Prince of Peace (65 page)

If it mattered to her, it mattered.

"Molly said you spoke to the chancellor."

"That's when I went to pieces. He was awful to me, cold and legalistic. And when I became so upset no one understood. They said it meant nothing, what bishops think. But I was destroyed, and I knew that no one would understand but you. No one would help me but you." She clutched at me. "Oh, Frank, we have to bury Michael in the Church! We have to!"

"I know it, Caro."

She had my shirt in her fists and was shaking me. "Oh, Frank, I'm the reason he's excommunicated! It's me, Frank! I'm the one they blame! It's me! That's what they think! It's me!"

Of course it was; an undispensed priest marries an ex-nun divorcee, flouting all values, all the holiest traditions. What did she expect? Baby's breath?

She should never have been the one to approach the chancellor. What latitude he might have had—what capacity for compassion—had surely been swamped in his clerical resentment, however clothed it had come in canons.

For myself, I had taken shelter both from that desolation of hers and from my own long-nursed wound in the one unclouded feeling I had. In its womb there was nothing of anger, despair or grief even; not even grief. There was only loving that woman and longing to soothe her.

"Carolyn, I'll talk to him. What time is it? I'll call him now."

She raised her hand, her wrist. The movement drew my eye along her arm to her bosom. A vision of her nakedness filled my mind again. It was the image to which instinctively and, yes, lustfully I returned repeatedly, as to a memory of the house that gave me shelter from my first storm. I saw her thighs open, her pelvis tilting at me, her offered cunt.

"It's three-thirty." She fell back against the bench and laughed crazily. "This is nuts! What's wrong with me? The service is all set, just four hours from now. The dean of the cathedral is presiding. It was in the paper. We can't change it."

"Let me talk to them, Caro. Maybe there's something we can do." Weren't there dispensations? Rescripts? Absolutions? Annulments? Weren't there miracles? Was there no way—I refused to believe it suddenly—for the Roman Catholic Church to manifest God's mercy toward that man? "I'll call the chancellor. What's his name?"

It was exactly as if I'd slapped her. "You don't know?"

"No."

"It's Archbishop O'Shea, Frank. Tim O'Shea."

"Michael's friend?"

Tears once more burst out of her.

 

"Take me to the Catholic chancery."

The taxi driver looked at me dully through the cloudy plastic shield.

"Behind Saint Patrick's Cathedral," I explained, "on Madison."

He popped the clutch and punched a button on his meter, a digital readout. Where was the meter flag? I wanted to ask. We jolted into traffic.

On the telephone in Dean Evans's office I had learned that Archbishop O'Shea was there. His secretary wouldn't put me through unless I stated my business. It had been easy to picture her, upright in a severe wooden chair in front of an antique Underwood, the dark reaches of the high-ceilinged old mansion looming above her. The chancery office of the archdiocese had been in the south wing of the Villard Mansions since 1948. Fit for a Borgia prince, the building was a Roman Renaissance palazzo full of Tiffany glass, Saint-Gaudens sculpture and the murals of John Lafarge. One of the grandest houses in all New York, it had been the vain indulgence not of an Italian aristocrat but of a nineteenth-century railroad baron. It had matched Spellman's position as the drum major of the Church's arrival in America that he should have bought the place and dubbed it the Cardinal Farley Building. It dwarfed his own residence across the avenue, and it seemed almost vengeful when he turned the mansion into the offices of his chancellor. He would not, of course, have grasped the irony that once more Catholics were scooping up the leavings of Protestants. The descendants of Henry Villard and his successor proprietor, Whitelaw Reid, who entertained the Prince of Wales in the house, had long since moved farther north. The fashionable Upper East Side had come into its own. Midtown was fit now only for commerce and for Catholics.

The cab, after cutting through Central Park, went down Fifth Avenue. The traffic was like traffic in Jerusalem, but the people on the sidewalk, their clothing, their lack of it, the shoulders and thighs of women, the glittering store windows in which their bodies were reflected, windows behind which the bodies of mannequins took tribute in glances, plaster nipples stretching plastic blouses, wreaked havoc with my concentration. I wanted to remember everything I could about Timothy O'Shea. I wanted to remember what I'd read in canon law. I was certain the bishop had discretion about who was buried where and how. In death, everyone is excommunicated; therefore no one should be. But I could not think. My mind was taken up utterly by the pretty girls in their summer dresses. Oh early Irwin Shaw!

