Peter hadn’t walked the campus grounds in quite some time. The sight of the statue and the accuracy with which Father Ingram had described it amused him. He’d made arrangements through Patricia Roedlin to visit Ingram’s office. “I’m not sure what you’ll find there, Mr. Merrick,” she said, perplexed by the request. Less than a week had passed since his death, and feelings about the news remained raw.
It hadn’t sounded nearly as meaningful when he tried to explain it to Patricia, but after he said he thought it was important to include the on-campus element, she realized its merits for promoting the college and endorsed his decision to visit the office. She even offered to send a photographer along if Peter thought it would be helpful. The truth was, his clearest memories were of how many books Ingram had in his office. When Peter met him, Ingram had only recently been made a dean. Until a larger office became available, he continued to use his office in the basement of the Theology Department. He’d chosen the basement office because it had a lot of bookshelves. While Peter’s other professors generally ignored texts that weren’t written by them, Father Ingram’s books all appeared well used and well loved. Splatters of tomato sauce streaked the page edges like a Pollock painting, and moisture rings dotted the front and back covers.
First introductions to the priest could be intimidating. He paced in front of the class, expounding on theories of psycho-religious cultural development and lobbing tough questions at unsuspecting students. But in his office, he would come shuffling out from behind a tower of books and papers, which somehow set a friendlier tone for interaction.
Peter wanted to see that office again. To read the titles on the spines and use that for inspiration as he struggled to articulate what Ingram’s life meant and the loss caused by his death.
He pulled open the heavy cast-iron doors of Abingdon Hall, where Ingram had relocated after becoming president of Ignatius University. The hallway to his office was flanked by portraits of past Jesuit priests who had served as president, a few French names at first, followed almost exclusively by Irish names. Father Ingram appeared to be the only variation among them. “Don’t feel bad,” he’d said to Peter once. “I sometimes felt like the only kid in the Bronx who wasn’t Irish, too.”
Patricia was kind enough to meet him at the office. Ingram’s secretary, Jane Kemp, was there to meet him as well and introduced herself with more bravado than she clearly felt. She was still shocked by Ingram’s death. He couldn’t remember if she’d been around when he was an undergraduate. In those days, he hadn’t spent much time with the university president, an elderly Irish man who mingled with the undergraduates from Jesuit high schools first and foremost, Catholic high schools next, and, if he had time left, kids like Peter, who had gone to public school. Peter never said so, but he sometimes wondered if Ingram would have taken an interest in him if he hadn’t managed to outshine the other students in a theology class freshman year. Even so, he didn’t look back at the uneven attention bitterly. To priests and students alike, it hadn’t seemed unequal. It was just the way things were.
Jane led him into the cavernous office. He was surprised by how little seemed familiar. He looked for the items he knew best: a brass rubbing of a German knight he’d coveted for years, and the framed photo of an Anglican bishop blessing a fox hunt in Devon that, upon closer inspection, included a hound urinating on the bishop’s opulent robes, its lithe leg lifted high for maximum coverage.
Ingram used the photo, he said, to “weed out the students rendered spineless by piety.” During Peter’s second or third class with Ingram, the vibrant priest had held the photo up for students to see. “What do you think of it?” he said excitedly. From his seat in the third row, Peter had spotted the hound and was trying to disguise the shock on his face.
“What do you think, Ms. Healy?” Ingram asked a bubblegum-chewing blonde sitting near Peter. She wore a tight tank top with the pink lace of her bra straps slung down both shoulders. Green shamrocks dangled from her ears, and around her neck a sterling silver string of Celtic knots came to a point just above her epic cleavage.
“Of what, Fawther?” She snapped the words in a nasal Long Island accent.
“The photo, Ms. Healy. The photo!”
“Oh, I . . . Well . . . ,” she struggled.
“What spiritual essence does it evoke in you?” Ingram prodded her.
“I, uh, like maybe God and nature?” she mumbled.
“Really?” Ingram’s tone indicated his belief was anything but real.
