Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  A year ago Leo’s parents had set off in their ancient Volkswagen bus for the deserts of the southwest and their virginal rocks. They never returned. The Volkswagen was found in the petrified forest, the bodies in the canyon below. As he plummeted to his death, Corbett had gone past layer after layer of the earth’s formation until he reached ultimate ground zero. In lieu of mourning, Leo raged at the newly learned fact that his father’s annuity had not been passed on to him. It was granted for the lifetime of the otherworldly geologist. It was after learning this crushing truth that Leo had encountered Tuttle and accepted his offer of coffee. Tuttle, it emerged, knew of what had brought Leo to the courthouse.

  “Such things happen,” Tuttle said philosophically, but then added hastily, “no matter how unjust.”

  “It’s not the money—” Leo began, but Tuttle laid a hand on his arm.

  “It’s always the money. And it should be yours. Imagine, the grandson of the Daddy Warbucks of Fox River without a penny.”

  “Can anything be done?”

  “It damned sure ought to be.”

  Tuttle was not a prepossessing man. He had led Leo into the room reserved for journalists where he helped himself to a cup of syrupy coffee. “I’m an honorary member,” Tuttle explained.

  “Aren’t you a lawyer?”

  “Yes. And the best friend the press ever had. You’ll need a lawyer.”

  Having said it, Tuttle pushed back the brim of his tweed hat and looked disinterestedly around the room.

  “Could I afford it?”

  “Are you employed?”

  Tuttle did not show any sign of surprise when Leo told him of his present employment. Leo added, “In a menial job at the country club that was one of my grandfather’s greatest benefactions.”

  “He golfed?”

  Leo dismissed the question as irrelevant. “Don’t you understand? I am reduced to the status caddies once had. I, the grandson of Maurice Corbett.”

  “Give me a token sum and I will be your lawyer and you shall be my client.”

  It had a nice biblical ring to it. Leo passed a dollar bill to Tuttle who made it disappear into his hat like a sorcerer.

  “Be at my office at ten tomorrow morning,” Tuttle said. “And don’t mind Hazel.”

  13

  Blessed are those who dwell in your house.

  —Psalm 84

  Marie, her eyes searching the ceiling as she said it, told Father Dowling that Martha Vlasko had come to see him.

  “How’s her knee?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Show her in.”

  Martha was scarcely more than five feet tall and despite the weather clutched a coat sweater to her narrow torso. She looked accusingly around the study, took note of the books, of the simmering Mr. Coffee, sniffed the tobacco-laden air. This affected her.

  “Casey smoked a pipe.”

  “Your husband.”

  “It never smelled as sweet as this. He smoked Prince Albert. There were little red cans everywhere. He put them to different purposes—to hold change, for bills, everything.”

  The bane of the nonbiodegradable container.

  “You’re feeling better, Martha?”

  “At my age better isn’t much. I came to talk about my lawsuit against the parish.”

  “I thought you dropped that.”

  “I did. I wanted you to know that I was put up to it by Joseph Novak. He told me that fall was my fortune.”

  “It certainly was a misfortune. Like the first fall.”

  “That was my first. I may be seventy-seven years old, but I am not helpless.”

  “No one would ever think so.”

  “I told Joe what I think of his advice. It has made me a pariah. No one will talk to me. They think I’m a traitor, and they’re right. It was a bad thing to do, Father, and I’m sorry.”

  “Just thank God you weren’t really injured.”

  “I twisted my knee. I wasn’t pretending. But if it hadn’t been for Joe …”

  Martha and Joe were, in Edna Hospers’s term, an item at the Center, one of the twilight pairings-off that enlivened the scene in Edna’s domain.

  “I’m sure he meant well.”

  “Meaning well never does. He refused to come here with me.”

  “No need for that, Martha. No need for you to say you’re sorry, for that matter. We live in a litigious age.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “Everyone suing everyone else.”

  “That’s what Joe said. He made it sound as if I had an obligation.”

