by J.F. Powers
“You should’ve called the Chancery, Father.”
“I told you why I didn’t.”
“After I came, I mean.”
Slowly, Joe brought the glass down from his mouth. “You mean that?”
Bill looked as though he did.
“Use your nut, Bill. Put yourself in my place. Would you call up the Chancery to find out your curate’s name—after you’d met him?” Joe shook his head, trying to understand what Bill could have been thinking. “You think just because it was all Toohey’s fault, he wouldn’t talk? It’d be all over the diocese and beyond. Father Felix would hear about it at the monastery. ‘Hear the one about Joe Hackett?’ The joke would be on me. On us. So, for God’s sake, keep this thing under your hat.”
“You should’ve just asked me.”
“Yeah? When? A couple of hours after we met? The next day? This morning? What would you have thought if I had?”
“I don’t know, but it would’ve been better than this.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know it would be like this. I was trying to save us both embarrassment. I didn’t want you to think what you would’ve—of me, of the Church, of yourself. I didn’t want you to think you didn’t matter, Bill. And I don’t want you to think that now. So don’t. This is all Toohey’s fault. God help the diocese if they don’t make a bishop of him pretty soon. He’s doing untold harm where he is now. But I guess I don’t have to tell you that, now.”
“You think he’ll be a bishop?”
“Odds on. Oh, not here. Some two-bit see. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before this. I don’t think the Arch likes him.”
“So what did you do?”
Joe was silent, thinking. They were back where they’d started, back to the phone call—it seemed unimportant now, after the embarrassing revelations. “I called someone.”
“Who?”
The waitress moved in with the check and was, for some reason, about to drop it on Bill’s side of the table.
“I’ll take that,” Joe said, annoyed with her.
“Who?”
“Look, Bill,” Joe said, annoyed with him. “I’ve told you what I can—why and how this thing happened. Believe me, it wasn’t easy.”
“I realize that, Father.”
“I’m damned glad to know your name, but I’m not about to say who told me. It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I did, but to me it would. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you, Father.”
“You don’t? Well, thanks. I can see how you might.” Joe dropped some bills on the check, leaving more of a tip than he might have, in case the waitress was a Catholic or a non-Catholic, and swiftly departed, Bill following him.
15. THEREAFTER
JOE STILL HAD to do practically everything—all the accounts and correspondence—and he also had to think of jobs that Bill could do, quite a job. The future looked brighter, though, with Bill making good progress in his typing. Well, fairly good progress. He had turned against his manual, his records, even his phonograph—which at first, at the end of the business day, he’d lugged up to his room to play folk (in Joe’s lexicon, “folks”), work, and protest songs on, but now, thank God, left down in his office. Bill was sweating it out these days, but so was Joe, and, really, Bill couldn’t complain. It wasn’t all business in the office area. With the door open between them, pastor and curate could carry on desk-to-desk conversation, and if the flow was more one way than the other, that was because there was so much Bill didn’t know about practically everything—procedure and policy, the parish and the community, and the world in general. Here too, Joe did what he could for Bill, mining a dozen periodicals that crossed his desk and passing them on with articles marked “Read” or “Skip.” Sometimes Joe would go over to Bill’s house just to smoke a baby cigar with him. And sometimes, Joe would put on his hat and say in the cawing voice of Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (to whom Joe knew he bore a growing resemblance), “Knock it off, kid.” Bill would cover his typewriter (Joe was strict about that, as he was about not leaving the toilet seat up in Bill’s lavatory) and off they’d go in Joe’s car, the radio tuned to an FM music station for Bill. They had called at a number of rectories on business that could have been handled over the phone but wasn’t because Joe enjoyed being seen with his curate—a pleasure he’d had to deny himself until he learned his curate’s name. They had dropped in on a few parishioners, including the Gurriers—Bill enjoyed small talk, Joe didn’t. At first, maybe after a visit to the hospital or the garage (in Bill’s little car to bail out Joe’s car, a habitual offender), they’d had a meal somewhere and gone on to box seats at the stadium—until it became clear to Joe that Bill, though he’d played in the outfield on his high school team and pitched in relief, was not greatly interested in the national game. One evening, at Bill’s instigation, they had taken in a lousy foreign movie, after which Joe had stopped at a drugstore for aspirin and then, with the idea of keeping in shape, had bought a couple of catcher’s mitts and a regulation