The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  Anyway, the whole purpose of the plot, if it still deserved that heroic name, was to give him access to Sister Helen. This had been thoroughly, if not gloriously, achieved. Again Dennis found himself thinking with savage self-satisfaction that it was somehow fitting to have Matthew Mahan’s unwitting cooperation in solving the problem of priestly celibacy - which he so blithely dismissed. True, he had been one of about twenty of the 300 bishops at Houston who had met with a group of married and shacked-up priests to discuss the celibacy problem. But he seemed unimpressed by what he had heard. They just aren’t in touch with reality was his comment. That had produced a secret smile behind the sober mask His Eminence’s secretary habitually wore.

  It was amazing how his intoxication with Sister Helen made the thrown pens, the snappish orders, the outrageous hours he worked, so much more bearable. When His Eminence berated him for forgetting yet another telephone call - from Mike Furia, of all people - he was able to smirk behind his pained apology. He had a consolation that made him indifferent to His Eminence, impervious to His Eminence, superior to His Eminence.

  How brave you are, Father McLaughlin, he mockingly congratulated himself. How marvelously metallically analytic, now that we are stabilized at 35,000 feet, and the booze is flowing. You can even enjoy yourself, accept the friendly greetings from the titans of the city’s power structure, so many of whom pass through your office to worship at the episcopal throne. There was Jim McAvoy’s sexy blond wife waving to him. Moderately sophisticated, they could chuckle at some of the idiocies of the Church, yet somehow retain an active faith in it. Madeline McAvoy began telling him about a letter that Jim had just received from one of his Notre Dame classmates. The alumnus wanted Jim to give His Eminence a secret solution for ending the Vietnam War victoriously. Massive, carefully tabulated, archdiocesan-wide daily communions. It was based on a tried and true formula developed at the mecca of Catholic education in the late 1940s. They had found an undeniable correlation between the number of daily communions each week and the scores by which the Fighting Irish rampaged to victory on the gridiron.

  “Isn’t that fantastic?” Madeline McAvoy said.

  “I bet he thinks Humanae Vitae is a great encyclical,” Dennis said.

  “Oh, he does, he does,” Madeline said with a conspiratorial smile. She had sat next to Dennis at a recent dinner for the women’s division of the Cardinal’s Fund and had, first cautiously, then candidly, confided to him her dismay over Pope Paul’s refusal to change the Church’s teaching on birth control. It was not that she, personally, had any regrets about having her six children. She was fortunate enough to have the money and the energy to cope with them. But she knew too many other women who lacked one or both of these vital ingredients.

  And Mike Furia, coming toward him now to clap him on the back. Mike was already a little drunk. His glistening black hair was rumpled, his $25 flowered red silk tie askew on his $50 dark blue handmade shirt. Without his exquisitely tailored coat, the fat on his massive chest and shoulders visibly pressed against the broadcloth. “Hey, Dennis,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  The man exuded a kind of animal warmth that made him hard to resist. The big arm was around his shoulder now. It was somehow flattering to find him treating you as an equal. A man among men. Although Furia could talk like a tough guy when he was in the mood, he was a shrewd, sophisticated man. Dennis had taken some fundraising reports up to his apartment ten days ago and was amazed to discover the good taste with which the place was decorated. The style was moderate modern. On the walls were Modiglianis, Chiricos (his favorite), and several other names that were new to Dennis - Osvaldo Licini, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Atanasio Soldati. Casually, Furia admitted that all the paintings were originals and quietly intimated that he probably had the best collection of contemporary Italian art in America.

  This discovery grew less surprising once Dennis learned that Furia Brothers was one of the ten or fifteen biggest construction companies in the world. They had gotten their start building schools for the archdiocese in the early fifties, with the help of some ardent arm-twisting by Monsignor Matthew Mahan. From there, they had expanded up and down the eastern seaboard, and then across the nation, building dams, apartment houses, office skyscrapers. Next had come a quantum leap to airfields, harbors, base camps in Vietnam, then railroad tunnels, superhighways, and shopping centers across Europe. Today there were Furia brothers, cousins, or nephews running subsidiary companies in Hawaii, Australia, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and London. Furia spent most of his time on planes during the decade - 1955 to 1965 - he spent building his empire. His wife had a pathological fear of flying and never traveled with him. His marriage had broken up three or four years ago. But he had settled - largely at Matthew Mahan’s urging - for a separation rather than a divorce.

