Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  The antiwar movement was a perfect mix of the ridiculous and the profound, of true nobility and blatant solipsism. And its most memorable moments held both elements in tension.

  I remember, for example, a rally at Boston University, the selfstyled "Berkeley of the East." It was held at the football stadium and students from Boston's half-dozen large colleges had filled the stands to overflowing. It was a balmy spring day, and the kids were tricked out in tie-dyed T-shirts, flowing hair and moccasins. Frisbees sailed to and fro above their heads and, between speakers, a blues band wailed away on amplified harmonicas. Michael and I had driven up from New York and we arrived late. A kid at the gate who didn't recognize Michael said that Dave Dellinger and Tom Hayden had already spoken, but that everybody was waiting to hear Father Maguire. Michael winked at me. The note of deference was a surprise from this kid, at least to me. B.U. wasn't Notre Dame or Fordham. I didn't think a priest, even the celebrity-resister-priest, would make much of a dent there. But that was because I had yet to grasp that draft-age boys particularly regarded Michael as their great defender. And kids who wouldn't have thought of going into a church were as susceptible to the Great American Romance of the Priest as their parents had been. Michael was their Bing Crosby. As we walked into the stands, students began to recognize him. He had taken to wearing a black turtleneck sweater and a black windbreaker, a costume other priests would imitate, and, with his height, his leanness, he was a striking figure. As we walked through the stands toward the platform, students began to applaud. Frisbees stopped flying, though the music continued to blare. The closer we came to the platform the more students recognized him and began applauding. They stood. The ovation crossed the stadium like a wave, following us. By the time we reached the platform the band had stopped playing. The musicians were a scruffy, ill-groomed bunch with the studied look of nihilists, but they were applauding too. Michael looked at me, helpless. Thousands of college kids were cheering him. I clapped my hands theatrically toward him and bowed. As he mounted the stairs to the platform he leaned into me. I could sense that he was moved, but also embarrassed. Who was he? Bob Dylan? This was wacky. "Fuck peace," he whispered.

  In May, Michael's case was finally heard. It was a simple procedure, quick and anticlimactic. The judge refused to admit into evidence the tape-recording that had been supplied to the Times, and when Michael's lawyer subpoenaed Celia Zack, he learned that she had disappeared. In the end Michael's defense consisted of little more than his own testimony. On the stand he was utterly credible, and it seemed to me the prosecutor's inability to shake his story would be decisive. When he sought repeatedly to refer to the war, the judge interrupted him. The war was not on trial. But when the prosecutor repeated the irrelevant slander that Michael had encouraged Nicholas Wiley to immolate himself, the judge allowed it. In his instruction to the jurors, the judge ordered them to disregard all arguments having to do with entrapment. The government was not on trial either. In fact, Michael had succeeded in making an issue, whether the judge allowed it or not, of abusive patterns the government would repeat against other Catholic resisters, against radicals, against genuine hoodlums and eventually against members of the U.S. House and Senate.

  It took the jury less than an hour to bring back its verdict. Michael was guilty of willful and malicious destruction of government property. A week later the incensed Irish Catholic judge handed down a sentence of two to five years in prison.

  When that sentence was announced there was a gasp in the courtroom. One of the jurors, present now as a spectator, cried, "No!" And Michael's shoulders sagged. When given a chance to speak, he only shook his head. A moment later, after the judge had left and people had begun to clear the room, Michael turned in his place, looking for us. Carolyn's face was buried in her hands. I knew it was her eyes he wanted. I touched her. She uncovered her face and Michael took refuge in what it showed him.

  At a time like that friends stand without defenses in one another's company. I knew that the level of feeling between Caro and Michael was more intense than ever, but the context for their feelings, their love, had been radically altered. How can I indicate our states of mind, or the common state I presumed we shared? It is important that you understand. We had all been softened by the years. Once, perhaps, even they would have romped into an affair, believing implicitly, as the young do, that there is only one possible form of expression for such feelings. But it was different for them now because their love for each other—I knew this with primordial certainty—existed inside their love for me. It was therefore radically chaste. It was a love I could encourage. Though we were two sides of a love triangle, Michael was not my competitor. It was as likely that Carolyn should have been, in fact. In that courtroom, after his sentencing, the three of us embraced. We stood together for a long time. That was the expression we wanted. Carolyn, Michael and I shared a sense of having come home again in one another.

  He continued to live with us during the months it took the courts to dispose of his appeal. Though his coming jail term loomed above us, we found it possible to live happily, as one family. Summer came. In August, to escape the rat-race of antiwar work—Michael was more in demand than ever—we rented a cabin at Lake George. At night after Molly was asleep, we would sit on the porch looking up at the stars. Sometimes I read poetry aloud. One verse of Eliot's became a theme of ours, a joke, but more than a joke because it hinted at the mysteries there were and would always be among us.

  Who is the third who walks always beside you?

  When I count there are only you and I together

  But when I look ahead up the white road

  There is always another one walking beside you

  Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

  I do not know whether a man or a woman

  —But who is that on the other side of you?