  “I hope there hasn’t been a falling out between you and Joe.”

  Martha bristled. “That’s another thing. They talk about us as if we were … well, never mind. I pray every day for the repose of Casey’s soul.”

  “If you’d like, I’ll say a Mass for him.”

  “Would you, Father? That would be so nice.” She opened her purse and he shook his head.

  “No. It will be my privilege.”

  “He wasn’t as bad as people thought,” she said enigmatically. As far as Father Dowling knew, Casey Vlasko hadn’t been bad at all, no worse than the general run of the sons of Adam. But wives always know so much more. “I wish you had been here when he died.”

  “Was it that long ago?”

  “He didn’t like the friars. All they talked about was money, them with their vow of poverty.”

  No need to encourage that line of conversation. He got all of that he needed from Marie. “He died a good death?”

  “Father Felix wouldn’t say. He just patted my arm and said that God is merciful.”

  “And so he is,” Father Dowling said, standing. “I’ll say that Mass for Casey at noon tomorrow. I hope you’ll be there.”

  “You’re sure …” She was fiddling with the clasp her purse again.

  He came around the desk and took her arm. “I’ll show you out.”

  “Can we use the front door?”

  She must have come by way of the kitchen, by way of Marie Murkin.

  “Of course.”

  It was nearly time for his noon Mass. When he went through the kitchen, Marie said, “It’s not yet eleven-thirty.”

  He looked at his watch, he looked at the kitchen clock. “You’re right.”

  Since his retreat, he had been trying to recapture the old habit of making his preparation for Mass in the church whenever he was not prevented. Marie was opposed. She wanted a good pastor, but not a pious one. Why, there had been a friar … He had long since thought that Marie invented friars for purposes of some lesson she sought to give him. Her job induced cynicism, but cynicism was the mask of the naive wish that things should be as they seemed. Marie wanted a world where priests, even friars, were saints, where all religious people were close to God, where even housekeepers were patterns of Christian perfection. If only everyone were like Father Boniface.

  “Skipping present company, of course.”

  “Marie, I am one of your long-standing defenders.”

  “Defenders?”

  “You were speaking of Father Boniface.”

  “When his Order closes down you should ask him to move in here permanently.”

  “His Order is not closing down, Marie.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Did she have sources of information closed to him? But his was Father Boniface, and the old priest admitted decline but not a final fall.

  “For one thing,” he said, “we can afford to keep the place. For another, there are signs of better times.”

  “Father Nathaniel.”

  “There are others, too.”

  “Ah. Vocations?”

  “Of a sort.”

  Boniface was not to be drawn and Father Dowling had no desire to pump him for information about the Athanasians. The Order had not received a five-star rating in its best days, maybe three or even just two. As the hotel metaphor suggested, such rankings were often based on the hospitality one might expect as a guest of
an order. The Athanasians had been generous but somewhat ascetic. They all seemed to be teetotalers, save for a glass of wine at the evening meal, and it didn’t occur to them that a visiting cleric, parched from the dusty road, might want scotch instead of weak beer as a restorative. But they got high marks from priests who made their retreats there.

  Father Dowling wondered what Boniface might have meant by a “sort of” vocation. Perhaps another returnee like Richard Krause. If they got their twenty percent there could be many prodigals trooping back to Marygrove in their twilight years. But they would all be of an age, not much promise for the future. What the Athanasians needed, and seemed no more likely to get than other such communities, was an influx of young men to fill up the rooms and chapels and make it seem like old times.

  In the midst of these distracting thoughts, Art Hessian shuffled into the sacristy, there to act as altar boy for Father Dowling’s Mass. His was help Father Dowling would have been willing to forgo, but he knew what it meant to Art. Art groaned audibly whenever he genuflected, he made going down the altar steps when the gifts were brought forward by equally old but more agile worshippers a via crucis, huffing and puffing at Father Dowling’s side.

  “Any chance of being made an extraordinary minister, Father?” Art had wheezed a week before.

