“They can do so much harm, Father, to their own children, too, without even realizing it, can’t they?”
Having thus transferred the burden of their terrible knowledge about the O’Connells to their pastor’s shoulders, Joe and Tina could return home with clear, if still worried, consciences.
Then there were the Murrays, who were guilty of some sort of terrible public discussion of sexual intercourse in front of the children, and the Ryans, who had turned all the other children against the Condon children.
I carefully checked out the stories each time. There was never any basis in fact. “Father, it all exists in her head, poor woman,” Jean Ryan said with a sigh. “And she’s such a nice friend until she goes haywire. You know it’s happened to others but you can’t believe that it’s going to happen to you.”
“Catch-22, Kafka’s trial,” Steve Ryan, a professor of literature at Chicago Circle, added, “and Wonderland all rolled into one. Out of sight.”
So when I opened the door and admitted Joe and Tina to the rectory (suspecting that the nosy teenage porteress who was on duty that night ought to be kept out of the picture), I knew the general story line that was to be played out. I wasn’t sure, however, what nuances would be added now that I was, to some extent, responsible for the assault on poor sweet little Coady (who was indeed little and sweet and emotionally impoverished now, if any senior girl in the parish was—and utterly beyond help now from anyone but God).
I resolved that however difficult it might be, I had to stand for reality. Linda had not conspired against Coady. The latter had lost the election. She had finished fifth among five candidates because, as Richard Daley observed of Hubert Humphrey, she didn’t have the votes. No way, José, as the animals would say, was Linda to be replaced.
Brave words.
They were both tense, solemn, preoccupied—like the people you see in hospital waiting rooms outside of surgery. Tina’s eyes were red from weeping.
“It looks like we’re going to have to move, Father,” Joe began, his thin, black-Irish face knotted in a fierce scowl. “If you think that’s what’s best, just say the word and we’ll put the house on the market tomorrow. Change every fifteen years is good for a family anyway.”
“I’ve investigated the matter,” I said, sounding a bit like the United States attorney at the daily press conference in which he confirms the leaks from the day before by apparently denying them. “And there is no evidence that Ms. Meehan ever spoke a word against Coady. If you could tell me what it was exactly that she is supposed to have said, I’ll be happy to look into it further.…”
You’ll note I did not say “alleged.” Pastor, not United States attorney.
“I feel so sorry for poor Linda.” As always, and despite her red eyes, Tina was cool, self-possessed, and reasonable. “What will it do to her own children? I mean how can you grow up to be normal and healthy if your mother feels that popularity is more important than integrity? And makes up stories about another person’s sex life just so she can be popular? What are the effects of that kind of home environment, Father?”
Tina was wearing a simple, and expensive, brown tailored suit, the mother as professional woman.
“As best as I can determine,” I continued on my truth-telling tack, “Patty O’Hara would not have lost to the Blessed Mother should she have been a candidate. Patty received three times as many votes as all the other candidates put together. There’s no need to rig an election in favor of such an accomplished politician and certainly no disgrace in losing to her.”
Truth to tell, if Patty O’Hara was set down in Rome two weeks before the cardinals went into conclave, she would be elected pope. By about the same margin. On the first ballot.
“She’s been very good with the kids; we were all fond of her,” Joe plowed on, his left eyelid twitching nervously, “and we understand that she’s close to getting engaged to George…”
“His name is not George.”
“But you really have to worry about a girl with that kind of character defect, don’t you, Father?”
“There are different talents given to different people. Patty is a great politician, but she can’t sing a note or play the piano. Coady has the makings of a concert soprano, I am told.”
“And, of course, there is the problem”—Tina was resolutely thoughtful, objective, dispassionate—“of the influence such an antisocial character defect might have on the young people with whom she is working today, not that it’s our responsibility to worry about that.”
“I have complete confidence in Linda.”
“We really are concerned about her, Father.” Joe shifted uneasily on one of the hard chairs we keep in rectory parlors even in the post-conciliar era because they discourage parishioners from staying too long. “Maybe if she spent some time in an institution, a few weeks, anyway, it would help.” He grinned. “I kind of feel sorry for poor George.”
“His name is not George!”
Tina leaned forward, fingertips under her tiny firm chin, a whiff of expensive scent easing its way discreetly across the parlor. “I suppose that there’s no way, is there, Father, that you can screen for those character defects, before you hire a youth minister? I know they screen young men in the seminary.”
“When her contract expires, Linda tells me that she may go back to school for her doctorate, but I would have no problem renewing it.”
Well, that should have made things clear enough, shouldn’t it?
“The whole thing is unfortunate.” Joe was now playing with his Cadillac key chain as his eyelid twitched violently. “Mind you, it’s not your fault, Father. Everyone says you’re doing a great job here under the circumstances.”
“Poor sweet little Coady didn’t want to run.” Martina shook her head, baffled over an insoluble puzzle. “But all her little friends insisted. And Linda encouraged her, which was her business, she certainly didn’t have to do it. And I said to her, I said, ‘Coady, Patty O’Hara is a formidable candidate.’ And she said, poor little tyke, ‘I don’t have to win, Mummy; I only want to see what it’s like to run.’ That’s why the outcome is so unfortunate.”
