We laughed hard, all relieved at his lack of pompousness.
"But, well, Father O'Shea was a priest and I guess what I'm trying to say is that when the average Joe does something like that, he gets treated like a hero because the average Joe isn't supposed to stick his neck out. But well, if a guy happens to be a priest, then we change what we expect. A priest stays behind with the wounded and everybody says, Well, of course. He's a priest. That's what he's here for. And I guess that just makes me feel real proud to be a Catholic. I know I felt that way in Korea. See, in the army the Catholic guys feel sort of defensive about the priests, and when they're good ones, we're proud of them. Father O'Shea, well he was the best and everybody knew that. And it didn't matter if you were Jewish or even an atheist. He was with you no matter what you were. Of course if you were Catholic, he was really with you."
He stopped while we laughed warmly. Monsignor Riordan was nodding dramatically at his place, feeding the laughter. It faded and Michael resumed, more solemnly. "And I know that if Father O'Shea could have, he would have taken my place on that hill and later in the POW camp. He would have taken my place for any of it. And I'll tell you something, there were a lot of days when I'd have let him."
We laughed again, but quietly. That audience of three hundred plumbers, cops, carpenters and telephone repairmen was beaming at Michael. Eyes glistened everywhere in the hall. Pride, admiration, gratitude filled the spaces above us, like angels. But the sons, teenaged boys mostly, had reason to squirm. Each of them at that moment, by virtue of not being Michael Maguire, was a disappointment to his father.
"People have told me I was pretty special because I was lucky enough to pull through the time in the camp in pretty good shape. It sort of embarrasses me because I know I shouldn't be getting any credit for it." Michael stopped and for an instant he looked right at me, but there wasn't a flicker of recognition in his eyes. Finally he said, "I have to give credit where it's due and that's with God. This is the first talk I agreed to give since I got home. You can probably tell I don't do this much. I didn't do it at all in China."
We liked him needling himself, and were edified by his testimony. This was an audience of devout men, but they had no patience for overt expressions of piety and would tolerate sermons only from the clergy, if that. But this kid had earned the right. They liked him for his reticence. He was still a blue-collar guy and knew it.
"When Monsignor Riordan asked me to talk to you I thought about it and I said I would because Good Shepherd gave me my faith. The monsignor knocked it into me."
Laughs again and coughing, nods all around. Monsignor Riordan had been known to clip altar boys on the ear right in the sanctuary. Once, during Mass, when I gave him a finger towel that was wet he threw it in my face.
"And I figured this would be a good chance for me to thank God sort of publicly, which is something I promised myself I'd do. Or maybe I should say I promised Him. So anyway, that's what I'm doing up here. Not that God needs it particularly, but, well, I do."
And suddenly Michael stopped talking and bowed his head. We realized he was going to pray now, and we all automatically made some shift in posture, uncrossing our legs, scooting to the edge of our chairs, dropping our heads onto our hands so that we wouldn't have to watch. We snuffed out our cigarettes and as always we coughed.
Michael said so softly one had to strain to hear him, "Thank you, Almighty God, for getting me through and for bringing me home." He paused, then for a long moment was utterly still. I looked up at him. He resembled a statue, a GI at prayer. And I realized there was not an ounce of swagger in him, no artfulness or conceit. I don't know that I'd ever had the experience of seeing a person for exactly what he was. He was not a pretender of any sort, and he had come before us to claim nothing. Therefore we'd have given him anything. My anxieties in relation to our reunion dropped away. He was unlike anyone I knew. Straight as an arrow. Square as a die. A profoundly good man. I thought him beautiful.
"And...," he continued softly, "...may the souls of the departed rest in peace, amen."
I made the sign of the cross too. Who was I kidding? Agnostic Fosdick! At that moment, because Michael Maguire believed in God I did. I was only the first of many people to react to him that way.
He looked up at us now, somewhat helplessly. We looked back at him.
