by J.F. Powers
The Bishop said nothing.
As if he’d settled that matter, Monsignor Holstein moved on to the next one. How did the Bishop feel about relocating the big cross in the cemetery so that it would be visible from the new highway? “John, wouldn’t it be fine if, next summer, people driving north on their vacations could see the cross?” Then, not mentioning the argument he’d had with Father Rapp, although Father Rapp was present now, riding up in front with Father Gau, Monsignor Holstein got onto the spelling of “godlessness.” He said he could see how the word, under special circumstances, might not be capitalized. A heathen of no faith at all—and there were many such in ancient Rome, by all accounts—might be said to be godless as well as Godless. “But, of course, when we use the word, we don’t mean anything like that, do we? I don’t know whether I make myself clear or not.”
Father Gau and Father Rapp, no longer conversing, seemed to be listening for the Bishop’s response. It was the Bishop, after all, who had said, “Don’t capitalize it.” Later, the Bishop had checked the dictionary and found himself right, but as he saw it now the dictionary was wrong. He said nothing.
Father Gau glanced around and, smiling, said, “How would you spell ‘atheism,’ Monsignor? With a capital ‘T’?”
By tradition in the diocese of Ostergothenburg, whoever became chancellor had to be a good, safe driver. Always before, with his long confirmation trips in mind, the Bishop had taken a young man a few years out of the seminary—a practice that might have been criticized more if the diocese hadn’t enjoyed the services of a very able, though aging, bishop and a strong vicar-general. For a number of years, Monsignor Holstein had had a lot to say about who should be chancellor, but Father Gau had been the Bishop’s own choice for the job. He had come to it at the ripe old age of forty, after years spent entirely in rural parishes, ultimately as pastor in Grasshopper Lake, a little place that hadn’t been much in the news until he went there—until, to be more exact, Father Rapp, a classmate of Father Gau’s, took over as editor (and photographer) of the diocesan paper.
In May, on a confirmation trip to Grasshopper Lake, the Bishop had had a chance to see some of the wayside shrines he’d been reading about (and seen pictures of). They weren’t as close to the road as he would have liked them, but Minnesota wasn’t Austria, and the highway department had to have its clearance. The figurines in the shrines were perhaps too much alike, as if from the same hand or mold, and the crosses had been cut from plywood. But, garnished with the honest flowers of the field, as they were in May, these shrines—these outward manifestations of the simple faith of simple people in a wide and wicked world—were a very pretty sight to the Bishop. When he’d pulled up at the church in Grasshopper Lake, little children had suddenly appeared and, grouping themselves around his car, raised their trained voices in song, pure song. The Bishop had never heard the like. “First time I ever heard angels singing, and in German at that!” he told the congregation before beginning what turned out to be a good, long sermon.
Late in August, returning from a trip that had taken him to the northern border of the diocese, the Bishop had paused at Grasshopper Lake. It was the day of the parish’s harvest festival. Such occasions still had meaning in the Ostergothenburg diocese, the Bishop believed, and he did all he could to encourage them, only asking that they be brought to a close by sundown, that there be no dancing, and that pastors keep an eye on the beer stand. Father Gau was doing this when the Bishop arrived, and was not tending bar, which was something the Bishop didn’t want to see, as he’d said time and again. Together they had strolled among the people, the Bishop smiling upon the pies and cakes and upon the women who had baked them, and occasionally giving his hand to a man for shaking. To the grownups he’d say, “You earned this. You worked hard all year,” and to the children, “Give us a song!” And, since he was still a long way from home, he had kept moving, in time with the little Ach-du-lieber-Augustin band that played in the shade of a big tree, until he was almost back to his car—in which his chancellor of the moment sat listening to the Game of the Day. After asking whether Father Gau’s driver’s license was in good order, and hearing that it was, the Bishop had said, “Like to live in Ostergothenburg, Father?”
“I’m happy here, Your Excellency.”
“I can see that.”
“What parish, Your Excellency?”
“I’m looking for a new chancellor.”
“Gee,” Father Gau had said. “Gee, Your Excellency.”
