Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  Still he felt an overpowering remorse at having failed Nicholas and at having broken his priestly vows and at having, yes, betrayed me. But the bite of those sorrows was nothing compared to the passion set loose in him at last. There was a woman now, and there was a war, and in relation to each he found the precious treasure that he'd counted lost forever, not the Kingdom of God, but his own manhood. His memory and his manhood had been returned to him by Wiley's soul and Carolyn's body.

  I have had twelve years to understand, and I think I do, although I have perhaps accepted less than I have understood.

  It was not their purpose to hurt me. On the contrary, they always sought to lull me in the cat's cradle of their lies. And there were times when they even offered me a crack at the truth, but I rigorously avoided that. When Michael spoke to me on Black Mountain of his dread, his discouragement and sense of doom, I chose to hear him always as the hero of resistance, as if the dread was of prison and not of hell, as if what doomed him was his faithfulness and not his betrayal. I was a cooperator in their adultery, and even a beneficiary of it. I'm certain it was true, as Carolyn said, that she loved me more than ever, even while she deceived me. It was Michael who opened her fully, not me. When at last she had him, her joy overflowed. She could not have feigned her happiness, and I, with Molly, saw more of it than anyone.

  Surely at some level I knew what had happened. They were secret lovers for three years. I have described already times when the truth—"I do love you!"—all but raped me. But I never allowed it entrance to the center of my heart. It was writing in the sand in the wind, and before the last letter was formed the first was always gone. I refused to hold the literal image in my mind; Michael and Carolyn naked with each other? Fucking? Not once in a fit of passion, but every chance they got? Every chance I gave them? Settling into a long, easy liaison that made them not less loving, as the "old morality" swore it would, but more? Carolyn became a great wife and mother, and Michael became a hero-priest because of—who could have explained this?—in a word, sin.

  When at last I was made to face what was obvious, I simply could not do so as myself. I became someone else. I became what the FBI man thought I was, and what he wanted.

  I watched the tape reels spinning, silent now except for the flick flick flick of the tailing brown ribbon. The room, stark white, unornamented, the light glaring fiercely above me, was like the set of a play. One of those modern things, Pinter or Beckett, in which the antagonist representing absolute evil or absolute good— it is never clear and doesn't matter—inflicts his torment from outside the room. He never enters.

  But if I was a Pinter character, I would have dismissed what I had just heard with an ironic remark—"Golly, but the good Father paid close attention in Confession all these years!"—and I'd have resumed my life with Carolyn, my friendship with Michael, as if nothing happened. But I'd have become the absolute antagonist outside their stark white room.

  But I am out of Ibsen, not Pinter. I had no choice but to shake heaven, to bring it down, even if on myself. This was the betrayal I'd foreseen, expected, made possible. Yet it was the one event—even including, say, the arrival on our cities of Russian missiles—for which I was utterly unprepared. There had been no air-raid drills for this.

  My reaction watching those reels was no more a matter of choice than it was for the end of the audio tape to go flick flick flick. I was possessed by the simplest reflex, the oldest one, an absolute impulse. It taught me the only wisdom I would need in Israel when I got there, the only relevant truth of the Nuclear Age: that when the enemy strikes and we are defeated totally—our cities razed, our future ash—it will not matter that no purpose is served by our destroying in return and with our last effort a Beirut or a Moscow or a My Lai for that matter. Retaliation is the rule of life. That's all.

  The door of the interrogation room opened—theater of the absurd now utterly—and the mode of mine walked in.

  THIRTY-ONE

  MONHEGAN Island is a whale-shaped rock twelve miles off the coast of Maine, only a few miles around and reaching perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the sea. For three hundred years it has maintained a cruel, stolid indifference to the pounding waves of the Atlantic, to the shrouding weather, to the fierce fishing people who have made it home, to the artists and rare summer tourists who defy the twin hostilities of nature and native, and to the hardy traffic of lobster boats, trawlers and cargo ships for which it remains a fearsome navigational hazard. Nearly a hundred vessels have piled up on its rocks. The story of Monhegan's wild shore is the story of shipwreck.

