She pulled back to look at me and I was afraid her steady gaze meant she was offended. Would she drag me to the coffin, lift its lid and make me look at him? No. She nodded.
I led her by the hand, out into the ambulatory and back around the curving, becolumned passageway. And suddenly I was leading her by the hand in a different darkness. Where? What was that sound? A name? A word? A moan? It was waves breaking. It was night. We were walking along the beach at Lake George. I had escaped Saint John the Divine once more in memory. The lake's calm inland surface had been transformed by the wind. It seemed to be a bay of the Atlantic, and in the darkness the water might have stretched for three thousand miles, instead of merely three. The imported sand underfoot was difficult to walk in, made us feel drunk. The house of our friends was behind the trees. We had come out, we'd said, for air. But in fact the endless Scrabble game had bored us.
The wind whipped at our clothes. Carolyn was wearing loose white cotton bell-bottoms and a white Mexican wedding shirt. She was a summer night vision, and what light there was—the moon had set but the stars were brilliant—seemed drawn to her. When we were down the beach, utterly alone, we stopped, wordlessly, as if we'd planned to, and embraced. Her tongue was in my mouth. My hands were on the blades of her back, pressing her against me. Her hands were at my belt. And then in seconds we were naked and on the sand. I was between her thighs, moistening her with my tongue. Then I was on her. She had my prick in her hands and was taking me in. And I was crying out, Oh, God, and trying to raise my head away from her, arching involuntarily, but she was holding me, my face by her face, and as she pumped back at me, swiveling, she breathed in audibly, endlessly. When at last she exhaled, the air was a word, a whisper alive in my inner ear, as if already it had entered my body through my skin.
"Durk!" she said. But it was more than my name. It was a plea, a summons, an expression of pain that I never forgot. "Durk! Durk!" For once passion seemed to have taken over her. "I do love you!" she said, but what I heard was her emphasis; I do love you! As if someone had said she didn't. As if she had.
Michael was assigned to duties at Saint Joseph of Arimathea in Aina, a village just north of Newburgh, about a mile west of the Hudson. He was solemnly forbidden to preach or teach anything having to do with Vietnam, but that was no problem in that parish where the pressing issues had been keeping the school open and the people closed. If he participated in antiwar activities in any way, his priestly faculties would be suspended. When this was spelled out to him upon his return that summer from Vietnam, he found it impossible to respond. Something like this had happened to him before when Spellman had coopted him with the Relief Fund job. But this was not sweet persuasion. He was not given a choice this time, and frankly the old pull of priestly obedience seemed less like oppression than rescue. Once more the refuge of certitude and exemption was being offered him, no, forced on him. But now, exhausted and emotionally spent after the events in Vietnam—after seeing the hopelessness of things there—he did not reject that refuge but welcomed it. His one request was to speak in person to Cardinal Spellman. It was refused. Spellman would not see him. The cardinal, the chancellor said, would like never to lay eyes on him again. And he might not have, except for Nicholas Wiley.
But it was a while before Nicholas came back into his life. By then, Michael had grown almost accustomed to the quotidian pastoral life of Saint Joseph's. No big crises, no acts of violence, no napalm; just the early-morning Mass, offered quietly for a few old ladies before dawn; at breakfast he exchanged banalities with his fellow priests and wasn't even tempted to read the papers, as in the evening he wouldn't be tempted to watch the news on television. The world beyond Aina became less and less important as he gave himself to the oddly fulfilling tasks of parish ministry. Instead of the wounded children in primitive hospitals, there were the shy teenagers in his Religion Class. Michael taught them to feel better about themselves. Instead of frantic trekking around Vietnam, there were afternoon games of pick-up at the high school, where boys imitated Michael's slow, loose-wristed jump shot. It wasn't long before Michael was the one they came to with their problems. Instead of terrified refugees, there were addled old peopie in the local nursing home. Michael talked to them about the Resurrection of the Dead, and if they wanted him to he would, yes, describe heaven to them, golden boulevards, becolumned mansions and all. Instead of demonstrations in the streets of Saigon, there were wakes in the evening at which he lead the rosary or meetings of the Holy Name Society to which each month more and more of the parish men came. But always, rooting him, giving him such solace, such nurture, such pleasure, the priest's version of love-making, were those quiet early Masses, the sharp smell of candles instead of tear gas, the taste of oversweet altar wine instead of fear, and the palpable sense of God's nearness instead of loneliness. His memento, still, was for peace, and he always mentioned by name Suu Van Pham and Inge Holz in the prayer for the living, but the war in Vietnam was in another world than his. At Saint Joseph of Arimathea's, in other words, for the better part of a year, Michael Maguire had been condemned to the life of a small town parish priest. The truth was he loved it.
