The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “The rude cries of the bleacherites would be too much for me, Paul. Besides, I’m way behind on my milk route. I’ve got some parish calls to make—and today is the God-marked time for making them.”

  Father Paul Ireton wiped the sweat from the blue-black bristles of his cleft chin. “Well,” he shrugged ironically, “if a curate wants to get a world’s-eye view of the Church, there’s no grimmer way of getting it than by making parish calls on a blood-hot August afternoon.”

  IT WAS two P.M. when Father Stephen Fermoyle began his parish rounds on Wigglesworth Street. Named after Michael Wigglesworth, a colonial Protestant minister, the street was now a stagnant backwash of workingclass Irish. Beyond it lay the city dumps and the Mystic Marshes, the latter traversed by a meandering stream in which Father Fermoyle could see some boys bathing. No. 44, the last house on the left, was a creosoted barracks with a flat roof and three crazy verandas sagging from its blistery brown facade. Father Steve entered its cracked, plastered vestibule; a penciled legend over a doorless letter box read: J. FALLON—TOP FLOOR. He climbed steeply, passed a gloomy little boy and girl, patted their heads, then climbed again. Without pausing for breath, he knocked at a scratched door on the third story. Slippered steps shuffled down the hallway; the door was opened an inhospitable two inches.

  “Who is it?”

  “I’m Father Fermoyle from St. Margaret’s. I was just going by—and thought I’d drop in on you.”

  Kate Fallon, completely gone about the teeth and middle, but with her hair up, opened the door with decent courtesy. “Come in, Father. The hallway is dark, and look out for the cot where my Perley sleeps, but come in. I’m just giving Jerry his soup.”

  Down a corridor stale with bedclothes, disinfectant, and the mingled odors of cabbage, fish, bacon, and cauliflower, Father Stephen followed her into the living room. Sun beating down on the flat roof made the room roasting hot, yet all the windows were closed. By a cluttered table sat a gaunt man, rigid as a mummy, clothed only in a suit of long underwear commonly known as balbriggans. In his left hand he held a funnel attached to a rubber tube. The other end of the tube disappeared through a little hole just below his Adam’s apple.

  The man did not rise or speak.

  “Jerry, this is Father Fermoyle,” announced Kate with considerably more cheerfulness than the situation warranted. “He’s come to make us a little call. Sit down, Father, and I’ll go on giving Jerry the rest of his dinner.”

  Father Steve sat down on a broken-bottomed cane chair and watched the strange ingestive process going on before his eyes. Kate Fallon took the funnel from her husband’s hands, raised it slightly above the level of his mouth, and carefully ladled into it a tablespoonful of beef broth. She waited two or three seconds for the soup to gurgle down, then poured another tablespoonful into the funnel. “Tastes good, eh, Jerry?” She turned to Stephen. “He had an accident ten years ago,” she explained. “One of his great thirsts came over him in the middle of the night, and he got up for a hair of the dog, you might say, but instead of putting his hand on the right bottle, he put it on the wrong one, and swallowed down almost a pint of sulpho-naphthol.”

  Father Steve cringed. Sulpho-naphthol was a cleaning fluid, caustic as carbolic acid. “Merciful God!” he exclaimed at the thought of the damage Jeremiah Fallon must have done to the membranes of his throat.

  “Merciful God indeed,” said Kate. “We’re lucky Jerry’s alive. It’s only through God’s mercy that he pulled through. His throat’s closed up entirely, and he can’t say a word for himself; but thanks be, Dr. Farrell cut a little hole just like you see, and now Jerry does his eating through a tube.”

  Father Steve fanned himself with his black hat.

  “It’s warm, I know, Father,” said Kate, “but we can’t open the windows because Jerry might get a draft, and if he catches cold Dr. Farrell says there’s no hope for him.” She switched the conversation to Steve. “You’re the new curate just out of the seminary at Rome, I hear.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Fallon.” Rome had never seemed farther away. Nor could he devise any conversational link between the Eternal City and the top floor of 44 Wigglesworth Street. He sat there sweating, lost for the little parish chitchat that Kate Fallon was longing to hear. Fumbling for a peg on which to hang one rational remark, he found it in an unframed photograph of a boy and a girl tacked to the wall. “Are those your children, Mrs. Fallon?”

