by J.F. Powers
After that, Father Urban and Monsignor Renton drove over to the Hill. “Busy, Father?” Wilf was in his office.
“Oh, I guess there’s nothing that won’t keep. Oh hello, Monsignor. I didn’t see you.”
Presently, Father Urban told Wilf what was on his mind.
“My God!” cried Wilf, but he wanted to hear more.
Later that afternoon, alone in the upper room at St Monica’s, Father Urban made himself a scotch highball, carried it to the little secretary desk, sat down, and took out several sheets of paper. For some time, he fingered the letter opener, which was like a little sword, and then, suddenly, he put it aside, took pen in hand, and wrote, “Dear Billy:”
Billy phoned the next day, about noon, from the railroad station in—Where? You’re kidding! Father Urban had sent Billy a very long wire at straight rates, but he hadn’t asked, or even hoped, for anything like this. “O.K., I’ll be right down to get you,” he said, and then, before he left the rectory, he rang up Monsignor Renton. “Great, good news, Monsignor!”
They met at the station, Father Urban, Monsignor Renton, Billy, and a Mr Robertson. Billy and Mr Robertson had taken the Blackhawk up from Chicago (“I’m not knocking it, but it used to be a better train”), and they’d made connections at St Paul that morning with the Voyageur (“Don’t knock it, Monsignor”). Monsignor Renton took them to lunch in the Greenwich Village Room (“Best we can do, I’m afraid”—“Don’t knock it, Monsignor”), and after a pretty fair meal, they drove out to Mr Hanson’s, Billy and Father Urban in the Plymouth, Mr Robertson and Monsignor Renton in the latter’s Imperial.
Mr. Hanson and the truck were elsewhere, but Rex showed the party around the farm. Most of the time they walked in silence, Mr Robertson occasionally raising small binoculars to his eyes. When they were back where they’d started from a half hour before, Billy said:
“Well?”
Mr Robertson gave the frozen ground, which he’d been eyeing from all angles, from close up and afar, one last kick, and said:
“I don’t see why not.”
“Let’s make it a standout course,” said Billy.
As they were getting into the cars, Monsignor Renton now alone in his, Rex spoke to them, and a moment later Mr Hanson and the truck appeared.
Billy, who had been told about Father Urban’s accident, said to Mr Hanson: “Paid that bill yet—that collision bill?”
“Yar, I got to pay it,” said Mr Hanson.
“Yar,” said Rex to Monsignor Renton.
“Don’t pay it,” Billy said.
“Yar, I got to pay it.”
“Don’t pay it,” Billy said, “and consider this place sold.”
“Yar, I got to pay it and I got to get my price,” said Mr Hanson.
“Help,” said Billy, and walked toward the car.
Father Urban took Mr Hanson aside and explained the nature of the deal to him. “We’ll pay your price and we’ll pay the bill from Cal’s Body Shop.” When Mr Hanson had got it straight, he was much taken with the idea of not paying the bill, and, of course, he was pleased to know that he’d be getting his price. Father Urban asked Mr Hanson, in a nice way, not to cut any more timber off the land, if he didn’t mind, for it seemed to Father Urban that there were fewer birches than he remembered in the thin little woods.
“Yar, O.K.,” said Mr Hanson, and, instructed by Father Urban, fetched Cal’s bill from the house.
Father Urban started to put the bill in his pocket.
“I’ll take that,” said Billy, from the car.
Monsignor Renton headed back to Great Plains, and Father Urban drove Billy and Mr Robertson to the Hill where he introduced them to Wilf. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr Cosgrove,” said Wilf, and offered to show Billy and Mr Robertson around. “This, of course, is the office.” And thus another tour got under way. It moved down the corridor to the refectory (“Mr Cosgrove, you have no idea how much we’ve enjoyed the set, and I trust you got my letter to that effect”) and then to the kitchen (“Electric mixer”) and then to the chapel, but there Father Urban remained on his knees and left the tour—recalling the one he’d taken in November.
