by J.F. Powers
Wilf appeared somewhat shaken by what he’d heard. “But what if the Bishop doesn’t write?”
“Frankly, I’ll be surprised if he does.”
“Just playing hard to get, eh?”
“Not a-tall. Why should I knock myself out for somebody who sends me a post card? How do I know it isn’t just this woman’s idea to have me come and give a talk? How do I know the Bishop would be there for it? I gather he isn’t very good about coming to meetings. The point is, if we’re going to oblige this group, the Bishop ought to be the one to invite us. When that happens, why, then, there’ll be some reason to go. I have no illusions about talking to women’s groups.”
“And if he doesn’t invite us?”
“Then I don’t think we should go.”
“I see what you mean. Yes.”
“I knew you would.” Wilf could appreciate the theory, but the practice frightened him. Wilf’s natural tendency was to give up and eat the bait.
He was pleasantly surprised by the number of requests being received at the Hill for speakers, he said that evening at table. In fact, he wondered if they shouldn’t give some thought to starting up “a speakers’ bureau” at the Hill. “The idea has possibilities,” he said, and kicked it around for a while. He suggested, among other things, that Brother Harold might give chalk talks to teenagers. “Well, we’ll see,” he said, finally shutting up.
Jack had shown no enthusiasm for a speakers’ bureau, and Father Urban, when asked for his opinion, had said, “I really wouldn’t know. I’ve always worked alone.” Father Urban was annoyed with Wilf for presenting the idea as he had—as if more than one man were in demand at the Hill. Actually, it was a dangerous idea. For who, with Father Urban on the menu, would want Wilf, Jack, or Brother Harold? Wilf, to preserve the fiction of a bureau, would be sending himself or Jack (“also well known”) out on Father Urban’s bookings. Then hard feelings would arise between the Order and the groups who had contracted to hear Father Urban, and, yes, between members of the community at the Hill. The idea had possibilities all right—for all kinds of strife.
Perhaps Jack recognized this. “Well . . .” he said the following evening, after Wilf had raised the matter again.
“I grant it might conflict to some extent,” Wilf said, “with our other work.”
“I turned down a couple of people today for that very reason,” Father Urban said. “I just don’t have much left in the evenings.”
Wilf, after a slight pause, said, “Father and I were speaking of the work we’ll soon be doing here, Father.”
“Oh,” said Father Urban, as if he hadn’t known. Perhaps he wasn’t playing fair with Wilf, but then Wilf—in this matter and others—wasn’t playing fair with him.
The lights went out.
“Did you do something out there?” Wilf called into the kitchen.
“No, Father,” Brother Harold called back, and a moment later he came into the refectory carrying a dim flashlight.
“Turn it off,” Wilf said, and when this had been done—to save the batteries—he continued the inquiry in total darkness. “You didn’t have your mixer on, did you?”
“Not then. I did earlier.” Perhaps Brother Harold’s only fault, in Wilf’s view, was that he used his mixer too much.
“And disconnected it?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And the TV wasn’t on,” Wilf said.
“I may be at fault,” said another voice. “I left an electric heater on in my room.”
“I didn’t know you had an electric heater, Father.”
“I left it on to take the chill off my room. I plan to spend the evening there. I’ve got some letters to write.”
From out of the darkness: “I didn’t know you had an electric heater, Father.”
“Monsignor Renton was kind enough to lend me one. It gets pretty cold in my room, you know.”
“I hope you didn’t tell him that, Father.”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“I wish you hadn’t, Father.”
“God knows it’s the truth.”
“If that gets around, it could keep retreatants away. Flash-light, Brother.” Wilf ordered Brother Harold to take a candle from the kitchen and to go and stand by the fusebox in the corridor. Then Wilf moved off silently, carrying the dim flashlight, and Father Urban followed him. Jack sat on at the table, in the dark.
Upstairs, Father Urban stood by the door of his room, as ordered, while Wilf went inside and disconnected the heater.
“Tell Brother it’s O.K. now.”
Father Urban sang out that it was O.K.
Wilf was moving toward the floor lamp when it came on. “Left that burning, too.”
“That I forgot.”
Wilf knelt to examine the little plate on the heater. “No wonder! Thirteen hundred and twenty on low and sixteen hundred and fifty on high—and you had it on high! You trying to burn the house down, Father?”
“You know what I was trying to do, Father.”
“You only sleep here, Father.”
“I’d like to be able to do more. I’d like to able to sit down and read and write in something like comfort.”
“Well, you won’t wear long underwear,” Wilf said, going over to the register. He knew better than to feel it. “What’s wrong with downstairs? The refectory’s always nice and warm.”
“It isn’t suitable.”
“Well, I don’t have to tell you this circuit won’t take this heater.”
“And wasn’t suitable even before we got television.”
Wilf looked old. “I’ll take another look at your duct,” he said, and quickly departed.
