“That imitation you used to give of Archbishop Hogan, Matt. That’s still the funniest act I’ve ever seen or heard.”
“Act is the right word. I did everything I could think of, not only to make you happy - for a little while - but to avoid telling you the truth. I knew there was no hope of you ever getting an annulment, but I told you to come here - come to Rome - because if you stayed in the city, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, Mary.”
The gelato tartufo, the special ice cream of the Tre Scalini, the best in Rome, was untouched on the plates before them. As he talked, Mary had slowly leaned back in her chair, not a gesture that suggested she wanted to get away from him, no, it seemed more a desire to see him in perspective.
“I never thought you’d stay over here for the rest of your life, Mary. I just thought - even a year, maybe two, would give me a chance to get a grip on myself.”
A small, sad smile played across Mary’s lips. Now, in the same deliberate way, she leaned forward again and took his right hand, which was closed in a fist on the table, in both her smaller, softer hands. She did not lift it from the table. She simply wrapped her fingers around it and slowly unbent the contorted fingers.
“Oh, Matt,” she said, “Matt. To think that all these years I’ve let this trouble you.”
“You let -?”
“Do you think I didn’t know, Matt? Do you think I came over here just because you suggested it? Women may not be terribly bright about things like moral theology and church politics. But when it comes to knowing when a man is in love with them - it’s the rare woman who’s too dumb to miss that.” She leaned almost imperceptibly closer to him. “And they also know when they’re in love with the man.”
Her smile was more solemn now, more earnest. “Matt, I was the one who decided to come over here. I came of my own free will knowing that nothing could be done about my marriage. I came because I saw that you were a great priest. I saw that - no matter what you thought or felt about me - your priesthood was the real center of your life. I didn’t want to be guilty of destroying that part of you, Matt. It was too important to you - and to the world. When I came over here, I knew I was going to stay a long time.”
He felt unbelievable. A chaotic mixture of joy and sadness surged in his body. “My God,” he said, “what an egotistic ignoramus I am.”
Mary threw back her head and laughed heartily, reminding him of the way she used to laugh when he did his imitations of the Archbishop and other chancery office factotums fifteen years ago. “No,” she said, “no, you’re not an ignoramus. You’re just a man. And like all men, you naturally assume you’re running things.”
Now came a question he had also been afraid to ask for too long. Almost in spite of his will, it rose to his lips. “How has it really been, Mary? All those years I asked you - are you all right? I always took the answer you gave me - too easily. It was what I wanted to hear.”
“I know Matt. That’s why I gave it to you.”
She ran her finger around the rim of her wineglass. “It was terrible for the first few years. I - I drank and - there were men. I was so bitter and empty, Matt. Giving up you - seemed to take all I had left. This isn’t a good country for a woman in that frame of mind. It’s so easy to be exploited - and Italian men are artists at it.
“That’s why I moved to Venice. I lived with a businessman whom I met in Rome. I also wanted to be someplace where you wouldn’t visit me. There was always too much of a chance of you showing up in Rome. Well - the thing went sour in Venice. Too close to the wife, that sort of banal problem. Then he came to Venice. I met him. And everything began to change.”
“Roncalli?”
Mary nodded. “He told me that we all had to spend some time in the desert. Forty days, forty months, or in his case thirty years. Thanks to him, Matt, I was able to come back to Rome, back to you, without - the old fear.”
They began to eat their gelato. They savored the chocolate taste in silence for a moment. It seemed to Matthew Mahan the perfect physical expression of what they were feeling - sadness, regret, but a dark sweetness, too. Outside in the shadows of the piazza the fountains splashed, the light-filled water of the four rivers ran out to the Eternal City. Matthew Mahan sat with the woman he had loved and still loved, and slowly realized that there was one more question to ask.
“And now, Mary. How are you now?”
For the first time, she avoided his eyes. “Not - not good, Matt. Oh, I know what you’re going to say to me. The same thing my psychiatrist says. Don’t be so involved with the Church. Let the clerical politicians play their games.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Mary. What’s this about a psychiatrist?”
