Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

  Egan smiled. ‘I have a friend who is one of these bureaucrats in Roman collars. He’s an American and we studied together. He is a member of the Holy Office and he can arrange to be at some private audience and pass the letter directly to the Holy Father.’

  Simultaneously, both men shook their heads, for the scheme induced its own vertigo. And on this same account Maitland refrained, for the time, from raising problems.

  ‘The thing to do,’ Egan said, ‘is to convince him that when I speak of two souls who will otherwise be lost, I mean it literally.’ He took his eyes from the Vatican, at which he had been gazing through the walls and around the curves of hemispheres. ‘I can tell you’re shocked, Maitland. But you yourself told me to take any attempts at coddling you as read.’

  ‘I’m not shocked,’ Maitland said, and went hunting in the sandwich bag to prove it. He had not had his evening meal. ‘I have to be honest. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea.’ He stared at the innards of the sandwich to make sure that the lady in the delicatessen had done the right thing by him.

  ‘It is not a good idea, no. It is the only idea I have left. No doubt you wonder how I will get on without the Mass.’

  Maitland slammed the sandwich down on a study of seventeenth-century Spanish diplomacy.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop confusing me with some sort of vocation-poster priest. There are thousands of priests who could get by without their Mass, just as there are thousands of husbands who could get by without their wives.’

  ‘I’ll miss the active life of the priesthood.’

  ‘Of course you would. But if a person left a Chinese laundry after giving it twenty of his earthly years, he’d miss it.’

  ‘I myself have no doubts, James. It is a question of salvation.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s as basic as all that?’ asked Maitland, like a born counsellor, like a chancery sharp-shooter.

  ‘Do you think I use such terms lightly? Speak up, Maitland. What’s your objection?’

  Maitland felt his beard, the long bristles around his Adam’s apple which his razor missed, often for a week at a time. ‘Firstly, if I had to forget that I was a priest, I could with ease do so. But you could never forget. The second thing is that perhaps when a person has suffered as Nora has – I only say perhaps – he or she gets used to abnormal situations, becomes addicted to them. All I would say is that you should make sure she would want you as a mere citizen, as a spouse.’

  ‘I am sure,’ the little man said slowly, and sat contemplatively for some time before losing his temper so thoroughly that he saw no false plea in asking, ‘What sort of priest do you think I am?’

  Maitland said, ‘You must realize, Maurice, that this is a suggestion and not an accusation. In fact, the usual cowardly claptrap.’ To show his mundane faith and his lack of high-flown malice, he retrieved the sandwich and began to eat.

  Egan, a man who had patience now only for accusations, bounced to his feet. ‘Sometimes you behave as if you deserved everyone’s hostility, James. You have no sense of fitness, no sense of time or place.’

  By the skin of his teeth, Maitland managed to be mean enough to say, ‘This is my time and place, mate. I’ve had no lunch and no dinner.’

  ‘Don’t let me be the one to keep you from your bun-bag. Besides, I have a letter to write.’

  Maitland intercepted the small angry man at the door.

  ‘Forgive me, Maurice. Eating sandwiches in front of you at a time like this.’ But the stupid thing was still in his hand, half-eaten. He went on, ‘There are considerations, human and otherwise … I suppose you’ve taken them all into account.’

  The little priest shook his head, not as a negative, but to dismiss his own profitless anger.

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘I was stupid enough to ask for advice I didn’t want. But if a young radical like yourself knows that there are considerations, James, all the more so an old stuffed-shirt like me.’ He smiled. ‘I exempt you from the obligation of cataloguing the things I have already taken into account. I thank you for your attention. And I do have a letter to write.’

  He passed Maitland and emerged in the seedy faubourg of the hall, a stranger who had to take his bearings by one of the economy bulbs.

  Maitland hissed at him from the ante-room, ‘Maurice, I must say it. It’s hard to see you succeeding.’

