The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  Caporetto … the greatest military disaster of modern times.

  Gaetano Orselli set his handsome teeth into the gold braid on his forearm and ripped the insignia of his rank off his fine London-made uniform. In frenzy he pulled the glossy curling hair of his beard out in handfuls. Here he was, anchored at Malta, cribbed and cabined in the obsolete Garibaldi, a cast-iron ark built in 1905—the single Italian component of a British-commanded Mediterranean patrol. To the proud Florentine it was agony enough that his countrymen were giving the world an example of poltroonery that would make Caporetto a reek forever in the nostrils of men. But unbearably worse were the sneering condolences of the damned Inglese!

  “Fortunes of war, old fellow … might happen to almost anyone.”

  Orselli’s tongue was bleeding, his face gray with humiliation, as he stared again at the newspaper accounts of the lost battle. It had come true, the thing he had always known: Italy would gain nothing from this war, neither territory nor power. And now, not even honor. Too many factions in politics, and in the army a divided command. Cadorna the Freemason had not admitted Capello the clericalist into the full confidence of his larger strategy. Generals at swords’ points; dissension, subversion, open mutiny in the ranks. And in Parliament too many parties sapping a government already rotten at the core.

  So many parties, and every party had its own press. Orselli gazed at the dozen journals spread under his gloomy eye. Left, right, and center, they all agreed as to the scope and horror of the catastrophe, and disagreed as to its cause and cure. In one of the journals a stentorian editor bellowed: “The scattered spears of Italian power must be grasped in a single strong fist, and bound together into an unbreakable sheaf of fasces. …”

  Orselli nodded. “It is the only way.” The paper was the Popolo d’Italia and the name of the bellowing editor was Benito Mussolini.

  UNDER the oriental lanterns of the Dreamland Dance Pavilion, Mona Fermoyle dipped and hesitated with Benny Rampell across a waxed half acre of paradise. In the violet glass mirrors that ran along three sides of the hall she could catch ecstatic glimpses of herself floating in Benny’s arms to the heavenly music of Mack Hallette’s Syncopators. And when Mack himself stepped into the orange glow-light and lifted his saxophone in a special arrangement of “Beautiful Ohio,” Mona, forsaking all others, clove unto Benny alone.

  “If it could always be like this,” she whispered.

  “Darling, it can. It will. Always.”

  “But you’re going to be drafted.”

  “Not till next summer. Dentists get exemptions till they finish their course. The war may be over by then.” His lips found her ear. “Darling, I’m crazy for you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Let’s get married before I go.”

  “Sweet, I want to. So much.” Mack Hallette’s music faded, disenchantment of reality set in. “But what would I tell my family?”

  “Tell them anything. Say a justice of the peace married you to a Jew. If that’s too brutal, tell them nothing. Only marry me.”

  Pure masculine plea for the thing most wanted was met by feminine tactic of delay. “Wait a little longer, Benny … just a little while till I figure out a way. …”

  Mack Hallette’s sax took it on the upbeat again. Once more forsaking all others, Mona Fermoyle dipped and hesitated across a waxed half acre of heaven with Benny Rampell. Nothing ever got decided, but everything was all right as long as she and Benny could catch glimpses of themselves floating together in the violet-colored mirrors of Dreamland.

  AS A CHRISTMAS PRESENT befitting duties of a curate in the North Temperate Zone, Corny Deegan gave Father Stephen Fermoyle a pair of four-buckled arctics with heavy rubber soles. Thus shod against the terrible winter of 1917-18, Stephen stepped out on his ceaseless round of parish duties. To the sick and the housebound, he brought the Eucharist in its golden pyx, and on many a night of falling snow he carried the case of holy oil down unplowed streets to anoint the eyes, lips, and limbs of the dying.

  Sheer routine, most of it, yet a touch of drama colored Steve’s priesthood now and then. Early in January, he climbed a swaying extension ladder to hear the confession of Fireman Miles Harney, trapped under a fallen girder in the Commercial Warehouse fire. While men worked frantically with hacksaws to cut Miles free, Stephen lay down on the scorching floor, placed his ear to the doomed fireman’s lips so that a little tent of privacy would cover his final act of contrition.

