Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  Alone with my panic.

  Panic? you ask. Why panic?

  Because I had to return then to Saint John the Divine Cathedral, which was empty of people but full of ghosts. Ancient ghosts: Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Edmund Campion, John Fisher and Thomas More. There were the ghosts of Morgans, Potters and Huntingtons who wanted worthy monuments to their own munificence, and there were the ghosts of the Irish coolies on whose backs their colossi rose. There were ghosts with names I knew: Lennie Pace, Mary Ellen Divine, Sister Anne Edward, Dorothy Day, Cardinal Spellman, Tom Dooley, Thomas Merton, two Kennedys and two Ngos. There were the ghosts of Korean refugees and Chinese soldiers, of Inge Holz, Suu Van Pham, of My Lai and of a legion of slaughtered Vietnamese. There were the ghosts of the American dead. There was the ghost of Nicholas Wiley. And in a room behind the great facade, like a room behind the fireplace, a priest-hole, there hovered above his own coffin the ghost of Michael Maguire. Each awaited the tri-une word that I knew had been refused; no "Requiescat in pace" here. The Church had spoken. The anathema had been pronounced. The benediction was withheld not from one man or several, bur from an age, a generation, a people, an entire world.

  It fell to me to be for the dead and for the living a sign of peace, of mercy, of forgiveness, and I knew I could not do it.

  By now, of course, you know why. The FBI man came back as he promised he would, and like some Arthurian alchemist, with a mere flick of his finger, he changed the gold of my life to lead.

  He turned on the tape-recorder, then left me alone in the interrogation room. Until then I had thought I was under arrest. I had thought they'd brought me to their headquarters to threaten me or bribe me, neither of which would have worked. They could have tortured me and I would not have helped them. I would have died first and my last thought would have been of Michael, my last feelings love for him and joy that I too, after all, had become a hero, a martyr for the faith. But, alas, they didn't kill me.

  They only made me listen.

  I watched the reels spinning and waited for the sound to crackle on.

  A man's voice broke the silence abruptly. "Maguire, tape forty-seven, Lake George, August nineteenth, nineteen sixty-nine. Two seventeen P.M."

  The silence then was of a different kind. It was the silence of our summer, of our cabin, of our nights and days, the three of us together. I remembered climbing Black Mountain with him. I remembered her clinging to me and saying, "I've never loved you more."

  A door banged open and a woman spoke. Why did it shock me that it was Carolyn? The door slammed closed and I heard then the familiar creak of floorboards and the swarming rustle of bedclothes being torn back.

  Michael's first words were, "Oh Christ!"

  I listened as to the sounds of a city being razed, the destruction of all future, all faith, all things, in his phrase, Luke's phrase, that make for peace.

  When Carolyn cried out as she never cried out when I was in her, it was the Master's "Epheta!" His mud and spittle were on my eyes. I opened them and I saw their story whole.

  Though it spanned twenty-two years, including one of the most tumultuous decades of the century, and though it swept across the full range of human experience, from war to childbirth to death, from virginity to adultery, from celibacy to parenthood, from sanctity to excommunication, their love remained until the end what it was in the beginning: the innocent love between a priest and a nun. Once the epitome of what is tragic in life, it is the most ludicrous of romances now and commentators always wink when they speak of it. Priests and nuns when they fall in love recapitulate the absurd Victorian melodrama of fully grown men and women fumbling through an excess of clothing toward their first nakedness. We are supposed to laugh at them as their habits fall. How superior they make us feel, those of us who succeeded at an early age in purging sex of awe and love of all transcendence. And how smugly do we imagine the desolation of their guilt, those who surrender principle and violate vows and cuckold God Himself. Priests and nuns think love means all things—salvation and damnation both—while for us it is the way, as our music puts it, to make it through the night.

