Prince of Peace (21 page)

"Any questions?" The professor blinked above his notes. He was an old man named Father James Ford, but because he'd always abbreviated his first name, "Jas.," and also, of course, because there was nothing modern about him, he'd been discreetly dubbed "Jazz" by seminarians years before.

Michael raised his hand and Father Ford nodded. "While there is no pope, Father, who can be said to hold the power of the Keys?"

"Why, the power rests with the whole Church."

"But then it reverts to the pope once he's elected?"

"Precisely."

"Thank you, Father."

Jazz blinked out at him.

Michael had hoped to get something going, but even he knew what a dustball his question had been.

"Anything else?" Jazz recognized another seminarian.

"In order to be in contact with the Apostles somebody has to be a member of the Church?"

"That's correct, although, as you know, the Holy Office distinguishes between
in re
membership and
in voto.
Who can tell me what this distinction means?"

No one moved.

Father Ford grimaced, as if their ignorance was a physical pain of his.

Michael raised his hand.
"In re
means 'in fact' and
in voto
means 'in desire.'"

Jazz nodded. "One can be incorporated as a member of the Church
in fact,
as we are, or one can belong to it
in desire,
as in the case of a man who wishes to act in accord with the will of God. Why is this distinction important, Mister Maguire?"

"Because it's how we get around the doctrine that there's no salvation outside the Church."

The class gasped at Michael's phrase "get around," and braced itself. Michael realized it was a slip. He'd answered, stupidly, with what he really thought. He tried to bury it by going on. "Father Feeney was condemned for concluding that those outside the Church are
ipso facto
damned. That has never been the Catholic position. The Catholic position is only that there is no salvation outside the Church. And we can affirm that because
in voto
everyone is, in potency at least, even atheists whose 'desire' may be implicit, a member of the Church."

"Even Luther?"

"Yes, I would say so."

"Well, you're wrong. Membership
in voto
is available only to those who have had no opportunity to know the truth. Luther was a heretic and apostate." Father Ford was angry. To him Luther wasn't an obscure figure from centuries before but an enemy who still threatened, the embodiment of rebellion. If he had been squashed the first time he'd used a cocky tone with his professor the Reformation would never have happened.

Michael said nothing.

"Do you understand now?"

"Yes, Father," Michael answered.

"And is understanding Church doctrine our purpose, Mister Maguire, or is our purpose 'getting around it'?"

"Understanding, Father."

"I expect you to remember that, young man."

"I will, Father." Michael felt sick. He continued to stare back at the professor, but not defiantly. He was afraid to lower his eyes for fear it would seem coy.

Father Ford snapped his notebook shut and stood. The class stood. They recited the Latin prayer and, then, once the priest left, burst into muted conversation, a release of tension.

Michael walked from the room without talking to anyone, but when he saw O'Mally ahead of him in the corridor he grabbed his arm. "Hey, Gene-o!"

O'Mally faced Michael. "Boy, Maguire, you got the hot-foot that time, didn't you?"

Michael made a face, a quick intake of breath through gritted teeth. "And I was just trying to play the damn game. Speaking of games...''He paused. He knew what he was doing. One way out from under the awful feeling of having been slapped down would be to do what this kid had asked. Michael wanted to belong. He had felt a new blast of the old
voto
—the desire to appease. Finally it came to that, and the walls around the last small part of himself that he had not surrendered just collapsed. He felt like a child asking a harsh playmate, "...Do you still want me for this afternoon?"

 

"Pick!" the Paulist guard cried and moved toward the top of the key, driving O'Mally into the other Paulist who'd set himself.

"Switch!" Michael called, sliding away from his own man, the pick, to cover the guard. The guard went up for a jump-shot and Michael went with him. When the guard released the ball, it was still arching slowly upward when Michael slapped it away.

"Shit!" the Paulist said, but the play moved quickly away from him as O'Mally led yet another TC fast break. Approaching the key he drew one of the two defenders and dropped a short pass to Maguire who was coming in right behind him. Maguire drove into the left slot, drawing the other defender, then fired a pass across to Tommy Coogan, the second TC guard, who was open for an easy lay-up.

