“Ah. I’m sorry.”
On TV, the actress went on explaining how she had yet to find the perfect man. He had to be someone who appreciated her intelligence as well as her body. The talk-show host thought this was a marvelously original idea.
“I can’t believe he was unfaithful. Unless he was blind as well as deaf and dumb.”
Barbara blushed like a schoolgirl of eighteen. “He didn’t want to live down here. We … didn’t get along.”
She continued to stare at the TV but she was no longer listening to it.
“I understand, I understand,” O’Gorman said. “I’ve had a similar marriage, for twenty years now.”
“Really? Why—How?” No doubt she assumed that everyone in Ireland sang turalooraloora all day long and never had a quarrel.
“Politics. My wife’s family is one of the richest in the Republic. They want no trouble about the poor Catholics in the north. When I vowed to devote my life to their rescue, they showed me the door. She … stayed behind.”
“Oh.”
“It was difficult at first. But …”
He let the implication of his suffering drift across the room toward her, a silent plea. The sympathy in her blue eyes was devastating. O’Gorman began hoping it would take the Cubans several weeks to deliver their marvelous weapons.
A MAN FOR ALL SERMONS
Head down, legs pumping in the wet sand, Father Philip Hart jogged into the relentless northeast wind. Above him, light seemed drained from the gray sky. With the windchill factor the temperature had to be twenty degrees below zero. His body was a piece of frozen meat; a curiously satisfying thought. Father Hart jogged every day, regardless of the weather. Yesterday he had jogged in driving, stinging sleet. He had loved it.
His numbed ears were filled with the rush of the wind and the boom of the surf. The waves towered to incredible heights and then crashed straight down when the wind caught them, creating explosions of angry water. Beneath the gloomy sky, the foaming combers seemed doubly berserk. Warnings from an angry God?
Another jogger came toward him, accompanied by a frolicsome Airedale. It was the Jewish girl, Jacqueline Chasen. She waved cheerfully to him. They often met in the dawn and occasionally in the twilight. She jogged on doctor’s orders, to regain her muscle tone after months in hospital beds, recovering from an automobile accident.
“How do you like this weather?” she called to him as they passed.
“I like it,” Father Hart said, slowing down.
“Me too,” she said, jogging backward. “Last year at this time, you couldn’t have gotten me out in this weather without a regiment of marines. Maybe there’s something to be said for almost killing yourself.”
“Maybe,” Father Hart said, jogging backward too.
She had an incredibly good figure, which was extremely visible in her jogging suit. Suddenly Father Hart’s body was no longer a frozen piece of meat.
“See you later,” she called, and continued up the beach toward her house on Leeds Point.
He would dream about her again tonight. Why had she become the object of his lust? Was it simply her figure, or was it her Jewishness? His lust, which Father Hart disowned, was feeding on myth and erotic hearsay, on vile jokes about the Jewish obsession with sex. Jacqueline Chasen was not a person to him.
Reprehensible. Father Hart gazed at the raging surf, the immense expanse of black, whitecapped ocean beyond it. He might have been jogging along the rim of eternity. That made his lust for this woman even more reprehensible.
In spite of this noble attempt to evade it, last night’s dream floated into his head. It had a lot to do with the confession he had heard earlier in the day. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I went to Atlantic City and won a thousand bucks and got laid at Billy’s. After I got laid, she asked me if I wanted a blow job and I said okay.
In the dream, Father Hart was at Caesars. He was lying naked on a huge roulette wheel and Jacqueline Chasen was smiling down at him. Ohhhh, Phil, you won, she said, and took his penis in her mouth. Lucky, Phil, she said, and slowly wiggled out of her jogging suit and mounted him. Let’s go for a ride.
A grinning crowd surrounded them. Someone spun the wheel and they whirled around and around, his hands on her breasts. He had awakened with his pajamas soaked with semen. He had had to take a shower and was sleepless for the rest of the night.