“I’ve been depressed, Matt. On and off, for the past year or so. It’s no fun. You can’t sleep. You find yourself thinking all sorts of sick thoughts. It even bothered my digestion for a while. I was living like an ulcer patient.”
“Really?” He was not sure which symptom upset him most. “And your psychiatrist blames the Church?”
“No. My morbid interest in the Church. In where it seems to be going. Or not going. It’s really a sense of loss, Matt. Loss of him, Don Angelo. Every day they seem to do something else that - that’s obscene - that makes him seem more remote, more - dead. Don’t you feel it, Matt? Don’t you sense that his spirit is being driven out of the Church?”
For a moment, something close to panic seized him. Was he part of this betrayal? Wasn’t that the only conclusion to be drawn from what he had just experienced in the Church of St. Peter in Chains? But to confess it would be devastating to this anguished woman confronting him.
“Mary, try to be - a little more charitable. Toward Paul. The men around him. Maybe it would help if I suggested including me. We’re all victims of the same thing, Mary. An incredible explosion of problems. And we’re just ordinary men, Mary. Not saints or geniuses like John. You do the best you can. But it’s so hard to get a perspective on whether that best is good or bad. The situation sort of engulfs you.”
“But charity, Matt. Charity and love. I’m sure you make them your first principles. And reasonable freedom.”
“I - I tell myself I do. I try. But maybe even you would say I don’t always succeed.”
It was almost a confession. Did she hear it? No, she was too embroiled in her own tormented emotions. “And birth control. That unspeakable encyclical? You fought that. You told me. You’re not browbeating your priests like that old ogre O’Boyle in Washington, D.C.”
“No. I’m trying to handle it - another way.”
“But how could it have happened? How could he turn his back on the commission, the best thinking of the best men? With the world drowning in people? How could he be so utterly heartless? How could he condemn women to my mother’s fate?”
“Your mother? Oh yes -”
Kathleen Murtagh had died giving birth to her fifth child in six years. Her husband’s second wife had made Mary’s childhood and adolescence a misery. She had married the first available man to escape from what she called a concentration camp. Inevitably, he turned out to be the worst available man.
Another wave of weariness washed over Matthew Mahan. “Mary,” he said. “Popes make mistakes, just like Archbishops and priests and everyone else. We have to live with them. We have to live with everybody. But we shouldn’t let anything shake our faith or our confidence in the Church. Christ himself told us that the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail against it.”
“What about the gates of heaven? Why don’t we look in that direction? Matt, it’s hope that’s being destroyed, not faith. That’s for the next world. But hope - that’s what the people want and need. I can’t tell you how much your becoming Cardinal meant to me, this way. Now you’re in a position to speak out - and be heard. You’ve got to do it, Matt. Somebody has to raise his voice against that crew in the Vatican.”
For another moment, he sat there paralyzed, his spoon in midair. Mary, too? Where did all of them - Cro
nin, Mike Furia, Dennis McLaughlin - get these incredible expectations? But this was the most unbearable summons. She was placing her soul in the balance and demanding the impossible from him to stop the scale from plunging her into darkness.
“Mary - I’m not going to be that important - to start lecturing the whole Church.”
“One of eleven American Cardinals. Of 135 in the whole world? If you speak, Matt, speak forcefully, they’ve got to listen.”
“But I’m not sure - it’s not really my style, Mary. I try to avoid brawls - not start them.”
“You fought old Hogan. You spoke out for important things - when you knew it would enrage him. Negro rights. The liturgy. Psychiatric help for Catholics. Honest labor unions.”
The causes of the fifties. How simple, how nostalgic, they sounded. How could he tell her the difference now? How could he explain how threatened the Church seemed to him, how much time he spent defending, preserving, rather than changing it? He saw from the anguish on Mary’s face that it was impossible to explain. And then he saw what he could never endure - tears. For a dazed moment, he saw his mother weeping, heard his father’s voice snarling: Okay, okay, we’ll do it your way. What were they arguing about? What hadn’t they argued about?
