Prodigal Father

by Ralph McInerny

  “Your grandfather was one of the giants of this area,” she told him on the veranda of the country club where they sipped iced tea. Leo had been taken back into the golf shop at the insistence of a majority of the members. His grandfather’s membership in the club was bestowed on him in reparation for the indignities he had suffered and the prospects that now seemed his.

  “He cut me off without a dime.”

  “That must be rectified.”

  Charlotte was dispassionately sensible of the attraction her feminine endowments exercised on the male of the species. That these had played their role in her swift rise at Anderson Ltd. had not been lost on her, nor had she been beneath showing a little leg for the benefit of her admiring but harmless employer. Her skirts were dangerously short, and when she crossed her legs on the veranda of the country club, Leo Corbett all but gasped in alarmed admiration. But the operation was accomplished without any pornographic display. She brought her iced tea to her mouth; plush red lips closed around the straw. Her cheeks hollowed as she drank. Half the battle was already won. An hour later, they were on their way to the corporate offices in Barrington in Charlotte’s olive-green Mercedes.

  23

  Deliver me from my enemies, O my God.

  —Psalm 59

  The man named John Sullivan who had been placed in the third floor of the lodge in which the Georges lived was said to be on retreat, but he seemed to do little other than show himself about the grounds and sit at the laptop computer he had installed in his room. And speak Spanish to Rita. And not just Como esta usted? He rattled away in a manner that brought Rita’s milk-white teeth on display in her warmest smile, the smile Michael had imagined only he elicited.

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, nothing.” But she smiled shyly when she said it and turned away.

  This distraction slowed Michael’s appreciation of his father’s concern at the stories in the local paper about Leo Corbett and, the culminating blow, the description of the former Corbett estate with the interview with Father Nathaniel, the bearded deserter who had returned to sow discord among his former confreres.

  “He is in the employ of Anderson,” Andrew George decided. “He is a Trojan horse in the community.”

  Father Nathaniel had certainly proved a godsend to the journalist Tetzel, mocking the pretensions of Leo Corbett, talking of how the Athanasians had taken a promising site and turned it into a garden spot.

  “Does he propose to come back here and live in the selfish luxury his grandfather did?”

  “But he was your benefactor.”

  “And his benefaction has served its purpose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me tell you about the present condition of the Athanasian Order.”

  MORIBUND COMMUNITY CLINGS TO ESTATE ran the leader over Tetzel’s story detailing the amazing revelations of Father Nathaniel. A once-thriving Order had, in the manner of so many religious communities in recent years, gone into decline. Buildings that had once burst with candidates for the priesthood, from high school through novitiate and on to philosophy, theology, and ordination, men who had played a significant role in the work of the Catholic Church, even taking responsibility for several parishes in the Chicago Archdiocese, were now the echoing habitat of a handful of aging priests. Buildings were entirely or partly shut up. The community, whose members took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, were now living in the gorgeous mansion Maurice Corbett had built for his second wife. Under her influence, Corbett had become a Catholic and in his waning years had deeded the property over to the Athanasians. Whatever merit there had been in that idea—and the noble history of the Order sketched by Father Nathaniel told how much—the Athanasians were not what they had been, nor were they likely to become so again. Meanwhile, the property was there, attractive, extensive, all but useless.

  “No one need tell us of our obligations,” Nathaniel had said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Some of us are willing to talk to Lars Anderson about his hope to develop the property into a tasteful new community, mindful of the environment.”

  “How many?”

  “Not yet a majority.”

  “More than there were?”

  Nathaniel nodded.

  “Because of my articles.”

  “But you are the champion of Leo Corbett.”

  “Surely he has a claim.”

  “A claim to enjoy these acres by himself, to stand in the path of progress? Nonsense.”

  Andrew George cried out with pain as he read this account, as he did several times, always aloud, as if he wanted God to hear and do something about it. Mr. Martinez heard about the series and Michael was shaken by Rita’s account of his reaction.

  “He wants to know what kind of work you’ll do now.”

  “All this will blow over. The Georges have lived here for years and aren’t going anywhere.”

  “But if the priests sell?”

  “Tell your father that Nathaniel ran away years ago and married in California. He came back just to cause trouble. But they won’t listen to him.” Michael said this with such conviction that he almost believed himself.

  “He ran away and got married?” She was deeply shocked.

  “That’s right. Ask my father.”

  Michael decided that he had to marry Rita before anything further happened. He would marry her in front of a priest, maybe Father Boniface would do it in the community chapel; that would cushion the blow to his father.

  “He would regard it as the deepest betrayal,” Boniface said, almost in alarm.

