The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “What distinction might be made, Father Clarahan, between Freud’s id, with its predispositions to lustful violence, and the Catholic doctrine of original sin? Does not each attempt in its own way to account for the hereditary stain on the human soul?”

  With Mulqueen’s admiring eye on him, Clarahan was all unction. “A searching question, Father. Both Freud and Catholic theology do take into account man’s tendency to evil. But need I point out to you, Father, that according to Catholic doctrine, original sin is at bottom nothing more than a withholding of God’s sanctifying grace—a condition that can be remedied by baptism? Whereas Freud would have us believe”—Clarahan’s timing and intonation were perfect—“that the condition can be remedied only by psychoanalysis.”

  Laughter greeted this clever hit. The questioner sat down.

  As the meeting broke up, Stephen congratulated his old classmate. “A clear and reasoned presentation, Dick. I’d like to talk further about this id business. Can’t we all ride downtown in my brother-in-law’s car?”

  At a lunchroom in Copley Square they had crackers and milk. Dr. Byrne ventured the opinion that Freud would one day be valued by physicians and clergy alike for the light that his theories threw upon the dark crevasses of the soul. When Clarahan vehemently opposed the notion, Stephen asked:

  “Why are you so afraid that Freud will get into general circulation?”

  Clarahan attempted to make an honest answer. “It’s not so much his stressing of sex, though he does terribly overdo that part of it. No, it’s the emphasis Freud places on sheer pathology. After reading him, one gets the impression that the human soul is a poor, sick thing. I claim that the nature of the soul cannot be learned from a study of its diseases.”

  John Byrne interposed quietly: “I don’t know that I agree with you about that, Father. In medical school our basic courses are two: biology, which concerns itself with healthy tissues; and pathology, which treats of morbid ones. From my experience as a surgeon and physician, I’ve found that one learns as much about the body from disease as from health.”

  “But we aren’t talking about the body,” said Clarahan. “I thought we were discussing the soul.”

  Stephen was happy when John Byrne replied: “I know, Father. Man is a creature composed of body and soul. But for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you where the body ends and the soul begins. I wouldn’t go so far as to say with Walt Whitman: The body is the soul’—but they’re wonderfully and fearfully connected somehow.” Dr. Byrne expanded his thought. “Patients come to my office with bodily symptoms caused by obscure psychic troubles. There is a host of ills—drunkenness, for example—that penalize the body for some defect in the soul.”

  John Byrne, a sound Catholic and a thoughtful healer, went on: “The day will come, Father, when doctors and priests may be obliged to regard alcoholism, sexual perversion, and certain chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis—not to mention insanity, suicide, and other less obvious forms of self-destruction—as self-inflicted wounds, wrought upon the body by the revengeful soul.”

  “I can’t follow you that far, Doctor,” said Clarahan.

  Long after Stephen went to bed that night he thought of John Byrne’s ominous suggestion that man might be a self-destroying animal. What lay at the bottom of the soul’s impulse to harm the body? And did the body in turn have power to stunt and deform the soul?

  He fell asleep thinking of Mona.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ESTABLISHMENT kept by Señora Guiomir (“Gussie”) Lasquez at 5 Stanhope Lane was too shady to be a lodginghouse and too grim to be a brothel. The sinister façade was pockmarked by grimy windows in which roller curtains of green scrim were drawn day and night. Rusty cast-iron balustrades flanked its brownstone stoop, and above the dangling bell pull hung the sign No VACANCIES. The sign told a literal untruth, because many rooms in the house of Señora Lasquez were unoccupied. But because the place was an abortion mill, Gussie could not risk opening her door to room hunters who might turn out to be police. Bolted and chain-latched from the inside, the front door was opened only to admit a certain type of caller—desperate young women with fifty dollars who could utter the password, “Dr. Ramón sent me.”

  Fifty dollars would move Señora Lasquez to exercise her skill with rare herbs and ingenious packs—or, if all else failed—blunt instruments not unlike knitting needles. The herb-and-pack method took a little time—three or four days, perhaps—and during this curative interval Gussie lodged and fed her customers according to their ability to pay. The fee for her front parlor was a straight two dollars a night, but third-floor rooms could be rented for as little as $2.50 a week. Meals extra. No plumbing or heat went with these quarters, but inmates of the Casa Lasquez, gazing through the unwashed windows on the top floor, could get an excellent view of Boston’s South End, with the spires of the Cathedral in the near-to-middle distance.

