“I’m fine, Your Eminent.”
“Your what?”
The girls started giggling, and even Timmy allowed a smile to flit across his sour face.
“Your Eminence,” his mother said.
Matt was totally unbothered by the correction. “Your Eminent,” he said again.
“Now listen,” Matthew Mahan said, speaking to all of them. “No one in this family has to call me by that silly name. I’ve always been Father Matt to you, and I always will be.” Speaking to Matt II, he added, “You don’t call a baseball player by a different name when he gets traded to another team, do you? Well, I’ve been traded to the Cardinals, but I’m still the same guy.”
Matt grinned. “It’s okay with me. What position are you going to play on the Cardinals?”
They were in the elevator now with a half-dozen strangers. Everyone started to laugh.
“I don’t know,” Matthew Mahan said. “What position do you think I ought to play?”
“Center field. That’s where sluggers play.”
“I’m too old and too fat for center field. I think I’d better be a coach.”
In spite of this amusing start, Matthew Mahan found the dinner depressing. He made a half-dozen attempts to start a conversation with Timmy and got nowhere. The girls gossiped and giggled and quarreled among themselves while their mother wearily corrected them. They were all picky eaters and left two-thirds of the food untouched. Only Matt seemed to have a good time, voraciously downing his child’s portion and confiding to his uncle all the gossip from the first grade at St. Damian’s parochial school.
He did his best to converse with Eileen Mahan, but it was hard going. A receptionist at the Furia Brothers Construction Company, she did not see or hear much that was even faintly interesting. Their only link was her pastor, Monsignor Frank Falconer, who was a seminary classmate of Matthew Mahan’s. Frank had been a tremendous help to Eileen in the first year of her widowhood, visiting the house frequently, persuading her to become active in several parish societies, something she had been ashamed to do when her husband was coming home staggering drunk two and three nights a week. Frank, not Matthew Mahan, was responsible for the spiritual resignation that Eileen Mahan had achieved. But after a quick rundown of the thriving state of things in St. Damian’s parish, a comment on a new curate who was fond of liturgical experiments - on Palm Sunday the children had led a procession around the church with forty or fifty banners that they had collected or improvised - a ritual exchange of praise for Monsignor Falconer, the conversation limped.
Outside her job, Eileen never saw anyone except the neighbors in her flat, and they were as boring as she was. Occasionally, she asked him to do one of them a favor - get a son or daughter into one of the diocesan high schools or an eighty-year-old parent into St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged. He usually obliged her, but the people behind the names remained a blur, unrelieved even when they took the trouble to write thank-you letters - which was seldom. Eileen insisted on talking about them as if they were all his intimate friends. He tried to listen, but invariably his mind wandered, and the conversation would end with: “Gee, you’re just like Charlie. You never listen to anything I say. It must run in the family. Timmy doesn’t, either.”
Timmy’s face was a mass of pimples. He, too, ate practically no food until he got to the dessert. He wolfed down a huge chocolate sundae and raided the strawberry shortcake and the peach melba and the chocolate cake that his sisters were eating. His conversation consisted of monosyllables. Was he enjoying his freshman year at St. Francis? No. He’d rather go someplace else? Yes. The state university? Yes. The answers, not to mention their style, did nothing to improve Matthew Mahan’s mood. He had had to twist a few Jesuit arms rather hard to get Timmy a scholarship at St. Francis, leaving him in the uneasy position of owing a favor. It was never a position he liked, and he especially did not like to owe anything to the Jesuits.
Although the Society of Jesus had educated him through high school and two years of college, Matthew Mahan never forgot or entirely forgave the snobbery with which the order had rejected his attempt to join their elite ranks. He would be happier, they told him, as a diocesan priest - coolly implying that he did not have the brainpower to be a Jesuit. One of the first things he did when he took charge of the diocese was organize a Vocation Day at St. Francis Prep. He made sure it was the very opposite of a Jesuit retreat: no emotional appeals - just an informative presentation of how a diocesan priest lived and worked, the variety of roles he played. Each year he had taken one or two, sometimes three or four of the Jesuits’ best prospects away from them.