Finally, Monsignor Riordan stood up and began to clap, and so did we. But I sensed a reluctance all around me. Applause was off the mark. Not even a standing ovation was what the moment wanted. The young sergeant had touched us all and had made every category we might have applied to him—hero, leader, saint—irrelevant. We just would like to have sat there for a moment longer and looked at him.
Before the applause stopped, Monsignor Riordan shook Michael's hand and smoothly drew him back to his place at the head table. He picked up his napkin and pulled his chair out. He nodded once at the audience, his first acknowledgment of the ovation, and then, only then, he looked directly at me and his eyes held mine, held me. His look made me feel caressed.
SIX
"HE is a tower unleaning," I said to myself, that opening line of John Crowe Ransom's, as I watched Michael greet the others. After the breakfast broke up a reception line had formed spontaneously. The men and their sons waited decorously to shake his hand, but I hung back. How could I possibly have greeted him that way, as if he were a politician I wanted favors from? On the other hand how could I presume to set myself apart? Maybe I was just one of the gang. From Olympus didn't all mortals look alike?
"Good morning, Frank," Monsignor Riordan said, startling me. "Hello, Monsignor." I shook his hand manfully enough, but he'd set my insides to quivering, as always.
"What do you think of your old friend?"
We both looked across the hall at Michael, who was graciously, patiently saying hello to each man, not with poise exactly, but with an utterly engaging awkwardness that served both to underscore his virtuousness and to put the Society members at ease. "I think he looks good, Monsignor. Real good."
"So do you, all decked out..." With a judging glance he took in my double-breasted suit, my starched shirt and tie, my polished wing tips. I had my overcoat over my arm, and my wide-banded felt hat hung at the end of my fingers. Like all college boys of the day I dressed the part of a bank teller or an FBI agent.
"...We don't see enough of you around here. You shouldn't forget your old friends, Frank."
"I don't get back much, Monsignor."
"I gather that. And you didn't go to Communion either."
I blushed despite myself. In the old days when we all went to Confession on Saturday, if you didn't go to Communion on Sunday, it meant you'd masturbated Saturday night or, if you'd had a date, you'd copped a feel. I remembered our all-purpose if unconvincing cover: "I broke my fast, Monsignor."
He grunted. "How are Mom and Dad? We miss them since they moved to Queens."
"They're fine."
"Your father talking to you yet?"
My father hadn't spoken to me for a year after I'd chosen NYU over Fordham. My objection to the latter wasn't the Jesuits or that it was Catholic, but that it was only across the river from Inwood. It meant I'd have had to live at home, and not even my father's wrath was enough to make me do that. My father eventually softened toward me, but my family would never recover from the wound of our breach. It mortified me that the pastor knew about it. His hostile pressing made me feel deprived of oxygen. "My dad and I get along fine, Monsignor."
"Good. Glad to hear it. I know your mother was brokenhearted."
I forced a smile. "She's fine too."
We laid off each other and let our gazes drift back to Michael. After a moment the monsignor said, "Father O'Shea told me he was simply the bravest soldier anyone had ever seen over there. He saved a lot of lives I guess, but you wouldn't know it from him."
It occurred to me that Michael's greatest achievement was to have forced this bitter old fart to suspend his mordant disdain. I'd never heard
him speak admiringly of anyone.
"And Father O'Shea knows what he's talking about. He's the head army chaplain in Germany now." The monsignor looked at me. "A colonel."
"Is that right?"
He stared at the bridge of my nose—for every Michael Maguire there are a thousand bums like you.
The last thing I'd imagined for our reunion was that when Michael and I finally met again our old priest-nemesis would be standing between us, but that is what happened. Michael was crossing toward us. When our eyes locked together I raised my hand to wave at him, but it seemed a wholly stilted gesture. Monsignor Riordan's presence? No, something else.
Now that I was facing my friend at last a new question had popped open in my mind. How would he take it that I'd created a personality around an imitation of him? Michael had always served me as a kind of compass of perception. With him what-was-what had always been obvious, and the things and styles that seemed good to him had by virtue of that seemed wonderful to me. He had been, and I gathered from his talk still was, both funny and solemn. They had seemed the perfect modes to me and I'd consciously tried to duplicate them in my own responses. I did not succeed, of course, but I became what I remain, ironic and pessimistic, the Greenwich Village versions of Michael's attitudes.
