The Good Shepherd (25 page)

Beside him he had heard Mary saying in a low, soft voice, “Come to me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me because I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.”

Matthew Mahan had glanced down at her in astonishment. She had draped a white lace kerchief over her black hair. A fold of it shadowed her face. She had drawn it back and smiled at him. “That’s Don Angelo’s favorite passage from the Gospels. He told me that he first realized what it meant, standing here.”

Ten years ago, only ten years ago. At times, looking back at this staggering decade, born in such hope and then bloodied by such tragedy, it was impossible to believe it was a mere ten years. It had to be twenty, thirty years ago that he had first heard (and largely failed to understand) Pope John’s cryptic words of hope and radical faith. But now the years coalesced and it was only yesterday, only a few hours ago, that they had turned from the statue after that exchange of Gospel words and walked down to the high altar, where the strip of sacred chain was framed by two magnificent bronze doors.
St. Peter is still in chains.
Then you had wondered what the old man meant by those words. The Pope was still more or less a prisoner of the Vatican, unable to leave without elaborate preparations to protect him from the enormous crowds he inevitably attracted. But in that sense, the President of the United States was also a prisoner of the White House. It was too trivial an observation to make Angelo Roncalli fear he was a secret heretic. Moreover, why was it juxtaposed to this statue of Moses?

“Remember how baffled we were - or at least I was - by what he said about St. Peter being in chains?”

Mary nodded, smiling. “You found out in the next two or three years - the whole world found out about it.” She sighed. “If only he hadn’t died so soon.”

“I don’t feel that way, Mary,” Matthew Mahan said. “Remember what he told that fellow who said he should abolish the College of Cardinals and fire the whole Curia?”

“‘It’s not for me to do everything.’”

“What he wanted done,” Matthew Mahan said slowly because the thought was coming to him as he spoke, “involved all of us. It was part of the thing itself - us doing it.”

“Yes,” Mary said, “but with him alive, there wouldn’t be - a perpetual spirit of obstruction.”

For a moment, Matthew Mahan felt as if she had thrown something at him. It was almost a physical sensation that caused him to move his head abruptly to one side, in what seemed like a shake of disagreement. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

Mary exchanged a
buona sera
with the sacristan, and they entered the darkened church. It was illuminated only by the glow of candles and perhaps a single invisible light before the statue of Moses and another light at the reliquary of St. Peter’s chains beneath the altar. With Mary beside him, Matthew Mahan walked slowly over to the Moses and stood before it. At first he thought of it as a test. Would he again be able to feel with his eyes what the old man, six years in the grave now, had created for him here? At first he felt nothing. A wave of unidentifiable emotion - regret, perhaps fear - flooded him.

Then an extraordinary thing began to happen. He found himself
within
the statue. He could almost feel the folds of Moses’ robes around his legs, the weight of the stone tablets beneath his right arm, the almost unbearable tension in the left arm, making that cordlike vein or sinew leap out just above the wrist. He was not watching a prophet gazing into history’s distance with sad longing; he himself was there, his own eyes aching for a glimpse of the face, his own ears yearning for an echo of the voice he had heard in this church ten years ago. This was what his straining body needed - to relax, to find peace, peace that the lawgiver can never know, in his perpetual struggle with rebellious men. The realization that he had become this lawgiver, this wielder of authority, in spite of all his inward wish to escape the role, struck him like a blow from one of those huge marble hands. His throat filled with tears. It was so natural. A leader - a bishop - has to give orders and then he has to see that those orders are enforced, and to guarantee enforcement on a regular basis, he has to enforce laws not of his own making.

Father, forgive us,
he whispered,
for we know not what we do.

“Every time I come here,” Mary Shea said, her eyes on the statue, “I always feel that either he or you - sometimes both of you - are here with me.”

