The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  —There’s one favor you could do me, chaplain, said Father Donovan, leaning softly over his vermouth.

  Never in his life had he raised his voice except to call for the murder of the umpire.

  —Anything, anything, the chaplain said, clearing his throat of orangeade with a lordly gargle.

  —Why won’t you call me Father? I’m a priest. Padre sounds like Teddy Roosevelt. . . . Oh I know it’s regular army and all that . . .

  —Army Regulations, said Chaplain Bascom, assuming the rapt pose with which he ended his prayer meetings, provide that all chaplains, regardless of denomination, shall be addressed as chaplain . . .

  —But they also state that there’s no objection to calling a priest Father. Don’t tell me that at this stage of the game you’re jealous of the prestige and affection in the word Father?

  —Always a slight chip on your shoulder, Chaplain Bascom said, gathering his weight up behind his orangeade. He smelled brimstone.

  —Just thought I’d ask, Father Donovan said in his meekest tone which he always lapsed into when piqued.

  Chaplain Bascom glowered around the Galleria. His veinous porcine eyes stared, as though he were looking for some shrinking GI to go to work on with the magic words: All here from South Calina raise their hands. . . . He relit his pipe. Father Donovan, who knew all his moods, waited but said nothing. He looked at the other chaplain’s cap with its gold oak leaf and wondered why all the priests in the army except the chief in Washington seemed to be first lieutenants. Soon Chaplain Bascom would be a lieutenant colonel, at which point he’d begin to consider himself a staff officer, with command functions. In vain did Father Donovan keep telling himself that he was a priest, commissioned in the army only to keep souls in the way they should go, to give the last rites to the dying, and to return the living to their dioceses without loss of faith or stain of mortal sin. For sometimes when he was saying his rosary or reading his holy office, he’d find his fingers straying to his cap and feeling that lone silver bar. It was a sin of vanity. But in his examinations of conscience he admitted to himself that to be promoted to captain would delight and appease him. . . . He deserved it. He’d done just as much work as Chaplain Bascom. . . .

  And Chaplain Bascom, watching his mild friend out of one corner of an eye throbbing with rage, thought: They’re all alike deep down inside. The same who started the Inquisition, the same who held back all scientific progress, the same who still wield a world dictatorship.

  —Look there now, said Chaplain Bascom. Most interesting. . . .

  An oily Italian priest came cruising into the Galleria in black cassock and brushed round hat. He zoomed among the GI’s like a water bug, wheedling, panhandling, trembling with holy zeal for alms. He had a card in English which he thrust under the faces of the GI’s.

  —Almost a different church here, Father Donovan said under his breath.

  The Italian priest arrived over an isolated GI who’d passed out in his chair. He looked quickly around the Galleria, then bent over the hunched form.

  —Most interesting, Chaplain Bascom said gleefully.

  As Father Donovan watched, saying a Hail Mary under his breath, the greasy Italian friar began to pry at a wad of lire and a pack of Luckies protruding from the unbuttoned breast pocket of the GI. Father Donovan leaped from his chair, crossed the Galleria, and barged up to the thieving brother. He didn’t know any Italian, but he used the Latin that came into his mind:

  —Hoc est enim corpus meum.

  Then as a sort of exorcism he shook the silver cross of his collar insignia. The hustling friar, unshaven and smelling of his last meal, whirled about in his cape, gathered it about him with grimy fingers, and went streaking away into the crowds of the Galleria Umberto. Father Donovan woke the sleeping GI gently and returned across the arcade, wondering what in this world or the next he could find to say to Chaplain Bascom in excuse for this most unpleasant incident. Through his mind flashed all the dialectical training of the seminary, long since all but forgotten now that his sermons had become a matter of the monthly collection and choir rehearsal. Father Donovan prayed madly for the gift of tongues, for Jesuitical casuistry to fence off the questions his Baptist friend was preparing for him. Though he seldom did it, except when pounding the chest of a section sergeant who’d forgotten to make his Easter duty, Father Donovan rallied all his shyness and determined to take the aggressive. After all, the Church was facing a greater opponent than she’d had at Anzio.

  —Shocking, said Father Donovan, seating himself. Probably not even a priest. Naples is full of them. Impostors . . .

