“I suppose you think God was saving Frank and Sandra from committing a mortal sin. But what was He saving the pilot from?”
“How do we know? It’s like The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Maybe it was the right time for all three. Or maybe God was saving someone who was not on that plane at all.”
“Who?”
“You, dear child.”
I was appalled. I had told Mother, of course, of my conversation with Frank. But could she really believe that God had had me in mind?
“Why was I more important to God than Frank and Sandra?”
“Because you’re one of His priests. He may have thought it best to save you from the consequences of your advice.”
I wondered whether perhaps my greatest mistake had not been in converting Mother. I urged her now to return to her efficacious baths and promised that I would accompany her to the dining room for dinner that night.
When Mother and I returned to New York a week later, I called at the Douglases’ and was told that Mrs. Douglas was playing the piano in the drawing room, but that I could go right in.
The piano was at the far end of the room; pausing in the doorway, I could see Claire in profile. It struck me at once that her composure had a marble quality. As she leaned forward to exert greater pressure on the keys for the soaring phrases of the nocturne, she might have been playing in a concert, utterly intent on her rendition, to the exclusion of any awareness of an audience that might or might not be there. I remained rigidly still; there could be no thought of interrupting her. Something in her poise, in the beautiful music she was creating, made me feel that I simply wasn’t there, that I had ventured into a space where I didn’t exist. It was awesome; I shivered.
When I turned to take my silent leave, I found Jamie in the hall. I had the feeling he had been watching me, but it was always hard to tell much from his motionless face. He followed me to the front door.
“You’re not going in?”
“Oh, I couldn’t interrupt that. Could you?”
He stood very close to me. “You’re right. I’ve never heard her play so well. But then, of course, she’s happy.”
I stared. “Happy?”
“Her prayers have been answered. Sandra’s soul is safe.”
I went away without seeing Claire, but I called again very soon and found her at the tea table as witty and delightful as ever. She observed a strict if serene mourning and did not go out, but she was always at home to her friends, and I became a regular visitor. I began to wonder, however, whether it was my oversensitive nature that gave me the faintest impression that her manner with me was less personal than formerly. Now that her daughter’s spiritual problem had received its violent solution, could it be that she had no further need of me? Yet there was still her husband to convert. Perhaps she did not deem me the appropriate instrument to bring this about.
She certainly knew I was seeing him. Jamie and I, despite our differences in age, style of living and religion, had developed a curious intimacy since Sandra’s death. He had taken a fancy to asking me to lunch with him, once a week, at the Metropolitan Club, where we would sit at his reserved table by a window looking down on General Sherman and his guiding angel and discuss everything from God to crêpe suzettes. He was possessed of an infinite curiosity, sometimes shrewd and probing, sometimes naïve, always accompanied by the same cheerful, mildly defiant boldness, as if it had to be the right of Jamie Douglas, a latter-day doubting Thomas, to ask the universe to explain itself.
As we grew closer, I ventured to ask him to explain himself. Why, for example, did a man of such undoubted intelligence not do more in the world than intelligently observe? He didn’t in the least resent my inquiry.
“I was in the coke business for a time. I thought it only made sense to keep an eye on my principal source of income. But when I discovered I could hire, for the same salary I was paid, a man of greater economic acumen to keep that same eye on things, I decided to devote myself entirely to pleasure. And don’t kid yourself that’s an easy task. It can be hard work not to get jaded and fatuous.”
“And is viewing the passing world your principal pleasure?”
“What greater?”
“You don’t ever feel the need to reproduce what you see? To draw it or write about it? Or at least to comment on it?”
“Oh, but I do. In my own small way. I’ll be glad to show you what I’ve written, if you’d like.”
