The final paragraph of the news story was a quotation from what it doggedly called "the letter alleged to have been written by Father Maguire." Looking at it now, I find it moving, as I did then, although also somewhat ingenuous. When he wanted to the son of a bitch could croon the Ave Maria, warble and all.
"Though as a Catholic priest and the son of a New York City policeman who died in the line of duty I have an inbred respect, even reverence, for the law, I decided to allow myself to be entrapped in this way to expose the illegal and immoral methods used by a desperate government against its own people to keep them from protesting the infinitely more illegal and immoral war it continues to wage against the Vietnamese people. In their name and in God's name and in America's, we say, 'End this evil war before it destroys us all!'"
TWENTY-SEVEN
CAROLYN and I were sitting on a stone bench in the Biblical Garden, a small, tidy plot nestled against the Cathedral Choir and containing with floral fundamentalism only plants mentioned in the Bible: fig trees, mustard plants, lilies, papyrus and the star-of-Bethlehem. Trellised between the buttresses of the cathedral were ten cedars of Lebanon, evergreens that one never sees in the Holy Land now. They were overharvested eons ago, and I was thinking for the first time since leaving Israel of the war in Beirut, the overharvesting of blood.
Another tree caught my eye, a small redbud, the Judas tree. I touched Carolyn's sleeve. "They say that tree descends from the one on which Judas hanged himself. Its flowers are crimson because it blushes with shame."
Carolyn did not speak. I left my hand resting on her sleeve. I remembered sitting self-consciously in a garden like that with Michael at the Cloisters above Inwood. I remembered our laughing hysterically because Jesus cast demons into some poor bastard's swine.
I remembered our sitting on that hill overlooking the river and the bridge.
Carolyn and I had bought our house years later because it overlooked the other river, the other bridge. "Do you remember," I asked quietly, "how we used to have supper on our balcony overlooking the river and the city?"
She nodded. The bright sun and its heat swaddled us.
She took my hand.
"I used to think on those evenings that we would live forever."
"I thought Michael would," she said simply.
Four fruit trees grew in the center of the garden. I could not read the small sign in front of them. Apple trees? Apricot? But of course it was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From one of those Adam plucked fruit and therefore death came into the world.
A large pigeon pecked at gravel near us. What a miserly life! I thought. A few desperate years, odd grains, bread crumbs, the discards of squirrels, then a solitary grotto under shrubs somewhere and a pigeon's heart attack. And is it different for us? The fucking outrage of it! It made me want to kick that bird, kick God.
Michael died of a heart attack. He was just fifty, as I was at that point. He'd been in perfect health, Molly told me, a jogger. He'd quit smoking as a wedding gift to Carolyn.
I knew nothing of the last years of his life, how he earned a living, how he was changed by federal prison, how he was as a father, whether he took up golf, whether he could fix the gutters himself or had, like me, to hire people.
"Where do you live?" I asked.
"In Brooklyn."
"Our house?"
"Yes."
"Good." Could I possibly have meant that? Michael had usurped me utterly. I must have known they were living there. Shouldn't I have been surprised? Had I been a ghost to him around that house? I hoped so suddenly. I hoped I had haunted him. I hoped when the wind blew doors shut in the middle of the night he had thought it was me coming after him. "Did the two of you have supper on the balcony?"
"Not alone, the way you and I did. It's different when the children are older."
"Molly looks wonderful, Carolyn. She fills me with pride."
Carolyn smiled, drew back from her grief.
"And I met your handsome son. You have a Vietnamese daughter. You've been busy." I covered her hand, cupped it between my two. "And you kept painting."
She nodded, but absently. She had no real capacity for talk about such things, as if her painting, her house, her children even, could have sustained her then. I saw that it would have been wrong for me to steer away from Michael. Memory alone assuages loss, and that was what I was there to help with. It shocked me to realize that I was the one person who could help her navigate that weather. I was there to put heart into that woman. Yet what heart had I? And if I could give her, finally, nothing, wouldn't it be because she had long since taken from me all I had?
