The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  Individually the pieces were excellent, but when Stephen set about arranging them he found that they did not combine well. Was it their newness? Perhaps. “They aren’t used to each other yet,” was Rafael’s way of putting it. Stephen tried to conceal his disappointment at the stiffly formal atmosphere of the cr&che. Several times he tried rearranging the figures, but finally resigned himself to the fact that the manger was not a success.

  Late one afternoon, a couple of days before Christmas, he entered the church, thinking to make a happier arrangement of the crèche. In the crimson light flowing from the sanctuary lamp he saw a young woman bending over the crib; her posture was that of a mother putting a child to bed, and she murmured softly as she tucked and patted the figures in the manger. At her feet was a pile of hay.

  Only one woman in the world could bestow such comfort and order with her bare hands.

  “Lalage!”

  The girl turned. Wisps of hay were in her chestnut hair. The hay was timothy, and its perfume hung field-sweet above Lalage Menton’s face.

  “I hope you don’t mind what I’m doing to your crèche,” she said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just making it into a stable. It was a stable, remember? With hay.” She stuffed handfuls of fragrant clover under the oxen, making them appear to be munching contemplatively at the wonder before them. Lalage tucked more hay about the kneeling figure of Mary, softening the edges of her blue robe and bringing her an inch nearer the Child. “There—she looks more comfortable, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, she does.” Stephen marveled at Lalage’s way with things living or inanimate. “But what’s that you’re putting on St. Joseph?”

  “It’s chilly in here,” said Lalage, “so I made a little sheepskin vest for him.” She slipped the garment over the carpenter-saint’s shoulders, kissed the back of his patient neck. “All we need now is a bellyband for the Infant.”

  Stephen found himself vetoing the bellyband. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that a touch like that would make things too—too naturalistic. After all, the crèche is intended to suggest what happened that first Christmas night. The hay helps carry out that suggestion—it was just the thing we needed. But if we get too realistic—with a vest for Joseph, and a bellyband for the Christ child—we’re apt to lose sight of what the characters stand for.”

  Lalage gazed at the three principal figures as if trying to grasp a meaning beyond them. “I forgot they stood for anything,” she said. “I keep thinking of them as people in a cold barn.”

  Lalage Menton’s ideas about the Incarnation might bring smiles or even frowns to a synod of bishops, but Stephen realized that she was the bearer of something much more important—the special love that is the monopoly of women.

  Droll defiance was in her face as she looked up at Stephen. “I wish I’d been around to help Mary that night. I’d have pinned a nice warm bellyband on her baby, no matter who He was.”

  “Pin it on him now,” said Stephen. And as he watched Lalage’s capable fingers bind the swaddling cloth around the figure of the Babe, he had the feeling that any mother would have welcomed such help on a cold night in a drafty stable.

  They left the church together, Lalage carrying the remnants of her hay in a clovery bundle. “I promised Napoleon I’d bring back all I didn’t use,” she explained. Outside the sacristy door she inhaled the fragrance of her timothy bouquet. “Mmm—it’s soaked with summer.” Artlessly she lifted her armful of hay to Stephen’s face. “Doesn’t it make you think of August?”

  The scented grass awoke memories in Stephen—the summer night he had found Lalage straightening out his kitchen; the day her hair had brushed his cheek as they bent over Hercule’s fiddle top. Irritably he wondered how any woman could be so honest and provocative at the same time. Lalage’s mixture of outgoingness and coquetry—her fearless and disarming advances—were these the marks of childlike innocence or feminine design? Stephen had never been able to decide. He could not decide now.

  They walked through the winter dusk toward the road that Lalage must take to L’Enclume. It would be a lonely walk; Stephen wanted to go with her, but prudence advised no deeper personal involvement with this affectionate girl. He was about to bid her good night when Lalage said:

  “My father tells me he sees you skating sometimes on Spectacle Pond.”

  “Yes, I often go there.”

  “Will you skate with me there tomorrow night?”

  The invitation was guileless as a snowflake, but Stephen held off his acceptance. Lalage put a special plea in her voice. “It’ll be the last time I’ll ever skate on Spectacle—and I want it to be with you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the last time you’ll ever skate on Spectacle’?”

  Lalage’s inflection was matter-of-fact. “The day after Christmas I’m going away to the Geraldines.”