And at our next lunch meeting he brought me two books, both handsomely bound and privately printed. One was a history of the Douglas family, mostly about Jamie’s grandfather, the Scottish emigrant, and his rise to riches. It was not much more interesting than other such accounts, but the style was strikingly polished, what is sometimes called Mandarin. The second volume, however, made me really sit up. It was a monograph on El Greco, whose paintings Jamie had studied with a penetrating eye during a recent winter spent in Spain while an astigmatic son was under the treatment of a world-famous Madrid ophthalmologist. It seemed to my dazzled eyes that his descriptions almost rivaled the pictures themselves.
“Where in the world did you ever learn to write like that?” I asked when next we met.
“You really liked it?” His manner was uncharacteristically shy.
“But it’s wonderful! The El Greco, I mean. Not that I don’t like the other. But the El Greco should be published. It’s not right to keep it just for your family and friends.”
He hesitated, but when he spoke it was not to comment on my project of publication. “There’s something else I’d like you to read, so long as you seem interested. I hadn’t meant to show it to anyone, at least until it’s finished. But I think I need your opinion. It’s a novel. About El Greco.”
A perfect copy of Jamie’s manuscript (it was like him to have typed it himself) was hand-delivered to me at home that afternoon, and I read it that night. His novella, like the one I am now writing (for more and more, Your Grace, it strikes me so), was cast in the form of a confession, but the confessor, or narrator, was not a humble and erring priest but the great mystical painter, El Greco himself. Jamie had adopted this guise in so masterly a way that before I had finished the first chapter I was nearly prepared to believe that my friend was translating an old manuscript discovered in some rotting chest in a Toledo attic. I knew that his style was polished, but now it had a new life altogether. It sparkled; it crackled; at times it seemed to explode out of the page, so that I almost had to hold it off. I may have been a bit carried away, but I knew, and still know, that I was reading a literary masterpiece.
The narrator of the tale has come to adore his adopted nation. He loves the bare, rolling, yellow-tan countryside and the yellow-brown villages huddled on the hilltops; he revels in the great vistas, the infinite pale blue sky, the Baroque interior of the churches, the bells, the constant toll of bells. But an early brush, however mild, with the Inquisition over his pictorial treatment of the “good” crucified thief—there was a hint of a halo behind his head—has grown with rumination from a small dirty cloud to a darkened firmament. The painter has at first been amused, then intrigued, but later alarmed and at last horrified by the ghoulish machinations of the Holy Office. He becomes a student of their lurid details. He is drawn by a hideous obsession to attend the spectacle of the autos-da-fe, the unwilling witness of tortures which sicken him but that he dares not publicly condemn. His ultimate vision is of a church that has created hell on earth and destroyed the work and word of Christ. This grim message, which can be conveyed only indirectly to eyes capable of piercing the outward signs of his paintings, he secretes in the features and bodies of his subjects and in their agitated backgrounds: in the cold opaque eyes of the Grand Inquisitor, in the flickering stormy sky over a doomed Toledo, in the despairing faces and bare, bony stretched-out arms of the saints, in the fiery greens and scarlets of the annunciations and transfigurations. His agony in the garden becomes the death throe of Rome.
Though it was late when I finished, I telep
honed Jamie. He answered immediately, as if he had been waiting by the instrument.
“It’s absolutely great!” I gasped. “You must drop everything until you finish it!”
“Are you speaking as a priest?”
“I’m speaking as a reader. Can’t a priest love art?”
“Can God be in godlessness?”
“Why not, if He’s almighty? Have you shown it to Claire?”
“No, I’ve been waiting to hear what you would say. I’ll show it to her now. Pray for me, Father.” He chuckled and hung up.
I was not surprised to receive a telephone call from Claire a few days later. She asked me to come to see her that same afternoon, and when I arrived in the art-filled drawing room, I was again not surprised to find her alone behind the tea tray.
“So you and Jamie have been creating a ‘best seller,’ ” she began in a tone of mild belittlement as she filled my cup. She remembered just how I like it. She remembered everything.
“Jamie has. I don’t know why you include me in it.”
“Because he was seeking your sanction.”
“Surely not as a priest?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?” She looked at me with what I can only describe as a grey gaze.