  “No need for that here, Art. The ordinary minister can handle the distribution of communion.”

  “I was thinking of the honor.”

  “That’s not the point of it, Art.”

  Insofar as the point was much adhered to in many parishes, that is. At communion time on Sundays the priest was surrounded by a platoon of Eucharistic ministers, there to dispense Holy Communion under both species, to bless the children who came forward with their parents as if they had priestly faculties, smiling and demanding eye contact before giving the host. Phil Keegan had seen it all. Even Amos Cadbury had commented on it.

  “The line between priests and laity is being smudged, Father. Smudged. The priest has become primus inter pares. No wonder boys don’t think of the priesthood. They can marry and become Eucharistic ministers.”

  “Or permanent deacons.”

  “God forbid.” Amos was a Knight of Malta as well as of St. Gregory, accepting such pomp as a loyal son of the Church, appearing in full regalia on special occasions at the cathedral. But these were unequivocally lay honors. As for Phil, he had become an infrequent presence at the Knights of Columbus.

  “They’re all guardhouse theologians now,” he grumbled. “Go for a beer and some idiot wants to tell you what’s wrong with the Church.”

  “We have known better days, Phil.”

  “But that’s what they deny!”

  14

  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

  —Psalm 137

  When Richard Krause first met the woman he would marry, he felt sure she had been a nun. They were having a drink in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying and she was attending a conference of psychological counselors. He had been prowling the conference area and popped in on a talk about “The Guilt Edge.” Marilyn was the speaker, her message was ways and means to move clients past the barriers of guilt and self-doubt into the happier climes of self-fulfillment. She was articulating thoughts that Richard felt he himself had developed in his days since leaving the Order. The trouble with having the past he did, all those memories and resentments, was that he couldn’t discuss it with anyone. Imagine, telling some woman you used to be a priest! If she was Catholic she would be either shocked or interested for the wrong reasons, sure to tell him of some Father So-and-so who had tried to make a move on her. He tended to think that such moves existed largely in the receptive eye of the movee. He himself had been careful never to identify himself as a priest when he was testing the waters of the lay estate before making the big move and applying to be laicized. Something in Marilyn’s intonations, even her vocabulary, suggested a kindred soul.

  “Wonderful presentation,” he told her afterward, waiting to be the last to get to her of those who had come forward. “Just wonderful.”

  “I’m afraid we have to get out of here. Another talk is scheduled to begin.”

  “Just what I was going to suggest. After yours, anything else would be a letdown.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “How about to a drink in the lobby?”

  She was good-looking without being beautiful, squarish face with ash-blond hair she was rightly proud of. No ring on the relevant finger of her left hand, but a pretty gaudy emerald on her right.

  “It was my mother’s,” she said, when he remarked on it.

  “For the Emerald Isle?” The name on the tag pasted above her breast was Marilyn Daly.

  “I never asked.”

  When the waiter came, acting like a prince in exile, bored out of his loafers, Richard said, “I’m going to have a Manhattan.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  Two Manhattans later, they moved to the dining room, where wine seemed appropriate to celebrate the way they were hitting it off. He had been telling her that her talk reminded him in some ways of a retreat.

  “What would you know about retreats?”

  “I used to give them.”

  She sat back, tucked in her chin, looked him over with her light brown eyes. “Who were you with?”

  “The Athanasians.”

  She thought a bit, then nodded. “The Midwest.”

  “That’s Marygrove. And you?”

  “OHM. Right here in Los Angeles. We’re dissolved now.”

  It was a fascinating story. They’d had a big fight with Rome and the cardinal and then sold the whole thing, kit and caboodle, and distributed the funds. Each share turned into a pretty penny.

  “So I finished my degree and set up shop in La Jolla.”

  “I live in San Diego.”

