Till Death (15 page)

Dora was, he thought, pushing things a bit. But there was no way to tell without a meeting.

He would call Pat Lennon this afternoon. He wanted this job. The desire was growing. If Lennon wanted someone who was dependable, reliable, and thoroughly professional, he would be the perfect candidate. Journalism? He was willing to learn.

He wanted to be close to Dora. Without a doubt that was the principal attraction.

Short of a job offer at
Oakland Monthly
, he wanted some means of employment. He had to get out of his parental home. The atmosphere there put him directly back to childhood. His mother, God love her, was doing as well as could be expected with her son’s midlife career change. She understood little of what was going on. Laicization threw her. But if Jerry said all was right between him and the Church, she believed him.

However, she was screening his phone calls. It was a stroke of luck that Dora’s call had reached him. Life would be taxing enough as it was without having to relive his adolescence with Ma.

He needed to be free to have guests over. Specifically, he needed to invite Dora to visit. He could just imagine entertaining Dora—any girl—with Mother hovering about. Not a very encouraging picture.

So, priority one: Get a job, preferably with the magazine. Priority two: Move out. Priority three: Establish rapport with Dora Riccardo.

But, please, God, don’t make a move toward Dora until the right moment.

At lunch he had touched the subject very lightly, he thought. She wasn’t serious about anyone. He couldn’t have asked for a better break than that.

He was a virgin. He hoped Dora was. But that really didn’t matter; after all, she had been out of the convent these five years. And this was a new era: A girl was expected to put out. The concern with virginity was a thing of the past. All that was necessary as far as he was concerned was that she love him, or grow to love him.

It was no accident that so many former priests and nuns became attracted to each other and married. They were not merely Catholics; they were dedicated, consecrated to a life of service to others. And they were not merely consecrated Catholics, they had risen beyond that commitment. Each had his or her reason for entering the seminary or convent. And each had his or her reason for leaving that life and reentering “the world.”

Anderson was in a special position to understand Dora’s religious history. She’d fallen in love with a myth. There were those women who taught her. They exuded discipline. They themselves lived disciplined lives and they demanded discipline from their students.

They were revered by just about everyone, Catholic or otherwise. They wore a dress called a habit. The habit set them apart from what might be called a normal life. From men, from other women, from courtship, from marriage, from having children.

They were truly set apart.

Dora had been so very young. All she knew was that her nuns had a firm grasp on things heavenly if not on things mundane. She didn’t know that the Theresians, the only religious order with which she was familiar, were semicontemplative. She wouldn’t even have known what semicontemplative involved.

Dora wasn’t alone. Many children fall in love with a uniform, the idea of a life of luxury and wealth, a life of selfless service, a life of material success, a life of spiritual success. When Dora had made her choice she was too young, too uninformed. And she had chosen the Theresians, an order so mired in the Middle Ages that it was moribund.

She left the order simply because the members who surrounded her made it impossible to stay.

Jerry Anderson had entered the seminary for many of the same reasons that had attracted Dora to the convent.

Unlike Dora, Jerry had years of study and testing facing him. Like a car racing a train to a crossing, Jerry ignored the red light signal that was Church law. He ran the signal and paid the price many years later as witness to a well-publicized clandestine wedding.

Nuns and priests prayed alike, were trained to serve others, lived dedicated lives, wore distinctive uniforms, were generally respected—very much alike. Many contemporary nuns and priests worked together in close collaboration, at an intimate level they had in the past been taught to avoid. Many of them fell in love and left their religious vocations to marry.

Others—Jerry and Dora among them—left for other reasons. For them, just as for ordinary laypeople, falling in love, getting married, and having a family was the natural progression of life.

Whatever reason priests and nuns had for leaving their vocations, once having left it was only normal for them to marry. Just as marriage was a normal step in adult life, so it was for former priests and nuns now that they had returned to the lay state.

