by J.F. Powers
“The boy’s giving up the store.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Dickie.
“It’s well to be sure,” Father Urban said, in case they were talking about Dickie’s vocation. “Were you, perhaps, thinking of something else?”
Dickie, who was sitting on a big footstool, with his hands all but lost in his hair, said, “This is the century of the cad.”
Father Urban thought this over for a moment, and then, to Mrs Thwaites, he said: “I take it this is why you’ve asked me here.”
“Yes, I thought you might be able to tell the boy what to do.”
Father Urban glanced at Dickie.
Dickie looked up from the floor at which he’d been staring. “Of course, I’d be interested in anything you might have to say, Father.”
Father Urban sat back in his chair, a club chair with an odd cushion, and was suddenly like a man sitting in a floating inner tube. “Then suppose,” he said, sitting forward, “we begin at the beginning. Why Ostergothenburg?”
Dickie said that he’d chosen Ostergothenburg, a highly Catholic community (as Great Plains wasn’t), to be near his mother—it was only an hour’s drive home in his little Porsche—and to be near St Ludwig’s and St Hedwig’s. Among the Dolomites who ran these colleges, one for boys, one for girls, both among the fathers and the sisters, Dickie had friends. He had opened the Eight Seasons in the summer, and had done well enough until late in the fall. Then “Dullinger’s young toughs”—Father Urban gathered that Dickie was referring to Bishop Dullinger’s young clergy—began to visit the Eight Seasons. They came not to buy and not even to browse. They stood around in their great stormcoats, dropping cigarette and cigar butts on the floor and saying whatever came to their minds, if you please. They laughed at the stock of sacred art, jeered at the work of such men as Franklinstein, Varian, and Foo. There had been incidents. Yes, Dickie’s friends and supporters among the Dolomite fathers and sisters had—at least the sisters had—clashed with Dullinger’s young toughs in the Eight Seasons. Unfortunately, it was now off-limits for Dolomites of both sexes, and college students seemed to be avoiding it, too. Here was the heavy hand of Bishop Dullinger. Dickie had been stuck with forty percent of his imported, and therefore unreturnable, Christmas cards. And now the brute (Bishop Dullinger) was refusing to consecrate a chalice purchased at the Eight Seasons, a chalice executed in the manner of Henry Moore. Back before Christmas, a group of laymen, obviously fronting for the diocese, had made Dickie an offer for the Eight Seasons. He’d rejected it out of hand. Then he’d heard a rumor that the diocese was going to open up a store of its own. And now—that very morning—another offer had come from the first group. This time Dickie had listened, but only because he wanted to discuss the matter with his mother and with his friends among the Dolomites. He had been calling St Ludwig’s and St Hedwig’s all day, but hadn’t been able to reach any of his friends, and well . . .
“Sell,” said Father Urban.
“That’s what I say,” said Mrs Thwaites. “You can’t afford not to.”
“I want to stay on and fight,” Dickie said to the floor.
“No good—not in your business,” Father Urban said. “You’re already finding that out. Did they make you a fair offer?”
“For the location and good will, yes, but nothing for my stock. Oh, they did say they’d take the rosaries and the worst of the books at cost.”
“Unload the rest wherever you can,” Father Urban said. “If the stuff’s as good as you say—and I don’t say it isn’t—that shouldn’t be so hard. I really don’t know too much about it. The only name that meant anything to me was Thomas More. That shows you how much I know about it.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?” said Dickie, in that nasty way he had.
After observing a moment of silence, Father Urban said, “Well, I’m afraid I have to run along.” He’d had enough of Dickie, and Mrs Thwaites looked as though she wanted her sets on.
“Thank you for coming, Father,” she said, “And many thanks for the advice.”
“I know it wasn’t what he wanted to hear,” Father Urban said, though he thought perhaps it was, “but I don’t think it ever pays to buck a bishop in his see.”
“He can’t afford it. Now get up,” Mrs Thwaites said to Dickie, “and see Father Urban out.”
Dickie removed his hands from his hair, rose from the foot-stool, and walked. At the door he passed out ahead of Father Urban. The boy seemed deep in thought. He said nothing until they reached the bottom of the stairs. “I’m bringing out a series of paperback books. Spiritual classics, you might call ’em,” he said, as if he wouldn’t.
“That sounds very worth-while. You’ll publish them yourself?”
“No, I’ll just edit them.”
Father Urban opened the door, as he had upstairs, and again Dickie passed ahead of him. They went down the steps together, and out to the car, Dickie talking. “There’ll be problems, of course, in editing. It won’t be easy. Denzinger’s Enchiridion, ‘the lost books’ of Tertullian—making such works attractive to a sizable audience, perhaps to a large audience, perhaps to a very large audience. Nobody knows what can be done with such works in cheap editions. It’s an experiment that’s never been tried.”
“Well, I must say it sounds very worth-while,” said Father Urban, opening the car door and taking care that Dickie didn’t get in. Father Urban turned off the radio and introduced Dickie, since he was still there, to Jack, and Jack to Dickie—as an author, saying, and hoping memory served him right, “Father’s doing the life of St Adalbert.”
