The Good Shepherd (39 page)

Again and again it returned, a whoosh of pain that soared up through his body. Unbelievable. Was he going to faint, make a complete fool of himself? Slowly, carefully, he took a deep breath. The pain seemed to subside slightly. He was taming it, yes, he would make a friend out of it yet. What did John call death? Oh, yes, his sister. Sister Death meet Brother Pain.

The rest of the mass was a blur. Somehow he managed to return to the altar with his fellow celebrants. At the Agnus Dei, the Pope gave the kiss of peace to Cardinal Yu Pin as a gesture of brotherhood, and it traveled around the altar. Matthew Mahan saw the black Cardinal who was standing next to him (what was his name? - unpronounceable, Rakotomalala from Madagascar), felt those dark lips brush his cheek and found a strange, unexpected comfort from them. Was that all you wanted, really, to escape this torment, to be gathered into the arms of God like a weary child? No, there were still miles to go. Like a drowning swimmer, he turned and groped toward Cardinal Dearden, embraced him, leaned forward to kiss him. Dearden eyed him strangely. Did he think he was drunk? God knows what sort of rumors the Vatican circulated about the Pope’s
frater taciturnus.

Going down the aisle at the end of the mass, he could barely see the smiling faces calling congratulations to him and other Cardinals. When he smiled and nodded, his head seemed to float up and down on a rubber neck, like one of those giant inflated toys in a Thanksgiving Day parade. Suddenly, with amazing clarity, his eyes found Dennis McLaughlin, sitting with Davey Cronin in the corner of one of the raised stands beside an ugly woman with a small, thin boy on her lap. Dennis seemed to be glaring at him, his face frozen in that blend of anger and arrogance that was the standard expression of the young these days. For a moment, an incoherent voice in him almost cried out the truth of his agony.
Not all glory, not all glory,
the voice wailed.

In the chapel, he handed his robes over to an obsequious monsignor and dazedly shook hands and exchanged congratulations with the other American Cardinals. He edged his way to the door and was enormously pleased to find Dennis McLaughlin waiting just outside it. He would never have found his way through the Vatican labyrinth to the Belvedere Courtyard, where the limousines were parked.

Matthew Mahan turned as they entered the sun-filled courtyard in the rear of the cathedral and pointed to a nearby doorway. “The first day I came to see John,” he said, “we parked here and went in that door, and took the elevator up to the library.”

Beneath medieval arches dripping with overhead spikes they rode, passing orange, red, and blue uniformed Swiss Guards and then on the right a cemetery with tall black cypresses among the gray gravestones. Finally, the streets, crowded with people, and the distant sound of marching bands, crowds cheering. The driver explained rapidly in Italian that he would have to take a detour because of the parades and demonstrations. They headed north, crossing the Tiber on the Ponte Matteotti and racing through the park of the Villa Borghese. Beside him, Dennis McLaughlin was silent, almost morose, gazing out at the lush green grass and brilliant flowers of the villa’s lawns. Bishop Cronin, he explained, had met an old compatriot who had persuaded him to risk lunch at the Irish seminary.

As Matthew Mahan got out of the car at the hotel, the driver bade him an extravagant goodbye. He stopped, leaned against the car, and pulled a 1,000-lira note from his pocket. “Give that to him,” he said to Dennis.

Slowly, carefully, he picked up one foot and then another and managed to reach the lobby without attracting any attention. He felt like he was walking under water now, a giant fish with a hook in his belly. Some sadistic fisherman on the top floor persisted in trying to reel him in. “Have you picked out your twelve apostles yet?” Dennis asked.

“What?” he asked dazedly, as they stepped into the elevator.

“For the audience tomorrow at St. Peter’s, remember? You’re supposed to pick twelve people and bring them forward to speak to the Pope.”

“No, I haven’t,” he said. “Whoever thought of that was no fundraiser.”

“I know. You said that the first time you heard it.”

“Pick out about twenty for me. I’ll eliminate nine tonight.”

“Any priests?”

“Just Petrie and Malone. What’s the rest of the schedule today?”

Dennis gave him a puzzled look and took a notebook out of his pocket. “Lunch at 1 p.m. with your seminary class.”

