Prince of Peace (59 page)

The cocktail lounge was dark. Most of the tables were taken by reporters, tech-reps, embassy people, French entrepreneurs and well-to-do Vietnamese. As they took places at a small table, Michael realized that Inge Holz, even gaunt and weary, was more beautiful than any woman there. He felt ill at ease suddenly, as if he had no right to be in such a place with her.

They ordered whiskey and waited for it to be served.

Michael said softly, "I was out of line. I shouldn't have said that. I know from nothing."

"You know more than I think." She shrugged. "We have been..." She didn't finish the sentence. What was she going to say? Lovers? Discreet? Fools?

"I know how hard it is," he said, "to love someone impossibly." His thoughts flew to Carolyn.

Her eyes were lit with feeling when she said in a voice he could barely hear, "It is not impossible."

"Of course it is."

"Then that is because of the war."

"No, the war is what has enabled you to find each other."

After a long moment her eyes went to his and she asked, "Have you loved a woman?"

"Yes," he replied simply.

She looked away from him, tears spilling over her cheeks. She said, "For long I have wanted to talk to someone. I love him."

"I know."

"Is that wrong? Is that sinful?"

Michael knew what he'd been trained to answer, what Fitzmaurice, Spellman and even O'Shea would have answered. An absolute answer, arrived at absolutely, without hesitation. And he knew what the circumstances of his own decision to be a priest and his determination to remain one required him to answer too. The same thing.

Wrong? Sinful? Those words he applied at last to the war. But the war—ah, there was a moral dilemma, conundrum, tragic problem! Michael knew that the chaplains and bishops, having considered the war from across an infinite stretch of the ambiguous, had disqualified themselves from passing judgment because military matters were not in the area of their competence. But was love?

"You love a man," he said. "How can that be anything in God's eyes but glorious?"

"M
Y
darling Carolyn," I said, and at last she looked at me.

"Oh, Durk, I'm dying."

"But not today." I touched her cheek. Even in the fickle light of the baptistry I saw how tan she was, how beautiful. Her face was distorted, though, with feeling. We had been holding each other for a long time. The Vietnamese girl had disappeared from the shadows, and I wondered, Was she there at all? Had I invented her? "Was that your daughter?"

She looked where I was looking, at no one, but she nodded. "Yes, Thuy Thien."

"She is lovely."

"She is heartbroken." Carolyn fell against me once more. "So am I, oh, so am I."

My eye drifted to the coffin, stark and brutal box. Beyond it in the stone wall were bronze plaques, and I realized with a shudder that they marked niches for cineary urns. That was the columbarium, the vault of the dead, and it seemed suddenly so foreign, so unnatural, so Protestant—until the Renewal, Catholics were forbidden cremation—that I wondered again at Michael's being there. But was he really? I looked at the coffin once more. It holds him, I told myself, but didn't believe it. Still, I wanted to get away. Michael Maguire had been more alive than anyone I knew. If he could die, then who or what couldn't? Could the very earth live? Could God? It was a surprise to learn that for all my years, for all my books, for my eternity in the tomb of the monastery, I did not believe in death. I had been assuming like a twelve-year-old that we and the ones we love live forever. I squeezed my eyes against the truth, touched my face to Carolyn's hair. I inhaled her. "Should we go outside," I asked, "where we can talk?"

She pulled back to look at me and I was afraid her steady gaze meant she was offended. Would she drag me to the coffin, lift its lid and make me look at him? No. She nodded.

I led her by the hand, out into the ambulatory and back around the curving, becolumned passageway. And suddenly I was leading her by the hand in a different darkness. Where? What was that sound? A name? A word? A moan? It was waves breaking. It was night. We were walking along the beach at Lake George. I had escaped Saint John the Divine once more in memory. The lake's calm inland surface had been transformed by the wind. It seemed to be a bay of the Atlantic, and in the darkness the water might have stretched for three thousand miles, instead of merely three. The imported sand underfoot was difficult to walk in, made us feel drunk. The house of our friends was behind the trees. We had come out, we'd said, for air. But in fact the endless Scrabble game had bored us.

