Conflict agitated the frail verger. He saw clearly enough that his monopoly of the high altar must now be divided among a herd of young ruffians. A galling surrender. Yet here was a sympathetic and very pleasant priest inviting him to take part in a project that might lead to a—a friendship that a soul as lonely as Lew Day’s could not afford to reject. The struggle showed outwardly in his almost hysterical rubbing of the candlestick with a piece of chamois. Finally the passive part of his nature asserted itself. He laid down his polishing cloth and said submissively, “I’ll do whatever pleases you, Father.”
The emotional note, underscored by a timid lifting of the eyelids, surprised Steve. Embarrassed by Lew’s capitulation—sudden, personal, and complete—he found himself talking too rapidly. “There won’t be much to it … a couple of sessions should whip things into shape. Some of those kids will take on a high polish. I mean …”
The tension was broken by a sound like a herd of yearling bulls all trying to push through the sacristy door at the same time. It was the new crop of altar boys, brash, clumsy, and un-Latined, reporting for their first drill. Father Steve closed Lew’s door behind him and stepped out into the sacristy to take command. He lined the boys up and proceeded to forget all about Lew Day as he gave the jostling, undisciplined youngsters the settling treatment of his voice and eyes.
“Boys,” he began, “from now on, you’re going to have privileges denied to all but special servants of God. You’ll be allowed inside the altar railing; you will ascend the steps of the altar. You will be close to sacred vessels; and the Mass Book will be entrusted to your hands. It’s important, therefore, that your hands be clean.”
A sudden thrusting of hands behind backs. “We’ll spend the next fifteen minutes at the sacristy washbowl,” said Steve. “Small boys first. And don’t spare the soap.”
Afterwards, hands scrubbed, hair combed, and faces two or three shades cleaner, the boys lined up again.
“That’s fine,” said Father Steve. “Outwardly, you’re in prime shape. Now the next thing is what we call ‘interior preparation.’ Before anyone, priest or server, approaches the altar, he must spend a little time in prayer and meditation. Anyone here have a prayer to suggest?”
Silence complete and paralyzing.
Father Steve saw Jemmy Splaine still wearing his green sweater with the horse-blanket pin. “Jemmy,” he asked, “what’s the one prayer that’s always acceptable?”
Jemmy made a lunge into the unknown. “‘Our Father’?”
“Perfect. St. Augustine himself couldn’t have given a better answer. Now let’s kneel and go through it together, very slowly and distinctly, as if we were saying it for the first time.”
Scuffing, they knelt. Steve then led them through the great prayer, making it a lesson in diction and reverence. At the Amen he nodded approvingly. “On your feet now. Next time we’ll say it in Latin.”
They chattered like delighted monkeys. “Latin? Yeh. Pig Latin? No, real Latin … He says next time we’ll say it in Latin.”
“Can anyone tell me,” asked Steve, “why the Mass is said in Latin?”
No immediate takers. Then the tentative hand of Andy Curtin, a stutterer.
“Well, Andy?”
“The M-Mass is said in La-Latin so that p-people w-won’t know wh-what you’re s-saying.”
One for the eternal book, thought Steve. He remembered his own childhood puzzlement at the strange cadences falling from the priest’s lips. Belief that the language of the altar must be bound up with some incomprehensible secret had troubled him until the day he had assisted at Mass for the first time. Father George O’Connor of the curly brown hair and consecrated hands—young, smiling, newly ordained—was the celebrant. Burning with boyish love for his hero-priest, Stephen had watched him turn to the congregation, open angelic arms, and utter the ancient greeting, “Dominus vobiscum” “Why, that means ‘The Lord be with you,’” Stephen had told himself in astonishment. And when he heard his own piping voice respond, “Et cum spiritu tuo” all strangeness vanished. The timeless greeting, understood and answered, had made him an initiate in the sweet fellowship of the Mass.
And now, twenty years later, he was initiating others. From lip to lip the fire of the unchanging Word would always pass.
“No, Andy,” he explained gently, “it’s not that the priest wants to make a mystery of what he’s saying. Just the opposite. He wants everyone, in all ages, everywhere, to understand exactly what he’s saying. The Mass is said in Latin because no other language—except Hebrew, perhaps—is so universal and changeless. When we say ‘Dominus vobiscum’ today, it still means ‘The Lord be with you,’ just as it meant twenty years —or twenty centuries—ago. Now say it after me.”
