Prince of Peace (30 page)

Aside from Cardinal Spellman's famous sermon condemning—and therefore launching—the movie
Baby Doll,
and the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, what had ever happened of more than parochial interest at Saint Patrick's? Ironically, of course, Michael was ordained in its sanctuary, but that would be cited by the chancellor as the very reason his funeral could not happen there.

As the grotesque meaning of the archbishop's statement became fully apparent I involuntarily but graphically conjured an image of him, at once ingratiating and hostile: "The archdiocese regrets, the cardinal might wish otherwise, but the new pope, you see, has reinstated the traditional emphasis on the absolute and permanent character of priestly vows. After a regrettable period of laxity in the wake of the Vatican Council, the Church no longer contradicts herself in these matters." He smiled sadly, in my fantasy, shrugged, turned his hands out. What could one do?

And I was thinking, yes, the new pope. Not the Hamlet Paul VI was, but Shakespeare's Brutus, slayer of brothers. The new pope ran the Church the way the Party wanted to run Poland. Michael Maguire was for a time the Lech Walesa of American Catholicism, and he was not forgiven. It was my mistake, of course, to think he might have been.

So the taxi took us to Saint John the Divine. As we paid the cabbie and got out, the heat blasted us. It was as hot as the desert.

I stood looking up at the mammoth dark structure with its rose window, the tracery dominating the glass in daylight, its portal gargoyles leering down at me, its tympanum saints indifferent, and the carved stonework ribs of the entrance arches soaring to their crowns. The cathedral was too large, as if a mere human person was unworthy to enter alone. We should have gone in as members of a throng. But I reminded myself:
This
cathedral has welcomed outcasts.
This
cathedral has bent itself to Michael.

But I was immobile there before it.

It will be cooler inside, I told myself. The Gothic windows will be brilliantly illuminated by the fierce summer light. Saint John's was a perfect rendition of man's most magnificent expression, and, compared to it, all the box-forms of Manhattan's architecture, from the looming Behemoths downtown to the sterile dwellings across the avenue behind me seemed as impoverished as the thatchedroofed mud cottages in medieval villages, as if contemporary people too invested all their greatest treasure, skill and art, despite themselves, in the house of God.

Still, I did not want to go in there. Michael was laid out in some crypt chapel under the vaulting, tracery, clerestory, triforium, arcade; under buttresses, capitals, mullions, voussoirs, keystones and acres of leaded glass. A cruciform jewel.

But I knew Michael and knew then with a certainty infallible as the pope's that where he belonged that night was at the head of the aisle of even the most undistinguished Catholic church in New York. Good Shepherd, say, in Inwood, which I was sure he never ceased to love. "Durk!" I could hear him screaming at me. "Durk! Don't let them do this to me! Get me back where I belong!" And even in my imagination the panic in his voice was absolute.

In primitive religion the worst fate was to be a lost soul, a spirit improperly dispatched from the world and condemned therefore to an eternity of aimless wandering. And whose religion, when it comes to death, is not primitive? The new pope was right. My fury at him showed it.
These things do matter.
Scratch us and we are all primitives, desperate for the ancient rites done in the ancient way. The pope was only doing what he had to do to protect those rites. Michael Maguire was a priest forever, bound by vows he had renounced. Were we now to say his ordination in Saint Patrick's didn't matter? If that most solemn act of the Church did not matter, what did?

And who was I to judge the chancellor for pronouncing his anathemas? I had cut Michael off before the Church did. I had turned on him even more heartlessly. He had been bound by the implicit vow of our friendship and he had disregarded it. More than anyone he had known what Carolyn meant to me and he had been the only one who could have taken her and he had. Was I now to say his betrayal didn't matter? Hadn't Michael understood, as the chancellor put it, the consequences of his decisions?