He could be heard down in the bowels of the house, tampering with the furnace, but when the heat came on again, it was, as usual, not for long, and more ebb than flow. When the temperature dropped to normal in his room, as it soon did, Father Urban put aside his breviary and went to bed. By not going downstairs to television, he hoped to keep the pressure on Wilf. He hadn’t meant that they should give up television and turn the one cozy room into a study. That, though, was what Wilf must have concluded—in his guilt, which was the guilt of the hooked but not yet hardened viewer—and on the high ground of that misunderstanding, Father Urban would take his stand, saying nothing, letting his actions speak.
The next evening, however, when he might have been home in bed keeping the pressure on Wilf, Father Urban was out. Early in the afternoon, a Mr Bean had called from St Paul to say that he’d be driving back to Great Plains that day and would like to pick up Father Urban on the way and take him to dinner—it was something he’d been wanting to do for some time. “O.K., if that’s how it is,” said Father Urban, assuming that they’d met somewhere.
Apparently, though, Mr Bean was just one of those people who had heard him—whether at St Monica’s on Sundays, or at the Poinsettia Smorgasbord, Father Urban didn’t know or bother to ask. They drove on to Great Plains, with Mr Bean, a weedy little man with a bass voice, doing all the talking. He was in outdoor advertising, and, for the last few days, he and his cohorts had been preparing for the battle soon to take place between them and the anti-billboard lobby in the state legislature. Mr Bean was full of it. “I still don’t know where you stand, Father,” he said, when they pulled into the parking lot of the General Diggles Hotel, where they were to eat. “Nor do I,” said Father Urban, getting out of the car. This was the kind of controversy he liked to steer clear of—he could meet somebody on the other side tomorrow.
Nothing had been said about Mrs Bean, but there she was, waiting for them in the Greenwich Village Room: the attractive redhead who had given Father Urban trouble at the smorgasbord. Father Urban felt trapped, felt that he had been brought there because Mrs Bean wanted another crack at him, and in the same arena, and that her husband had acted as matchmaker. But there was no mention of the earlier encounter—Mrs Bean must have assumed that she wouldn’t be remembered—and the conversation went along nicely, with everyb
ody having a second drink and with Father Urban giving an amusing account of the hardships and misadventures of the little community at the Hill. Through it all, even in the matter of the electric heater, he covered up for Wilf (“Actually, he’s doing a bang-up job”) and was moving gradually from the ridiculous to the sublime aspects of the religious life when Mr Bean interrupted him.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said in the car, Father.”
Father Urban couldn’t recall saying anything memorable in the car. “Yes?”
“This may give you a better idea of us. The industry’s pledged the use of 12,000 highway billboards, for emergency-warning purposes. Within twenty-four hours after the declaration—the declaration that an enemy attack is imminent— we’ll have a previously prepared civil defense message up in six hundred key points around the country. Of course, we hope that day never comes, but if it does, we’ll be ready.”
“Sounds like a large order,” said Father Urban, thinking it didn’t make any sense in the space age but might throw the enemies of outdoor advertising for a slight loss.
“Oh hell, Ray!” said Mrs Bean, and went off on a tangent of her own—the persecutions taking place behind the Iron Curtain, the sufferings of “the Silent Church.” Turning on Father Urban, and referring, presumably, to his Sunday sermons at St Monica’s, she cried: “I keep hoping you’ll say something about that! But you never do!”
“We don’t know how lucky we are,” Father Urban said, trying to calm her down, but somehow sounding guilty—like the slacker she evidently believed him to be.
“Then say that!” cried Mrs Bean. “Oh, say something!”
“We follow a regular course of sermons in this diocese. At present we’re going through the sacraments, and that’s what I have to talk about.”
“You could still say something! Others do, you know.”
Obviously, Mrs Bean’s mind had been conditioned, if not impaired, by reading the Catholic press, and she may have had one more than was good for her, too. What else? Her husband couldn’t handle her—that was all too clear—and there were no children from their union to knock the starch out of her. Father Urban wondered if he could be making a mistake in being gentle with her. He had let her have it at the smorgasbord because there had been no other way, but perhaps it was the only way to handle her. She had asked him earlier if he ever read the Drover, and he had evaded the question, but when she asked him again, he said:
“It’s too rich for my blood.”
“Would you read it if I had it sent to you?”
“No.” The Drover, a weekly, had begun as a paper for the livestock trade, but it was now—and unfortunately had been for the last thirty years—wandering in the wilderness of religion and politics, keeping the old name, and doubtless a few old subscribers, and adding crooks and crosiers to the masthead where longhorns had been before. In no other paper would you find everything that was wrong with the Catholic press. The Drover had it all, all the worst features of the bully and the martyr. Why anybody—any educated person, even one who didn’t like the way the world was going—would want to read the Drover, Father Urban didn’t know.
“I’m going to subscribe you anyway.”
“Sylvia,” said Mr Bean.
“Don’t,” said Father Urban, with a smile, but firmly.
Mr Bean said, “If you don’t mind me asking, Father, how cold does it get in your room?”
