SPIRIDION LARIOS, proprietor of the Gamecock Café, peeled a ten-dollar bill from an indecently large roll, and handed it to a stoutish young man in an ascot tie and chamois-topped shoes. “Go ‘way,” said Larios. “You giva my customers earache. Pipple say, ‘Mr. Larios, you got nize place here, but who tol’ that Irish Thrush heza piccola-player?’”
Larios laughed at his own misrendering of the old joke and poured himself a giant thimbleful of Metaxa brandy.
His EMINENCE LAWRENCE CARDINAL GLENNON sat at one of the three ebony Steinways in the magnificent study of his episcopal mansion, repeating contemplatively eight sedative measures of Bach. To facilitate the fingering of this passage, which in the Cardinal’s opinion contained the whole secret of counterpoint, he removed the massive sapphire from the third finger of his right hand, and laid it on the music rack. He solved the passage, and, moving on to the next invention, raised his large hazel-gray eyes to an early Mantegna that was gathering to its umbers the last golden rays of an afternoon sun. Tranquillity lay at least epidermis-deep upon the Cardinal’s domed forehead, and softened the diagonal gash of his large mouth. But the involuntary twitchings of the trigeminal nerves, running from the lobe of his ear to the sole (so to speak) of his heavy but not fat chin, would have revealed to any member of his retinue that Number One was about to blow off. No member of the retinue was in the study at the time; they had all taken to their quarters and were busy battening down the hatches in preparation for the coming storm.
The Bach-Mantegna medicine lulled Lawrence Cardinal Glennon for about twenty minutes before he remembered why he was dosing himself. Abruptly now it all came back to him. He rose from his piano stool and jammed the sapphire ring back onto its official finger. He snatched irritably at a copy of The Monitor, the Catholic weekly published under his direction, took a brief vexed glance at its front page, then slapped it against the polished surface of his pearl-inlaid desk.
“Is there no priest in this Diocese who can write English with a bite to it?” he bellowed.
No answer forthcoming, he jerked at a brocaded bell rope. His secretary appeared with Japanese celerity, pencil poised, pad in hand. “Scour every parish in New England for an editor who’ll get some crunch into this paper,” said the Cardinal. “Meanwhile send Monsignor O’Brien in to me. I want him to write a ringing editorial against the murders going on at the Boston Maternity Hospital. Crushing babies’ heads, are they? I want every doctor in Boston to know just where the Catholic Church stands in this matter.”
He ground his massive ring into the palm of his left hand as if sealing the doom of baby-killers. “Send O’Brien in to me.”
IN THE KITCHEN of their five-room railroad flat on Tileston Street, Maiden, large suety James Splaine, stonemason talked hopefully to his wife. “Julie,” he said, “that new young priest is a saint. He talked to me for an hour when I went to see him this evening. Not a word of religious guff. He says to me, ‘Jim, if you had a job in Maiden here, a job that didn’t take you past all those swinging doors on Dover Street, do you think you could stay sober?’ ‘Why sure, Father,’ I said. ‘It’s the whiff of the stuff coming out of those places that makes it so hard.’ Then he says, ‘I’ve put in a word to Pastor Monaghan for a job on the foundations of the new school. You can walk to work and home again without ever passing a barroom. The rest is up to you, Jim.’”
Julia Splaine, stringy-haired, greasy-wrappered, put in a word. “Is it true now what he said about me collecting your pay?”
“True as true, Julie. Every Saturday you just go down to the priest house and get my envelope from Father Fermoyle himself.”
Blessed be die mother who bore him, thought Julia Splaine; she must be a wonderful woman.
THE REVEREND WILLIAM MONAGHAN unloosed the three center buttons of his cassock, stretched his large legs under the roll-topped desk in his room, and lighted his evening cigar. His favorite dinner of barley soup, roast beef, and boiled potatoes lay just behind him, and an evening of “counting up”—the happiest time of the week—lay just ahead. In the top drawer of his desk were four canvas bank bags, three of them fat with bills and coins collected at the nine-, ten-, and eleven-o’clock Masses that Sunday; the fourth bag held the miscellaneous coins, mostly nickels and pennies taken that week from the poor boxes, the votive-candle offerings, and the pamphlet racks.