  “Yes, that’s Perley and Mamie taken twelve years ago, the day they were confirmed by Bishop McArdle. They’re twins. Mamie’s married these five years and lives in Roslindale. Four children she has, counting the baby that’s just come. Perley works in the rubber factory. He’s a fine boy, Father. Without his wages I wouldn’t know where to turn.” Kate gazed unbelievingly at the picture. “Twelve years ago. That was before Jerry drank from the wrong bottle, and a year before Father Monaghan came to St. Margaret’s.”

  “You must have known the old pastor, Father Halley.”

  Kate’s eyes went to the ceiling as if following the gown of an ascending angel. “How well I knew his sainted ways! Holiness breathed out of him like air breathes out of you and me. ‘Twas a pity he had to be sent away. What became of him, I don’t know.” She recovered the present. “Can I be making you a cup of tea, Father?”

  Stephen rose hastily. “Thank you, no, Mrs. Fallon. I must be on my way. So many calls to make this afternoon.” He laid his hand on the balbrigganed shoulder of the voiceless man sitting rigidly in the armchair. A clammy dampness, smelling of death, exuded from the nightmarish figure of Jeremiah Fallon.

  The corporal works of mercy … visit the sick, bury the dead.

  “God gives us strength to bear the crosses He lays upon us, Mr. Fallon,” said Stephen.

  Jerry Fallon’s eyes glazed like those of a codfish in the bottom of a dory, stared unblinkingly at the young priest.

  Kate Fallon was fumbling in the depth of a black handbag. Now it was coming. Steve turned his face away.

  “Here’s a little something for your private intention, Father,” said Kate, holding out a half dollar.

  “No, no, Mrs. Fallon. Really—I can’t. Buy something for Mamie’s baby.” Over her protests, past her shapeless bulk, he was down the dark hallway. “Good-by, Mrs. Fallon. I’ll remember your husband in my prayers.” He stumbled over Perley’s cot, found himself on the landing, and ran down three flights of stairs. The little boy and girl were sitting silently where he had last seen them. Without stopping to pat their heads, Stephen tumbled into the streaming sunlight of Wigglesworth Street.

  A terrible revulsion gagged him. Was this the high calling to which he had dedicated himself? Were these the labors that he must carry on till the end of his days? A distaste for the whole business of the priesthood overcame him; he felt hot, nauseated, unclean. Useless now to tell himself that the two people in that suffocating, mean room were gentle, uncomplaining souls, bearing their grief with heroic fortitude and mutual love. The gurgling of the soup down that horrible rubber tube, the codfish stare in the eyes of the afflicted man, and the odor of encroaching death rising like a grave motif from unlovely flesh—these swept over Stephen Fermoyle in an hour of desperate fatigue and drenched him with loathing and disgust.

  Utterly lost, and desperately in flight from the realities of his vocation, he stood under a grocer’s awning at the corner of Wigglesworth and Main Streets. He wanted to get far away from the smell, feeling, and remembrance of the Fallon nightmare. But where could a young priest go, what could he do on a broiling August afternoon? It was still early; many parish calls might yet be made—but Stephen lacked the will to make them. Should he return to the dim sacristy of St. Margaret’s, fling himself down at the altar, acknowledge the sin of overfastidiousness, and pray humbly for a renewal of strength and love? The idea oppressed him. For the first time since his ordination, he had no wish to lift up his heart in prayer. Worse, he feared that if he asked for succor, only a vast deafness would hear his plea.

&nbs
p; An open trolley car, orange-colored, bearing the sign WAKEFIELD COMMON, clanged toward him. Stephen knew Wakefield slightly—a semirural hamlet at the extreme northern end of the trolley line. He had played baseball there occasionally while in high school, and recalled a small lake, scarcely more than an ice pond, that bordered the town. I’ll ride out to Wakefield, he thought. The open country will do me good. He swung aboard the nearly empty car, found a seat on the shady side, and gratefully let his sweating face be sponged by the little breeze whirled up by the car’s motion.

