Well, I never finished the silly story, so why go on? Reading over my feeble chapters shortly before graduation, I realized what any amateur critic could have told me: that miracles and mystical experiences are interesting only if true, or at least supposed to be true; there is no place for them in fiction. But quite aside from this it was cruelly evident to me that my pages showed no sign of genius, now or yet to come. They were flat and lifeless. I fell into a depression as profound as that of my fictional protagonist. I had to leave college, graduating in absentia, and take refuge in the expensive sanatorium to which Mother now sent me, the same that provided her with an occasional retreat when the social whirl proved too hectic.
It was here that Archbishop Walsh took time out from his busy schedule to visit me. He sat quietly by my bedside, making a few joking remarks about the splendor of my medical establishment. These were followed by a silence that was somehow peaceful rather than constrained. When he next spoke, it was very softly and gravely.
“Your dear mother has told me of your literary aspirations and disappointment. She has even showed me a typescript that her secretary made of your unfinished novel.” He raised a hand as I indignantly sat up. “You must forgive her. She meant very well, and I think she did the right thing. Indeed, it may have turned out providentially. It may be that the good Lord has not destined you to be a writer. I cannot tell. I am no literary critic. All I can be sure of is that the young man who wrote those pages wished with all his heart to convey the word of God to his fellow men. Is that not so, my son?”
“I thought it was. But I hadn’t the means to do it.”
“Perhaps not in fiction. You may have been marked for a higher calling. To convey the word of God more directly. As a priest.”
Never shall I forget the immediate, simple conviction that those deliberate words conveyed to me. I could not speak. Then I found that I was trembling all over. My eyes filled with tears. The Archbishop rose and laid a hand on my brow. “It’s something to be thought over, my son. Simply thought over for the present. But that is the message I bring you.”
Thus it came about that I entered the priesthood. The years at the seminary at Fordham were the happiest and most serene of my life. There was no return of the depression that had vanished with the Archbishop’s visit; I had no doubts about my chosen vocation. Indeed, I was so enthusiastic about it that I viewed in the most charitable colors the driest and most boring of my fellow seminarians. Certainly even the best of them, largely of Irish middle-or lower-middle-class background, lacked the easy congeniality of my Harvard classmates, but I disciplined myself to think of the old Reggie Turner as a snotty, spoiled youth whose eyes had been blinded to true merit by the trivial standards of the social world. Indeed, I fell into the error, so common to refugees from Gotham, of attributing nobility of thought to mere simplicity of expression. It is a dangerous error because the inevitable disillusionment is apt to be accompanied by too extreme a reaction.
Mother was delighted by my decision, and I had little doubt that I would now bring her, too, to the faith. Father, on the other hand, was so disagreeable that I felt exempted from the least remorse. He was now a confirmed alcoholic, and his sober times were almost worse than his inebriated ones, for he told me, in a cold, sneering tone: “Your mother wanted to dress you like a girl when you were little, and I prevented her. But now she has you in skirts at last! Maybe it’s just as well. At the rate she’s going through my money, there’ll be barely enough for your sister’s dower!”
I had hoped to go abroad, even before we entered the Great War, as a chaplain, with British troops or even French, but the Archbishop had other plans for me.
“You have a persistent romantic streak, my son, that you are not going to find it easy to cope with. The church has no greater concern with war than it does with peace. People are always suffering and dying; that is our business. The exhilaration that you might experience at the front, despite all its horrors, in the vision of courage and endurance would be essentially a romantic one. It is more suited to Reginald Turner, the would-be novelist, than to Father Turner, the priest. Remember that in the trenches Catholics are killing Catholics.”
Was it the last remark that evoked my first doubt? Did I detect a note of Irish hostility to England’s war? Did I, Your Grace?
“You must learn to temper that exhilaration. You must learn to get on with people even less sophisticated than those whom you encountered at the seminary, uneducated people with vulgar prejudices, people who have never read a book or looked at a work of art and whose sole idea of pleasure is a tavern or a baseball game. I am sending you to Saint Catherine’s in Queens. It is a large parish, and you will be one of the vicars.”
And for the next three years I labored in a vineyard that was every bit as culturally arid as he had predicted. There were, of course, compensations. I felt on occasion that I had been instrumental in consoling the sick and the dying, and I made some good friends among the older parishioners, particularly the women, in whose simple households I was made welcome. But I never felt I had much success in reaching the young, and my too-intellectual sermons, over which I labored with such excruciating care, were received with the same indifference as the hollow homilies, full of bombast and comminations, of some of my confrères. What troubled me more was the confessional. In the innocence (or inexperience) of my own life, I had had no conception of the rifeness of the vilest sins or of the complacency with which sinners took for granted both the evil in themselves and its facile absolution. It seemed to me that the world was an ocean of malfeasance on whose surface bobbed the few little vessels of the church. What was astonishing was how these small craft were able to give to the sea around them at least a patch of the aspect of a Christian society. It must have been one of God’s miracles.
