Robert Kennedy frowned. “I suppose that officially we don’t know how Cronin obtained these records.”
“No, sir,” said Bud O’Hara.
“Functional justice again?” asked the Attorney General.
“Cronin is a good man.” O’Hara wanted no part of responsibility for Cronin’s violation of the law.
“I know he is. But he’s also a reckless gambler.” He grinned. “A Kennedy can’t object to that, I suppose. Yet we could have nailed da Silva some other way. This wasn’t necessary.”
“It saved us a lot of time,” O’Hara replied.
“We ought to put a letter in Cronin’s file commending him for progress in the investigation.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Texan, who never called the Attorney General by his first name.
“And perhaps we ought to reconsider his value to the administration here in Washington.” He hesitated and shook his head. “We’ll miss Nora.”
The difference between Paul Cronin and the Attorney General was that Bob Kennedy would need a cause before he broke into the office of a citizen. Paul Cronin would break into the same office purely for the hell of it.
* * *
Cardinal Eamon McCarthy was a short, slight man of sixty-two, with salt-and-pepper hair and shrewd brown eyes peering through thick horn-rimmed glasses. “I’m very happy you came to see me, Mr. Cronin,” he said. “I must say I was impressed by the newspaper account of your brother’s behavior during that robbery attempt. It would seem”—he smiled briefly—“that you are not the only one in the family with heroic proclivities.”
“I may have the medal, Your Excellency,” said Paul smoothly, “but Sean has about four times as much courage as I do.”
“Indeed?” The Archbishop’s voice was mild and reedy. He seemed to be a timid, diffident sort of man. “Some of the people on my staff have tried to persuade me it was scandalous for a woman to be having supper at St. Jadwiga’s rectory, even though she was a member of Father Cronin’s family. It seemed to me that they were drawing a bit of a long bow.”
Paul leaped at the opportunity. “Nora came to Chicago because we were advised that Sean is in failing health. I was stuck at the Justice Department, so I asked Nora to investigate. I can’t imagine anyone seeing something wrong.”
The Archbishop tapped his finger lightly on the manila folder that was in front of him. “As far as I’ve been able to gather, your brother has done remarkable work there under extraordinary conditions. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as you say, his health is in danger.” He flipped open the file. “Your brother’s record at the seminary was excellent, at the top of his class most of the time. He apparently is also a man of strong commitment and dedication to the priesthood. Indeed, there is a note here in the file from one of his seminary teachers.” The Archbishop held up a single-spaced letter, typed on both sides of a sheet of seminary stationery. “It recommends him for graduate study. Without making any judgments about my predecessor’s decisions”—again the Archbishop smiled—“I should think that Father Cronin ought to be encouraged in such work, don’t you?”
The Archbishop was making it very easy indeed. Paul would not even have to raise the question of the renewed flow of Michael Cronin’s generosity to the Archdiocese of Chicago if his son was sent to graduate school. “Sean has always been a fine student. I think he would enjoy graduate school enormously.”
“Yes, indeed.” The Archbishop closed the file. “Very well, then,” he said. “The matter is settled.”
“By the way, Your Excellency, I wonder if I may make a request of you. I would just as soon Sean didn’t know that I—”
The Archbishop smiled. “I understand perfectly, Mr. Cronin,” he said. “I, too, have a brother.”
After he left the Victorian gray pile of stone on Wabash Avenue that was the Chicago chancery office, Paul consulted his watch. He still had some time before his return trip to Washington. He could surprise Maggie Shields at her Lincoln Park West apartment. After his victory with the Archbishop, he deserved a prize. On second thought, he decided Maggie was a trivial piece of candy compared to Chris. He could wait until he reached Washington.
* * *
Maggie Shields poured herself a second gin and tonic, insisting mentally that two drinks in the afternoon were not a serious sign unless you needed them. She was not turning into one of those quietly drinking frustrated doctors’ wives. She had a lot to live for. She was twenty-seven years old, her figure was in better shape than it had ever been since her marriage, her children were attractive, even if they were a nuisance when they were not out at the playground with their nurse, and her life was still ahead of her.
