Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  "Robert Moses?"

  "He says this neighborhood is blighted. Blighted!"

  Michael watched the pastor as he began to read the news story again. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority planned to demolish certain buildings on the West Side—"warehouses and dilapidated dock facilities"—to expand the access ramps for Lincoln Tunnel, an expansion made necessary by the in-town congestion resulting from the completion two years before of the third Lincoln Tunnel tube. The accompanying diagram indicated that one ramp would empty onto Forty-third Street, right in front of the parish school. Michael had only arrived at Holy Cross from Washington two days before, having been freshly ordained to the deaconate, which was, in effect, a kind of internship, the last phase of training before ordination to the priesthood. Michael would be working in the parish all summer and looked forward to his first experiences of pastoral ministry. But so far the talk had been of nothing but Moses's plan and the threat it posed to the safety of the schoolchildren. The old priest trembled visibly as he read. Michael looked in vain for signs of the bright, good-humored man he must have been in his prime. The first thing anyone ever said about Monsignor Ellis was that he had won the United States Amateur Golf Tournament in 1911, the year he entered the seminary. This was 1960; he was seventy years old, and his arthritis had kept him off the golf course for years.

  He looked up again at last, fixing his stare in Michael's direction, but his eyes remained unfocused. "He won't get away with it, the goddamn child-hating Jew."

  Neither Father Rice nor Michael commented.

  Monsignor Ellis pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. His body creaked. "I'm going downtown."

  In the argot of the New York clergy "downtown" meant the Chancery Office at Fiftieth Street right behind Saint Patrick's, and even priests for whom the trek was uptown referred to it that way. Holy Cross Church was on Forty-second Street at Ninth Avenue. The school was on Forty-third.

  "The cardinal won't let this happen."

  At the dining room door the pastor stopped and looked at Michael again. Now he did see him. "What'd you say your name was?"

  "Maguire, Monsignor. Michael Maguire."

  "What do I have you doing?"

  "The hospital, Monsignor. I'm taking Communion to the hospital."

  Monsignor Ellis nodded.

  "And Father Mahon's going to take me over to the school this morning. He thought I could help the sisters get the children ready for the May Devotions."

  "He would!" Monsignor Ellis said bitterly, and he left.

  After a moment Michael said to Father Rice, "What did he mean by that?"

  The priest turned the page of his newspaper, foppishly shooting a French cuff free of the black sleeve of his sharkskin clerical suit. He eyed the day's stock listings while he said, "The kiddies are the only ones left who can stomach Father Mahon's breath. They think he's funny. The nuns probably tell each other the poor dear's had a stroke. The school is the one parish duty, aside from the early Mass, that Monsignor hasn't had to take away from him. Of course, Father Mahon considers himself more overworked than ever. Hence his interest in you."

  Rose came in from the kitchen and began to clear the dishes. She was even older than Monsignor Ellis; she limped just the way he did, as if her knee was arthritic too, though it wasn't. She'd been the housekeeper at Holy Cross almost as long as he'd been the pastor. Whenever he left the table she cleared it immediately, whether the curates were finished eating or not.

  "Morning, Rose," Michael said.

  She nodded at him and took his coffee cup.

  Father Rice snapped his newspaper shut, stood noisily and left the room. As a rule he and Rose did not address each other unless the monsignor was present, in which case they were ingratiatingly courteous to one another.

  Rose, mightily balancing a tray of dishes, left the room. From inside the kitchen she threw the switch that doused the dining room lights. Because the heavy curtains remained closed, it was as dark in there as it would be at night, though Michael knew that an April morning was shimmering outside. He sat at his place for a few moments longer thinking, What in God's name have I done to myself by coming here?