But he would not snarl. He could not, would not, be that man of iron, or rock - yes, that marble man to whom he felt so strangely close these days. He would consciously refuse to be him, snarling his laconic decrees. No, somehow, no matter what it cost him, no matter how soft, how vulnerable, it made him, he would be a man of love. He took Mary’s hand and held it between his bigger hands. “Don’t, Mary, don’t,” he whispered. “We’ll do it. We’ll find a way.”
Dear Leo:
It’s the beginning of my first full day in Rome, and I am so tired I am seeing double. The flight over was sheer barbarism, no possibility of sleep for the entire night. We all staggered into bed late in the afternoon, napped a few hours, and then had dinner. The Cardinal went off alone with this mysterious Mary Shea whom I have mentioned to you. By now I’ve met her, and if there is something going on there, I have to congratulate His Eminence for his good taste, at least. She’s a real beauty, one of those svelte, gray-haired women who simultaneously manage to look sexy and mature without trying, all very subdued and controlled. That same night, I went to dinner with our millionaire godfather, Mike Furia, and Bishop Cronin. What a combination, I thought, at first. But it turned out to be an interesting evening. Cronin left his intellectual hat in his room, and we spent most of our time talking about Matthew Mahan. Mike F. told me that he’d probably be a hit man in the Mafia today if he hadn’t met Padre Matt in W.W. II. His father was a soldier in one of our city’s best families. Incidentally, if you think you’re cynical about the Church, you should talk to Furia. He knows an incredible amount about the Vatican’s business dealings.
Furia and Cronin got talking about the odd way that Mahan became a bishop in the first place. It’s a series of coincidences, built around Pope John XXIII, of all people. It seems that Roncalli, who was an Italian army chaplain during World War II, decided to give a dinner for American army chaplains just after the war ended, in 1945. (He was the papal nuncio in France by this time.) Since his English wasn’t very good, he wanted someone who spoke French or Italian to help him out. The local chief of chaplains tapped Captain Matt, with his decorations and his mother’s good Italian, and the two of them got along like father and son. The dinner was a big success. Father Matt suggested inviting Protestant and Jewish chaplains, as well as Catholics, and Roncalli loved the idea. Thereafter, Roncalli invented all sorts of excuses to keep Matt on his staff practically full time until the division sailed for home.
Back in the States, Big Matt corresponded with him sporadically. Then Mary Shea came into the picture. She is the very rich niece-in-law of our fair city’s old boss, and Matt was assigned to soothe her spiritually when her marriage collapsed. Since she was loaded with money, he told her that her best chance for an annulment was a direct appeal in Rome. Sensible advice, even if it didn’t work. But Mary decided that she liked living in Europe, and she settled down - guess where? In Venice. And guess who was appointed patriarch of Venice on January 15, 1953, within a month or so of her arrival in Gondolaville? Naturally, Patriarch Roncalli got to know the very rich American lady. In that respect, good Pope J. was, I gather, no different from any other prelate. She was soon being invited to lunches and dinners at the patriarchal palazzo, no doubt responding magnificently via her checkbook.
Guess who she talked about when she got the ear of His Eminence? Who else but that wonderful monsignor who was charging around our archdiocese, building schools and CYO gymnasiums by the dozen, and raising money by the ton. That’s right, good old Matt. Imagine her surprise when Roncalli, who apparently never forgot a name, brightened instantly and began agreeing with her paeans.
When the miracle occurred in 1958, and the old man became Pope, he was better informed on our archdiocese than he was on any other see in the United States, including New York. He knew that old Hogan was senile and was never any good in the first place. So he promptly made Matt an auxiliary bishop, and within a year had made him coadjutor with a guarantee of succession. Talk about casting your bread upon the waters - or in this case, upon grass widows. There are some curious questions unanswered, of course. Wouldn’t it have been logical, if Mary Shea went to Europe at the suggestion of Big Matt and failed to obtain her annulment, for her to look upon him without much warmth? What has been the source of her continuing attraction, not to say fascination? Renaissance possibilities are the most obvious. If this is the case, he is an even bigger fraud than he seems to be, and thoroughly deserves all the opprobrium you plan to heap on him. But keep that diabolical pen of yours in your pocket for the time being. Let’s try to find out the truth. I know you liberals are not much interested in that sort of thing these days, but I’m old-fashioned enough to believe it may be important.
