Such Is My Beloved (8 page)

 

THIRTEEN

O
ften Father Dowling stayed so late with the two girls it was embarrassing to have to go home, for the other priests had begun to notice that he sometimes came in after midnight. They were talking about him in such a way that the words they used barely trembled with the faintest, slyest inferences. Sometimes they even regarded him very thoughtfully. He was still giving money to Ronnie and Midge and sometimes little presents like chocolates and flowers, as though they were shy, timid girls. He had got to know when they were feeling gay or sorrowful and even when they were deceiving him, and knowing their weakness and shameless deceits so well only made him love them all the more. He could see that Midge was sick, for she had become thin and bad-tempered, but he dreaded to find out what was the matter with her, as though there were diseases that might mark the final depth of her degradation. His love for these two girls was so great now that he longed for them to remain always a part of his life.

When he was leaving them one night, they looked at him solemnly, glanced at each other, and Ronnie said, “I don't know what we'll do now, Father.”

“What's the matter now, child? I thought you both seemed quite happy.”

“Midge ain't feeling well, Father.”

“I know. God help her. I was thinking about her last night. What's the matter with her?”

The girls looked at each other uneasily and finally Ronnie said, “It's a sickness you mightn't know about. It's like…I tell you what it's like, it's like a woman's trouble. That's it.”

“Hasn't it a name? It must have a name.”

“Then I don't know the name. It's just a complaint. Like a woman's complaint,” Ronnie lied to him. “I'm sure you wouldn't know about it.”

“She ought to see a doctor.”

“She ought to go to a doctor and maybe go to a hospital and be looked after in proper style. If we only had a few dollars to last a few weeks it would make all the difference in the world. Don't you see what I'm driving at?”

Midge remained silent, staring at the priest mournfully, pleading with her round eyes like a child that hopes nothing will be denied her. Father Dowling was suddenly full of longing to be able to take the girls far away from the city, to free them once and forever, but he was helpless. His hand went mechanically to his pocket, he sighed and muttered, “I wish I could do something. I've nothing now.”

“There's not much for us to do then,” Ronnie said sullenly.

“What do you mean?”

“You can take three guesses about what it will have to be.”

“We've got to do something,” Midge said, hurting him ruthlessly even while feeling a bit of sympathy for him. She looked haggard, desperate, but she smiled slyly at Ronnie.

“It's a terrible situation,” he said, rubbing the tips of his fingers on his cheekbone. He was trying to think of some place where he might get money. His foot began to drum nervously on the floor and then began a tapping beyond all control. His shoe was slapping on the carpet. “The main thing is, don't feel impatient. Don't feel uneasy. I'll help you. To-night or to-morrow night. Something will turn up,” he said. He smiled so warmly and with such hope that they kept on grinning even after he had gone.

The priest's allowance was no more than fifty dollars a month and from that sum he always put aside a few dollars to send to his mother. In the town where he had lived before going to the seminary, his family had been very poor, but his mother, a determined, ambitious woman, had longed for him to be a priest, and his brother, too, had wanted a priest in the family. So his brother had supported him and his mother during the long years at school. “I ought never to neglect sending money home. But I wonder what's the matter with Midge? She ought to be sent to a doctor.” He kept on hearing Ronnie say, “There's nothing else for us to do. We've got to try and keep ourselves in some way.” With sudden eagerness he tried to pretend to himself that his mother would approve of him giving money to the girls, although he secretly knew well that she would despise them without ever trying to understand them. In the last few months money that ought to have gone home to his mother had gone to the girls, and as he began to realize how he had neglected his obligation, he found himself thinking of those days when he had been a student and had gone home for the holidays. His mother waited on him with devotion; his brother brought him presents; the neighbors whispered that his family had no right to be spending so much money on an education for Stephen when they
were so poor. It was all pride and vanity on the part of the mother, they said. Sometimes he himself had wondered whether his mother was a very pious or a very proud woman. But those evenings in the summer were fine and joyful, when he and his mother and brother sat on the front porch that was covered by the leaves from the big elm tree, and rocked back and forth lazily on their chairs while the boards squeaked and he answered their eager questions and they listened to the sound of the lake water lapping on the shore just beyond the end of the street. At such times he had felt their tremendous happiness, especially during those moments when they were silent. It had always been understood among them that when Stephen became a priest, he would support the mother and give his brother a chance to save some money. As Father Dowling walked along, he began to remember what the town and the surrounding country would be like at this time of year, when the snow was going and there would be strong spring sunlight. All those northern hills beyond the town that were so blue in the summer time would now be bare and the sun would shine on the naked slopes and make them seem from the bay like fields of yellow wheat, and on top of the great hills the snow patches would remain to glisten brilliantly in the late afternoon. The bay and the lake would be intensely blue, but there would be the long white margin of broken ice along the shore.

