Silence again for another full minute. The prayer was over. Dennis raised his head and smiled wanly. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
Together they walked back to the memorial building where Superintendent George Carmody was waiting for them. He gave them a package containing a colored aerial photograph of the cemetery and a black and white photograph of the cross with Richard McLaughlin’s name on it. “We don’t get many of these kinds of requests anymore,” he said. “Most of the people who wanted them wrote to the commission and got them a long time ago.”
“I’m sure Father McLaughlin’s mother has one,” Matthew Mahan said, “but I thought it would be nice if he had a set, too.”
Mr. Carmody nodded, and they chatted for a few moments. He told them there were very few air force men buried here. “Most of those poor fellows got it down at Anzio, the beachhead. What a foul-up that operation was. The generals who thought that one up should have been shot.”
Mr. Carmody got quite emotional. He pointed to a map on the wall and described how the Germans ringed the Anzio beachhead with artillery and pulverized everything that came ashore. “Eighty-eights they had, the best gun of them all,” he said. “We never had anything to match it. They could double as antiaircraft.” He lectured them for five minutes on the virtues of the 88-millimeter gun. Dennis McLaughlin listened, slowly letting this clumpy, earnest man return him to the real world with its stupidity, its idiotic fascination with violence.
Still, something had happened to him out there kneeling before that cross. He did not understand it. He did not understand why that intense emotion did not crush his chest and send his breath whistling up his throat. What a strange paradox, emotions of equal intensity seemed either to kill him or - what? What do you feel, Dennis? He tried to let the words come into his mind, unhindered by preconceived ideas . . . more free, more real.
Back in the car, Matthew Mahan told Tullio to drive them to a good beach. “We’ll eat our lunch down there and take a walk.”
Dennis nodded agreeably. As they rolled toward the shore, he looked out at typical resort scenery. Villas and hotels and restaurants (most of them closed until late May, Tullio told them) filled the landscape. It was hard to believe that thousands of men had died along these roads and in the miles of farmland through which they had just traveled. Dennis began asking Matthew Mahan about his experience as a chaplain. “I never realized you were such a hero,” he said half joking.
“Don’t listen to those stories. They get better every time someone tells them. The fact is, Dennis, if you really don’t care about dying, almost anybody can be a hero.”
For the first time, Matthew Mahan talked frankly about his chaplain’s experiences, especially what they meant to him as a priest. For over twenty-five years, he had never talked about them to anyone. He did not think it was edifying for a layman to know that a priest could have strong doubts about his faith. He never shared them with a fellow priest because he did not trust anyone in the diocese to hold his tongue about them. How childish these fears seemed now. Childish, even humiliating. As he talked about them, Dennis McLaughlin’s face in the shadowy back of the car seemed to brood over them, like the fixed expression of a statue.
“The terrible part of it was the way it kept happening, day after day. The dailiness of it. Again and again you’d think: This time God will listen to me, this time my prayers will do something. But at the end of every day, there was a new batch of bodies to be blessed by me and tagged by the grave detail. After a while, I went a little crazy. It wasn’t enough, not to care about whether you lived or died. I started trying to get myself killed. I was saying to God, take me, take my sacrifice, and let the others go. I’m absolutely positive I’d be dead by now if it wasn’t for Steve Murchison.”
“The Methodist bishop?”
“That’s right. He was the Protestant chaplain of our regiment. He’s ten years older than me. One day, just before we crossed the Rhine, he took me aside. We’d been under heavy artillery fire all day and taken terrible casualties. For a couple of hours, I’d walked around in it and never got a scratch. ‘Matt,’ he said, ‘you’re not Jesus.’”
Matthew Mahan leaned back and stared up at the car’s gray roof. Dennis McLaughlin, the sunny resort landscape, were gone now. He was back in that shattered French town, staring into Steve Murchison’s rawboned Yankee face while the grave teams methodically recorded and tagged the shrouded bodies.
“I saw you out there today waltzing through the shrapnel. And I thought to myself, that guy wants to get killed.”
