by Karen Hall
“Excuse me,” she said, in the general direction of Monsignor Graham. “Michael, your housekeeper’s on the phone, she says she has to talk to you. I tried to take a message, but she said it’s an emergency.”
Bless you, Barbara.
He excused himself and made his way quickly through the crowd and into the sanctuary of the kitchen. Barbara followed.
“I had to get away from Tom Graham for a few minutes,” he said.
“I know. You’re starting to get that nailed-to-the-cross look.”
“Other than him, everything is fine. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And don’t get me wrong, I want them out of here as much as you do.”
Someone across the room caught Michael’s eye. A guy who had just come in the front door and was talking to Graham. A guy in clerics.
“Who’s the priest?” he asked.
“Oh, I meant to tell you about him. He was Vincent’s new best friend. They spent a lot of time together at the villa. He lives there.”
“The Jesuit villa?” Michael asked. Vincent had restored an old estate north of Atlanta for the Jesuits from the region to use as a getaway. Vincent had his own room out there, for when he wanted to escape the city.
“I think he’s originally from Chicago,” Barbara said. “Do you know him? His name is Gabe—”
“Novak,” Michael finished.
“Do you know him?”
Michael nodded. “He makes himself known.”
“What do you mean?”
Michael ignored her question. “Vincent spent time with him?” he asked.
“I think they played chess, mostly. And went bass fishing at the lake. Why, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a narrow-minded, abrasive, pre–Vatican II, self-righteous, holier-than-God papist ass.”
“So you know him?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know—”
“I’ll find you some articles he wrote before his superiors wisely gagged him.”
“No thanks. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Is he the minister?”
“I thought you were all ministers.”
“Is he the guy who calls the plumber, makes sure there’s beer in the refrigerator?”
“That sounds right.”
“You see? Any time you have a guy with two PhDs who speaks seven dead languages, and he’s handing out towels at a villa, it’s because he can’t get along with anyone.”
“Vincent was very fond of him.”
“Vincent could get along with anyone. Gabe Novak is proof.” Michael grabbed his jacket from a hook on the wall. “I’m out of here. I’ll be back later to help you clean up.”
He was out the back door before Barbara could voice an opinion.
Michael drove around aimlessly for an hour, ending up in downtown Atlanta. He found a parking place on Ellis and walked up the hill to Peachtree. There was a fair amount of traffic; a couple of limos were pulling in and out of the Ritz-Carlton. The glass tower of the Westin Peachtree lit up the sky for seventy-four floors; he could see the glass elevator, currently on its way to the top. The downtown area was putting forth a gallant effort, but between its legitimately respectable crime rate and the equally crippling plague of white paranoia, it was still just an echo of its former self. Michael turned away from the nightlife and walked uphill, stopping directly across Peachtree from the building that had been the Winecoff Hotel. (The builders had been right about one thing. The building hadn’t burned. Just the furniture, the carpet, the drapes, and the guests.)
The building was dark now, deserted, except for a Chinese restaurant on the first floor. Half the windows were broken out and there was a large FOR SALE sign above the door. In spite of the broken windows and peeling paint, the building was still beautiful. Michael felt some strange affection for it. Like an abused child gravitating to the offender parent, he returned again and again. And now that Vincent was gone, it seemed, somehow, the right place to remember the dead.
He thought about the first night he had stood on this spot. The night Vincent had told him about the fire. Up until then, Vincent had told him that his parents and grandmother had died in a car wreck while out Christmas shopping, and that Michael had survived because they’d left him at home with Vincent. One warm spring evening, a week before what would have been his First Communion, Vincent drove Michael downtown, parked, and led him down the hill to stand where he was now standing. By then the hotel was the Peachtree on Peachtree retirement home. As they stood there and looked at the building, Vincent told Michael the true story for the first time. He said he hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth until he felt Michael was old enough to deal with the visions it would inevitably conjure. Michael had been too stunned to feel much of anything at first; he had been embarrassed by his lack of feeling—felt he should be crying or something, and that his reaction would disappoint Vincent. He covered by asking questions: which window had been theirs; how, exactly, had his parents died; how, exactly, had he and Vincent managed to escape. Vincent answered everything, and did not sugarcoat it.
Back home, Vincent had taken out a scrapbook he’d made of newspaper clippings about the fire. He’d been waiting to give them to Michael when the time was right. They sat down together and went through the book. It was overwhelming that night, but Michael had returned to it time and again, and was deeply grateful that Vincent had put the book together. At least he’d had something tangible in front of him—a place to search for answers, even if there were none to be found. He read the names over and over, including several accounts of how his father had saved Michael’s life. There was even a picture of Michael—at least, the caption said it was Michael—being carried by a fireman. The baby in the picture was smiling and playing with the fireman’s mustache, oblivious to the agony around him. Michael could not connect himself to the photo, no matter how hard he tried.
