Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  The dean was a priest, and he could blast him the way Professor Corrigan had, but the dean would know no more about what had mattered at the yards than the dandruff-ridden torts professor had.

  "Tort," Dillon recited to himself, "any wrongful act not involving breach of contract, for which a civil action will lie."

  Wrongful act, as in walking out on a helpless friend. Dillon would simply explain about the cross, that other cross, the poor bastard's Celtic cross tattoo.

  "Tort," he recited, "the breach of a duty imposed by law whereby some person acquires a right for action for damages." Tort, from the Latin tortus, past participle of torquere, meaning twisted, wrung or, as in the English, tortured.

  As in the cross. He stared at it hard. The symbol of a tortured people. The symbol, whether he liked it or not, of who he was. The Son of Man flogged, His skin shredded, His body left to rot through all history on a pair of beams. Dillon could not stifle his old question, the one he had been told never to ask: Are we supposed to be consoled that God has joined us in this?

  The door beside him banged open, and the lean stooped figure of Professor Corrigan stumbled in, burdened with a stack of books and examination papers. Inside his rumpled brown serge jacket the point of one shirt collar was bent up above his tie, like a flap. His tie was askew. The sight of Dillon had obviously startled him, and now he peered over the rims of his glasses, his eyes flaring as they had when Dillon entered the examination hall nearly two hours late.

  Dillon stood, eager to show the man the deference he seemed to require. But Corrigan turned brusquely away and crossed to the door of the dean's inner office. He knocked, and from within came a muffled sound which the professor took as permission. He went through the door, clutching his books and papers. It closed with a bang behind him.

  Dillon sat again. He brushed the back of his hand against his nostrils, whiffing it. He smelled nothing.

  The dean's door opened. The black-robed Jesuit stood there holding it, but not for Dillon, as he first supposed. Professor Corrigan, still with his armload, brushed by the priest without a word. Three paces took him across the anteroom, his eyes rigidly avoiding Dillon. When he fumbled at the knob, Dillon sprang to his side to help him, but the professor managed the door on his own and, without a word, was gone.

  "Come in, Mr. Dillon," the dean said coldly.

  As Dillon crossed in front of him, he picked up the man's faint body odor. Away from the yards Dillon was a connoisseur of odors, and he put this one at two parts tobacco, one part the smoke of incense and one part stale perspiration pouring off an unlaundered cassock. A priest's odor, it automatically summoned Dillon's potent memory of the seminary rector. Once when Dillon was serving as an altar boy a consecrated host had fallen from the gold lip of the ciborium to the profane linoleum of the sanctuary floor, and when Sean Dillon, age eighteen, had instinctively reached for it, the rector had stomped on his hand with the heel of his stout, black, ankle-high boot.

  Dillon took up his place facing the cluttered, desk while the dean crossed behind it to sit. On the near edge of the massive mahogany desk Dillon read the Gothic letters of the nameplate: "Reverend Aloysius T. Ferrick, SJ."

  "You have a problem, Mr. Dillon, a rather large problem." It had been more than fifty years since the priest had come as a child from Ireland, but he had an accent still.

  "I understand that, Father."

  "Professor Corrigan was more than a bit incensed at your interruption. You caused a major distraction, he says."

  "With all due respect, Father, it was his reaction that did that. I was intending to slip quietly into my usual chair, which isn't far from the door. Professor Corrigan—"

  The Jesuit silenced him with an abruptly upraised hand. "That isn't the issue anyway. The commotion isn't the issue." Father Ferrick leaned forward to pick up a thin, black volume from his desk. "Your problem, Mr. Dillon, is that regulations of Loyola Law School"—he began leafing the pages, the book of rules—"define absence from a terminal examination as ipso facto cause for failure of the course in question."

  "I was not absent, Father. I was late."

  The Jesuit raised his eyes to Dillon. "Professor Corrigan has failed you."

  Dillon had to resist an urge to look behind himself; to whom could this priest be talking?

  "Failed?"

