Prince of Peace (72 page)

"Archbishop," I said carefully, "if Michael Maguire cannot be buried in the Church, is there leeway for some other solution? Another gesture?"

"Like what?"

"I thought perhaps you'd want to come to the service. Perhaps you'd offer a prayer."

He shook his head.

Suddenly a vision of what Michael's funeral would look like filled my head: that vast, dark cathedral and, lost in its shadows, the scrawny company of mourners. Who would be there? A few dozen neighbors, the parents of his children's friends, a handful of co-workers. But more evident than who was there would be who was not. Even a hundred in attendance would seem like no one, and the empty chairs of the mammoth church would stand like rebuking ghosts.

As altar boys Michael and I had served at countless funerals at Good Shepherd. We vied for funerals for unworthy reasons—to miss morning classes, to earn the dollar tip, to ride in the priest's limo out to the cemetery in the Bronx—but also because in that parish nothing edified, nothing affirmed, nothing made us cherish who we were more than that large demonstration of loyalty and loss. Perhaps because the Irish are emotionally inhibited, particularly when it comes to the expression of simple affection, they respond to funerals compulsively, as a last, though often first, opportunity to stand with a friend
as
a friend. Funerals in Good Shepherd were jammed, and the numbers—not the liturgy, not the eulogy, not the holy water or the benediction, just the numbers—were what we cared about. And we, imagining our own funerals, knew that one day the aisles would be crowded with our cronies too.
They
would be weeping by the hundreds.
They
would be clutching rosaries.
They
would be passing hats for our wives and children. Their multitude would represent the finest achievement of our lives, that we had accumulated such abundant love. This dream was one of many we had before we realized to our horror and then relief—or was it the other way around?—that Good Shepherd Parish had everything a man could want: comely wives, cozy taverns, rent control, ball fields and cheap transport to the job; everything but oxygen. When we left Inwood our parents were crushed and their friends regarded us as traitors and the guys in the bars swore that we'd be sorry. And now, finally, I was.

I put my glass by his and stood. He stood. When our eyes met I realized I did not remotely understand him. Despite myself I pressed, "There is one other question, Archbishop."

He blinked at me.

"I'm thinking of Korea. You were on a hill waiting for the enemy to come and kill you. Michael stopped them. He saved your life at a huge cost to himself. Did you ever pay him back for that?"

"No. Once I thought he was asking me to, but he never really did."

I shook my head. "Archbishop, he did just now."

For a moment it seemed he was going to respond, but he did not. I imagined him standing in the hatchway of that helicopter firing an officer's sidearm down at the Chinese soldiers, a killer priest. It was impossible to tell now what if anything he felt, and it seemed ludicrous to me that earlier I had found something in this man to pity. But now the secret in this iciness, in this absolute rejection, revealed itself, and at last I understood. "How he must have hurt you."

A moment later I was on the steaming street.

Alone with my panic.

Panic? you ask. Why panic?

Because I had to return then to Saint John the Divine Cathedral, which was empty of people but full of ghosts. Ancient ghosts: Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Edmund Campion, John Fisher and Thomas More. There were the ghosts of Morgans, Potters and Huntingtons who wanted worthy monuments to their own munificence, and there were the ghosts of the Irish coolies on whose backs their colossi rose. There were ghosts with names I knew: Lennie Pace, Mary Ellen Divine, Sister Anne Edward, Dorothy Day, Cardinal Spellman, Tom Dooley, Thomas Merton, two Kennedys and two Ngos. There were the ghosts of Korean refugees and Chinese soldiers, of Inge Holz, Suu Van Pham, of My Lai and of a legion of slaughtered Vietnamese. There were the ghosts of the American dead. There was the ghost of Nicholas Wiley. And in a room behind the great facade, like a room behind the fireplace, a priest-hole, there hovered above his own coffin the ghost of Michael Maguire. Each awaited the tri-une word that I knew had been refused; no
"Requiescat in pace"
here. The Church had spoken. The anathema had been pronounced. The benediction was withheld not from one man or several, bur from an age, a generation, a people, an entire world.