It seemed terrible to Father Dowling that he had been neglecting to send money to his mother, who was so deserving of his love, and it seemed just as terrible that he had no money, either, for those whom he most wanted to help.

That evening he was hearing confessions. People who came to him at this time every week felt a strange aloofness in his manner. It was true that he listened as patiently as ever and
sometimes even sighed sorrowfully, but his sighs hardly seemed to be for the sins of his penitents. And it did not occur to him to-night to scold them or work himself into an ardent passion in the way some of the women loved. Up until the time one young man came into the confessional he had actually let many penitents go away feeling that their sins were trifling and unimportant, and even this young man, for the first part of his confession, did not arouse the priest. He was a university student who was worrying about losing his faith: it seemed that he could not pray when he went into a church, for his soul seemed to dry up and he felt uncomfortable and bored and sat in the pew arguing with the priest in the pulpit, and in his imagination making the priest appear stupid. There were times, too, when he felt that the Church, the visible church and the mystical body, was rotten at the core and always socially delinquent.

Father Dowling whispered, “Are you sure you're not getting your notions from authors of books. Are you sure your reading doesn't tend to destroy your faith? What have you been reading?”

“I've been reading Marx and Engels and Nietzsche, Father.”

“And you like Marx and Engels?”

“They have sometimes filled me with enthusiasm, Father.”

Father Dowling hesitated, not knowing quite what to say, for he did not know these authors very well, but he began by saying, “What a great pity Marx was not a Christian. There's no reason why a Christian should not thirst after social justice. The Church is not tied up to any one economic system, in fact, all systems tend to degrade the Church by using it to pacify discontented people. They would make religion an opium for the people, and we must be ever on our guard to
see that the laity and the clergy, too, are not becoming the tools of designing rulers and the class interests. There is nothing to prevent a priest speaking stupidly on matters that he does not understand. It is only in the confessional and on the altar that he must be heeded and his instructions followed. But for heaven's sake, have a little Christian charity; if you are at mass and you hear a priest in the pulpit talking nonsense, or what you feel sure is nonsense, don't sit there sneering at him. You don't have to listen to him. Get up and walk out. Smoke a cigarette outside and then go back when he's finished. Ah, my dear young Christian friend, it is indeed a disordered world. God help us all. There are so many remedies offered. Try Our Lord, why don't you? And there is no reason why you should be worried by Nietzsche, my son. I know he is not a Christian, but are you sure you are understanding him? Are you sure that there is not an emphatic spiritual declaration in Nietzsche? There is, my boy. He hates paleness. Man, for him, is not an end, he is a bridge. His was a martial spirit. Remember how he writes with passion and how he hates spiritual inertia. He hates paleness, too, I have said, and he would surely think that your mean shallow contemporary skeptics and atheists were dreadfully pale and woebegone. Perhaps even his lack of Catholicity is a disguise, and underneath this disguise there's much that a Christian can learn. Do you follow me?” Father Dowling, whispering rapidly, began to make the young man believe that he had not read the German writer correctly. When he had finished the priest thrust his face close against the wire grating and said, “Now do you understand?”

