The Good Shepherd (16 page)

“Your Eminence,” Father Disalvo said desperately, “I can’t go back down there and withdraw this proposal. I’ll look like a total fool. I’ll lose every bit of influence I have with these people. Especially the blacks. They’re getting more militant every day. They’re tired of marching on City Hall to demand that fair housing law. They see what’s being done in Milwaukee.”

“And you see what Groppi’s doing out there, don’t you,
amico mio.
You’d love that kind of publicity, wouldn’t you, Vinny?”

“I’m not in this for publicity,” Disalvo said doggedly, obviously repeating something he had said several times before.

“Oh sure, oh sure. I bet you’ve got a dresser drawer full of press clippings down there in your room right now.”

It was fascinating, Dennis McLaughlin thought, his mind cool once more. Watching His Eminence handle Father Disalvo was a little like seeing an old pro, the total professional, up against a brash, nervy newcomer to the power game. Father Disalvo never really had a chance. His confidence had undoubtedly been shattered by four or five previous sessions like this one. Now he was being jabbed, uppercutted, and one-two-punched without ever seeing where the next blow or the one before it came from.

Earnestly, His Eminence was now assuring the victim that his heart was in his corner. “You know how much I care about those people, Vinny. I stood up for them in this diocese - in this country - when there weren’t a half-dozen other Catholics saying anything for them. God knows I’m one of the founders of the Catholic Interracial Council.”

“I know, Your Eminence. But the situation has
changed -”

“I know it’s changed. And I know you’re meeting it realistically. That’s why I’ve given you all the freedom of speech I think you can handle. It’s a lot more than some of my pastors think you should have. You don’t seem to realize how much time I spend defending you up here. From Father Reagan, from the mayor. From half the people in the chancery office, for that matter. I’m on your
side,
Vinny. But never forget what I told you about that collar you’re wearing. If I ever took it off you, you’d be a has-been in two weeks. You’re getting attention because you’re a priest, Vinny. And because you’re a priest, you’ve got to demonstrate responsibility, prudence, if you expect me to stay on your side. Now look me in the eye and tell me that you really believe your effectiveness would be hurt if you backed down on this patrol.”

Matthew Mahan’s tone reduced the idea to utter idiocy. He was now the benevolent father, talking to a headstrong child.

“It would, Your Eminence, I swear it.”

“All right. Then you can do it. But limit the number to
twenty.
Get me?”

“All right, Your Eminence.”

“Dennis, get that apostle of law and order, Father Reagan, on the phone for me.”

Dennis retreated to his cubbyhole between the Cardinal’s study and the hall, dialed the university, and got an anxious Father Reagan on the phone. “Phil,” Matthew Mahan boomed into the phone on his desk, “I’ve got Father Disalvo sitting here in front of me. He’s coming out to visit your so-called educational institution tomorrow. Do you know how many people he’s bringing with him? Twenty! That’s right. He originally intended to bring thirty-six, but when he heard how nervous you were, as a gesture of Christian charity, and at my request, he’s reduced it to twenty. He also says that if more than 200 students show up, he’s going to apply to the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints for certification as a miracle. Just to be a good fellow, he’ll attribute it to some phony Jesuit candidate. Who are you pushing these days, anyhow? No one? I’m overwhelmed by this outburst of humility. All right, Phil. Sleep tight. No one’s going to trash your office tomorrow.”

Matthew Mahan gave the mayor pretty much the same treatment, only sticking the needle in from a slightly different angle. “I don’t know what you’d do without me to hold this city together, Jake.”

Matthew Mahan hung up and sighed. Again Dennis sensed a touch of the theatrical. “What a disappointment that fellow has been to me on a personal level. So antagonistic. And he won’t take advice. On anything.”

With an effort, the Cardinal brightened. “Well, Vinny, are you satisfied?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Do we still understand each other?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Good. What are you going to talk about tomorrow?”

“Mostly I’m going to attack Nixon. The war. Try to get more students involved in seeing the connection between the war and black poverty.”

Matthew Mahan sighed again. “I don’t agree with it but - okay. Just remember, no talk about violence. I don’t want to hear even a hint that this city might burn.”

Father Disalvo nodded glumly. “I got that message the last time, Your Eminence.”

