Prince of Peace (23 page)

Sister Rita bristled somewhat. "Puerto Ricans aren't immigrants, are they? I mean of course they're American citizens, as you know. And many of them feel they have the right to maintain their Spanish heritage. And that enriches us as well, don't you think?"

"Yes, it does." He felt chastened but also chastised, and he had to stifle an old resentment.

"Some people feel that Puerto Ricans aren't quite as worthy of their attention as the Irish are."

"'Some people' wouldn't by any chance be Irish, would they?"

Sister Rita laughed. "Father Mahon says you might be available to work with us."

"I'm looking forward to it."

The nun looked at him directly and said in a frank, unapologetic way, "We could use a man around here."

"I'm only here for the summer, Sister, and I assume the school year ends soon."

"Now is when we can really use you. This summer we're trying something new. We're going to have programs in the school that we hope will involve not just the students but their families as well. We'd like the school to be a real center of the community here. This neighborhood is full of life. We want to celebrate it. We want to bring it out into the open. The school gives us our entrée. The people cherish it. We want to help them cherish themselves. We could use your help if you're not busy elsewhere in the parish." She smiled; where else was there?

Michael felt like he'd walked out of a gloomy, unfriendly woods into a clearing that was splashed with sunlight, littered with flowers. "I'd very much like to be part of that, Sister, in any way I can. I'm at the hospital two mornings a week, but that's all."

"Good. I'll talk to the monsignor about it. Come into my office. I'll call him."

And just like that she did. Michael sat in a straight-backed chair opposite her desk. It was the chair, he realized, for mulish pupils. A saccharine portrait of the Sacred Heart hung on the wall behind her. Her approach to Monsignor Ellis was direct; she asked to have the deacon assigned to the school's Summer Outreach program, and she winked at Michael while listening to the pastor's response.

"Yes, Monsignor, we'll keep him busy, I promise you."

Her face changed and she listened again. Obviously the pastor had something else on his mind. Michael guessed that he was telling her about his meeting at the chancery. After a moment she said, "All right. I'm sorry. I'll talk to Sister Laurice about it. Thank you, Monsignor." When she hung up she looked at Michael and shook her head sadly. "He says the altar boys don't fold the finger towel properly. 'They just flop it in the dish,' he says."

"He didn't mention the Lincoln Tunnel ramp?"

Sister Rita reacted carefully, with a hint of the devious that suggested how the nuns and priests distrusted each other. "No, he didn't. Why should he have?"

"Well, it was in the paper this morning."

"I know."

"I would expect you two to be talking about it."

Sister Rita nodded. "Anyone would."

"But you don't?"

"The Lincoln Tunnel ramps have been in the works for months. Monsignor Ellis has insisted it would come to nothing. He refused to consider the possibility that they would actually run that traffic by our school. We decided we had to proceed without him."

"To?"

"To protect the children. We're going to take it to the parents. To the neighborhood."

Michael smiled. "The Summer Outreach program."

"That's right. It's called 'building community.'"

"It's called 'community organizing.'"

Sister Rita shrugged. "Public opinion; Robert Moses always needs to have public opinion on his side. That's how he operates. But he won't have it this time. Not when 'the good sisters' get through with him. We're going to get the ramp moved. It's our summer project, and you've just been assigned to it."

"Great!" Michael said, and he let his pleasure show.

"You haven't met my assistant principal."

"No."

Sister Rita looked at her watch. "She'll be back in twenty minutes. You should meet her. It's her show. Can you wait?" "Sure," he said. "You're the boss."

Michael waited in the reception area outside the principal's office. Half an hour later a tall, slim nun breezed down the hallway. When she saw Michael she smiled at him but kept going. He stood and said awkwardly, "Hi."

She stopped. "Are you the new deacon?"

"Right. Michael Maguire." He put his hand out.

"I'm Sister Anne Edward." She had a striking aquiline nose and lively blue eyes, one of those nuns whose gift of presence was enhanced by the habit and whose face was made to seem radiant by the dark frame of the abstracting religious headgear. Michael guessed that she was younger than he was. When she took his hand he was struck by the force of her grip—it seemed unfeminine to him—and in some way he did not approve of in himself, he was put off by the forthright manner in which she returned his curious stare.

