The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  So much love, so much human longing in the world. So good to be a part of it. For the next couple of hours Stephen Fermoyle forgot that he was an anointed priest, and became the human son and brother, loving his own people greatly, and greatly loved by them in return.

  BOOK ONE

  THE CURATE

  CHAPTER 1

  What VEHICLE, bottle-green in color, arkish in shape, cranky in motion, and dilapidated in repose, was a familiar feature of the Mystic River flatlands between Boston and Medford during the early years of the present century?

  That’s easy! Trolley No. 3, of course—a four-wheeled drudge that had lugged some six million passengers, at a nickel a head, to their clerkish warrens in the morning and back to their suburban hutches at night. The strain had taken its toll. No. 3 may have been a mechanical marvel in her youth, but by the year 1915 she was a balky shrew with a notable slippage of her trolley, an incurable slappage of her brake shoes, a profound weakness in her rheostat, and a proneness to fuse-box trouble on cold mornings and hot afternoons. How she found courage to start, stop, grunt, and start again was a mystery to the repair crew at the Medford carbarns where No. 3 lay nightly at her siding like a spavined cab horse gathering heart for the next day’s run.

  The theory advanced by Bartholomew (“Batty”) Flynn, chief dispatcher and carbarn metaphysician, was that No. 3 must be held together by a pure act of faith on the part of her motorman, Dennis Fermoyle. To state the proposition in Batty’s own words: “Reason fails us here. Din’s car should now be the fragment of a figment. But faith is beyond reason. Ergo, No. 3 is held together by faith rather than reason, or,” he always added slyly, “good works.”

  None of this quiddish logic went on in the hearing of the Fermoyle. Din’s feelings on the subject of No. 3 were well known. His walrus mustaches would stiffen into tusks at the suggestion that No. 3 be junked in favor of the newer, handsomer, sixteen-wheeled air-brake job that his seniority rated. Devotion to Din, or possibly fear of his stern mustaches, kept superintendents docile and repair men gagged. Not even suffering passengers who hung to No. 3’s tired leather straps dared voice the hope that she would blow up, or fall apart, or be put decently out to pasture.

  On a spring evening late in April, 1915, No. 3 was lumbering along at its top speed of nine miles an hour toward the Medford carbarns. With Din Fermoyle at the controls, and conductor Marty Timmins on the rear platform, it rounded the Highland Avenue curve with a banshee screech of wheels and plunged down the gentle grade near the end of its suburban steeplechase. As No. 3 careened past the center door of the Immaculate Conception Church, Dennis lifted his right hand from the brake and doffed his motorman’s cap. No perfunctory touching of hand to visor. This was a real off-the-head obeisance to the Presence that dwelt—Dennis Fermoyle could not tell you how—in the tabernacle on the high altar within. He had made this obeisance a dozen times today: six times on the inbound run to Boston and six times on the outbound run to the carbarns. Yesterday, and the day before yesterday, he had raised his hat twelve times. For twenty-five years—ever since the tracks were first laid—he had been raising his hat as he passed the center door of the church. And if the varicose veins in his right leg didn’t murder him entirely, Dennis Fermoyle hoped to keep on repeating the gesture of devotion and respect for twenty-five years more. Well, fifteen maybe. By that time he would have eight service stripes on his coat sleeve. One life, one job. …

  To accompany the hat-raising ritual, Dennis always added an aspiration. His favorite was “Blessed be the Holy Family,” but he often varied this with sentiments appropriate to his state of mind or body. If the deep veins throbbed in his leg, as they did now, he would murmur, “Blessed be the wounds of Jesus.” Or if his throat was parched, as it always was, come evening, he would say, “Blessed be His Holy Thirst.” The whole business took but a second and was immediately followed by an uprush of well-being that burst geyserlike into song.

  In a true-keyed but husky baritone Dennis now gave off with the first stanza of “The False Bride of O’Rourke,” a ditty of his youth in Cork. The weary passengers smiled as they heard the Celtic melody rise above the clatter of car wheels; they winked at each other knowingly, as characterless people do when confronted by a character. Even “Greasy” McNabb, the company spotter who was dying to nail Marty Timmins in the act of knocking down a nickel, had to wink and smile. He was sure that Marty was knocking down plenty of nickels and professionally resented the veteran conductor’s skill at masking his larcenies. But the sweet contagion of Din Fermoyle’s song soothed the spotter’s rancor, transported him to the wattled glens of Connaught, and caused him to wink knowingly at the very man he was attempting to catch.