  —Oh, I don’t know, Chaplain Bascom said silkily. Looks kinda like the Good Samaritan rolling the man who lay by the side of the road, don’t it? Or Christ asking Mary Magdalene for a handout. . . . You have a very rich church, padre. Money rolls into Rome from all over the world. . . . I think I begin to understand the capitalism of the Roman Church. I’m only a Hard-Shelled Baptist, but I guess I realize that a big political machine don’t pay its expenses on hay. . . . No sireee.

  Father Donovan felt a white flame of rage rising in him. Then he saw something and said in a choked voice:

  —Look. . . .

  Two nuns were entering the Galleria in that way they have of seeming not to walk. No GI yelled at them. Each nun had by the hand two little girls in the chaste black dresses of Neapolitan orphans. The children laughed to one another and to the GI’s. They had the glowing faces of southern Italian babies. The nuns beamed down on them, keeping a firm grip on their small hands. Then Father Donovan thanked Our Lady for answering his prayer.

  —You must consider this side of the question too, he said, relieved.

  —Ah yes, said Chaplain Bascom airily, mother love. . . . How nice to find it even in Naples. It’s the one great constant of our mean little world.

  —But you miss the point, chaplain. . . . Those nuns have no natural tie to those orphans. They function in accordance with the Church’s exalted idea of parenthood, which goes back to Our Blessed Mother. . . . And you Protestants seem almost ashamed to admit that Christ had a mother. You make fun of our devotion to her, as though you were uneasy at the function of the love between man and God . . .

  —It’s a scorcher today, padre, Chaplain Bascom said. He finished his orangeade, fanned himself, and loosened the shirt about his thick neck.

  Chaplain Bascom brooded sulkily to himself. It was quite clear to him why the Roman Church had failed in the modern world. In a time when men wanted something positive to cling to, she offered them only the lacy traceries of an old theology. The twentieth century was too rapid for arguments on the navel of Adam. Especially Americans . . . they wanted that good solid old-time religion, which was precisely what the Baptist Church was giving them. Plenty of tangible things for Americans with common sense. Good shoutin of hymns, fear of hell, and tables heavy with food at church suppers—that was religion. Deep down inside Chaplain Bascom suspected that Christ was more than a little of a red; this was why He’d been done to death. No American need examine too deeply the nature of Christ. This was what the Baptist Church offered them: a renewal of the spirit on Sundays and Wednesdays, excellent business contacts, and keeping the young away from sinful habits. It was all so down to earth. Chaplain Bascom thought of Thomas Aquinas visiting Spartanburg, South Carolina, and had to slap his chunky thigh. . . . No, the Roman Church was Europe and the past and a dirty slice of history to boot. He’d seen enough to know how uneasily Romanism sat on Americans. Whereas your good southern Baptist was his religion walking and in act. So was his good comfortable wife, who cooked for church socials and taught Sunday school. So was his immaculate prim daughter. Practical Christianity. . . .

  Over the kettledrumming of the truck convoys moving to the front, the crowds in the Galleria Umberto were like all the crowds of the world, drifting and inert except under stimulus. But this crowd had an uncrowdlike tendency to break up into its individual components. Their only common bond as a crowd wa
s that they were all in Naples in August, 1944. Their focus shifted. Since most of these people came to the Galleria to lose themselves and therefore to find themselves, their flavor was more strongly marked than that of a crowd assembled for a specific purpose. The chaplains noticed isolated elements more easily than they might have at a race track or on a city street. And both chaplains thought to them selves that this crowd, perhaps more than any other on earth, showed the agony of the individual and of society, that some peculiar problem of the age was here mirrored.

  Presently, in the crushing brilliance of the August sun and the buzzing of the convoys the chaplains found themselves dozing. A burr of laughter brought them sharply to in their chairs. For the laughter that they heard was intended to pierce even an unconscious man. Two Italian girls skipped arm in arm through the Galleria. There was an intimacy in their leaning on one another more flagrant and saucy than the friendship between school chums.

  The girls spied the two chaplains, but they danced easily through the Galleria, in no hurry, exclaiming over the shop prices, casting swimming eyes over the lounging GI’s. And they sang. Both chaplains knew that they were singing not out of high spirits but as a call to all interested to come and buy, as a fruit vendor hawks melons in the street. They sang in English. It was an American song learned by rote from many darkened rooms with rumpled beds and empty vino bottles:

  —You’ll nevair know just ow motch I mees you,

  You’ll nevair know just ow motch I caaaare . . .

