The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  But his father had paid a price, they had all paid a price, for his calm. Another memory now, a tense game, between the front runners for the International League Pennant. A play at the plate, his father’s thumb above the dust - out. “Son of a bitch!” A huge man with a knife in his hand charged past the box seats where he and his mother were sitting. He was across the distance to the plate before a cop could move. Bart Mahan had thrown aside his chest protector and dropped into a fighter’s crouch. A left to the belly, a right to the jaw, and the would-be knifer was on his back in the dirt. The crowd screamed with joyous excitement. He was screaming, too - until he looked at his mother. There were tears streaming down her face.

  That was the moment when he realized the spiritual chasm between this woman and this man. She had seized his arm (he had only been seven or eight when it happened) and dragged him out of the ballpark, denouncing baseball as a sport for fools, morons, lovers of violence. If he became a baseball player, she had screamed at him in her hysteria, she would disown him. What did it mean? It was the sport of atheists, Protestants. How could a man give his life to it?

  Later that day she had calmed down and tried to apologize. She did not mean to criticize his father. She was only criticizing baseball, which she considered a peculiarly American insanity. She hoped and prayed her son would have higher, more serious goals. Hut it was too late. The knowing had been born, knowing that deepened and grew more saddening with the years. Somewhere, somehow, there had been a breakdown of love between this silent man and voluble woman. Had he grown weary of her chatter? Had she become bitter over his months away from home each baseball season? It was never explained, it was simply there, the chasm, filling the house with silent tension.

  Matthew Mahan moved restlessly in the strange bed, trying to find a familiar feeling of comfort. Too late, too late to heal the wounds of the dead. But not too late, perhaps, to find his balance between them. It was more than calm, more than steadiness that turned his mind and spirit toward his father. It was - it had to be - his independence. Not something flaunted, argumentatively proclaimed, but a quiet, incontestable fact. Bart Mahan was his own man on the baseball field and off it. And a bishop: Didn’t a bishop have to be his own man, too, most of the time, except . . . when he was the Pope’s man?

  A low, gentle snore filled the room. Cardinal-designate Matthew Mahan was asleep.

  Matthew Mahan was dreaming again. It was another procession in a ghostly church to the foot of a huge cross. Looking up, the tortured body of the Savior with his father’s face. Forgive me, Father, I know not what I have done. Forgive me, he prayed.

  Bells were ringing, the kind of bells that rang in prison movies. A breakout. They were free, free at last. . . .

  He awoke to find the room full of shadows. The Roman sunlight had vanished and gray dusk dulled the windows. The telephone was ringing. He picked it up and a woman’s voice said, “It’s supper time, Your Eminence.”

  “Mary,” he said, struggling up on one elbow. “How are you?”

  “Mildly ravenous, but I thought first you’d like to make a visit. I go there myself quite often in the early evening. I’ve gotten to know the sacristan. For 1,000 lire, he keeps the church open an extra half hour. When I told him I was bringing a neo porporato . . .”

  “I’m all shaved and showered. All I’ve got to do is put on my uniform,” Matthew Mahan said. “When can I pick you up?”

  “I’ll pick you up in a half hour. You’re right on the way.”

  “No, I’ll pick you up.”

  There was a tiny pause, which told him she understood exactly why he said it. “All right,” she said in a voice that strained too much to be offhand. “We’ll have a drink at the apartment first.”

  An hour later she welcomed him at the door of the penthouse, which was only a five-minute walk from the Hassler. She was wearing a dark red linen suit with a single gold brooch on the lapel. She had warned him a year or two ago that her hair was turning gray. It stunned him to find that it made her more beautiful than ever. There was scarcely a line in her face. Her figure was still as slim as it had been when he first saw her in 1949. She had been twenty-six that year. That meant she was forty-six today.

  He took both her hands, and for a moment, they simply faced each other. “This was the right place to meet,” she said. “I should have known I was going to kiss you and cause a scandal.”

