The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  “Can I wait in the hall?” Dennis asked. “I feel a little - sick.”

  Matthew Mahan’s mouth twisted with irritation. He nodded and sent him on his way with a curt umpire’s wave of the thumb.

  From the hall, Dennis listened while Matthew Mahan phoned the hotel housekeeper and told her he was leaving $20 for the maid to clean up his friend’s room. “He was taken sick unexpectedly. We’re very sorry about it.” He also called the desk clerk and told him to send the bill to the chancery office. So crisp, so businesslike, the perfect spiritual executive, Dennis thought sourly.

  Archbishop Mahan gestured to him as he came out the door, holding Fogarty erect by his right arm. Dennis seized the left arm, and they proceeded down the hall to a bank of elevators in the rear. Fogarty smelled like a troop ship in heavy weather, Matthew Mahan thought grimly. But there was a good chance that they could get him out of the hotel unnoticed on this back elevator.

  On the ground floor, the bellboy guarding the rear door stared curiously at them. His bored sallow face and dull greedy eyes were almost a guarantee that he would not be scandalized in the least by the sight of two priests hauling a nameless alcoholic into the night. At least this time, the drunk was not dressed in clericals.

  Outside in the parking lot, Eddie Johnson was waiting for them, the car motor running. Eddie had helped him pull so many drunken priests out of the hotel in the past ten years, the whole thing was routine for him. In a moment, they were on their way downtown to St. Peter’s Hospital without Matthew Mahan saying a word to him.

  “Where are we going?” Bill Fogarty asked dully when they started down Hillcrest Avenue. Matthew Mahan told him, and there was a gasp of agitation, a panicky shaking hand on his arm. “Don’t put me in the alcoholic ward, Matt, please. I remember visiting my old man there once. It’s a terrible place.”

  “I don’t even think they have an alcoholic ward anymore, Bill. You’re going to get a private room, and you don’t have to see anyone until you get enough vitamins in you to hold your head up.”

  Strange, Matthew Mahan thought, how drunks seemed to dread most the alcoholic ward or the mental hospital or the probing psychiatrist - the very things that came closer to them every time they bought a bottle. You would almost swear that they had a need for suffering, to expiate some awful unknown crime. But no matter how you scrutinized the lives of the few alcoholics you knew well, you could never find any evidence of such a crime. No, Matthew Mahan thought mournfully, you were never able to find a trace of a reason for this demonic, destructive guilt, not even in the alcoholic you knew best. For a moment, he saw before him his brother’s boyhood face with a grumpy look on it. “No like peaches, mad,” his mother had written at the bottom of the photo. A sorrowful sighing wind seemed to blow through Matthew Mahan’s mind. God’s will be done, he thought, even when we are totally unable to understand it.

  There was work to do, he abruptly told himself. Now was not the time to meditate on the mystery of suffering. He picked up the car phone and called Mother Margaret Canavan, the head nun at St. Peter’s. Although she was rather stiff about the short notice, she agreed to have a private room ready and a psychiatrist on call to prescribe whatever was needed to get Bill Fogarty through the night.

  “Tonight will be rough, Bill,” Matthew Mahan said as he hung up. “The first night in the hospital is always the worst. Trust them. They’re on your side. I’ll see to it.”

  With a sideward nod of his head, Matthew Mahan ordered Dennis McLaughlin to join him in escorting Fogarty to his room. After ten more minutes of soothing reassurance, they left him sitting on the bed giving his vital statistics to the head nurse and found Eddie Johnson waiting for them in front of the hospital.

  “Well, that was a change of pace, wasn’t it?” Matthew Mahan said to Dennis McLaughlin as they headed uptown.

  “You sound like you’ve done that before,” Dennis McLaughlin said.

  “In a way. Most of the time, it’s a priest in good standing who’s on the sauce. I’ve got one of the worst alcoholic problems of any diocese in the country. About 80 percent of my priests are Irish-American. I guess that explains it.”

  He sighed and lit a cigarette. “Poor Bill,” he said. “You can’t believe what a fantastic priest he was. He could - he had this power to make people do things. He seemed to radiate - a kind of modern holiness. Visible grace. I never had the gift. I always had to make my mark the hard way.”