Damn Atlantic City. It was Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one city of sordid glitz. He heard a dozen confessions like that a month. Married men who swore they were sorry, who vowed they would not do it again. Yet they did it again and again. He tried not to associate names and faces with the shape of the head, the sound of the voice that penetrated the confessional screen. But it was hard not to make the connections in a small town. It was hard not to remember what was happening, night after night, only fifty miles away.
Out on the frothing ocean, Father Hart saw the white hull of the SS Enterprise emerging from Pochank Inlet. The sixty-foot fishing boat was rolling violently as the fifty-mile-an-hour gale struck her on the beam. The Vietnamese refugee Phac, abuser of his delicate, tragic-eyed wife, was on board that ship. Father Hart had not heard from him. He had been hoping he could solve that problem with a warning. If Phac proved defiant, the situation could become messy.
Father Hart jogged down Delaware Street to St. Augustine’s two-story, brown-shingled rectory. Next door, the church, a vine-covered stone rectangle with a stubby Romanesque tower added as an afterthought, was dark and silent. It would remain that way for the rest of the day. Father Hart had said mass at 8 A.M. for a half dozen aged women. A meeting of the Sons of the Shamrock was scheduled for seven-thirty tonight. At least the basement lights would be on for a while.
Father Hart hated to see the church empty. It reminded him uncomfortably of the slipping attendance at Sunday mass, the even steeper decline in daily massgoers. That was why he made the basement hall available to organizations like the SOS, even though they were not religious.
As he jogged up to the gate, a big man got out of a car and walked toward him. It was Mick O’Day, the cop. Not one of his favorite people.
When Hart had come to Paradise Beach in 1972, Mick’s grandfather, Dan Monahan, had been the town’s reigning patriarch. With money he had stolen during his years of power in the corrupt big-city machine that had dominated the state’s politics for the first half of the century, Monahan had bought fishing boats, saloons, and other businesses for his daughters and sons-in-law and nephews and cousins and taken over the town’s power structure.
Hart had been invited to pay his respects to the old man, as priests had paid obeisance to him and his cohorts for generations. At dinner they had gotten into a discussion of the presidential election and the war in Vietnam. When Hart had said he was voting for George McGovern and began denouncing the war, a chilly silence had enveloped the table. He had not been invited back.
Mick had not been at the dinner. He had been in Vietnam. That year he had been dishonorably discharged from the marines for committing an atrocity. Old Monahan was getting senile now, but most of the family remained surly and even hostile to Father Hart. Mick came late to Sunday mass and left early. If he ever went to confession and Communion, it was not at St. Augustine’s.
“Say, Father. Could I talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Mick said.
“Sure.”
In the rectory, the priest slipped out of his sweaty running suit and pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. “Some coffee?” he said to Mick, who was waiting in the small parlor.
“No thanks. Listen, Father. You got to lay off Phac. His wife called me. She says you’re gonna give him a hard time for beating her up. Stay out of it, Father.”
Father Hart bristled. Where did this Neanderthal get off giving him advice? “Why is this any of your business?”
“I knew them both in Nam. I was stationed in their village.”
“I’m amazed they’d ask you for help. They probably saw you gun down their
brothers, sisters, cousins. Didn’t you get a dishonorable discharge for doing something like that?”
Mick’s fair-skinned face flushed. Guilt. If ever Father Hart, who considered himself an expert on guilt, saw it. “Let’s forget about what I did. I’m here to protect Trai. If you push Phac over the edge, he could really hurt her.”
“That’s a hell of an attitude for a policeman to take. Aren’t you supposed to protect women against wife beaters?”
“Sure. But Phac isn’t some Irish drunk, Father. This guy’s been through a lot. Don’t put any more pressure on him. Let me talk to him instead.”
“Now you’re really being ridiculous. Are you setting yourself up as a marriage counselor?”
“No. But I know the background, Father. Phac trusts me. I’m the reason he came to this crummy town—”
“Haven’t you and people like you caused enough pain and suffering to him and Trai?”
Amazement flickered across Mick’s wide face. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Father.”