  She touched his cheek with her lips and stepped back again, their hands still joined. “You look - as wonderful as ever, Mary.”

  “Stop it, you clerical flatterer,” she said, freeing her hands and strolling ahead of him into the living room.

  “I don’t flatter people I care about,” he said. “I tell them the truth.”

  “You look tired,” she said. “And you’ve gained weight.”

  “Good God, you sound like my doctor,” he said with a grin. He patted his waistline. “Only ten pounds in three years. That’s not a mortal sin.”

  Mary studied him for another moment and tossed her head in that feminine way that made her hair swing around her neck. Twenty years ago the sight of her glossy flowing black hair had turned his brain to jelly. Now in the lamplight he saw the gray hair swirl, and the feeling was a sad yet somehow sweet memory.

  For a moment, he wanted terribly to share his feelings with her as he had shared them in the past. He wanted to confess his ulcer, his troubles with liberals and conservatives, his weariness, as he had lamented his persecution by Archbishop Hogan in that lost decade that seemed almost prehistoric now. But the letters Mary had been writing him for the past two years, lamentations over the failure of renewal, the betrayal of the spirit of Pope John and the council, forced him to assume another role. He must be the sympathizer, the consoler now. Perhaps he had even passed beyond these roles, to the spokesman, the defender of the Way Things Are Done. For a moment, he thought guiltily of Dennis McLaughlin. Too often, that was unquestionably the part you played for him.

  “The way you talked about your hair - you made it sound like you were turning into a grandmother.”

  She smiled and gave it a pleased pat. “My hairdresser deserves the real credit. It was his idea to silver it.”

  “What have you been doing besides writing me those - those gossipy letters?”

  The pause gave him away, and once more it was clear that she caught the meaning he had tried to avoid. “Oh, I keep on painting, telling myself a small talent is better than none at all. I’ve done another translation - a marvelous young poet named Aspirante.”

  “I want ten copies. I only wish that you’d try to publish some of your own poetry, Mary.”

  “Oh, stop flattering me, you big Irish lug. I’ve told you there are too many minor poets around already.”

  Matthew Mahan sighed. “I give up. What’s the latest gossip?”

  “Let’s see. They’re giving Wright the Congregation of the Clergy.”

  “Good. He’s a good man.”

  “Oh. How you people stick together. You’re worse than politicians. He’s a stand-patter with a few bits of liberalism for window dressing.”

  “They say the same thing about me, Mary.”

  “I know. But I’m trying to change you. And I’m going to succeed because I know your heart is in the right place.”

  Matthew Mahan strolled over to the window and studied the illuminated dome of St. Peter’s. “It’s wonderful that you of all people can say that, Mary. But don’t expect too much. The situation is - so delicate. So very delicate.”

  “You sound like Pope Paul. Fix me a drink.”

  “The usual?”

  “Of course.”

  He found the full bottle of Cinzano Bianco beside a silver ice bucket on the bar. Cinzano was certainly on Bill Reed’s forbidden list. Aside from his desire to conceal the ulcer, Matthew Mahan flinched from refusing to join Mary in a drink which had become almost a ritual. She had ordered it for them before their first dinner in Rome. The situation was very delicate here, too.r />
  In a moment, they were clinking glasses. They drank in reflective silence for a minute or so. Then Mary made a visible effort to brighten their mood. “Let’s see. What else have I heard from my revolutionary monsignori? Oh. You’re going to be required to take a CIA-style oath.”

  He sipped his drink. The cool sweet liquid felt pleasant, even soothing in his stomach. But it was not soothing to realize that Mary was forcing him to ask about this new oath. “I can’t imagine anything CIA-ish about the oath we take.”

  “This is not the regular oath. It’s an oath of secrecy. Under pain of excommunication, you’ll have to promise right there on the altar before Il Papa that you will never disclose a word of anything he says or writes to you.”

