Ash Wednesday (3 page)

Anyway, she told Father Dowling, Florence Green fell ill, cancer. The diagnosis, the prospective treatments, and the likelihood that they would do little but postpone her death had brought on depression and then despair. The friar who was then pastor, Father Hyacinth, was summoned to her hospital room. Florence’s refusal of treatment became the favorite lugubrious topic at the dining room table, and Marie had been privy to it all, storing it away in the hard drive of her memory.

“She refuses treatment,” Hyacinth announced at table.

“Isn’t that her right?” asked Placidus.

“It’s like suicide,” said Boniface.

“She has cancer,” Hyacinth said.

“There’s no cure for cancer,” Placidus pointed out.

Hyacinth said, “The doctor thinks that with radiation and chemotherapy it could be brought under control.”

“But for how long?” Placidus wanted to know. “It would only be a postponement, not a cure.”

Eavesdropping, hovering around the table, keeping the kitchen door ajar, Marie had followed it all, trying to decide whose side she was on. She sympathized with Florence. She told herself that Florence was doing what she herself would do in the circumstances. Cancer spelled a death sentence, and Marie had known of parishioners who went through months and months of treatment and died anyway. That view was represented at the dining room table.

“Everyone’s going to die sooner or later,” Hyacinth said.

“Not everyone has cancer,” Placidus observed.

The topic had not diminished the appetite of the friars, and Marie was in and out of the dining room, half tempted to join in the discussion but not sure what tack she would take.

“What would you have said, Father Dowling?” Marie asked.

He tipped his head to one side. “It would just be a general problem for me now. The friars were confronted by a concrete case.”

“Oh, come on. Does someone with cancer have a right to refuse treatment?”

“Why don’t you just tell me the story, Marie. Did she refuse treatment?”

“Finally she left it up to her husband.”

“And?”

“The treatments began,” Marie said.

“Would the doctors recommend that if there was no hope?”

Marie dropped her chin and looked at him over her glasses. “How many oncologists do you know?”

“Oncologists?” Father Dowling said.

“Isn’t that a weird word? It’s scarier than ‘cancer specialist.’”

“So Mrs. Green began treatments. What was the effect?”

“Apparently good. Then she had a relapse, and Father Hyacinth gave her the last sacraments.”

“She asked for them?”

“Nathaniel did!” Marie leaned forward. “It was part of his plan.”

The treatments had seemed to work. Florence’s cancer went into remission, and her depression lifted. Shortly before, she had been certain death was imminent, and then she was told she had a future, maybe years of life. Despair gave way to cautious hope. Father Hyacinth became an I-told-you-so at the rectory table, and who could blame him? Then the relapse, and Nathaniel Green asked him to give Florence the last rites.

Marie sat back for dramatic effect. “That day he killed her.”

“How?”

“He pulled the plug,” Marie said. “She was on a life support system. He was always at her bedside. After the last rites, he pulled the plug. He was still sitting beside the bed when the nurses came in and found Florence was dead. They asked what had happened. He said he had killed her.”

“And?”

“Hyacinth was sure it could be hushed up, but Nathaniel wouldn’t have that. He went to the police and confessed to murder. They checked it out, and eventually he went to trial.”

The judge had insisted that Nathaniel had to have a lawyer, and he had chosen Tuttle.

“Tuttle?” Father Dowling was surprised.

“It was like a death wish, Father. Tuttle’s defense was that it was a mercy killing. Nathaniel Green was convicted of manslaughter.” Marie made it sound like Al Capone’s conviction for income tax evasion.

“And sent to prison.”

Marie nodded. “Yes, and now, obviously, he’s out.”

Marie fell silent, wondering what she expected Father Dowling to say. Serving lunch to a man who had killed his wife had required
iron discipline on Marie’s part. She had leapt at the suggestion that she take Nathaniel Green over to the senior center and then had hurried back to tell Father Dowling this story.

