Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  Incredibly, within a week his faith was wholly gone. He saw Phyllis at every opportunity; they exchanged tales of those who had left, nuns, priests. How easy it seemed. They were both young; there was still time for another life. They began to fantasize about California.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  In answer he showed her the keys to the car and the Order’s credit card. It was as if the decision had already been made by his blood.

  At thirty-eight thousand feet he relived it all, and it was as if for the first time he dared think about it, review the steps, see himself as if from some great height. He had two opposed sets of criteria with which to judge himself: those he had acquired during the years of study for the priesthood—the prayers, the conferences, the advice of directors—on the one hand, and on the other those he had adopted with Phyllis. He was condemned by the one set and exonerated, even liberated, by the second. Flying across the country he was returning to the setting where the condemning criteria seemed to have their habitat, where his father awaited him, dead or alive, and the family that must regard him as a traitor.

  The pilot began to draw their attention to the scenery over which they were passing, a tour bus guide. Those on the right of the aircraft could see below them the Grand Canyon; later those on the left could see where the mountains gave way to plains. A jolly mindless voice dedicated to making their trip more enjoyable. Raymond would have given anything to be back in Thousand Oaks sparring with Phyllis about Julia. The final hour was the worst as they slowly descended toward O’Hare and the city came into view and rose slowly to meet them. He had the feeling that he had left a Technicolor world and was reentering a world of black and white.

  8

  In any profession there are bottom feeders, lowly creatures who live off the leavings of those in the water above them. Doubtless there is often resentment down there at the bottom of the tank, but among the lowly are some who are happy to be in the tank at all. Such was Tuttle’s position, and attitude, in the legal profession of Fox River, Illinois. His path through law school had not been easy, though he had attended the Calhoun & Webster School of Law, not the most eminent institution of legal instruction in the Midwest. On the other hand, admission was largely a matter of paying the fees. Tuttle’s father brought him to class the first evening, riding the bus with him from the South Side and hugging him proudly before he passed through the portals of the school, in fact a revolving door that resisted the shoulder and made entrance a hard-won success every time. There were tears in Tuttle senior’s eyes. He himself had dreamt of being a lawyer, but it was not to be. He had shuffled through his mail route in those years before carriers were equipped with vehicles, mace, and seasonal uniforms. But the pension was a godsend, enabling Tuttle senior to send his son through Calhoun & Webster. Although it was a night school, Tuttle studied all day long, living at home, the saving realized more than offsetting the daily carfare to class. The law had not come easily to Tuttle. But when he flunked a course, he simply took it over again and either that time or the next passed. He flunked many courses. In a sense, he might have been called the most thoroughly educated lawyer in the region. His father’s support had never wavered. When Tuttle himself grew despondent, his father was there to cheer him on. Eventually, he graduated and gladdened his father’s heart that his son was now indeed a Bachelor of Law. That gladdened heart soon gave out as if the goal being reached he now could lay his burden down.

  Tuttle opened law offices in Fox River, hoping to find less competition in the little town to the west of Chicago but part of the greater metropolitan area. He had lettered on his door Tuttle & Tuttle in commemoration of his father. Few Chinese could rival Tuttle’s ancestor worship. The memory of his father could bring a tear to his eye, and a day did not go by that, prompted by the name of the firm, he did not breathe an Ave for his father. Fox River proved to be rife with lawyers, as what town is not, and Tuttle carved a place for himself slowly. He would not touch divorce cases, this scruple inherited from his father and honored unquestioningly. Besides, divorces were notoriously messy. Hanging around the courthouse, drinking the vile but free coffee in the pressroom, making acquaintances if not friends with the resentful members of the media, he also formed a real friendship with Peanuts Pianone, a police officer who owed his appointment to the influence of his family, in several senses of the term, and who spent the day napping in various places about the courthouse. Peanuts would never have made the force on the basis of an examination; there was one school of thought that claimed he could not read—false—and Captain Keegan, when asked, said that Peanuts was on a roving assignment. He and Tuttle roved together, and from time to time a client came Tuttle’s way, some poor devil helpless in the municipal court and ripe for representation. Occasionally bigger things came to Tuttle, but he was ever on the qui vive for his main chance.

  When Professor Cassirer called Tuttle’s office he and Peanuts were enjoying fried rice and chicken wings. It was their pleasure to have such snacks brought to the offices of Tuttle & Tuttle, a pleasure less frequent now that Hazel had established herself as his secretary, but today she was indisposed and home with the flu. The office was a fourth-floor walk-up in a non-air-conditioned building that had somehow survived urban renewal. The rent was risible, and the manager not a stickler for timely payment. Tuttle was masticating noisily when he answered the phone.

  “My name is Cassirer. I am a professor at St. Edmund’s, and I am seeking legal representation.”

  Tuttle suppressed a chuckle, assuming that Tetzel in the pressroom was playing a practical joke.

