The Cardinal

Home > Other > The Cardinal > Page 7
The Cardinal Page 7

by Henry Morton Robinson


  “We’ll try the elastic stocking for a while,” he said.

  He might be able to tell this man many things about the British war loan, the influence of Petrarch on Western thought, and the chitchat of European chancelleries. But there was nothing he could add to Dennis Fermoyle’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount.

  He said good night to his father and closed the door of the stuffy bedroom very softly.

  A ten-o’clock hush lay on the lower floor as Stephen went down the backstairs to the kitchen. Bernie had gone to the Gamecock. Florrie and Mona were in bed; Dr. Byrne and Rita were making the most of the poor privacy of the living room. In the kitchen Celia Fermoyle was kneading dough, tossing it lightly from hand to hand before putting it in the baking pan. The maker of daily bread gazed up at her son with a matter-of-fact affection. Loving she could be, mawkish never. Her concern now was for her husband.

  “What did Dr. John say about Pa’s leg?”

  “He advised an elastic stocking.”

  Celia patted an oval loaf into its pan. “Lizzie Gillen says hers gives her great comfort. Sit down now, Stevie, and have a piece of bread and molasses before you go.”

  “Will it make my hair curly, Ma? You used to tell me it would.”

  Stephen sat at the kitchen table and watched his mother set out the bread and molasses. Her hair had become disarranged during the evening, and the dark pigmentation of her skin was purplish under the shade-less electric bulb. The knuckles of her hands were red and cracked, her nails unattended. As she moved about the kitchen, it seemed that she had lost something of the tireless resiliency Steve remembered as a boy.

  “You must be tired, Ma.”

  “No,” she said cheerfully. “I was tired an hour ago, but I’m all right now, Son. Florrie did the dishes, and baking a batch of bread is no work at all. A good night’s sleep will fix me fine.”

  The old bounce! An inheritance more valuable than gold.

  Celia cut bread, poured molasses into a saucer, then sat down opposite him. Her forearms, still plump and shapely, lay on the figured oilcloth; her eyes, brown as the liquid she had just poured, were fixed on her priest-son as he mopped up molasses with a slice of homemade bread.

  “Remember how I used to wade through this stuff?” he asked.

  “I remember everything about you, Son. The magic-lantern shows you were always giving in the dark pantry, the printing press down cellar, the telescope in the attic, the rabbits in the back yard, the mandolin in the parlor, the candy-making in the kitchen, the baseball in summer and the hockey in winter, the tap dancing, the yodeling, and that time you tried to be a ventriloquist. I remember the wet battery you made for the front doorbell, the bobsled you almost killed Mona on, taking her down Crescent Hill, and the string telephone you rigged up in the back yard. I remember every bit of it, Son—including the girls you were wild about, not to mention the ones that were wild about you.”

  Celia paused in her nostalgic cataloguing, a question in her eyes.

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Steve, ever since you told me you had a vocation. Maybe I won’t get the answer I expect. But tell me, Son—tell me truly—did my wanting you to be a priest make you decide to be one?”

  Stephen pondered the answer he should give his mother. Dare he reveal the hard truth that his love for her, great as it was, could not be compared with the mightier devotion that had drawn him, and now bound him, to the priesthood? How could he tell her that the depth and power of this greater love was immeasurable, that it filled and dominated him, that it was stronger than any love a son could feel for a mother?

  He spoke as honestly as he could to the tired woman opposite him. “No, Mother, your wanting me to be a priest didn’t make me one. I used to wonder about it when I was younger. But now I know I’m a priest because there’s nothing else on earth that I want to be. It’s as simple as that, and it will never change.”

  The worn corners of Celia Fermoyle’s mouth trembled slightly. “That’s the answer I hoped for, Steve. I’ve known mothers who were forever at their sons to be priests, and because the sons loved them, or were weak, they sometimes mistook that love for a vocation. Unhappiness is their lot afterwards.”

  Courage and good sense, plenty of both, were in Celia’s voice. But Stephen felt that his answer had somehow disappointed her. Well, he would try to make it up to her in a thousand loving ways. He started to say, “I’m offering my first Mass for your intention tomorrow,” when he glanced at the kitchen clock.