  But he reminded himself it was only for the summer, and he knew he could bear anything until September when he'd return to Washington for his last year of theology. These two days at Holy Cross had given him his first taste of the ferocious chill inside which most American priests must make their lives, and it stunned him. But he refused to take it as more than an isolated instance. The priesthood was a lonely life, he knew that. But there was a consolation in the manly fellowship priests shared, and he was sure that in most rectories there was cheerful conversation at table and good-humored wisecracking around the television. Here, however, each priest had his own set in his room and apparently they were never together except to eat. A rectory full of loners, he thought. The seminary was right to discourage that tendency in the men. The evening meal the night before had taken a mere fifteen minutes from start to finish. Father Mahon might be a drunk, but he was the only one who'd showed even a mild interest in Michael. He decided to join him in the common room.

  "What's on?" he asked, entering, surprised to find the television on.

  "The Today show, my boy. Have a seat." Father Mahon slapped the leather hassock with his free hand. In the other he held a highball. He sat placidly in an easy chair, his legs slowly opening and closing. He grinned at Michael, then turned his attention back to the television show, sweeping a long strand of reddish-gray hair across his mostly bald pate.

  "Monsignor went downtown to see Cardinal Spellman about the school," Michael began. "He said the archdiocese would never let the Triborough Authority get away with it."

  Father Mahon grunted and sipped his drink. A large burly Irishman, it was easy to picture him behind an Inwood bar, serving drinks, or at an intersection waving traffic through, or, for that matter, in his undershirt operating a jackhammer.

  "What do you think, Father?"

  "It's not what I think. It's what I know."

  When Michael realized the priest wasn't going to tell him, he pressed. "What would that be?"

  Father Mahon looked at him. "Old man Moses and Spelly have a deal. No doubt about it. That ramp is going onto Forty-third Street and that's it. You watch."

  "But the archdiocese would have a case. Imagine rush hour. How many cars use Lincoln Tunnel? Good Lord, the hazard would be enormous. I agree with the monsignor. It seems quite callous." "Robert Moses? Callous?" Father Mahon laughed. He continued to laugh; inappropriately, Michael thought.

  "They could route the ramp some other way," Michael offered.

  "No need." The priest chuckled again, then stopped. He faced Michael. "Can't be any hazard to the children, can there, if there's no school?"

  The two men stared at each other.

  "What do you mean, Father?"

  Dave Garroway was talking with Burt Lancaster about his new movie, Elmer Gantry.

  "What do you mean, Father?" he repeated.

  "Hey, Mike, call me Ed. You make me feel like an old fart. That what they call you? Mike?"

  "Yes. Or Michael, either one."

  "You're the war hero, right?"

  "I was in Korea. Forgive me, Ed, but I don't follow what you said there, about there being no school."

  Father Mahon lifted his shoulders dramatically, grimacing. "I've said too much already."

  Michael stared at him.

  "Let me put it to you this way, Deacon. Old man Moses and Spelly are like this." He held up a pair of crossed fingers. "Have been since the Saw Mill Parkway deal. Moses bought a corner of the property at Dunwoodie for two million dollars when he brought the Cross County into the Saw Mill. Same corner the real estate guys said was worth about fifty grand. He bought Spelly off, but good. And for good."

  "How do you know about that?"

  "I was procurator at Dunwoodie at the time. Nineteen forty-seven. They've been scratching each other's backs ever
since. You think Moses would defy Spelly on something like this? You think Spelly would defy Moses?" He snorted. "Poor old Arthur. He's just the last to catch on."

  "But you said..."

  Father Mahon snapped his fingers at Michael. "It's gone! I said it's gone!" Father Mahon leveled his voice, and for a moment he seemed a different person, alert and sober, an Irish DA. "You go look at that diagram again, Mike. Notice two things. To bring that ramp out on Forty-fourth Street they'd have to reverse the direction of traffic going all the way across town, but that would screw up their fancy new alternating system completely. Second, to bring the ramp out on Forty-third, they've got to have twice as much street on both sides. They've got to take the school for that. You can bet Spelly got a pretty penny for it, not that we'll see a dull nickel."

  "Well, they'd build a new school then, right?"

  Father Mahon laughed.

  "What about the children, Father?"

