The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

“What’s this I hear about you walking round the Reservoir last night? You were supposed to be at Sodality.”

  Maiden skill at dissimulation failed Mona completely. Her cheeks were bloodless china. “Who—who said I was walking around the Reservoir?”

  “Oh,” sniffed Florrie, “she takes a questioning tone.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Florrie,” said Bernie, “quit nagging the kid.”

  “I’ll quit nagging her when she stops sneaking off into the woods with Ikey Rampell.”

  Mona turned defiant. “His name isn’t Ikey, it’s Benny.”

  “Ikey or Benny, what’s the difference? Aren’t there enough Catholic boys in the parish without you running around with a ragpicking Jew?”

  Mona sprang from kitten to full-clawed cat. “Benny isn’t a ragpicker. He’s the smartest boy in high school and he’s going to be a dentist.” The futility of defense broke over her; Florrie the prosecutor had her down. Mona burst into tears and fled upstairs.

  Vexed by the undaughterly scene, Din lifted voice in reproof. A good drag-down and knockout argument on politics was all very well, but female bickering was something he could not tolerate. “I want no more of this wrangling, do you hear, Florrie? You’ll drive your sister away from you by your barging.”

  “It’s for her own good, Pa.”

  Blue anger sparked in Din’s eyes. Florrie might contribute as much as he to the family purse, but Dennis was still master in his own house. “Let your mother and me decide what is good for our children,” he thundered, then clamped down on his temper as though he were breaking his trolley car. “Stephen must not find us quarreling. Go cool your face with a wet towel, Florrie. You’ll feel better. Bernie, play the piano.”

  “Sure, Pa. Want to hear Too Much Mustard’?”

  “I’ll listen to anything that’ll drown out the sound of contention in this house.”

  Bernie jammed his chamois-topped boot onto the forte pedal, and bore down on the keys till the upright trembled under the attack. He raced through “Too Much Mustard” (not a vocal number), vamped the first bars of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” and broke into a refrain:

  I didn t raise my boy to be a soldier,

  I brought him up to be my pride and joy,

  Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder

  To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?

  “Louder, Bernie,” advised a quiet voice in the front hall. “They can’t hear you down at the carbarns.”

  Bernie whirled round on the piano stool; Dennis dropped his Globe. “Steve,” they cried with one voice, both moving toward the young priest in the doorway. Spare he was, built like the ideal miler—narrow in the hips, long in the thighbones, broad and easy in the shoulders. He had Celia’s lightness of stance and Din’s commanding head carriage, but his coloring was his own. A blackness of hair and eyebrows made white drama of his face. Thin-walled nostrils gave the ascetic clue, heightened by the good forehead climbing straight above blue-black eyes. There was a collectedness about him that one sees in the concert pianist sitting down to his instrument. All of which was laid aside now in the excitement of greeting his father and brother.

  “St. Dennis forever,” he cried, producing a red tin of smoking tobacco. “Here’s something for your old dudeen.” Stephen was up to his old habit of making little presents. He handed Bernie a pack of cigarettes, surveyed his brother’s pinch-back suit and chamois-topped shoes with humorous approval.

  “Dazzling, Bernie—especially the footgear. It wouldn’t be quite the thing for a young curate”—Steve put a well-shined oxford through the beginning of a heel-and-toe routine—“but in show biz …”

  “That’s it,” echoed Bernie eagerly. “In show biz you’ve got to dress this way. Classy! People expect it.”

  Celia coming out of the kitchen saw her first-born through the bead-fringed valance. Involuntary tears welled into her eyes. Having grown accustomed to Steve’s being away, Celia must now get used to having him home again.

  “Stevie,” she said, holding out her arms in the not-to-be-duplicated manner of mothers. The compass of those arms was too small now; willingly she let herself be encircled by Stephen’s embrace.

  “Got something here for you, Mother.” He lifted the cover of a tiny pasteboard box, revealing a delicately embroidered Agnus Dei. “It’s from the Cenacle of St. Theresa, and it’s blessed by the Pope himself.”

  “By the Pope himself,” Celia repeated in awed accents, showing the imprinted wax disk to her husband. “I’ll put it away.”