  Silence. This priest and this nun—my dearest, dearest friends. The silence in which they came together deafens me even now. Can the cuckold-husband narrate such a scene? And how could he possibly know of it? Oh, it is so simple; this is the hard-won prize of my work, the very center of the story I have struggled to bring you. I have played it over and over in my imagination, never fussing over diction, over voice, over the length of sentences. It is the curse of sensitivity that we behold more than we want, the blessing that we see the truth. Truth! What is truth? Mere rhetoric? But rhetoric, in Yeats's definition, is will doing the work of the imagination. Alas, I am a man of no will when it comes to this. I am at the mercy of what I have continually imagined. Nay, conjured. Nay, witnessed. Silence. This is what happened. Silence. This.

  See him walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on its fabled scaffold high above the black river, a solitary figure in the middle of the night. In daylight and with good binoculars Carolyn could have watched him coming from the balcony not a dozen paces from the bed where she was asleep alone. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivering a paper on Hopkins at an important Harvard symposium. I'd been honored to be asked and had thought of it as my lucky day. Oh cruel irony. Oh the inscape, the instress, the asshole of Inwood.

  It was the night of the day in May 1966 that Nicholas Wiley died.

  Michael had left Bellevue, having run the gauntlet of reporters—"You don't condemn suicide?"—from whom he learned of the Church's condemnation of Nicholas. He had found it impossible to return to his parish and had instead walked aimlessly through Manhattan. He went to Chrystie Street, thinking to talk to Dorothy Day—had she renounced Wiley too?—but at the last moment he knew it was impossible to talk to her. From Chrystie Street to the Brooklyn Bridge is no distance, and instinctively he made for it. He could have as easily been coming to me as to her, and there is the irony, the particular pain. What chaos followed from the accident that at the moment of his most brutal desolation, I was away and Carolyn was not.

  He rang the bell.

  Carolyn stirred, but did not wake up.

  He rang again, although he almost decided not to.

  Carolyn was frightened by the bell when it finally woke her, and she went immediately into Molly's room. Molly was two and a half years old. She was fast asleep.

  When Carolyn saw through the glass that it was Michael, she was afraid at first that he had come with news of me, that I'd been killed in a car wreck. How much simpler for everyone if that had been the case.

  "Michael, what's wrong?"

  It startled him to see her in her robe and nightgown, her long hair falling over her shoulders, and he realized only then what rudeness it was to present himself at that hour. He didn't answer at first. They stood looking at each other on opposite sides of the threshold.

  He shook himself. "I'm sorry, Carolyn. Something awful happened. A young friend of mine burned himself today."

  "Oh Michael, I heard about it. He was a friend of yours? Oh God!" She took his hand and pulled him into the house, and in that movement he went into her arms. She held him for some moments, but like a mother would have.

  "Come have a drink," she said.

  He looked at his watch. "God, Carolyn, I had no idea it was so late. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be silly. I'm glad you came."

  "I know," he said, following her into the kitchen, "but Durk will kill me."

  "He isn't here," she said over her shoulder. "He's in Boston until Friday."

  If you imagine Michael shuddering with anticipation at that revelation, you have misunderstood him. He was capable of all the inner urges, of course, but his virility was a function of restraint. He was thirty-four years old and had been faithful to his vow of celibacy, remained in fact a virgin. He had been ambushed on occasion by desire, and masturbation was not unknown to him, but he had not allowed himself in years
consciously to fix upon Carolyn's image as the object of his lust, as he would have surely were she not still the owner of his heart.

  In the kitchen he sat at the Formica counter while Carolyn brought glasses and the gin. They sipped quietly. Michael told her Nicholas's story. She listened carefully for what it revealed about his own.

  Michael was adrift in the aftermath of his futile time in Vietnam. His final surrender to Spellman's tyranny, his upstate banishment to Saint Joseph's and his too-easy embrace of the tranquillity of exile left him profoundly vulnerable to feelings of guilt. The guilt was appropriate because he violated his conscience brutally when he chose to obey the bark of the Church rather than the cry of the Vietnamese. And then he had tried to draw Nicholas Wiley into exile with him, but the young pacifist's conscience was more ruthless. The mistake had been to dam its torrent with the trivialities of life in the country parish. When the dam burst, poor Nicholas was at the mercy of that flood, the rage of it.

  "I know it seems silly, Caro, given his age and mine, but I felt like a father to Nicholas. I never felt like a father before."

