It wasn’t just that I didn’t become the Jesuit my father had hoped for—young Father Ben Driskill, mighty Hugh’s boy, chucking old ladies under their chins at rummage sales, shooting baskets with the neighborhood toughs and turning them into altar boys, giving smelly old wino Mr. Leary the last rites, arranging for the teens’ hayride with Sister Rosalie from the Visitation Convent School, leading the caroling at Christmas … none of that for me. No, I said good-bye to all of it, turned in my rosary, hung up the reliable old scourge, packed away the hair shirt, kissed them all farewell.
I haven’t been inside a Catholic church in twenty years, except to honor my sister Valentine, who picked up the standard that I’d thrown down and became a nun of the Order. Sister Val: one of those new nuns you kept hearing about, running around raising hell, driving the Church nuts. Val had made the covers of Time and Newsweek and People. Old Hugh—to his considerable dismay, at times—had sired a hellion.
Val and I used to joke about it because she knew where I stood. She knew I’d gone inside the Church and glimpsed the machinery glowing red-hot. She knew I’d heard the sizzle. And she knew I’d been burned. She understood me and I understood her. I knew she was more determined than I, had more guts.
The only thing I didn’t enjoy chatting with Drew Summerhays about was football. Unfortunately, as I’d feared, football was on his mind that day. It was the season, late October, and there was no stopping him as we set out on foot for one of his many clubs. He wore his impeccable chesterfield with its perfectly brushed velvet collar, a pearl-gray homburg, his tightly rolled Brigg umbrella tapping the narrow sidewalk where the jumble of financial district workers seemed miraculously to part and make way for him. It had become a raw, blustery day down at our end of Manhattan, heavy smudged clouds like thumbprints moving in after a sunny, perfect morning. There was a taste of winter working its way up the island, starting with us. Grim gray clouds were pressing down on Brooklyn, trying to drown it in the East River.
As we sat down and commenced lunch, Summerhays’s dry, precise voice was going on about a long-ago game I’d played in Iowa City against the Hawkeyes. I made seven unassisted tackles and had two sacks that day, but the play that was lodged in the old man’s mind was the last of the game with Iowa on the Notre Dame four-yard line. The tight end had run a brutal little post pattern, I’d had to fight off two blocks, and when I looked up, the ball was floating toward the tight end in the back of the end zone. We were six points ahead, there was no time left on the clock. The end zone was flooded with receivers alert to the possibility of a tipped ball. So I’d made a frantic leap out of the mud sucking at me and intercepted the pass. Anybody standing there could have done it. It happened to be me. My nose had been broken to start the fourth quarter and a gash over my eyes had blinded me with blood, but I got lucky and caught the damn thing. The interception became a Notre Dame legend that lasted the rest of the season, and Drew Summerhays, of all people, was remembering it and wanted to hear the whole boring story again.
So while he was bringing down all that old thunder from the skies I remembered how it had felt when it had struck me during a summer scrimmage that I quite suddenly understood the game. I could see it all, as if it were a single piece of fabric: the quarterback across the humped tails and helmets of the down linemen, his eyes moving, the cadence of his raw, hoarse voice, yes, I could somehow see his voice; I saw running backs tense; as if I could chart the movement of molecules, I saw the receivers shift their weight, strain at the leash. I saw the linemen thinking out their blocking assignments. I saw inside the quarterback’s head, I knew what he was thinking, how the play would develop, how I should react.
And from that day on I understood the bloody game, saw each play developing as if it were in slo-mo. I understood the absolute essence of what was going on and I became one hell of a football player. Made the Look All-American team and got to shake hands with Bob Hope on TV. Football.
You tell yourself later on that you learned a lot about life from playing football and maybe you did. You learned about pain, about the wild-eyed crazy bastard down in the silt at the bottom of your psyche; you learned about locker-room jock humor and gung-ho for the Fighting Irish and old grads who turned on you if you lost the fucking game; you learned that just because you were a football player it didn’t mean you were going to get anywhere with the blondes with big tits on the Bob Hope Show. If that was life, well, I guess you learned something about life from football.
