The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  CHAPTER 6

  FLYING LOW across the Archdiocese of Boston early in February, 1917 the Angel of the Lord might have remarked the following not-unrelated events.

  ALDEN P. KIMBALL, president of the Maiden Trust Company, and a fine old cravatted specimen of the McKinley school, rose to greet the maker of the ninety-day note that lay on his desk. The note, in the amount of $7500, was due tomorrow; the signature on the note was that of William J. Monaghan, and the stated purpose of the loan was to pay for the plumbing of the new parochial school. Banker Kimball half expected Pastor Monaghan to ask for a renewal, and was fully prepared to accommodate him. (“With that signature, gentlemen,” he pointed out to his directors, “how can we go wrong?”) He was not surprised, however, when Dollar Bill tendered him a perfectly good check for $7500 drawn on the Old Colony Trust Company of Boston.

  “Done is done,” said A. P. Kimball, returning the note to its maker. “The only question, Father, is—how do you do it? The man before you—Haley, Hawley?—what was his name?—wasn’t quite up to it.”

  Dollar Bill tucked the canceled note into his wallet. “The name was Halley—Edward Everett Halley,” he said distinctly, as if unwilling to slur over a precious syllable of that name.

  “Ah, yes … E. E. Halley. His signature didn’t mean much in this shop.”

  “St. Francis’ signature wouldn’t have meant much, either,” grunted Monaghan. With a that’s-neither-here-nor-there wave of his hand, he came down to cases. “I’ve a bit of a favor to ask, Mr. Kimball. Next Monday we dedicate the Cheverus School. His Eminence Cardinal Glennon will be the guest of honor, and it’s my hope that some of our local personages will, ah—ornament the platform.” Dollar Bill laid his blue eyes on the president as a carpenter lays his spirit level on a joist. “Will you represent the banking fraternity, Mr. Kimball?”

  A. P. Kimball was on a bit of a hook. Father Monaghan was a good customer, but several of the Maiden Trust Company’s directors didn’t quite approve of parochial education. True, it took a load off the public-school tax (and that was desirable)—but then again, these R. C.’s were coming might-ty fast. Too darn fast, if you asked Mr. Kimball. He tugged at his cravat.

  With no design in the world other than to take A. P. Kimball off an embarrassing hook, Pastor Monaghan said casually: “I suppose you’ve heard that His Eminence is making large deposits of diocesan funds in some of the better-grade suburban banks?” Dollar Bill had no need to add that one hand washes the other. But at the dedication of the new parochial school, Banker Kimball was on the platform to greet His Eminence. They seemed to get on together. Anyway, $40,000 from an entirely new source was deposited in the Maiden Trust Company a week after the Cheverus School opened its doors.

  LEW DAY sat in his sacristy cubbyhole trying to gather courage for the thing he must now do. Lew’s job as sacristan was over; henceforth his duties would be performed by others. With the completion of the new parochial school, a community of nuns had come to St. Margaret’s; they would teach in the school, and, as the sweetest part of their prerogative, take charge of the altar. Monaghan had broken the news a month ago. This was the last day of grace. Lew must go.

  Lew began packing his few belongings: spools of colored thread, embroidery scissors, some assorted needles, and various remnants of material left over from the repairing of priestly vestments. Scarcely an armful altogether, yet that armful embraced everything that had kept Lew Day alive since his rejection from the seminary. An old red chasuble, too shabby for repairing, hung from a hook; Lew folded it reverently, placed it in the suitcase. “Clothe others, Lord, in shining garments,” he murmured, “but for Lew Day, only shreds and patches.”

  A bit of metal polish remained in a can. How use it most fittingly? Lew went to the cabinet where the sacred vessels were kept, and removed the chalice. Returning to his high stool, he spread the last of his metal polish over the golden vessel, and rubbed it with a worn piece of chamois until the chalice gleamed like a king’s cup.

  Occasionally he paused as if listening for footsteps outside his door. If only Father Fermoyle would walk in with supporting courage and a touch of heart-strengthening love! But Father Fermoyle was away, making a spiritual retreat with the Cistercians; he would be meditating in his cell now, or joining others at Compline. Lew Day stopped listening with his ears for Father Fermoyle’s footfall. In his heart he had stopped listening long ago.