  “The Geraldines! The nursing sisterhood?”

  Breathing at her clover nosegay, Lalage nodded. “I’ve always wanted to go, ever since I was a little girl. That’s why I studied nursing.”

  “But the Geraldines! They take only incurables into their hospital. Hopeless t.b. cases, last-stage cancer—and all that.” Stephen couldn’t reconcile Lalage’s brimming health with the death-in-life duties of the Geraldines. “It’s the grimmest kind of burden.”

  “It’s the one I was born to carry,” she said simply.

  If her simplicity was a rebuke, it was also a revelation. So this was the secret of Lalage’s wide-open heart, her mystifying habit of walking up to life with outstretched arms! Stephen understood now the hidden source from which her actions bubbled. Strong in vocation, dedicated to purity, she could pour affectionate strength over everything she encountered: a braggart father, a spavined horse, a whittled wooden figure of Joseph, a fellow creature wasting incurably to death—or a priest, endangered perhaps, by a too-stuffy reading of his role. All needy things claimed her, and she responded in proportion to their want. Everything Lalage Menton did or said was only a manifestation of the thing she was.

  Standing beside her in the snowy road, Stephen realized that anyone fortunate enough to be the object of this girl’s love should count himself the recipient of a special grace. Could he not match that gift with a generosity of his own?

  He would try.

  That night Stephen searched his emotions concerning Lalage. Honestly he put the question, “What do I feel about this girl?” Without equivocation he could answer: “She is the most natural and unspoiled woman I have ever known. Out of a surplus of human affection (which cannot be disregarded) she has asked me to go skating with her on the eve of her departure for the convent. To refuse would be churlish; to accept would give me pleasure and make Lalage happy. …

  “I will go skating with her.”

  But he did not go.

  When the next evening came, etched blue with winter stars, Stephen could not give himself permission to keep a rendezvous with this girl who would never skate again. There was nothing wrong about meeting Lalage on a sheet of wind-swept ice. They would join hands as skaters do, and glide up the pond together under a tall sky. Coming back, they would joyously surrender themselves to the goad of a December wind. All very innocent and harmless. But Stephen knew that some pleasures, innocent though they might be, were not for him. The knowledge gave him no feeling of elation or virtue. Actually, he felt rather ignoble at being unable to match the yes-saying generosity of Lalage Menton’s heart.

  IRON WINTER merged into the rigorous season of Lent—then, as if tired of severities, spring took Church and nature by the hand and led them both into the warmth of April. Again L’Enclume became a scene of crackling activity; clotheslines flapped in the breeze; shawled women gathered at the tail of Victor Thenard’s meat wagon, while their husbands lounged with blunt, brown pipes against sunny walls. Nothing had changed—yet everything was different. And the difference, Stephen realized, sprang from his sharing of human hardships and triumphs with these people. T
hey had come through a year together. They had survived winter, and now were quickening into a new cycle of hope.

  It was the third Saturday after Easter when Corny Deegan drove up from Boston in his black Cadillac. After an admiring inspection of Stephen’s refurbished church, the papal nobleman accepted an invitation to supper. The one-dish meal of spareribs and cabbage cooked and served by Agathe d’Éon was settling pleasantly while Corny—a mouse-colored Corona in his hard, red fist—talked about Rome (from which he had just returned), Vatican politics, and a dozen other matters. Clearly the papal Knight had something more than his elbow up his sleeve, but exactly what it was, Stephen could not determine. At last he broke in on Corny’s detailed account of the Cardinal’s plan for a new cathedral:

  “Cornelius, what in heaven’s name are you being so canny about?”

  “Can’t an old friend pass the time of day?”

  “The time of day and all night, too. It’s a joy to have you and to hear of your missions in high places. But every so often you start to grin like a man who knows something. What is it, Corny?”

  Cornelius came down to cases. “Do you remember holding an umbrella over the Cardinal’s head on the day of Ned Halley’s funeral?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, His Eminence remembers it, too. Spoke of it this morning. He was much moved by the fact that you weren’t afraid of him—that you dared put your arm around his exalted person. But the thing that struck him most was the reason you gave for your fearlessness.”