“I just want to make sure you’ve still got it. Okay, Vinny, good night. The car’s still waiting outside, isn’t it, Dennis?”

Dennis nodded.

The Cardinal held out his hand. “Thanks for coming up,
amico mio.
”

Father Disalvo trudged into the night. Dennis McLaughlin looked at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. His followers, including Sister Helen Reed, would wait an hour and a half for his return - if they waited. Not exactly the sort of experience that kindles the illusion of charisma. Did His Eminence understand this, too? Dennis wondered. Was his application of the negative nuances of power that sophisticated?

“Tell me frankly, Dennis, how do you think he feels about the deal we just worked out?”

Dennis was too surprised by the question to find a diplomatic answer. Perhaps he did not really want to find one. “I think he’s mad as hell.”

“Really?”

To Dennis’s amazement, there was dismay, genuine dismay, on Cardinal Mahan’s face.

“And the money - you just can’t believe the way he handles money. He’s the corporation, you know. He literally
owns
everything in the archdiocese. Every building, every cent in every bank account. I was looking at this year’s financial report the other day. He takes in about 800,000 a year in his cathedraticum -”

“His
what?
”

“Cathedraticum. It’s a tax of 5 percent the archdiocese levies on each parish. That means that the total take must be around $40 million. Exclusive of the annual fund drive.”

“Wow. This is fascinating stuff,” said Leo McLaughlin as he thrust another Bourbon and ginger ale into his brother’s hand.

You are talking too much
, a drowsy voice whispered in Dennis’s skull. But he did not care. He was not talking to Leo and his wife, Grace, although they sat open-mouthed on the couch. No, his audience was the young woman in the pale pink suit with a skirt that stopped at least a foot above her knees. He was talking to the dark hair that fell in a glossy fountain down her back, to the curve of those nylon-stockinged legs so insouciantly crossed, to the breasts that filled the white blouse and created a lovely hollow within which a gold cross rested. If Sister Helen Reed was impressed by the revelations of the Cardinal’s secretary, she did not show it. A Mona Lisa smile was all she deigned to bestow on Father Dennis McLaughlin. So he talked on.

“When it comes to money, he’s got the instincts and style of a Renaissance prince. I think it’s a reaction to the bad time he had in the depression, when his father lost his life’s savings in a restaurant and had to take a crummy city job. He’s paying me $600 a month. I couldn’t believe it. That’s three times what a curate gets. He just laughed and said I was working three times as hard.”

“Well, you are,” Grace McLaughlin said.

“Oh, I suppose so. But I’m getting used to it.”

“You like it,” said Leo. “You don’t have to think anymore.”

“Is he going to publish a financial report this year?” asked Sister Helen.

“Not if he can help it. The chancellor, Terry Malone, who’s to the right of Bismarck, is against it 100 percent. It’s easy for Matt to go along with him. There are figures in the draft report I saw that he wouldn’t like to make public. The cost of running the episcopal residence, for instance: $32,567.80. And something called travel expenses that came to $26,896.50.”

“And he won’t give us $25,000 for our inner-city project,” Sister Helen said.

“Careful,” Dennis said. “No revolutionary statements, please. Didn’t I tell you that my head is on the block if you girls try anything drastic? Let Father Disalvo play local radical.”

“He’s a jerk,” Sister Helen said.

That had a very satisfying sound in Dennis McLaughlin’s ears. He had somehow assumed that Sister Helen was enamored of the city’s leading militant. The thought that there might be a vacuum in Sister Helen’s heart inspired still more revelations from the inner corridors of the chancery.

First a word-for-word description of the way the Cardinal cowed Father Disalvo. Then the contretemps at Holy Angels, where Monsignor Paul O’Reilly was still doing his utmost to create a confrontation over birth control. Next the worries over the fund drive which did not seem to be going well. The failure of the Republican-controlled state senate to even report out of committee the bill to subsidize the parochial schools, in spite of the Cardinal’s covert offers of political support in the next election.