  “I’m amazed to hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem to handle people effortlessly.”

  “Ah,” said Matthew Mahan, pleased by the compliment, “it’s just practice. And this ring,” he added, tapping the emerald ring on his fourth finger of his right hand.

  “What happened to the woman Fogarty married? Do you know her?”

  “I knew the family. The Donnellys. A familiar story. Rich girl marries Irish drunk. Or playboy, whatever. In that case, I think it was a mental breakdown. They split up, she’s got plenty of money, and we say she can’t get married again. Result, we’ve created a tragedy that’s very likely to involve a half-dozen more people before it’s over. It takes fantastic effort, superhuman effort, to keep these women in the Church without destroying themselves - and other people. I know from experience.”

  As Matthew Mahan said this, his mind again leaped from the moving car, across housetops and river and sea to Rome. For a moment, he stood in the window of a penthouse apartment looking out at St. Peter’s illuminated dome, then turned to a heartbreakingly beautiful woman and said: Are you all right, Mary? You’re sure?

  “Don’t pastors do anything for these women?” Dennis McLaughlin was asking.

  “What?” Matthew Mahan said, struggling to return to the reality of time and place. “Pastors? No, most of them are scared to death of a divorced woman. For obvious reasons. They’re afraid they may go the Fogarty route.”

  “What about these good-conscience divorce programs that bishops are operating down in Baton Rouge and a few other places?”

  “Portland, Oregon,” Matthew Mahan said guiltily. “Yes. I’ve been very interested in them. But Monsignor Barker, the head of our diocesan Rota, takes a very dim view of them. It gets pretty complicated when you tell people that all they need to return to the sacraments is the subjective judgment that there was no way to avoid the breakup of the first marriage. I’m in favor of it from a spiritual point of view. But it creates a legal nightmare from a canon lawyer’s point of view.”

  “Maybe if we all went the Fogarty route we wouldn’t be so legalistic,” Dennis McLaughlin said.

  “What?” Matthew Mahan said.

  “I mean - get married,” Dennis said hastily.

  “Sometimes I think that’s all guys your age think about.”

  “It’s pretty hard not to think about it.”

  “I know, I know. I went through it. There were nights -”

  And days, days in the country walking under spring trees, the air rich with greening grass, budding branches, sunlight on glossy dark hair, incredibly white skin, turning to search the direct green eyes. The face too perfect to tolerate sadness on it. Your voice asking once more: Are you all right, Mary?

  Beside the Archbishop, Dennis McLaughlin was brooding over the impossibility of discussing celibacy with any priest over forty. He had tried and failed and had seen his friends try and fail too often. The word meant revolution to them. He had been foolish to think that the Archbishop’s reaction would be less extreme. His Excellency was practically strangling with rage. Or was it embarrassment, because he had blundered into admitting he had been frustrated in his time? The episcopal dignity had been compromised. Quick, Dennis, change the subject, or you will get either a growl or a howl, and this little experiment delaying the collapse of your priesthood may end.

  “Do you always deal with alcoholic priests yourself?

  “I try to - for several reasons,” Matthew Mahan said. “My brother was an alcoholic. I tried to h
elp him and made a mess of it. It’s one of the few chances I have to do some real pastoral work. As we said at Vatican II - it’s part of a bishop’s job to be a father to his priests. It sounds great, but it isn’t easy to put into practice. Priests are grown men. Most of them don’t want a father - at least not in the obvious sense of that word.”

  Dennis nodded. “Like the laity - they don’t want shepherds anymore. They’re not sheep.”

  The larger implication of those words made Matthew Mahan recoil. They had stopped for a red light. He looked out the window and saw a half-dozen black teenagers staring hungrily at the Cadillac. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “But people still need care. They need help in so many ways. I’m not quite ready to give up that image.”

  “Most people my age have given it up.”