It fell to me to be for the dead and for the living a sign of peace, of mercy, of forgiveness, and I knew I could not do it.

 

By now, of course, you know why. The FBI man came back as he promised he would, and like some Arthurian alchemist, with a mere flick of his finger, he changed the gold of my life to lead.

He turned on the tape-recorder, then left me alone in the interrogation room. Until then I had thought I was under arrest. I had thought they'd brought me to their headquarters to threaten me or bribe me, neither of which would have worked. They could have tortured me and I would not have helped them. I would have died first and my last thought would have been of Michael, my last feelings love for him and joy that I too, after all, had become a hero, a martyr for the faith. But, alas, they didn't kill me.

They only made me listen.

I watched the reels spinning and waited for the sound to crackle on.

A man's voice broke the silence abruptly. "Maguire, tape forty-seven, Lake George, August nineteenth, nineteen sixty-nine. Two seventeen
P.M.
"

The silence then was of a different kind. It was the silence of our summer, of our cabin, of our nights and days, the three of us together. I remembered climbing Black Mountain with him. I remembered her clinging to me and saying, "I've never loved you more."

A door banged open and a woman spoke. Why did it shock me that it was Carolyn? The door slammed closed and I heard then the familiar creak of floorboards and the swarming rustle of bedclothes being torn back.

Michael's first words were, "Oh Christ!"

I listened as to the sounds of a city being razed, the destruction of all future, all faith, all things, in his phrase, Luke's phrase, that make for peace.

When Carolyn cried out as she never cried out when I was in her, it was the Master's "Epheta!" His mud and spittle were on my eyes. I opened them and I saw their story whole.

 

Though it spanned twenty-two years, including one of the most tumultuous decades of the century, and though it swept across the full range of human experience, from war to childbirth to death, from virginity to adultery, from celibacy to parenthood, from sanctity to excommunication, their love remained until the end what it was in the beginning: the innocent love between a priest and a nun. Once the epitome of what is tragic in life, it is the most ludicrous of romances now and commentators always wink when they speak of it. Priests and nuns when they fall in love recapitulate the absurd Victorian melodrama of fully grown men and women fumbling through an excess of clothing toward their first nakedness. We are supposed to laugh at them as their habits fall. How superior they make us feel, those of us who succeeded at an early age in purging sex of awe and love of all transcendence. And how smugly do we imagine the desolation of their guilt, those who surrender principle and violate vows and cuckold God Himself. Priests and nuns think love means all things—salvation and damnation both—while for us it is the way, as our music puts it, to make it through the night.

Silence.
This
priest and
this
nun—my dearest, dearest friends. The silence in which they came together deafens me even now. Can the cuckold-husband narrate such a scene? And how could he possibly know of it? Oh, it is so simple; this is the hard-won prize of my work, the very center of the story I have struggled to bring you. I have played it over and over in my imagination, never fussing over diction, over voice, over the length of sentences. It is the curse of sensitivity that we behold more than we want, the blessing that we see the truth. Truth! What is truth? Mere rhetoric? But rhetoric, in Yeats's definition, is will doing the work of the imagination. Alas, I am a man of no will when it comes to this. I am at the mercy of what I have continually imagined. Nay, conjured. Nay, witnessed. Silence. This is what happened. Silence. This.

See him walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on its fabled scaffold high above the black river, a solitary figure in the middle of the night. In daylight and with good binoculars Carolyn could have watched him coming from the balcony not a dozen paces from the bed where she was asleep alone. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivering a paper on Hopkins at an important Harvard symposium. I'd been honored to be asked and had thought of it as my lucky day. Oh cruel irony. Oh the inscape, the instress, the asshole of Inwood.

 

It was the night of the day in May 1966 that Nicholas Wiley died.

