Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  Matron told Delaney he should not worry about the praying on this occasion. She would find him something else to do. She asked him to wait for a moment outside the main entrance to the chapel. When she came back there was a ghost of a smile about her face. She led him into the little church, for so many of the nuns the very heart of the hospital. There were enough pews to hold about forty people. All of them were filled, mostly with kneeling women. All of these Sisters, she told him, had come to pray for his son James. It was a special effort for a special young man. When Delaney asked her what he had to do, she gave him a box of matches. She pointed to the great banks of candles inside all the side chapels and below the paintings on the walls.

  ‘You must light these,’ she said, ‘and as you light each one, you must pray to God in his mercy to save the life of your son. Do not worry if we have gone before you have finished. You must light them all and then return to the bedside. Later on this morning I am going to find you a priest or a chaplain to teach you how to pray.’

  With that Matron knelt to the ground in the pew beside him. Delaney turned to the candles to his left and began lighting them very slowly. Please God, spare the life of my son James, he said to himself, feeling coarse and awkward as he did so. Gradually, as he repeated his prayer, he began to weep. The tears poured down his face and would not stop. Sometimes they would drop on to his match and extinguish the possibility of lighting another symbolic message before it had even begun. The nuns took little sideways glances at the weeping tycoon but left him to his ordeal. At eight o’clock the Sisters began to peel away, walking quietly back to their nunnery or their places on the wards. Matron sent word to a Father Kennedy, asking him to come to the hospital and to James Delaney’s ward later that day. Michael Delaney had not finished yet, though one wall was a blaze of light, dancing off the faces of the saints or the waters of the Lake of Galilee. It was so strange for Delaney, asking an unknown and invisible God to save the life of his only son. His was not a world made up of these religious or metaphysical certainties. His was a world of balance sheets, of strike-breaking, of amalgamations, of mighty trusts, of personal enrichment, of power, power over the lives of the thousands of people who worked for him, power over the local politicians who might need a subvention to help them through their next election, power over grander politicians, aspirant statesmen perhaps, whose need for invisible assistance was often as great as their hunger for high office. Alone in the chapel with his matches and his candles he thought of Mary, the boy’s mother, who had died three years before. She too had come to this last resting place of Manhattan’s Catholics and been tended by the nuns until she died. There had been, he shuddered slightly, a great deal of pain. It was a mercy, they said, when she was called home. Delaney didn’t think it had been a mercy then and he didn’t think it was a mercy now. This God person, he reckoned, reaching up to the top of a sconce almost out of reach, He had a lot to answer for. If He took James as well, Delaney thought, he would write God out of his account books, sell Him off to a competitor, even at a knockdown price, put Him out of business, close this God outfit down once and for all.

  Just before nine o’clock all the candles were lit. Delaney sat down in one of the pews and looked around him. He tried to remember the words but they had gone. Hail Mary, that meant something, he was fairly sure of it. The same went for Our Father. But of what those nuns said as their knees rested on the stone floor he had no idea. He turned back at the door and looked one last time at the candles. He wondered if their light would go out before his son’s life. Suddenly his brain took off into a strange mixture of his own world and the very different world of the hospital. Did they have enough candles here at the hospital? Did the other hospitals? This was something he, Michael Delaney, could do. His mind set off on a journey round the economics of candle production, possible advanced production techniques that could reduce the cost of manufacture and the numbers of employees, candle transportation routes and freight rates, distribution of candles round the churches and hospitals of New York. Would it be cheaper to amalgamate candle supply into general delivery lines of food, linen and so on, or simply have one outfit responsible for distribution? What about the competition in candle land? Could he buy them out? Could he drive them out of business?

  As Delaney pondered these questions on his way back to the ward a whistle blew less than a mile away at one of New York’s great railway stations. A mighty passenger train moved slowly out on its way to Chicago. The train was nearly full and promised to be a busy one for the stewards and the cabin staff. This railway line was one of many owned by Delaney’s companies. This section of his three and a half thousand railway employees across the eastern seaboard of the United States was clocking on for work on the normal ten-hour shift with no breaks, which would see them travel halfway across a continent. And, in the rear part of the train, there was a steward who rejoiced in the name of Patrick or Paddy Delaney, a cousin of the proprietor on the Irish side of the family though the two had never met.

  The boy had hardly moved in his bed when his father returned. The new Sister on his left was also stroking his hand. Delaney paced up and down the room, staring into the face of his son, doing more planning for his schemes for a candle monopoly, then peering out of the window. Sometimes he cried and wished he knew the words of the prayers. Ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock passed, and by noon Delaney’s train with his cousin on board was well into upstate New York. Occasionally a doctor would come in and look at the young man, feeling his pulse and taking his temperature by the heat on his forehead. None of the doctors had seen a version of the disease like this. They were acutely conscious that any new treatment might not cure the young man. It might kill him instead.

  Shortly before one o’clock a priest appeared and took Michael Delaney aside. You must go home and rest now, the priest told him. You do not need to rest for a very long time, but you must maintain your strength for what might happen. I, Father Kennedy, will meet you here in the chapel at seven o’clock this evening. The nuns will have finished their services by then. Please, I will stay with the boy a while.