Worst of all, however, in these years was the dulling effect on my spirits of the attitudes of my fellow priests. Few if any of those whom I encountered in my daily work appeared to have much concern with a god of love and mercy. They were dryly dogmatic, wholly absorbed in the outward religious observances of their flock and bristling with hostility to anything that was not Catholic. Indigence and misery in the world around them hardly mattered; so long as heaven was offered to those who observed the rules, was the present condition of things of much importance? Their job was to save as many souls as possible from hell fire, and they accepted with a shrug the conclusion that this goal was not feasible for the greater portion of humanity.
Mother was greatly distressed by my relegation to dreary realms of the city unvisited by herself and was constantly urging me to apply to the Archbishop for a transfer to what she called “civilization.” “Don’t well-bred persons have souls, too?” she would demand. At last, moved to desperation by my increasing pallor and loss of weight, she offered me the carrot of her own conversion if I would at least tell my troubles to our friend at Saint Patrick’s. I could hardly, as a priest, refuse this appeal, and I did as she asked one wintry afternoon in the prelate’s reception room, warmed however by the broadness of his smile.
“I shall myself supervise your dear mother’s instruction. The angels themselves will sing when Marianne Turner joins the true faith! Oh, of course, I’m aware there are those who think she has lived too much in and for the world, but I believe she has a mission to fulfill, and an important one. And that is where you come in, my son. You have labored enough in the desert.” His smile now became a beam. “For the time being, that is. None of us can ever be finished with the desert, which is why I wanted you to know the church in all its aspects. But now I have a different role for you. Your mother can supply us with a wedge into the stronghold of the heathen. I want a charming and sympathetic Father Turner to be a regular attendant at her dinner parties. You will find that many of the great ladies of the Protestant persuasion are dissatisfied with their humdrum little parsons and are ripe for conversion. It will be your task to offer them a richer, deeper, more consoling faith. But you must do it tactfully
and diplomatically. You must never appear the zealous proselytizer. You must manage things so the first step comes from them.”
“Not like Saint Paul to the Galatians,” I couldn’t help muttering.
“What are you saying?”
“‘O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?’”
“But very much like Saint Paul to the Athenians,” came my reprimand, now stern. “And it is to people as cultivated as the Athenians that I am sending you. Saint Paul knew there was a time for persuasion and a time for thunder. The work of God must be accomplished with the appropriate tools. The priest in the drawing room and the martyr facing the lions are engaged in the same task.”
But I didn’t really believe that, and I began even to wonder whether this weighty representative of the church too militant had not suggested to Mother that she offer me her conversion as the price of my going to him. I obeyed, of course. I knew I was in the army. I accepted his offer of an administrative post in the palace with evenings free for the social experiment.
The next two years of my life were dominated by the evening hours. Mother, now a fervent convert, was not only proud but enchanted to have a priestly son as her co-host. My unhappy father had died at last, as was to have been expected, of a liver ailment, and Mother, after a blubbering but perfectly sincere mourning period of two months (vide the queen in Hamlet I), came back, brighter than ever, to resume, however prematurely, her duties as a hostess. No doubt she regarded my new “mission” as her spiritual exoneration.
Father had been in no condition in his last days to alter, as he had frequently threatened to do, his will, and Mother found herself the mistress of the remnants of his fortune. “Je dépense; donc je suis,” she would blithely quote, or misquote, to those friends who raised their hands at her extravagance. Of course, I as a cleric had no need of her money, and Alice had married a wealthy sportsman as lethargic and dull as herself, so I saw no pressing reason to curb Mother’s spending. Obedient to the Archbishop, I never missed one of her parties, and as she and I were now asked out as a couple by those who returned her hospitality, I soon found that I rarely had an evening free.
The Archbishop had predicted that I would be an object of considerable interest to the ladies of Manhattan society, regardless of their religious affiliation, and he proved quite correct. Some of them seemed to be seeking a species of nondenominational absolution in confiding to a black-robed dinner partner their peccadilloes. On a second or third encounter these peccadilloes tended to mature into actual sins. Such revelations were apt to be accompanied by a comment such as: “I suppose that’s a heinous crime in your church, Father,” uttered sometimes mockingly, sometimes defiantly, always apprehensively. I would pass it off lightly, but not too lightly. The door would be left open for further confidences, possibly even instruction. Other ladies would take pleasure in teasing or taunting me. “Tell me frankly, Father, are you always quite happy with the church’s rule of celibacy?” or “Would you have to believe the Pope if he pronounced the Earth to be flat?”
I was most at ease at Mother’s own parties, for there her prestige, added to the fact that she, too, was a Catholic, spared me at least the flippancies. And then too, I must confess that the excellence of the maternal arrangements threatened to seduce even my ascetic soul. Mother certainly did her job well. She had “modernized,” as she put it, my paternal grandfather’s “Egyptian” mansion by stripping its exterior of bas-reliefs of pyramids and sphinxes and its interior of beaded curtains and Turkish corners and substituting, out and in, a kind of French eighteenth-century décor, equally conventional for its time but much less offensive and much more comfortable. The grey panels and green tapestries of the “state” dining room were restful and pleasing to the eye; the cushioned fauteuils around the oval table resplendent with pink China Trade porcelains were delightful to sit back in. Father had left a well-stocked cellar, and the four glasses at each cover were constantly refilled with the finest wines, difficult to obtain from bootleggers. It was a double pleasure for those invited to feel that their hostess was as discriminating in the fare she provided as in the selection of her guests.
