The Senator and the Priest

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “There’s always a chance, but I don’t think she could admit to herself that she had been rejected. Both the women have given me an affidavit. I will type out one for you and I’ll witness it and put it in a file”

  I sighed and agreed.

  “I don’t need this aggravation right now.”

  “You’re not over that flu yet.”

  I was in fact over the flu. I was sick of the United States Senate. Maybe my brother was right. I didn’t belong here.

  Joe McDermott called from Chicago.

  “Some interesting rumors going around, Tommy. The feds have started an investigation of your good friend Bobby Bill.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “There’s a new federal prosecutor down there, out to make a name for himself.”

  “I think I just published a book about that kind of person.”

  “Bobby Bill is very popular down there. He’s given money to lots of folks, especially to Christian churches and schools. The feds better have the goods on him before they make any charges. I hope it takes them a long time.”

  “Oh?”

  “So the news will break during the election campaign.”

  “We won’t be able to use it.”

  “We won’t have to … By the way, you were very good on ‘Fast Pitching.’”

  “They got the tape to you already?”

  “Very efficient staff. That forty million figure that he had is the same one we have.”

  I found myself hoping that if there had been violations down there in Tulsa, they would break soon. It would get Lee Schlenk off my back.

  I was thinking like I would be running for reelection. I must avoid those kinds of thoughts or I would be dragged into a race which everyone but me seemed to want.

  I walked over to the chapel at Georgetown after I had delivered my two younger daughters home.

  You got me into this, I told God. I can’t believe that you want me to stay here. I survived yesterday. But I do not have the temperament for this kind of life. Maybe it was the way I was raised. Maybe it’s my problem with my brother. But I don’t have the energy or the motivation to keep this pace up. All right, I got some decent legislation through. Maybe that’s all you expect me to do. Isn’t it enough? Do you have any signs in mind to make it clear to me what I ought to do next? Otherwise maybe I should go back to being a public defender with a rich wife.

  There were no answers. There never are.

  Or maybe there was.

  That night we went to a reception and a dinner, the former for the American Civil Liberties Union, the latter for the Latino-American Alliance. I was a hero with both of them. Hence they would pressure me to run for President.

  “These are nice people,” Mary Margaret said with a sigh as we dressed, “but I’d just as soon stay home and watch college football.”

  “You look scrumptious, Mom,” Maryro looked up from a history book in the parlor which she was reading while a football game went on in silence on the TV. “You too, Dad … Come home early. You both look tired.”

  “No date?” I asked as we got in our car, the Chevy van which had replaced the one that Bobby Bill had blown up.

  “Daniel’s parents are in town. She’s having supper with them tomorrow night.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  “A lot less than we were at the same age, counselor.”

  I wished we were that age again. I would have done a lot of things differently.

  There was enthusiasm for the two of us at both affairs. Mary Margaret had won another gender case at the court five-four. And my performance on “Fast Pitching” had made me a presidential candidate. It did me little good to protest that I had no intention of running.

  Then that night I was seduced. By my wife, a lot more polished and ingenious a seducer than poor Robbie Becker. Anger, frustration, disappointment, passion suppressed too long, desperate need—all made our romp wild, demanding, implacable. We grasped recklessly for pleasure and then achieved it in a final explosion of love.

  Then something strange happened. As we both relaxed in the floating sensation that comes often at the end of satisfying sex, something else invaded our bedroom. Or, to be honest, someone else. Or even more honest, Someone else.

  The room seemed to fill with light, luminosity that flowed from us and then bathed us in a tidal surge of joy and peace and love. We knelt on the bed in a terrified but happy embrace, crying and laughing, caught up in a pleasure so intense that we felt that if it increased even a little we would be torn apart, not that we would have minded.

  The Transcendent had invaded our marriage bed and joined in our game.

  That’s a reflection we had afterwards. At the moment itself—maybe a half minute and maybe an hour, it didn’t matter, we only knew that we had temporarily left time and space behind and had been caught up in a demanding power that held us and did not want to let us go, a power that loved us and was consuming us with the fire of its love. His love. Her love. Whatever.

  Then slowly it seemed it released us, but not without the promise that we three would meet again.

  OK, Tommy Moran, you wanted a sign. Was that enough?

  We collapse into prone positions. Mary Margaret, always the modest matron, pulled the sheets over us.

  “Who was that?” I gasped. “What did he want?”

  “She.”

  “OK … What was it all about?”

  “She wanted us.”

  “No right to invade the privacy of our love-making.”

  “She owns us, Tommy love. Delights in us. Created us to enjoy one another and then decided to join the fun.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “What else could it have been? God delighted in us.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask her!”

  I buried my head against her breasts. She caressed my head with her fingers.

  “Will it ever happen again?”

  “The afterglow will always be with us, Tommy.”

  “All your fault for attacking me!”

  She laughed.

  “I thought I was pretty good at it … then the Transcendent taught us both how to do it.”

  Then we both said together, “I’m sorry.”