On and on Dennis talked while laughing Leo stuck more dark Bourbon and ginger ales into his hand. Negative aphorisms, snide cracks, tumbled from his lips. Sister Helen was smiling now, yes even laughing at Father McLaughlin’s description of the wreckage of the Jesuit order, the Bona Mors (Happy Death) Society, as they called the over-fifties, who sat in their rooms wondering where all the certainties had gone. She murmured her amusement at his recipe for soothing Pope Paul. “Let him take lessons in humility from the Archbishop of Canterbury.” She even chuckled at his solution to the celibacy problem. “Voluntary castration. Peace will descend upon the Church, and the Pope will once more have a choir second to none.”

They were at the table by now, dining on veal parmigiana as only Grace née Conti cooked it. The wine was flowing, and for some reason, he still had a full Bourbon and ginger ale beside his plate. “Leo,” he said raising his glass, “allow me to toast you as a diplomat second to none.”

It had been Leo’s idea, this “Easter truce session,” as he called it, between Father Dennis and Sister Helen. He had summoned her to his office for a conference earlier in the month, and she had icily told him she was too busy. Mentioning it to Leo on the phone, he discovered that he and Helen and Grace were old friends. Grace had been in Helen’s class at Mount St. Monica’s. It was easy for Leo to discover that Sister Helen had no place to dine on Easter Day, thanks to her feud with her reactionary father. So the peace banquet had been arranged.

But Father Dennis had been totally unprepared for the chic, astonishingly beautiful girl who greeted him in his brother’s living room. He had murmured idiotic things about her hair being different, her clothes. Only after the first drink did he regain some shreds of his savoir faire. Now, smiling at Leo through the alcoholic haze, he felt wonderful. The compulsion to play the frowning big brother had strangely diminished, and apparently so had Leo’s fondness for sneering at Mother’s favorite, the Jesuit genius.

“What are we going to do about it?” Leo said as he raised his glass in response to Dennis’s toast.

“Do about what?” he said, puzzled by his brother’s harsh tone.

“The Church.”

“Little Brother, you are speaking to an intellectual. We don’t do anything. We just talk about it.”

“Maybe it’s time you started doing something,” Sister Helen said.

Her voice was amazingly seductive. Dennis realized that she had yet to say a word about the role he had played at the conference with Sister Agnes Marie and Matthew Mahan. It was generous of her to keep such lethal ammunition out of Leo’s hands (or mouth).

“Don’t you realize, Big Brother,” Leo said, “that you are in a position to get information that could blow up the whole crummy show? You are on the inside - on the inside of one of the most important archdioceses in the United States. Not the
most
important, like New York - which is precisely what makes it so valuable. An exposé of New York wouldn’t excite the rest of the country one bit. Everyone assumes that everything is rotten in New York, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that the Church had the same disease. But this guy, your guy, is
typical.
What he’s doing is what most of the other shepherds are doing - the phony image, the controlled press, the secret finances. Do you get a look at his checkbook?”

“I draw the checks.”

“Fantastic. Then you see him in action. Absolute master of a $10- or $12-million-a-year operation, with no accountability to anyone but himself and his guardian angel. Has he spent any money recently that might be questionable?”

A shrug from ossified Father McLaughlin. “He gave his sister-in-law $100 for Easter. All the bills she runs up at the department stores come to us. She’s a widow.”

“Black widows are living on welfare,” Sister Helen said. “Did he say one word when the governor cut the welfare budget 10 percent last week?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Father McLaughlin said, and for his reward, got another smile. “It was also part of a deal. No protest, and they’d support the parochial school subsidy bill. But the WASPs double-crossed him.”

Leo began asking questions like a parody of a CIA section chief. Was there a copying machine in the office? Yes, a Xerox. Did he have access to it at any time? Any time. Did he have access to all Mahan’s correspondence? All. How far back? Years. What about tapping his telephone? Now wait a minute. It’s simple, you and he are on the same lines, right? You can tap his phone at your desk. All you need is a cassette tape recorder and a jack with a suction cup. If he catches you, he can’t put you in jail - that would ruin the episcopal image.

“You’d be back in the ghetto, working with people you really care about,” Sister Helen said.

Somehow, through the alcoholic blur, a cry almost sprang to Dennis’s lips.
My priesthood, my priesthood, don’t any of you understand?
whispered the lamenting voice. But obviously no one understood, and the words remained unspoken.

