Prince of Peace (20 page)

Some people thought the seminary basketball league was frivolous, the litniks and the eggheads, but O'Mally's opinion was that God was as glorified by a nice lay-up as He was by the
Tantum Ergo.
But he also thought it was a disgrace to have all these effete religious orders trouncing the diocesan guys of TC, and he was going to do something about it. If he didn't, the Paulists, who could be vicious bastards, were going to run off a hundred points against them.

As the seminarians began to drift out of the common room—they had to be in their rooms in ten minutes for the night study period—he slid into line behind Mike Maguire. Oh, if he could just get the son of a bitch to play tomorrow, that would do it! Not that they'd win, but O'Mally just wanted to keep it from being a rout. Maguire, at six-three, was taller than anybody on the team, and the guys from Dunwoodie said he was good. In fact O'Mally had seen him shooting baskets by himself the previous spring, and he had the touch. The ball just floated off his fingers, like it had helium in it. He'd knocked off ten in a row from all over the court. But Maguire wouldn't play, and he didn't even shoot baskets by himself this fall. For sports all he did was swim laps in the CU pool. When O'Mally'd approached him in September he'd declined pleasantly enough, but firmly. He'd said he wanted to concentrate on studies and that b-ball wasn't his sport anyway. Maguire'd made a joke about being older and said his jock days were over. But O'Mally's theory was that Maguire was used to being the big shot. He never referred to the war-hero stuff himself, but everybody else was always aware of it. Hell, a lot of guys looked at him with a kind of awe. Maguire seemed oblivious to that, but probably he secretly lapped it up. He probably wouldn't play ball unless he was the captain. Well, O'Mally had decided during that miserable game against the Capuchins that if that was what it would take to get Maguire on the team, it was okay with him. He'd resign the damn captaincy and offer it to Mister Wonderful.

"Hey, Mike, how goes it?"

"Hi, Gene-o, how you doing?" Maguire was a year behind O'Mally, but at twenty-six, he was two years older. He'd gained weight since entering the seminary in New York four years before, and had lost the ascetic leanness and gray pallor he'd brought home from China. He was stoop-shouldered now, but no more than many tall men, and when he tired, his face took on a bony, haggard look. Still he was an imposing, robust man, devoid of boyishness, a handsome black Irishman in his prime. In the opinion of his superiors and most of his colleagues his physical stature was more than matched by other less tangible qualities of character. Once, on a bet, he skated out onto the freshly frozen lake at Dunwoodie. When the ice, which was too thin, began to crack he went faster and soon he was furiously skating across the lake, ahead of the crack. A gully of black water opened up behind him, but he never hesitated. He made it all the way across the lake, and the seminarians who saw what he'd done said to themselves, though not to each other, "Here is a man I want to be with."

Some of the fellows, however, could never master their ambivalent feelings about him. It was less a problem at TC than it had been at Dunwoodie, but even among the theology students in Washington there were men for whom Michael's background was an insufferable rebuke, as if he'd risked his life in combat and endured years as a POW precisely to make them feel inferior. What his fellows were not aware of, for Michael kept his feelings to himself, was the fact that he felt deprived of the very sense of manhood, of power, his years in Korea and China had given him. This man who'd survived war and withstood brainwashing had been cut down to size too by the chickenshit of seminary life. It had been like a return to the suffocating, child-pinching world of Inwood.

Once, the previous winter, he'd asked permission, as he was required to, of Father Farley, the gruff rector, to go ice skating on the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument. Father Farley said no, which so surprised Michael he involuntarily, for it was practically insubordinate to do so, asked why. The rector replied that it was dangerous. Dangerous! The water in that landscaped artificial pool was only three feet deep! At Dunwoodie Michael had skated across that cracking ice above twenty feet of water. "Go, Michael, go!" Michael Maguire had been a war hero! Had killed people! Had saved many lives! Stop, Michael, stop!

"Dangerous, Father?" he asked, his face reddening.

Father Farley stared at him.

After a long time, a critical time in Michael's life, he turned and left the rector's room, but not before saying, as he was required to even though he'd been refused, "Thank you, Father."

Michael worried, in other words, as much as any of them did about appeasing the great authority figures of rector and faculty, and he spent all of his energy, like the others, trying to dazzle not two parents but two dozen of them. If there was a difference between Michael and most of the others it was this: he was man enough to suspect what was happening to him. He was becoming what Saint Paul called a "eunuch for the Kingdom of God." And there's the key. He would never have tolerated it, but he had inherited a belief and had yet to question it that the emasculating shit of life in the Church was the absolute will of God.