He was halfway through his first cigar when he started counting; his third cigar was a cold stub when the last penny had been tallied. He added up his jottings: $1156.44. A creditable sum. Deduct the tithes he must forward to the diocesan treasury, and there would still be more than a thousand dollars left to carry on the work of his parish. A payment on the new electric organ, the salaries of his curates, the upkeep of the parish house. Not to mention a little sum that must be set aside for the repair of the church furnace and steam pipes, long overdue.
Not to mention the new parochial school.
The pastor drew out a small deck of bankbooks, unsnapped the elastic band holding them together, and studied the figures therein: Maiden Savings Bank, $5500; Maiden Trust Company, $3500; First National of Boston, $11,000; Medford Savings Bank, $4200. He totaled them: $24,200. His glacial blue eyes thawed when he saw that his cash position amply warranted the start of the much-needed parochial school.
From the altar at High Mass that morning he had made his announcement to a crowded upper church. “Dear Parishioners,” he had said in his hoarse pulpit voice, “by virtue of God’s grace and your generosity, we will start digging tomorrow on the new school. Ten long years—years of bountiful giving on your part and stewardly saving on mine—have brought us to this propitious time and place. But though a beginning will be made, ’tis only a beginning. The school will cost three times as much as we have on hand, and though the local banks have promised to see us through, this means, my dear people, that you must continue to give, and I must continue to save. Meanwhile the regular expenses of the parish do not—y’mm—decrease. This church in which you now worship needs new heating equipment; the furnace and the pipes are almost beyond repair. And the house in which your pastor and curates live needs tearing down completely, it’s that old. How often I’ve been stopped on the street and had people say, ‘Father Monaghan, when are you going to build a new parish house for St. Margaret’s? The old one is a disgrace.’ And my answer always is, ‘St. Margaret’s will get a new parish house after the parochial school is built and paid for.’ Meanwhile don’t worry about me or the curates. None of us will be rained on in our beds—you can be sure of that. I will now read the Gospel for this Sunday. But before that, I want to make one more announcement. If any among you are looking for jobs on the new school, don’t come to me. McBurney Brothers, the well-known contractors, are in charge. See them. I’m running a parish, not an employment agency. The Gospel for this Sunday …”
From a pigeonhole in his desk Father Monaghan drew a tube of blueprints, spread them out lovingly, and gazed at the plans of the new school. Three stories high, faced with finest Quincy granite, thirty classrooms, a gymnasium, a recreation hall, a chapel for the nuns. All modern, fireproof, up-to-date. It would be called the Cheverus School, in honor of that long-dead fighting missionary bishop of Massachusetts, Louis Cheverus. The Cardinal himself had chosen the name.
Outside Pastor Monaghan’s window rose the clatter of voices, shrill, foreign-sounding, hysterical. He glanced at his watch: nine-forty-five P.M. What tumult was going on at this hour? Monaghan flung up his window and saw a throng of people milling about in the bricked areaway at the entrance to the basement church. Unseemly. Disorderly. Must be stopped. Pastor Monaghan stepped to his door and called in a shipmaster’s voice: “Father Fermoyle.”
Steve appeared at his own doorway. “Yes, Father.”
“Go down into the areaway and see what all that shouting is about. Sounds like a lot of Pastafazoolis drunk on dago red. Get them out of there. Do you hear?”
“Right away, sir.” Steve clapped on his biretta and slipp
ed downstairs. At the edge of the bricked areaway he heard cries of, “Miracolo! Miracolo! … La bella Madonna ha fatta uno miracolo.” Steve shouldered his way through the mob till he saw Val McGuire braced against the door of the basement church.
“What’s going on here, Val?”
Whey-faced, the sexton explained. “They say a miracle has happened, Father. Some girl came in here this afternoon, lit a candle in front of the Blessed Mother. Then she went home and found that her boy friend, good as dead from a stiletto stab, was sitting up in bed, asking for his spaghetti. These wops have been flocking up in droves here ever since. I’m trying to get them out so I can lock up.”
