by T K Kenyon
Bev raised her eyebrows, and her gaze sharpened. She didn’t seem fuzzily intoxicated at all anymore. “That’s a horrible thought.”
“The answer that they want is that you should drink it, and you should allow others to drink it because you must act as if you do not know what is said in confession, because the seal of confession is sacred, and that our mere corporal lives are far inferior to the sacred nature of the soul and the hereafter. Martyrdom is also encouraged.”
Bev began to waver backward. “You would break the seal of confession?”
“I would not commit suicide, and I would not allow innocents to be murdered.” He shrugged. “I will not be used as a tool of evil.”
“But he confessed!”
“I said that I would give the man the penance of confessing his crime and ensuring that no one drank the wine. If he did not do this, then I would know that he had not been truly contrite, that he was not dreading the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, et cetera, and he had not resolved to confess his sins, do his penance, and avoid the near occasion of sin. Thus, if he did not save everyone from drinking the poison, he had not made a true confession and the sacrament of reconciliation was void, so I was under no obligation to allow the murders to proceed.”
“So you’d break the seal of confession.” She looked horrified, eyebrows down and upper lip contracted, as the old priest had.
“The hypothetical confessing man had not made a true confession, he was not forgiven for his sin, and therefore I was under no onus to act as if he had. Indeed, if I had not hypothetically acted, the sin of murder would have also stained his hypothetical soul.” Again, the debate flared, not intellectual, but righteous. “A priest must not allow himself and the Church to be used as an instrument for evil. If the Devil exists, since the Devil exists, we must not allow the Church to fall into diabolical hands.” It was a variation on Cardinal Newman’s postulate—If God exists, since God exists—a desperate scrambling of belief.
Bev stared at her empty, cream-smeared plate. “It still seems wrong.”
“They felt I was quibbling with the letter and spirit of the law. I was angry that the larger issue, that of true confession, went unremarked upon.”
She looked away and tucked her honey-brown hair behind one pearl-studded ear. “And they think the laity are superstitious.” She shook her head.
“It is why they did not believe the reports of sexual abuse. They are generals discussing strategy of battle, lines of skirmish within semantics of doctrine. Most have not been in a parish for decades. They have been locked in the Roman Curia, debating the nuances of Aramaic words or the order of words as they were written in Latin, investing them, I think, with far more content than remains. They think all the priests are like they are: scholastic, ambitious, political. Since I have been here, working at a parish, which I have not done since my regency, I am astonished at how little the Curia knows about the people of the Church. They don’t remember a normal life. Few of them have had normal lives, since many of them entered the Church when they were fifteen or so. They don’t understand the world, or its pressures, or what children are like.”
Bev shook her head and rested her temple on her hand.
Dante confided, “They thought ‘streetwise youths’ were tempting vulnerable, innocent, naïve priests.”
Bev glared at him. Her alcohol fog had burned away.
The twinge twinkled in Dante’s temple, a reminder of his sleepless nights. “The seminary was designed for right and wrong beliefs. It was easier to be admitted to a seminary if one believes in absolutes or if one is convinced of one’s own partial divinity, meaning if one was emotionally immature or a narcissist. Especially, I have heard, in the States.”
“No.” She shook her head and straightened her silverware to square with the edge of the table, like the careful placement of the Host on the altar.
The flicker in his temple grew insistent, became a sting. “American seminaries were notorious for demanding absolutes, encouraging shallow reasoning, admitting anyone who showed the slightest interest in the priesthood, even men who obviously, in their applications, were repressing their sexuality and attracted to vulnerability. They turned away men who evinced interest in having a family because they thought, rightly, that these men would eventually leave the priesthood. They turned away the normal homosexuals because they proselytize that homosexuality is a sin. Thus, they eliminated normal, heterosexual and homosexual men and admitted those who were hiding their sexuality.” The backs of his legs ached as he repressed pacing.
Dante said and tapped his fingers on the edge of the glass table, “They told the young men that the vow of chastity precluded sex with women. If they did horrible things to a child, that was sinful and they should repent, but it didn’t break their vow of chastity.” He shook his head. “They used to hand out paddles to young men in the seminary to tuck in their shirts, so they would not accidentally touch themselves and be tempted to sin. Insanity.”
Bev grunted, an expulsion of disbelief.
“As a horrible result, the seminaries allowed the self-selection of damaged, childlike men and churned out classes enriched with pedophiles.”
Bev stared, horrified, and yet Dante couldn’t stop talking. It must have been the wine. It must have been the stress and the horror. He said it all, everything in his heart that hurt so much. “These emotionally stunted men were sent to dioceses where they were given the least prestigious duties: altar boys and youth groups. The young priests—impressionable, ignorant—saw the young men in the youth groups experimenting, searching, learning things they themselves should have learned as teenagers, and they identified too strongly with the young men, saw themselves as the leader of the pack, which indicates they were wolves. They established preferences, predilections, habits, and techniques.”
