The Prudence of the Flesh (13 page)

“That I am no Amos Cadbury.”

“I wanted to know what I could about the person saying such things about me.”

“You came to the right man.”

“I wish to God I hadn't.”

“If I were you, I would thank God that I did. What would you do if all this were simply sprung on you, records produced, the boy brought forward, and you unprepared?”

Barrett sank back in his chair. This was the worst conversation he'd had since he talked with Hennessy, the auxiliary bishop, and applied for laicization. The process was still more or less routine in those days.

“It goes more quickly when a marriage has already been entered into,” Hennessy had said.

How do you tell an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago that you have not broken your promise of celibacy? And he hadn't. He and Nancy had talked, walking in the evening on the playground of the parish school, two young people suddenly wanting to get out of the lives they led. This desire had grown because of their talks. Once he had put his arm around her and tugged her to him, but that was the extent of it. He had told Hennessy the truth, as he had to Roger Dowling, and Dowling at least seemed to believe him. How often in the years since had he and Nancy marveled at the innocence of those conversations when it became clear that the decisions they were about to make were a single decision, a joint one, a promise of a future together. And so it had turned out. But even Nancy had been shaken when that woman telephoned her and made her accusation.

“Does that sound like the man who took you for evening walks on the parish playground?” Barrett asked his wife.

She squeezed his hand, her doubts, if doubts they had been, gone. “But what can you do?”

“I suppose I could wish that she would let the archdiocese buy her off. It would be blackmail, but maybe that would be an end of it.”

“I think she wants publicity more than money.”

The accusation would have been bad enough at any time, but now when day after day stories appeared about what priests had done, stories that could not be doubted, that were in many cases acknowledged by the accused, he would seem merely one of a platoon of wayward clerics. How many had at first denied what was later proven of them? On the other hand, there was the case of Cardinal Bernadin, who had been accused by a young man of inappropriate sexual behavior when he was in Cincinnati. He
had denied it calmly and met with the young man, and eventually the charge was withdrawn, admitted to be the product of a mind stirred by all the talk of repressed memory; for a time the man actually believed that he had some kind of affair with Bernadin. The upshot had given a tremendous lift to Bernadin's reputation. His meeting with the young man, like the pope's visit to the one who had tried to assassinate him, was a vivid example of Christian forgiveness.

He must meet this woman. It looked cowardly to screen himself from her with lawyers and inquiries into her life. How could she look him in the eye and make that accusation? He was on the verge of expressing this resolve to Tuttle, but that would be ridiculous. From now on it must be between him and Madeline Murphy.

“My secretary is typing all this up for you.”

“Good.”

“I will let you know what records there are of her giving birth—”

“No. Let's drop it here.”

“Drop it? That makes it sound as if it is simply up to us.”

Us. How the pronoun seared his soul. But the only way he could rid himself of Tuttle was to confront his accuser and persuade her to withdraw her charges.

Tuttle stood and picked up the bottle from which he had not drunk. He shook his head, adjusted his hat and turned away, then stopped. He came back to the table.

“Do you know Ned Bunting personally?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Avoid him. He's trouble.”

Many of those Roger Dowling had known when he worked in the archdiocesan marriage court had gone on to the greater things that had been thought to be in store for him as well. First they had been auxiliaries, then got dioceses of their own, lifting into a clerical stratosphere that made it unlikely he would encounter them in his daily work as pastor of St. Hilary's. An exception was old Bishop Hennessy, already at that time one of the senior auxiliary bishops in the archdiocese and more than content to remain.

“Leave Chicago? Do you know the legend on the gates of Amalfi? When Amalfitani enter heaven, they have the sense of coming home. That is how I feel about Chicago. Can you see me as the ordinary of Boise?”

“I can't see you as ordinary anywhere.”

As he did once a month at least, Roger was visiting Hennessy in his retirement. The now elderly bishop had resisted entering a retirement home and was now the chaplain for a house of Poor Clares.

“They are saints, Roger. This is the kind of place one wants to prepare for death in.”

“I feel the same about St. Hilary's. Not that we have many saints there.”

Hennessy loved to hear about Roger's parish and could not get enough of stories about Marie Murkin. “I wish I'd had sense enough to do what you did, Roger.”