  Delaney’s carriage and Delaney’s coachman had waited for him outside St Vincent’s. The coachman spent his time playing cards with the porters or reading one of his ever-growing collection of magazines about motor cars. Mercedes Benz. Ford. Chrysler. Cadillac. Bugatti. The coachman was very fond of his horses but these names took him to another world where he sat proudly at the wheel of a mighty machine and drove his master up and down the eastern seaboard, hooting his horn at recalcitrant pedestrians, a muffler round his throat and a chauffeur’s cap upon his head. As they made their way slowly through the crowded streets they were overtaken by a couple of fire trucks, their insistent bells shrieking and echoing round the thoroughfares. Sitting inside his carriage, Michael Delaney remembered that other bell which had woken him up earlier. He thought suddenly of the numerous funerals he attended as his contemporaries in the Wall Street jungle died off in their prime. Delaney never missed one of these sad occasions, come, his enemies whispered, to make sure that another of his competitors had really been removed from the earthly market place. He recalled the words in one of the addresses, usually full of sentimental rubbish about the dead man, now transformed from a rapacious capitalist into a virtual saint and generous benefactor of the poor: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ Were these bells ringing for him? For his son? Michael Delaney huddled into his greatcoat and tried to pray.

  The Archbishop of New York used to say that the net wealth of Father Patrick Kennedy’s flock was about the same as that of a medium-sized country like Sweden or Portugal. Delaney was a parishioner of his, a very occasional worshipper at Mass, like so many of his kind, but a generous contributor to church charities, like so many of his kind. Quite simply, Father Kennedy was the parish priest in the richest part of the richest city in one of the richest countries on earth. He was popular with his congregation, Father Kennedy, with his charming voice
and elegant manners from the Old Confederate State of Virginia. In his youth Father Kennedy had been slim, ascetic almost, a devoted reader of the works of Meister Eckhardt and St Thomas Aquinas. He was about five feet ten inches tall with a Roman nose and his blue eyes were then fixed on another world. The temptations of the flesh did not reach him in his rich parish, but the temptations of the table made an impact. Middle-aged now, he was known to his critics as the Friar Tuck of Manhattan. He glided through the Fifth Avenue drawing rooms with his polite smiles and his anecdotes from his time in Europe a decade before. Father Kennedy was very successful at drawing new converts into the bosom of Mother Church, and as most of his recruits were as rich as everybody else in the parish, St James the Greater increased yet further in wealth until cynics in poorer parishes referred to it as St James the Richer.

  Father Kennedy worried a great deal about the very rich. He saw all too clearly that the leisure of those who lived off the interest on their money, or even, in some cases, the interest on the interest, without needing to work at all, could be corrosive. Souls could be lost in the fripperies of the season as easily as they could in the brothels and the gambling dens of the Bronx. He worried a great deal, Father Kennedy, about camels and their ability to pass into the kingdom of heaven. Three times he had asked to be transferred to a parish in one of the slums of New York. Three times the church authorities had refused. The Archbishop always maintained that remaining in Manhattan would be good for Father Kennedy’s soul. The truth was somewhat different. Father Kennedy was the greatest benefactor of the poor in the whole of New York. Not personally, but through his parishioners, who would contribute funds for the education or housing of the poor, for the support of the destitute, for building new churches where none had been before. It was all so easy. The rich just reached for their chequebooks as they might hold out their hands for a glass of champagne at a Fifth Avenue soirée. After watching this waterfall of charity dollars for years Father Kennedy himself had become cynical. They’re trying to buy their way in with false currency, he thought. God doesn’t want their money, he wants their souls. So, while he never stopped the cascade of charity, he was beginning to think about deeds rather than dollars as the way to improve the spiritual health of his flock.

  Michael Delaney’s staff pressed anxiously around him as he returned to his mansion. None dared to ask the question they most wanted to – how was James? Was he still alive? The young man’s father refused all offers of refreshments except for a large glass of bourbon and took himself off to bed. He slept badly. He dreamt he was in a cemetery looking at his wife’s grave, the two marble angels he had had erected a year after her burial towering above the marble tomb. But now, by her left side was another tomb, to his son, passed away in the month of November 1905. This month. Then he noticed what was happening by her right-hand side. Four gravediggers were excavating a third burial place for another Delaney. It could only be himself, last of the line. There was no inscription yet on his grave, he realized. He might have years to go still. With that comforting thought he woke up to a darkened city at a quarter to six in the evening.

  He was early at the chapel in St Vincent’s Hospital. Somebody had removed the guttered candles and replaced them with fresh ones. Delaney began to light them, remembering to say the words the Matron had told him earlier that day. Father Kennedy came and sat down with Delaney in the very first row, a large silver cross in front of them. Just repeat the words after me, he said to Delaney, that’s all you need to do for now. They started with Hail Mary.

