And so with a finger under the lip of wood I lifted the cover of your coffin expecting anything—a staring mask, plasticene, lipstick, rouge, a pirate's skull—but you.
Ah. Ah. I had nothing then but silence. Only emptiness. The void. Nothing. And nothing. And nothing.
Later—only moments, but it might have been all of time—Dean Evans interrupted me. He was as imposing as I'd remembered, that great shock of white hair, that physical self-assurance. Also, that quiet earnestness.
"Mister Durkin," he said sadly, "it is nearly time to begin."
"May I have a moment more, please?"
He looked at me, not as if I was ridiculous, which I expected, but as if he'd known I was going to ask. He nodded, and threw a glance at the pallbearers behind him. They withdrew.
"Where's Carolyn?" I asked.
"She's in the pew with her children."
"Is Molly there?"
"Yes."
"Then would you ask Carolyn to come here a moment? Just for a moment?" To help me break the grip of that nothing, which had me, that paralysis.
He nodded and turned.
Then, again after no time or all time, she was standing in the arched entrance of the baptistry.
Her eyes went to the open coffin, and she drew back, shaking her head.
I offered my hand, but said, "Caro, help me make my peace with him. Please help me."
When she looked at me I saw in her eyes finally the glint of understanding. She came and stood by me.
Over his remade, lifeless face.
"Michael, it's me and Caro." I had no idea whether I was speaking this aloud or only in my head. "You died before I said to you that I am sorry, and I so wanted your forgiveness. I wanted to give you mine. Is it too late?"
Carolyn took my hand, pressed it like a dead flower.
He did not speak to me.
I leaned toward him, thinking to kiss those lips. But when he did not breathe on my face I stopped, suspended just above his frozen skin.
Oh, he is dead!
This is death!
There was no kissing now. No forgiving.
Organ music behind me. And a congregation resonant but removed, as if in another sphere, singing, "The strife is o'er, the battle done; Now is the victor's triumph won. O let the song of praise be sung, Alleluia!"
Dean Evans, vested in black cope, motioned at the pallbearers and they came forward.
Carolyn and I stood aside. We should have slipped out then to join the laity, to let the clergy splice their rubrics, but we could not, either of us, leave him.
One of those strangers closed Michael's coffin.
When the pallbearers had it hoisted and began the slow unsteady procession out into the ambulatory, Dean Evans gestured toward me and Carolyn. "Walk with us," his hand said. Holding each other we fell into step behind the gleaming box.
I was numb. I was as a man upright but asleep. I merely followed, with only one sensation, that of a chill on my face, a frosted patch where I'd expected the warmth of Michael's breath. Outside the baptistry, in the main body of the cathedral, the procession suddenly became elaborate. Ahead of the coffin were dozens of robed choir members, and ahead of them was a huge borne cross, a pair of torches and a white banner emblazoned, "Blessed are the Peacemakers." Interspersed between the choir and the coffin and between the coffin and us were a thurifer carrying a smoking incense vessel and two pairs of surpliced acolytes. And waiting to walk with Dean Evans were vested deacons and more acolytes, candles flickering off every face.
And they were all singing with rolling robust voices, "On the third morn he rose again, Glorious in majesty to reign; O let us swell the joyful strain, Alleluia!"
Slowly we moved. Instead of cutting directly across the near aisle to the sanctuary, however, the procession wound into the north aisle, into the nave, among the pews where the mourners sat.
And it was there that the first jolt hit me, the first surprise, the first miracle. The frontmost dozen rows of chairs—not pews—were full of albed priests, some with stoles crossed on their breasts and gathered in cinctures, some with stoles hanging in stripes from their shoulders. Others wore the vestigial Benedictine cowls, that serve professors now and low church preachers. As the coffin appeared, their eyes displayed their loss. They were like firemen, policemen, soldiers gathered by the death of a brother. After the choir passed they began to file out into the aisle ahead of the coffin. As I watched I could feel my concentration slowly coming back, a focus of mind, to grapple with this mystery. Who exactly were they? But at once, recognizing the cut of the albs and stoles, the flash of cassocks and habits under outer vestments, I understood that they were Jesuits, Paulists, Franciscans, defiant priests of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, as well as Episcopal vicars and canons, Lutheran pastors and Baptist ministers. I saw familiar faces, priests from Michael's seminary class—Gene O'Mally—and veterans of antiwar demonstrations. They were clergy of every stripe from New York, but not only New York. Monsignor Egan, the famous Chicagoan, was there. Interspersed among the men were women, similarly vested, the new ordinandi, the new prophets of several denominations. There were parish priests and teachers, pastors, curates and missionaries. There were the famous ones whose names came back easily as they passed: Harvey Cox, Daniel Berrigan, William Sloane Coffin, Monsignor Fox, Bishop Alcott of the Episcopal diocese, John Ferris Smith, Robert MacAfee Brown, Henri Nouwen, Paul Lannan, and Michael Hunt. There were more than a hundred, ordained all, brother and sister priests of the excommunicant.
