by Неизвестный
When Jamsie looked in at him, he stopped in a leisurely fashion, one fingernail curled around a mosaic fragment.
“We won't be needing this garbage, Jamsie, will we, you and I?” He smiled self-assuredly. The smell wafted around Jamsie's nostrils. “After all, I can't spend the night with this thing beside me, now, can I?” Ponto smirked.
Jamsie saw red. All the resentment that had piled up inside him since his early teens—his anger at being frightened, his frustration about that “funny-lookin' face,” his disappointment with his father and mother, his final desire to be rid of Ponto and his importunings, his perpetual loneliness—all burst out from his inner self, flooding his mind with a nausea against knowing anything more about life. In that moment his will went rigid with a firm decision that pointed him to dying and death as his only release and hope of rest.
For some seconds he stood swaying from side to side, his head aching. Then he broke into the desperate rage that propelled him like a wild man, swearing and cursing out loud, as he bolted down the front steps to his car.
There was nothing very unusual about Father Mark A.'s childhood or about his family. Mark is a native New Yorker. His father, still alive, is a Yankee from Maine who settled in New York after World War I. His mother, now dead, was a Kelly from Tennessee. Her family had come over from Ireland to America in the late eighteenth century. She had been educated in Kansas City. When she came to New York to stay a while with relatives, she met her husband. He worked in a large accounting firm.
Mark was the third of five children. His two brothers still live in New York. One of his sisters married a Swiss manufacturer and lives in Zurich. The other sister, a missionary nun, was in the Philippines when World War II broke out. She survived in a Japanese concentration camp, but she was badly weakened and died in Manila after the war was over.
All in all, no one could have guessed that a man of Mark's normal and uneventful background would be the one person who could not only believe, but understand Jamsie's predicament, or that Mark's father's rather prosaic profession as an accountant would be the chance link to complete the chain of circumstances.
As a young man, after a year and a half of college, Mark entered the diocesan seminary. Seven years later, in 1928, along with eight other men, he became a priest. He spent ten years as an assistant in four parishes of the New York diocese. He became known as a hard worker and a very effective priest. He was practical rather than mystical, an activist decades before that was fashionable, and very hard to discourage. Those who knew him then recall him as bouncy, almost jaunty, with clear blue eyes, quick gestures, ready words, sudden flare-ups of temper and equally quick returns of good humor.
Mark himself tells how in those early years life always seemed to him to be made up of “scenarios.” Each situation was composed of people and objects. You assessed the people, got to know the objects, and plotted your course of action, your “scenario,” for that situation. Mark shunned any wishy-washy ideas about “motivations” or any “mystical realities.” To many of his contemporaries he seemed to have a shallow and brittle approach. And, indeed, Mark now admits that in those early years it was as though his inner self was covered with a hard, protective rind that nothing pierced. He was impervious to any emotional appeal; and he was not held up or influenced by the intangibles of a situation.
When Mark was about to be moved to his fourth parish, his ecclesiastical superiors offered him a choice: a parish in the suburbs, or one in the center of midtown Manhattan. Mark chose without hesitation to work in the heart of the city. And for the next two years he experienced a new set of problems, totally different from those he had been confronting in the outlying parishes where he had already served.
At that moment in its history, just prior to World War II, New York was a mecca of sorts, and not merely for those with financial and economic interests. Serviced by 21 tunnels, 20 bridges, 16 ferries, 6 major airlines, New York received 115,000 visitors on an average day and an additional 270,000 out-of-town delegates who came to 500 annual conventions. Through trunkline railways, buslines, airlines, highways, they poured into the city and, as one statistician of that time calculated, on any one given night the hotel bedsheets in use would have covered 840 acres of Central Park.