In September, Father Gau had moved into the Cathedral rectory. He handled the routine work at the Chancery, drove the Bishop’s car, heard confessions at the Cathedral on Saturdays, and said two Masses there on Sundays. He also organized a children’s choir—this at the earnest request of the Bishop. All went well. Then, with the Bishop’s consent, Father Gau formed a men’s chorus, and there was trouble. Mr McKee, the director of the Cathedral choir, a mixed group, said that if male members of the choir wanted to get together on purely social occasions and sing “Dry Bones,” that was one thing, but if they were going to sing sacred music, that was something else. The men’s chorus would be a choir, and a choir couldn’t serve two directors, said Mr McKee and Monsignor Holstein backed him up. Father Gau took no part in the controversy. In fact, he offered to resign as director of the men’s chorus, or to disband it, or to turn it over to Mr McKee—and the children’s choir as well, if that would help any. The men of the chorus wouldn’t have this, nor would the mothers of the children. The Bishop said nothing—wouldn’t discuss the matter with anybody, not even Monsignor Holstein. In the end, in a surprise move, Mr McKee resigned. And so Father Gau, who already had enough to do, was obliged to assume the direction of the choir. But what the Bishop had feared, an all-out choir war, hadn’t happened, and for this he was grateful to all concerned.
Then, a week before Christmas, soon after Father Scuza’s funeral, the men of the chorus put on bright tights and sweatshirts and, thus attired, went caroling through the streets of downtown Ostergothenburg. The Ostergothenburg Times, whose editor Father Gau had already got to know better than the Bishop ever had (the Bishop didn’t like the man’s politics), printed a very nice story about the minstrels in their colorful medieval garb. The Bishop had just finished reading the story when in came Monsignor Holstein, who said he’d spotted the men in Hokey’s, the town’s leading department store, and complained bitterly that they had been singing pagan-inspired drinking songs. The Bishop listened to him but said nothing, and Monsignor Holstein went away. Did it matter to Monsignor Holstein that the minstrels were important men in the community, that they thought they were engaged in a good work, that the Times thought so? Monsignor Holstein had just plunged in, as was his habit—a very bad habit. Monsignor Holstein was a rash man, an unsuccessful man, and even when he was right, as he sometimes was, there was something wrong—something wrong about the way he was right. However, the Bishop did feel that jolly songs shouldn’t be performed under his auspices during Advent, which, as Monsignor Holstein had said, was a penitential season second only to Lent, and so Father Gau was asked to see that such songs were dropped from the minstrels’ repertoire, the Bishop citing “Jingle Bells,” and another that, to quote Monsignor Holstein, went “Ho, ho, ho, the wind doth blow!” When Father Gau heard these words from the Bishop’s lips, he smiled, and then the Bishop, too, smiled. Until then, he had been worried that Father Gau might think that the Vicar-General was running the diocese. Father Gau, though, had made a joke out of the incident—and, to a certain extent, out of Monsignor Holstein.
In January, after Monsignor Holstein left town—he was appointed pastor of St John Nepomuk’s, in New Pilsen—the Bishop and Father Gau were often seen together in the evening, in the main dining room of the Hotel Webb. The food was good and plentiful at the Webb. The tables weren’t placed too close together, there was light enough to eat by, and there was music. In fact, the organist, a nice-looking middle-aged woman who didn’t use too much make-up, was a Cat
hedral parishioner.
These evenings at the Webb, topped off with Benedictine and Dutch Masters, were great occasions for Father Gau (who called himself a country boy), and this was a good part of the Bishop’s pleasure in them, although he also did most of the talking. He spoke of his youth “in and around Fargo,” of his years of study at home and abroad, of his ordination at the hands of a cardinal in Rome. Back and forth in time he journeyed, accompanied by Father Gau, who now and then asked a question. One evening, the Bishop spoke of the curious role the number two had played in his career: curate in two places, pastor in two, chaplain to the Catholic Foresters for two terms, fourth Bishop of Ostergothenburg (and four is the square of two), and consecrated on his forty-second birthday, on the second day of the second month. “In 1932.”
“Gee.”