  "Yes." Father Ferrick snapped the regulations closed and sat back in his chair, relieved to have done his duty.

  "But, Father, I hoped for a chance to explain myself."

  "Loyola College Law School procedures require no explanations of you, since none would mitigate the ruling. 'Ipso Facto' is the operative phrase, Mr. Dillon."

  "But if I fail this course, that means I can't take the bar next month."

  "I know that. I said as much to Professor Corrigan. He was adamant."

  "Can't I take the exam tomorrow?"

  The dean shook his head. "Professor Corrigan's position is that there is a principle here that must be upheld."

  "But if I—"

  "You will have to repeat the course next year. It is offered again beginning in January."

  Dillon thought his melting knees were going to collapse under him. Next year! Impossible!

  The stinking monstrosity he and Hanley had hauled out of the blood pipes had finished him for working in the yards. Another year in the slaughter pits—impossible!

  To stiffen his quaking legs, his quaking self, he used them to step toward the priest. "Father, you have to listen to me—"

  But he stopped himself, afraid of the emotion he felt stinging the backs of his eyes. A voice in his brain instructed him, "Like a lawyer. Do this like a lawyer. You are a lawyer for yourself."

  The lawyer's first idea is that discipline takes the place of feeling. Dillon forced a quality of detachment into his voice. "Father, I was late for the examination, too late to reasonably expect to take it, because a man was dead at my feet. I am speaking quite literally here. And my choices were two—either to abandon him before authorities arrived to deal with him or to maintain the vigil proper to the deceased despite the delay it caused. For the crucial time, it fell to me and me alone..." Was that true? Was it wrong to omit mention of Hanley? But Hanley might as well have been absent. The Jesuits themselves had taught Dillon the principle of the Pertinent Truth."...to care for the dead, which I took to be my serious moral obligation. When help came I left at once and got downtown as fast as I could. I'm sure my rough appearance was part of what put Professor Corrigan in such a state."

  "You work at the stockyards." The priest's hand went unconsciously to a closed manila folder, Dillon's own file, he realized.

  "Yes. I am a steamfitter's helper." Jack Hanley's helper, he added to himself, and with a shock he realized that, moving with a lawyer's instinct to the best possible case for his behavior—with this Jesuit, a moral case based on the absolute Catholic obligation to respect the dead—he had, despite his careful rationalization about Pertinent Truth, just told the priest an explicit lie. He had stayed so long beside the corpse not for the dead man's sake, or for God's, but for Jack's. To someone else these distinctions might have seemed innocuous in the extreme, but to Dillon, a line had been crossed.

  "And you say a man was dead?"

  "I helped pull the body out of a blood sewer."

  A stricken look crossed the dean's face. "I know what a hard place the stockyards are. It doesn't take much of a slip..."

  The priest thought it was an accident. Dillon felt impelled to protect Father's innocence, as if murder were some kind of sexual sin the clergy should not hear of. He shrugged noncommittally. "It happened just at the end of my shift. There was no possible way for me to get here by five."

  Dillon paused. Knowing the value of seeming to concede, how it undercuts an opponent's sense of power and makes him generous, he said, "I've offered my explanation not as an excuse, but because I want you to understand that only a conflict of conscience could have kept me from being here. I understand now th
at there is nothing you can do—"

  The upraised hand again. "It is I who apply the regulations. Professor Corrigan..." And an upraised eyebrow, a hint of condescension which Dillon grasped at once. No one knew better than his students that Corrigan was a mediocre lawyer for whom teaching was a refuge. "...has done his duty. Now I must do mine. And my duty is to decide whether the intention of the lawmaker is served by applying the law in a particular case. It is a question of...?" Now both the dean's eyebrows shot up, indicating the interrogatory.

  "Epikaia," Dillon said at once.

  "Precisely." Father Ferrick sat back, satisfied. "The truth, Mr. Dillon, is that you are quite well prepared for your torts exam, aren't you?"

  "I believe so, Father."