  On a sheetless mattress in one of these upper rooms lay Mona Fer-moyle, approximately eight and a half months along in pregnancy. She had come to 5 Stanhope Lane three weeks ago, much too late for the exercise of Señora Lasquez’s principal art. But because she showed splendid credentials, and because she had twenty dollars in her pocket-book, Gussie had consented to don the Samaritan mantle of midwife and give the pale, terrified girl refuge. She took Mona’s twenty dollars, assigned her to the third-floor back, and fed her patient whenever she remembered to do so.

  Mona lay on the sagging cot and traced with her eyes the gaping crack in the plastered ceiling. She did not know enough about the rivers of the world to realize that the crack bore a striking resemblance to the Amazon. She knew only that her baby might come any time now. It thumped inside her like a rabbit trying to escape from a snare drum. Each percussion shook Mona with guilt and terror. Guilt, because her body gave swollen proof of what she had done; terror, because she was ill, penniless, and alone.

  Of a certainty, ill. Not quite penniless though, because she still had a dime in her pocketbook—the remnant of two dollars a pawnbroker had given her for her coat. And not wholly alone either, because by twisting her head more, she could see the paired spires of the Cathedral. For three weeks now, ever since her creeping, compulsive return to Boston, she had drawn from those upraised arms some childhood recollections of protective comfort. In the fading light of a January afternoon, Mona levered herself onto an elbow and gazed at the symbols of goodness and security she had willfully left behind. A wild longing claimed her childish soul. If only she could snuggle back into the safety of those arms. Regret squeezed full tear glands. Like an exile dreaming of home, or a small girl waking fearfully in the night, Mona wept.

  The tears, as tears will, purged away her accumulated anxieties. For the first time in many months, hope made a pattern, a plan, in a pattern-less world of guilt and misery. Mona rose from the cot and looked into her purse to be sure the dime was there. Feverishly she brushed her hair, dirty gold at the ends, ebony-black at the roots, where no bleach had been applied for weeks. Then, bareheaded and coatless, she felt her way down the dark, uncarpeted stairs, noiselessly unhooked the chain latch on the front door, and slipped out of Señora Lasquez’s house into a world of falling snow.

  At first the cold braced her, but by the time she reached the Spanish Pharmacy at the corner of Washington Street, she was chilled and spiritless. The drugstore had a soda fountain; to revive her strength, Mona ordered a cup of hot chocolate, the first nourishment she had taken in twenty-four hours. She slid her dime onto the marble slab; a splotch-aproned proprietor shoved a nickel back. The coin of her salvation! Mona sipped the sweetish liquid slowly, trying to summon up courage to enter the phone booth at the end of the dark shop.

  As she passed the rubber-goods showcase, a thin icicle of fear pierced the inner membranes of her heart. Who would answer the phone? What would they say when they heard her voice? At the cosmetics counter she wavered. The salesman eye of Mr. Hernandez passed over her coatless figure, lighted hopefully on her two-toned hair. He
wiped his hands on his splotchy apron. Perhaps he could sell her a bottle of peroxide. No sale, he concluded, as he watched her move heavily toward the pay station. When a woman lets her hair go like that, she no longer cares.

  Coin clutched in her thin hand, Mona entered the telephone booth and closed the door behind her. The dimensions of the box, its darkness and stuffy air, reminded her of—of what? The confessional! Soon a little panel would slide back; she would hesitate for a moment, take a deep breath, and say: “This is Mona, Father. I want to come home” … Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Oh, impossible declaration! Guilt too great for absolving! Yet of necessity the confession must be made. With trembling fingers Mona dropped the nickel into the coin box and gave the operator the number of the telephone 47 Woodlawn Avenue. She heard the muffled brr-r, brr-r of the little bell under the mission-oak table in the Fermoyle front hall. Long ago, Florrie had stuffed the bell with a piece of cotton because it jangled too loudly. Brr-r, brr-r. Now the sound was echoing through the chenille portieres into the living room where Bernie would be playing the piano while Din raised his voice in accompaniment of song. At the kitchen stove Celia would hear the brr-ring and hope that someone less busy than herself would answer the phone. Upstairs in her quiet sanctuary, Ellen would hear the bell, too. …

  Clickingly the receiver came off its hook. Then Mona heard the gruffest, sternest voice in the world—the male voice that had filled her childhood with the thunder of its authority. The voice of Dennis Fermoyle said, “Hello.”