  The metal polish was all gone now; no brighter glow would ever be rubbed into the vessel’s golden cheek. Like a child trying not to cry, Lew sat for a long time with the chalice in his hand. Twilight was wrapping the sacristy in violet gauze when he carried the sacred goblet back to the cabinet. This final service completed, Lew stood at the bottom stair of the altar in the manner of a priest about to commence Mass.

  “Introibo ad altare Dei,” he murmured. “I will approach the altar of God.”

  It was dark when Lew stole out of the church, carrying all he owned with him on his one-way journey. Next morning they found him hanging in the coalbin of his mother’s rooming house, attired in the vestments worn by a priest while celebrating Mass. The vestments were old, shabby, and red (the hue of martyrs), and they had been terribly slashed by small, sharp embroidery scissors held by rejected, self-loathing hands.

  BURNING with mystical devotion and tuberculosis, Ellen Fermoyle was carried up the steps of 47 Woodlawn Avenue on a stretcher. The mother superior of her order had made a wise and humane dispensation in Ellen’s case. “To our beloved novice and spiritual sister, Humilia Theresa, now in the last extremity of illness, we grant permission to return to the home of her earthly parents.” No surer death warrant could have been written; its date, stamped on the flaxen parchment of Ellen’s body, was short.

  Dennis Fermoyle took one fiercely proprietary look at his daughter, and determined to tear up the contract between her and death. Single-handed Din was powerless. But connections he had. The best. He decided to use them shamelessly.

  “Celia,” he said to his wife, “our plea must be lifted to the Virgin herself—then handed up, wet with her tears, to Him who cannot refuse His Mother anything she asks in the name of love.”

  Kneeling together in their bedroom, they stormed heaven with the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Din led off; Celia responded. Their voices echoed through the house.

  Lord have mercy

  Christ have mercy

  Christ hear us

  Christ graciously hear us

  They beseeched the Virgin most prudent, venerable, and renowned; they pleaded with Mary, Queen of Angels, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs; they begged Mary—Mystical Rose, Morning Star, Tower of Ivory, Health of the Sick, and Comforter of the Afflicted—to intercede for their child Ellen at the throne of Her Son.

  The Virgin did not intercede in vain. Ellen hung on, sank, burned, sank once more, and hung on again while Din’s preposterous plea and Celia’s unflagging antiphon rang through the house:

  Mirror of Justice,

  Pray for us

  Cause of our joy,

  Pray for us

  Singular Vessel of Devotion,

  Pray for us

  Mystical Rose,

  Pray for us

  The Litany, repeated every night—supported by the medical skill of Dr. John Byrne and Celia’s heroic nursing—began to justify Din’s celestial connections. At the end of February, Ellen was still alive. Death’s chattel mortgage had been torn up, dissolved, abrogated, and spat upon by Dennis Fermoyle.

  Stephen, bringing his sister the spiritual comfort of the Eucharist, marveled at the flaxen stem that had refused to wither in the fires of tuberculosis. An unbelievable victory. At what point, he wondered, did Ellen’s spirit make its unconquerable stand against the awful batteries of disease and death? And what had supported her in the battle? Only to hear Din’s voice ringing through the house, and one knew the answer. Din might call it faith, and faith indeed it was. But Stephen felt that love was also having its way here—
a love so God-partaking in its authority, so steely terrible in its Father-resolve—that neither flesh, nor hell, nor death could prevail against it.

  Lacking such love, Lew Day had killed himself. Possessing it, Ellen Fermoyle could not die.

  Yet, as if undecided about which sphere she inhabited—the world of mystical dream or fleshly reality—Ellen developed strange symptoms of somnambulism. She lived, but became a sleepwalker. Once Celia found her kneeling before the statuette of the Holy Family in the living room.

  “Ellen dear, come back to bed,” said Celia softly.

  “Yes, Mother. But let me venerate the three of us before I go.”

  “What three, darling?”

