The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  For a moment, Matthew Mahan felt as if she had thrown something at him. It was almost a physical sensation that caused him to move his head abruptly to one side, in what seemed like a shake of disagreement. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  Mary exchanged a buona sera with the sacristan, and they entered the darkened church. It was illuminated only by the glow of candles and perhaps a single invisible light before the statue of Moses and another light at the reliquary of St. Peter’s chains beneath the altar. With Mary beside him, Matthew Mahan walked slowly over to the Moses and stood before it. At first he thought of it as a test. Would he again be able to feel with his eyes what the old man, six years in the grave now, had created for him here? At first he felt nothing. A wave of unidentifiable emotion - regret, perhaps fear - flooded him.

  Then an extraordinary thing began to happen. He found himself within the statue. He could almost feel the folds of Moses’ robes around his legs, the weight of the stone tablets beneath his right arm, the almost unbearable tension in the left arm, making that cordlike vein or sinew leap out just above the wrist. He was not watching a prophet gazing into history’s distance with sad longing; he himself was there, his own eyes aching for a glimpse of the face, his own ears yearning for an echo of the voice he had heard in this church ten years ago. This was what his straining body needed - to relax, to find peace, peace that the lawgiver can never know, in his perpetual struggle with rebellious men. The realization that he had become this lawgiver, this wielder of authority, in spite of all his inward wish to escape the role, struck him like a blow from one of those huge marble hands. His throat filled with tears. It was so natural. A leader - a bishop - has to give orders and then he has to see that those orders are enforced, and to guarantee enforcement on a regular basis, he has to enforce laws not of his own making.

  Father, forgive us, he whispered, for we know not what we do.

  “Every time I come here,” Mary Shea said, her eyes on the statue, “I always feel that either he or you - sometimes both of you - are here with me.”

  “Yes,” Matthew Mahan murmured, “yes.” How could he explain this desolating sense of loss to her now? For Mary, this was a church of fulfillment, of happiness, peace. For him it had suddenly become a house of dread, of accusation. He almost expected Moses’ massive right hand, with the index finger resting now on the prophet’s stomach (another ulcer patient?), to raise and point accusingly at him. Matthew Mahan felt his pulse racing, his heart pounding in his chest. Again he looked around the darkened church, but there was no glimpse, no sense whatever, of his mother now. She was a vanished ghost, only an echo in those noisy tenements across the square. He was utterly alone, unable to share his grief with anyone. He could only reach out in the darkness to the lost image of the old man in the Vatican; he could only say with extravagant hope that he was somehow listening: I understand, now I really understand.

  Mary, seeing him turn away, thought that he wanted to look at the relic of St. Peter’s chains. He didn’t. He wanted more than anything else to escape from this church with its shadows that seemed to press claustrophobically around him. How could this be happening? he thought in utter bewilderment. How could this sentimental gesture be turning into agony?

  Mary walked ahead of him into the darkness, saying, “The old chain is still there, and over at the Vatican they’re reforging the few links he managed to break. Why can’t they see that they’re destroying themselves, Matt?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  The banks of devotional candles before the altar flickered eerily on the bronze doors on each side of St. Peter’s chains. Matthew Mahan stared numbly at them, thinking, Not just Peter’s chains, but yours, too. He had no idea how long he stood there while these words reverberated within him. Mary finally touched him on the arm. “Matt,” she said, “I hate to keep the sacristan waiting too long. It is suppertime.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” he said, “of course.”

  Outside it was totally dark. Matthew Mahan slipped a 1,000-lira note into the sacristan’s hand and apologized to him in Italian for keeping him waiting.

  There was a flash of white teeth in the darkness, and the man replied that he was enjoying the cool night air, it was no trouble at all.

  They said good night to him and strolled down an alley past a technical school to a small ristorante with an outdoor café. At the end of the street, the Colosseum loomed eerily in its floodlights, looking like a great ship, wrecked and abandoned by history’s unpredictable winds. Matthew Mahan felt incredibly exhausted. Maybe the whole experience had been nothing more than exhaustion, he told himself, an unparalleled seizure of nerves. But he knew even as he toyed with the thought that this was an evasion. What had just happened to him in that church was a truth that he could never deny without risking his soul.

