“Okay,” Bill said. He scribbled his conclusions on the chart that was spread out on a white metal table beside the examining table. “Okay,” he said again, his shrewd eyes glinting behind his silver-rimmed glasses, “what’s eating you?”
His dour, sallow face, with the faint tracing of a scar on his right cheek where a shell fragment had ripped it just before they crossed the Rhine, almost made the question an accusation. But Archbishop Matthew Mahan and Dr. William Reed had too much in common to let a tone of voice trouble them. For eleven harrowing months, June 6, 1944, to May 8, 1945, they had shared a special agony. Young Dr. Reed had been in charge of the forward aid station where the 409th Regiment’s wounded were brought. When Matthew Mahan was not in the lines with the men, this was where he spent most of his time. How many awful nights and days had he watched while Dr. Reed, his face saturnine, separated the wounded according to the heartbreaking but lifesaving triage system, working first on the seriously wounded, next on the slightly wounded, and last, when he had time, on the men who were almost certainly going to die.
With his fondness for the sardonic, Bill had called the mortally wounded Matthew Mahan’s patients. “Three more for you out there, Padre,” he would say as the medics carried a writhing figure to the operating tent. Chaplain Mahan would stumble into the darkness or the daylight and kneel beside the dying men and give them his blessing and, if they were Catholics, absolution from their sins.
On slow days, Dr. Reed and Chaplain Mahan discussed God. Dr. Reed did not believe in Him. He called himself “a scathing atheist from birth.” Chaplain Mahan and the Protestant chaplain, Steve Murchison, dismissed Dr. Reed’s verbal hostility. “When I see you talking to the wounded, Bill, I know you’re not an atheist,” Matthew Mahan used to say. This inevitably made Dr. Reed furious and would inspire even more vehement denunciations of the “God stuff” that the chaplains were “selling.”
After the war, at Matthew Mahan’s urging, Dr. Reed had migrated from his downstate hometown to the city. Father Matt had not a little to do with making him a very successful internist. Reed had married a local girl, a shy, dark, Irish beauty who remained a devout Catholic and raised their only daughter, Helen, almost too strictly, Matthew Mahan thought, as if she were constantly afraid that her unbelieving husband would steal the girl’s soul. Otherwise, the marriage had been extraordinarily happy. When he was with his wife, Bill Reed became almost sociable.
Four years ago, Shelagh Reed had died of cancer. The effect on her husband had been catastrophic. Each time Matthew Mahan saw him, Bill seemed more dry, empty, laconic, a man going through the motions of living. Studying the drawn face now in the harsh light of the examining room, Matthew Mahan saw that things were no better.
“Don’t you know what’s eating you?” Bill asked, his eyes glinting upward beneath the glasses. “Or are you afraid to tell me?”
“How about giving me your diagnosis first.”
“You’ve got an ulcer. I’m 95 percent certain of it. I want you to go into the hospital Monday. We’ll do a gastrointestinal series and take some X-rays to make sure I’m right.”
“Monday? I can’t possibly do it, Bill. It’s the beginning of Holy Week. We’ve got the Archbishop’s Fund Drive coming up in two weeks. I’ve got speaking appointments scheduled right straight through, three and four a day.”
“When was the last time you took a vacation?” Bill asked, tapping his ball-point pen on the metal table beside the chart.
“I went to Brazil last year -”
“And spent all your time in the bush visiting missions.”
“What else could I do?” Matthew Mahan asked. “We’ve got twenty-five priests down there. I had to go see all of them or none of them.”
“When was the vacation before that one?”
“I made my ad liminem visit to Rome in sixty-seven.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Every five years or so, a bishop has to go to Rome and report on how things are going in his diocese.”
“That’s no vacation, either.”
“Oh, I took it easy. I hit all the best restaurants.”
“And between meals worried your ass off about what the Pope was going to say about your report.”
No, Matthew Mahan thought, not about that, Bill, I worried about a woman. A woman with haunted eyes who responded bravely, always bravely, to my perpetually fatuous question: Are you all right, Mary?