  Then we argued about who was to blame for the loss of passion in our lives, each of us claiming responsibility, each of us promising that we would never let it happen again.

  Then we went to sleep, peaceful sleep, sleep which was a grace of all the goodness in the world.

  We slept till ten o’clock Saturday morning. The daughters had made brunch for us, at the suggestion of Maran, who had decided at lunch in the Senate Dining Room that I looked like I needed a good night’s sleep.

  Did they realize that we had made love together? Who knows what such smart and perceptive young women might guess. However, they would never know the half of it.

  They went out shopping together. My wife and I, still in robes, retreated to the library, not to talk about our menage à trois from the previous night, but merely to talk to one another.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m glad we got that out of the way.”

  “It’s only the beginning, woman,” I replied. “I have plans for you for every night of the week.”

  She blushed.

  “I realized I was risking something like that.”

  “In fact,” I said, closing and locking the library door, “I have plans for you right now!”

  I pulled away her robe and peeled off the gown she had donned when we got out of bed.

  “Tommy,” she protested weakly, as I pinned her on the couch.

  “We have to make up for lost time.”

  “There’s that!”

  Our love-making was very gentle and sweet, despite my pose as an attacker. She was right in her prediction there was a distinctive afterglow from our night visitor.

  We went to our bedroom, dressed in jeans and Loyola sweatshirts, returned to the library, and poured ourselves so
me champagne.

  “I suppose,” she said toasting me, “I can be available most nights of next week, especially since I’m taking a temporary leave from the firm.”

  It was none of my business, but I still asked, “Why?”

  “I’m going to work in your office as a volunteer for a while anyway.”

  She spoke as though this was just a minor change in my fortress prison.

  “Chris knows?”

  “Of COURSE! She and Manny said they needed me around there to deal with the increase of press attention and Illinois politics … Unless of course, you object?”

  “You will be a substantial distraction in my work, but I’ll love the distraction.”

  “I figured you would,” she said complacently.

  “How long have you women been planning this coup d’état?”

  “We had lunch two weeks ago at the Monocle. I had to rearrange some of my work at the firm. I’ll have to plead a couple of cases in the spring, but that won’t restrict much my volunteering.”

  So before the Robbie matter had occurred. A scheme to prevent it?

  What did I know?

  Our daughters returned, laden with purchases.

  “How come the champagne?” Marytre asked.

  “Celebrating that I’m going to work in Daddy’s office!”

  “Finally told him, huh?” Marytre said. “He couldn’t say no anyway.”

  “It had nothing to do with Robbie,” Chris told me on Monday.

  “We just felt it would be useful to have her around. She’s terribly bright and everyone likes her and her presence always cheers you up.”

  “Lately I’ve been in need of cheer,” I admitted.

  “I know that the conventional wisdom is that a wife shouldn’t be anywhere near the office … no mom and pop stores as you once said. But this is a different kind of wife.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  What Ambassador O’Malley calls, misquoting John Knox, the “Monstrous Regiment of Women” had taken over. The Senate job had hammered the poor little Senator’s morale into the ground. So they would take steps to salvage the poor dear man.

  Saturday night Mary Margaret and I, both a little tired from our activities of the past twenty-four hours, were watching NFL on TV, my excuse being that the Senate was for all practical purposes quiescent till the election in the first week in November when a third of its members were compelled to submit themselves to reelection.

  Maryro bounced into our media room in high dudgeon.

  “Daniel is a dweeb, a nerd, a flake,” she announced as she sat in the easy chair.

  “You broke up with him in front of his parents?” I asked. I would never have dared break up with my teenage date in front of her parents.

  “He didn’t tell them my name until he introduced me to them at dinner, like I was a brand-new pet puppy.”

  “Irish wolfhound bitch?”

  “Don’t be gross! He tells them that I’m Mary Rose Moran …”

  “Your real name!”

  “They take one look at my hair and they know who I am. So all we talk about all evening is my parents, whom they, you know, totally adore! BORING! I have to tell them what you’re like …”

  “And what did you tell them?” Mary Margaret asked.

  “I said that my father was born with the gift of wit and my mother with the gift of laughter which made a great combination, except that he worked at the Senate where laughter wasn’t permitted and she at the Supreme Court where the only wit was dry legal jokes that were not very funny.”

  “You had prepared that beforehand,” Mary Margaret observed.

  “Of COURSE, I did. I knew what would happen. Mrs. Leary said that I clearly had inherited from both sides of the family. And Daniel there beaming proudly at his prize bitch.”

  “I assume they’re Democrats,” I said.

  “Worse even than you … Now they want to have dinner with you the next time they’re here in D.C., like I’m going to permit that.”

  “We’d be happy to meet them, dear.”

  “Not yet,” she said firmly.

  “You’re not breaking up with Daniel, are you?”

  “Just because he’s a dweeb? I’m not THAT dumb! … And their grandparents knew your grandmother, Mom, back in St. Gabe’s during prohibition, whatever that was.”

  “Were they sure?”