At Fiftieth Street the driver slowed for a turn. We passed in front of Saint Patrick's, then cut and swerved and were driving along the side of it. An unexpected affection for the spired church surged in me, but I was amazed how small, how ungrand it seemed. Saint John's, even incomplete, was more than twice Saint Patrick's size, and standing as it did on the promontory of Morning-side Heights it had a monumentality Saint Patrick's, in the shadow of the skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center, lacked.

New York's nineteenth-century Catholics had been outraged when they heard about plans for the heretics' cathedral in their city. It would be—and was—the largest cathedral in the world. Ingenuously, in making that claim the Protestants did not include in the comparison Saint Peter's in Rome, which, at nearly twice the size again, was the only edifice bigger. Technically they were right, though, because Saint Peter's was not a cathedral, but a basilica. Still Catholics in New York over the years had refused to be cowed by the relative modesty of their cathedral. It may not have been designed and furnished by America's great architects and artists, and it may have been only the size, they would admit, of Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris, but at least it was finished. The churches were begun within a decade of each other. In less than two decades, Saint Patrick's, paid for by the pennies of millions of immigrants, was completed. Saint John the Divine, paid for by the sporadic benefactions of the richest people in America, would probably never be completed. The house of worship for a dwindling elite, Saint John's, even at solemn services on Sundays, seemed always nearly empty. Saint Patrick's, even between Masses on any weekday, seemed always nearly full. And there was the difference, the oldest one, the one that mattered. There are fifty million Catholics in America, two million Episcopalians.

We Catholics have long memories. Take your thumb out of our ingratiating joviality, of our worldly liberalism, and you will loose a flood of bitterness. Then watch what we do with it. In the new age in which neither layman nor priest, progressive nor conservative, chancellor nor cardinal nor pope, even, want to be thought unecumenical, small-minded or parochial, we spare the ancient Protestant enemy and pour the old acid on ourselves.

Hence my taxi ride. Hence my purpose as the cab swung north on Madison, cut across the avenue to the far curb and jolted to a stop in front of the Renaissance palace; I had come to ask the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York to lift its sanction, to ask Holy Mother the Church to have mercy on her son.

"This place?" the cabbie asked.

"That's right." I was counting bills out for him. The feel of the money was alien, and not because it was American. I had not even so much as paid a cab fare in a decade. The bubble of unreality in which I had been living touched ground but did not break.

"This is a hotel, Mac, not the archdiocese."

"What?"

Even in daylight, even in August, the courtyard trees were lined with white Christmas twinkle lights.

"The Helmsley Palace Hotel."

I craned toward the mansion. The windows sparkled. The entranceway glimmered with brass. At a polished revolving door a uniformed man was taking someone's suitcase. And above the three stories of the nineteenth-century masterpiece loomed a huge, gleaming skyscraper.

I paid the cabbie and got out.

At the door the uniformed Hispanic—in earlier days he'd have been Irish—gave me the once-over. What's with the denim shirt and sandals, man? I nodded at him and went in.

The Viliard Mansions now served as a showplace narthex—grand staircase, polished pink marble, restored paneling, flashing chandeliers, Oriental runners with brass fasteners—for a piggybacked run-of-the-mill behemoth hotel. New York's Industrial Brahmins had abandoned their palazzo to upstart Catholic clergy who had bequeathed it now to expense account admen from Dayton and accountants from Houston who wore English suits, knew their
nouvelle cuisine
and preferred a Continental ambience. This was the best Olde World Palace Hotel yet. I made a quick round of the public rooms to convince myself I was not dreaming. Where were the portraits of Farley, Hughes, Hayes and Spellman? In niches where once stood statues of Frances Cabrini, Mother Seton and Isaac Jogues were now flamboyant floral displays. Against the elaborately carved oak wall at the top of the grand staircase where once the huge seal of the archdiocese—the tassled hat, the Greek Cross, the flame, the motto
Fiat Voluntas Tua
—had hung there was now a mammoth portrait of the unsmiling, waistcoated, mustachioed Viliard. His successors still displeased him.