Bill Reed sighed and looked at the ceiling, as if he were invoking an unknown god for assistance. “I can see that we’re not going to settle anything here. A lame-brain atheist like me can’t win this kind of an argument. But, generally speaking, there are only a couple of reasons why people get ulcers. They’re either drinking too much or worrying too much or working too hard. Usually, it’s a combination of all three.”
“I like a scotch and soda in the evening,” Matthew Mahan said, “but that’s about the only drink I take regularly. Unless I’m eating in a restaurant or speaking at a dinner.”
Bill Reed gave him a fleeting smile. “Okay, Padre. I know you’re not on the sauce. It’s obvious to me and everyone else who knows you that you’re working too hard. Frankly, if I had a choice of diseases for you, I’d pick this one. It’s a lot safer than a coronary. Put on your duds and let’s go into the office and talk this over.”
In his wry way, Bill told Matthew Mahan how an ulcer worked. The new Cardinal only half listened. His eyes were on the furrows in Bill Reed’s haggard face. The man looked like he was dying of some mysterious disease that dried out the flesh and annihilated the spirit.
“Now, this Titrilac comes in liquid form and in pills,” Bill was saying. “Use the liquid whenever you can. Carry the pills in your pocket. Take the pills any time you feel like it. Take the liquid a half hour before eating.”
“This second prescription is for some pills called Donnatal,” Bill said, scribbling as he talked. “They cut off the nerve that pumps acid into your gut. They have a side effect you don’t have to worry about. Periodic impotence.”
“I wish you’d prescribe it for a few curates I know.”
“Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“I wake up around 4:00 a.m. an awful lot of nights and never get back to sleep. I lie there solving problems.”
“And you feel lousy for the rest of the day. I do the same thing. Here’s a prescription for my favorite sleeping pill, Seconal. Don’t use them every night. Wait until you feel really sleep-starved, then take one and arrange things so you can sleep about ten hours. It’ll put you back on your feet.”
Matthew Mahan nodded glumly. Next Bill handed him two mimeographed pages listing foods he was forbidden to eat and sample meals of what he was permitted to enjoy - if that word still meant anything. Matthew Mahan doubted it as he glanced clown the pages and saw veal, spaghetti, lobster, and a half-dozen other favorite foods on the forbidden list. “Booze is out, and so is smoking,” Bill said.
“Smoking,” Matthew Mahan said. “Come on, Bill, give me a break. You remember what happened when I tried to give it up two years ago. I didn’t sleep for a month.”
“How much are you smoking now?”
“Oh, about a pack a day.”
“Cut it in half this week, and cut that in half next week.”
“Okay. But if the condemned man can make an observation, I think you’re taking entirely too much pleasure in giving these orders.”
Bill almost smiled. “How often does anybody get a chance to order a Cardinal around?”
“How are things with you, Bill? You look awfully tired yourself.”
“What the hell is this? Are you trying to play witch doctor on me in my own office?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Matthew Mahan said. “When is the last time you took a vacation?”
“Oh, I go up to my shack in the woods and putter around on weekends during the summer.”
“Alone?”
Bill’s eyes were on the
blue and silver ballpoint pen that he kept turning around and around in his hands. “Yeah. It guarantees you a real rest.”
“I never see you at dinner parties, lunches. Nobody does anymore since Shelagh died.”
A nerve twitched in Bill Reed’s drawn cheek. He gave a little sigh. “I know, Matt. I just don’t have the heart for it anymore.”
“Bill, you’re a young man. You can’t be more than fifty. Why don’t you get married again?”
A dry sound, something between embarrassment and distaste. “Mrs. Right just hasn’t come along, Matt. Maybe I’m a hard man to please.”
It was hopeless. He was like a turtle retracting into his shell. Matthew Mahan groped for a new approach. “I saw your daughter today. Sister Helen.”
