Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  I caught myself before I cried, "Ef tu!" No melodrama, no display. I would show the fucker nothing. I covered one of his hands. "I've been sick," I said.

  "I think he may be dehydrated," Carolyn explained.

  "There's a tap in the cabin. Come in." Michael led me into the shack and Carolyn followed. I put my mouth at the faucet and drank, an act full of history, for as boys we were always finding faucets to drink from. He might have slapped me on the back, "It's my turn, Durk, come on!" But he let me drink my fill. I remembered the Inwood summer ritual of opening the fire hydrants and dancing in the spray. This man was in the middle of every happy memory I had. He'd taken those from me too.

  The water tasted of rust, but it soothed me and my stomach felt better at once. When I straightened I was less lightheaded, and I looked around the small shadowy room. Rampant cobwebs held the corners. In the center were two chairs at a plain table, the only furniture, and I took one of them. Carolyn and Michael remained standing, but I didn't care.

  "A lighthouse?" I asked, "Won't the coast guard find you?"

  Michael shook his head. "They run these things from Portland or someplace now. They're automated. These cabins haven't been lived in for years."

  "How long have you been here?" Now when I looked around I noticed that there was no cot, no toilet, no sign of food. A blanket was bunched in a corner.

  "Last night. I came out on a boat like yours."

  "But you'll be staying here?"

  He shook his head. "This was just a rendezvous. I'm pulling out right away."

  "What do you mean?" Suddenly I didn't know what to feel or think. Would it be good news or bad if he escaped the FBI? Were they even then watching from hiding places in the woods?

  "I'm going away." He looked toward Carolyn. He was explaining himself to her, not me. "That's why I wanted to see you. I'm leaving the country."

  "For Halifax?" she asked. She'd been paying attention too.

  "Yes."

  "Then it's over?" I asked. "Your resistance is over?" Was it possible that the great hero had reached his limit? That the antiwar priest, having spent his passion for peace, would become just another convict on the lam?

  No.

  He said, "I'm going to Vietnam. This Friday, Good Friday, Suu Van Pham and thirty-two other Vietnamese priests are going to occupy the cathedral in Saigon. They're going to offer it as a sanctuary to anyone who will refuse to fight anymore. I'm going to join them."

  "Oh Michael!" Carolyn crossed to him. She did not bother to disguise her impulse now as she embraced him, resting her head on his shoulder. Light glistened off tears in her eyes.

  "You'll be a martyr yet," I said with a show of bitterness, despite myself. I was sick of his fucking virtue, his righteousness, his crusade against evil. I was sick of his hypocrisy. Was I the only one who had to suffer it?

  But he took me literally. He shook his head. "As usual the risk is mostly someone else's. If I go, though, some American GIs might be moved to join us."

  I was impressed despite myself. It was the perfect way to bring his resistance to a close. No mere surrender, but the most dramatic challenge yet to the war and, finally, a fully Catholic act of atonement for its Catholic origins. A Good Friday protest against the crucifixion of a people that began with the holy righteousness of Tom Dooley, Ngo Dinh Diem and Cardinal Spellman. Sanctuary in Saigon! Michael Maguire strikes again! His arrest in Saigon and the long transfer back to the States for prison would attract the attention of the world.

  Suddenly I felt sorry for Carolyn. No matter what had gone on between them, no matter what understanding they had, he was still putting her second to his sacred vocation. So what that his sacred calling now was to political opposition instead of ecclesial subservience. But clearly Carolyn had accepted second place in his heart. Why shouldn't I have accepted second place in hers?

  It was not a question I was interested in answering.

  Michael said, "I just wanted to see you both before I went."

  He meant me too. "Oh Jesus, Michael..." I began, but I had to stop because my voice cracked. Perhaps I was going to tell him what I'd done. Perhaps I was going to accuse him of what he'd done. It doesn't matter, because he interrupted me.

  "And I wanted someone in the States to know where I was going in case..."