A few years ago, before Timmy Mahan had lapsed into adolescent sullenness, his uncle had hoped that he might be one of his Vocation Day converts. Timmy had gotten extraordinarily good marks in his first two years at St. Francis Prep. He had been a daily communicant. But with no warning, as he crossed from sixteen to seventeen, he had undergone an almost malevolent transformation from true believer to defiant cynic.
“Timmy,” Matthew Mahan said as the waiter served their coffee, “would you like to come to Rome with your mother for my official crowning?”
“Crowning? Yuh mean they’re gonna make yuh the Pope?”
“No, I’m only kidding. There’ll be a ceremony in St. Peter’s where the Pope will put a red hat on my head. I’ll be dressed in a long red cloak with a train, called a cappa magna.”
“Sounds like something out of the Middle Ages.”
“Timmy!” said his mother.
“In a way it is. But it’s kind of interesting; it reminds us of how old the Church is.”
“Too old sometimes, it seems to me.”
“Timmy! I’m gonna wallop you when we get home. I don’t care how big you are, I’m gonna wallop you.”
“I know what you mean. At least I try to understand what people your age mean when they say that, Timmy. But stop and realize that the Church has seemed too old many times in its history. When the Roman Empire fell. When the Protestant Reformation swept Europe. Each time, the Church was reborn, it evolved new ways of doing things. That’s happening today, too. That’s why I’d like you to come to Rome. To give you a chance to see the heart of the Church in action there.”
“That’s all we’re gonna do? Go to Rome?”
“No, no. We’ll spend a little time seeing the rest of Europe. Not all of it. But some of France, maybe Ireland. It depends on what we can work out.”
Timmy shrugged, still unimpressed. “Sure, I’ll come. Why not?”
“I wish I could bring all of you,” Matthew Mahan said, speaking to the girls, whose faces had grown more and more forlorn throughout the conversation. “But we’re going by plane and there’s a limit to the number of seats.”
“I wish I could come,” said Matt.
“I wish you could, too. What would you call the Pope if you met him?”
“His Heightness,” said Matt.
“Holiness,” said Alice, his eight-year-old sister. “What a dope you are.”
“I’m not a dope,” said Matt, his cheeks flushing and his eyes swimming with tears. “You’re a dope.”
“Stop it both of you!” said their mother.
Matthew Mahan welcomed the appearance of the waiter with the check. He scribbled his name and audit number on it and in another five minutes was shoveling his nieces and nephews into a taxi. As Eileen Mahan was about to climb in after them, he slipped two $50-bills into her hand. “If you want to buy a couple of dresses for the trip,” he said.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Matt,” said his sister-in-law. “I dunno what we’d do without ya.”
No matter how small his gift, Eileen was always effusively grateful. “I wish I could do more. A whole lot more,” he said.
Riding back to his residence in another taxi, Matthew Mahan tried to shake off the depression that seemed to be wrapping itself around him like a huge serpent. The sense of helplessness that had tormented him so often lately only sharpened every ti
me he saw his brother’s wife and children. What could he do beyond seeing them three or four times a year for a dinner like the one he had just endured, and send birthday and Easter and Christmas presents, and listen patiently on the telephone to Eileen’s sighs and lamentations. Although he urged them to call him Father, he was nothing of the sort, and he knew it. To them he was a vaguely benevolent figure, an authority whom their mother invoked in moments of desperation, when all other appeals to discipline had failed. Why, why, why, had his brother married such a stupid woman? If Charlie were only alive. . . .
But that line of thought only made him more depressed. If Charlie were alive, the situation would probably be worse. Drunks do not make good fathers, and even if you had prayed, exhorted, pleaded, threatened, twenty-four hours a day, Charlie Mahan would still be a drunk if he were alive. You know, too, that those seven children were what destroyed him. Especially the five girls. What did Charlie used to call them? The Weird Sisters. Like many drunks, Charlie had a wicked tongue, especially when it was loosened by liquor. Every cent his wife spent on those five girls was savagely resented and denounced. It was almost pathological toward the end. Not only were they the reason for his self-destruction, they were his excuse. Both had blended into the nightmare in which Charlie had spent the last two years of his life. It was a nightmare into which he malevolently tried to lure Matthew Mahan. Again and again, he had poured out his defeat and self-hatred to him on the telephone.