On another evening, the Bishop said, “I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d landed St Paul or Milwaukee, or more pleased.” The Ostergothenburg diocese might well be what it was sometimes called, “the biggest little diocese in the world,” for you really couldn’t count Europe and South America. There might be dioceses to compare with it in the French part of Canada, but had the faithful in those dioceses been completely exposed to the temptations of a high standard of living? Ostergothenburg, and all the roads around it, blazed with invitations to drink, dine, dance, bowl, borrow money, have the car washed, and so on, but let the diocese stage a rally of some kind at the ballpark and there wouldn’t be much doing anywhere else. Oh, of course, if you looked for Ostergothenburg on the map, or judged it by any of the usual rules of thumb—population, bank debits, new construction—you might not think it was much of a place. It had no scheduled air service and no television station and it had lost its franchise in organized baseball. But if you looked at the diocese—well, pastors in Minneapolis and St Paul, who might compare their situations very favorably with those of bishops in barren sees to the north and west, knew they weren’t in it with Dullinger. Catholics outnumbered non-Catholics by better than three to one in the diocese. The Bishop had a hundred thousand souls under his care.
“We’re well over the hundred thousand mark, Your Excellency.”
“When I first came here, we were under seventy thousand.”
“Gee.”
Another man arriving in such a diocese, with no previous experience as a bishop and only forty-two years old, might have chosen to leave well enough alone. This the Bishop had not done. He had twice voted for F.D.R., had backed the New Deal in all its alphabetical manifestations, and, in general, had tried to do what the government was already doing for the common man, only spiritually. “My words were widely quoted. I was referred to as ‘the farmer Bishop.’ Some thought it sounded disrespectful. I didn’t.”
“I don’t.”
But then had come the war and prosperity. The Bishop went out as before and spoke to gatherings, not so large as before but interested. After the war, to combat the changed times—changed for the worse—the Bishop had reached into the faculty of the seminary for Monsignor (then Father) Holstein.
“We were all sorry to see him go,” said Father Gau, who had been a seminarian then.
“A good man, in his way.”
Monsignor Holstein had done well with public events of a devotional nature—field Masses, “living rosaries,” pilgrimages, and processions. And he had stamped out the practice of embellishing the cars of honeymooners with crude sentiments. But in too many ways he had failed. There had been no change at the Orpheum, and at the normal school some smart alecks who hadn’t been organized before—before Monsignor Holstein—now made themselves heard on the slightest provocation. When the second Kinsey report had come out, Monsignor Holstein had played right into their hands, telling the Times, “Only an old priest with years of experience in the confessional should write such a book, and he wouldn’t.” This, though true, had looked silly in print.
The Bishop was glad that the troublesome postwar, or Holstein, period was over. Father Gau had been stationed at some distance from the front during this period, and might have been interested in a firsthand account of the fighting, but he seemed to understand that the Bishop didn’t care to talk about it.
Father Gau was very understanding. The organist in the main dining room at the Webb did not forget the Bishop’s one request—for “Trees”—and night after night played it, sometimes at great length, which was all right, but when she took to rendering it as a solemn fanfare to mark his arrivals and departures, the Bishop wasn’t sure he cared for it, but he said nothing. After a while, the organist abandoned the practice, and Father Gau, when questioned by the Bishop, admitted that he’d asked her to do so.
During the day, too, on trips and at the Chancery, Father Gau saw to it that the Bishop’s will was done—sometimes before the Bishop knew what his will was. “Just say yes or no, Your Excellency,” Father Gau would say, offering a solution to a problem the Bishop might not have been aware of, or to one he’d regarded as tolerable.
One such problem had to do with the regulations for fasting, which, of all the regulations of the diocese, were the ones of most concern to the laity. Monsignor Holstein, trying to make these regulations perfectly clear and binding wherever possible, had gone too deeply into the various claims for exemption—youth, old age, poor health, pregnancy; “But if you can fast, so much the better!”—and had shown an obsessive preoccupation with “gravy and meat juices,” the abuses of which were subtle and many. The regulations had been “clarified” until they were in need of codification and took a good half-hour in the reading. Father Gau, with the Bishop’s permission, let the wind out of them, and took up the slack with the magic words “If you have any questions, see your pastor.”