  He stopped short of statement because the implication carried. If he was found by the government in Vietnam before the press knew he was there, anything could happen. He could simply disappear forever. He had come a distance from fun and games with the Fordham boys of the FBI.

  "You haven't told anyone else?"

  "You're the only ones I trust enough."

  At last I faced what I was doing. Compared to what rose in my throat then, the vomit had been lemonade. The first full knowledge of the meaning of my act choked me, and I realized that whatever happened to him, I had already destroyed myself. I had committed moral suicide, or in the more familiar phrase, mortal sin. I had made myself over into what he and Carolyn were in relation to me—liars, traitors, egotists. But I lacked utterly the element that mitigated their offense: they at least were driven by love, not hate. And when the coming events laid the truth bare—I saw this clearly for the first time—they would have each other still. I would have not even my own soul. I was disemboweled. Like an Oriental warlord I had, with ceremony but no dispatch, sliced open my own soft middle. It only remained to press against the wound until the flow of blood rescued me from the awareness of what I'd done. Faced with doom like that, there was nothing to do but surrender to it.

  But in truth I was not dying. Maybe moral suicide is never fatal. The chasm inside me, having swallowed everything I valued, began to close. Soon all would be smooth again. Air would purify my lungs. The bile would recede. And I could claim like everyone—like Michael, like Carolyn, like the FBI and like the men who ran the war—that life's cruelties force us all too regularly to do what we abhor.

  He looked at his watch. "I'm sorry to say it's time to go."

  "You have to leave before the tide goes out," I said.

  "That's right."

  "And from Halifax?"

  "To Montreal, then Paris, then Saigon."

  "But how? What about visas?"

  He smiled. "Vatican diplomat, Durk. I'll be an Irish monsignor with Caritas International as of Wednesday." He laughed raucously. "They still leave the clergy alone, especially if they have a little red at their throats."

  "Unless it's lipstick," I said. Carolyn started, but Michael laughed easily.

  "Come on," he said. He put his arms out, one to drape each of us. Carolyn and I fell into step with him, and like three chums we strode down the rough trail toward the harbor.

  Michael saw it before I did.

  He stopped abruptly as we came around the last curve a few dozen yards above the pier.

  Sitting in the middle of the harbor, dominating it, was a large white boat, seventy-five feet or longer. On its bow was the red diagonal slash that identified it as a coast guard cutter; on the forward deck was a large weapon, a machine gun or a cannon, at which a man sat. It was aimed at us. A dozen other men in orange life vests stood at various stations on the boat holding rifles.

  On the pier were four men dressed like duck hunters. One of them was Finnegan. He was holding his badge aloft. "FBI, Father!" he called. "You're under arrest."

  Michael did not move. He did not lessen the pressure of his arm on my shoulder. I stared straight ahead, not breathing, terrified that I would have to look at him.

  Someone stirred behind us. Out of the corner of my eye, only a dozen yards away, I saw two more duck hunters by a shack. These had shotguns aimed at us.

  "Keep walking!" Finnegan ordered. "We don't want anyone to get hurt."

  Michael dropped his arms from me and Carolyn and without a word to either of us stepped away and began to walk to the pier.

  Carolyn ran after him, crying his name. She clung to him. Michael tried to pull away from her but couldn't. />
  I went to them and tried to pull her back. She fought me, but Michael made her release him. When he looked at me I found it possible somehow to meet his gaze. I saw the recognition at the very moment it came to him. "Jesus Christ!" he said, "You!"

  Carolyn looked at me. Her realization grew more slowly but with deadlier effect. I watched the flood of horror rising as she stared at me.

  Michael turned immediately and walked to Finnegan, who began reading him his rights while the others handcuffed him. I heard one of the agents call him "Father." Later, leaving the cutter in Portland, he would be photographed smiling broadly, like a lottery winner, between two glum agents. He would be flashing the peace sign despite his handcuffs. The fucker was indomitable. The photograph would appear everywhere. I would be certain that he flashed that "V" just for me, to say, "Michael Maguire withstands everything, even you, Durkin!"

