The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  Best,

  Mag

  Dennis quickly addressed an envelope to the Villa Stritch in Rome and scanned the letter before sealing it. From a literary point of view, it was interesting to note the decline of irony between the first paragraph and the last paragraph.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled. After a record September heat wave, a storm was moving across the city. A flash of lightning glinted on his small window. Suddenly, Dennis could feel Helen’s trembling body in his arms in the Pensione Christina. Hold me, hold me, please hold me, she had said. Yes, you had said, yes, we can really love each other. Last week, in the bedroom of her childhood, with her face smiling at you from a half-dozen pictures, in her white First Communion dress, her blue graduation gown, her postulant’s white robes, you had felt the joy of entering not only her body but her self, her life.

  But this other love, somehow more real, more terrible, stood between them, his love for this bulky man whose task was the orchestration of love, the movement of love beyond the personal toward some unspoken but promised immensity. Was it possible? Was he pursuing a chimera and sacrificing a love that existed outside power, intellect, theology, a love that inhabited the one surety for a man of thirty, the pulsing, wanting flesh?

  Dennis went downstairs to mail his letter. He made it to the corner mailbox and back to the residence just as the first huge raindrops began to fall. On the second floor, he heard a squawk of static. The Cardinal was listening to the Vatican radio again. It had become almost an obsession. Dennis walked through his own small office and peered into the inner sanctum. Matthew Mahan was getting nothing but barks and whistles. “Those crazy Italians really sound worked up today,” Dennis said.

  A weary smile came and went on Matthew Mahan’s face. It was almost impossible to make the man laugh anymore. “I just had a phone call,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Father - or ex-Father - Novak.”

  “Really? What did he want?”

  “He wanted to find out if there was any chance in the reasonably near future of him returning to work.”

  “What happened to the book he was writing?”

  “He read a half-dozen books by ex-priests and realized that most of what he wanted to say had already been said.”

  Matthew Mahan dropped his wry tone and apologized for it. “It’s sad, really. The poor fellow is having money troubles. His wife has become pregnant, and her teaching job has evaporated. He’s working for the local Office of Economic Opportunity, part-time. He paid me the compliment of saying that he’d keep the job, such as it was, and stay in the city if there was any hope of him getting permission from Rome.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What else could I tell him? No.”

  “You don’t think there’s the faintest possibility?”

  Matthew Mahan gave him a curious look. “Why so intense?”

  “I think everybody my age lives in hopes,” Dennis said evasively.

  “I know,” Matthew Mahan said. “I just got some confidential material from the Catholic Conference Office in Washington, D.C. They’ve made a secret survey which concluded that something like 75 percent of the priests thirty-five and under expect to marry someday. Nobody in the hierarchy seems to realize it - or at least nobody is doing anything about it - but we’re sitting on a land mine.”

  Could he tell him, should he tell him, what he had just written to Goggin? No, he could not add another burden to this man’s weary shoulders. In the lamplight, the Cardinal looked appallingly ill. His once well-padded cheeks were slack and hollow. Vitality had vanished from his eyes. Except for moments when he clearly summoned himself to make an effort, he spoke and moved like a man of seventy.

  Yet, there was also the need to be honest with this man. The Cardinal knew there was no longer any compelling need for him to see ex-Sister Helen Reed. He would have to construct one of those disgusting transparent lies - the old college friend in town for the night. No, it was time to speak the truth.

  “Your Eminence - I mean, Father - could you spare me another five minutes?”

  “You’ve got the rest of the afternoon if you need it.”

  Dennis sat down in one of the two mundane leather armchairs that had replaced the French antiques. “There’s - there’s a very good reason why I’m intense on this subject. I think you should know - about it. I’m in love with Helen Reed. I want to marry her. But I don’t want to leave the priesthood. It’s - an awful conflict. The two things are sort of - balanced in my mind. But I can’t - I can’t let Helen go on thinking - it only gets worse, for both of us. Do you think there’s any chance of a married priesthood? Not this year or next year - but even in - five years?”

