Thy Brother's Wife

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Jenny Warren hugged Sean vigorously and told him how well he looked. Most of his father’s “friends” were fond of Sean, and he had become sufficiently tolerant to admit they were nice women. He wished his father would marry Jenny; she was a sweet and lovely lady who might bring some order and calm into Mike’s life.

  Sean joined Roger Fitzgibbon and Jimmy McGuire at the fringe of the party.

  “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” cracked Jimmy.

  “At least Nora isn’t part of the vanity.” Sean needled Jimmy whenever he could about his longtime crush on Nora.

  “She and Maggie certainly divert attention from the Tail Gunner,” Jimmy agreed. In sheath dresses with short sleeves and matching shoes, the two young women were indeed images of contrasting youthful loveliness.

  “I can see your brother’s point,” Roger said. Roger wore French cuffs and a vest and what was surely a tailor-made suit.

  “It’s a long way to go before he and Nora are a definite thing.” Sean realized he didn’t even like to hear a hint of eventual marriage.

  “Nora?” Roger raised an elegant eyebrow. “I thought it was Maggie. Remember the night last winter when we bumped into them at that bar near Loyola, Jimmy? When we were on vacation?”

  “I think they’re just friends,” Jimmy said. His red face turned even redder.

  “They looked like more than friends,” Roger said.

  Later, when Roger had slipped away, Sean said to Jimmy, “I want the truth about that night, and I don’t mean about why you two were breaking rules.”

  “You and the rules,” Jimmy said impatiently. “Well, they were very, very affectionate before they saw us. Didn’t bother her. Paul was kind of embarrassed. They left right after they talked to us.”

  “How affectionate?” Sean insisted.

  Jimmy gulped. “I’ll give it to you straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent part of the night in bed.”

  “That’s straight enough.” Sean was chilled to the marrow despite the June warmth.

  Jenny Warren, smelling as lovely as she looked, interrupted them. “There’s a bit of a problem with your Aunt Jane. I’m afraid I’d make things worse.”

  “Okay,” said Sean. It was not okay, but at least he had something else to think about. “Get Ed Connaire and tell him. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Jane, in an out-of-date burgundy spring dress, was in back of the house, shouting drunken orders at the cook. Jane Cronin was no longer a secret drinker.

  Nora arrived at the same time as Sean, in time to see Jane stumble over an evergreen bush and onto the grass in front of a case of wine bottles.

  “Miserable bastards,” Jane said, as they helped her to her feet. “Trash.”

  “Easy, Aunt Jane. We’ll get you into the house for a nap.”

  “Don’t want to nap.” Jane swayed dangerously.

  Sean held her firmly and breathed a sigh of relief as Ed Connaire joined them.

  “Easy, Jane,” said the burly red-haired construction contractor. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “It would be better if we’d let her kill her little bastard.” She waved a drunken hand at Sean. “She and her priest friend … bastards … they’re all worthless.”

  “It’s all right, Jane. It’s all right.” Ed circled her with his muscular arms. He whispered to Sean, “I’ll take care of it from now on, son.”

  He led the still-muttering Jane toward the back stairs of the house. Erithea was waiting patiently at the door. Jane was tottering uncertainly.

  “We’re going to wait for Ed,” Nora said, her jaw firmly set, “and ask him what all that means. I’m not going to have you worrying about her nasty cracks any more.”

  Sean felt cold. He wanted to hide in the basement.

  Ed Connaire looked dubious at first when Sean and Nora cornered him; then he nodded his head thoughtfully, and the three walked silently down the hill to the sidewalk on Glenwood Drive.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds, Sean. It was all so long ago. I suppose you have a right to know, although I wish it could be forgotten. It doesn’t make any difference—”

  “Maybe I should be the judge of that,” Sean said.

  Ed cracked his massive knuckles. “Sure, Sean, only please try to understand that some things happen for which no one is really to blame.”

  “Sean understands,” Nora said. “He still needs to know.”