Matthew Mahan heard his own voice, half angry at being corrected by this heretic, half hysterical at confronting the truth. “What of it, what’s wrong with that?”
“Is that the kind of example a pastor should give his people?”
“I was helping wounded men -”
“Sure you were, but a man, a man who wanted to give the right kind of example, could have done that crawling on his belly. Think for a minute, Matt. What are you saying to the men when you stroll around out there like an umpire on a baseball diamond? You’re saying: If you were as holy and as brave as me, you’d be doing this, too. So you make them feel like shit, Matt, like shit, because they’ve got their heads down in their holes and they’re saying prayers to God to give them the guts just to stay there. And if they do come out of a hole to help a buddy, they squirm along in the slop like so many snakes, with the shrapnel whizzing about a half an inch above their heads, and they look up and see Father God Almighty Mahan walking toward them looking about ten feet tall, his Irish grin saying, O ye of little faith.”
It was dusk. They were loading the bodies on the trucks. Up ahead, the Germans started shelling again. In the distance, the shells made a crunching sound like bones breaking, flesh tearing. More than anything else he had ever wanted, Matthew Mahan had suddenly wanted to be angry at this man; he had wanted to grab him by the open flaps of his battle jacket and scream insults into his face. But he could say nothing. All he could feel inside himself was an enormous emptiness in which his heart pounded crazily.
“You think it doesn’t break my heart, Matt? You think it doesn’t break everybody’s heart? To see them come back that way, day after day?”
Murchison pointed to the bodies, and Matthew Mahan noticed that his finger was shaking. “Getting yourself killed won’t solve a damn thing, Matt. It doesn’t have anything to do with faith. If anything, it may mean a loss of faith for you and the men who see you get it. Faith means going on, Matt, no matter how bad it gets. Faith means still trying to serve, when service doesn’t mean anything anymore. Dead men, dead priests, don’t serve, Matt - only living ones do that.”
He stepped back a few feet, as if he no longer wanted to be close to such a priest. “You’re going to hate my guts for saying all this to you, Matt, but so help me God it’s spoken out of love.”
Gone, the big gangling figure vanished into the dusk, stalking up the road toward the shellfire.
“That was the worst night of my life,” Matthew Mahan told Dennis McLaughlin. “The worst. I had to face the fact that everything Steve had said to me was true. True. Where did he get the grace, the wisdom, to know that much about faith? Why did I know so little? That was the night I joined the ecumenical movement.”
“It is a marvelous example of the difference between Protestant faith and Catholic faith,” Dennis said. “One ventures, the other tries to apply a set of formulae, and when they don’t work, hysteria sets in.”
“It’s not quite so neat, Dennis. It’s the difference between real faith and false faith, between grandstanding and caring. There are plenty of formula boys in both churches.”
Silence. Matthew Mahan hadn’t intended his answer as a rebuke. But it was disconcerting, the way Dennis and his generation could draw such different conclusions from the same experience. “Anyway,” he said, trying to restore their mood, “I never got up off my belly under shellfire for the rest of the war. For some reason, from that ni
ght, I was able to bear the dying. Steve and I kid about it sometimes. He says that at one point in our argument he grabbed me by the shoulders, and this was a laying on of hands that gave me the consolation of the Holy Spirit.
“I told that story to Pope John. Would you believe it, he took it seriously?”
“Why not?” Dennis McLaughlin said.
Ahead of them, the Mediterranean glistened like dark blue metal in the sunlight. Tullio drove slowly along a road that ran parallel to the sea, until Matthew Mahan saw a wide swatch of deserted white sand. “This looks perfect,” he said.
Tullio took a blanket from the trunk and spread it out on the sand a few dozen feet from the road. Dennis lugged the hamper that had been delivered from the hotel’s kitchen a few minutes before they departed. There was a bottle of Soave Bolla packed in dry ice, a dozen small chicken sandwiches and as many drumsticks, wings, and breasts wrapped in tinfoil, cardboard boxes containing olives, celery, miniature tomatoes. They drank the cool dry wine, which went beautifully with the chicken. The air was hot and still. Not a flicker of a breeze ruffled the motionless water. It reminded Dennis of the beaches of their home state in July or August. He remarked this to Matthew Mahan as they finished the wine and insisted on giving Tullio the last chicken breast.
