Deadline for a Critic

by William Kienzle

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing . . . for now.”

  “What do you mean, ‘for now’?”

  “I’m going to save it.”

  “Save the picture? What in heaven’s name for?”

  “For someday.”

  “Someday? What do you mean someday?”

  “I don’t even know when that’ll be. I sure as hell don’t need it now. I’ve got the poor bastard where I want him right now. I don’t need to drop this on him. I’m just going to hold onto it. Maybe someday I’ll need it. Maybe someday I’ll have to settle the score with him once and for all. Then I’ll use it. Maybe someday it’ll drive him nuts for everybody to know he’s nothing but a sneaky firebug.”

  Koesler said no more. His mind was swimming in these revelations. He had never before known an arsonist. He was devastated that one of his friends was a firebug. But he could not deny Palmer’s proof.

  Koesler was even more disconcerted that another of his friends could be so mean-spirited. He would not have thought David Palmer capable of blackmail.

  Koesler’s premonition that a horrendous evil would evolve from an otherwise innocent music recital had proven accurate.

  Part Three

  Liturgy of the Word

  6

  Father Koesler hoped his mouth was not hanging open. It often did when he was lost in thought. And he had, indeed, been lost in the memory of Robert Koesler, the musical hack; David Palmer, the gifted musician; and poor Ridley Groendal, talented, but not quite up to his own or others’ aspirations and expectations.

  By simply bringing his eyes into focus once more, he saw David Palmer seated in the congregation. He appeared to be musically evaluating the motet just rendered by the choir. There seemed no other thought or concern on his mind.

  There should have been.

  Koesler forced his attention back to the Mass of Resurrection. It was time for the Liturgy of the Word. There would be three readings from the Bible: one from the Old Testament, one from the Epistles, and one from the Gospels. Since the Second Vatican Council, there had been a reemphasis on the importance of Scripture in the Mass. Before Vatican II, Scripture readings had been more or less perfunctory. Nor had much importance been made of drawing upon the Scriptures for homiletic purposes.

  All that had been changed. Now, Catholics were encouraged to find the living presence of God in “God’s Word.”

  Willliam Doran, one of St. Anselm’s lectors, stepped to the podium to read from the Second Book of Samuel.

  “The king was shaken and went up to the room, over the city gate to weep. He said as he wept, ‘My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you. Absalom, my son, my son!’ Joab was told that the king was weeping and mourning for Absalom; and that day’s victory was turned into mourning for the whole army when they heard that the king was grieving for his son. The soldiers stole into the city that day like men shamed by flight in battle.”

  Doran closed the lectionary and held it high, saying, “This is the word of the Lord.”

  To which the congregation replied, “Thanks be to God.”

  Koesler reflected that while Doran read well, there was one in the congregation who would have read even better. That would be Carroll Mitchell. Although he was a playwright and a screenwriter, his earliest training and experience on stage had been as an actor. And he had the actor’s finely trained voice and presence. He would have read the Scripture excerpt magnificently. But that, of course, was out of the question under the circumstances.

  The sight of Carroll Mitchell brought Koesler’s memory back to his earliest days at Sacred Heart Seminary. When he had first entered that specialized high school in the early forties, he had known no one but his fellow Redeemerite, Ridley Groendal.

  In those days, seminaries were well supplied with candidates for the priesthood. They would become steadily more crowded until the dramatic drop of the seventies.

  Seminary faculties of that era liked to think that they conscientiously promoted only the best and brightest. In reality, as time would tell, it was a buyer’s market. Because there was such a record number of students, the administration had the luxury of being very selective in their choice of who would move on to the priesthood. The weeding-out process went on inexorably from year to year. While great numbers of students were dropped for intellectual, moral, or medical reasons during high school and college, it was not rare for some to be asked to leave even during the final four years of theology.

  Koesler and Groendal quickly blended into that group of young men who had a common vision and goal. As high school freshmen, they were hazed by sophomores. They bought tickets to nonexistent swimming pools. They were sent on missions to off-limits sections of the buildings. Eventually, they became upper classmen.

  Quite a few students were musically inclined. But there were no David Palmers with whom to contend. Early on, Groendal resolved that he would dominate the musical scene. And so he did. He became the principal organist, frequent accompanist for others, and regular performer whenever concerts were held.

  Koesler continued to play the piano mostly for his own amusement. He was in competition with no one. While Groendal competed, or at least tried to compete, with almost everyone. It was, Koesler had often thought, as if Ridley were obsessed. With the exception of sports—Groendal had never been very well coordinated—he seemed compelled to challenge nearly everyone.

  This tendency led to disaster when Groendal collided with Carroll Mitchell. Mitch, as everyone called him, was to the theater what David Palmer was to the violin—a natural. Tall and freckled, with thick red hair and brows, Mitch, with his chiseled features, was one of the seminary’s most handsome students.

  But he wasn’t just a pretty face. He had a powerful, affecting, and pleasing voice, great presence, and the ability to involve an audience with genuinely moving performances.