  —Those girls are wearing crosses on their necks, said Chaplain Bascom, clucking with his tongue.

  —Aren’t they entitled to pray? Father Donovan asked, setting down his vermouth.

  The Neapolitan girls paused by the two chaplains’ table and stood there swaying enticingly, arms around each other’s waists.

  —Why, allo, major! Buy me a drink?

  Chaplain Bascom for the first time in his army career, instead of flashing the gold oak leaf on his right collar, took hold of his left and wriggled his silver cross at them. Father Donovan began to giggle.

  —What would you have done if you’d been a rabbi?

  —I’m thinking of my wife, roared Chaplain Bascom. Believe me, padre, I’ve reached such a maturity of married love that those two women seem to me vile Jezebels.

  —You are a cute one, lieutenant, the other girl said.

  She sat genially down in the chair at Father Donovan’s right. The waiter brought two vermouths without being asked. Chaplain Bascom reddened as the other girl sank into the wicker chair at his left.

  —I think we should leave at once, with dignity, said Chaplain Bascom.

  —It would be the first issue I ever knew you to avoid.

  Father Donovan said to the girl on his right:

  —Are you hungry?

  —As hungry as the devil for Christian souls, cried Chaplain Bascom. Padre, let’s end this comedy and get out of here. You can’t touch pitch and not be defiled. . . . I think my wife’s ears are burning back in Spartanburg, South Carolina . . . Padre, think of what you represent.

  —That’s exactly what I’m doing, Father Donovan said. You and I were in tighter spots than this at Cassino, chaplain.

  He looked at the girl, who was now nervously stroking her vermouth glass and shivering a little, though it was August. Then she reached out to lay her hand on his arm. But before her fingers descended, she seemed to reconsider and dropped her hand to the beaded bag that lay in her lap.

  —You don’t like me? she said, making a face. Whassamatta, Joe?

  —But I do like you, Father Donovan said, taking a thousand lire from his Ayrab wallet. Now listen to me. You take this and go to a black market restaurant and buy all you want to eat. Then go to confession, hear? Then go home and get a good sleep. You look very tired. . . . Promise me? . . . Sacerdos sum. . . .

  Both girls went quickly away, covering with one hand the jeweled crosses on their necks. They went out of the Galleria into Via Roma.

  —They should be horsewhipped by their families, Chaplain Bascom said testily, mopping his beety brow.

  —No, Father Donovan said, replacing his wallet. Their sin is partly the world’s.

  —The world, Chaplain Bascom said, blowing his nose with an olive-drab handkerchief. Women go on the streets because they’re just plain ornery and refuse to settle down . . . and Italian women are much more immoral than our own. One minute they’re crossing themselves in church, and the next they’re on Via Roma. The only way the world is concerned in this filthy business is that public opinion doesn’t have the power in Naples that it has in our own country. Here nobody cares what those women do, because all the Italians are that way.

  Father Donovan thoughtfully spread his ringless hands and ordered another vermouth. He didn’t try to answer Chaplain Bascom directly. He spoke more shyly than usual:

  —We must be cautious in judging impurity because it’s such a natural sin. Not everyone murders. Not everyone robs. But impurity springs from the natural impulses of our own bodies. A deed which under one set of circumstances brings a child into the world becomes under others a mortal sin. Impurity comes from an impulse that we all possess.

  —Then we must wrestle with that impulse, Chaplain Bascom cried in triumph, slapping the table so that the glasses jumped to attention. We must marry if we don’t want to burn, as the Apostle Paul says. . . . I don’t mind telling you, padre, that as a young preacher I wrestled mightily with the lusts of the flesh.

  —Then you should be more charitable towards those who are still wrestling, said Father Donovan gently.

  Chaplain Bascom always got riled up in his arguments with Father Donovan. Secretly he feared that the priests of popery got a more subtle and cunning training in propaganda than they gave you at the Baptist seminary. He saw why people feared the Roman Church. You could easily dismiss the run-of-the-mill Catholic as a superstitious fool living in the past, but Father Donovan not only had faith but could explain why he had it. Chaplain Bascom explained it to himself this way: Catholicism was a secret society whose aim was just barely eluding him. He was sure it was up to no good. This aim was known only to the pope and to a few of the inner circle. Even the average priest didn’t know it.