  “Ten-thirty! Monaghan will murder me. I’m supposed to be in before eleven.” He snatched his black hat from its hook and bent down to kiss his mother’s cheek.

  “Give me your blessing, Son.”

  He made the sign of the cross above her bowed head. “Give me yours, Mother. It’s worth more.”

  He could still feel her thumb-cross on his forehead as he walked swiftly down Woodlawn Avenue to the carbarns. The lightest of spring rains was falling. An indescribable joy, an exuberant sense of work ahead, made Stephen feel like running. And when he saw the headlight of the trolley leaving the carbarn, he did run, and leapt aboard it surefooted.

  As the car jolted toward Maiden Square, Stephen read the Office for the Time, then closed his breviary with the echo of Matins in his ears.

  “I am the true Vine,” the echo said, “and you are the branches. He who abides in me bears much fruit, Alleluia, Alleluia.”

  A few minutes later, Stephen Fermoyle let himself into the parish house of St. Margaret’s, and started to tiptoe up the thin-carpeted stairs. He heard the chime of a clock striking in Father Monaghan’s room, and saw the pastor’s door open slightly.

  Then at the head of the stairway appeared an apparition of great bulk—the towering figure of William Monaghan himself.

  “Are these your usual hours, Father Fermoyle?” the rector was inquiring in a sarcastic, bullying tone.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN OTHER TIMES and places, had he not been a priest, William Monaghan might have been many things: centurion under Pompey, the master of a clipper ship, or the general manager of a Bessemer steel mill. He had the physical bulk of an Olympic hammer thrower and the vocal cords of Michael the Archangel, roughened, it is true, by long misuse in a large church with poor acoustics. His complexion was of the meaty red rightly associated with choler, and his curly gray hair, which he combed in a roach, would tighten like individual watch springs when his choler rose. Neither curate nor layman dared cross him: he ran the parish of St. Margaret’s as a veteran conductor runs a crack train, responsibly and hard, along the steel tracks of pay-as-you-go discipline.

  The city of Maiden, in which St. Margaret’s lay, was wedged like a slice of suburban pie, five miles north of Boston, between the Saugus marshes on the east and a woody, undeveloped section of Medford to the west. The place had been settled in 1631 by a shipload of dour Dissenters; in 1915 the tone of the city was still puritanical and Protestant. Socially, the best people attended either the Baptist church, with its really magnificent cast of bells, or the Episcopalian St. Jude’s that rose in an ivied Gothic pile on Pleasant Street. Numerically, however, William Monaghan’s congregation was the largest in the city. Upwards of four thousand devout worshipers surged in and out of the three Masses said at St. Margaret’s every Sunday—an edifying spectacle from any point of view, except possibly that of the Protestant divines, who pursed their lips enviously as they thought of the bright silver clinking into the collection boxes of St. Margaret’s fifty-two Sundays a year.

  The wittiest and least envious of these divines, Dr. Arthur Lethbridge, D.D. (Oxon), had punned rather brilliantly, so he thought, on the name of William Monaghan. “Dollar Bill,” he had called him at a smart, very Anglican luncheon at the Kenilworth Club shortly after his arrival at St. Jude’s. But the wheeze was already ancient among Father Monaghan’s parishioners. They had nicknamed him “Dollar Bill” ten years before, when, on taking over the pastorate of St. Margaret’s, h
e had baldly declared that pennies and nickels were fit coinage for gum slots only.

  “Green in any denomination is a color most pleasing to the Lord,” he was quoted as saying. A canard, probably—yet even the Cardinal had laughed when he heard it.

  If the fiscal part of William Monaghan’s soul was somewhat overdeveloped, this could be traced to realistic causes. As a youth he had felt hunger to the marrow of his large leg bones; but even more painfully he had felt the hatred and contempt in which his unpropertied kind, the South Boston Irish, were held by Boston Brahmins. Muckers, Micks, Harps, they were called, and their lot was to dig in the streets, drive garbage carts, or tend bars. Gradually he had seen his people climb the economic ladder to become policemen, firemen, motormen, and—after decades of struggle—lawyers, teachers, and doctors. They had moved away from South Boston, migrated to Dorchester and Roxbury, gained title to houses of their own. If Father Monaghan overvalued property, it was because the society in which he lived overvalued it, too. Ownership of something—that was the badge of membership. A house was a physical monument built on the rock of social acceptance. And a well-constructed church of Quincy granite or a prosperous parochial school of fine brick was an outward sign of substance that could not be blown down or whirled about by winds of prejudice.

