Such Is My Beloved (13 page)

“Detroit, Your Honor.”

“And you, Catherine Bourassa?”

“Montreal, ma'am.”

The magistrate, with her chin on her hand, looked at the girls wearily, peering steadily into their faces, trying to find something special about them; the little dark one, she thought, might have been graceful at one time, for even now there was an odd, almost amused bit of a smile hovering around her mouth, though her eyes were wide, soft and scared. From the great window the strong morning sunlight came in a thick shaft across the room and struck the upturned pale, tired face of the tall angular girl; and when the magistrate saw Ronnie's face in this light, full of misery, pleading now because of Lou, she thought the girl looked awkward and ugly. “They're both very commonplace, it seems to me,” the magistrate was thinking. “I can't see why anybody should mention those two to me. Why did anybody bother speaking to me about them and intimating what disposition ought to be made of their case? It's beyond me.” They seemed to fit so easily into that long procession of girls that kept straggling before her every morning, making her disgusted and angry. “I'd never remember them if I saw them again,” she thought.

“I'm going to give you girls till this afternoon some time to get out of town,” she said. “I'm going to hand you over to the custody of the Salvation Army to see that you're put on trains. You must never come back here again, or you'll be taken into custody at once. Do you hear? Take them away now.”

 

EIGHTEEN

I
n the early evening Father Dowling went to the hotel. He had borrowed ten dollars from Father Jolly. As he went along the street the feeling of early spring weather softening the night air delighted him and made him walk faster.

When he rapped on the white door, as he had so often done, and waited, with no one answering, he could really feel the emptiness in the room on the other side of the door, feel the darkness there, too, and that the time he had so often dreaded had come at last, when he would keep on knocking and waiting and knocking with no hope of an answer. He tried the knob, the door swung open and he stepped into the room. A little moonlight, coming through the window, shone on the trampled and mussed-up carpet, on the dresser where there was no comb, nor looking-glass, nor small vase, nor brush, nor powder puff. He did not turn on the light because he knew with certitude that there was no one there and yet he called out, “Midge, Ronnie, Midge, Ronnie,” and he walked over to the window and then back again, as if his presence alone might make the room seem not so empty.

Gripping the banister, he went downstairs, thinking, “Something has happened to them. They would not go like that. Something dreadful must have happened,” and he looked over eagerly at the desk. No one was there. He called out, “Hello, hello, hello there,” and he pounded the desk with his fist.

“Just a minute,” Mr. Baer called. Coming out, he stared at Father Dowling through his glasses without speaking, staring as if it would never be necessary to see the priest again, and then he snapped, “You get the hell out of here, you fornicatin' friar, and never come back. I've got a hunch you're the cause of a lot of trouble.”

“Shut up. Don't talk so much. Where are the two girls?”

“I told you to get on your horse. Didn't you hear me?”

“Where are those girls? Have you put them out?”

“I'm putting you out, Lovin' Sam, you understand? You been sneaking in and out of here grinning like a baboon and drawing a crowd. We might just as well of hired a band as let you in. Now I'm going to let the whole neighborhood know how you've been whacking away at those girls. How will you like that, Lovin' Sam?”

For the first time Mr. Baer was sneering openly at the priest, his lower lip hanging thickly after he spat with vicious contempt. Father Dowling felt and remembered all those times when he had tried to hide his collar; he felt all the secret smirking that had followed him every time he came into the hotel, all those times when he had gone upstairs with his back to the desk, with the man's eyes following and an ugly grin on his face. That leering contempt which had remained hidden in Mr. Baer was made plain now when he spat contemptuously.

“I asked you where the girls were,” Father Dowling shouted, and he shot his hand across the desk and grabbed
Mr. Baer by the collar. Father Dowling was a big, powerful man. His face now was hard and brick red, the lips sucked in so there was only a colorless line at his mouth. He kept shaking Mr. Baer by the neck, holding him even while the eyes bulged. “What happened to those girls, you foul-mouthed swine?” he was saying.

“Let me tell you,” Mr. Baer gasped.

“Hurry.”

“Take your hand off my throat, Father.”

“There. Hurry up now, or I'll knock some respect into you, you lizard.”