  Mute fear paralyzed Mona’s tongue. It would not make the words that must be made: This is Mona, Father. I want to come home.

  “Hello, hello,” Din was saying, “who is it?”

  Shaken by old fear and sin too shameful for utterance, Mona hung up the receiver. She waited till her knees were strong enough to bear her, then wavered from the booth, and clung for a moment to the cosmetic showcase. Unsteadily she walked out of the drugstore and stood on the freezing pavement of Washington Street.

  Swollen with the wickedness thumping inside her, where could she go? To whom could she turn? This troubled, foolish girl had never heard the trusting cry of the Psalmist: “If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” She had never read a book in her life, and she could not know the promise of the poet’s line, “Fear wist not to evade, as love wist to pursue.” But better than familiarity with poet or Psalmist was Mona’s recollection of the comforting Presence streaming from the altar. Remembrance of that Presence drew her towards the steps of the Cathedral. Into its tenebrous silence she entered now, knelt in a pew at the back of the church, and gazed down the long vista of the center aisle where the sanctuary lamp glowed in crimson comfort above the altar. She felt neither ecstatic nor pious. An emotion older than these cradled her. She felt safe.

  A pyramid of candles with flames like fiery apostrophes burned before the shrine of St. Anthony. Mona could not remember when she had last lighted a candle, but she could never forget the first one. It had been lighted to this very saint—the patron of lost things. Her mother had sent her downtown to buy a flatiron holder, and on the way home Mona had stopped to play jump rope with some little girls on Maude Street. When it came time to go home, Mona could not find the flatiron holder. “Why not light a candle to St. Anthony?” suggested Kathleen O’Donnell. “I haven’t got a nickel,” sobbed Mona. “Oh, he’ll trust you,” soothed Kathleen. “I owe him a dime already for two things I’ve found.” At the head of a party of supplicants Mona had walked into the church, lit the candle to St. Anthony, said three Hail Marys—then suddenly remembered that she had left the holder on the counter at the hardware store.

  O marvelous St. Anthony, patron of lost things! Would another candle, lighted on credit, solve the woman’s problem as easily as it had solved the child’s?

  He’ll trust me, thought Mona as she approached the rail of the shrine. With a taper she lighted the highest candle in the pyramid, then, kneeling before the dusky statue of the saint, watched her candle flicker timidly on its prong. The flame caught hold, and when she saw it burning as fierily as the others, Mona said three Hail Marys. For the first time in all her vacant years, the prayer was not a jumble of nothingness. Her specially tuned ear caught the central phrase of the Angelic Salutation, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” The words supported her like a prop under a laden bough, and the splendor of bringing forth new life warmed her with a proud fire.

  Twilight was a purple veil dotted with snow when Mona left the Cathedral. She stretched out her hands, palms upward to catch some falling flakes, then, happier than she had been for a long time, trudged past the pharmacy of Senor Hernandez, turned left, and disappeared into the shadows of the South End.

  Her pains were beginning as she reached the cast-iron stoop at 5 Stanhope Lane.

  IN THE MAGISTRATE’S COURT at Roxbury Crossing, the usual number of Monday-morning drunks, streetwalkers, and sneak thieves were on the receiving end of justice as dealt out by Judge Peter J. Stranahan. His Honor had a bad head cold, and he sniffed angrily at a menthol inhaler that was doing him no good at all. Calendar and courtroom were overcrowded; nothing marched right, and as the day grew longer Judge Stranahan’s patience grew shorter. At 3:22 P.M. he listened irritably to the evidence given by Patrolman No. 677. “The defendant was found lying in a hallway at 10 West Springfield Street in a state of alcoholic intoxication induced by a bottle of Jamaica ginger discovered on his person.”