ball. Now, when free in the evenings, they went out in the yard and pitched to each other. Bill had a honey of a fast ball, but Joe could hold him—better than Bill could hold Joe, who threw what is known as a heavy ball and was rather wild. Joe’s change-up too was deceptive—as it was at such times in conversation. “You can say what you like about the Redemptorists, Bill, but don’t forget St Alphonsus Liguori is a Doctor of the Church. You wouldn’t remember Gomez. Tall like you, but frail. World of speed. With the Yanks.” Sometimes the ball, streaking back and forth between them, going pop in Joe’s mitt, plunk in Bill’s, took part in their discussions, siding with the one who threw it last. Pop. “Get that junk off to Africa, Bill.” Plunk. Joe hadn’t realized, when he gave Bill permission to respond in a quiet way (nothing from the pulpit) to an appeal from an off-brand order of bearded missionaries for reading matter, T-shirts, and any spare change that might be lying around the house (toward the purchase of a “milch cow”), that parishioners would be involved to the extent they had, that Duz and Dash cartons would pile up in the office area. “Junk? No, you’re right. We could and should be doing a lot more.” Pop. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Bill. Another operation like this and . . .” Plunk. “And what?” Pop. “And parishioners’ll wonder what they’re being protected from.” Plunk. “Protected from!” Pop. “Under our system.” Plunk. “Our system!” Pop. “Your bearded friends have their system. We have ours.” Plunk. “So?” Pop. “They’ll get their cow.” Plunk. “So?” Pop. “I’m not so sure we will.” Plunk. After they retired to the rectory—because of the failing light—and after a bath (Joe) and a shower (Bill), they might continue their discussion in the pastor’s study, as they had that night, Joe in the end prevailing but contributing a twenty toward the purchase of the milch cow. Most of their evenings were spent together in the pastor’s study, with drinks, TV if the Twins were playing away from home (but with the sound turned down), and good talk. Well, fairly good talk. Little interest was shown when Joe spoke of the remarkable personalities at the seminary during his era, and likewise when Bill spoke of his trials there, of piddling causes that already sounded like ancient history. Bill could say the usual things about the late Pope John, and about the present pope, but he couldn’t discuss Frank Sinatra (“the Chairman of the Board”) or Senator Dirksen (“the Wizard of Ooze”), and he hadn’t even heard of figures like Fishbait Miller (the colorful doorkeeper of the House) and Nancy Dickerson (of all the media people, perhaps the one nearest and dearest to the President). Large, fertile areas of conversation—Capitol Hill, show business, sports—had therefore been abandoned. But what made the likeliest subjects unrewarding—the difference between Joe and Bill—was what kept them going when they got onto religion. Bill talked up the changes in the liturgy, lay participation, ecumenism, and so on, and Joe didn’t. Bill claimed that religion had hit bottom in our time and had no place to go but up, and Joe questioned both statements. Bill said that religion (though not perhaps as we know it) was the
coming thing, and that the clergy (though not perhaps as we know them) were the coming men. “Fuzzy thinking, Pollyanna stuff,” Joe said, and advised Bill to stop reading Teilhard de Chardin (who—did Bill know?—had got a bang out of the Bomb) and other unpronounceables. So Joe was inclined to be bearish, and Bill bullish, about the future. As for the present, Joe could understand how Bill might be unhappy in his work, considering the satisfactions there were, or were said to be, in the priesthood—which, unfortunately, was not what it was cracked up to be in the seminary and not what you chose to make it. “Still, I’m sorry you don’t like it here.” “I like it all right.” “But hoped for something better?” “Not better. Different.” “Like what?” “I taught catechism at Holy Cross last summer.” “So you know Al.” (Al Fresco, not a friend, not an enemy, but also not a man to whom Joe was indifferent, was pastor at Holy Cross, a slum parish.) “I’m told he eats beans out of the can. O.K. I can see why you might want to go there, but what made you think you might?” “Father just told me he’d do what he could.” “Probably meant he’d pray for you.” Oh, Joe could see how it might be fine for the poor to have somebody like Bill ministering to their spiritual needs and confiscating switchblades on the side, but why should a young man who’d more or less forsaken everything have the privilege of dealing with the world, the flesh, and the devil on his own terms? Might it not be better for another, one not so eager to share their lot, to go among the poor? Might it not be better for one like Bill to go to a place like Inglenook? These things didn’t just happen. (Or why had Joe been sent first to Van and then to Catholic Charities?) “Or is this Fruchtenberg”—one of Bill’s