She shrugged. "Offering to do the flowers, that's a nice idea."
"I'm a nice person, hon."
Didi laughed, turning away. "It's true, you son of a bitch. You are nice."
***
Squire drove across Boston, hating rush hour, wondering, as he idled in traffic, how he would do as a diplomat Everywhere he turned, some wop was sticking his finger in someone's eyeball, and his job was to get their fingers out.
He looked at the other drivers, salesmen going home, cops waving cars through yellow lights, football players practicing on the fields along the river. None of those people knew anything about Guido Tucci, much less his death. If they'd heard of the pope's encyclical, they probably thought it was something cold on a stick. Tucci and Pope Paul, the two posts, Squire thought, of the wire he was walking on.
At numerous intersections along Commonwealth Avenue, college kids pouring out of their classrooms into the streets ignored the lights, as if the rules didn't apply to them. Fucking radicals, fucking peaceniks. He remembered the line from senior year: "College, where false pearls are cast before real swine."
At one corner, a particular girl caught Squire's eye —her tie-dyed T-shirt, her long black hair hanging straight. As she crossed in front of his car, she shifted her books, and he glimpsed an unshaven armpit Suddenly it was more than he could stand that she had no idea of his existence. He resisted the urge to honk, and instead reached down and snapped on the radio, loud.
"Can't get no satisfaction ... but I try and I try ..."
She looked his way, startled. Squire raised a forefinger, clicked it once, a minimal salute. And the girl dropped her eyes. I could teach you things, he thought.
Mick Jagger sang with sex in his voice. "Can't get no ..." The way he would have if he'd become a singer. Now Squire wondered, Did they call him Mick because he was Irish?
The light changed. Squire hit the gas, slapping the steering wheel in time to the music as the song built to its conclusion, blaring out into the street.
The entrance to BC was just ahead on the left, but shy of it on the right, hovering over the avenue, was the cardinal's house, a super-rectory set on an obviously artificial and, to Squire's eye, overly landscaped hill. He reached to the dashboard to lower the volume on the radio. He knew to turn into the next driveway, and recognized the sweeping curves of the private road as it wound past the residence and the chancery and another nondescript building or two before descending into a tidy, fairwaylike valley that seemed miles from the city he'd just left.
The next song to come on was "Sympathy for the Devil." He laughed, but also snapped the radio off.
The road brought him down toward the massive main building of the seminary proper. Twilight had already fallen in this valley, and the Gothic stone hulk loomed eerily, five stories high, row upon row of chaste leaded windows, corner turrets, towers, and arches like out of a fairy tale. Only a cross rising from the peaked center of the roof undercut the impression that this was an asylum, or a setting for a movie about a baron who had no choice but to help the Nazis because they've locked his daughter up in this abandoned old castle.
Squire pulled into a visitors-only parking space near the front door, turned his motor off, and told himself to cool it. For a moment he sat there watching the windows. Lights were on in most of the rooms, but the blinds were drawn. He saw nothing.
Before, when he'd come here, spirited boys in cassocks had swarmed the stairs leading up to the large double oak doors, worthy of a drawbridge, of dwarves to act as porters. But those visits, usually in the company of his grandfather, had been by invitation, on feast days. He was an intruder now, and knew it. Except for the lights in those windows, no human being was in evidence here. It was creepy.
He got out of the car with his wrapped shamrock plant Instead of going to the door, he walked the length of the building to its corner, from which he had a view of the handball and basketball courts. He had half expected Terry to be out there shooting hoops. All those years ago, how he had been the last to leave the asphalt court behind the high school. How many times, at dusk, had their mother sent Squire out to get him? Squire had always approached the court wondering why his brother seemed so at home shooting baskets alone in the dark, seemed so perfectly himself like that. The sight had always made Squire's heart sink, because his own idea was of the two of them playing. Squire had always hated practicing alone, but not Terry, which was why, eventually, Terry's skill had left Squire's behind. Terry could hit baskets even when it was so dark that Squire needed the snap of the threads to be sure he'd scored.
