Thy Brother's Wife

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Always happy to oblige a Prince of the Church,” Paul said. The Prince of the Church’s suite in the Statler was not especially princely, but it was big, appropriate enough for Michaels, who was a tall, stocky man with iron-gray hair and thick glasses. He was alleged to have one of the lowest golf handicaps in the hierarchy.

  “If you’re ever in Chicago, Your Eminence,” Paul said, “I’d like to play golf with you. Perhaps we could persuade my wife to accompany us. She was a junior champion as a young woman. Her handicap is still four, and that’s without working on it.”

  The Cardinal laughed. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t stand a chance against such skill, Congressman, but I might take you up on it sometime. Your brother the Bishop doesn’t play golf, does he?”

  The first mention of Sean. “He used to play, but he’s been so busy being a bishop, with Cardinal McCarthy’s illness, you know, that he hasn’t played in a number of years.”

  “Yes, it’s certainly a shame about poor Eamon. He’s never had very strong health. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the North American, you know.”

  “I certainly hope”—Paul moved quickly now—“that nothing comes of this ridiculous censure motion that’s aimed at Sean.”

  “Oh, now,” said the Cardinal, “it really isn’t aimed at him.”

  “Most people think it is, Your Eminence, and it will put me in a very awkward position.”

  “Oh? I don’t see why you should be embarrassed.”

  “Sean’s extremely popular in my district. If the Church censures him, the people in my district are going to demand that I take a stand. I’ve got enough trouble with this Watergate thing as it is, and I certainly wouldn’t want to get into a fight with the hierarchy. But my district wouldn’t give me any choice.”

  “Is that so?” The Cardinal seemed interested and sympathetic.

  Paul was creating his story out of whole cloth. Sean was indeed popular, but there would be little constituent pressure to denounce the hierarchy for going after him. “I could possibly be put in a position where my people would expect me to take a vigorous stand against everything the Church wanted, from help for Catholic schools to tax exemptions for Church property—that sort of thing. You know, Your Eminence, I’d certainly hate to change my position, especially since my membership on the judiciary committee is so crucial for such issues, but our neighborhood is the kind of place where you stand up for your own or you get out.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?” The Cardinal’s voice turned cold.

  “Yes, Your Eminence,” Paul said. “That’s precisely what I’m trying to do. I’m telling you to leave my brother alone. He doesn’t know I’m doing this. Indeed, he explicitly told me not to do anything. He’s still my brother, however, and I’m not going to let a bunch of bullies pick on him. Leave him alone, or you’ll regret it.”

  There was a long pause while the Cardinal’s shrewd blue eyes probed into Paul Cronin’s soul. Finally the great man spoke. “I’ve always admired family loyalty, Congressman. I’ve always admired it very much.”

  * * *

  On the last day of the bishops’ meeting, Paul invited Sean to the Monocle Restaurant, a sleek, plush bistro on D Street, around the corner from the Capitol.

  “Order the Crab Imperial; they know how to do it here,” Paul said.

  Sean, however, ordered bay scallops and declined the bottle of wine Paul offered. His brother looked disappointed but quickly masked his feelings behind bluff enthusiasm.

  “No censure vote after all?”

  Sean shrugged indifferently. “I suspect Eamon made a few phone calls.”

  “I’m glad it worked out. And sorry you can’t stay here until the weekend. Nora’s going to be in town, and it would be nice for the three of us to be together again.”

  “You two certainly have a peripatetic marriage.”

  A tinge of sadness touched Paul’s eyes. “It works out well enough. Maybe after the next election she’ll be able to shift her base from Chicago to Washington. We have good times when we’re together. It takes a long time to be friends, Sean. A long time.” The last sentence escaped in a burst of candor.

  “I’m sure it does.” Sean felt guilt and anguish. How could Paul and Nora ever be close when Nora carried with her the memories of Amalfi?

  “You should have married her.”

  “What?” Sean wished he had accepted the wine.