  The cold arrogance in those words disturbed Matthew Mahan enormously. It was not the first time he had caught an undertone of contempt in Dennis McLaughlin’s voice. But for the first time, he was able to locate one of the central sources of the uneasiness he felt when he was talking to or thinking about Father McLaughlin’s generation - their sullen attitude toward imperfections of phrase or practice that his generation had tolerated - an attitude that eventually seemed to translate itself into a contempt for the tolerators and finally for toleration itself.

  “I wonder if you’ll feel the same way in twenty years,” Matthew Mahan said.

  “Who knows where I’ll be in twenty years,” Dennis McLaughlin said.

  Again the tone was icy, and Matthew Mahan heard the contempt - and something else (an implied threat?) - in the words. For a moment, he felt himself poised between anger and sadness. The past two days flickered behind his eyes, a succession of disconnected images, the Jefferson Memorial serenely Greek beside the water as the plane landed in Washington D.C, the suave Roman courtesy of the apostolic delegate, subtly refusing his agitated plea for assistance, while words of empty reassurance flowed from his mouth; the city, mysterious, coagulated, and impenetrable from the air; Monsignor Paul O’Reilly’s stony hatred. The unspoiled faces of the confirmation class; the tormented face of Bill Fogarty; and now this stiff-necked rebuke from thirty-year-old Dennis McLaughlin.

  To lose his temper now would be unfair, Matthew Mahan wearily realized. It would only widen the gulf between him and this haughty young man. Letting go of his anger, even regretting it, Matthew Mahan succumbed to muddy, stagnant sadness, letting it engulf him and his voice, his will, even his good intentions. Was there really any hope of escaping this insistent sense of bafflement, of frustration, of failure? It seemed to infect, infest, every fiber of the fabric of faith, to defy every effort, thought, prayer.

  “The trouble with that attitude, Dennis,” he said, “is you may give up caring about people completely. There’s a young priest in Pittsburgh - what’s his name, Ross or something - who recently announced that the real reason for the priest shortage is the Catholic laity. They’re not worth bothering about. That’s what he actually said.”

  “Yes,” said Dennis.

  The response could not have been more inert. The car slowed to a stop. Eddie Johnson was opening the door, lifting out the briefcase with its daily burden of problems and propositions. Matthew Mahan stared for a moment at the cathedral, illuminated by two dozen floodlights that cost almost as much to maintain each year as a grammar school teacher. The product of his immediate predecessor, the huge white pseudo-Romanesque structure was unique - uniquely expensive and uniquely grotesque. Sandblasting its limestone exterior twice a year to prevent the city’s polluted air from turning it a perverse gray cost another five grammar school teachers.

  With the same enthusiasm for fake traditional architecture, his predecessor had also built the twin fieldstone buildings that comprised the Archbishop’s residence and the diocesan offices. Blunted turrets and an imitation parapet decorated the roofs, and the high narrow windows on the first floor were protected by iron grillwork. The front door was a huge one-piece mixture of cast iron and glass that required substantial muscular effort to open. Wryly, Matthew Mahan remembered that Monsignor Lawrence McGraw, the pastor in his first parish assignment, used to call the cathedral the White Elephant and the residence Castle Rackrent. What did they call it these days? He must ask Dennis McLaughlin sometime, when he was not feeling quite so discouraged.

  Dennis McLaughlin seized the large cast-iron ring on the front door and tugged once, twice, then tried both hands before finally persuading it to creak open. In the warm downstairs hall, the housekeeper, Mrs. Adelaide Norton, hurried toward them, wiping her hands on her long white apron. “Good afternoon, Your Excellency, or better, good evening.” Mrs. Norton’s way of reminding him that she had been keeping the supper hot for two hours.

  “I’m sorry we’re late. We got delayed by an unexpected emergency.”

  “Perfectly all right, perfectly all right. I’ve made a roast, and it was no trouble to keep warm.” Mrs. Norton’s overlong pointed nose twitched as it often did when she was annoyed or excited.