What, that he should wander aimlessly forever? Could we mean it? Without the only blessing, the only forgiveness that he'd have wanted? Of course the Protestants could welcome him now, and the dean of the cathedral no doubt would asperge the coffin himself. But why not? Michael had not offended the Protestants. He had not betrayed them. To an entire generation he'd been a hero, the Prince of Peace. Only to the few of us who loved him most had he been the vilest enemy. I saw suddenly what I had in common with the cardinal. And also, since the Church had so resolutely condemned Michael, why Carolyn had needed me to come home. I was there, I understood finally, to pronounce the absolution that saves a soul from hell, and I knew, to my horror, that I could not do it.

 

Molly and I mounted the stairs and at the huge center portal—the lower of the pair of wrought-iron hinges was above the level of my eye—I found the ring handle that indicated which panel served as the quotidian door. But it didn't budge. I went to the side portal and tried its door, but it too was bolted. Only then did I recall that in the cities of America, God's house, even in the middle of the day, is locked from the inside.

Our path around the side of the cathedral took us through the garden which was elegantly laid out around a stunted steeple, a relic from some English town perhaps, which looked, when seen whimsically, like the topmost part of a church that was otherwise completely buried in the earth. An underground church, as it were. In fact the structure was an outdoor pulpit that hadn't been used in years, and I remembered being struck by its archaic beauty once before. I had been standing by it years ago when the agent of my destruction ambushed me.

"Molly!"

A boy of about eight, dressed nattily in a little blue blazer, had called her from a bench and was now running toward her. He was sobbing.

Molly dropped her bag and took a few steps toward him, and they embraced violently. He left the ground and for a long time she held him. I marveled at her strength, at the strength of her affection for the child, and I was filled with awe at that epiphany of her goodness. She was my daughter! And it ripped me anew that the degradation of my love for her mother had degraded in turn my fatherly love for her. Else would I have left? Else wouldn't I have fought Michael for at least my daughter's love? If I had been there she would never have taken his name. I was filled with regret, but also stern acknowledgment that opaque hardening is the only law that heartbreak knows.

When finally Molly turned to me with her arm around the boy's shoulder, I was in no way prepared for it when she said, "This is Eddie, my brother."

But I must have suspected it. Surely otherwise I'd have consciously entertained the possibility. Staring at the boy whose face, even wrecked with emotion, had the dark Irish charm peculiar to his father, I knew that I was looking at an extension—no, the consummation—of the adoration I'd seen in his parents' eyes that first day at the house in Dobbs Ferry. No wonder I hadn't wanted to contemplate this possibility. For the first time in many years I felt the full force of Carolyn and Michael's love for each other. It was glib of me to claim earlier that I had put my resentment behind me. Perhaps I could even have felt bitterness toward this child, but the intensity of his grief overcame me. Michael was his
father!
I knew what it was to feel bereft as he felt. And I knew what it was—though I had broken faith with this knowledge—to comfort a child who yearned for a father's touch. "The fathers of families..." Suddenly, I longed for Michael anew, to clap his back for what we had in common now, and quote Peguy: "...those great adventurers of the modern world."

"Eddie," I said, while he shyly avoided my gaze, "Are you named for your grandfather?"

The boy nodded and collapsed against Molly again, and I sensed that Carolyn's father had died at some point too. I looked at Molly with my question, and she flicked her eyes, yes.

When the boy pulled himself together I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but the words seemed cruelly glib, and I suddenly felt exhausted. Was I up to this? How many time zones had I crossed? I rolled down the sleeves of my shirt; that child was dressed the way I should have been. What was I doing there?

"Mommy's in the church." He indicated the doorway at the south transept. "I can't go in there because Daddy..."

Molly took him again. Without speaking we agreed that she would wait with him in the garden. He clung to her gratefully, and I crossed slowly to the stairs. At the threshold of the church I stopped. Inside the darkness beckoned, soothing and cool. I thought of the threshold stone of the ancient gate of Jerusalem, the one Jesus crossed. Then I entered the everlasting moment the cathedrals preserve for us.

It took some moments for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and at first all I could see were the brilliant blues and reds of the towering windows. There was not a sound in the vast church. As I moved to the center of the cruciform, my sight sharpened. Stairs to my right led into the sanctuary. The elaborately carved wooden stalls of the choir framed the space in which the high altar stood. Beams of sunlight filtered down upon it magically.