  Wakefield Pond, once a rendezvous for canoeists and picnickers, had long ago fallen prey to the weedy ills that afflict small bodies of fresh water. Rushes and pond lilies rimmed its banks; the stilts underneath the dock of the canoe livery had snapped with rottenness, and the chute of an abandoned icehouse was overgrown with creepers. Stephen circled the lake to its farthest tip, sat down on a patch of pebbly sand, and gazed dejectedly at the brownish water. A lethargy, physical and spiritual, crushed him. He took off his shoes, shed his coat and Roman collar, and lay on his back, gazing up at the midsummer clouds drifting like fleecy spinnakers across a blue sea. For a long time he watched them sail highpiled, weightless, uncontaminated by the sick griefs of earth.

  “Happy as a lark,” “free as the wind,” “lonely as a cloud.” How tempting for distracted human beings to wish themselves into the condition of natural objects! The poets were always doing it. He smiled a little at the sentimentality of poets, closed his eyes, dozed lightly. Into the shallows of his nap fell a splashing pebble of sound: Stephen sat up just in time to see a veteran pickerel leap out of the pond lilies, snatch at a waterfly, and dart back into the protective forest of reeds. The grace and surety of the pickerel moved Stephen to a kind of admiration; the fish suggested an unconscious metaphor too elusive for his tired mind to grasp.

  Absently he began taking off his clothes, and stood for a moment contemplating the unusual sight of his own body naked in the sunlight. From a frame already too bony, he had lost fourteen pounds in the first three months of his curateship; his skin was colorless—“green trying to be white”—and the great extensor muscles of his arms and legs ached with fatigue. Unbidden, two lines from Baudelaire sprang to Stephen’s mind:

  O Seigneur, donnez-moi le force et le courage

  De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans dégoût.

  Baudelaire! How, thought Stephen, do I happen to be quoting Baudelaire? Then he remembered where he had first heard the lines. He was in Rome; it was his third year as a seminarian. Monsignor Quarenghi was lecturing on mysticism, explaining the painful steps of the illuminated soul in its progress toward God.

  “At first, all is warmth and light,” said Quarenghi. “The soul, rejoicing in its loverlike kinship with God, traverses a luxuriant, flowering terrain. Suddenly the landscape changes, becomes an arid desert. God’s presence is withdrawn. A sense of bereavement and emptiness assails the heart. Joy turns to dust, the salt of prayer loses its savor. It is indeed the dark night of the soul.”

  The burning brown eyes had closed, as if drawing Quarenghi into a remembered darkness. “Such, my friends, is the classic pattern repeated over and over again in the lives of every great mystic—and every priest. A truly illuminated soul persists in its search, but the weak and malformed spirit, overcome by world-weariness and corporal disgust, sinks into despair.

  “Consider the case of Baudelaire, an imperfect mystic whose fastidious senses, outraged by appearances of ugliness and decay, deceived him into morbid self-loathing. Few poets have ever been more talented—or more pitiful. It is as though our Lord, having fallen for the first time, had permitted Himself to be overcome by the futility of His travail, and never risen again to bear His cross.”

  By the edge of this New England ice pond, overgrown with weeds and rushes, Stephen heard Monsignor Quarenghi’s elegant Tuscan syllables: “You will all be assailed, my dear friends, by the very real temptation to believe that you have been forsaken by God—that your priesthood is in vain, and that the weight of mortal grief and sin is more than you can bear. In the midst of your anguish you will ask of Him a sign, some visible ray of His unchanging light in a world of hideous darkness. I am sorry to say that this visible sign will rarely be given. The burning bush of Moses, the jewel-encrusted dove of Theresa, the Tolle lege of Augustine—these are no longer the style, as in the simpler days of saint and prophet. The light will be interior; you must look for it within.”

  But here there is no light, thought Stephen. Disconsolate, he waded into the lake across a sharp-pebbled beach, and the stones hurt his feet. He saw an island of pond lilies in the center of the lake and swam toward it. The entangling stems of the lilies grasped at his ankles as he circled the floating garden and inhaled the special perfume that rises from water flowers. He floated face toward the sky, and this time the sight of the sailing clouds filled him with peace. Stephen was not a pantheist, accustomed to finding God in dells and birch groves, but was it not a kind of worship to exalt the Creator of natural beauty in slow rhythmic strokes through water scented by sedge and lilies?