In the stunning second-floor library that had served as the office of the chancellor—I had been in it once and remembered the twin fireplaces with Italian marble mantels and the barrel-vaulted ceiling—afternoon tea was being served on tables covered with pink damask. A lady touched her napkin to her mouth and eyed me suspiciously. Would I come over to her table and sell her a sign-language card? Suddenly I sensed that she would have bought one. She might have taken me to her room.

It was the building I remembered, but the gloom was gone, that cinctured repression, that overhanging threat that swamped light and life, sucking oxygen from the rooms and spirit from their occupants. Now, as in all hotels, infidelity was in the air, the faint smell of sex. Even that matron from Ohio at her tea knew it, exuded it. She had that Last Chance look in her eyes and flashed it at me because I was not dressed right, because I did not belong. She would have been in charge. She would never have had to see me again. With a shock I realized she was younger than I was and, yes, I would have loved to screw her, not in her husband's company's room upstairs, but in
this
room where once an archbishop of the Church had sat up to his ass in anathemas. Anathema shit! Tempus fuck!

I left the room for the corridors and stairs again. The restoration, the polish, the carpeting and gold leaf had turned the intimidating shadows of God's offices in New York into the living illustration of a slick travel brochure. Amenities and ambience! It was the perfect end for that counterfeit Roman masterpiece, that New York version of a Hollywood backlot front. From its beginning that house had offered its lonely, uprooted American owners the illusion of a past, of a culture, of a tradition. Ironically, a
Catholic
past, culture and tradition—as in Michelangelo, as in Dante Alighieri. Its first owners had stayed most of a century. Its second, the Irish clergy to whom the Italian Renaissance, however Catholic, had been as alien, finally, as it had been to the Protestants who aped it, had stayed a few decades. Now its owners were guests who stayed the night, had coffee and
brioche
in the Gold Room and left, pleased with the place and with themselves.

When a bellboy—no,
concierge!
—saluted me, I wanted to intone the benediction in plain chant for him. Instead I asked where to find a phone book and he told me.

I looked up "Chancery," then "Archdiocese" and found nothing. I looked up "Catholic" and found a listing, with multiple departments and centrex dialing, for the New York Catholic Center at ion First Avenue, and I understood even before going there what had happened.

It was a new twenty-story rectangular office building with aluminum window frames, beige Levolor blinds and gray facing stone. Unpainted aluminum letters above the entrance identified it straightforwardly: "The New York Catholic Center," and a good thing too, for otherwise I could have taken it for one of the other seven million clone-buildings in this city, the Arco Building, Random House, Lever Brothers. It was the perfect emblem for the new Church. Having rejected as unmodern and antidemocratic the trappings—if not the political structure—of the feudal aristocracy, the archdiocese had embraced the trappings of the American corporation. The clergy who worked in this building did not aspire to be princes but managers. The cardinal was the president and the chairman of the board, and Archbishop O'Shea was "Senior V.P. for Ops," or perhaps "Assistant CEO."

Good, I thought, crossing the street and going in. I slipped by the distracted security guard—not spinster secretary—and into the elevator. The floors were identified by their offices: Catholic Guardian Society, Hospital Apostolate, Insurance Division, Pension Division, Catholic Relief Service, Marriage Tribunal, Communications, Catholic Home Bureau, Catholic New York. At the top, floor twenty, not a palace but the executive suite, the sign said "Chancellor." I wanted to say, No, that's wrong! You can't have it both ways. Thomas More was a chancellor. An absolutist, he drew lines and refused to cross them, but you can't do that. Not in this place, not in this business. You are an American executive, paid to accommodate and compromise. You cannot pronounce anathemas against your middle management. This building professes the new faith, Your Excellency, even if you don't. It is efficient, computerized, unionized, organized, socialized and banalized. In its sterile fluorescent glare we see episcopal arrogance, clerical vengeance and vestigial medieval tyranny—and this is why, finally, one accepts this otherwise tragic transformation as the work of God—for the devils-on-the-loose they are.