The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  Still stoning each other, thought Stephen. Aloud he said, “Fourteennothing is quite a trimming. Still, it’s not a matter for a religious war. Seems to me that what St. Margaret’s needs is a little coaching.”

  “Yeh, I guess we could use some, Father. Dr. Lethbridge, the Episcopal minister, coaches his kids.”

  The Groton touch. “Well,” said Stephen, “I haven’t been on skates for four or five years. But when I played forward for Holy Cross—”

  “You played for Holy Cross! Geez, Father, I mean gee, Father—would you coach us?”

  “I’d do anything to back up that Collect for St. Stephen’s Day. Get your gang up at Spot Pond this afternoon at three-thirty. I’ll be there with skates on.”

  The next month was one of the happiest times in Stephen Fermoyle’s priesthood. Full of grace and fortitude, he did great wonders among the skaters of St. Margaret’s. He showed them how to nurse a puck across the ice in the crook of a hockey stick, how to pass the hard-rubber disk in team play from man to man instead of dashing down the pond with it alone. The boys took on style—but no amount of style could keep their cheap strap skates from falling off at critical times. Stephen dreamed of fitting out his squad with hollow-tubed shoe skates; he priced these desirable items at Troland’s Sport Shop, and found that six pairs of shoe skates would stand him two weeks’ salary. Whereupon he called up Cornelius J. Deegan and said to that knightly gentleman:

  “Corny, I need thirty dollars to buy shoe skates for six little hockeyplaying demons.”

  “Shoe skates, is it? When your dad and me were boys we slid across Liffey ice on the seat of our pants.”

  “I know, Corny. But my altar boys are playing the Episcopal hockey team.”

  “Episcopals!” exploded Corny. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  The next day St. Margaret’s swarmed onto the ice in aluminum shoe skates, while the Knight of St. Sylvester stamped up and down the edge of the pond warming himself with the fire of Irish pride. The ragged jackets of Stephen’s boys troubled Corny. “You’ll be needing sweaters with a big gold St. M. on the breast of each and every one,” he burst out—and straightway the team had sweaters.

  “Arrange the game, Jemmy,” said Stephen after two weeks of practice. “St. Margaret’s as ready as she’ll ever be.”

  The game was played on a day of iron New England cold. Sharp skates rang against blue ice as hard-muscled boys, inheritors of the world’s toughest tradition of play, struggled against each other. It was strictly a North American clash; as Stephen watched the two teams play he knew that no Greek or Italian boys had ever moved so rapidly or with equal grace. With the score 6-6 and a minute to play, Stephen saw Jeremy Splaine snatch the puck from a scuffle of hockey sticks and streak down the pond like a zigzag wind. But now the St. Jude captain, a longshanked blond youth, shot in obliquely, hooked the puck away from Jemmy, and was off toward St. Margaret’s goal for a heartbreaking score.

  Episcopals, 7; Catholics, 6.

  But no religious war broke out. When the game was over, Jeremy Splaine shook hands with the St. Jude captain. Even Corny Deegan, setting up hot chocolates for both teams at Morgan’s Drugstore, had to admit that the Protestant lads had an honest bit of an edge somehow.

  Dog-tired when he went to bed that night, Stephen turned back the pages of his Missal to the Gospel for St. Stephen’s Day. “How often”, he read, “would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?”

  Would it ever be otherwise? Would men one day drop the stones of hatred, forget the names of sect and nationality, and join in praising one Name forever and that Name alone? Stephen Fermoyle doubted that they ever would, but the last image in his mind before he fell asleep was that of a red-cheeked Jemmy Splaine extending his hand in a sportsman’s embrace to the St. Jude hockey captain.

  PILL HILL is the irreverent name given to a steepish incline in the heart of South Boston. It is a street of doctors; every door sports a medical shingle, and the higher a patient climbs, the larger the fee he pays. Major surgeons crown the hill; halfway down are the consultation rooms of wellestablished general practitioners; clustering at the base of the slope are the dingy offices of physicians young in reputation, green in judgment, or shady in practice.