“Dom-i-nus vo-bis-cum”
He fed the syllables to them one at a time, as a bird feeds bread crumbs to its young.
“Dom-i-nus vobiscum” they repeated.
“Et cum spiritu tuo. That means, ‘And with your spirit.’”
“Et cum spiritu tuo” they piped in ragged chorus.
“See,” said Steve, “you’re really talking Latin now.”
He drilled them in the opening words of the Mass, coached them in the management of their hands and feet as they approached the altar. At the end of an hour they were bowing like grave little bishops, and at the end of two weeks they could perform quite creditably the not-too-difficult task of serving at a Low Mass. Steve knew, however, that they could not yet undertake the more complicated ritual of High Mass sung at eleven A.M. on Sundays.
Once more he tapped on the door of Lew Day’s cubbyhole. “I’m looking for a deacon,” he said pleasantly. “Could you spare a few minutes this afternoon, Lew?”
Lew Day lifted his spectacled eyes from the vestment he was embroidering. He had been sewing rapidly, and the exacting needlework had puckered his forehead into squinting wrinkles. At the sight of Father Stephen, some of the tension disappeared from his taut lips, and his narrow shoulders relaxed as though the burden of waiting had been lifted.
“I’m ready.”
A nameless embarrassment unsettled Steve. Lew’s trick of tendering more than was asked, his emotional jostling, warned Stephen that he must handle the suggestible young man with extreme caution. To jockey the conversation away from personalities, he picked up the embroidery hoop lying on the workbench. A green satin maniple was stretched across the hoop, and a needle filled with gold thread pierced the cross that Lew had been embroidering. Stephen saw no point in withholding his admiration.
“This is beautiful, Lew!”
“Are you—surprised?”
“Not at all. Why should I be? Every medieval monastery had an artist who did nothing else but design and repair vestments. I remember seeing a fourteenth-century Cluny chasuble, a masterpiece of jeweled brocade, all amethysts and seed pearls. The man who did it must have been a great craftsman.” Stephen knew he was laying on the butter, but continued. “Then there was Cellini, who did the papal cope for Clement VII.”
“Cellini did only the button for the cope,” said Lew quietly. His correction was a warning: “Don’t try to push me around with flattery.” And the prissy fix of his lips said, “I may be emotionally docile, but I’m no intellectual pushover.”
Stephen felt like a man walking through a patch of cockleburs. He was glad to hear scuffling in the sacristy. “Here they come, Lew.”
Part drill sergeant, part wet nurse, Steve marshaled his Low Mass veterans at the end of the sacristy farthest from the altar. Then he addressed them much as Caesar might have addressed his legions on the eve of their departure for Gaul:
“Boys, today we’ll attempt a very beautiful and complicated ceremony of the Church—High Mass. I’ve asked Lew Day to help us, and I want you to do and say exactly what he tells you. Now I’m going to assign the various parts to boys who’ve shown up well during the past few weeks. Jemmy Splaine, you be thurifer, Andy Curtin and Charlie Boyle can be acolytes, and the rest of you fall
in behind.
“High Mass starts as a solemn procession to the altar,” Father Steve went on. “First comes the thurifer swinging the censer—that’s you, Jemmy—followed by the cross-bearer with the acolytes behind and on either side. Then comes the main body of altar boys followed by Lew as master of ceremonies, and last the celebrant—that’ll be me.”
Father Steve surveyed the line-up critically. “Lengthen out a bit—you’re all bunched up in a huddle. Ready, boys? No shoving now. Step off slowly on your left foot. There’ll be music to this. Hey, Jemmy, that’s not a lariat you’re swinging. It’s a thurible, full of smoking incense. Keep it down!”
At the sacristy altar the procession halted while Father Steve and Lew Day regrouped the boys in their proper positions. Steve read the Introit and Kyrie at the Epistle side of the altar; after the Dominus Vobiscum and its hearty answer from the boys, he read the Collect.
While teaching the boys the art of serving, Lew’s Latin was a model of cleanliness and articulation. His demeanor, priestly perfect, touched Stephen’s sense of pathos. So much devotion, so genuine a calling! What pity that the intended vessel should contain a secret flaw!
