THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Avoiding, meanwhile, any hint of scandal.”

  “Exactly. And there we come to it, Mab. You’ve thrown out hints about Father Bryce that were a little unnerving. I hope there’s no connection between Bryce and the unhappy matter that brings you to Minneapolis.”

  “I share your hope, Alex, but it’s not something we ought to be discussing at this point.”

  “Oh dear, as bad as that? Well, I trust you won’t do anything rash. If it becomes as serious as you seem to think, would you at least talk to one of our lawyers before you go elsewhere?”

  “Surely. Unless the whole thing blows up before I have the opportunity. It would help if I could talk to the man. This Cogling person is not exactly forthcoming. In the literal sense that he wouldn’t come to the door of the rectory when I called on him there the other day. Oh, and that reminds me. Cogling is stonewalling someone besides me. You may remember my talking to Jeremiah at dinner about the young man I met at Schinder’s.”

  “Yes, the one you traded jokes with over your friend’s casket. I liked the one about John Gotti going to prison, though in one form or another it’s as old as the hills.”

  “That young man, yes. It seems that Cogling has spirited away his fiancée and refuses to say where she is.”

  “I should think Cogling is a little old for that sort of thing.”

  “It may well be she doesn’t want to be reached. But Greg—that’s the boy’s name—has gone to the girl’s mother, and she told him that Cogling had her sign some papers—without leaving her a copy, of course—putting the girl in the care of some home for unwed mothers who might otherwise be seeking abortions. Do you know anything about such a place, Alex? I assume it’s a Catholic charity of some sort.”

  Alexis Clareson grimaced into his snifter and answered the question with a significant silence. At last he sighed, and said, “Oh dear.”

  “Have I stepped in something?”

  Alexis laughed. “Indeed, you may have stepped in the same river twice, which is something that’s not supposed to be possible. How do you do it, Mab? You haven’t been here long enough to put your friend in the ground, and already…” He finished his sentence by pursing his lips and closing his eyes, as though to say his lips were sealed.

  “Is this something else Bryce is involved in?” Father Mabbley persisted.

  “Something else? Except for his having gone off on an unannounced retreat, I know of nothing Bryce is ‘involved in.’ And I don’t want to. But I would wager that your young friend may find his fiancée and you may find Bryce at the same place. But I don’t think I can say more than that, for it’s all very hush-hush at this point.”

  “Oh, I won’t reveal my sources, if that’s what worries you.”

  “You wouldn’t have to. Massey knows you’re dining here tonight. He can put two and two together.”

  “All the young man wants is a chance to talk to his girlfriend on the phone.”

  “In order to persuade her to get an abortion?”

  “Just the opposite, in point of fact. They had quarreled about it, but he’d understood she meant to have the child. He was floored when the girl’s mother told him that Father Cogling had stopped her from entering the abortion clinic. And delighted. You see, his circumstances have suddenly altered in a peculiar way, and it all has to do with my friend Bing Anker. And it involves me, too, in the oddest way. In fact, it’s turned my life upside down.”

  “Really? In a nice way, I hope.”

  “I honestly don’t know at this point. Do you have time to hear the whole story? It’s a bit complicated.”

  “Mab, really! But let me freshen your brandy before you unfold your tale. Mind you, this isn’t a quid pro quo.” Alexis negotiated his wheelchair to the liquor cabinet to retrieve the brandy bottle, then motored over to his guest to pour a more generous portion than the first into Father Mabbley’s snifter. “You may tell me your story, but I’m really not at liberty— You understand.”

  “Whatever you decide, Alex. I can’t coerce you. So.” Father Mabbley tasted the brandy and thought how best to begin.

  “Some long while ago,” he began, “my friend Bing Anker came into an inheritance. A double inheritance, in a way. His mother died, and he inherited her house in St. Paul, and he also came into another house, in Willowville, and rather a nice piece of money, from his brother-in-law. That’s a very long story, which I won’t go into, but the upshot is that Bing was able to leave his job in Las Vegas, where I had got to know him, and settle down here, and like the good steward in the parable, he invested the money that had been left to him shrewdly during the go-go days of the eighties. And he died rich. At least, by my standards he died rich.”