  “Can you promise me that I will live here as my father and his father did?” Michael asked, adding, “Father?”

  Gone was the round and merry face that Michael had known all his life. He remembered when he had been enrolled in the dwindling Latin class that Father Boniface taught. He had surprised the priest with an aptitude for classical tongues that Michael himself had been too young—thirteen—to find surprising and which had led him, at fifteen, to pagan poet Catullus, much to the old priest’s dismay. Boniface had given him Augustine to read that his mind might be cleared of the pagan hedonism, which could be redeemed only by the love poem addressed to his dead brother, Ave atque vale.

  “That might be Nathaniel’s motto. He has come back to greet us with a final farewell.”

  “Now, now. Everything is in God’s hands.”

  How could he explain, without sounding like Catullus singing of his Lesbia, that he wanted to be in Rita’s hands and have her in his. Even in the sanctum sanctorum of Father Boniface’s office his breath caught at the prospect. He had respected Rita too much to take advantage of those moments when she as well as he found postponement a physical pain, but such restraint had been an investment, proof that he wanted her in the only way that would leave her conscience untroubled. And his? There was Mediterranean blood in his veins, as there had been in Augustine’s, and it was the early Augustine that tempted him now: Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.

  “You were meant to be more than a gardener, son.”

  “Horace and his villa.”

  “He had slaves to take care of the farm at Tivoli.”

  “Is my father your slave?”

  “You know he isn’t. Oh, Michael, I wish I could promise you that things will go as your father and I wish. I am the superior here, but in such matters I have but one vote.”

  “There was no need to take a vote until he came back.”

  “No.”

  “Send him away.”

  He could see that he touched the deepest desire in the old priest. And why not? Nathaniel, as he insisted on being called again, was a renegade. He did not deserve to have a vote equal to the others. He was on probation. And that meant that his staying was still undecided.

  “Send him away, Father. He is destroying us all. What he said to the reporter …”

  The old priest winced.

  “My father read it aloud, again and
again.”

  And Michael remembered his father only that morning, trimming the hedge when Nathaniel passed and when his back was to him, gesturing at him with the whirring blade, as if he would like to trim his beard, and his head as well.

  “The poor man.”

  “My father?”

  “Of course. Michael, let me promise you this. No matter what happens, you will be taken care of. Perhaps this is God’s way of insuring that your talents will be developed. The order will finance your education, you can continue your study of the classics, become a teacher.”

  “No.”

  “It has been the consolation of my own life, son.”

  But it was the prospect of living in the lodge after they were married, to have it to themselves eventually, filled with their children, that had removed all resistance Rita had previously shown to his impetuous desire that they marry. Now, waiting was a sin if their love need be no sin. Her response to the man Sullivan, with his Spanish fluency, made him see how tenuous his hold on her was.

  “I want to be a gardener here and Nathaniel won’t stop me.”

  And he stormed out of the office as if his dilemma was of Boniface’s doing.

  24

  Rescue me, Lord, from my enemies, I have fled to You for refuge.

  —Psalm 143

  The dark wood choir stalls filled the sanctuary of the chapel, and in the summer evening a polychrome shaft of light descended from a stained-glass window high above them, falling on the just and unjust alike, making Nathaniel’s beard look like the dyed hair of a young delinquent. Back and forth between the stalls the verses of the psalm were traded, the words of David that had defined Jewish and Christian worship for millennia, sung in a way that also had its origins in Israel and had been modified in the monasteries to carry the prayer of the Church, the opus Dei, up to God, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, century after century … Boniface never felt more a part of the long history of the faith than when he said or sang the office, his voice blending with those of long-dead Jews and monks, the choirs of angels harmonizing with them, solving the great mystery of Israel, the covenant and the cross at last in concord. And the recovery of this practice among them they owed to Nathaniel.

  A church remains cool in summer, in shadows, the invisible ceiling above with the great arches making them safe as Jonah in the belly of the whale, old men with their reedy voices finding in the mesmerizing monotone of chant the purpose of their lives as they moved toward the little variation at the middle of the verse and the greater one at the end. And then the other side picked it up. At the end of the psalm, the deep bow as they sang the doxology. Oh, dear God, how he loved it, and how he hated the man who had made it possible again, Nathaniel at the organ, Nathaniel with his golden voice, Nathaniel the Judas among them.

  Boniface realized that the community was split along the lines of their opposite views on the proposal that Nathaniel had put before them. How could those men be so insensible of the sanctity of this place that they could imagine putting it on the block for a mess of pottage? But they would go from the church to the common room where the by now all-too-familiar discussion would go on. But tonight it would go on with a difference.