"I was just going in to see Sister Rita. I think she's waiting for me." She took a half-step toward the door, but paused like a girl on a porch who wasn't ready to say goodnight.

"I know. She wanted me to meet you."

"Oh." She smiled and blushed; you were waiting for me?

Michael gestured. "So lead on. I think she's waiting for both of us."

They went into Sister Rita's office. Even before the principal greeted her, Anne Edward said, "They wouldn't give them to me. They said the specific plans are not public documents. They were utterly condescending to me."

"What plans?" Michael asked. He hadn't noticed how agitated she was.

But now Sister Anne waited for the principal to nod before replying, "The tunnel ramp blueprints. We wanted to see exactly where on Forty-third Street the access will go."

Sister Rita said, "We can't start making an issue of it until we can show exactly what our problem is. We have to convict the planners with their own testimony. We need the documents. They've been very clever in keeping all the public talk vague and the diagrams sketchy, but we know they have detailed plans, and there have to be alternative plans too."

"Have you considered what the alternatives might be?" Michael asked.

"Forty-first Street," Sister Anne said. "They have to have considered it. They have to have drawn it up. It's what we'll be pushing for. That's why we need that plan too."

Michael realized it had never occurred to her that the school could go altogether; it hadn't occurred to either of them. He nearly blurted it—"The school is gone!" Father Mahon had said—but he checked himself instinctively. Already an incipient clerical loyalty inhibited him, despite his instinct that the initiative for the real welfare of the parish had fallen to these women. "Who has access to the blueprints?" he asked.

"Just officials," Sister Anne replied. "The Pharisees and the Scribes. Aside from Triborough, only the City Construction Coordinator, who also happens to be a fellow named Moses, the Planning Commission, chaired by a fellow named Moses, and the Traffic Bureau."

"The Police Traffic Bureau?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's not run by Moses."

Sister Anne studied him. Her hand came lightly up to her lips and remained so for several moments. Her expression was both frankly interested and perfectly natural. Another woman, looking at a man like that, would have been thought perhaps somewhat overly personal. But Sister Anne Edward was clearly more interested in the subject under discussion than she was in this new young clergyman.

Michael felt himself begin to blush. He couldn't explain to her what he was thinking, and she would conclude that he was stupid. A mulish pupil after all. But he had just decided to find out before this went any farther just exactly what the threat to Holy Cross School was.

 

At police headquarters everyone nodded at Michael, and some officers even touched their hats. The shows of deference made him all the more self-conscious. He never for a moment was unaware of his Roman collar, and he felt vaguely guilty, as if despite his deaconate he was not truly eligible yet to wear it. The laity did not know about the distinctions of orders, major and minor, porter, acolyte, exorcist, subdeacon, deacon, priest, bishop. Were there stages of virginity? To the people you were a priest or you weren't. If you were, you wore a Roman collar, heard confessions, said the breviary, had Sunday dinner with your mother and never paid for tickets—concert, baseball or traffic.

On the sixth floor was the office of the Deputy Commissioner for Operations. Michael presented himself to the receptionist.

"Hello, Father,." she said, a middle-aged woman with her dull hair in a bun. "What can I do for you?"

"I'd like to see Deputy Commissioner Kerr, if he's in."

She consulted the diary. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No, I'm sorry."

She stood up. "Whom shall I say...?"

"Just say Joe Maguire's son Mike is here."

She studied him. "Father Maguire?"

He shook his head. "No, please. Just say Joe Maguire's son."

"Mike?" She pursed her lips disapprovingly, then disappeared into the adjoining office.

Michael focused on the oversized seal of the New York City Police Department that hung on the wall behind her desk. Its design—a pair of warriors flanking a shield below an eagle—was familiar to Michael because it dominated the Medal of Honor certificate displayed since his childhood in the living room of Cooper Street. Whenever Michael thought of his father, it wasn't the face of a man he conjured, but a place—the treeless hill in the Queens cemetery, bare except for the crowded rows of tombstones, from which one looked across the East River at the crowded rows of skyscrapers. As a boy, during those sad, pensive visits, it had been easy for him to think of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings as giant tombstones. What had been hard was having any specific sense at all of who his hero-father had been.