  On a shabby door at the foot of Pill Hill hung a sign bearing the simple legend: John Byrne, M.D. By Dr. Byrne’s location, medical bargain hunters knew that his fee was one dollar. In the year since the sign had gone up, an increasing number of patients with or without a dollar bill (mostly the latter) had passed through the paintless portal into Dr. Byrne’s office, where they received as thorough a going-over and as thoughtfully written a prescription as could be had all up and down the hill. John Byrne’s fame was growing and if his income would only grow in proportion, all would go well with Dr. John and his newly taken wife, Rita, born Fermoyle.

  It was nine thirty-five, one April evening, when Dr. Byrne closed the door behind his last patient, a Mrs. Julia Twombly who suffered from dropsical legs and a chronic tanning of her liver, brought on by drinking twenty cups of tea a day for thirty years. Julia Twombly also suffered from another long-standing ailment, lack of cash. She tendered Dr. Byrne a coin characterized by her as “my last half dollar in the entire world, except one.” By pressing the coin back upon her, John Byrne had kept his evening receipts just under four dollars. He had seen fifteen patients and had collected a total of $3.85.

  He walked through the railroad flat to the kitchen, where his wife sat having an aftersupper visit with her priest-brother, Stephen Fermoyle. The men greeted each other affectionately. “Don’t see you often enough, Steve,” said John. He kissed his wife, then handed her the little wad of money he had taken in that evening. Rita counted the bills and silver, then helped her husband out of his white surgical jacket.

  “Your coat’s the wrong color, darling,” she teased. “It should be black like Steve’s here. Then you could work for nothing all week, but drag down a swalloping big collection on Sundays.”

  “A percentage player,” said Stephen. “What do you do with all the money your husband gives you?”

  From a shelf over the kitchen table, Rita took down a red spice tin marked Cinnamon and popped a dollar bill into it. “In this house,” she announced to Stephen, “Cinnamon means Rent. Whereas Clove”—she took down a yellow tin—“means installment on office equipment.” Rita put a dollar bill into the yellow tin. “And Nutmeg means baby clothes.” She dropped the loose change into the nutmeg tin. “Which leaves a dollar for food and other unnecessaries.” Rita waved the remaining bill triumphantly.

  “What’s John’s share of all this?” asked Stephen.

  Dr. Byrne’s arms were around his wife. “Ever hear of Allspice, Steve? That’s what I get.” He kissed Rita twice. “It’s a rather unbalanced diet! How about some quick carbohydrates as in Shredded Wheat?”

  Stephen had never seen his brother-in-law in such buoyant spirits. Marriage had brought color to his sober personality. Now as they sat around the kitchen table, eating cereal from blue-ringed bowls, John impersonated one of his dead-beat patients reading a list of symptoms from a slip of paper.

  “Oh, Doctor”—John mimicked the whiner’s recital—“I suffer the pangs from green and yellow spots before my eyes, a mortifying drip from my nose, a knifelike pain between my shoulders, and an empty, gone feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have a strain at stool; scanty, hot urine in the morning, and a bathing, cold sweat at night. I need a little something for a general weakness in front and a rash behind—not to mention the carbuncle big as an egg under my right knee, the torments of rheumatism in my left big toe, and a twinge of numbness in the soles of both feet.” John Byrne grinned. “Can you imagine trying to diagnose a case like that in twenty minutes?”

  The patient’s mixed bag of ailments somehow reminded Stephen of the hopeless catalogues he so often heard in the confessional. How did a medical man handle su
ch cases? “I’d be interested to know what you did for him,” he said.

  “What could anyone do? He was a malingerer with alcoholic complications—broke, undernourished, and determined not to work. I lanced his carbuncle and wrote him a shotgun prescription—strychnine, caffeine, and cascara—which ought to hit everything but the numbness in the soles of his feet.”

  So much doldrum misery in the world—stagnant grief that neither medicine nor religion could move. Sometime, thought Stephen, I’ll explore the matter with John Byrne. For the present he was content to keep the conversation on a shoptalk level. “How’s the surgery coming, John? Getting your share of gall bladders and appendectomies?”