“Oh yes. Yes. I should go but -”

A spasm hit him, the worst one yet. He crumpled against the wall of the elevator. “Dear Jesus -”

He stumbled into the hall and asked Dennis to help him. “Put your arm around me,” he gasped, “before I make a fool of myself.” They walked together down the hall like a three-legged man. He handed Dennis the key to his room, and they continued at the same gait to the bed. “I’m afraid - the ulcer’s kicking up, Dennis,” he said. He retched and suddenly his mouth was full of muddy, mucky blood. He stumbled to the bathroom and spit it into the toilet.

Coming back to the bed, wiping his mouth, “You’ll have to go down and apologize to them, Dennis. Say I’ve got a virus. I’ve had it for a couple of days. Worn out.”

Dennis nodded obediently and departed. Matthew Mahan lay in bed, shuddering with anticipation before every spasm and almost crying out in agony when it hit.
Here is pain
,
with interest for all those wounds you never got, my heroic chaplain,
whispered a crazy voice within him.
Here is the real teacher of humility, my dear Prince of the Church.

Should he call Bill Reed? Or some other doctor? No, he knew what was wrong, and he knew it was his own fault. He had brought all this on himself by ignoring his diet. He had no desire to be lectured like a naughty boy, especially when he was guilty. He would suffer through, somehow.

Downstairs, Dennis McLaughlin listened to the class of 39 uninhibitedly recalling their seminary days. To hear them tell it, they were a bunch of rowdies, mugs from the city streets beyond all hope of reform in the opinion of their professors. Monsignor Eddie McGuire, pale and wasted from a recent operation for cancer of the prostate, asked if anyone remembered the time they had heated the bowling ball.

Cries of joy, gasps of laughter. “That was Matt’s idea.”

“Yeah, to get rid of that damn Benedictine.”

Eddie explained to Dennis that the Benedictine had taught them plain chant. He insisted on them memorizing dozens of hymns, when all they needed to learn was how to sing Kyrie Eleison. He was also the monitor of the fourth floor of the dormitory and enforced every letter of the regulations. So they had stolen a bowling ball from the seminary’s lone alley, heated it in a fireplace on the second floor, and hoisted it to the fourth floor in a bucket. There, Big Matt had balanced it delicately on a shovel, stepped into the hall, and sent it hurtling to the monk’s end of the building. He had rushed out of his room and seen this engine of destruction rumbling toward him. Naturally, he bent to stop it before it put a hole in the wall. Only then did he discover that it was very, very hot.

“Back to the monastery for him,” said Eddie McGuire, laughing so hard he almost swallowed his cigar, “after he got out of the infirmary.”

Dennis sat there letting his eyes rove around the square of laughing faces in the private dining room. Nineteen had been ordained that year. Two were dead; one, Fogarty, was a failed priest, a drunk. The other fifteen were sitting here paying homage to the man who had been their leader “from the first day inside the wall,” said Eddie McGuire, making “first” sound like “foist,” which in turn made it sound like he was reminiscing about a reform school, not a seminary. Next to Eddie the Mug sat George Petrie, of the cultured voice and elegant phrase. Next to him sat slight reticent prison chaplain Peter Foley, the only man who did not have a parish.

“Remember the sermons we used to get about the younger generation?” asked Monsignor Harry Hall, another suave one. He was pastor of Christ the King parish in suburban Hollisport. He clipped the ends of his cigars with a set of gold nippers before he smoked them. But he was a hardworking thoroughly modern priest who had taken courses in psychology and marriage counseling on his own time and had, according to Matthew Mahan, saved several dozen marriages in his own and nearby parishes.

“Oh yeah,” said Eddie McGuire, laughing in anticipation, “and the imitations Matt used to give of what’s his name. The Wheezer.”

“Father Dermot McNulty,” George Petrie said.

“Yeah, yeah,” gasped Eddie McGuire. “He had emphysema, I guess. He smoked about three packs a day. He worshiped Father Coughlin. We thought he was an asshole. In fact, we thought they were both assholes. Anyway, Matt used to give this fantastic imitation of ‘im. You know, a wheeze after every word.”

“But his imitation of the Old Man was better,” said portly square-jawed Monsignor Frank Falconer.

“It’s a toss-up,” said Eddie McGuire. “Old Hogan spoke in an absolute monotone. Not the slightest inflection. Not even when he got to a period.”

From the doorway on the right came a droning voice: “I want all you young men to know how lucky you are to be here at Rosewood.”

The room exploded into shouts of joy. “It’s the Big Cheese himself,” rasped Eddie McGuire.