Next up was a Fordham Prep graduate on the water-polo team.
“A metaphor for the Church’s historical hunt for heretics,” he said, oozing intelligence and confidence well beyond his eighteen years.
“Mmm.” Ingram’s head wobbled with noncommittal consideration. He paused in front of the first chair in Peter’s row. “What about you, Mr. Merrick. What does it evoke in you?”
Peter had a cogent thought on the matter, but the obvious nature of it gave him pause. He thought there must be something wrong with him for not seeing something more profound.
“Confusion, sir?” Peter expected a rebuke.
“Why confusion?”
“Because the hound is, uh . . . relieving itself on the bishop?” Peter uttered the words with trepidation. He waited for the priest to call him juvenile.
Instead, Ingram whooped with laughter and clapped. “Indeed, Mr. Merrick. Perhaps the hound was confused. Those Anglicans—you know, especially the English ones—can be very wooden!”
Ingram explained that most students were too self-conscious to say what they actually saw. “Don’t overthink it,” he barked at them. “Don’t overthink yourselves into a stupor of silence.” He wandered slowly back to the desk at the front of the classroom.
“Sometimes a dog urinating on a bishop is just that—a dog urinating on a bishop! The most important element of worldly faith, ladies and gentleman,” he continued, “is that though we represent God, we are but men and women made in his image. Human and, at times, vulnerable. Even to the bladder of a canine. I don’t want you to say what you think I want to hear. To regurgitate what someone else with more letters after his name has already said. I want you think about what human frailty means for religion. Show some ambition!”
By commenting honestly, Peter had evidently impressed Ingram. He heard from subsequent classes that Father Ingram’s hound photo was a ploy he used to break in every class of freshmen. That’s why Peter was so surprised that he couldn’t find it now as he looked around the office, while Jane Kemp and Patricia Roedlin anxiously watched his face for any sign of emotion. He didn’t give them one, not at first. It wasn’t until he noticed the boxes around the room, half open and half filled, mostly with file folders, papers, and the occasional book, that he cracked a little.
He gestured toward the boxes. “I didn’t realize they’d appointed a new president already. Isn’t that—” He tasted bitterness as he spoke. “Isn’t it a little soon?”
Jane rubbed his shoulder in a maternal fashion. “Oh, I know. Believe me. I’ve been having trouble trying to put things away myself. It’s not to make room for his replacement. At least not yet.”
Patricia stepped forward smiling brightly. “We’ve had a request from His Excellency Owen Feeney at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to send Father Ingram’s papers and correspondence to them. It’s quite an honor. We’re sending it today.”
Peter was perplexed. “What do they want his papers for?” But Patricia was no longer listening. She’d begun taking photos with her iPhone.
Peter had never much cared for Owen Feeney and other career-climbing clergy like him. He first met Feeney a few years after graduation, at dinner with Ingram one evening in Manhattan. He was a little man, slight of build and possessed of the inadequacy complex that usually afflicts such men. His rust-colored hair was thinning into transparent wisps, leaving the pale and freckled skin of his scalp peeking through the tufts like bits of skull. Dark brown eyes peered out f
rom behind severe round spectacles that seemed better suited to a 1920s silent movie. A small reddish caterpillar mustache sprang from his upper lip. Like him, it seemed to struggle to grow. His speech patterns were incongruously grandiose, and when he spoke, he deliberately deepened his voice in a way that forced him to puff out his chest like a bird.
“What an absolute pleasure it is—really—to meet one of James’s best students. Do you drink sherry? I do hope so.” He’d taken Peter’s hand and shaken it too emphatically.
Could he possibly know that much about Peter? Ingram only ever mentioned Feeney occasionally in their years of mentoring and friendship, and it usually came courtesy of another battle the Church faced in the press. “Owen must be having an awful time with this,” Ingram would say, the earnestness in his voice almost paining Peter. This earnestness was one of the qualities Peter most admired, envied, and puzzled over in Ingram. He knew firsthand how often people based their beliefs and convictions on what was most personally advantageous to them. He felt certain that from his privileged post inside the DC Beltway, Feeney felt little or none of the genuine concern or guilt that plagued Ingram. A year or two after that, he ran into Feeney at a National Press Club function in Washington, where Feeney said much the same thing as when they first met.