The place was in better shape than it had been then. At the moment, there were a half-dozen retreatants in residence, not bad for the middle of the week. The absence of retreatants, in days past, had been one of the weak points in Wilf’s tours. Physically, too, the place was in better shape now. Still too many rocking chairs around, but the Rec Room now had four easy chairs (including the one that had been on loan to Father Urban), Parlors A and B had been redone (and renamed St Thomas Aquinas and SS. Cyril and Methodius), there was color TV in the refectory, there was a sacristy off the chapel, there were fresh new signs posted throughout the house, and the driveway was now designated as “one way.” And something, it appeared, was going to happen in the chapel.
Rising from his knees, Father Urban visited with Jack and Brother Harold, who had come in carrying a ladder. They were preparing for the morrow, they told Father Urban. Then, and there, in the chapel, after months of apprenticeship and weeks of planning, Brother Harold was to have his big chance as a sacred artist. Father Urban, glancing at the cartoons the artist had made, was relieved that Billy hadn’t seen them. “They’re not representational in the photographic sense,” said Brother Harold of some of his figures. “So I see,” said Father Urban. And still, he thought, once you accepted the idea that the chapel would be “contemporary” (to the extent that paint could counteract such evidences to the contrary as the pews and the altar), maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. “How’s it going, Jack?”
“I can’t complain,” Jack said.
Father Urban went to Wilf’s office and made a few telephone calls, mostly to pass the time of day. “No, nothing special, George. I happened to be thinking of you. How’s that virus? Good. And Marge? Good. No, I’m at the Hill. At the moment, yes. Nothing much, but I may have something to tell you in a few days. Good. ’Bye, George.”
“Say,” said Wilf, entering the office when the tour had ended. “If you can get away from St Monica’s for a couple of days, I think you’d better go down to Chicago. I’d go myself, but I can’t spare the time. Anyway, you’re the logical choice to put this thing over with Father Boniface and the others.”
“Whatever you say,” Father Urban said. “If I’m back for confessions on Saturday, it’ll be O.K.”
“I’m only sorry our guests won’t stay and eat here this evening. I believe it’s northern pike.”
“Don’t tempt us,” said Billy. His plan, though, called for them to be on their way. They had to catch the Empire Builder on which he’d reserved a suite (so Father Urban needn’t worry about space), and they’d rent a car in Great Plains, or take a taxi to the train.
Billy wasn’t kidding, Father Urban realized, though it would be a ninety-mile fare from Great Plains to the Empire Builder’s nearest stop. “No, we’ll take my car. I’ll pick it up on the way back,” said Father Urban.
After the guests had sampled the water, they said good-bye to Wilf and the Hill, and Father Urban drove them to St Monica’s. There he packed his bag and arranged for Johnny Chumley to borrow a parishioner’s second car. The next thing they knew, after a couple of drinks in the upper room, it was time to eat. They decided they couldn’t do better than the Greenwich Village Room. During dinner, and for almost two hours afterward, going from Drambuies to scotches again, they talked golf.
The fairways at the Hill would be shaggy for the first year or two, Mr Robertson said, but the soil would be ideal for growing grass. Most of the area to be used was already in acceptable grass. Stump clearance could begin at once, reseeding and rolling very soon. The greens had to be constructed from the bottom up, since they had to retain moisture as well as drain water, and they would be topped from sod. If all went well, they’d be playable by early summer. If Father Urban should ever want to expand the course to eighteen holes, or even to thirty-six, the land would always be there.
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br /> They went on to discuss famous courses they’d played. Billy and Mr Robertson had been disappointed by St Andrews, but they were not without reverence for it as a shrine. Mr Robertson, or Chub, as Billy and Father Urban called him, spoke of courses he’d laid out (two of which Father Urban was certain he’d played, and perhaps two more), and then they got onto the subject of famous golfers and famous shots. In the end, as must often happen when good fellows get together, they considered the life and times of the great Walter Hagen. Both Billy and Mr Robertson knew stories that hadn’t appeared in the Haig’s autobiography. “I read the book, but I’m sorry to say I never saw the man play,” said Father Urban. “He was raised in the Church, you know.”
