The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  The glaze of half-dream slowly left her eyes as they traveled around the disordered table, gathering up, in fragments of blue, white, and gold, the awful meaning spread before them.

  Stephen prayed that she would not notice the blood on Din’s brow.

  His prayer went unheard. Ellen was awake now. On her father’s face she saw the crimson evidence; by the immortal act of Veronica she acknowledged it. Taking a napkin from the table, she pressed it with maternal pity against Din’s forehead. Her gesture seemed to say: “Only believe, dear Father, that this blood has not been shed in vain.” What she actually said, Stephen could not hear. For Ellen’s lips were buried in Din’s grizzled hair, and he was pressing her close to him.

  “I will carry you upstairs myself,” said Din, lifting Ellen in his powerful arms. A beatific smile lighted her face. At this moment she was not the rejected spouse of the Mystical Bridegroom, but the much-loved daughter of Dennis Fermoyle.

  FLORRIE cleared away the dinner-table debris, and Bernie sat down at the piano. In the everyday manner of mortals, the Fermoyles were attempting to forget the wretched quarrel that had marred the evening. By a sleepwalking miracle, Ellen had temporarily stripped the poisonous leaves from the vine of family dissension. But Stephen knew that it would flourish again, break forth in new strife between Florrie and Mona, unless the roots of the trouble were torn out.

  Celia knew it, too. Sitting on a low chair beside her priest-son, she laid a bluish worn hand on his knee. “Stephen,” she asked, “will you do a great deed of kindness for your mother this night?”

  Stephen knew what was coming. “I’ll do anything you ask, Mother.”

  “Go to Mona. Urge her to give up this boy. Plead with her, Stephen, while she is torn by grief for the sorrow she has caused us. Speak to her heart, Son, speak as a priest and brother. Wring the promise out of her—for my sake and her own.”

  Stephen dreaded the ordeal that his mother proposed to him. His sympathies were all with Mona; even her unforgivable hurling of the statue was the result of Florrie’s nagging. To interfere with the emotions of others, to tamper with their private concerns, was distasteful to him. But with Celia’s hand on his knee, he had no alternative. Heavyhearted, he mounted the front stairs, knocked at Mona’s door.

  “Monny dear; it’s me, Steve.” In the darkness he stroked her forehead. Mona’s muscle tensions told him that the dark visor of her rebelliousness was down and that her small, infantile teeth were tightly set against him. How, either by logic or love, could he reach her?

  Logic was out. Love, then, it must be. Tears sometimes came with love, and if one could get tears …

  “Monny darling.” His lips were close to her ear as he struggled for her soul in the darkness. “Put your arms around me, Monny.”

  No response from Mona’s rigid body.

  “Remember the bear hugs you used to give me when I’d take you down Crescent Hill on my double runner? Before we’d start I’d show you how to wrap your arms around me. I’d say, ‘No matter what happens, just hang onto me.’ And you’d say”—Stephen mimicked the high-pitched trustingness of that little hugger—‘I’ll hang on, Steve.’”

  Without encouragement from Mona, he placed her rigid arms around his neck. “Hang on again, Monny. Trust me once more.”

  He waited till her arms tightened in an embrace that said, “I’ll always trust you, Stephen.” Now that he had softened her, he could proceed. “You know, Monny, you were a naughty girl tonight.”

  “It was Florrie’s fault. She nagged me into it. If she’d only move out, there wouldn’t be any more fights about me and Benny.”

  “That’s not the answer, Monny.” Stephen couldn’t bring himself to say, “You must give up Benny Rampell.” Instead he asked, “Why don’t you let me meet this boy? Maybe he’d want to become a Catholic. Then you two could be married.”

  “He’ll never turn, Steve.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because his father’s a rabbi. It would kill him, Benny’s father, I mean, if his son turned Catholic. They’ve got their pride, too.”

  No escaping it now! “Have you ever thought of breaking up with Benny?”

  “Breaking up? Why, Steve, we’re in love with each other. How can you break up with someone you love?”

  Stephen remembered another such conversation. His first evening in the confessional; the stubborn girl with the faint scent of carnation in her hair. “You must give up this Protestant,” he had said. And the girl’s reply: “I can’t. I love him very much.”