Stumbling and bumping into each other, the boys floundered through the complex ceremony. In rehearsal fashion Father Stephen moved through the Gradual and Gospel, his back to the fledgling mob. Desperately, Lew Day was acting as a whipper-in, bringing up stragglers, prompting them with word and gesture. The carnage was fearful, but somehow the great drama went forward and its dignity rose above the stumbling.
Three weeks later the new crop of altar boys assisted Father Monaghan at High Mass. Jemmy Splaine swung the thurible with notable restraint. Andy Curtin managed the bells beautifully. It was a distinguished performance all around. William Monaghan glowed with pastoral pride, and even that sensitive plant, Lew Day, managed a smile when Stephen thanked him after Mass.
AUGUST HEAT simmering over the Mystic River flatlands broiled the asphalt pavements and shingled roofs of St. Margaret’s parish. Babies died, houseflies multiplied, the beaches were jammed, and Stephen Fermoyle lost fourteen pounds from a frame already perilously spare. He was working too hard; there was no doubt about it. Celia Fermoyle, heaping his plate with Friday-night codfish, warned him that he was too pale—and Dennis of the walrus mustaches seconded the “take it easier” theme.
“What’s this new color you’re going in for?” he asked. “Is it green trying to be white? Ecclesiastical pallor is one thing, Steve, but the hue of a corpse is another. Be like Bernie, now. Go out to the ball park, sit in the bleachers, and tone up that mushroom complexion.”
Green trying to be white … ecclesiastical pallor … mushroom complexion. Din Fermoyle’s pungent phrases ran like a fugue through Stephen’s weary mind as he drove himself to his parish duties. He was fagged and he knew it. Too thin maybe, too pale perhaps—but because the first rapturous gale of his priesthood had not yet blown itself out, Stephen crowded on more canvas and prayed for the coming of cooler weather.
As the summer wore on, a curious depression and loneliness settled over him. He missed Rome! He missed the magnificent architecture of stone treated by generations of builders who had lifted marble and travertine infinitely higher than the surrounding hills from which they were quarried. By contrast, the poor New England Gothic of St. Margaret’s with its red-brick veneer, its trim of Quincy granite, began to seem cheap and ugly to him. What would the great Bramante, designer of St. Peter’s, say of this edifice? Would Michelangelo smile patronizingly at the chalk statue of the Virgin in the basement? Stephen knew in his heart that altars of jasper and columns of finest cipollino marble were no essential part of the covenant between God and man. Nevertheless, he longed for them.
But more than these, he missed the Roman point of view, the Roman passion for world affairs, that he found not at all in the lives of the people, Catholic or Protestant, he met in his parish rounds.
A great war grinding deeper into its second year of military deadlock and diplomatic impasse had already stripped the delicate gears of Western civilization. Stephen knew that in Rome everyone, from the Pope down to the humblest minutante, was devouring hourly dispatches from a score of chancelleries, weighing and interpreting every shred of information for its bearing, in all latitudes, on the Roman Catholic Church. Eagerly Stephen scrutinized the Boston papers, hoping to catch some emergent hint of America’s role in the struggle. But aside from the military communiques, played up with anti-British emphasis to please Irish readers, he found nothing. On the day that Nuncio Pacelli carried Benedict XV’s peace proposals to the Kaiser, The Boston Post carried headlines “Two-Headed Squash Grown by Weymouth Farmer.” Of the million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston (and the three million Protestants in the same area) few—as far as Stephen could discover—knew or cared about the larger implications of the European struggle.
The Boston Red Sox, hot as pistols, were the focus of attention that summer. Led by dauntless Bill Carrigan, catcher, the Red Sox looked like pennant winners. The Detroit Tigers, sparked by the great Ty Cobb, were the team to beat. Now in August, 1915, a mortal feud existed between Bill Carrigan and Ty Cobb. Carrigan publicly announced that he would block home plate with his two hundred and twelve pounds of bone and sinew every time Cobb attempted to score. Cobb responded by vowing that he would massacre Carrigan with his spikes if he blocked the base line. To the delight of the customers the feud went on all summer. Sometimes Carrigan’s massive bulk would cut off Cobb at the plate; anon Cobb’s flying spikes would slide around, over, or across Carrigan’s shins, for a score. While Cobb and Carrigan made baseball war, the tireless missions of a lanky Cardinal to Germany and Austria, England and France, went notably unrecorded by the Boston papers.