  To top it off, Mitch was a playwright—albeit an amateur. None of his plays had been published; all of them had been performed in the seminary, without charge and on a shoestring. Many were no more than skits, sometimes pulled together for a full-length performance. Though most of his work was comedy, he had also done serious drama, particularly on Lenten themes.

  Though Ridley did perform from time to time, he knew he could not keep up with Mitch on stage. But he did consider himself a playwright and he had worked out some fairly entertaining stage pieces. Of course in that setting one could be fooled. A captive audience, the students were astonishingly easy to please.

  And so the rivalry between Mitch and Ridley went on. But the only one conscious of the combat was Groendal. As David Palmer before him, Mitchell never considered Groendal a competitor.

  Enter the subject of girls.

  Koesler and Groendal had, in a manner of speaking, been without them virtually all their lives. While they attended Holy Redeemer School, boys and girls were separated from the first through the twelfth grades. Thus, through the first eight grades, neither boy had ever been in class with a girl. Girls, of course, could, under ordinary circumstances, nowhere be found within a seminary building. This would seem at best strange to almost anyone but a strict Catholic and/or a seminarian of that time.

  Strange but true.

  Over the centuries, the Church had formed a system that mass-produced priests, who were at the same time asexual and macho. It achieved the macho image by emphasizing “masculine” pursuits. Sports were not only encouraged, there was an insistence on at least minimal participation. The more violent the physical contact the better.

  At the same time, a brotherly camaraderie was nurtured. But this good fellowship had to be completely free of any sexual feeling. Even the hint of anything remotely sexual between seminarians was branded a “personal friendship” and was grounds for expulsion.

  Women, in the abstract, were easier to exclude from the future celibate’s life. As Tertullian once remarked about women: “The judgment of God upon your sex endures even today; and wi
th it endures inevitably your position of criminal at the bar of justice. You are the gateway of the devil.”

  If that were not strong enough medicine, a little more than a hundred years later, St. Augustine wrote: “I consider that nothing so casts down the manly mind from its height as the fondling of a woman, and those bodily contacts.”

  So, instead of “those bodily contacts,” seminarians were encouraged to dust each other off in baseball, elbow each other in basketball, flatten each other in football and maim each other in hockey. “Particular friendships” scarcely ever sprang from such violent contacts. Before vacations—Christmas, Easter, summer—the seminary rector would ramble on to the effect that, “Take it for granted, boys, that you’d like girls if you tried them. So, don’t try them.”

  At one point in high school, Koesler and a few others decided they would like to spend a profitable summer as lifeguards. So they took the Red Cross safety course, only to discover that seminary rules forbade them to be lifeguards at a public beach or pool. They could be lifeguards only at a summer camp for boys.

  It took only a modicum of thought to realize there was something one might well expect to find on a public beach that would never be found at boys’ camps. Girls.

  What the seminary seemed to be teaching was that while it was all right to save girls’ souls, it was very definitely not all right to save their bodies.

  Or, as St. Alphonsus Liguori once noted (replying to his own rhetorical, “Is it then a sin to look at a female?”): “Yes; it is at least a venial sin to look at young females. And when looks are repeated, there is also danger of mortal sin.”

  He wrote that in the eighteenth century, but the theory was still very much alive in the seminaries of the 1940s and fifties.

  Briefly, that was the setting for the formation of the priests of yesteryear. The priest was to be a man’s man with no overt or covert sexual expression whatever. To help achieve this goal, the seminary system was replete with some of the strictest discipline imaginable. By and large, it worked.

  In the seminary of Groendal and Koesler’s day, there was one major exception to this rigorous code: Carroll Mitchell.

  Mitchell’s attitude toward the seminary’s attitude toward women was one of benign neglect. His reaction was somewhat akin to that of Eddie Daugherty, who had entered a seminary several decades earlier. Daugherty, who later became a journalist, wrote in his autobiography that a seminary spiritual director had explained women apparently so attractively that Daugherty decided he wanted one. So he quit the seminary and, as it turned out, found quite a few.

  Mitch could see nothing basically wrong with women. He understood that there was a solemn promise to lead the unmarried life expected of a priest. But he wasn’t a priest Not yet. And he hadn’t made anyone any promises. He was not unaware of the seminary rules nor of the rigid attitudes behind the rules. He thought they were silly.

  His was a most rare reaction. That was a day when rules were not a matter for discussion or dissent.

  The love life of Carroll Mitchell, considering his station, was both rich and varied. It was anyone’s guess how many and who knew about it. It was not general knowledge, although certainly his closer friends and associates knew.

  Koesler, associating through sports and an occasional stage appearance, was close enough to know. Groendal, as a fellow playwright, was close enough to know. As were several others. They did not so much envy him as just not understand.

  It was questionable that anyone on the faculty might know. If they did, they should have expelled him . . . unless they were marking time in hopes this talented lad would straighten out before the administration’s hand was forced.

  It was also reasonable to assume that Mitch felt some of the pressure caused by all these people keeping his secrets.

  But pressure was coming from other fronts too.