  “Better get going, Father,” gasped Miles, “the walls will be buckling any minute.” Three minutes after Stephen went down the ladder, the warehouse wall caved inward.

  By Ash Wednesday, which came early that year, the heavy soles of Corny’s gift overshoes were worn through.

  At about the same time, Stephen completed his translation of The Ladder of Love.

  Not once during his labors had he given a thought to publishing Quarenghi’s essays. The work had been a challenge and a delight in itself. But now that two hundred pages made a thickish sheaf on Steve’s desk, a natural desire to give the work an audience began to ferment in his mind. He tested the idea on Milky Lyons, who become greenishly pale at his confrere’s audacity.

  “Publish a book?” he gasped. “Why … why … Steve—curates can’t do that.”

  “You mean there’s a papal decree against it?”

  “No, but”—the idea of printing anything was too much for Milky—“what will Monaghan say?”

  “I’ll certainly have to get his permission. If he says ‘no’—then it’s no. But after all, I didn’t write the book, Milky. It’s only a translation, you know.”

  “Better pick a good time to broach it to him,” was Milky’s timid and very sound advice.

  It was after an excellent dinner of barley soup and roast beef that Stephen laid the manuscript before his rector. Monaghan had never seen a book manuscript before. “What’s this?” he asked testily, fingering it as though it were a specimen in alcohol.

  Briefly, Stephen explained the nature of Quarenghi’s book. Dollar Bill lighted one of his special Havanas and examined the title page.

  “Hmmph … The Ladder of Love. In plain English, what would be the meaning of that?”

  “Well, Father, you know how the angels are ranged in heavenly choirs—cherubim and seraphim nearest the throne, and the others taking their places lower down?”

  “Yes, yes.” Happy to show that he was up on such matters, Monaghan puffed his cigar like a robed theologian. “They sing Hosanna in excelsis all the time.”

  “That’s it. Now the author of this book suggests, inferentially, of course, that similar rungs of spiritual experience exist on earth. Each of us sings, so to speak, in a different choir.”

  Monaghan looked up sharply. “Did anyone ever doubt it?”

  “No, I suppose no one ever really did.”

  “And we all try to sing the same Hosanna in excelsis, each in our own way, don’t we?”

  “Yes …”

  “Then what’s all this grand wordage about?” asked Monaghan, riffling the pages of the manuscript.

  Stephen considerably cooled down, tendered his ace.

  “Would you like to read it and find out?”

  “God forbid. I’ll take your word for it. But you came in here to ask me something, Father.”

  “I want your permission to hand this manuscript up to the diocesan censor. If he approves, it will then go to the Cardinal for his imprimatur.”

  Monaghan considered the matter from the only viewpoint that really concerned him. “Will this … ah … little typing item … be getting the parish into trouble with Num—I mean His Eminence?”

  “I don’t think so. The Cardinal might even regard it as a fine compliment to Rome.”

  “He might. Then again—but I wouldn’t presume to be reading the thoughts of a Cardinal.” Monaghan looked up at Stephen with paternal fondness. “It’s a risk you’re taking, Steve. His Eminence is a great hand for letting one know who’s the cook and who�
�s the potatoes. If you want to take the chance of being boiled in your jacket, and if you assure me that this book contains no scandalous or heretical matter, why, yes—you have my permission to hand it up to the diocesan censor.”

  “Thank you, Father,” said Stephen. That very night he mailed The Ladder of Love, together with the original much-annotated volume of La Scala d’amore, to Monsignor Linus Sully, censor librorum for the Archdiocese of Boston. It was April 20, 1918, almost three years since he had taken up his work at St. Margaret’s.

  THREE YEARS had wrought changes in the Fermoyle household at 47 Woodlawn. The welt in Din’s forehead, the wound of vocation cut by his motorman’s cap, was deeper; the bison hump of his great shoulders more pronounced. Since the operation his leg pained less, but still it pained, and he dragged it coming home from work. Much of the bounce had left Celia’s step, too. Nursing Ellen meant running up and down the back stairs twenty times a day; the preparation of special meals (Ellen’s dishes and laundry had to be kept separate to protect the rest of the family) meant double duties at the stove, sink, and washtubs. There was an increasingly blue discoloration of Celia’s hands, and her upper teeth had been replaced by a dental plate. Because the plate was uncomfortable she seldom wore it during the day; as a result her upper lip had sunken, and the robust beauty of her late forties was, at fifty-three, quite fled. Yet since Celia Fermoyle was a woman who never looked at herself in the mirror, her only inkling of change was the dragged-out feeling that a good night’s rest—when she got it—could no longer banish.