Only she was bored silly—with her serious husband, for whom delivering babies into the world was more important than his own sex life; with her difficult eldest daughter, Nicole; with the confines of their apartment overlooking the park; with herself. Her friends were all married and talked about nothing but teeth and toilet training. The free-floating intellectuals in the neighborhood were too highbrow. She did not like to read, and the soap operas on television held her attention for only a few hours each day. The infrequent vacations she took with Tom were no help. He tried to become amorous, and that bored her worse than anything.
She had thought about divorce, but she couldn’t face being alone. Maybe she ought to open a shop somewhere, sell expensive dresses to wealthy women. She would be good at that. Her taste in clothes was excellent. The slacks and blouse she was wearing cost three hundred dollars and made her look ravishing. It might be worth trying. Tom would go along.
The telephone rang. It was Paul. He wouldn’t be able to stop by after all. The Attorney General needed him back in Washington. It had been months since Paul had come to see her. She did not know how long she could stand not being with him. He was the only thing in her life that made her feel alive.
She poured herself another drink. Maybe she could invent an excuse to go to Washington.
* * *
Paul Cronin arrived late at the Kennedys’ home in Virginia. The garden behind the house was illuminated by hundreds of twinkling lights. The end of the November Indian summer had lingered long enough for the Kennedys to have one of their outdoor parties.
Pleading a delay at the airport and a need to stop by his office, Paul had telephoned Nora and told her to take the Mercedes off to Virginia and he would join her in the Ferrari later.
“What about your wife?” Chris had asked when they were finished making love. She was lying casually on top of him, her flesh pressed against his.
“What do you mean, ‘What about her’?” he replied. He knew that he should leave for Virginia any minute, and that he would not.
“Do you love her?”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Not especially. I just like to know where I stand.” She kissed him provocatively.
“Yes, I do love her. It’s not like—”
“Not very good in the sack, huh? That’s her problem, I guess. I like you a lot, Paul.” Her kisses were now becoming insistent. “I intend to keep you around a long time. If I make up my mind that I want you permanently, I’ll do my best to take you away from your gorgeous Nora. I just thought it fair to warn you.”
“I’m warned.” He tried to sound casual, but under the circumstances it was impossible to make any serious response to Chris.
Now, as he searched for Nora among the crowd in the Attorney General’s garden, he told himself that neither Chris nor anybody else could possibly take him away from Nora.
“There you are. I thought you would never come.” This time it was Nora who initiated the passionate embrace. “You told me the news was good on the phone,” she said, releasing him. “What are the details?”
“Sean is being sent to Rome to study Church history.”
“Marvelous!” Nora exclaimed, embracing him again. “I knew you could charm the Archbishop.”
Paul was at the bar later when the Attorney Ge
neral of the United States, fully dressed, toppled into his swimming pool. When Paul heard the splash and the mixed cries of horror and delight, he pushed his way through the throng to the edge of the pool. The other Kennedys and members of the staff were there first and were helping the bedraggled but laughing Attorney General out of the pool.
“Who did it? Who did it?” The words were forming on everyone’s lips.
Bob Kennedy made his way through the crowd to Nora Riley Cronin. “We’re even now, Nora, I guess,” he said with his most infectious grin.
“Who, me?” said Nora innocently.
The Attorney General laughed and turned to Paul. “Do you ever win any fights, Paul?”
“I have sense enough not to try,” Paul said.
As the Attorney General started for the house and a dry set of clothing, he turned once more to Paul. “By the way, I’d like to see you for a few minutes tomorrow—if you have the time.”
Paul could not help but notice that the Attorney General was no longer smiling.