  There was something of the vehemence of his scheme in the little priest’s voice as he said, ‘I refuse for the moment to consider the possibility of failure. Of sacrifice, obedience and mercy, I know which one is the most perfect. I cannot believe that a Supreme Pontiff does not also know.’ He rubbed his paws and gathered his shoulders like a man already seated at a desk writing what he wants to. He paused before telling Maitland valedictorily, ‘In any case, you are one of those people whom I feel I can never repay.’

  On the appropriate morning, Maitland cornered Hurst after breakfast and told him that this was his day to return to the psychiatrist.

  ‘I don’t know whether I need it,’ Hurst said, though his eyes, pallid and moon-struck, were symptoms in themselves.

  For once, Maitland went gently with him. ‘You’re feeling better?’

  ‘Much.’

  ‘Well. Nothing lost by going today. It’s only etiquette, you know. I’m afraid I must insist.’

  ‘Very well, doctor.’

  ‘And don’t be seen catching the ferry, eh? Oh, and please, if he writes a letter –’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I said earlier that I’d abandon you after your first visit.’

  ‘Yes. But it takes time to decide what has to be done.’

  What had to be done, so far as Hurst had decided, was that he must confess the psychiatrist’s findings and deliver the psychiatrist’s letter to Costello, on whom the Spirit had breathed, and not to this inept outsider.

  Meanwhile, Costello was as full of business as any bride with an outside chance of happiness. He kept tailors busy on his episcopal robes, goldsmiths busy on his pectoral cross and ring designed by himself. Often bishops inherited the insignia of deceased prelates; but that was a risk, to depend on the taste of a dead man. He booked his air passage to Rome for his ad liminal visit, could be seen in Asiatic pyjamas limping the passageway after inoculations, made after-dinner speeches, and lovingly prepared his autobiography for the secular and religious press.

  Morning and night in the chapel, the prayers for a newly elected bishop were said; and Nolan spoke, prayed and effervesced about the coming consecration as fervently as an ugly bridesmaid who knows not only that she will never reach the altar on her own merits but that it has occurred to all the wedding-guests that she never will.

  While Maitland was trying to corner Hurst a third time and considering telephoning the doctor, Costello brought home three tailor’s boxes full of modish pontificals – a cassock with cape and piping, a chimer, a zucchetto and biretta. The big man, clad in them before his mirror, would have been seen as touching and lovable if anyone had happened in. Though the robes seemed extremely new and incomplete without his overdue pectoral, he stood immobile in them for some minutes and murmured three times before disrobing, ‘For He that is mighty has done great things to me …’ So he hung them in the wardrobe and went down to dinner.

  While he ate, the students’ dinner ended and Hurst came to the bishop-elect’s room to admit two visits to the psychiatrist. Hurst had noticed that Costello had not been at table at the beginning of the meal, but he had then been once more consumed in a spirit-to-spirit struggle with the bread-knife. That wedge of inimical black that was His fulfilled Lordship entering no more than nudged the outer edges of his vision. So now, believing Costello to be in, his frightened veins, freighted with blood-lust, jumped as he waited for an answer to his knock. He thought he heard the bishop ask him in, though it was only a window grating in the wind. When visibly exercising patience, His Lordship did sound like a window grating in the wind; and now paid the penalty. For Hurst, desperate though well-ma
nnered, opened the door to see immediately the robes, empty but ineradicably suggestive of the princely bulk of Costello. At the same time he wondered whether Costello’s teak letter-knife, which he had often eyed during confessions, was on the desk.

  The paper-knife served only for making triangular rents in the cassock, but his hands could do the rest of the work. Tittering through introverted lips like Charlie Chaplin’s, he sat on the purple biretta that lay on the bed. After that, confident that he could explain the prank away, he went upstairs and took enough tablets to give him a good sleep short of the final one. He took, in all, four days’ supply of sedative.

  Maitland himself found Costello stumbling as never under the influence of smallpox injections. The mouth was forced towards one corner of the face. He was hissing.

  ‘What is it?’ Maitland had to ask.

  Costello tried first to gather the pace to brush past, but then stopped dead.

  ‘You might ask!’ In contravention of his years of sober deep-breathing, he champed a mouthful of air. ‘No, not even you could have done this.’

