The Good Shepherd

The silver-haired woman walked to the window of her penthouse and gazed down at the city. It was twilight. Faint echoes of the evening traffic’s cacophony drifted up to her, muted by her closed windows and the hum of her air conditioners. For a moment, Rome was a panorama of magic beauty. The ribbons of streetlights, the headlights of the moving cars, the glow of the illuminated piazzas, were a gigantic festival being staged for her benefit. All because of this piece of paper that she held in her hand, a letter that began:
Your friend will be one of five Americans. The news will be announced tomorrow. . . .

Beyond the dark hollow of the Tiber, the dome of St. Peter’s suddenly rose from the shadows of Trastevere as the floodlights came on. The woman’s eyes recoiled from the huge bulbous mass of stone. Not so many years ago the sight of it had soothed and strengthened her. Now it only seemed to arouse enormous sadness in her.

Last night, standing here, she had seen the dome suddenly sprout enormous cracks. Like a huge empty eggshell, it had crumpled before her eyes. Below her the city had become a deadly tempter, the indifferent lights, the mocking sounds whispering:
Come. Come into my meaningless arms.
With sickening panic, she had jerked the drapes closed.

Tonight the woman was able to turn her back on St. Peter’s dome and walk briskly out of her apartment. She rode to the ground floor in a creaking Eiffel Tower vintage elevator with elaborate black iron scrollwork and walked swiftly through the lobby to the street. She wore a white linen suit and almost no makeup. Her purse, her shoes, were also white. She paused before the wrought-iron doors of the apartment and took a deep breath of the soft air of Roman spring. Past her on the Via Margutta flowed a motley parade of art lovers, some young, dressed in the kinky violently colored clothes that were being sold in several nearby shops, others wearing the more soberly shaped and tinted styles of middle age. She enjoyed the Via Margutta, which doubled as Rome’s Carnaby Street and East Village with “now” boutiques beside art galleries and antique stores.

Behind her, unseen and unnoticed, the portiere of the apartment sat at his small narrow window on the street level, swigging beer from a bottle. He was about fifty, a fat little man with bulging piggish eyes. “There she goes to her lover again,” he grunted.

From the kitchen of their tiny apartment, his wife, who resembled him in shape and size, unleashed a stream of vituperation on him and on Italian men in general. The American Madonna was beautiful, she swore, but in a spiritual way, a way utterly beyond his animal understanding.

The portiere studied the woman’s firm American rump, barely listening to his wife’s insults. “I still say she has a lover,” he said. “It can be seen by a discerning man. There is something about the way a woman carries herself, once she has awakened a man’s desire.”

“Perhaps,” said his wife, “the desire of a real man. Would that I had had the experience. Perhaps I, too, would have a walk that made men lecherous.”

Unaware of the exchange of insults she was generating, the woman in white strode swiftly along the Via Margutta for a few hundred yards and turned down a short silent alley that led to the Via del Babuino. She scarcely glanced at the ravaged Roman statue of Silenus, the drunken old satyr who told King Midas that it was happiest for a man not to be born at all, and failing that to die as soon as possible. Covered with moss and dust, a yellow cigarette butt thrust into his leering mouth, the statue looked more animal than human and gave the Street of the Baboon its name. The woman in white hurried purposefully past more antique stores and art galleries. Several times an owner or a staff member rushed to the doorway to call, “Good evening, Signora.” She acknowledged the greetings with the smile of an old customer.

In three or four minutes, she emerged from the Via del Babuino into the Piazza di Spagna. Guitars twanged through the deepening twilight, and cigarettes glowed up and down the ancient yellow steps, where the embassy of imperial Spain had once sent orders to popes. A half-hundred young people from a dozen nations, most of them wearing clothes and hair that made them sexually indistinguishable, lounged on the steps. Some of them were singing; most stared dully. The woman in white was glad it was too dark to see their faces. The vacuous boredom on so many of them, especially the American faces, always pained her.

She stepped into a small black cab at the head of the taxi rank near the Spanish Steps and said in perfect Italian, “The Church of St. Peter in Chains, please.” The driver made a sharp turn into the Via del Babuino while pedestrians fled before his horn. Another swift turn and he was racing down a narrow alley to the Via del Corso, Rome’s main street. Here his Italian fondness for physical combat with other drivers flowered. Roaring down the special lane reserved for commercial traffic, he charged between buses and taxis, passed first on the left, then on the right, his horn challenging all comers.