  Easter vacation was almost over. Only a couple of days remained before Mitch would have to return to the seminary and complete the final few months of his junior college year. By his lights, he had been making good use of his time. He had dated Beth Yager practically every night. As far as he was concerned, it was time for vacation to end. The excuses he was giving his parents for his nightly absences from home were growing very thin.

  In 1949, drive-in theaters were a relatively new phenomenon. But already, in strict moral circles, they were known as “passion pits.” They were just made for the young Carroll Mitchell.

  “What’s supposed to be showing here tonight, anyway?” Beth Yager asked.

  “Who cares?” Carroll Mitchell answered. “We wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.”

  He was correct. The car windows were so fogged over, it was impossible to see out even if either occupant had been interested. The sound track might have provided some clue. But they had not bothered to bring the speaker into the car. There was still a measure of cold in the spring night air, so they had pulled the portable heater in.

  Mitchell had the family car. This was taking a bit of a risk; there was always the chance that someone—a neighbor or a fellow parishioner—might recognize the car or the license. But Carroll Mitchell was not above taking chances.

  Carroll and Beth were engaged in what was called necking and petting—making out—in that slightly more innocent day. They had been at it for quite a while. So each had probably committed a mortal sin, since, in the traditional version of Catholic theology, sins of the flesh were always serious matter. And mortal sin consisted of serious matter—full knowledge and full consent.

  They certainly knew what they were doing and surely had consented. Each would include it in the next confession. As would just about every other Catholic young adult. The priest might be kindly or abrupt. He would assign a penance—an average of about ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. Mitch would be sure to omit from his confession that he was a seminarian. To mention that would be to court a long lecture on jeopardizing one’s vocation.

  Like a swimmer struggling to the surface, Beth fought her way to a sitting position. “Whew! Let up for a minute, okay?”

  With some reluctance, Mitch backed off to his end of the seat. He lit a cigarette, further fogging the windows.

  Beth tried to adjust her clothing. Though none of it had been removed, it had been considerably loosened and twisted. “How am I ever going to explain all these wrinkles?”

  Mitch exhaled two streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Don’t try.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! I look like I’ve been in a wrestling match. Which is not far from the truth. My folks are going to notice.”

  “The idea is not to stand around waiting for them to notice. I’ll get you home as quietly as possible. Go in the side door, head directly for your bedroom, and change before they get a chance to see you.”

  Beth shook her head. “You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you? How do you do it?”

  “An inventive mind.” He didn’t think it wise to mention that this was by no means the first time he had confronted this problem. It was, after a brief but intense relationship, the first time with Beth.

  She looked at him directly, one eyebrow cocked. “Are you sure you want to be a priest?”

  He seemed surprised. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Won’t the presence of women all over the rectory kind of clutter your image of celibacy?” Beth and most of her friends were well aware of Carroll Mitchell’s reputation as a restrained Casanova. Someone, versed in Latin, had dubbed him Romanticus Interruptus. He would paw and fondle and hug and French, but he would not “go all the way,” as the euphemism had it. The legend grew that if he ever threw caution to the winds, he might just marry that girl.

  Mitch chuckled. “Whatever gave you the idea there’d be women in my rectory? Rectories are homes for unmarried fathers, not mothers. And no tunnel to the convent, either.”

  “Really! And when is this magic transition going to take place? When they ordain you? And what makes you think you can turn yourself o
ff like a light bulb?”

  “I can do it . . . or haven’t you noticed I go just so far and no farther?”

  “I know. It’s not natural.”

  Mitch smiled. “It’s supernatural.”

  “Supernatural! Come on! You mean what we’ve been doing in the back seat of this car tonight is supernatural?”

  “Well, preternatural.” In truth, Mitchell had a difficult enough time satisfying his own conscience without trying to explain the rationalization to someone else. “Look, it’s this easy: I don’t know whether I’m going to be a priest or not. I think I want to be. That’s what I’m in the seminary to find out. I’m a little better than halfway down that road. I’ve been in almost seven years. I’ve got five to go.

  “If, when I get close, it looks like all the lights are green for the priesthood, I’ll make the supreme sacrifice. Until then, I don’t need to wonder whether I like girls. I love ’em!” He cracked the window open and flicked his cigarette out, then grinned and reached for her. “But enough talk. I’m getting lonesome.”

  “Hold it!” It was Beth’s turn to light a cigarette. “There’s more to it than this, you know.”

  “What?”

  “One-night stands.”

  “Wait a minute! I’m not like that. I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  It was true. Although he had been close to many girls, he had never been the one to put an end to any of the affairs. In each case, the girl became convinced that the relationship was dead-end and had nowhere to go. Of course, Mitch had never done anything to prove them wrong.

  “I don’t mean ‘one-night stands’ literally. I mean all these wrestling matches in confined places like the back seat of a car.”

  “Well, excuse me if I can’t afford a limousine.”

  “I don’t mean a limousine.”

  “Then what?”

  “A bed.”

  Panic seized him. “A bed!”

  “Yes. You know: a long, soft thing where you can stretch out and be comfortable instead of being twisted up like a pretzel.”