The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (33 page)

Working with Mac would be action of a positive sort, better than continuing his fruitless correspondence, better than following such advice as he’d had from acquaintances—or even from the confessional, where, too hopefully, he’d taken his problems. There he had been told to go into business or science and get ahead, or into government and make a success of
that
, after which, presumably, he could come—tottering—before the bishops of the land as a man of proved ability and, what was more important, a man of stability. When the wise old confessor realized, however, that Myles not only had been cast aside by the Church but was likely to be wanted soon by the State, there had been no problem at all. His counsel had flowed swift and sure: “Enlist! Don’t wait to be drafted!”

“Don’t think of it as just a job,” Mac said now. “Try to think of it as the Fathers do, and as I hope I do. Think of it as the Work.”

Myles, thinking of it as a stepping-stone to ordination, said he’d like to be considered for the job.

Mac said that of course the Fathers would have the last say, but his word would carry some weight with them, since Myles, if accepted, would be working under him—at first, anyway. He then asked Myles to bring a glass of ice water, and easy on the water. Myles, returning with a glass of ice, noted a bottle in bed with Mac, tucked under the sheet at his side like a nursing infant. He left them together, behind the screen.

Two days later Myles was summoned by telegram to an address in the Loop. He found the place, all right—an old building with grillwork elevators affording passengers a view of the cables. Mac was waiting for Myles at the cigar stand downstairs. As they rode up to the Fathers’ floor, he advised Myles to forget all about his past as a seminarian, reasoning that if this was mentioned to the Fathers, it might make a bad impression. Myles had to agree with that, if reluctantly.

At the fifth floor, which the Fathers shared with a number of tailors, publishers, and distributors of barbers’ supplies, Mac hustled Myles into the washroom. Myles’ black overcoat, suit, and tie were all wrong, Mac said. He told Myles to take off his coat and then he suggested that they switch ties. This they did, morosely. Mac’s suit, a double-breasted Glen plaid with a precipitous drape and trousers that billowed about his disproportionately thin legs, would “just carry” the black tie, he said, and presumably his tie, with its spheres, coils, and triangles suggesting the spirit of Science and Industry, would carry Myles’ black suit. “Don’t want ’em to think they’re hiring a creep,” Mac said.

There was no trouble at all with the Fathers. Mac evidently stood high with them. He told them that Myles had gone to the University of Illinois for a time, which was news to Myles. He let it pass, though, because he remembered a conversation at the hospital during which, assuming Illinois to be Mac’s old school, he had said that he’d once attended a football game at Illinois—or almost had. He had been dragooned into joining the Boy Scouts, Myles had explained, and had marched with his troop to the stadium for the season opener, admission free to Scouts, but on reaching the gates, he had remained outside, in a delayed protest against the Scouts and all their pomps. He had spent the afternoon walking under the campus elms. “Then you were there,” Mac had said, which Myles had taken to mean that Mac felt as he did about those beautiful old trees.

Mac delivered a little pep talk, chiefly for the benefit of the three Fathers in the office, Myles suspected, although the words were spoken to him. He could think of nothing to say. He was more impressed by the charitable than the catechetical aspects of the Fathers’ work. And yet, little as he might value their radio program, their pamphlets, their dim magazine, it would be work with which he could associate himself with some enthusiasm. It would suit his purposes far better than going into business or staying on at the hospital.

“The Work is one hundred percent apostolic,” said one of the Fathers.

Myles remembered that the Fathers ran several institutions for juvenile delinquents. “I know something of your trade schools,” he said quickly.

“Would that we had more of them,” said the Father sitting behind the desk. He had bloodied his face and neck in shaving. “You have to move with the times.” He seemed to be the boss. On the wall behind him hung a metal crucifix, which could have come off a coffin, and a broken airplane propeller, which must have dated from the First World War. “How do you stand in the draft?” he asked Myles.

“All clear,” said Mac, answering for him. Myles let that pass, too. He could tell Mac the facts later.