  Father Steve looked at Din; both laughed. Celia’s habit of “putting things away” was an old joke in the Fermoyle family. Tablecloths, sheets, towels, china, silverware, glasses—everything was “put away” for a future that never quite arrived. It was part of her hoarding instinct, a hangover from the poverty of her childhood.

  “Why put it away?” asked Steve. “Use it for a place mark in your missal and pray for your son every time you see it.”

  “Ma!” Florrie’s voice came from the kitchen. “The cod’s all but done.”

  “Merciful Mary, I forgot the cod. Go upstairs, Son, and get washed. Here, let me give you a towel.” Celia darted toward the sideboard drawer where she had “put away” her best linen.

  “I can find a clean place on the roller, Ma.”

  The idea of an ordained priest using a roller towel violated Celia Fermoyle’s sense of the decencies. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said, handing him an embroidered guest towel she had won fifteen years before at a parish whist party.

  “There is laughter from certain quarters when I put something away,” she said, looking at her husband, “but the laughter freezes when they see what I put it away for.”

  Towel maniplewise on wrist, Steve passed through the kitchen on his way upstairs. Florrie, flushed from the hot stove, was peeling jackets from boiled potatoes preparatory to mashing them. Competent, on-the-job Florrie. Steve hugged her with one arm. “Hello, Steve,” she said, going on with her work. A rivalry, or offishness rather—chiefly on Florrie’s side—had always lain between them. Should I soften her now, thought Steve, with the little phial of perfume in my pocket? No, that was for Mona.

  “Be down in a jiff,” he said, climbing the back stairs two at a time. The same old linoleum was on the steps, the same cracks were in the plaster. Had nothing changed during his four years in Rome? Not, at any rate, the plumbing fixtures at 47 Woodlawn! The same slow trickle of water from the thin faucets, the same zinc bathtub with the cast-iron legs. The permanence of impermanent things! Stephen lathered his hands on a curled chip of blue soap, splashed some water onto his face, then dried himself on the linen towel. He felt hungry, glad to be home, eager for family food and talk.

  Familiarity woven of a thousand boyhood yesterdays lay over the back of the house. Here was the brown patternless wallpaper, grease-smudged and peeling at the baseboard; the bedroom doors with their cocoa-colored knobs; the frayed runner of carpet—how elegant it had seemed to his bare feet when it was first laid! And over everything the indefinable smell of one’s own family.

  Here at the left was Ellen’s room, unoccupied since she had gone away to the Carmelites to live out as a garbed nun the dream of mystical love that had possessed her since childhood. Through the closed door shone the radiating purity of his sister’s life. How could so frail a taper burn with such an energizing ray and still not consume itself to ash? The secret fuel of the heart …

  Across the hallway, a flight of steps mounted to the attic bedroom that Stephen had shared with his brother George. Some impulse bade him climb the stairs and see again the garret room—“the boys’ domni-tory,” as Celia called it—where he had slept and studied till he was eighteen years old. The garret was neater now; a student lamp, a new armchair, and rows of lawbooks told him that his brother George used it as a study. But the dormer window looking out upon the roofs and rhubarb gardens of Woodlawn Avenue revived in Stephen emotions deeper than recoll
ection. It was in this room that he had decided to become a priest. Beside this lumpy bed he had knelt in prayer, dedicating his life to the service of the Master who had beckoned with an imperious finger, “Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”

  He knelt again now, lightly, momentarily, on one knee in a genuflection of gratitude, then left the attic room and hurried downstairs.

  A snuffling sobbing sound caught his ear as he passed Mona’s door. Tears? He tapped gently, turned the knob, and saw his youngest sister lying face downward on her single bed, weeping. Silently he sat on the bed beside her, put his hand into the hair at the nape of her neck.

  “Monny darling”—it was his special name for her—“it’s me, Stevie. What’s the matter, Monny?”

  Mona kicked her toes in a small fury against the foot of the bed. “That Florrie! She’s hateful.”

  “Florrie’s tired, upset about something. She doesn’t mean the things she says.”

  “She’s spiteful, that’s what she is.” Mona pressed her tearstained face into the pillow. “She treats me like an infant.”