“Too hot for a couple of guys in clericals,” Matthew Mahan said. “Let’s strip down.”
Quickly they took off their coats, collars, and rabats. To Dennis’s surprise, the Cardinal also took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers to the knees. “I can never go near a beach without doing some shell hunting,” he said. “Want to join me?”
They left Tullio to clean up the fragments of lunch. Matthew Mahan smiled when Dennis mischievously wondered if there would be enough food to feed 5,000 people when they got back. “In Italy, anything is possible,” the Cardinal said.
“How did you get interested in shells?” Dennis asked as they reached the sea’s edge, and Matthew Mahan walked in until the water covered his ankles. It was icy cold but clear.
“I guess I started when I was ten or eleven,” Matthew Mahan said. “We used to spend our summers at the shore. When my father got a few days off and joined us, he and I would get up around seven and walk the whole beach, from Paradise all the way down to the tip of the peninsula. I loved those walks.”
How much, how much. Matthew Mahan was astonished to find his eyes blurring, deep emotion throbbing in his body. “My father wasn’t much of a talker. We’d just tramp along. Every so often we’d pick up a shell. If we found one that was especially interesting, he’d say, keep it as a souvenir. I did. Pretty soon I had several dozen. When he went to Florida at the start of the baseball season, we’d join him down there for a week or so. That’s where I really got interested in conchology, as they call it. The Florida beaches are a treasure trove. My mother bought me a book on the subject, and presto, I was a collector.”
“What’s this one?” Dennis said, picking up a brown and white cone-shaped shell with a small stem at the bottom.
“That’s a ranella. There’s a beautiful variety from the Philippines with bigger knobs and reddish-brown markings. But I like the little fellows. he bent over and scooped out of the sand a Fusinus syracusanus, a tiny brown and white and gold shell which rose from a narrow stem to a bulging middle and then narrowed again with the same white rectangular markings around each bulge, growing smaller and smaller to a point at the very top. “Like a piece of architecture, isn’t it?” he said. “I always think of it as pilgrims ascending a holy mountain. I saw something like it one night in Ireland, thousands of people going up the mountain to the shrine at Knock, carrying torches.”
“Dante’s vision of Paradise,” Dennis said.
“Now here,” the Cardinal said, picking up a brown and white speckled shell which was almost round in shape with an opening at one end and a tiny knob at the bottom from which spiral lines ran out. “Here’s a Mediterranean version of the New England moon shell. I believe this one is called Natica millepunctata. On this one, you can see clearly what I find so fascinating about shells. They illustrate a principle of growth that not many people understand - the dynamic spiral. To produce a spiral, you need three things. Growth has to follow a continuous course - it can’t backtrack. It also must proceed freely, with a minimum of outside interference. Finally, it must never lose touch with the beginning of the spiral. You know, that part hardens and stops living; for all purposes, it’s dead. But the lip of the spiral stays alive, keeps growing. One of the best examples of this is the American chambered nautilus.”
“A principle of growth,” Dennis said, staring at the shell. The idea stirred a vague excitement in his mind.
“You have to picture it starting from that tiny knob at the bottom of the spiral. That’s called the protoconch.”
“Can I keep this?”
“Of course. I’ve got one from Mauritius, Natica fluctuata. It’s especially interesting because almost the entire shell consists of the last whorl. Spiral growth doesn’t always follow a lockstep rhythm. There are great leaps forward.”
“Do they all curve in the same direction?”
“Practically all of them. There’s only one I can think of, the left-handed whelk from Florida, that goes the other way.”