“Oh, Mr. Merrick, what a pleasure to see you. It’s an absolute delight to run into one of James’s best students, really. I do hope you still drink sherry?”
No, he didn’t like Feeney one bit. He found him fake and unctuous, and he told Ingram as much.
Ingram only mildly protested. “You mustn’t be so hard on him,” he said.
Peter scoffed. “I’m not. He’s a shady powermonger and a poster child for everything that’s wrong with the Vatican.”
Ingram, with his reservoir of patience and understanding that Peter had been born without, sighed deeply, his eyebrows furrowing more in concern than consternation. “Owen is a good man at heart. I truly believe that. Even if, at times, he allows ambition to cloud his judgment.”
Peter disagreed. As far as he could tell, Feeney’s most notable contributions to society had been to show up at political functions, dodge questions from the media about mistakes made by the Church in handling abuse accusations, and go on talk shows to criticize the use of stem cells. It didn’t help that early in Peter’s journalism career, Feeney had written a letter to the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times characterizing an article Peter wrote about union-busting to preserve profit margins at a nearby Catholic hospital as defamation and demanding an apology.
Peter resented what he thought was hypocrisy and knew how to hold a grudge. “If he’s so interested in the morality of these issues and saving America’s soul,” he carped to Ingram during one of their catch-up sessions, “why isn’t he at the Capitol fighting for legislation himself instead of hiding behind Jesus and cocktail parties?”
Ingram’s raised eyebrow told him he’d gone too far. “Don’t pretend to be so naïve,” he chastised his protégé. “Politics, Peter, has always been the second role of religion. Occasionally it’s even been the first. You’re kidding yourself if you’ve ever thought otherwise. You’re right, though. Owen would’ve made a formidable congressman.”
“But Rome is an easier mark,” Peter muttered with disdain.
“Maybe so,” Ingram conceded. “It’s a complicated relationship—politics and religion. One I don’t pretend to understand. But also one that can’t always be defined by convenient sound bites.”
Nonetheless, now that Peter was standing in the office of his former friend looking at the remains of his life being boxed up, he felt angry. In that moment he didn’t just dislike Owen Feeney for his self-promotion and habit of placing political machinations above doing good. In that moment, he also hated him for being so quick to put the pieces of James Ingram away. Worse, to put them on a shelf in his own office, as if by doing so he could ever hope—through proximity, through osmosis, through pure envy—to glean any of the grace that had so clearly bypassed Feeney himself.
Peter watched as a pair of burly men parked a handcart outside the door and began carrying sealed boxes into the hallway. Patricia took a break from packing to answer a phone call while Jane gave instructions to one of the movers. She kept saying the words slowly and loudly and pointing with gusto. The man, whose uniform said he was named Eduardo, blinked at her with the benign patience of someone accustomed to assumptions about his English fluency. At the end of Jane’s (downright aerobic) display, he nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am. We got the address in DC and will make sure it’s hand delivered.”
Peter walked from box to box, peering with some jealousy at the physical objects that had outlived his friend: books, three-ring binders, a chipped mug with a pun about Descartes. A large bound volume, The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad, had been crammed into a nearby crate. Peter absentmindedly picked it up and flipped through the pages. Sentences were underlined throughout, the margins riddled with running commentary in Ingram’s handwriting. “Causality and redemption!” he’d scrawled on a page of Lord Jim. “The convenient ignorance of power . . . ,” he’d written midway through Heart of Darkness.
