Prince of Peace (32 page)

"Shall we just go?" I asked.

"No. Durk, you're so good to me." When she looked up there were tears in her eyes. I must have been a blur to her. "I need you, Durk. Without you I'm nothing."

"Oh, that isn't so, Caro." I took her in my arms again, wanting to press into her what I thought. How wonderful you are! How beautiful! How good! But I saw too the other truth about her. She was bereft of any purpose in life, and of course she would be. She had been beloved of the Lord, and now she was His outcast. When her sisters, then Michael, had turned their faces from her, who was to say God had not? I knew her despair as if it was my own. She was nothing, nothing, nothing.

And therefore, ironically, at last, she was mine. To spare her the pain of her loss I'd have returned her at once to God or Michael. Having begun by wanting her, now I wanted only her happiness. My happiness was that neither God nor Michael seemed interested.

She wept quietly against my shoulder.

"I love you, Caro."

She shook her head. Yes? I know? Or could it have been, I love you too?

All at once her arms were around my neck and she was pressing her mouth against mine. I was opening her coat; she shrugged it off, barely pulling away; then I was undressing her while she kept coming at me with her mouth, as if finally the only pain she'd ever felt was hunger. I told myself it was hunger for me. Me, I said, she wants me! I nearly believed it. She was weeping all the while. Ungodly, frightening noises came from her. She pressed her fingernails into my neck, hurting me, and I had her by the hair, by the ears, by the bones in her face. I kept saying, "I love you, Caro," but she was the one who had us locked together. She was the one whose longing peaked first, who would not be denied. By the time we'd moved to my bed, naked, and had crashed down onto it, it was impossible to say who was taking whom. I knew that everything she had for a man who was not Michael was there for me. He was in my brain, whether in hers or not, but that didn't stop me from devouring her. Figments were nothing to me. Not even her body was a dream; it was the ultimate physical expression, those clasping legs, those curving breasts, the smell of perspiration, of crotch. And my body had never been so responsive, so alive to every sensation. We were weightless with each other.

I received what she could give gratefully. Her gift changed my life. Please don't think it pathetic of me, but because Carolyn found it possible to settle for who I was, I also could. If she had rejected me then I would never have accepted myself. So there's the great irony: because I knew she loved Michael more, that she loved me at all seemed miraculous. It was like
redemption
to me. I was the Earth after Copernicus, not wounded that I wasn't the center of the universe, but so awed by what that genius had revealed that I was glad to have a corner of the universe for my own. But metaphors fail me utterly. Copernicus indeed! I am simply saying that what peace with myself and what pride in myself I have ever known came from Carolyn that merry night.

I was for her the other thing, the lover absolute. It is a rare thing to act without reservation, without pretense; that was my virginity. Ineptitude, yes. Our timing was off, but who was clocking? There was awkwardness, but no mirror in the mind, no detachment, no dream of someone else. It was a simple, heartfelt cleaving. I felt the special weight it was to be initiating her, and sensed hovering beyond the ghost of Michael that other, holy ghost, her first chosen spouse, the Lord. But even His shadow seemed benign.

She embraced me—was this
my
suspension of disbelief?—as if I was quite enough for her.

 

Naturally, for a range of reasons, we felt somewhat awkward at Michael's ordination a few months later. As it happened, his ordination took place not long after we had become engaged. Carolyn, who had had no communication whatsoever with him and hadn't been invited, did not want to go. I insisted. I knew that I could not compete with a memory or a dream, whether hers of Michael or Michael's of her. My friendship and my love depended on their adjustment to what was real, and that would never be more apparent than at his ordination. But at the last minute Carolyn said she simply could not face it. She wasn't coming. We quarreled. It was a flashpoint, and she understood that if she did not come with me, then our relationship was at an end as well. It was the moment of her choice. The misery in her face made me think of Father Zossima's line—you understand by now that I take refuge in profane quotations the very way Michael did in sacred ones, and Dostoevsky remains a favorite—"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." Carolyn was looking up at me from the edge of my bed and as she said finally, "You're right," I was aware of her handing herself over to me in a way she hadn't yet. It was as if she had curled herself into a small wad and held it up between her fingers. I bent to her and put my hand under her head with a tentativeness that made my hand tremble, and I kissed her. She pulled me down onto the bed, on top of her, and with an abandon she had yet to demonstrate and I had scarcely suspected she was capable of, as if her acquiescence released all sexual restraint at last, she made love to me.

