False Gods (16 page)

Mother was not at all hostile to my project; on the contrary it caught her fancy and interest as no other proposition of mine ever had. Until then she had tended to see me, I'm afraid, as a not too individualized offspring through the mists of a warm but not too discriminating maternal affection. She now told me that she had long had a secret hankering for the more splendid rites of the Roman Church, for the soaring choral music, the smell of incense, the intoning priests, the glory of Gothic cathedrals and red-robed cardinals. "They do it so well!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands. She had never dared to "take the leap"; my father and most of her friends were too anti-Catholic, associating the faith with superstitious Irish maidservants and the rough priests who led them by the nose. "But if I had someone to lead the way!" she ended.

Then she really surprised me. "I've arranged for you to talk with Archbishop Walsh."

I shouldn't have been surprised. It was Mother all over, to go straight to the top. The Archbishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of New York was a familiar figure to all. He sat by the mayor at parades; he gave the invocation at political dinners; he was quoted in all the newspapers on the moral aspects of current events and he was as much at home in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria as at the altar of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He was affable, shrewd, worldly wise (would Your Grace object to that?) and universally admired, even by non-Catholics. The social world cultivated him, and Mother placed him on her right at her grandest dinners.

When I called on him in his "palace" behind the cathedral, he was, of course, much too astute to encourage me in anything but the fulfillment of my simple wish.

"Go to mass with your school friend, by all means, my son. And if you find it edifying, as I have no doubt you will, come to mass at the cathedral on your next vacation, and I will give you breakfast afterwards."

I returned to school with the necessary permission and never missed a Sunday mass before my graduation in the spring. And of course I attended services at the cathedral in the Christmas vacation and enjoyed an inspiring breakfast with my new mentor. At school I no longer felt lonely or set apart. However much of an oddball I appeared to my classmates, I was at peace with myself. There may even have been a smugness in my new security, a sense of something like pity for those still benighted. Frank Chappell seemed to find that I was overdoing it; I was encountering for the first but not the last time the irritation that born Catholics feel with zealous converts. I think he was even faintly embarrassed when I announced my intention to be received into the church. Protestants, I fancy he believed, were all very well, but they should stay in their place. He could not have reconciled any such attitude with his faith, but Frank was never one to see that things had to be reconciled. He took the world pretty much as it came.

He went to Yale and I to Harvard, and for the next four years we met only on football weekends or at New York parties. My interests, at any rate, had developed in very different directions from his. I was taking as many courses as I could in English and French literature and trying my hand at pieces for
The Advocate.
There had never been a writer in our family, but I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't be the one to break new ground, and I made a special trip to New York to talk with old Mr. William Dean Howells, whom my mother, true to her habit of going straight to the top, had invited to lunch that I might meet him. That dear delightful dean of American letters was enchanting to me. When I told him that I was a fervent convert to the Roman Church, he replied, "Then why not become a fervent Catholic writer?"

This gave me the inspiration that sustained me for the next two years in Cambridge. I was now determined to be a "Catholic novelist," not a novelist who happened to be a member of the faith, but one whose whole work was designed to promote it. I at once proceeded to devote my afternoons to the composition of a story about a reputable banker who finds himself suddenly, even quixotically, involved in a hugely profitable and virtually undiscoverable embezzlement. At the opulent debutante party he is now able to give for his beloved only daughter, he is suddenly seized in the stranglehold of an atrocious depression. He knows at once that he is damned, that he has already, fully alive, descended into hell. In a desperate effort to redeem his soul he seeks to restore the stolen funds to their rightful owners, but each repayment results only in his further enrichment. Nothing will ransom him, it seems, but public confession and exposure, and when he at last resorts to this, he and his family are publicly disgraced and beggared. His ultimate torture was to be his apprehension that it was Satan who had induced him to prefer his own salvation to the welfare of his loved ones, but in the end...

Well, I never finished the silly story, so why go on? Reading over my feeble chapters shortly before graduation, I realized what any amateur critic could have told me: that miracles and mystical experiences are interesting only if true, or at least supposed to be true; there is no place for them in fiction. But quite aside from this it was cruelly evident to me that my pages showed no sign of genius, now or yet to come. They were flat and lifeless. I fell into a depression as profound as that of my fictional protagonist. I had to leave college, graduating
in absentia,
and take refuge in the expensive sanatorium to which Mother now sent me, the same that provided her with an occasional retreat when the social whirl proved too hectic.

It was here that Archbishop Walsh took time out from his busy schedule to visit me. He sat quietly by my bedside, making a few joking remarks about the splendor of my medical establishment. These were followed by a silence that was somehow peaceful rather than constrained. When he next spoke, it was very softly and gravely.

"Your dear mother has told me of your literary aspirations and disappointment. She has even showed me a typescript that her secretary made of your unfinished novel." He raised a hand as I indignantly sat up. "You must forgive her. She meant very well, and I think she did the right thing. Indeed, it may have turned out providentially. It may be that the good Lord has not destined you to be a writer. I cannot tell. I am no literary critic. All I can be sure of is that the young man who wrote those pages wished with all his heart to convey the word of God to his fellow men. Is that not so, my son?"

"I thought it was. But I hadn't the means to do it."

"Perhaps not in fiction. You may have been marked for a higher calling. To convey the word of God more directly. As a priest."

Never shall I forget the immediate, simple conviction that those deliberate words conveyed to me. I could not speak. Then I found that I was trembling all over. My eyes filled with tears. The Archbishop rose and laid a hand on my brow. "It's something to be thought over, my son. Simply thought over for the present. But that is the message I bring you."