We sat in the stillness of the garden. I saw the shadow of the great cathedral creeping toward us, the stillness and the shadow of death.
Finally she said, "Frank, thank you for coming."
"No, Carolyn. I'm the one to thank you. How could I ever have not been here?" I must have shown her more of my feelings than I intended, because all at once she took me in her arms and pressed my face to her breast. She consoled me!
After a time I pulled away from her. "Carolyn," I said somewhat formally, stifling my emotion, "I want to help you, to be your friend."
"Oh, Frank, I need you! I went to pieces and sent Molly for you, as if you lived in Philadelphia. It was crazy." She shook her head. "What made me wild was when they said we couldn't bury him in sacred ground. It made me crazy when they used that word about him."
"Excommunicated?"
She nodded. "As if he were Hitler or someone. And I didn't know what to do. Someone suggested Saint John's and Dean Evans here has been wonderful..." She looked up at the soaring cathedral, the buttresses, the windows, the great bulk of stone. "...but it's not..." She didn't finish.
"Catholic."
"I didn't think it would bother me, but it does. I can't put his ashes in a wall, a safe-deposit box. I have to commit him to the earth! I have to bury him the way he buried people! This isn't where he belongs, Frank. It's a Protestant church. We can't leave Michael here."
"We could try to think about it in a new way, Caro. So much has changed. Catholics and Episcopalians are so much alike now..."
"Oh, but Frank..." Her eyes glistened. "...none of that matters. This isn't Michael's place."
I'd had the same reaction at first, but I'd put it aside. Now I felt the depth of her pain, her shock. "We're still Catholics, aren't we?" I said it smiling, hoping to bring out the irony—we'd thought ourselves so worldly, but we were just mackerel snappers after all—so we could savor it together.
But her eyes overflowed. I was not prepared for that show of desolation. She had displaced her great distress, loading it on that detail of obsolete ecclesiology. It didn't matter to the dead where they were buried, and did God care if it was Saint John's and not Saint Patrick's? But God was not sitting by me, shattered. What did God know of exile or excommunication or the loss of home?
If it mattered to her, it mattered.
"Molly said you spoke to the chancellor."
"That's when I went to pieces. He was awful to me, cold and legalistic. And when I became so upset no one understood. They said it meant nothing, what bishops think. But I was destroyed, and I knew that no one would understand but you. No one would help me but you." She clutched at me. "Oh, Frank, we have to bury Michael in the Church! We have to!"
"I know it, Caro."
She had my shirt in her fists and was shaking me. "Oh, Frank, I'm the reason he's excommunicated! It's me, Frank! I'm the one they blame! It's me! That's what they think! It's me!"
Of course it was; an undispensed priest marries an ex-nun divorcee, flouting all values, all the holiest traditions. What did she expect? Baby's breath?
She should never have been the one to approach the chancellor. What latitude he might have had—what capacity for compassion—had surely been swamped in his clerical resentment, however clothed it had come in canons.
For myself, I had taken shelter both from that desolation of
hers and from my own long-nursed wound in the one unclouded feeling I had. In its womb there was nothing of anger, despair or grief even; not even grief. There was only loving that woman and longing to soothe her.
"Carolyn, I'll talk to him. What time is it? I'll call him now."
She raised her hand, her wrist. The movement drew my eye along her arm to her bosom. A vision of her nakedness filled my mind again. It was the image to which instinctively and, yes, lustfully I returned repeatedly, as to a memory of the house that gave me shelter from my first storm. I saw her thighs open, her pelvis tilting at me, her offered cunt.
"It's three-thirty." She fell back against the bench and laughed crazily. "This is nuts! What's wrong with me? The service is all set, just four hours from now. The dean of the cathedral is presiding. It was in the paper. We can't change it."