  That was why William Monaghan valued the dollar and drove hard for it.

  The Cardinal, knowing all this about Father Monaghan, had called him in, one day back in 1906, and handed him two slips of paper. On the first piece was written: “Dedham, Parish of St. Jerome. No church debt, a new parish house, a nine-grade school.” On the other: “Maiden, Parish of St. Margaret. $30,000 church debt. Rickety parish house, no school.”

  “Take your choice, Father,” the Cardinal had said.

  “I’ll take St. Margaret’s, Your Eminence.”

  “Thanks, Father.” Whereat “Your Eminence” evaporated, and a grateful administrator held out a very human hand. “Good luck to you, Bill.”

  In ten years, William Monaghan had wiped out the $30,000 church debt, and was now incurring a bigger one—with his Cardinal’s consent, of course—for the new parochial school. Meanwhile he dwelt with his three curates in a time-stained wooden structure, and let his mind leap forward to the day when this tumble-down ark would be supplanted by a modern parish house of brick and granite. As a reward for his labors in this once arid vineyard, the Cardinal had conferred upon him the coveted honor of the P. R.—permanent rector—with life tenure on a tough job.

  The toughness of the job alarmed William Monaghan not at all, but he had been somewhat dissatisfied of late with the curates sent out to assist him. They were not the men they used to be. They lacked rugged-ness and push; there was no jump to them. One and all, they were too much concerned with liturgical niceties and all manner of clerical bric-a-brac. But at the drudgery of parish work—they were no good at all. Take Father Lyons, for example. “Milky,” they called him, and a blind man could see the reason for the name. Why, if a cupful of rain fell on Milky Lyons while making a parish call, he would rush back to the house in mortal fear of pneumonia. And forever talking about Gregorian music, he was. With two hundred housebound invalids in the parish, all needing the comfort of a priestly voice and hand, why should a curate always be harping on Palestrina?

  And this new chap, Fermoyle, the fine imported article from Rome. A theological disputant, no doubt, a learned wrangler on canon law, with a varnish of Italian and a lively admiration, like as not, for the sound of his own voice box. The Reverend William Monaghan had never been to Rome, but he had seen plenty of young curates fresh from the North American College there, and they were all cut from the same bolt: “All finish but no fabric,” he grumbled to his fellow pastor, Flynn of Lynn. “Their feet are too small, Gene, for the heft of their ideas.” A Hibernicism—but one that found ready understanding in the crypt of the Flynn ear.

  Peevishness heated William Monaghan’s red neck as he paced his study on this rainy April evening, dreaming of the ideal curate with big feet and tireless hands. Other matters, too, were putting a tighter curl in his roached hair. Italians in great numbers were flooding into the parish of St. Margaret’s; the whole region west of the B & M tracks was swarming with Neapolitans—noisy, wine-drinking brawlers, quick with their steel but slow with their silver. True, they were Catholics, and therefore welcome in God’s sight. But in the sight of William Monaghan, who was not God but merely the rector of a self-sustaining parish, they were definitely not welcome. And for two reasons: first, they didn’t support their rector generously; and second, he didn’t know how to get along with them. They were excitable, superstitious, dirty, and cynical, not in the decent fashion of Celts, but in some outlandish manner of their own. To put it briefly, they were not Irish. Worse yet, they were pushing out the Irish! The fine old names of Finan, Finnegan, and Foley were giving place, on the baptismal roster, to Castelucci, Foppiano, and Marinelli. Unless Michael the Archangel or some other Saint Militant defended Bill Monaghan in the battle against his Latin parishioners, St. Margaret’s was doomed.

  Saint Militant? Pastor Monaghan would have settled for a good curate.