Thus it came about that I entered the priesthood. The years at the seminary at Fordham were the happiest and most serene of my life. There was no return of the depression that had vanished with the Archbishop's visit; I had no doubts about my chosen vocation. Indeed, I was so enthusiastic about it that I viewed in the most charitable colors the driest and most boring of my fellow seminarians. Certainly even the best of them, largely of Irish middle- or lower-middle-class background, lacked the easy congeniality of my Harvard classmates, but I disciplined myself to think of the old Reggie Turner as a snotty, spoiled youth whose eyes had been blinded to true merit by the trivial standards of the social world. Indeed, I fell into the error, so common to refugees from Gotham, of attributing nobility of thought to mere simplicity of expression. It is a dangerous error because the inevitable disillusionment is apt to be accompanied by too extreme a reaction.

Mother was delighted by my decision, and I had little doubt that I would now bring her, too, to the faith. Father, on the other hand, was so disagreeable that I felt exempted from the least remorse. He was now a confirmed alcoholic, and his sober times were almost worse than his inebriated ones, for he told me, in a cold, sneering tone: "Your mother wanted to dress you like a girl when you were little, and I prevented her. But now she has you in skirts at last! Maybe it's just as well. At the rate she's going through my money, there'll be barely enough for your sister's dower!"

I had hoped to go abroad, even before we entered the Great War, as a chaplain, with British troops or even French, but the Archbishop had other plans for me.

"You have a persistent romantic streak, my son, that you are not going to find it easy to cope with. The church has no greater concern with war than it does with peace. People are always suffering and dying; that is our business. The exhilaration that you might experience at the front, despite all its horrors, in the vision of courage and endurance would be essentially a romantic one. It is more suited to Reginald Turner, the would-be novelist, than to Father Turner, the priest. Remember that in the trenches Catholics are killing Catholics."

Was it the last remark that evoked my first doubt? Did I
detect a note of Irish hostility to England's war?
Did
I, Your Grace?

"You must learn to temper that exhilaration. You must learn to get on with people even less sophisticated than those whom you encountered at the seminary, uneducated people with vulgar prejudices, people who have never read a book or looked at a work of art and whose sole idea of pleasure is a tavern or a baseball game. I am sending you to Saint Catherine's in Queens. It is a large parish, and you will be one of the vicars."

And for the next three years I labored in a vineyard that was every bit as culturally arid as he had predicted. There were, of course, compensations. I felt on occasion that I had been instrumental in consoling the sick and the dying, and I made some good friends among the older parishioners, particularly the women, in whose simple households I was made welcome. But I never felt I had much success in reaching the young, and my too-intellectual sermons, over which I labored with such excruciating care, were received with the same indifference as the hollow homilies, full of bombast and comminations, of some of my confrères. What troubled me more was the confessional. In the innocence (or inexperience) of my own life, I had had no conception of the rifeness of the vilest sins or of the complacency with which sinners took for granted both the evil in themselves and its facile absolution. It seemed to me that the world was an ocean of malfeasance on whose surface bobbed the few little vessels of the church. What was astonishing was how these small craft were able to give to the sea around them at least a patch of the aspect of a Christian society. It must have been one of God's miracles.

Worst of all, however, in these years was the dulling effect on my spirits of the attitudes of my fellow priests. Few if any of those whom I encountered in my daily work appeared to have much concern with a god of love and mercy. They were dryly dogmatic, wholly absorbed in the outward religious observances of their flock and bristling with hostility to anything that was not Catholic. Indigence and misery in the world around them hardly mattered; so long as heaven was offered to those who observed the rules, was the present condition of things of much importance? Their job was to save as many souls as possible from hell fire, and they accepted with a shrug the conclusion that this goal was not feasible for the greater portion of humanity.

Mother was greatly distressed by my relegation to dreary realms of the city unvisited by herself and was constantly urging me to apply to the Archbishop for a transfer to what she called "civilization." "Don't well-bred persons have souls, too?" she would demand. At last, moved to desperation by my increasing pallor and loss of weight, she offered me the carrot of her own conversion if I would at least tell my troubles to our friend at Saint Patrick's. I could hardly, as a priest, refuse this appeal, and I did as she asked one wintry afternoon in the prelate's reception room, warmed however by the broadness of his smile.

"I shall myself supervise your dear mother's instruction. The angels themselves will sing when Marianne Turner joins the true faith! Oh, of course, I'm aware there are those who think she has lived too much in and for the world, but I believe she has a mission to fulfill, and an important one. And that is where
you
come in, my son. You have labored enough in the desert." His smile now became a beam. "For the time being, that is. None of us can ever be finished with the desert, which is why I wanted you to know the church in
all
its aspects. But now I have a different role for you. Your mother can supply us with a wedge into the stronghold of the heathen. I want a charming and sympathetic Father Turner to be a regular attendant at her dinner parties. You will find that many of the great ladies of the Protestant persuasion are dissatisfied with their humdrum little parsons and are ripe for conversion. It will be your task to offer them a richer, deeper, more consoling faith. But you must do it tactfully and diplomatically. You must never appear the zealous proselytizer. You must manage things so the first step comes from them."

"Not like Saint Paul to the Galatians," I couldn't help muttering.

"What are you saying?"

"'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?'"

"But very much like Saint Paul to the Athenians," came my reprimand, now stern. "And it is to people as cultivated as the Athenians that I am sending you. Saint Paul knew there was a time for persuasion and a time for thunder. The work of God must be accomplished with the appropriate tools. The priest in the drawing room and the martyr facing the lions are engaged in the same task."

But I didn't really believe that, and I began even to wonder whether this weighty representative of the church too militant had not suggested to Mother that she offer me her conversion as the price of my going to him. I obeyed, of course. I knew I was in the army. I accepted his offer of an administrative post in the palace with evenings free for the social experiment.