False Gods (17 page)

The next two years of my life were dominated by the evening hours. Mother, now a fervent convert, was not only proud but enchanted to have a priestly son as her co-host. My unhappy father had died at last, as was to have been expected, of a liver ailment, and Mother, after a blubbering but perfectly sincere mourning period of two months
(vide
the queen in
Hamlet I),
came back, brighter than ever, to resume, however prematurely, her duties as a hostess. No doubt she regarded my new "mission" as her spiritual exoneration.

Father had been in no condition in his last days to alter, as he had frequently threatened to do, his will, and Mother found herself the mistress of the remnants of his fortune. "
Je dépense; donc je suis,
" she would blithely quote, or misquote, to those friends who raised their hands at her extravagance. Of course, I as a cleric had no need of her money, and Alice had married a wealthy sportsman as lethargic and dull as herself, so I saw no pressing reason to curb Mother's spending. Obedient to the Archbishop, I never missed one of her parties, and as she and I were now asked out as a couple by those who returned her hospitality, I soon found that I rarely had an evening free.

The Archbishop had predicted that I would be an object of considerable interest to the ladies of Manhattan society, regardless of their religious affiliation, and he proved quite correct. Some of them seemed to be seeking a species of nondenominational absolution in confiding to a black-robed dinner partner their peccadilloes. On a second or third encounter these peccadilloes tended to mature into actual sins. Such revelations were apt to be accompanied by a comment such as: "I suppose that's a heinous crime in your church, Father," uttered sometimes mockingly, sometimes defiantly, always apprehensively. I would pass it off lightly, but not too lightly. The door would be left open for further confidences, possibly even instruction. Other ladies would take pleasure in teasing or taunting me. "Tell me frankly, Father, are you
always
quite happy with the church's rule of celibacy?" or "Would you have to believe the Pope if he pronounced the Earth to be flat?"

I was most at ease at Mother's own parties, for there her prestige, added to the fact that she, too, was a Catholic, spared me at least the flippancies. And then too, I must confess that the excellence of the maternal arrangements threatened to seduce even my ascetic soul. Mother certainly did her job well. She had "modernized," as she put it, my paternal grandfather's "Egyptian" mansion by stripping its exterior of bas-reliefs of pyramids and sphinxes and its interior of beaded curtains and Turkish corners and substituting, out and in, a kind of French eighteenth-century décor, equally conventional for its time but much less offensive and much more comfortable. The grey panels and green tapestries of the "state" dining room were restful and pleasing to the eye; the cushioned
fauteuils
around the oval table resplendent with pink China Trade porcelains were delightful to sit back in. Father had left a well-stocked cellar, and the four glasses at each cover were constantly refilled with the finest wines, difficult to obtain from bootleggers. It was a double pleasure for those invited to feel that their hostess was as discriminating in the fare she provided as in the selection of her guests.

It was at Mother's that I met Mrs. James Douglas. I knew about her, of course. The Archbishop had briefed me. She was not a subject for my mission, having been converted as a girl in Paris, where she had lived with expatriate parents, and she was known as the leading non-Irish lay Catholic in urban society. But her husband, of rich Pittsburgh origins like my own, had so far declined to come over, although all six of the children were of the true faith and one daughter even a nun.

"Do you suppose she imagines I might succeed where she has failed?" I asked when Mother informed me that Mrs. Douglas had requested to be seated by me at dinner. "But is it likely that I could accomplish what a powerhouse like Mrs. Douglas could not?"

"Perfectly likely. There's nothing a husband resists like a powerhouse. Remaining a heretic is Jamie Douglas's best way of hitting Claire where it hurts."

"And why should he want to do that?"

"I should have thought the confessional, my dear boy, if nothing else, would have taught you that much about marriage. "

"I never knew you were such a cynic on the subject!"

"Remember that I was taught by a master."