  Stephen laughed. “I told him that he reminded me of Din. It’s true, Corny; he does. Glennon is a peremptory man with a stiff Irish neck. But Din’s that way, too. He’s a perfect father—and Glennon, somehow, seems to fit into that pattern.”

  Cornelius, the father of five girls and a hard-drinking son, was meditative. “Every man dreams of having a son who loves him without fear. Would it surprise you to know that the Cardinal has such a dream?”

  “Not at all. Even God had it. But what’s this mystery prologue leading up to? Does His Eminence plan to adopt me?”

  “Adoption isn’t the word for it, Steve. But he’d like to have you around him. In fact—to stop all this beating about Paddy O’Houlihan’s barn—Glennon’s decided to make you his secretary.”

  Astonishment whirled Stephen to his feet. Three times he paced diagonally across the study, then halted in front of the contractor-Knight. “Have you been up to your old fixing tricks again?” he demanded.

  Corny raised a solemn, red-freckled hand as if taking an oath of innocence. “It’s no doing of mine, Steve. Number One picks his own peppers. And out of the whole bushel, he’s picked you. Somehow I had the idea that this news would be pleasing to you.”

  “A year ago, it would have been wonderful. But right now I want to stay at St. Peter’s. I suppose I could say that my work here isn’t finished yet—not even begun. But the honest truth is, Corny, I like it here.”

  The papal Knight held the fire—or more accurately, the blackthorn—of his sarcasm. He loved Stephen too much to bring that heavy bludgeon down with, “Oh, the wee man likes it here, does he? He wants to stay in his nice broken-down parish and be a brushwood saint to a tribe of Canuck woodcutters.” Even to twirl such a shillelagh in Stephen’s presence was dangerous. Corny was silent for the length of a Hail Mary; then he spoke with all his forthrightness.

  “Once, I thought you were ambitious, Stephen. I see now that the fire of the Holy Ghost has burned that ambition right down to cinders. But did you know”—there was a cheerful upturn in Corny’s voice—“that cinder blocks make the best building material? Stuff that’s passed through fire to ash can’t be burned by anything else. Master contractors know that. Glennon knows it. That’s why he’s chosen you for his purpose.”

  The contractor-Knight laid a hodlike hand on his friend’s shoulder. “The days of your initiation are over, Stephen. Now the real work begins. For the next forty years you’ve got to be the toughest, tenderest, damnedest priest of your generation—a son worthy of the father—a chip off that old cinder block, Din the Down-Shouter.”

  BREAKING pastoral ties, Stephen discovered, was like breaking the point off his heart. He made his final rounds of L’Enclume, entering low-roofed homes once peopled by strangers. Now, just as these strangers had begun to think of him as their champion and friend, he must tell them that he was going away. Scrawny women, whom he had first seen gabbling around the butcher wagon, held greasy aprons to their eyes when they heard the news. Men who had sullenly drifted away from him a year ago now wrung his hand in dumb puzzlement. “Why you leave us, Father? You come back to see us sometime?” they asked. And to these unanswerable questions Stephen gave the most cheerful replies that he could summon. He entered the pine forest in the gorge and, standing under massive boughs, recaptured for a moment the sorrow of banishment breathing through the theme poem of this sacred wood, The Nut-Brown Maid. No longer exiled, elected to preferment, he could say now:

  I need not to the greenwood go,

  Alone, a banished man.

  But the triumphant finale was mixed with a motif of mourning. The persons associated with the ballad—Ned Halley, Hercule Menton, and the Nut-Brown Maid herself—had passed, or were passing, from his life. The tears of ever-changing things. He fingered the pine seedlings between the giant stumps of their predecessors; during the hard winter the young trees had taken root, and were an inch prouder in height than when he had planted them.

  For the last time he visited the burned-out forge and laid his hand on the legendary anvil that had given his parish its name. L’Enclume! He knelt amid the cobwebbed debris and briefly praised the Maker of symbols so meaningful and lasting on the tongues of men.

  Stephen said his pastoral good-by from the altar on the fourth Sunday after Easter. The church was filled. In the front rows sat his first-Communion class; the girls flower-crowned, white-veiled, on one side of the center aisle; on the other, little boys in patched serge suits and white silk ties. Behind these scrubbed first communicants sat their fathers and mothers—the men weather-scarred and ageless, their wives aged too early by poverty and domestic toil. Gazing into the familiar faces, Stephen saw the indestructible toughness that is the preserver and guarantor of life; a more reassuring vision, no lover of humanity could ask to behold.