  During the period leading up to our "vacation," Carolyn had worked herself to a frazzle too. Once she'd laid aside her painting, it was as if all her creativity was channeled into organizing, and she had done it with great success. She shunned the celebrity mode that Michael, like it or not, fell into, and she didn't function as a pinch-hit speaker as I did. Instead she spent long hours arranging events, benefits at art galleries, concerts at which the heroes spoke and cocktail parties at which the rich radicals could make donations to Michael's rich lawyers. At all of these occasions Carolyn would hover at the edge of things, making sure the microphones worked and the bartender had ice and the girl at the table by the door had pens with which the chic supporters could write their checks. And Carolyn always looked lovely. She'd developed a style of dressing that was fittingly unconventional; she was surely no lawyer's wife, no socialite, no BonWit DimWit. But she never embraced the counterculture cult of ugliness—uniform unisexuality; workboots, overalls, fatigue jackets, torn flannel shirts—that held sway in the movement. I remember her in long, high-waisted dresses, sandals, but still with heels, bangles at her wrists, no makeup but her luxuriant blond hair cinctured in bright, trailing silk like Louise Nevelson or Isadora Duncan. You knew she was an artist, just looking at her. It didn't matter that she hadn't painted in months.

  Well, it mattered to her. And the fact that she'd fallen into a role, that of an antiwar hostess, that she despised mattered too. Stokely Carmichael had said a woman's place in the movement is on her back. Carolyn's place, she said, with bitterness that shocked me, was at the door, smiling. We were alone in our room one night at Lake George. It was the first time we'd talked to each other about what those months had really felt like. Her alienation, her weariness, were different from mine, and had led her to a vastly different conclusion.

  "I've decided to do a raid, Durk."

  "What?" I sat forward. I'd been propped against the headboard of our bed. I was wearing pajamas. She wore a T-shirt, no bra, and shorts. A blue engineer's bandanna was tied around her head.

  "On the Dow Chemical offices at Rockefeller Center next month. A symbolic burning of napalm agai
nst its creators. We're going to burn some files."

  "You're not serious."

  "I am. There are seven of us. I have to do it, Durk. I haven't done anything."

  I stared at her, unbelieving. This was the most insidious thing about the antiwar movement, how it could make such generous, dedicated, zealous workers feel as though they'd done nothing. Shit, she'd done nothing but, for months. For the crazies who were always within an inch of taking over, the only contribution to peace that counted was the act of going to jail. It was self-aggrandizement through self-punishment. It was madness. I'd never expected Carolyn to fall for it. I had to control my anger, I had to work at understanding her, at listening. I said quietly, "Why am I only hearing about this now?"

  "Well, there wasn't any point to both of us being in on it, was there? We couldn't both do it."

  "Because of Molly, you mean."

  "That's right."

  "Well, I'm glad you thought of her to that extent."

  "Don't use Molly against me in this, Durk. Don't be angry at me. I need your support."

  I took her hand in mine. "Caro, I think it's brave of you to want to do it. But you can't. You simply can't. They'd use it against Michael."

  She shook her head. "He doesn't know about it. We've kept him out of it on purpose. Obviously the court would use any involvement on his part to extend his sentence."

  "And when you and who—Jack? Sonny? Kate?—when you get busted in Dow Chemical they're going to think Michael's not involved? He got two to five years, remember? You want to make sure he serves every possible day, is that it?"

  "Of course not. But we do want him to know that what he's begun will continue."

  "Sweetheart, it can't continue. Not that way. There's only one Michael Maguire. There's only one hero."

  She withdrew her hand from mine and looked away. What a disappointment I was to her. It was true. There was only one Michael. I was a disappointment, of course, to myself. But, hell, I was used to that. Nevertheless, I pressed the point, because I was right. "We have to work against the war, Caro, in the ways that we can. That means not making Michael's situation worse. And it also means, by the way, staying close to Molly. You'd be in jail a year."

  She looked down at the thin bedspread, smoothed it with her hands. "But, Durk," she said finally, "I haven't done anything against the war. And I haven't helped Michael."

  "You want to take his place in jail, don't you?"

  She looked up and I saw the flicker of her recognition. She nodded slowly and I could read her worry. "I think I would handle it better than he will."

  I was about to say, "You would. You're stronger than any of us." But before I could I had a recognition of my own. She didn't want to take his place in jail. She just wanted to be with him. The truth stopped me cold. Before I maneuvered past it, Molly cried out sharply from the next room, the panic of a bad dream in her voice. Carolyn went to her at once.

  I was alone with unwanted knowledge. Carolyn was far more like Michael than like me. If she'd been a nun still, instead of my wife, she'd have been his virgin princess, his Saint Joan at the head of his army. It did not occur to me to think of her as his Magdalen.

  When Carolyn returned she stopped short in the doorway of our room and leaned against the jamb. Wearily she unknotted her bandanna and shook her hair free. Then she looked at me pensively. "You're right, Durk. I couldn't leave Molly. She's what's kept me from becoming even harder."