Remembering that his sufferings were as nothing compared with those behind the Iron Curtain, Father Urban said, “Let’s just say it gets unbearably cool at times, Mr Bean.”
At this point, Mrs Bean got up and left the table. The atmosphere was such that Father Urban was relieved to see that she wasn’t taking her fur coat with her.
“Father, have you thought of calling in an electrician?”
“I won’t say I haven’t thought of it, Mr Bean.”
“Ray,” said Mr Bean.
“Ray,” said Father Urban.
“But you haven’t done anything yet, Father?”
“No, Ray, I haven’t.”
“Then don’t.”
The next day an electrician who did a lot of work for Ray Bean’s firm came to the Hill and did a rewiring job on Father Urban’s circuit, and there was heat in Father Urban’s room. Wilf, invited in to feel it, shook his head and said: ”I knew it. I was watching the meter go around downstairs.”
The next morning Wilf said, “Don’t have it on any more than you have to, will you?” And that evening, dropping in on Father Urban, he said, “You don’t have to run it on high, do you?”
The next day was Saturday. Early that morning, Wilf said, “Better pack. I’ve decided to send you to St Monica’s, after all. Phil’s been good to us, and you’ll be able to handle some of those speaking engagements you’re turning down now.”
“Whatever you say,” said Father Urban.
7. THE MOST A MAN CAN DO
PHIL SMITH, PASTOR of St Monica’s, though rather puffy in the face and gray-looking, was still a handsome man. His friend Monsignor Renton, Rector of the Cathedral, was large and pink, with a jug head, splendid white teeth, very blue eyes, and white hair, which, always neatly combed, gave him the look of the good little boy of long ago. Phil and Red were great friends and saw each other two or three evenings a week, usually at St Monica’s.
Father Urban, invited to have a nightcap on his first Saturday there, had since become a regular (as Wilf never had when he was going to St Monica’s) in the upper room. Here everything was pretty much as it had been when Phil and Monsignor Renton were curates at St Monica’s: leather chairs and old books and brown photographs of men and boys dressed for tennis, camping, and touring—these had been the three passions of their pastor, a Philadelphian, who’d not only planned the big brownstone rectory (cherry woodwork throughout, walled-off housekeeper’s quarters, five bedrooms, each with its toilet and bath, among other refinements), but paid for it with his own money, believing that he was to become the first bishop of Great Plains. Unfortunately, the friend who’d been running interference for him in Rome had got into trouble over his friend in France—of course Gallicanism was always a danger with the French, Monsignor Renton said—and the bishopric had gone to another. Brother clergy, still jealous but no longer afraid of the man, had then hung the nickname “Bathroom” on him, and this had proved harder for him to live with, in his big rectory, than the humiliation of having been left at the church “by those Aztecs in the Curia.” So said Monsignor Renton. “Oh yes. He was a convert—from Anglicanism—and believed in fair play. I’d say he died a broken man.”
The church he’d planned had never been built. It would have been the Cathedral, and that was why the rectory was more impressive than the church at St Monica’s.
The effects of that ecclesiastical tragedy were again being felt there, now that the big swamp down the hill was no more, was dry land, now that people were living on it—a surprising number of them young Catholics of rural background, fertile, church-going people. They were Phil’s problems. Most men would have been happy with such a problem, or at least would have dealt with it. Phil wasn’t happy with it, and he wasn’t dealing with it. Phil, who had put off building a church for years, and was still putting it off when Father Urban arrived on the scene, said he didn’t like it that the promoters of Orchard Park had used shots of his church and school as part of the come-on propaganda without a word to him. Phil seemed to think that if he’d been asked for his permission, he might have withheld it, and thus nipped Orchard Park in the bud. Otherwise, he didn’t say much about his problem.
And what did Monsignor Renton, who had made such an excellent first impression on Father Urban, say? He said, “I blame the state—for draining the swamp.”
Meanwhile, the poor people were standing in the aisles on Sundays. Saturdays, in their way, were worse. Phil just vanished after hearing a few confessions, and Father Chumley, the curate, besides being something of a spook, was a very slow worker. Father Ur
ban, of course, kept his line moving right along, but after a couple of Saturdays at St Monica’s, he had a personal following (this always happened if he stayed long enough in one place), and it didn’t help the situation to have more people coming oftener.
Penitents caught in the bottleneck at St Monica’s went downtown to the Cathedral. Had they been coming from anywhere but St Monica’s, Monsignor Renton would have done something about them, not that he was suffering so much personally. (By custom, he heard confessions only at Christmas and Easter, and yet if the lines did get too long on an ordinary Saturday he might put himself into service for a brief spell, crying “Over here! Over here!” while dusting out his confessional.) Fortunately, the Cathedral curates, two youngsters very much under each other’s influence (and consequently out of sympathy with him, Monsignor Renton said), attributed the overflow in great part to their extreme, and yet still growing, popularity with the laity.