  A black Protestant should have this job, thought Greasy, unscrewing the wink from his eye.

  In mid-melody Dennis Fermoyle shifted his hundred and ninety pounds onto his good left leg, tapped his right toe gingerly against the gong button on the floor, and let his car glide into the network of trackage and switches in front of the carbarn. He had mastered the art of the jerkless halt and now gave a virtuoso performance unnoticed by anyone but Marty and himself. The forlorn passengers streamed palely into the lengthening April sunlight. Two bells from Marty. Ding-ding! Then the slow entry into the long cool carbarn, sliding under the very guns of the big sixteen-wheel jobs, to the special corner that was No. 3’s berth.

  Dennis removed the control handle, smooth from long contact with his cotton glove, and slipped it into the side pocket of his blue brass-buttoned coat. Tomorrow at seven A.M. he would fit the handle onto its square spindle again. Till then, none could start Dennis Fermoyle’s car. Or would want to. A poor thing but very much his own.

  He walked through the empty car to the rear platform, where Marty Timmins was peering with bloodshot eyes at some figures on the clock-like register above his door. Baggy at the knees and saggy about the coat pockets, Marty was of the pint-sized defenseless breed that juries take pleasure in finding guilty on sight. His mildness would be mistaken for weakness, his timidity interpreted as guile. Thin stubble covered his rabbitish chin, and a perennial drop hung from the tip of his nose. He jotted down a figure on his tally book and snapped it shut before Din reached him.

  “Everything even, Marty? All regular and even?”

  The conductor scruffed at his nose drop with the back of a dirty hand, and nodded. Wordless rather than silent, Marty Timmins had no language to express the bewildered, lonely dumbness that had come over him in the past year. Ever since he had lost his wife Nora after her sixth baby and third miscarriage, there were only two things that consoled the terrible desolation of his days. One was whisky; the other, Din’s great hand on his shoulder. The hand was on his shoulder now. He would have the whisky later.

  A fine delicacy prevented Din from mentioning Greasy McNabb’s presence in the car. Nor could he bring himself to lecture Marty now or at any time about the booze. Thick fingers squeezed thin shoulder; calloused palm patted bent spine.

  “Good night, Marty. Go straight home now.”

  “Good night, Din. I will.”

  Trolley mates. The miles of their common voyaging on No. 3 would have put ten girdles around the earth.

  At a little wicket near the gates of the carbarn Dennis Fermoyle thrust his walrus mustaches close to an iron grille. “Would you be having a little something for me, Angus?”

  The man behind the grille riffled through a small box of envelopes, and shoved one under the wicket. Din felt the flat fold of bills and the hard half dollar inside the envelope. His weekly pay, $27.65—forty cents an hour for an eleven-hour day, six days a week, plus a bonus of twenty-five cents for each of the diagonal gold service stripes on his coat sleeve. He thrust the envelope into his pocket and faced westward into the salmon-colored rays of the six P.M. sun. With the stiff-legged gait of a man who stands in one place all day, he trudged along a muddy unpaved sidewalk fronting straggly three-story houses and vacant lots. To let the cool spring air sponge his fo
rehead, he pushed back his motorman’s cap. A deep red stripe, cut by the sweatband, lay across his forehead. The true service stripe, the wound of vocation.

  A lance of pain traveled up his leg from ankle to groin. Din quickened his pace; movement seemed to help a little, speeding sluggish blood through knotted veins. The pain would be all right, it would go away, as soon as he sat down in his kitchen rocker and hoisted the leg onto another chair. Thoughts of coming good sustained him as he turned up an inclined side street, the gentle gradient of Woodlawn Avenue. The best of the day lay just ahead: the bottle of beer that Celia would pluck dewy cold from the icebox when she heard his step on the back porch; the fine fat cod stuffed with bread crumbs that was browning right now in the kitchen oven; the oval supper table, the faces of his children, grown-up now, but still making reasonable concord when he breathed upon them.