  The priest tapped his head. "They will have thought of that. So happens old man Moses has just finished tearing down most of Clinton for that nice new Lincoln Center of his. Cut the heart right out of Saint Paul the Apostle two parishes up. You know the church on Fifty-ninth Street? Looks like an armory?"

  Michael nodded.

  "A thousand families evicted! Shipped out to Jersey or Bay Ridge or Flushing, like that!" He snapped his fingers. "So Saint Paul's has a school but no kids. Down here we got kids but no school. Just sixteen blocks away. A couple of used buses get donated and bingo! Problem solved! So what if it cuts the heart out of this parish. We're just 'blight' anyway. Relax, Deacon. All things come to him who takes it easy."

  "Is this all ... a surmise ... of yours?"

  Father Mahon seemed to think the question bordered on the insolent, but he decided, what the hell, not to take offense. "You mean has anyone taken me into his confidence? Or sought my advice?" He laughed. "I can figure it out, my boy, because I don't expect to be consulted. Poor old Arthur, on the other hand. His problem is he thinks he's the pastor of this parish, can't imagine he wouldn't be in on the planning. Ought to know better by now. There's only one pastor in New York, a roly-poly red-cheeked bowl of Jell-O, the Cardinal-Leprechaun. Only this Jell-O's got arsenic in it. This leprechaun has a rapier hidden in his shillelagh. I know it. Bob Moses knows it. And now even our wet-behind-the-ears war-hero deacon knows it. Want a drink?"

  "No thanks. I'm on my way to the hospital."

  "I used to have the hospital."

  "Did you?"

  Father Mahon stared at Michael, his eyes full of self-pity. "Yeah."

  Here was a man, Michael sensed, who had tilted with Spellman and lost. He shuddered, as if he was seeing into the future, the shell of another man, the husk. He looked away. "I'll check in with you when I get back. We're going over to the school, right?"

  "Sure. Got to show you around while it's still there." Father Mahon started. "Hey, don't say anything to the nuns, okay? Don't say anything about that to anybody. I'm just an old asshole breaking wind."

  "I won't say anything."

  The pastoral duties of the deacon include preaching, baptizing and bringing Holy Communion to the sick. As Michael went that morning from room to room in Saint Clare's Hospital, dressed in black suit and Roman collar, carrying the small ciborium and placing on the outstretched tongues of patients, young ones as well as old, men as well as women, the thin white wafer, the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord Himself, he realized that for a long time he'd carried a picture of a man doing exactly this. A picture of the priest who'd bent over his father at the end, a picture of Father O'Shea distributing Communion on a hillside in Korea the night of the barrage, a picture, he saw now, of the man he longed to be. It was to a hunger of his own that he brought the sacred food.

  In one room there was a barely conscious man whose head was completely bandaged. Only two holes remained in the swaddling, one for breathing and one for an eye, which moved toward Michael when he touched the man's hand. Michael saw the eye register his collar, then settle on his face. Disembodied in that way, the man's eye flashed eerily, like an animal's in a cave. But then Michael sensed how it was pleading and he guessed the man was dying. He stood by him silently for a long time, holding his hand, returning his gaze. Then he said, "God bless you and keep you." All at once the man squeezed Michael's hand fiercely. Michael had never felt such an expression of gratitude before. He returned the pressure on the man's hand, not in mere sympathy, but with gratitude of his own. "I'll come back every day," he promised. For you, he thought, but also for me. This patient, like the others, was making possible for the first time in Michael's life—himself. That was what he felt. Until those first "priestly" moments—the patients all regarded him as a full-fledged priest; why wouldn't they?—it was as if he had always been someone else, and now at last, touching the bandaged man's hand, the pale cheek of an old lady, the arm of a teenager in traction, the bed of a burn victim, he touched himself with just that tenderness, just that acceptance. Ironically he knew that when they looked at him it was someone else they were seeing. He was an image of Christ now, a sign of His love; he was himself a sacrament. He'd become Michael Maguire by being more than the man of that name, and less. That was the point of the Roman collar, the point of the priesthood, and in fact it was the point of the rigorous abnegation one underwent in seminary. It was all worth it. He felt awed and humbled, profoundly unworthy. Yet, also, prouder and stronger than he'd ever been in his life. Thus, despite the glimpse he'd had that morning of the lifelong stalemate of rectory living and its effect on men who had begun every bit as hopefully as he did, and despite the premonitory chill Father Mahon gave him, Michael felt a surge of happiness to be in the ministry at last. Had he ever been happy before?

