Overdrive (26 page)

Gloria sits in front with me, Rebeca and Olga in the back seat. Gloria's beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter has a weekend guest, and one of them will need to ride in rear of the station wagon, sitting on one of the boat cushions back there, but they insist they will
both
do this, so I let them in through the back and we drive three miles to St. Catherine of Siena in Riverside. To St. Catherine of Siena because there is a most beautiful service there at 10:30, to be sharply distinguished from most Catholic Masses since the awful events of Vatican II. I must not go on about it, because I have written on the subject, and it only makes me weep. But I have privately offered as final proof of the existence of God that Evelyn Waugh was struck down fatally after Mass on the Easter Sunday immediately before the procedure was instigated in which one is instructed, at one point in the service, to shake hands with the parishioner on your right and on your left; and before long, the one in the pew ahead, and the pew behind. Before long Catholics at Mass looked as though every one of them was running for public office. The thought of reaching over, hand outstretched, and running into Evelyn Waugh ... I don't know how exactly he'd have handled it, but I remember that on one occasion when Hilaire Belloc came to New York he stood during the canon of the Mass, as is the habit on the Continent. At which point a deacon shuffled over to him and whispered, "We kneel here, sir." Belloc, his hands on his missal, turned calmly and said, "Go to hell." The deacon, startled, said, "Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't know you were a Catholic!"

The singing at St. Catherine's is utterly beautiful, the music marvelously selected, and, given the acrobatic compulsion to bob up and down every few minutes, it is actually possible, in the interstices, to worship the Lord, even while wondering why He permitted them to take from us the Tridentine Mass in Latin.

The sermon, on the other hand, was provocative, in the unendearing sense of the word. The impression is widely held that Sunday mornings, for Catholic communicants, are devoted to homilies on abortion, or on communism, or on civil disobedience, or on whatever was the issue that figured most prominently in the week's news. It happens that this isn't so. For instance, I have yet to hear a sermon on the subject of Ireland—not one. And I have heard only two on the subject of abortion, one on the subject of the Vietnam war. Today's was by a visiting bishop from South Carolina who talked about justice, and soon one realized he was talking about social justice. I thought it worthwhile to write down (in the back of my prayer book) one or two of his points, perhaps for use in a column.

For many years I have pronounced to myself the traditional words, no longer recited by the priest when placing the host on the tongue of each communicant. He used to say, and now I say it for him, "
Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi, custodiat animam turn, in vitam aeternam, amen."
May the body of our Lord Jesus Christ safeguard your soul through life everlasting, amen. I long since concluded that no other verbal sequence comes as close as this in documenting human equality. The same words, for prince or for pauper; reminding us, young and old, healthy and sick, rich and poor, of our common dependence on our Maker.

Many years ago I was struck by a passage in one of the marvelous novels of Bruce Marshall. I had thought it was from
The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith
, but having now chased it down I find it was from
Father Malachy's Miracle
, one of the great
tours de force
in modern literature. In the first chapter are these wonderful paragraphs, which, I think, say it all on the subject of equality:

A fat man climbed into the same compartment as the little clergyman, a fat man with a face that was so red and pouchy that it looked like a bladder painted to hit other people over the head with at an Italian carnival.

He sat down, or rather threw himself down, in the corner opposite the priest and began to read a pink paper in which the doings of horses and erotic young women were chronicled at length. He was followed by a middle-aged woman who had a peaky, shiny nose with a funny little dent in the middle and whose hat was one of those amorphous black affairs which would have been, at any moment, out of fashion in any country.

The priest was distracted from his meditation. It was impossible, he told himself, with a wry little mental smile, to think competently of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost proceeding from Both, with such a bulging, red face in front of him and such a peaky, peering woman placing her parcels here, there and everywhere. How hard it was, here below and with the material and the temporal crowding out the spiritual and the eternal, to love one's neighbour, how hard and yet how necessary. For the soul behind that bulging, red face had been redeemed by Christ just as surely as had his own, and Our Blessed Lord, while He hung on the cross, had seen the funny little dent in the middle of the peaky, peering woman's nose just as clearly as He had seen the broad, bland visage of Pope Pius the Eleventh, and so merciful was He, loved it just as much. And yet it was difficult to imagine bulge or dent in heaven unless, among the many mansions, there were one which should be one-tenth Beatific Vision and nine-tenths Douglas, Isle of Man. Of course, if it came to the point, it was difficult to imagine the majority of contemporary humanity in any paradise which did not syncopate Saint Gregory, and whose eternal sands were without striped bathing tents and casinos.

He closed his eyes again. If he must love his neighbour he would love him without looking at him. He closed his eyes, and not only did he close them, but he kept on repeating the reflex action in his brain so that, with the bulging red face and the peaky, peering woman, away went the compartment, the train, the station, the world; and, as Scotland went swinging after Scandinavia and Spain came scampering after and Australia flew to join the stars, he was alone with God.

A great nothingness was before him, a great nothingness that was Something, a great nothingness that was All; and in the warm freedom from the tangible he knew his Saviour and was absorbed by Him.

I am glad I found the passage, having remembered exactly only the sentence, "If he must love his neighbour he would love him without looking at him." But the radiance of the whole thing cries out, and the great mysterious dilemma is made plain.

