The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

  Archer and his advisers strategically held a rally at a community center in Fairhill to talk about immigration and improving the quality of life for those in impoverished parts of the country, with Mayor Garcia providing the introductory remarks. Welcoming the attendees not just to the rally but to America, Archer reached out to the city’s immigrants and Catholics all at once. “Being Catholic compels me to work to eradicate poverty,” he said to a cheering crowd. “Being American compels me to welcome those who have come here to work hard for a better life and to restore opportunities for that life. Not just for them, but for all Americans. I hope you’ll join me in preserving Philadelphia’s heritage and celebrating it. Together, we can build strong, diverse communities across this great nation, starting right here in El Centro de Oro.” The crowd roared even louder in approval. The event had received enormous coverage.

  “Yes,” Ally told Casey. “I remember.”

  Casey was blunt. “John sai—I mean, the cardinal said you might be the right person to speak with community leaders there. Find out if they’re still leaning toward Archer now that the fanfare has settled.”

  She sat up sharply, unable to disguise her excitement at the opportunity.

  “I’ll need you to go Monday.” He moved on before her enthusiasm became too embarrassing. “And you’ll have to go with Steve Tilden.” He caught the flicker of irritation on her face when he said the name. Steve was one of her least favorite coworkers. He didn’t know it, but Ally had overheard him making fun of her on more than one occasion for being too uptight. Steve seemed particularly preoccupied with the status of her sexual experiences (“Must be like having sex with an igloo,” he remarked once. “Even if it happens, it’s not likely to leave a dent.”) and openly questioned her ability to contribute to the office. To an extent, he was right. Her parents back in sparsely populated Piedmont, Michigan, were not politically connected. They could not, like Tilden’s parents, pressure others to hire their son who, as best as Ally could figure, had little beyond an aura of entitlement to offer. The irony of Tilden’s disparaging whispers was that he was oblivious to how often everyone referred to him as “Daddy’s Checkbook.”

  “He’s been here longer. He’ll be a good resource,” Casey coaxed her. “I just need someone to take the temperature there. See if you can get some good sound bites for us to throw in. But just so we’re clear—whoever comes back with the most information gets the prize. So consider the challenge issued.” He put on his jacket and headed for the door.

  “Sir?” she called out. He stopped, but didn’t turn around.

  “Milt?” she tried again. This time he spun to face her with a smirk.

  “What’s the prize?” she asked.

  “Why, knowing you’re better than the person I pitted you against, of course.” He pulled open the door and stepped through it. “And a free trip to Philadelphia,” he said over his shoulder.

  She was still laughing when she heard his voice echo from down the hallway.

  “Goodnight, Ms. Larkin.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The scent of soup or stew greeted Peter when he got home. His glasses fogged up from the change in temperature. It was so cold out that the short walk from the end of the driveway to the front door was enough to cause him pain. At eighteen degrees (according to the thermometer hanging from the mailbox) it was still several degrees warmer than on the night James Ingram died. Peter stopped in his tracks at the thought. He was processing the news the way he did most things he found unpleasant—in little pieces that tripped him up at the strangest times, but by doing so, only made him stumble and not fall. He wondered what Emma’s circle of fellow therapists would say about that.

  Grady, a border collie–golden retriever mix with one blue eye and one brown, had come clomping down the hallway even before Peter got the door fully open. Through the haze of his fogged-up glasses, he could make out the form of the dog, his wagging tail and the way he boxed with his front paws in an invitation to play. The eagerness with which Grady greeted him pinched a little. It reminded him of how Emma used to be when he got home from being on assignment. When he returned from Jammu, she’d been so relieved to see him. She knew it was awful, she said, but all she could think about was that he was okay, even though she knew she should be thinking about those who died in the explosion. He accepted that this was the nature of most people—they could conceive of something terrible happening to others but remain utterly focused on if they had been personally affected. But with the acrid scent of roasted flesh and melting plastic still fresh in his mind, he’d snapped at her instead of telling her how glad he was to be home. Now, as he buried his head in Grady’s warm, wriggling side he willed himself to be nicer to Emma. He hadn’t always been so sharp and argumentative with her. Part of him knew he was pushing her too far, and once the limit was reached she would be gone.