Claire Douglas, then a woman of sixty, had an air of notable equanimity, unless serenity was the better word. She dressed with the simple neatness and care of one to whom clothes were mere necessaries, incidental to her tall slim figure and the strong features of her long oblong face. It was her eyes that saved her from any imputation of plainness. They were large and calm and opaline; they seemed to encompass you with a patient attention and a mild curiosity, a curiosity, indeed, that might find refuge in dry amusement at your expense. She made me think of a benevolent but slightly detached teacher.

"What is that little pad in the gold clip by your mother's place?" she inquired at the dinner where we met. "She just scribbled something on it. Does she take notes on what her neighbor is telling her? He's an astronomer, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes, he's just discovered something on Mars. Mother always has the latest 'name' on her right. But she's not taking notes on what he's saying. I doubt she's even listening. I know that misty golden expression. Yet the professor is probably perfectly satisfied with it. He will tell his friends tomorrow that Mrs. Turner is much more than a fashionable hostess, that she really cares about the planetary system."

"And she doesn't?"

"Not in the least. That jotted note will be a reminder that there was too much pepper in the soup or that the Chablis was insufficiently chilled."

Mrs. Douglas nodded in half-amused approval. "So she's always at work. She never rests."

"Some people might think it's taking a party too seriously."

"Well, I'm not one of them. What can your mother do to help matters on Mars? She quite properly sticks to her own trade. Even, which I don't for a minute imply, if she was given only one talent, like the man in the parable, she has not gone and buried it in the earth."

I reflected, with a sudden drop of spirits, that Mrs. Douglas was trying to be nice about a life of which, intellectual as she was reputed to be, she could hardly have a great opinion. And it occurred to me that she might rate a party-going priest with his party-giving parent.

"I sometimes wonder whether I haven't done that with mine. My talent, I mean. Not the coin referred to in the gospel but my aptitude."

"Why, Father Turner, what a thing for a priest to say!"

"I don't mean my talent for the priesthood, if any. I mean as a writer. I tried my hand at a novel once and gave it up as a bad job. Maybe I gave up too soon."

"Why can't you try again? Does your vocation interfere? Cardinal Newman wrote novels."

"But he was a genius. Shouldn't the ordinary man put everything he's got into his chosen profession?"

She responded at once to my earnest glance by adopting a graver tone. "Very possibly. Your calling is not only the highest; it is a most exacting one. When I was a girl I was much taken with the notion of being a concert pianist. And I had a considerable talent, if I say so myself. But marriage came and six children to rear, and that dream departed. However, I have always enjoyed playing when I could."

"Do you ever regret not having done more with your gift?"

"Never. I feel I have done the job I had to do. And the lesser use of my fingers may have quickened my ears. I may have been able to bring to music a more intense appreciation."

"But that's hardly the same as playing to a great audience!"

"Isn't it? Any piece of music requires three persons: a composer, a performer and an audience. Each is indispensable to the art."

"But surely they're not co-equal."

"Why surely? If each is perfect, you have perfection. Perfection must be heaven. Is heaven divisible? I don't think we shall find it so."

"Is God in music and the other arts?"

"Why, of course He is."

"Even if the artist denies Him?"

"God loves beauty. There may even be such a thing as divine greed. He can claim for His own all that's good in a work of art and reject the rest. I hear God in
Parsifal,
even if I lose Him in Wagner."

After dinner, in the library where the gentlemen forgathered for brandy and cigars, I found myself seated by Jamie Douglas. It was not often in the New York society of that day that I enjoyed talking with the husbands of Mother's guests, whose interests were usually confined to business, politics or sport, but Claire's husband seemed quite disposed to discuss any subject I cared to initiate.

His was a strong, fixed presence. His large, bland, expressionless face, which might have been almost handsome with a little light or color, and his large, straight torso seemed to repudiate the triviality of change. Yet for all his stolidity he soon manifested what appeared to be a habit of probing curiosity.

"I knew your father a little," he began. "Our families were both in coke and bought out by Carnegie. That makes us in America, as the Frogs say,
un peu cousin.
Related by product if not by blood, like the oil and railroad clans. Once or twice removed, perhaps."