I did not presume to enter the sanctuary—lay brother, still—but crossed to the far aisle and followed it into the apse of the cathedral because I knew that in the classic plan the chapels are behind the choir in the alcoves formed by the easternmost buttresses. As I wound past the sanctuary and the altar and the bishop's throne, it wasn't Chartres I thought of but Saint Patrick's. For all their differences, those places inside were very much alike.

As I approached the chapels I instinctively slowed my pace, all at once conscious of the click of my sandals on the stone floor. I was aware of Carolyn's presence even before, as I passed a last column, she came into view. She was kneeling with her back to me before a subtly illuminated statue of the Virgin, and I froze. The sight of her, bent like that in prayer before the icon of Mary, that great sufferer, confounded me. An avalanche of emotion—love for her and infinite sympathy, grief for my friend, infinite loss—crashed down on me. I had no choice but to turn away and retrace my steps, back around the aisle to the choir. I could not breathe, and for an instant the dread phrase "Heart attack!" flashed before me. I slipped into a choir stall, a monk's stall, and collapsed, burying my head in my arms, weeping.

When I raised my eyes and beheld the sanctuary, it wasn't that moments had passed, but that years had fallen away.

 

Carolyn and I took places toward the rear of Saint Patrick's just as the great anthem of pipes and horns unleashed waves back and forth across the vault of the cathedral. The congregation rose to its feet and the flourish was followed by the grand processional antiphon, the ancient Gregorian
Ecce Sacerdos Magnus,
Behold the Great Priest! And the bobbing procession-cross flanked by candles led the long train of paired-up
ordinandi
vested in white albs with stoles slashing across their chests as deacons wear them, golden chasubles folded like large waiter's towels over their arms, into the body of the cathedral. The procession came nowhere near us but we were easily able to pick Michael out because he was the tallest deacon. He carried himself with a natural grace.

They wound through the nave and up the stairs into the sanctuary. Trailing them, between his chaplains, poking the floor with his crozier, was the diminutive figure of Francis Cardinal Spellman. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on him, and from where we stood, he seemed slightly ludicrous, that roly-poly cherub in miter and velvet slippers, like a newspaper cartoon of the time called "The Little King." It was the spring of 1961 and in fact Spellman's power was in decline. His worldwide influence had depended on his intimate relationship with the aristocratic Pius XII. He and the Peasant Pope, John XXIII, had not hit it off. John had raised Spellman's old rival, Cushing of Boston, to the College of Cardinals. As if that wasn't enough, the Kennedys had embraced Cushing too, and now after that winter's inaugural, the nation thought of the old coot from Boston as the preeminent American Catholic prelate. But here in New York, Spellman was still in command, and if New York was all that was left him, he would be more in command there than ever. Anyone who dismissed him, in other words, as a roly-poly cherub, made a big mistake. Spellman was the
Sacerdos Magnus,
and anyone who doubted it had only to watch this line of handsome, robust young men in their prime—men who'd have been the prizes of recruiters at firms all over Manhattan—kneel before him at his
cathedra
one by one to have their hands bound in linen cloth. In that consecration each made his obeisance in a ceremony derived from the feudal rite of fealty; obeisance not to God or to Jesus or to the Church, but to this man, to this—as the argot puts it with rare irony—Ordinary.

Spellman addressed his question in the Latin: "Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey me and my successors?" Michael like the others did not hesitate with his "I do." Years later he would openly break that vow and I would applaud him for it, thinking stupidly that he would keep his others. I would only wonder, not understanding yet how thoroughly that seminary meat grinder had chewed his ego up, what took him so long.

I remember the jolt with which he slammed his drink down on the table late one night. "Goddamnit, Durk, I
want
someone to obey! I
want
someone to respect! Authority is the basic principle of my life, and look what I've done to undermine it!" He had his finger on the irony of what he'd become. I said, cruelly perhaps, "You just want your daddy, Michael." He looked at me with shock in his face, as if he hadn't seen that elemental orphan's wish as a motivating force behind his vocation.