Peter smiled and closed the book, making to return it to its crate, when from the back sleeve of its battered jacket, two small envelopes slipped out and fell to the floor. As he picked them up, Peter recognized the pale cream linen stationery and wavy script from the many letters he’d received from Ingram. But he was struck by large red rejection messages pinning Ingram’s words to the page: “Return to Sender” on one, and “Address Unknown” on the other. In his nearly twenty years bouncing around at least fourteen countries, Peter couldn’t remember missing one of Ingram’s letters. Even when he was in a small village in Malawi, Ingram’s letters had reached him. His mentor had been as devoted to keeping his address book updated as he was to keeping epistolary traditions alive. Peter stared at the letters, suppressing the urge to read them. He stuffed them in the book and reached to put it back in the crate when he spotted—in the hole left when he picked up the book—more scattered letters.
Maybe it was his all his time in war zones, or the memory of getting caught reading comic books during Mass, but Peter somehow knew that he wanted to examine the letters and that he would need to do it discreetly. He retrieved the letters from the book, grabbed a few more from the crate, and tucked them all into his jacket pocket.
He stepped into the hallway and took advantage of the privacy to look more closely at the letters. Two were addressed to a Kevin Garrity in Olmsted, Wisconsin. The “Return to Sender” was handwritten in each case, apparently by the same person. It seemed odd to Peter that the message didn’t indicate it was a wrong address or that the recipient no longer lived at that location. This was a personalized, individual refusal to accept the letters. The date and time stamps showed they had been sent two years apart. The third letter was addressed to Angela Terzulli in Parkchester, Illinois. Her envelope bore the “Address Unknown” stamp. The last, addressed to Erik Bader in Claremont, Pennsylvania, had been stamped “Return to Sender.”
He tucked the envelopes away and returned to Ingram’s office. Patricia was pulling books down from their shelves, and Jane was labeling boxes with a fat Sharpie. Its tangy chemical smell wafted through the air. Her letters were large and thin. Illinois, it read when she finished. She turned to the box next to it and drew a tall W.
“Excuse me, Jane,” Peter said. “What’s in those boxes?”
“Papers and files from his various parishes,” she answered. “Homilies, research notes, you name it. He sure loved to write, didn’t he?”
Peter was surprised. “His parishes?”
“Yes—the various cities where he spent time as a novitiate. Before he came to Ignatius.”
Peter thought about the letters. “Would it be possible to get a list of those locations?”
Jane and Patricia looked at him quizzically.
He smiled tightly and said, “I’d like to be able to ment
ion his work elsewhere. The piece is meant to be a retrospective on his entire life. From the moment he decided to join the Society of Jesus up until his—up until now.”
Jane’s face crumpled again at the reminder. “Of course, yes,” she said. “I can get you that information now, if you’d like.” She walked briskly to the antechamber where her desk sat, a look of focused determination and efficiency on her face. It was clearly a relief to have something else to do. He soon heard frenzied tapping on the computer keyboard.
“When do you think the piece will be finished?” Patricia tried to ask the question nonchalantly, but failed.
“It’s almost done,” he lied. “Eight hundred words isn’t a lot of space. I’m afraid it won’t even scratch the surface of who he was and what he accomplished. But I’ll provide you with a copy by tomorrow,” he said, careful not to commit to rewriting anything based on her review. Normally he didn’t mind word limits. They had a way of restraining a writer, of forcing you to remove self-indulgent flourishes and get to the most important information. But this time he would have liked a little more room to play with. It didn’t seem possible to limit James Ingram to less than a page.
Jane returned with a summary of Ingram’s priestly career—where and when he joined the Jesuits, what he studied, and where he taught in regency. Olmsted, Wisconsin, and Parkchester, Illinois, weren’t on the list, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Garrity and Terzulli might have met Ingram as students at Ignatius the same way Peter had. Terre Haute was on the list, but Peter had no idea where Parkchester was in relation to the Indiana border. More out of curiosity than anything, he decided to look closely at both the letters and the list Jane gave him later.
He put the list in his satchel and began to pack up. It wasn’t exactly what he’d planned to find when he arranged to visit Ingram’s office, but he did feel closer to being able to start than before.
“Thank you so much for letting me visit,” he said, shaking Jane’s hand. “It feels right to have been here.”
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