  No savvy fugitive would have gone there, and I could not imagine why Michael would have chosen it. Carolyn and I were clinging to the same stanchion, the upright pipe that supported the flimsy roof of the lobster boat we'd hired to take us out from Boothbay Harbor. It was early in April, much too soon for tourists, and the lobsterman had eyed us warily when we'd approached him. But for fifty dollars he swallowed his qualm. He could be out and back in four hours. It was a Sunday and he couldn't haul traps anyway. What was it to him that the island's one small hotel didn't open up until June? What was it to him that the Monhegan people would shun us? We didn't explain that we had reason to think that a friend of ours was out there already, expecting us.

  I pressed the ends of my collar together at my throat. The spray had saturated my citified raincoat, and I dearly wished for a hat. I was freezing, though the day had begun as balmy and bright. I tried to focus on the island, which seemed to undulate mystically ahead of us, though we were the ones who rose and fell. Our boat was at the mercy of swells and I considered it a miracle that I had not gotten sick yet. For the first hour it had frightened me that I could not see the island through the fog, and all that time the lobsterman's boat had seemed less seaworthy the farther from land we got. How I wished for radar. I did not trust his compass or his skill until suddenly the island appeared ahead of us, like an apparition. I looked at the man to offer the homage of a nod, but he ignored me. Carolyn raised her eyebrows with relief. We were strictly Circle Line sailors. This was fucking awful.

  I said, "Why the hell would he come out here?"

  "This is why." Carolyn grimaced as the boat dropped.

  "But if they came after him, there's no escape. It's a corner. He's put himself in a corner."

  "You just wish he'd stayed in Manhattan, the island with bridges."

  "Damn right I do. Maybe this is the wrong Monhegan Island. Maybe it's the name of a nice resort in North Carolina."

  Carolyn shook her head. The message that fell through our mail slot, in Michael's writing, had said only, "Monhegan Island, Palm Sunday morning."

  "Besides," she said, sliding her arm through mine, "they'd never think to look for him out here."

  "They have their ways." I pressed her arm between my elbow and my ribs. The wind feathered the wisps of her hair, tugging them one after the other out of her scarf. Beads of water clung to her lashes.

  One time we took the boat from Galway to the Aran Islands. The sea became rough and then rain began to fall. Neither Caro nor I became sick, but many of our fellow passengers did, and to escape the cramped, putrid space below we went up on deck and stood huddled by a lifeboat. The rain lashed us and the boat bucked like a bronco, but we loved it. When the tourists came crashing up from below to be sick, they rushed one after the other for the nearest rail, but that had them puking into the wind with predictable results. Perhaps it was cruel of us, but we laughed and laughed. We were on the largest of the Aran Islands for three days. It never stopped raining, but that did not faze us because we spent the entire time in bed. Our Irish hosts—we stayed in a small, child-ridden B&B—eyed us suspiciously during our rare forays downstairs for meals. That we scandalized them heightened our pleasure. What a surprise to both of us that a gloomy, puritanical outpost of the Kingdom of Repression should have been the scene of our greatest coital excess. Talk about broncos! Carolyn and I rode each other like champions. Because that dreary littl
e world held nothing for us we could focus for a change entirely on each other. In that foreign place we could become the other people we wanted to be. We came together like sex-starved strangers. The weather, having transformed our tourist weekend into a tryst, was a problem in only one regard. Owing to the pervasive dampness, our sperm-soaked sheets never dried out and we were too embarrassed to ask the Missus for fresh ones.

  Carolyn leaned toward the lobsterman. "How do local people get out here, if there's no ferry?"

  He shrugged. His gaze was fixed on the island. His hands played the wheel, the spokes of which were welded bolts. "Not much call. Local people stay put. Mail boat on Tuesdays. That's it."

  "Do they get television out here?"

  "Nope. No phones either. Just two-way radio."

  Carolyn looked at me and said quietly, "So he can walk- around without worrying about being recognized. That might be worth being in a corner."