  “Haven’t opened a belly for three months, Steve. You’d think at least one derelict would collapse on my front stoop with perforated ulcers—the stuff they drink would burn holes in a tin roof. But no such luck. I open my office door hoping to see a nice thyroid or emergency hernia—and what flashes before me? Running noses and numbness in the soles of both feet.” John’s grin was on the rueful side. “I guess the story’s got around that I’m strictly a pill-and-powder man.”

  “Don’t believe a word of it, Steve,” protested Rita. “Make him tell you about the new outpatient clinic he’s just started at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the wonderful surgery he’s doing there, free.”

  John was his old sober-sided self again. “Rita makes it sound too altruistic. The fact is, Steve, that the better-known surgeons on Pill Hill—like anywhere else—hog the major operations for themselves. It’s next to impossible for a new man to get a bowel resection or even an appendix. The only things left are the minor specialties.” John Byrne crunched another Shredded Wheat into his bowl. “That’s why I’ve gone in for peripheral vascular surgery.”

  “What would that be?” asked Steve.

  “Varicose veins, mostly. It’s a wide-open field. The big fellows aren’t interested, and the quacks murder people. But new surgical techniques are coming along fast, and I’m practically the only man in South Boston that knows about them.”

  “Where does the free clinic at St. Joseph’s come in?” asked Steve. “Aren’t you doing enough charity work right here in your own office?”

  John Byrne explained. “Surgeons need hospital connections, Steve. They can’t work without a hospital any more than a priest can function without a church. But here’s the catch—most surgical staffs are full up. A newcomer has to win a place for himself. Well, I made my varsity try about a month ago by suggesting to Sister Domenica—she runs the show at St. Joseph’s—that her hospital needed a free varicose-vein clinic, and that John Byrne was the man to run it.”

  “He got the job,” said Rita. “Three mornings a week, no money, but plenty of operating. See how a surgeon gets his knife inside the door, Steve?”

  Stephen regarded his sister and brother-in-law with new admiration. Yokemates, eager to make the hard, rugged climb together. “You two can’t miss,” he said.

  Pill Hill was dark when he came down Dr. John Byrne’s stoop, a few minutes later. The patients had all gone home; the diagnosing and prescribing were over till tomorrow. As Stephen climbed the steep ascent, his mind was filled with cheering thoughts of men and women paired for love and work, fulfilling themselves in daily acts of human goodness and mutual consolation. What though the world be plagued by physical disease and its spiritual counterpart, sin? While people like John and Rita Byrne loved each other, the forces of hell could not prevail against them or the world in which they lived.

  The important thing, Stephen saw, was not to be oppressed or deceived by the multiple symptoms of evil, but to search beneath these appearances for the divinely implanted realities of courage, faith, and charity that throbbed in the heart of man.

  It was well past eleven P.M. when he entered the parish house in Maiden. A letter and a package were lying on the table in the front hall They were postmarked ROMA and addressed to the Reverend Stephen Fermoyle. He snatched them off the table, bounded up to his room, and read the long-awaited letter from Alfeo Quarenghi.

  CARISSIMO STEVE: [the letter began]

  Did you think I had entered the order of Sepulto Vivo and taken vows of eternal silence? I would not blame you, dear friend; your Roman correspondent has indeed been remiss. Yet I speak truly; not until this hour of snatched pleasure have I had a free moment to answer your letter, so kindling with news and warmth that it makes a little glow among the dreary tundra of papers on my desk. I envy you, Stephen. All that you tell me about St. Margaret’s and your incomparable Monaghan makes me realize that a priest’s greatest happiness is found in parish labor. Whence, curator of souls, springs my joy at your good fortune, and my longing someday to taste a crumb of that priestly fortune myself. I pray only for a swept room, a small altar, the faces of my people. Deo volente, the day will come.

  But it will not be tomorrow. I had hoped, after ten years of teaching (not altogether barren if they helped bear fruit such as you, Stefano), for an assignment to parish work. But war comes, and in the search for men who can pass muster as linguists, I am combed out of pedagogy and pressed into service as a minutante, a kind of upper clerk in the Vatican Secretariat of State. The Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with forty countries. Even in peacetime this calls for an enormous amount of correspondence, but I really can’t describe the avalanche of detail that has fallen upon us since the war began. As a minutante, I spend sixteen hours a day working up the raw material of notes and dispatches to French, German, and English ambassadors. I then hand my scrivenings up to my immediate superior, a diplomatic genius, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli. He gives my clumsy phrases the gloss of diplomacy, then presents them to our overworked Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacobbi, a tireless Titan who hurls Vatican bolts in the name of our Holy Father.