Jerry Anderson had been squeezed out of his priestly life. That was behind him. It was gone. No longer was there any reason for him to live as a single man for the rest of his life. In the normal progression that he picked up now, he would find a woman, they would fall in love, they would be married. They might or might not begin a family. At their age, having children could be a dicey decision.

But putting one foot in front of the other, Jerry had found his woman. She would no longer be a part of his fantasy life. She was real. And her reality excited him.

He would have to force himself to go slowly. The wrong word, the wrong move could prove disastrous.

One thing was certain: He knew what he wanted. He would do anything to make it happen.

Eleven

“We seem to be doing the right thing,” said Father Robert Koesler. “It’s Wednesday, we’re priests, and we’re playing golf.”

Father Zachary Tully looked about him. “Kind of crowded,” he observed, “but I’ll bet you there aren’t any other priests here. And certainly no doctors.”

“That, my dear friend,” Koesler said, “is a tribute to the caliber of our golf game. They wouldn’t let us loose on a good course.”

They were a twosome playing on a Detroit municipal course notorious for its topography. It was as flat as a poorly chosen parish choir. Each fairway was set off from another by a row of widely separated trees. Occasionally a groundskeeper would water the greens. God took care of the rest of the course. And, sometimes, even He didn’t care.

It was known to be a shooting gallery, in that it was advisable to hit your ball and duck; someone on an adjacent fairway was likely to hook or slice and take your head off. In short, it was not a championship course. The players were not scratch golfers. They were hackers before the term described computer interlopers.

The greens fees, though modest, for all that were still exorbitant.

Father Koesler, having reached the age of seventy a couple of years before, was now retired from priestly service in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Or, to use the official term, he had achieved the status of a Senior Priest.

Perhaps the approved description was closer to the truth. Retirement connoted inactivity. As in: What are you going to do in your retirement years? Nothing. Whereas the average senior citizen, having reached a certain age, would avail himself or herself of some cut-rate benefits and continue on with an active life.

Koesler mused that he might have shrunk an inch or so. Just a few weeks ago he’d met a young man whom Koesler judged to be one inch or so taller than he. He liked guessing the height of others, particularly if the person was taller. “Six foot four or five?” the priest had asked.

“No,” the young man had said, “Six three.”

“Impossible,” Koesler had gasped. “I’m six three. I have been since high school.”

“No,” the man had insisted, “six three.”

Koesler was so sure of himself that this caused doubt to creep into his mind. He’d heard of shrinkage in older years. Could it be happening to him? He would wait till his next visit to the doctor and get weighed and measured on accurate instruments.

Whatever, he was tall enough to see the foursome ahead was walking off the green. On this par three hole, golf etiquette allowed teeing off when the green was clear or if the preceding foursome was in trouble and waved the following group on. “You’re away,” he told Father Tully, who had won the previous hole and had honors.

Neither Tully nor Koesler had ever had a golf lesson. If there were any doubt, all one needed was to watch them play.

For example, Tully used a driver for his tee shot on a par three hole. A bit too much club, but Father Zachary needed all the help he could get. Instead of soaring high in the air, Tully’s shot skipped merrily down the baked fairway. Despite his overclubbing, the ball stopped well short of the green.

Koesler had never grasped the fundamental difference between golf and baseball. In both games one used a ball and a club. Actually golf appeared less demanding than baseball. After all, no one was throwing the ball toward you. It just sat there on the ground waiting to be hit.

Although Koesler aimed his tee shot well to the left of the fairway, it sliced onto the fairway to the right.

They parted to address their respective balls. They would meet again, inevitably, on the green. Needless to say, neither would come close to par on this or any other hole, except by accident.

They played the ninth, a par four hole, in remarkably the same manner as they had the eighth—well over par for both holes.

Nine holes constituted the beginning of a golfing day for genuine players. For these two hackers, nine constituted all the exercise they needed.

They repaired to a nearby restaurant for a well-deserved lunch. Each ordered a tuna sandwich and a Miller Lite. Both were saving themselves for tonight’s dinner party.