Michael had left Bellevue, having run the gauntlet of reporters—"You don't condemn suicide?"—from whom he learned of the Church's condemnation of Nicholas. He had found it impossible to return to his parish and had instead walked aimlessly through Manhattan. He went to Chrystie Street, thinking to talk to Dorothy Day—had she renounced Wiley too?—but at the last moment he knew it was impossible to talk to her. From Chrystie Street to the Brooklyn Bridge is no distance, and instinctively he made for it. He could have as easily been coming to me as to her, and there is the irony, the particular pain. What chaos followed from the accident that at the moment of his most brutal desolation, I was away and Carolyn was not.

He rang the bell.

Carolyn stirred, but did not wake up.

He rang again, although he almost decided not to.

Carolyn was frightened by the bell when it finally woke her, and she went immediately into Molly's room. Molly was two and a half years old. She was fast asleep.

When Carolyn saw through the glass that it was Michael, she was afraid at first that he had come with news of me, that I'd been killed in a car wreck. How much simpler for everyone if that had been the case.

"Michael, what's wrong?"

It startled him to see her in her robe and nightgown, her long hair falling over her shoulders, and he realized only then what rudeness it was to present himself at that hour. He didn't answer at first. They stood looking at each other on opposite sides of the threshold.

He shook himself. "I'm sorry, Carolyn. Something awful happened. A young friend of mine burned himself today."

"Oh Michael, I heard about it. He was a friend of yours? Oh God!" She took his hand and pulled him into the house, and in that movement he went into her arms. She held him for some moments, but like a mother would have.

"Come have a drink," she said.

He looked at his watch. "God, Carolyn, I had no idea it was so late. I'm sorry."

"Don't be silly. I'm glad you came."

"I know," he said, following her into the kitchen, "but Durk will kill me."

"He isn't here," she said over her shoulder. "He's in Boston until Friday."

If you imagine Michael shuddering with anticipation at that revelation, you have misunderstood him. He was capable of all the inner urges, of course, but his virility was a function of restraint. He was thirty-four years old and had been faithful to his vow of celibacy, remained in fact a virgin. He had been ambushed on occasion by desire, and masturbation was not unknown to him, but he had not allowed himself in years consciously to fix upon Carolyn's image as the object of his lust, as he would have surely were she not still the owner of his heart.

In the kitchen he sat at the Formica counter while Carolyn brought glasses and the gin. They sipped quietly. Michael told her Nicholas's story. She listened carefully for what it revealed about his own.

Michael was adrift in the aftermath of his futile time in Vietnam. His final surrender to Spellman's tyranny, his upstate banishment to Saint Joseph's and his too-easy embrace of the tranquillity of exile left him profoundly vulnerable to feelings of guilt. The guilt was appropriate because he violated his conscience brutally when he chose to obey the bark of the Church rather than the cry of the Vietnamese. And then he had tried to draw Nicholas Wiley into exile with him, but the young pacifist's conscience was more ruthless. The mistake had been to dam its torrent with the trivialities of life in the country parish. When the dam burst, poor Nicholas was at the mercy of that flood, the rage of it.

"I know it seems silly, Caro, given his age and mine, but I felt like a father to Nicholas. I never felt like a father before."

She touched his arm. "You're a good father, Michael. Only good fathers make good priests."

Michael shook his head slowly. "If I'd been more attentive to him, to what he was feeling..."

"Michael, how could you know? He didn't know himself."

"But I did know, Caro." He leaned against her. She caressed him. And they were still.

After a time he said, "It's as if I was forbidden to."

"What?"

He straightened, moved away slightly. She withdrew her hand and each fussed with the gin. "To pay attention to feelings."

"Well, in a way you are forbidden to do that, aren't you?"

He smiled. She was bitter about her convent experience, and the religious life was a topic they avoided. "I guess I am," he said. "If so..." He took a hefty drink. "I'm in the state of disobedience now."

"Because you're feeling...?"

"Like getting drunk."

"Now there's a feeling priests are allowed to have."

He laughed and poured more gin into his glass. "Not 'allowed,' encouraged!" He drank again.

Carolyn watched him. "Which is sad," she said quietly.

"It's the only way, love. As Saint Paul said, it's either that or burn."

"I thought he said, 'Marry or burn.'"

That stopped him. He looked at her abruptly. "That's the issue, isn't it?"

"Is it?"