  These bolts have, of course, no temporal power, yet they do have an effect in the realm where politics touches upon morals. Let me cite an example. Last week His Holiness protested to General von Falkenhayn that the German treatment of Belgian noncombatants was needlessly cruel. Monsignor Pacelli delivered the note in person to von Falkenhayn, and absorbed the usual amount of Prussian bullying. Finally our Nuncio told von Falkenhayn that if Germany persists in its inhumanity to defenseless women and hungry children, it will forfeit the moral support of the Christian world. A weak argument? It worked! Might not one recast the wisdom of Archimedes: “Give me a moral lever, and I will move the world”?

  Stephen remembered a similar lever in the hands of another Italian. A gray battleship, bristling with guns, rising and falling in a North Atlantic swell. What force could oppose its temporal majesty? Then Orselli’s innocent question: “How would it look in your London Times—‘British Warship Fires on Italian Liner’?” That lever had worked, too. Yes, undoubtedly a power existed above and beyond the temporal. If one only dared use it to the full, thought Stephen.

  The saddest part of the Vatican’s position [the letter went on] is this: No matter what truth the Holy Father utters, it is distorted and misinterpreted. If he says: “Loving all our children equally, we must by necessity and logic remain neutral when they quarrel” —then the British press abuses him for not condemning Germany! Does he beg for disarmament? He is accused of mouthing pieties! Yet when he offers his very practical and impartial skill as a mediator, he is warned not to meddle in matters that do not concern him. The Holy Father was shocked—stricken is a better word—to learn that the secret treaty between England and Italy (the very treaty which won Italy to the side of the Allies) contains a clause barring the Vatican from any part in peace negotiations. Is it not ironic that the voice whose only plea is Pax should be excluded from the shaping of the peace prescribed by Christ, and longed for by man?

  But enough of this dismal strain. In your last letter you asked what progress I was making with my volume of essays. I can report that the Speranza Press has just published it under the title La Scala d’amore. I send you a copy with this letter. What I’ve tried to do in t
his thoroughly unimportant book is to show the various rungs of mystical experience—some orthodox, others not quite so sanctified—recorded by souls in every age and climate. We Catholics are apt to think of mysticism as our monopoly. But witness the case of E. Swedenborg, or again, the strange experience of your Mormon-founding American, Joseph Smith. Wherein does his vision of the “two glorious personages” who accosted him differ from those of Theresa or Augustine? Don’t answer till you’ve waded through the book, Steve. Then tell me what you think. It will give this mumbling cogitator fresh courage if, far off in a country I have never seen (but someday hope to see), a priestly colleague is mulling over the awkwardly set down conclusions of La Scala d’amore.

  So late the hour, so drugged with sleep the world! Soon the first day-shallows of the sun will lap at the turrets of the Leonine Wall, and new clamors of diplomatic and military strife will begin again. Forgive me if I sound weary-hearted. Really I’m not, Steve. Just weary-headed. I shall fall asleep now, trusting as always that our days are in His hands. Good night, dear friend. Write soon and fully to

  Yours devotedly in Christ,

  ALFEO QUARENGHI

  Stephen let his breath escape in an exhalation of delight. By some epistolary sleight, Quarenghi had conveyed his heart and mind to the heart and mind that needed them most. He smoothed out the letter, and started to read it again. “Carissimo Steve … this hour of snatched pleasure … I envy you … a priest’s greatest happiness is found in parish labor. … I pray only for a swept room, a small altar, the faces of my people.”

  Pious cliches dispensed for the benefit of the lower orders? On two counts, no. Quarenghi’s patrician soul could distill no untruth. And odd though it seemed, Stephen realized that this distinguished scholardiplomat, destined to glorious preferment in the Church, was somehow being deprived of his birthright as a priest.

  Would I change places with him? thought Stephen.