classmates—“happy at Holy Cross?” “He thought he’d be studying abroad. He’s a brain.” “Well, there you are.” If Bill and Fruchtenberg had expected to labor in certain parts of the vineyard, and not in others, then they should have said so and saved the diocese the expense of educating them—and maybe the mistake of ordaining them if, later on, they jumped ship, as so many were doing these days. “Bill, when you sign on this ship, you don’t get out and swim, or try to walk on the water, because you think you should be doing more. You stay put. You do what little you can. You work on yourself.” If Bill felt, as he said, thwarted and useless at SS Francis and Clare’s—well, that was how men in slum parishes felt, probably Al too, if the truth were known. The truth was Bill had got what he wanted—a tough assignment, without the romantic props of a slum parish, bums, pigeons, and so on. “This is a big old ship, Bill. She creaks, she rocks, she rolls, and at times she makes you want to throw up. But she gets where she’s going. Always has, always will, until the end of time. With or without you.” “Man the lifeboats.” “Wrong again, Bill. No lifeboats on this ship—none needed.” “What would St Francis think of a parish like this?” “From what we know of him, I’m not sure he could hack it in a parish like this. But why do you ask? You might as well ask what Moses would think of space travel. Our means may be different, Bill, but the end’s the same.” “We spill our seed on the ground.” “That so?” “I mean we waste our substance in spurious activity.” “I got you the first time.” “Suburban parishes are all the same.” “They all have money problems, if that’s what you mean.” “Things like finance and construction shouldn’t concern us at all. Or at least not as much.” “Turn it over to the laity, huh? That’s the answer to everything nowadays. Turn it over to the laity.” “Why not?” “Let ’em waste their substance?” “It wouldn’t be the same for them.” “Ho, ho.” Sometimes Bill forgot himself and talked like the bad old clergy of dark, preconciliar times. “Look, Bill. We may be men apart and all that, but we still have to pay our way like everybody else. By the sweat of our brow, by doing things we don’t want to do—like raising money. That’s one of my jobs here. I don’t ask the laity to do it. I don’t even ask you. Look. This—all this—isn’t my idea of the priesthood. But this is how it is, Bill, and how it’s going to be. This is it, Bill—the future. I’m sorry.” “I don’t believe it.” “You’d better, Bill. Al Fresco’s living in the past. The corporal works of mercy have had it.” “In this country maybe.” “What’d you have in mind—Latin America?” “Well, I didn’t.” “What’s your answer, Bill?” “You know I don’t have one for a parish like this.” “Well, there you are. For a parish like this, it’s either yackety-yack about money all the time, or a system of some kind. The old nickel-and-dime days are over. (When I need repairs I know it’s going to hurt, and if I weren’t practically a master plumber and master everything else I’d get taken more often than not.) I have no choice. Pastors who think they can go along like the lilies of the field that toil not and neither do they spin—they find out differently. They find themselves out in the sticks.” “Maybe that’s better than this.” “I wouldn’t know. I do know one of the men from my class asked for and got a country parish. He couldn’t stand the money worries in the city, he thought, and now he’s collecting scrap iron to make ends meet. Farmers bring him their old rusty wheels. He doesn’t find it any easier, I understand.” “‘Easier’ isn’t what I want.” “‘Easier’ isn’t what you’ve got.” Naturally, Bill was finding it hard to adjust to reality after living in the rarefied atmosphere of the seminary. A slight case of the bends. That was all. Or was it? “Pride, Bill.” “Pride?” “Pride. You look down your nose at people out here because they aren’t poor. They aren’t poor enough, good enough, or maybe bad enough, to have you for a priest. Pride, Bill.” All the same, Bill seemed to get along with them well enough. One evening at a cookout at Brad’s place, after Joe said they had to be going, Bill wouldn’t go, continued to sing along and play lead guitar around the campfire, and Joe had to drive home alone—a bad moment in the pastor-curate relationship. Late at night, in the pastor’s study, Joe still accused Bill of looking down his nose at the parishioners because they weren’t derelicts or great sinners, calling him an apostolic snob and a dreamer. In that connection, Joe had noticed that Bill had a faraway look in his eyes and had a head like a violin. Dreamers hadn’t been so common in the Church back when he’d been one himself, hadn’t constituted a working majority then, Joe was saying one night, when a picture of Rudolf Hess, the old Nazi, once Hitler’s right-hand man and chosen successor, appeared on the TV screen, and Joe noticed that Hess had a head like a violin. Joe was beginning to develop his thesis, saying the fact that Hess had flown to Scotland in