  ‘Are you sure, My Lord?’ Maitland asked boisterously.

  The bishop leant against the wall. ‘Oh God!’ he said.

  Maitland took hold of Costello’s elbow. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just you come and see!’

  Across Costello’s room lay his shredded robes. He said, ‘A hundred and seventy dollars’ worth,’ and punched the wall with his fist, and began to weep, neither for the money nor for the fist.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Costello. It’s barbarous,’ Maitland told him, and saw the paper-knife lying near the wardrobe.

  ‘Who in the name of heaven did this poisonous thing?’ Costello called to him.

  ‘No one who merely dislikes you.’ He struggled uselessly with the temptation to suggest, ‘Someone with disappointed hopes –’

  ‘Don’t be insane. If you think Monsignor Nolan would –’

  ‘Of course not. I wasn’t naming names.’

  Costello found the chair by his prie-dieu. ‘It’s so disgusting,’ he said, and stared at his cassock with as much horror as if blowflies had been drinking at its wounds. He seemed nauseated, and his large hands just managed to control themselves.

  But where was Hurst and what was Hurst doing?

  As a pretext, Maitland said, ‘I’ll go and get you something for the way you feel.’

  Upstairs, on a floor where he had lived as a student, a bunch of young clerics stood finding nought for their comfort beneath a dim bulb. The remembered dinginess struck him, even in his present hurry, with an odious nostalgia. He asked them where Hurst’s room was and left them with such urgency when they’d told him that their eyes followed him and then, off-handedly, as if going to their rooms, they followed too.

  Hurst was asleep and his person innocent of blood. After trying to rouse him, Maitland could not resist taking the boy’s slack jaw in his hand and shutting and opening it fluidly, like the jaw of a sambo money-box. Even in those muscles that traditionally resisted and gave the alarm, Hurst slept. Without pain and dreary interviews with Nolan, he had eased himself out of the priestly life.

  The pulse, Maitland found, was low but strong.

  ‘You’ve managed it,’ he told the utterly reposeful form. ‘You’re out of limbo.’ A bungalow and seven mortal and miserable thousand a year for Hurst; and offspring, smelling of wet, milk and talc, in his arms. So Maitland hoped.

  Nolan was not so happy.

  ‘Poor boy. Is it an attempt at suicide?’ he asked, blinking at the livid sleeper.

  ‘Monsignor,’ said Maitland, ‘he’d hardly know what you were talking about.’

  And he felt a genuine hatred of the president, who began to tidy up the affair from a sacramental point of view by raising his right hand and muttering an absolution.

  ‘Conditional absolution I hope, monsignor. I mean to say, he may not have passed out in the state of grace.’

  The president mistook the derision for alarm, ‘Of course, conditional,’ he reassured Maitland. ‘Of course, James.’ And he began the absolution again.

  ‘Whatever possessed him?’ said Nolan, waiting for the ambulance. ‘Demons,’ Maitland informed him. ‘Demons for a start.’

  Nolan boggled at the thought of exorcisms.

  Furious at his own negligence, Maitland talked turkey.

  ‘Demons first off. And carelessness topped it off. If you’re wondering whose, then mine in the last instance, Costello’s in the second. Yours ultimately.’

  Demands of Nolan, explanations of Maitland, sleep of Hurst, all continued in the ambulance.

  ‘Yes, yours!’ Maitland was contending. ‘For a variety of reasons.’

  ‘I’d be interested to hear.’

  ‘For one thing, monsignor, making it hard for those you expose to your high-geared system of kibosh to see a doctor and ask him why the hell they can’t sleep of nights and want to mutilate people.’

  ‘Did Hurst want to mutilate people?’

  ‘Let him tell you.’

  Nolan snorted and inspected the boy, whose jaw was still deliciously slack.

  ‘Your inimical attitude, James –’ he began.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Maitland. ‘Hurst is the point.’

  The attendant, who kept taking Hurst’s pulse, smirked at the blossoming wrangle. Nolan murmured, ‘Maitland, don’t vulgarize this affair. Not everyone –’ he waggled his eyebrows towards the attendant – ‘is in sympathy with us.’

