The City Below (16 page)

He didn't answer her. He didn't have to. He just shook his head. No. And then he left.

Outside again, approaching Healy to get his stuff, he had to cut through the line of Georgetown students, a throng of them now, heading into the chapel. It was the mandatory Friday Mass. Without thinking, he joined them.

Inside the church, his eyes failed for the moment it took to adjust to die dim light Intending only to step out of the way, Terry found himself standing behind another student near the purple curtain of the confessional. He was in the line.

He heard the murmur of the priest behind the curtain, and he wondered, How had this happened? If every move he made was wrong, what of this one? His first impulse was to flee. But he could not trust it. He could trust no impulse if it was his.

He had not been to confession since May, when he'd decided against entering the seminary. He knew he had not caused his mother's death. And he knew he had not blinded Bright Or deliberately lied to Didi. Or abandoned Nick. Yet moments later, on his knees, curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church, he whispered dryly to the shadowy ear a few inches from his mouth, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

And for the first time ever, he knew, it was true.

F
ORTY-TWO YOUNG MEN
on their knees, arrayed along the gleaming brass Communion rail. Across an apron of polished marble and up sue steps at the high altar itself, a priest on the ceremonial chair, the
cathedra
from which faith and morals were proclaimed and from which the building took its name. The priest was garbed in cassock and collar, not a bishop but a professor of theology and, today, an instructor in the liturgy. The acolytes and servers posted here and there around the sanctuary, and the seminarians themselves, were all dressed in mufti: the ubiquitous black shoes, but also khakis and sport shirts, cord trousers and sweaters, since this was a rehearsal and not the sacrament itself.

They were an impressive-looking group of men, although with their trim haircuts and clean-shaven faces, a not altogether typical one in that year. From appearances they could have been a class of newly commissioned army officers or incoming management trainees at a brokerage house. In feet, they were men who'd worked hard through most of that chaotic decade to root themselves in another age—an age, above all, of order.

Order: the name of the sacrament they were to receive. Order: the word from which the cardinal took his ecclesiastical title of Ordinary. Order: the unifying principle of the architecture of the very building around them, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, in the South End of Boston. Seminary rituals until now—those mini-ordinations beginning with tonsure, initiating them into a succession of arcane clerical states—had all taken place at the modest chapel at St. John's Seminary, on the far side of Boston. But this ordination to the diaconate would be different, and the massive setting told them so.

They let their eyes drift up the soaring walls to the ribbed, groined vault in the apex of which the late Cardinal O'Connell's red hat hung rotting; to the pointed arches; to the luminous windows and their diffusing filters of colored glass through which common daylight was transformed; to the coarse stonework across which it splashed. What the seminarians saw was an example of the harmony they knew to be the source of all beauty and all truth, the ultimate expression of the laws according to which divine reason had ordered the universe. Orders. The sacrament. The place. The people, the strict geometry of their lifelong relationships not only to authority but to those they would serve, and to each other. The shadowy vault, immense as the night sky, timeless as the ancient silence, efficiently aroused the sacred feeling on which they all depended absolutely now: the Church!

They were forty-two Americans who loved show tunes, jazz, the Beatles, and all kinds of sports. They were fiercey dedicated, even if at an enforced remove, to the politics of peace and civil rights. They knew their Camus and their Flannery O'Connor, their Kazantzakis, their Frantz Fanon even; their Daniel Berrigan and their Camillo Torres. But all that was peripheral now. They had been trained for
this
feeling, conditioned to maintain it—a mystic revelation, the beatitude Thomas wrote of, Saint Augustine's holy intuition, the cloud of unknowing within which all comes clear—the Church!

They had been, in the argot, "formed"; formed every bit as much as the space around them had been—the ribbed, groined vault of their souls. The soon-to-be deacons recognized
themselves
in the Gothic verticalism of Holy Cross,
their
cathedral, a stone emblem—for them, proof!—of God's existence, God's nearness, God's real presence. They'd been taught to believe that the Church was the Body of Christ, and as such it was more real to them at that moment—this was conditioning too—than their own bodies.