  “How about an aperitif?” he said. “It’s a long way to the Piazza Navona.”

  Agreeable as always, Mary sat down with him at one of the green and yellow tables. She fingered the swans on the tablecloth and let him order two Cinzano Biancos from the gravely formal middle-aged waiter. While they waited for the drinks, they watched a half-dozen boys in a field across the street trying to play soccer. An eerie glow fell across the field from searchlights playing on a massive hunk of rock, lined with 1,001 ridges. It looked older than Rome.

  “What’s that?” he asked, knowing that Mary’s knowledge of the city was practically encyclopedic by now.

  “Probably part of Trajan’s baths. They were the first ones to admit women.”

  “And right after that,” Matthew Mahan said, “Rome started collapsing?”

  “Don’t be such an obvious male chauvinist,” she said.

  She began asking him about people they both knew. He gave her the little information he had, mostly a list of divorces. A dismaying number of well-to-do Catholic marriages had broken up over the last five years. Most of them had not even bothered to seek the advice or permission of the Church. Mary was frankly amazed. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I thought I’d still be a pariah if I came home. Now I realize I wouldn’t even be noticed.”

  “That’s certainly true,” Matthew Mahan said.

  “What’s the explanation for it, Matt? Is there one?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always been wary of putting people into moulds and attributing personal decisions like divorce to some sort of national trend. An awful lot of people in their late forties and early fifties are getting divorced, and they’re not all Catholics by a long shot. The Episcopal bishop and the Methodist bishop, who have lunch with me once a month, tell me the same thing is happening in their churches.”

  “But take the Currans, Joe and Wilda, four kids, twenty-five years of marriage. Why would they suddenly walk away from it?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said, thinking ruefully that when Joe Curran got divorced he stopped giving $25,000 a year to the Archbishop’s Fund. He was the most successful patent lawyer in the state. “In his case, from what I could find out from friends, it was the old sexy-secretary cliché. Obviously, more and more Americans don’t see any reason for saying no when they want something badly. Personally, I think they’re seduced by this myth of experience, the great enricher. And the fantastic propaganda coming out in books and magazines and on television about marriage being passé. There’s nothing we can do about it. But I’m willing to bet that the priests of the next generation will spend a lot of time with these people’s children - they’re the ones it breaks your heart to think about. Speaking of children, how’s Jimmy?”

  “Oh, just great, from a distance,” Mary said, fingering the stem of her glass. “I’ve tried hard to take your advice, Matt, and not smother-love him. He enjoys his job. All those languages he learned spending every summer over here with me are paying off beautifully. No other editor his age can match his publishing contacts in Europe. I see him four or five times a year when he comes over on business. But I suspect that his moral life leaves so
mething to be desired from a Catholic point of view.”

  Matthew Mahan sighed. “I’m afraid there’s nothing much you can do about that, and there’s even less for me to do. His letters got pretty perfunctory after he graduated from college. I could see that he’d had just about all the clerical advice he could swallow - though I did my best to sound as unclerical as possible.”

  “I’m sure you did, Matt,” she said, touching the back of his hand lightly with the tips of her fingers, damp from her glass. “What you’ve given him - what we’ve both tried to give him will come through eventually, I’m sure of that. I really am sure.”

  “I am, too,” Matthew Mahan said, hoping that he sounded convinced. Trying to find a more cheerful subject, he began asking for some of their Roman friends. “How is Monsignor den Doolard?”

  “Gone home to Holland. There’s nothing for him to do in Rome these days.”

  Den Doolard was a brilliant Dutch theologian who had been on the staff of the late Cardinal Augstin Bea, the leader of the Vatican outreach to Protestant and other churches. He had been one of the hardest working periti - experts - at the Vatican Council, a constantly cheerful, undiscouraged man, an earthy version of the saintly Bea.

