“You mean younger.”
“I mean young,” Marie said and tromped down the hall. The kitchen door banged shut behind her.
In the old days, they had had nuns who took care of the laundry and refectory, a community of German nuns who chattered away in their native tongue and had only an imperfect grasp of English, much to the delight of the seminarians who were always trying to get them to commit spoonerisms. But Marie Murkin was something entirely different. Boniface had had two sisters, one a nun, the other married, both dead now, and he supposed he had heard female chatter as a boy before he went off to the Athanasians. But Marie Murkin’s loquaciousness was a marvel. There was some respite while she was at work in the kitchen, but she sat at the dining room table while he ate, watching each mouthful, anxious for his reaction. But mainly she just talked. Little response was required of him and Boniface considered it a small price to pay for the delicious meal. But he was looking ahead to the solitude of Father Dowling’s study before he went over to the church for confessions. And then she mentioned Stan Morgan.
“I’m sure Father Dowling told you of him.”
“No.”
So Marie did. “It shows you the influence a priest can have, doesn’t it?”
Was there any secret of St. Hilary’s parish that Mrs. Murkin would not divulge to a priest she trusted? When she began about the man who had come looking for a runaway priest, Boniface quelled his conscience and asked her to continue.
“Can you imagine? Now he was as nice a man as you could expect to meet, Father. I gave him tea and we had a good talk. You never know when something you say will strike the proper note. You know what I mean.”
“And you struck the proper note?”
“Oh, I tried to help him. Father Dowling was spending the week with you, and I do what I can.”
“He wanted a priest?”
“Not just any priest. This was someone in particular. A man he had met in California and who had mentioned Fox River … so, of course, he came here to ask.”
“To ask?”
“If I knew the man. Now what was his name … ? Richards. Yes, Richards.”
Boniface managed not to express the surprise he felt. “He was looking for a man named Richards who said he was a priest?”
“That was his story. Do you know what I thought? Well, I was right. It turned out he himself was a lapsed Catholic. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that was just a story. He wanted help.”
“Ah.”
She chattered on. The man said he had come from California, but Marie would not vouch for that. Boniface would know what subterfuges people use when they are in need of help.
“Did he say why he wanted this particular priest?”
“When I got out the Catholic Directory, he told me the man was no longer a priest. I think he was afraid I would find someone and the whole point of his coming by would be lost.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, we had a good talk and I hope I did some good.”
“I’m sure you did.”
Eventually he escaped to the study. He sat at Father Dowling’s desk and noted the volume of the Summa and Dante sitting on it, as if for ready reference. The First Part of the Second Part. What a marvel the Summa was, particularly perhaps in its moral part. He opened the book without moving it. Question 16. A bad conscience binds but does not excuse. A difficult doctrine, though Boniface was sure it was true. Medieval Latin grated on his inner ear, but he was willing to acknowledge this as a fault. In the medieval schools, Latin had been a living language, not a nostalgic return to classical times as it had been during the Renaissance. It was the Renaissance revival of classical Latin that had made it a dead language. C. S. Lewis. This was true. Aquinas wrote in Latin as in his mother tongue, a contemporary idiom, which was as it should be.
But Boniface’s mind was full of Father Richards.
Richard Krause? It was not impossible. He got down the Catholic Directory and found several Richards, none of them from Illinois. He admitted to himself that in his heart of hearts he did not want Richard reinstated as an Athanasian. His years away from the Order represented a vast terra incognita. What Boniface had learned of it did not inspire confidence in the prodigal returned. And yet there was much in his favor, not least his role in restoring the communal recitation of the office in choir. Richard had been the best Latinist Boniface had ever taught. He remembered the sadness he had felt when he learned that Richard was among the many who had decided to return to the lay estate. Of course one was always a priest, tu es sacerdos in aeternum, an indelible mark that lasted into eternity, but a priest could be laicized. And so many had been. They had rushed like lemmings to the sea, in Richard’s case to California. Stout Cortez, wasn’t it? A financial advisor. It would be quite in order to ask Richard for a detailed account of his life in the world, places, dates, occupation. And to learn more about his marriage, and the former nun he had married who had since died.
How sad any life is when summed up in a sentence or two. A life sentence. He imagined a young girl becoming a postulant, passing through the novitiate, taking her vows. And then? Boniface had never understood what prompted men to leave the religious life, let alone women. They had come to regard being faithful to the vocation to which they had been called a weakness. Did they want the security of a predictable life? Well, that could be the case. All the spiritual writers warned against it. They had been instructed about such dangers from their first years in the Order. The right deed for the wrong reason. But one could strive to do the right deed for the right reason. Wasn’t that the task of a lifetime? Security did not seem quite the word for that lifelong quest of perfection. Why was abandoning the task preferable?