"Terence Michael Doyle."

The priest intoned the name with a curling of vowels that hinted at self-mockery; he, for one, could not go on taking this lifeless rehearsal all that seriously.

"
Adsum
," Doyle answered, as if this were the real thing. He stood, entered the gate of the Communion rail, crossed the marble apron, and began to mount the stairs. As tall as ever, still a fine-looking man, he was twenty-six now. He had shed the last vestige of boyishness and carried himself nimbly, with the grace of one who'd learned to move in a sanctuary. When he answered, his voice rang with authority, and as he went up to the altar platform, his affirmation echoed in the dense air overhead. He wore trim-cut corduroy pants and a navy blue cotton windbreaker, clothing that emphasized his leanness. His classmates watched him, as if they would learn now how this part was done.

At the top step, in front of the priest, Doyle went down on his knees again. This is only rehearsal, he told himself, but his hands still shook slightly as he placed them inside the priest's. He thought, despite himself, of his brother Nick kneeling before Gramps in the crypt of this very building years before. Terry Doyle would be a squire now too, but God's.

Father Joe Collins, the cardinal's stand-in, was bald and stout-faced. Sixty years old, his once powerful body had softened and begun to fold down on itself. His cloudy blue eyes contained an aura of resignation, and the faint aroma of whiskey poured off him, as always. But as he squeezed Terry's hands in a way the cardinal never would, he conveyed the strength of his particular affection, and Terry once again felt grateful that this priest had been his spiritual director.

Over the years, Doyle had come to understand that he'd entered the seminary, deciding on the priesthood after all, because, beginning that winter of his mother's death, he'd lost the capacity to believe in himself or trust his own impulses. In the Church he could account for such feelings of unworthiness and, with Father Collins's help, had learned to make the most of them. In relation to Didi and Bright, and even his brother, Terry had felt doomed to failure, but here such an emotion seemed a kind of qualification. "We are broken servants," Father Collins loved to say, "to a broken world."

But now what he said was, "In the presence of God and the Church"—he looked at Terry intently as he recited the prescribed questions without any hint of his former levity—"do you solemnly promise, as a sign of your interior dedication to Christ, to remain celibate for the sake of the Kingdom and in lifelong service to God and mankind?"

"I do," Terry answered, but his mind was blank.

Now Father Collins smiled. "May the Lord help you to persevere in this commitment."

And Terry answered, a bit overly firm, "Amen." Some of his classmates tittered nervously.

Father Collins silenced them with a glance. "And my son, do you solemnly promise respect and obedience to your Ordinary?"

Without having planned to, Terry blurted his answer: "Ordinarily."

And behind him the young men exploded in laughter.

Even Father Collins chuckled, his eyes rolling above his jowly face and collar.

Periodic outbursts of tension-relieving but puerile laughter were a long-standing seminary tradition, but when such a thing occurred in chapel, the men were adept at stifling their reactions quickly. This time, though, the laughter grew, especially once they saw that Father Collins had discreetly joined in. The noise rolled back across the large empty space, swelling in the shadows, and the echoes coming back only made them laugh louder.

It wasn't
that
funny, but the pressure had been building so steadily, and with so little outlet, that it rushed through the small opening of Doyle's wisecrack and became, like air through a penny whisde, something shrill. There was a bitterness in their laughter. They all heard it, they all felt it, they all understood it Their tension had mounted in the days and hours leading up to this rehearsal, of course, but it had also been steadily climbing in every month of that mad year, the events of which had undercut even their inbred docility.