  “How much?” Alexis asked.

  “Not counting the houses, half a million.”

  “That’s certainly respectable. And are you his sole heir? If so, I expect you’ll soon have your sufficiency of lobster—at home or wherever you like.”

  “Not quite his sole heir. That’s where Greg comes in.”

  “The Orpheus of our story,” Alexis glossed.

  For a moment Father Mabbley was puzzled. “Orpheus? Oh, because his fiancée has been borne off. Rather a sinister simile, Alex. I hope the girl’s situation isn’t as drastic as all that.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt. Go on, I’m all ears.”

  “My friend Bing was one of those people—thank heaven there aren’t that many—who consider the writing of a will a test of their creativity. The writing and rewriting, for according to his lawyer, Mr. Wiley (such a name for a lawyer!), he came up with a new one about once a year. Happily, I always figured prominently. But Bing would add codicils and filigrees, and in the last will he wrote, not long ago, he made provision for his cousin Greg Romero, whom he’d met at a family wedding a short while before and taken a fancy to. He’d always wanted to leave a little something to one of his relatives—in part, at Wiley’s insistence, who said it was a kind of insurance policy in cases when one is leaving the bulk of one’s estate to someone who is only a friend. It shows that one has given some consideration to the bonds of blood. So Bing provided for his cousin, but with all sorts of provisos. At the wedding Greg had been telling Bing about his problem being torn between wanting to finish up at the university, where’s he’s studying business, and wanting to get married, and possibly needing to get married. So Bing wrote into his will that his cousin should be allowed five years of free rent in the house in Willowville (which then reverts to me), plus a kind of scholarship of ten thousand a year, until he’s got his college degree. Provided that he gets married. I think it was Bing’s not-very-subtle way of getting him to do the right thing.”

  “It sounds,” Alexis commented, “as though he were intending to die the next day. I mean, your friend wasn’t on his deathbed, was he? You said on the phone that he wasn’t HIV-positive.”

  “Bing always thought he was going to die the next day. Wiley says that he’d come in every year with some new, similarly fanciful, manipulative codicil. Wiley didn’t object. Bing paid good money.”

  “So now, as a result of the will, this Greg Romano—”

  “Romero,” Father Mabbley corrected.

  “—has a sudden urgent need to tie the knot.”

  “I must say, to his credit, that he was trying to get back in touch with Alison—that’s the girl’s name—before he learned of Bing’s caprice. But yes, now he is more highly motivated to do the right thing, as I suppose was Bing’s intention. In any case, I think he ought to be able to talk with the girl and explain his situation.”

  “Oh dear,” said Alexis.

  “There’s more,” said Father Mabbley. “There were also conditions as to my inheriting. One condition, rather—that I leave the priesthood.”

  “But you can’t!” Alex protested.

  “Can’t, Alex? It’s done all the time.”

  “Yes, of course. I meant the sacrament can’t be undone. You’ll always be a priest.”

  “I
n the sense that I possess sacramental powers, yes. But not in the sense Bing’s will intends—that I resign my office.”

  “But you’d lose…” Alexis lifted his hands in perplexity.

  “I wouldn’t lose that much, in fact. My pension won’t kick in for another fifteen years, or even twenty, and even then it’s meager. You know my salary, or you can guess. I’d lose living rent free in a shabby rectory. But think what I’d gain.”

  “Yes, half a million isn’t to be sneezed at.”

  “I mean, Alex, my self-respect.”

  “Mab, you shock me. And in any case, you’re wrong. That is precisely what you’d lose.”

  “I shock myself, in a way, but it’s so. You see, it’s something we used to talk about, Bing and I. Whether, given the way the Church has changed, it means the same thing to be a priest as it did when we were ordained.”