Matthew Mahan stood in the doorway, smiling. He looked terrible. His face had a deathly pallor. In spite of the Cardinal’s protests, Dennis vacated his seat at the table and sat down in another chair against the wall. A waiter came in, and Matthew Mahan spoke to him in fluent Italian.

“That’s why he’s wearing the royal red, fellas,” shouted Eddie McGuire, “while we’re all still pulling away at the oars. It’s a ginny conspiracy.”

“You didn’t say that when I used to take you home and feed you the best spaghetti in the state, you two-faced mick,” Matthew Mahan said.

“I know, Matt. But who ever heard of getting a red hat for slipping the recipe to Il Papa?”

“No, no, I got made Archbishop for that. To get here this time, I had to come through with the one for ravioli.”

Roars of laughter. While Dennis, the observer, smiles his outsider’s smirk.

“You should have given it to the maître d’ here,” said Monsignor Falconer.

Matthew Mahan frowned as the waiter handed him a glass of milk. “Seriously, Frank, was it a bad lunch? Because if it was, we’ll have another one tomorrow free of charge.”

“Has Fastidious Frank liked anything that wasn’t haute cuisine straight from the Champs Ulysses?” demanded Eddie McGuire. “I remember he used to complain on steak night.”

“Because it only came once a year, you clod.”

“Ah, tell it to your French chef, Frank,” said Eddie, taking a large draft of his well-filled brandy glass. “You’re a traitor to your own kind. On the level, Matt, how do you let him get away with it? Is there another rectory in the archdiocese, in the country, with a resident French chef?”

“Lest that young fellow be scandalized,” said Frank with rumbling gravity, pointing to Dennis, “the chef is a French woman.”

Hoots, whistles, cries of ooh-la-la. “She does the cancan between courses,” Eddie McGuire bellowed.

“Sixty-five years old. Just an ordinary French cook. Which means that the food on my table is a 150 percent better than anything these barbarians ever see, even when they eat in restaurants in our fair city.”

“I’ll vouch for that, Frank,” said Matthew Mahan. “I had my best meal in a year the last time I visited St. Damian’s.”

Cries of bribery, conflict of interest. George Petrie suggested that Madam Proudhomme was Satan in disguise and was planning to force Frank to sell his soul for a perfect soufflé.

“Do I get to taste it before I make up my mind?” asked Frank.

“Come on, Matt, give us an imitation of the Wheezer,” Eddie McGuire begged.

The Cardinal only had to gasp out a line or two, and they were all in convulsions.

“And Coyne. Give us Coyne, Matt,” Eddie McGuire choked, laughing already.

Coyne had a high-pitched voice and a very feminine speech pattern. “Honestly, you fellows are
awful.
If you think I’m going to stand up here and discuss the liturgy while some joker blows soap bubbles around the room. Mahan, it’s you again, isn’t it? Admit it.”

“No, Father, it’s Foley.”

More roars of laughter while Peter Foley grinned good-naturedly.

“Foley!” Matthew Mahan said, his voice contralto once more. “If there’s one person in this room who’s well behaved, it’s Peter Foley. The only one, I might add.”

They were boys again, Dennis thought, listening to the guffaws, watching them pound their fists on the table with glee. Maybe they were always boys. Maybe they never became men. Maybe manhood always eluded them; they were condemned forever to cavort in the boys’ playground behind chastity’s barbed-wire fence.

Was that really true? Were they acting any differently from any other random group of alumni, thirty years out? Probably not. If anything, they were remarkably normal for a group of celibates. No matter how hard you try to disapprove of their humor and style, no matter how excluded you feel by the generation gap, there is a link between you and these men. No, more than a link. That word suggests chains, bondage. What held you was living, a sense of something shared. During lunch, they had accepted him as one of their own, kidded him about being a runaway Jesuit, wanted to know how he survived working for the “Eminent Slave Driver.” It had been a new experience, at first strange and then exhilarating. But the bond? What they shared - he suddenly realized - was this big smiling man, sitting in the seat of honor.

They were talking baseball now. It had been a major topic during lunch. They had lamented like obsessive Jeremiahs the city’s perpetually losing professional team. Now he gathered that their class had been the seminary champions six years’ running, thanks largely to Matthew Mahan on the pitcher’s mound. “Tell the truth now, Matt, once and for all,” croaked Eddie McGuire, swirling his almost empty brandy snifter, “didn’t you use a spitter?”

“Eddie. I only had two pitches, and you know it. The curve and the fastball.”