The surprise was, when Wiley showed up, Michael did not feel ashamed.
It was March of 1966. Michael was improvising a system of supports for the star magnolia that he had planted in the churchyard the previous autumn. The tree was one of his first attempts to brighten the place, but the winter had savaged it and it seemed unlikely that spring would revive it. The other priests, the pastor and the first curate, were old men who'd lost their battles years before, and the backwater church of Saint Joseph's, the emblem of their defeat, had taken on their slouch. Michael had planted several trees right away and the beginnings of a rose garden. By Christmas he had organized teenagers to paint the parish hall. This spring he'd already recruited local masons to point the brick facade of the church itself, and he was planning to turn the entire neglected churchyard into a garden. But now he wondered, Was it futile?
"Sad-looking tree," Nicholas Wiley said from behind Michael. "How'd you expect it to survive in this fresh air?"
Michael turned slowly.
The sight of Nicholas Wiley, now wearing a colorful headband and hair to his shoulders and a full beard, threw him. He had never expected to see Wiley again, as if in Aina he'd entered a world to which the likes of this by now full-blown hippie would not be admitted. In a way it was true. Wiley looked like the young people who had staked their claim to the Bancroft Fountain in Central Park. In the city his get-up was as ordinary as the business suits of lawyers, but in the churchyard of a conservative town, it seemed provocative, inflammatory. Michael himself had to stifle an instinctive repugnance at his appearance. But, when he did, when he actually looked at Nicholas Wiley then, he saw that in his own way he looked good. He looked like what he was.
He looked, of course, like Jesus. Remember how for a time America was populated with young Saviors?
Michael dropped his pliers and crossed the lawn, grinning. "You son of a gun," he said.
Nicholas Wiley opened his arms wide. Remember how men began to embrace each other that year?
Michael felt a surge of guilt as they hugged roughly, half-fighting, not about his life at Saint Joseph's but about having left it to Wiley to come to him. When he'd returned to New York he'd written to him, but the short note came back undelivered and Michael hadn't pursued it. Nicholas Wiley was part of what he'd all too willingly left behind. Already Michael's years in Vietnam had receded into the haze of memory. His sharp outrage, his intensely felt compassion for the children, his attachments to the Vietnamese he'd met were like items of contraband he had handed over to stern Customs agents upon his return. He had done it in the name of faithfulness. That irony—that he had broken faith while keeping faith—confused him. Of course he had to shut it out, along with all his feelings and convictions. The conflict implicit in his position was impossible. There could be no such thing as a defiant priest. And so, of course,
he'd taken refuge in his belief that the benefit of the doubt, for priests as for married people, had always to go not to intense present feeling but to the solemn promise around which one's life was built.
"You son of a gun," he said again.
"I'd rather you called me a son of a bitch."
Michael pulled back to hold him by the shoulders, expecting to see him grinning. But he wasn't. He'd made the comment earnestly—I'm no son of a weapon—and that was Michael's first warning. "Okay, you're a son of a bitch." Michael tapped his chin. "And it's great to see you."
"It's good to see you too."
"Thanks."