  By his dogmatic insistence, he had driven that girl from him unabsolved. Ah, the futility of dogma to sweep back the tides of the heart. The heart! “Speak to her heart,” Celia had advised. …

  Fowler to thrush he was now. “But if loving a boy leads to family quarrels … hurting your father and mother? Don’t you see, Monny, you can’t go on wounding others, making them suffer.”

  Like a captive bird, Mona struggled in her brother’s arms. She was caught in a net of affection and authority that she lacked strength to break. “I can’t give him up. I’ll die if I do,” she wept. But Stephen felt the weakening flutters of her resistance. He pitied the frail child, but Celia Fermoyle’s voice was at his ear. “Wring the promise out of her—for my sake and her own.”

  “Say that you’ll give him up. Promise me, Monny.”

  In a burst of weeping, Mona tore the promise from her heart.

  Celia was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when Stephen came down. “She’s promised, Mother,” he said.

  “God will bless you for this, Son.”

  But as Stephen walked down Woodlawn Avenue that night he doubted that God’s blessing or any other good would flow from the violent wound he had inflicted on his sister’s soul.

  SCARCELY two weeks after mailing off The Ladder of Love, Stephen was summoned into the Cardinal’s presence.

  The summons came in the form of a three-line note:

  You are requested, on receipt of this information,

  to present yourself at the Cardinal’s residence in

  connection with a manuscript sent to this office.

  Very truly yours,

  MONS. DAVID J. O’BRIEN,

  Secretary to the Cardinal

  Monaghan grunted when Stephen showed him the note. “The tone of it—if anyone should step out from behind a lamppost and ask me—is not exactly warm.” With a Pilatelike dusting motion, he brushed some dandruff off his cassock and handed the note back to Stephen. “Better hop over there.”

  “When should I go?”

  “Early this afternoon. I hear His Eminence gets broodier as the day wears on.”

  Muted chimes from the depth of a Flemish clock bonged two as Stephen entered the Cardinal’s antechamber—a high-ceilinged room of squeezing narrowness. Against a black-walnut wainscot, shoulder-tall, stood tapestried chairs, high-backed, armless, and so widely intervaled that conversation was impossible. Stephen took the edge of an isolated chair and scrutinized the other people in the room. A mendicant friar, sandaled, sat gazing at the shovel hat on his lap. A puffy secular priest—a rector, judging by his flesh and years—nervously opened and shut the gold cover of his hunting-case watch; the clicking, which seemed to reassure him, increased in tempo whenever a member of the Cardinal’s retinue entered. Two or three other people were at the far end of the room. Stephen had the feeling that everyone perched on the coldly formal chairs was expecting summary judgment to descend in awful form very soon.

  A prelate with the purple touch of a monsignor at his throat opened the door of the Cardinal’s sanctum and beckoned to the puffy pastor.

  “His Eminence will see you now, Father Boylan.”

  Giving his watch cover a final click for courage, Father Boylan slid into the presence. When he came out five minutes later, he was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Friar Ambrose … this way please.”

  The sandaled monk arose, passed through the door. In seventy second
s he emerged again with the precipitate, singed look of a man who has taken a loud, round “no” for an answer.

  What in God’s name does he do to them? Stephen wondered. He rose from his chair and was gazing out the nearest window when he heard his name uttered with the exaggerated vocalism of a man in love with his own larynx.

  “Stephen Fermoyle,” the voice said. “It’s been years!”

  Steve knew that voice. It belonged to his Holy Cross classmate, Dick Clarahan—formerly “Dicky the Tonsil”—but now the Reverend Richard Clarahan of resounding pulpit fame and a member of the Cardinal’s palace guard.

  “Hello, Dick.” Stephen held out his hand. He saw no harm in being cordial to an old classmate, even though they had disliked each other in college. “It’s a pleasure to see an old H. C. face in these high chambers.” Stephen smiled: “Oh, I almost forgot. You work here.”

  On Dick Clarahan’s unquestionably fine forehead three lines appeared: two were deprecatory, and the third underscored the others with sheer self-esteem. “In a semiattached way, yes. I deliver the High Mass sermon at the Cathedral on alternate Sundays. People seem to like it.”