the hope of stopping the war, a war that still had years to run, certainly proved the man was a dreamer, when Bill interrupted: “The fact that you’ve got a head like a banjo, Father—what’s that prove?” Well, Joe had tried not to show it, had smiled, but he’d been hurt—a bad moment in the pastor-curate relationship. On the whole, though, they were getting along. There were nights, yes, when Bill had to be called more than once before he came out of his room, before he left off strumming his guitar, listening to FM, or talking to his friends on the phone. There were nights too, when Bill returned to his room earlier than Joe would have liked, when Joe had maybe had one too many . . . The truth was these weren’t the nights that Joe had looked forward to during his years as a pastor without a curate . . . and still they weren’t bad nights, by rectory standards nowadays. There had been some fairly good talk—arguments, really, ending sometimes with one man making a final point outside the other man’s door, or, after they’d both gone to bed, over the phone. “Bill? Joe.” And there had been moments, a few, when the manifest differences of age, position, and outlook between pastor and curate had just disappeared, when Joe and Bill had entered that rather exalted and somewhat relaxed state, induced in part perhaps by drink, that Joe recognized as priestly fellowship. One of the best things about the priesthood, he had been told in the seminary, is other priests—priestly fellowship. The words had sounded corny to Joe at the time, but he had believed in the idea behind them and he still did. For years, though, he hadn’t had room in his life for those who should have been and would now be his intimates. Pursuing his building program as he had, he had been forced to associa
te almost exclusively with the laity—he wanted more from life now. And the truth was he wasn’t getting it where he kept looking for it—under his own roof. Late one night, feeling content but also wondering if he couldn’t do better, he invited Bill to have a friend or two in for a meal sometime, soon.
16. PRIESTLY FELLOWSHIP
WHEN JOE DISCOVERED that surplus sod couldn’t be returned for credit, he had put it down alongside the church, over the so-called flower beds—petunias, just a lot of dirt, really. And now he could walk in what shade there was during the last Mass on Sunday, read his office, and keep an eye on the parking lot. “The story is told . . .” And when the church windows were open, he could catch the sermon. He had heard Bill earlier, and now Father Felix was on. “Troubled by poor Mass attendance in one of his villages, the old duke, traveling incognito, wearing an overcoat, or cloak, buttoned up to his chin, arrived at the village in question just as the church bells were summoning the faithful to worship, yes, and just as the others were sitting down to a long table in the bar, or Keller, of the inn, or Gasthaus, where the old duke, tipped off by the local clergy, had known he’d find them at that hour. Asked to join them at the table—little did they know—the old duke seated himself beside what appeared to be the leader, an imposing individual, before whom was set an enormous jorum, or basin, of brandy, or schnapps, but with no ladle, glasses, cups, or steins. You see, at that time, in the Duchy of Brunswick, or Braunschweig, now part of Germany, it was the custom for friendly groups to drink from the same receptacle, in this case a jorum, or basin—a good idea, rightly understood, in that it made for communitas, or community, but in this case, of course, no, far from it. Well, after taking a big swallow from the jorum, or basin, the leader handed it to the old duke, saying, as was the custom, ‘Pass that to thy neighbor.’ The old duke did as directed (after only pretending to take a swallow), saying, as was the custom, ‘Pass that to thy neighbor.’ In due course, the jorum, or basin, came back to the first man, the leader, an imposing individual, who sent it on its way again, after taking a swallow, another big one. Again, the old duke only pretended to drink. And so it went, the jorum, or basin, going round and round the table until, finally, the old duke, furious, unbuttoning his overcoat, or cloak, and thus revealing his well-known uniform and insignia to the company, struck the leader with all his might, saying, ‘Pass that to thy neighbor! And let thee beware and likewise any other here who striketh not his neighbor with all his might, for I will make an example of him and thee!’ Well, the old duke’s word was law, and blows fell hard and fast (none, of course, on the old duke) all around the table. Bim! Bam! Pow! At length, the old duke was satisfied with the penance he’d exacted (with good reason, need I say?) and departed for his castle, or Schloss. On the following Sunday, my good people, and on all the following Sundays in the old duke’s lifetime, in that village, and in villages throughout his realm, attendance at Mass, it is said, and also at Vespers, was one hundred percent.”