And with full strong voices they were singing, "O Risen Lord, all praise to you, Who from our sin have set us free, That we may live eternally, Alleluia."
The second jolt—miracle—came when our part of the procession resumed, behind the concelebrating clergy, and I saw at last, moving into the heart of the darkened nave, that the vast cathedral, the second largest church in the world, was full.
Full of people. Men, women, children, students, nuns, old, young, ex-priests, journalists, politicians, peace workers; a dominance surely of the middle-aged, looking slightly worn, faded, but above their hymnals, looking also strong, clear-eyed, resolute. They were Parthians, Medes and Elamites. They were Jews. There were thousands of them.
And I was stunned. Archbishop Timothy O'Shea was not there. Terence Cardinal Cooke was not there. Pope John Paul II was not there. But their people were. People come to bury Michael Maguire; come to send him on his way.
Who, therefore, were the outcasts? Who the excommunicants?
"Alleluia, the strife is o'er, the battle done..."
The song soared above us.
The procession turned the first corner and then the second.
"Who from our sin have set us free."
And we were striding now down the main aisle, toward the altar and the pulpit. Carolyn had both her hands linked in the crook of my arm and when I looked at her, I saw those eyes, brimming over, fixed upon the coffin.
I saw also, for the first time, what we were doing here, why she had sent for me.
Yes, Michael was dead.
And yes, we were alive. The Church, having died, was reborn. We were the Church, that throng gathered in memory, and also by it. We had been remembering ourselves, becoming part of each other once more. This had been the work of Michael's ghost and the work—Ah, Bright Wings!—of the Holy Ghost. That alleluia there and then outweighed all unfinished business, every anathema and each harbored wound of betrayal. That alleluia outweighed what we had done or not done, what we had lost, had found or had forgot. That alleluia outweighed death.
Yes, we believed in the Holy Catholic Church, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.
Into life everlasting we had gathered to commit our friend. Into life everlasting we wanted to release him.
I had been using memory and remorse to cling to him. He was my saint, my sinner, my hero, my great friend, my last enemy. He was none of these. He was a man. And as a man, not God, he stop
ped the world for a moment to speak of peace. And if the world had not heard him, we had heard him.
As we approached the altar on which we would break bread, a communion of the living and the dead, of Catholics and Protestants, of Jews and gentiles, of believers and unbelievers, of the reborn and the fallen-away, of Americans and Asians, of the saved and the damned, a communion, in that precious phrase, of saints, I sensed at last—oh gratitude!—the Presence of the One from whom Michael heard the call and toward whom even then Michael, steadfast marcher, was striding. He was striding as always, just ahead of us. And we had come to that act of remembrance and of worship out of the old habit of following him. We yet believed—and this is what our priests must do for us!—because he did.
As my eye fell to the magnificent carved pulpit, the shrine of the eternally unimprisoned Word of God, I knew at last what I would say. That throng needed no sermon, no homily, no eulogy, no explanation or confession, nothing more from me. Michael Maguire's story had been enough. It had brought us here to earth again, and him to the threshold of heaven. It was my place, my privilege just to end it, crying with my fist raised at his remains, "Go, Michael! Go, Michael! Go in peace, dear Michael! Go!"
AFTERWORD
SINCE I wrote this book in the early 1980s, so many entirely unanticipated things have happened. And many things you would perhaps consider much more likely have not happened.
More than ten years after this book appeared, twenty years after the fall—or liberation—of Saigon, Robert McNamara published a memoir in which he acknowledged that early on he saw that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and that the further pursuit of it was a terrible mistake. (Fie also said that Ngo Dinh Diem's Catholicism was part of what led to the first fatal errors: "we totally misjudged that.") Yes, McNamara's silence after reaching that conclusion seems unforgivable—but where, at least, is any comparable statement of conscience from Henry Kissinger or the others who kept the war going?