The edge of the table creased Dante’s palm. “In the Vatican, I saw the records, and I told them that these men will continue to commit crimes, that they think of children to be objects or contemporaries.” Dante drummed the edge of the table with his fingers, fingerprinting the glass. “The cardinals believe reflection and hearty sorrow for offences and penance would cure pedophiles. They think it was a sin, not a crime, not a pathology of an incurable disease. Some Vatican administrators and even some counselors believe that some victims harbor ‘loving memories’ of the monsters who raped them, though most psychiatrists realize that those victims suffered from something like Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnapped victims are brainwashed to identify with their captors in order to survive. Transmuting traumatic flashbacks into ‘loving memories’ is a dysfunctional way to reconcile oneself with abuse. It assumes that the child consented, which they could not have, by the very fact that they were a child. If a child thinks that kind of abuse is love, his life is a horror. They can’t feel love. They can’t feel they are loved. They look for more abuse because they are seeking love, and they usually find more abuse.”
Bev held a hank of her oak brown hair, tugging, an unconscious diversion to direct her attention away from what she did not want to confront. She twisted the lock into a shining cord.
Dante said, “Most pedophiles do not even know what they are. They do not develop an aberrant theory of pseudo-theological sexuality, that demonic nymphets strut the earth, searching for their nympholept.” He had read and reread Lolita while studying pedophiles. “Pedophilia has as much to do with homosexuality as rape has to do with heterosexuality. Pedophilia and rape are violent crimes, not a manifestation of sexuality, even when accomplished by persuasion or intimidation rather than overt violence. Primary pedophiles want sex with children, and they do not discriminate against boys or girls. Age is more important than gender. Most pedophiles do not admit to themselves that they are attracted to children. It is only this child, this one here. This child is mature ‘beyond her years.’ I cannot tell you how often I have heard that. It harkens to Victorian child prostitutes, girls who were ‘young in years but old in sin.’ And there
are thousands of pedophiles who are priests. Six percent is a conservative estimate. It is probably higher. At least six percent of priests have sexually abused children.”
“It can’t be,” Bev said. Her eyes were full of horror. “The priests I know are good men.”
“It’s one of our secrets. Six percent.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to ease his headache. “Ninety-four percent of priests are innocent,” he said. “Sixteen priests of seventeen have never harmed a child.” He was reversing himself, flipping his statistics, emphasizing the innocent. He manipulated the numbers for his own reasons, when it suited him, because he was as hypocritical as the rest of the damned Vatican.
Damned was the operative word. If there was a Hell, since there was a Hell, he would see most of the Vatican there with the ragged omission sins gouging their souls.
“You haven’t,” she said, and it might have been a question.
“What?” He opened his eyes and electric blue dots poxed the dining room, smudged over the glass table, the chandelier, and Bev, whose caramel eyes held tears.
“You haven’t hurt a child,” she said.
“Of course not.” His outrage at her accusation of pedophilia was blunted because, after those overwhelming statistics, it was a perfectly logical question from a mother with children in the house. “I do not fit the profile. I entered the seminary when I was twenty-seven after an undergraduate degree, medical school, a residency, a young life, and I have never worked with children before this assignment. In the fifties and sixties, some would-be priests entered ‘minor seminary’ when they were thirteen. It was a boarding school, and they were cut off from their families and girls and the normal world, even movies, even television.”
Bev leaned closer. “Are you gay?”
He shrugged. “No. I am celibate.” He smoothed his pants over his thighs. Shame scoured his face. Since he had taken Holy Orders, anyway, he had been celibate and chaste.
“Sorry.” Bev picked up her dish and the children’s plates. “Didn’t mean to pry. I’m just going to tidy up. Girls!” she called, and the girls’ faces poked around the corner. “Would you entertain Father Dante for a moment?”
Again, they dashed in and each of them grabbed one of his hands and tugged.
At his sister’s in Roma, there was always one extra child dancing around, tugging at his pant leg or latching onto a pinky to propel him where Theresa had decreed.
The girls chattered about the board game they were playing, getting out of jail and retrograde motion.
~~~~~
Conroy’s office door was closed. He typed with two cold fingers.
Beyond his closed door, a door slammed. The rectangle window glowed behind the fried-egg apoptosis poster. Someone had arrived.
He had finished another paragraph when the doorknob turned. Conroy tapped the button for an apoptosis paper he was reviewing and it spread over the grant, hiding it.
Leila opened the door. She was wearing her lab coat buttoned all the way up to her sharp chin. Below the coat’s hem, she wore black slacks and high-heeled boots. “Thought I’d say hi.” She glanced at the screen. “Show me that gel again.”
“Okay.” He popped over to the grant, found the page, and sent it to the printer. The gel had to be good enough to fool a graduate student if it was going to slip by an NIH committee.
The laser printer ground out the pages. Leila looked at the gel and the text around it. She flipped one of the pages over as if she were missing something printed on the back. Her fingernails were the color of good claret. “What the heck is this?”
“New grant,” Conroy said. “New direction. More of an anatomical focus than molecular.”
“Come on, Conroy. We’re spread too thin now. I’m doing viral apoptosis. Danna is studying Schwann cells. Yuri’s doing immunology. Joe is working on the glial wild goose chase. Not to mention the summer of the Yucatan mini-pigs.”