  Carolyn pulled away from me slowly and backed down to the pier. It was as though she was staring at the Man With No Face. I see that expression of hers vividly, its shock and disbelief. I had done this to Michael, she saw at once, because of what she had done to me. This nightmare began with her, and she knew it. But it ended with me. Shock and disbelief bound us, and also, finally, guilt. Looking at her was like looking in a mirror. Hers was the face, the desolation of that moment and the despair, I had turned on myself ever since. It was what I had fled from and what, even in the desert, in the fourteenth century, I had never escaped.

  The agents took her back to the mainland with them. They offered to take me too, but I refused. When the cutter pulled out of Monhegan Harbor, Michael was already below. I never saw him again.

  Carolyn was at the railing, staring back at me. I had her full attention at last.

  The funeral would begin in less than an hour. Carolyn was napping in the guest room of the dean's house when I returned from the Catholic Center, and so I went to see Molly. While her brother and sister explored the Biblical Garden, my daughter and I sat together in silence on a stone bench. She held my hand. I held hers. That seemed enough. When it came time for me to go to Carolyn, Molly hugged me fiercely, and I knew that I would never be without her again.

  I waited for Carolyn in the austere parlor where visitors were received. The maid had the impression I was someone's brother.

  The door opened and it was she.

  I stood.

  There was no sign of sleep in her eyes, but a subtle luster had been restored to them. Her hair was even more tightly pulled back than before. She had changed into a simple black dress, and it enshrined her grief. Her grief had become part of-her loveliness. It displayed the fullness of her love and therefore, curiously, made her seem as gifted as bereft.

  Without a word she sat on the sofa and I joined her. She looked at me expectantly. I hated that I had failed her. I wanted to report that the cardinal himself was coming. "I'm sorry, Caro. They're adamant."

  "Did you see Archbishop O'Shea?"

  "Yes. If he wasn't so personally involved..."

  She looked away. "Well then."

  "It doesn't matter," I said without conviction. "The Church is different now. Charismatics, Encounters, Journal Groups, Christian Zen. Michael wouldn't recognize it anyway."

  She nodded. "But I can't have him cremated, Frank."

  "Caro, even the Catholic Church permits cremation now."

  She shook her head. "I can't leave him here. I have to bury him in the ground someplace." She took my hand suddenly. "Will they let him be buried in sacred ground?"

  "No, Caro, they won't."

  "Oh." She exhaled, dispirited.

  Because I thought it would help her to address the detail of where to bury him—isn't concreteness what rescues us?—I pressed it. "Do you go to the country?"

  She nodded, then looked at me. "Lake George."

  The words pierced me. How I'd cherished our time there. Michael had simply replaced me in my house, in my vacation place, in my daughter's life and in my wife's arms. Did they pretend I never existed? Did they come to think I was simply the part of Michael's personality he outgrew? Had my function only been to save his place until he was ready for it? But my function now, to find him a new place, did not allow such questions. "I recall an old cemetery in Bolton Landing. Do you?"

  She nodded. "We went there for stone rubbings." The memory saddened her. The wave of emotion endeared her to me, completed the resurgence of my love.

  "Would that be a place?"

  For a moment she didn't react. Then she nodded vigorously, decisively. Her teeth cut into her lip.

  "It's his remains that will make the ground sacred, Caro."

  "I know." Her acknowledgment of my banality made it seem quite true.

  Sadness, and with it silence, took over both of us.

  I looked at the clock above the mantel. It was nearly six-thirty. I listened to it ticking. Two minutes went by, then five.

  Caro whispered my name. I looked at her. She was staring at her hands. "Frank, I wanted you to come because Michael and I both hoped that someday..." It frightened me when she stopped. I wanted desperately to talk about it before going into the cathedral, before seeing Michael's face.

  "Don't stop, Caro."