  Paul drained his gin and tonic. “I’m not up to her. She’s a woman of substance and depth. She deserves a husband more like you. You should be a politician too. The old man made a big mistake.”

  Sean struggled to regain his composure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Paul. You were the star athlete, the war hero, the charmer. I couldn’t win a race for precinct captain.”

  “It takes more than those things.” Paul signaled for another drink. “I don’t know what to call it—character? Anyway, you’d make a good president, and I might not. You would love Nora the way she ought to be loved, and I can’t.” He waved a hand vaguely. “It’s too late to change anything. I’m her husband and I might just end up in the White House. With any luck”—he grinned—“I won’t be any worse a president than I am a husband.”

  * * *

  The Cronins were together at Paul and Nora’s home on Christmas Day, all except Mike Cronin, who refused to leave his apartment even to celebrate Christmas. For Nora, it was the best Christmas in years. She and Sean were friends again. Her daughters were safely on their way to young womanhood. And her marriage had settled into an easy and relaxed pattern.

  “The daughters” arranged one of their usual performances before the Christmas meal: flute music, Christmas carols, crazy little skits, including a dialogue among the “three old Cronins,” with Eileen playing her father, Mary playing a very solemn “Bishop Uncle” and Noreen, of course, playing her mother. Noreen had about half the lines in the miniature drama because she had written the skit.

  After the entertainment was finished, Noreen bustled around the room, filling glasses with sparkling burgundy for the six of them. “Now, Mother, a few extra drinks on Christmas aren’t going to affect your good looks at all.” She giggled, as bubbling herself as the burgundy.

  Eileen offered the toast. “To the old Cronins, it’s good to have them here with us on Christmas Day. They’re really not all that bad, not when you consider how old they are!”

  The burgundy was downed with much laughter. It warmed Nora’s throat and stomach. She was close to tears. She wished she could preserve the precious moment forever. From now on, she hoped and prayed, everything would go well for the “old Cronins.”

  * * *

  Sean Cronin could not sleep. The excitement of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at the cathedral, the brilliant liturgy, the superb choir, and the fun of Christmas afternoon with his family ought to have left him at peace. Yet for Sean there was no peace. There would never be peace. He tried to make an entry into his journal, but the words would not come.

  He closed the notebook and went back to bed. Eileen’s toast tormented him. Things were very good this day for the three “old Cronins,” better than they’d been for a long time. But his mother was in a stranger’s grave, and his father was alone, unloving and unloved. Was aloneness, then, the destiny of all the Cronins?

  Sean shivered. The interlude of happiness this afternoon was a deception, a trick. For Paul and Nora and himself, he sensed the worst was yet to come.

  BOOK VIII

  Lord, God, you make use of the ministry of priests for regenerating your people. Make us persevere in serving your will that in our days by the gift of your grace the people concentrated to you may increase in merit and numbers through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

  —Prayer of Priestly Recommitment, Holy Thursday Liturgy

  When he had washed their feet and put on his clothes again, he went back to the table. “Do you understand,” he said, “what I have done to you? You call me master and lord and rightly s
o I am. If I, then, the lord and master have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example so you may copy what I have done to you.”

  —John 13:12–15

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  1976

  March was a wonderful time in Rome. Spring had survived its tentative beginnings and the occasional rains washed away the sour smells of the decrepit, phony old city. Sean didn’t even mind the hideously dull meeting of the Commission on the Revision of the Code of Canon Law. In fact, he rather enjoyed jousting with Cardinal Pèricle Felici, who was grimly determined to use every trick at his command—and they were many and clever—to undo the entire Vatican Council. From Felici’s viewpoint, Sean was a dangerous combination of historical knowledge and pastoral experience. Furthermore, he spoke Latin too well, although not, of course, as well as did the Cardinal, who wrote sonnets in Latin.