The wind whipped at our clothes. Carolyn was wearing loose white cotton bell-bottoms and a white Mexican wedding shirt. She was a summer night vision, and what light there was—the moon had set but the stars were brilliant—seemed drawn to her. When we were down the beach, utterly alone, we stopped, wordlessly, as if we'd planned to, and embraced. Her tongue was in my mouth. My hands were on the blades of her back, pressing her against me. Her hands were at my belt. And then in seconds we were naked and on the sand. I was between her thighs, moistening her with my tongue. Then I was on her. She had my prick in her hands and was taking me in. And I was crying out, Oh, God, and trying to raise my head away from her, arching involuntarily, but she was holding me, my face by her face, and as she pumped back at me, swiveling, she breathed in audibly, endlessly. When at last she exhaled, the air was a word, a whisper alive in my inner ear, as if already it had entered my body through my skin.

"Durk!" she said. But it was more than my name. It was a plea, a summons, an expression of pain that I never forgot. "Durk! Durk!" For once passion seemed to have taken over her. "I do love you!" she said, but what I heard was her emphasis; I
do
love you! As if someone had said she didn't. As if
she
had.

 

Michael was assigned to duties at Saint Joseph of Arimathea in Aina, a village just north of Newburgh, about a mile west of the Hudson. He was solemnly forbidden to preach or teach anything having to do with Vietnam, but that was no problem in that parish where the pressing issues had been keeping the school open and the people closed. If he participated in antiwar activities in any way, his priestly faculties would be suspended. When this was spelled out to him upon his return that summer from Vietnam, he found it impossible to respond. Something like this had happened to him before when Spellman had coopted him with the Relief Fund job. But this was not sweet persuasion. He was not given a choice this time, and frankly the old pull of priestly obedience seemed less like oppression than rescue. Once more the refuge of certitude and exemption was being offered him, no, forced on him. But now, exhausted and emotionally spent after the events in Vietnam—after seeing the hopelessness of things there—he did not reject that refuge but welcomed it. His one request was to speak in person to Cardinal Spellman. It was refused. Spellman would not see him. The cardinal, the chancellor said, would like never to lay eyes on him again. And he might not have, except for Nicholas Wiley.

But it was a while before Nicholas came back into his life. By then, Michael had grown almost accustomed to the quotidian pastoral life of Saint Joseph's. No big crises, no acts of violence, no napalm; just the early-morning Mass, offered quietly for a few old ladies before dawn; at breakfast he exchanged banalities with his fellow priests and wasn't even tempted to read the papers, as in the evening he wouldn't be tempted to watch the news on television. The world beyond Aina became less and less important as he gave himself to the oddly fulfilling tasks of parish ministry. Instead of the wounded children in primitive hospitals, there were the shy teenagers in his Religion Class. Michael taught them to feel better about themselves. Instead of frantic trekking around Vietnam, there were afternoon games of pick-up at the high school, where boys imitated Michael's slow, loose-wristed jump shot. It wasn't long before Michael was the one they came to with their problems. Instead of terrified refugees, there were addled old peopie in the local nursing home. Michael talked to them about the Resurrection of the Dead, and if they wanted him to he would, yes, describe heaven to them, golden boulevards, becolumned mansions and all. Instead of demonstrations in the streets of Saigon, there were wakes in the evening at which he lead the rosary or meetings of the Holy Name Society to which each month more and more of the parish men came. But always, rooting him, giving him such solace, such nurture, such pleasure, the priest's version of love-making, were those quiet early Masses, the sharp smell of candles instead of tear gas, the taste of oversweet altar wine instead of fear, and the palpable sense of God's nearness instead of loneliness. His
memento,
still, was for peace, and he always mentioned by name Suu Van Pham and Inge Holz in the prayer for the living, but the war in Vietnam was in another world than his. At Saint Joseph of Arimathea's, in other words, for the better part of a year, Michael Maguire had been condemned to the life of a small town parish priest. The truth was he loved it.

The surprise was, when Wiley showed up, Michael did not feel ashamed.