  “It’s not the Church that’s changed, Mab. In a way, that may be its problem—that it’s in the nature of the Church that it can’t change. What’s changed is the world around us.”

  “Bullshit,” said Father Mabbley.

  “Mab, really,” said Alexis, lowering his eyes reproachfully.

  “All right, then, to be brutally honest, it’s the hypocrisy. The sheer weight of it. And don’t talk to me about shouldering the cross. Christ came down on hypocrisy more than on anything else. He hated hypocrites. And that’s what we all are—those of us, anyhow, who wear the uniform of celibacy and don’t practice it. Especially if we’re gay, and you and I both know what percentage of us are gay.”

  “But how else are we to change the Church, Mab?” Alexis demanded. His tone of zestful debate had developed an edge of petulance. For if Father Mabbley was a hypocrite in these matters, Father Clareson had to be accounted one equally, and while he was perfectly ready to acknowledge any number of other sins with equanimity, Father Clareson prided himself on his intellectual honesty—at least when he was among friends.

  “Has anyone been trying to change the Church?” Father Mabbley replied. “I hadn’t noticed. Everyone I know is just looking out for his ass. Isn’t any homosexual act still a mortal sin? Don’t teenagers still attempt suicide when they realize they’re gay and they can’t help it? You did, Alex. You told me so.”

  “That’s not fair, Mab. I told you that in strictest confidence.”

  “But you must see my point. It’s cruel to make people go through that kind of suffering. Some don’t survive, as we did, and we were warped by it. Not as badly as some are warped, I’ll give you that. I hate to think of what it must be like for a poor bastard like Bryce. He probably can’t help himself with the pedophilia. All he can do is try to deny his urges. But surely you can see that it’s the system, the Church, that has shaped those urges. You don’t think it’s an accident, do you, that every diocese in the country is having a scandal with pedophile priests? We attract them. We are the culture in which they breed, like excited bacteria. Just because of the hypocrisy. People whose sexual desires have been declared criminal have to be hypocrites, they have no choice. And we extend them the same protection we’ve extended ourselves. We say, ‘It’s only human to be gay. So, maybe it’s a sin. But I’ll confess it. And sin again.’”

  “It is only human, Mab. Come on! Did you miss the Renaissance or something? The Church can celebrate life as well as deny it. How about the wedding feast at Cana?”

  “As I understand it, Alex, gays weren’t invited to that party.”

  “Christ got it off with publicans and sinners.”

  “And as a result, we’re all alkies. It’s the one vice permitted us. And gambling, I forgot gambling.”

  “And hasn’t gambling been your special ministry, Mab? Are you going to want to give that up? You’ve done inestimable good in helping gamblers recover. Don’t deny it. I’ve even heard it said that you are to Nevada what Mother Teresa is to India.”

  “True enough. I’ll miss that the most. But I’ll tell you something, Alex—the twelve-step programs work better in that area than the Church. My entire ministry to gamblers is based on AA and GA, not on Church doctrine. The Church isn’t against gambling; it uses it! That’s been one of the hardest parts of working with gamblers who are Catholic. They swear off blackjack and turn to bingo. Bing used to tell me stories that would curl your hair, if you had any left. He was a bingo caller in Vegas, and he got to know the real addicts. And almost all of them were Catholics.”

  “So,” said Alexis, in a tone of theatrical melancholy, “are there to be no more cakes and ale?”

  “Of course there will. But I don’t have to preach against cakes and ale when I know perfectly well that for most people they constitute one of the simple, accepted pleasures of life. Some people can’t handle the ale; they’re alcoholics, and they have to swear off it. Some can’t handle gambling. And some can’t handle sex. But in that category I don’t include gays.”

  “Well, that’s very generous of you, Mab. Considering the number of times I’ve sucked your cock.”

  “And I was grateful every time, Alex, believe me. Parting is such sweet sorrow, and all that.”

  “So why not just declare a policy of live and let live? Why become the Robespierre of the sexual revolution?”

  “Robespierre? That seems a bit excessive. I’m not proposing to remove anyone’s head. Only my own collar.”

