The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  Next came the problems of the diocesan priests who were serving in Brazil. They were there in response to Pope John’s call and their Archbishop’s urging. John had asked 10 percent of the priests from every United States diocese to volunteer for service m South America. But diocesan priests were not enthusiastic about missionary life. Less than 1 percent had responded. Matthew Mahan had recruited twenty-five - twice as many as any other diocese. Father Tom O’Hara reported the final collapse of his car. What he really needed was a jeep. “Send him 3,500,” Matthew Mahan said. Father Jerome Lang had a bright boy who said he wanted to be a priest, but could not afford a university education, which Lang felt he should get first. It would cost 3,000 to support him for the first year. “Send it to him,” Matthew Mahan said. Father Edward McMullen wanted to build a chapel for an outlying village. “Send him 5,000.”

  Matthew Mahan could almost hear the groans of protest from his money-manager, iron-jawed Chancellor Terence Malone. He knew he was too generous with these young priests. But it made him feel better - and not many things made him feel that way these days.

  There were a half-dozen letters from Washington, D.C., enclosing reports from various committees on which he was serving under the aegis of the National Conference of Bishops. More night work, Matthew Mahan thought glumly. A letter from Father Peter Foley, chaplain of the state prison, introduced one of his model prisoners who was about to be released after serving ten years for armed robbery and felonious assault. The man was totally reformed. Would the Archbishop help get him a job? Matthew Mahan groaned. “Write to Mike Furia. You’ll see a dozen previous letters in his file. He manages to hire a lot of these poor guys for his overseas companies.”

  He twisted his episcopal ring, a habit that Dennis had learned to interpret as a sign of uneasiness. “I wish I could get Foley out of there. He’s the only guy in my seminary class I haven’t settled in a good parish. He says he likes being chaplain.”

  Dennis found it hard to tell whether the Archbishop was simply baffled by Foley or disapproved of him. “I told him at our last reunion I may not be around forever. My successor may decide he’s too old and leave him there for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to bother him. What’s next?”

  A long letter from the pastor of St. Malachy’s parish described the trouble he was in with his parish council, which was in the hands of superconservatives who barely tolerated the use of English in the mass. A sociologist wanted to find out how many priests the diocese had lost in the last five years, with case histories, if possible. Finally, there were the usual random letters from various lay men and women, about everything from lack of heat in St. Joseph’s parochial school to accusations against two or three priests, alleging they were about to be - or should be - caught in flagrante delicto with lady friends.

  “Five years ago we could file 90 percent of those sex letters in the wastebasket,” Matthew Mahan said. “But these days every one of them sounds true. Send them to the vicar-general and ask him to make the usual investigation.”

  Dennis McLaughlin nodded obediently, but there was a drop of disapproval on his sensitive mouth. Suddenly Matthew Mahan found himself wishing he could stop the frantic daily treadmill on which he and Dennis were running. If somehow, somewhere, they had time to sit down and relax for a clay or two, to talk about things in a casual, honest man-to-man way, he was sure that they would find themselves in substantial agreement. Dennis would be surprised to discover that the Archbishop had been something of a rebel in his youth and understood - or tried to understand - the impatient feelings of young priests and laymen. They would even share a mutual laugh or two if he managed to explain that he didn’t really enjoy always playing the solemn upholder of dignity and authority. But there was no way to turn off the treadmill; there did not even seem to be a way to slow it down.

  A batch of letters offered Matthew Mahan a number of supposedly rare seashells and almost as many offers to swap. He was one of the world’s foremost collectors of shells, and his letters abounded with references to tritons, conches, turbans, volutes, whelks and miters.

  “Tell that guy I’ve already got an episcopal miter and papal miter. But I wouldn’t mind getting a Cardinal miter,” he said, flipping the top letter into Dennis’s lap.

  “Should I send a carbon to the Vatican?” Dennis asked.

  “It would be a waste of paper,” Matthew Mahan said, smiling.

  The rest of the malacologists were swiftly dispatched. Yes, the Archbishop had a Purple Drupe and a Spiral Babylon whelk. But he would like to see an Eye of Judas, from the Galapagos Islands. No, he did not want a Grinning Tun or a Wide-Mouthed Purpura, and hence declined to trade his Magnificent Wentletrap from Japan for either of them.

