Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  "You?"

  He nodded, and he said gravely, without bravado, "I could stop the bastards in their tracks."

  Michael waited.

  "I was the presiding priest yesterday. I had the vestments on. I had the holy water. That was my procession, not some nun's!" His eyes flashed and suddenly there was a veteran preacher's energy in his voice, conviction, solemnity. A throng was before him now, a throng, Michael realized, of reporters. "I am the priest in charge of Holy Cross School. It is the duty and privilege assigned to me by the pastor of my parish. I am responsible for the welfare of that school, and the idea to save it from the expansion of Lincoln Tunnel was mine! I stole those blueprints! I told the nuns to make those signs. I told the kiddies to march down Ninth Avenue! And I regret none of it. And I come before you now to say that God won't let Robert Moses make a laughingstock out of one of my nuns! A thief indeed! The only thing that girl has ever stolen are the hearts of the countless children to whom she has dedicated her life. Robert Moses, for all his power—and yes, for all the good he has done—must not be allowed to demean the sacred vocation, the infinite sacrifice of every nun in this city! A thief? This Bride of Christ? This woman clothed in mystery? We do not expect those of other faiths to adopt our beliefs, but we insist that they respect them! Robert Moses has insulted every Catholic in New York. The man already controls every park, every bridge, every tunnel, every highway, every public works project! Does he also want to steal, like a thief, the archdiocese of New York? Is it his to decide which Catholic child shall have access to a parochial school? Is it his to decide which woman is worthy of the veil? Is it his to decide which Catholic parish lives or dies? I tell you it is not. And if you doubt my word, then I bid you, go downtown to that beautiful old cathedral, named for the patron of the humble Irish immigrants who have broken their backs and spilled their blood to build the great public monuments of this city for which Robert Moses, like a thief, steals all the credit. Ask the leaders of the great Irish building trades about that! And ask the Irish contractors if they think nuns are thieves! And at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, you ask His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman who still controls the archdiocese of New York and who alone has authority over its parishes and schools and who alone has the cherished responsibility to protect its children from the anti-Catholic assaults of the secular world and its women religious from the gratuitous insults of outsiders! You ask Cardinal Spellman who the thief is! I promise you he will neither repeat nor countenance the vile slander of Robert Moses!"

  Father Mahon stopped. Fie put his drink down. His hand was steady. And then he looked at Michael.

  Michael wanted to stand and throw his arms around the priest. Here was a spar to grab hold of! It could keep him from sinking! He said, "Do you think you could repeat that for the record?"

  "You're damn right I could."

  "You'd take a lot of heat."

  Father Mahon laughed. "That's the difference between me and you. I'm 'a priest forever.'" He laughed again, as at his favorite joke. "Spelly would have fired me years ago if he could. He can't fire me now. Anyway, I'm going to make him a hero. The minute Moses thinks Spelly's on the way in, he'll back down."

  "I think we should have it in the school cafeteria."

  "Will you be with me?"

  "Of course," Michael said, but once again he began to calculate the risk. And then, instantly, guilt overwhelmed him. First he'd hidden behind a nun, and now behind a whiskey-priest.

  "Just nearby, son. I'd appreciate having you nearby." Father Mahon's eyes filled and he turned toward the bar where his drink was. Then he checked himself. "I better leave this alone for a while."

  Michael stood and crossed to him, took his arm and pressed it. "You're a good man, Ed."

  "I used to be." For a moment they were suspended in the silence of the room.

  "I'll call the reporters," Michael said.

  Father Mahon nodded. "I think I'll make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament; collect myself, you know?" He tugged at his collar, straightening it. A wily smile crossed his face. "Let old man Moses dump his shit now on a priest of the Roman Catholic Goddamn Church!"

  TWELVE

  "HE built all these roads, didn't he?"

  Sister Anne Edward nodded, but remained silent.

  Michael kept his eyes on his driving. He'd borrowed my car, an old Ford famous for not starting on rainy days, but that day was bright and hot. It was mid-July, and Michael had driven out to the Mother House in Tarrytown to pick the nun up. There was a block party at Holy Cross celebrating the victory and Sister Anne Edward, unknown to her, was going to be the guest of honor.