Seminarians are inveterate nicknamers—they call each other "Fuzz" and "Spade" and "Champ" and "Wolfjaw" and "Bishop" and "Sleepy," always with a needle—and in Dunwoodie Michael had been tagged as "Mister Wonderful." Few had the nerve to call him that to his face, and it had evolved, as such handles do, first into "Won-ton," as if he was being ribbed for an interest in China, and then simply into "Won," pronounced "Juan." Michael knew better than to show how it insulted him, and he'd grown used to the complicated feelings his fellows had about him. But their bitterness, when it surfaced in a cold look or a snide crack, could depress him, and Michael had learned in Dunwoodie that nothing was served by outshining the others unnecessarily. That was, in point of fact, why he'd stopped playing basketball, a game at which since Good Shepherd no one he'd played with could touch him.

"What do you think, Won?" O'Mally asked. "Who's going to get it?"

There were Vatican-watchers among the seminarians who had all the leading candidates—the
papabili
—doped out. That crowd lived for Church gossip and it was them Michael kidded when he said, "Walter Cronkite, Gene-o. I think Walter Cronkite."

One of the wags would have come back with a Cronkitish,
"Et vos ibi!"
—"And you are there!"—but O'Mally wasn't famous for his wit and his Latin was far too workmanlike for cracks. He said, as they rounded a corner into one of the long dark corridors off which each man had his room, "But it's got to be an Italian."

At first Maguire thought that O'Mally was responding to his remark about Cronkite, but in fact he'd ignored it. Michael couldn't imagine that Gene-o really wanted to go on about this. There was nothing new to be said on the subject. In recreation and in every class for days now the Consistory had been the only topic. If they all talked about it compulsively it was surely because the interregnum was implicitly threatening. Where was Holy Mother the Church without her Father figure? "I hope it's Triozzi," Maguire said. "At least he knows the U.S. I think a lot of those Italians think we're all Baptists over here."

"He doesn't have a chance. Too young."

"That's true. Only sixty-three."

They both laughed.

"When we're sixty-three," Maguire said, "It'll be nineteen ninety-five."

"Speak for yourself, old man."

"That's right, I keep forgetting. I'm a delayed vocation."

They stopped at Maguire's door. The pause there should have been the briefest possible, like one of them getting off a moving sidewalk. They were discouraged from talking at each other's doors, and absolutely forbidden, for the usual reason, to cross the threshold of another seminarian's room.

"Actually, Won," O'Mally said awkwardly, "I wanted to ask you something."

"What's that, Gene-o?" Michael waited. It could have been anything from switching a dishwashing assignment to help with his Canon Law notes.

"You probably know the team isn't doing that hot."

"Hey, the season's early, Gene-o. It'll pick up."

"It's a third over, Mike, and we haven't won a game. And we haven't played the toughest teams yet. Even the Capuchins beat us. Talk about mortification! Lord!" O'Mally fingered the row of cassock buttons that bisected him as neatly as a shrimp's vein.

Michael liked O'Mally. When he'd first come to TC, O'Mally had called on him somewhat formally to say welcome. It was a studied act of kindness—he repeated it for all the first-year men—but Michael appreciated it nonetheless. Later he understood about O'Mally's preoccupation with the basketball team and realized he was in fact scouting the new class, but that didn't seem to take from the gesture's sincerity. O'Mally was the kind who could talk with feeling and a pseudo-Freudian erudition about the importance of athletic competition as a sublimation of the sexual drive. Not that he would credit Freud, of course, who was still regarded as an enemy of religion, or for that matter, not that he would even know that the theory he was parroting originated with the notorious psychoanalyst.

"Losing is one thing," Michael sympathized, "but getting murdered is another. It's enough to make you want to quit, I'll bet."

"That's why I wanted to talk to you. We can't quit, of course. I mean, jeez, what a disgrace that would be. And imagine how that would look in my file. Farley would love it."

