When Michael came back into the room he said, "Did you hear her scream?"
"Yes. What happened?"
"She had a seizure of some kind, epileptic, I think. Did you hear what she said?"
"No."
"When she regained her senses she looked up and saw me kneeling over her and she screamed, 'A priest! Oh, God! Am I dying?'"
Michael's weary face broke into that familiar grin of his. "I'm the harbinger of death," he joked.
I felt a pang for him and opened an arm. He came into our embrace, more mine than Carolyn's. Once more the feeling we had for each other, that essence of friendship that would sustain us through nearly, but not quite, everything, asserted itself. While Lee Harvey Oswald breathed his last and while President Kennedy's remains approached the place from which he had said, "Let the word go forth...," the three of us laughed quietly and shared thoughts, as Mrs. Kennedy would describe them, "that lie too deep for tears."
"She's beautiful," he said, though Molly was sleeping on her stomach and wrapped in the tight sleeve of blanket so that only the dark crown of her head was showing. We each leaned on the glass as if to draw as close to her as possible. "What a weekend to be born in. Durk, you should save the papers for her."
My impulse was the opposite, to shield her from those events, even to deny them. I changed the subject. "How long have you been back from Vietnam?"
"A few months."
"And you didn't call us?" I stared at him.
"I've been busy," he said, but he was blushing, looking at his feet.
"What have you been doing? You seem exhausted."
"I was in Los Angeles Friday. I took the Red Eye Special home. I could have stayed out there, but I wanted to be in New York. It was dawn when I got back. There was a message at the rectory from Mom about your baby. That news redeemed the other news. It made me very happy for you both. In fact it made me happy for the world. The Talmud says that when a funeral procession intersects with a wedding march, the mourners must give way."
"You've become ecumenical, Michael. I remember when you only quoted the New Testament."
He laughed. "'Now war arose in Heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon.'" Facing me, he said soberly, "I was so glad they were both all right."
"It scared hell out of me, what Carolyn went through. Still does. Seems like that dragon has drawn close this week, waiting to snatch people we love."
"I felt that way. My first impulse yesterday was to go see my mother." He rolled his eyes self-mockingly, as if he of all people was a momma's boy. He was in fact a dutiful son. "Then I walked downtown from Good Shepherd."
"In the rain?"
"Yeah." He smiled. "The rain was good, purifying, cleansing, you know?"
"Yeah, like a carwash."
"I wound up at Saint Patrick's and went in to pray. That's when I saw all the folks at Confession. I went to Confession myself."
"I assumed you'd been hearing them."
"It's the first time I actually just went, you know? Like one of the people."
"I hope the priest gave you the same kind of shit he gives us."
"I chickened out." He smiled again and, leaning on the glass, cupped his hand to light his cigarette. "I figured I could either tell him I masturbate or tell him I'm a priest, but I couldn't tell him both."
"Let me guess."
"I said I'm a priest and confessed that four times I prayed the breviary without paying attention, and I genuflected twice without actually touching my knee to the floor. Oh, and that I've said Mass without wearing the maniple four hundred and seven times."
We laughed softly for a moment, but when he put his hand on my arm it was sadness we shared.
"So then you left the cathedral and found a phone booth and called us because it was the loneliness you felt that seemed sinful."
He met my eyes. "That's right."
"We've missed you, Michael. Why didn't you call us? And you never wrote. We were going to be your family."
"I don't know how to answer that, Durk."
"Just don't tell me how busy you are. I'll have one of those cigarettes. Thanks."
We stood in silence, smoking, looking at the baby. Finally he said, "You just never know what's going to happen, do you? I mean we all thought we had everything laid out. Kennedy was just hitting his stride. He was just getting control of things."
"Are you talking about Congress, or what?"
"I'm talking about Vietnam."
I stared at him, I'm sure blankly. I wanted to ask him what it was like there. Had he seen those monks burn themselves? I wanted to tell him that I'd been worried about him. But I didn't know how, thinking, still, in those days, that you didn't just say so.