The year had begun with the turning-point crisis of the let offensive in Vietnam, when their attitude of opposition, with Walter Cronkite's, had finally galvanized. Every month since had brought a new shock of disenchantment: McCarthy's unseating of LBJ in New Hampshire, Martin Luther King shot, the King riots, student revolts in Paris and then at Columbia, Bobby shot, the Chicago riot, Humphrey nominated, then Nixon. But for these
ordinandi,
the great shock not of the year, but of their entire time in training for the priesthood was an event few outside Catholicism had found all that surprising: Pope Paul's
Humanae Vitat,
issued only weeks before. The encyclical reasserted the Church's absolute rejection of all forms of birth control save abstinence and rhythm. Despite the arcane
aggiornamento
hoopla of the Vatican Council, and despite the widespread post-Council assumption that the Pill had given the Church an opening it wanted, the pronouncement had slammed the famous window shut on the idea that anything truly fundamental would change. When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague a few days later, many Catholic priests and lay people—and seminarians—thought, perhaps unjustifiably, they knew the feeling.

Respect and obedience for your Ordinary?

Doyle's remark had given efficient, if visceral, expression to the dilemma these men had yet to discuss openly. If the old authoritarian mode still held, what did it mean that they'd been trained in the New Theology? Were confessors expected to enforce Pope Paul's punishing hard line? In the secrecy of the curtained booth, could priests—could
they?
—tell men and women to let conscience be their guide? Wouldn't the cardinal himself do as much?

As the laughter subsided behind Doyle, Father Collins leaned forward to whisper, "Watch that stuff." But there was no rebuke in his voice, and Doyle felt the affection in the way the priest squeezed his hands one last time. Doyle returned to his place and the next man went up. After repeating the run-through half a dozen times, Collins raised his hand to stop the next one. "You get the idea," he said, standing. The
ordinandi
remained kneeling. He scanned their faces, then said, "Lucky for you, Deacs, your Ordinary is no such thing. It takes nothing to make such a vow to him." He turned to go to the altar from which the cardinal would lead the prayers on Saturday. Father Collins bowed at the tabernacle, then turned to face the men again. "At this point, having taken your places inside the sanctuary, you will all prostrate yourselves for the Litany of the Saints. Do we need to practice that?"

The seminarians only looked at him.

"You just stretch out, right forearm under your forehead. Once you're down, be still. Just pretend to be dead. Pretend you hear your friends and loved ones praying over you after you're gone, because, my buckos, that's exactly what's happening. You are dead to the world. If you go to sleep, do yourself a big favor and don't snore. His Eminence will throw his miter at you."

The men looked at each other.

Collins saw someone in the doorway of the sacristy, on the far left side of the sanctuary. He glanced over, and at once he felt a cold wind on the back of his neck Loughlin. The chancellor. The one man who'd warned him about his drinking. What the hell was he doing here?

Collins pretended to ignore him. "Then, once the litany is complete, you come up to your knees again, and the cardinal will offer the Prayer of Consecration for each of you. And I want you to listen to every word of it, especially the part that says about you, 'May he give the world the witness of a pure conscience. May he imitate your Son, who came not to be served, but to serve ...'"

As he spoke, Collins was aware that Loughlin had entered the sanctuary, was standing a few feet away, by the cruet table, watching icily. Loughlin was dressed in street clericals, a nicely tailored black suit with slim lapels. Collins considered Loughlin a fop; he was always shooting his French cuffs to show the gold of his Chi-Rho cuff links. At his throat a sliver of red showed below his white collar, the unmistakable mark of the standing in the Church Collins himself would have had if he hadn't blown it with his bending elbow. Loughlin was the man who ran the archdiocese while Cushing was off at bar mitzvahs and bond rallies and picnics for the nuns. As large-hearted and spontaneous and disorganized as Cushing was, Loughlin was that rigid and cold and, well, mean. As he had to be, Collins supposed. Collins knew better than anyone how little of what the Cush started he followed through on.

Out of the side of his eye, Collins noticed the manila folder Lough-lin was holding. He found it impossible not to imagine the sheet it held as the official order sending him off at last to the dry-out farm for whiskey priests down in Rhode Island. It was a paranoid thought that the chancellor would serve his summons here, and Collins knew it. But God, the sight of that bastard made him want a drink. He stopped speaking and faced Loughlin, but his eyes went to the cruet table, where the wine would sit sparkling and ready during Mass. It held nothing now except a doily.