Death, judgment, heaven, and hellâThe Four Last Thingsâhow they pressed on Father Dowling's mind as he drove away from the hospital. Cronin, the hospital chaplain, a stolid humorless man whose life was lived in the misery of others, had not filled Father Dowling with confidence. Cronin's thinning hair was cut close to his domed head, and he listened to the account of Fulvio Bernardo's refusal to see a priest with no visible emotion.
“It happens all the time.”
“What do you do?”
“Pray that they come around. Some do. You have to realize that they are usually drugged or in pain, either way not the best circumstances to think clearly. People are what they are by the time they come here. Deathbed conversions you can count on one hand.”
“You'll talk to him?”
“But will he listen?”
Driving to the rectory, he prayed for the old man. The defection of his son the priest was at the bottom of it according to Jessica, and he was on his way from California. Father Dowling
prayed for Raymond too, wondering what he could possibly say to his dying father.
That evening he was having dinner with Amos Cadbury at the University Club in the Loop and was unsure he would be good company for the lawyer because of the events of the day.
“Eleanor Wygant tells me she has been to see you,” Amos said.
Father Dowling smiled. “I should have guessed you would know her.”
“Her late husband, or I should say her latest husband, Alfred Wygant, was a dear friend.” Amos frowned over his glass of Barolo. “His death came as a decided shock to me.”
“And when did you see Eleanor?”
“Just yesterday. I look after her affairs, and she stopped by the office. Widows like to fuss about their holdings.”
“Is she comfortable?”
“Oh yes.” Another frown, a sip of Barolo. “Not as comfortable as she might have been, but no need to worry. I oversee her investments, and the market has been good to her.”
“I saw her today at the hospital.”
“The hospital!”
“I suppose you know Fulvio Bernardo? He has been in intensive care.” Father Dowling told the lawyer of Bernardo's stroke.
“And of course Eleanor would be there. Her first husband was Fulvio's brother. The Bernardos continue to be her family. She had no children by either marriage, poor thing. Is it serious?”
“Very.”
“God bless him.”
Something in Amos's tone caught Father Dowling's attention. “That sounds grudging.”
“Then God forgive me. I never really liked the man but de
mortuis nil nisi bonum.”
Amos's Notre Dame education often put in such an appearance.
“Oh, he isn't dead yet. I called the hospital before coming here and learned that he had been transferred out of intensive care.”
“One of the Bernardos was a priest.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Have they informed him?”
“He is on his way from California.”
“This is exceptionally good wine.”
“I gather he wasn't diocesan.”
“Oh no. An Edmundite. The Order of St. Edmund. They are said to be an old order, not quite medieval, but they have never amounted to much in this country. St. Edmund College was founded by them.”
There are many contingencies in any vocation, one of the main ones being the priest who first discerns that a boy may be destined for the priesthood, in Raymond's case an Edmundite named Bourke.
“Father Bourke is still alive, a veritable patriarch.” Amos sighed. “Think of what a man that age has had to witness.” The remark might have been autobiographical. “In any case, he was the reason young Raymond opted for the Order of St. Edmund. His departure was a surprise and a shock. I'm on the board there, you know.”
“I didn't know.”
“For my sins. It is a sad thing to see the way we have dismantled our own institutions. I stay on to slow the process, not very effectively, I am afraid.”
“I know the college is there, of course, but little else about it.”
Amos over brandy developed the pathology of the once Catholic college. The Second Vatican Council, providential as it no doubt was, had effects it could scarcely have envisaged. The urge to renew and updateâaggiornamentoâwas taken by many to be an invitation to jettison the past. The Edmundites, whatever their lack of success in the country at large, had flourished in the Chicago area. Their seminary was on the grounds of the college; indeed the college was in its way an outgrowth of the seminary, thought of at first largely as a source of new vocations but soon opened to young men at large. The curriculum expanded, accreditation was won, the faculty enlarged. In the wake of the Council it was the college that wagged the tail of the Edmundites, soon eclipsing all else. And becoming increasingly secular.
“Priests became rarer and rarer on the faculty, lay professors were hired, soon the standards for hiring became increasingly like those of any secular college. Today it boasts of its academic excellence, and in a sense this is justified, but at what an expense has it been bought. Raymond Bernardo was not the only Edmundite priest to abandon his calling. There was for a time a hemorrhage. It seemed to have subsided, and then he left, a blow to Father Bourke. The seminary was closed years ago.”