  He read the Gospel for the fourth Sunday after Easter. It was from John xvi, verses 5-12, and began: “At that time Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I go to him that sent me.’” He finished reading Christ’s last discourse to His disciples, laid aside the Book, and spoke to his people.

  “My dear friends: For the past few days we have been saying good-by to each other. In your homes or along the roadside, we have clasped hands as friends do in parting, and bid each other farewell. Though there has been much sadness in these farewells, we have tried to keep them as cheerful as possible, saying to each other, ‘After all, Boston is not so far from L’Enclume. We will be running into each other all the time. You will visit us, we shall visit you. Let us say, then, au revoir. Good-by until we meet again.’

  “I heartily wish that my going was merely a matter of au revoir. Even more heartily, I wish that I might never go away at all. If I could spend my life among you, baptizing your children, preparing them for Communion, bringing you the sacraments, and growing ever closer to you in friendship and love, this I would choose to do.”

  Stephen paused. “But to a priest, such dear and human happiness is not permitted. Lest we become attached to mortal friendships and thereby forget the immortal love of Him to whom we are dedicated, we learn to say not au revoir, but adieu.

  “À Dieu. To God. Your native language, in its ancient wisdom, instructs us in obedience to His will, His work, His plan.

  “Together we have come through many hardships. During the rigorous seasons of winter and Lent we have measured and sustained each other. Spring and Easter have given us victory over cold and death. We have had other victories, too: I see it in the faces of t
he boys and girls who today will receive our Lord for the first time. I see it in your gentleness to one another, husband to wife, father to son, neighbor to neighbor. I feel it in the ties of mutual trust and love that were beginning to bind us together. But now these ties must be broken.

  “I have told you why.

  “In the Gospel for today, Christ says to His disciples, ‘I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’ I do not know exactly what our Lord meant by these words, for the promise contained in them is fearful and great. But I think He meant that we should ready ourselves for the gifts of suffering and joy He holds in store for us”—Stephen spoke very slowly—“and accept obediently whatever burdens, sorrows, and commands He lays upon our lives.

  “It is in this spirit of obedience that I say to you now, ‘Adieu, mes amis.’

  “It is in this spirit of acceptance that I say, ‘Adieu, mes frères.’”

  Stephen opened his arms as if to embrace the people of L’Enclume. “I have called you friends and brothers. You are more. The priest whom you call ‘Father’ echoes your love with a still dearer name. My children all! Till the day when we are gathered up into the arms of the eternal Father, I give you that tenderest of farewells. ‘Adieu, adieu, mes enfants. …’”

  He raised his right hand to bless them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

  BOOK THREE

  The Touch of purple

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CATHEDRAL OF THE HOLY CROSS, episcopal seat of Lawrence Cardinal Glennon, had been in its day an architectural marvel. Cruciform in shape, built of Roxbury pudding stone, and covering an area nearly as great as that of Notre-Dame de Paris, it was considered in 1875—the year of its consecration—the handsomest church between Baltimore and Montreal. But the luckless truth about the Cathedral was this: in selecting its site, the builders had guessed wrong! Scarcely had the glorious edifice been erected in the quiet purlieus of the South End —at that time the most substantial section of Boston—when one of those unforeseen population shifts that plague property owners and city planners took place. Tall green waves of Irish immigration began to flood the port of Boston, foamed southward past the Cathedral, and flattened out in the unstylish backwaters of neighboring Roxbury. To meet the rapid-transit needs of these newcomers, the elevated railway thrust an unsightly double track along Washington Street, and at the turn of the century a noisy procession of elevated trains began roaring past the Cathedral’s enormous rose window at three-minute intervals. The intolerable clatter marred the dying fall of pulpit oratory, broke in on prayer, and destroyed meditation. Worse, the el drove die more prosperous people away from the neighborhood. Into the vacuum of rundown dwellings and lowered rents rushed a poorer and ever poorer tenancy, until the noble buttresses of the Cathedral were surrounded by a wasteland of cheap lodginghouses, huddling shops, and dingy taverns.