“I see.”
“I heard it makes things a lot harder if the spouse won’t cooperate.”
“Not all that much, I’m told.”
I was not about to play horse to his Lady Godiva.
“I was kind of wondering,” he uncrossed his legs again, “whether you might make a pitch for me to her. For old times sake, you know. Like you did for me in the old days.”
A masterful performance—vulnerable appeal and veiled threat.
“I’m not that close to her any more,” I lied. “I haven’t been back long enough to spend much time up at the Lake, so I don’t see her very often. I’m hesitant to talk to her about what she might consider a personal matter.”
“I can see that.”
In his vague, unfocused eyes there was a glow of pure terror, a man at his wits’ end. Why should he feel that way? The Feds would let him walk. He still had a fat salary from the Devlins for doing almost nothing.
“You know how Jane is,” I continued. “When she doesn’t want to talk about something, you can’t get her to open her mouth.”
“I sure do know that.” He shook his head despondently. “She’s a tough woman to share life with.”
“I can well imagine.”
Now I understood Phil Clare’s problem. He had skimmed through life by exploiting his own seeming vulnerability. When an attempt at exploitation failed, he was frozen in panic. Maybe the magic was eroding.
It had no more power over me. But I wanted to be rid of him.
“Look,” he said, “if you happen to be talking to her and this kind of comes up, could you put in a good word for me?”
Not on your life.
“Mr. Kelly,” Mae buzzed me, “it’s that call from the White House.”
“OK, Mae, tell Mr. Mondale’s aide I’ll be with him in a minute.”
Phil was a bastard, but a poor pathetic bastard. His world was unraveling and would continue to unravel. Jane had probably kept him stitched together. Why not say something harmless to reassure him without making any commitments. I almost did just that.
Instead something snapped inside me. I was angry, not Korea angry, just plain West Side Irish angry.
“You know Phil, I should have thrown you back into that car,” I said calmly. “Saving your life was the worst mistake I ever made. You killed two of my friends. You betrayed me in that police station. You stole my woman from me. You raped her when she was vulnerable, knocked her up and forced her to marry you.”
“I didn’t mean…” he gasped.
“I don’t care what you meant, you stupid bastard,” I continued to be the professional provost, cool, poised, wise. “You found out she was too much of a woman for you, so you dishonored your marriage vows from the beginning and ran out on her whenever you felt threatened.”
“I didn’t…”
“Shut up till I’m finished. You’re worthless, Phil. Worthless as a man, worthless in bed, worthless as a husband, worthless as a father. You make me sick to my stomach.”
I stood up to dismiss him.
“I tried…”
I grabbed the lapels of his coat and shook him.
“Now let me tell you what I’m going to do,” I snarled into his ear. “I’m going to take my woman back. I’m going to make love with your wife on the marriage bed you betrayed. I’m going to move in with her and stay with her for the rest of my life. I’ll beat the shit out of you if I ever hear that you’re harassing her again. Do you understand?”
“You’re hurting me,” he whined.
“Not nearly as much as I will if you don’t leave Jane alone. She’s mine now, do you hear me. MINE!”
“Please…”
“Now get the hell out of my office and don’t ever come back.”
He left, shoulders slumped, head bowed, the hang-dog rejected.
“Odd man,” Mae observed a few minutes later when I had calmed down and entered the outer offices.
“All of that. I had some odd friends in the old days.”
“At his wits’ end?”
“Far beyond them. Would you see if you can scare up that other odd friend, Monsignor Patrick T. Keenan.”
She laughed. Packy had already charmed her in a couple of telephone conversations. “I’ll try. He’s almost as elusive as you are.”
“Who, me elusive?”
“The Monsignor is with the teenagers,” she informed me a few moments later. “Is it important?”
“Yes.”
“Father Keenan,” a warm personable priestly voice said a few moments later.
“Temporarily leaving his teenagers.”
“It’s you.”