All Father Hart could see was Trai’s plaintive, innocent eyes, her trembling lips. Here was the antidote to the lust Jacqueline Chasen stirred in him. Here was innocence betrayed by a vile warmongering power elite. Here was their spokesman, with the blood of other innocents still on his hands.
“I do know what I’m talking about! I marched against the war. I went to teach-ins where they told the truth about it. I know exactly what went on out there in Vietnam. Exactly what people like you did to innocent men and women trying to live in peace in their own country.”
“Live in peace! There hasn’t been any peace in that country for a hundred years. Look, Father. Phac is a tough guy. Awful tough. He was the police chief in Binh Nghai.”
“Did he shoot people like that police chief in Saigon shot the man they caught during the Tet Offensive?”
“No. Usually Phac hanged them. It made more of an impression.”
“You helped him?”
“I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t have stopped him if I wanted to. He was in charge. I’ve seen him beat people up too. I mean really beat them up. I don’t want him to do that to Trai.”
“This is the sort of war criminal we’ve brought to our country? I’m going to write to the head of Catholic Relief and get him deported.”
“Then he really will kill her. He might kill you too.”
“I’m not going to let you intimidate me!”
“I’m not doing anything but telling you the truth! Now that he’s gotten Suong to this country, Phac doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. He’s told me that more than once. But he won’t let you disgrace him. He’s a proud son of a gun.”
“Well, I’m going to humble him. I want you to bring him down here tonight after work in your car.”
Mick stepped back two paces. “Father, I heard from a lot of people that you were more or less an asshole. But I didn’t realize how big an asshole you were.”
Father Hart trembled from head to foot. He was face-to-face with one of the helmeted killers he had marched against in 1969 and 1970, his first years as a priest. One of the military murderers who had a lot to do with sending him to this obscure parish on the freezing Atlantic. The archbishop had made it clear that he did not approve of his priests becoming radicals.
It was incredible the way the Irish could close their minds by an act of the will. Here was a man who had committed a crime so vile his militaristic government could not condone it. Yet he refused to admit his guilt. He defended one of his fellow killers and dismissed his pastor’s condemnation.
“I’m giving you an order, Mick. Bring Phac down here.”
Mick strolled to the door. “You go get him. That’s the only way you’re going to see him. I told Trai to forget the whole thing.”
Fuming, Father Hart took a shower and poured himself a dish of cornflakes. He could not believe that Trai would listen to Mick O’Day and ignore his offer to help. Should he drive to the house tonight? No, that could create an ugly scene in front of the boy, Suong.
As he finished his cornflakes, Father Hart felt, not for the first time, a sinking sensation. Around him, the rectory creaked in the March wind. Outside, on street after street, his parishioners lived their impenetrable, entangled lives. Not singly, like him, but as part of families, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Too often, he felt like a space traveler, marooned on an alien asteroid.
Father Hart had joined the priesthood in the euphoric days of the early 1960s, when the Vatican Council was supposedly transforming the Church. Priests were going to be permitted to marry, they would share power with the bishops. Now, in the year of our Lord 1984, it looked more and more like the Catholic Church of the 1950s. The difference was, there were fewer priests and a lot less respect for them. In 1962, when he had entered the seminary, no one would have talked to a priest the way Mick O’Day had just talked to him.
Father Hart struggled for equilibrium. He must not yield to the winter blahs. Spring and summer were just around the corner. He had a family, even if they were scattered now, his father and mother in a retirement village in Florida, his older sister living in Seattle, his two brothers pursuing the almighty dollar in Chicago. He was not as lonely as he sometimes felt. They were all just a telephone call away.
In spite of the knock the Monahans had put on him, he had some supporters in the parish. Now that he had learned to keep politics out of his sermons and his conversations, he would have more. With some prodding from the archbishop, he had accepted the sad fact that no one in Paradise Beach (or in the whole diocese of Trenton, for that matter) cared about the need for a nuclear freeze or a reduction in the arms race.