  Ed smiled appreciatively. “All right Nora, you win. Sean, your father and mother were very different kinds of people. They both tried, but the first years of marriage are always hard, and—well, your father was traveling so much. Mike pretends now that their marriage was perfect, but your mother was never really happy at the house at Oakland Beach. Even though Mike had Glendore built because he thought it was what she wanted, she was discontented. She became depressed, especially after Paul was born … that often happens, you know.”

  “I know. Please go on, Ed.”

  “Your mother turned to religion, and your father, with the best intentions in the world, wouldn’t let her continue to see the priests she had started to bring around. He was afraid it was becoming an obsession. Then, when you came along, Mary Eileen became even more depressed. One day, when Mike was in Europe on business, your mother took the car out and had the accident. No one could ever prove that she had done it on purpose, but it was a terrible sad wake, Sean. She was so young and so lovely. And they couldn’t even open the casket. Some people were mad at your father because the wake was only one night. But he was right. It was too terrible for everyone. Doc Shields said it was a blessing, because she might have been crippled for the rest of her life.”

  “I wonder if she thought it was a blessing,” said Sean bitterly.

  “Drop it, Sean,” Nora said. “Ed is right. It was long ago and it was tragic and it was no one’s fault.”

  Sean regained his self-control. “Of course. Thank you, Ed. I did have to know, and now that I do I’ll forget about it.”

  “I sure hope I did right in telling you.” Ed rubbed his hands together.

  “You did, Ed,” said Nora. “Now it can all be buried and left in God’s hands.”

  “He’s not telling the whole story, Nora,” Sean said softly as the old giant slowly climbed the steps back to the lawn party.

  “Don’t torment yourself. It won’t do any good.”

  “Our lives could have been different,” Sean said.

  Nora drew his face down to hers and kissed him. “That’s for being Sean, the most decent person I know.”

  * * *

  That night Nora knelt at the side of her bed, wrapped in a large bath towel. “You know what I have to say. Help him to be a good priest, help me to take care of him, help me to love him the way I should love him.”

  There were no answers. There never were.

  As she fell asleep that night, she felt a little guilty. She had kept her love for Sean in a tightly sealed compartment of her heart, a compartment that had almost exploded open when he had awkwardly hinted at marriage in the car coming home from St. Mary’s. He had been angry at the seminary and hoping that she could be a substitute for his priestly vocation. Nora had known better.

  She drifted off to sleep. Tonight there would only be peace, even on the subject of Sean Cronin.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1956

  Sean could not sleep the night before ordination. He tossed and turned on the stiff mattress in his room in the Sacred Orders building at Mundelein, knowing that many of his classmates were doing exactly the same thing. Outside the window, the smell of May flowers hung in the air, sweet, gentle, young. This was the day he had worked for since entering Quigley as a freshman twelve years before. It would be the happiest day of his life, everyone assured him. Yet he did not feel happy. He was no more certain of his vocation now than he had been through the twelve long years. His faith was as thin as a communion wafer. While he was eager to work in his first parish assignment, he now found it harder to pr
ay than ever before.

  He struggled out of bed, sat at his desk, and turned on the lamp. No lights-out rule the night before ordination. He looked at the shelf at the side of his desk, at the seven brown-covered ring-binder notebooks that were his diary for the seven years at Mundelein. He slid one off the shelf. Its cover felt reassuringly smooth beneath his fingers. He slowly flipped its pages. Yes, he would be ordained tomorrow. It was too late to turn back now. He had become a subdeacon the year before and a deacon last fall. He was now committed to a life of celibacy; he might just as well be a priest.

  Briefly, he thought of Nora, a nostalgic love out of a forgotten past. She and Paul would probably break the news of their engagement to him after his first Mass, with characteristic tact trying not to upstage him during the day.

  He sat at his desk for a long time, hardly noticing the hours pass. The first light of day creased the eastern sky behind the redbrick auditorium. Then the sun slowly eased its way over the horizon, turning the early morning a faintly glowing rose. With a start, he noticed the clock staring at him disapprovingly from his desk. He was already late for the preliminaries in the basement of the main chapel.