But nothing I’ve ever known since quite equaled that moment of summer scrimmage when I saw it all so clearly. Drew Summerhays never understood football like that. And what he understood I simply never grasped. Summerhays understood the Church.
I watched him complete the neat, surgical slicing and spearing of the last morsel of Dover sole which he ate without any accompaniment whatsoever: no salad, no vegetables, no rolls and butter. A single glass of Evian water. No coffee, no dessert. The man was going to live forever, and what I really wanted from him was the name of the person who did his shirts. I had never seen such starch work. Never a ripple, just shirts like perfect fields of snow. I felt like a peasant sopping up the sauce in which the last of my osso buco lay. His face was expressionless, unless patience with my appetite constituted an expression. He urged a choice Fladgate port on me and the wine steward scurried away to the club cellars. Summerhays slipped a gold hunter from his vest pocket, checked the hour, and got to the point of our luncheon, which had nothing to do with Notre Dame and old gridiron exploits.
“Curtis Lockhardt is coming to town today, Ben. Have you ever spent much time with him?”
“I hardly know him. I’ve met him a few times. That’s since I’ve been a grown-up. He used to hang around the house when Val and I were kids.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I’d have described him as your father’s protégé. Almost a member of the family. That’s how I’d have put it, anyway.” He ran a knuckle along his upper lip, then shifted away from the possible implications I might recognize about Lockhardt’s relationship with my sister. Whatever that might be. It was none of my business, what your new nuns got up to these days.
“He’ll be seeing me, of course,” Summerhays went on. “And your father, too … ah, thank you, Simmons. Precisely what I had in mind for Mr. Driskill.” Simmons placed the bottle on the table, allowing me the privilege of pouring my own. I slid it around the glass. The port had legs, I had to give it that. Simmons reappeared with a Davidoff cigar and a clipper. In no time at all I decided that reminiscing about the Iowa game had been a small price to pay.
“And,” Summerhays said softly, “I’d like you to spend some time with him. It occurs to me that given some of the firm’s interests—” He may have shrugged. It was so subtle I may have imagined it.
“Which interests would those be, Drew?” I felt a draw play coming my way. I was being suckered into committing myself too early. If I didn’t watch out, Drew Summerhays would have a first and goal inside the ten.
“I wouldn’t try to mislead you,” he said. “We’re talking about the Church here. But, Ben, the Church is business, and business is business is business.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Drew. You’re saying business is business?”
“You have grasped the essence of my thought.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Two lawyers,” he said, “being cute.” A smile flitted across his thin lips. “You may have heard that the Holy Father is unwell?”
It was my turn to shrug.
“That’s why Lockhardt is coming to town. He’s firming up plans for choosing a successor to Callistus. He may want our counsel—”
“Not mine,” I said. “Most unlikely.”
“And I want you firmly in the picture. It is valuable to the firm that we have sufficient lead time when this sort of decision is being made. Or seriously contemplated.”
I rolled about ten dollars worth of port on my tongue. I puffed a bit on
the cigar while he waited with vast serenity. “I thought the College of Cardinals still elected the pope. Did they change the rules and not send me the letter?”
“They haven’t changed anything. They pick the popes exactly as they always have. You know, Ben, you’ve got to keep a firm rein on your anticlericalism. Just a word of advice.”
“It’s served me pretty well so far.”
“Things change. Almost everything changes. But not, as it happens, the Church, not at its heart. You mustn’t think I would ever ask you to compromise your principles.”
“Thank God for that, Drew.”
The irony was lost on him for the moment. “But the firm works closely with the Church,” he said. “There are things you should familiarize yourself with … things that are somewhat out of the ordinary run. Why not start with our friend Lockhardt?”
“Because the Church is my enemy. I can’t make it any clearer than that.”