  I asked the lobsterman, "What about newspapers? What about Time magazine?"

  He shrugged.

  "You ask him," I whispered to Carolyn. "He won't answer me."

  The boat wallowed as we hit what seemed to be a wake, a wave distinctly larger than what we'd been through. Then the boat's propeller bit again and we steadied. Carolyn hugged me. "I hate this," she said. "I hate it. I wouldn't do it for anyone else."

  "Me neither," I said.

  Irony does not feature in my recollection of that morning. Obviously my true feelings toward Michael and toward what I had done, was doing, were coated over by numbing layers. My mind was entirely taken up with the details of our journey, although I do recall thinking that my nausea, once I began to feel it, was fitting. Otherwise it seems to me I was moving through events the way a sleepwalker does, with no sharp sensations of anticipation, fear, bitterness, or guilt.

  As we approached the small harbor nestled in the gut between Monhegan and its tiny satellite, Manana, the noise of our boat's engine grew louder, not that our reticent skipper gunned it, but that the sound bounced back at us from the island's looming mass. The irregular, insistent clanging of a floating gong filled the air with tension, then faded as we left it behind. Even before I could distinguish between the gray rock of the shore and the sharp line of scraggly green pine above it, the boat slowed. Inside Manana the water was smooth. When I leaned over the boat's edge I could see the reflection of my own face, which I barely recognized.

  I saw no houses until we swung around the tip of a promontory. On the hill above were separate small clusters of rugged-looking cottages. A large white clapboard building with a covered porch and shuttered windows must have been the summer hotel. Poking up from the trees at a higher elevation were a church steeple and the round white tower of the famous lighthouse.

  We were cutting through a fleet of moored lobster boats essentially like the one in which we were riding. On their transoms were names like "Lu-Ann,"

  "Beth-Marie" and "Sally-Jo." I nudged Carolyn. "Do you think the women out here have hyphenated names, or do the fishermen credit their wives and girlfriends together?"

  Carolyn stared at me as if she hadn't understood. I was thinking that if she had a boat, it would be the "Michael-Frank."

  Tied to the pilings at the single thrusting pier was a large oceangoing trawler, the only boat of its size in the harbor. It dwarfed us as we pulled in beside it.

  "Goddamn!" the lobsterman said when he saw it. "What's she doing in here?"

  There was an emotion in his voice—anger? alarm?—that disturbed me. "What do you mean?"

  "These trawlers wreck our traps," he said. "They got no business in this close."

  Close? It seemed to me we were halfway to Europe.

  "She just better get out of this harbor before the tide goes. Ever seen a whale on the rocks? That's what she'll be."

  With effortless skill he slipped in behind the trawler. I reached out to fend us off when we bumped the pier, but the boat slid up to it gently and stopped, just kissing the pilings.

  I looked up at the trawler's looming black stern. Rust-stained white letters two feet high arched across it: "Sea Witch. Halifax."

  A young man dressed for weather in a yellow slicker and watch cap greeted us from the pier. We clambered out of the boat, which slipped away then as smoothly as it had come in. I turned to thank the lobsterman, but he was intent on the helm and headed out with no farewell. As I watched him leave it was with a pang. Why didn't I just go with him?

  The young man led us off the pier and up a dirt road that was lined with open oil drums. An unbearable stench came from them. They were full of rotten fish, lobster bait, and it was then that my nausea got the, best of me. I turned away and vomited violently on the side of the road. Carolyn tried to help but I shrugged her off. For perhaps two full minutes, though it seemed like hours, I retched. When the heaves subsided and I recovered some sense of myself, of my situation, I looked around expecting to see unfriendly men laughing at me the way I had laughed on the boat to Aran. But there were only Carolyn and our guide.

  I followed them miserably.

  I was quite aware that Carolyn could hardly contain her excitement, and only then did the bile coating my mouth seem truly bitter.