  “A most beauteous infant,” said Steve. “Here, roll over, and let me see you.”

  Lying on her back, Mona gazed up at her brother. Tears, like drops of belladonna, had made her eyes lustrous and dark.

  “Do you really think I’m beautiful, Steve?” Vanity, catching her halfway between child and woman, snatched at this almost unknown man looking down at her.

  “As beautiful as one of Raphael’s angels. No one should be as beautiful as that—but you are. Don’t all the boys rave about your dark eyes and black hair?”

  “I wish I was a blue-eyed blonde,” sighed Mona.

  “A blonde? Blue-eyed? Ridiculous. I guess you never heard what a pretty good poet said about his Dark Lady.”

  “What did he say?”

  “What didn’t he say! He practically rifled the language, looking for similes in praise of black. Images of pearl and gold were tossed into the wastebasket—nothing but ebony damask and ravens’ wings would suit him when he wrote about his mistress’ hair and eyes.”

  Stephen couldn’t quite decide how much emotional pressure Mona could stand. He didn’t want to frighten her by plumping out the sonnet in all its glorious rhetoric—but anything that would soothe her grief was worth trying. He’d give her the opening lines for a sample. Muting all but the barest note of tenderness, he recited the first quatrain:

  Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,

  Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,

  Have put on black, and loving mourners be,

  Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.

  Magnetized by language she did not understand, spoken in a tone she had never heard before, Mona lay silently looking up at her priest-brother. She had neither curiosity to ask the name of the poet who had written the lines nor the intelligence to make any comment on their substance or quality. All that she conveyed to Stephen was a kind of astonishment that such words should exist, or that a priest should utter them.

  Stephen changed the note. “Got something here for you, widgeon.” He pressed the little phial of perfume into her damp palm. “The drugstore man said to use it with caution. Up you come now—they’re waiting dinner for us downstairs.”

  “You’re awful sweet, Steve,” said Mona. She wanted to add that somehow, in a different way, of course, he reminded her of Benny Rampell. But the moment passed. She rose, dabbed at her eyes with Stephen’s clean handkerchief, and with his arm around her went downstairs to dinner.

  DINNER at the Fermoyles’ was strictly a one-dish affair, a solid work-ingman’s meal with no date-and-nut nonsense about it. Barely had Father Steve finished grace when Celia began heaping the first plate with cod, mashed potatoes, a cascade of egg sauce, and a big spoonful of piccalilli for color and relish. In this home Din was always served first; even now with her priest-son at the table Celia gave her husband precedence.

  “A hungry man is an angry man,” she said, passing Din his laden plate. Without waiting for the others, he fell to his food with zesty trencherman manners.

  “Do you know, Steve,” he said between forkfuls, “things haven’t changed much around here. There’s still nobody that pours tea like Florrie. She makes it hot, black, and strong”—he held out his cup to his oldest daughter—“the way I like it.”

  “Pa’s tea blarney” was a remnant of the time Florrie was a little girl with the privilege of snuggling into Din’s lap as he read his Globe. Ousted from this seat of affection by later girl babies, Florrie had kept some part of her emotional security by taking on certain semiwifely duties. Pouring her father’s tea was the sole reminder of the earlier father-daughter love that had existed between them. Steve remembered the violent quarrel that had once broken out when his sister Rita had attempted to pour the tea. Now as he watched Florrie perform the vestal role unchallenged, he knew he was watching a devotional rite. That flush of pleasure on her cheek—the first, the only relaxation of her face that evening—told Steve more than he could understand about Florrie’s thwarted love for her father, her tension, and her bad temper.

  “How do you like Monaghan, your pastor, Steve?” Din was asking.

  “I’ve only been at St. Margaret’s a day or two,” said Steve, “and the rector hasn’t yet invited me into his private parlor. As a matter of fact, he was pretty gruff when he greeted me. I guess he didn’t like the Italian Line stickers on my suitcase.”

  “You’ll soften him up.” Celia’s confidence was magnificent, airy.

  “I hear he’s one of the biggest money raisers in the Diocese,” said Din. Only a very good Catholic had the right to say anything like that, and Din, a man of great piety but little reverence, was always the one to exercise his rights freely.