  Matthew Mahan sat behind his desk like a statue. Not a man of marble, but of wax. Dull, mushy cheap wax. Another of his failures was confronting him. Another humiliation. He heard himself telling Terry Malone and George Petrie that he was prepared to risk his prestige, his authority, for the sake of this young priest. Let the ninety-nine stay on the hills.

  But wait, wait. What is he really asking? What is he really saying? Isn’t he trying to tell you how much he cares about his priesthood? Remember the cold-voiced young man in the car a few months ago: Who knows where I’ll be twenty years from now. What a difference between him and this open, troubled young face.

  “Dennis, you’ve read those drafts of the committee that’s studying the subject for the National Conference of Bishops. You can see the direction they’re taking.”

  “But those statistics you mentioned. Seventy-five percent of the priests under thirty-five expect the rule to be changed.”

  “That won’t change many bishops’ minds, Dennis.”

  “If you spoke out on the subject now. That could - that could start a trend, a swing in the opposite direction.”

  “Dennis, don’t you think I’m in enough trouble already?”

  Disappointment stained the earnest young face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put any pressure on you. I just wanted - you to know. Helen - invited me to supper tonight. Do you need me?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  In his own office, Dennis found his hand shaking as he dialed Helen’s number to tell her that he was free. The mockery in those last words temporarily overwhelmed him. Avoiding them, he sounded like a schoolboy. “I - can come. It’s okay. When do you -?”

  He was going to say want me. Every word, every phrase, was a land mine. “About six-thirty,” Helen said cheerfully. “Would you pick up a bottle of wine at Sweeney’s Package Store on Western Avenue? It’ll be charged to our account.”

  “All right.”

  He hung up, telling himself: Tonight you will be faithful, you will be faithful to your vow. For the sake of that man in there.

  For the first time since he had come to work for Matthew Mahan, Dennis McLaughlin visited the chapel. As he entered the now drab room and knelt before the tabernacle, he realized how regularly he had avoided this room after saying his obligatory morning mass. Only a single votive candle glowed before the tabernacle. Above it the crucifix looked like it had been bought in Woolworth’s. Lord, I am not worthy, I am not worthy of him. Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.

  Matthew Mahan was standing beside a slimy ocher-colored river with Mary Shea beside him. But it was not the woman he had seen in Rome, not the silver-haired matron struggling bravely against depression. No, this was the dark-haired smiling girl he had met in the chancery office on that sunny day in June of 1949, the girl who mingled hope and resignation and a wordless plea on her lovely face. And Monsignor Mahan, the firm but kindly cleric, had smashed them all into a grief-stricken mess with a crunching denial. There is very little possibility of your marriage being annulled, Mrs. Shea.

  What is she doing here, this young lost face beside you, the hulking, middle-aged Cardinal? She keeps pointing across the river as if she is acting a part in a childish pantomime. His yearning eyes run down the supple curve of that
young arm until he sees in the distance a dome. There is only one dome that looms like that above its city, above the world. Suddenly, Lost Mary, Young Mary, begins walking on the water, apparently oblivious to the oily, greasy surface. “O ye of little faith,” she says playfully.

  It is all a game, a childish, heartbreaking game. But the river was forbidding, or somehow forbidden for him to cross. How could he walk on water in these heavy robes, the chasuble, the cope on his back, the miter on his head, the crosier in his hand? “O ye of little faith,” mocked Mary, strolling cheerfully back and forth about a dozen feet from shore. Then she suddenly grew serious. “How can we get there,” she asked, pointing to the dome in the distance, “if you won’t come with me?”

  “We need time, Mary, time to build a bridge. I can afford it.” Magically, instead of his crosier he was brandishing his checkbook.

  Mary grew cross, like a petulant little girl. “There isn’t time. There isn’t time,” she said.