“Sorry I’m not a teenager.”
“They didn’t say who it was. I’ll leave word that you can disturb me any time, even when I’m doing something important, like arguing with the kids on the front lawn.”
“I feel privileged…you’d never guess who paid me a visit out here today?”
“I’d give odds it was our friend from the good-old days, Phil Clare. What did he want?”
“He wanted me to talk herself into funding his lawyers in this case in which he is embroiled.”
“Poor stupid bastard.”
“A common opinion. He also hinted that if she didn’t he might block an annulment.”
Silence for a moment.
“Look, Leo, he can delay it for a bit, but he can’t stop it. You’re not going to pass that on to Jane are you?”
“No, certainly not. It is an interesting approach to blackmail, isn’t it?”
“Neither you nor Jane are to let it interfere with your wishes and plans,” he informed me crisply. “That was never a sacramental marriage. She is therefore free to contract marriage again in the eyes of God, even by the current canonical standards. There’s a lot of different ways to handle it…”
“Should it become an issue.”
“Right. Should it become an issue, neither of you ought to delay merely to keep the ecclesiastical bureaucracy happy, understand?”
“We’re nowhere near that yet, Packy.”
“Such matters have a way of picking up momentum. It should only concern you if you want a public Catholic marriage.”
“I can’t imagine that being an issue.”
“The thing to keep in mind is that you and Jane are both free now in God’s eyes to contract a marriage…”
“With each other?”
“What the hell else are we talking about? Moreover you have the perfect right to do so. Church law cannot stand in the way of that right if it creates a grave inconvenience for you. Given what the two of you have been through for the last thirty years, waiting once you make up your minds would be a grave inconvenience. Right?”
“If you say so, Monsignor.”
“I say so,” he chuckled. “Now can I get back to my teenagers?”
“Only after I tell you what I said to him.”
I was disgracefully proud of myself.
“Oh?”
I told him. He was silent for a moment.
“Did you mean all that?”
“About making love with Jane?”
“That in particular.”
“Of course I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Of course.”
“It remains to be seen how the matter works out in practice.”
“Of course.”
It’s odd, I thought, that Pack is not enthused by my doing what he has wanted me to do for a long time.
“So, can I go back to my teens?”
“Heaven forfend that I should stop you.” I laughed.
“Be up at the Lake soon?”
“Not till the middle of August when Laura comes home from Boston and New Mexico.”
“Not till then?”
“Not with my present schedule.”
“See you then.”
Come now, Monsignor, one can pursue the prize in Chicago if one has the nerve.
I dismissed Packy’s odd reaction from my m
ind. It was most unlikely that he wanted Jane for himself.
Later at my apartment, my head aching from a mild hangover, I put some mixed vegetables into the microwave and, a glass of iced tea in my hand, settled back to watch the MacNeil-Lehrer report, a matter of obligation under pain of mortal sin for an academic. After they were through analyzing the world, I would try to analyze my own eventful day.
The University, in lieu of the Provost’s house, which I had demanded (as I say, out of stubbornness and meanness rather than real need) provided me with a large and rambling penthouse in an art deco apartment building on the edge of the Park, a fashionable place for senior faculty with a fair amount of money. It was on the sixteenth or top floor and was reached by my own private elevator, which Laura had said, “Like totally blows my mind.”
Mine too.
Unfortunately in the twenties when the Castles (as it was called) was constructed, they didn’t know air conditioning. The six window units that the University, in its wisdom, had installed, provided just enough cooling for all but the hottest days of the summer. On which days you might just as well turn off all the machines, give them a rest, and let in the fresh air. I thought about opening the windows but not with enough energy to actually do it.
The phone rang.
“Kelly,” I said irritably.
“Would you rather talk to your cute daughter or listen to Robin MacNeil?”
“No choice.”
“Good. I hear you had lunch with Jane today.”
“Who?”
“Whom, Daddy.”