  "We hoped we could find a way to ... We..." She faced me at last. "Oh, Frank, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

  It was my impression that tears had come into her eyes, but I was unsure because tears had blinded mine. "You, Caro? You're sorry? But what I did was so much worse."

  "Frank, I loved you." She fell against me.

  "I know it, Caro. You loved both of us. I understand about that now."

  "Will you forgive me?"

  "I did that long ago. That's why I came when you asked me to. It's Michael I never finished with. Did he ever indicate how he felt? I mean about what I did?"

  She dropped her eyes. "He never spoke of it, Frank."

  "Did he speak of me?"

  "No."

  "Oh, God."

  "But that's only because his feelings about you ran so deep. I know that he wanted to be reconciled with you more than anything. He wanted it as much as I did."

  "And now he's gone before we ... Time has healed a lot, but it never healed that."

  "But it would have, Frank."

  "Do you think?"

  "Yes, I'm sure." She stroked me. The gentleness of her touch acknowledged my grief, my right to it.

  "I feel completely lost, Caro. I've been suspended all this time, floating in space. Now I'll never ... Michael was like the earth to me. I think I'll never get down to it again."

  "But you have to be on earth, Frank, for me. I need you, and so does Molly."

  How I wanted to reassure her, to say she had me. But I was telling her the exact truth. The loss of Michael had left me incomplete, like an amputee. Of what use could I be to her or Molly or anyone?

  She sat upright, but left her hand on my arm. "It helps just having you here." She was pulling back from the edge. Had she seen over it too? Into that pit, that emptiness? "I appreciate it. I know you've put us first. I appreciate it very much. Now if we can just get through the service."

  "As long as we don't have to sing 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.'"

  We both laughed. In his great hymn, Luther called the pope the Devil.

  "You know what?" I said gamely. "We don't need the Catholic Church. We have each other." I punched her shoulder lightly. Even as I said that I knew how untrue it was. The final loss of our Catholicism—for what did the archdiocese's rejection mean if not that?—was as devastating at that moment as the loss of Michael. What was our religion but the cluster of rituals, formulas, beliefs and learned responses by which, precisely, we were able to finish the business that every death interrupts? The Church existed to help us say a final word of love or, as in my case, forgiveness. If our religion—our Catholicism—was useless to us then, having become a sign of recalcitrance instead of reconciliation, when would it ever be of use? We were like victims of a shipwreck clinging to each other
on an alien shore. Who asked in such a situation whether the compass was at fault or the navigator or the captain? Or was it the fault of the dumb rock we ran upon? All we knew was desolation. We consoled ourselves by insisting that we didn't need the only vessel that could have carried us home.

  At that moment, as if to underscore the poignancy of our exile, there was a rap on the door and an oh-so-Anglican clergyman, a canon of the cathedral, opened it.

  He was as tall and lean as those upper-class clerics with the best jobs always are. Though he was middle-aged, his face was boyish and his hair was closely cut, giving him the look we once associated with marines, but now with homosexuals. Not that he was one of those; his wedding ring flashed. His foppishness was a function of mere breeding, not sexual preference. It was no longer considered bad form to look like what he was. In the sixties men like this let their grooming go and pretended they were the sons of plumbers like the rest of us. But not anymore. In his clerical collar and striped seersucker suit he looked like a chaplain of the British Raj, and I realized it had been glib sophistry to assert that little remained to separate Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. In that "little," revealed in meaningless details like the color of a priest's clothing, were buried millions of colonized and murdered people, many of them Irish and many Catholic. In that "little" were buried my own ancestors and Michael's. In that "little" was lost the distinction between the people who built the Cloisters and the people who clean it. Nothing separated us but history. It was a whole new reason to resent our own Church, that its intransigence abandoned us to the exquisite civility of the rich. For the point was that, at that moment, we would go anywhere and embrace any heritage and accept any offer of hospitality, even the smuggest one, if it included a simple, direct proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

  "Carolyn?" he began familiarly. Then, seeing me, he put his manicured hand out. "Hello, I'm Martin Putnam, the dean's assistant."