"I don't know what his death will mean," he said. "Something terrible, I'm afraid."
I watched him smoke. He was already considering the consequences of Kennedy's assassination for the nation, for the world, for his own work. I saw how we were different. I was still in the grip of that present. Implications and consequences were nothing to me. Our brush with death—for what is childbirth but that, and what was Dallas?—had made the future an enemy to whom I was going, eventually, to lose my wife and daughter. Therefore I refused to think about it. I preferred to bask in the baby's presence—she was the present tense itself. Otherwise, like most Americans, I preferred the suspension of time in television that weekend; we knew instinctively that if we prolonged that awful moment, before it ended it would soothe us.
"What do they have you doing now?"
"Fund-raising." He smiled. "I'm a bingo-priest at last." He smoked his cigarette for a moment, then said, "I run something called the Children's Relief Fund. The idea was to build orphanages over there, but we can't keep up with the numbers. Since Diem's death, thousands of homeless Buddhist children are showing up. They were afraid before to show themselves to Catholic priests. Imagine."
I sensed the fury that filled him, but I barely understood it. Vietnam was more than I could think about.
We smoked and looked through the glass at the room full of babies. I remember thinking they looked like potatoes wrapped in foil.
"Molly. Carolyn said you're naming her Molly."
"Yes. Molly Saint Vincent Durkin." I laughed, but Michael missed my joke. "Edna Saint Vincent Millay was born here. Her parents named her for the hospital."
"You're kidding."
"No, really. Well, I'm kidding about naming Molly that. Carolyn and I laughed at the thought because Saint Vincent was a patron of Mother Seton; Mount Saint Vincent's was to be her exile. Just being here as a new mother is joke enough for her. Molly's middle name is Anne, for Carolyn's mother."
"And 'Molly'?"
"Snagged from the mists of our Irish past. We're lucky she was a girl. We hadn't agreed on a boy's name. I wanted 'Cornelius.'"
Michael laughed. "No wonder you didn't agree."
"Caro wanted 'Michael.'"
He froze with his cigarette halfway to his mouth.
"I'm kidding. She wanted 'Earl.'" I grinned at him.
He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. I wanted him to admit that the reason we hadn't heard from him or seen him till now was that he still loved Carolyn. Now, of course, I understand that I wanted him to admit that as a way of punishing him. I wanted to see the pain he felt. I wanted to see the extreme of his loneliness. I'd have said at the time, though, thinking myself sincere, that I just wanted an honest conversation; I wanted the source of our awkwardness out in the open so we could deal with it. I'd convinced myself that since I loved him too, it was no big problem that he and Carolyn loved each other. I was custodian of Carolyn's love, not its proprietor, and I always knew it. But I'd have said that was more than enough for me. I was there day after day, and I was certain that over time familiarity alone would soften her heart to me.
Carolyn and I had not talked about Michael, and his absence since our marriage had made it impossible for any of us to normalize our feelings, to grow
accustomed to them, to tame them. His being away kept the issue alive for both of us, kept him a figment, a dream, a threat, which now I see was why, whether innocently or not, he did it.
"It's the worst thing about celibacy," he said. The direct, abrupt reference to his condition surprised me. He lit another cigarette, and I realized he wasn't going to finish the thought, as if he'd begun it aloud inadvertently.
"What is?"
"Not having children."
Because of Molly, I saw that he was right, but I rushed to reassure him. "You have all those children whom you help."
He laughed. "Do you know who I spend my time with, almost all of it? Monsignors. Church bureaucrats. The heads of Catholic Charities or Offices for the Propagation of the Faith. In Sioux City one day and Mobile the next, and L.A. the day after that. Always in chanceries. You know what a chancery is in wrestling? Any hold that imprisons the head." His bitterness surprised me.
"But you're building orphanages," I said. "You're taking care of children whose fathers are gone. You're a father, Michael, to thousands of them."
"But I never get to hold them." He looked at me. "Could I hold her, Durk?"