“No vocations?”
“That is not a problem confined to the Edmundites.”
“Indeed not. You knew Raymond Bernardo?”
“Only in the way you know a youngster. And then he was assigned to the college after ordination and further studies.”
“What did he study?”
“Psychology.”
“Ah.”
“The witchcraft of our times, Father Dowling. Freud, Jung, Reich, the whole lot as far as I can see needed exorcism rather
than therapy. It has made mincemeat of the law, of course. The assumption is that a criminal act cannot be freely performed but is the result of some obscure mechanism that need only be righted. No matter the harm that has been done to society and the demands of justice. The courts have become the anteroom to the counselor's couch. But I am raving.”
Father Dowling chuckled. Passionate as Amos's words might be, his precise elocution and modulated bass voice seemed the very organ of rationality. “Bishops too have fallen prey to it. A battery of psychological tests must be taken before one can enter the seminary.”
“Raymond Bernardo was named spiritual director of the Edmundite seminary on campus. He changed the title to spiritual counselor.”
“How long after ordination was he laicized?”
White brows rose over Amos's dark rimmed glasses. “That would suggest that he left in an orderly way. Not at all. He commandeered one of the order's cars and credit cards and went westward with a young nun from campus ministry. Bonnie and Clyde.” Amos closed his eyes. “A dreadful movie I once saw as captive on a flight from Rome.”
Amos did not know if young Father Bernardo had ever applied for laicization, once easily had for the asking but after the unbroken flow of men from the priesthood made more difficult.
“He married the nun?”
“God knows. The Reformation seems almost innocent compared with recent years. Luther and his nun, the vulgar talk at table, German earthiness, but at least it was accompanied by a sense of sin. No one could think less of Luther than he thought of himself. Of course he thought his actions did not matter since he was not truly free. God would throw a cloak over his corruption;
that was salvation. I suppose psychiatry is a version of that but without the sense of sin and without redemption. Sanity consists in accepting the actions we do not freely do.”
“You are becoming a philosopher, Amos.”
“I am an old man who is heartsick at the spectacle of the times.”
“A man named Rosmini wrote a book called
The Five Wounds of the Church.”
“Only five?”
“It brought him under a cloud.”
“The Church has become St. Sebastian now, more wounds than one could count. Sometimes I fear some great calamity will befall us for what we have done to the Church.”
Amos did not know if Raymond Bernardo had ever repaid the Order for the expensive westward journey he had taken with his bonny nun. “I was told he considered it just recompense. Occult compensation, as it used to be called.”
Father Dowling's degree was in canon law, a subject in which Amos was well read. Once men took degrees
utriusque legis
, in both civil and church law. Amos was the latter-day equivalent of such a dual doctor, trained in the one, an autodidact in the other.
They ended their evening in the club library, where Amos could smoke his cigar and Father Dowling light his pipe.
“You say the college is flourishing?”
“On its altered terms, yes. The question is, why have Catholic institutions if they are so little different from secular ones? But of course there is a bull market in college students and government loans to encourage young people into debt and fill the coffers of the colleges. I will not bore you with some of the nonsense that has entered the curriculum.”
“You mentioned Eleanor Wygant earlier. She came to me quite
upset with the prospect that her niece plans a novel about the Bernardo family.”
“Jessica. She is the best of the lot, a very gifted young lady. I cannot say that her fiction is my cup of tea, but it shows obvious talent. And her reviews have been magnificent.”
“So she has been successful.”
“Not financially, of course. Few novelists could live on what they earn from their books. She is a lab technician at Sorenson's Labs. Once pathologists worked for hospitals; now they establish their own laboratories and profit far more handsomely from their work. Not that Sorenson himself has touched a slide in years. That is him over there.”
A round little man sat in a leather chair frowning at the financial page, a cigar emerging from the exact center of his mouth, which was stretched in a grimace of pain. Amos rose.
“Come, Father. I will introduce you.”
And so it was that Father Dowling made the acquaintance of Eric Sorenson in the library of the University Club. The little doctor managed not to stare at Father Dowling's Roman collar.
“I am Missouri Synod. Our ministers have stopped wearing those.”
He meant the collar. Amos said, “I mentioned Jessica Bernardo to Father Dowling, then looked up and saw you, Eric. I thought the two of you should meet.”