Instead, over a glass of port they listened to Leo expound the “theology of action.” The Church, he declared, with its stupid clinging to Aristotelian ideas, made a childish distinction between essence and existence. She saw herself as the champion of essentials, which were constantly being stained and muddied by the accidental travails of existence. She moved when she moved at all like a cautious dinosaur. Only when you realized what Jesus was really saying when he declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” did you understand what Christianity really was, a continuous series of implosions that released dynamic revolutionary energy. Truth, way, life, were all one thing - action that defined itself by existing. Without action, there was nothing, the void, nausea.

It was terrifying, Dennis thought, gripping his refilled port glass as if it were a stanchion that was holding him upright. You are listening to yourself two years ago. All these ideas that Leo is spouting, to the obviously hypnotic delight of Sister Helen, were the nihilistic nostrums of Father Dennis, the man-who-saw-the-revolution-coming-and-when-it-came-did-not-like-it. Yes, you must say that very rapidly because if you stop to think about it, you may throw up.

On Leo talked. The world with its multiple agonies was forcing America to stop staring into the magic mirror of childhood with its always flattering answers. The same thing was happening to American Catholics. For the first time, they were discovering that their faith did not automatically make them loyal to God and country. So far, more warmed-over Dennis talk.

But suddenly Leo was on his own, beyond big brother Dennis, moving through new exciting territory. The Catholic Church in this country was one of the few institutions where “a revolutionary situation” existed.

What was a revolutionary situation? One in which the Establishment has lost its charisma, its prestige, and the expectations of the people were rising faster than the rate at which the Establishment was prepared to meet them. That was the moment when the revolutionaries must renew their efforts with the utmost savagery. The sentimentalists will cry out, wait, give them more time; they are doing their best. Nonsense, of course. No establishment ever voluntarily surrendered its power. Ultimately, power must be ripped from their hands.

Sister Helen turned to smile admiringly at Dennis. “It makes sense; it makes so much sense.” She was paying him a compliment. Why? His numb cerebellum gradually deduced that she regarded
him
as the source of this wisdom. Suddenly the possibility - no, the several possibilities - of the situation coalesced in Father McLaughlin’s double vision. In the glow of Sister Helen’s revolutionary smile, he coolly agreed to supply his brother Leo with all the confidential material he might need from Matthew Mahan’s files to create a book-length exposé that would rock the archdiocese - and hopefully the entire American Catholic Church. Not that Leo would ever write the book, or that Father McLaughlin believed it was worth writing. Leo was much too disorganized, and the realities of Matthew Mahan’s day-to-day activities were much too ambiguous to be worthy of righteous condemnation. No, Father McLaughlin had another motive. As he made his blithe promises, he was remembering his brusque conversation with the Cardinal about celibacy. Suddenly, he saw how to resolve the question for himself in a way that was doubly satisfying.

The evening ended with a long, cold cab ride downtown. Dashing Father Dennis insisting on taking Helen to her dingy door in the ghetto. More jokes about conferences in the coming weeks to negotiate a truce between Cardinal Mahan and Sister Agnes Marie. “We’ll be very good, we’ll come up with the most harmless imaginable programs,” Sister Helen said. She was silent for a moment, and then, in the semidarkness of the tenement hall, he felt her eyes upon him. “May I ask you about something that puzzles me? Why did you make that devastating comment out at the college the other day? About the sheepfold?”

“I don’t know. This last year, I don’t know why I’ve done or said a lot of things. I have this sensation of floating in space in one part of myself while the other part of me goes through the motions of living and talking down below, reacting to a situation without any attempt at - coherence.”

“The void. Not even you - have been able to escape it. When Leo first told me about it - and about you - it explained so much.”

The hero must now speak with just a touch of tragedy in his voice. “We’re all so locked into the system, body, mind, and soul. Only -”

“- exceptional ones can break out.”

Incredible. She had memorized his Great Thoughts. He insisted on escorting her up the three flights of dark stairs. The stench of sweat and several other human effluvia was unbelievable. On the second-floor landing, a man sat hunched against the wall, singing softly to himself. On the third floor, illuminated like the other landings only by the random rays of a streetlight coming through a dirt-smeared window, Sister Helen paused, took out her key, and slid it into the lock. She turned to him, and he said, “Would you be shocked if I kissed you?”