“The kids were pinched last night. The cops raided the place. They pinched me, too. They pinched Lou, Father.”

“Where are the girls now? Why are you here?”

“The kids had to get out of town or go to jail, and they fined me two hundred and fifty bucks and I haven't made a cent for three years, and God knows what I'll do now.”

“You don't know where the girls went?”

“I'd tell you if I did, Father. I don't know where they've gone and they were fine kids, too, no trouble at all.”

Out on the street, Father Dowling suddenly felt that there was no place for him to go. He looked up and down the street. A little piece of paper by the curb, caught in a gust of wind, went spinning and eddying along the road till it was out of sight. “Where will they go? What will become of them?” he was thinking.

When he went home, he met Father Jolly. The little, thin-faced priest with the glasses started to laugh as soon as he saw him and he said, “Things are coming your way at last. I'm being moved out of town. I'll give you my room by a last will and testament. The room with the nice shelves for your books. The room you always coveted with a lustful eye.”

“Thanks, Father. Sorry you're going.”

“What's the matter with you? Aren't you glad about the room?”

“It's a fine room. I'll be glad to get it.”

“Is something bothering with you? I thought you'd be chuckling with joy.”

But Father Dowling did not hear him. He went up to his own room. He took off his shoes and put them together on the floor and stared at them thoughtfully. “I'll go to the city hall to-morrow. I'll find out something.” He got undressed and lay wide awake in bed. “They needed me very much. Who will help them now? What is there for them to do?” he was thinking.

 

NINETEEN

I
n the morning, after he had said a mass for the soul of Mrs. Schwartz, who was being buried that day, Father Dowling went down to the city hall to try and find out where the girls had gone. They sent him to the probation office, where there might be some record, they said. The polite, lazy-moving, white-haired probation officer, a Mr. Woolf, was very glad to see the priest, for he would welcome any one into his office who would sit down and listen to him telling about his remarkable cases. “Sit down, Father,” Mr. Woolf said and he started a long, amiable conversation while Father Dowling waited impatiently with his head thrust forward, almost pleading with the man to stop talking and look into his records. But the probation officer, seeing the intense eagerness in the young priest's face, thought this was a splendid opportunity to describe the variety and scope of his work. “Do you know, Father, in this probation office, in this little black book, we have the names of some of the finest people in town, husbands who can't get along with their wives, wives being given another chance, and so on. You'd be surprised, that's all I say,” he said, tapping the little black book lovingly.

“But have you any record of these two girls? Two girls who were in our parish,” Father Dowling interrupted apologetically. He leaned forward. “They were arrested the other day and, I believe, told to get out of town. They told me you might be keeping track of them.”

“What did you say their names were, Father?”

“Midge Bourassa and Ronnie Olsen.”

“Nothing recently, Father. If they were told to get out of town they'd really be getting out of our jurisdiction.” While Father Dowling leaned over the desk, moistening his lips, still hoping desperately that some small fact might yet be discovered, the officer started to thumb through his book. “A year or so ago there was a mention of those two names. Two little streetwalkers. It was hard to keep in touch with them when they were on probation. We lost track of them. What were they like?”

“One was a little dark girl with a kind of impish way about her. The other was tall and rather severe in her way.” Father Dowling was standing up and indicating with his hand the height of the girls, and when he paused, with his lips parted, he seemed ready to go on and describe their faces.

“You had a very deep interest in them, Father?”

“I've been trying to help them for some time.”

Looking closely at the young priest, Mr. Woolf really felt sorry for him, for when he first came in he had been so hopeful and apologetic; now he wanted to stand there and keep on describing the girls, so they would suddenly become so real one would have to remember them.

“I'm sorry. I don't remember them,” Mr. Woolf said.