  “And what of Bryce, Father? You’re not hunting for his head?”

  Father? he thought. He let it pass, but he was aware that by that form of address Alexis had moved to a different ground.

  “Bryce is the particular subject, Alex, that I understood you didn’t wish to be informed about. If it can be avoided.”

  “Indeed. I stand corrected. And”—Alexis brightened, and retreated to a tone of formal cordiality—“I have been inconsiderate in badgering you about what must be, except in its financial aspect, a painful dilemma. What, if I may ask, is to happen to the money if for some reason you don’t remove your collar? Would it all go to this Greg Romano?”

  “I was wondering when you’d think to ask that one. What would happen would be, from the Church’s viewpoint, the worst possibility of all, and the lawyer tells me that that proviso is ironclad and incontestable. It would go to creating a memorial, in iron and concrete, to the victims of priestly pedophilia.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Alexis.

  “That was my own first reaction.”

  “A memorial where?”

  “In the front yard of his home in St. Paul.”

  “There are zoning laws!”

  “I’m afraid not. There was a case recently about crossburning by the Klan that Wiley says—and he should know—establishes a clear precedent.”

  “And the form of this memorial? Is it to be a plaque, or—?”

  “Bing had an artistic imagination. It is to take the form of the Christ Child, at something like the age of eleven, crowned with thorns, and crucified. He’s to be shown life-size, but the cross is to be twelve feet high. He’s commissioned a sketch of what’s intended from the sculptor Donald Granger. Wiley showed it to me. It’s impressive.”

  “Might I add: indecent?”

  “Not ostensibly. There are no genitalia or wounds. It’s all very aboveboard and symbolic. But the symbolism is powerful—I think you’d agree.”

  “Massey will shit his episcopal breeches.”

  “Which was another reason, it occurred to me, why it might be better, all around, for me to take the money and run.”

  “Oh, you sly fox,” said Alex, smiling in a way that was once again friendly. “You arranged this with him!”

  “I swear to God,” Father Mabbley declared, crossing himself. “Never!”

  “Well, it changes everything, doesn’t it? You will leave the priesthood for the sake of the priesthood.”

  “I doubt that Bing looked at it that way.”

  “Ah, but he must have thought how you would look at it, so it amounts to the same thing.”

  “So, between
my priestly vows and the prospect of scandal…”

  “Mab, it’s my job to avoid scandal.”

  “Well, we’ll avoid that scandal, at least. With Bryce I can’t offer any guarantees, just as I can’t offer any information. But I do need a phone number, an address. Where is he?”

  “Oh, you always know how to get what you want! Such a politician. But aren’t we all. I’ll tell Jeremiah to give you what you need to know. Over the phone. Unofficially. Mab, it’s wonderful to see you. But I’ve got to say good night.”

  31

  As many times as he had stood beneath the immense concrete ribs of the dome of the Shrine of Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, Gerhardt Ober never ceased to feel a chill of reverence. He had made pilgrimages to Rome, to Lourdes, to Oberammergau and Berchtesgaden. He had seen the great cathedrals of Chartres and Köln, and others whose names he’d forgotten, when he accompanied Monsignor O’Toole on his European speaking tour in 1951, but none of those edifices had inspired Gerhardt with the same sense of wonder. There had been in all of them something fussy and feminine, as though their architects had felt they must disguise the stark power of the masonry with filigrees of lace and bouquets of flowers. The architect of the Shrine had made no such concessions to mere prettiness. Here there were no frescoes of infant angels tumbling through gilded clouds, no stone carved to look like foliage—just the sheer muscling upward of the supporting pillars and the awful weight of the ferroconcrete dome they supported. To stand beneath this dome was to experience the Fear of God.

  Gerhardt could see that he was not alone in that response. Father Bryce, though he had attended Étoile du Nord as a seminarian and later taught there, and must therefore have been familiar with the Shrine’s somber majesty, was nevertheless goggling at the dome like any tourist entering this holy place for the first time.