  “Father Monaghan’s not exactly El Poverello,” laughed Steve. “But when you consider that he’s putting up a new school, and plans to build a parish house when the school is finished—why, I’d say he has plenty of need for money.”

  “That parish house at St. Margaret’s must be ninety years old,” said Celia, who knew every church in the Diocese. “It ran down terrible under Father Ned Halley, sainted man. The threshold was worn hollow when I went there to stand up for Delia Doherty’s second child Annie, in May, 1907, it was, nine years ago. Has anything been done since to it, Steve?”

  “It’s still pretty much of a barracks, but Father Monaghan has made a lot of improvements, I hear. Painted it up and put in some new plumbing. He’s quite a manager.”

  “Managed himself a new Packard last week,” observed Florrie. “Paid cash for it, too.”

  “The pastor of a big parish needs a good automobile,” said Father Steve stoutly.

  “Father Halley before him had no automobile,” said Celia. “He made his sick calls on foot—ankle-deep in slush he walked—all over the city of Maiden and without rubbers either. He’d give them away to the first poor man he met, so they say.”

  Stephen Fermoyle looked at his mother curiously. “I’ve heard that about Father Halley.” A special interest in the last end of priests prompted his question: “Whatever became of him?”

  “Oh, he was bundled off to a poor place somewhere near Taunton—I forget the name of it now—with a lot of French Canadians for parishioners. Delia Doherty went to see him there, and came back with some story or other about his church falling apart. She sent him a dollar for Christmas once, then she lost track of him.”

  With the deft step of one who knows dangerous ground when her feet are on it, Celia changed direction. “And how do you get on with the other curates in the house?”

  “I’m going to like both of them, I think. Especially Father Paul Ireton. He’s a handsome, quiet priest, doing a grand job as assistant pastor. I—I rather get the feeling that he’d like to have a church of his own.”

  “He’s got a long wait ahead of him,” said Din. A truculent pre-argument jut stiffened his jaw. “If the Cardinal in the augustitude of his wisdom would only br
eak up the big parishes and squeeze some of the lard out of a few old pastors I could mention, then the young priests could have churches of their own in jig time.” His eye was hopeful. Would this elegant son of his, with the fine top-lofty brow, snap at the bait of argument?

  It was Celia who snapped. “When His Eminence wants advice about laying out new parishes, he’ll come down to the carbarns and ask for it,” she said, peppering her cod so violently that she burst into a fit of sneezing. “Forgive me, Son. My pepper hand slipped. What about the other curate?”

  “The other curate”—a half smile laid hold of Steve’s mouth—“is a gentle, pious chap called ‘Milky’ Lyons. He’s interested in Gregorian music and wants to start a plain-song choir, but”—Steve’s black eyebrows went up in sympathy for a hopeless cause—“Monaghan will have none of it.”

  “Why do they call him ‘Milky’?” asked Monica.

  “Because his skin and voice have all the resplendent color of a glass of milk. Either he’s genderless or—“ Father Steve’s answer was interrupted by a voice of great carrying power ringing through the house.

  “Stephen … Stuff … You’re here!” George Fermoyle, a full-grown man at twenty, flung an armful of books onto the sideboard and came toward his older brother, both hands outstretched in greeting. They hadn’t seen each other for four years. Now they embraced, pounding each other like football players after a touchdown. Then they stood off to appraise each other.

  “Where did you bury that pimply kid?” asked Stephen, taking in George’s breadth of shoulder, long jaw, and clear skin.

  “The same place you buried that pie-faced seminarian. Why, Stuffy, you’re bigger, better-looking. Rome’s marshy, I mean martial, air must have agreed with you.”

  “It did, Gug. Sit down, eat some of Ma’s patented cod—it’s wonderful—and tell me all about yourself.”

  “Haven’t got much time, Stuff.” George craned his neck to get a look at the kitchen clock. “My class in ‘Bills and Notes’ starts at eight. But I had an hour after work, so I thought I’d run out and see you.” George sat down at the place Celia and Florrie fixed for him and began on his cod.