"Let me talk to them, Caro. Maybe there's something we can do." Weren't there dispensations? Rescripts? Absolutions? Annulments? Weren't there miracles? Was there no way—I refused to believe it suddenly—for the Roman Catholic Church to manifest God's mercy toward that man? "I'll call the chancellor. What's his name?"
It was exactly as if I'd slapped her. "You don't know?"
"No."
"It's Archbishop O'Shea, Frank. Tim O'Shea."
"Michael's friend?"
Tears once more burst out of her.
"Take me to the Catholic chancery."
The taxi driver looked at me dully through the cloudy plastic shield.
"Behind Saint Patrick's Cathedral," I explained, "on Madison."
He popped the clutch and punched a button on his meter, a digital readout. Where was the meter flag? I wanted to ask. We jolted into traffic.
On the telephone in Dean Evans's office I had learned that Archbishop O'Shea was there. His secretary wouldn't put me through unless I stated my business. It had been easy to picture her, upright in a severe wooden chair in front of an antique Underwood, the dark reaches of the high-ceilinged old mansion looming above her. The chancery office of the archdiocese had been in the south wing of the Villard Mansions since 1948. Fit for a Borgia prince, the building was a Roman Renaissance palazzo full of Tiffany glass, Saint-Gaudens sculpture and the murals of John Lafarge. One of the grandest houses in all New York, it had been the vain indulgence not of an Italian aristocrat but of a nineteenth-century railroad baron. It had matched Spellman's position as the drum major of the Church's arrival in America that he should have bought the place and dubbed it the Cardinal Farley Building. It dwarfed his own residence across the avenue, and it seemed almost vengeful when he turned the mansion into the offices of his chancellor. He would not, of course, have grasped the irony that once more Catholics were scooping up the leavings of Protestants. The descendants of Henry Villard and his successor proprietor, Whitelaw Reid, who entertained the Prince of Wales in the house, had long since moved farther north. The fashionable Upper East Side had come into its own. Midtown was fit now only for commerce and for Catholics.
The cab, after cutting through Central Park, went down Fifth Avenue. The traffic was like traffic in Jerusalem, but the people on the sidewalk, their clothing, their lack of it, the shoulders and thighs of women, the glittering store windows in which their bodies were reflected, windows behind which the bodies of mannequins took tribute in glances, plaster nipples stretching plastic blouses, wreaked havoc with my concentration. I wanted to remember everything I could about Timothy O'Shea. I wanted to remember what I'd read in canon law. I was certain the bishop had discretion about who was buried where and how. In death, everyone is excommunicated; therefore no one should be. But I could not think. My mind was taken up utterly by the pretty girls in their summer dresses. Oh early Irwin Shaw!
At Fiftieth Street the driver slowed for a turn. We passed in front of Saint Patrick's, then cut and swerved and were driving along the side of it. An unexpected affection for the spired church surged in me, but I was amazed how small, how ungrand it seemed. Saint John's, even incomplete, was more than twice Saint Patrick's size, and standing as it did on the promontory of Morning-side Heights it had a monumentality Saint Patrick's, in the shadow of the skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center, lacked.
New York's nineteenth-century Catholics had been outraged when they heard about plans for the heretics' cathedral in their city. It would be—and was—the largest cathedral in the world. Ingenuously, in making that claim the Protestants did not include in the comparison Saint Peter's in Rome, which, at nearly twice the size again, was the only edifice bigger. Technically they were right, though, because Saint Peter's was not a cathedral, but a basilica. Still Catholics in New York over the years had refused to be cowed by the relative modesty of their cathedral. It may not have been designed and furnished by America's great architects and artists, and it may have been only the size, they would admit, of Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris, but at least it was finished. The churches were begun within a decade of each other. In less than two decades, Saint Patrick's, paid for by the pennies of millions of immigrants, was completed. Saint John the Divine, paid for by the sporadic benefactions of the richest people in America, would probably never be completed. The house of worship for a dwindling elite, Saint John's, even at solemn services on Sundays, seemed always nearly empty. Saint Patrick's, even between Masses on any weekday, seemed always nearly full. And there was the difference, the oldest one, the one that mattered. There are fifty million Catholics in America, two million Episcopalians.