  ‘Me for one,’ Maitland admitted. ‘Now Costello! If Costello had known one end of a human being from another, he would have got Hurst to a doctor months ago. Instead he told him to pray to Our Lady of Victories.’

  ‘You surely wouldn’t quarrel with that advice.’

  ‘Only with its utter ineptitude.’

  The ambulance man, frowning over Hurst, seemed disappointed by the veer the conversation had taken towards theological debate.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Nolan announced, ‘Dr Costello did approach me some weeks back about a student who spoke of seeing a doctor. No doubt the student was Hurst, because Dr Costello is Hurst’s spiritual director. Now, you don’t realize how much these doctors interfere. We had three students with stomach ulcers last year, and before I knew it the guild of Catholic doctors wrote to me recommending that students should have both a small morning tea and a small supper. I put their recommendation into practice, for all the good it’s done …’

  ‘It’s done no good for Hurst. He doesn’t have a stomach ulcer.’

  Nolan raised his voice. ‘Maitland, if you think I owe you any of these explanations …’ But he went on giving them; the presence of Hurst actually compelled him. ‘There had already been a dozen students to psychiatrists in the first half of the year. Psychiatrists are the last people we want to have butting into our affairs. I asked Dr Costello was it urgent, and he assured me that he thought not. Now, I happen to feel honoured that Dr Costello is a member of my staff. He is, like most men, fallible, but he is never stupidly fallible, and he lacks both a pride and a malice that are prominent in your own make-up, James. I honestly cannot envisage any future for you in the House of Studies.’

  ‘May it assist you in your orisons, monsignor, to know that it depressed the tripes out of me as a student and gives me the gorblimeys as an adult?’

  The ambulance and the debate stopped, and the doors swung open on a neon sign saying ‘Casualty’ as merrily as any sign ever said ‘Ladies Lounge’ or ‘Wine and Dine’. A tired resident, who had been playing Rugby all afternoon, was the first to take delivery of poor Hurst; but by the time the pumps were manned, nuns of high rank were arranging supper and inside information for distinguished Monsignor Nolan. The inside information was that Hurst, apart from the necessary discomfort of the treatment, was quite safe.

  ‘Did I hear you admit, James,’ Nolan asked drolly after a time, ‘that you actually hold yourself partially to blame for what has overtaken Hurst?’ />
  ‘Indeed,’ Maitland showed some enthusiasm in admitting. ‘I sent him off to the doctor but didn’t take the trouble to find out exactly what the doctor said. As they say at tennis classes, my execution was good but my follow-through lacked strength.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you then that Hurst could not have put himself in this state if you had not violated my authority?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Maitland said, ‘if you find in Hurst’s room a letter from the doctor telling you or me or whom it may concern that Hurst should be immediately hospitalized.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nolan, smiling after a hard victory. ‘You refuse to answer my question.’ He sat back saying, ‘Obedience, James, obedience is better than any other thing on the earth.’

  17

  IN JULY THERE were to be examinations for the students. It was certain now that Maitland, once he had his history papers corrected, would be sent into some parish accustomed to rugged fund-raising clergy who trained the youth organization football team to a grand-final pitch and held boxing evenings. For himself, Maitland felt afraid; but he was sorry also for the salt-of-the-earth people on whom his few half-learned uncertainties were soon to be foisted.

  He thought it discreet to stay away from the meeting in the parlour held annually to decide, by vote, whether each student be allowed to go on to a higher grade of Orders. No one accused Maitland for his absence. No one except Edmonds ever spoke of it.

  Edmonds had come to say good-bye.

  ‘Good-bye?’ Maitland asked.

  ‘They’ll never admit me to Orders. This is the second year the vote has gone against me. Even an Edmonds comes to understand in the end.’

  Maitland said nothing.

  ‘No condolences?’ Edmonds wanted to know.

  ‘No. If you have a reason to go, thank God and go. Sit down.’

  Edmonds slung himself indolently into a chair. Already he seemed to be back with the sweet life – debenture issues, Niagaras of whisky.