“Ah, Jessica. I love her novels. I wish all my employees wrote novels. It gives one great insight into their minds.” He rolled his cigar in his fat fingers. “I sometimes think of writing a novel myself.”
“Better not, Eric. It will give your employees insight into your mind.”
Sorenson laughed.
“Jessica's father has fallen seriously ill,” Father Dowling said.
“Fulvio,” Sorenson said deliberately as if there were dashes between the syllables.
“Don't get started on him, Eric,” Amos Cadbury said. “Father Dowling and I are leaving.”
Handshakes all around. Amos's car came round, and he took Father Dowling to his rectory where, enjoying a final pipe in his study, the pastor of St. Hilary's reflected on the connections between what might have seemed a random group of people. Before going to bed he called the hospital and learned that Fulvio Bernardo had slightly improved and was now in a room out of intensive care.
Thunder, Jessica's agent, called before she went to work, and even his bored tones could not conceal his excitement.
“I think this is your breakthrough novel, sweetheart. Diurno loves it. How soon can you get me a one-pager I can get a contract on?”
Jessica's enthusiasm for the literary life, never high, had suffered from the events of recent days. It is a sobering experience to stand at one's father's bedside in intensive care and see the digital monitoring of his vital signs wink in green and red while fluid drips into his veins from a plastic bag. How evanescent everything seemed.
“They like it?”
“Diurno likes it. Meaning he is eager to sign a contract.”
“How did you describe it?”
“I? You did. The saga of a Midwestern Catholic family, from order to chaos, from rules to what the hell, disintegration. But with tears.”
“That was my description?”
“I paraphrase, of course. You deal with me; I deal with publishers. I know Diurno's mind, such as it is. The man is a cash register. I doubt that he has read half a dozen books in his lifetime. He knew a man who turned down
Gone With The Wind
when the novel was only the whisper of a breeze in the mimosa. For him novels are one page long.”
“So what do you need?”
“Drama. Gut-wrenching episodes. A dying fall.”
She thought of her father. Suddenly her great idea seemed an exploitation of her family, of real tragedy. Raymond was at the heart of it, but how could she make Thunder or Diurno understand what it meant for a man to abandon the priesthood, destroy his parents' pride, flee to California, and join the fruits and nuts? She promised to send the one page.
“Fax it. When can I expect it?”
“Give me a deadline.”
“What time is it there, nine o'clock? How does noon sound?”
“You're kidding.”
“I have never been more serious in my life. I nurtured you, sweetheart. I loved your first two novels, you and I and four thousand buyers. Plus two hundred reviewers, which is the important thing. They were the prelude; this novel is the main act. Think big. Noon, okay?”
“I'll try.”
“Succeed.”
He hung up. Jessica had difficulty thinking of what she wrote as a commodity, but of course that is what it was for Thunder and even more for the cash register Diurno. They thought in terms of dust-jacket hype. Had Thunder actually read her novels? His only suggestion was to soften the religious motif. “This is a neopagan age, sweetheart, like it or not. I speak as a lapsed Catholic.”
“I didn't know that.”
“I don't mention it in
Who's Who
. What's the point? Nobody is what he was.”
“I am.”
“Sweetheart, that is your charm, your strength.”
“This novel could be pretty religious.”
“I'm counting on that,” Thunder said with breezy inconsistency. “I want you to put the fear of God into us backsliders.”
She called Sorensen's and said she wanted to take the morning off. The reaction made her think she could have asked for a week and gotten it. Then she sat at her computer and stared at the screen, but all she could see was the monitor above her father's bed in intensive care.
The phone rang. It was her colleague Walter. “Is anything wrong?”
“No.”
“I heard you had called in sick.”
“My father is in the hospital.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Dear Walterâgifted, dumb, unimaginative Walterâwho tried desperately to understand that her writing was more important to her than her work in the lab. For Walter Sorensen's lab was the world; the slides he worked on
rerum natura.
Make-believe was a distant childhood memory. Their work determined what surgeons would do, what physicians would tell their patients, whether flesh and blood people would live or die. Walter never forgot that.
“He's better now. They've moved him into a room out of intensive care.”
“He has prostate cancer?”
“This was his heart. They don't think they should operate.”
She had the feeling she was inserting her father into a carefully calibrated category for Walter's benefit. That was unfair.