The tears had come as he and Vincent looked at the book, as Michael read the gruesome details and saw the pictures, and it had all started to become real. Vincent just held Michael in his arms and let Michael cry for as long as he needed to. Vincent cried with him. The night had lived vividly in Michael’s memory ever since. It had cemented the bond between them that had never weakened. But it had also created their first rift.
In Vincent’s mind, there had been a healing significance to Michael’s hearing all this a week before his First Communion. In Michael’s mind, the juxtaposition had been jarring.
“Grandpa, how many people were in the hotel?”
“Two hundred and eighty.”
“How many died?”
“One hundred and nineteen. God saved me so that I could save you.”
“If God saved us, why couldn’t He save everybody?”
It was the first time Michael had ever asked Vincent a question that he couldn’t answer. Not only couldn’t he answer it—he admitted that he didn’t know.
Michael, making his first “adult” decision, had refused his First Communion. He couldn’t go through with it, given this huge question in his mind that no one could answer. He spent the following year asking Father Donahue over and over. He heard a lot of rambling about God’s will and acceptance, but nothing ever made sense. It was just words. Almost a year from the night Vincent told him the real story, he got sick and “saw” his mother, and the questions were answered, on some level that went far beyond words.
Now here he stood again, with a lifetime’s accumulation of questions that couldn’t be answered.
Okay, run it down. Remove the emotion from it. What’s the bottom line?
I’m a priest and I’ve fallen in love with a woman. (That last part being, in fact, the problem. If I’d fallen in love with another priest or a twelve-year-old boy, the Church would be much less horrified—but I digress.)
What are the options?
Stay a priest and leave Tess. Stay with Tess and leave the priesthood. No troublesome gray areas there.
W
hat are the issues?
Vocation. I’ve always been so thoroughly convinced I had a divine calling. If it’s all dissolving before my eyes, what does that mean? I was deluded? God had the wrong number?
His friend Larry’s predictably nonchalant answer: “First of all, if you did have a calling, who said it had to be permanent? You’ve done a lot of good work here, now you’ll go do a lot of good work somewhere else. And secondly, there is the possibility that God is and always has been as silently indifferent to your occupation as He is to most people’s.”
What about Tess’s “real world” accusation? Is it true that I don’t want to live in the real world? The temporal world?
What would that look like? Everyday stuff. Mortgage, or at least rent. Bills. Some kind of job. Cocktail parties. Car trouble. Income taxes. Friends over for dinner. Sex. Guilt free.
What was the alternative? Spending the rest of his life as a priest, knowing forever what he’d given up. Dying of old age in some home for senile priests. Alone.
And it’s not like everything was perfect until Tess showed up. You’ve been having problems with the Church for a long time.
There were a lot of things that had been bothering him for years. He’d always minimized their importance, tucked them away in the back of his mind, in a file marked “Things to Worry About Later.” Over the years, the file had gotten fatter and fatter. When it became too large to ignore entirely, he’d just stepped over it whenever it got in his way. Lately he’d bundled it with Tess. The Priesthood vs. Tess and All This Other Stuff That’s Been Bothering Me Anyway.
When did it start?
The first seeds of doubt had been planted in his mind in 1967, while he was a scholastic at Saint Louis University. He had written a rather blistering antiwar editorial for the University News, which had resulted in his being hauled before the university president.
“It is not the university’s place to take sides in a political matter.”
“It’s a moral matter. People are dying in an unjust war.”
“Who are you to declare it an unjust war? Has the bishop said it’s unjust? Has the pope said it’s unjust?”
Michael was then informed that there had been complaints from four members of the board of trustees, not to mention several “routinely generous” alumni. While no one disputed the fact that Michael was quite talented and had been making a valuable contribution to the paper, the president was left with no choice but to remove him from the staff. (Thus establishing a lifelong career pattern—people telling him how talented he was while they were getting rid of him.) Furthermore, anything Michael wrote for publication while he remained a student must first be approved by the president himself.
On the heels of all that came Humanae Vitae—Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, which had destroyed, in one fell swoop, Michael’s hope (and the hope of all liberal Catholics) for reform on that issue.
Celibacy.
His own personal peccadillo. Hard to analyze it with anything approaching objectivity. Maybe it would have been easier if he’d been a virgin going into seminary. If he hadn’t known what he was being asked to give up. But he’d had far too much curiosity (not to mention far too many raging hormones) to commit himself to abstinence and ignorance. He’d just see what it was like, he’d thought. So he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life not knowing. But “just this once” hadn’t worked. Neither had “just a few times” or “just until I enter the novitiate.” It had been a battle from the beginning; it was a battle still.
Corruption.
First under this heading was the Church officials’ unconscionable pattern of covering up pedophilia—shuffling offenders from one parish to another, exposing new victims to a known threat, with cognizance and without warning. Michael had even heard of cases where bishops had destroyed files on repeat offenders in order to avoid lawsuits and, of course, bad publicity. (Given what had happened to him, Michael had no problem believing it.)