  Chaplain Bascom was also honest with himself. He knew he wasn’t Christlike. Yet that name was always in his mouth because it was the open-sesame of his profession. It was a name which had a strange hold over people, possibly because they thought it should. The name Jesus Christ could open more hearts than a skeleton key. Nor was Chaplain Bascom quite at ease with the personality of Jesus Christ. His mind was teased by the concept of a carpenter who allowed Himself to be crucified and was remembered and invoked for the next two thousand years. Chaplain Bascom sometimes went so far as to ask himself whether he’d honestly have liked Christ. Perhaps He was just a little . . . effeminate. All this talk about love. . . . Chaplain Bascom acknowledged no other love than one took in the arms of a good woman. Any other love seemed to savor of unmentionable vice. . . .

  Father Donovan broke the silence:

  —You’re thinking hard, chaplain. Isn’t it a painful sensation?

  —Not at all, not at all, my boy. . . .

  And at this moment Chaplain Bascom realized that for two years Father Donovan had been playing with him, in that savage affection with which a cat tortures a mouse. He felt the blood rising under his crimson skin. And he knew at last that there are other forces in the world than the fists of a red-blooded American man. So he changed the subject.

  —I was thinking of the future of the church.

  —Which church? Father Donovan asked coyly.

  —Christianity, of course, Chaplain Bascom growled.

  Then something inside his burly soul swung outward like a rusty lock after it’s oiled. He called to the waiter to bring them each a vermouth. Father Donovan looked at the vermouth in front of the Baptist and began to laugh in the high-pitched relieved manner of a boy who has passed an examination he expecte
d to flunk.

  —Thank God I’ve lived to see this, chaplain! Vermouth! The blackmail I could collect from you if I had a camera! What would your South Carolina congregation say?

  Chaplain Bascom took a huge swig of the vermouth. He made a face like a maddened bull and called for another.

  —Why, I like you so much this way, Father Donovan said still laughing. And there’ve been times when you depressed me no end.

  —The fruit of the vine isn’t altogether strange to me, Chaplain Bascom said in a mellow voice. In my youth . . .

  —I’m not hearing your confession, Father Donovan said, raising a hand and smiling.

  It was getting on to the time of sunset in the Galleria Umberto. The arcade was swelling up with people.

  —I’m worried, said Chaplain Bascom resuming, for the future of the church. You and I both know, padre, that there are atheists in foxholes. And many of these fellows will go back to the States and attempt to sweep away the heritage of the ages. They’ll call all faith simply dead lumber which has survived because people were stupid and afraid.

  —And I’m of the opinion, said Father Donovan, that good things, like the poor, will always be with us. It’s an article of faith with me that my own church will last till the end of time. As for the others, unless they have something to offer the returning veteran that is free of bigotry and sectionalism, those other churches will go down in defeat.

  —Just what do you mean by that? cried Chaplain Bascom.

  —Just this. When an American has seen Naples and death and the wretchedness of the whole world, he may try to forget it when he goes back to the farm in Illinois. But he won’t forget it completely. Malaria and sorrow temper the blood. And do you think that such a man will be satisfied again with a religion which says he may not smoke or drink, which offers strife for peace, which bases its commandments on little stupidities he has outgrown? . . . After this war we’re going to see either an age of complete barbarism or a gradual return to the simplicities and felicities of Our Lord’s life, adapted of course to the time in which we live. . . . And I, chaplain, have faith in human nature, which isn’t intrinsically evil. There are many things in human life that you and I have almost forgotten since we put on these uniforms. It’s natural to lose sight of these things in a war so vast and horrible as this one. And there are reckonings to come for all this slaughter. . . . But as surely as I know there’s sin in the world, I know also that there’s that in us which makes us desire to bring up our children in love and peace, which makes us shield our wives and daughters, and which occasionally makes us capable of the noblest sacrifice. . . . You can’t tell me that these virtues will ever utterly disappear. . . . You remember how far the striking of a match carried in those black nights on the line? So tiny but so bright? Well, just like that match, whatever is good will survive till the end of the world. Otherwise human life becomes the cruelest joke and the figure of Christ on the cross the hollowest gesture that anyone ever made.