“I take it you’ve read the manuscript.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I suppose you find it heretical.”
“I shouldn’t dignify it with that term.”
“What term would you use?”
“I’d call it a jeu d’esprit. A rather petulant one.”
I considered this. “I don’t know whether it will be a best seller, but it will surely be well reviewed.”
“It won’t be reviewed at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Jamie has destroyed it.”
I jumped up in dismay. My cup smashed to the floor.
“A pity it’s the China Trade,” she observed dryly. “But let it be. It can be cleaned up later. I’ll pour you another cup.”
Overcome by her impassiveness, I sat down again. “But that book was a work of art. Was it your idea to destroy it?”
“I certainly suggested it.”
“Because you thought it was the work of the devil?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? A great many things can be that. It was certainly full of foolish ideas. But the dangerous thing was the motive behind it. Jamie wanted to hurt me.”
I stared. “And why should he have wanted to do that?”
“Because he envies me my faith.”
“You convinced him of that?”
“I convinced him that he was wrestling with God!” The serenity of her tone and countenance had now been replaced with something more formidable. “You know the Hopkins poem ‘Carrion Comfort’? ‘That night, that year of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.’ Well, I hope Jamie’s darkness is now done.”
“But must a work of art be destroyed for that?”
She glanced with a kind of high triumph about the cluttered room. “Is anything worth an instant’s separation from God?”
“I think so. And I shall certainly do everything in my power to persuade Jamie to rewrite his novel!”
Claire became very grave at this. “I doubt he’ll even see you now. And I’m very much afraid that you may be under a duty to reconsider your vocation.”
3
I sat once again before the Archbishop in his office. My manuscript lay on the blotter of his desk. The plump white hand with the gold ruby ring patted it.
“Well, Mr. Novelist, I’ve read your tale.”
“Why does Your Grace address me so? Do you imply I’ve made it up?”
“A goodly portion of it, yes. Oh, not the few bare facts, of course. They hardly matter. But the constructions, the interpretations. They are fanciful indeed. I am afraid you are undergoing the crisis of a loss of faith, my son. It is a time of anguish for you. You strike out blindly in self-defense. You don’t even spare Mother Church.”
“What must I do?”
“Have you prayed? Deeply, deeply prayed? There has to be some answer there.”
“I have prayed. And I think I may have made out at least the glimmer of an answer. I need to lose myself in some kind of grinding toil. In some sort of mission to the wilderness. To a savage tribe, the more dangerous, the better. Are there no leper colonies left?”
But he grinned at me. “I could have predicted that. You have a very stubborn streak of the romantic, my son. The devil, we know, is devilishly ingenious. No, I can give you no such easy out. You must humble yourself. I’m sending you back to Queens. To Saint Catherine’s. We shall consider our little mission to Protestant Gotham temporarily suspended.”
Before I even knew what I was doing I was on my feet. “No!”
His Grace looked down at his fingers. “You forget yourself,” he said softly.
“No!”
“Leave me now, my son. Before you are guilty of further insubordination.”
“No!”
He hit the little bell on his desk smartly. “Father Turner is going now,” he announced quietly to the sister who entered the room.
I went directly home and, slamming my bedroom door, stripped off my cassock and searched the deep closet where I had stored my old suits for what I had once considered my smartest tweed. Putting it hastily on, I defiantly struck a self-consciously debonair pose before the full-length mahogany-framed mirror.
I looked ridiculous.
Hurrying down the corridor, I burst into Mother’s dressing room to find her in negligee sitting before her triple mirror while her maid did her perennially golden hair. Taking in my reflection, she said at once:
“Go, Norah, please, and leave me with Mr. Reggie.”
That she used the old term by which the household had once addressed me showed she had recognized my change. “What does this mean, Reginald?”
“It means that I’ve left the church.”
“With the Archbishop’s sanction?”
“No. With my own.”
“But, darling, you can’t do that!” Her voice broke into a wail. “Your soul! It’s dangerous!”