“You’re losing your sense of humor, Ben. Your sense of proportion. I’m not suggesting that you aid the Church in any way. I merely want you to listen, to become more informed about our dealings. Forget your personal problems with the Church. Remember, business—”
“Is business.”
“That’s it in a nutshell, Ben.”
It certainly was turning out to be my day for the Catholics.
When I got back to the office Father Vinnie Halloran was waiting for me. I felt a groan welling up inside me. He was a Jesuit, about my age, and I’d known him a long time. The Society had put him in charge of handling the last will and testament of the late Lydia Harbaugh of Oyster Bay, Palm Beach, and Bar Harbor. It was a marginally nutty document that left the bulk of her vast estate to the Society of Jesus. There was a good deal of Jesuitical concern about its ability to withstand the challenge from three understandably truculent, shortchanged heirs presumptive.
“Look, Ben, the dowager empress of Oyster Bay gave two sons to the Jesuits. Is it any wonder that she wanted the Society to benefit in a large way? As her will clearly indicates, let me hasten to add. Hell, it isn’t as if the other three offspring—have you seen them, Ben? God at His cruelest—they aren’t getting shut out. Coupla million apiece for them. Greedy little bastards.” I hadn’t seen Vinnie in his clerical collar more than five times in my life. Today he wore a Harris tweed jacket, a striped shirt, a bow tie. He looked at me in hopes of encouragement.
“They’re going to offer a lot of evidence that she was a batty old dipsomaniac for the last twenty years of her life. Very persuasive case, in my view. And under the influence she made a patently absurd will. Jesuits camped at her bedside. And so on.”
“Is that any way for our mouthpiece to talk?” Vinnie came from money so, contrary to popular belief, money meant a great deal to him. Halloran money from Pittsburgh was nothing like Driskill money from Princeton and New York, but it was enough to get you into certain habits.
“Is this really what the Church had in mind for you, Vincent? Hovering over the doubtful wills of rich old ladies?”
“Don’t get moralistic on me, Ben,” he said blandly. “It’s a doggie-dog world out there.”
“Dog eat dog,” I corrected him. We’d been doing that bit for years.
“The Church is no different from any other big organization. You know that. The Church, and the Society, we have to look out for ourselves because sure as hell nobody else will. I do my part by rounding up odd bits of loose change here and there. The Church has got to own itself—”
“Vinnie, Vinnie, this is me, Ben. The Church hasn’t owned itself since the days of Constantine. It’s always out whoring for someone. The pimps change but the Church is always back on the street the next day.”
“By Jove, laddie, you may be this Antichrist we’ve all heard so much about. What a red-letter day for me … still, you might make the perfect Jesuit yet. Except you fight for your piddling little idea of the great truths too zealously. You never learned to speak your piece and shut up. The truth is you never understood what the Church was about. You were never able to force the cuddly little lamb of idealism to lie down with the fierce lion of realism and make nice-nice. Which is what the Church is all about.”
“What a happily pragmatic fellow you are!”
“Have to be. I’m a priest.” He leaned back and grinned at me. “I’ve gotta live with this mess. And it is a mess; the Church is not a tidy place. Because man is never tidy. We all just run around doing the best we can and if we’re right fifty-one percent of the time, well, hell, that’s about all you can ask for. Believe me, the Dowager Harbaugh wanted the Society to have this moola. And if the old bat didn’t, she should have.”
What mattered to Vinnie and all the other Vinnies was that they believed. Halloran’s faith was intact. He’d always told me that I’d had a faithectomy somewhere along the line. His belief and faith were not only in God-maybe not even mainly in God—but in the Church itself, which was where we really parted company. I’d observed them at work and I’d learned you could find God a convenient myth or you could believe He lived in your dishwasher and spoke to you during the hot-dry cycle, none of that mattered. But, by heaven, you’d better believe in the Church.