As he walked away from the city hall, Father Dowling saw no one else on the street in the spring sunlight; the images of the two girls alone filled his thoughts. “I ought to have done something for them more than I did. They were like children.
I know what will happen to them. Lord, be kind to them, be merciful to them. They'll drift into the old way of life. They'll go from one degradation to another, they'll be poor and hungry and mean. No one will ever love them for themselves. No one will ever want to help them and they'll get harder and harder till they'll be immune to all feeling. Why should they be without the love of some one? Why should I not have been allowed to help in the way I could?” He walked along the street pondering the matter, thinking that God's justice was mysterious. It seemed to him as he frowned and hung his head that the girls were being deliberately abandoned. Then he straightened up and thought, “I shouldn't say that. That's blasphemy. They're abandoned from my help. Surely not from the mercy of God.” This comforted him. He walked more easily with the strong city sunlight shining on his face that was now almost confident and trustful. It was even more comforting to him to realize that Easter time was coming, the most joyous period of the whole year. When he passed a corner where men were working on a building and heard the tap-tap-tap of riveters, the sharpness of the noise was startling. He looked up, and again he was thinking, “They'll be lost to all human goodness. What will become of them?”

Before dinner, when Father Dowling was reading the newspaper, young Father Jolly came in and said to him, “Poor Mrs. Schwartz, she's buried now. God rest her soul. How did she die?”

“A most beautiful death,” Father Dowling said, putting down his paper. “I've rarely seen such peace. It was a beautiful death.”

“It was very bad up at the cemetery, it rained so heavily last night. The ground was terribly muddy after the winter snow.”

“Was it still raining at the time of the burial?”

“No. It had stopped. I don't like the rain at funerals. I like there to be sunshine.”

“This is the rainy season. You can't have much sunshine in the winter, either.”

“No, but then you have snow. Snow is different. Well, the poor soul's gone. I'm glad she died so well. God give her peace,” Father Jolly said. “She'll go straight to heaven as far as I'm concerned,” and he nodded his head with absolute certainty.

Father Dowling raised his newspaper, but he went on thinking of the departed soul of old Mrs. Schwartz. Her soul was in such peace and so well secured. He glanced again at the newspaper; two young men had held up a girl and robbed her of her purse. A young mother had tried to kill herself and her child because they were without food and a place to live. This spring there were floods in China and talk of war all over Europe, and there were riots in Germany and a hunger march on London. It was the same all over. In Canada one-third of the workers had no jobs. All the street sounds, the rattle of cars bringing crowds home from work, the steady throbbing of city life, could be heard quite clearly. But Mrs. Schwartz had died very beautifully after being so afraid of death on that night when he had first met Ronnie and Midge. Before him, as he listened, there seemed to be slowly passing all those restless souls who were struggling and dying all over without consolation. And these who were living seemed so much more in need of peace and the justice of God than the soul of the dead old lady who had known such repose.

 

TWENTY

O
ne afternoon Father Dowling was in the poor neighborhood, visiting Mrs. Canzano, the Italian woman who was very ill, after bearing her twelfth child successfully. This Italian family lived on a street that was a blind alley, in a row of yellow roughcast cottages under one long sagging roof. Father Dowling sat by the woman's bedside. She had the weariest, whitest face he had ever seen, and sometimes her black eyes had a frightened look. “I will not have another child. I'll go mad. I can't stand it. Look at me, Father. The child will die. Why should the child live? They hurt me this time. They were not good to me. I did not want to see the child when they brought it to me. Kids, kids, kids, they just keep coming and I don't know why. It would be different if I knew why. You understand, Father? But nobody knows why?” Her eyes were enormous now in her pinched, hollow face. Her body lay dreadfully still as if she never wanted to move again after the birth struggle. When the young priest was patting her hand and speaking very soothingly she started to cry. Beside her lay the purple-faced child, with round eyes which now began to glow and snap brightly. The child's small
hand wriggled with life, and Father Dowling smiled. The mother looked at the child and smiled, too, patting the hand that stirred.

Eight of the other children were still alive. Three of them were out playing on the street. Two girls were standing at the foot of the bed and the priest shuddered because there was a fixed silliness in their eyes. While he was talking, the husband came in, a short, fierce-looking little man wearing a blue denim shirt, and carrying parcels of food in his arms, for he was on city relief and had just come from the city food kitchens.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Canzano,” Father Dowling said warmly. “God has been good enough to give you another child.”

“God is not good to do such a thing,” the Italian said sharply, shaking his head with violence.

“You must not say that. You must believe in God, Mr. Canzano.”

“I believe in God, but he is not good,” the Italian said. “You know that.”

“You must not despair like that, Mr. Canzano.”