“Don’t believe that nonsense, Mummie. There’s nothing they can do to me, even in the next world, if there is one. It certainly won’t be theirs.”
“Oh, but a renegade priest! It sounds so horrid. Didn’t they used to do dreadful things to them? I mean in this world.”
“Oh, sure, when they had the power. And they’d do it again if they could. Do you remember the nun in Marmion who ran off to her lover disguised as his page? They caught her and walled her up for life in stone, feeding her through a niche.”
“Oh, Reggie, don’t laugh at these things!”
“I’m not.” And I wasn’t. I was trembling all over. I felt bare, stripped, exposed, inside and out. I was a poor tattered thing. I was a nothing. My only desperate hope was that I was some kind of a real nothing. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. I appealed to my Scottish Protestant forebears to keep me from being an ass and a coward to boot. “I’d shout at them the way that renegade nun did: ‘Yet fear me from my living tomb, ye vassal slaves of bloody Rome!’”
“Reggie, dear!”
Standing behind her I gripped her shoulders and studied the pale face that stared at mine in the mirror. She had not put on her make-up, and I was appalled at her pallor. I knew she had high blood pressure, but I had not before seen what now struck me as her doom. If I lost Mother, what indeed should I have left?
“Oh, Mum, darling, you and I are going to go right on having the most wonderful time. We’ll give the biggest and best parties in town! Let’s throw a fancy-dress ball to end all fancy-dress balls to celebrate my freedom!”
“Oh, we couldn’t do that.”
“Well, we needn’t tell people what we’re celebrating.”
I saw that I had caught her fancy, the only way that was sure. A party. “What kind of fancy dress? Should
we give a topic, like a ball at Mary Queen of Scots? Or come as your favorite character in literature? Or anything goes?”
“I think anything goes. I’ll be a cardinal!”
“Oh, darling, no!”
“I’m only joking, of course. I’ll be the court jester, a fool. And you can be Semiramis.”
She frowned. “Dr. Carleton says I shouldn’t be up after midnight.”
“The ladies, like Cinderella, will be sent home on the stroke of twelve!”
I had a sudden vision of my brother-in-law warning me that, now I was an unemployed layman, it might behoove me to save a remnant of Mother’s residue for my future. But wouldn’t it be my very redemption to let her blow it all? So that I should have made at least one human being happy? And when that was done … well, we should see.
CHARITY
Goddess of Our Day
MYRON TOWNSEND believed that his life, or at least the better part of it, had ended on the winter afternoon in 1985 when, in a fit of anger and humiliation, he had flung his resignation from the firm of Townsend, Cox & Collins in the face of the managing partner, Ralph Collins. He had not been obliged to do so. He had survived, technically speaking, what was odiously known in Manhattan legal circles as a “partnership purge.” But the price would have been to become a figurehead at a fixed stipend that was slightly less than what the firm paid a first-year law clerk.
Myron, passing through the reception hall on his way home that night and paying what he thought might be his farewell to the three portraits hanging there, wondered grimly whether they did not mark the stages of the decline and fall of the Townsends. His own clear recognition of that seemingly ineluctable process added the final drop to the brew of his bitterness. The large dark canvas that depicted his grandfather Sidney, the firm founder, by Daniel Huntington showed a corpulent gentleman in a Prince Albert with muttonchop whiskers, a man whose god had been created in his own image, one who deemed failure an illness and illness a judgment from on high and who never in a long life had done a stroke of physical exercise. And there was Ezra Townsend, Myron’s father, child of the founder’s old age, conceived by that fashionable painter John Alexander as the suave adviser to the very rich in the day of the great Theodore, with brooding eyes and a drooping moustache, grey suede gloves held in one hand as if about to take polite leave of a valued but nonetheless tedious client, thin to the point of boniness, elegant, superior, bored. Was he already spending the capital of the family reputation? And answering the courteous but insistent queries of the younger partners with tales of his progenitor’s old triumphs at the bar?
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