by Caryl Rivers
The day of the rally dawned bright and clear, and we all rendezvoused at Sean’s house. The count was decked out in his most splendid finery. He was not only wearing his cape, but on his breast sparkled a Byzantine Cross encrusted with rubies, and he wore at his waist a white leather scabbard with the hilt of a sword protruding from it. The hilt of the sword glittered, like the Cross, with precious stones. I was mightily impressed. The count’s sword made Excalibur look like a carving knife.
We all set off for the monument grounds, with Dr. McCaffrey driving the white Caddy, Count Orlov beside him, and Sister Immelda beside the count. Sean, Con, and I were in the back seat, and Davy and Mollie were following, in Davy’s car.
Oh, Count, this will be a historic day!” cooed Sister Immelda.
“Today we begin the march to victory!” Count Orlov said.
“I hope they don’t forget the portable toilets,” Dr. McCaffrey said.
“Yeah, it’s hard to pray good when you have to pee,” Sean said. Con jabbed him with her elbow.
We rode in silence for a while, and then Sean said, “Hey Count, how many people do you think we’ll need to pray to get the winds up to a thousand?”
I shot him a warning glance, but his face was as innocent as a choirboy’s.
“It will depend,” the count said, “on how fervently our people can pray. If our hearts are pure, if we are not Doubting Thomases, God will send the power of nature to assist us in our cause. But if we cannot gird our loins, if we are not pure in spirit, surely then we will fail.”
“Yeah, if we only get ‘em up to thirty-five miles per hour, we’ll just stir the dust around and aggravate their allergies a little,” Sean said.
This time l jabbed him in the ribs. I looked at the profile of the count: the strong aquiline nose under the heavy brows. This was a guy who did not kid around. He really was ready to pray the Kremlin to its knees. I wondered if the people in the Politburo were quaking in their boots.
“Brace yourselves, Comrades. The Catholics in Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Crystal Springs, and maybe even Alexandria, Virginia, are praying up a storm.”
“We have them on our radar now. A squadron of Hail Marys.”
“Hail Marys? That’s it?”
“No, there’s a few Our Fathers and some other stuff thrown in.”
“Where are they now?”
“Coming in over Leningrad, on a wing and a prayer.”
“Ten seconds to impact. Five, four, three, two, one—”
“Oh, my God!”
“You can’t say that. We don’t believe in Him.”
“Damage report, Comrade General.”
“Lenin’s tomb has just taken a direct hit from an Apostles’ Creed.”
I was going to write a story about the rally for the Marian Messenger, so I guessed I’d better start my work. “Uh, Count, do you really think we can do it? I mean, knock down the Kremlin?”
“More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” he said.
“Yeah, but wouldn’t a lot of innocent people get hurt? Just ordinary people, not communist bigwigs.”
“God swept his fiery sword across Sodom and Gomorrah!” he declaimed. “He destroyed the world in a flood when the people knew not God!”
“The Blessed Mother sent us a warning, at Fatima,” said Sister Immelda. “She told us that Russia must be converted or terrible things will happen.”
“Let a tidal wave of blood sweep from the Urals to the sea!” the count thundered. “Let the blood of the Godless drench the fields, flow through the cities, let the Virgin crush the heads of atheists as she crushed the head of the serpent!” He took the ruby-encrusted Cross that hung from his neck and raised it above his head: “In hoc signo vinces. In this sign, you will conquer!”
“I bet they won’t have enough hot dogs,” Dr. McCaffrey said. “If we get a hundred thousand, we’ll run out of hot dogs for sure.”
“I love hot dogs,” Sister Immelda said. “We don’t get them much in the convent.”
“They have no hot dogs in Russia,” said the count. “I too like hot dogs.”
“When Russia is converted, then they’ll have hot dogs,” Sister Immelda said with conviction.
Sean reached over and took my notebook, the one I had brought to take notes for my story. He took out his pen, and made a quick sketch of a hot dog in a bun—Sean was a good drawer—and underneath he printed the words, In Hoc Signo Vinces.
I had to shove a knuckle in my mouth to keep from laughing outright. Then I whispered to him, “Our secret weapon!” and I took his sketch and I wrote on the hot dog, “B.V.M. Franks.” Underneath, I wrote:
Mother dear, Oh pray for me
Whilst far from heaven and Thee
Just one bite of a B.V.M. frank
Is a taste of Eternity.
We both giggled quietly, and Con threw us a disapproving glance. I handed her the sheet of notebook paper and she looked at it, her face set in a hard anticommunist line. But then I noticed the corners of her lips tugging upward; even the militant Con, the red-baiting, J. Edgar Hoover-loving Con, couldn’t resist a funny line. She fought it, but in a minute she was stuffing her knuckles in her mouth like I had, trying not to crack up.
When we got to the monument grounds, everything was in readiness for the rally. The portable bathrooms had indeed arrived, the hot dog stands were doing a brisk business, and a stage had been set up for the speakers. It was draped in blue bunting, with a banner featuring the Blessed Mother, in her usual blue-and-white color coordinated ensemble, draped across the top of the stage. There was another banner on the far side of the stage, which depicted a huge Cross, landing like a buzz bomb on a hammer and sickle, smashing it into tiny pieces, under the words In Hoc Signo Vinces.
A good crowd had already begun to gather, nothing like the hundred thousand that Count Orlov said was needed to polish off the Kremlin, but there did seem to be several thousand people milling about. Sean, Con, Mollie, Davy, and I wandered around for a while, and then we noticed that little knots of people were gathered around what appeared to be informal speakers in several areas of the grounds. We ambled over to see what was up.
In the center of one group was a man in white priests’ robes, surrounded by a small group of men and women who were dressed in a similar manner. But the women, although they wore nunlike garments, didn’t wear the standard head coverings, but long mantles like the Blessed Mother wore in her pictures. The men and women all wore some kind of a chain around their waists, which served as a belt, and large red cloth hearts about their necks. In the center of the group, the man who was speaking was gesturing with his hands; he was a small, rather mild-looking man—I’d have thought he was maybe a GS—five in the commerce department—except for his eyes, which had a Count Orlov glitter to them. One of the women was holding a hand-lettered sign saying, “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Jesus.”
“Protestants! Jews!” the man was saying. “Accept the One True Church, before it is too late. The gates of heaven are barred to those who do not accept the Holy Roman Universal and Apostolic Catholic Church. It is the only true Church. Listen and be saved!”
The man threw his arms in the air, a gesture of appeal to heaven.
“Holy shit,” Sean said. “It’s Father Frank Feeley.”
We’d all heard stories about Father Feeley, the brilliant scholar and poet who had simply gone round the bend one day and decided that everybody went to hell but Catholics, an opinion that many of his fellow religionists might have agreed with privately, but didn’t like to say out loud, especially if their bosses were Jews or Methodists. The hierarchy kept trying to get Father Feeley to soft-pedal the hell business, but Father Feeley was adamant about that, and he had gathered his own little band, which went about the East Coast preaching.
“Who’s he?” asked Davy. The Reverend Frank Feeley was not as well known a personage at Hoover High as he was at Sacred Heart.
“No kidding? Tossed out on his can?”
“Yep.”
“How come?”
“He says Protestants can’t get to heaven,” Mollie explained.
“Can they?”
“Yeah, if they’re sincere in their beliefs,” Sean said.
“No shit,” Davy said. “I didn’t know that.”
We listened to Father Frank Feeley for a while, but it got boring pretty fast. Besides, most of the people listening to him were Catholics, so nobody tried to punch him out, which happened a lot to Father Feeley. I guessed that his new life—getting smacked in the teeth in shopping malls and parking lots—was a lot more exciting than his old one, sitting in a classroom and lecturing on medieval poetry.
Over the loudspeaker system came the announcement that the glee club from Visitation Convent would perform for the multitudes, and the clear, piping voices of female singers started in, inexplicably, on “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.”
“What’s going on over there?” Con asked, and we walked in the direction she had pointed, where another small group had gathered. Holding forth there was a young man, who looked, I thought, a little bit like Lee Masters with his blond crew cut, and who was wearing brown pants and a brown shirt, and some kind of strange officer’s cap. It had a skull and crossbones on it, and an American flag. Four other young men, dressed in similar fashion, stood with their arms crossed and legs spread, Benito Mussolini style, peering malevolently out at the crowd.
The young man, his chin thrust out aggressively, was saying, “Are you going to let the niggers and the Jews take over the country? Commies want the niggers to take over. They want them to marry your daughters and produce a race of little brown bastards to take over the country and give it to Karl Marx.”
Davy looked at Sean. “Did this cat get excommunicated too?”
I don’t think he’s a Catholic.”
“Oh,” Davy said. “With those uniforms, I thought they might be from St. John’s.”
The young man, we discovered, was Commander Raymond G. Blanton, from the Fighting American Patriots and Heroes, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and his Thunder Troopers.
“Thunder Troopers?” Con said. “Those guys don’t look like they have the brains to come in out of the rain.”
“They all have acne,” I said. “You ever hear of an Aryan superman with acne?”
“Kill the niggers! Kill the Jews!” Commander Blanton screamed.
“I guess he isn’t big on Brotherhood Week,” Sean said.
“We ought to get him for our assembly next time,” I suggested. “He’s a lot livelier than the life of Mother Marie Claire.”
“Yeah, and I bet he gets canonized before Mother Marie makes it,” Con said.
The Visitation Glee Club switched to “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad,” and we wandered over to the third little group that had gathered in another part of the grounds.
There were about twelve people holding signs in this group, printed signs tacked to wooden slats: FREE ALGER HISS. DOWN WITH FASCISM. IMPEACH MCCARTHY. DOWN WITH FRANCO.
The speaker here was a tall, gaunt man clad in jeans and a work shirt, who had a flamboyant mane of silver hair, and who still retained in his speech traces of a boyhood in Dublin. He was Seamus O’Flaherty, president of the Socialist Progressive People’s Worker’s Party.
“They’re commies,” Sean announced.