"Beautiful! Way to go, Coogs!"

Coogan crossed to Maguire on their way upcourt. "Mister Wonderful," he sang, "that's you."

Michael grinned. With less than ten minutes to go they were leading 74—70. TC hadn't beaten the Paulists in four years. Michael had already scored twenty-four points, but his real value to the team seemed to be the way in which his concentration and his hustle—his discipline—communicated to his teammates. He had a rare
esprit
and they caught it. On the basketball court his natural grace, his instinctive willingness to take risks, asserted themselves. It was the opposite of the inhibitions he felt throughout the rest of his life. He was a man of action again. Why had he denied himself this pleasure? So as not to show the others up? To protect a little autonomy for himself? Or had he refused to play because he
was
a loner? No, not that. Suddenly he knew. He had denied himself this pleasure—driving, shooting, passing, scoring—because it
was
pleasure.

O'Mally had scored nineteen points, a personal high. Even if they couldn't quite hang on to win, although at last he believed they were going to, this was already the happiest day of his life. During his two years at Notre Dame, the truth was he'd been a substitute and he'd never really experienced until now the true ecstasy of the game. All he'd wanted was a ringer to keep the score respectable. It never occurred to him that what he'd get was everybody at his best together.

The Paulist forward took a bad shot. None of his teammates was in position for the rebound and Michael snagged it easily. He passed off to O'Mally for the run upcourt.

O'Mally's heart was in his throat. This would make it six, a lead of six!

But something happened.

The carillon in the Knights of Columbus bell tower at the shrine exploded with a loud peal of bells, and in quick succession bells began to ring loudly from the crenellated tower of the adjacent Paulist house and then from the Redemptorists' beyond the playing field and from TC across the wooded ravine behind the basketball court. The bells in the tower at the CU faculty residence began ringing too.

The players drifted. O'Mally started to throw a pass at Coogan, but Coogan wasn't paying attention. He was looking goofily up at the sky as if for a show of angels. Bells were coming from Trinity College across Fourth Street.

The referee blew his whistle; time out.

They all stood there listening as the bells from religious houses all over Brookland began to sound. It was the most extraordinary thing.

"Habemus Papam!"
one of the Paulists cried. "We have a pope!"

And with that, the Paulists and the TC guys filed off the basketball court, some without picking up their sweatshirts. They were all dressed alike in tan workpants or old black cotton trousers and T-shirts. They didn't wear shorts. They crossed the driveway en masse and funneled quickly into the common room of the Paulist House. As a religious order, the Paulists took the vow of poverty, which meant that they had a new, expensive, large-screen television mounted nicely where everyone could see it. On the screen was a photograph of Saint Peter's Basilica and a correspondent on radio hookup was describing through static the white smoke that even then was pouring from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel. He said the cardinals burned their ballots without wet straw and that's why the smoke was white.

A few moments later the correspondent said that the first unconfirmed report was that the new pope was named Roncalli. Walter Cronkite came on then and awkwardly explained that Roncalli had not been mentioned as a possible pope. For the moment they knew nothing about him, not his first name, the see of which he was Ordinary, his age or the stripe of his politics. Nor did they have a photograph. The newsman flashed that twinkle of his, though, and said it was safe to assume that Roncalli was Italian.

The seminarians didn't laugh. A somber crowd, they pressed forward, listening, waiting to glimpse their future.

Michael looked out the window. O'Mally was still standing on the basketball court with the ball between his forearm and his hip, as if he expected the game to resume. "That guy," he thought, "doesn't have his priorities straight."

Later, by the time he told me this story, by the time he'd finally thrown off the pall of priestly subservience, long after the famous fresh air that blew into the Church with the election of John XXIII had grown stale, and after Eisenhower's Lebanon had become Johnson's Vietnam and Civil Rights had become Benign Neglect and birth control had become abortion and Lennon had become Lenin and the world had learned that at Auschwitz the smoke from the ovens was white because the victims' bones lacked fat enough to blacken it, Maguire had decided that O'Mally was the only guy of all who got it right that day.