  “Looking forward to kissing Il Papa’s ring?” Furia asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Just between you and me, I think the whole papacy rigamarole ought to go. It’s ruined Italy. I’m not kidding; it really has.”

  Furia had a remarkable ability to sense a person’s mood. He had been saying things like this to Dennis every time they met. “I don’t have the nerve to tell that to your boss.”

  “Why don’t you try it sometime,” Dennis said. “Bishop Cronin gets away with it.”

  Furia laughed. “That old screwball could get away with thumbing his nose at God. On the level, is there anything to that book he’s writing?”

  “It’s hard to say. I only spent a couple of hours looking through the material last week.”

  “He’s had my people in Rome shipping him stuff by the trunkload. We’ve run up an air freight bill of $1,000. I told him I’d pay a $100,000 to knock a few holes in that crummy setup.”

  “What do you hear from Tony?”

  “The usual bullshit. Excuse my French.”

  From his refuge in the Hard Times Haven commune, Furia’s son Tony made a habit of writing his father outrageous letters, calling him a tool of American imperialism and an agent of the military-industrial complex. Furia had shown a recent letter to Dennis at the residence and asked him for some advice. With that cool objectivity that both intrigued and repelled him, Dennis had put aside his personal opinions and given Furia an unorthodox suggestion. Start returning Tony’s letters unopened, cut off his allowance, and in general start acting more like an outraged father - which he was - and less like a patsy, which was what Tony was intent on making him.

  “When I get back, I think maybe I’ll take that advice. About getting tough with him. I’m just afraid - you know my wife works on the kid all the time, turning him against me. I hate to give him more ammunition.”

  Dennis nodded sympathetically. “It’s a tough decision. I just thought it was time to try something different.”

  “Anyway, I appreciate your interest.” Furia’s beautifully manicured fingers slipped something in the pocket of Dennis’s coat. “Buy yourself something in Rome. Something you don’t need.” The big hand banged him on the back, and Furia was moving past him down the aisle, calling cheerful insults to Herb Winstock whose gnomish face evoked Jewishness as totally as Furia’s satiny olive skin and gleaming black hair said Italian.

  Sitting in an aisle seat talking to Winstock was Kenneth Banks, member of the City Council and a power in the NAACP, the city’s leading Oreo. Sitting behind Banks was Mrs. Dwight Slocum, wife of the city’s richest Protestant. Her gaunt, horsey, rather oddly handsome face could easily have joined any collection of Early American portraits in the city’s art museum. All of these people, devout Jew, black Baptist, idealistic WASP, served on the executive committee of the Cardinal’s Fund. It was fascinating, how thoroughly Matthew Mahan had studied the money-raising style of Francis Cardinal Spellman and adapted it to his native city. Ecumenical? You bet. There is nothing more ecumenical than cash. That was His Eminence’s (unspoken) motto.

  In his pursuit of the dollar, Matthew Mahan had had an advantage that even the prince of N
ew York would have envied. Furia, McAvoy, Winstock, and almost every other man on this plane, reserved for the mostly rich, had served with Matthew Mahan in the 409th Regiment or at least in the 113th Division. It had provided him with a fantastic city-wide ecumenical head start which no one in the archdiocese, including the resident Archbishop had been able to match. No wonder he waxed sentimental about G. I. Joe at the annual division reunion dinner and steadfastly refused to say a word against the war in Vietnam.

  “Hey, Dennis. Dennis.”

  Mike Furia was waving to him. “We wanna check something. Your boss ever talk to you about the war?”

  Dennis shook his head.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Mike Furia, bringing a formidable fist on the back of Winstock’s seat. “He’s so afraid of bragging, he won’t tell anybody anything. You ought to write a book about him, Dennis. You really should. Somebody should. I mean - the things we saw him do.”

  You are going to spend the night listening to these stories, yards and yards of them, Dennis told himself. He ordered himself to look interested.