Father Tully had been ordained a priest in the Josephite religious order, a group whose mission was to the poor, especially to poor African-Americans. He was unique in being the only Josephite ever to transfer to the Archdiocese of Detroit.

His father had been African-American, his mother, white. His father died soon after the boy’s birth. So, Zachary grew up knowing next to nothing about his father’s background. Since his mother’s family were fervent Catholics, the boy was raised Catholic.

He’d been working a parish in Dallas when he was sent on a business trip to Detroit. Then it was that he had learned from an aunt that his father had had a previous family in Detroit. The only member of that family still living in Detroit was Zachary’s half-brother, Alonzo Tully, a police lieutenant in Detroit’s busy Homicide Department.

Zoo, the lieutenant’s nickname, shared Zachary’s father but not his mother. Zoo was dark-skinned. Zachary, a mulatto, while sharing many characteristics of his brother’s physiognomy, could easily pass for white.

As luck would have it, Zoo, a backsliding Baptist, had married a committed Catholic. This was Zoo’s second marriage. He had five children from his first marriage, all of whom lived with their mother, outside Michigan. He had no children with Anne Marie, his present wife.

Both Alonzo and Zachary had been amazed to meet each other for the first time so far along in life. But in no time they were getting along famously—each meddling in the other’s territory whenever it was appropriate.

By a geographical chance, and to be close to his newfound brother, Father Zachary on his initial stay in Detroit had billeted in Father Koesler’s rectory.

Then, after sending Koesler on a well-deserved vacation, Zachary had baby-sat the parish. By a strong turn of fate, during Koesler’s absence, Zachary became involved in a murder investigation his brother was handling—and eventually helped solve the case.

Koesler himself was no slouch when it came to amateur detection. More or less annually, beginning in 1979, he either blundered into or was invited into a homicide investigation.

Not that either Tully or Koesler were in the same league with professional police officers. It was just that periodically there seemed to occur a murder with a decidedly “Catholic” cast to it.

As yet the police had not developed their own expert on religion in general or Catholicism in particular. So they had come to respect and utilize the expertise of, first, Father Koesler, and now Father Tully as well.

Each Detroit priest, at the age of seventy, was offered the status of Senior Priest. By mutual consent of the Archbishop and the said priest, he could, in effect, retire. Or he could continue in full service. Some priests could scarcely wait for the opportunity to retire. Others simply plowed on, treating their seventieth as no different from their sixty-ninth—or their fiftieth, for that matter.

Father Koesler had chosen to accept retirement, while continuing to work pretty much full-time. Now, he was able to pick and choose where he felt called to be.

Both priests had been sipping at their beer and exchanging small talk when the sandwiches were served. Koesler studied the plate. “Potato chips,” he said. “I hadn’t counted on that.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Salt.”

“Salt?”

“Yes,” Koesler said. “I try to stay away from salt. They put so much of it in food, it’s almost impossible. Add the salt to the greasy chips and I can almost watch my arteries shut down.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to eat them?”

Koesler looked at the other priest and smiled. He pushed his plate toward Tully. “Enjoy.”

Smiling in return, Tully scooped up the rejected chips and added them to his own pile. “You make this seem sinful,” he complained in jest.

“Not at all, Zack. Eat up. But I’m afraid I can’t say: Eat them in good health.”

They finished lunch in leisurely fashion. Wednesdays were Tully’s day off. Koesler no longer restricted himself to a specific day off. Still he managed to keep busy nearly all the time.

This afternoon a meeting at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral was Tully’s sole appointment.

Koesler was aware of the meeting. But since he wasn’t required to attend, he wasn’t going to. Not attending meetings—diocesan, vicariate, parochial, or what-have-you—was the prime luxury of his retirement. Instead, he had a list of former parishioners and friends who were either hospitalized or were infirm at home. These he would visit. As time passed, more and more of his friends and acquaintances were finding that old age was not for sissies.