  Five minutes later he rushed down the steps into the noisy crowd of his classmates. Father Roache, the genial majordomo of ordination ceremonies, whose principal job was to calm the jumpy nerves of the priests-to-be, cracked into the microphone, “Okay, guys, relax; Sean’s going to go through with it after all.”

  The laughter was inappropriately loud, but it settled a lot of nerves, Sean’s not included.

  “Hey, you had me worried,” Jimmy McGuire whispered, already dressed in his white alb with a deacon’s stole over his shoulder and the priest’s chasuble over one arm. “Last-minute cold feet?”

  “Do I have feet?” Sean asked innocently.

  The high point of the ordination ceremony came when the newly-ordained priests, wearing the chasubles they had carried into the sanctuary, stood in ordered ranks in front of the altar in the colonial-style chapel, their hands anointed with the oil of ordination. Each priest attending the ceremony marched up and down the rows, imposing his hands on the heads of the new priests and then joining old Cardinal McNulty on the platform of the main altar. The older priests then raised their right hands in the air as though in solemn benediction. It was the moment that many said was the most inspiring and most awesome part of the three-hour-long ritual.

  Sean, however, felt nothing at all, just sore knees, an aching back, and a bad headache. Was God punishing him for his lack of faith?

  Then, in a tottering voice, with frequent corrections as Father Roache whispered the right words into his ear, Cardinal McNulty chanted the form of the Sacrament of Ordination to the Priesthood over the newly ordained priests:

  “Almighty Father, grant to these servants of yours the dignity of the priesthood. Renew within them the spirit of holiness. May they be faithful to the ministry they receive from you, Lord God, and be to others models of right conduct … so that the words of the Gospel be preached to the ends on the earth and the family of nations, made one in Christ, may become God’s one Holy People.”

  Later, at the first blessing ceremony held on the steps and lawn surrounding the main chapel, clusters of families and friends in bright dresses and summer suits circled around the young priests, who were trim and self-conscious in their brand new cassocks. Mike Cronin, uncharacteristically giving way to Irish emotion, wept as Sean, for the first time, said, “May the blessing of almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit descend upon you and remain with you always.”

  Paul embraced Sean enthusiastically after his blessing and after he had kissed the hands on which the oil of ordination had not yet dried. “You already look like a cardinal, Sean, and you sure say the blessing like one.”

  And then it was Nora’s turn: Nora, glowing with fresh full beauty in her virginal sleeveless white dress. After Nora kissed Sean’s hands, they embraced tenderly.

  “I’m so proud of you, Sean,” she said through her tears.

  “And I’m proud to have you as a sister,” he replied, wondering as he said it whether they were the right words.

  * * *

  A First Mass banquet for Sean was held in the sun-filled dining room of the Beverly Country Club. The only awkward moment came when Mike Cronin proposed a toast to his son, “the future cardinal,” embarrassing Sean and offending most of the old and new priests who were there.

  As the banquet broke up, Nora and Paul walked up to Sean. “We have something to tell you,” Paul said, grinning.

  “I can’t imagine what it is.” Sean grinned back.

  “You tell him,” Paul said.

  “He’s your brother, you tell him,” said Nora.

  “Well”—Paul’s embarrassment, amazingly enough, seemed genuine—“Nora claims that sometime in August she wants to make an honest man out of me.”

  “Nonsense,” said Nora. “When he was trying to find a toast for the newly ordained Father Cronin, he discovered a couple of wedding toasts and remembered what weddings were for.”

  “You’ll officiate?”

  “I’d have my lawyers sue if you asked anyone else.”

  As Paul and Nora walked away, hand in hand, a tall, glorious, handsome young couple, it occurred to Father Sean Cronin that Michael Cronin’s plans for his family were well under way.