  Two weeks later, he moved into her apartment in La Jolla, mountains to the east, sea to the west, an impossibly beautiful setting that they justified to one another in terms of the thwarted lives they had lived during those wasted years. They deserved this, they were entitled. That was Marilyn’s mantra, which he was happy to repeat. Marry? It would have seemed a repetition of the vows they had repudiated, and he was male enough to welcome the apparent impermanency of it all. Until the first clouds of jealousy began to gather.

  “The men are the worst,” she said. She was speaking of her clients.

  “In what way.”

  “The hang-ups. You would think the body is their enemy. They have to see it as the glove with which they grasp the world.”

  “I hope they don’t get too graspy.”

  “I wish they would. It is terrible to see people imprisoned by beliefs they no longer hold, if they ever did.”

  Any restraint was an illusion, one had to remain open, flexible, free. But it was more theory than practice with Marilyn. She had developed, or adopted, her own creed, the California creed as he thought of it, and its accompanying ritual, too. They spent hours at the beach, offering themselves as unclothed as decency permitted to the sea. It had been in the hour after sundown, on a blanket with the melancholy withdrawal of the sea, that they first made love. For all her theory, she was shy and clumsy. Her inexperience belied the houri she professed to be. Afterward she clung to him and whispered wetly in his ear.

  “How long I have awaited you.” Late have I loved thee? But it was his mention of the melancholy roar she asked about.

  “Dover Beach. The receding tide of religious belief. Matthew Arnold watched it ebbing away with sadness.”

  “I envy you your education. I majored in pyschology. I got my degree after I was professed. It was like trying to subscribe to two creeds, what I learned in class, what was said in conferences. Of course, all that changed.”

  Under the influence of Carl Rogers who was brought in to help them renew. He helped them get in touch with themselves, Bocaccio scenes ensued. It was only a matter of time until they realized
they had adopted a new religion, the religion of pleasure.

  “The prudence of the flesh.”

  “Prudence was not our virtue, believe me.”

  It had seemed simple honesty when her order declared its independence of the cardinal, then of the Church, finally of their vows.

  “At first it was spooky, you know? It is easy to talk about the silliness of all the taboos, but it is something else really to reject them. The woman I lived with when I first left became a mental case. The more affairs she had, the more guilt she felt. She was a warning.”

  Marilyn resolved to lead a disciplined life even in the new order of things. She opened her office in La Jolla and helped others rid themselves of inhibitions, but she herself …

  “Richard, I was still a nun, essentially, when we met.”

  “Physician, heal thyself.”

  “Isn’t it odd how all those phrases stick. I still love Jesus.”

  “How so?”

  “How ridiculous it was to think of oneself as the bride of Christ. Think of the implications. In repudiating that I found him.”

  “As your personal savior?”

  “Don’t mock. He was a great man, a good man.”

  She probably had a theory to explain such a transfer. It helped, it was necessary to think that in her new life she was actually fulfilling the old. Theirs was a very cerebral affair. Only he did not want an affair, not after he began to wonder how participative counseling might become. They were married in front of a woman judge in San Diego and spent their honeymoon in the great Coronado hotel. It was when he undertook to invest her money that he discovered his gift for finance.

  “Feel that,” she said, offering him her breast.

  “Gladly.”

  “I’m serious.” She guided his fingers. “Is that a lump?”

  It was a lump, discovered too late. He thought of himself, kneading that lovely breast, his only thought that it represented all the pleasures he had forgone. They had resolved not to have children, their reaction to the nonsense of Humanae Vitae. They were not the instrument of the species, their union aimed at something beyond itself. When she was told that the cancer had already invaded the lymph nodes, she was filled with terror. He held her tightly throughout the first night of the dreadful knowledge. She told him of the operations, of the ambiguous prognosis, of radiation and chemotherapy, and he held her more tightly. A true lover would have wished that he could offer his life for hers, but in his heart of hearts he felt the enormous separating relief of one still in possession of his health. She had the operation, the treatments made her bald, and the champagne-colored wig could not remove the tragic resignation from her soft brown eyes.