At one point during the evening, Father Urban left the table to make a phone call—to Dickie Thwaites. (“And say hello to your mother.”)
Finally, they pulled themselves together and hit the road, Father Urban driving, and Billy and Mr Robertson singing themselves to sleep in the back seat. Father Urban didn’t disturb them until the Builder, as Billy called it, was actually standing in the station. With the help of a couple of porters, Billy and Mr Robertson got settled for what remained of the night. They all rose late the next morning, had brunch together, and arrived in Chicago at 2 P.M., right on time. “That’s the Builder for you, and what a ride!” said Billy.
Paul met them in the Rolls. He dropped Billy and Mr Robertson off on Michigan Avenue, where they both had their offices, and then he drove Father Urban to his destination. Paul had cried out, “Well, look who’s here!” when he saw Father Urban, but he didn’t get any encouragement to continue along such familiar lines. Father Urban had thought of Paul before he saw him and had decided to straighten out their relationship. Father Urban’s new attitude was not so much cool as grave and preoccupied. When the Rolls turned into the Novitiate grounds, into the Avenue of Elms, as it was called, Father Urban looked up from his breviary and murmured, “Ah, here we are,” and when the Rolls stopped in front of St Clement’s Hall, he murmured, “Ah, thank you, Paul.”
Father Boniface was in his room, recovering from a touch of flu. When he learned the purpose of Father Urban’s visit, he said, “We won’t discuss these matters any further now. These are matters for the chapter to take up in the morning.”
Father Urban spent the rest of the day walking and talking with men who could be helpful to him in the morning, but he also said hello—hello! to a number of dim bulbs whose existence he’d always tried to overlook in the past. “Great to be back, if only for a little while.” In general, he got a warm welcome.
Quite late that night, he smoked a cigar with Father Louis, and the talk turned to Wilf. “Oh, he’s not so bad,” said Father Urban. “Come off it,” said Father Louis—in some ways a man much like Father Urban, another one of Father Placidus’s boys, a few years younger, yes, but almost in his flight as a golfer, a man who cut a good figure, who had a mind he could use if the occasion ever warranted it (he was presently employed as a professor of moral theology), and also a man who’d done a stretch at St Clement’s Hill. He had spent all but one of his seminary years with the Jesuits, and would be with them yet, he said, but for a run-in with his confessor over the value of St Ignatius’s “Exercises” as prose. He had been asked to leave. He had met Father Placidus and joined the Clementines on the first bounce, as a divorced man takes up with the first floosie he meets, so he’d once told Father Urban. “Wait’ll you have to go back there and live with him,” he told Father Urban now, making too much of the fact that Father Urban had been living away from the Hill. “A guy like that wouldn’t last two minutes in any other outfit.” This landed them on familiar ground. At this point, Father Urban usually said, “Like,” and Father Louis said, “Yes, like,” but that night Father Urban, much as he wanted to discourage Father Louis in his “order pride,” a peculiar form of order pride in that it wasn’t his own order he was proud of, let it pass. He had been everybody’s pal that day, and would be the same with the man who was probably his best friend. They went on to discuss the matters to be taken up by the chapter in the morning. “More power to you,” Father Louis said. “In any other outfit, they’d kiss your feet.”
“Everybody’s been very nice, but I doubt that it’ll come to that,” said Father Urban.
It didn’t. The next morning, at the chapter meeting, Father Boniface wore a pained expression while Father Urban spoke in behalf of a golf course at the Hill. Father Urban said it was high time somebody considered the plight of the one man for whom the Church was perhaps doing too little. Probably this man had never made a retreat, he said, and would feel funny about making one at, say, a Trappist monastery. This man just didn’t care to get in that deep, as he might express it himself, and still he was up to a bit more than he could get out of a parish mission. This man—so he imagined anyway—wouldn’t care for the company he’d find in a monastery or, for that matter, at a parish mission. You might say, “Well, isn’t that just too bad?” but that wouldn’t change anything for this man. He’d still stay away, and be the loser for it, and so it really was too bad, wasn’t it? Not every man of this type would be a golfer, of course. Golf was just one way (a good one, Father Urban thought) to get at the problem. It was the old, old problem of the unchurched, you might say. That was the problem, then, and the challenge. Would the Order of St Clement, with a little extra effort and no monetary outlay, respond to the challenge? That, of course, was not for Father Urban to say. That was for Father Provincial and the others to decide, said Father Urban, and sat down. He hadn’t mentioned the slim pickings they’d had from retreatants at the Hill. That could come later, if necessary.