The closer Michael came the taller he seemed. He wore his nervousness quite loosely, as a given of the moment, as if awkwardness between us was the most natural thing in the world. He was the first to speak. "Welcome home," he said when he grasped my hand.
I had to smile; the son of a bitch welcoming me home! "Thanks," I said feebly.
"It must have been rough," he said. I realized what he was doing, turning all the shit they'd just been giving him on its ear by giving it to me. He was dodging the embarrassment of our reunion by making a joke on the leering Monsignor Riordan. Michael was proposing an improvisation. I caught it instantly, as if I was his drummer, as if this was Birdland.
"It wasn't that bad," I said. "You do what you have to do."
"I guess so. But I doubt if I could have."
"You never know..." I matched his grieving tone exactly. We were picking up where we'd left off ... until you're in the situation how you'll react."
"Some men just have what it takes, I guess."
"Though really," I offered modestly, "I can't claim any credit."
"Well, you may not believe this, but..." Michael gave me his most meaningful look. "...I wish I'd been there with you."
"Where?" Monsignor Riordan asked, bewildered.
It was time to turn the scat around. I answered him, "Korea. I just wish I'd been with Michael, that's all. He has what it takes, Monsignor. Don't you think?"
The old coot blinked at me.
"I appreciate it, Frank," Michael said.
Monsignor Riordan eyed us both, then muttered, "I misunderstood ... He turned and took several steps, then stopped and said to Michael, as if he were a schoolboy after all, "Tell your mother I have some envelopes that need addressing."
"Yes, Monsignor."
We watched the priest leave the hall. He seemed stoopshouldered and weary, and I felt a twinge of guilt, as if we'd been tossing lit matches at a derelict.
The hall was nearly empty. The Holy Name Society volunteers were noisily clearing the tables. Michael and I stood in awkward silence until I realized that he was waiting for me to speak. It would have been wrong to be sarcastic, but the prank with Monsignor Riordan had been such a relief that I wanted to prolong it. "As I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted by Kim II Sung..." I grinned cockily, proud to have remembered the North Korean's name. "...it's great to see you're back." I slapped his back to underscore the hackneyed pun.
"Did you miss me?" he asked somewhat mockingly, as if to deflect the banality of my welcome the way he had the others.
But I met him head on. "Hell yes, I missed you. What do you think?"
"I think you're a turd," he said.
"Who's a turd?" I punched his shoulder. It was rock hard, and he cocked his fist to punch me back.
He held the pose for a long minute, hooding his eyes like a boxer posing for a photo. Then he straightened up and laughed. "God, we were punks, weren't we?"
"Some of us still are, Mike."
"I thought when I saw you in church, That can't be Durkin! You moved. Even your folks moved. I couldn't believe it when I heard they moved."
"Yes, they live in Queens. I never get up here anymore. I came up today to see you."
"Oh yeah? Not for the plenary indulgence?"
"Well, that too, naturally."
He looked away, as if our needling had run its course and he wasn't sure where that left us. After a moment he said, "How are they?"
"Who?"
"Your mom and dad. Mo."
"They're great. They love it out there. A yard, grass, their own tree, the whole bit. They flipping love it. Mo's in a nice Catholic high school. She calls herself Maureen now. My mother can still walk to Mass every morning and my old man has a clunker of his own. Everything's a dream but me. Me, I've lost my soul." "Because you live in the Village?"
I shrugged. "'N.Y.Jew' my father calls it. Famous for its urban campus, its liberal curriculum, its heterogeneous student body, but also for its atheists, Commies, dope fiends and transvestites. Professors stand in line to take whacks at Irish kids, to prove that there is no God but Sartre and Simone is his savant."