* * *
Sean Cronin waited in the long, elaborately carpeted corridor of the chancery office that led to the Archbishop’s suite. On both of the walls of the corridor were pictures from the career of George William Mundelein, the first Cardinal of Chicago. “Do you know what it’s about?” Sean asked Roger Fitzgibbon, who was now acting as assistant chancellor before going to Rome to study canon law.
Fitzgibbon had been busy, rushing up and down the corridor delivering documents to the offices of the vicar general, the chancellor, and the vice-chancellor. “I don’t know for sure,” he said brusquely, indicating by tone and manner that he didn’t have much time to talk. “I suppose, though, that there’s been some complaint about Nora being in your rectory when it was robbed.”
“Nora?” Sean said, incredulously.
“Not very prudent, Sean. Not very prudent at all,” said Fitzgibbon, shaking his head disapprovingly.
Sean had an urge to smash Fitzgibbon’s pious face, just as he had smashed the faces of the robbers at St. Jadwiga’s.
When he was finally shown into the Archbishop’s office, the Archbishop came immediately to the point. “Sit down, Father Cronin. First of all, let me congratulate you on the—er—well, I suppose the right word would be ‘efficient’ way in which you handled the attempted robbery at St. Jadwiga’s.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” Sean said, trying to read the shrewd little Archbishop.
“I was wondering, Father Cronin, whether you would be willing to apply the same efficiency to a small task I have in mind?”
“Of course, Archbishop.”
“You say yes before you even know what it is? Well, I certainly cannot criticize enthusiasm. My task, however, may take some time. I need a Church historian, a well-trained and competent one. I propose to send you to Rome to study history at the Gregorian University, and I would ask you to concentrate especially on the history of the Church’s teaching and practice in regard to the sacrament of matrimony. I would be relieved to have someone with such competence on my personal staff both at the Vatican Council and afterward. Are you still enthusiastic about my task, Father?”
“Even more so,” said Sean. He was scarcely able to believe what he had heard.
“Excellent,” said the Archbishop. “We’re going to see many changes in the Church in the years ahead, Father Cronin. I’m inclined to agree with the late Archbishop of Paris that the crises will be crises of growth and not of decline. I feel the American Church will suffer badly for its lack of proper scholarship. The change may be disconcerting.”
“The Church won’t change,” Sean said. “It won’t change because it can’t change.”
The Archbishop tapped his pencil lightly on his blotter. “I’m afraid I must disagree, Father.” And then, echoing what Nora had said the week before, the Archbishop of Chicago added, “The Church will change because it has to change.”
* * *
“Paul, I need help,” Bobby Kennedy said, running his fingers nervously through his thick hair.
“Anything wrong?” Paul asked. There were warning gongs sounding inside his head.
Kennedy grinned his charming grin. “It’s a rough assignment, but an important one. You know as well as I do, maybe better than I do, that Chicago is the center of organized crime and that our Crime Task Force in Chicago is a mess. Too damn much hanging out in bars, if you ask me. Can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys any more. You’ve been so good here—well, I thought we might send you to Chicago. You’re young for the job, although that doesn’t bother me, of all people.” Again the charming grin. “It’s a great challenge.”
Paul knew that he had no real choice. He was being dismissed from the Attorney General’s staff in the nicest way possible. He was being kicked upstairs.
“We’ll miss Nora, God knows,” Kennedy said. Then he added, somewhat lamely, “You too, of course.”
BOOK IV
This is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business. I call you friends.
—John 15:11–15
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1963
Sean Cronin walked through the Piazza Farnese with quick steps. Although concerned that he would be late for dinner, he smiled cheerfully and said buona sera to a young couple walking in the opposite direction. They responded with solemn silence. Sean had learned enough history to know why the Roman people hated the clergy; the citizens of Rome had neither forgiven nor forgotten the absolutism of the papal state and the repeated crushing of their attempts to achieve democratic self-government. Yet, raised as he was on the South Side of Chicago where priests were greeted routinely and greeted in return, Sean could not adjust to the hostility of the young people.