“What outcome?” I shouted, angry at myself that I was angry and angry that again I had been pulled into their Wonderland scenario.
“We’ll do whatever you think best, Padre.” Joe put the Caddy keys into his blue sport coat (ideal for dinner at the country club after golf). “We understand that we’ve become something of a parish problem. We’re sorry, but we feel we have to stand by our kids, especially when there are sexual innuendos. What else,” he added with a slight choke in his voice, “do you have if you don’t have your kids, right? And if you don’t stand by them, who will you stand by?”
“So…” Tina took over for him, as if rescuing him from the incoherence his strong emotions had created. “If you really think it would be better for us to move, we’ll do it, without any ill feelings.”
“I don’t think you ought to move,” I exploded. “There’s no reason for that.”
“It’ll be hard.” Joe had actually pulled out his handkerchief and was wiping his eyes. “We’ve always thought of this parish as home.”
“For the love of heaven, what do you want me to do?” I shouted so loud that the associate pastor told me later he could hear me above the TV (before which he sat with the same religious fervor, day and night, as the junior boys manifested at the basketball courts).
“Poor sweet Coady will be all right, of course. She has a family to stand by her. She feels fine, actually.” Tina arranged the folds of her skirt. “Really it’s Linda we’re concerned about, Father. Her parents are both dead, you know.”
“Will you both shut up and listen!” I rose to my full six feet three inches of slightly moth-eaten dignity. “I don’t want you to leave the parish. There is no reason to do so. Linda did not interfere in the election against Coady. There is no conspiracy against you. This whole crisis is a product of your imaginations.”
I promised myself a double shot of Bushmill’s Black Label when I would later sneak by the curate and the TV. Protestant ministers have wives on whom to dump this sort of crap. Black Bush is a harmless substitute, not so pleasurable but not so demanding either.
“Maybe you could have a talk with her, Father,” Tina murmured softly.
“Coady?” I was girding my loins for a full-scale attack on Martina’s game—demolish the whole thing in one fell pastoral swoop. Act like a monsignor even though they were an extinct species.
“Oh, no, she’s fine. I mean Linda. Maybe if she went into therapy before she was married…”
“I’ll think about it,” I muttered, wanting them to walk out the front door before I was trapped in Wonderland with them.
Those magic, if quite dishonest, words were enough. They had discharged their responsibility.
We shook hands, they thanked me, and after assurances that everyone thought I was doing a great job “under the circumstances,” they left the rectory, walking briskly down the steps into the warm, caressing Indian-summer night—brave, mature Christians, coping well with intense personal pain.
My heart unaccountably heavy despite my victory, I went to the office instead of the parlor. Paying no attention to the red-haired sixteen-year-old porteress who was dying for information, I glanced out the window.
Joe had his arm around Martina, a protective, reassuring husband standing by his wife in her grief. She was sobbing hysterically, her body shaking like that of a widow at a graveside.
“Is Coady Anne really going away for the rest of her senior year?” The redhead’s curiosity had finally torn its bonds asunder. An Irish biddy in training.
“I don’t know, Jackie.” I turned away from the window. “Maybe.”
“Poor kid. Everyone likes her. She has tons of friends. Really.”
“I know.”
“I feel sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Condon, too.”
Also a gentle Irish mother in the making.
“I feel sorry for everyone, Jackie.”
“Yes, Father.”
You give up a family of your own and you dedicate yourself to a life of compassion for the least of the brothers and sisters. Fine. But my compassion reared its hesitant head only after Joe and Tina Condon left the rectory. It probably would not have healed their pain, but how did I know that? What sort of compassion is it that excludes those who are strangling on their own hate?
The saints would judge Linda innocent of betrayal. As I sipped my Bushmill’s, what would they think of me?
Mary Jane
I didn’t like the look of Arnie’s rectory the first time I saw it five years ago; a sinister place, I thought. My reaction, I suppose, was not psychic sensitivity but a romantic tendency to think that all late-nineteenth-century homes with turrets and gables look sinister. Still, I was right, as it turned out.
“Wow,” I said, “that’s a big place, especially with no curates.…”
Arnie took my flight bag out of the trunk of his Datsun and glanced up at the old gray house outlined against the twilight. “It used to be the bishop’s house in Sander’s time. When the city spread in this direction, they built a church next to it and had a ready-made parish. Hell of a place to heat in the winter…”
He met me at the United flight at the airport. He was easily recognizable despite the twenty years since we had been together in the seminary—tall, thin, with fair hair, not as much of it at the temples, more at the earlobes. He still looked like a plainsman, wiry toughness, far-seeing blue eyes. Same old Arnie, yet something indefinably different, not just the lines around his eyes—a look of abstraction, preoccupation. Arnie was a monsignor and a rural dean, former president of the parish senate. He wore gray slacks, a parish baseball-team jacket, and no Roman collar.
We drove through brown and desolate frost-touched cornfields as the gray sky turned dark. Next week it would be night at this hour as we reluctantly traded in daylight saving time to salvage some early-morning sunlight for our ride to work. The plane was late, the lecture was at seven; there would be time for a hamburger before I went through my act.