  “So many people think I’m a sucker, just because I wear a round collar,” the Archbishop growled.

  Next came a long memorandum from George MacNamara, the diocesan lawyer, advising Matthew Mahan to settle out of court with a parishioner who had fallen down the front steps of the cathedral last winter and was suing the archdiocese for $1 million, claiming his back injuries had left him permanently disabled.

  “I thought it was a mortal sin or something to sue the Church. “Them days are gone forever,” said Matthew Mahan. “We’ve had at least one, and sometimes two and three of these suits every year since I became the ordinary. Everybody thinks we’re rich. It’s like suing General Motors. Draft a letter making me sound very indignant and swearing by all the angels in heaven that I won’t pay a cent more than $25,000. Then do a covering letter to George MacNamara and tell him to show it to the other lawyer. If it doesn’t work, we’ll settle for 50,000, as he’s telling us to do here. After that, draft a memorandum to Monsignor Delaney over at the cathedral, telling him the bad news. It’s going to send our insurance premiums out of sight.”

  Next came invitations to Matthew Mahan, orator. Yes, he would be happy to be the speaker at the annual dinner of the 113th Division; he was sorry, but conflicts in his schedule made it impossible for him to address the St. Francis Xavier University alumni dinner. To his even deeper regret, he was unable to give the university any money out of the diocesan treasury this year.

  A tough smile played across Matthew Mahan’s mouth. “I’ve been giving those former colleagues of yours $100,000 a year for the last few years. What thanks do I get for it? Five of their so-called theologians sign that statement attacking Paul for Humanae Vitae. Let’s see how they enjoy practicing that vow of poverty for a while since they don’t seem to have much taste for obedience.”

  “Chastity stock is pretty low out there, too,” Dennis said. “I know at least a half-dozen men my age who are dating regularly.”

  “I can’t understand it,” Matthew Mahan said. “I thought the Jesuits would be the last ones to fall apart, not the first.”

  Dennis smiled wryly. “The Jesuits always like to be in the vanguard, even when the line of march leads to the abyss.”

  Matthew Mahan roared with laughter. “I like that. I’ll have to use it the next time I have dinner with President Reagan.”

  They went swiftly through the rest of the correspondence, with Matthew Mahan roughing out his answers, leaving Dennis the job of putting them into decent English. By the time they finished, Dennis was sitting with at least a pound of papers in his lap. “Well,” the Archbishop said, “that takes care of that.”

  For a moment, Dennis was inclined to remind the Archbishop that five or six hours of secretarial labor were still needed before that was taken care of. But he found it more satisfying, on second thought, to say nothing. You really prefer your bitterness, don’t you? whispered a mocking voice in his mind like the voice of an ironic angel. Yes, he replied. Yes. I do.

  They were out on the freeway now. The fading light seemed to soften the landscape on both sides of the road, turning the ugly factories and gas tanks and power grids into inoffensive suggestions of themselves, less grotesque and strangely human, capable of being welcomed in spite of their ugliness.
They were part of his city - unchangeably, so it seemed to a man Matthew Mahan’s age. Even the acrid odor of cooking ink, the sweetish stench of refinery oil, the stink of rotting flesh from the slaughterhouses’ waste pits, did not trouble him. “You probably won’t believe this,” he said to Dennis McLaughlin, “but even the air smells good to me. I guess you can get used to anything.”

  “The university Chemistry Department has entered a class action suit against these factories,” Dennis said. “There’s no reason for them to be releasing those fumes so close to the city.”

  The city. Yes, there it was ahead of them, looming up on its long narrow hill, most of its ugliness also softened by the deepening dusk. A sprinkle of house and office lights testified that it was inhabited. As Matthew Mahan looked meditatively at it, the pain in his stomach flickered menacingly. He suddenly remembered that it had begun yesterday evening on his flight back from Washington D.C., where he had pleaded in vain for the apostolic delegate’s help in controlling his insane nuns. Looking down on the city as the plane landed, he found himself murmuring: Would that you knew the things that made for your peace.

  Now was not the time for those kinds of lamentations. There was still work to be done. “Have you checked with the chancery office switchboard to see if we have any calls?”

  “No,” said Dennis, visibly twitching. A tendency to forget or fail to record telephone messages was his new secretary’s worst failing. A typical intellectual was Matthew Mahan’s not-always-patient excuse for him. Off on cloud nine - or ninety-nine.