  “That - that’s incredible.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “It gives you a good idea of the prevailing psychology. They act like they’re a fortress under siege.”

  “God help us all.”

  St. Peter’s dome, sailing serenely above the darkened city, was suddenly a reproach. Too frank, too frank, Matthew Mahan warned himself. You are here to sustain this woman, to give her the hope and faith and love she needed to survive. “I’ve brought your old friend Bishop Cronin along with me. In the mood you’re in, I’m not sure you should see him. The two of you may try to depose poor old Paul with a coup d’état.”

  “I know. We correspond. I’ve gotten him a lot of material for his book.”

  “You have?”

  Matthew Mahan did not like to be taken by surprise. For a moment, he almost asked what in the devil’s name Mary thought she was doing, playing games with Cronin behind his back. The realization shocked him. He concealed it by hastily draining his drink. “What time are we due at the Tre Scalini?” he asked.

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “If we want to make our visit, we ought to leave now.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, glancing at her watch. “I don’t like to keep the sacristan waiting.”

  They hurried into the cool Roman night past the shops and strollers on the Via Margutta and Via del Babuino to the Spanish Steps. Matthew Mahan squeezed his long legs into a tiny Fiat cab that happened to be at the head of the line. Perhaps the size of his cab or the presence of a priest made the driver more cautious. They drove almost sedately to the Via Cavour and trudged together up the tunnel beneath the slope of the Borgias to the Piazza of St. Peter in Chains.

  They paused for a moment at the edge of the piazza. Through the darkness, the sacristan was little more than a patch of white shirt, at the door of the church. Matthew Mahan looked across the piazza at the flats where his mother had been born. The windows were open to the warm April night, and sounds of voices, bits of music being played on radios or television, drifted across the empty square to them. A man in his undershirt with a glass of wine in his hand stopped at one of the windows, threw back his head, and laughed. A little girl ran to him and threw her arms around his waist. Matthew Mahan’s throat tightened. Life, love, is truly indestructible; it endlessly empties and fills and empties, year by year, decade by decade.

  “The more things change,” Mary said softly beside him.

  “Yes,” he said. “The old cliché. Except it’s true. It’s true.”

  “Remember the first time we came here, Matt?”

  “Could I ever forget it?”

  You must go, said the old man with the huge nose and the sagging cheeks, you must go to this church at twilight, my favorite time to visit it, whenever I have been in Rome. I wish I could go with you, but trust me, I will be there in spirit. You must do two things. You must stop before the statue of Moses and try to see it above an immense tomb with forty other statues of similar magnificence. See it for what it was intended to be, the very essence of the old law, all that Christianity must never become, all the terror, the agony of the law and the majesty of it. Let’s hope you also sense what I have always found in Moses’ gaze, which is fixed on no one, which stares into a distance that is almost infinite. There is a sadness, a longing, even an emptiness in that gaze.

  I think this longing is only visible because the work is on our level. If it had been raised to where it was originally intended to go - atop a mountain of marble - it might have become imperial. It was intended to be the summit of the tomb of Julius II, the man who built St. Peter’s. Look about you at St. Peter in Chains, a humble church at best, and think for a moment about the way God has of teaching even popes a lesson. This Julius was more an antipope than a pope, a brigand, a tyrant who rode out of Rome at the head of his own army to pillage anyone who refused to pay him homage. And I mean pay. He died the most hated man in Italy, and his successor immediately canceled Michelangelo’s work on his magnificent tomb. In the end, they shoveled his bones into the grave of his uncle, Sixtus IV.

  Now go down to the reliquary under the high altar and look at the chains which supposedly bound Peter. Whenever I went there in the past, I used to think: Alas, St. Peter is still in chains. I used to reproach myself for that thought, which always seized me in spite of all my resolution to avoid it. I used to wonder if I was a secret heretic. Now I know I was only telling the truth.

  Go now, and when we meet again, let us talk of some thoughts I have to free St. Peter from his chains.

