Till Death

For Javan
,

my wife and collaborator

Prologue

Late autumn. In Michigan, nature had staged its annual show of shows. No artist living or dead could have matched God’s broad strokes of color in stands of trees.

Now it was gone. Brilliant leaves had faded in turn to dull and fallen to earth.

There are those for whom spring signifies birth; summer, life; autumn, death; winter, burial. Followed by nothing. For others, the very perpetuity of the seasonal cycle attests to summer as life; autumn, death; winter, burial; and spring, rebirth into eternal life.

Father Robert Koesler belonged to the latter school.

And those were the thoughts he mused on as he stood very much alone in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

He shuffled his right foot, allowing the chilly breeze to waft some leaves, uncovering a grave marker set flush with the ground. The chiseled inscription provided minimal information, a name and two dates, the earlier commemorating birth; the latter, departure from this life.

In the span between these two dates was a life that changed many others.

Actually, this story began some forty years earlier.

Father Koesler, then a young priest, was appointed the unlikely editor of the
Detroit Catholic
, the archdiocesan newspaper. The
Detroit Free Press
, reporting the appointment, termed the paper “influential” and was patently surprised that this inexperienced inner-city priest had been given the job.

Concurrent with the appointment, Koesler was directed to live at the rectory of St. Ursula. St. Ursula’s could have been designated an ethnic parish, having been erected in a neighborhood almost entirely Italian. By the time Koesler moved in, it was almost equally Italian and Polish, with a mix of African-American.

The most distinctive feature of St. Ursula’s was its pastor, Father Angelico, who succeeded the affable Father Pompilio.

In the early sixties, the Second Vatican Council was about to break forth upon the world. Few could have guessed the changes it would bring.

At this time, the clergy were split not along conservative and liberal lines; rather, the line was drawn between pastors and their assistant priests.

Father Angelico was the one of a trio of east side pastors recognized as notorious tyrants. He virtually imprisoned the two priests assigned to him as assistants, and dictated their daily schedule down to the very minute. In this he was not blocked by current Church law.

With rare exception, each priest who served under Father Angelico emerged from his five-year stint with a severe case of shellshock or battle fatigue. Whatever one cared to term their condition, they were rubbed raw.

The one who uniquely escaped Angelico’s tender mercies was Father Koesler. Angelico had no pigeonhole for him. Koesler was not a defenseless assistant. He was “in residence.” Whatever the hell that meant, Angelico had no idea what to do with him, nor what his role might be in the pastor’s fiefdom. For all Angelico knew, Koesler might be a chancery spy.

So, Bob Koesler ended by, in effect, writing his own ticket. He offered daily Mass and assisted on weekends.

Father Koesler could not help but be acutely aware of the shameful treatment accorded Angelico’s assistants. Had he been more experienced he would have intervened—although what he might have accomplished was questionable. The chancery, with ultimate clout, though aware of the situation, did nothing.

Once Koesler left St. Ursula’s, he tried to bind up the wounds of shredded dignity inflicted by its despotic pastor. As part of this effort, he established an informal group dedicated to supporting those who had served under Angelico or were presently imprisoned there.

The nuns who staffed St. Ursula’s school were in worse condition than the parish’s assistant priests. Not only were they browbeaten and cowed by Angelico’s pervasive presence, they were also dominated by their rigorous religious order. Not until nuns began leaving religious life in large numbers in the wake of the Council were these women free to join the recovering Ursuline group.

In the beginning, the organization was more or less ad hoc—called upon as needed. Gradually, as a result of the growing priest shortage, fewer and fewer priests were assigned to St. Ursula’s. Then Father Angelico died. The group’s raison d’etre began to wane. Eventually, the group—or what was left of it—met only once a year, on the first Wednesday of June.

Now, in the year 2000, fewer than ten of the Ursuline club remained. And a peculiar chemistry marked their relationship.

At this point, Koesler was able to do little more than observe their interaction—an interaction that tore asunder committed pairings and forged others. An interaction that led to death for one of the members and possible complicity for others.

He felt sorrow for the one at whose grave he now stood and prayed.

He felt sorrow for just about everyone involved on that fateful day: the first Wednesday in June.

One

Never get sick on a Wednesday.

Why not?

Because the doctors and priests will be on the golf course.

Lil smiled at the memory of the old wheeze as she peeled strips of bacon from the package and slid them into the frying pan.

It was very much an “in” joke for Catholics of long standing who could count themselves well within the loop. Once upon a time, when Catholics fell ill a priest might be summoned as routinely as a doctor. While the doctor scribbled a prescription, the priest would confer the appropriate sacrament, and assure the family of his prayers as well as those of the other parishioners.

Nowadays, doctors don’t make house calls, and priests, an ever more endangered species, are buffered from callers by answering services. Nonetheless, Wednesday is still a popular day off for those able to arrange it.

Lil wore only the top half of a man’s pajamas. The man, still snoozing, wore the bottoms.

The sun was creeping into the basement studio apartment. The tiny dwelling comprised a kitchenette wall, one bath, and an all-purpose space that was foyer, living room, dining room, and bedroom.