“I meant who told you?”
“Lucianne, who else? She calls her mother’s office and like Nessa, goes your mother has gone to lunch with this really gorgeous man with red hair and some flakes of white in it.”
“So Lucianne has to call you.”
“Really!”
“Do you still call Mrs. Clare, Jane?”
“Sure. She said I should. Like I told you. She’s like one of the kids anyway. Even Lucianne goes that her mom is like one of the kids. Still she’s mad at her a real lot and I go Lucianne you’re an asshole to be so mean to your mother.”
“And Lucianne goes, er, I means says?”
“Gotcha, Daddy. She goes, yeah I know I am but I can’t help it.”
“Does she call her mother Jane?”
“Behind her back, sure. Not to her face yet but she’d like to, you know?”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“But, Daddy, you didn’t answer my question.”
“Which was?”
“How was lunch with Jane?”
All right, my beloved was one of the kids.
“Laura, how could lunch with Jane be anything else but a fun experience? You know, she’s like one of the kids, really!”
“Daddy!”
“Actually I had a very nice time. Drank two glasses of Jameson’s!”
“Daddy, you didn’t!”
“I did so. Now I have a headache.”
“Serves you right!”
“Jane had only one. And a glass of white wine.”
“I’m sure.”
Huffy because I wouldn’t spill out my personal life to her.
“All right, it’s too early for you and Lucianne to start ordering presents, but I imagine we’ll have lunch again.”
“Great! Because, you know, Lucianne wouldn’t dare ask her mother anything about it.”
Time for candor, real candor not academic candor.
“Laura, I know that teenagers tend to be embarrassed at the thought that their parents, though doddering and decrepit, still have a sex life. Do I hear you saying that you would not be offended at the possibility of your ancient father in bed with a woman?”
“Not if it were Jane. Of course not.”
“No promises,” I concluded our conversation.
She merely giggled.
When I had hung up I could hardly believe that I had permitted the little bitch to trick me into a confession of intent.
So I gave up on MacNeil-Lehrer and tried, like a good professor of the social sciences, to order and analyze the data I had collected during the day.
I had missed a lot of implications in my three conversations. There were patterns and possibilities lurking in the data that I couldn’t quite tease out. There were null hypotheses that I should try to test. Somehow there was a hint of an explanation that I saw for an instant or two and then faded away before I could pin it down.
I did come to one conclusion however: Jane wanted more time. Fine, I would give her till the middle of August. No longer.
With that happy thought I put aside the APSR (American Political Science Review to the uninitiated) and decided to treat myself to a good night’s sleep.
1968
Patrick
“The Pope,” I exploded, “is a sick little faggot.”
The two adjectives and the noun were accurate enough in my judgment but they were irrelevant and I should have had more respect for the Pope. Moreover his sexual orientation was none of my business.
Jane, Jerry, and Maggie (the latter living just down the street) had come for supper the night before. My poor parents had to listen to another one of my diatribes against the Pope. After my outburst our dining room was as quiet as an empty funeral parlor. Maggie opened her mouth as if to say something and then shut it—most unusual behavior for my beloved sister-in-law.
“We’re all wonied about you, Packy,” Jane said firmly. “That terrible place has destroyed your wit and your serenity. You’re not the warm, wonderful priest you used to be. Don’t go back there. Please. Be a parish priest again. You were never happier than when you were that ten years ago.”
I had become Jane’s confidant during the year, offering her advice, reassurance, encouragement, and affection by mail and an occasional phone call. Now she had deftly turned the tables on me. Our relationship had become more intricate at that moment—and more intimate.
The rest of them had waited expectantly, Maggie biting her lip to keep her mouth shut.
“You’re right, Jane,” I sighed. “Sorry for blowing up. I’ll get over it.”
“We know you will, dear,” Mom had nodded. “It was a terrible disappointment.”
“But not the end of the world,” Maggie had added.