  “April May Cronin is not a name you’d forget … She must have been quite a woman … I told them how you found her dead in her bedroom and said a decade of the Rosary and were even younger than I am and Mrs. Leary started to cry, like I’m doing now.”

  She rushed up stairs to finish her crying in privacy.

  “A lot of heavy emotion in the family this weekend,” I remarked, only to discover that my wife was weeping too, silently.

  “The little brat had us down cold, didn’t she, Tommy?”

  “Even if she prepared it beforehand … Am I correct in assuming that dinner with the Learys went well?”

  “Certainly. Rather better than she had expected.”

  CHAPTER 28

  I WILL NEVER forget the lunch with Chris and Manny. It changed my whole life and made me realize what a dweeb I had been.

  We lunched at the Monocle which was filled with Democrats and their friends and constituents. Tommy’s two aides did not follow the Irish procedure of waiting till dessert before discussing the reason for the lunch. Rather they dove right in. We want you to work in the office. We need you to help out with the media and constituents. In the latter to liaison with Joe McDermott of the Senator’s Chicago office; you know that scene better than we do. We can’t pay you a salary because it would violate the nepotism rule. We need you as a volunteer.

  Does my husband know about this scheme?

  We haven’t told him yet. We thought you would ask him about it if you decide to come on board.

  Tell him about it.

  Whatever. There are other reasons. The Senator is one of the great men here in the Beltway. There hasn’t been anyone like him in a long, long time. Yet he is not happy here, though he enjoys the game and is very good at it. When he comes into the office, it’s a prisoner returning to jail. He still smiles. The geniality is so much part of his personality that he smiles no matter what is happening in his heart and his gut.

  That’s my Tommy.

  But he never laughs. Except when you are around.

  So my job would be to keep the Senator laughing.

  Happy and therefore laughing. Joe McDermott says that the campaign would have folded early if it wasn’t for your laughter. We haven’t asked about finances. You could work part-time and maybe do some cases before the court too. Not at the first but as time goes on.

  I can’t promise to deliver a re-election decision. He has to make up his own mind on that. He should do what he wants to do.

  We agree, of course.

  Sometimes I think Tommy married me because of my shanty Irish laughter.

  If you need time to think about it, it’s OK. We don’t want to rush you.

  I won’t have to think about it. I’d love the job. If I get out of line—all Irishwomen are bossy—let me know.

  All women. You won’t get bossy.

  I can’t guarantee that he’ll run again, I repeated … He has to make that decision himself. If he asks me what I think I’ll tell him, but I won’t argue.

  That’s the way it should be.

  I was trembling when I left the Monocle and not because of the cold wind blowing in from the north. I was trembling because I now understood something about our marriage that I had never grasped before. These two women and, later, my daughter Maryro had seen it immediately.

  Tommy, my sweet, cute little Tommy had married me because there was tons of laughter in the crazy O’Malley clan and none at all in his own family. He had married into laughter, laughter I had always taken for granted. It did not enter into my adolescent head that this boy wanted, indeed needed, a wife who would laugh at his jo
kes and at him. I was his escape from his elderly and respectable parents and an obsessive brother into a world of comedy. That model didn’t explain everything about our love. There was considerable sexual attraction too. Or there used to be. And it is my fault I’ve let it diminish. Even if it takes two to tango, it should have been obvious to me that I’m the musician in the family.

  I ducked into the St. Joseph’s Church. I had to straighten out this mess with God before I straightened it out with Tommy.

  Why didn’t You tell me that I’m supposed to be an audience for a stand-up comic? I would have taken the job a lot more seriously. Were You afraid that it would offend my feminism? My husband is a wonderful man and I’m grateful for Your sending him my way. I like to laugh. That ought to have been icing on the cake. Instead I missed the point. I didn’t appreciate after the campaign how essential my laughter was to him, how he couldn’t really be the United States Senator he wants to be and can be and should be unless I were around to laugh at him and to protect him from his creepy brother. So I deserted him for the Supreme Court where people only smirk.

  I’ll defend myself on the grounds—see what a good attorney I am—that I thought I shouldn’t intervene in the work of his office. That’s good advice for most senatorial wives, but no good at all for my Tommy.

  Well, all’s well that ends well, isn’t it? His staff had to appreciate that they needed me before it would work. It will be tons of fun! So will the renewal of our romance … Look at me laughing—and dirty laughing at that—in Church!

  So all I have to do is seduce my husband and bring a little laughter to his life in the Dirksen building. No problem. And the firm will be happy with whatever cases I’m willing to work for them.

  And, like I told them at lunch, I can’t guarantee he’ll run for re-election. Like them I think he should. But he has to want to do it. When it comes to decision time, he’ll ask me what I think. I don’t know what I’ll think. Whatever, it’s his call. Right?

  I talk to You like I’d talk to Chucky. Is that reverent? If it’s not, it’s Your fault for giving me a father like him.

  It’s up to You to give me some kind of sign that this is the right road. I’ll count on You for that. OK?

  I’m going home now to take a nap before supper. I want to be wide awake when we begin this new phase of our life.