This Wednesday in June promised to be a pleasant day, the type that invited one to get out and enjoy the weather. Many of those left behind at this suburban apartment complex after the majority went off to work—mostly mothers and young children—would gather poolside.

Not this couple.

Lil and Rick had to be extremely careful.

This caution did not concern Rick nearly as much as it did Lil.

He was by nature carefree, spontaneous, and relatively fearless. She envied him these traits. Still she feared they’d be found out. Her fear was more for him than it was for her. But she too had high stakes in their relationship.

After all, Lillian Niedermier was principal of St. Enda’s elementary school. She wondered how long she would hold that position if it leaked out that she had for the past ten years been half of a significant-other relationship.

The marital status of parochial teachers and principals had been taken for granted in the era when Catholic schools were staffed almost totally by nuns. Religious brothers served a few schools; priests—Jesuits, Basilians and the like—taught at some other schools as well as at seminaries.

That considerable dedication—for that was what it was—solved any number of problems.

There were no unions in Catholic schools. There was nothing to be negotiated. There were no interviews of prospective teachers to sap the pastor’s time. If St. Paraphanucious school was slated to have twenty-four Dominican nuns, there they were: twenty-four dedicated women all in black-and-white habit.

None of the twenty-four had volunteered for a specific parish. The pastor did not select any of the nuns. They were sent.

Like so many other changes in the Catholic Church since 1965, when the Second Vatican Council concluded, things were radically different in today’s parochial schools.

Formerly there was no challenge in finding
the
layperson on the Catholic school faculty. She was the only one wearing ordinary clothing.

Now there was plenty of challenge. The nun—if there was even one on the faculty—probably couldn’t find a religious habit to save her soul—literally.

So, layperson Lillian Niedermier found herself principal of a parochial school in a northwest suburb of Detroit.

She could have made lots more money teaching in the public school system. Her choice to go parochial was partly because her schooling had been Catholic and also because here she could achieve the rank of principal. A position for which she would have had to wait many more years had she been in the public system.

But what would the parishioners of St. Enda’s—let alone Father O’Leary, the pastor—think if they were to discover that she had a live-in boyfriend? Marriage and its rules and regulations had for centuries been, and continued to be, an obsession with the Catholic Church. It would not take a canonical major to conclude that Lillian was “living in sin.” St. Enda’s students were not the only ones likely to earn an
A
.

Lil began cracking eggs into a bowl. She dropped four slices of bread into the toaster. The essentials were ready to go. All that was missing was a hungry man. Her man would have to wake up to feel hunger.

As if on schedule, stirrings and grunts emanated from the bed. “Do those sounds,” Lil called over, “mean that you are about to favor me with your presence?”

There was a pause while he rolled over onto his back and rubbed his eyes. “If you play your cards right … maybe.”

She turned up the heat under the frying pan. After some moments the distinctive aroma of sizzling bacon permeated the room.

“Sweetie,” he said, “you just dealt a royal flush!”

She smiled as she flipped and flopped the strips in the pan. He liked his bacon uniformly well done.

Her back was toward him and she swayed slowly as she busied herself at the stove. He studied her appreciatively.

Her straight dark hair, parted in the middle, fell to the base of her neck. Her shoulders and upper torso were, he thought, incredibly narrow. Yet she was surprisingly strong. On those occasions when a heavy object was too hefty or bulky for him to lift alone, Lil bore the load every bit as equally as he.

His pajama top was many times too large for her slender figure. The garment hung to approximately mid-thigh. It reminded him of a mini skirt. Below her wasplike waist, the pajama top clung to her hips and suggested the rounded firmness beneath.

No doubt about it, she was one beautiful woman. And he was one lucky guy.

Breakfast would be prepared without his participation. Not that he couldn’t prepare food; actually he did that with some regularity. And when he himself was chief cook and bottle-washer, he welcomed the involvement of others.

Not so with Lil. When she was in charge she firmly warned all others to steer clear of “my” kitchen.

He’d learned his lesson. He would not approach the kitchen area until everything was on the table. Meanwhile, he would feast his eyes on her generous beauty. He’d never met a curve in her body that he didn’t treasure.

His thoughts flowing in free association, he contrasted her youth and perfect form with what he brought to this relationship. His gift, he thought, was not all that much.

In his prime—Lil’s age and younger—he had been a trim athlete. If it bounced he’d played it: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, racquetball. Come to think of it, even if it didn’t bounce, as long as it was a game, he’d played it.

Now his exercise was limited to bowling, golf—when the season and weather allowed—and sporadic visits to a fitness gym.

His upper body testified to his youthful athleticism. A thick neck and strong, sloping shoulder and chest muscles suggested strength and sinewy toughness. But that was the end of that. Over the years, he had developed a paunch that now threatened to sag over his belt.

Well, he said to himself, what could you expect at age sixty? Gravity, as well as other forces such as inertia, tended to remind one of the passage of time. Belying a drooping middle was his rigidly square face displaying the storied map of Ireland, accentuated by brilliant blue eyes and a full head of still-red hair.