If only I could sit down with Orselli, thought Stephen, he could tell me in ten sentences what’s going on in the world. But since his farewell to the Florentine dandy on the deck of the Vesuvio, Steve had heard from Orselli only once—a brief note saying: “Italy now fights on the side of the stronger diplomacy. Am in command of an auxiliary cruiser in the Mediterranean. Had a good laugh with Ramilly at Genoa last week. Dear friend, preserve yourself for the joy of our many meetings after the war. Meanwhile write me of your apprentice labors in the vineyard. Affectionately, Gaetano.”
No news from Quarenghi. Stephen had written twice, but either the war mails were slow or his old teacher had forgotten him.
Hungry for Roman intelligence, Stephen sounded off to Father Paul Ireton after luncheon one sweltering Thursday. Heat-laden dust from Main Street sifted through the screened windows of the dining room; a cracked hurdy-gurdy unrolled its melancholy program amid the desolations of suburbia. Not eager to pick up the labors of the long afternoon ahead of them, the two curates lingered over some iced coffee and a plate containing six ginger snaps.
Stephen stirred the thin, sweetish liquid with peevish energy and was off:
“Paul, how’d you like, just for a change of pace, to find out what’s going on in the world? What’s really going on, I mean. Not what Annie Regan said about Lizzie Gillen while paring Agnes Doyle’s corns, or how Bill Duffy figures the Red Sox chances for the pennant. But just as a novelty, a mature, world’s-eye view of the world?”
Paul Ireton dipped a ginger snap into his coffee. “I don’t get the importance of it, Steve—this hankering of yours for European information. Suppose a private wire to the Vatican were plugged in beside your bed. So before you fell asleep tonight you’d hear that Nuncio Ragazza had, or had not, just concluded a three-hour audience with Prince Manglewurzle of Trans-Bavaria.” Father Paul lifted the dripping cookie to his mouth. “What could a shavetail curate like yourself do about it?”
“Concedo. Nothing. Don’t misunderstand me, Paul. It’s not that I want to be privy to a lot of palace gossip. But what I do miss here in St. Margaret’s is the sense of being at the pivot of things—a feeling I had every minute in Rome. Something streams out of the stones there—political awarene
ss, diplomatic insight—call it what you please.” Steve drained the sweetened coffee dregs from his glass. “What I feel is that hardly anyone around here has the slightest notion of what’s going on in the world.”
One of Paul Ireton’s ironic smiles, the equivalent of a guffaw from anyone else, loosened the corners of his mouth. “What you’re really grumbling about, Steve—forgive my saying it—is the obscure little part the Church is asking you to play. Shush now! Hear me out. While the chamberlains curtsy and the amethystine nobility tread the center of the stage”—unexpected acid dripped from Paul Ireton’s words—“poor, abused Father Fermoyle frets at his menial task and fears that his chance will never come. He’s ambitious, is Fermoyle. Oh, most vaultingly. After a short three months on the milk route, he chafes for private advancement, and would reorganize the Archdiocese of Boston to get it.”
“It’s not true, Paul. I won’t let you twist my words like that.” Fatigue and heat made Stephen irritable. “Is it ambitious to think of the priesthood as something more than a milk route? Am I a menace to St. Margaret’s because I point out the Church is Roman Catholic—Catholic meaning universal, and Roman meaning Rome?”
Half hearing, Paul Ireton batted down a housefly. “Coast awhile, Steve.” He had the knack, often found in strong-charactered priests, of consigning intellectual problems to a cool limbo located somewhere between indifference and manana. “Let Rome take care of itself. It’s been doing all right for several centuries. They’ve got a good man in charge there, I hear.” He dropped his cavalier tone and became a solicitous submaster advising an overstrained student. “Play hooky this afternoon, Steve. Go see the Red Sox rip the hide off Detroit. It’ll do you more good than all the spiritual self-floggings from here to Compostella.”
The Cardinal Page 12