  She touched his arm. "You're a good father, Michael. Only good fathers make good priests."

  Michael shook his head slowly. "If I'd been more attentive to him, to what he was feeling..."

  "Michael, how could you know? He didn't know himself."

  "But I did know, Caro." He leaned against her. She caressed him. And they were still.

  After a time he said, "It's as if I was forbidden to."

  "What?"

  He straightened, moved away slightly. She withdrew her hand and each fussed with the gin. "To pay attention to feelings."

  "Well, in a way you are forbidden to do that, aren't you?"

  He smiled. She was bitter about her convent experience, and the religious life was a topic they avoided. "I guess I am," he said. "If so..." He took a hefty drink. "I'm in the state of disobedience now."

  "Because you're feeling...?"

  "Like getting drunk."

  "Now there's a feeling priests are allowed to have."

  He laughed and poured more gin into his glass. "Not 'allowed,' encouraged!" He drank again.

  Carolyn watched him. "Which is sad," she said quietly.

  "It's the only way, love. As Saint Paul said, it's either that or burn."

  "I thought he said, 'Marry or burn.'"

  That stopped him. He looked at her abruptly. "That's the issue, isn't it?"

  "Is it?"

  "I mean that's the point of renouncing feeling. It's the only way to live like this."

  "That's the saddest thing I ever heard, Michael."

  "But you know it's true."

  She wouldn't look at him.

  "Don't you?" he pressed.

  "Then why live like that?"

  "You know why."

  "No, I don't, Michael. I honestly don't."

  "Well, you did."

  Now she faced him squarely, and when their eyes met, he had an impulse to shield his from hers. "Yes, I did," she said. "I knew about the 'Come follow me!' and the 'Not my will but Thine!' and the 'Be ye perfect!' and the 'Fiat Voluntas Tua.' But I also know about the man who put the Pharisees in their place. And I know who the Pharisees are today. And I know how they maintain their control over good people like you. They make you think that the most precious experience possible to a human being is an evil one. Nicholas Wiley has offered you a chance, Michael, because he's made you feel something. Well, don't drown that feeling! And don't talk it away with your Bible quotes!"

  "But Carolyn, Nicholas Wiley burned himself to death because of his feelings."

  "Is that what you're afraid of, immolating yourself?"

  "No." He looked away from her. "But I am afraid of lunacy." Carolyn lifted her gaze to the window. The lights of Manhattan shone in the black, but it was to a reflection in the glass her eyes were drawn. On Michael's face the lines were taut, fierce, unbecoming. She had never seen him in the grip of cowardice before. "Your refusal is the lunacy," she said harshly.

  It was the truth between them, the very heart of it. He knew, as I would have, that she meant, beneath the generalities about "feelings," his refusal of her.

  He said quietly, "I wish I could change it."

  "You can," she said simply.

  Michael waited for her to look at him. "I'm afraid," he said.

  "I know."

  Neither breathed. Already they had crossed the threshold; he closed a door behind them by saying, "Of you."

  Silence, what silence then between them. Michael stared at the counter, Carolyn bowed her head. They could still have drawn back. Each small step required another, bolder one. The wind from the river rattled lightly at the window. The wall clock hummed.

  Michael raised his eyes to look at her. The nightgown was closed at her throat. Its white cotton shimmered against the navy blue of her robe, a kimono, full sleeved without lapels. She had belted it tightly. Her waist and bosom were defined, not erotically but with unabashed womanliness. He pictured her as she had been when he first knew her, in the black habit of a Sister of Charity, and then he pictured her stepping from the terrace in Dobbs Ferry, in the near nakedness of an ordinary bathing suit, her long legs, her cropped blond hair, her thighs. Was it possible that first vision of her beauty had occurred only six years before? Those six years, with a marriage, a child, a house, a resolute pursuit of painting, had been for her a long time, but for him they had been an eternity, an infinite stretch in which, while worlds ended outside, nothing happened inside. It had been that long since anyone touched him, since she had.

  He reached his hand toward hers where it rested by her glass. Shyly he covered it.