And made us late. I was acutely aware, not smugly so, that even while Michael, hands folded inside Spellman's, made his vow, my sperm was moistening the fold between Carolyn's legs.

At the end of the ceremony each of the newly ordained priests went to a section of the main communion rail or to a side altar to bestow on his family and friends his first priestly blessing. Carolyn and I approached with awe for what had just happened to our friend, but also with a more mundane fear that our appearance together at this moment would undermine each of us. As the line moved slowly forward I watched Michael raise his arms and eyes to heaven, smoothly and solemnly as if he'd always done it, and then cut the air in a cross and press his now consecrated hands onto the bent head of his mother. It moved me nearly to tears to see her. Michael took her by the elbow then and helped her up, and when he embraced her she almost disappeared in the wrap of his golden chasuble.

By the time Carolyn and I presented ourselves at the altar rail and knelt before him, he had blessed several dozen people. I couldn't help but grin up at him, and as he bent toward me with impressive solemnity I was afraid he would think me irreverent. But at the last moment he winked and my anxiety disappeared. Hell, after all that tossing and turning, it was Michael! My oldest friend, my friend for life! Ontological change or not this was still the man I'd grown up with. The distance between us and even the awkwardness I felt about Carolyn evaporated. No woman, no Church, no God, no meaningless observances or penances or humiliations were going to wreck our friendship.

Even my argument with his piety disappeared for the moment. In the case of Carolyn I had been the beneficiary of his selfdenial, but otherwise I'd been depressed to watch the transformation of my strong-willed, active friend into a dependent, necessarily passive cleric. I thought the alleluiahs with which the Church propagated such abnegation—"I am a worm" was how the great Thomas a Kempis put it, "and no man"—was so much shit. But all at once I saw the thing differently. Now that he was a priest, perhaps I saw the other side of that self-surrender. Maybe it wasn't cowardice. Perhaps it wasn't mere masochism. Maybe that ancient impulse of religious men and women—"abandonment"—did express some kind of wisdom. Maybe even a sophist punk like me could understand it.

As I tell you this story now, looking back on that moment from a vantage two decades later, it is obvious to both of us that my suspicion of "holy obedience"—the ecclesial version of "wholly owned"—is intact. Still, even now, remembering how moved I was in that first encounter with him as a priest, I admit that something else was at work. Something else was in him. Hadn't it been superficial of me to dismiss Michael's experience, his choice? Wasn't it possible to see his self-surrender not as an act of feminine piety, but as a bold image of what we all do every day—this blind handing over of ourselves to the blank future? What if the cardinal
was
an authentic sign of God's presence, a proclamation exactly that God draws near to us in what is ordinary? What if Michael's belief in the Church, in other words, was true?

"Why do priests carry chocolate pudding in their wallets?" we Village anticlericals used to ask. "For identification. Har. Har. Har."

Why then was I weeping?

Michael loomed over me like an angel. He seemed a man of tremendous virtue and strength, and if I could have, I'd have put my hands in his and sworn fealty, not to God, to him. But with great sweep and priestly panache, he deflected my mind back to God, away from him. It was what he would always do to me.
"Benedicat Deus omnipotenti
..." And with his large athlete's hands he pressed down on the crown of my head, pressed so hard I imagined him praying like some fundy, "Believe, Durk! Believe!"

It had been six years since I'd discarded the faith and now, to put it simply, I took it back. Hell, even Wallace Stevens, the most eloquent agnostic of all—he wanted poetry to take the place of the God he couldn't believe in—became a Catholic on his deathbed. So did I have to wait until I was dying?

Oh, sure, you say, how they soften after college, once they have a job, when they fall in love and start thinking family. Can't send the kids to Sunday school if you don't believe in Sunday.