  “Did he request a transfer?”

  Mary nodded. “It’s just as well. He might have ended up like Father Guilio.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Guilio Mirante was an Italian Jesuit, a quintessential Roman with a gentle, melancholy air, a touch of Roman cynicism in his usually self-deprecating irony. He had long operated on sort of detached duty, in the Jesuit order but not of it, serving as chaplain of an orphanage to which Matthew Mahan had contributed handsomely, and as a friend of prominent Romans of every class and political persuasion. He, too, had been a council perito, appointed by John himself.

  Mary glanced at her watch. “It’s a long story, and I think it would be better if he told you himself. If I get into it, I may spoil our evening - and we’ll be late for dinner.”

  “Tell him to call me.”

  “I will.”

  In a somewhat uneasy silence, he paid the waiter, and they strolled down the street and through part of Trajan’s Park to steps that led them down to the street level and the Colosseum. They peered into one of the outer arches and found themselves being appraised by a half-dozen prostitutes in silver and gold miniskirts and satin blouses. Several small boys, none older than twelve, approached them and cheerfully inquired whether they were interested in a guide to the Colosseum or to the young ladies, all of whom were ready to satisfy a customer’s preference, no matter how bizarre. For a single girl, 1,000 lire; for two or three the price went up, depending upon whether they wanted to participate or just watch. Matthew Mahan stood there, transfixed by the utter lack of caring in their boyish voices.

  “Don’t be ashamed, Father,” said the tallest of them, with black hair falling over his ears. “Last night we had a Cardinal.”

  Laughter echoed from stone arches, the same savage, empty tones that must have filled them when an unpopular gladiator died ingloriously.

  Mary was pulling at his arm. He decided it was better to say nothing, and they walked along the curving path until they found an archway occupied only by postcard salesmen. These could be brushed aside, and they stood for a moment gazing across the battered interior of the stadium. There was nothing realistic about it, neither in the daylight nor now in the moonlight, helped here and there by floodlights. Death was all Matthew Mahan saw, ancient, grinning death, man’s oldest enemy. The whole thing was a gigantic skeleton, leering here with an empty mouth, staring there with an empty eye, a gigantic monument to death. “It always depresses me,” Matthew Mahan said, “but every time I come to Rome, I feel compelled to stare it in the face for a minute or two.”

  “What do you see?” Mary asked.

  He told her. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “Pope Paul came down here a few months ago and said the Stations of the Cross. It was a mistake. The place dwarfed him. He looked lost, futile.”

  They crossed the street and found a cabstand on the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The taxi whisked them past the Church of St. Maria in Aracoeli, once the site of a temple to the goddess Juno and of a palace of Caesar Augustus. There, according to myth, the Virgin and the Child descended and informed the trembling Emperor that henceforth “this is the altar of the son of God.” Now the magnificent Byzantine Virgin over the main altar shared with the Virgin of St. Maria Maggiore the responsibility of watching over the people of Rome. A few minutes of hairbreadth driving down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and they were at the entrance of the Piazza Navona. No traffic was allowed inside, the driver explained, and they hastily assured him in good Italian that they understood. With Mary’s hand resting lightly on his arm, Matthew Mahan entered their favorite Roman enclave.

  Shaped like a huge outdoor salon, the piazza occupied the former circus of the Emperor Domitian. The palazzos, the church, and the other buildings along each side and at the loops on both ends composed an almost perfect harmony of form and space. Three fountains added their own circular contrasts to the composition. At this hour of the evening, there were strollers everywhere, the very old hobbling on canes, the very young pushed in carriages. Between the darkened facades of the palazzos and the church, the restaurants glowed busily. In the shadows, wrinkled old beggar women chewed on grapes, and other fruit and vegetables snatched from the shops of the nearby Campo dei Fiori market.