Father Gau suggested other changes. “You know what, Your Excellency? People don’t know you.” This couldn’t be helped, the Bishop felt, but he was interested, and after listening to Father Gau, and seeing that the greater good of the diocese was involved (something he hadn’t always been sure about when listening to Monsignor Holstein), the Bishop did promise to be seen more in public. He attended a Bosses’ Night banquet given by the local Jaycees, going as Father Gau’s guest and giving a talk on “My Boyhood in and Around Fargo,” which turned out very well. He kicked off the Red Cross campaign, which hadn’t had direct support from the diocese before, and won the approval of non-Catholics, who, economically and ecumenically, were not to be sneezed at, as Father Gau pointed out. The Bishop was even seen at concerts at the two Catholic colleges, which, in recent years, he had visited only when necessary, for commencement exercises, and had departed from as early as he possibly could, as soon as he’d said all he had to say against the sin of intellectual pride. The Bishop really got around. On some nights, returning home, he fell asleep in the car and had to be roused, and it was all he could do to get into his pajamas. But he often retired with a sense of satisfaction he hadn’t experienced since his New Deal days.
In his pastoral letters he became more and more humane, urging the faithful to drive carefully, to buy a poppy, to set their clocks ahead for daylight-saving time. Formerly it had been his custom to visit the orphanage once a year, at Christmastime, with six bushels of oranges. He hadn’t gone oftener because it always made him feel bad—and mad. Now, at Father Gau’s suggestion, he went every month, and found it easier. “They wait for you, Your Excellency,” said Father Gau, and he was right.
There were other changes. For some years, the Bishop had had his eye on a certain large family, had noted the new arrivals in the birth column of the Times, and had inquired of the family’s pastor whether there was any improvement otherwise. (The head of the family was an alcoholic, his wife a chain smoker.) There was no improvement until Father Gau, fighting fire with fire, found the father a job in the brewery. Miraculously, the man’s drinking and the woman’s smoking fell off to nothing. “There’s your model family, Your Excellency,” said Father Gau, and the family’s pastor agreed. So the Bishop dropped in on the family one
Sunday afternoon with a gallon of ice cream, and was photographed with the parents and their fourteen children for the diocesan paper.
And there were other changes. In June, Father Gau, who had been acting rector of the Cathedral, became rector in fact, and a domestic prelate.
“Gee,” said Monsignor Gau after the colorful ceremony—at which the choir had performed under the direction of Mr McKee, whose reappointment had been one of the first official acts of the new rector. “Gee, Your Excellency.”
“Just call me ‘Bishop.’”
The next day, a scorcher, it was business as usual for the Bishop and Monsignor Gau at the Chancery. In the afternoon they drove out to the cemetery, where the big cross was to be relocated so that it would be visible from the new highway across the river—the Bishop had noticed many out-of-state cars in town during the past week. He had hoped to escape the heat by coming out to the cemetery, but the place just looked cool. He walked along the edge of the low bluff, below which ran the river, until he found a spot he liked, and Monsignor Gau marked it with a brick. Then the Bishop gazed around the cemetery with an eye to the future. “I give it ten years.”
“If that,” said Monsignor Gau.
The Bishop shot a glance at the adjoining property, a small wilderness belonging to the Ostergothenburg Gun Club.
“It’s a thought,” said Monsignor Gau.
But that evening at the Webb, which was comfortably cool, Monsignor Gau said he doubted if any land at all could be had from the Gun Club, and also if purchasers of cemetery lots would care to be any closer to the activities of the Gun Club. As for buying the Gun Club lock, stock, and barrel (to answer the Bishop’s question), even if that could be done, it would be a very unpopular solution. The center of population had shifted north since the war, people following wealth and the river as closely as they could, and now, all along the river, right up to the cemetery and continuing on the other side of the Gun Club, there were these large estate-type houses, while back from the river the prairie was filling up with smaller but still very nice houses. “The Gun Club’s holding the line against us, as some people see it, and they’d take us to court if we could get the Gun Club to sell—if.”