The seminary courts were deserted, and Squire was relieved. A lone figure out there now could only have evoked the image of the wandering mystic, the hated man who had no place to lay his head, the misunderstood and finally crucified Christ —from whom Squire Doyle had long since claimed his distance.
Why am I nervous? he wondered as he walked back to the pointed arch of the entrance. He mounted the stairs, found a button in the wall beside the door, and pushed it He pushed it again, then stepped back so they could see him. He nestled the plant in the crook of his left arm like a ball.
Jesus, Terry, he thought, you've buried yourself alive.
After a few minutes, he pushed the button again.
The door opened partway, and he realized someone had been just inside all this time, watching him.
"Yes!" An old man put his head in the opening. His skin was flaked with psoriasis, his eyes seemed twisted, lifeless.
"I'm a visitor. I want to see one of the students."
"No visitors. Come back."
The man's head only now came far enough through the door for Squire to glimpse his Roman collar, the shoulder of his dandruff-layered cassock.
"I'm sorry to bother you, Father. It's a family emergency. I need to see my brother."
"What's that, then?"
"A gift for the altar, a plant" Squire offered it.
The priest shook his head and pulled back "An emergency? But you bring a plant? You're ..."
"Terry Doyle, Father. Can I see him?"
"No, no." The name seemed to confirm him in his suspicion. He began closing the door. "You're a reporter."
Squire jammed his foot in the door. "I'm his brother. The cardinal —"
"They're on retreat They're all on retreat. No visitors."
Squire could easily have pushed the priest aside, claiming authority from Cushing himself. But suddenly he wanted the hell away from here. He'd say to his grandfather, "Retreat, they're on retreat What trouble can there be if they're on retreat?"
"So when can I see him?"
"Call the rector. Call Monsignor —"
"When can I see —"
"Recreation, tomorrow, after lunch."
Squire pulled his foot back The door slammed shut, a solid, low-toned thunk.
Fuck you, Father. How does Terry survive this shit? But maybe he doesn't. Was that the point?
Squire stared at the oak panels, bile in his throat that he hadn't tasted since being an altar boy. He remembered the monsignor clipping him from behind: "Line up! Line up!"
Doyle balanced the shamrock with one hand, bouncing it slightly, for the heft. Right through the fucking window, that was his thought.
But who was he kidding? No bile of humiliation since the monsignor of his boyhood? What about yesterday? What about Frank? How does Terry take such shit? No, how do I?
He tucked the innocent plant back in his arm and returned to the car. For a long moment he sat at the wheel with the gaudy foil bundle in front of his face. Now what?
The crushed foil reflected light from the windows above him. He studied the sharp green flashes in the dark, thought of them as a meager connection with his brother. His brother shooting hoops, alone, at dusk.
Squire raised his eyes to the windows above him. He felt the loneliness, not only of Terry, but of all the men inside those rooms, and then, just as suddenly, though far more unexpectedly, he felt his own loneliness. H
e placed the plant on the seat beside him, started the car, put it in gear, and screeched away from that house of the dead.
About a half hour later, he pulled into the long horseshoe driveway in front of the Massachusetts General Hospital. There were twenty minutes remaining in visiting hours. He swung into one of the spaces marked EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY and left his car there.
The lobby was far more crowded than it had been in the middle of the previous afternoon. Was it possible so little time had passed since his coming here? Returning to where old Tucci had died the day before released the flood of his anxiety. Squire Doyle was a man without an angle, without a plan. Was that Terry's problem too?
In two separate clusters, men in doctors' coats were conferring with relatives of patients. Other visitors, pulling sweaters on, were heading for the revolving door through which Squire had just come. Children too young to go on the wards had been left in the company of older siblings, and they had taken over the squared couches in the corner. A pair of boys, perhaps seven and nine, were happily rocking the standup ashtray back and forth, and it was inevitable that Squire see them as a version of what he and Terry had been, the Doyle boys. All they'd ever needed was each other.
"Excuse me, thanks," a man said. Squire stepped aside, not realizing he'd been blocking the doorway.