  “Stephen, me, and Father. See, Father carries him so lamblike, Stephen, I mean. But his other arm supports me, too.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect us,” said Celia Fermoyle, chilled with fear at the very names she uttered.

  THE KETTLEDRUMS of war were really thundering now. Every day brought a new crisis: an American merchantman spurlos versenkt, a larger loan to Britain, a more agonized plea from France. All Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy had failed to shackle the U-boat; fresh atrocities and galling ultimatums incensed the American people. Events stood in a narrow place when the President read his fateful message to Congress on April 2, 1917.

  Stephen heard the news as he came out of the sacristy into the bricked areaway between the church and parish house. Aloysius Quinn, the waddling youth who delivered the Globe, thrust the paper into Steve’s hand and was off again without touching the visor of his cap. Father Steve was about to call Aloysius back and give him a brief lecture on manners when his eye fell on the streamer headline: WILSON ASKS CONGRESS FOR WAR. Transfixed, Stephen read the President’s message:

  The world must be made safe for democracy … right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy … for the rights and liberties of small nations, for universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations.

  Stephen paced up and down the bricked areaway, studying the periods of the noble stylist whose idealism had set the tone of American war-thinking. Moving though the message was (and beautifully timed to coincide with the peal of public opinion), Stephen saw that it lacked the one element which alone could bring peace and safety to the world. That element? Recognition of God’s primacy in the affairs of men. Nowhere was that primacy mentioned. Democracy, the rights of small nations, peace, safety, and freedom—all good and desirable in themselves—were merely parts of a vaster whole which had somehow escaped the notice of President and people. Stephen Fermoyle was neither a cynic nor a pessimist, but he shook his head with foreboding of disaster yet to come.

  He entered the house, folded the Globe in the special way that Bill Monaghan liked it folded, and wedged it between the doorknob and jamb of the pastor’s door. Then he went into his own room and looked up a passage in his breviary:

  Come, behold the works of the Lord … He maketh wars to cease; unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.

  Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

  Four days later, the American nation was at war.

  MILITARY ENGINES began to grind out the materials and personnel of war; the newly discovered art of propaganda became a bellows that fanned America’s temper to martial heat. Four-minute men, editorial writers, cartoonists, and song pluggers transformed the war into a crusade. To insure adequate marchers in the crusade, a compulsory draft became operative on June 5, 1917. Almost ten million Americans registered, and the mass trek to training camps began.

  Bernie Fermoyle’s flat feet kept him out of combat duty, but his honey-boy tenor got him employment as a camp entertainer. George Fermoyle didn’t wait to be drafted. He went into one of the first overseas detachments and got his second lieutenancy at once. Stephen waved him off at a Commonwealth Pier debarkation to the mingled tunes of “Washington Post March” and “Over There.”

  The single greatest surprise was Paul Ireton’s volunteering as a chaplain. He knocked at Stephen’s door late one night and announced quite simply, “I’m going away with the Twenty-sixth Division tomorrow, Steve. May I come in and say good-by?”

  “Come in, Paul. Take my chair.” Stephen sat on the bed and waited for his friend to open up. Paul Ireton was a man you didn’t catechize; he either disclosed the springs of his action, or he didn’t. Usually the latter. But tonight his reserve was broken by a deeply charged impulse to talk.

  “Quick-change Ireton, they’ll be calling me,” he began, “out of the cassock and into the tunic. Different uniform, but same old discipline. ‘Right by squads … forward, march!’ I’ll catch on quickly, don’t you think?”

  “No doubt of it.” (What’s he so bitter about? Steve wondered.) “If you can think up some deathless phrase like ‘Fire when ready, Gridley,’ you may go down in history as the ‘Cast-Iron Chaplain.’” Steve tried to keep it light. “What rank are they giving you?”

  “Captain.” Paul Ireton’s false zip fell away. “I suppose you wonder why I’m going?”

  “Other than patriotism, I can’t think of any reason a thirty-nine-year-old priest should be dashing off to the wars.”