  “We’re in the Hürtgen Forest, see. Goddamn Germans dug in ten feet deep everywhere. We’re coming down this ravine, when all of a sudden, they open up on us with machine guns. We dive for the bank of the ravine, and they can’t depress the guns enough to get us. Out in the middle of the ravine, we got a half-dozen dead and maybe four badly wounded. We lost another dozen guys trying to get to those wounded. This thing started at dawn, and for a while, it looked like a replay of the Lost Battalion, you know, the World War I job, on a small scale. The Krauts were counterattacking all around us, and we lost contact with everybody as they rolled back with the punches. Meanwhile, those wounded guys were out there all day in the sun dying little by little. It was absolute agony, listening to them.

  “Well, we hang on there for twenty-four hours. Every two or three minutes, all night, Adolf’s friends send up flares to make sure nobody gets to those wounded guys. By noon the next day, we’re out of water, and some guys were talking surrender. I told ‘em I’d shoot the next guy that used the word, but I was thinking about it myself. Suddenly, into the ravine comes this - this figure. We were all half-crazy with thirst, and I thought it was an hallucination. But it was the Padre wearing his mass vestments. He was walking in a very slow, stately way, like he was in a procession in the cathedral. He kept shouting, ‘Ich bin ein katholisch Priester.’ He was betting there were some Catholics behind those German machine guns. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a man do. Those Nazis didn’t give a damn for priests, most of them. By any kind of odds, he should have gotten himself blown apart.

  “He got to the wounded guys. Two of them were dead. He touched some oil on their foreheads and said a prayer over them. Then he picked up the other two guys, one under each arm, and dragged them over to our foxholes.

  “Under his robes he’s got about ten canteens full of water and a couple with whiskey in them. And a couple of pounds of C rations hanging off his belt. Next, he ties us into the operations for the day. There was a big counterattack coming in about an hour. We went up the bank just as Adolf’s boys got hit from the flank by a couple of other companies, and they didn’t stop runnin’ until they got to Düsseldorf. I was for giving the Padre a Medal of Honor, but the chief of chaplains cut it down to a DSC because there was some sort of hanky-panky about wearing his vestments that way. It violated the Geneva Convention or some damn thing.”

  “Hell,” said Herb Winstock, “he won a DSC damn near every day that we were in action.”

  More stories from Winstock, from Jim McAvoy, from a half-dozen other well-fed, middle-aged faces, all conspiring to make Matthew Mahan a cross between a saint and a superman.

  “The guy just wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of anything,” said Jim. “I remember when he made me chaplain’s assistant. I thought I had it made. Then I found out the three guys who had the job before me were in the hospital. The next thing I find myself taking more chances than the whole rest of the division put together. There was no place he wouldn’t go. And half the time he didn’t crawl - he walked straight up - right through barrages.”

  Jim gulped his drink, obviously reliving some of the fearful emotions of 1944-45, then he said quietly, “I’ll tell you something - following him made a man out of me. I mean, I was the original callow kid, and maybe a little bit of a mama’s boy in those days. I was sure I was going to fink out under fire. I forgot all about it, after watching him in action for ten minutes.”

  “You should write a book about him, Dennis, I really mean it,” said Mike Furia. “He should have been the Father Duffy of World War II. Even Ernie Pyle said so. But when he got home, he wouldn’t talk to a writer. Not even to the reporters from the Journal.”

  A harried stewardess came by, begging them for the third or fourth time to sit down for dinner. Dennis reluctantly rejoined Eileen Mahan and her son. They discussed Catholic education, and Dennis was surprised to discover that Mrs. Mahan was not in favor of reinstating the Baltimore catechism. “They got to give these kids more freedom. Why shouldn’t they? They treated us like we were in reform school or something.”

  “Maybe you would have been better off if you had been,” said Timmy, wolfing down his filet mignon.

  He looked mockingly across his mother’s tray at Dennis as he said this. Mournfully, Dennis saw the pathetic dimensions of Timmy’s illusions. The Archbishop’s secretary had to be a square faggot. The Catholic Church in particular and everything else in the world that represented tradition, order, were garbage. This reduced the number of books worth reading, the music worth listening to, the thoughts worth thinking, to a pitiful minimum.

