Stained Glass

by Ralph McInerny

He passed the returning Rebecca in the hallway and gave her a salute.

  “Is he still in there?”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  Lurching groundward in the elevator, Tetzel coaxed from secrecy the inspiration he had had listening to Rebecca. She and apparently the police were stymied because there was no relation between Madeline Schutz and Amy Gorman. No direct relation. The solution seemed simple to Tetzel and would have, he was sure, even if his mind had been clear. There had to be a tertium quid, a third person who linked the two. Find that link and voilà!

  Meanwhile he would interview the prolific science fiction writer.

  12

  Phil Keegan’s condo overlooked an artificial lake in the middle of which a fountain sent up a silvery umbrella-shaped spray of water. There were ducks on the lake that residents were warned not to feed, a prohibition surreptitiously ignored. It was the Canada geese that were the problem, wandering along the walks; their strangely designed bodies were not adapted to easy terrestrial travel, yet they were seldom in the water and used their wings infrequently. Phil had been prepared to admire the awkward birds until the management identified them as nuisances. The nature of the nuisance was delicately hinted at, but those who used the walks understood. From time to time a couple with a brace of dogs was called in to scatter the geese, but after a week, they always returned.

  Phil sat at the table in his combination kitchen/dining room, holding a mug of coffee with both hands, and thanked God he was not retired. All around him were oldsters, living on pensions and Social Security and whatever else, shuffling along the walks, going nowhere. He almost thanked God that he was not like the rest of men, but the Gospel scene expelled the thought. Not even Father Dowling had seen how shaken he had been by the threat to close St. Hilary’s. If that happened, Roger Dowling would go, and with him one of the mainstays in Phil’s life.

  It had been ten years since he had sold the house in which he and his wife had raised their two daughters, now living on opposite coasts. As captain of detectives, he worked himself harder than anyone, almost dreading going home. What in God’s name would he do if he retired, sit here looking out at the ducks and geese? The pastor of St. Hilary’s had become a close friend during these lonely years. Roger had been a couple of classes ahead of him in Quigley, where the then mandatory Latin undid Phil. Eventually, he went into the army, became an MP and, when he got out, went into police work. Several evenings a week he would drop by the St. Hilary’s rectory to visit with Roger, watch a game on TV, talk about the crime of the day.

  “Hung in a garage?” Father Dowling exclaimed when Phil told him of the murder Cy Horvath and Agnes were investigating.

  “Not even her own garage. Nor was she the Madeline Schutz we thought she was.”

  Roger liked to be informed of the department’s work, although Phil knew they looked on things differently. As a cop, his aim was justice, an arrest, indictment, conviction, and then a long spell in Joliet. Roger Dowling understood that, but his interest was mercy. What for Phil was a crime was a sin for the pastor of St. Hilary’s, and his concern was for the soul of the wrongdoer. Not wholly incompatible points of view, of course.

  “Who was she?”

  “God knows.”

  The familiar, comfortable exchange went on, but now there was the disturbing undertow that St. Hilary’s might be closed and Roger Dowling reassigned. Phil didn’t want to dwell on what this would mean for him, but neither could he rid himself of the thought.

  “I told Massimo Bartelli to add my name to the list.”

  “I wish he hadn’t formed that group, Phil.”

  “Do you just want to wait and see what happens?”

  “Not quite. But the Church doesn’t make her decision on the basis of protests.”

  “I hope the cardinal listens to them.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Phil tried to understand Roger’s resignation. He would do what the cardinal asked him to do; that was what motivated Roger. Phil agreed that a priest ought to be a good soldier, but still …

  “You think it’s going to happen, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I doubt it.”

  “Have you heard from Bishop Wilenski?”

  “Two things impressed him when we talked. That the Deveres are parishioners here and that we have Angelo Menotti stained glass windows in the church.”

  “They are nice windows.”

  The Deveres. Of course, they were an affluent family, and generous. It turned out that they had donated the Menotti windows, years ago.

  “Funny thing, Roger. The woman in whose garage the body was found is staying with Susan Devere.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  Phil thought a moment. “I’d have to ask Cy.”

  13

  Years ago when Father Dowling had been taken to the third floor of the Devere mansion for the first time, he had assumed he was bringing the Eucharist to an invalid, but the woman who greeted him with a reverent nod toward the burden he bore looked spry and agile. Jane Devere was neatly dressed, she had a mantilla over her silver-gray hair, and, as Father Dowling approached, she dropped to her knees in a single motion. She received the host devoutly and then withdrew to a prie-dieu under a magnificent picture of the Blessed Virgin, having first waved Father Dowling into the adjoining sunny room, where coffee and rolls awaited him.

  A few minutes later, folding her mantilla and setting it aside, she joined him. “I hope you won’t think it presumptuous if I welcome you to St. Hilary’s, Father.”

  “Your family must have been among the original parishioners.”

  “I believe we were.”

  Once a month or so after that, he brought her communion and they had a little chat over coffee and rolls afterward, but the years passed and Father Dowling did not feel he knew her any better than he had the first time. Until he asked about the picture. “I have always wanted to ask you about the Madonna over your prie-dieu.”