  Father Mahon and Michael had lunch that day with the nuns in the teachers' dining room off the school cafeteria. The difference from the scene in the rectory was extraordinary. Father Mahon himself, free suddenly of bitterness and sarcasm, glowed pleasantly, and not only because of liquor. The women had an enlivening effect on him, and he conducted himself with an old-fashioned courtly flair that charmed the sisters. A dozen nuns and half a dozen lay women came and went, each with her tray, in a pleasant bustle. The talk was friendly and animated as they exchanged anecdotes about the morning. Three nuns had led a second-grade field trip by subway to the Central Park Zoo, and they recounted in hilarious detail each phase of it. One child had climbed into the Pulitzer Fountain at the Plaza Hotel, a younger Scott Fitzgerald.

  Michael had trouble squaring these women with the image he carried of the grim crones of his childhood in Good Shepherd. In the seminary the only nuns he had encountered were the self-effacing Mexican sisters who prepared the meals and did the laundry. These women were Sisters of Charity and though their traditional black habits and stern Mother Seton bonnets, not veils, were grim enough, the nuns themselves were not. For one thing they seemed young, though in those days it was impossible to tell with precision. Sister Rita, the principal, reminded Michael of a Muriel Spark heroine, that witty liveliness and bright intellect not flaunted but definitely on display. She wasn't fifty, he was sure.

  He'd expected them to defer to him and even to address him as "Father," but they didn't. Father Mahon introduced him as Michael and that was what they called him. Each woman he met found some way to make him feel welcome. After lunch Father Mahon excused himself to go back to the rectory—to say his breviary, he explained. No one winked, though Michael sensed that they all knew he was going back to drink himself to sleep.

  Sister Rita showed Michael around the school. Holy Cross was a weary brick building dating back to the late nineteenth century. Only its arching, story-high paned windows distinguished it as a structure, but its corridors and classrooms were brightly plastered with drawings, cut-outs and the winners of poster contests. The floors were spotless and the windows were too. It was attended at that point by seven hundred and fifty boys and girls, a third of whom were Puerto Rican, a third Irish and a thi
rd Italian. "We should be called 'Unholy Trinity,'" Sister Rita said. The division was an accident of fluid demographics; a decade later the neighborhood would be almost entirely Puerto Rican and no one would call it "Hell's Kitchen" anymore. A decade after that the neighborhood would be full of affluent young professionals who thought their handsome brownstones, restored to perfection, were all the more wonderful for having stoically survived three generations of screaming filthy children. There would be few children by then, of course, anywhere in mid-Manhattan.

  It didn't take years of pastoral experience to see right away that the school was the liveliest thing in the parish. The people came faithfully to church, but it was in the school, Michael realized, that the Church came faithfully to them. Take the matter of Spanish, for example. None of the parish clergy spoke a word of it. Sister Rita, her assistant and two other sisters were fluent. And the other nuns were all studying it in a special course at night run by the parents of children.

  "Do you speak Spanish, Michael?"

  "No, I don't," he admitted. In his embarrassment he offered the usual excuse. "Isn't it important to help the immigrants learn English?"

  Sister Rita bristled somewhat. "Puerto Ricans aren't immigrants, are they? I mean of course they're American citizens, as you know. And many of them feel they have the right to maintain their Spanish heritage. And that enriches us as well, don't you think?"

  "Yes, it does." He felt chastened but also chastised, and he had to stifle an old resentment.

  "Some people feel that Puerto Ricans aren't quite as worthy of their attention as the Irish are."

  "'Some people' wouldn't by any chance be Irish, would they?"