“I do despair, Father. We must despair. What else is there for us to do? Look at my wife. Look at me. You understand, Father? There is nothing left but despair,” and leaning forward intently, he shook his hand erratically at the priest. His hand kept on shaking and he seemed to have forgotten about it; the hand seemed to be detached from his body. “I'll pray hard for you,” Father Dowling said. “I should not have mentioned the child,” he thought. “There may be much that we don't understand,” he added awkwardly. But he got up to go in a hurry, for he felt he must have appeared complacent, and he pitied the man and woman so that he dared not rebuke them for their despair. “I'll come and see you again. Just friendly call.
And I'll baptize the baby soon, eh? Keep me out if you don't like to see me,” he said, trying to laugh. He went out to the street where the little kids were shouting and playing with a ball. All the kids stopped to watch him coming out of the Italian's house. Some ran up to him as he waved his hand. “Some of the children of that man were not right wise. I could see it in their faces,” he thought. “More children while the woman grows more wretched and the man full of despair. God help them. It's inevitable that some of those girls go on the streets and become far worse than Ronnie and Midge.” These girls playing on the street suggested a problem to him. What chance did they have for spiritual development when they were born with weak minds? When they died how did God judge their souls? Was it original sin that accounted for their condition? If they were not normal, and therefore, not to be judged, what was the purpose behind their existence? Or was it all something like the problem often raised in old classes in logic, the problem of the two-headed calf that simply couldn't be explained by original sin or in any other satisfactory way.

Then he began to feel that his love for Midge and Ronnie made much more comprehensive his sympathy for all the wretched people he had ever known. “The more I love and think of those girls the closer I am to all these people,” he thought, and he felt glad.

But at the close of benediction that evening, when the bell had been rung by the acolyte, and he had replaced the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle, and the congregation, having risen, was singing the
Sicut Erat
of the
Gloria
, and he was walking from the altar, he felt the beginning of a fear that almost sickened him. He began to take off his vestments. The altar boys who had assisted him were talking rapidly to each other. There was worry and love and eagerness in his feeling,
but mostly fear, as he thought that he was the only one who could have prevented the girls from losing their souls forever; he was the only one who really knew them and loved them; and he began to long to be with them so he could talk to them gently, show them how much he cared for them and encourage them to be patient. He was also thinking that by this time they might have the same terrible despair that was in the angry eyes of the little fierce Italian who had stood in front of him with the parcels of food in his arms.

Father Dowling could go no further in his thoughts without talking to some one. He went into the house, put on his hat and coat and walked up the street to see his friend, Charlie Stewart. Just before he went into the apartment house, he looked up at the light and felt very thankful that he had a friend like the young medical student, who would listen willingly and, no doubt, see the whole matter clearly.

As soon as Charlie Stewart saw Father Dowling he knew he was worried, but he was patient, and he began an involved conversation, a pompous monologue on economics. Father Dowling was bending forward, rubbing the palms of his hands together between his knees. “Something on your mind, Father?” Charlie said suddenly, terminating his conversation and becoming simple and friendly. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. The spring night air was filling the room through the open window. It was the time when Father Dowling had gone so often to the hotel. Very slowly he began to tell about the girls and how he was worrying about them now. He did not talk with the ardor and enthusiasm of that night when he had walked along the street with the lawyer, for sometimes he even halted, looking up anxiously at his friend, and then went on mildly as if explaining his worry to himself.

“Father, that's curious. It does focus a social problem. Why didn't you tell me before?” Charlie Stewart said as he got up and began to walk up and down the room in his enthusiasm. Watching him, Father Dowling thought, “What a splendid fellow he is,” and he even felt a fresh warmth in himself. His face began to glow with eagerness because his friend understood his feeling so well.

“If you feel like walking, we could take a walk over to the neighborhood and I'll show you the hotel,” Father Dowling said.

The young medical student, who had been so sophisticated, who had discoursed so learnedly on political economy, now seemed to be giving deep consideration to the priest's enthusiasm. They walked along in step through the poor neighborhood; they came to the hotel by the lighted lunch counter. They stood on the other side of the street looking at the hotel with the broken sign, the drab front, the poorly lit entrance. “I've passed this hotel a hundred times, Father,” Charlie said. Father Dowling had grabbed his friend's arm tightly, looking over at the hotel, but then he sighed and said, “Probably some other place by this time. There's some other hotel with an entrance just like that. Do you think so, Charlie?”