“Take the day, Jessica. I will cover for you.”
A good part of her relation to Walter was avoiding becoming beholden to him. He was too good for his own good, too good for her. She had the sense that he was the kind of man she should love, but all she could muster was a profound admiration.
“Thank you.”
“I would do anything for you.”
“I know.”
She could tell him anything. She had told him about Raymond as well as about the academic squabble Andrew was involved in at the college because of a bumptious colleague named Cassirer. “Apparently he has hired a lawyer.”
“Are professors insured against that sort of thing?”
“You would think it the most peaceful life in the world, wouldn't you?”
“I'm surprised you weren't attracted to teaching.”
And compete a second time with Andrew? No thanks.
She hung up, full of the tranquillity talking with Walter always gave her. She began to plink away on the keys of her computer. She thought of Raymond, coming home at last, to be with his dying father. What a drama that would be. Fulvio had never forgiven his son for what he had done. He could not begin to understand how a man could be so unfaithful to his vows.
“I will go to Mass when Raymond is the celebrant.”
That was his position. He was punishing himself in the hope of shaming Raymond into repentance. Did Raymond even know
that their father had stopped going to Mass, that their mother wept and pleaded but always got the same answer? He would go to Mass again when Raymond was back at the altar.
“It would kill your father if you wrote about the family,” Aunt Eleanor had said.
That might not be necessary. What had struck Jessica was the intensity of Eleanor's concern. Did she really care that much for the family she had married into? Uncle Joe had died and Eleanor had married Alfred Wygant, much to her father's disgust.
“What does he have but money?”
Uncle Joe had been the black sheep of the family, dependent on her father. When he died there had been an insurance policy worth five thousand dollars.
“I'll take care of Eleanor,” Fulvio had said, the prosperous brother asserting his authority. But she had married Alfred Wygant. When Alfred died, Eleanor had considerably more than five thousand dollars.
A call came from Leonard Bosch, literary editor of the
Tribune
, Chicago, not Fox River. “Sorry about your father.”
“He's somewhat better.”
“Good. Is this a bad time to talk about my suggestion?”
“Yes.”
Leonard wanted her to do a column for the Sunday book section or if not that to agree to be a regular reviewer. “You are a local asset, Jessica. You have to accept that. And I have an obligation to be sure our readers know it.”
“Andrew would be the one to write a column.”
Silence. And then, “What I like about the Bernardos is that they stick together.”
Was that true? Raymond had gotten Andrew the job at St. Edmund's not long before he left. It seemed a compensatory gesture. No, that wasn't fair. Andrew knew so many things she didn't;
he loved literature. Too much. His writing was impasto, spread with a knife, overwritten, aimed at God knew what reader. Whom did one write for, after all? What reader did she herself imagine when she sat at her computer and followed the fortunes of imaginary people? Only they did not seem imaginary. Not real, more than real. She wrote for them, her characters. That seemed the answer to her question. Andrew wrote for critics.
She typed a title on the screen:
Last Things
. And stared at it. What were The Four Last Things? That was something she felt she had known but now could not remember. Whom could she ask? She smiled, remembering Aunt Eleanor's plea. She found the number for St. Hilary's and dialed it.
“Father Dowling? Jessica Bernardo.”
“How is your father?”
“Better.”
“Thank God.”
“I called to ask you a question.”
“All right.”
“What are The Four Last Things?”
A pause. “Death, judgment, heaven, hell.”
“Wow.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I am planning a novel I want to call
Last Things.”
“Is this the one Eleanor Wygant spoke to me about?”
“I suppose.”
“And that is the theme? She said it was a family novel.”
“I wish I had never told her about it.”
“She wanted me to talk you into dropping it.”
“No!”
“I think I'll stop by the hospital this morning.”
“Maybe I will see you there.”
Thunder and Diurno could wait. But suddenly she began to
type, and the story idea was all about Raymond and how what he had done affected his family. Of course that was the story of the Bernardos. Jessica wrote swiftly, acknowledging what her brother's defection had meant to her, knowing what it had meant to her parents. Was Andrew unaffected? How could he be? But he probably saw it in turgid Graham Greene tones. She finished the page and printed it out and faxed it off to Thunder with scarcely a change.
Then she called Andrew and told him she was going to the hospital.
“I am meeting Raymond's plane. I'll bring him there.”