  She actually glowed. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “I don’t recognize it.”

  Her chin dropped to her starched white collar. “You don’t think it’s a copy, I hope.”

  He went closer to examine the canvas. “I can’t read the signature.”

  “Angelo Menotti.”

  With time, Father Dowling’s monthly visits to Jane Devere grew, if not lengthy, longer, but their conversations were quite impersonal, even theoretical. She had a keen interest in Marian apparitions and was angry to hear that there were some in the Church who questioned the fact of purgatory.

  “Nonsense, Father. Haven’t they heard of Fatima?”

  “Or Dante?”

  Her expression changed. “You’re teasing me.”

  Amos had prepared Father Dowling for the old woman’s interest in the law. “I think she could pass the bar, Father. How she picks up the lore I do not know. Understandably, I suppose, she is particularly interested in trusts and wills and inheritance and all the rest, but I once had an extended conversation with her on the law of copyright, and another on benefactions. She showed me an extraordinary document that had been drawn up when August commissioned the stained glass windows for the church. That was before my time, of course. I mean as the family lawyer. What a sense of contingency that old man had.”

  “How so?”

  “You will be interested to learn that ownership of those windows reverts to the Deveres in case of, well, there must have been half a dozen possibilities. Jane told me that she herself had insisted on those.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “Oh, the conversations I have had with Jane Devere,” Amos said with a dreamy smile.

  Father Dowling often envied the old lawyer until he had the uneasy feeling that he might be on the brink of a romantic revelation. After all, both Jane and Amos had lost their spouses.

  “I’ll give you one example. ‘Take a case,’ she said to me. She always began that way. Well, I was to take the case of a family in which a husba
nd fathered a child by a servant girl, a child whose origins were kept a firm secret. It was adopted into the family, not in any legal sense, but under the pretense that it was the betrayed wife’s child. The years pass, and that child has children of its own. They bear the family name, but hovering over them is the shadow of the bar sinister; they derive from a parent who was born on the wrong side of the blanket. Very well, time passes, and somehow the secret is learned. Members of the family whose origins are without blemish take action to disinherit the children of that unfortunate child. What did I think would be the outcome.”

  “What an imagination she has. What answer did you give her?”

  “As we say at my alma mater, I punted. She continued to press me, and I continued to avoid the question. Thank God I have never been confronted with such a problem.”

  Eventually, Jane had put a similar case to Father Dowling as a matter of canon law. Amos had told her of her pastor’s doctorate in that subject. This time it was the case of a wife who concealed from her husband the fact that the baby she bore was not his. The secret was retained throughout their marriage; the husband died; children were born of the child that was the wife’s but not the husband’s. Was illegitimacy transitive? Were the issue of that child conceived in sin tainted with illegitimacy?

  “But the child was hers.”

  “Granted. She marries into a family and of course bears her husband’s name. Her son, too, bears his name. What would be their status, Father?”

  He promised to do research on the subject if she really wanted to know.

  “I do. I do. Some old women knit or do crossword puzzles or simply say their prayers. Conundra like that are my hobby.”

  “I suppose you hear her confession,” Marie said. The housekeeper was resentful of the claim the Deveres had on the pastor, particularly Jane, whom she had never met. The whole Devere family was a kind of blank in Marie’s knowledge of the parish.

  “What if she asked me if I heard yours?”

  Marie became indignant. “What housekeeper would confess to her own pastor? You know I have a Carmelite confessor.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, now you do.”

  The next time he visited Jane he asked her about confession.

  “Oh, Father Felix takes care of that.”

  “Father Felix.”

  “A Franciscan. He was an assistant here before you came and has continued to serve as my confessor. Surely you didn’t think I would receive communion without being in the state of grace.”

  “You’ll forgive my asking, but it is the kind of thing pastors should know.”

  “I am surprised you didn’t ask me earlier. What is the latest news from Bishop Wilenski?”

  “He tells me that the latest list he has prepared for the cardinal does not include St. Hilary.”

  “I’m almost disappointed.”

  “You are?”

  “I was looking forward to a court battle.”

  14

  Amy Gorman was darned if she was going to play the role of duenna, but the constant presence of Fulvio in the house made her feel like a beady-eyed middle-aged woman. It didn’t help that she had often thought how nice it would be if something developed between her Paul and Susan. It had been through Paul that she had met Susan, but soon it seemed to be the mother rather than the son that interested the aspiring young artist of such interesting genealogy. Susan had become a constant visitor after Paul went off to war again.

  “I’m an orphan, you know,” she told Amy.

  Amy had laughed. The famous Devere family made such a claim silly. Even so, not having a mother doubtless did affect Susan, and the girl’s affection was welcome to Amy. God knows she saw little enough of Paul, off in Iraq on a second tour. Did he have a death wish? She was proud of him, though. He was so like his father, who had fallen in an earlier war.

  Fulvio Menotti looked like Michelangelo’s David with clothes on. When Susan told Amy that Fulvio was sitting for her as an artist’s model, doubts had arisen. What a narcissistic occupation. What had happened to the boy who posed for Michelangelo? Amy had rather pointedly remarked that her son was fighting in Iraq.