"You're welcome." Now Wiley grinned, but strangely. They separated. Wiley looked around awkwardly. "Nice garden." Michael looked at the budding trees, the grass with its first splash of green. Mulch still protected the new flower beds and burlap sacks still covered the infant boxwoods. "This is nothing. Come back in a month."
"I don't know if I'll be able to," Wiley said with abrupt solemnity.
"Why not?"
"That's what I came to talk about."
The peace movement with its full-page ads in the Times, its teach-ins, marches and draftcard burnings was just picking up steam that spring, and Michael was certain Wiley had come to ask him to join it. He hadn't considered that Wiley might have come to him for help. He chided himself. There was more on this young man's mind than what Michael Maguire did or didn't do to sublimate his guilt and loneliness. He studied him for a moment and read, now that he bothered to try, the signs of his pitched anxiety. Nicholas's beard obscured the facts that he'd lost weight and that his skin had a gray pallor to it. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot. Where once only his thumbs were gnawed, now all of his fingernails had been chewed to the quick. "Come on inside," he said.
"I'd rather stay out here." Wiley looked nervously toward the grim rectory. "Could we just go for a walk or something?"
"Sure." Michael led the way. Soon they were on an unpaved lane that went up Rattlesnake Mountain, the hill at the base of which the town nestled. Neither spoke until they came to a bright meadow around a house-sized boulder. Michael scurried to the top of it, then reached back to help Nicholas up. When they were sitting, the stone cold beneath them, Michael said, "I come here to think my best thoughts."
"You're going to need them."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to tell me what to do."
"What's up?"
Wiley looked at him strangely. "You know what's up."
"No, I don't."
Nicholas pulled a creased news photo from his canvas bag. He handed it to Michael. It wasn't a picture of a child now, though, but of a Buddhist pagoda in flames. In the foreground, helmeted Vietnamese Rangers were clubbing an aged monk. It was all too familiar. The Buddhist Struggle had resumed as the war had worsened and become Americanized. The cities of South Vietnam were paralyzed daily by thousands of chanting, frenzied demonstrators. There were reports that taxi drivers and shopkeepers were shaving their heads and dressing as monks to replace those who'd been arrested. It was yet to be seen whether Ky and Thieu would be any more effective against them—though they were equally brutal—than Diem had been.
Michael folded the photograph and handed it back to Wiley. "What does it mean to you?" he asked somewhat rigidly. He resolved to keep his own reaction at arm's length until he knew what Wiley wanted.
"Just that we're back where we started three years ago. Catholic government against Buddhist people. Only now the government has three hundred thousand American mercenaries and bombers galore. They're using B-52S now."
Michael hadn't known that. B-52S? Was he so out of touch?
Nicholas shook his head. "The Buddhists don't hope to change their government anymore, you know. They're trying to change us. They know that we're the ones who have to stop the war. We're the ones who pay for it. You and I are the ones who let it happen. And it just keeps getting worse."
Michael said nothing.
Wiley looked sharply at him. "Didn't you learn anything over there?"
Michael felt the blast of the young man's disappointment—it was there after all—and tried to deflect it. "I learned always to put my chopsticks into the hot rice as soon as it was served. It was the only way to sterilize them."
"Is that what you worried about? Germs?"
Michael shook his head, but of course he had worried about germs.
"You were going to save the children! You were going to make the army take care of the wounded!"
"I was naive, Nicholas. I was wrong. You were right. The only thing to be done about the war is to stop it."
"Well, what are you doing here then?"
"I'd convinced myself that you didn't come here to guilt-trip me. You didn't come here to talk about my life; you came to talk about yours. What's going on?"
"I'm pulling out."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to serve the people."
"What do you mean, Nicholas? You sound like Chairman Mao." Michael waited for him to answer, but he didn't. The war had obviously possessed him, as surely as some devil, and now Michael could only try to imagine what he was contemplating.
"I have to volunteer," he said at last. "I have to cut my hair and shave and sign up."