"Sure you can." Even if I'd known that one day Molly would have his name instead of mine, I'd have let him do it. He was my friend, and, having seen his pain, I wanted to take it away.
Saint Gregory's is a neo-Gothic church on East Seventy-ninth Street, and the rectory is a large stone building adjoining it. When Michael returned there late that afternoon, the steady rain and the shadows from the nearby buildings made the place even gloomier than usual, and it was with a shudder of reluctance that he mounted the stone stairs from the street and went in. He didn't go to his room, even to hang up his soaking coat, because he dreaded being alone, but also because he had no television. He went to the common room, and heard the reassuring hum of Walter Cronkite's commentary even as he pushed the door open. But his heart sank when he saw that, even though the television was on, none of the priests was there. Walter Cronkite had been describing the line of mourners passing the catafalque in the Capitol Rotunda to an empty room and that seemed to Michael, suddenly, the saddest moment of the weekend.
He poured himself two inches of Scotch and sat in the big armchair in the center of the room that the pastor reserved for himself. He hoped the whiskey would dull his sense of isolation, but if anything it only sharpened it. An hour passed.
A bell was ringing somewhere in the building. At first Michael ignored it. But it kept ringing. The doorbell, he realized. Why wasn't someone answering it? Weren't there staff people? Wasn't there a duty-priest? But then he realized that he not only felt alone in that building. He was alone.
The bell rang again.
He put his cigarette down and went to answer it.
When he opened the front door, there to his surprise was the kid from the airport press conference. What was his name? Wiley. Nicholas Wiley. It was dark by then but still raining. Wiley's coat was soaked and his hair matted, and Michael's first thought was, Where's your hat?
"Hi, Father."
"Nicholas..."
"I hope you don't mind my coming by. I've been thinking a lot about things. I mean, when something like this happens, you'realize you better just go ahead and act on the impulses you have."
"Come on in."
"No, I can't." He looked up at the rectory. How unwelcoming it must have seemed to him.
"In out of the rain, anyway."
Wiley stepped past Michael, then Michael closed the door. They faced each other in the ill-lit foyer.
"This will just take a minute," Wiley said. He fumbled in his coat pocket, then pulled out a small packet wrapped in brown paper and handed it to Michael. "This is for you."
Michael took the package, but he was looking into Wiley's eyes. The boy seemed intense and alert, utterly in control of himself, but also brimming with feeling.
Wiley said, "You were nice to me, Father, and I liked you a lot. And I was hoping you'd visit us at the Worker. And then when the president..." He lowered his eyes, but only for a moment. "You were one of the people I felt close to. And I guess I thought, well, he'll never know unless I..." He shrugged and smiled shyly.
Michael felt ambushed, completely unprepared both for Wiley's expression and his own sudden, nearly overwhelming sense of need. Wiley had pierced it like the truest arrow. Michael channeled his feeling, his surprise, into the act of unwrapping the package.
It was a hand-carved wooden cross, two inches high, on a leather thong. It was stark and delicate. It was strong. Michael felt a rush of emotion. When he looked up at Wiley, their eyes met. When had he ever felt such a blast, like furnace heat, of another's affection? "Nicholas, it's beautiful."
"I made it."
Michael looked at it again. He remembered the kid whittling in the car that day. "It's just beautiful," he said. "I'm very touched."
"You were nice to me, Father," he repeated.
Michael looked into his eyes again. He wanted to say, I refused your invitation. I put you out of mind. I was afraid of what you wanted from me. He said nothing. Instead he put the cross around his neck. It hung at his breastbone. He fingered it. "I'll always wear it, Nicholas."
"You don't have to say that."
"No, I will. I really will. I want to."
"Well..." Nicholas smiled, he was so pleased. "I guess I better go."
"You won't stay? Have some coffee?"
"No." Of course not, and they both knew it.
They shook hands then, warmly.
At the door, watching Nicholas plunge out into the rain, the dark, Michael called, "Thank you. I really mean it. Thank you."