  It had happened once when they were dating in college. She was preparing to leave for study abroad in Paris. Rather than tell her he was convinced she would meet some fabulously wealthy, sophisticated, and intelligent European man, he had acted like a jerk. Sniped at her the way he’d been doing lately, laughed at her every contribution or suggestion, as though belittlement would somehow persuade her she was unworthy of any attractive man she met in France.

  She had argued at first. He was being ridiculous, she told him. Then she appealed to his ego, explaining she wasn’t in love with being in a relationship like most girls in college were. She was in love with him. None of it, not the screaming matches or the genuine expressions of affection, made him feel any less powerless to control what happened after she got on the plane. “You’re not supposed to control it or me,” she’d reminded him firmly on the one and only occasion he came close to telling her what was really bothering him. “You’re supposed to trust me.” Even then, at age twenty, she was so much more emotionally articulate than he’d ever been, and she still was. Trying to explain that he didn’t trust his ability to compete with men he imagined to be more attractive and worldly had come out all wrong. “Then stay here, so I don’t have to worry about it,” he told her. “Stay and it won’t have to be over.” That was when she gave up. After weeks of almost daily bickering, she wouldn’t take the bait anymore. He kept trying to pick fights with her, to prove she still cared enough for him to be provoked, but she just wouldn’t respond. She looked at him one afternoon and said, “That’s enough, Peter. Really.” Like he was a small child stamping his feet in a shopping mall. A few days later, about a month before she was due to leave, she just disappeared. He called her house. She wasn’t home, her mother said. He called her office, a summer job at a financial firm on Wall Street he knew she hated. She wasn’t available, a secretary said.

  By the fifth night of silence, he had driven to her parents’ house in Tenafly, New Jersey, and parked outside to see if she came home. After a few hours her father came out and knocked on the window. “Peter—nice to see you, but it’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Parking outside the house like this?” Emma’s father, Hugh Merriman, was a friendly man with bright blue eyes that crinkled when he smiled, which was most of the time. He was a high school English teacher and seemed always to address Peter as he would his more favored students. “Why don’t you come in for a minute?”

  Moments later Peter was seated awkwardly at the Merrimans’ circular kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate.

  “She’s not here,” Mr. Merriman said with a bluntness that took Peter aback. “I’m not going to tell you where she is, but I can tell you that she’s not here so you don’t waste any more time parking out front and scaring the neighbors. Not that I mind it all that much—Mrs. Kearney two doors down is a terror in her own right.” He took a sip of hot chocolate. “I just love the miniature marshmallows, don’t you? They’re like a cluster of little surprises,” he said with a warm smile.

  “Why is she—why can’t I—”

  “Oh, I think you know the answer to that, Peter,” Mr. Merriman said without a trace of
anger or admonition. “Would you want to be around you right now?”

  Peter felt the color spring to his cheeks. He was certain he emitted more heat than the old iron teakettle bubbling on the stove.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And he meant it. “I don’t really know what to say, Mr. Merriman.”

  “Well, for a start, you don’t need to apologize to me. Seems to me Emma’s the one you’ve been hurting lately. Am I right?” Peter nodded.

  “She’s not even mad right now, Peter. I think she’s done. I know my daughter. She’ll give something a hundred tries if she thinks she can get it right. But once she decides there’s no use . . . well, she doesn’t waste any more time on it. See what I’m saying?”

  “I didn’t know,” Peter said. He could feel tears springing to his eyes but refused to cry in front of his girlfriend’s father. “I didn’t know she was done.”

  “I know. But you had to know it was upsetting her. Now look,” Emma’s father went on, “I think you’re a pretty good guy. So get it together if this is what you want. She’ll give you another chance if you do.” He stood up and patted Peter on the shoulder. “And stop parking out in front of the house or I’ll call the cops, okay?”

  Peter nodded in a way that made him feel like he was disembodied, watching the entire scene from the ether. He took the mug over to the kitchen sink and reached to turn on the water. It was a product of his time as an altar boy. Cleanliness was a sign of respect, and there was very little that couldn’t be fixed by cleaning. Twelve years later when the World Trade Center was hit by two jetliners, Peter would spend every minute he wasn’t filing a freelance story vacuuming the apartment he shared with Emma. He would wash the windows from the fire escape and do the same laundry he’d done the day before as if creating a sterile environment within the confines of his home could keep the chaos and fear outside at bay.

  “Leave it,” Mr. Merriman said of the mug. “I’ll get it. I do some of my best thinking when I do dishes.” He had smiled at Peter, a warm smile that said everything would be okay if he was willing to let it be.

  Now, standing in the front hall nuzzling Grady, Peter realized that Emma wouldn’t tell him when she’d had enough this time, either. He would come home some afternoon and find the house empty. She’d probably even leave everything behind for him—except maybe for Grady. She loved that dog. And in fairness, she spent more time with him than he did. In his mind, Peter could already see the Emmaless house. The hallways dark when he came home, the scented candles he mocked her for unlit or gone.

  “Honey, is that you?” Emma called from the kitchen. He rounded the corner and found her standing at the gas burner stirring the pot of stew. Heat rose from the wall-mounted oven behind her where he could see rolls browning under the coils.

  “They’re Pillsbury,” she said apologetically. “I can’t take credit for them.” She beamed a smile at him—her father’s crinkle-eyed smile. Peter reached out and pulled her into a hug. He felt the hesitation in her response, so he held on even harder, gave an additional squeeze, waiting for her to return it. She didn’t. After a few moments she pulled away. “Well,” she said somewhat uncomfortably. “I don’t want dinner to burn.” She turned back to what she was doing, and Peter watched her for a moment more before retreating to his office. Without thinking, he knocked the door shut with his heel as he entered but caught it before it slammed against the door frame. Outside, the sound of Grady’s nails on the kitchen floor rattled down the hallway alongside the syncopated clink of a spoon in the pot.

  As he sat down at his desk, he felt a crackle of paper in his pocket. He pulled out Jane Kemp’s list of locations where James Ingram had spent time as a novitiate and then as an ordained Jesuit priest before he arrived at Ignatius as a professor. The column next to the locations listed general dates—May 1982 to March 1983—beginning with his entrance into the Society of Jesus in 1970.

  Next to the locations, Peter wrote the names of the letter recipients and their towns and states. So far, nothing about Kevin Garrity seemed connected to Ingram’s movement. The closest Ingram had ever been geographically to Wisconsin was the brief stint teaching in Indiana.

  He looked at the other two letters—Angela Terzulli in Parkchester, Illinois, and Erik Bader in Claremont, Pennsylvania. Terzulli’s address was about 140 miles from Providence Cristo Rey High School in Indianapolis where Ingram taught, according to Jane’s list, between 1982 and 1985. And Erik Bader was the most direct hit of all. If he was still living in Claremont, he was in the same town where Ingram had volunteered as a retreat coordinator for Good Shepherd Catholic Church while he completed the first of his two PhDs (English and, a few years later, theology) at the University of Pennsylvania.

  On the drive back from Ignatius, Peter’s search for Kevin Garrity on his iPhone brought up 9,820 hits. He’d decided to wait until he could be a little more specific in his search parameters. He now tried a search for Kevin Garrity and Wisconsin. It still brought over 2,000 hits, although not necessarily in ways that related well to each other. He didn’t need to know, for example, that there was an entire town named Garrity in northwestern Wisconsin, or that the Garrity Gators basketball team usually went to regionals each year.