"Mike?" the voice called from the office, and then Ray Kerr, the deputy commissioner, who as a young cop was Joe Maguire's partner, came through the door. "My God, Mike!" Deputy Commissioner Kerr was so fixed on Michael as he approached him, hand extended, that the Roman collar didn't register. "Good to see you, Mike!" After shaking hands heartily, the two men stood back and looked at each other. The policeman's white shirt was resplendent at the shoulders with gold braid. They laughed at their costumes, but then Kerr said with alarm, "Hey, you're not ordained already?"

"I'm just a deacon, don't worry. Would I get ordained without you there? It's next year."

The commissioner flicked Michael's collar. "Well, you look wonderful. Christ, you must break the heart of every dame in New York City.".

Michael smiled. "I would if they had hearts."

The receptionist had resumed her place at her desk.

"Right, Marie?" Kerr said, "Don't the best-looking guys always go in the priesthood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Come on in, Mike." They went into the deputy commissioner's office and sat in studded leather chairs. Marie brought coffee. Ray Kerr asked about Michael's mother and took obvious pleasure in hearing Michael describe her. She couldn't have been better, particularly now that Michael was in the city again. The commissioner told Michael about his own children; his daughter was in law school, but his son had quit high school to work in a garage. He shook his head, a bare hint of the disappointment he felt, then fell silent.

After a moment, Michael said, "Ray, I have a favor to ask."

"You name it, Mike. I'd paint the stripe on Fifth Avenue green for you."

 

Michael did not open the tube that held the blueprints until he was alone in his room at Holy Cross. The sun had begun its decline over New Jersey and the priests had already gathered in the rectory dining room for the evening meal, but he spread out on his bed the plans entitled "Manhattan Entrance Plaza, Expansion." It took him some moments to orient himself, and the first several sheets, while indicating other buildings on Forty-third Street, did not refer to the school. The width of the ramp entering Forty-third, however, was indicated as ninety feet, while the width of the street itself was indicated elsewhere as sixty. Thirty feet were going to have to come from somewhere. He found a sheet marked "Demolition," on which a wedge-shaped blue shadow angling intown from Forty-third Street and Tenth Avenue was superimposed on the plots of existing buildings. Holy Cross School clearly fell within it.

It was not as if he went down to dinner intending to keep it secret, but the mood at the dining room table derailed him. Monsignor Ellis had just rebuked either Father Rice or Father Keegan. Both men were flushed, bent over their food. Father Keegan, a frail priest of about fifty, had seemed timid before, but he was cowed now. Father Mahon smiled at Michael obliviously, his face still creased from sleep. Michael's entrance altered the silence, without ending it. The priests ate their soup daintily, but the sounds of spoons against dishes dominated. When Michael had taken his place and spread his napkin in his lap, the monsignor said coldly, "Nice of you to join us."

"I'm sorry," Michael said, automatically. Once he would have hated himself for his subservience, but by now it was ingrained. No one spoke. Rose served grossly overcooked lamb, and they went to work on that. It was going to be another fifteen-minute meal. Michael knew that it wasn't his place to speak, but he simply could not tolerate either the silence or the suspense.

"Monsignor Ellis," he began, "How'd it go this morning?"

It seemed to Michael that the three curates froze for an instant.

Monsignor Ellis, however, did not miss a beat. "Darn well!" he said. "Darn well!"

"How so?"

The pastor leaned toward Michael and gestured with his fork. "The cardinal gave me his personal assurance that there was no cause for concern. He's not going to let anything befall the children of Holy Cross." He resumed eating.

Michael looked quickly across at Father Mahon, but he was intent upon the bread he was spreading with oleo. After a moment, Michael asked, "So the ramp will be rerouted?"

Monsignor Ellis looked sharply at him. "Isn't that what I just said?"