“It all depends. Not if they think of you at all, Father.”

“Do you think they'd remember me occasionally? It would be a wonderful consolation if I could keep thinking they would.”

“There must surely have been times, Father, when you felt you had a real effect on them, weren't there?”

“Oh, there were. Times, too, when they didn't know it, and I was delighted. We'll go back and I'll tell you.” He told first of all about the time he had brought the money and left it for Midge, and that time when the two girls had come into the room with their new dresses and had looked at him shyly.
They were just like a couple of kids. You ought to have seen them. They didn't know how they looked,” he said. There was the time, the last time, when he had come and found them with men and Midge had turned at the door and said simply, “I'm sorry, Father, that you saw me like this.” “Seldom have I seen such simple regret,” he said. “They could be so warm-hearted and thankful.” He told of many other little incidents he must have observed very shrewdly. “Of course, I know they often deceived me. I tried not to be foolish about the matter. They continually deceived me. I see that now. They often hurt me. But it doesn't matter if they wounded my self-respect or my pride a thousand times, does it? They were streetwalkers, Charlie, but they made me think about prostitution.”

“If you don't mind me saying it, Father, I disagree with you to a certain extent about these girls,” Charlie said. “In the perfectly organized state there would be no streetwalkers. If the state has a proper control of the means of production and the means of livelihood, it's never necessary for a woman to go on the streets. No healthy woman of her own accord would ever do such work. It's too damned degrading. But if in the ideal state there were still women who were streetwalkers out of laziness or a refusal to work steadily then they would be kicked out or interned somewhere for laziness, or as non-producers. Then they'd have to work or starve. Your mistake is seeing this as a religious problem. It's really an economic problem. Do you see, Father?” Charlie said like a lecturer.

“I know, and in a way you're right, but not entirely. I knew a woman who thought all these girls were feeble-minded. All you would have to do would be to sterilize the feeble-minded, and in a couple of generations everything would be rosy for the strong-minded ones, who would all be highly moral. It's a point of view.”

“It's not my point of view.”

“No. I've been trying to see it in this way. I wouldn't say it to everybody, Charlie, but I know many respectable women in the parish enjoying marriages of convenience and I know they're just as low in the scale as these girls. I mean when you think of the girls hunting around the streets here and the young men and the married men going to them because of their secret passion and their lust, it looks almost as if the girls, even here in my own parish, were in a way doing some good– in a way, had a spiritual value. These girls were taking on themselves all these mean secret passions, and in the daytime those people who had gone to them at night seemed to be leading respectable and good lives. Those girls never suspect the sacrifice of their souls that they offer every day. I know Father Anglin would not agree with me on this point. I am not sure about it. I've just been trying to understand it myself. All I'm driving at is that we get so accustomed to despising those girls that we never see them at all. I'll think more about it, Charlie, and we'll talk it over, eh?” Then he was silent. Charlie Stewart, too, was silent for a while, for he saw that Father Dowling was trying to find something in the girls' lives that was good. He said impulsively, “Maybe we could find out where those girls are gone, Father. We'll find out where they are gone and you can write them or go and see them.”

“I'll try and think of some way of doing it. You try too, Charlie, will you?” the priest asked. “Please try hard.”

Then there was hardly any more conversation, and Charlie knew the priest was worrying about the life the girls might now be leading.

After he had left his friend, Father Dowling went into the deserted church. He stood in the aisle looking up toward the red sanctuary light. He walked on tiptoe in the aisle of
the deserted church as if some slight noise, or a footfall, might disturb its peace. In the darkness the white altar gleamed brightly. With his eyes on the tabernacle, he knelt down, blessing himself, his face full of timidity, and he began to pray to the Virgin Mary. He asked the Blessed Virgin to be a mother to the two girls because of her own virginity. Closing his eyes, he began a contemplation of the mystery of Mary's virginity. And then, with his eyes closed, he was making no conscious prayer, using no word; his mind was swept clear of all thoughts so there was only a void and a darkness within him. But this most silent prayer was more intense than any he had ever made.