  When she looked up at him, tears spilled from her eyes. Her crusty assertiveness had evaporated. When she spoke he could barely hear her. "I have been wanting you to do that."

  Michael knew that if he continued touching her all was lost, yet he could not remove his hand. This was what he'd feared—being outdistanced by his racing heart. But Carolyn was ahead of him, she was waiting for him. She at least had been consistent from the start.

  He leaned toward her and she brought her face to his. He kissed a tear. He raised his other hand to touch her hair. Suddenly that hand closed on the back of her neck and pressed her face against his. Their kiss was like a blow, stunning them both. Carolyn's lip bled at once, and the taste of her blood made Michael wild. Lunacy, he thought, yes, lunacy! This could make a man set fire to himself. But this had nothing to do with Wiley.

  Against the image of a man aflame he buried his face between her shoulder and her neck. "Oh Caro!" Immolation of another kind.

  The chair fell out from under him. She took his weight and her hands pulled at him passionately. She brought his face up to kiss him again, pushing her tongue into his mouth, but she began to fall too. They went together to the floor, roughly. Their arms and hands never faltered, hers pulling him on top of her, his pressing through her robe and the thin cloth of her nightgown.

  "Stop!" she said, "Stop!" and rolled her face away.

  He raised himself on one knee, off her. Oh Christ, what are we doing? This is impossible!

  But that was not her meaning.

  She stood and took his hand and led him to her bedroom. To our bedroom.

  He followed mutely.

  She closed the door behind them and by our bed she turned toward him. She opened her robe and let it fall. "We should be undressed," she said. "We should be naked for each other."

  Michael unbuttoned his black shirt. No woman would have done that for him. At his bare chest, hanging from a string around his neck, was a small plain cross of wood, Wiley's cross.

  He went to her, understanding that this must happen slowly, deliberately. He would have preferred it that way himself, but preference had nothing to do with it. The storm of his arousal broke. He kissed her, pressed her body against his, and the sensation of her breasts rising beneath the thin cotton against his skin unleashed him. He tore
at her nightgown, pulling it down feverishly, even while pushing her away to look, to see those breasts, her waist, the hair of her crotch, to see that she was after all the fulfillment of his lust. She fell back onto the bed, and her legs opened.

  He threw off his clothing and was on her, but he was too frantic, too new, too at the mercy of his passion, and he could not find her. All at once he was terrified that he would ejaculate outside her. "Help me!" he said. "Help!"

  And didn't that plea of his sum up everything? Why he was afraid; why the suicide of his protégé drove him into her arms, her legs; why this moment had been so long in coming, so terrifying. He was the man who helped others. He had never needed help himself. There was his true virginity.

  She knew just what to do and did, guiding his penis successfully, seizing it in the mouth of her womb so that when, seconds later, all that he withheld began to pump violently like Gatling rounds, a new terror took hold of him—many first-time lovers have it—that he would kill her.

  When she screamed, how could he have known it was not with pain? In his dream of copulation, brutality was muted but there. But now when she thrashed below him, all was violence. Her arms held him as the walls of her cunt held his prick. Her constrictions came in spasms; she gave what she got. She strangled him.

  Then he cried out like a gored beast. They were both killers. Was that the recognition that freed him?

  He stopped caring finally what would happen if he fucked her, and simply did.

  Remorse, when it came, was gentle. They spoke of me, of course, and would surely have felt horror at their betrayal, but their postcoital happiness reduced it to something like regret. It was as if I was a passenger in a car one of them was driving—it didn't matter which—and then the other's car came out of nowhere. Perhaps it was the highway's fault or the weather's. In the collision I was the only victim. What else could they do but console each other for what they'd done? At least I would never know.

  Michael dressed before dawn and at the door he said to her, his finger under her chin, "I love you." Then he left. He went to his rectory in Aina, showered, put on fresh clericals and said the early Mass for the repose of the soul of Nicholas Wiley. Later that morning, in his fateful, final meeting with Francis Cardinal Spellman—"I refuse to yield to you in anything related to this evil war!"—he remembered what, on the scale of moral conduct, was the true blasphemy, not disobedience or adultery, but genocide.