The woman in white sat in the back seat scarcely noticing that her life was in danger. She had survived too many similar rides. Instead, she looked out at the city that was flowing by her window. Halfway down the Corso, she peered into the Piazza Colonna, dominated by the immense column commemorating the victories of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Discreetly parked against the buildings of the piazza were gray buses full of riot police. The Palazzo Chigi, home of one of Renaissance Rome’s proudest families, was now the office of the Prime Minister of Italy. The Houses of Parliament were also nearby, and this made the Piazza Colonna the favorite arena for Rome’s increasingly violent political demonstrations. One day it was the Communists, the next the neo-Fascists, the next the students. At times, Rome seemed a city on the brink of chaos.

Another minute or two of reckless driving and the cab was crawling through the permanent traffic jam of the Piazza Venezia. The woman in white gazed somberly up at the balcony where Mussolini had harangued his Black Shirts and declared his wars. Five minutes later, they were skirting the foot of the Capitol Hill, passing the huge dazzling white marble monument to King Victor Emmanuel II and the unity of Italy, agleam in its nightly bath of floodlights. To Romans it was “the wedding cake,” an oblique comment on the mediocrity of both the monument and the Royal family.

Now they were racing down the broad Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Road of the Imperial Forums, where pathetic fragments of ancient Rome’s power and glory gleamed in another battery of floodlights. At the head of the street, was the Colosseum, with its multiple mouths full of gray darkness, a living monument to ancient Rome’s other heritage, her incredible bestiality. Halfway down the Via dei Fori Imperiale, the cabdriver made a heroic left turn which hurtled them past oncoming cars; all their drivers, of course, refused to touch their brakes.

Exultantly shifting gears, the cabdriver headed up the shabby Via Cavour. Already the prostitutes in their net stockings and gold miniskirts and silver lamé blouses were strolling past the dreary pensions and fifth-rate hotels. Opposite the glossily modern Hotel Palatino, which looked like a rich American tourist bravely maintaining his composure among the natives, the cabdriver stopped. The woman in white slipped lire into his hand and got out.

Walking once more with a stride that belied her gray hair, she entered a dark narrow passageway that ran uphill. The tunnel ran beneath the slope of the Borgias. Above it were the grim tower and palace where once lived Vannozza dei Catanei, the mistress of Pope Alexander VI and the mother of Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia and the rest of that murderous clan.

At the end of the passageway, the woman in white emerged into a small cobblestone square. On the right were flats with windows aglow. On the left was an old church, built in the fifth century. A man in a white shirt stood in the doorway. The woman took a black veil from her purse and draped it over her carefully molded silver hair. At the doorway, she slipped money into the man’s hand and murmured, “Thank you, Mario.”

He nodded. “I will wait,” he said.

She entered the church and stood in the back for a moment, gazing at the marble statue on the right. It was by Michelangelo, and it depicted Moses not long after he had received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. It was surrounded by a half-dozen other statues, all obviously inferior to this massive masterpiece. Beneath the high altar, candles gleamed on the bronze doors of the reliquary containing the chains that had reputedly bound St. Peter in Jerusalem.

The woman in white had not come to worship a relic or admire a statue. Nor had she come to pray. She had come to commune with two men who had brought her to this church ten years ago, two men whom she loved in a way that she herself sometimes found hard to understand, a way that was impossible to explain to anyone else. Especially the love that she felt for the man who was still alive.

He was almost 4,000 miles away from her across the dark Mediterranean and darker Africa and the vast shadowy Atlantic. But standing here in this church, she felt his presence, could almost hear his voice, see him smile. She could relive for a brief, fierce moment the days and weeks and months when her love for him had been a constant torment. Yet she found strength, even a bittersweet happiness in this memory. Now this man meant something more profound, more immense than that old lost passionate wish to touch him, to hold him and be held by him. He had acquired a meaning that pervaded her soul.

The woman in white had come here often for this communion during the past five years. More than once it had sustained her when she thought her heart was about to wither like the skin of a gutted tangerine. But tonight she had not come seeking the mysterious strength this man emanated. She had come to commune with his joy, to share with him the joy she felt, too.