  He opened the meeting with a statement.

  “I am told that canon law prevents us from selling, even if we were agreed,” Boniface said. He had wanted to hold back this precious information, but noticing the wavering among his allies, he could not restrain himself.

  “Whoever told you that is wrong,” Nathaniel said.

  “My informant has a degree in canon law.”

  “But law is a matter of precedents, even Church law. Other communities have sold their property.”

  “But not licitly, I have been informed. It amounts to the alienation of Church property.”

  “Are you saying that the Church has never sold a piece of land in two thousand years?”

  Old Martin piped up. “During the Reformation, churches were confiscated, the heads of statues knocked off, terrible sacrileges committed.”

  “Don’t forget the goddess of Reason on the main altar of Notre Dame,” Ambrose said, and a moment of silence ensued when the rest of them tried to remember.

  “Of course it all would depend on what we did with any money gained from the sale of the property,” Boniface said.

  What did he mean?

  “If it were used to establish another Marygrove elsewhere, the goods of the Church would not be alienated, but put to a different sacred use.”

  Boniface watched Nathaniel as he said this. It proved to be far more of a trump than his first invocation of canon law. Father Dowling had described for Boniface the precedent that had so pained Amos Cadbury and himself, the nuns in Los Angeles who had enriched themselves personally with money gained from the sale of their property, each one pocketing her share and heading into the world. Hadn’t Nathaniel said that the woman he married had been a nun of that community? Boniface felt that he had indeed hit upon the precedent that motivated Nathaniel, and if that was so it cast his return to the community in the darkest of lights. In any case, Nathaniel for a change fell silent and there were looks of consternation on the faces of his allies. What had they been persuaded to favor? Surely they had had no notion of enriching themselves at the expense of the Order of St. Athanasius. Dark frowns formed and Nathaniel angrily left the room.

  Boniface breathed a prayer that he had been spared the need to make known what John Sullivan had told him.

  “Has Father Nathaniel made any comment on my presence here, Father?” the visitor had asked.

  “Of course he noticed it.”

  “He is avoiding me.”

  “Avoiding you?”

  “My name is not John Sullivan, Father. It is Stanley Morgan.” The mystery of the initials on the man’s briefcase was solved. “I am here under false pretenses. I knew Nathaniel in California where he was known as Nathaniel Richards. He stole a large sum of money from me.”

  “Good God.”

  “He siphoned money from people’s savings and from my firm and transferred it to an account in a Zurich bank.”

  If Father Boniface had not been sitting, he would have fallen. “Why are you here?”

  “To confront him. To demand that he give back that money. I spent time in prison for what he did, but there is no way he could be successfully prosecuted for it. This is a peaceful place, Father, I almost wish I were here for the reason I gave you. But you have a traitor amongst you. Mr. George showed me the story in the local paper suggesting that Richards favors selling this property. I have no doubt that it was the thought of the fortune it represented that drew him back to you.”

  Nathaniel’s reaction to what Father Boniface had said, at last making use of the ammunition provided him by Father Dowling and Amos Cadbury, seemed to justify Stanley Morgan’s interpretation of the prodigal’s return. In the course of the evening, two of those who had allied themselves with Nathaniel came to Boniface to assure him that they had been motivated solely by the thought that they were preventing worthy people from having the property they themselves loved so much and where they had lived their long lives. In some of their cases, a life lived under the vow of poverty had made money so odd a substance that he would have had trouble imagining himself with several hundred dollars, let alone a fortune.

  “Did Nathaniel intend that each of us should become wealthy?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know what he intended.”

  “You are a good man, Father Boniface.”

  Meaning he had a good face. Black thoughts stirred in his heart, at the enormity of what Nathaniel had done, misleading those good old men. Perhaps he had a further plan whereby he would come into possession of it all, putting it into his Swiss account. Boniface had known annoyance before, he had responded to the small irritations of community life, but never had he felt a temptation to dark and murderous anger. He was in no condition to speak to Nathaniel now. God knew what he might do if Nathaniel’s mot
ive had indeed been exposed. But by waiting he was giving the man time to think of some plausible explanation of what he had done. No, the time was now.

  But when he left his room and the mansion, Boniface took the path to the chapel and there in the dark church he knelt and asked that his heart be cleansed. He would tell Nathaniel that he must leave, his probation was up and Boniface would not permit him to rejoin the community permanently. He would stand at the front gate like the angels showing Adam and Eve out of the garden, but he prayed that he would not do it from a vindictive motive. He stayed in the church for an hour, but when he left his heart was still not cleansed of anger and hatred.