T
HE
breakfast dishes hopped when the monsignor slammed his hand down on the table. "The son of a bitch!" he said.

"Who?" Father Rice asked mildly without looking up from the
Times.

"Moses! The son of a bitch!"

Father Rice raised his head and shook it once at Michael. "He doesn't mean the prophet."

Michael checked himself; Moses wasn't a prophet, but it wasn't a deacon's place to correct a priest, not even a vain, pompous one like Henry Rice.

The monsignor muttered under his breath while he read the article to its conclusion. Then he looked up at the table. Father Rice and Michael were the only ones left. Father Keegan was in the church already for the eight o'clock Mass, and Father Mahon was in the common room where he could have his morning drink in peace. Since Father Rice remained buried in his newspaper, Monsignor Ellis addressed himself to the new deacon. "He is one son of a bitch."

"Robert Moses?"

"He says this neighborhood is blighted. Blighted!"

Michael watched the pastor as he began to read the news story again. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority planned to demolish certain buildings on the West Side—"warehouses and dilapidated dock facilities"—to expand the access ramps for Lincoln Tunnel, an expansion made necessary by the in-town congestion resulting from the completion two years before of the third Lincoln Tunnel tube. The accompanying diagram indicated that one ramp would empty onto Forty-third Street, right in front of the parish school. Michael had only arrived at Holy Cross from Washington two days before, having been freshly ordained to the deaconate, which was, in effect, a kind of internship, the last phase of training before ordination to the priesthood. Michael would be working in the parish all summer and looked forward to his first experiences of pastoral ministry. But so far the talk had been of nothing but Moses's plan and the threat it posed to the safety of the schoolchildren. The old priest trembled visibly as he read. Michael looked in vain for signs of the bright, good-humored man he must have been in his prime. The first thing anyone ever said about Monsignor Ellis was that he had won the United States Amateur Golf Tournament in 1911, the year he entered the seminary. This was 1960; he was seventy years old, and his arthritis had kept him off the golf course for years.

He looked up again at last, fixing his stare in Michael's direction, but his eyes remained unfocused. "He won't get away with it, the goddamn child-hating Jew."

Neither Father Rice nor Michael commented.

Monsignor Ellis pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. His body creaked. "I'm going downtown."

In the argot of the New York clergy "downtown" meant the Chancery Office at Fiftieth Street right behind Saint Patrick's, and even priests for whom the trek was uptown referred to it that way. Holy Cross Church was on Forty-second Street at Ninth Avenue. The school was on Forty-third.

"The cardinal won't let this happen."

At the dining room door the pastor stopped and looked at Michael again. Now he did see him. "What'd you say your name was?"

"Maguire, Monsignor. Michael Maguire."

"What do I have you doing?"

"The hospital, Monsignor. I'm taking Communion to the hospital."

Monsignor Ellis nodded.

"And Father Mahon's going to take me over to the school this morning. He thought I could help the sisters get the children ready for the May Devotions."

"He would!" Monsignor Ellis said bitterly, and he left.

After a moment Michael said to Father Rice, "What did he mean by that?"

The priest turned the page of his newspaper, foppishly shooting a French cuff free of the black sleeve of his sharkskin clerical suit. He eyed the day's stock listings while he said, "The kiddies are the only ones left who can stomach Father Mahon's breath. They think he's funny. The nuns probably tell each other the poor dear's had a stroke. The school is the one parish duty, aside from the early Mass, that Monsignor hasn't had to take away from him. Of course, Father Mahon considers himself more overworked than ever. Hence his interest in you."

Rose came in from the kitchen and began to clear the dishes. She was even older than Monsignor Ellis; she limped just the way he did, as if her knee was arthritic too, though it wasn't. She'd been the housekeeper at Holy Cross almost as long as he'd been the pastor. Whenever he left the table she cleared it immediately, whether the curates were finished eating or not.