  After dinner, they turned out the lights, and Dennis tried to sleep. Eileen Mahan was soon snoring gently beside him. Timmy continued to peruse Zap comics. By this time, Dennis estimated that he must have read each copy at least seven times. After an hour of squirming, Dennis found his mind yearning for sleep and his body refusing to obey it. First his back ached, then his eyes ached, then his neck ached. His mind drifted like a Ping-Pong ball accidentally loose in a spaceship with zero gravity.

  First, Helen Reed’s breasts were touching his moist palms, then his mother smiled primly at him and snapped his picture in the white suit he wore for his First Communion. Then Leo was there, a disembodied face peering in the cosmic window, shouting above the humming engines: “When are we going to start telling the truth, Jesuit?”

  Next came memories of the day he visited Bishop Cronin at the seminary. He was sitting on the sagging daybed once more, politely drinking cold coffee and staring around him at a room piled high with books and stacks of miscellaneous papers. Names whizzed past him; Mansi, Cccconi, Mosley, Veuillot, Icard. The immense effort that the old man was making staggered him. More saddening than dismaying was the evidence that the task was too huge. The text, what he read of it, was too emotional to be history and too burdened with abstruse arguments to be a successful tract. He did not have the heart to tell him, but Cronin, with an almost awesome intuition, seemed to read his mind. “I know I’ll never finish it,” he said. “All I can hope, really, is to get enough on paper to catch the nose of a bright young dog like yourself who likes to feed on red meat.”

  Then his sudden outburst. I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong dog. For me, the whole thing is an argument about nothing. I don’t believe this fanatic first-century Jewish revisionist named Jesus is the son of God. The more I think about it, the more I realize I’d better sit down and tell that to Cardinal Mahan, and be on my way.

  In the background, the ironic angel had clapped his wings. They sounded exactly like the erasers he used to clean for Sister by pounding them together in the school yard once a week - a job that left him coated with chalk dust.

  Do you really believe that, lad, asked the old man with a very serious face, or is that the result of last night’s or last month’s book?

  What do you believe?

  First of all, I bel
ieve that history has some sense, that it isn’t a totally mad collection of anecdotes as it sometimes appears to be. I believe, with that Frenchman who like me never had the guts to publish what he really thought when living - once past seventy you might as well consider a man legally dead, because people no longer take him seriously - I believe with that Frenchman in the Holy Event. Exactly what the devil that means I don’t pretend to know. But it changed the course of human history, and you can’t walk out on history, you can’t act as if the whole damn slate can be wiped clean, not if you’re Irish. Out of it came the Church - and for all its terrible blunders, there’s something grand about it at the same time - soaring as it has above history, and at the same time so much a part of it - it’s the one thing around that puts poetry in the mouths of common people, lad, and gives them someplace else to look for consolation and hope. The nation can’t do these things, try as it might. It’s too bound up in the lust for power and the pursuit of its own best interests. Only the Church can change men’s hearts - and how well she might do it, we both know, if only we could free her from her self-forged shackles. The truth is - and it must be told by someone - that the Church has been seduced by the nation. In fact, seduced is hardly a proper word. The hussy never so much as resisted old Constantine’s first buss, but she leaped into bed with that bad imitation of a Roman emperor and like a shrewish wife immediately began coopting his power. It’s this fatal imitation of Caesar that’s destroying us, and since there’s no hope of convincing the Italians of this, we must tell the rest of the world.

  But listen, now. What disturbs me more than anything else in that bit of foolishness you just bespoke is the idea of talking to Mahan about it. Don’t do that. If you must go, think up something more suitable, like being seduced by an oversexed nun. The likes of Matt were not made to deal with problems that torment garçons like you and me. He was born to lead the common people, to fill their hearts with hope and faith of the sort that they must have to live at all. Shackled though he is, it’s toward freedom that he leads them, the kind of freedom that no bureaucrat in the Internal Revenue Service of the Curia will ever understand. If God is willing, the likes of you and me may yet strike off some of the shackles that keep him from being the true shepherd that he is at heart, that cursed subservience to Rome and the canon law that sits like an imp of Satan on every bishop’s crook. Such as Matt can’t free himself from those shackles. He loves too much, too readily. He has a heart that’s too full, too good. Those are the most obedient, you know. It’s the cold fools like us who have little or no love to spare; we’re the ones who must stand back and decide with good reason on what we shall bestow our mite.