A woman, shawled, with an infant in her arms, pushed toward Father Stephen. “My baby vomiting these-a three days,” she cried. “The Blessed Madonna will make him keep milk down.”
“Wait, little mother,” said Father Stephen. “We’ll go in together.” Facing the crowd, he lifted his voice and addressed them in the language they knew best.
“Children of the Miraculous Queen of Heaven,” he cried in the declamatory style matching their mood, “listen to your priest.”
“We listen. Speak to us, Father.”
“The Virgin has performed a deed of great wonder here today. You, her children, weeping and wailing in this valley of tears, wish to honor this most tender of advocates. You come to light candles, to pray, to ask her intercession. That is most pleasing to her. But all this must be done in the spirit of orderly devotion. I will lead you. Follow me, in reverent silence, to the feet of the Madonna.”
Sexton McGuire tugged at Stephen’s elbow. “But it’s ten o’clock, time to lock up,” he protested, pulling out his watch.
“Come on, Val, put that ticker in your pocket. Miracles don’t happen by the clock. Help me form them into a single line now, that’s the good man.”
Into the dimly lighted church, down the side aisle to the Virgin’s statue, Stephen led the hushed throng. They packed the pews nearest the shrine, overflowed into the aisle, buzzing like excited hornets. Stephen approached the triple tier of candles blazing in fiery apostrophes before the little niche sheltering the figure of the Virgin. It was a tawdry chalk statue in the style prescribed by local taste and tradition. A gilt-pronged crown sat on the Virgin’s head; beneath a face of serene purity, she held the nestling Infant in the hollow of her right arm, while her left index finger pointed toward the apex of her lily-crowned heart. Kneeling at the shrine, Stephen gazed upward at the statue.
Blood-red drops falling from the Virgin’s heart were splashing in a tiny pool at the base of the statue.
“If I could only dip my finger into that stuff,” thought Stephen. But a buzz like the flight of asthmatic hornets rose behind him. No time for scrutiny now. Emotions were bubbling dangerously. He must drain them off somehow. How?
By prayer. What prayer? The Rosary, of course.
Stephen turned to the people. “This is the first Sunday of May,” he said. “The month of Mary song.” The feeble wail of a retching baby was the only sound in the church. “Let us garland her with flowers—the flowers of the Five Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary.”
Father Monaghan, storming into the basement to find out for himself what was going on, saw five hundred bent heads, and heard his curate’s clear voice uttering the first part of the Angelical Salutation:
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
To which five hundred voices responded:
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Father Monaghan tiptoed out of the church. “He’s sure got a way with these wops,” he murmured.
Father Stephen Fermoyle said the Rosary five times before the crowd was completely calm. Meanwhile the drops continued to fall. There was awe in the eyes of the Italians as they filed singly past the Virgin’s statue on their way out. The last to leave was the woman with the retching baby. “Look,” she said to Father Fermoyle, peace in her voice and eyes, “he has not thrown up since Rosary began.”
It was one A.M. before the church was empty. “Now,” said Father Steve, “we’ll see what goes on.” He opened the gate before the Virgin’s shrine, came close to the statue, and reached out to touch the crimson heart with his finger. As he did so, a soft red splash fell on his fingernail.
He looked upward into the ceiling shadows, high above the Virgin’s head. Rusty water, falling from a steampipe, was leaking down, a drop at a time, onto the heart of Mary! It struck the cheap brilliant color in a solvent splash and continued falling to the floor.
“Wait till Dollar Bill hears this,” said Father Steve.
“The Miracle of the Leaking Steam Pipe,” as Paul Ireton called it, was nipped early next morning by a crew of plumbers. Under the sound of their hammers the mystical music died, but its echo lingered on. It lingered in the heart of Filomena Restucci, who was married to her Vittorio a few days later at a nuptial Mass celebrated by Father Stephen Fermoyle. It lingered in the heart of the shawled woman whose baby died of an intestinal obstruction. And especially it lingered in the memory of Pastor William Monaghan.