  "You haven't missed a step here in five years." He indicated the file. "You have compiled an excellent record. It would be an understatement to say that your professors, until now, have rated you highly."

  "I appreciate that."

  "It's not what they did; it's what you did." Father Ferrick paused, not troubling to conceal a glint in his eye that was at once admiring and self-satisfied. "It would have reflected badly on what we teach here if you had failed in your duty as a Catholic. The human body is the temple of the Holy Ghost and must be treated as such, even after the immortal soul has departed from it."

  The pieties breezed by Dillon, familiar and meaningless.

  "There's something else, Father," he said without meaning to. Suddenly it felt as if the grill of the confessional were between them, and now his words came unbidden, in a guilt-stricken rush. "I also stayed at the yards because my partner needed me to. That is"—here it was, an admission of the lie, the only way to undo it—"my partner was there. I wasn't alone."

  Father Ferrick waved his hand dismissively. If this was a hollow spot in the wall of the case that had just convinced him, it was not a hole he cared to open.

  Dillon felt relieved, but also foolish for being so easily teased by his own conscience.

  Father Ferrick had picked up a page of Dillon's scholastic transcript. "You did your college work at seminary."

  "That's right."

  "But you left?"

  Dillon answered, but only to himself. Of course I left. I'm sitting here, aren't I? He could feel the color coming into his face.

  "You left after third theology."

  "Yes, just before ordination to the deaconate. Just before vows."

  "Do you mind my asking why?"

  "Why I left?"

  "Yes."

  Dillon wanted to look out the window, to see the beauty of the evening, the shadows on the street, the men and women going out to shows. What could he possibly say?

  For an instant he was back in the rector's office, the rector staring harshly at him, waiting for an explanation. Sean Dillon had been selected to go to Rome for his doctorate, and this was his response? Sean Dillon had been housed, clothed, fed and educated from the age of twelve, and this was his response? But Sean Dillon had had no response.

  Now he said simply, "I left because I'd lost the sense of my vocation."

  The Jesuit sighed dramatically. "Well, it's too bad. We hate to see the Church lose a good man." His teeth squeaked as he inhaled through them. "Do you ever reconsider?"

  Dillon shook his head.

  Ferrick dropped the transcript and folded the file shut. "The law is a noble calling too." He smiled. "I hope you can keep your sense of this vocation."

  "I hope so too, Father." But then it hit him that he had just done the same thing to himself. He'd come within an inch of ordination, and now he'd come within an inch of the bar. Only to fall short? The nightmare was that his first failure to follow through would repeat itself again and again through his life. Dillon knew that that was exactly what the rector and all his disappointed seminary teachers expected would be his pattern. Or was it only that they hoped so?

  Was this the real reason he'd stayed with Hanley, undermining himself without knowing it?

  Father Ferrick surprised Dillon, cutting through the glue to say abruptly, "I want you to take that examination right away. Did you say you can do it tomorrow?

  "Yes."

  "I will speak to Professor Corrigan. He won't like it, but if you answer all the questions correctly, he won't have a move against you, will he?" Father Ferrick smiled suddenly. "And after the bar, what?"

  Dillon shrugged. "I have six years in at Swift's. That should give me a shot at a job in their law department."

  "Why not a law firm?"

  Dillon looked quizzically at the dean. They both knew that the law firms, after a decade of steadily laying off their own lawyers, weren't hiring new graduates even out of the prestigious law schools, certainly not out of Loyola.

  The Jesuit said quietly, "I have a contact at Lambert, Rowe..."

  Dillon waited. Lambert, Rowe was one of the top State Street outfits.

  "I could get you an interview." Loyola was at the point where it had to start placing graduates with better firms or accept permanent consignment to the ranks of the fly-by-night law schools that trained ambulance chasers, JPs and pols. Dillon was the best prospect Father Ferrick had seen in a long time. He turned his hand over, brandishing his palm. "The rest you'd have to do for yourself."

  Dillon laughed with surprise. "One minute, Father, you're flunking me. The next minute—"

  "The next minute I'm seeing in you a good example of what we try to do here. Is Swift's really what you want?"