A mistake. Bill’s already saturnine face became a mask of fury. For the next ten minutes, Matthew Mahan sat there while Dr. Reed told him that the Catholic Church had destroyed his daughter’s mind. Intensely conservative like so many doctors, Bill’s temperament fed upon the nostrums of the far Right. He was too intelligent to join the John Birch Society, but he was ready to believe that the American system was threatened by wild-eyed critics who seemed to be sprouting like weeds everywhere. He had seen too many men die for the country to tolerate wholesale castigation of “Amerika.”
Six years as a nursing nun at St. Clare’s had turned his daughter, Helen, into one of the castigators. She was now living with four other sisters in a rat-infested slum in the heart of the First Ward. She totally rejected everything her father stood for, everything she had enjoyed so casually in her girlhood - the baronial house on the Parkway, the beach-front mansion at the shore, the yacht clubs and country clubs, the sports cars and stylish dresses that Daddy’s money had munificently supplied. Worse, she called him a hypocrite, a parody of a doctor, because he spent most of his time peering down the throats and tapping on the stomachs of the Establishment. Understandably, Bill was hurt, confused, outraged.
“Bill, if it makes you feel any better, I can’t figure out what’s going on in their heads, either. People her age. I’ve got a secretary, Dennis McLaughlin. A very bright young kid. At least three or four times a day he says things that are totally incomprehensible to me. Something’s - snapped, Bill. The links, cords, whatever you want to call them that we assumed were there, connecting us to the next generation. Kennedy’s assassination, this war, Nixon in the White House.”
“Not everybody thinks that’s so bad, you unreconstructed Democrat.”
Matthew Mahan forced a smile. Now Bill was trying to cheer him up. He was also trying to tell him that no matter how bad he felt about his daughter, they would always be friends. It was a consolation, a deep consolation, Matthew Mahan thought ruefully as he involuntarily rubbed his aching stomach, to know how many men like Bill, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and men of no particular faith, were his friends in this city, friends on a deep, unshakable level reached a quarter of a century ago in that fiery trial they had all endured in Europe.
Gruffly, Bill Reed demanded a firm date for the gastrointestinal series. Matthew Mahan told him he would have to consult his appointment book, shook hands, and departed. Walking back up the Parkway to his residence, six blocks away, he felt vaguely humiliated by his illness. A sense of personal defeat dogged him - something he had rarely felt before. It was multiplied by an even more unpleasant feeling, helplessness. There was nothing he could do to solve this problem except take his pills and stay on his diet. A servile, mindless kind of obedience. Beyond that, the solutions seemed to lie in not doing, in not working so hard, in not caring so much, ideas that only seemed to compound the feelings of failure and futility that were haunting him these days. Lord, Lord, thy will be done, he prayed, but why this, why now? When he needed all his strength, all his physical and emotional resources to hold back the waters of chaos?
At the residence, Mrs. Norton peered from the other end of the hall, seconds after the big iron front door clanged shut. He gave her the two sheets of diet data and asked for some cream of wheat for his supper. “I’m afraid this is going to be an awful nuisance for you,” he said.
“Oh dear, dear,” she said. “Oh dear, dear. I was saying only the other day to Mrs. Finch that you didn’t look well to me, for all the flesh on you, you were eating like a bird. This won’t be any trouble. Not a bit of trouble at all. I’ll have the cream of wheat up to your room in only a minute or two.”
Calling Dennis McLaughlin on the telephone intercom, he asked him to come down and take the prescriptions to the drugstore. The new Cardinal trudged wearily up the stairs to his second-floor apartment, wondering why he was the last person to discover that he was visibly overtired. He did feel exhausted now, but it had been a lulu of a day. He thought for a moment about Sister Agnes Marie, and the pain made a rapid reconnaissance from one side of his abdomen to the other.
On the second-floor landing, he met his secretary, wearing a blue turtleneck sweater and green tweed sports jacket. He gave Dennis the prescriptions and said: “I seem to have an ulcer. At least that’s what the doctor says, based on an educated guess.”
“Oh. Oh. I’m - sorry.”
“So am I. I’m afraid you and the rest of the crew will have to do more, so I can do less.”