“It was done for me, Bishop.”

Hennessy's ring had been given him by Pope John Paul II when he was consecrated, a ring identical to the pope's. The episcopal hand now held a cigar, an indulgence encouraged by the nuns.

“I think they fear I'll get religion.”

Even so, they sat in the courtyard of the convent so that the cigar smoke would drift away in the April air. Inevitably they talked of the burgeoning clerical scandals.

“Cardinal Law has become a monster in the press, Roger, but I understand the man. When a scandal happens in a family, the impulse is to keep it quiet. Is that ignoble?”

It was a generous estimate, and would have been more deserved if the cardinal had not simply reassigned priests whose conduct warranted punishment rather than another parish. Hennessy had been the auxiliary in charge of laicization when requests had been in their flood.

“Of course, I was criticized for making it too easy for men to leave, but what was the alternative? Send them off to a monastery to think it over? Many of them were already involved with women. Even when they weren't, I came to see that by the time they came to me their minds were made up. So let those go who wanted to go. Delaying them might have led to scandal. Now I wish that more had gone, these poor devils we're reading about now.”

“They couldn't do legitimately what they're accused of even if they were out of the priesthood.”

“True. Yet dropping celibacy is the only solution some have. That's like making polygamy the remedy for adultery.”

Roger laughed, however much the analogy limped. “Do you remember Gregory Barrett?”

“Oh, yes. I was genuinely sad to see him go. I couldn't say that of many of the others.”

“He came to see me recently.”

“What has he been doing with himself?”

“Teaching at Loyola, for one thing.”

Hennessy groaned. “And what does he say when he runs into people who knew him as a priest?” The old bishop had another analogy. Spouses who divorced had once avoided the friends they had made in their married days. What were laypeople to make of a priest who got out of the priesthood? “It must make marriage seem equally escapable when things get tough.”

“He also has a radio program, discussions of books. It's quite good. He developed it when he was living downstate, and its success led to the invitation that he broadcast it from Chicago.”

“What does it matter where he does the program?”

“A program from Chicago has a greater chance of being picked up elsewhere. But there's more. A woman has accused him of improper conduct while he was a priest.”

“Was a priest?
Tu es sacerdos in aeternum
.”

“When he was in the active priesthood. She claims he took advantage of her when she went to him for counsel.”

“Dear God. Have you ever read Rabelais?”

“No.”

“Don't. Very gamy stuff, and Rabelais himself was a priest.”

“The woman got in touch with the archdiocese as they were ready to buy her off, but she refused.”

“What does she want?”

“That's unclear.”

“Does she think he will marry her?”

“Barrett already has a wife. And a son.”

“I do remember Barrett, Roger. I can't believe he would have been mixed up in such a thing.”

“Should I suggest to him that he come see you?”

Hennessy thought about it. “Does he smoke?”

Roger rose to go, and the bishop asked for his blessing. He gave it, and received the bishop's in his turn.

“What I could never understand in those who left, Roger, was how they could face a future in which they would no longer say Mass.”

Part Two

Against his inclinations and against his habit, Captain Philip Keegan had taken a vacation this year. Oh, he always took several weeks, usually in the winter, but he did not leave Fox River, just tried to be lazy, sleeping late, sometimes until nine in the morning, if he had sat up late watching television and drinking beer the night before. And he would spend more time with Father Dowling. All along he was sustained by the thought that he was easily within reach if anything important came up. Just to make sure, he would call Cy Horvath once a day to hear how things were going in his absence. But this year had been different.

For years, his married daughters had pleaded in vain for him to visit. He resisted because they lived on opposite ends of the country, and visiting neither could be presented as evenhandedness. Now, though, his granddaughter Nell, named for her grandmother, was to make her first communion in Charleston. Cecilia, his daughter, insisted that he must come.

“And don't say you're afraid of hurting Norah's feelings. She
and Oliver and little Jimmy will be here, too. Dad, it will be a family reunion.”

It was an invitation he could not refuse, and so he accepted. A family reunion. He had been alone now for seven years, but he still dreamt of his wife and sometimes came awake at the call of her voice. In the wee hours of the morning, the hard-nosed captain of the Fox River police sometimes wept himself back to sleep.