For five minutes, she stood there, her mind, even her body, radiant. Then she thought of the other man, the one who was dead, and a shadow seemed to fall upon her joy. On the altar, the candlelight suddenly flickered weirdly. A frown appeared on Moses’ marble brow. She raised her eyes into the darkness beneath the roof of the Church of St. Peter in Chains and whispered: “Watch over us, Don Angelo, watch over us,
please.

At that very moment, the man for whom the woman in Rome was praying emerged from his limousine and paused, almost blinded by the bright 11:00 a.m. American sunshine. With the black seven-passenger Cadillac behind him, he looked like a fantasy figure, a man from a time machine or a creature from another planet. On his head, he wore a tall elliptical purple and gold miter; in his hand was a bronze shepherd’s crosier. He was dressed in purple and gold vestments. A gold cross on a field of purple decorated the chasuble which hung from his shoulders to his knees. A purple and gold cope covered his shoulders and was fastened across his chest by a gold clasp. On his feet were square-toed purple shoes with large silver buckles.

The sun was warm. Only a faint breath of March’s often chilly wind stirred the air. Archbishop Matthew Mahan was not in the least disturbed by the humdrum architecture of the church that confronted him. The building was little more than a big slant-roofed red brick rectangle, with a touch of pseudo-Georgian architecture in its white doors and trim. Instead, he noted with silent approval the fresh white paint glistening on the doors. Beside the church, the massive rectory, also in red brick, showed the same meticulous maintenance. Across a huge blacktop parking lot, half full of gleaming new station wagons and sleek sedans, the one-story red brick school, built cluster style with walkways between the separate buildings, occupied the entire north side of the block. Up and down the surrounding streets spread the one-acre zoned homes of affluent Catholics which prompted younger priests to call this suburb the Golden Ghetto.

The sarcasm might have disturbed some churchmen in the year of our Lord 1969. But Matthew Mahan prided himself on being a realist. The Church had to serve both the affluent and the poor. If the sight of Holy Angels Church and school stirred any emotion in him, it was pride. His energy, his vision, had planned this center of Catholic life, when the Golden Ghetto was still on the drawing boards of the real estate men. Even more of his energy had raised the money to pay for the nearby Catholic high school, which guaranteed Catholic parents a religious education for their children, from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. It was this kind of foresight, this kind of awareness of the folkways of the modern family, with its seemingly tireless compulsion to flee ever farther from the smoggy city, that had won Matthew Mahan the admiration - and cooperation - of the state’s real estate entrepreneurs.

There was also nothing in the least disturbing about the three priests and the crowd of smiling smartly dressed parents who waited for him at the doors of Holy Angels Church. From pug nose and square jaw to bulging belly, Monsignor Paul O’Reilly looked like the personification of the traditional Irish pastor, stern but kind. Flanking him, Fathers Emil Novak and Charles Cannon seemed model curates, earnest, humble, a little timid in the presence of authority. No, Matthew Mahan thought ironically, nothing here to disturb an Archbishop.

But something was disturbing this Archbishop. Beneath his purple and gold vestments, just below the knotted white cincture around his waist, symbol of the whips with which Jesus had been beaten by the thugs of the High Priest, prowled a malevolent pain. It seemed to open and close with every breath he took, like some exotic tropical flower. This morning at 4:00 a.m., when it had awakened him, another metaphor had suggested itself: a rotating medieval mailed fist with jagged spears on its knuckles. The bread and wine he had consumed at his morning mass, followed by a well-filled plate of bacon and eggs and home-fried potatoes, had temporarily stilled it. But the pain had returned in this more subtle flowering guise as his Cadillac rolled off the expressway and entered the Golden Ghetto.

Since he had recovered from the measles at the age of nine, Matthew Mahan had never had a serious illness. He was not the sort of man who liked to admit that any aspect of his job troubled him. Whatever was happening in his innards, it had nothing to do with the knowledge that behind Monsignor Paul O’Reilly’s formal smile of welcome lay inveterate treachery and hatred. Nor was it caused by knowing that behind the timidity on the faces of Fathers Novak and Cannon lay fear and loathing and rebellion. Nor would the Archbishop admit that the pain had anything to do with the weariness that seeped through his body as he paused beside his limousine. Instead, he made the usual promise: Tonight you will go to bed on time, no matter how many letters are undictated or committee or commission reports unread.