Just before three, he went over to the church and took up his post in the visitor’s confessional. And then they came, one after the other, with their little menus of sins, their fear of punishment, so often a calculating attitude as they argued with themselves and with God whether they had really done anything wrong at all. Boniface listened patiently. The fact that a person was in the confessional was prima facie evidence of repentance. It was one of the rules he had learned. And it was true. He accepted the recitation of sins and tried to direct the penitent to sorrow and a firm resolution to amend his life. Or her life. His or her life, as the phrase now was. The different genders did not seem so different in the confessional. Boniface assumed the role of an alter Christus, welcoming the sinner, whispering encouragement. Between penitents, he prayed for them all, the ones who came and the ones who feared to come, certain their deeds were unprecedented in their depravity. A species of pride, that. Who has not sinned? Who is not capable of any imaginable sin?
Between penitents, thoughts of Richard returned, negative thoughts. Richard had lobbied the community on the matter of working out some sort of deal with Anderson. It now looked deadlocked, half for, half against, and, of course, opponents were thought of as antiprogressive, conservative, stuck in the mud. When had change as change come to seem unquestionably good? Most changes brought both good and bad. Sticking with the tried and true doubtless did the same. Yet it was the nature of such division that the opposite side had to be seen as benighted. Surely there were persuasive reasons to sit down with Anderson and talk.
The most powerful argument turned on the greed and selfishness involved in so small a community, a community that would dwindle before it ever grew large again, if it grew at all, possessing a vast piece of real estate. The main building was closed off on all its upper floors, floors that contained the dormitories and rooms that had once housed the student body. The whole second floor had been allotted to members of the community then, but now they all lived in the mansion, each with a suite—bedroom, sitting room, private bath. Boniface had been told that all the new houses going up in the area around them contained multiple bathrooms, six, seven, even more. He thought of his own home with its one bathroom on the second floor, more than enough for his parents and sisters and himself. Mention of the new tren
d in bathrooms had been meant to cushion the guilt they all seemed to feel to some degree at taking up residence in a house that truly deserved the name mansion.
It had a horseshoe form, the wide front made to appear smaller because of the overhanging eaves and the front porch whose descending roof seemed to take the house with it. Large, fat pillars supported the porch roof, green-tiled as was the roof above, the sides of stucco. The irony of the house was that when old Corbett could afford to build it he had few years left to live in it. Can a man in his sixties build with thoughts of only his own future? Boniface did not know. In any case, Maurice Corbett had unwittingly been building a house for a religious community he would not have heard of at the time of the house’s construction. The entry from the county road gave little sense of what awaited as one came up the driveway. The unimpressive little woods through which the driveway wended soon gave way to an expanse of lawn on both sides that rose in broad terraces to the house. The trees became more numerous as one neared the house, decorous trees, trees selected for their variety and beauty. And, of course, the magnolias, their pride and joy.
The chapel was the first addition when the Athanasians took possession, and then what came to be called the main building, one designed to house every aspect of the Order’s work. That building had gone up the year before Boniface’s entry. When he first came up the drive what he saw had a look of permanency, of having been there forever yet he had seen it in its first years. Was he seeing it all now in its last? It was an odd thought that institutions, too, have lifetimes, a natural inevitable cycle from infancy through childhood to maturity and finally decline. But other orders had lasted for centuries and were still around. It would have been unthinkable to him as a young man that he had boarded a sinking ship. Well, all ships are sinking, nothing is forever in this world, we have here no lasting city.
There was the creak of the kneeler as a penitent settled in. Boniface slid the little panel aside to open the grill.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
You could guess the age of penitents by the way they confessed. Once nuns had drilled such formulas into children and they remained for a lifetime. Very likely the same sins had been confessed over the years as well, with every now and again some great eruption of misbehavior, but then settling down again into the uneasy mediocrity that marked most lives.
Father Dowling seemed refreshed rather than exhausted by his outing, though Captain Keegan soon went yawning into the night, leaving the two priests alone. Marie had finally accepted their refusal of a snack, a drink, tea, coffee.
“Good night, Marie.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
And she retreated to the kitchen and then up the back stairs to her apartment.
“Mulier fortis,” Boniface murmured.
“Fortissima. Do you use the Web, Father?”
“Only when first I practiced to deceive.”
Father Dowling smiled appreciatively. “Neither do I. The young are all adepts now, of course. Certainly Edna Hospers’s son Eric is. This is something he found and, as he put it, downloaded.”
The pages on Stan Morgan contained news stories from various California papers, accusations, complaints of peculation, fraud, misleading of clients. There were half a dozen pictures of Stanley Morgan, the object of all these accusations. Boniface looked at Father Dowling.
“It’s buried in the story.”
And so it was, mention of a silent and suddenly absent partner in the firm that was the object of such obloquy. Richard Krause.
10
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my anxieties.
—Psalm 139
On Monday evening, when Father Dowling showed him the stuff that Eric Hospers had downloaded from the Internet, Phil read through it with a scowl.
“This is the nice guy you were telling me about, Marie?”
“Let me see that.”
Phil handed her the papers. Father Dowling went on puffing at his pipe, giving no indication of what he thought Phil’s reaction to the California machinations of Stanley Morgan would be. Marie rattled the pages as she skimmed them, her expression one of indignation.
