Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  When I raised my eyes and beheld the sanctuary, it wasn't that moments had passed, but that years had fallen away.

  Carolyn and I took places toward the rear of Saint Patrick's just as the great anthem of pipes and horns unleashed waves back and forth across the vault of the cathedral. The congregation rose to its feet and the flourish was followed by the grand processional antiphon, the ancient Gregorian Ecce Sacerdos Magnus, Behold the Great Priest! And the bobbing procession-cross flanked by candles led the long train of paired-up ordinandi vested in white albs with stoles slashing across their chests as deacons wear them, golden chasubles folded like large waiter's towels over their arms, into the body of the cathedral. The procession came nowhere near us but we were easily able to pick Michael out because he was the tallest deacon. He carried himself with a natural grace.

  They wound through the nave and up the stairs into the sanctuary. Trailing them, between his chaplains, poking the floor with his crozier, was the diminutive figure of Francis Cardinal Spellman. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on him, and from where we stood, he seemed slightly ludicrous, that roly-poly cherub in miter and velvet slippers, like a newspaper cartoon of the time called "The Little King." It was the spring of 1961 and in fact Spellman's power was in decline. His worldwide influence had depended on his intimate relationship with the aristocratic Pius XII. He and the Peasant Pope, John XXIII, had not hit it off. John had raised Spellman's old rival, Cushing of Boston, to the College of Cardinals. As if that wasn't enough, the Kennedys had embraced Cushing too, and now after that winter's inaugural, the nation thought of the old coot from Boston as the preeminent American Catholic prelate. But here in New York, Spellman was still in command, and if New York was all that was left him, he would be more in command there than ever. Anyone who dismissed him, in other words, as a roly-poly cherub, made a big mistake. Spellman was the Sacerdos Magnus, and anyone who doubted it had only to watch this line of handsome, robust young men in their prime—men who'd have been the prizes of recruiters at firms all over Manhattan—kneel before him at his cathedra one by one to have their hands bound in linen cloth. In that consecration each made his obeisance in a ceremony derived from the feudal rite of fealty; obeisance not to God or to Jesus or to the Church, but to this man, to this—as the argot puts it with rare irony—Ordinary.

  Spellman addressed his question in the Latin: "Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey me and my successors?" Michael like the others did not hesitate with his "I do." Years later he would openly break that vow and I would applaud him for it, thinking stupidly that he would keep his others. I would only wonder, not understanding yet how thoroughly that seminary meat grinder had chewed his ego up, what took him so long.

  I remember the jolt with which he slammed his drink down on the table late one night. "Goddamnit, Durk, I want someone to obey! I want someone to respect! Authority is the basic principle of my life, and look what I've done to undermine it!" He had his finger on the irony of what he'd become. I said, cruelly perhaps, "You just want your daddy, Michael." He looked at me with shock in his face, as if he hadn't seen that elemental orphan's wish as a motivating force behind his vocation.

  After making the vow of obedience, the ordinandi, in the metaphoric and dramatic climax of the ritual, prostrated themselves on the sanctuary floor, assuming the posture of the dead. Twenty or thirty corpses in white, utterly immobile for the transfiguring duration of the litany of the saints. Its strains, sung antiphonally between the schola, its precious falsetto, and the entire congregation, its ragged base, rose like incense to the vaulted reaches where the faded red hats of Spellman's predecessors hung rotting from the crown joint of the intersecting arches.

  Kyrie Eleison!

  Christi Eleison!

  Kyrie Eleison!

  Sancta Maria, Mater Dei...

  Ora pro nobis.

  Sancta Michaeli Archangeli...

  Ora pro nobis.

  And so on through dozens of arcane names—Athanasius, Sebastian and Basil, Perpetua, Agatha and Felicity—men whose bodies were pierced like pin-cushions with Roman arrows and women whose breasts were crushed with Appian Way paving stones.

  All holy men and women, saints of God...

  Pray for us.

  Lord, be merciful...

  Lord, deliver us.

  Bless these chosen men...

  Lord, hear our prayer.

  My true feeling surfaced even as I sang. Those poor sons of bitches! Chosen men? One can always tell God's chosen ones—Jesus, the Jews—when they get nailed or gassed. I rose up on the kneeler, straining to see Michael lying there, like a dead man, one of a massacred crowd. I could not tell which was him. Spellman knelt smugly above them, like Moses having laid low a band of Pharaoh's thugs.

  Moses! I remembered Spellman's part in the humiliation of Carolyn less than a year before, and I was angry suddenly that Michael would bind himself to that petty tyrant. But my anger fell before my pity. Poor Michael! What was he doing to himself? At that moment surely he was in the grip of a vicious despair. Perhaps he was undergoing, victim of that liturgical enactment, a true foretaste of death. Or was he facing the facts about himself? That his touted bravery had driven him headlong from the world; he was dead to the world now! No human feelings in him from now on, no weakness, no vulnerability, and no autonomy. One of God's true heroes forever. Surely he saw the sham of it! Surely he knew that his priesthood was a blessed sleeve, a maniple, in which to hide the stump of his cowardice! Why else would an American male of my generation cooperate in the denigration of such a ceremony? I was utterly scandalized by it, and I think even now that I understood its radical character, therefore, far better than that edified throng awash in its ocean of sentiment. The ordination of a priest is an awesome, artful and affirming act only to those who buy the whole package, and I didn't.