He glanced at his wristwatch. They were only ten minutes late - not disastrous if what was to come inside the church and rectory ran on time. With abrupt irritation, the Archbishop turned and peered into the dim interior of the limousine. “Come on, Dennis,” he said, “we’ve got a schedule to keep.”

The pale, freckled face of Father Dennis McLaughlin, made even paler by the round white collar beneath it, responded with a nod. He was frantically clipping notes to pieces of paper scattered on the seat beside him and on the floor. They had gotten through half the day’s mail en route from the city.

“I don’t want to forget - anything,” Dennis said, the hiatus an unspoken apology for the numerous things he had already forgotten in the past ten days.

Dennis McLaughlin emerged into the sunshine and stood beside the Archbishop. He was as wiry, bony, and sinewy in build as Matthew Mahan was solid. His shaggy red hair spilled over his ears and rioted around the back edge of his collar. Matthew Mahan consciously suppressed the additional flicker of irritation caused by his new secretary’s haircut, or lack of one, and strode up the walk to greet the priests and parishioners of Holy Angels.

Dennis found himself marveling at the broad smile on Matthew Mahan’s face as he shook hands with Monsignor Paul O’Reilly and his two curates. Did it prove that the Archbishop was what he liked to consider himself - the thorough politician - or what Dennis suspected: the complete hypocrite? Fathers Novak and Cannon looked like frightened birds, ready to flutter away at the first gesture of violence. “We’re ready whenever you are, Your Excellency,” said Monsignor O’Reilly in a superbly neutral tone.

“I’m sorry we’re a little behind schedule,” Matthew Mahan said, turning as he spoke to smile at the twenty or thirty parents on the steps.

“The children have been very patient,” said Monsignor O’Reilly.

“Joe, how are you,” the Archbishop was saying to one jowly face he recognized in the generally Irish-American semicircle of watching parents. Joe O’Boyle, the local captain of the annual Archbishop’s Fund Drive. Successful insurance man. Father of eight. “One of your gang in here?”

“My daughter Morrin.”

“Good. Good.”

Matthew Mahan turned back to Monsignor O’Reilly. The pain throbbed ominously in his stomach as he stared into that stolid face. Up close the ravages of age made it look as if it had been chipped from marble by a third-rate sculptor. The whole man was marble - or some cheaper stone. Everything about him - the square jaw, the thick stubby hands folded complacently on the big belly - said
immovable.
Without another word, Monsignor O’Reilly turned and stalked into the church. Fathers Novak and Cannon hurried after him. Matthew Mahan told Dennis to wait for him in the sacristy and followed them.

Going up the aisle, Matthew Mahan found himself wondering why he did not appoint another auxiliary bishop - a young man - to handle these chores. Was it the memory of his own career as auxiliary bishop - the way he had quietly absorbed more and more of the control of the archdiocese from old Hogan? It had not been an easy role to play, especially when the old man had retired within his medieval fortress to brood about Rome’s ingratitude. Or was it simply the pleasure that he got out of fulfilling all the rites and duties of his office, especially this one - administering the sacrament of confirmation, conferring the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which only a bishop was empowered to bestow?

It was more than the sacrament, he decided, as he studied Monsignor O’Reilly’s thick neck. He enjoyed speaking to the young people as they left childhood. He nodded and smiled at their curious expectant faces in the first ten pews on both sides of the aisle. The girls were all dressed in white; the boys wore blue blazers and gray pants - a minor variation from his day, when they had worn dark blue suits. In the city, where so many of the parishes were now filled with the poor, the nuns had abandoned a strict dress code. It was somehow comforting to see the tradition continued here - although he was sure that Dennis McLaughlin would argue that the youngsters should wear their old clothes and their parents should donate the price of these blazers and dresses to the poor.

Monsignor O’Reilly and his curates entered the sanctuary and took seats to the right of the altar table. Matthew Mahan remained in the center aisle, waiting for the organ music to end. As the last notes died away, he opened his arms and said, “Peace be with you, my clear friends, and especially with you, my dear young people who are going to receive your confirmation today. First though, I’m supposed to find out if you’re ready to receive it. Let’s see. Do you know why I am here? Why couldn’t Monsignor O’Reilly or Father Novak give you this sacrament? Can you tell me?” He pointed to a towhead in the first row. “What’s your name, son?”