“Yes,” Matthew Mahan murmured, “yes.” How could he explain this desolating sense of loss to her now? For Mary, this was a church of fulfillment, of happiness, peace. For him it had suddenly become a house of dread, of accusation. He almost expected Moses’ massive right hand, with the index finger resting now on the prophet’s stomach (another ulcer patient?), to raise and point accusingly at him. Matthew Mahan felt his pulse racing, his heart pounding in his chest. Again he looked around the darkened church, but there was no glimpse, no sense whatever, of his mother now. She was a vanished ghost, only an echo in those noisy tenements across the square. He was utterly alone, unable to share his grief with anyone. He could only reach out in the darkness to the lost image of the old man in the Vatican; he could only say with extravagant hope that he was somehow listening:
I understand, now I really understand.

Mary, seeing him turn away, thought that he wanted to look at the relic of St. Peter’s chains. He didn’t. He wanted more than anything else to escape from this church with its shadows that seemed to press claustrophobically around him. How could this be happening? he thought in utter bewilderment. How could this sentimental gesture be turning into agony?

Mary walked ahead of him into the darkness, saying, “The old chain is still there, and over at the Vatican they’re reforging the few links he managed to break. Why can’t they see that they’re destroying themselves, Matt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

The banks of devotional candles before the altar flickered eerily on the bronze doors on each side of St. Peter’s chains. Matthew Mahan stared numbly at them, thinking,
Not just Peter’s chains, but yours, too.
He had no idea how long he stood there while these words reverberated within him. Mary finally touched him on the arm. “Matt,” she said, “I hate to keep the sacristan waiting too long. It is suppertime.”

“Oh yes, yes,” he said, “of course.”

Outside it was totally dark. Matthew Mahan slipped a 1,000-lira note into the sacristan’s hand and apologized to him in Italian for keeping him waiting.

There was a flash of white teeth in the darkness, and the man replied that he was enjoying the cool night air, it was no trouble at all.

They said good night to him and strolled down an alley past a technical school to a small
ristorante
with an outdoor café. At the end of the street, the Colosseum loomed eerily in its floodlights, looking like a great ship, wrecked and abandoned by history’s unpredictable winds. Matthew Mahan felt incredibly exhausted. Maybe the whole experience had been nothing more than exhaustion, he told himself, an unparalleled seizure of nerves. But he knew even as he toyed with the thought that this was an evasion. What had just happened to him in that church was a truth that he could never deny without risking his soul.

“How about an aperitif?” he said. “It’s a long way to the Piazza Navona.”

Agreeable as always, Mary sat down with him at one of the green and yellow tables. She fingered the swans on the tablecloth and let him order two Cinzano Biancos from the gravely formal middle-aged waiter. While they waited for the drinks, they watched a half-dozen boys in a field across the street trying to play soccer. An eerie glow fell across the field from searchlights playing on a massive hunk of rock, lined with 1,001 ridges. It looked older than Rome.

“What’s that?” he asked, knowing that Mary’s knowledge of the city was practically encyclopedic by now.

“Probably part of Trajan’s baths. They were the first ones to admit women.”

“And right after that,” Matthew Mahan said, “Rome started collapsing?”

“Don’t be such an
obvious
male chauvinist,” she said.

She began asking him about people they both knew. He gave her the little information he had, mostly a list of divorces. A dismaying number of well-to-do Catholic marriages had broken up over the last five years. Most of them had not even bothered to seek the advice or permission of the Church. Mary was frankly amazed. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I thought I’d still be a pariah if I came home. Now I realize I wouldn’t even be noticed.”

“That’s certainly true,” Matthew Mahan said.

“What’s the explanation for it, Matt? Is there one?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been wary of putting people into moulds and attributing personal decisions like divorce to some sort of national trend. An awful lot of people in their late forties and early fifties are getting divorced, and they’re not all Catholics by a long shot. The Episcopal bishop and the Methodist bishop, who have lunch with me once a month, tell me the same thing is happening in their churches.”

“But take the Currans, Joe and Wilda, four kids, twenty-five years of marriage. Why would they suddenly walk away from it?”