  Michael in fact was not seeing it my way at all. He told me later that he lay there on that cold stone floor in the grip not of despair but of euphoria. The Church to which he was giving himself, its theology, its liturgy, its discipline, was as seamless as the round of chanted music echoing above him, and he felt that the eyes of heaven—all those Felicities and Basils— were upon him. His clinging reservations, his shame at what he knew he'd become when he'd failed to stand with Carolyn, and the huge selfdoubt I imagined as his burden had fallen away or had been lifted with the airy litany and incense to the shadowy cavern above. When he stood at last, it was no act of abnegation to kneel once more before the cardinal for the imposition of hands and the investiture. "Receive the yoke of the Lord, for his yoke is sweet and its burden light." As the cardinal crossed the stole on Michael's breast, he felt his heart lighten, for he believed fully for the first time that he was indeed called by God, no, seized by God, captured by him—he would almost have said "ravished"—to be held forever. The relief he felt came from the obliteration of his conflicts. There was no issue any longer of which choice to make, for with a clear-headed self-awareness, arrived at over seven arduous years, he had made his choice. That other human beings have to make their choices repeatedly, even their life-shaping ones—especially their life-shaping ones—was a fact without relevance for him.

  The contradictions implicit in the Catholic priesthood—slavishly obedient men are expected to use mature judgment exercised with flair in their pastoral positions; men unconsciously in revolt against intimacy and domesticity are expected to nurture the family lives of others—simply did not exist for Michael Maguire at the moment of his ordination. He willingly suspended his disbelief so that Cardinal Spellman could seem a dignified figure of magnanimous authority, the congregation in Saint Patrick's a veritable choir of the moving spheres, and his own life stretching out before him an adventure of transcendent significance. The illusions were in place. Michael accepted with great joy the chasuble of charity upon his shoulders and the oil of kings upon his hands. He touched the chalice of gold and the paten with the sacred Host upon it. "Receive the power to offer sacrifi
ce to God and to celebrate Mass for the living and the dead."

  A priest undergoes, in the phrase of Saint Thomas, an ontological change, a change so fundamental that it reaches to the very core of his being, making him, according to this theology, a completely different creature. But Michael's happiness that day, he would tell me, derived from his experience that he became the man he always thought he was.

  It was the previous September, only weeks after that day at Dobbs Ferry and after Michael had returned to Washington for his final year of seminary, that I had first called Carolyn at her parents' home. I talked to her on the telephone two or three times before I quashed the feeling that I was a thief and finally asked her out. We began in a tentative way "to see each other," a phrase then light years away from its present status as a euphemism for fucking. We first came together, in other words, the way porcupines, in the old joke, make love—very carefully.

  Carolyn had suffered not one but two traumas, for she'd lost Michael and, even more shocking, the Church. If she'd been the Bride of Christ, now she was—and this was the feeling Catholics had about ex-nuns and the feeling Catholics expected ex-nuns to have about themselves—His unfaithful former wife. For a girl who'd been raised to expect affirmation and acceptance, it was a stunning blow to find herself in a situation of failure and rejection. Her parents stood by her, and no one openly derided her, but the shame hung over her nonetheless. It made her feel that she would never recover, would never know happiness, would never again bask in the easy love either of God or the Church, not to mention of a man. The greatest agony, of course, was in having had for a moment, then lost, the love of such a man as Michael. Hadn't it seemed in its intensity, its purity, the perfect gift from God?

  Initially my company was a solace to her because I was Michael's friend. I could tell her stories about our boyhood, and she could describe the enthralling first discovery of her feelings and the pain she experienced at his rejection. She could describe her confusion; how could God's gift have become her sin? How could her urgent desire to serve the children have caused her disgrace? How could Michael have left her alone with such trouble? If she'd done nothing wrong, as I kept telling her, why was she consumed with sorrow? "Help me understand, Durk!" she'd cry. "Help me live with this!" And I did. She was no failure to me, no reject, no pariah, and eventually she knew it.

  After a while she began to enjoy my company for its own sake, and she began to regard me in relationship to herself, not Michael. Only then, and most carefully, did I reveal my feelings to her, but still the effect of my admission was to make things more confused than ever. Now when I invited her to my somewhat shabby Village apartment, was it to make love to her? When she came to my apartment and I didn't make love to her, was she disappointed? I wanted her sexually more than I'd ever wanted any girl, but I had no intention of pressing her in any way. But, as a virgin, was she waiting for me to overcome her hesitancy? In order to have her, did I have to pretend that I was Michael? Looking back on it now, it seems a miracle that our relationship at last became clear, became ours.