  As usual, the roast was overdone. Matthew Mahan ate a single slice hurriedly. He had more or less given up trying to get Mrs. Norton to cook things his way. His stomach felt vaguely uneasy, and he wondered if the chicken salad sandwich he had gulped at the airport restaurant yesterday in Washington was tainted. He had no time to get sick, not even for a day. In the center of the long table, Dennis McLaughlin ate his dinner in silence as usual. Matthew Mahan felt vaguely annoyed by the way Dennis seldom, if ever started a conversation. It was especially irritating tonight, when he was too tired to think.

  He finally resorted to the most obvious conversation starter of them all and asked Dennis what sport (if any, he thought as he asked) he had preferred at college. Track was the answer. A sprinter? No, cross-country. It was logical. The wiry, almost skeletonic frame. “I was a team man myself. Baseball mostly. A little basketball. What do you think about while you run along?”

  He realized the question sounded vaguely contemptuous. Dennis did not seem to mind. “Nothing. That’s what I liked about it.”

  Another enigma. Matthew Mahan said good night and trudged wearily upstairs to his bedroom. He had barely taken off his coat and collar and slipped his tired feet into some loose-fitting slippers when the red light on the telephone beside the night table glowed. “For you, from Washington D.C., Your Excellency,” said Mrs. Norton.

  “Put it through.”

  “Excellency,” said the apostolic delegate, apparently thinking he had already been introduced by Mrs. Norton. “I am calling you because of a message I received from Rome, scarcely an hour ago. I would not in the least way want you to think that I concealed such happy information from you, either through an idle lapse or from absurd pique, because of the delicate nature of the subject we were discussing yesterday.”

  “There is no need for you to worry about that,” Matthew Mahan replied. “I understand your position.”

  “Yes, of course. But the information. May I tell you now what you will receive from me by telegram tomorrow morning? The Holy Father has seen fit to add your name to the distinguished fathers of the College of Cardinals. I would like to extend my most heartfelt congratulations.”

  “You’re sure?” Matthew Mahan said dazedly.

  “Beyond all doubt. It is one of five. Archbishops Cooke, Dearden, Carberry, and Bishop Wright are the others. May I say that for the first three, the honor is perhaps a perquisite of their sees, whereas for you - I do not believe your see has ever had a Cardinal. So it is a signal mark of the Holy Father’s affection for you.”

  “I - I can hardly believe that. I mean I can hardly believe - I can’t believe - that I am worthy of it.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the sibilant Italian voice on the other end of the telephone. “As for the problem we discussed yesterday. You may be sure that I will do my utmost on my next visit to Rome to place your views before the persons who are most concerned with such matters. One of my dearest friends, Idel
brando Cardinal Antoniutti, is now head of the Sacred Congregation for the Religious. I can’t understand why this did not occur to me when we were together.”

  Another shower of congratulations and Matthew Mahan said goodbye to the apostolic delegate. For a moment, he stared at his reflection in the round mirror above the heavy dark brown antique bureau. This glum-faced man with the square fighter’s jaw darkened by five o’clock shadow, this potbellied fifty-five-year-old who had mounted the stairs wondering if he was a walking, talking mistake - this was a Cardinal? A Prince of the Church?

  Instinctively, Matthew Mahan sank to his knees beside his bed and gazed up at the suffering Christ on the crucifix between the high carved newelposts. You are not worthy. There is simply no comparison between your doubts and discouragements and disappointments and that suffering figure, taking upon himself the incomprehensible burden of the whole world’s pain. To his lips came the words from the mass, words that were always deeply meaningful to him although he never completely understood why. O Lord, I am not worthy. Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.

  Upstairs in his third-floor bedroom, Dennis McLaughlin was also communicating with Rome.

  Dear Gog:

  I am glad to see that your determination to save my soul has not lapsed along with most of your theology. But it may be too late. Instead of being picked off by a swinging nun, I’ve been plucked by an Archbishop. You won’t believe it, so I will write it twice. I have become the Archbishop’s secretary. I have become the Archbishop’s secretary. Yes, secretary. I, the anarchistic depreciator of all authority, the rebel with or without a cause, have been catapulted by Somebody into the highest councils of the Establishment. I am in a position to acquire an intimate knowledge of the power structure. Before many more moons, I will know precisely where to place my intellectual dynamite to bring the whole system crashing down around our ears.