We Catholics have long memories. Take your thumb out of our ingratiating joviality, of our worldly liberalism, and you will loose a flood of bitterness. Then watch what we do with it. In the new age in which neither layman nor priest, progressive nor conservative, chancellor nor cardinal nor pope, even, want to be thought unecumenical, small-minded or parochial, we spare the ancient Protestant enemy and pour the old acid on ourselves.
Hence my taxi ride. Hence my purpose as the cab swung north on Madison, cut across the avenue to the far curb and jolted to a stop in front of the Renaissance palace; I had come to ask the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York to lift its sanction, to ask Holy Mother the Church to have mercy on her son.
"This place?" the cabbie asked.
"That's right." I was counting bills out for him. The feel of the money was alien, and not because it was American. I had not even so much as paid a cab fare in a decade. The bubble of unreality in which I had been living touched ground but did not break.
"This is a hotel, Mac, not the archdiocese."
"What?"
Even in daylight, even in August, the courtyard trees were lined with white Christmas twinkle lights.
"The Helmsley Palace Hotel."
I craned toward the mansion. The windows sparkled. The entranceway glimmered with brass. At a polished revolving door a uniformed man was taking someone's suitcase. And above the three stories of the nineteenth-century masterpiece loomed a huge, gleaming skyscraper.
I paid the cabbie and got out.
At the door the uniformed Hispanic—in earlier days he'd have been Irish—gave me the once-over. What's with the denim shirt and sandals, man? I nodded at him and went in.
The Viliard Mansions now served as a showplace narthex—grand staircase, polished pink marble, restored paneling, flashing chandeliers, Oriental runners with brass fasteners—for a piggybacked run-of-the-mill behemoth hotel. New York's Industrial Brahmins had abandoned their palazzo to upstart Catholic clergy who had bequeathed it now to expense account admen from Dayton and accountants from Houston who wore English suits, knew their nouvelle cuisine and preferred a Continental ambience. This was the best Olde World Palace Hotel yet. I made a quick round of the public rooms to convince myself I was not dreaming. Where were the portraits of Farley, Hughes, Hayes and Spellman? In niches where once stood statues of Frances Cabrini, Mother Seton and Isaac Jogues were now flamboyant floral displays. Against the elaborately carved oak wall at the top of the grand staircase where once the huge seal of the archdiocese—the tassle
d hat, the Greek Cross, the flame, the motto Fiat Voluntas Tua —had hung there was now a mammoth portrait of the unsmiling, waistcoated, mustachioed Viliard. His successors still displeased him.
In the stunning second-floor library that had served as the office of the chancellor—I had been in it once and remembered the twin fireplaces with Italian marble mantels and the barrel-vaulted ceiling—afternoon tea was being served on tables covered with pink damask. A lady touched her napkin to her mouth and eyed me suspiciously. Would I come over to her table and sell her a sign-language card? Suddenly I sensed that she would have bought one. She might have taken me to her room.
It was the building I remembered, but the gloom was gone, that cinctured repression, that overhanging threat that swamped light and life, sucking oxygen from the rooms and spirit from their occupants. Now, as in all hotels, infidelity was in the air, the faint smell of sex. Even that matron from Ohio at her tea knew it, exuded it. She had that Last Chance look in her eyes and flashed it at me because I was not dressed right, because I did not belong. She would have been in charge. She would never have had to see me again. With a shock I realized she was younger than I was and, yes, I would have loved to screw her, not in her husband's company's room upstairs, but in this room where once an archbishop of the Church had sat up to his ass in anathemas. Anathema shit! Tempus fuck!
Prince of Peace Page 50