The visitors could stay in any one of 460 hotels with a total of over 112,000 rooms costing anything from 254: in the Bronx to $50 per day at the Ritz. And, with or without the courteous and patient help of the eight young ladies in Macy's City Information Bureau, they found their way to one or another of New York's 9,000 restaurants, where they ordered their heart's desire from Irish stew, Japanese sukiyaki, and Creole gumbo, to Swedish smorgasbord, Budapest salami, and Cephalonian afgalimono.
“Hard-boiled New York is just a three-minute egg” rhapsodized the Convention and Visitors Bureau in one of its blurbs. Visitors rapidly discovered the soft center of that marvelous city. But Mark discovered that there was also a smell of human suffering and degradation.
Mark's parish was in the center of the tourist and hotel area. Between chambermaids, bellhops, desk clerks, cashiers, stewards, chefs, waiters and waitresses, and kitchen help, Mark calculated that there were 50,000 to 75,000 men and women whose hours were irregular and long. They went to bed when most church services were starting. Many were holding down two jobs at the same time. There was no way for these men and women to keep religion as part of hotel-life schedules. But it was such a hidden problem—or at least one nobody would normally think of—that it was practically neglected by every church.
What heightened both the plight and the peril of those neglected people in Mark's eyes was the web of organized crime-mainly in drug traffic, prostitution, and the numbers game-into which many were willy-nilly drawn. From simple steering of individual visitors to pimping for one or another of the several madams and their parlor houses; from simple bet collecting to bet agenting; from drug running to drug peddling and distributing; the road in every case was easy to find and too attractive not to try. Even with the Seabury investigation in 1930 and the breakup of the Luciano syndicate by Thomas Dewey some time later, there was no real cessation of this traffic in crime and vice.
Mark's father, as a certified accountant, handled the affairs of some major hotels in New York City. When-Mark took up his new post, his father provided him with introductions to some of his friends and clients in the area. It was exactly the opening Mark needed in order to get to know the conditions in the hotels and restaurants, and to talk often and easily with the personnel. His factual mind seized on the salient elements, and his priestly experience and instincts indicated to him what could be done to meet the religious needs of the hotel and restaurant workers.
By the time his next tour of duty came up for consideration two years later, he had his mind more or less made up as to what he wished to do.
In August 1938 he got his chance. He had a long discussion with his superiors. He had a simple proposal to make: to undertake a special mission as chaplain extraordinary to the hotel and restaurant personnel in New York City. As Mark presented the case, it must have sounded like asking to go as missionary to savage lands. The superiors were impressed with his analysis of the situation. They were not difficult to persuade. The decision was made, and Mark went to live in a midtown parish rectory. He was relieved of all duties in that parish. It was to be merely his home base.
His new parish actually lay in every hotel in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. He divided this parish into six areas based on a rough grouping of hotels. The Grand Central area was centered on the Commodore and the Biltmore. The Penn Station area had the New Yorker as its center point. Times Square was relatively self-contained. The East Side was dominated by the Waldorf-Astoria. The Central Park group centered around the Plaza and the Sherry Netherlands. Brooklyn Heights centered mainly on the 2,641-room St. George.
But Mark's beat was not exclusively hotels, and it definitely was not all first class. He knew restaurants, nightclubs, swing joints, dives, second-, third-, and no-cla
ss hotels. He was as familiar as the “regulars” in the Paradise Cabaret on Broadway and in the Cotton Club on 48th Street (where, as he recalls, “50 Tall Tan Girls” danced to Cab Galloway's music). He knew Billy Rose's Casino de Paree, and was well known at swing joints such as the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Hickory House.
It was not surprising that Mark got to know some of New York's best chefs (and some of the worst!). Partly as a means to help him reach the hearts and minds of some of his “parish,” Mark began to take an interest in cooking. One fine day he even found he had a genuine talent for cooking and that he had a real interest in it.
It would not be long before he found that this was not the only part of his new life that would reach inside and become part of him always.