Thanks to all the publicity that the Church had not been able to fend off, buy off, or lie its way out of, pedophilia had become a problem to every priest in the country, guilty or not. At his own parish, a particularly paranoid couple had met with Michael before he’d finished unpacking to inform him that he was never to be in a room with their altar boy son unless one of them was present. None of this had anything to do with the priest Michael had replaced. He knew that from asking, and from having grown up in the South. Southerners had only to hear of something once, from any source of national media, to be convinced they were all its next victims. And his parishioners’ fears were exacerbated by the fact that Michael had come to them by way of New York City, which meant there was no limit to the range of perversion he might be importing. He realized, thinking about it now, that his preference for civilian clothes had a lot to do with getting tired of watching strangers size him up everywhere he went. He knew the look and he knew what it was about—people wondering if he was someone with a penchant for adolescent boys. (A couple of times he’d had to bite his tongue to keep from saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a girlfriend.”)
Whenever he had confronted his superiors with any or all of these issues, the unvarying response was “the Church isn’t perfect.” Maybe not, but if it didn’t at least aspire to be, it might as well be a bank. He’d spent all these years telling himself that the bureaucracy and the religion were two different things, but the bureaucracy controlled him: where he lived, what he did, what he could and couldn’t publish . . .
And yet.
He loved being a priest. And, in spite of all his disillusionment and all his gripes and frustrations, he loved the Catholic Church. Fiercely.
Maybe blindly?
No. It was impossible, these days, not to ask questions. It went far beyond Church issues. Larry was right. The current theological trend was “let’s find a way to salvage something from all this, given the fact that we sophisticated intellectuals know it can’t possibly be true.” Since it was no longer respectable to believe in Jesus’s divinity, scholars had to convince themselves and everyone else that it really didn’t matter. To Michael, this was sheer insanity—to say that it made no difference whether Jesus was God come down to live on earth or simply the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on civilization! And then there were people like Tess, who were convinced Jesus’s entire existence was a fabrication. Which would mean the gospels were all a very elaborate fraud. Not to mention damned good fiction.
Even the people who agreed with him kept his head spinning with their constant commentaries and analysis and insights and new theories and new versions of old theories. All of them convinced they’d happened upon the angle that was going to make sense of the whole mess once and for all. There were more versions of Jesus these days than there were of Barbie. Historical Jesus. Eschatological Jesus. Mythological Jesus. Political Rebel Jesus. New Age Jesus. Jesus Seminar Jesus. Twelve-Step Jesus. Apocryphal Jesus, who made clay birds fly and killed a playmate and brought him back to life. Jesus a.k.a. Joshua and/or Jeshua, who was channeling new holy books and starting new cults all over the place in order to explain (to the select few who happened to be in the right bookstore staring at the right shelf at the right time) where it had all gone astray.
We can never know—really know—anything.
And still, people are expected to devise a moral code and make life-altering decisions, based on what they suspect or guess or hope to be true. What sense does that make?
That was the main reason Tess’s proclamation had upset him. If she thought Jesus never lived—and even if he lived as a mere mortal—then she thought Michael’s whole life was a lie. Then who did she think she was in love with?
They needed to talk about it. Really talk, with no clock ticking.
But what if she talks you into something you end up regretting? Your brain goes out the window the minute you get in a room with her. (Some rooms more than others.)
If my faith is so flimsy that I can be talked out of it, I
have bigger problems than Tess.
He heard a noise and looked toward it. A member of Atlanta’s large homeless community was making his way up the street with a shopping cart full of meaningless possessions. The guy was barely recognizable as human. He looked like he hadn’t had a bath in decades, and there was a wild, glazed stare in his eyes that led Michael to believe he was high on something other than life.
Oh, great.
The guy stopped his cart against a bus bench (downwind, mercifully) and looked at Michael. “You got a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke,” Michael said. “And I left my wallet at home,” he added, fending off the next question.
And I don’t have a MARTA token or the time and I don’t know the bus schedule and even if I had any money, I wouldn’t give it to you because I’d be afraid I was subsidizing your addictions, which is why I send checks to organizations that would be happy to help you if you went there.
The guy turned his crazy gaze away, across the street.
“You’d never know it burned, would you?” the bum asked, staring at the hotel.
Michael looked at him, surprised.
“It was a sight,” he continued, eyes fixed on the building. “Flames comin’ outta the windows, people jumpin’, like it was rainin’ bodies.”
Michael stared at the guy, trying to put it together. It was difficult to tell his age under the dirt and beard and ravages of alcohol, but even if the guy was old enough to have been alive in 1946, he certainly would not have been old enough at the time to remember it in any detail, much less talk about it like it was a week ago.
The bum pointed to Ellis Street. “There was bodies piled up on that street, musta been a dozen. People knockin’ each other off ladders. This one woman jumped and her arm got caught on the cable that held up the sign with the name of the hotel. She just hung there like meat on a hook. ’Nother guy fell on the cable, ’bout cut his head off.”