He turned his gaze toward the information desk on the far side of the room. Only when he saw her did he realize how little reason he'd had —wasn't this a different shift? —to expect that she would be here now.
He approached slowly, wanting to savor the sight of her profile before she saw him: her thin nose supporting a naturally perfect brow, her luxuriant hair, part blond, part gray, pulled back to display her ear, the understated single pearl at its lobe. He had remembered best her cheekbones, how color rode them like a memory of the sun.
She lifted her face and turned it fully toward him, smiling with a warmth that made him think, This is how, early in their marriage, she had raised her face when her husband came into the room. If her husband mattered now, why would she be here in the evening?
He was certain she would recognize him.
"Hi," he said, so easily.
"Hello."
Her smile held. In fact, it held an instant too long, so that he began to see it as counterfeit, a Brahmin smile.
Why wasn't she surprised?
He peered at her intently, waiting for her color to deepen, for that ever so slightly spotted hand to flutter to her mouth. Her open mouth.
One place he had pictured her was in the paneled elevator of Phillips House. His erotic fantasy had featured a smooth sequence beginning with his throwing the red switch, the two of them alone, stopped in that elegant box, her so much older, yet bracing her heels and shoulders against the wall, arching her body into a bow, leaving it to him to tear her clothes, her breasts leaping against him, her hair, loose at last, flying back and forth as she kept turning her head, her hair whipping him. The smell of her armpits, the taste of her cunt. Mrs. State Street.
"May I help you."
"I came to see someone."
"Of course, but —" She glanced at her watch, turning her wrist so that he could see the blue veins below the pale skin. "There isn't much time."
She was good. She was pretending not to know him.
"I came to see you."
"What?"
"I brought you this." He put the green-wrapped pot on the desk between them.
She pushed away suddenly, her chair scooting back. "I beg your pardon?"
And then he saw it. She had no idea that he had been here yesterday. She had no idea of having ever seen him before. The charge in their encounter, as dazzling as it was improbable, had been all his. He could feel the heat in his ears, knew that he was blushing. He raised his hands, backing off.
She recovered enough to push the plant a few inches toward him. "Please, take this away."
He shook his head. "It's just a wee piece of the Old Sod," he said with a stagy brogue. "I'm just the delivery boy. I lost the card, Missus, and I'm terrible sorry."
Now she was confused. "Card?"
"It said, 'From your secret admirer.'"
And then he turned and headed for the door. Outside, in the first cool phase of darkness, he laughed aloud. "What an asshole, Doyle!"
Making for his car, he laughed again and shook his head, wishing for Terry, only Terry at last, to throw his arm around. "We're both assholes."
9
Authority which ignores the principle of collegiality does not compel obedience. Terry Doyle was at the blackboard, underscoring each word with chalk, the squeak squeak underscoring his exasperation. "That is the essence of our declaration." The sleeve of his tan button-down was white with chalk dust, like the fingers of his right hand.
Doyle's forty-odd classmates stared at the blackboard, not at him. He had become too emotional, too insistently shrill, and whether he knew it or not, there were a number among them whom he had already lost No one wanted to meet his eyes.
This was a musty basement classroom in a remote wing of the seminary building. The meeting was already two hours old, and they were getting nowhere. They were sitting in the one-armed school chairs that had always constituted the perfect symbol of their degradation. Were they schoolboys or men? The chairs were ordinarily arranged in neatly ordered rows, but during this frustrating session, the space had taken on the look of a storage room, plastic cups and balled paper littering the floor, anarchy in the way they had their legs hooked over the furniture.
One of the few wearing the cassock raised his hand and spoke timidly. "If it is a question of conscience, then we have to find a formulation that respects everybody's position."
"That's impossible," someone else called out.
"Then we're screwed," said a third.
"And that," Doyle said, "is why we have to stick together. All of us." He banged the chalk on the board. The stick broke.
The man in the cassock said, "But we've been at this for hours, and we can't —"
"Who says we need a statement at all? This proves we don't."