Mark was on a late-night call-ordinary for his new beat-when he had his first close brush with a force that would later become the focus of all his efforts. It was at the bedside of a young prostitute who had been found bleeding and unconscious in a vacant lot near Ninth Avenue and 43rd Street. This and Sugar Hill in Harlem, where the mulattoes plied their trade, were the cheapest and the most dangerous areas in prostitution. Mark never went there except on urgent call.
When he entered the ill-lit room where the girl lay, her mother was there. She indicated the little cot in the semidarkness of one corner. The girl was moaning in pain. In the shadows at the foot of the cot Mark could see the figure of a man wearing a hat and overcoat, hands thrust in his pockets. As Mark approached the cot, the man took out one hand and held it up in an arresting motion. Mark stopped.
“Who is this?” Mark asked the girl's mother in a whisper.
She shook her head. “I don't know, Father. He used to be with her now and then. He came in a few moments ago. I thought he. . .” She trailed off helplessly.
Mark was now close enough to see the girl's eyes in the semidarkness. They were open and fixed on the man at the foot of the cot. The little light thrown by the single bulb in the room picked up the oddest expression in her eyes. Mark's mind flashed in a split-second memory to a pet rabbit he had had as a boy. One day he found the rabbit huddled and shivering staring at the cat that hovered by its cage. The ugly glitter in the cat's eyes—its superiority, its mysterious pull on him, its cruelty and disdain—was hypnotic. The fear that paralyzed the rabbit was dreadful and pathetic.
“She doesn't need you.”
The words came from the man standing at the foot of the cot. The accent was normal. The tone was authoritative. There was no hint of hostility, just utter finality.
Mark fumbled for his crucifix and the little bottle of holy water he always carried. He had decided in that instant to give the girl a blessing and to leave it at that. He was not begging for trouble. Perhaps she was not even Catholic.
“That is enough.”
The same voice again, but this time the tone held a definite menace. There was an implicit “or else” in those three words.
Mark was puzzled. Perhaps the man did not understand. He turned and faced the dark figure. It seemed to withdraw deeper into the shadows.
“But I'm. . .” Mark began by way of explanation.
But he never finished the sentence. The entire “scenario” as he had seen it up to that moment disappeared. It all became clear to him. The hard rind seemed to have been peeled off of his inner self; and he became wholly sensitive to what lay behind the “scenario” facing him—the girl, the man, the old woman, the dingy room, and the peculiar atmosphere enveloping all three of them. He was instantly aware of multiple relationships stretching taut like invisible cords among all present.
He drew back almost in shock at what he now understood. He knew that somehow the girl was in thrall to that man. And he knew it was far beyond the thralldom of a prostitute to her pimp. Somehow the man could assert his claim with a brutal authority.
The girl's mother touched Mark on the arm. They left the room. Outside, their conversation was brief.
“No, Father,” she answered his question. “He's not her pimp.” She looked at him with eyes full of despair. “I thought you'd get to her before they arrived.”
“They?” echoed Mark with a new sense of shock. The mother nodded her head and stared steadily at him. He made a move to go back in.
“No.” She laid a hand gently but firmly on his arm. “No. You're still young. You don't know what you're up against. You can't deal with anything like this. Yet.” And then, already moving away from Mark to the door of the apartment, “Save yourself, Father. She's already in their grip.”
She opened the door, and then closed it between them before he could ask any more questions.
“You can't deal with it.”
He never forgot the woman's words. But it took him some months and many experiences before he began to understand that he was more than once up against cases of possession. Sometimes the situations resembled that of the dying girl, but not always.
At the end of the year Mark went to his superiors again and asked to speak to the official exorcist of the diocese. There was none, he was told, at that particular moment. But, said the official with whom Mark talked, if any cases of possession came up, they would call Mark in. He said this with the jocularity that is so often the sign of total ignorance. After all, the official added, with what Mark had been through, and if Mark's suspicions were true, he already had more experience than anyone else they knew.
The official's tone may have been light, but the result of the conversation was serious. Mark was now official exorcist of his diocese.