“‘There are eight million stories in the Naked City,’” Father Dowling murmured. “Do you remember that program?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I’m glad I met him.”

“Glad?” Marie asked.

“The poor fellow.”

Marie just stared at Father Dowling. He sounded like Father Hyacinth.

“What about his wife, Father Dowling?”

“May she rest in peace.”

Marie rose, her lips a thin line. She crossed her arms. Then she turned and marched back to her kitchen.

Well, what had she expected Father Dowling to say? Tuttle had argued that Nathaniel was merely carrying out his wife’s wishes. The trial had engrossed the friars. Hyacinth had been called as a witness, offering the theological opinion that what Nathaniel had done was not murder.

Boniface was outraged. “So if someone asks me to shoot him it’s all right?”

“You’d probably miss,” Placidus said.

It was their merry laughter that made the friars hard to take. Of course, priests dealt with death and other tragedies all the time, so who could blame them for getting used to it? “The poor fellow,” Father Dowling had said. Marie had to admit that the somber Nathaniel seemed to be carrying his punishment around with him.

“Did you love your wife?” the prosecutor had demanded of him.

“More than myself.”

“You didn’t kill yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I did.”

Captain Phil Keegan unscrewed the plastic tube and let a cigar slide into his free hand. He moistened it, struck a match, and soon Father Dowling’s pipe smoke was joined by the acrid smell of Phil’s cigar in the pastor’s study. Phil rotated the cigar in his fingers and nodded.

“Sure I remember Nathaniel Green, Roger. The guy couldn’t wait to be found guilty and sent off to prison.”

“Guilt would have that effect.”

“Ha. People with blood on their hands usually claim to be innocent of even original sin.”

“Murder was the original sin. Original actual sin,” Father Dowling corrected himself, as if a theologian were listening in.

“If it was murder,” Phil said.

“Wasn’t he found guilty of manslaughter?”

“Labels. Green killed his wife.” Phil spoke with the contempt of a widower who still half hoped that his wife would be waiting for him when he went home at night. A sentimentalist with a gruff exterior.

“How?”

“He shut down her life support system. He admitted right away what he had done.”

“And went to trial, Phil.”

“With Tuttle as his lawyer.” Phil’s tone required no comment. Tuttle was the bottom-feeder of the local bar.

“How did he plead?”

“Guilty, of course, but everyone goes into court on the assumption of innocence.”

“But he confessed?”

“That doesn’t count, Roger. Tuttle argued that it was a mercy killing. I suppose that is what prompted them to call it manslaughter.”

“That didn’t leave you much to do,” Father Dowling said.

“Oh, we investigated it. Cy Horvath interviewed everyone at the hospital, friends of the couple, everyone even remotely involved, but all it did was seal Green’s fate. Finding out that everyone liked the guy and thought him a devoted husband couldn’t trump the nurse’s testimony that when the monitors at the nurses’ station went haywire and she ran into the room, Green was sitting there with the tubes still in his hand.”

“He showed up in the church on Ash Wednesday,” Father Dowling said.

“I got mine at St. Hedwig’s,” Phil said hastily. He meant the blessing with ashes. St Hedwig’s was downtown, an old church dwarfed by the buildings around it, not far from the courthouse.

“Marie took him over to the parish center.”

“He’s old enough,” Phil said.

“Well, he paid the price for what he did.”

“His wife’s still dead.”

Phil might have been drawing attention to the paradox of remorse. Not that he would ever call it that. It was a paradox Father Dowling faced in the confessional. A person repented of his sins, confessed them, and received absolution, but even when the penitent was returned to the state of grace, the effects of his sins did not
go away. This was dramatically true in such a case as Nathaniel Green’s. It was clear that he felt remorse. Had he confessed to a priest? His remark that he was no longer a Catholic seemed the answer to that. Certainly he had paid the civic penalty for what he had done. Nonetheless, as Phil said, his wife was still dead. Nothing he or anyone else did could change that, not prison, not contrition.