“The man was accused and acquitted, that’s the long and short of it. He is as innocent as you or I.”
“He got off on a technicality.”
“What else is law but technicalities? He was acquitted.”
“That’s right,” Father Dowling said.
Phil was relieved. He had feared that the pastor of St. Hilary’s expected his old friend the cop to run Morgan out of town on the basis of these shenanigans on the West Coast.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Searching for his flown partner, apparently.”
Marie sat forward. “A man he said had been a priest!”
“He wasn’t even indicted, Marie.”
“So why did he disappear?”
“That’s Morgan’s story. He didn’t accuse his partner of anything.”
Marie was having none of that. She had found Stanley Morgan to be a fine man and swiftly developed her version of what must have happened in California. It was clear as a bell. This renegade priest had left Morgan in the lurch, Morgan was indicted, and the Judas Iscariot probably thought Morgan would be out of circulation for a good long time, courtesy of the California penitentiary system.
“Wasting away in Alcatraz.”
“Alcatraz is closed, Marie,” Phil said. “It’s become a movie set.”
“I just wish Stan Morgan was here to defend himself.”
“He could plead guilty to a lesser offence. Again.”
“That’s right!”
“His partner does seem like a skunk, Roger.”
The pastor sent a wobbly smoke ring sailing over his desk. “Have another beer, Phil. Marie?”
Marie got to her feet. “You can drink a toast to Stan Morgan.”
After she brought the beer, Marie did not stay, and when they were alone, Father Dowling asked Phil to close the door.
“I think I know where Marie’s villain is.”
“The runaway priest?”
“He has returned. He was an Athanasian.”
“So what is there for him to return to?”
“They’re still a community, Phil. With the return of Father Nathaniel, there are six.”
“Nathaniel?”
“Richard Krause.”
“Aha. Who found him? Morgan?”
“No. I don’t know that Morgan realizes where the man he is looking for is. Boniface made the connection when I showed him those pages. Eric gave them to me Saturday, Boniface was here, and I showed them to him. It seemed a cruel thing to do, but it would have been more cruel to keep the information from him.”
Roger described the prodigal’s return to the Order of St. Athanasius, where he was spending a period of probation before he could be reinstated.
“So you already suspected?”
“It was Boniface who saw the connection.”
“What will he do?”
“I don’t know. He is not enthralled with Richard’s return.”
“And this could blackball him?”
“We’ll see.”
Phil shuffled through the pages young Hospers had printed out. “All this stuff was there for the asking?”
“If you know how to ask. There was something about a search engine.”
Phil did not even pretend to understand, but the printouts provided a spooky sense of the Web, everyone’s secrets available to anyone with a computer anywhere on the globe.
“Cy Horvath has gotten into that. Sometimes it’s quicker than going through regular channels.”
“Have Cy put through a search on you, Phil.”
“He better not.”
“Boniface told me that something like twenty percent of those who left the priesthood have come back.”
“And they let them in?”
“What would you suggest?”
“D
rawing and quartering. Think of the scandal they caused, and the scandal their just coming back would cause.”
“There is that danger, I suppose. But not with an Athanasian.”
“I hope Boniface gives him the heave-ho.”
“Well, that’s two strikes against him.”
“Did you advise Boniface to send him packing?”
“I was thinking of Marie.”
“She’s just infatuated with this guy Morgan.”
“Is that a note of jealousy in your voice?”
“Roger, the idea of marrying again never so much as enters my mind. I am celibate as you are.”
“And you might have been in the same way as I am.”
“Latin,” Phil groaned. “But don’t get me wrong. I will never regret marrying and having my daughters, being grandfather to their children.”
“That’s not an impediment, Phil.”
“To what?”
“Maybe you should return to the dreams of your youth. Talk to the cardinal.”
Father Dowling’s little joke. But driving home, the suggestion lingered. How unattractive it was. Yet how many times had he sat in Roger Dowling’s rectory nursing the unexpressed illusion that they were just two priests, having a chat, watching a game on TV. But that was the allure of the might have been and never could be. Father Dowling’s kidding suggestion confirmed Phil in the conviction that his inability to learn Latin had been providential. He wasn’t meant to be a priest. He was a cop and that was the way he would end up. And he didn’t regret it a bit. He could still have his semiclerical evenings with Roger Dowling.
11
Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it.
—Psalm 96
Michael George awoke with a twinge of conscience to the sound of a mower, the latter the cause of the former. He scrambled out of bed and went to the open window of the lodge, the building that had housed his family since before the Athanasians had come into possession of the estate. All this was family lore. His grandfather had been employed by the Corbetts and when with his second marriage Maurice Corbett had returned to the faith of his fathers it had seemed to threaten the security of the George family. But the second Mrs. Corbett had been a paragon of ecumenism—Father Boniface had supplied the phrase—and it was largely due to her counsel that the estate was deeded to the Athanasians, with the proviso that the Georges went with the land.
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