“No,” I agreed. “But it will make things more difficult.”
“It won’t affect us laypeople,” Jane added. “We’re all are on your side.”
So indeed they were.
But many laypeople would suffer terribly because of the encyclical Humanae Vitae.
A year ago I had assured Jane and everyone else that change on birth control was inevitable—just as poor Cardinal Heenan had assured everyone in England. Then the Pope double-crossed us.
He had sold out the leading Cardinals of the Council who had been on the Birth Control Commission—Suenens of Brussels, Döphner of Munich. Heenan of Westminister, the best of the moral theologians—Häring, Fuchs, and DeReitman—lay demographers like Tom Burch from the United States and Mercedes Concepcion from the Philippines—and the laity of the world. He had betrayed us under pressure from the Italian curialists who wanted revenge for what the Council had done to their power. Led by Cardinal Alfredo Ottovianni, an old man and almost blind (who had the reputation of possessing the Evil Eye), they had waited to prey on the Pope’s conscience till the commission had disbanded and gone home. He was, they told him contemptuously, violating the teachings of Christ and destroying the credibility of the Papacy. He would be the first Pope against whom the gates of hell had prevailed. Good Catholics would go into schism. History would judge him a coward and a failure.
These were his old enemies in the Curia who had made his life miserable when he was Under Secretary of State and had voted against him in the Conclave. Yet through all his years as Pope he seemed more afraid of them than of anyone else.
The Pope gave in, rejected our report, and wrote Humanae Vitae renewing the traditional birt
h control teaching. He said that in twenty years he would be hailed as a prophet and was dismayed when many of the hierarchies around the world were lukewarm in their support. Our own gloriously reigning psychopath had someone write him an innocuous statement and then went off to Alaska the day the encyclical was issued.
Paul VI had listed in the encyclical some of the reasons we had advanced for change. He dismissed them rather than responding to them. There could be no change, it seemed, no matter how good the reasons. The encyclical ultimately was not about sex but about power, the power of the Vatican and the Pope over the sex lives of the laity. It seemed to me then and it still does that to interfere with what goes on in the marriage bed in the name of your own power is demonic. Ironically, far from protecting the power of Church leadership, the encyclical destroyed it because the laity decided that the Pope and his advisors did not know what they were talking about on the subject of marital sex.
A few of us in Rome tried to mobilize opposition in the months before Humanae Vitae was issued. We knew that the curialists had defeated us on the possibility of change, but we hoped to head off the encyclical, which we were sure would do exactly the opposite of what Ottoviani and his crew of mafiosi had told the Pope. Maybe Paul would settle for a compromise: an encyclical that said in effect what the Holy Office had told the French hierarchy in the nineteenth century: Don’t trouble the consciences of the laity.
But like many passive-aggressive personalities when they dig in their heels, the Pope turned stubborn on us. We warned him that neither priests nor laity would obey and papal credibility would be shattered. The Holy See, trapped in its Aristotelian view of the nature of human nature and indifferent to what scientists since Aristotle had discovered about human nature, had dug a trap for itself.
Ted Hesburgh, a personal friend of the Pope, had come over to try to talk him out of it. But, passive-aggressive man that he was, the Pope had dug in his heels. At least we persuaded him to take out the line that would have made the teaching infallible.
Some day I’ll do a book about the whole disgusting business. The letters I wrote to Jane during that year will make an excellent source for describing how hope gradually turned to despair.
I had stayed on in Rome, teaching a seminar at one of the colleges and trying to figure out what to do next. My friends told me that my career was finished because I was the one who had drafted the rejected report. I would become a non-person, just as would the members of the commission. I didn’t care about that. I had not come to Rome looking for a career. However, I did not want to return to the insane asylum, which Chicago had become under our new Cardinal. At that time I had no thought of leaving the priesthood and displayed contempt for many of the weepers and complainers who had.
Summer at the Lake Page 27