What’s your opinion on birth control, Bishop? You go right down the line with His Woppiness? You tell your story, and then listen to mine.
After number seven, why my wife said no more. My good Roman Catholic wife, Eileen née Corcoran Mahan. And what did Eileen née Corcoran Mahan do to make sure there were no more? She kicked me out of bed. You and I, dear brother, excuse me, dear Bishop, are now fellow celibates. How does that grab you?
Rhythm? Eileen née Corcoran Mahan is too stupid to keep a chart. Even if she could keep one, she’s too irregular to make one worthwhile. This is the considered advice of her fine Irish-Catholic obstetrician, Brendan O’Reilly Kendrick, M.D. So it’s whack off or screw whores for poor old Charlie Mahan. How do you like that, old Uncle Shepherd? I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly. Haw, haw, haw. Haven’t you got anything to say, you fucking miter-headed fraud?
An exception? An exception? There are six guys in this bar, all drunker than me, in the same state of unsolicited celibacy. Tell you what, why don’t you invite us all up to the residence? We’ll get together for a little pray-in. How does that grab you? It doesn’t? Don’t want to rescue your strayed spavined sheep from their distress, Shepherd? We need advice, Shepherd. We need to find out the secret of how you survive without doing it. On the level, don’t you diddle one of those rich Catholic divorcées like Mary Shea now and then? Come on, you can admit it to the kid brother. If a bag of skin and bones like me gets the urge two or three times a week, you must get it every night. Give us the inside story, big husky Shepherd. Don’t some of those little ewes look inviting when they poke their tits at you at confirmation? That’s the real hope of my heart, Shepherd. Someday they’ll catch you fooling around with nine- and ten-year-olds. When that happens, I swear to Christ I’ll stop drinking.
A vague nausea mixed with pain stirred in Matthew Mahan’s stomach. Please, Charlie, please be quiet, he prayed. Every three or four months, this rancid ghost’s voice awoke inside him to recite the same searing words. It was enough to make a man wonder about evil spirits and diabolical possession. Or at least to half believe that some souls are too misshapen to enter Heaven, too tormented on earth to deserve Purgatory, and too innocent to be condemned forever. So they wandered the world recalling the lies and delusions and rages that had destroyed them while living.
When it came to tormenting his elder brother, Charlie Mahan might as well have been sitting beside him in this taxicab, instead of lying silent beneath a stone in Holy Name Cemetery. But it was understandable, Matthew Mahan told himself, struggling to regain control of his mind, perfectly understandable. There was the Kit Kat Lounge on the corner of Van Nostrand Boulevard and the Parkway. Four years ago Charlie had stumbled through those doors at 3:00 a.m., into the path of a Parkway bus. Although Matthew Mahan had been in South America when the accident happened, the sight of the semi-fashionable saloon with its neon cats blinking alternately on a flickering seesaw was instantly transmuted into sound. He could hear the shriek of brakes, his brother’s drunken dying cry. Lord, Lord, have mercy on us. Lord, forgive us, for we know not what we do.
“At’ll be three twenny, Ya Eminence,” said the cabdriver.
Matthew Mahan gave him $4 and trudged up the walk to the residence. As he pulled open the heavy outer door, a wave of total gloom engulfed him. What had happened to the confidence with which he had taken command of the archdiocese ten years ago? He had been so sure he could do a better job than old Hogan. Perhaps there had been too much arrogance in that confidence. God was on record as being distinctly unfond of arrogance. Did He insist on failure as the only alternative? Maybe losing is better, Dennis McLaughlin had remarked in the car the other day. If that were true, Cardinal Mahan could only confess his total inability to understand it.
A strange sound reached his ears as he hung his coat in the hall. Laughter, filtering through the closed doors of the sitting room. Was someone giving a party? Had Dennis invited a few friends without bothering to ask permission? Had the revolution finally reached his residence? But those voices were vaguely familiar. As he stood outside the door, he heard an unmistakable Irish brogue declare: “He may send us into the night with a volley of anathemas.”