Maybe that's all I was doing, ending my adolescent apostate phase on schedule. But at that moment, with Michael pressing on my head, it seemed to me that God Himself—the Heavenly Condor—had swooped down, talons flashing, to seize me by the hair. I "had trod, had trod ... bleared, smeared with toil." Not only that, "I had fled Him down the nights and down the days." But in Michael He had followed me. He was my "ransom, my rescue, my first, fast, last friend." Christ. Jesus Christ. He came back to me.

You see, what Michael did for me that day, pressing down, was to bring me back to myself. I was born like this. I am Catholic like I am freckled, like I am smart, like I am, under all this flippancy, afraid. Michael revealed to me how much I wanted to believe, and he reminded me that wanting belief is having it. That is the chief way in which belief differs from sex.

I felt defenseless. I wanted to tell Michael that I loved him. But my affection was swamped by tidal waves of guilt and remorse. How unworthy I was of this man, of his friendship, of his blessing. How unworthy I was of God. Those were the feelings I had. I wouldn't know how true they were until years later. I seized Michael's arm and like a self-loathing peasant—this gesture of subservience had always disgusted me, but it was the perfect primordial act—I pressed my mouth to his hand and kissed it.

If Carolyn's presence next to me upset him I did not see it. I was too ambushed by my own emotion—by my experience, for this is what it was, of conversion—to notice anything of their encounter, but when I looked at her as we both stood to leave the rail, I saw the black streaks of mascara beneath her eyes. She looked like she'd been beaten.

 

The reception for the
ordinandi
in the Cathedral Hall was jammed. Long tables were spread with sweet rolls and finger sandwiches. Hatted ladies were dispensing coffee from huge aluminum urns. The families of the new priests were crowding them. Flashbulbs, forbidden in the cathedral itself, were popping everywhere.

Priests' mothers were already laying claim to the linen bands in which their sons' hands had been wrapped during the anointing. It was the privilege of the mothers of priests to be buried with their own hands wrapped in the strip of white cloth that would still, years later, be stained with the sacred oil.

On smaller tables were displayed the priests' new chalices and patens which the laity could ogle but not touch. Also on those tables were tidy stacks of holy cards commemorating each man's elevation to the sacred state. I took one of Michael's. On one side was a Daliesque picture of Saint Paul, kneeling with a sword, looking up to heaven. For a holy card it was a manly pose, a dismounted warrior after all, exactly what I'd have expected from Michael. On the reverse side was a line of Paul's, a selection that frankly surprised me. "In my own flesh I fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church." And beneath that verse were the words, "Reverend Michael Maguire, Ordained a Priest, May 22, 1961. Please Pray For Me."

I handed it to Carolyn and despite myself said, "I hadn't realized anything was lacking in Christ's suffering." Carolyn read the card and gave it back to me, apparently uninterested in what Reverend Michael did in his own flesh. Even in the flush of my "conversion" I thought the quotation smacked somewhat of smugness and self-pity, but I saved the card. Years later I would come across it in my Bible and see that it expressed perfectly what he'd done.

As we moved through the crowd, Carolyn clung to my arm as if the scene in the becolumned hall was foreign to her. She was afraid she would see someone she knew, someone from the Sisters of Charity. She was afraid those mothers of priests would point at her and snarl, "She used to be a nun." She didn't look it. She wore a trim tan linen suit with a bright blue silk blouse open at her throat. Her blond hair with which she'd lashed me that morning—she would never wear it short again—was in a perfect pageboy, and she wore a pillbox hat as becomingly as Mrs. Kennedy did. She had repaired her makeup and now held herself, despite the nervousness I could sense, with the poise of a movie star. Beautiful women have a right to feel ill at ease in the basements of cathedrals.

When Michael finally entered, his mother was on his arm. Her arthritis made it impossible for her to walk without help. He saw us, left his mother with his aunts and hurried across the large room. If space and decorum had permitted it, he'd have run. He arrived with his arms open and an expression of happiness I'd never seen in him before. He embraced us both, singly and with great feeling.