“Sorry to schedule it so early,” Arnie said as we left the farm country and entered the fringes of his parish. “We Iowans go to bed early, though.… Then the Friday housekeeper got sick, so I had to cancel the supper. I hope you don’t mind my hamburgers.”
I assured him that I was used to cooking my own meals. Arnie and I had not been particularly close at the seminary. He was a solid, quiet kind, his family from the land where Poland and Germany meet, whose members star on the athletic field, perform competently in the classroom, and keep their own counsel—hardly a soul mate for a Mick with more flair than sense. He had worn well, better than many of us, I thought as we drove up to the old rectory. He used the language of the new Church with practiced ease, parish council, school budget, servant church, religious education team, charismatic renewal … no identity crisis here … only those deep-set eyes intently scanning the prairie, even though there weren’t any prairies around. I was glad I had accepted his invitation to talk, though you wouldn’t refuse a classmate; I wanted to see how one of my generation handled the post-Conciliar Church on the fringes on a small Iowa city.
My momentary unease vanished when we went into the house. It was as warmly and as tastefully decorated as any Lake Shore Drive apartment—light, creamy pastels banishing all hint of Victorian gloominess. “You’ve got a good interior decorator, Arnie,” I told him as he led me up the staircase to my room. He turned toward me and smiled the same faint plainsman smile I had known in the seminary. “Hell, I did it myself. Didn’t dare risk hiring one firm over the others; we’ve got all the interior decorators in the city in this parish.”
My room was a pleasant light green with a thick, quilted comforter doubling as a spread and an extra blanket for the Iowa winters. “You gotta be careful about such things in a place like this,” he went on, flipping the thermostat up to sixty-eight and closing the drapes on the gloomy night sky. “I have three different housekeepers. Each one comes in two days a week—keeps the parish happy; no family gets too much power with the pastor.”
“A big house for just one man to live in,” I said, rummaging through my briefcase for the quotes I’d use in my lecture.
“Cheaper to live in it alone than build a new one.” Arnie shrugged as he stood in the doorway. “We use it for priests from the out-counties when we have meetings in the city. Anyhow, it’s a lot easier to keep places clean here than it is in Chicago.” The faint plainsman grin again. “See you in the kitchen in a few moments.”
I put the thermostat up to seventy-two, arranged my things for the morning, even though I was breaking a rule and staying around till midafternoon, and checked out the room: small, airy, comfortable; an easy chair made for sitting in, a mirror which was not scratched, an ivory-colored dresser with big drawers, a shower which worked. The combination of taste and efficient concern for comfort was not what I would have expected of my plainsman friend.
I was hungry, so I wasted no more time on reveries about the past. As I hurried down the thickly carpeted steps something happened which I barely noticed then, but which made a lot of sense—if any of it made sense—later. Halfway down the stairs I smelled scent, a powerful and unfamiliar perfume, though I confess to no great familiarity with scents. It was strong enough to make me stop and sniff. Where was it coming from? But then it disappeared suddenly. I forgot about it by the time I entered Arnie’s flawlessly equipped, ultramodern kitchen.
“No complaints from your housekeepers about the equipment.” I laughed, sinking my teeth into a hamburger which was light-years better than my own pseudo-McDonald’s efforts.
“All they complain about”—he grinned back at me—“is that the other housekeepers don’t keep it clean enough. You can’t win with women.…”
We talked about the years in the seminary, the tragedy in Chicago after Meyer’s death, the possibilities of the next papal election,
the peculiarities of Arnie’s bishop—a relatively straight man by my standards. I sipped a cup of tea and Arnie carefully nursed a bottle of Heineken’s. There were a few minutes before it would be time to greet the lecture audience. We went to his parlor—another stunning room—light blue and white, soft and restful but still masculine—no TV—a piano in the corner with a Mozart sonata open on the music rack.
“Cooking, interior decorating, and Mozart, Arnie,” I said in astonishment. “We never would have guessed any of it twenty years ago.”
Arnie’s fair skin colored. “The Mozart’s just part of the theme; I don’t play it.”
I ran my fingers over the keyboard, pounding out with my terribly inept technique the first few bars of the Mozart; the piano was in perfect tune.
Arnie leaned back in his vast couch and smiled contentedly. “I’m not the only one who has learned something since seminary days.”
“The difference,” I responded, “is that you’re a good cook and interior decorator and I’m a rotten pianist.”
I thought to myself that there were lots of other differences. I had become more transparent; publicly so, God help me, Arnie more opaque. I was eager to get on with the lecture and go home.
The school hall was already filled with people when we got there five minutes before kickoff time, and the cars were still pouring into the parking lot. Lecture crowds are influenced not by the quality of the speaker but by the promotional efficiency of the sponsoring organization. Arnie’s was very efficient indeed. You could tell from the faces lighting up in smiles when Arnie appeared that his people liked him, flinty plainsman personality and all. The talk went well enough; the people were friendly and courteous. I could have talked in Sanskrit and gotten away with it, I think; I was a classmate of their pastor and that settled it.
All About Women Page 5