The boy stood up. “Thomas Maloney, Your Excellency.”

“Now, now, don’t call me Your Excellency. Just call me Father. The popes don’t want us to use all these titles anymore. Pope John even told me that he would rather be called Don Angelo. Don is an Italian title of respect. But I couldn’t manage that one. I called him Santo Padre. That’s Italian for Holy Father. Somehow it sounds better. Anyway, I want you to call me Father. I don’t stop older people from calling me Excellency because I’m afraid of hurting their feelings. But I want to start you people off right. You’re the ones who will really change the Church. Now, why am I here, Thomas?”

“Because only a bishop can administer the sacrament of confirmation.”

“Right. Sit down now, and let me find another victim. Why am I wearing this ridiculous getup?” He gestured to the miter on his head, the cope, and the chasuble on his shoulders, the crosier in his hand, and eyed a boy with a head of blazing red hair, four rows back. “How about you, Red? Don’t you think this outfit is pretty ridiculous?”

The boy stood up, his cheeks turning the color of his hair. He shook his head.

“You don’t? Come up and take a closer look. Come on. Right up here.”

The boy climbed out into the aisle and timidly approached him. Matthew Mahan took off his miter and put it on his head. Everyone roared with laughter. “Now tell me the truth. Wouldn’t you feel pretty silly walking around with that thing on your head?”

The boy nodded.

“Then why do you think I’m wearing it? I look like a pretty sensible fellow, don’t I?”

“Well, you’re wearing it because other bishops wore these things” - he took off the miter and studied it for a moment - “a long time ago.”

“Right! I’m wearing these robes, as we call them,” Matthew Mahan said, speaking to all the children now, “to remind us that the sacrament of confirmation goes all the way back - almost 2,000 years - to the Apostles, who were the first bishops. This getup only looks silly until you understand why I’m wearing it. What does this mean?”

He pointed to the crosier and chose another redhead, a girl this time. Her hair spilled down over her shoulders almost to her waist. “That’s to remind us that you’re the shepherd of the people.”

“Like who?”

“Like Jesus.”

“Right. He was the Good Shepherd. I’m only mediocre.”

It was amazing, thought Dennis McLaughlin, watching from the sacristy. The total transformation of the man from the moment he began talking to the children. He suddenly seemed to emanate a kind of psychological radiance. Excitement, joy, were visible on his face and audible in his voice. Was he basically an actor? Or was the smooth reserve that you saw most of the time an act, a mask he wore for his own good reasons?

With a pat on the shoulder, Matthew Mahan sent the red-haired boy back to his pew. “You’re doing awfully well. If you’re as smart as you look and sound, I think I may tell Pope Paul the next time I go to Rome that we all ought to resign and let you people start running the Church when you’re eighteen or so. There are just one or two more things I’d like to hear. You, young lady,” he said, pointing to a plump dark-haired girl in the first pew. “Tell me who received the first confirmation.”

“The Apostles,” she said.

“Right. Where?”

“In the same room where Jesus had the Last Supper with them.”

“Right again. And how did they receive it? What did they see?”

“Tongues of fire above their heads.”

“Right again. Do you think you’ll see some tongues of fire today?” Whirling, he pointed to a handsome dark-haired boy sitting on the aisle in the second pew. “What do you think?”

“I - I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, you won’t. The only tongue you’ll see is mine. Here it is, wagging away.” He stuck his tongue out and walked down the aisle while everyone burst into laughter again. “Just a poor old bishop’s tongue,” he said as the laughter died away. “Not much good for anything but trying to persuade people to do what they should be doing without being told. Those tongues of fire the Apostles saw - that was to help them
believe
that they were receiving the Holy Spirit. No one had ever received it before, you see, and Jesus knew how hard it was to create
faith
in people, faith that inspires people to
do
things. But when the Apostles went out and started converting people, right in the Temple at Jerusalem before the eyes of the men who had killed Jesus, then people began to see what the Holy Spirit really meant. How many did they convert in the first few days, does anybody know?”