It was March of 1966. Michael was improvising a system of supports for the star magnolia that he had planted in the churchyard the previous autumn. The tree was one of his first attempts to brighten the place, but the winter had savaged it and it seemed unlikely that spring would revive it. The other priests, the pastor and the first curate, were old men who'd lost their battles years before, and the backwater church of Saint Joseph's, the emblem of their defeat, had taken on their slouch. Michael had planted several trees right away and the beginnings of a rose garden. By Christmas he had organized teenagers to paint the parish hall. This spring he'd already recruited local masons to point the brick facade of the church itself, and he was planning to turn the entire neglected churchyard into a garden. But now he wondered, Was it futile?

"Sad-looking tree," Nicholas Wiley said from behind Michael. "How'd you expect it to survive in this fresh air?"

Michael turned slowly.

The sight of Nicholas Wiley, now wearing a colorful headband and hair to his shoulders and a full beard, threw him. He had never expected to see Wiley again, as if in Aina he'd entered a world to which the likes of this by now full-blown hippie would not be admitted. In a way it was true. Wiley looked like the young people who had staked their claim to the Bancroft Fountain in Central Park. In the city his get-up was as ordinary as the business suits of lawyers, but in the churchyard of a conservative town, it seemed provocative, inflammatory. Michael himself had to stifle an instinctive repugnance at his appearance. But, when he did, when he actually looked at Nicholas Wiley then, he saw that in his own way he looked good. He looked like what he was.

He looked, of course, like Jesus. Remember how for a time America was populated with young Saviors?

Michael dropped his pliers and crossed the lawn, grinning. "You son of a gun," he said.

Nicholas Wiley opened his arms wide. Remember how men began to embrace each other that year?

Michael felt a surge of guilt as they hugged roughly, half-fighting, not about his life at Saint Joseph's but about having left it to Wiley to come to him. When he'd returned to New York he'd written to him, but the short note came back undelivered and Michael hadn't pursued it. Nicholas Wiley was part of what he'd all too willingly left behind. Already Michael's years in Vietnam had receded into the haze of memory. His sharp outrage, his intensely felt compassion for the children, his attachments to the Vietnamese he'd met were like items of contraband he had handed over to stern Customs agents upon his return. He had done it in the name of faithfulness. That irony—that he had broken faith while keeping faith—confused him. Of course he had to shut it out, along with all his feelings and convictions. The conflict implicit in his position was impossible. There could be no such thing as a defiant priest. And so, of course, he'd taken refuge in his belief that the benefit of the doubt, for priests as for married people, had always to go not to intense present feeling but to the solemn promise around which one's life was built.

"You son of a gun," he said again.

"I'd rather you called me a son of a bitch."

Michael pulled back to hold him by the shoulders, expecting to see him grinning. But he wasn't. He'd made the comment earnestly—I'm no son of a weapon—and that was Michael's first warning. "Okay, you're a son of a bitch." Michael tapped his chin. "And it's great to see you."

"It's good to see you too."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome." Now Wiley grinned, but strangely. They separated. Wiley looked around awkwardly. "Nice garden." Michael looked at the budding trees, the grass with its first splash of green. Mulch still protected the new flower beds and burlap sacks still covered the infant boxwoods. "This is nothing. Come back in a month."

"I don't know if I'll be able to," Wiley said with abrupt solemnity.

"Why not?"

"That's what I came to talk about."

The peace movement with its full-page ads in the
Times,
its teach-ins, marches and draftcard burnings was just picking up steam that spring, and Michael was certain Wiley had come to ask him to join it. He hadn't considered that Wiley might have come to him for help. He chided himself. There was more on this young man's mind than what Michael Maguire did or didn't do to sublimate his guilt and loneliness. He studied him for a moment and read, now that he bothered to try, the signs of his pitched anxiety. Nicholas's beard obscured the facts that he'd lost weight and that his skin had a gray pallor to it. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot. Where once only his thumbs were gnawed, now all of his fingernails had been chewed to the quick. "Come on inside," he said.

"I'd rather stay out here." Wiley looked nervously toward the grim rectory. "Could we just go for a walk or something?"