  All this spoken with a magic combination of sadness and vivacity. Overcome with emotion, they had fallen to their knees, ignoring the old man’s protests, and kissed his ring. Then they had left Pope John XXIII smiling sadly after them, an ugly yet beautiful old man, bulky in his white robes as the peasant son he was, and driven directly to this church. Then, as now, the sacristan was waiting for them, and they had entered the gloomy interior of the 1,300-year-old building and approached the magnificent statue of Moses.

  At first, Matthew Mahan recalled, he had been seized by a kind of panicky humility. He knew nothing about art. What was this amazing old man in the Vatican trying to tell him? Why couldn’t he say it, instead of sending him on this strange errand? Then he had looked around the church and remembered that his mother had knelt here as a girl. He remembered, too, the incomprehensible coincidence that had brought him to the attention of this old man, not once but twice, and had now made him Archbishop of one of the ten largest dioceses in America. A remarkable calm had descended upon him, and he found himself totally involved with the statue, giving himself to every twist and fold of the marble, to the incredibly realistic arms and hands, the curve of the muscles, the ridges of the veins, the massive reality of the shoulders and chest. Finally, the face, abstracted, yes, even somber, gazing into some unknown distance. There was not a hint of triumphant power in it. In fact, not a sign that the prophet was even aware that, beneath his right arm, he held the tablets of the Law.

  Matthew Mahan had suddenly remembered a print in his grammar school Bible history book showing a bearded Moses holding high the commandments while the people fell on their knees before him. This was not the same man. There was an immense sadness on his face, Matthew Mahan suddenly saw. Yes, even a weariness, born of living and knowing the children of men. Is this all, is this all I have to give them? he seemed to be saying. Is there no choice but to lay this burden upon their backs? he mused, listening, perhaps silently praying, for a voice that would say: My yoke is sweet, my burden light.

  Was it all in the statue? Matthew Mahan had dazedly asked himself. Was the marble and the mysterious power of the artist saying these things, or was it infused by that radiant stooped old man in the Vatican?

  Beside him he had heard Mary saying in a low, soft voice, “Come to me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me because I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.”

  Matthew Mahan had glanced down at her in astonishment. She had draped a white lace kerchief over her black hair. A fold of it shadowed her face. She had drawn it back and smiled at him. “That’s Don Angelo’s favorite passage from the Gospels. H
e told me that he first realized what it meant, standing here.”

  Ten years ago, only ten years ago. At times, looking back at this staggering decade, born in such hope and then bloodied by such tragedy, it was impossible to believe it was a mere ten years. It had to be twenty, thirty years ago that he had first heard (and largely failed to understand) Pope John’s cryptic words of hope and radical faith. But now the years coalesced and it was only yesterday, only a few hours ago, that they had turned from the statue after that exchange of Gospel words and walked down to the high altar, where the strip of sacred chain was framed by two magnificent bronze doors. St. Peter is still in chains. Then you had wondered what the old man meant by those words. The Pope was still more or less a prisoner of the Vatican, unable to leave without elaborate preparations to protect him from the enormous crowds he inevitably attracted. But in that sense, the President of the United States was also a prisoner of the White House. It was too trivial an observation to make Angelo Roncalli fear he was a secret heretic. Moreover, why was it juxtaposed to this statue of Moses?

  “Remember how baffled we were - or at least I was - by what he said about St. Peter being in chains?”

  Mary nodded, smiling. “You found out in the next two or three years - the whole world found out about it.” She sighed. “If only he hadn’t died so soon.”

  “I don’t feel that way, Mary,” Matthew Mahan said. “Remember what he told that fellow who said he should abolish the College of Cardinals and fire the whole Curia?”

  “‘It’s not for me to do everything.’”

  “What he wanted done,” Matthew Mahan said slowly because the thought was coming to him as he spoke, “involved all of us. It was part of the thing itself - us doing it.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, “but with him alive, there wouldn’t be - a perpetual spirit of obstruction.”