  Filled with a new tranquillity, he turned toward shore. Face buried in the water, he moved in leisurely strokes, diamonds dripping from his arms, and when he turned his head to breathe, each intake of air was an act of praise. His eyes were closed now, the better to enjoy the embrace of so much sweetness. Once more he felt the pebbly beach beneath his feet, and this time its stones were marvelously smooth.

  Stephen stood knee-deep in the lake, and opened his eyes on a world curiously transformed into greenness and beauty. Who is the patron saint of little ponds? he wondered. And it was then that he saw the pond lily clinging maniplewise to his wrist.

  The sign! Natural and miraculous, the stem of the lily lay across his forearm like an emerald ribbon, reminding him of the labors and burdens of the priestly vocation.

  “Load me more heavily with Thy secrets, Lord,” he murmured, and bent his head to kiss the dewy blossom.

  At five o’clock, refreshed and strengthened, he put on his clothes and walked toward Wakefield Common. An open car marked MALDEN was standing at the end of the trolley line. He got aboard, and as the conductor gave the two-bell starting signal, Stephen slipped his hand into the pocket of his black coat, pulled out his breviary, and read his Office for the Time with serenity and devotion.

  CHAPTER 5

  WITH FEAST, fast, and changing color of vestments, the ecclesiastical year wore on. September brought crisper weather and the Nativity of Our Blessed Lady. October slipped past in an ocher haze: All Souls’ Day trod upon the eve of All Saints’; the long Pentecostal cycle drew to a close, and the blessed season of Advent began. With purple vestments the coming of the Infant was celebrated—the beginning of a new cycle of joy to the world, and the Incarnation of new hope for man.

  How frail that hope seemed under the assault of war! From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, men faced each other at bayonet length. In Flanders, the poppy fields ran red before their season; in the Masurian Lakes, armies perished. The trenches grew longer; the deadlock of Europe dragged on.

  In blood-red vestments, on December 26, Stephen celebrated the feast of his name saint, Stephen the first martyr. The Epistle for the day recounted the age-old story of that earlier Stephen who, full of grace and fortitude, saw the heavens open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. But even in that younger age, when the personal splendor of Christ still illuminated the world, men could not sustain the vision. They ran violently upon Stephen, stoned him to death. He fell asleep in the Lord, forgiving his persecutors in words of loving severity. And then, from the Gospel, Father Stephen read Christ’s lament: “How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?”

  Smiling at the homely tenderness of the hen-and-chicken simile, Stephen was unvesting after Mass, when young Jeremy Splaine came up. Jeremy had become Stephen’s favorite altar boy. Nothi
ng clownish these days about Jeremy’s handling of the Book and bells. He was a little master of liturgy now, and a daily joy to Stephen at early-morning Mass.

  There was a troubled query in Jeremy’s blue eyes, and one of them was black. “Father,” he began, “is it true like it says in the Collect for today that we should love even our enemies?”

  “That’s what it says, Jemmy.”

  “Does that mean I ought to love some Episcopal kids that make fun of the skates my father gave me for Christmas?”

  “I think it includes Episcopalians, Jem. But why should anyone make fun of your skates?”

  “Because they’ve got straps,” said Jemmy.

  “And what,” inquired Steve, “do other skates have?”

  Jemmy burst forth, “These sissy Episcopals have aluminum skates that fasten right onto their shoes. The blades are hollow—they go like blazes. Well, yesterday afternoon me and some other altar boys went up to Spot Pond to play hockey, and these St. Jude kids—they’ve got a choir team—began to laugh at my strap skates …”

  “That got your Irish up, eh?”

  “It sure did. But I came right back at them. ‘My skates ain’t screwed onto my shoes,’ I said, ‘but me and my brother and Dave Foley here, we’ll beat you playing hockey.’”

  “You played them?”

  “Yeh, we played them all right, Father.”

  “And,” suggested Steve, “they beat the pants off you. Those St. Jude sissies skated all around St. Margaret’s tough guys?”

  Jeremy Splaine nodded. “They goose-egged us, fourteen-nothing.”

  Stephen pretended to mull over the tragedy. “Did you have a little disagreement afterwards?”

  “Well, we sort of threw snowballs”—Jeremy hung his head—”with rocks inside.”