What, the army? Did he intend to go in as a medic or something? But the army wouldn't let him within a mile of itself. Was he thinking of going to Asia with a volunteer agency? Michael knew what that impulse was like, and how futile it would be. For Nicholas it would be dangerous. "What do you mean?" he asked again.
"I have been conscripted and I have to go."
"I want to understand what you mean, Nicholas. Help me to understand."
"Is that all you can say?" He clambered to his feet. "What do I mean? What do I mean?" He raised his arms to the sky melodramatically and threw his head back. His hair rained down like an Indian's, like a prophet's. "How the hell do I know what I mean? The fucking war has got to stop! That's what I mean! The American people have got to stop it! The Catholic Church has got to stop it! 'War no more! War never again!' The pope said that! The pope said that!" he began screeching wildly. "Peace now! Peace now!"
Michael stood quickly. Balance was precarious on the boulder. Before Wiley could fall, Michael grabbed him and held him. The young man deflated and shrunk, falling against Michael who sensed in him an infinite relief. Nicholas began to sob. Michael remembered Inge Holz: Is this wrong? Is it sinful? Am I insane? And he had the same reaction. Was it mere rhetoric, a deflection of his own sense of responsibility for what Wiley had become? Perhaps. But he felt it nevertheless. The madness was not in this boy, but in the war.
***
Michael knew from his own experience that what Nicholas Wiley needed was some ordinary living, a taste of the pleasures and duties of work and friendship, a spell in the realm of the utterly unnewsworthy where alone he could be safe from the ravaging News. Death held sway over the world, after all; life over only the smallest pieces of it. Over little places like Aina and Saint Joseph's. From what Michael learned on their subsequent walks, Nicholas had become less and less connected in New York. After leaving the Catholic Worker he'd attached himself to a settlement house in Harlem for a time, had written for a Quaker magazine, had joined, then quit, the Newman Club at NYU in the Village. He attended demonstrations and had gone to Washington twice, once as part of a group of Quakers who held a vigil outside the Capitol while Congress debated—and passed—a special four-billion-dollar appropriation for the war. It was then he'd begun to fast, and he hadn't eaten right since. Despite all this, his part in the peace movement remained tangential. He'd made no close friends. He was no longer in touch with his family, and along the way he'd stopped seeing his therapist. So Michael offered him a job as his helper in the garden at Saint Joseph's and convinced him to take it. Surely he'd tracked Michael down hoping for such an intervention, even if he couldn't admit that to himself.
Behind the sacristy there was a room wi
th a cot where Nicholas slept, and he stayed through the spring. At first he was too depressed to express much in the way of gratitude, but that was the last thing Michael required of him. At times he was downright sullen and at other times, often after watching the nightly news in Michael's room, he was hysterical about the killing in Vietnam. But Michael stayed at him. There was no question now of arguing about the peace movement. All Michael wanted to do was help restore the equilibrium Nicholas needed to deal with his experience creatively. Eventually Nicholas began to respond. The rectory housekeeper treated him like the son she wanted, and the hard physical work gave him an appetite for her plain food. He gained weight and a bright sunburn replaced his pallor. Even the pastor softened toward him and said that if he'd shave his beard and cut his hair, he could start taking up the collection at Mass. Nicholas refused, of course, but politely, though to Michael he joked that he was tempted because he could have used the extra income.
One morning, while Michael was taking his vestments off after Mass, Nicholas came into the sacristy from the garden. He wore an expression of pure joy and he said, "Father, you've got to come outside."
Michael followed him.
Nicholas led the way to the star magnolia and with a ringmaster's panache he stepped aside and swept his arm toward the tree's first-ever flower. "I said to the magnolia, 'Sister, speak to me of God,' and the magnolia blossomed." Wiley grinned as he watched Michael approach the branch and put his nose to the flower. "Isn't it great?" Wiley asked. "Isn't it just so great!"
It was the boy who seemed great to Michael; there was such happiness in him. Michael grinned too and said, "And this is just the beginning, Nicholas. You'll have flowers coming up all over the place before you're done."
Prince of Peace Page 46