  “Who recommended you?”

  “The yellow pages. I chose your name by the Sortes Virgilianae . I would like an appointment.”

  Something told Tuttle this was not a prank. He looked around his office. No need to ask how it would seem to Cassirer.

  “As it happens I have business near St. Edmund’s. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “I am. Do you know the student center?”

  “I will find it. Two o’clock?”

  “Wonderful. How will I know you?”

  “I will be wearing a tweed hat. Irish tweed.”

  He hung up, tilted that tweed hat to a more rakish angle, and looked at Peanuts. “A client.”

  “Too bad.”

  Peanuts assumed that he avoided business the way Peanuts avoided police work. But Peanuts was on salary.

  “Do you have a car?”

  “I can get one.”

  “On second thought, I’ll take mine.” Arrival in a squad car might send the wrong signal to Cassirer. “Give me a few bucks for gas.”

  “I paid for the Chinese.”

  Tuttle flourished a piece of paper. “I am keeping exact records. My ship may be about to come in.”

  “What ship?”

  “A manner of speaking.”

  No time to expand Peanut’s command of the King’s English. Tuttle was a stranger to professional optimism, fish regularly slipped his net, but the call from Cassirer was different. His thoughts lifted to his sainted father, whom he had consulted about continuing the ad in the yellow pages. The saving that cancellation promised had its attractions in this time of drought, but the paternal voice had suggested keeping the ad. He could take it out of the rent money.

  He found the student center, and Cassirer found him, confronting him as if about to demand his I.D.

  “Tuttle?”

  “Cassirer?”

  They shook hands. “You’re young to be a professor, aren’t you?” The beard was clearly an effort to add gravitas, but it gave him a mad-bomber look.

  “I have always been precocious.”

  Cassirer led the way to a cafeteria and pushed a tray along as he impressed on Tuttle the utter confidentiality of what he wished to discuss. Once mugs of coffee were on the tray and Tuttle had made a half-hearted attempt to pay, Cassirer led him to a table for two in a far corner.

  “How much do you know about academic tenure?”
>
  That quickly, the moment of truth. “Tell me about it.”

  A stroke of genius that, as Cassirer was primed on all occasions to lecture. It was a trait that would enable Tuttle to seal their relationship. Cassirer assumed that Tuttle knew what Cassirer knew, and since the young man did all the talking this fiction was sustained. Cassirer laid a copy of the faculty manual on the table.

  “You will want to study that. The usual way is for people to wait until they have been turned down for tenure and then sue. I plan a preemptive strike. Of course my job is good for another year whether or not I am granted tenure, so the risk of suing after the fact is less, but I cannot be passive in this matter. You probably have heard of Foucault.”

  He heard of him then. Gradually Tuttle discerned that Cassirer was not speaking of a Chinese friend. Tuttle nodded through the unintelligible narration, which led finally to the heart of the matter. Cassirer had put himself forward for tenure before the stated time, and he was now sure he would be turned down.

  “This will be a monumental injustice. I have means of learning what goes on in the committee. I have identified my principal enemy.” He leaned forward and mouthed a name. They he said it audibly. “Andrew Bernardo.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I want to sue Bernardo, the dean, and the provost. Their names are in the manual. The sooner we file the better.”

  “You want to sue on the basis of what you have learned about the committee’s proceedings?”

  “It sounds weak when you put it like that. I don’t have to tell you this, but the lawsuit is a means of putting pressure on them. Of course they will want to avoid court and wish to settle. Usually that means money. I am not interested in their money.”

  “Payment of money is a powerful admission of guilt.

  “Oh, I’d take it. But what I want is tenure now.”

  “You must really like this place.”

  “I hate it. It is a monument to mediocrity.” He pushed a copy of a newspaper across the table. “There is a piece of mine in the student paper you will want to read. The orchestration of response to my article is a public matter. Of course Bernardo was behind it.”

  “What’s his motive?”

  “Jealousy. I tell you frankly that I am both the youngest and the most distinguished member of my department. For me to be denied tenure would be a crime against the intellect.”

  So phrased, there was no local, state, or federal statute that covered the crime. But Tuttle knew that he was on to something. Rumors, newspaper stories, bits of information gathered from God knew where had acquainted Tuttle with the litigious atmosphere on college and university campuses.

  “It would help if I could meet Andrew Bernardo.”

  “Good! Stop by his office. Shake him up. I want them to know I mean business.”

  And so Tuttle had visited Andrew Bernardo in his office, where a whirring machine made everyone speak in a high voice. Foster, his officemate, was a genial sort, reminiscent of Peanuts, and Tuttle liked Andrew as he had not warmed to his client. Cassirer was someone who would put mother love to a trial. Tuttle had met his share of egoists, but most of them were in the pressroom and their self-estimate was at variance with general opinion. Cassirer, he was sure, was as good as he said he was, but the fact that he kept saying it was off-putting. Andrew on the other hand was affable, diffident, more like Tuttle’s notion of a professor. And the son of Fulvio Bernardo.