"Or even three times in my case. A Roman priest is a long way from the glories of coke."

"As far as all that?" He glanced significantly around the paneled library with its gleaming leatherbound sets.

"Oh, as you see, I visit."

"I couldn't help watching you and my wife talking together at dinner. You seemed so absorbed. May I ask whether you were discussing religion?"

"We were leading up to it, perhaps."

He smiled. "You're putting me off. I know how it is. It's bad form to discuss religion in society. But the subject happens to interest me deeply."

"My dear Mr. Douglas, you can't believe I'm unwilling to discuss religion!"

He took my protest as an invitation. "I envy my wife her faith. My parents were strict Presbyterians. We were Scottish only two generations back. But the black streak in Calvinism always depressed me."

"Surely it has lightened by now."

"Almost too much so. We've gone from faith to good works. From sermons about hell fire to settlement houses. Isn't religion essentially something
within?
"

I wondered whether he had quite escaped that depressing streak from Geneva. If Jamie Douglas had come down from the Highlands of his Scottish forebears to join in the gambols of his fellow men, he may still have left his heart in the rocky Presbyterian crags above.

"One can overdo that, I suppose," I responded. "Like all those early hermits in the Egyptian desert."

"But mightn't they have known joy? I don't know any Presbyterian, or any Protestant for that matter, who feels the
joy
that Claire feels in her religion, the inner peace and serenity. I wonder why I can't have it too."

"Well, of course, you can." But then I remembered the Archbishop's warning about appearing too zealous. Souls, he maintained, had to be
fished
for. "Hell is one of our dogmas, too, you know."

"Yes, but I like what that wise old Parisian, Abbé Mugnier, said: that you don't have to believe anyone's in it."

"Hmm. I wonder. Would God have created something He had no use for? But certainly there's nothing that requires us to believe there are
many
people there. Perhaps only a tiny number."

Mr. Douglas became strangely animated at this. "No, no, that would never do! If there were even one solitary soul languishing there, it would spoil heaven. For how could we go on forever and ever knowing that such suffering existed? You remember that phrase of Shelley's about life staining the white radiance of eternity? Well, that's just what a single damned person would do. No, Father, I doubt I could accept the idea of even an empty hell. For in a time as long as eternity mightn't some poor soul tumble into it?" His earnest expression checked my impulse to smile. Could it possibly be that I didn't
want
this compassionate man to become a Catholic? That I wanted him to remain just as he was? Our old butler came over now to tell me Mother wanted us to join the ladies.

As we rose, Mr. Douglas invited me to a dinner party that he and his wife were giving the following week. He added that he was particularly eager for me to talk to his youngest daughter. I accepted, surprised that the invitation had not come from Mrs. Douglas, who had asked for me as a dinner partner. Had I failed some unexpected test?

The Douglases had an old brownstone on a side street, wider than the usual of its kind (five windows in width), probably because Claire, contemptuous of the now-favored derivative Beaux Arts façades, had opted for the peaceful anonymity of the more common urban chocolate. Within, the big rooms harbored a clutter which in the dim light of Manhattan dwellings at first seemed the usual Victorian miscellany but on closer observation revealed itself as an eclectic collection of beautiful things: twisted Renaissance columns, Jacobean portraits of long-legged young nobles, sturdy Majolica platters, black walnut Italian chairs, bronze figures of gods, men and beasts, DelLa Robbia bas-reliefs, huge old folios spread open on tables and Chinese lacquered cabinets. Claire would sacrifice none of her treasures to the decorator's rule of taste and proportion; she preferred to be able to concentrate on one perfect object at a time to being soothed by even the most harmonious arrangement of the second best.

Mrs. Douglas did not believe in large dinners; she preferred gatherings of eight, where the conversation could be general. But the party to which her husband had invited me was apparently an exception; it was, as their daughter Sandra rather crudely expressed it, the "annual massacre" by which her mother killed off all the people to whom she was socially indebted but whom she did not regard as qualified for her more intimate evenings.