“Yes, Father.”

“That's good. The grace of God will help you to see much further into the matter. Go on with your confession,” Father Dowling said, leaning back.

“I committed fornication, Father.”

“How many times?”

“Twice, Father.”

“With a young girl that you seduced?”

“No, Father.”

“Not with another man's wife, I hope?”

“No, Father. With a prostitute.”

“Dear, dear, dear. Well, better with a street woman than with an innocent young girl or a married woman. You saw the same woman twice?”

“Yes, Father.”

“You picked her up off the streets?”

“In the first place, Father. Then I liked her and went to see her again.”

The next question came slow and hesitant from Father Dowling: he did not even know whether he should ask the question. “Was it in this neighborhood, my son? On the streets around here?”

“Yes, Father. It was.”

As he sat up stiffly, Father Dowling felt absolutely sure that the young man had picked up either Midge or Ronnie; then he could not prevent his head from going forward and his eyes peering through the wire wicket into the dark corner where the boy was kneeling. But he could not see more than the back of the boy's head, so hidden he was, and as he breathed deeply, and heard the boy breathing steadily, too, it began to seem inevitable that those two girls should have been touching the life and soul of this young fellow and perhaps many others like him, touching in this piercing way the life of the whole parish. How close they all were together. Yet it was not until he had seen the girls apart from others and separately, that he had realized how united was all the life of his
congregation, students, the mothers and fathers of students, prostitutes, priests, the rich and the poor who passed girls on the street and desired them. This exciting thought, which at first filled him with wonder, began to make him feel eager to be kind to the young man, who was whispering, “For these and all other sins which I cannot remember, I am heartily sorry, Father.”

“For your penance say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, and now make a good Act of Contrition.”

While the young fellow was muttering his prayer, Father Dowling was making the sign of the cross over him, and this motion with his hand in the air as he granted absolution became almost a caress, he was feeling such extraordinary tenderness for this penitent. Then he swung the panel across the grating and he was alone. He sat in the darkness, waiting for some one to come into the confessional, still hearing the scraping of the young man's feet, smelling the odors of stale face-powder, cheap perfumes, the mixed breath of many strangers, the smell of bodies confined in that small space, and as he listened, it all seemed good to him, like the teeming richness of living things.

And he began to realize more clearly than before, after having listened to the student, how important the souls of the two girls were to him. He realized that they required all his love, because he alone understood them, and saw that through them he could love the young man too, and every one else who touched them. “It certainly was better for that boy to have been with Ronnie or Midge than some pure young girl. It was probably Midge. Maybe there is some purpose in their life after all,” he thought.

No one else came into the confessional, so he removed his purple stole from around his neck and put it into his
pocket, and he swung aside the curtain and walked out to the church aisle. He went out and stood on the Cathedral steps, feeling the cool night air and looking over toward the main streets where the sky was glowing bright with the electric sign reflections, where the traffic was rumbling, where the crowds were streaming out of the theatres and into the restaurants and dance halls. And in the small hotel room on the other side of the block, Ronnie and Midge were maybe waiting for him to bring them a little money.

He felt dreadfully tired. As he went into the rectory he passed Father Anglin's door, and he thought, “If something does not turn up by to-morrow, I'll speak to Father Anglin.”

Upstairs, he talked for a few moments with Father Jolly about the ball teams in the spring training camps in the far south. In the summer time the two priests went to the ball games together, and tried to arrange it so they could motor to the city where the world series was being played. Father Jolly knew the pitching record of every pitcher who had been in the big leagues for at least two years. His small, eager, dark face, with big glasses, was full of animation as he talked. “Come on into my room and I'll give you a shot of rye and maybe we can get worked up to singing some songs,” he said. “Not to-night. I feel restless,” Father Dowling said, and Father Jolly, eyeing him shrewdly, knew that he was unhappy.