It was one of the few things he did not like about Rome. Everything else—the catacombs, St. Peter’s, the Vatican gardens, the Via Veneto, the baroque churches and palaces, the street urchins, and the noise—he enjoyed enormously.
The months had been busy: learning Italian and entering Gregorian University in the middle of the year; taking courses in the history of Christian attitudes and practices on marriage that the Archbishop wanted him to study; learning his way around Rome; meeting new friends. It had been an exciting and challenging six months that quickly blotted out the nightmare years at St. Jadwiga’s. Then, a few weeks before, the death of John XXIII and the election and installation of a new pope. Sean’s mind was still jammed with the sights and sounds as he stood in the Piazza of St. Peter’s and saw the white smoke go up and heard the first blessing “to the city and to the world” of Giovanni Battisti Montini, Pope Paul VI. How could anyone want to change a church that had so much grace and beauty in its ceremonies?
He continued across the Piazza Farnese toward Chicago House, trying not to notice the dirty looks his cassock and clerical hat earned him. Already some of his classmates at the Greg were abandoning clerical garb, behavior that Sean felt was dangerously close to apostasy.
The small sixteenth-century palazzo at the end of the narrow street that Sean had just left belonged to his friends the Alessandrinis—Angèlica and Francésco—members of the black, or papal, nobility who had chosen Pope Pius IX over Victor Emmanuel in 1870. The Principio, a thin handsome man, and the Principessa, who was lovely in a delicate, ethereal way, were people his own age. They now lived in only one fourth of that ancient family palace but did not seem to lack money, although it was not clear if either of them had ever worked a day in their lives. Sean had met them at a cocktail party at the American embassy, and they had promptly taken him under their wing.
Their “little party” this afternoon had included an assortment of curial bureaucrats and the great wise old Cardinal Menelli, who had dropped a few hints about what had happened at the conclave. Sean had felt vaguely unea
sy. He had cheered enthusiastically for the new Pope, and it did not seem right to hear him discussed by Menelli in such a cynical manner. Moreover, while Sean was deeply opposed to changes that might impinge on the timeless serenity of the Church, and horrified by the translation of the Mass into English, his sense of fairness was affronted by the trickery and deceit that seemed to be a matter of course in Vatican politics. It had been much more pleasant to watch Angèlica’s delicate fingers dance up and down the keyboard as she played “a little Vivaldi concerto” than it was to try to understand Rome.
* * *
At Chicago House, in the Via Sardegna, just off the Via Veneto, Eamon McCarthy, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, shook his head unhappily. “It isn’t like the first session, Father Cronin, not like it at all. The new Pope is a brilliant man. He understands what is happening in the Church intellectually, far better than did his predecessor.” The Cardinal’s hair was now almost entirely white and his normally serene brown eyes were troubled. “But I believe he is making a grave mistake. The forces of change have been unleashed. They should be guided, but they cannot be slowed down. I fear that he does not trust his fellow bishops. There will be deep trouble if that is the case.”
Each evening at the dinner table at Chicago House, the Cardinal would discuss the events of the Aula of St. Peter’s that day. The Chicago students who also lived in the elaborate palazzo that Cardinal Mundelein had purchased—to show that an American Cardinal could live as elaborately in Rome as an Italian Cardinal—listened intently to Eamon McCarthy’s analysis. Sean found that he was the only one at the table who thought the Church was changing too rapidly. Jimmy McGuire, who had come to Rome in the fall to study canon law, had become more radical with each passing year. He even wore a black turtleneck at the dinner table instead of a cassock. Unaccountably, the Cardinal did not seem to mind.
“As you know, Father Cronin,” the Cardinal said, directing the discussion to Sean, “I’ve asked you to specialize in the history of marriage and sexuality in Catholic teaching because I am convinced that that is the most corrosive issue we face. The other things we do at the Council are important, but mostly for scholars and priests. Sexuality is important to all our lay people.”
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