“How do you know?”
“Anything with People in it is a communist front.”
“People’s Drug Store?”
“Well, almost anything,” Sean said.
The people around Seamus O’Flaherty were a fairly unkempt lot, also clad in work clothes, and they applauded wildly every few minutes. Everybody else just stood around quietly.
“He’s Irish, and he’s a communist?” I said to Sean.
“He’s from New York.”
“Oh,” I said. Strange and wonderful things happened in New York that didn’t happen anywhere else in America—somebody with a name like Seamus could be a real, live communist. I wondered if I really wanted to go there. You could probably Lose Your Faith real easy in New York. (That was always the big warning to Catholic kids who were tempted to stray off their own turf-like to a state university. You could Lose Your Faith. The nuns always said it that way, with capital letters, as if faith was like a clutch bag, which could just slip through your fingers and onto the sidewalk before you even missed it.)
“Did you think we defeated fascism when we destroyed Hitler, vanquished the Roman legions of Benito?” Seamus O’Flaherty asked, in a deep, musical voice. “Oh no, my friends, no! Fascism is in flower here, in the very citadel of democracy. It is not only in the fascist countries that people are thrown into prison, hounded into exile for their beliefs!”
The Visitation Glee Club switched to a musical version of Joyce Khmer’s “Trees”:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree—
The crowd around Seamus O’Flaherty and his group started to get larger as the word spread that there was a communist, in the flesh, on the monument grounds. It wasn’t every day you got to see a commie, close up.
“There is blood on the hands of Franco, and we pay for his bloody terror by the aid and comfort we give—”
Suddenly there was a stirring around the edges of the crowd, and then it parted like the Red Sea, and storming through the opening, Rasputin eyes flashing, was none other than Count Vladimir Illyich Orlov.
“Swine!” he thundered, taking one look at Seamus O’Flaherty and shaking his fist at the sky.
Seamus O’Flaherty looked at the count and spat contemptuously on the ground, “Tsarist pig!” he hissed.
“I think they know each other,” I said to Sean.
“Scum of Satan, filth thrown up from the bowels of the sewers of Sodom!” growled Count Orlov.
“Oppressor of the masses, running dog lackey of the Wall Street bloodsuckers!” countered Seamus O’Flaherty.
A Tree who may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair—
“Seed of Lucifer, bastard son of Beelzebub, excrement of the Jew pig Karl Marx, slime of the earth!”
“Anti-Semite, Nazi murderer, pig who would violate the sacred womb of your mother in the unholy name of Capitalist avarice!”
“They sure have good vocabularies,” Sean said, admiringly.
The crowd was growing larger by the minute, and it now included Father Frank Feeley and his Immaculate Slaves and Commander Blanton and his Thunder Troopers; the commander, in fact, was standing right next to me.
“May God strike you down in the filth where you stand!” roared Count Orlov.
Commander Blanton nudged me on the shoulder and asked, “Is he a Ruskie?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s a commie, then.”
“No, he’s a White Russian.”
“They have niggers in Russia?” the commander said, astonished. “Damn!”
“God is a myth, invented to oppress the masses. Opium of the people!” yelled Seamus.
Upon whose bosom snow has lain—
Father Frank Feeley had been watching, and, seeing himself fatally up staged, decided to remedy that situation by stepping between Seamus and the count, throwing his arms in the air, and crying, “Accept the One True Church and be saved!”
“Who’s he?” the commander asked.
“Father Frank Feeley. He was excommunicated.”
“And he lived!”
“Usually they do,” I said.
“Damn!” the commander said in wonderment.
I noticed that Dr. McCaffrey had worked his way into the crowd, had struggled up to Count Orlov, and now was tugging tentatively at the count’s cape.
“Count, we’d better get started. Count?”
Now Father Feeley spotted Commander Blanton, and he stepped in front of him and shrieked, “Do you accept the One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic, Roman Catholic Church?”
“Hell, no,” said the commander, “I’m a Baptist.”
“Then you will face the fires of hell. Repent and be saved!”
“Shut up, you fairy, or I’ll beat your face in,” yelled the commander.
Intimately lives with raaaaiinnnnn—
“Depart this holy place at once!” screamed Count Orlov, shaking off Dr. McCaffrey’s hand and glaring at Seamus. “Slink away to your sewer, communist pig!”
“Do you think you frighten me, you—you gigolo! Have you never heard of the Constitution and free speech?”
“Have they free speech in the wastes of Siberia? Have they free speech in Lubianka prison?”
“Is there free speech in America, when honest men tremble before the pig, McCarthy?”
“Hey, Count,” said the commander. “You want we should break their heads open?”
Dr. McCaffrey had resumed tugging at the count’s cape, and Father Feeley, always on the lookout for converts, grabbed Sean’s father by the lapels and said, “Do you accept the One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic, Roman Catholic Church?”
And Dr. McCaffrey, upset because the rally was already twenty minutes late getting started, lost his temper and yelled at Father Frank Feeley, “Of course I do, you stupid twit!”
Sean chortled. “Way to go, Pop!”
