual activity, he suggested a deal.

  Sebastian’s continued involvement in Faith, after being specifically ordered not to, could have caused him some major problems. Clarence agreed not to report him and to cover for him if necessary. In return Sebastian would maintain silence about Clarence’s married life.

  Clarence explained about wanting to stay a priest, emphasizing the good he could do for people. He wanted both worlds and would fight to keep them.

  “Sebastian didn’t raise much objection. Maybe he really was the saint everybody says he was. I think he felt sorry for me. I’m probably the first actively heterosexual priest he ever met. How could he talk? If I had told on him, he’d be in just as deep shit as me.”

  “What about what Jerry overheard?” I said.

  This was a pure accident according to Clarence. He’d never have threatened Jerry if he hadn’t been so startled.

  It seems an official high in the diocesan hierarchy had come to give him a friendly warning. Word in the chancery was that they had to cover up the real cause of Sebastian’s death, but that an internal investigation of the priests in the parish, already secretly under way for some months, would be expanded. Rumors of sexual irregularities in, at, or connected with St. Joseph’s rectory had reached too far up in the hierarchy to be ignored. Clarence didn’t know why there needed to be a cover-up of the cause of death. He hadn’t been terribly interested because of the threat the sexual investigation posed to his own safety.

  On that day Clarence had panicked at the news. He told the official everything he knew about Sebastian’s gay life and then confessed to sexual indiscretion. The chancery official was an old friend of Sebastian’s and someone Clarence trusted from his seminary days. The friend promised to delay any investigation as much as possible, giving Clarence time to decide if he wanted to stay a priest, get a divorce, or find some unknown third solution. The friend had left. Clarence, relieved but still badly shaken, heard the noise and stumbl
ed on Jerry. Fury at another part of his life out of his control caused him to lose his temper at the boy.

  I asked for the name of the chancery official; we’d have to talk to him. Reluctantly, under pressure, he told us it was Auxiliary Bishop John Smith. We also got access to Father Sebastian’s room.

  As we began our search Clarence said, “I don’t think it’ll do you any good. A couple of old guys, priests from the diocese, came by the day after the funeral and took out maybe a suitcase full of stuff.” Clarence didn’t know of any family Sebastian might have. He thought he spent most holidays with an old friend or two from his seminary days. “I got the impression,” Clarence said, “that the ones who cleaned the room were old friends of his. They took only the immediately personal stuff.” He only knew that the priests came from the chancery and that it was a normal occurrence when a priest died with no family for someone from the central office to take care of things.

  I told him I wanted him to call ahead to his buddy in the chancery to set up a meeting and to smooth our way. With some reluctance, he did so as we listened. Then we searched Sebastian’s room and found absolutely nothing at all connected with murder. The combination of chancery office and the probable cleaning by the Weber sisters had made it totally antiseptic.

  As we prepared to go I asked if he knew of any possible love interest in Sebastian’s life.

  He shook his head. “The guy believed in his chastity vow. He refused to judge others, but held himself to a rigid moral code. I can see him becoming very close to somebody but not consummating the union, if that’s what gays call it.”

  “Some of us call it that,” Scott said. We left him standing in the middle of the room. A quick stop at Glen’s found the parents sitting worriedly on the couch without a lead to pursue. I explained how the disappearance might have been connected to Sebastian’s death. They seemed to prefer that explanation to assuming some child molester had got hold of him. Glen had no problem with my keeping Jerry’s secret. He said, “What would we have done differently if we knew? The kid’s been making his way home for years by himself.” We promised to do whatever we could to help find him.