  “Blessed be the Holy Family…”

  Tonight the family music would have a special quality. There would be clean napkins all around, a fresh jar of piccalilli from the cellar, a deeper glow in Celia’s dark eyes. Stephen was coming home for dinner. Stephen the dedicated priest, Steve the proud-walking one, the eloquent first-born of Dennis and Celia Fermoyle; Stephen the motorman’s son who had led his class for four years at Holy Cross. Steve would be at dinner tonight for the first time since arriving home from the North American College in Rome.

  They had seen him for a moment when he came off the liner, but that glimpse had been too brief, too full of gulped excitement. Tonight Din would savor his son’s quality in more leisurely fashion, strike the spark of an argument maybe, and come over his son’s elegant learning with a nimble brickbat of his own. He hoped, with all his Irish love of disputation, that Steve would not be too proud to grapple with him in debate.

  Din’s soul magnified the Lord as he reached the last house at the top of the street. Boxy, brown, and graceless with its ugly front stoop, 47 Woodlawn Avenue was a whole house, not a flat, and after living in it for almost twenty-five years, Din almost owned it. By scrimping and denial, by putting a dollar a week into the Building and Loan Bank for fifteen years, he had laid eighteen hundred dollars on the line. There was still a twelve-hundred-dollar mortgage. Easier for a camel to enter a needle’s eye than for a motorman with six children to get title free and clear to his own home.

  He entered his house, workingman fashion, by the back door. Odors of baking fish, gingerbread, and damp mops in the back closet told him that he was home. Celia at the stove gave a half turn, a half smile, a half kiss that struck the air in the general direction of her husband’s bent-down face. Comely buxom at forty-nine, a trifle gone at the middle and not too tidy about her graying hair, Celia Fermoyle was still airy on her feet. She had been a tireless dancer, the belle of many a Hibernian ball in her day. Now, knowing exactly where she stood with her man and her children, she was a confident woman without a fear in the world.

  She held out her hand expectantly. Dennis Fermoyle drew his pay envelope from his pocket, and placed it in her outstretched palm. Celia tucked the envelope into her bosom, then in place of spoken thanks she gave her husband something much better—a bit of wifely service.

  “I’ll fetch your beer in a jiffy, Din. Let me clear the sink for you first.” Celia Fermoyle was a good cook and a thrifty manager, but she did not place a high value on neatness. Her kitchen was a clutter of pans, dishes, pails, and unironed clothes. Now she made an open space among her saucepans in the sink, put a tin basin under the hot-water faucet, tossed a sliver of yellow soap into it, and gave the roller towel a swish to bring a reasonably clean sector into view. “There now, Din.”

  “Lavabo” intoned Dennis Fermoyle. He hung his hat and coat on his regular hook, rolled up his sleeves, and with narwhal sputterings washed his face and hands. While he dried himself on the roller towel, Celia flipped off the cap of a beer bottle and set it on the kitchen table. She had never learned to pour beer to Din’s satisfaction. He poured it to his own taste now, drained a tumblerful, rubbed the back of his hand across his foam-flecked mustache, and picked up his Globe.

  In the manner of an appellate judge reviewing a weighty case he surveyed the news. “Ho-ho, Celia—look at this,” he roared, reading aloud the streamer headline:

  BRITISH REEL BACKWARDS TO CHANNEL PORTS

  “Von Falkenhayn has the lobsterbacks on the run, Ceil, with their teacups and shooting boxes and all. Right into their precious Channel he’ll push them—wait and see.”

  To Din, the British Army was still the oppressor of Irishmen and the historic despoiler of their religion, homes, and children. But to Celia, born in Boston, the feud between lobsterback and bog trotter had no such pulsing immediacy. Other matters—her backward oven, for instance —claimed the front of her mind just now. She pushed her stove dampers this way and that with the preoccupied briskness of a stage manager on a first night.

  “Read to yourself, Din, if it’s all the same to you, because I’ve got nothing else to do for the next half-hour but cook a dinner fit for Stevie in a slow oven that won’t heat up because the coal is slaty and the flues need cleaning.”