  “ ‘Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country,’ as Horace says. But that’s not my real reason for going, Steve. You came nearer it when you mentioned my age. In a few months I’ll be forty. You can’t imagine what it feels like to be pushing forty—and still without a parish of one’s own.”

  Father Ireton must have remembered his earlier strictures on the subject of priestly ambition, for he burst out, “It’s not a big church that I’m after, Steve. I’d gladly take the meanest ark in the diocese, sleep on the ground beside it, if I could only call it mine.”

  “I understand, Paul. It’s the Jacob in you, craving a flock of his own. But here in St. Margaret’s the flock happens to belong to another Biblical character named Monaghan.”

  “And what a grip he keeps on his shepherd’s staff! He’ll be pastor here for another thirty years.” Ireton rubbed his blue-black chin ruefully. “Let’s see—that would make me his assistant till I’m seventy.”

  “Will marching off to war speed things up any?”

  Paul Ireton had evidently asked himself that very question; he laid down his answer like a well-considered card. “Maybe it sounds calculating, Steve, but I figure that after the war there’ll be a big shake-up in this diocese. It’s got to come. The present pastors are holding on to their parishes like baronial fiefs. They’re getting too—too proprietary. It’s my hunch that the Cardinal is just waiting for the right moment to split the old parishes in half, and give the younger men a chance to build new churches.”

  This passion for building! Stephen had yet to feel it, but sooner or later every priest was consumed—as Paul Ireton was now—by the need to build a church.

  “If ever a man deserved the opportunity to put up a church, it’s you, Paul. And if I were Number One, I’d stick a pin in the toughest spot on the diocesan map and bellow: ‘Build it there, Father.’” They both laughed at Stephen’s fantasy. “Wait and trust, Paul. When the flag-waving is all over, your day will come.”

  Paul Ireton put out a hard-palmed hand. “Good-by, Steve. You’ll pray for me?”

  “In all my orisons.”

  Four hands were clasped now, around, above, and below each other in the wordless supporting embrace that close friends often use in parting.

  PAUL IRETON’S going away left an empty place in St. Margaret’s—and in Stephen’s heart. Thrown together oftener now with Frank Lyons, Stephen discovered that Milky, despite a pallid complexion and fear of rain, was quite up to carrying his full share of parish burdens. Though Father Lyons was not (as Monaghan put it) “the discoverer of dynamite,” he was zealous and
hard-working in the discharge of his priestly office. There hung about him, however, a certain air of immaturity that caused Stephen to withhold the final measure of confidence and affection.

  Other than music, Father Frank Lyons had few internal resources. The only book he ever read was his breviary. Ideas of more than parochial scope terrified his inexperienced soul. He spent most of his free evenings visiting the homes of a select group of parishioners, where he made himself welcome by his willingness to play the piano and be a fourth at whist. It was all innocent enough, though Bill Monaghan might have been somewhat disedified if he could have heard his curate splashing about sentimentally on the best parlor uprights of the parish.

  Milky kept begging Steve to join him in his forays among the whist-playing nobility. Busy with translating Quarenghi, Steve cut him off several times. “I don’t play whist well enough, Milky. Let me off this time, will you?”

  Milky would take the rebuff as though he expected it, and Stephen would turn once more to his task of translating The Ladder of Love. The deeper he plunged into the work, the more he discovered that it was not a mere literary exercise nor a theological treatise. Instead, it was a celebration of love, a new Convivio investigating the mysterious relationship between body and soul. Which dominated which? Where in man’s clayey tabernacle did the soul reside, and was it master or tenant in the house? Quarenghi, mystic and realist, sang the triumphs and limitations of life as men actually lived it. Clear and warm, the stream of his thought glided between banks of flesh and spirit, touching both affectionately in the passage.

  Perfect love, Quarenghi said, was that divine infusion which inclined men to cherish God for His own sake—not as a source of help, or reward, or propitiation, but as an infinite good in itself. Such was the mystical love of Bonaventura, Theresa, and Bernard. But Quarenghi knew also that other kinds of love existed; that human hearts hungered, pitiful hands reached out, and voices pleaded for the mutual consolation that the children of earth are commanded to show each other.