If seminarians were obsessed with Farley's opinion of them it was because no one got ordained without his recommendation. Students at TC were rarely fired, but the culture of seminary life required a constant insecurity. The rector and faculty nurtured it and students—remember, these were all men in their twenties—played into it. It was another of the ways in which the slave-master mentality of priests was inculcated. By the time a man makes bishop he has spent a lifetime cooperating in his own humiliation, and he can't understand, now that he's in a position to humiliate others, why they don't cooperate too.

"Anyway, quitting isn't what I wanted to talk to you about. I was hoping you might reconsider and come out." O'Mally leaned against the door jam.

Maguire snapped on his desklamp, then sat on the edge of his perfectly made bed. "I know it's not easy for you to ask me, Gene-o."

O'Mally smiled. "It's not so bad."

"I'm not the easiest guy in the world to approach."

"That's true."

"I'd really like to help you out, but..."

"Hey, it's not me I'm asking for, Mike. It's the other guys. Jeez, talk about demoralized. You know what I'm saying to you? Your brothers need you. I mean it's that simple. Your brothers need you. Not because you're so terrific yourself." He smiled winningly. "But God happens to have given you certain gifts. You're taller than any of us. You can shoot. And you're tough. And why did God give you those gifts? Not so you could hang out with the litniks in the sacristy. God's favorite people are the jocks, everybody knows that. And you're a ten-talent guy if there ever was one. But you're just burying your talents like the fellow in the gospel."

"'Well done, good and faithful servant,'" Maguire laughed. "'You have been faithful over a little. I will put you over much.'"

"Just put me over tomorrow when we play the Paulists." O'Mally's face darkened. "You're probably better than I am, Mike. I think you probably ought to be captain."

"Don't be ridiculous. The guys elected you captain. What's my being captain have to do with it?"

"I thought maybe you'd come out if you were captain."

Michael stared at O'Mally. "'You wicked and slothful servant'!" he said good-naturedly, disguising the insult he felt. Why didn't this son of a bitch take a hint? Michael simply didn't want to play. Think of it as an act of independence, one of the few he allowed himself in that world where conformity and dependence were the great virtues. It wasn't only the faculty you had to please, finally, but all your peers too. Everyone's opinion counted but your own. Here was O'Mally saying that in
his
opinion Maguire was a vain, arrogant showboat who could be bought off with the measly honor of being team captain.

"It would look good on your record if you were captain," O'Mally pressed.

"My record looks okay, Gene-o."

"Not if they think you're a loner, Mike. This is your chance to do something for the community."

How had such a small thing become so big? How could Michael's
not
playing basketball reflect badly on him? But O'Mally's thrust had struck home and Michael felt a moment's panic. Did they think him a loner? If his fellow seminarians so regarded him, wouldn't the faculty learn of it? Wouldn't Farley?

"Look, Gene-o, I'd appreciate it if you didn't press me on this." What Michael meant was, "Please don't tell on me." He knew that his act of autonomy was an offense, but there was little enough autonomy left to him and he had instinctively to protect it. How ironic that a last pathetic defense of his balls should have required the rejection of sport.

O'Mally shrugged and opened his hands. He was about to say a final word.

"Mister O'Mally!" a voice boomed down the corridor. It was Father Farley. "Get to your room!"

O'Mally flashed a stricken look, then disappeared.

 

The next morning Michael woke feeling a fresh insecurity about his status, and so he resolved that during theology class, at his first opportunity, he would dispel any possible impression that he considered himself apart from the others or, God forbid, better, by joining in the discussion with unusual energy. Class participation was one of the things you were judged on.

De Ecclesia,
Ecclesiology; the subject of the class was the Church itself, and the ongoing Consistory had led the professor to focus for some weeks on the concept of Apostolic Succession. On that notion—that the bishops and popes of the Church are linked in an unbroken line to Peter and the Apostles themselves—rested both the legitimacy of Catholic Orders and the Catholic claim to spiritual and juridical superiority to the Protestant denominations. For days the professor had been displaying the charts of the historical record, the conclusive if mechanical evidence that Catholic claims were true. It was like an endless relay race with each bishop a runner taking the baton—God's Grace—and handing it on to the next. No matter that, far from sleek, ascetic athletes, most of them were like the characters Orson Welles portrays, pampered, self-indulgent, dictatorial and vain. The idea of Apostolic Succession was as central to the Church as the idea of the Balance of Powers was to the U.S. Constitution. From it derived the basic Catholic doctrine that the authority of bishops and pope came not from the people, but through the Apostles from Christ Himself.