  We'd had dinner at the New Port Alba, a homey Italian restaurant just below Washington Square, and we headed out into the cold—it was February. We were going to Grand Central so that Carolyn could catch her train to Dobbs Ferry, but crossing the square we came upon an old lady who was trying without success to wrap herself in newspapers. She was blue with cold, wearing only a pair of sweaters and a wool knit hat. Without thinking, I took off my coat and draped her with it. It was a navy pea coat, easily replaced, and so it was not an act of great generosity. Still it was utterly unlike me. I crossed that square every day and hardly ever registered the derelicts. My impulse came from Carolyn, not that I was, grossly, out to impress her, but that, in her presence, such expansiveness came naturally to me. I not only loved Carolyn but loved myself as I was when I was with her.

  The old lady cried, "God bless you!"

  And as we walked away, Carolyn put her arm around me, to warm me. "You're good," she said.

  She was looking at me with such affection that I replied, "Gee, maybe I'll go back and give her my shirt."

  But now we had to stop at my apartment so that I could get my other coat, which meant we had to hurry to make her train. It was cold. We walked on as quickly as we could toward my place, Carolyn leaning on me, rubbing my arms, me reciting loudly Millay's "Recuerdo."

  We were very tired, we were very merry,

  We had gone back and forth all night

  on the ferry.

  We hailed "Good morrow, mother!"

  to a shawl-covered head

  And bought a morning paper, which

  neither of us read;

  And she wept, "God bless you!"

  for the apples and pears,

  And we gave her all our money

  but our subway fares.

  "Oh, Frank," she said excitedly, "could we do that?"

  "What, give her all our money?"

  "No. Ride all night on the ferry."

  "Sure we can, kid. Stick with me."

  "I mean it. I've never been on the ferry."

  "Could we wait till August?"

  "I didn't mean tonight." She pushed me, and I started to run. She followed, playfully. The truth was I didn't want to take her on the Staten Island Ferry. It was a cliché. It was where I'd gone with other girls, which was why I happened to know "Recuerdo." Reciting poetry into the wind worked wonders. I hadn't tried tricks like that on Carolyn. But, hell, the ferry didn't have to be a trick. It cost a nickel. It offered a great view of New York. It ran all night. And no one bothered kissing couples if they kept their clothes on.

  "Hey, why not?" I said suddenly, stopping her. "Want to?"

  "The ferry?"

  "Sure! What the hell? It's a perfect night."

  "It's freezing!" she laughed.

  "You're telling me! What do you say?"

  "Let's get your coat, then we'll flip a coin."

  "Okay. That's a deal."

  We ran the few blocks back to my apartment, holding hands, and my mind was filled with her image, how beautiful she was, how untamed, how untouched. It was the most I frankly hoped for, running, joined to her, like that, hands only, and such was my happiness that I thought it could be enough. By the time we got there we were both winded. Carolyn collapsed across my tattered overstuffed reading chair, while I caught my breath against the wall. We were grinning at each other like exhilarated kids. I took my topcoat from its hanger and put it on. She stood up. I produced a quarter and held it toward her on my thumb. "Still game?"

  I saw a hint of insecurity in her eyes, but she nodded.

  "Heads if by land, tails if by sea."

  I flipped and it was tails. We both stared at the coin, stunned, as if that etched George Washington had just cried, "All aboard for Staten Island!"

  "Oh," she said. When we looked at each other, I saw how vulnerable she felt. What was this anyway? And I resolved to leave my sure-fire poetry at home with all my hard-learned wiles and moves and savvy calculations. I was not on the make anymore. That, perhaps, was what she sensed, and what, as Frost said, made all the difference.

  She said, "I'll have to call my folks."

  "What will you say?"

  "I'll say, 'We're very tired. We're very merry.' And not to wait up for me in Dobbs Ferry."

  "You're good," I said and grinned. I was aware that those were the very words she'd said to me in the park. She'd made me feel not noble precisely, but, well, worthy. Worthy, I realized suddenly, of her.

  She went to my phone. As she dialed, her hand shook slightly, but it wasn't her parents who made her nervous. When she told her mother that we were going to ride the ferry, it seemed ludicrous to me, but apparently her mother encouraged her, said it was just the thing for young people to do. It would mean missing the last train, Carolyn said; she'd stay in a hotel. It underscored the difference between our backgrounds when her mother did not object. In Inwood even that bright, self-assured young woman w
ould have been scolded home by midnight.

  When Carolyn hung up the phone she turned toward me. When our eyes met we realized together that we were in a completely new situation.

  It was the first time an evening had passed in which Michael had not been mentioned. That told us.

  It was unthinkable that we should have withdrawn from one another. That told us.

  And now, by the same instinct, we knew that the Staten Island Ferry was nothing to us. We weren't going anywhere. And none of this was spoken or needed to be.

  I let my coat fall from my shoulders. She started to unbutton hers but her hands could not manage it. She plunged them into her pockets and let her eyes fall instead. She couldn't look at me. She couldn't move. It was my place to cross to her, to take her hand, to show her what to do. But it was as if we both were virgins. I crossed without speaking. My arms went around her; I kissed her. But she was afraid, and I couldn't help but sense it.

  "Shall we just go?" I asked.

  "No. Durk, you're so good to me." When she looked up there were tears in her eyes. I must have been a blur to her. "I need you, Durk. Without you I'm nothing."