When Myles heard what the salary would be, he was glad he had other reasons for taking the job. The money would be the least important part of it, Mac put in, and Myles could see what he meant. But Myles didn’t care about the money; he’d live on bread and water—and pamphlets. The salary made him feel better about not telling Mac and the Fathers that he intended to use his new position, if he could, to meet a bishop. The expense allowance, too, impressed him as decidedly prewar. Mac, however, seemed to be hinting not at its meanness but at Myles’ possible profligacy when, in front of two more Fathers, who had come in to meet Myles, he said, “You’ll have to watch your expenses, Flynn. Can’t have you asking for reimbursements, you understand.” As Myles was leaving, one of the new arrivals whispered to him, “I was on the road myself for a bit and I’d dearly love to go out again. Mr McMaster, he’s a grand companion. You’ll make a great team.”

Three days later the team was heading north in Mac’s car, a lightweight black Cadillac, a ’41—a good year for a Cadillac, Mac said, and the right car for the job: impressive but not showy, and old enough not to antagonize people.

Myles was not sorry to be leaving Chicago. The nuns and nurses at the hospital had been happy to see him go—happy, they said, that he’d found a better job. This showed Myles how little they had ever understood him and his reasons for being at the hospital; he’d known all along that they had very little sense of vocation.

Speaking of the nurses, Myles told Mac that the corporal works of mercy had lost all meaning in the modern world, to which Mac replied that he wouldn’t touch nursing with a ten-foot pole. Nursing might be a fine career for a girl, he allowed, and added, “A lot of ’em marry above themselves—marry money.”

They were like two men in a mine, working at different levels, in different veins, and lost to each other. Mac, who apparently still thought of Myles as a doctor, wanted to know how much the interns and nurses knocked down and what their private lives were like—said he’d heard a few stories. When Myles professed ignorance, Mac seemed to think he was being secretive, as if the question went against the Hippocratic oath. He tried to discuss medicine, with special reference to his diet, but failed to interest Myles. He asked what the hospital did with the stiffs, and received no pertinent information, because the question happened to remind Myles of the medieval burial confraternities and he sailed into a long discussion of their blessed work, advocating its revival in the modern world.

“All free, huh?” Mac commented. “The undertakers would love that!”

Myles strove in vain for understanding, always against the wind. Mac had got the idea that Myles, in praising the burial fraternities, was advocating a form of socialized medicine, and he held on to it. “Use logic,” he said. “What’s right for the undertakers is right for the doctors.”

They rode in silence for a while. Then Mac said, “What you say about the nurses may be true, but you gotta remember they don’t have it easy.” He knew how Myles felt about hospital work, he said, but instead of letting it prey on his mind, Myles should think of other things—of the better days ahead. Mac implied that Myles’ talk about the corporal works was just a cover-up for his failure to get into anything better.

Myles restated his position. Mac, with noticeable patience, said that Myles was too hard on people—too critical of the modern world. “Give it time,” he said. When Myles persisted, Mac said, “Let’s give it a rest, huh? You wanna take it awhile?” He stopped the car and turned the wheel over to Myles. After watching him pass a Greyhound bus, he appeared to be satisfied that the car was in good hands, and went to sleep.

The first night on the road they stopped in a small town, at the only hotel, which had no bar, and Mac suggested that they go out for a drink. In a tavern, the bartender, when he found out they were from Chicago, showed them his collection of matchbooks with nudes on the cover.

“I have a friend that’ll get you all that you want,” Mac said to him. “You better avert your eyes, son,” he said to Myles. “This is some of that modern world you don’t like. He doesn’t like our modern world,” Mac said to the bartender.

“Maybe he don’t know what he’s missing.”

The bartender seemed anxious to make a deal until Mac asked him to put down a little deposit “as evidence of good faith.”

“Do I have to?”

“To me it’s immaterial,” Mac said. “But I notice it sometimes speeds delivery.”

“I can wait.”

“All right, if you’re sure you can. You write your name and address on a slip of paper and how many you want.” While the bartender was doing this, Mac called over to him, “Don’t forget your zone number.”

“We don’t have ’em in this town.”

“Oh,” Mac said. He gave Myles a look, the wise, doped look of a camel.

The bartender brought the slip of paper over to Mac. “They gotta be as good as them I got—or better,” he said, and walked away.

Mac, watching him, matched him word for step: “When-you-gonna-get-those-corners-sawed-off-your-head?”

Leaving the tavern with Mac, Myles saw the wind take the slip of paper up the street.

“My friend can do without that kind of business,” Mac said.