  Even with George away at war, the house was packed to the eaves. Ellen’s return from the convent and Florrie’s marriage to A1 McManus (she had insisted on bringing her husband home with her) had filled the second-floor bedrooms. Bernie, chronically jobless, was crowded into the attic. “A temporary arrangement till Bernie finds something permanent,” was Celia’s way of putting it. But the temporary arrangement had a terrible permanency that Bernie was unlikely to disturb. He slept till eleven every morning, ate the hearty breakfast that Celia cooked for him, borrowed a half dollar from her, and disappeared till dinnertime. Promptly at six P.M. he would come whistling up the front stoop, kiss his mother, sit down at the piano, and literally sing for his supper.

  This placid, if somewhat overcrowded, domestic hive, with its workers, drones, and sick queen upstairs, was a happy enough home except for the goading fury in the breast of Florence Fermoyle. Marriage to A1 McManus had not soothed that fury. To tame Florrie would have required the imagination, nerve, and whip hand of a Petruchio, but if A1 had possessed these qualities Florrie would never have married him. A1 belonged to the weakfish species that most women contemptuously throw back into the sea; tepid good temper and a mild interest in baseball, bowling, and Kelly pool were his only visible assets. Merely looking at him seemed to irritate Florrie.

  If A1 irritated her, Mona drove her quite mad. The wrangling between the sisters had deepened into a feud. Possibly Mona’s stemlike fragility and camellia complexion heightened Florrie’s awareness of her own coarse-pored skin and piano legs. Mona’s unwillingness to help in the kitchen, her slack habit of leaving her bed unmade while she primped and adorned her person, were tormenting burrs under Florrie’s heavy girdle. But the chief source of contention was the fact that Mona, despite a hundred family scenes, still “went around” with Benny Rampell—a non-Catholic, a Rabbi’s son, a Jew.

  Coming home for dinner one Friday in April, Stephen felt the tensions reverberating through the house. As he took his place at the table, it seemed that everyone was eating off a drumhead. How different his home-coming dinner three years ago! Then, all was promise; the Fermoyle wave was still creaming to a peak. Now, the moment of promise had passed. Din running down, Celia wearing herself out with overwork, Ellen ill upstairs, Bernie a jobless sponger, Florrie a hippish shrew. And Mona? Stephen looked at his sister’s face, dewy, lineless, pretty as a violet—what about Mona? Too often, Steve observed, she was sullen, rebelliously withdrawn, ungiving either in word or manner. Over her blue-black eyes she had pulled a visor—not the gay domino that questing maidens wear, but a stubborn mask of hostility. Sometimes Steve could coax her to lift it; any talk of dancing would bring her around (wasn’t she Celia’s daughter?) and once, after he had brought her an Irene Castle dance record, she had put it on the phonograph and floated about the room petaling with laughter.

  “That’s what I’d really like to be,” she breathed in confidence. “Not a stenographer in a plumber’s office, but a ballroom dancer.” She drew him behind the green portieres between the living room and front hall. “No one home here knows about it, but Benny and me won a contest a couple of weeks ago.”

  “What kind of contest?”

  “Oh, for amateurs. At Dreamland. Benny’d be a wonderful dancer if he didn’t have to study so hard about teeth and things.”

  The old difficult subject of Benny once more. Steve had hoped she would go on, and was at the point of asking her to let him meet Benny sometime. But Florrie had come in just then, and the visor had dropped over Mona’s eyes again.