  "Saw Mill River, Deegan, Taconic, Cross Bronx, Cross County, Henry Hudson. Incredible," Michael said. "And we beat him."

  Sister Anne Edward harrumphed and repeated what Moses had said at his press conference the week before. "'I planned to build the ramp on Eleventh Avenue at Forty-first Street all along. This confusion is what happens when the public intrudes itself on the planning process prematurely.'"

  They both laughed.

  And then they fell silent again and watched the gracefully cultivated knolls of the parkway passing by. Moses did build a hell of a lovely highway.

  After a few moments Sister Anne Edward said, "My parents live here." She pointed to an exit sign. "Dobbs Ferry."

  Michael glanced at her with surprise. Her family had money? He almost asked her; how rude. Instead he said, "They must like having you so close."

  She gave him a look. "We don't go home, you know. I couldn't even attend my sister's wedding last year. My father was wild. He wishes I'd quit."

  "Really? How about your mother?"

  She shrugged. "She'd rather have the grandchildren, I think, than the Grace. She'd never say that, of course."

  He looked at her again. Her parents' ambivalence about her vocation was a sure sign that they'd begun to make it in America. "What does your father do?"

  "He's an importer."

  "Successful?"

  She nodded and smiled. "Diamonds."

  Michael whistled dramatically, but perhaps he shouldn't have been surprised. Even if she was typical in her nun's romantic and self-denying attachment to the Lord and to the cloistered sorority, she was unusual in her capacity to muster self-assurance and will when the chips were down. She had not been your typical nun on TV, but that was Dobbs Ferry ego she had fallen back on. Marx was right: everything was a matter of class.

  "Industrial diamonds," she said, "not ornamental. He's not Harry Winston." She paused.

  Michael thought, Who is Harry Winston?

  "He was going to sue the Daily News for calling me 'Sister Felony.' He was wild. They both were."

  "But not at you?"

  "Oh, no. They're not like that. They're on my side." She faced away. "Unlike some people I can think of."

  "Has Mother Superior eased off?"

  "She doesn't even talk to me."

  "I was hoping she'd send you back to Holy Cross now that the dust is settling."

  "I'm afraid not. I've been assigned to the library at Mount Saint Vincent's College in the Bronx. I'm going to be dusting books." "Oh, God! How long will that last?"

  "The sister whose place I'm taking was there seventeen years. She'd still be dusting but she died."

  "Oh, Anne."

  "I'll have all the time in the world, but she said I'm not to paint." She let him see how devastated she'd been made to feel.

  "You paint?"

  "Yes. It's the most important thing about me."

  It seemed to Michael she was rebuking him for his ignorance, and he felt suddenly ill at ease. Why should he have known anything at all about her? They'd hardly ever talked about themselves. He'd visited her three times in June, but they had talked stiffly in the Mother House parlor, and only about the uproar at Holy Cross after Father Mahon's press conference. That he knew so little about her was an affront, perhaps, when compared to the charged air between them, the unexpressed but potent intimacy th
at he'd felt from her side since that first meeting in the teachers' lunchroom. She had communicated a certain affection, but he was sure she also felt disappointed in him. He had let her take the heat alone, after all, and now she was telling him in detail what that was like. Had she bristled because, really, she was angry at him? No. Not that. She had bristled, he sensed, because she had shared his intensity of feeling, and now his ignorance about her made it seem misplaced. Well, ignorance can be dispelled. "You grew up in Dobbs Ferry?"

  "No, Bronxville. We moved when I was in high school. They have a fabulous swimming pool." Was she bragging? No. She was showing him that her parents' affluence had become as strange to her as it would be to him.

  "A pool would be great on a day like this, wouldn't it?" He looked over at her, eyed her habit. "You guys must get hot in those things."

  She smiled winningly. "They tell us to offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory. But do you know what I think? In July we are the poor souls in Purgatory. I think I'm being punished for sins I committed in an earlier life."

  "Maybe you were a thief."