  Two doctors, one middle-aged and one very young, were examining James Delaney. The nurse had moved unobtrusively to the back of the room. They agreed that he looked a little better, that the terrible chalky colour of the previous day was less pronounced.

  Father Kennedy and Michael Delaney had moved on to the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them who trespass against us . . .

  And so a strange ritual evolved. Early in the mornings Delaney would pray with Father Kennedy in the chapel and relight the candles while the doctors looked at his son. He would wait by the bedside during the day and early evening, departing occasionally to care for his business or buy out a competitor. One of the nuns would sit on the other side of the young man and stroke his hand. Delaney now had reading matter, a missal provided for him by Father Kennedy. He also had a special prayer of his own. It was, he knew, somewhat unorthodox, owing more to contemporary business practice than to the Gospels. If God would save his son, he would, in return, make a mighty offering to God. The nature of the offering was to be determined by Father Kennedy, who smiled delphically when told about the Delaney Compact. Early in the evening all the nuns and Matron would pray for James for half an hour. His father would light the candles and say some of the new prayers he had been taught by Father Kennedy. As the priest watched the intensity of Delaney’s concern, the depth of his grief, he wondered if there might be other grounds for sorrow and remorse in his past, now mingling with anxiety for his son James.

  As Delaney became a part of this medical world, so different from his own, he found his eyes roaming the wards and the corridors for a sight of Sister Dominic. Even in her formal Matron’s clothes, he thought, you could still discern the woman underneath. Lust began to flow through him as the medicines and the drugs flowed through the veins and arteries of the patients. Damn it, man, he said to himself, not here, not now. All your life you have followed your basic instincts. The temporary delights of fulfilment have all too often been followed by recriminations and remorse. This is neither the time nor the place for such base thoughts. Here, above all else, you must focus on the life of your son, James. But it was no good. His lust did not grow weaker. It grew stronger. Fantasies filled his mind, of those clothes falling to the floor, of his holding such a beautiful creature in his arms. Matron, for her part, was not insensitive to what was happening to Michael Delaney. She knew. She had seen this phenomenon all too often before. She took great care to pay even less heed to her appearance. That, had she but known it, inflamed Michael Delaney further, clothes slightly out of place, hair not properly tucked in yielding up yet more erotic thoughts. Sister Dominic did change her ways in one respect. Every evening when she and her Sisters prayed for James Delaney in the little chapel, she prayed for Michael Delaney too.

  Then the doctors moved. For over a week they had monitored every medical detail they could measure about the condition of James Delaney, still lying motionless in his hospital bed. Neat folders recording his current state were tucked away in the cupboard beside the bed. The following day was a Saturday. They asked Delaney to a meeting in the library at ten o’clock in the morning. If he wished, Father Kennedy could accompany him. Matron was to attend too. All that evening the nurses and the Sisters looked at the Delaneys with great pity. All too often they had seen mothers and fathers or husbands and wives coming out of that that room, holding on to each other in desperation, weeping their way down the corridors and out into the fresh air. The library was the place the doctors brought close relatives when they had to tell them that their loved ones were about to die.

  2

  The library of St Vincent’s was on the top floor of the hospital, looking out over the tall buildings of the city. A storm was brewing outside, angry bursts of rain battering at the windows, gusts of wind blowing the hats off the pedestrians and rattling and shaking the cabs as they made their way around the streets. As Delaney and Father Kennedy filed in for their ten o’clock meeting that Saturday morning, the senior doctor, George Moreland, waved them into a couple of comfortable chairs by a low table in the centre of the room. Dr Moreland was a graduate of La Salle University, summa cum laude, and had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Harvard Medical School. He was six weeks off his fortieth birthday. He was short and his hair, to his great regret, was receding rapidly. His colleague, Dr Stead, was ten years younger with exactly the same medical pedigree as his superior. Together they represented one of the most formidable medical
teams in their field in the United States.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming at such short notice,’ Dr Moreland began, a slight smile moderating his look of extreme gravity. ‘Believe me, I can only imagine how difficult a time this must be for you, Mr Delaney.’

  Delaney was trying desperately to stop himself looking at Matron’s eyes. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I am so grateful for all you are doing here for my James.’

  ‘I’m afraid I am going to be frank with you this morning, Mr Delaney,’ said Dr Moreland, who had to steel himself for these difficult encounters with a small shot of brandy before they started. ‘I want to put a proposition before you. You know by now, of course, of the difficulties we have with James’s condition. We believe it to be some form of leukaemia, but we do not what form, what shape it is taking. His illness does not a have a name. If it did,’ he pointed at the lines of books that lined two whole walls of the room from floor to ceiling, ‘there would be articles about it in places like the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine or the Proceedings of the Harvard Medical School which line the walls here. But there is nothing. We are working in the dark, groping our way to some form of treatment that might effect a cure. So far we do not believe we have found the answer.’

  Delaney brightened slightly. ‘If it would help, Dr Moreland, I could endow a Chair for the study of this strange disease at the university here in the city. Or I could establish a Foundation to look into it.’ This world of self-interested philanthropy was one he knew all too well.