  “So I hear. They tell me you take your audience right up the face of the purgatorial cliff—then drop them into burning brimstone a thousand feet below.”

  “Rank hyperbole. Still I wish you could hear me sometime. Benefit no end by your criticism. Where’ll you be next Sunday at eleven A.M.?”

  “Deaconing at St. Margaret’s, probably.”

  “St. Margaret’s? That’s in Maiden, isn’t it?” Dick Clarahan managed to convey the idea that Maiden was somewhere east of Tibet. Creepers of association began to cross his fine marble forehead. “Say, you aren’t the chap who handed up those, ah—Italian translations for an imprimatur, are you?”

  “That’s me.”

  Clarahan puckered orator lips in a low whistle, then motioned with his head toward the Cardinal’s door. “Monsignor O’Brien tells me His Eminence has been in a viceregal pet ever since he laid eyes on your manuscript. What’s it all about, Steve? Don’t tell me you’re still dabbling in mysticism?”

  “In a semiattached way. I can’t seem to escape from such God-bitten characters as Augustine, Bernard, and Bonaventura.”

  “Number One won’t like that” said Clarahan.

  Monsignor Secretary O’Brien was announcing, “His Eminence will see you now, Father Fermoyle.”

  “Dominus vobiscum,” murmured Dick.

  “Morituri te salutamus. Keep the brimstone burning, Dicky.”

  Stephen followed the Cardinal’s secretary through an iron-hinged oaken door, climbed a spiral stone staircase, and entered the hexagonal chamber known as the Tower Room. The dominant motif here was military-ecclesiastic. Mullioned windows, spandrel ceiling, and arras-hung walls made the room seem precisely what Lawrence Cardinal Glennon wished it to seem: the tribunal of a Templar general in the era of the Crusades. Cardinal Glennon had other rooms for other moods, but when he wanted to chill and paralyze a man he chose the Tower Room.

  Across a floor of bare masonry Stephen advanced toward the refectory table where Lawrence Cardinal Glennon, Archbishop of Boston, sat nursing a chronic wrath.

  The causes of that wrath were as numerous and as sharp as the colored glass pushpins sticking in the large wall map behind the Cardinal’s chair. The map represented the Archdiocese of Boston, an area of 2465 square miles in eastern Massachusetts, one of the most thickly populated regions of the United States. More than a million Roman Catholic souls lay in Glennon’s spiritual keeping; the churches they attended were represented by 452 green pins. The ninety-eight blue pins were parochial schools with an enrollment of 86,000 children. The thirty-six red pins stood for charitable institutions—hospitals, orphanages, houses of shelter and mercy, their inmates numbering 40,670. Other pins told the Cardinal that his Archdiocese sheltered communities of Jesuits, Augustinians, Redemptorists, Oblates, and Franciscans, not to mention 1100 secular priests, and 1676 nuns gathered together in some thirty different orders of the Sisterhood. All these must be co-ordinated, disciplined, made to function and prosper, which, under the administrative genius of Lawrence Cardinal Glennon, was exactly what they did.

  To the spiritual cares and mental irritations of administering the second richest Archdiocese in the world, this prince of the Church could now add a fleshly ailment, recently diagnosed. Only last week his physician had pronounced the dread word “hypertension” to explain the maddening headaches of his distinguished patient. The state of medicine being what it was in 1918, not a great deal could be done about the Cardinal’s blood pressure. It was his cross, and for the most part he bore the cranial agony with toughhearted contempt. But today the headache was unbearable, and the Cardinal’s temper was that of a bear pursued by remorseless hornets.

  In addition to these personal and administrative griefs, His Eminence was carrying a still heavier sorrow. To put no fine point on the matter, he was not hitting it off with Rome. Or more particularly, with Pietro Cardinal Giacobbi, the papal Secretary of State. The feud between Giacobbi and Glennon, ancient and unrelenting, had broken out shortly after Pius X had ascended the papal throne in 1903. At a Vatican musicale, Lawrence Glennon—at that time merely an attache of the Propaganda College—had improvised on a theme from Scarlatti. His inventions had been unusually rich and pleasing, but Pietro Giacobbi, the sheep-herder’s son, who disliked both music and Americans, had taken the opportunity to whisper loudly: “This Monsignor plays the piano like a North American cow.”