  “Good for him,” Fulvio said. “I figure that my time in the merchant marine counts.”

  “Merchant marine.”

  “For four years. It’s as bad as being in the navy, but I loved it.”

  What a smile. What a charmer. And a sailor besides. It was on a freighter that made half a dozen unscheduled ports of call and carried a few passengers that he had met Margaret Ward.

  “On a freighter!”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There’s only one class on a freighter, first class.”

  “How long did that trip last?”

  Fulvio thought, working his lips. Amy wanted to reach out and touch them. “Two and a half months.”

  “Margaret Ward was stuck on board that long?”

  “She could have left the ship any number of times if she had wanted to. She said she was on a kind of retreat.”

  “How did you get to know her?”

  “I tripped over her deck chair. She had set it up where she shouldn’t, and I didn’t see it. I helped her get it out of there. She seemed to enjoy being chewed out.”

  “I don’t suppose she gets much of that.”

  “I had no idea who she was until afterward. All we talked about was fiction. She had a suitcase full of New American Library editions. She put me onto The Rise of Silas Lapham. Do you know it?”

  Amy didn’t know the novel. Susan didn’t either.

  “It’s by William Dean Howells.”

  Amy and Susan just looked at him. Then Susan said, “Some kind of right-wing stuff, I suppose.”

  Fulvio laughed. Susan could never prod him into controversy.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t thought of becoming a writer,” Amy said.

  Instead it was sculpture at which Fulvio worked in a corner of Susan’s studio. Amy found herself fascinated by the way he fashioned clay, often not even looking at what he was doing, as if his mind’s eye were on what he intended to shape. When Amy came from the office, Fulvio often joined them for supper, which was junk food sent in if she didn’t get there in time to make a decent meal. It was usually about nine that Fulvio left.

  “Where does he live?” Amy asked Susan.

  “I don’t know. Not with his father. Oil and water. I may offer him your room when you leave.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Leave?”

  “Susan, I know I am taking advantage of your hospitality, but I can’t go back to that house.”

  Susan threw her arms around her. “Stay here, Amy. Sell the darned house. You can never go back there. You shouldn’t.”

  “Would you buy a house that had a murdered woman hanging in its garage?”

  “Who knows what went on in this house before I bought it.”

  “You back in your house yet?” Emil asked. He moved around the office in his chair, since getting all of himself into or out of it was a task.

  “I may sell it.”

  Emil looked at her. “In this market?”

  It had taken all the nerve Amy had to drive her car out of the garage, wondering whose hands had been on the wheel. Why had he left the motor running?

  “Maybe he thought his victim was still alive,” Agnes Lamb had said.

  “What a monster. How I wish you would find him.”

  “So do I.”

  So she remained with Susan, wondering about her relationship with Fulvio.

  Margaret had told Fulvio about her niece and urged him to look up Susan, whom she had described as politically illiterate.

  “I told her we’d make a good pair,” Fulvio said.

  Amy looked at Susan to see what effect this had on her. Apparently none. Maybe with a father as handsome as hers, Susan had gotten used to male beauty. Even so, offering a room to such an Apollo would be the height of imprudence. Not that she could put it that way to S
usan. It would have provided motivation.

  “Do you see your grandfather often?” Amy asked him.

  “He told me I should have stayed in the merchant marine.”

  “He disapproves of your becoming a sculptor?”

  “You wouldn’t want to hear him on what has become of the arts.”

  Susan said, “I think my grandmother Jane had a crush on him.”

  Fulvio grinned. “I think it was mutual.”

  Fulvio’s father was a nature nut who lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He had been an instructor in economics at the University of Chicago, a Milton Friedman fan. Susan groaned.

  “I don’t know anything about economics,” Fulvio said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Why should you? You’re loaded.”

  “This is my first glass of wine,” Susan protested.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  Susan had told Amy of her Franciscan dream, to give it all away and embrace poverty. Did that include the house in Barrington?

  “I have to have a studio.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Susan was determined that she would make it as an artist. If not, she would take up—maybe economics. “I certainly wouldn’t want to just hang around and make a business of the work of others.”

  As it had before, that led to talk about Susan’s bête noire, Carl Borloff, the affected parasite, the alleged expert on religious art. “Everything about religion interests him except faith. The whole thing is aesthetic with him.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Amy had been edified by Susan’s Sunday Mass going. It shamed her back on track herself.

  “Photographs of stained glass windows! Anyone can do it.”

  “Have you tried?”

  For answer, Susan got out her camera and showed the shots she had taken of the windows at St. Hilary’s.

  15

  Carl Borloff was browsing in the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Dirksen Boulevard, checking to see how many of the ten copies of Sacred Art he had on display there were sold. He closed his eyes and prayed as he let his fingers move over the shrink-wrapped copies. Ten! The giant of despair had its feet on his shoulders and was pressing him down. How in the name of heaven could customers resist the magazine? Seen from several paces back, it leapt to Carl’s eye, easily the most aesthetically designed and striking of any of its companions in the rack. Perhaps if he ran naked through the store flourishing a copy attention would be paid. Undeniably, simply having something available for readers, even in such a much visited bookstore as this, was not enough.