  Dennis plucked a white telephone from a cradle in the armrest beside him and called the chancery switchboard. He asked the required question and jotted down a list of names on his steno pad. They were in the city now, rolling down Kennedy Parkway toward a warm bath and a soothing scotch and soda. Dennis read the list of callers to him. Mike Furia, chairman of the Archbishop’s Fund Committee; Herb Winstock, the vice-chairman; Mrs. O’Connor, the mayor’s wife, another potent fundraiser. “A man named Fogarty.”

  “Bill Fogarty?”

  Dennis peered at his hurried scrawl. “Yes. I think it’s Bill. He’s at the Garden Square Hotel.”

  “Eddie,” said Matthew Mahan, “get us to the Garden Square fast.”

  At the next traffic light, Eddie Johnson swung the big car around the stone island in the center of the Parkway and hurtled them to the Garden Square in ten minutes. Matthew Mahan explained the abrupt about-face to Dennis McLaughlin, en route. “Bill and I were in the same class at the seminary. We lost him about fifteen years ago. Woman trouble. Lately, I’d heard they’d split up, and he was drinking the bars dry. I wrote him a letter asking him if I could help.”

  As they got out of the car, Matthew Mahan told Eddie Johnson to buy himself some dinner if he got hungry. “This might take awhile,” he said. In the green-carpeted lobby, filled with third-rate modern furniture, the Archbishop walked swiftly to the desk. “Is there a William Fogarty registered here?” he asked.

  The long-haired young desk clerk picked at a pimple on his cheek, ran his finger down a list of names, and said there was a Fogarty in Room 1515.

  “Give me a key to that room,” Matthew Mahan said.

  The clerk stared in astonishment.

  “I am Archbishop Mahan, and that man is a priest. A sick priest. Give me a key.”

  The Archbishop and his secretary were soon striding down the upstairs hall, which also had a green carpet, plus wallpaper full of equally green shamrocks. Matthew Mahan knocked at the door of 1515. There was no answer. He inserted the key in the lock and stepped into the room. The drapes were drawn. The hot-air heat from the register in the wall had turned the room into a sauna. Worse, there was an overpowering odor of vomit in the thick air.

  After a moment of fumbling, Matthew Mahan found the wall switch, and the overhead light revealed Bill Fogarty sprawled on the bed. There was a two-day stubble of gray beard on his chin and cheeks. A half-dozen whiskey bottles stood on the dresser, all of them empty. He had thrown up in several places, the last time on the bed. Matthew Mahan took a deep breath and stood there for a moment, staring mournfully at the sleeper. He was remembering seminary days. He could hear Bill Fogarty singing his outrageous parody of Mother Machree at the musical they had staged at the end of their third theology year.

  Sure we’ll love the dear surplice

  that drags on the ground,

  And we’ll serve, and we’ll sugar your tea

  If you let us stay out until ten once a week.

  Dear Father, Dear Father McKee.

  Wait, it had been a duet, he and Bill had sung it as a duet Matthew Mahan recalled. Which gave him all the more reason for thinking, as he pondered the ruins of Bill Fogarty: There but for the grace of God go I.

  A handsome black Irish buck, that was what he had been, Matthew Mahan thought mournfully, looking down at the flaccid cheeks and sagging mouth and thinning gray hair and beer belly of the man on the bed. Was it time alone that wreaked such havoc, or was it spiritual failure, whatever that meant? Matthew Mahan did not pretend to be an expert on the subject, but he knew that it had something to do with pride and the way pride so slowly slides into arrogance and too often ends in despair. No one had been prouder than Bill Fogarty, prouder of being priest, prouder of his unique ability to hold an audience, to make them laugh and to make them cry.

  The pride had seemed innocent enough, even justifiable to his friends and admirers in the class of 1939 at Rosewood Seminary. It had also seemed perfectly understandable that Bill became the darling of the uptown Catholics, always invited to parties and on trips, always cajoling a week off here and a week off there to relax in Florida or enjoy the summer sun at the state’s poshest beaches. And what harm was there in riding back and forth on these outings with a very attractive and very divorced woman?