  It covered them now. Stephen tried to catch her interest by tricking out the table talk with bright pennons of anecdote. But on this listless air, no flag could flutter. Celia was tired to the bone nursing Ellen, Din was silently holding out his teacup to Florrie for “more of the same.” And Florrie, wiping the tea drops from his graying mustache, nagged, “Be more careful, Pa.” A1 McManus, a chin-in-plate eater, was putting away cod and potatoes with two hands. Florrie signaled him to lift his face a little. A1 obeyed. Then, as Mona rose from the table, the storm broke.

  “Where’re you off to?” challenged Florrie.

  “Shh-sh,” warned Celia. “Ellen must not hear you quarrel.”

  “I don’t care who hears me.” Florrie jabbed her fork belligerently at Mona’s back. “She’s going to help with the dishes tonight for a change.”

  Mona whirled, small infantile teeth parted, a kitten become cat. “You and your old dishes,” she screamed. “I’m sick of you, them, and everything in this house.”

  Florrie split her with a deliberate shaft: “You’d rather go dancing with your sheeny boy friend, I suppose.”

  The gibe goaded Mona to frenzy. On a small table beside her stood a chalk statue of the Holy Family. She picked it up, and using the venerable head of St. Joseph as a handhold, flung the statue at her older sister. Aimed in rage, the image of the Holy Family struck the platter of codfish. Statue and platter broke, sending fragments of crockery, fish, and chalk flying across the table.

  A piece of the broken statue struck the red welt on Din’s forehead; from the wound of vocation a red drop fell. He sat dazed for a moment, then in awful anger lifted his great hand to strike Florrie, author of the quarrel. If the blow had fallen, it would have broken her neck.

  The blow did not fall. Self-mastering forbearance held it off. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph forgive us,” said Din in the frightened whisper of a man who has seen the Adversary coming in the front door.

  Having once escaped the wrath, Florrie tempted it a second time. “Let’s have a showdown on this,” she screamed. “Either Miss Fancy-pants stops running around with a Jew, or I walk out of this house—salary, bag, and baggage.”

  Stephen was tempted to say, “What a blessing!” But the contentious words were checked by a voice, near at hand but far off, familiar yet terribly strange, drifting in from behind the green portieres. It was the voice of an exorcist, a mingling of incantation and lament:

  “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our Hope …”

  Through the green portieres glided the figure of Ellen Fermoyle, barefooted, wearing only a nightgown of unbleached cotton. Her hands were clasped like a bride carrying a wedding bouquet; the waxen pallor of long illness lay on her forehead. Is she awake or asleep? Stephen wondered. He could not tell. Ellen’s eyes were open, and she appeared to be searching for something.

  “What are you loo
king for, dear?” asked Celia with the tenderness a mother uses on a sick child.

  Wandering puzzlement crossed Ellen’s face. “Where has the statue gone?” she murmured.

  “What statue, darling?” asked Celia.

  “Don’t you remember, Mother? The statue of the Holy Family that used to stand on this little table. Has someone taken it away?”

  No one answered. Mona stood chilled with fright. Florrie’s face was in her hands. And from Din’s downcast forehead trickled a dark ooze of blood.

  Celia was at Ellen’s side, gently urging. “Come back to bed, dear. We’ll find the statue again.”

  Ellen’s voice lost its exorcist quality; she became again the Fermoyle daughter. “Let me stay downstairs a little while, Mother. It’s so lonely up in my room when I hear you talking and laughing around the supper table,” she said. “So often in the convent I remembered our happiness together. More than all my other memories of home. Tonight, Mother, I had to see the faces of my brothers and sisters once more.”

  She called them each by name, characterizing them by their nobler parts. “Florrie, responsible and hard-working. Be patient with us, Florrie. Mona, pleasure-loving and beautiful. Beauty must be generous, Mona. Sweet-tempered Bernie, lover of song; never change, dear Bernie. And Stephen”—she turned to her priest-brother—“fisher of souls; one of the divining few. Ah, such a chant of praise should go up from this home!”

  Bewilderment puzzled her again. “Perhaps if we all looked for the statue, we could find it.” She approached the table as if to begin the obsessional search anew. “Look!” She pointed to a sharp fragment of blue plaster, a portion of the Virgin’s robe lying in the platter of codfish. “There’s a piece of it now.” Ellen’s hand went to her mouth as if to suppress the utterance of reality. “Oh.”