After lunch I stood in the corner office I’d occupied for most of a decade and looked out at Battery Park and the towers of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty, which was only barely visible through the fog and mist that was thickening by midafternoon. It was the kind of office Hugh Driskill’s son was expected to have, and expectations were very much a part of our lives at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. There was an English partners desk from Dickens’s day, a Louis XV refectory table, a Brancusi on top of it, an Epstein bust on a pedestal, and a Klee on the wall. It could give you the shakes if you weren’t feeling pretty confident. Gifts from my father and my former wife, Antonia, and all very eclectic and smashing. New York magazine had once done a piece on power offices, and mine had been among them and it had taken me a long time to live it down. I’d picked the carpet and both Hugh and Antonia thought it looked like the bottom of the canary cage which was, if memory serves, just about the only thing they ever agreed on. In the end all that Antonia and I had shared was a deep distrust of the Roman Catholic Church, but it hadn’t been enough to save our marriage. I always felt that she had inherited her attitude at birth while I’d acquired mine the old-fashioned way. I’d earned it.
The fog was rolling in from the direction of Staten Island, blurring familiar landmarks, like clouds of memory overtaking the everyday trivialities. When you reached the middle of your life, one of the revelations concerned memories, or so it seemed to me. They seemed so important and they would not be pushed aside. They exercised their claim on you and you began to wonder if they held all the keys to all the locked doors in your psyche. It was a little scary.
There had always been lots of priests hanging around the house while Val and I were growing up. By the time Father came home from the war in 1945 I was ten, and it was summer. In those years when Father was out of the country and we couldn’t see him except on leaves, there was an elderly priest with a great deal of white hair billowing from ears and nostrils who made an impression on me. He was Father Polanski, who came to say mass in our chapel. He sometimes puttered about in the gardens with Mother and me and once gave me a trowel of my own but we didn’t really know him any more than we knew the man who kept the skating pond neat and smooth or the fellows who came to do the lawn, mow it and rake it and prune the trees in the orchard.
It wasn’t until our father came home from the war that we really noticed a priest as a human being, and that was a matter of comparative necessity. He brought one with him, an actual Italian who spoke English with a heavy accent. Val and I somehow got it into our heads that Father—or was he Monsignor?—Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, in his long cassock and high-topped, bulbous-toed, thick-soled black shoes, was a trophy of the war that Father had bagged in some peculiar way—akin to the dusty, moth-eaten stuffed bear standing
in one corner of the tack room and the lion and rhino heads in the lodge in the Adirondacks. In some childlike way little Val, who was nearly four, and I figured that Father D’Ambrizzi belonged to us. He seemed to enjoy the relationship, too. There’s no way to count all the piggyback rides, the games of checkers and animal lotto and croquet he played with us that summer, how many hours he spent with us in the first autumn of peace, taking hayrides and learning to bob for apples along with us, carving jack-o’-lanterns and trying to get the hang of ice skating out on the pond beyond the orchard. He seemed as innocent as Val and I certainly were. If the other priests I came to know had shared his virtues, I suppose I’d be a priest now, but that kind of supposition is pretty much of a dead end these days.
Father D’Ambrizzi liked doing things with his hands and I used to sit by the hour, entranced, watching him. He built a swing out in the orchard, hanging the ropes from the stout limb of a large apple tree. I’d never seen anything quite so wonderful—but then he surpassed himself with a tree house reached by a rope ladder. And even more impressive than that was watching him lay bricks, the way he slapped the mortar around and leveled them with such certainty. He did some work on the chapel, which had taken to crumbling in a couple of places. I was spellbound. I took to dogging his footsteps wherever he went other than when he closed the study door to do his “work.” I could tell that his work was terribly important. No one ever bothered him when he was at his work in the study.
But when he emerged, there I’d be waiting for him. He would pick me up in his long, hairy, simian arms as if I were a doll. His hair was thick and black and curly, cropped close to his boulder of a skull like a cap. His nose was like a banana, his mouth curled like a prince in a Renaissance painting. He was a good six inches shorter than my father. He was built like Edward G. Robinson, according to my mother. I asked her what that meant and she thought for a moment and said, “Well, you know, Benjy. Like a gangster, darling.”
The Assassini Page 4