Dennis nodded and started down the stairs. Suddenly Matthew Mahan felt compelled to say something about his outfit. “Dennis,” he said, “would you, as a personal favor to me, only wear those kind of clothes when you are off duty?”
It was almost unfair. Taking advantage of your illness. Was it also unwise? Speaking from weakness instead of strength? “It’s more or less what I’ve asked all our priests to do. I sent a letter to them last year, laying down some guidelines.”
Father McLaughlin looked more wistful than angry, gazing up at him from the darkened staircase. “I’m sorry. I went downtown with my brother for a few drinks. Do you want me to change now?”
“No, no.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. Again.” He smiled guiltily. “Father Reagan, the president of St. Francis, called. He’d like to speak to you about the demonstration that Father Disalvo is planning to hold on the campus tomorrow. He sounded very uptight.”
“All right. I’ll call him. As soon as I’ve finished my mush. That’s what I’m condemned to eating for supper.”
Matthew Mahan turned away abruptly, again displeased with himself. Wrong, wrong. You must learn to handle this illness without any pleas for pity.
In his bedroom, he switched on the television to get KTGM’s ten o’clock news. B-52S flew high over South Vietnam in response to the latest enemy offensive. The bombs drifted down, as he had seen them fall in countless other film clips while a voice-over named their unseen target. “As of last Sunday 33,063 Americans have died in Vietnam fighting. A figure fast approaching the Korean War total of 33,629,” the invisible announcer said. Matthew Mahan turned off the sound and called “Yes?” to a sharp rap on the door. Mrs. Norton came out of the dark hall like an apparition, his steaming cream of wheat on a tray. “Here it is, Your Eminence,” she said. “It takes only a jiffy. Any time you want some more, let me know. I’ve a nice pitcher of cream here. It gives it a scrumptious taste, in my opinion.”
Midway through the cream of wheat, the international news ended, and the local news began. He turned on the sound and listened to himself answering nice harmless questions from Jack Murphy. Downstairs, the telephone rang. A moment later the red light on his phone came aglow, and he picked up the receiver. “It’s the president of St. Francis University,” Mrs. Norton said. “He called before and I connected him to Father McLaughlin. No doubt he’s forgotten to tell you.”
“No, he told me,” said Matthew Mahan mildly. “I’ll take the call now.” He sat down in his Barcalounger beside his bed and switched off the sound on the television.
“Good evening,” said Father Philip Reagan. He was one of those almost too handsome boy geniuses in which the Jesuits had seemed to specialize during Matthew Mahan’s two stude
nt years at St. Francis. In fact, Reagan had taught him freshman Latin. He had been considered a brilliant classical scholar in those days. But as far as Matthew Mahan knew, Reagan had never fulfilled his early promise. Typical of too many Jesuits of that era, he thought. Posted from one job to another, fundraising for the missions one year and giving retreats the next year and running a university the next, they became jacks of all trades, masters of none. “Can I jump the gun a little and call you Your Eminence?” Father Reagan asked. “At least, I want to extend my personal congratulations and the best wishes of every member of our faculty.”
“Thanks,” said Matthew Mahan. “What’s the problem? Not another financial crisis, I hope.”
Last year, Chancellor Malone had caught the Jesuits negotiating a private $2-million loan from an out-of-state bank. In a fierce test of influence and willpower, Archbishop Mahan had won an unconditional victory both in the countinghouse and in Rome. The Jesuits had been forced to withdraw their loan application and borrow the money through the archdiocese, thereby admitting to Matthew Mahan that the university was in perilous financial health.
“Oh no, oh no,” said Father Reagan. A little more humility crept into his voice, however, which was why Matthew Mahan exhumed the topic in the first place. “It’s this rally they’re going to have out here. Solidarity Day, they’re calling it. Father Disalvo says that he’s planning to lead 10,000 blacks out here. He estimates there’ll be 5,000 students to greet them. Our campus security people tell me they can’t possibly handle a crowd that size.”
The Good Shepherd Page 13