  Alas, when Archbishop Thomas Hogati heard about, he thought there was a good deal of harm. Bill suddenly found himself exiled to what the older clergy of that era called the Prairies, and Matthew Mahan’s generation called Siberia - the dreary downstate boondocks of the archdiocese where Catholics were a distinctly unaffluent timid minority. When Bill balked, he was singled out by the Archbishop at the next meeting of his deanery and publicly excoriated as a disgrace to the priesthood. He was then summoned to the episcopal throne and ordered to kneel and kiss the extended ring.

  Bill crept out to his assignment, a cowed, embittered man. His very divorced lady friend was horrified by what she had inadvertently done, and deeply sympathetic. Result: A clandestine romance which finally become a real scandal. Saddened friends, Matthew Mahan among them, advised Bill to ask for laicization. After two years of not very patient waiting, Bill left the Church and married his divorced friend. When Matthew Mahan became Archbishop, he had looked up Fogarty’s case in the files. Hogan had never even forwarded the papers to Rome.

  Fogarty’s wife had money, which seemed a good thing because Bill found it practically impossible to get a job. Old Hogan and the characters around him were vengeful men, and they got Bill fired or blocked his being hired more than once In the end his wife’s money only made it easy for Bill to drink all the booze he wanted. Like so many ex-priests’ marriages, Bill’s love was doomed from the start. He never resolved the conflict between the woman and his priesthood. He loved both, and now he was ending his life probably hating both.

  Matthew Mahan gently shook the sleeping man’s shoulder “Bill. Bill,” he said.

  Fogarty awoke and lay there staring numbly at him. “You called me, Bill.”

  Tears trickled out of Fogarty’s eyes and down the unshaven cheeks.

  “O Jesus, Matt,” he said. “O Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Matt, what’s going to become of me?”

  “I don’t know, Bill,” Matthew Mahan said. “I don’t know. I don’t think you’re in any shape to discuss it right now.”

  “Sally left me, Matt. She walked out on me. She gave me a thousand bucks and walked out on me.”

  “I know,
Bill, I heard about it. I wrote you a letter.”

  “I got it. That’s why I called you. I wouldn’t - I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it otherwise.”

  Fogarty turned his face away as if he found the round collars on Matthew Mahan and Dennis McLaughlin an unbearable sight. “I’m just a drunk, Matt, an absolutely useless drunk. I was going to kill myself. That’s why I checked in here. But I couldn’t get drunk enough. When I woke up this afternoon with puke -”

  “Somebody was praying for you, Bill. Maybe a lot of people were.”

  The bed shook. Fogarty was sobbing silently. “What’s the point, Matt, I’m finished.”

  “No, you’re not, Bill. I don’t think you are. Would you want to come back to work as a priest?”

  “Would you - would you even consider it?”

  The voice was choked, the head still turned away. “Of course, I’d consider it, Bill,” Matthew Mahan said. “But you’d have to get yourself back in shape physically and spiritually. You’d have to join Alcoholics Anonymous. And spend three or four months, maybe longer, at a monastery down in Kentucky. When you’re on your feet, we’ll talk.”

  “I don’t deserve it, Matt. I don’t deserve it,” Fogarty said. But the offer got his feet over the side of the bed, and he sat up. In this position, he was even more pathetic looking. The belly bulged, the chin dissolved into the blubbery neck, the raddled cheeks sagged. Whether he sensed what Matthew Mahan was thinking or the attempt to sit up straight had revealed to him the totality of his collapse, Fogarty began to weep again.

  “You’re wasting your money, Matt.”

  “It’s my money. If I feel like wasting it, I will.”

  No. That was too harsh, too arrogant, Dennis McLaughlin thought as he saw Fogarty flinch away from these words. But Archbishop Mahan either did not notice or did not care. As usual, Dennis thought mordantly.

  “See if he’s got any clothes, Dennis.”

  A search of the room revealed nothing but a raincoat and a few more empty whiskey bottles in the closet. In his drunken stupor, Fogarty had also used the closet as a bathroom. Dennis McLaughlin snatched the raincoat off a hook and hastily closed the door. But the urine stink mingled with the vomit, and for a moment, he had to struggle for breath. Anxiously he wondered if he was getting another attack of the claustrophobia that had sent him fleeing off elevators and avoiding planes and tunnels for the past two years. When it combined with his asthma, it could come close to killing him.