  "No, no, to deserve this?" She lifted a fold of her habit in her lap. "I must have been an ax-murderer."

  "That explains everything. You're deadly."

  Michael knew that she was desolate. He admired her for covering her grief but it wasn't working. If he'd been she it wouldn't have been the prospect of dusting shelves forever that would have depressed him, but the massive disapproval. The parish school's victory had been her defeat. If her superiors disliked her now, didn't that mean, finally, that Jesus did? Wasn't that what she'd be feeling? Michael wanted to touch her, to reassure her. Jesus had said, "Let the children come to me." Jesus would love Anne Edward more than ever. "Tell me about the painting you do. Have you been painting long?"

  "I studied a year at the Art Students League after high school. They liked my stuff. I wanted to be an artist and a nun both."

  "Why do you say 'wanted'?" The word made him nervous. Even if I hadn't pressed him into a study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Michael knew how difficult it was to square artistic impulses with life in the Church. "Birds build," the poet groused, "but not I." She did not answer him at first, but only stared out at the snaking road, the passing trees. She leaned into the wind at her window for the air, then faced him. She explained, pensively, "Until now the Order encouraged my work. My novice mistress was a sculptor who'd studied in Europe as a young woman, and she thinks I have real talent. She was the first one who enabled me to take myself seriously. She said I could glorify God with my gift. But now Mother tells me painting was a privilege, and it became the source of my vanity."

  "Your vanity?"

  "That's what she called it. Anyway, there was a problem even before this. Once I was assigned to Holy Cross my own work came last, just because there was always so much to do in the school. I love the children. I could never say no to them." She stopped talking. Michael thought she was finished. He looked at her. She was staring at him. She said, "I think to be an artist in the religious life, one would have to be in the cloister or in the novitiate or someplace. The only nuns I know of who are serious about art are Benedictines."

  "It's hard to think of you as a contemplative. You're too good with people. It would be a waste."

  "And dusting library books won't be?" She laughed, but at last her bitterness showed. She looked across at Michael and said, "If I was a contemplative I would have to talk to you through a grille."

  "I'd hate that," Michael said quickly.

  "Me too." She blushed and began to fuss with the rosary beads in her lap. "It's bad enough this way," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Michael knew what she meant. There was a grille between them. It thrilled him to think she hated it too.

  She looked up brightly and said in a change-the-subject voice, "You know something about the contemplative life, I think."

  He shook his head. "Not me."

  "I mean the POW camp. I gather your vocation came from that."

  "That's my previous life. It's like it happened to someone else. Whatever you've read about prison camps, remember this: writers always make life better and worse than it really is."

  "But you came out of it wanting to be a priest."

  "I did, yes."

  "Why?"

  This was the first time anyone had ever asked directly for an explanation, and Michael felt his face redden. He deflected her. "You tell me first. Why are you a nun? A rich girl, an artist, a rebel. How'd it happen?"

  She shrugged. "I told you. High school. I fell in love." She looked right at him. "Jesus ravished me," she said blatantly. "He carried me away."

  "And now?"

  "I still love him. And of course, now I have my vow. But I haven't heard much from him lately. I think he's away on business." She grinned, then added, "I'm not a swooning teenager anymore, but I still believe. Now it's your turn."

  Michael was in trouble. How could he possibly match her honesty? Or her feeling? Jesus was a compelling biblical figure to him, not a lover. "I want to serve the Church," he said automatically. It was a weak statement, and he knew it. He took refuge in lines from Maritain. "I want 'to celebrate the Eucharist, to assist the sick and dying, to console the afflicted, to instruct the Catholic people, to intercede for all and to bear witness to the truth.'"

  "All that and golf on Wednesdays."

  "Those are in fact the things I want to do. I didn't mean to sound pompous."

  "Seminarians and young nuns have to sound pompous when they bare their souls."

  "Are you baring your soul?"

  "I would if I knew how. To you."

  Michael was aware that the steering wheel was slick with perspiration. My hippo of a car lumbered along the serpentine parkway, and he found that he had let the speed drop to twenty-five. He gunned it back up to forty-five. Anne's simple statement unhinged him. What would happen if they put those feelings into words ?