  Suddenly, she was no longer walking on the water; she was floundering in the slimy current. The checkbook fell from his trembling fingers. He stretched out his arm to her. She was beyond his reach. He began to tear off his robes. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he cried. But it was too late. The river was full of corrosive acid. How clever the enemy was. Mary was dissolving in front of his eyes. Her face drifted on the surface now like a one-dimensional photograph. He knelt on the shore weeping futile tears.

  Bong, bong, bong, 3:00 a.m. Pain gnawed in Cardinal Mahan’s stomach. It was the fifth or sixth time he had had the river dream. Sometimes it was full of sharks, piranhas, crocodiles. Sometimes the other shore bristled with pillboxes and barbed wire. Always he was afraid to cross. Always when Mary was in the dream, she died horribly, tragically.

  With a sigh, the Cardinal heaved his legs over the side of his bed and let his feet fumble for his slippers. There would be no sleep from now until dawn. He listened for a moment to the chilly November wind moaning past his window. A draft of cold air filtered through his sweat-soaked cotton pajamas. The temperature of the room must be sixty, and he was sleeping beneath a sheet. But he regularly awoke, his mouth dry, his whole body burning as if he were running a fever. The dry heat of desolation.

  He trudged down the darkened stairs to the chapel and knelt on the prie-dieu before the altar. The anguished baroque Christ, the center of the magnificent hand-carved altar, was gone. So was the surrounding purple glow from the stained-glass windows, the ecstatic saints on the soaring, mystical ceiling. Sold to a Texas museum for $250,000. Everything had been sold, every last piece of old Hogan’s antiques, for something close to $1 million. Now the Cardinal prayed before a simple tabernacle shrouded in white cloth surmounted by a gold cross with a trite, drooping Christ on it. The art of the people, Dennis McLaughlin had said rather grimly as he stood the crucifix behind the tabernacle on the plain oak table they had borrowed from the chancery office. Vanished, vanquished utterly, the episcopal splendor. Within the walls of their palace, the Cardinal and his secretary were trying to live like poor men. He even urged economy on Mrs. Norton, who responded with ever more atrocious stews, dishes of meat loaf and pasta, against which she committed high culinary crimes.

  And the money, where was the money? Matthew Mahan asked the trite, drooping Christ. Spent, the money is always spent. Like yourself, Cardinal Mahan, spent. The fund drive had ended in catastrophe, $3 million short of its goal. They were borrowing operating expenses from the banks for the first time in the ten years of Matthew Mahan’s episcopacy.

  For the thousandth time, Matthew Mahan asked that figure on the cheap gold cross if this was the humiliation he could not accept. If so, he accepted it. Let me accept it, Lord.

  He almost laughed. There were so many other humiliations, so many other nights when he knelt here and prayed for the strength, the resignation, to accept one of the other failures. Perhaps a catalog is in order. Help me to accept the abuse I take from Monsignor O’Reilly and his friends. Help me to accept the decision of my auxiliary bishop and vicar-general, George Petrie, to join them. Help me to accept the lawsuit that Father Disalvo and his Ad Hoc Committee have filed, accusing me of fraudulently manipulating the archdiocese’s finances for my own benefit. Help me to accept the latest demand from the Catholic teachers union - parity with public school salaries. Help me to accept my pastors’ appalling lack of cooperation with my program to bring divorced couples back into the Church. Help me to accept the letters I receive each day from the conservatives and the liberals denouncing me as a coward and a liar.

  No use, no use, you could go on cataloging for the rest of the night. That is all you can do, my Lord Cardinal, catalogue your woes, your sores, you cannot offer them up. You cannot raise them an inch above your dry, withered heart, and they travel about the same deplorable distance beyond your bloodless lips. Catalogue and swallow them, catalogue and swallow them, that is all you can do. No wonder your stomach is always aching. Catalogs are not on Dr. Reed’s diet.