In explaining something to Olga on the drive back it becomes relevant to know the Spanish word for "flesh," which I suddenly can't remember. So I ask Maria—and she can't remember, though she spoke not a word of English when, at age five, she arrived from Mexico. I get terribly exasperated, and Gloria and Rebeca offer several substitutes, none of them correct, so I find a circumlocutory way to tell Olga what I had in mind to relate—about how, in the Catholic Mass, the species were united for hundreds of years, with only the priest taking both the bread and the wine, representing, or more accurately incorporating, the flesh and the blood; whereas of course now in many churches anyone who desires it is also given the chalice from which to take wine. I reflect that it is the failure to come up with the exact word you wish that can result in tiring one so awfully when using a foreign tongue. Consider, for instance, forgetting in English, let's say, the word "apple," and trying to communicate, let us say, that "fresh cider is made by crushing apples." I will find myself, in my desperation, saying some such thing as, "fresh cider is made by crushing the fruit that Eve gave to Adam." After a while that kind of thing tires you, as it must the listener. The alternative is to change what you intend to say, so that when you come to the thought that fresh cider is made by crushing apples, you find yourself saying that fresh orange juice is made by crushing oranges, but then you have to figure out a way to relate
that
to the jug of cider being sold at the side of the road that launched you into this discussion in the first place.

Always they thank me when I stop the car and let them out, and always I say, "For nothing," which is exactly accurate. I let the girls out of the back of the station wagon and then get into the driver's seat again, because I must go to see Tom.

Tom Hume is in the hospital, having suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. It happened six weeks ago, and this is my third visit, having learned of the stroke from Tulita, his wife, only a fortnight ago. Tom and I were at Yale together. He is the architect of my music room, of our beautiful bedroom that looks out over so considerable an area of the sea, and of my swimming pool, though this he did not complete, having left to join a large firm of architects in New York City. We share also an enthusiasm for the sea, and Tom is as experienced a yachtsman as anyone I know. A month before his stroke we set out, with Van Galbraith and Danny Merritt and Reggie Stoops, in
Patito
, to take her to Newport where she would undergo refinements. We left at six in the evening and reached Newport at 10:30 in the morning, a distance of about 135 miles. We really
flew
to Newport that night, with absolutely relentless, but even-handed, winds all the way, coming in from the south and permitting us to exit the Sound at maximum ebb tide. Tom is tall, handsome, muscular, thin. He doesn't drink. He hasn't smoked for several years.

Why a stroke? No one knows, of course. The competent Tulita, having brought up six children, now works for Channel 13 in New York, but substantially she has become a therapist, wholly confident of Tom's recovery.

They are both in his room, and it's better that way because Tom can't talk, though one has the feeling that he can understand. His eyes are luminous with his extraordinary intelligence, and every now and again he essays a phrase, but it usually reduces, smiling, merely to "shit," a word for some reason he can utter with abandon and security. His right arm is lifeless and he has been practicing pencil strokes with his left hand. I dumped on him last week a supply of oils, brushes, and crayons. He is extremely artistic, but I note he hasn't broken them out— probably trouble concentrating. His ambition, Tulita tells me, is to go from the therapeutic center, to which he will be taken in several weeks, right to his desk at the office— say in six months. Let us pray. I told him I had done just that at church, and he didn't say shit, because he is himself a believer (his uncle founded Canterbury School; his cousin is head of St. David's in New York). In fact, it was he who told me about St. Catherine's, many years ago.

By the time I arrived home, Jamie Niven, David's son, had arrived at the house, with wife Fernanda and two little daughters, and there is general conversational levity. Jamie is larger than his father, heavier, and more opinionated. He is in business, doing well, and has become a wonderfully well-informed conservative, traveling a nice distance from back when he wasn't eating grapes for Chavez, but I don't like to tease him about that because I once did, and I hurt his feelings. Pat and I were at their wedding and they are both sprightly and companionable people. At lunch, I forget why exactly, the subject of accents came up, and we succeeded in getting David to go right down the line, and he was successively a Cockney, a Yorkshireman, a Scotsman, a Dubliner, Gary Cooper, Johnny Carson—I have never known anyone with superior mimetic skills. He has to fight a little against whatever it is that is bothering him in the throat, and he tells us this, but manages, and with evident pleasure. The little girls are enthralled.

The great surprise came immediately after lunch. Christopher arrives—unannounced, unexpected. He had come up the night before for some function or other in New York, and now he was here with Leslie Dach, who had been his first roommate, during freshman year at Yale, in 1970. Christopher is a little overweight, is still wearing that cursed little mustache (why is it that it would never occur to one to refer to David Niven's "cursed little mustache"? or Clark Gable's?). He brings into the room freshness, affection, and informality. His mother forces food and drink on both of them, and we go for coffee and the kind of hopscotch conversation by which, in most social exchanges, you find out about things. It is quickly established that Christopher needs to return to Washington that afternoon, and in a sense that is a relief, because I would hate it if he could stay and I could not, which I cannot. In midcoffee I get the same idea as yesterday, which had proved so pleasant. I approach him out of earshot of the others and whisper:

"Sail?"

He looks at his watch. He has not been to Mass, and four o'clock is the last service. I guarantee him that I'll get him back in time. I dash to the telephone and contact Danny, and of course he is raring to go—we'll pick him up. So, with Jamie, we set out, and for the fun of it I have activated my stopwatch—eight minutes from the moment we switched on the starter in the car to when the
Patito's
lines were cast off. We were under power for fifty yards before reaching the channel. Then—no fooling crowd here, with Danny and Christopher so thoroughly familiar with the boat—three minutes later we were under full sail, blasting out of the channel at full speed.