  His reticence didn't stop her. "I'm having my problems, as you can tell. I have no one to talk to."

  "You can talk to me, Anne," he said, not glibly. "I'd like to be your friend." It was a dangerous statement but still within bounds, he thought. Wasn't the ideal of such friendship held out to priests and nuns by hagiography that so emphasized the bonds between Saint Therese and John of the Cross, Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Clare and, for that matter, Abelard and Eloise? Even Pius XII was known to have had for over forty years a special friendship with the nun who served as his secretary. But Michael was hip enough to know how easily such impulses between celibate men and women, who were poised on the brink of permanent adolescence, slipped over into puppy love, spiritual finger-fucking. He was right to be uptight.

  Anne for her part veered away from the issue. She brought her hands together in front of her mouth, impishly.

  "Can I tell you who I remind myself of? You won't laugh? Or think me 'vain'?"

  "Of course I won't."

  "Joan of Arc," she blurted; then added with mock solemnity, "She was condemned by the Church too."

  "The judges of Rouen weren't the Church, Anne. Cardinal Spellman's not the Church and neither is your mother superior. They're wrong and they're unfair, but you mustn't think of them as the Church. The Church is the people of Holy Cross and they love you."

  "They'll barely remember me, Michael."

  "You saved their school and they know it." Michael almost told her of the plan to honor her at the block party, but checked himself. The secret—what joy it portended—was more precious than before. "They appreciate what you're putting up with."

  "Will they appreciate it seventeen years from now?"

  What could he say?

  After a moment, she touched his arm. "I'm sorry. I'm having an authority problem."

  "I don't blame you. You've been blasted by the very ones who should have supported you."

  "You know something, Deacon? You're the only one who has...." She stopped and leaned toward the window for
a moment. "...You and my parents. I've been feeling somewhat bereft." She closed her eyes. Wisps of her hair tore free in the wind; blond, he thought. "The judges of Rouen may not have been the whole Church, but they sure were a part of it."

  "They made Joan a saint, right?"

  "I suspect she'd have settled for a few more years as an ordinary mortal." She faced him again. "Look, that's the point. I love Holy Cross. I love the Church. I love my Order. But I'm not going to give up my painting for any of them. I'm not going to be a martyr. If that's what the religious life requires, then I want no part of it."

  "I wouldn't want part of it either, if I thought that's what it required."

  "But you don't."

  "No, not at all. You're right that authority is the problem here. We agree about that and we agree on what to do when authority is in the wrong. Hell, you take it on the best way you can. You rant against it." Was he really saying this? It was an act of his and he knew it. And she would know it. How had he ranted on her behalf? He felt nowhere near this brave, which of course was why he pretended to. "You try to change it. But you accept in principle its fundamental structure."

  "Even if that means martyrdom?"

  "Martyrdom is your metaphor, not mine. That's not how I feel about my life."

  "Metaphor?!"

  "I—"

  "You don't feel this way because you're not the one who's on the spot!"

  "I know that," he said quickly, guiltily. How he wished she wouldn't say it. "I've kept my head in the trench, and I don't feel right about it at all. You've really been out there by yourself." He glanced over at her and saw tears on her cheek. It happened that just ahead there was one of those rest area/picnic groves off the parkway and he swung into it and stopped the car. He leaned toward her and touched her shoulder while she wept as quietly as she could. She seemed so vulnerable. How he wanted to protect her, but he knew how he had failed her.

  As if she read that in him she raised her hand to his and pressed it against her shoulder, and her body, until then a remote abstraction, took over the field of his perception. He felt suddenly through her habit the sharply defined bone of her left clavicle. He became aware of the clean odor of her skin, that nun's soap smell he'd noticed in the teachers' room. But now it seemed intensely erotic to him. She was more woman than nun and for a moment it was possible to forget all that kept them apart. He touched a tear at her cheek with the back of his free hand, then let his finger fall to her lips. She opened them and took his finger between her teeth and bit him just sharply enough to cause him pain.