  What tortured Matthew Mahan more than anything else was his new ineptitude. It was simply incredible how badly he handled the crises that he had once smiled - or growled - or bellowed - through. Why? The obvious answer, the one that tormented him most, was his inability to scour the old smoothie from his soul. He was still in love with the flattery, the bowing and scraping, the deference, all the little perquisites of power that came his way, and when he tried to avoid them, to explain that he no longer wanted them, the result was confusion. Of course, there was another, more terrible answer - the feeling that thrust through the very center of his body and soul at unexpected moments - that it was all a fraud, a charade. This endless repetition of the word “Eminence,” these calls from Newsweek and Time reporters, royal red robes and watered silk skullcap - not only was he unworthy of these things, but if the truth of why, how he became Eminence was known, even cynics would pity him. He was a purchased man, a pawn on the chessboard of international power.

  The memory of the inner-city deanery’s last meeting rose before his eyes. He heard the young, strident voices, saw the dismay on the lined solemn faces of Eddie McGuire and his fellow pastors. Eddie McGuire was the most painful memory. Weeks later, dying of cancer, the sad suffering face looked up at him from the hospital bed to whisper: “You can’t let them walk all over you Matt.” How could you tell him that he was part of it? The haphazard way he ran his parish, the top three floors of his school closed, bars and wire mesh on all the windows of the rectory and parish hall, the church locked from dusk, like an island fortress in a hostile sea. Matthew Mahan remembered sadly his halfhearted efforts to persuade Eddie to change his style, to welcome the black community - and his shock at discovering how deep and intense Eddie’s prejudice was. You had failed to face that challenge then. What could you do now but nod sadly and ask him to offer up some of his pain for you?

  That, of course, was only the beginning of your spiritual Jobarama, Your Eminence. In the beginning was the ineptitude, then the catalogs, dry pages that you swallowed day and night. Then, one by one the prayers dwindled away, too. Now you cannot levitate the simplest cry. My Jesus, mercy. There it goes, spinning to the ground like a malformed toy airplane or a dead bug. Yes, your prayers have become more and more like insects, weightless insects that crawl up and down your body day and night, savagely stinging their creator for the crudity of his spiritual biology. Prayers without wings. Don’t you know anything, Your Eminence?

  Would a hair shirt help? Some apocalyptic penance seemed in order. Fasting was forbidden for the ulcer patient. Some desperate scourge was needed to batter the enemy, the smoothie, from his soul.

  Patience, tolled the three-thirty bell. Oh yes, Patience, good old Patience. A friend of Common Sense. Associate of Reasonable Explanation. His Eminence had been consulting with those three physicians since the trouble started. At first, they seemed to be all the help he needed. It was inevitable, after so many decades of living under literal obedience, which Cardinal Mahan had softened
to firm leadership. What was inevitable? These upheavals, these defiances, these challenges to authority, these personal attacks. They would pass. In time, the sensible majority would come to realize and revere what you are doing. They would use their holy freedom creatively. Thank you very much, gentlemen, that is just what I wanted to hear. It is amazing how precisely you always tell me what I wanted to hear.

  As if it mattered. As if any of the things that were happening really mattered. That was the Death Valley of desolation, the Dead Sea with irreducible Masada looming above it. Not mattering. Mary Shea not mattering. Mike Furia not mattering. Bill Reed not mattering. Davey Cronin not mattering. Even Dennis McLaughlin not mattering. The final horror, the ultimate fear that you will pay any price, go any distance to defeat. Yet you are motionless, Your Eminence. You kneel here, tears streaming down your face, while the beast, whatever it is, that shapeless thing in the dark, moves closer to you every night.

  My Jesus, mercy. Another toy plane on the floor and Sister Stella Dolores looming above you. Matthew Mahan playing with planes again. They’re not even good toy planes. Hold out your hand. Whop, whop, whop.

  Ah, Sister, with your childish seventh-grade tortures, if only you were here to scourge me until the blood flowed. If only you could give me the strength to stand beside my beloved Savior, equally torn, equally bloody.