Best,
Dennis
He had just finished licking the envelope when there was a knock on the door, and in marched Andy Goggin, escorted by Bishop Cronin in a tam-o’-shanter. “I found this innocent wandering about the lobby,” he said, poking Goggin with his blackthorn walking stick, “and thought, at first, he was one of those clerical panhandlers. But then he gave me the password, McLaughlin, and I agreed to deposit him at your door.”
Goggin was, if possible, taller and skinnier than ever. Both aspects drew appropriate comments from Bishop C. “I asked him if they were putting Christians on starvation diets in the Mamertine Prison again. He said no, so I asked him if they were using the rack, for I couldn’t imagine how else he’d been stretched to such a length.”
“He says you’re writing a history of Vatican I with him.”
“He’s liable to say anything,” Dennis said.
“We’re on our own today, lads,” said Bishop Cronin. “His Eminence-to-be is taking his millionaires about the city in a chartered bus with himself as guide. I offered to supplement his comments with a few of me own, and he insulted me by saying he couldn’t afford to have any of his biggest givers scandalized. However, I managed to shake him down for 50,000 lire, which will save us the trouble of eating at the Irish College, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone but my worst enemy.”
“I am putting myself totally in the hands of you two experts,” Dennis said. “Before the day is over, I expect to know the essential Rome.”
At this point, there was another knock on the door, and Jim McAvoy came wandering into the room looking sheepish. “We missed the bus. I set the alarm clock wrong. Madeline’s downstairs in the lobby, ready to kill me. Do you think we could join you fellows for the morning, at least? We can pick up the Cardinal and the rest of the crowd at the Cavalieri Hilton. That’s where they’re having lunch.”
Bishop Cronin looked annoyed. But Dennis could see no reason why the McAvoys would not fit easily into their entourage. He introduced Goggin, and they descended to the lobby,
where Madeline McAvoy looked both relieved and pleased. “We may learn more from a strictly clerical tour,” she said archly to Dennis. “I’m sure the Cardinal is going to give the rest of the group a pretty standard lecture.”
“Which we’ve heard,” said Jim McAvoy. “We came with him in sixty-seven.”
“Well now,” said Bishop Cronin briskly, “there’s only one place to go first. Only one place that means Rome to the likes of us. Saint Peter’s.”
They found a large taxi and headed for Vatican City. Crossing the Tiber on the Ponte Cavour, they drove along the river to the Via della Conciliazione which, Cronin told them, had been built by Mussolini to celebrate the treaty he signed with Pope Pius XI. The street had destroyed The Borgo, one of the most charming sections of old Rome. As they rounded the curve along the river, Cronin pointed out the ancient Castel Sant’Angelo, the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, and more recently a place “where the Pope put people he didn’t like, so he could kill them at his leisure.”
“See that bridge there?” said Cronin, pointing to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. “I never cross on it. I don’t trust the damn thing. In 1450, it collapsed and drowned 172 Christmas pilgrims.”
Soon, St. Peter’s was visible straight ahead of them on the Via della Conciliazione. It looked particularly immense from this distance, Cronin said. In fact, this was the best possible perspective. Closer, the long nave, installed at the order of a pope who wanted the biggest possible audience, destroyed the original architectural plan, which called for a church with four equal wings, surmounted by the stupendous dome.
Against the clear blue sky, Dennis thought the dome looked weary and a little forlorn for all its size. Cronin, seeming to read his mind, remarked, “Belloc in his Road to Rome said it was a delicate blue in 1901, but by the time I got here in 1911, it had faded to its present gloomy gray. Either that, or the old boy was looking at Rome through tinted glasses - which I suspect he was.”
The Good Shepherd Page 24