  “Guilty or not guilty?” asked His Honor, and, on hearing the answer, pronounced irreversible judgment, to wit: “Ten days on Deer Island. … Next case.”

  “The next case,” explained Assistant District Attorney Schultz, his eye on the court clock, “involves the theft of a bicycle from the premises of Ignatz Lazlo, repairman, 1144 Washington Street. The defendant, James T. Splaine, a minor with a record of delinquency, admits taking the bicycle without permission of the owner and selling it for four dollars.”

  “Is Splaine represented by counsel?” asked the judge.

  “Yes, Your Honor. The Catholic Charities Bureau has engaged …”

  “Skip the details,” snapped Stranahan. “Put the defendant on the stand.”

  The defendant turned out to be a gangling, scab-complexioned youth in need of a necktie, a haircut, and a month of good meals. Examined by District Attorney Schultz, he sullenly admitted the charge as drawn, then gazed piteously at a sunken-eyed woman on a front bench as if to say, “Honest, I didn’t mean to cause you no more trouble, Ma.”

  Counsel for the defense, a fledgling barrister named George Fermoyle, began a gentle cross-examination. “Where do you live, Jimmy?”

  “Twenty-two High Street, Maiden.”

  “Who lives there with you?”

  “My mother.” Jimmy motioned with a dirty knuckle at the haggard woman with the sunken blue eyes.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Dead. Got killed in a barroom fight three years ago.”

  Magistrate Stranahan sniffed at his inhaler. “Counsel will please not range all around O’Houlihan’s barn, or we’ll never get out of this court tonight. What do you intend to show by this line of questioning?”

  “I intend to show the family background of this boy, Your Honor. He is the product of a home invaded by death and economic want. His mother works all day as a domestic servant. I hope to demonstrate that the defendant is a virtual orphan who needs social care and psychiatric guidance.”

  Stranahan could scarcely credit his ears. “What kind of guidance, did you say?”

  The Fermoyle temper exploded in Stranahan’s face. “I said ‘psychiatric guidance,’ Your Honor. If this boy were physically ill he would get free medical care. Yet now, during critical formative years …”

  “Critical formative rats,” scoffed Stranahan. “He stole the bicycle, didn’t
he? Sold it, didn’t he? Spent the money too, heh?”

  “We admit all that, Your Honor. But …”

  “But now you ask this court to coddle him.” Justice Stranahan dropped his inhaler, snatched up his gavel, and banged twice. “What this young thief needs is not coddling, but discipline. If you’ve finished your argument, Counselor, the Court will pronounce judgment. Six months in the Concord Reformatory. Court adjourned till tomorrow.”

  Tears coursed down Julia Splaine’s cheek.

  “Better luck next time, Counselor,” said the assistant D. A. “Even Rufus Choate didn’t win his first case. But seriously, Fermoyle, don’t try to pull that psychiatric line on P. J. Stranahan.”

  “It’s not a line, it’s the dreary truth,” said George. He stuffed his papers into his brief case and turned to the melancholy business of consoling Julia Splaine. “It’s lucky that Stranahan didn’t send Jimmy to State’s Prison,” he told her. “They’ll teach him a trade at Concord. He’ll be a credit to you yet, Mrs. Splaine.”

  “It’s the kind heart of the Fermoyles that makes you say that, George, but my boy’s a stray, and I know it now.” She shook her gray hairs in bewilderment. “The question I’m asking myself is why should my Jimmy be so bad, and my Jemmy so good?”

  Having no offhand answer to this classic problem, George patted Julia Splaine’s bony shoulder and walked out into the gloom of a snowy twilight. Roxbury Crossing was an X-shaped traffic tangle; trolleys, trucks, and pedestrians crawled in slow motion across slushy cobblestones. While George waited for the Park Street trolley that would take him back to his office, he bought the Globe and scanned its headlines. “Pope Benedict Sinking”; “New England Battens Down for Hurricane”; “Italian Superliner Enters Boston Harbor on Maiden Voyage.” With the ominous expectancy that always accompanies a falling barometer, George Fermoyle found a seat in the warm streetcar, and settled himself for the ride to his office.