  Before the first fountain, a huge bare-chested fire-eater performed. They gave him only a passing glance and headed for the central Fountain of the Rivers, one of Rome’s masterpieces. Four huge rocks supported a pedestal on top of which stood an obelisk from the Appian Way. On the rocks stood four statues symbolizing the Ganges, the Danube, the Nile, and the Rio de la Plata.

  “They’re still waiting for it to fall,” Matthew Mahan said, pointing at two of the statues, who seemed to be reacting with fright and horror to the facade of the church opposite them. According to the story, this was the way the creator of the fountain, the great architect-sculptor Bernini, had spoofed the architect of the church, his rival Borromini.

  Mary sighed. “I’m afraid that story has been disproved by the architectural historians. The church was built after Bernini finished the fountain.”

  “It’s still a good story,” Matthew Mahan said. “I’m telling it to my tourists tomorrow.”

  Mary was barely listening. She was gazing mournfully at the numerous hippies in their standard blue jeans, beads, and long hair sitting around the fountain rim. “I try to understand them. I even try to love them,” she said, “but they’re so vacuous, Matt. What’s wrong with them? What do they want?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  They turned back to the Tre Scalini and were soon sipping another set of Cinzano Biancos. They had a choice table, inside, so that the noise of the human traffic in the square was muted, while a window gave them a view of the Four Rivers Fountain. The food was superb, as usual, and Mary entertained him for a while with funny stories about her outrageous landlady, a countess who collected the rent for her apartments personally and always managed to be condescending even at her most mercenary. “She’s decided to take charge of my life,” Mary said, “as I’m sure she’s taken charge of everyone who made the mistake of letting her get too close. She keeps telling me I should marry. ‘It is never too late,’ she says.”

  A temporarily forgotten sense of guilt assailed Matthew Mahan. He suddenly remembered something he had wanted to say to Mary Shea for years. The last time he had come to Rome he had almost said it, but prudence, that virtue to which bishops come naturally, and a fear of the eternally unpredictable feminine had held his tongue. But tonight he suddenly knew that he would say it. He would shuck off once and for all this role of protector, all-wise adviser that had been half hypocrisy for too long. It was only a matter of waiting for the right moment. He did not want to play the standard cleric and abruptly interrupt Mary’s gaiety w
ith a solemn outburst. Instead, he entertained her with some of the nut mail he got every day. She particularly enjoyed the plan to end the Vietnam War Notre Dame style with a massive bombardment of daily communions.

  They finished a bottle of Valpolicella with their main course, and Matthew Mahan surreptitiously swallowed two or three Titrilacs to soothe his ulcer. By now it was ten o’clock. The crowd in the piazza was beginning to thin. “Why don’t we have our coffee and gelato on the terrace?” he said. He signaled the waiter and issued the order. In a moment, they were seated at an outside table in the deliciously cool night air. The Romans, the tourists, even the hippies, slowly vanished from the piazza. In a few more minutes, it was almost empty. They sat there, lulled by the splash of the fountains, the magical mingling of light and water and marble that enriched their eyes as the sound charmed their ears.

  “What a wonderful reunion, Mary. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see you so well, so lovely, so serene, after all these years.”

  She lifted her face just slightly to him, and her eyes seemed to anticipate his words. Or was he only hoping that this was the case? “I hope the - the emotion in those words doesn’t upset you, Mary, or surprise you. But for years now there’s been something I wanted to tell you, something on my part that has been less than honest and has - well, troubled me. In those days in the early fifties, when I was the hustling young monsignor ready to tackle anything the bishop assigned to me, I - I wasn’t ready for someone like you, Mary, a woman with such depth, such sweetness, a woman who was my spiritual superior in so many ways. I thought it was just a matter of giving you the standard soft soap, spiritual consolation, daily mass, Communion, frequent prayer. All the time I was saying those things, Mary, a voice inside me was saying, ‘But not for her, she deserves something better. She wasn’t born to live this mutilated life, just because she had the bad luck to marry a drunken Irish bum.’ The more I saw you, Mary, the more panicky I became. I disguised it pretty well. Remember, you used to tell me I should have been a comedian?”