  In such a fine mood was Sean Cronin that he invited Roger Fitzgibbon to dinner at the Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona. They drank a toast to their twentieth anniversary in the priesthood, which was only two months away. Roger’s carefully groomed hair had vanished, he had put on weight, and the assignment as a delegate, or nuncio, for which he had been hoping had not yet appeared. He confessed, however, that the Sostitúto, the famous Under Secretary of State, Archbishop Benelli, had hinted broadly to him that he might well be in the running for a posting to Nairobi later in the year. Sean decided that he would put in a kind word for Roger with Cardinal McCarthy.

  “You know, you’re on everyone’s tèrna for Chicago when Eamon steps down.” Roger flipped the spaghetti alla bolognése around his fork with practiced ease.

  “Programmed number three, I hope.” Sean sipped his wine.

  “Not on Eamon’s list. Not on a lot of people’s. Benelli clearly likes you—”

  “Maybe that’s because I blew up at him once and told him he was an arrogant, narrow-minded son-of-a-bitch. Tell you the truth, he seemed to love it. Who are the real candidates?”

  “There’s some mention of O’Malley from Denver—”

  “Oh, my God. He’s to the right of Caesar Augustus. He’d destroy Chicago.”

  “And your old friend Martin Spalding Quinlan.” Roger’s smile was sly and complacent.

  “That’s enough to ruin my day.” Sean shoved aside his pasta.

  But it wasn’t Sean’s problem, it was Chicago’s. If the Holy See sent a despicable little neuter, it was their fault, and God’s, not Sean Cronin’s.

  * * *

  The week after he returned from Rome, Sean called to make an appointment with the Apostolic Delegate in Washington. The next morning he was among the tens of thousands of people who swarmed into O’Hare International Airport. On the way into that vast, sprawling glass and concrete barn, he encountered Tom and Fiona Shields, the latter pregnant for the second time.

  “Off to celebrate mid-Lent in Florida, I bet,” said the Bishop.

  “From the color of yourself,” said the articulate Fiona, “you should be joining us. Or is it one of the rules of your order that bishops have to look gray and haggard all the time?”

  “We’ve been trying to help shoulder the Archbishop’s load,” Sean admitted.

  “Ah, ’tis now that I understand it. We worry about the Cardinal’s health, but not about the health of the Bishop. Shame on ye, Sean Cronin. Shame on ye.”

  Her mocking grin made the Florida sunlight look doubly attractive.

  “Is Nicole enjoying working on my brother’s campaign?”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. The old wounds had been healed, the old angry words forgotten. Yet, as Sean had suspected, Tom clearly did not like Nicole working for her mother’s lover. “She certainly seems to enjoy it,” he finally said. “And it was good of Eileen to get her the job after she dropped out of college. I’m not sure a political campaign offers quite the stability that Nicole needs—”

  “What Nicole needs,” Fiona commented, “is a life of her own, Tom, whether you and I like it or not.”

  “I guess so,” Tom agreed. “At least it looks as if she’s working for a winning candidate, which means she has a job until next November.”

  Sean was sorry he had initiated the conversation. He didn’t like to discuss Paul with the late Maggie Shields’s husband.

  Fiona Shields didn’t like to either. “And how’s the lovely Nora?” she asked. “Sure, we don’t see so much of her any more.”

  “She’s spending more time in Washington now that the two older girls are in college. If Paul’s elected Senator, I suppose she’ll move there more or less permanently. Oh, that’s my plane that’s boarding over there. I’d better run.” He bade the Shieldses goodbye and hurried into the boarding area for the flight to Washington. He was not happy that Nicole was working for Paul. Paul should have had more sense than to hire her.

  As the plane took off, Sean jammed his Chicago Sun-Times into the pocket on the seat in front of him and began to struggle through Humboldt’s Gift, more out of a sense of obligation to keep up with current literature than any enjoyment of the story. After a few pages, he closed it impatiently and reached for the latest spiral notebook in his attaché case.

  He had made a momentous decision yesterday before he had phoned the Delegate. It was a decision that was inevitable. He had intended to write something in his journal the night before, but there had been a confirmation and a counseling case in the rectory, and an idiotic letter from Rome about the seminary—a letter that presumed the year was 1910—which had to be answered. When he was finished he was so tired he could barely see the pages of the notebook, so he resolved he would write something on the plane to Washington.