Nicholas waved. And Michael thought, This is what it's like when an angel comes and rescues us. No, not angel, he realized then. But son.
The cavernous Saint John the Divine seemed brighter then, but it was only that the pupils of my eyes had dilated. Our eyes, the "windows of our souls," in the nuns' phrase, can become accustomed to the most impenetrable dark.
I was kneeling still in the choir stall on the margin of the sanctuary, but the time had come for me to stand and go to her. Oh, Carolyn! How memory revived my worship! How magnificent you were! How bottomless your courage! It had been the great privilege of my life to be the awed man at your side on the day of our daughter's birth. Those were the things I wanted to say to you.
The sound of my sandals clicking on the floor seemed eerily distant, unrelated to the steps I was taking as I wound back toward the rearmost chapels. At the Lady Chapel I saw the Virgin Mary, hovering, suspended gravity, but Carolyn was gone, and I was filled with panic. Had I lost her again?
I turned and retraced my steps along the ambulatory. Just as I passed the arched entrance to a small room behind the choir, a sound stopped me a faint groan. After a moment's hesitation I crossed into a jewel-like baptistry. Windows high up in its tower admitted light, but transformed it, and the air itself seemed sacred there. The font was a carved marble masterpiece the size of a pulpit. Beyond it, against the far wall, was the casket, Michael's casket. I could hardly look at it. My eye gratefully came to Carolyn who was kneeling there with her back to me. She had a hand on the coffin, and that detail recalled a pose of Jacqueline Kennedy's. Grief choked me. There was no Walter Cronkite whispering here, and for once the comparison with the death of the president, which was the loss against which my generation measured all other losses, was inappropriate. This could have been the first death ever; that could have been Eve there, mourning Adam. But who would that have made me?
I approached slowly, as quietly as I could. Even from behind she was familiar enough to arouse a familiar ache. Had it really been a decade, a dozen years? Her blond hair, now riddled with gray, was pulled back and piled upon her head, exposing her neck. She was wearing a simple blue dress, belted at the waist. She was forty-four years old, but there was no thickness in her body yet. The sight of her curving flesh reminded me, though really I had never forgotten, of the dream it w
as to be inside her. Sunday afternoons, sex, the newspapers, Bloody Marys, cigarettes, Billie Holiday and complacencies without the peignoir. While pretending to idle through the Times I could watch her as she left our bed without covering herself to cross our bright bedroom—bleached floorboards, white walls and a ficus in the corner—to answer the telephone. Her nakedness from a distance was thrilling too, more exotically perhaps than up close, the thrill of the voyeur. I could study her body, her pert buttocks, her taut thighs, her ruddy breasts. When she had been aroused her breasts kept that lively piquant color for a long time. If the phone call was from someone she liked, she would whirl on the toes of both feet, a pirouette, and lift her hair from the nape of her neck and throw her head back with pleasure. She might signal me with a snap of her fingers, then put them to her mouth, meaning, "Cigarette, sweetie!" I would toss and she would catch. Her toned nudity was free of the extraneous and her movements were completely natural, musically natural, having neither flats nor sharps. She was as easy with herself in front of me as a model before her artist and perhaps, come to think of it, all the hours she had spent in studios with an eye on the nude was why. But there was nothing impersonal in my gaze, and I could study her for hours. I liked it when those phone calls lasted. When she finished and she came back to the bed I would spring out from behind the paper and take her. She would laugh and I would know that she had sensed my watching, that she had displayed herself coyly, foreplaying me.
Oh, Carolyn, I thought, without you I have been a man with no use for arms!
She was aware of me. I sensed the tension in her even before her head came up and her shoulders straightened. Once more my grief and longing took second and third place to panic; the panic of having found her. What would she say to me? And I to her? It was wrong, I felt all at once, my being there. I was no helper. I was no friend. I had not forgiven Michael. I had not forgiven her. I had tried to flee my hurt, but I had nursed it.
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