  "No."

  "You'd have a little extra ... work ... to do if you wanted a real shot at Lambert, Rowe."

  "What do you mean?"

  "That you don't go into a State Street law office whistling 'The Bells of Saint Mary's.'"

  "It's not a tune of mine, Father."

  "Your first name is Sean. Jack Benny's real name is Benjamin Ku-belsky. Did you know that?"

  Dillon cursed himself for being unable to think what to say. Perhaps he lowered his eyes out of a sort of despair, but they fell upon the desk nameplate. "And yours is Aloysius."

  "That's right. But if I wanted what you want, it would be Allen."

  Dillon saw it then. "But you do. You just want it for Loyola, that's all." Dillon laughed at himself for thinking this priest was out for him, for thinking his reprieve could come without a price.

  Father Ferrick leaned across the desk. "There's a bit too much of the harp, lad, in the likes of us."

  "I don't lead with my Irishness, Father. But I don't disavow it either."

  Ferrick opened his hands. "As you wish. I was only interested in your seeing the thing for a minute the way the managing partner at Lambert, Rowe would see it. He'd never be so crude, of course, as to display discomfort at a candidate's overly ethnic name. Only a fellow Mick on the make would raise the issue." He grinned. "Let's say I considered it my job."

  "And the managing partner's job is to make sure the firm's first Irish Catholic doesn't seem like one."

  The priest nodded. "John Dillon has just the right ring to it."

  "And after I changed my name, you were going to send me down to Moss Brothers Outfitters for a new suit."

  "I was going to lend you the money."

  "Is it so important to you, Father?"

  "You're a young man, Sean. When you get to be my age you'll have grown weary, I'll wager, of the border turf they leave to us."

  "When I'm your age, Father, I'll be in the middle of the field, and I'll be there as myself." Sean knew that to any other priest such a statement would have seemed like rank arrogance: Who do you think you are? "I'm Sean Dillon, Father."

  "And you live in Canaryville."

  Dillon laughed. "Where no one raises the question of my name. It's one advantage of working for a fellow named Gustavus."

  "Swift would be lucky to get you for a lawyer. I want you to think about what I'm offering you. But your given name is an obstacle. I'm serious about your changing it. If you want out of the cramped, unpromising world you were born to—it's ei
ther that or go back and finish up your studies for the priesthood and get sent to Rome." Father Ferrick leaned back in his chair. "Or stay in Canaryville, Sean, with the sparrows."

  Dillon eyed the priest steadily, aware that he was not only "offering" something, as he claimed, but exacting something too. After a moment Dillon said with bemused casualness, "You know about the sparrows?"

  The Jesuit laughed. "I know that the birds around the yards aren't canaries, and never were."

  The two men smiled at each other, thinking of the same story. In the last century the population of English sparrows feeding on bits of grain in the ubiquitous piles of dried dung had become so large that the area had become known as Canaryville.

  Father Ferrick said, "But when I think of sparrows I think of St. Bede's sparrow."

  What was this? Dillon raised his eyebrows.

  The priest leaned toward him, his large hands entwined. "The story is in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the story of the conversion to Christianity of what we now know as England."

  Father Ferrick's intensity pulled Dillon in.

  "The Druid king, Edwin, called a meeting of his councilors to hear what they had made of the preaching of the monks who had come over from the Continent. The king and his barons gathered in a great stone hall illuminated by the flames of torches and candles, warmed by a massive fire at one end. They sat around a table, each man giving his impressions while the king listened.

  "St. Bede says that the king and his advisors achieved no understanding of what they were groping toward until one councilor—we don't know his name—stood up when it was his turn to speak. Instead of talking about what he'd heard of the Christian preaching, he said something about human life."

  Father Ferrick paused here, as if to plunge into his story. But surfaces to him were a sea to move across. Dillon saw the sea shimmering in his eyes. His story was a ship in which to cross it. Dillon waited, listening.