  * * *

  Too bad Mary Eileen could not have been there yesterday to see her son become a priest. It was working out, in spite of all the things that might have gone wrong, Mike Cronin thought, as he tightened the belt on his robe and poured himself another glass of orange juice.

  Despite a bad beginning, the night had been rewarding. Jenny Warren had been reluctant to make love when they returned to the empty house on Glenwood Drive after the First Mass banquet. Mike, bristling with enthusiasm over the ordination of one son and the impending marriage of the other, had enthusiastically won her over. It would be a shame to have to give her up, but none of his women seemed to understand that marriage could never be part of the arrangement.

  He dismissed Jenny from his mind and returned to thinking about Sean. The boy was a strange one; he read too much poetry, but he had the mark of greatness on him. A discreet visit to the Cardinal in a week, and a large check folded in two and placed on his desk, would doubtless guarantee Sean an excellent assignment and would be the first step in his career. After that, in a couple of years, another check would mean graduate school in Rome and a place on old McNulty’s staff. It would be a lot easier, he was convinced, to buy a career for Sean in the Church than to get that damn fool Paul through his bar exam.

  Jenny entered the dining room, her round pretty face soft with pleasurable memories, her thin pink negligee loose enough to hint that she would like more to remember.

  “Hey, Jenny,” he said softly, “do you think my boy is going to be a cardinal?”

  * * *

  Instead of studying for his bar exam, Paul was daydreaming over the latest issue of Playboy, linking in his imagination the auburn-haired centerfold with Nora. After two years of heavy necking and petting, he wanted her badly. Not because his sex life was frustrated, but because she fascinated him. Paul’s taste ran usually to soft, compliant women. Nora was mysterious, aloof, and seemingly unassailable.

  His near North Side “pad,” just off Lake Shore Drive, was carefully furnished with pillows, cushions, low soft chairs, and throw rugs. It had all the elegance and comfort necessary to make it the place for his law school classmates to come with their dates.

  Paul sighed happily. He had not wasted the three years in law school. He had carefully chosen as friends the young men who would be useful in the years ahead: lawyers, politicians, bankers, an occasional journalist. Flattery, fun, pleasure—these were the techniques for attracting them. It was all informal and casual, yet he could tell when he glanced around his apartment during a party that everyone in the room was calculating how they could use everyone else.

 
That was the way it ought to be. So much the better for him that his calculations were never revealed by his amiable, smiling eyes.

  Paul knew that it was time to turn domestic and raise a family. Nora would be a stabilizing influence in his life, and he probably needed that. He would stop the screwing around, too. Political success would come easy. He was a winner, of that there was no doubt. He wanted also to be a man of substance. Nora would help give him depth.

  * * *

  “Are you really going to marry him?” Maggie Martin Shields shook her head in disbelief. “I mean, he’s great-looking, and I know you’ve been dating, but you’re so serious and he—well, he seems to enjoy his fun.”

  They were sitting on the beach, luxuriating in the feel of the mid-July sun on their smooth young skin. Nora was careful in her answer. She knew that Maggie had once had a crush on Paul, and there were signs that her three-month-old marriage to Tom Shields had not settled down yet. Maggie seemed as restless as ever.

  “I’m mad about him, Maggie, and I’m impressed by how much he’s grown up in the last couple of years. He’s thoughtful and attentive and he’s studied so hard for the bar exam. I can’t think of anybody I’d rather marry than Paul Cronin.”

  “Not even Sean?” Maggie arched her bare shoulders suggestively.

  “Sean’s a priest,” Nora said firmly.

  “Men are men,” said Maggie. “I don’t care whether they’re priests or not.” Maggie rolled over on her stomach. “You’re naive, Nora. You’re going to be in for a terrible surprise. Men don’t really care about women. They want a woman’s body and nothing more.”

  “Paul’s a gentleman. I’m not afraid of him,” Nora insisted, knowing that she was very much afraid of being alone in a bedroom with her husband-to-be, despite all the reading she had done about sex. “In any event,” Nora said, “he may be a little surprised too.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT