“Can’t we use the old office?”
Privately, yes. But in community? The cardinal was more than amenable.
“It may earn you the graces that will enable you to flourish again.”
Others joined them, as if they had been waiting for this to happen. They became almost a monastic community, gathering in the church at the appointed hours. Richard, it appeared, was a musician and when there was a quorum in the choir he took his place at the organ. And such a voice he had. When he intoned the Nunc Dimittis at Compline, tears formed in Boniface’s eyes. Was it possible that the worst was over and a new day was dawning? And then Richard asked him to speak with Mr. Anderson.
“Anderson?”
“He is responsible for most of the growth in this part of the state, Father.”
“If it is about our property …”
“Just listen to him. That’s all I ask.”
This was on a Sunday evening. The opening psalm of Vespers still clung to the corners of Boniface’s mind. Dixit Dominus ad Dominum meum … “The Lord said to my lord, ‘I will make your enemies a footstool to thy feet.’” Boniface agreed to listen to Mr. Anderson.
And now on this June morning, he stood halfway down the drive, looking back at the main building, hearing the church bell toll the half hour. But it was the evening prayer that filled his mind. Now dost thou dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to Your word in peace.
2
In the shadow of your wings I take refuge till the storms of destruction pass by.
—Psalm 57
There had been a time in his priestly life, too long a time, when Roger Dowling had almost begrudged making his annual retreat, so full had his mind been of his work on the archdiocesan marriage tribunal. At first the tribunal had been a welcome assignment where he could make use of his training in canon law, but gradually he had been weighed down with the burden of all those couples looking for a legal loophole that would enable them to claim that they had not really entered into a marriage after all. Their general view seemed to be that a decision that had produced such unwelcome results could not have been truly made. There were those who had anticipated an annulment by getting a civil divorce and regarded the tribunal as simply another court that could undo the past. Whatever credence one gave to their tale of a loveless marriage, however willing the couple to collude with one another in the testimony given, each as eager as the other to get the Church’s sanction on their intention to marry again in the hope that they would be luckier a second time, there was nothing the tribunal could do for them. Friends and relatives might add their testimony, but the fact remained that a valid marriage had been entered into and no tribunal could put asunder what God had joined together.
During his first years as defender of the bond, Roger Dowling had known only one case where it was possible to believe that no true marriage had taken place, the husband fully intending, as he pledged fidelity at the nuptial altar, to be unfaithful with the mistress he had no intention of giving up. How could such a man have made an authentic promise to plight his troth to the unsuspecting woman in her bridal gown, stars in her eyes, her imagination full of the life of bliss that lay before her? When eventually she learned of her husband’s perfidy, when he and his friends acknowledged that he had not sincerely entered into a marriage, there was indeed the possibility that the case could be successfully sent to the Roman rota and a verdict of nullity eventually reached. Eventually. That had been the rub. But most cases were hopeless and brought before him men and women who expected the tribunal to do what not even God could do—make what had been not to have been.
A week’s retreat was not long enough to cleanse the mind of all those sad stories. He felt almost self-indulgent, spending long, silent days in prayer and meditation, and in the evening listening to clerical gossip but not able to join in. His head was full of things he must not divulge any more than he could have chatted about what he heard in the confessional. It would not do to speak of Mr. A and Mrs. A since one of his classmates might know the couple, however algebraically he referred to them. With time the pressure grew too great, even his annual retreat did not relieve it, and be began to seek solace in drink. The habit had stolen upon him, an evening libation becoming two, then more, until increasingly it became his only solace in what he had come to think of as Bleak House. Finally his condition became known. All his prospects of promotion went aglimmering. Bishops were chosen from those with degrees in canon law as often as not, and Roger Dowling had been widely regarded as on track to be named an auxiliary of Chicago and eventually to have a diocese of his own. When all that came crashing down upon him, something like despair gave way to relief.
After rehabilitation he was told he was to be pastor of St. Hilary’s in Fox River. Before taking up the post, he made a retreat at Marygrove which was near his future parish. His retreat master had been Father Boniface. It was the first genuine retreat in years and ever since, after he had settled in at St. Hilary’s and come to see that what was universally regarded as his personal tragedy was a gift from God, he had returned each summer to that seminary and to Father Boniface.
“You saved my life,” he often told the wise and gentle priest.
“Hardly that, Father.”
In the evening, they would stroll the lovely grounds of Marygrove and Boniface would liken his own life to Father Dowling’s.
“Without the happy ending, of course.”
“I don’t think I have ever known a man as contented with his lot as you are, Father Boniface.”
“I dreamed of being a missionary when I was a boy here.”
“How old were you when you first came here?”
“Just out of grade school.”
“That came to be thought a mistake, taking a boy from his family at so early an age.”
“In some cases that may have been true.”
As Father Boniface recounted what had happened to his Order, the peace of the place seemed an illusion. Why had Father Dowling never realized the significance of the quiet that awaited him on such occasions? Perhaps he had thought that summer was merely a lull in the busy life of the place, that the handful of priests in evidence meant only that the rest were engaged in other work during the vacation months. Boniface had told him of the decline of the Order of St. Athanasius in a tone of wondering resignation.
“Life is a book in which we set out to write one story and end by writing another.”
“Who said that?”
Boniface stopped and tried to frown the author from his memory but without success. It didn’t matter. They resumed their walk.
“And now you bring consolation to me, Father Dowling.”
Perhaps he did. Priests need priests, too, after all. Father Dowling had lived through some version of Boniface’s story, watched men flee the priesthood and nuns doff their veils and head into another—and they hoped—more satisfying life.
“I have been told that some come back,” Boniface said. “As many as twenty percent.”
“One out of five?”
“Perhaps more want to but cannot.”
“Married?”
“Yes.”
For a time it had seemed far easier for a priest to be returned to the lay estate than for a couple to receive an annulment. The new code of canon law had altered the practice of many marriage tribunals. Judgments could now be made at the local level and, imitating the divorce courts, tribunals allowed psychological impediments to contracting a valid marriage supplement and then replace the older more stringent requirements. The results had often been scandalous, but a brake had been put on such abuses.
“Have any of your own men returned?”
“One.”
“Not twenty percent?”
Boniface laughed ruefully. “I suppose it’s not really a matter of numbers.”
“Tell me about him.”
And so Father Dowling had heard the story of Richard Krause. He had not realized that the distinguished bearded man in the choi
r when office was said was on probation. Nothing in his appearance suggested that he had spent his life differently than the other fathers trading verses of the psalms as they recited the hours in chapel. Father Dowling felt a kind of kinship with the man, another lost sheep returned. But it was by accident that he met the bearded prodigal one evening when the two of them happened to be making the outdoor stations of the cross together. After the fourteenth station, Father Dowling introduced himself.
“St. Hilary’s? I said Mass there from time to time years ago. You’re a Franciscan?”
“No. They had the parish for a time.”
“We had parishes, too.”
“Yes.” Father Dowling had been filling his pipe and when he lit it Richard watched with amusement.
“We all smoked here. Almost all.”
“And you quit.”
“I never really acquired the habit. It was something we did during recreation. I was glad to give it up.”
“When did you do that?”
The other man combed his beard with his fingers. “Has Father Boniface told you about me?”
Father Dowling nodded. “I was surprised at your name. Richard.”
“My religious name is Nathaniel.”
“And will you adopt it again?”
“First I have to be adopted.”
“And has Father Boniface told you about me?”
“What would there be to tell?”
“Nothing dramatic.”
“Like my own story?”
“No, nothing like that.”
For some reason he had not wanted to confide in Richard. And he did not think of what had happened to himself as dramatic. Even so, like Richard’s, his story had a happy ending.
“Some day I would like to say Mass at St. Hilary’s once again.”
“I think we could arrange that.”
“Boniface tells me you sometimes rely on him.”
“Not as often as I would like. St. Hilary’s is not a demanding assignment.”
That was all. Was he just imagining that Richard avoided him after that?
3
From deceitful and cunning men, rescue me, O God.
—Psalm 43
Marie Murkin would not take vacations and she did not go on retreat. Her role as housekeeper of the St. Hilary rectory was all she needed of restorative satisfaction in this Vale of Tears and more than she needed to keep a watch over her soul. There were pastors who gossiped with their housekeepers as if they were aunts or older sisters. When from time to time she got together with another housekeeper—Gretchen Carey of Mother of God was impossible to keep at bay—she listened with tolerant amusement to tales of the chatty domesticity of that sybaritic rectory with its two and a half priests (old Father Harrington was in residence, and good for a Sunday Mass, but otherwise Gretchen’s foe at pinochle), and she was filled with contentment at her own lot.
Oh, there had been the years in the land of Egypt when the Franciscans were in charge. From day to day, she had never been sure how long she could abide those jolly, incompetent friars under whom St. Hilary’s went into a financial nosedive. The exodus from the great old homes in the parish had begun and FOR SALE signs abounded as one ribbon of concrete after another cut off the parish from what had once been the surrounding countryside. With revenue down and parishioners melting away like wax, with the school only half full and run by suddenly discontented nuns, Marie would have thought that any pastor worth his salt would do his best to galvanize the parish and defend against the evil day that was upon it. But Father Felix, the last of the lot, was out of the rectory more often than he was in it, playing golf or having lunch elsewhere with important friends who never gave a dime to St. Hilary’s. And then, as if to prove that novenas to St. Anthony were never in vain, everything changed and Marie was confirmed in her suspicion that the Franciscans had wrongly appropriated the saint of Padua as one of their own. Would any Franciscan have heeded her prayer that the parish be rid of Franciscans? Almost over night they were gone and the cardinal sent Father Dowling to brighten her twilight years.
Marie was not that old, but she became a valetudinarian when her husband disappeared, going off without warning, not to be heard from again for years, as if all those hitches in the Navy had made dry land impossible for him. And so she had become a housekeeper.
“The grass widow’s equivalent of joining the convent,” Father Dowling had said with the dry humor that had taken some getting used to.
“The convent!” The nuns were gone then, the school closed, but Marie’s memories of the disgruntled band in their silly pastel suits and veils the size of hankies over their permanents were fresh. They had abandoned the convent as cutting them off from the people, and took up residence in one of the larger houses on Dirksen Drive. A crafty developer named Anderson had talked Felix the Catholic, as she ironically thought of him, into converting the convent into posh apartments, causing the few remaining nuns to covet the place they had so cheerfully abandoned. But soon they and Felix were gone and Father Dowling was in place.
“It is the age of delayed vocations, Marie.”
“You mean departed vocations.” Two could play at that game, as she quickly learned.
“You’re not thinking of leaving?”
“Is that what you would like?”
“Talk it over with your spiritual advisor.”
The knack of getting along with Father Dowling lay in knowing when he was serious and when he was not. He had been through the mill, as Gretchen was only too eager to tell her, Marie nodding through the narrative as if it was not all news to her. It was difficult to think of Father Dowling as a man with elbow trouble. He drank nothing stronger than coffee now, and gallons of that, and he ate like a bird. Marie’s cooking was legendary, but it was all lost on Father Dowling. She could have served him cereal at every meal and she doubted he would have noticed. But he had the wit of the Irish and kept her on her toes and she flourished under the new regime. And he was always on the job, so much so that his annual retreat and the monthly day of recollection that took him away were equivocal times for Marie Murkin. The days of recollection were not bad, but the weekly retreat in June was another matter.
The first two days, she went over the rectory, scrubbing, scouring, beating the carpets, waxing the floors, doing the downstairs windows, and putting Edna Hospers’s boy Carl to work on those on the second floor. He was such a fearless acrobat at the work she couldn’t watch him, but Edna told her not to worry.
“He leads a charmed life. And it gets him away from his computer.”
Thank God, Father Dowling shared her disdain for such new contraptions. He had an old portable typewriter in his study on which he wrote his few letters; he kept the books by hand and could have been an accountant if he really cared about money, which he didn’t. Not for himself.
“You haven’t had a raise in years, Marie.”
“What would I do with more money?”
“You could consult with your spiritual advisor.”
Was he telling her she ought to have one? Once she hinted, after meeting Gretchen at the Crossed Tea, that she had taken his hint. He lowered his head and looked at her through a cloud of pipe smoke and she resolved never to try fooling him again. He did give her a raise and she sent it to Mother Teresa. She realized that she no longer felt like an employee. It was Marie’s little secret that she was in her way a pastoral assistant. Don’t get her started on the subject of women’s ordination, it wasn’t that, but for all Father Dowling’s kidding manner she never felt patronized, or worse, ignored, as she had with the Franciscans. Phil Keegan, the Fox River captain of detectives, was a tougher article, but Marie accepted him as the pastor’s friend since boyhood.
“I washed out of Quigley,” Keegan said.
“I don’t believe it.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“As a priest, you would have made a good cop.”
“I didn’t have to know Latin to be a co
p.”
“You wouldn’t have to know it now to become a priest,” Father Dowling remarked.
“It’s too late,” Phil said, but without regret.
“Oh, I don’t know. Marie is thinking of entering the convent.”
“And exiting five minutes later.”
“Oh, they might let you stay.”
There were times when no reply was the best reply. It was good to have a layman in the house as often as Phil Keegan was. His wife had died, and his daughters lived at opposite ends of the country, but between his work and frequent visits to his old friend, he was more or less content with his lot.
“Or you might marry again,” Father Dowling said with a straight face.
Marie harrumphed. “Once burned, twice shy.”
“Is that St. Paul?”
“The epistle to the grass widows.”
“Marie, you know you’re eligible. And Keegan is willin’.”
Phil Keegan was more embarrassed than she was by such sallies. Of course Father Dowling did not mean it. He was not an effusive man, but Marie was confident that he relied upon her and would act very differently indeed if she ever spoke of leaving.
On Wednesday of the pastor’s annual retreat week, the house was spotless—all but the study; she had learned her lesson about touching anything there.
“Don’t,” he had said. “I use the Dewey decimated system. I know where everything is.”
“Everything” was largely the books that lined the four walls of the study and were piled on the only windowsill as well. The first time Marie had smelled the aroma of pipe smoke she had wanted to cheer. The Franciscans had smoked malodorous cigars and the house was as full of ashes as a crematorium. But the smell of a pipe was a glorious thing and Father Dowling was a very neat smoker. He only smoked in the study and the room was redolent of sweet tobacco. But how quickly it dissipated. She went into the study now, but the smoky ghost of the pastor had gone with him. It was a sad thought that the signs of our passage are so quickly gone. She had aired the house for days after the Franciscans left, but the smell of cigars had lingered until it was replaced by the pleasant one of pipe tobacco. It seemed a metaphor of life that the effect of Father Dowling’s smoking should be so quickly diluted. She would discuss that with her spiritual director. She had long since decided that living in the same house with Father Dowling was all her soul needed, and for special consultation she had herself. No need to confide in some stranger.
Prodigal Father Page 2