Several men, not known to be partial to Father Urban but men he’d walked and talked with the day before, then spoke in favor of the course. The strongest support came from old Father Excelsior who, when he stood up, head to one side, arms thrust down, fists clenched, seemed to be hanging from a rope. Father Excelsior was director of the Millstone Press, and a revered figure in Catholic publishing circles. Father Siegfried, the new procurator, a man closely associated with the administration in Father Urban’s mind, also spoke for the course. Father Urban hadn’t walked and talked with him, and wondered if this might not be a power play on Father Siegfried’s part. The procurator, with his crewcut, and his open, gushing manner, and his bloody claws, was definitely a man to watch.
Finally, Father Boniface rose and suggested that the money would be better spent on pamphlets. At this two or three notorious suckholes (among them Brother Henry) nodded. But Father Boniface said that since this was not the alternative, he would abide by the will of the others and not exercise his veto. Father Urban and his faction, most of them younger men, easily prevailed when the matter was put to a vote. “Permission granted,” said Father Boniface, “and now the other matter.”
Father Urban rose. He expected less trouble in this matter. “This has to do with the Millstone Press, and if you wonder what that has to do with me, or what I have to do with it, the answer is—nothing,” said Father Urban, and drew a smile from just about everybody. “I just happened to be on the scene, you might say, when this thing broke. Father Excelsior has asked me to tell it to you as I told it to him.” Father Urban told the chapter that he’d been brought in close contact with their benefactress, Mrs Thwaites, and through her he’d come to know her son. Richard Thwaites, a Harvard man who’d retained his habits of study (there was nothing to be gained by mentioning Dickie’s sojourns in religious orders), was now engaged in editing a series of what might be called spiritual classics—leading off with translations of Denzinger’s Enchiridion and the so-called “lost books” of Tertullian. Mr Thwaites felt confident that there was an audience for such works in inexpensive, paperback editions, perhaps a large audience, perhaps a very large audience. Father Urban really didn’t know about this, and, frankly, he was doubtful. Father Excelsior, who knew all there was to know about such things, was also doubtful. Mr Thwaites, however, was fully prepared t
o subsidize the project—the common procedure where scholarly books were concerned. And so, whether or not Mr Thwaites’s faith was justified in a material way was beside the point, fortunately, and need not be discussed. The point was that books of this type weren’t easy to come by. They would be a credit to any publisher’s list. “Isn’t that right, Father?”
Father Excelsior nodded. “These are known as university press books in the trade,” he said, “and, under the circumstances, I think we should be very glad to get them. Strong as our list is, it could be stronger.”
“Now that’s not all,” Father Urban said, and explained that it was young Mr Thwaites’s hope to bring out a series of what might be called children’s classics. Oh, books like Robin Hood and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—but with a Catholic twist. Father Urban had been astonished to hear of the possibilities in this respect. “I’m told that Sir Lancelot is the real hero of the King Arthur story. Well, in the end Sir Lancelot lays aside his sword and becomes a priest. How many people know that? Now, in the case of Robin Hood, Mr Thwaites plans to move the story up in time, to set it in the so-called Reformation period, keeping it in England, of course. It’s all legends, you know, and so you have a pretty free hand. Robin Hood will still steal from the rich and give to the poor—you can’t very well get around that—but he’ll only steal from the rich who’ve stolen from the Church. So it really isn’t stealing. More emphasis, I understand, will be put on Friar Tuck—whether he’ll become the real hero of the book, I don’t know—and also on Maid Marian. It’s pretty generally known that she was Robin Hood’s girl friend, whatever that might mean, but how many people know that Maid Marian ended her days in a nunnery?”