“The apostle to the Slavs?”
“The Bohemian,” Jack said.
“Oh, the apostle to Pomerania. A good sort of man, for a bishop—too good, by all accounts.”
“But I haven’t begun it yet.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
Father Urban drove Jack to the Hill—“No, I won’t come in, thanks”—and then drove himself back to Great Plains, slowly, enjoying the landscape in the moonlight. The hills, under snow, the trees casting shadows, had an enchanted look, the look of night in the north in the movies, and the sky was all broken out with stars. Once, at a bend in the road, the headlights slipped up on some white rabbits playing in a field. Father Urban hadn’t realized that rabbits had such fun. The world was really a beautiful place. He rolled along enjoying it all, oblivious of himself, until he entered the city limits of Great Plains. He was sorry that he’d have only two or three more days with the car, which he’d come to depend on, and he was going to miss the deep satisfaction there was in doing the work of a parish priest—his daily Mass meant even more to him at St Monica’s. He had done well there in the last five weeks. Could he have done better? He did not think so. His record would speak for itself.
• Mrs Burns, freed from the telephone, given a new lease on life.
• Johnny Chumley rehabilitated.
• People polled on new church—and pollinated.
• Parish life now a reality.
• Attendance at daily Mass up 150 percent (eight–ten people now made it).
• Mission—most successful in history of parish.
• All-around good work for the Order.
• Mrs Thwaites.
Here, until that evening, there hadn’t been much to cheer about. At the end of each week, Father Urban received an envelope with a fifty-dollar bill in it, but this, though more than it might have been—it might easily have been nothing—was probably no more than Phil had been getting. Father Urban had heard Mrs Thwaites’s confession once, and had talked over her chances in the next world, giving her all the reassurance he could—which wasn’t quite enough, he’d felt. Mrs Thwaites was pretty much as Monsignor Renton had described her, in that respect. But it now appeared that Father Urban, without knowing it, had scored somewhere along the line. Otherwise why would Mrs. Thwaites have tried him out in the role of adviser? And since this was a role he might be asked to play again, having played it well
once, it probably had to be rated as the greatest of his achievements while at St Monica’s. Much good could come from it, for the Order.
It was almost ten when Father Urban arrived back at the rectory, but a young man was waiting for him. The young man was wearing a short coat made of the same material as Wilf’s long devil’s-food one, but green, and he needed a shave. He said he wasn’t a Catholic but was married to “one.” He said his children were being brought up as Catholics. He said, “What more do you want?”
It was Father Urban’s practice, in census-taking, to express regret when he discovered that children were not attending the parish school—not too much regret, though, since the parish school was overcrowded—and it was this, presumably, this regret expressed by Father Urban, and communicated to the young man by his wife, that had brought him to the rectory. “May I ask your religion, sir?” said Father Urban.
“Don’t have any,” said the young man.
“I see. Well, we don’t want to make one of that, do we?”
“How’d you like a bust in the nose?”
At that point, Johnny Chumley entered the office and went over to the file, opened a drawer, and stood looking into it.
After a moment, during which nothing happened, the young man got up and walked out.
“Thanks, Johnny,” said Father Urban. “I didn’t realize he’d been drinking.”
Johnny shut the drawer of the file. “Monsignor Renton called a while ago.”
“Oh no!” said Father Urban, thinking Monsignor Renton was asking for still more time to wear Phil down.
“No,” Johnny said. “No. The Pastor’s dead.”
9. DEAR BILLY:
LONG LIVE THE PASTOR?
Although the Great Plains diocese was hard up for men, no order, and certainly not the Clementines, could expect to walk into an established, going concern like St Monica’s. Those good men and true who’d coveted the parish while Phil was alive were still there, and doubtless more had joined them now that he was dead. Nevertheless, Father Urban did ask himself whether there might not be a chance, just an outside chance, for the Order. Always, after asking, he had to reply in the negative, and yet he went right on asking. How could he?
To begin with, he was chosen to say a few words at Phil’s funeral. Whether this was the wish of the Bishop (or only the wish of Father Udovic, who did the actual asking), Father Urban didn’t know. In any case, it was not an easy assignment. Phil hadn’t been popular with laity or clergy. He represented a type of gentleman-priest no longer being produced in seminaries—now thoroughly Americanized and turning out policemen, disc jockeys, and an occasional desert father. And the circumstances of Phil’s death (heart attack while golfing in the Bahamas) weren’t favorable, for it was a very cold day in Minnesota. The Bishop had liked Phil, however, and that was about all Father Urban had going for him when he began to speak. “Most Reverend Bishop, Right Reverend and Very Reverend Monsignors, Reverend Fathers, Venerable Sisters, and Beloved Members of the Laity.” Although Father Urban knew that the deepest sympathies of the most important part of his audience could be readily engaged, he spoke more of death itself than of the death of a priest. But he did say it was not too much to say that Father Phil Smith, seeking to respond to every call, had given his life for his people, that he had exercised the common touch without ever becoming common, and that his greatest earthly desire had been to erect a new church at St Monica’s—for God’s sake and the people’s. “That I can assure you,” said Father Urban.