  The young man led us up the steep hill behind the village, along a rutted dirt path. If there were cars or trucks on Monhegan I didn't see them, and I can't call the trail we followed a road. At the top of the hill was the lighthouse we'd seen from the water, a great phallus fifty feet high. At its base stood a neglected shed. No sooner had we come upon it than our guide turned and left us.

  Michael came promptly out of the shed, walking vigorously. He too was dressed like a seaman, and his beard enhanced the ruddy image, but I knew him at once. Despite everything—what I'd learned and what I'd done—my first surge of feeling was of the old affection, the need.

  When my father lay dying in a dreary Queens hospital in 1964, Michael never left us. My father had a terrible time. He knew he was dying, and when he was awake he was crazy with fear. His piety had failed him when my mother died several years before, and if it had been up to me to console him, he would have died in the throes of despair. But Michael knew how to help him, with a combination of silence and muted reassurance. Michael talked simply and directly of the Christian faith. He told my father, and me who listened, about the death of Lazarus, about the anguish of Jesus. Another priest had glibly begun describing the Streets of Heaven to my father, who had cursed him in a seizure of panic and railed, "Don't talk to me about heaven! Talk about my dying!" And that's what Michael did. Only when the full terror of that loss—Lazarus', ours—had been plumbed did he broach the subject of resurrection, but by then my father was ready to hear of it.

  Eliciting faith from the wary is like getting a wounded bird to walk into your hand, but Michael, a natural priest if I ever knew one, could do it effortlessly. When my father died Michael was holding his hand and they were praying together the Hail Mary. It was the first prayer my father had uttered since my mother's death. He released his grip on life because Michael made him ready to. He believed in God, like me, because Michael did. If he had not been my friend, if he had only been the priest who sent my father on his way, I'd have been in his debt for the rest of my life. But with Michael, as with a brother, it was never a question of owing. At my father's graveside he said to me, "Now we really have to stick together."

  I watched Carolyn go into his arms.

  They kissed the way I'd seen them kiss dozens of times before, not with great passion certainly—no one's mouth opened—but with forthright affection. Their bodies were pressed together, but not sensually. Still I saw their kiss and embrace differently, and though even then I could not have identified its signals explicitly I recognized the unmistakable reality of their intimacy.

  I lowered my eyes. Was that an act of deference? Of bashfulness? Reluctance to intrude upon lovers? Wasn't it my acknowledgment of their right to be together? From the very beginning I'd been the outsider in the ill-fated tr
io. I was the interloper, the one who'd come between. Perhaps that knowledge was what kept my jealousy at bay. If I trembled it was with the weak-kneed vertigo of one who'd just puked his guts out. I was sicker than I'd felt in years. But emotionally I was in space, floating weightlessly, not like an astronaut, but like an astronaut's tube of toothpaste.

  When Michael turned to me I found it possible to go to him and embrace him. I did not kiss his cheek.

  Hey, I told myself, no big deal. These things happen. What the hell, he fell in love with the wrong woman, or I did. It wasn't the end of the world. Just a bit of nastiness between two mortals. He slugged me; now I was slugging him. It had been going on since Cain and Abel. No, since Eve left Adam for the snake. No big deal.

  Then why were my legs trembling?

  The lighthouse was in the middle of a clearing, but ringing it were wild, weather-beaten shrubs and vine-tangled trees. The undergrowth was too thick to see into. Where was the goddamn FBI? I wanted this shit over with.

  Michael took my arm firmly between his two hands. "Durk, what's wrong?"

  When I looked at him, the concern in his eyes, the friendship, was what set off the charge at last. This fucker! This son of a bitch! This self-proclaimed saint! How dare he manifest love to me! Or rather pity! Or was it mere guilt? Out with it, Fuck! Show me what you really feel, the smug superiority of the usurper! Oh, you tortured soul! How you condemned yourself for flourishing a bayonet at those Korean peasants, but what of the bayonet you plunged in me? My wife's betrayal is nothing to yours! My first friend, the one who taught me trust! But what is trust now? Now I feel it, that blade between my breast and its bone, cutting cleanly, opening a hole in which to bury all past and future, a hole...