  The ormolu clock with the fine Waltham movement chimed ten-thirty, and a deeper burn of irritability reddened the pastor’s neck. Where was this new curate Fermoyle at such an hour? Monaghan glanced at the Mass schedule for the week, written out in Father Ireton’s tall clerical hand. Praise be for Paul Ireton, a steady priest and a fine assistant. Plain as day the schedule showed that Father Stephen Fermoyle was assigned to the six-thirty A.M. Mass tomorrow morning and that Jimmy Splaine was to be his altar boy. Wouldn’t you think now that a young priest, on the eve of celebrating Mass in his first parish, would be in his room, on his knees, preparing himself by prayer and meditation? But where was Father Fermoyle? Ah, yes, this elegant limb was at home visiting his parents in West Medford, regaling them no doubt with marvelous stories about his doings in Rome—how he saw Cardinals Vannutelli and Merry del Val just leaving the Vatican arm in arm with His Holiness on their way to sing High Mass in St. Peter’s. Or some such sculch.

  Monaghan’s wrath climbed with the rising minute hand as it swept toward eleven o’clock. This night-owl business must be checked. The ormolu clock was chiming the hour when the front door opened and the new curate came tiptoeing upstairs. Bill Monaghan jacked his huge body out of its pastoral armchair and started for the brown crockery knob of his study door. The whole duty of pastors being to discipline and regulate curates, Monaghan was about to tear the door off its hinges and do his whole duty, when his ireful blue eye alighted on a small photograph in an oval silver frame.

  The photograph was of a young priest with roached hair and a square, cleft chin. The eyes of the young priest were neither raised to heaven nor cast down to earth. They were level with hope, steady with purpose. The photograph of Father William Monaghan was taken the day after his ordination. How proud his father and mother had been of that picture! They had placed it in the silver frame and kept it on the parlor mantelpiece in South Boston till they were both dead and gone. A long while now. Neither they nor William Monaghan had ever realized that this photograph was a composite picture of all the big-footed, capable-handed curates that had built the Archdiocese of Boston, a brick at a time. Pastor Monaghan had no such notion even now. The picture merely reminded him that most young curates have parents somewhere, and that no great harm comes to the priestly cloth when stroked by a mother’s admiring hand.

  The thought did not entirely blunt his intention to give Father Fermoyle a good dressing down. He jerked open the door and, in the manner of a clipper-ship captain asking a second mate why in God’s name the vessel wasn’t getting anywhere, queried:

  “Are these your usual hours, Father Fermoyle?”

  A soft answer, thought Stephen, is indicated here. “I’m sorry if I’m late, Father. It won’t happen again.”

  “See that it does not.” Monaghan was about to close the interview and his door
when he noticed that the hair of this long-legged young priest was slightly shower-sprinkled, as though he had been walking in the rain. In contrast to Milky Lyons’ dread of dampness, this sign of hardihood in a curate was almost endearing. Certainly a matter to be investigated.

  “Step into my room, Father Fermoyle.” Monaghan’s crafty eye estimated the probable amount of water glistening in Stephen’s hair. He ventured a testing remark. “I see you’re not afraid of a little rain.”

  “I like rain,” said Steve.

  “Sit down,” said Monaghan.

  Into a sag-bottomed Morris chair Stephen sank unevenly, and gazed about the room. Study, office, bedroom, Monaghan’s lair had the incoherent no-period look that only a hard-working celibate can give a place. Nothing matched anything else. An ancient roll-top desk of fumed oak, its pigeonholes crammed with envelopes, ledgers, blueprints, and canvas coin bags, clashed with a surly black walnut bookcase full of unread religious periodicals. The lumpy four-poster bed disagreed with the brass hatrack on one side of it and an oleograph of St. Cecelia playing the organ on the other. A mangy carpet covered the floor; from the ceiling hung a crystal chandelier of the Welsbach gas-mantle era, now wired for electricity. The crystal pendants of the chandelier carried on the feud by jangling noisily whenever a streetcar rumbled past.

  Does it have to be as dreary as this? thought Steve. He remembered Quarenghi’s study: white-walled, bare except for a flat table, a hard chair, a shelf of books in red and gold. The cell of an anchorite. But this room —what was it trying to say about the man who lived in it?

  Collarless, carpet-slippered, hands locked behind his back, and his great meat-colored face thrust forward, Monaghan began pacing the track between window and door. He was trying hard not to glance at something—and that something was his curate’s feet. The attempt failed. Monaghan left off his pacing, and stared point-blank at Stephen’s shoes.

 

‹ Prev