  "You're not hard, darling."

  "I hate the war. I hate what it's doing to us. Don't you feel it?"

  "Yes. But I didn't know it was the war."

  "What else is it?"

  I shrugged. "Quotidian Distraction, darling." I could be so insufferably blase. I patted the bed, Come sit. She crossed to me. I said, "Once Michael is gone, you and I can withdraw somewhat from all that antiwar shit." She started to protest. I stopped her. "You know we can. We're both in it because of him. He drafted us, didn't he?" She nodded. "You simply must start painting again, Caro. You're an artist. That's the longing you feel, the unhappiness. You're not working. You must work. Your paintings are the opposite of war. That's how you resist. That's how you keep faith. You are an artist, Caro!"

  She leaned against me, and I felt the tension drain out of her. "You mean I can?" she asked. "I really can?"

  "What, go back to painting?"

  She nodded.

  "Darling, you must."

  Her arms went around me. "Oh, Durk, you know me, don't you? You take care of me. No one takes care of me like you do."

  "That's my job, love. I'm your husband."

  "You're my best friend."

  "Same thing."

  "It's why you put up with me."

  "I put up with you because I love you, Caro."

  "Oh, Durk." She surprised me then by kissing me passionately. We fell back upon the bed, at the mercy of her emotions, which I took to be gratitude, relief, and the old affection.

  "I love you," she said. "I've never loved you more." She clung to me so fiercely I believed her.

  Of course I was conscious of Michael's presence in the room beyond Molly's. I was both grateful to him—he had drawn from both of us entirely new capacities for feeling—and sorry for him because he would never experience with either of us the fullness of intimacy that Carolyn and I, to our mutual surprise, shared then. I remember restraining myself at orgasm that night and subsequent ones at Lake George so that he wouldn't hear, so that he wouldn't feel bereft.

  That August Michael and I climbed Black Mountain, one of the highest peaks in the Adirondacks. Carolyn and Molly had gone down to Westchester to see her parents. The heat was ferocious and by the time we arrived at the top of the mountain we were soaked with perspiration and too weary at first to bother with the view. In our packs we had liquor. We sat against the rocks and traded swigs. When I finally looked out across Lake George the vista—a spine of mountains running north—made my mind reel. In my dehydrated state, the gin helped, of course. I felt instantly drunk. I faced away, but behind us was an even grander view, the Green Mountains of Vermont. I faced west, nestled in the crevice of the rock and tried to focus, for sobriety's sake, on the sun. It had fallen to within two or three hands of the horizon.

  We sat in silence for a long time. Maybe we did get drunk. Maybe that was why we said those things.

  He began, "All of this I will give you."

  "If?" I knew the phrase, the opening of the devil's temptation of Christ. If you will fall down and worship me.

  But he said, "I'll just give it to you. There."

  "Thanks."

  "I would though, Durk. I'd give you the whole goddamn world if I could, for what you've done for me."

  "Michael, it's been a privilege. You're a fucking hero. Have a drink."

  "Don't say that."

  "But it's true."

  "I'm not interested in being a hero to you. One time we sat in the Cloisters. Do you remember that?"

  "Sure."

  "We covered the same ground."

  "You were a hero then too."

  "Do you remember the Unicorn Tapestry?"

  "The Unicorn in Captivity."

  "That's right. I pointed out to you that what looked like the blood of the Unicorn was actually the juice of the pomegranate tree dripping down on it. Do you remember?"

  "Yes."

  "Guess what."

  "It was blood after all."

  "That's right. And if it wasn't for you I'd have bled to death."

  "Get out of here."

  "I would have, damnit. I still might." He took my sleeve. "Durk, I've got to tell you, I'm bleeding right now. I'm scared shitless. I think prison is going to do me in."

  "Come off it, Michael. You know about fear. It's a reflex. It just gets you ready. Fear's your friend."

  "No." He draped my neck. He was drunker than I was. "You're my friend."

  "We're all your friends, hero!"

  "Goddamnit, listen to me! Don't call me that. I'm telli
ng you I'm afraid. I'm afraid because I know the stakes now. I didn't before. When we were kids, you and me, we hadn't a clue how fucking easily things get lost."

  "What, like youth?"

  "Like faith." He hesitated, took a breath, then declared, "I think I'm losing mine."

  Michael was serious. Even in my fog I sensed that he was talking about something important, something more profound than his alienation from Church authority. Michael Maguire was nothing if not a believer. "You mean in God?" I asked carefully.

  "I don't trust Him to sustain me. Isn't that the point of faith?"

  "I guess." My mind went blank. After all the months of being at the mercy of this man's ordeal, of being, however willingly, at the service of his vaunted integrity, this was impossible to take in. Michael had to believe in God, he was that kind of priest, of man. He had thrown himself over Kierkegaard's edge where there was either grace or nothing. If God did not sustain him—we knew the Church wouldn't—who would or could? Then I panicked; not me, I thought, no way, bud! I can be your friend, but not the Ground of Your Being.