  The imminent death of the young man’s father appealed to all Tuttle’s devotion to his own, and he felt a genuine sympathy for him. And there came to him the conviction that this campus was a fertile field for his talents. He would study the faculty manual, he would become an expert in academic procedures, and he would make his name known so that the disgruntled would find their way to his door.

  9

  Death, judgment, heaven, and hell—The Four Last Things—how they pressed on Father Dowling’s mind as he drove away from the hospital. Cronin, the hospital chaplain, a stolid humorless man whose life was lived in the misery of others, had not filled Father Dowling with confidence. Cronin’s thinning hair was cut close to his domed head, and he listened to the account of Fulvio Bernardo’s refusal to see a priest with no visible emotion.

  “It happens all the time.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Pray that they come around. Some do. You have to realize that they are usually drugged or in pain, either way not the best circumstances to think clearly. People are what they are by the time they come here. Deathbed conversions you can count on one hand.”

  “You’ll talk to him?”

  “But will he listen?”

  Driving to the rectory, he prayed for the old man. The defection of his son the priest was at the bottom of it according to Jessica, and he was on his way from California. Father Dowling prayed for Raymond too, wondering what he could possibly say to his dying father.

  That evening he was having dinner with Amos Cadbury at the University Club in the Loop and was unsure he would be good company for the lawyer because of the events of the day.

  “Eleanor Wygant tells me she has been to see you,” Amos said.

  Father Dowling smiled. “I should have guessed you would know her.”

  “Her late husband, or I should say her latest husband, Alfred Wygant, was a dear friend.” Amos frowned over his glass of Barolo. “His death came as a decided shock to me.”

  “And when did you see Eleanor?”

  “Just yesterday. I look after her affairs, and she stopped by the office. Widows like to fuss about their holdings.”

  “Is she comfortable?”

  “Oh yes.” Another frown, a sip of Barolo. “Not as comfortable as she might have been, but no need to worry. I oversee her investments, and the market has been good to her.”

  “I saw her today at the hospital.”

  “The hospital!”

  “I suppose you know Fulvio Bernardo? He has been in intensive care.” Father Dowling told the lawyer of Bernardo’s stroke.

  “And of course Eleanor would be there. Her first husband was Fulvio’s brother. The Bernardos continue to be her family. She had no children by either marriage, poor thing. Is it serious?”

  “Very.”

  “God bless him.”

  Something in Amos’s tone caught Father Dowling’s attention. “That sounds grudging.”

  “Then God forgive me. I never really liked the man but de mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Amos’s Notre Dame education often put in such an appearance.

  “Oh, he isn’t dead yet. I called the hospital before coming here and learned that he had been transferred out of intensive care.”

  “One of the Bernardos was a priest.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Have they informed him?”

  “He is on his way from California.”

  “This is exceptionally good wine.”

  “I gather he wasn’t diocesan.”

  “Oh no. An Edmundite. The Order of St. Edmund. They are said to be an old order, not quite medieval, but they have never amounted to much in this country. St. Edmund College was founded by them.”

  There are many contingencies in any vocation, one of the main ones being the priest who first discerns that a boy may be destined for the priesthood, in Raymond’s case an Edmundite named Bourke.

  “Father Bourke is still alive, a veritable patriarch.” Amos sighed. “Think of what a man that age has had to witness.” The remark might have been autobiographical. “In any case, he was the reason young Raymond opted for the Order of St. Edmund. His departure was a surprise and a shock. I’m on the board there, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “For my sins. It is a sad thing to see the way we have dismantled our own institutions. I stay on to slow the process, not very effectively, I am afraid.”

  “I know the college is there, of course, but little else about it.”

  Amos over brandy developed the pathology of the onc
e Catholic college. The Second Vatican Council, providential as it no doubt was, had effects it could scarcely have envisaged. The urge to renew and update—aggiornamento—was taken by many to be an invitation to jettison the past. The Edmundites, whatever their lack of success in the country at large, had flourished in the Chicago area. Their seminary was on the grounds of the college; indeed the college was in its way an outgrowth of the seminary, thought of at first largely as a source of new vocations but soon opened to young men at large. The curriculum expanded, accreditation was won, the faculty enlarged. In the wake of the Council it was the college that wagged the tail of the Edmundites, soon eclipsing all else. And becoming increasingly secular.

  “Priests became rarer and rarer on the faculty, lay professors were hired, soon the standards for hiring became increasingly like those of any secular college. Today it boasts of its academic excellence, and in a sense this is justified, but at what an expense has it been bought. Raymond Bernardo was not the only Edmundite priest to abandon his calling. There was for a time a hemorrhage. It seemed to have subsided, and then he left, a blow to Father Bourke. The seminary was closed years ago.”