Michael said nothing. I realized that my blase references would be lost on him, and I resolved not to show him up. The deprivation of his having not read a book in years only then struck me. The New Testament didn't count. "What about you?" I asked. "You get the GI Bill, right?"
"Rights."
Cracks, I thought. Everything is cracks. "I mean, are you going to use it, or what?"
"I don't know yet."
"When do you get out of the army?"
"I could be out now. My leave is up January first. I have to let them know by then."
"You wouldn't stay in?"
He looked at me sharply. "I wouldn't? Why not?"
I blushed. "Well, you know. Christ! It's the army!"
"And you civilians think the army is shit, right?"
His defensiveness stunned me. "I'm no civilian," I said inanely. I meant that the very notion requires a military point of reference.
"It's one of the things they say, you know. That civilians hate us. After the wars are over they just want soldiers to flush themselves down the toilet."
"You think the Holy Name Society hates you?"
He shrugged, pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one.
"If you did stay in, what would...?"
"I'd apply for OCS. I guess they'd take me."
"You guess? Jesus Christ, of course they'd take you, after what you did."
He flicked the match, as if we were outside, and he said fiercely, "Let's cover that right now, Durk. I didn't do shit! Get it? Not shit! I don't want that what-I-did crap from you!"
"What crap?" I asked helplessly.
Michael's face was inflamed and his mouth had tightened in the way it always had when he was angry. His chin had a way of turning white, even while the skin from his neck up burned. I had a fresh ear now on the pitch of his emotions. He was puffing at his cigarette compulsively and his hand trembled. He was more tightly wired than I'd realized. I chided myself. What did I expect? It wasn't the Adirondacks he'd returned from that fall.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I think I'm on edge. I mean I know I'm on edge. I don't know what I'm going to do."
He stared at me. I remember how starkly I perceived his despair then. It was the despair of youth, the absolute conviction to which only the young are capable of clinging that the pattern of a lifetime is already set, and that never would zest, affection or spontaneity form part of his experience again. "Downward to darkness," is the feeling, "on extended wings." I was as young as he was, of course, and did not recognize the illusion for what it was, having not learned yet that despair overpowers us
not once but repeatedly through life. Only in looking back on them are we capable of seeing how little true damage those fits have done us. At that moment, though, I felt only a bleak sweet kinship with Michael; I was as convinced as he was that the joy that had made us friends was irretrievably lost. But no real matter. Our despair would make us friends again.
"Maybe I'll do some coaching," he said after a moment. "Monsignor said I could lend a hand with the CYO league." "Would they pay you?"
"I'm loaded. I've got two years' back pay piled up. Sergeant's pay."
"Wow. Well, maybe coaching's just the thing. You kept in shape, I guess, huh?"
"How many pushups do you want?"
"How high'd you get?"
"Five hundred."
"Jesus Christ, Mike! Every day?"
He smiled. "Morning, noon and night."
It was as if a bird had taken off from behind a bush by my feet, scaring me, but also giving me my first real inkling of what he'd been through. Fifteen hundred pushups a day? That was something I could understand. I'd never done fifty. All at once I realized that what seemed like strength to everyone else—the quality that pulled him through—was to Michael himself the most acute desperation. And I realized too that his ordeal had not ended. Now instead of Chicoms tormenting him he had us. We were punishing him with our distance from his experience, from the sickness of soul it left him with. The vicious routines required by mere survival had been suspended everywhere but inside him. A vacancy, willfully displayed, had come over him. A hero to the world, I saw at last, but a basket case to himself.
To my horror I found myself using the line he'd used on me in our shtick for the monsignor. "It must have been rough, Mike." "Where the fuck have you been, Durk? I've been home on leave for weeks."
I had to look away, I was so ashamed. I'd been afraid to face him for fear of what he'd think of me. Yet I hadn't thought of him. It had never occurred to me that Sergeant Michael Maguire, D.S.C., Silver Star, could stand in need of me. "Mike, I'm sorry." I found his eyes. "I should have come up sooner. I was afraid to. You're a fucking war hero, you know. I'm a chump, a saphead."
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