Doyle met the challenge by banging his fist down on the desk, causing Jimmy Adler's pen to jump on his yellow pad. Adler had been taking notes the whole while.
"We have to issue a statement," Terry said, "something we all agree with. I know we can."
"But if we're silent, then we're like Thomas More. 'Our silence,' he said, 'must needs be read ambiguously.'"
Terry leaned back against the blackboard, soiling his shirt further. "That wasn't Thomas More, Mark. That's Robert Bolt"
Adler lifted his gaze. "Can we leave Thomas More out of this? Considering how he wound up?"
Doyle ignored the small bursts of laughter. "That's because he was alone." He pushed off from the chalk ledge to lean over the desk again. "Two points, fellows. Two simple points. One, we do what we do together, and the cardinal has to back off. And two, we explain ourselves in a brief statement, because the Church needs us to. All those men and women out there who are waiting for somebody to speak up for them."
"They'll never know, Doyle. They'll never know what we've said or what we've done."
"If we release our statement to the press, they will."
A general outburst shook the room as half seconded Doyle and half derided him. Arguments immediately broke out in several clusters. Their tension, weariness, and anger wafted through the air like fumes.
Jimmy Adler exchanged a look with Terry, one that said, I'm with you, bud.
Doyle allowed himself to flow toward Jimmy, as if that brief, consoling expression on his big-eared, freckled face were a swiftly passing log he could grab hold of.
Jimmy put two fingers to his mouth and shrieked a whisde. The commotion stopped.
Gradually the stolid, mute figure of Terry Doyle drew them back He waited until they were completely still. "I've sought counsel on this with someone in significant authority, someone who knows the whole picture better than we do."
&nb
sp; For an instant Terry felt the gentle pressure on his head of Blight's father's hands, and it reassured him. After their hour together in the book-lined study, Terry and Bishop McKay had hesitated at the threshold, a last moment's silence. On an impulse Terry had said, "May I have your blessing?"
"Indeed you may."
Terry had knelt right there in the doorway. It was then, undergoing his first imposition of hands, that he understood about apostolic succession, the passing on of Christ's own healing power, a visceral lesson from a man dismissed by Terry's own Church as standing outside that succession.
"He thinks," Terry was saying now, "that we are absolutely right to stand up to Monsignor Loughlin. His hunch is the cardinal wants us to. He thinks we have a chance of helping the cardinal emerge as a spokesman for the American Church on birth control. The cardinal agrees —"
"What 'authority'?" someone demanded.
"I can't say."
"Then let him send out a press release, goddamnit!" The seminarian in the cassock came forward, his face purple with anger. "Your adviser is anonymous? Well, we aren't! Why doesn't he take on the pope?"
Terry remembered how Bright's father, after blessing him, had drawn him up with both hands. For the first time, Terry had bowed and kissed his ring, and the bishop had squeezed his hands. "You and your classmates have a moment of kairos here. You are called to this. The whole Church needs you, not just Rome." And then, leaning closer, bringing the deep umber of his face within inches of Doyle's, Bright's father had added, "I need you."
"This guy is a coward if he won't —"
"He's no coward," Terry shot back. "He can't address the issue, because he isn't a Catholic."
"Oh, well, shit."
"Shit?" Terry moved closer to his classmate, his fists clenched. "Shit? Is that what ecumenism means? The other churches have no stake in —"
"A stake for burning heretics. Who are you, Doyle? Martin Luther? Ninety-five Theses? That's what a press release amounts to, and it will get us all kicked out."
Adler had Terry's arm, but Terry calmed himself. Win these guys over, he told himself, make them agree. He said, "Public pressure is our only chance. And it will help die cardinal. He can turn to Rome and say, 'See?' But in secret, there's no way he can do anything but back up His Holiness. If we take this on, we have to make noise about it" Terry began to walk among his classmates, aware that the reluctance of a few had begun to spread. He touched shoulders and forearms as he moved and spoke. "People will rally to us. Parish priests who feel alone out there will join us."
The City Below Page 19