  He felt a weary sense of overload as he clicked through the pages, an endless stream of information that had no meaning to him but had meaning to someone somewhere. He tried Erik Bader, typing in his name alongside Claremont. No immediate luck finding a connection. A slew of articles came up related to Erik’s status as a powerhouse player on the Claremont high school baseball team. Articles in the local paper as recent as a month ago referred wistfully to the golden days of Bader’s reign as a shining athlete by comparison to the dry spell now affecting the region. Based on the date he graduated from Claremont, it was unclear what sort of interaction Bader would have had with Ingram. At most he’d have been five or six by the time Ingram finished at Penn and moved on. He tried a search on Erik Bader and Good Shepherd. The hit list suddenly went from 282 to 19.

  That reduction alone would have been attention grabbing, but Peter didn’t have time to contemplate statistics. The first heading that came up under Erik Bader’s name alongside Good Shepherd wasn’t a list of athletic accolades. It was an article on an abuse survivors’ network website in which Bader was quoted. Under the terms of a settlement reached with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia several years beforehand, Bader explained, he was unable to discuss the specifics of his abuse or his case. However, he stated to the author, he could generally confirm that the incidents had taken place in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The article commended Bader for his willingness to speak, but appealed to other victims to refuse to sign confidentiality agreements and instead speak openly and publicly. Agreeing to silence, the article argued, prevented other victims from coming forward.

  He opened another search window and entered Kevin Garrity’s name—this time with “sexual abuse” alongside it. This, too, narrowed the search. Garrity was on a list of individuals who received out-of-court settlements from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. As with Bader, however, under the terms of the settlement, the details of his case were confidential. He opened a third search and entered Angela Terzulli’s name with the same phrase. He wasn’t expecting much—from what he’d read about the abuse scandal that had been swirling for several years in America, the victims had tended to be mostly young boys who were now grown men. If he’d been willing to admit it, in his mind Angela Terzulli seemed more like a seventy-sixyear-old town librarian than an abuse victim.

  He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right either. The search didn’t bring up a list of victims with her name on it. The first article to pop up listed Angela Terzulli as surviving her late son, Anthony Terzulli, whose body had been pulled from the rushing depths of the Meskousing River. According to witnesses, the twenty-nine-year-old man had voluntarily plunged from the crossbeams of a truss bridge nearly fifty feet above the water. Funeral arrangements, the article concluded, were being h
andled by Martinelli Bros. Funeral Home.

  The next few articles were related to the suicide—factual, mostly. Small blurbs in the police news sections of two of the local Parkchester newspapers, followed several days later by an obituary in one and an advertisement in the other praying to Saint Jude for Anthony’s soul and expressing sorrow for the entire Terzulli family.

  The sixth article tied it all together. Anthony Terzulli was listed as a plaintiff in a suit brought by more than eighteen men in Illinois who claimed they had been sexually abused by a Father William Hartnett while attending the Academy of the Holy Cross parish school or participating in parish activities. The suit named the Diocese of Greeley as the defendant and cited failure on the part of its leaders to remove Hartnett and at least one other abusive priest who had rotated through the parish despite numerous written complaints from parents. After an article about Father Hartnett’s abuse at Holy Cross was reposted to an abuse survivors’ site, parents from two of his previous parishes in Rochester and Baltimore had come forward to say they notified his superiors of similar abuse and cc’d the archbishop’s office on subsequent complaints after failing to receive satisfying resolution. In an interview with Parkchester’s local paper, the parents of a victim from the Baltimore parish claimed it would have been impossible for the individuals who transferred Father Hartnett not to know he was a risk before relocating him to his post in Illinois.

  The plaintiffs’ attorney had filed court papers to compel the church to share internal documents regarding who knew what about Father Hartnett’s predilections and when, but an attorney representing the Diocese of Greeley had filed a series of motions to deny the request. It wasn’t the first time Peter had heard about this sort of thing happening. Since the scandal erupted, a number of dioceses facing scrutiny had declined to cooperate fully with attorneys, citing internal investigations already underway and privacy entitlements for the clergy involved to refuse to turn over documentation about their actions to the victims’ legal representation.