“I’ve got myself a curate at last,” he told his crony, Flynn of Lynn. “A funny combination he is, too. A proud-walking American—if carriage is any sign, Gene, he’ll end up with a miter at least—and sprung from good Irish stock, the Fermoyles of Medford. His father is on the cars, I hear, and he has a sister with the Carmelites. But the luckiest part of it, Gene”—Pastor Monaghan put it to his colleague as one Leinster man telling a tale of wonder to another—“the luckiest part of it is … he knows how to get along with those Eyetalians.”
HAVING GOTTEN HIMSELF a curate, Father Monaghan now proceeded to put him to work. There was plenty for Steve to do. With his priesthood honing in him like a trident, he waded chin-deep into parish waters. He celebrated Mass daily, alternating with Father Lyons at the six-thirty A.M. service. He baptized babies, and was quite expert at soothing their shrieks after the holy water had been poured over their soft pink heads. “Where’d you learn that trick, Father?” asked an admiring young mother after Stephen had hushed her squalling infant.
“Had plenty of practice as a kid,” said Steve, laughing. “I played first base with a baby in my arms till I was fourteen years old. It’s all in the jounce. Here, let me show you. No, not straight up and down—babies like the horizontal jounce, stomachside up. But when you bubble them, lay them over your shoulder—like this.”
On three evenings a week he stood house watch, patiently listening to the troubles of garrulous old women who came in to have a medal blessed, then launched forth upon the unselected details of their life. Getting them out the front door with their tale still in the telling was a triumph of tact. Observing Steve’s manner with these “old biddies,” Monaghan promptly made him spiritual adviser to the Married Women’s Sodality.
“But what’ll I say to them?” Steve was genuinely puzzled.
A cheerful grunt rumbled out of Monaghan’s chest. “Your mother and father had a big family, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And when your father came home from work, your mother had a hot supper ready for him, didn’t she? Night after night, no matter what else happened, there was the supper, and he always got served first, didn’t he?”
“Why, yes, he did. She always used to say, ‘A hungry man is an angry man,’ as she handed him his food.”
“A smart woman. And when supper was over she washed the dishes while he read the paper in his stocking feet, didn’t she?”
“Usually.”
“Then they had a few words, maybe about money or the children, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so pleasant—which might have ended in a family brawl if one of them hadn’t given in to the other. Isn’t that the way it was with them?”
“Just about,” said Steve.
“Then around nine or nine-thirty your fa
ther went to bed while she worked around the house, darning socks or making a batch of bread while she spoke with her children. And when it was all done, she went upstairs, or wherever their bedroom was, and laid her tired head on the pillow beside him.” Pastor Monaghan’s blue eyes sought confirmation in his young curate’s face. “Isn’t that about the way things went, Father Fermoyle?”
Stephen nodded. Justness and knowledge, uncolored by sentimentality, were in the picture that Dollar Bill had drawn.
“I think now,” said Monaghan, “you’ll have no trouble in saying the few words required of you at the Married Women’s Sodality.” The tight curl in the pastor’s hair seemed to loosen a trifle. “In my judgment, Father, the best training for the priesthood is to be brought up in a big family by a good father and mother. The values are sound. They can be applied anywhere. And were I the Pope, writing an encyclical, I’d say that these values are the hope of the world.”
Stephen did not tell his pastor that a great Pope had already written such an encyclical. Monaghan wouldn’t have read it, anyway. He wouldn’t have to, thought Steve. Thereafter, when the new spiritual adviser to the Married Women’s Sodality lacked material for his homilies, he merely tapped the gusher of his old knowledge of Celia and Dennis Fermoyle.
BY LONG TRADITION, the supervision of Sunday school was automatically taken over by the junior curate. Every Sunday afternoon Stephen heard children lisp, stammer, or reel off the answers to questions in the blue-green catechism. (Q) Who is God? (A) God is the Creator of heaven and earth and all things. (Q) Why did God make you? (A) God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
How simply the penny catechism stated the essential terms of the covenant between God and man! In its taut counterpoint of question-and-answer Stephen heard echoes of Aquinas the Angelic Doctor thundering out his divinely inspired propositions. And here, seven hundred years later, those propositions, unchanged and unimpaired, were being given new utterance in a Western tongue of whose existence Aquinas had never dreamed. Might it not come about that these same questions and answers would one day be recited in languages yet unformed on the tongue of man?
The Cardinal Page 10