I could not have imagined in 1984, when Prince of Peace was first published, that the United States would maintain its punitive embargo of Vietnam for ten more years. In that period, the black flag of the POW/MIA movement became ubiquitous in America, sprouting on flagpoles outside post offices, VFW posts, union halls. Yet while the hundreds or thousands of missing American soldiers and fliers would understandably haunt us, little was made of the Vietnamese MIAs, whose numbers were counted in five digits or six. And this "nonreckoning," as I see it, goes to the heart of the matter.
Prince of Peace was written around a nut of outrage that still sits in my throat. I first claimed that feeling as my own upon learning of the massacre of more than five hundred civilians at My Lai by American soldiers. The massacre occurred in 1968, although we did not hear of it until 1969 because of an army cover-up. By 1984 it was clear that the cover-up was continuing: thirteen soldiers were indicted for war crimes, and twelve for carrying out the cover-up, but only one man was convicted of anything: Lieutenant William L. Calley, who was found guilty of twenty-two murders. He was given a life sentence but served only six months in prison. On the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre, in March 1998, at ceremonies in Washington, three veterans were honored for having tried to stop the berserking GIs of Charlie Company. "The army has finally come to terms with what was a black day," a U.S. senator said. But had it? What does it say about the army and the country that this anniversary was observed by honoring true, but decidedly exceptional, heroism when we have never held responsible the perpetrators of that crime?
It is this ongoing inability to "come to terms" with Vietnam that I could never have imagined as I wrote about the war in this novel. Our nation remains cursed and haunted by Vietnam. Why? Because we lost? Because those who fought in the war were so unfairly scapegoated when they returned home? Or could it be that the Vietnamese dead—perhaps two million of them—weigh anonymously on our conscience.
Not long after publishing Prince of Peace, my wife and I brought our daughter to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, that stark symbol of what the war did first to the dead and then to all of us.
"The Vietnam War?" Lizzy asked, taking in the names etched in black granite.
"Yes," we answered.
"Then where are the Vietnamese names?"
The question hangs above this nation. Where are the names of the 504 women, old men, and children who died at My Lai? Like Kissinger, we have never really acknowledged what we did in Vietnam. If you had told me in 1984 that eight years later this country would elect as president a man who had responded to the Vietnam War by resisting the draft, I would have been consoled and proud. But if you had then told me that he would cooperate with his right-wing critics in treating that resistance as a thing to be ashamed of, I would have been mystified.
The failure to "come to terms" with Vietnam has been part of a broader failure to come to terms with America's Cold War militarism. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than our refusal to significantly reduce our dependence on nuclear weapons. In 1984 the United States possessed more than thirty thousand nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan had dispatched Pershing missiles to Europe, and announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which, if implemented, would have violated the crucial Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That same year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic timepiece tracking the likelihood of nuclear war, to three minutes before midnight, the closest the world had come to the zero hour in more than thirty years.
The antinuclear movement was born. Millions took to the streets demanding, as it was called, a nuclear freeze. And they were heard. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985, he and Reagan formed an unexpected partnership to turn the tide against the arms race. Their 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty led to START and START II. George Bush followed Reagan's lead to cut the American nuclear arsenal by half. In 1991 the Doomsday Clock was moved "off the scale," to seventeen minutes before midnight. The danger seemed past.
Amazingly enough, under Bill Clinton, a president with a history as a war protester, that process has not only stalled but, with the outbreak of nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, reversed itself. As this edition of Prince of Peace is published, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is stuck at fifteen thousand warheads, many of which remain on a hair trigger. The president has refused to embrace a policy of No First Use, or even the ultimate goal of nuclear abolition. The hands of the Doomsday Clock were moved forward in 1995, and again in 1998—to nine minutes before midnight.
On the Mall in Washington, one might also wonder where the names of the Vietnam War protesters are. No monument stands to the peace movement. With few exceptions, this nation still behaves as if the mass outpouring of revulsion and anger at McNamara's terrible mistake and at Richard Nixon's unconscionable prolongation of it remains something to be ashamed of. Perhaps we are ashamed, finally, of having failed so utterly to leave behind our Cold War militarism.
"Come to terms"?
Prince of Peace is a political novel, but it is a religious novel too. So I will end with a prayer. May the men, women, and children who died in those towns and hamlets and jungles—ours and theirs—rest in peace. Peace. Peace. But there will be no rest for those of us who live, forgetting what we learned. "No more war!" said Pope Paul VI at the United Nations in 1965. He says it again in this novel, the act that sets the story in motion. "War no more! War never again!" We will not have peace until Peace becomes our purpose.
J.C.
Boston, Massachusetts
June 1998
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