“I wish I knew,” he said, thinking ruefully that when Joe Curran got divorced he stopped giving $25,000 a year to the Archbishop’s Fund. He was the most successful patent lawyer in the state. “In his case, from what I could find out from friends, it was the old sexy-secretary cliché. Obviously, more and more Americans don’t see any reason for saying no when they want something badly. Personally, I think they’re seduced by this myth of experience, the great enricher. And the fantastic propaganda coming out in books and magazines and on television about marriage being passé. There’s nothing we can do about it. But I’m willing to bet that the priests of the next generation will spend a lot of time with these people’s children - they’re the ones it breaks your heart to think about. Speaking of children, how’s Jimmy?”

“Oh, just great, from a distance,” Mary said, fingering the stem of her glass. “I’ve tried hard to take your advice, Matt, and not smother-love him. He enjoys his job. All those languages he learned spending every summer over here with me are paying off beautifully. No other editor his age can match his publishing contacts in Europe. I see him four or five times a year when he comes over on business. But I suspect that his moral life leaves something to be desired from a Catholic point of view.”

Matthew Mahan sighed. “I’m afraid there’s nothing much you can do about that, and there’s even less for me to do. His letters got pretty perfunctory after he graduated from college. I could see that he’d had just about all the clerical advice he could swallow - though I did my best to sound as unclerical as possible.”

“I’m sure you did, Matt,” she said, touching the back of his hand lightly with the tips of her fingers, damp from her glass. “What you’ve given him - what we’ve both tried to give him will come through eventually, I’m sure of that. I really am sure.”

“I am, too,” Matthew Mahan said, hoping that he sounded convinced. Trying to find a more cheerful subject, he began asking for some of their Roman friends. “How is Monsignor den Doolard?”

“Gone home to Holland. There’s nothing for him to do in Rome these days.”

Den Doolard was a brilliant Dutch theologian who had been on the staff of the late Cardinal Augstin Bea, the leader of the Vatican outreach to Protestant and other churches. He had been one of the hardest working
periti -
experts - at the Vatican Council, a constantly cheerful, undiscouraged man, an earthy version of the saintly Bea.

“Did he request a transfer?”

Mary nodded. “It’s just as well. He might have ended up like Father Guilio.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Guilio Mirante was an Italian Jesuit, a quintessential Roman with a gentle, melancholy air, a touch of Roman cynicism in his usually self-deprecating irony. He had long operated on sort of detached duty, in the Jesuit order but not of it, serving as chaplain of an orphanage to which Matthew Mahan had contributed handsomely, and as a friend of prominent Romans of every class and political persuasion. He, too, had been a council
perito
, appointed by John himself.

Mary glanced at her watch. “It’s a long story, and I think it would be better if he told you himself. If I get into it, I may spoil our evening - and we’ll be late for dinner.”

“Tell him to call me.”

“I will.”

In a somewhat uneasy silence, he paid the waiter, and they strolled down the street and through part of Trajan’s Park to steps that led them down to the street level and the Colosseum. They peered into one of the outer arches and found themselves being appraised by a half-dozen prostitutes in silver and gold miniskirts and satin blouses. Several small boys, none older than twelve, approached them and cheerfully inquired whether they were interested in a guide to the Colosseum or to the young ladies, all of whom were ready to satisfy a customer’s preference, no matter how bizarre. For a single girl, 1,000 lire; for two or three the price went up, depending upon whether they wanted to participate or just watch. Matthew Mahan stood there, transfixed by the utter lack of caring in their boyish voices.

“Don’t be ashamed, Father,” said the tallest of them, with black hair falling over his ears. “Last night we had a Cardinal.”

Laughter echoed from stone arches, the same savage, empty tones that must have filled them when an unpopular gladiator died ingloriously.

Mary was pulling at his arm. He decided it was better to say nothing, and they walked along the curving path until they found an archway occupied only by postcard salesmen. These could be brushed aside, and they stood for a moment gazing across the battered interior of the stadium. There was nothing realistic about it, neither in the daylight nor now in the moonlight, helped here and there by floodlights. Death was all Matthew Mahan saw, ancient, grinning death, man’s oldest enemy. The whole thing was a gigantic skeleton, leering here with an empty mouth, staring there with an empty eye, a gigantic monument to death. “It always depresses me,” Matthew Mahan said, “but every time I come to Rome, I feel compelled to stare it in the face for a minute or two.”