Nathaniel Green had continued to come to the noon Mass, staying in his pew at communion time. He had continued to come to the senior center as well, but in church he knelt alone in his pew and afterward went back to the school building alone. Father Dowling, on his way to the rectory after Mass, often saw Nathaniel shuffling slowly down the walkway to the school, a solitary figure carrying his invisible burden.

In the meantime, Father Dowling had been reading up on what Nathaniel had done, puzzling over the distinction between killing and letting die. He was most interested in a distinction Pius XII had made between ordinary and extraordinary means of medical help. The pope had decreed that no one was under an obligation to make use of extraordinary medical means when death was inevitable. It seemed a spoor worth pursuing. Had Florence Green’s life support system amounted to extraordinary means to keep her alive? Whom should he call?

Basil Spritzer, a Jesuit at Loyola, was often consulted on medical ethical problems by the local media. No. Spritzer put one in mind of the Jesuits Pascal had caricatured in
The Provincial Letters
. He seemed to find a way of justifying any convenient course of action. Father Dowling decided to go out to Holy Angels Home and have a talk with Father William Nolan, who had taught him moral theology
at Mundelein. He had been known as Willy Nilly by the seminarians and was famous for his rigorism.

Holy Angels Home was up the Fox River Valley just below the Wisconsin border, a pleasant drive even if Willy Nilly could not provide him with information that would be useful when he had a talk with Nathaniel Green.

Is there any scenery more beautiful than the Fox River Valley, even in late winter? Father Dowling went north on minor roads, enjoying the rolling snow-covered hills, the copses of beeches and fir, the shimmering river visible from time to time as he drove. An hour and a half later he turned into the drive that led to the main building of Holy Angels.

At the reception desk, he was directed to the cottage in which Father Nolan was living out his twilight years. He found the old priest sitting on a glassed-in porch, his breviary on his lap, dozing. The sound of the car door stirred him into life. He sat forward, brought his glasses down from his bald head, and peered at his unexpected guest.

“Come in, Father. Come in. That door’s not locked.”

“Roger Dowling, Father. I hope you remember me.”

“Of course I do. Sit down. This must be a visit. You’re too young to be thinking of joining us.”

“Not yet,” Father Dowling said with a smile. “It seems pleasant enough.”

“I always swore I would never end up in such a place. Chaplain in a convent or weekend work, anything but being put on the shelf. Vanity, of course. As it happens, although I was brought in kicking and screaming—metaphorically—I love it here. Let me show you my little house.”

The brick cottage contained a bedroom, a study, a living room with fireplace, a dining room, and a diminutive kitchen. The window blinds were tilted and laid bars of winter sunshine on the furniture and floors. Every available wall space contained bulging bookshelves. It was as if Father Nolan had reproduced his suite of rooms at Mundelein.

“This is wonderful,” Father Dowling said. Did such a future await him?

In the study a laptop computer nestled among books and papers and dozens of framed photographs. A statue of St. Thomas Aquinas looked down from atop a bookcase.

“You use a computer?” Father Dowling asked. He himself had resisted learning how to use this wondrous device.

“A very useful gadget. I am writing my memoirs.”

“I can hardly wait to read them.”

“Autobiography is the best revenge,” Willy Nilly said. “Let’s have a beer on the porch.”

“Not for me, Father.”

The old priest drew back in mock surprise. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t golf. What kind of a priest are you?”

“Do you know Dr. Johnson’s remark? ‘I find abstinence easier than moderation.’”

The old priest chuckled. “The one I remember is ‘Marriage has its pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.’”

Father Dowling accepted a glass of iced tea, and they went out to sit on the porch where he had found Father Nolan. It was there, surrounded by Christmas cactus, a large potted impatiens—“My middle name, Father”—and other plants, that they talked. Willy Nilly sipped his beer and nodded as Father Dowling told him the saga of Nathaniel Green.