Mac began operations on a freezing cold day in central Wisconsin, and right away Myles was denied his first opportunity. While Mac went into a chancery office to negotiate with the bishop, who would (or would not) grant permission to canvass the diocese, Myles had to wait outside in the car, with the engine running; Mac said he was worried about the battery. This bishop was one with whom Myles had already corresponded unsuccessfully, but that was small consolation to him, in view of his plan to plead his case before as many bishops as possible, without reference to past failures. How he’d manage it with Mac in attendance, he didn’t know. Perhaps he could use the initial interview for analysis only and, attempting to see the bishop as an opponent in a game, try to uncover his weakness, and then call back alone later and play upon it. Myles disapproved of cunning, and rather doubted whether he could carry out such a scheme. But he also recalled that puzzling but practical advice, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves,” the first part of which the bishops themselves, he believed, were at such pains to follow in their dealings with him.

The next day Mac invited Myles to accompany him indoors when he paid his calls upon the pastors. The day was no warmer but Mac said nothing about the battery. He said, “You’ve got a lot to learn, son,” and proceeded to give Myles some pointers. In some dioceses, according to Mac, the bishop’s permission was all you needed; get that, and the pastors—always excepting a few incorrigibles—would drop like ripe fruit. Unfortunately, in such dioceses the bishop’s permission wasn’t always easy to obtain. Of course you got in to see bishops personally (this in reply to a question from Myles), but most of the time you were working with pastors. There were two kinds of pastors, Mac said—those who honestly believed they knew everything and those who didn’t. With the first, it was best to appear helpless (as, in fact, you were) and try to get them interested in doing your job for you. With the other kind, you had to appear confident, promise them the moon—something they were always looking for anyway—tell them a change might come over their people if they were exposed to the pamphlets and the
Clementine
. Of course, no pastor had a right to expect such a miracle, but many did expect it even so, if the pamphlets and the
Clementine
hadn’t been tried in the parish before. You’d meet some, though, Mac said, who would be cold, even opposed, to the Work, and offensive to you, and with them you took a beating—but cheerfully, hoping for a change of heart later. More than one of that kind had come around in the end, he said, and one of them had even written a glowing letter to the Fathers, complimenting them on the high type of layman they had working for them, and had placed an order for a rack of pamphlets on condition that Mac received credit for it. Then there were the others—those who would do everything they could to help you, wanted to feed you and put you up overnight, but they, for some reason, were found more often in the country, or in poor city parishes, where little could be accomplished and where you seldom went.

On the third day out, they came across one of the incorrigibles. He greeted them with a snarl. “You guys’re a breed apart,” he said. Myles was offended, but Mac, undaunted, went into his routine for cracking hard nuts. “Don’t know much about this job, I’m ashamed to say,” he said, “but it’s sure a lot of fun learning.” The pastor, instead of going out of his way to help a cheerful soul like Mac (and a nervous one like Myles), ordered them out of the rectory, produced a golf club when they didn’t go and, when they did, stood at the front window, behind a lace curtain, until they drove off.

Before the end of the first week, Myles discovered that Mac wasn’t really interested in getting permission to canvass a parish house-to-house. He said he just didn’t care that much about people. What he liked was cooperation; he liked to have a pastor in the pulpit doing the donkey work and the ushers in the aisles dispensing pencil stubs and subscription blanks, with him just sitting at a card table in the vestibule after Mass, smiling at the new subscribers as they passed out, making change, and croaking, “God love you.” That was what Mac called “a production.” He operated on a sliding scale—a slippery one, Myles thought. In a big, well-to-do parish, where the take would be high, Mac cut prices. He was also prepared to make an offering toward the upkeep of the church, or to the pastor’s favorite charity (the latter was often the former), and to signify his intention beforehand. He had to hustle, he said, in order to meet the stiff competition of the missionaries; a layman, even if he represented a recognized religious order, was always at a disadvantage. Fortunately, he said, there were quite a few secular pastors who, though they didn’t care for the orders, didn’t consider the struggling Clementines a menace. But there weren’t many pastors with flourishing parishes who would cooperate with Mac or with anybody. They were sitting pretty, Mac said, and they knew it. If he now and then succeeded with one of them, it was only because he was liked personally—or, as it seemed to Myles, because of what Mac called “the package deal.” The package deal didn’t actually involve the Work, Mac was careful to explain, but it sometimes helped it. And, Myles felt, compromised it.