  The words were slow in coming.

  Holy Week is approaching again, a quarter of a century since Paul was missing in action in Korea. I have no more faith now than I did then. I plug along at my work. I have almost no faith in you and now even less in the Church and the priesthood. I have no faith in anyone or anything. What I do is mechanically routine. If only I could believe in something.

  He hesitated and then began again.

  You refused a sign to your Judean critics who demanded to view a miracle. So I will not ask for a sign. I will rather tell you I need one, I desperately need some sign that you are there and I’m not being a fool.

  The small Beechcraft twin-engine plane dropped out of the clouds somewhere under six hundred feet, vibrated sharply in a wind gust, and then settled into its final approach to the airport. Senatorial candidate Paul Cronin shook himself fully awake. “Rockford?”

  “Moline,” said Tim Burns, his bright and ambitious young campaign manager. “We changed that last night, remember?”

  “Oh,” said Paul sleepily. “I remember. Yes.”

  The bump of the landing awakened the third member of the campaign party, Nicole Shields, who in some vague way was an aide to Burns. “Explain to me again,” she said, “why it’s necessary to cover seven of these places the week before the primary election even though the polls show us way ahead?”

  Nicole was a disturbing presence on the plane. She was dark and tempestuous, the most tantalizing nineteen-year-old Paul had ever known. He wondered if she was sleeping with Burns. Probably. Paul gathered up his notes. He couldn’t afford to take that risk. Too much trouble with the Shields family as it was. Besides, as a candidate for the United States Senate, he had to be careful—a girl less than half his age, the daughter of a woman whose family thought she killed herself because of him—that would be the kind of scandal that would finish him off quickly.

  As Tim Burns held the umbrella over his head and a chill March wind assaulted his face, Paul helped Nicole out of the Beechcraft. She managed to press her body momentarily against his as she stumbled down the slippery stairs.

  Her taunting young flesh sent a stab of sweetness through him. God, he wished he were twenty-six instead of forty-six. He also wished he had not seen Chris Waverly with her mocking smile among the reporters coverin
g his rally in Chicago the night before.

  Congressman Cronin and his two aides huddled together under the umbrella as they walked toward the terminal. The local television crew was waiting for them. “The latest polls show you ahead of Mr. Mitchum by twelve points, Congressman,” said an eager television journalist. “Do you have any comment?”

  Paul started to quote Richard Daley on the polls and then realized that this was downstate and you didn’t quote Daley downstate. “I’d rather have six points after the election,” he said, smiling engagingly, “than twelve points before it.”

  He hoped that Nora did not see the Moline television tape. She might note how close to him Nicole Shields was standing.

  * * *

  “My decision is final, Monsieur l’Archevêque,” Sean said to the Apostolic Delegate at his office in Washington. “I am well aware that the Cardinal has submitted his resignation effective on his birthday, September fifth. I also know that he has put my name at the top of the list for his recommended successor.”

  “But of course he has, Bishop Cronin,” said the shrewd, charming French aristocrat who represented the Holy See in the United States. “It is no secret that you have been running the archdiocese and running it very well for the last few years while the Cardinal’s health has been poor.” The Delegate, as different as day was from night from the usual Italian careerists who came to Washington, had a marvelously effective diplomatic technique of being utterly candid at least half the time and totally secretive the other half.

  “Be that as it may, Monsieur l’Archevêque, I do not wish to be considered as a successor. I assume that the Holy See has not taken such a possibility seriously. I am a native Chicagoan, I am too young and too outspoken. While I presume that I am not exactly the winterbook favorite to succeed His Eminence—”

  The Gallic eyebrows shot up quizzically. “Winterbook favorite, Bishop Cronin?”

  “An American racing term, Archbishop. You see, many months before the three-year-old thoroughbreds are tested in preliminary races, listings are made of their relative potential.”