The front doorbell rang. There stood a medium-sized, sandy-haired man in a black suit and black overcoat and round collar, with a suitcase in his hand. He had the saddest eyes, the most hangdog expression, Hart had ever seen. “Father Hart?” the man said in a soft Irish brogue that somehow added to his mournful mien. “I’m Dennis McAvoy. Archbishop Cardigan thought it might do me good to stay with you for a few days.”
“Come in,” Father Hart said.
McAvoy gratefully accepted a cup of coffee. It did not take him long to tell his story. He was a graduate of the Irish seminary at Maynooth. With Ireland’s declining population and steady supply of vocations, priests were one of its main exports. Half the American bishops wrote letters to Maynooth, begging for one of their products. But Father McAvoy had run into trouble in his tour at St. Patrick’s Parish in posh Tenafly, in suburban North Jersey.
He had asked for volunteers to join him on a trip to the UN to protest British policy in Northern Ireland. Not a soul had come forward. When he tried to organize a poverty kitchen in nearby Union City, he had been similarly ignored. When he preached a sermon against America’s imperialist policy in Nicaragua, people had walked out of the church. He had had a terrible row with the pastor.
“I’ll tell it to you straight, Father. I went on a bender. It’s a weakness in my family,” McAvoy said. “Maybe in the race, God knows. I’ve been drying out for the last six weeks at a sanitarium in Flemington. The archbishop thought I might be happier down this way ‘with your own kind,’ as he put it. I’ll try not to be a burden to you. I’ll try to be some help.”
Father Hart’s eyes misted, his throat filled with sympathy. Here was a fellow priest struggling to save his vocation, his soul. A fellow wayfarer in late-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Perhaps a partial answer to his loneliness. “Welcome to St. Augustine’s Parish,” he said, holding out his hand.
It seemed more than a coincidence that Father McAvoy had arrived in time to join Father Hart at seven-thirty that night for the monthly meeting of the Sons of the Shamrock. Hart told him about the SOS at supper and was pleased by the way McAvoy’s wan face came aglow. The Sons usually mustered about a hundred people for a meeting, about two-thirds of their membership. They were a modest organization, compared to the Order of the Friendly Sons of the Shil
lelagh, forty miles up the coast in Madison township. The Shillelaghs had a sumptuous clubhouse and a membership of four hundred. Like them, the Sons were dedicated to keeping Irish culture alive in New Jersey.
Some 1,440,000 New Jerseyans reported themselves to be of Irish descent in the census. But most of them had lapsed shamefully from their heritage if not from their faith. “My family’s one of them,” Father Hart ruefully admitted. “I grew up in Metuchen, a typical suburb. We knew nothing about Ireland. My father said he was sick of Mother Machree and just ignored the whole subject. He was reacting against the god-awful songs and Irish jokes at parish smokers when he was growing up in Jersey City.”
“What a pity,” Father McAvoy said.
“Every year on the first of April the Sons of the Shamrock stage a feis. Authentic Irish dancing and piping, sports like hurling, Gaelic football. We attract about ten thousand people.”
“I can hardly wait,” Father McAvoy said.
Mayor Desmond McBride, who doubled as taioseach of the Sons, greeted Fathers Hart and McAvoy as they entered the parish hall. “What a coincidence,” he burbled, pumping McAvoy’s hand after Hart had introduced them. McBride led the priests over to a corner and introduced them to two smiling strangers. One was as tall and elegant as the other was squat and ugly. “Meet Dick O’Gorman and Billy Kilroy, just off Aer Lingus. They’re here to lecture on Irish culture. Every cent they raise is going to a home in Belfast, where children orphaned by the violence are being raised by nuns.”
“How wonderful,” Father Hart said.
“That isn’t all, Father,” McBride said. “Dr. O’Gorman here’s agreed to supervise our feis. He and Billy will live here and work with us.”
“It was the least I could do, in return for such hospitality as Desmond’s shown us,” O’Gorman said. “Right, Billy?”
“Yah,” grunted Billy, who did not look very bright to Father Hart. He warned himself not to allow stereotypes to influence his thinking.
“We’re planning to lecture around the state. It’s easy to reach almost any part of it from here.”
Hours of Gladness Page 9