They were strolling along on the water’s edge, letting the small waves lap over their feet. The sun was fierce, but Dennis felt strangely exhilarated. The Cardinal began talking about the importance of shells in various parts of the world. In the Roman era, they were ground up for dyes. Then and now artisans made them into jewelry. In other parts of the world, particularly the South Pacific and Africa, they were used as money. Shinto priests in Japan sound the call to worship on Triton’s trumpets. In India, left-handed spirals are considered sacred. In the Fiji Islands, the golden cowry, a smooth very rare shell that looks from the top like a piece of expensive china, is worn by chiefs as proof of sovereignty.
“Do you have one?” Dennis asked.
“Sure,” said the Cardinal with a grin. “It cost me a fortune. Do you think I ought to wear it when I do battle with Sister Agnes Marie?”
The Cardinal was enjoying himself tremendously. It was the first time Dennis had seen him relaxed, carefree, since he had watched him performing for the confirmation class at Holy Angels. Again, he felt a kind of awe at the natural radiance of the man. But now there was no envy riding like a vengeful imp on top of that awe. Because the radiance, the good humor, the bonhomie was being given to him alone? Or did it subsist independently of an audience, as God supposedly did? No, no, no, Dennis told himself. Tell that Ironic Angel to shut up, once and perhaps for all. Accept the human reality, the happiness that this man is sharing with you, and something else, something deeper that seemed to be just outside his mind’s reach. He fingered the Mediterranean moon shell in his pocket.
For another hour they walked and talked, picking up an occasional shell which invariably turned out to be too common for the collector’s eye and was tossed into the water, but mostly rambling reminiscently around their own lives. Matthew Mahan told him the story of his relationship with Mary Shea - the whole story, including what they had told each other three nights ago at the Tre Scalini. Dennis thought of the sneering suggestion in his letter to his brother Leo and writhed with silent regret. That, of course, was only a small part of his betrayal of this man. But he told himself feverishly that he would atone for it, he would swear Leo to silence, force him to return every leaked document, convert him from an enemy to an admirer of Matthew Mahan.
The Cardinal also talked freely about his early life. He told him about his Italian-born mother - her hatred of baseball, how she had refused to see him play in a single game, even the day he won the county championship for St. Francis Xavier Prep. How the Jesuits had turned him down. And that day at the end of his freshman year, standing on that small hill in the center of the university looking down on the depression-wracked city at twilight, how he had been filled with a wish to reach o
ut, to comfort, to counsel, to lead, the poor bewildered people, trapped between economic disaster and the know-nothing Irish thugs who masqueraded as the city’s politicians. The day, the hour, he knew with finality that he would be a priest.
“I should have waited for a couple of years and gone to college that way,” Dennis said. “Maybe by then I’d have had a chance to meet a few intelligent women.”
The Cardinal looked unhappy. He obviously thought Dennis was about to embark on a diatribe against priestly celibacy.
“I don’t mean I would have married them,” Dennis added hastily. He spent the next few minutes explaining to Matthew Mahan his belief that physical celibacy was not the heart of the problem. It was the feeling on the part of most priests that they never had a chance to really know or understand women as mature, equally human beings. “I mean really appreciate them. We just see them as the Temptation.”
“I know, I know,” Matthew Mahan said. “I know exactly what you mean. It wasn’t much different for me, Dennis. I scraped up a few dates - girls from the neighborhood, for proms, that sort of thing. But most of the time I hung around with a bunch of guys my own age. It was the depression, you know. Everybody was leery of getting involved with a girl. There wasn’t much hope of finding a decent job to support a family. I was pretty unprepared to deal with women - in a mature way.”
Totally unprepared, totally unprepared, whispered a corrective voice in Matthew Mahan’s mind. “I guess I was - influenced by my mother. She was a good woman - but a little - silly. High-strung, violently emotional. All the things that feed the male stereotype of women. When I met Mary Shea - I couldn’t believe she was real at first.”
The Cardinal picked up another moon shell and reminded himself that he was here to help Dennis, not lament his now ancient travails. “You went into the Jesuits right after high school, then? You probably made the decision on your senior retreat.”
The Good Shepherd Page 29