With intermittent breaks in his routine and some trips to other parts of the country and to Canada, Mark's ministry in New York lasted for 24 years. During that time he developed his knowledge and skill in dealing with cases of possession (real and counterfeit—he always said that out of every hundred claimants there might be one genuine case). But, more importantly, he became aware of an entire world of the spirit about which he had been taught nothing in the seminary and which seemed to flourish as the dark underside of life in his beloved New York.
Mark still gave the impression of jaunty objectivity. But now there was a deep underlay of awareness and shrewdness. And he was open and sensitive to the slightest trace of diabolism, while highly skeptical of all claims of diabolical “attention.”
It was a source of some amazement to his close associates and superiors that he did not go the way of most exorcists. A few years' active ministry in Exorcism, and the majority paled, as it were: they seemed to wither in a variety of ways; some by illness, others by premature aging; others still because they seemed to have lost the will to live.
“Most of us crawl away and die somewhere quietly,” Mark said as we talked one evening. I knew he was right.
“Why not you, Mark?”
“Well, you see,” Mark began jokingly, “I have this great pal upstairs, and when I start into one of those exorcism businesses, he comes along and holds my hand.” But at the end of the sentence Mark's eyes were away over my head and his expression was not in the least jocular. It was luminous and fixed on some object or person I could not identify.
One colleague of Mark's with whom I talked had been a close friend since their seminary days. They had always exchanged confidences. But all that had changed. He told me he had long since realized that Mark's inner life had been invaded by a dimension of which he knew very little and at which he could only guess.
Mark seemed all of a sudden very old and deeply weary to his friend. For most priests, as for most lay people, the world of the exorcist is totally unknown. The toll it takes is incommunicable and can pass unnoticed for years, even by those nearest to the exorcist.
But in those days Mark was still a young man. He lost most of his hair before he was thirty-five, but so did his two brothers. His health remained excellent. He exercised frequently, and rarely seemed to be affected adversely by his job. For two or three weeks after his first brush with an evil spirit, he seemed retired into himself and to be in deep thought. Then he snap
ped out of it. When he came across his first case of a “familiar” spirit (the subject was a pimp arrested for a multiple murder), he was completely befuddled, as he now admits. “Evil was very hard to trace,” he recalls. “And I had two psychiatrists telling me that this was a classical case of multiple personality.” In spite of the psychiatrists' opinions (which seemed to be somewhat confused, anyway, Mark recalls) and his own puzzlement about the ease, Mark decided to try Exorcism because of four cardinal “symptoms”: the physical disturbances accompanying the presence of the pimp, the pimp's physically uncontrollable and violent reaction to the crucifix, to the name of Jesus, and to holy water.
The only type of possession that produced a strange and unwonted tension in Mark was what he came to discern as “the perfectly possessed.” His colleagues learned of such cases from Mark only because from time to time they sensed a peculiar tension very unusual in Mark. And occasionally they questioned him, thinking that he had had some accident, or that he was in some danger, or that they might help solve some problem. What they saw in Mark at such times, as they or some of them came to learn, was not a nervous tension, but lather an intense watchfulness and wariness which, his friends felt, was directed even at them. At those times he gave the impression of extreme guardedness. He was tight-lipped, gimlet-eyed, and curt in his (Malversation. When they finally were able to draw him out, and he them some idea of the condition of those who, he found, were perfectly possessed, they were taken aback by his totally negative attitude. This, too, was very unusual in Mark.
To all questions as to why there was no room for mercy or hope in such cases, Mark would try to recount some of his experiences with the perfectly possessed. But most of all he reflected the reality of the experience in a stare of such stark and concentrated realization that no one could pursue the subject further with him.
At the age of sixty Mark asked for a sabbatical. His health was still good, but something was changing in him. The years had piled up inside him an accumulation of disgusts and reticences that finally even he could not ignore.