Only that morning, he said, he’d received a post card from Father Smith (written before he died), a post card (“Thanks again. Taking boat and pressed for time. All for now. Phil.”) from which he recalled only the words “All for now.” He dwelt upon the meaning in those three little words, though not as an etymologist might, saying that only saints and children could really comprehend them, for only great saints and little children lived each moment for all it was worth. Those three little words, rightly understood, were all we needed to know. Rightly understood, they would—like St Augustine’s famous “Love God, and do what you will”—carry us safely through this world and into the next.
Father Urban then spoke of God as the Good Thief of Time, accosting us wherever we go, along the highways and byways of life. So, in light and darkness, as children, as young people, as old, we meet Him. And bit by bit we are deprived of our most precious possessions, so we think, our childhood, our youth, all our days—which, though, lest we forget, we have from Him. We try to hold back what we can, have a secret pocket here, a slit in the lining there, where He won’t look, we think, but in the end we give up everything, every last conceit. “That’s all, Lord,” we say. “No,” saith the Lord. “What else, Lord?” “You,” saith the Lord. “Now I want you.” Thank God He does! Pray God that He always will! God Almighty wants you! That is the biggest, the best, fact of life! That is the fact of life! Death! Life and death and life—eternal life! Who could ask for anything more?
Afterward, in the sacristy, the Bishop called the sermon “a dazzling performance,” this in the hearing of several mastodons who stood high in the diocese, and then asked Father Urban whether he’d be able to stay on a bit at St Monica’s.
“That’s not for me to say, Your Excellency.”
“No?”
“No, Your Excellency. That’s up to you and Father Wilfrid.”
“Is this the man I’m to write the letter to?”
“Letter, Your Excellency?” It appeared that the woman who’d made the mistake of writing to Father Urban on a post card had managed to get in touch with her group’s moderator. Father Urban was tempted to carry his show of forgetfulness further, to the point of making the Bishop explain what he was talking about, but thought better of it. He had only wanted it understood that he had many calls on his time and wasn’t to be taken for granted, and this, he believed, was now understood. “Oh yes,” he said. “That’s right, Your Excellency.”
For a moment, the Bishop seemed to be waiting—as if expecting to be dispensed from the necessity of dealing with Wilf. This could not be, according to the rules of the game (any breach of which was a breach of his own authority, as the Bishop should be the first to see), and so Father Urban, though he wished he could help the Bishop, waited him out and said nothing. When they parted, as they did most amiably, it was Father Urban’s feeling that he might have distinguished himself even more by his replies in the sacristy than by his sermon.
Wilf phoned that afternoon. “I’d like to have you stay on there for a bit,” he said.
“How long?”
“I’m hoping it won’t be for too long. The brochure’s out. Three big boxes came this morning. Freight. And Wacker at the station just dumped ’em out in the snow. They’re all right, though. I put a copy in the mail for you, but it looks like it might be cheaper if we delivered the larger quantities ourself.”
“In the truck?”
“That’s how it looks. Of course, we’ll take what we need when we go out on Saturday, Father John and I, and if you’re over this way in a car, you might pick up the bundles labeled St Monica’s and Cathedral—and any others you can deliver without too much trouble. Saginaw, Bucklin, Lowell.”
“If I get over that way.”
“And maybe Webster and Conroyo. They’re not so far from you.”
“How about Arna?”
“It’d help, if you would.”
As a matter of fact, Father Urban wouldn’t, but he knew several laymen who’d be glad to do the job for him.
“Oh, and another thing,” said Wilf. “Talk to that women’s group over there, will you? You know the one.”
“Was something said about that?”
“Yes. The Bishop wants it.”
“You spoke to him?”
“No.”
“Father Udovic?”
“No, the girl in the office.”
The next day, as Father Urban was leaving the house for a luncheon engagement, he asked Johnny Chu
mley to call Father Udovic at the Chancery. “Father Udovic wasn’t in,” Johnny said later, “but I talked to the girl in the office and she said she’d take care of it.”
That evening the secretary of the women’s group phoned the rectory, and, after a date was agreed upon, Father Urban inquired: “Will the moderator be there?”
“He can’t always attend, you know.”
“No?”
“He’s the busiest priest in the diocese, you know.”
“Let’s just say he’s the busiest bishop.”
On the night Father Urban addressed the group, the moderator failed to appear. However, he sent word that it was now his hope to attend the next meeting, and the group’s president made quite a bit more of this hope than she did of the fact that Father Urban was there.
Father Urban was unhappy about this, and, of course, about the Bishop’s failure to show up, but nobody could have guessed it. He gave his subject (“The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World”) everything he had, and then flatly refused to accept the envelope tendered him by the chairman. “Not a-tall, not a-tall.” During the refreshment period—just coffee, since Lent had begun—he exchanged a few words with Sylvia Bean. Sylvia, not a member of the group, had come as the guest of an older woman. “And I’m certainly glad I did. Too bad the Bishop couldn’t come tonight.”