It was at Mother’s that I met Mrs. James Douglas. I knew about her, of course. The Archbishop had briefed me. She was not a subject for my mission, having been converted as a girl in Paris, where she had lived with expatriate parents, and she was known as the leading non-Irish lay Catholic in urban society. But her husband, of rich Pittsburgh origins like my own, had so far declined to come over, although all six of the children were of the true faith and one daughter even a nun.
“Do you suppose she imagines I might succeed where she has failed?” I asked when Mother informed me that Mrs. Douglas had requested to be seated by me at dinner. “But is it likely that I could accomplish what a powerhouse like Mrs. Douglas could not?”
“Perfectly likely. There’s nothing a husband resists like a powerhouse. Remaining a heretic is Jamie Douglas’s best way of hitting Claire where it hurts.”
“And why should he want to do that?”
“I should have thought the confessional, my dear boy, if nothing else, would have taught you that much about marriage. “
“I never knew you were such a cynic on the subject!”
“Remember that I was taught by a master.”
Claire Douglas, then a woman of sixty, had an air of notable equanimity, unless serenity was the better word. She dressed with the simple neatness and care of one to whom clothes were mere necessaries, incidental to her tall slim figure and the strong features of her long oblong face. It was her eyes that saved her from any imputation of plainness. They were large and calm and opaline; they seemed to encompass you with a patient attention and a mild curiosity, a curiosity, indeed, that might find refuge in dry amusement at your expense. She made me think of a benevolent but slightly detached teacher.
“What is that little pad in the gold clip by your mother’s place?” she inquired at the dinner where we met. “She just scribbled something on it. Does she take notes on what her neighbor is telling her? He’s an astronomer, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, he’s just discovered something on Mars. Mother always has the latest ‘name’ on her right. But she’s not taking notes on what he’s saying. I doubt she’s even listening. I know that misty golden expression. Yet the professor is probably perfectly satisfied with it. He will tell his friends tomorrow that Mrs. Turner is much more than a fashionable hostess, that she really cares about the planetary system.”
“And she doesn’t?”
“Not in the least. That jotted note will be a reminder that there was too much pepper in the soup or that the Chablis was insufficiently chilled.”
Mrs. Douglas nodded in half-amused approval. “So she’s always at work. She never rests.”
“Some people might think it’s taking a party too seriously.”
“Well, I’m not one of them. What can your mother do to help matters on Mars? She quite properly sticks to her own trade. Even, which I don’t for a minute imply, if she was given only one talent, like the man in the parable, she has not gone and buried it in the earth.”
I reflected, with a sudden drop of spirits, that Mrs. Douglas was trying to be nice about a life of which, intellectual as she was reputed to be, she could hardly have a great opinion. And it occurred to me that she might rate a party-going priest with his party-giving parent.
“I sometimes wonder whether I haven’t done that with mine. My talent, I mean. Not the coin referred to in the gospel but my aptitude.”
“Why, Father Turner, what a thing for a priest to say!”
“I don’t mean my talent for the priesthood, if any. I mean as a writer. I tried my hand at a novel once and gave it up as a bad job. Maybe I gave up too soon.”
“Why can’t you try again? Does your vocation interfere? Cardinal Newman wrote novels.”
“But he was a genius. Shouldn’t the ordinary man put everything he’s got into his chosen profession?”
> She responded at once to my earnest glance by adopting a graver tone. “Very possibly. Your calling is not only the highest; it is a most exacting one. When I was a girl I was much taken with the notion of being a concert pianist. And I had a considerable talent, if I say so myself. But marriage came and six children to rear, and that dream departed. However, I have always enjoyed playing when I could.”
“Do you ever regret not having done more with your gift?”
“Never. I feel I have done the job I had to do. And the lesser use of my fingers may have quickened my ears. I may have been able to bring to music a more intense appreciation.”
“But that’s hardly the same as playing to a great audience!”
“Isn’t it? Any piece of music requires three persons: a composer, a performer and an audience. Each is indispensable to the art.”
“But surely they’re not co-equal.”
“Why surely? If each is perfect, you have perfection. Perfection must be heaven. Is heaven divisible? I don’t think we shall find it so.”
“Is God in music and the other arts?”
“Why, of course He is.”
“Even if the artist denies Him?”
“God loves beauty. There may even be such a thing as divine greed. He can claim for His own all that’s good in a work of art and reject the rest. I hear God in Parsifal, even if I lose Him in Wagner.”
After dinner, in the library where the gentlemen forgathered for brandy and cigars, I found myself seated by Jamie Douglas. It was not often in the New York society of that day that I enjoyed talking with the husbands of Mother’s guests, whose interests were usually confined to business, politics or sport, but Claire’s husband seemed quite disposed to discuss any subject I cared to initiate.
False Gods Page 13