She didn’t see anything odd about the gel. The recently added smudges must have blurred it toward realism. Conroy raised his hands. “No one’s switching projects. This is a whole other grant that I’m applying for.”
The paper wrinkled where she grasped it. She looked ready to throw the pages at his head. “You’ve got nine grants, including two R01’s. We had to buy that sequencer last year to dump an extra hundred grand from an expiring grant. It looks like someone has a shopping addiction around here. How much more money do you need?”
“The focus of the lab should be broadened, more models, more applications.”
She slapped her forehead. “More mice? More chickens? More Yucatan mini-pigs?”
“Humans,” Conroy said and waited for her reaction.
Her jaw dropped and jutted sideways. “We do basic research. We’re not a pharmaceutical company. We can’t file the paperwork for human trials. What’s it called, an IND?”
“Part of this,” Conroy tapped the screen, “is money for a lawyer to do the paperwork.”
Leila rolled the pages into a spanker and slapped her hand. “Our stuff isn’t ready. In my first paper, you added the word ‘suggests’ to every sentence.”
If anyone would understand his ambition and the path to glory, Leila would. “I presented my name to the Med School department chair search committee. It meets next Monday.”
Leila dropped the pages and they scattered on the industrial tile floor. Her eyebrows raised so far that they dragged her eyelids up and white showed all the way around her dark, dark brown irises. “You want to start human trials because you want a God-damned promotion?”
He explained, “And because our data warrants it. In the conclusions of your first paper, we said that the next step was provisional clinical trials.”
She leaned on the computer desk and covered her young, lean face with her hands. “We cannot rip out parts of people’s brains and feed them poison to see if it slows down multiple sclerosis. Inhibiting fatty acid synthesis is contraindicated in people who want to stay alive.”
“We wouldn’t just scale up the mouse protocol, Leila.” She wasn’t seeing the grand scale. “Phase I trials are all do-no-harm. We can do micro-dosing trials. If I get this grant, they’ll give me the department chair. If I were the head of the department, we’d have all kinds of resources, people, residents, funds, equipment. We could do the experiments to get to clinical trials.”
Leila shook her head. “So if you get this grant, then you’ll get this promotion, and then we could utilize the department’s resources to do the stuff in the grant.”
“Yes!” She did understand.
“So it’s okay that you’re lying on this grant, because you might be able to make it true.”
“I’m not lying.” She might have figured out the faked gel.
She stabbed the printing pages with her finger, pinning them to the printer tray, “You’re relying on a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“If you want to engage in wordplay, I suppose you could call it that.” Conroy examined his fingernails, which were rimmed with powder from latex gloves.
“What is killing your mice, and what is growing in your cells? It doesn’t even look like Yuri’s research. The CPE is wrong.”
He picked up the pages from the floor and berated himself for letting her ever see the cells’ cytopathic effect. She hadn’t picked up on the gel, however. The gel did look more realistic with smudges. He had even managed a partial fingerprint, clipped and pasted from another gel. It might be his own. “You didn’t touch those mice or cells, did you?”
She said, “I just hope it’s not pathogenic. Your aseptic technique looks like a toddler in a bathtub.” She slammed his office door behind her.
No one understood him. Not his wife, not his mistress, not even his casual fuck.
Leila should have understood. She should have appreciated the way the keys slipped into the lock, becoming the next key that would open the next door.
Leila should have appreciated the way he casually fucked the system.
~~~~~
Bev washed dishes while Father Dante played board games with her children. The cast iron skillet thumped the rubber mat under the hot water. She kept the white kitchen bi-fold doors open, watching the priest and her daughters in the living room.
Six percent, at least six percent.
If one out of every seventeen cars randomly exploded, the lawsuits would drive every car manufacturer out of business.
If six percent of dogs were rabid, people would shoot dogs on sight.
And yet, there were worse statistics.
Cigarette smoking kills two out of three smokers due either to cancer, heart disease, or stroke. If you drive ten miles to buy a lottery ticket, your chance of dying in a car accident is fourteen times greater than your chance of winning the lottery.
Statistics lie.
Women bear 1.8 children in their lifetimes.
One out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
When the good china was soaking, Bev noticed that it was five minutes past the girls’ regular bedtime and called though the doorway, “Girls! Time to go upstairs!”
Protestations ensued: they weren’t tired, they hadn’t finished their game, and Father Dante wanted them to finish their game.
Father Dante cleared his throat. “Indeed, it appears that I was about to be beaten, rather badly. The game should end in a few moments.”
“All right,” Bev relented.
They played quickly. Dante miscounted his moves twice, but Dinah wasn’t going to correct him because he landed on her property and had to pony up his railroad, which meant that she owned all four, then Dinah landed on an overbuilt street, and Dinah had to turn it all over to Christine.
The girls went upstairs without further ado.
Bev sat at the other end of the couch from Dante. Wine made her legs heavy.
Dante’s black shirt and Roman collar seemed predatory now, like a vampire’s cape.