  At the time Giacobbi’s contempt had meant nothing, politically speaking, to Lawrence Glennon. His chariot was hitched to another star—the brilliant, well-born Merry del Val, then papal Secretary of State. Merry del Val was a lover of music, an adept with foils and horses, and, oddly enough, a superb rifleshot. A deep and lasting friendship had sprung up between Glennon and Merry del Val—a friendship that had flowered long after Glennon returned to the United States. Many favors flowed between Rome and Boston during those years. At the peak of the wave Pius X had placed the red hat of a Cardinal on Glennon’s head and hung a pectoral cross of diamonds around his neck.

  Then in 1914 Pius X died, and Glennon journeyed to Rome for the election of a new pontiff. What more human than to hope that his beloved Merry del Val should wear the triple crown? In this hope, Glennon and God did not see eye to eye. The conclave of cardinals chose a Genoese noble—Benedict XV—as Keeper of the Keys. And then the fearful blow fell. The new Pope selected Pietro Cardinal Giacobbi as his Secretary of State, and straightway all warmth evaporated between Boston and Rome. The scalar chain of authority was of course unbroken, but it clanked dismally. Glennon’s more than generous contributions to the Holy See were coldly acknowledged or received as a matter of course. With Merry del Val in retirement, Glennon had no influential friend at the papal court. A new crowd was in power; the old basking days were over, and Lawrence Glennon felt chilly, out of things, alone.

  “Father Fermoyle, Your Eminence,” Monsignor O’Brien was saying.

  The Cardinal looked up with weary uninterest at the young priest advancing toward him. Ah, yes, this would be the translator of those elegant and perfectly useless essays on mysticism. His Eminence felt no particular ill will toward mysticism; it merely had no bearing on his problems, could not help him in his administrative labors. And with so much financing and organizing to be done, why did young curates complicate matters with their private urgencies to explore and translate the emotions of mystics long dead and buried?

  Stephen genuflected to kiss the beveled sapphire ring that the Cardinal extended and then snatched away. His Eminence was in no mood for ecclesiastical homage; he wanted to get down to cases, particularly the case of the manuscript on the table before him. He signaled Stephen not to stand around calfishly, but to take a chair, that chair, for the critical scrutiny about to begin.

  From the infallible side of the table His Eminence appraised the young priest opposite him. Fort
y-two years of professional experience were in Glennon’s fine hazel eyes—eyes that gazed with a single query at the endless line of priests bending and bowing before him. Like any other administrator of large affairs, Glennon was sorely pressed for capable lieutenants. His first inquiry—frankly explicit by now—was: “How can I use this man?”

  Fingering his pectoral cross, Glennon assayed Father Fermoyle. Physique and carriage excellent; grooming impeccable (Glennon despised slouchers with dirty fingernails, imperfect teeth, and poor skin). Demeanor reserved, with just the proper touch of dedication. Outward markings favorable. Interior gifts? Glennon’s clairvoyant glance uncovered in Stephen the spiritual glow so essential to a priest during the earlier phases of his career. And the manuscript (which Glennon had carefully read) revealed an undoubted stylistic grace. Barring the subject matter of the essays, it appeared that the Archdiocese of Boston could use a man with this talent. Not precisely in its present form, of course. Father Fermoyle would have to come off his mystical perch, descend to terra firma. But after all, The Ladder of Love was merely a translation. This good-looking curate might be persuaded to lay the subject matter aside, and, after a season of tempering and growth, who could foretell the uses to which his maturer pen might be put? Why, he might even become editor of the archdiocesan organ, The Monitor.

  His Eminence permitted none of these favorable judgments to appear in his face or manner. There was yet another test to be made—a test that took the form of a standing question: “What is this man’s weakness?” Is he vain, stupid, greedy, or spineless? The Cardinal intended to discover whether the curate now facing him was underboweled or overweening, too stubborn for handling or too easily led by the nose. Glennon had his own techniques for exposing hidden defects of character. He picked up The Ladder of Love, showed it to Stephen as Exhibit A, and asked:

  “Did you make this translation?”