Matthew Mahan opened the door and found himself a witness to a crime. An aged cleric with a long nose which stopped just short of looping into a beak was cheerfully demolishing the archdiocese’s supply of Irish whiskey. In one of the period armchairs sat a large dark-haired man in a very expensive monogrammed shirt with his tie askew. “Don’t worry, I’ll write him a check and calm him down,” he said in a cheerful rasp.
“The hell with anathemas,” Matthew Mahan said, stepping into the room, “I may just call the cops.”
“Matthew me boy,” said Auxiliary Bishop David Cronin, raising his glass high.
“Padre,” said Mike Furia, rising from the chair to extend a ham-sized hand.
Bishop Cronin remained close to the Irish whiskey bottle, eyeing his former pupil warily. “‘Tis all his fault, Your Eminence,” he said. “I told him a man who will soon be hobnobbing with the Pope had no time for the likes of us.”
“I decided I’d take him out for Easter dinner and give him one more chance to turn wop,” Mike Furia said. “It’s his only hope of getting past St. Peter. But, he still thinks the devil is better company.”
Matthew Mahan absorbed all the nuances of these remarks with a smile. In earlier years, the three of them had spent more than a few cheerful Sunday evenings in this room with their feet up on old Hogan’s antiques, simultaneously insulting each other and solving the problems of the archdiocese. But in the last three years, the parties had become more and more infrequent and in the last year had dwindled to a full stop. Old Davey Cronin’s radical rage at the way things were going in the Church had become an embarrassment for Matthew Mahan, even in private. Since last July, when Pope Paul had issued Humanae Vitae, his birth control encyclical, his former mentor had become totally berserk. Mike Furia, who had no interest in the theology but knew that Cronin was hurt by Matthew Mahan’s avoidance tactics, was simultaneously rebuking him and trying to restore their old camaraderie. Fortunately, Matthew Mahan was able to greet them wholeheartedly. They had come to him at a moment when he was desperately in need of remembering better, happier days.
“You know what he’s just telling me?” Mike Furia said. “Christ visited Ireland.”
“‘Tis a strong belief among the peasants in the West,” said Bishop Cronin. “And there’s historical evidence for it. The wine in Palestine
was the strongest of its day. According to the story, sometime between his twentieth and thirtieth year the young rabbi perambulated to the Emerald sod and brought the formula for it back with him. Which explains why no one could tell the difference between the water and the wine at the marriage feast of Cana.”
“You’re a terrible old man. You’re lucky it’s not the thirteenth century. I’d have you out there on a pile of faggots, cooked to a turn.”
“Ah yes, holy freedom. Wasn’t it nice of good Pope John to discover it just in time?”
“Just in time for what?” Matthew Mahan said.
“In time to keep the whole bloody works from going up by spontaneous combustion.”
“I used to think so, but I must confess I’m starting to wonder if holy freedom wasn’t a phrase that would have better been forgotten.”
“By God, he’s got the glooms for sure. What’s happened, have the Giovannicides in Rome withdrawn your red hat? Saying it was all a clerical error? You could get much worse news than that, believe me. The more I think of it, the more I dread the thought of you associating yourself so closely with the present occupier of the Chair of Peter.”
“Now, there you know we disagree. He’s doing the best he can.”
“The best he can what? The best he can to turn a mess into a disaster, and a disaster into a catastrophe. The man’s a fool, Matt, and it’s better to face it. He knows no more about leadership than I do about atomic physics. Take old Pacelli by comparison. Much as I disliked the cold Roman bastard and everything he stood for, such as business as usual while the Jews were getting cooked and his castrated connubial bliss while Africa and Asia and South America were already drowning in babies - with all of that against him, the man was still a leader. He knew you couldn’t prance six paces forward and tiptoe five back, then pirouette three to the left followed by a pas de deux to the right. He went straight at the objective and carried the whole church militant, whatever the hell that means, banners high behind him.”
The Good Shepherd Page 17