  Piano chords and a tenor voice drifted into the kitchen. Din cocked a critical ear. “Bernie has a new ballad,” he said placatingly to no one in particular. “This I must hear.” He limped into the dining room and ducked under a beaded valance that separated it from the parlor. At an upright piano tucked into the aperture of a bow window sat an overfed young man with hair parted in the middle, wearing a pinch-back suit, chamois-topped shoes, and the high starched collar of the period. Bernard, Din’s second son, a song plugger—and not too good at it if the truth had to be told.

  With beer and paper Din sat down in a leatherette armchair and listened as one who reserves judgment, till the singer ended his performance on a true-toned high C.

  “New, Bernie?”

  The young man nodded. “It’s Chauncey Olcott’s latest, Ireland Must Be Heaven, For My Mother Came from There,’” he warbled. “They’ll be crazy for it at the Gamecock.”

  “The Gamecock? That wouldn’t be the fancy house on Washington Street, Bernie?”

  “Cabaret, Pa,” corrected Bernie. “I’m getting a tryout there tomorrow night. If I connect, it’s two weeks at twenty dollars a week.”

  If I connect! Accent on the if. That was Bernard for you. Din hoisted his leg onto a carpet-covered hassock. “Give us the ‘Fingarry Christening’ like a good boy now.”

  “Sure, Pa.” Always obliging, Bernie threw back his pomaded head of hair and gave off with the opening verse of a ballad that dealt with the vagaries of certain elegant Celts at the christening of an infant referred to only as “sweet Dennis the boy.” The first stanza was vague in Bernie’s memory, but his mind cleared at the second:

  All the aristocracy came to the party,

  Bold McCarthy, hale and hearty,

  And Bridget Bedelia Fogarty,

  ‘Twos the French (so she said) for her name.

  Din’s glass of beer touched him off. He joined his son in song:

  Then they all went into the luncheon,

  There was such munchin’ and much crunchin’

  While the christeners went about punchin’

  On coffee, tea, whisky, and wine.

  Their harmonizing, and the peace that rises therefrom, was broken when the front door opened, and a young woman, big of hip and heavy about the lower part of her face, entered the parlor. Florence Fermoyle resembled a not-too-modish policewoman. At twenty-five she had little lightness of mind, manner, or body. For six years now she had been working as a bookkeeper in an automobile office, and her wage was as large as her father’s. In a few months she would pass him as the chief earner at 47 Woodlawn.

  “Stephen here yet? Who’s helping Ma in the kitchen? Where’s Mona?” The questions came in a staccato jet as Florrie pulled the pins out of her hat with disapproving truculence at the sight of males lounging in the parlor. Not too subtly she conveyed the feeling that nothing ever got do
ne unless she did it herself. Bossy was the word for Florence. No wonder, thought Din, that she scares the men away.

  “You got the chamois tops, I see, Bernie?” she said, edging around to get a side glance at her brother’s feet. “That ten dollars I gave you was for a pair of ‘good substantial shoes,’ and now you turn up with these ‘Pretending Percy’ numbers. What’s the idea?”

  “Well—mm—you see, Florrie, I needed something a little bit dressy for my try out.” To nip off further debate, Bernie made a run with his left hand, and soared into song.

  In the midst of the feasting, Mike Cronin,

  Mighty Cronin, without groanin’

  Downed a pound of pâté de foie gras

  Made of goose livers and grease—

  Again the harmony was shattered by Florrie’s top-sergeant voice calling up the front stairs: “Mona… Mona. Come down here and set the table. Ma’s breaking her back in the kitchen, and Father Steve’ll be here any minute. Come down right away.”

  Monica came down. At sixteen she had a fragile porcelain beauty—a doll’s face linelessly smooth, but pouting now with discontent. She had been washing her hair, drying, combing, and pinning it this way and that for the past two hours, and now it lay in a lustrous blue-black aureole around her head. Snatched from her favorite occupation of gazing into the mirror, she half expected her father to defend her against Florrie’s barging. To win him, she planted a kiss on his cheek, then sat kittenlike on the arm of his chair. He put his forefinger under her chin and tickled it as though she were still an infant.

  Something about the armchair tableau sent Florrie into a tantrum of anger. She had a barb to throw. She had planned to save it till later, but now she let Mona have it right up to the feather.