Prince of Peace (77 page)

Is it the core Christian insight that just when we free ourselves from the spell religion casts, we come face to face with God? When we confront failure we succeed? When we die we live? Doesn't the inbuilt tension between forgiveness and sin provide the drama of every human narrative? Aren't the stresses between, in Simone Weil's phrase, gravity and grace what keep the Gothic masterpieces standing?

Michael was dead, but God lived.

Was that enough for me?

Could one believe finally in the Resurrection of the Dead? That is the question this story puts. As it was the question Peter's put. It is the only question left, and has always been.

 

I was ready now to be with him.

His coffin waited, still, in the baptistry, the priest-hole, and as I crossed in front of the high altar toward that octagonal chamber in which the marble font sat like God's crown, I genuflected, right knee to left heel with an altar boy's precision. The physical gesture reassured me, restored me, reminded me.

On the coldest mornings of winter in Inwood the place we loved to be was in the sanctuary—steaming radiators, undulating linoleum tile, threadbare orientals—of Good Shepherd Church. Each pair of altar boys thought of themselves as halves of one person. Since they, together, held the corners of the priest's chasuble while he genuflected and raised up the Sacred Host, it was natural for altar boys to come to think that together they were worthy of almost anything. But let a morning come when one of the pair did not appear; the other was struck with terror at what he had to do alone. What if the Host fell to the floor? What if the finger-towel got wet? What if he forgot the secret Latin phrases that the priest's hocus pocus—
"Hoc est Corpus
..."—required?

I always served Mass with Michael because he never failed to come and he always knew exactly what to say and when to move the Book. And if the unexpected happened, a tabernacle key missing or a shortage of sacred wafers or a blown-out paschal candle, I knew that Michael could deal with it. At those times, I anticipated terrified GIs and Vietnamese priests and American draft-dodgers, crying after him as he moved decisively to do whatever had to be done, "Go, Michael! Go!"

A tower shaped like a lantern and supported by rounded arches overhung the baptistry. It was nearly dark in there, shadows dominated, and at first I did not see the coffin. Had attendants moved it already? But no, for I had just crossed the intersection of aisles where it would sit during the funeral. The coffin would be carried into the nave in the opening procession. As my eyes adjusted I saw the oblong shape against the arched doorway that led to the columbarium, the room where ashes were interred in stone, the final prison. Caroly was right to want the earth for him, not walls.

Slowly I approached.

I wanted to cast aside our personal history. I wanted to exchange the end of our friendship for the beginning. Couldn't we have been two boys lifting up the corners of a golden chasuble forever? That close to God? That close to one another? Instead we were two men on a weather-beaten desperate island, separated forever by the woman who united us. I saw him looking back at me, amazed, through that fog of pathos which was to blur, then stain, the entire chronicle of our time. Even the most cherished memories of our innocence had become polluted by the knowledge of what happened. It was like wanting to be rid of our
national
history. Oh, if we could only have been the heroes of the world, vanquishers of Hitler, defenders of freedom, forever. Oh, if we could only have had our Kennedy, our Pope John, our Tom Dooley, Tom Merton, our Cardinal Spellman in his prime, our Martin Luther King. If we could only have had the Holy Catholic Church we'd first believed in. If we could only have had "America."

Instead we had Vietnam. That evil war forms the center of this narrative, not as the source of all the evil that befell us, but as the great reminder that no nation is holy—not even ours; no Church is sacred—not even this one; any more than a single one of us is free from sin—not even Michael Maguire. The shadow of the Fall has been upon this story from the start, and that, not references to cathedrals, cardinals or the infidelity of priests, is what has made it Catholic. The bronze cock stands on every paragraph, as if it were a barn, a basilica, and like the memory of My Lai, it rattles each time the wind blows. It crows each time we deny who we are. And for every denial there is later put the question, thrice, "Do you love me, friend, more than these others do?" In every paragraph I have tried to answer.

I tell you, Michael, dead as you are, that you and I
ourselves
embodied the age without knowing it. We were the town that had to be destroyed to be saved. We were the immolations and the gunships and the body bags. We were the naked girl running down the road with napalm bubbling her skin. We were the dark-eyed campus beauty at Kent State, screeching above the corpse of her youth. We were the scar on LBJ's belly, and we were the coonskin on the wall. We were what made Cassius Clay change his name. We were the stonewall around Nixon and we were Washington aflame. Instead of in truth or God we believed in our innocence, then in our sorrows, and that is what made us dangerous. You were going to end the war. I was going to create a mansion of literature, love and loyalty.

We had handfuls of each other that we carried like treasures until the day we turned and found that all we carried were stones. What else to do but set them rolling? How did it feel to be all alone? To be on your own? How did it feel? Oh, dear reader, by now dear friend, don't ask me. I could never tell you. Ask Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Cesare Pavese, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Papa Hemingway, William Inge, and why shouldn't our souls be disquieted?

"Go, Michael!" I cried. But also, "Wait for me!" You didn't. You forgot what my life was, and you became hard while I grew soft. You were too far ahead to see it happening when I became totally—overly—dependent on one thing. Not you, God or booze. Just her. She was all I needed and all I had. And no one in the world—not Nixon, Mao or J. Edgar Hoover—could have destroyed our love but you. You took Carolyn from me, you bastard. And I repaid you without a kiss.

 

And now I was touching the gleaming wood of your coffin, at the end of my recitation.

How could I believe in God, Church or the Resurrection of the Dead when I did not believe you were in that box? You, Michael, in the throes of decay? You, Michael, with a waxen face? A rosary through your fingers? All you ever had were bones and flesh, fleet feet and that fierce conscience of yours. Now they were separated? If flesh was falling from your bones, why did mine adhere? If you were dead, Michael, how could I believe that I was alive? The box alone did not convince me.

And so with a finger under the lip of wood I lifted the cover of your coffin expecting anything—a staring mask, plasticene, lipstick, rouge, a pirate's skull—but you.

Ah. Ah. I had nothing then but silence. Only emptiness. The void. Nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

 

Later—only moments, but it might have been all of time—Dean Evans interrupted me. He was as imposing as I'd remembered, that great shock of white hair, that physical self-assurance. Also, that quiet earnestness.

"Mister Durkin," he said sadly, "it is nearly time to begin."

"May I have a moment more, please?"

He looked at me, not as if I was ridiculous, which I expected, but as if he'd known I was going to ask. He nodded, and threw a glance at the pallbearers behind him. They withdrew.

"Where's Carolyn?" I asked.

"She's in the pew with her children."

"Is Molly there?"

"Yes."

"Then would you ask Carolyn to come here a moment? Just for a moment?" To help me break the grip of that nothing, which had me, that paralysis.

He nodded and turned.

Then, again after no time or all time, she was standing in the arched entrance of the baptistry.

Her eyes went to the open coffin, and she drew back, shaking her head.

I offered my hand, but said, "Caro, help me make my peace with him. Please help me."

When she looked at me I saw in her eyes finally the glint of understanding. She came and stood by me.

Over his remade, lifeless face.

"Michael, it's me and Caro." I had no idea whether I was speaking this aloud or only in my head. "You died before I said to you that I am sorry, and I so wanted your forgiveness. I wanted to give you mine. Is it too late?"

Carolyn took my hand, pressed it like a dead flower.

He did not speak to me.

I leaned toward him, thinking to kiss those lips. But when he did not breathe on my face I stopped, suspended just above his frozen skin.

Oh, he is dead!

This is death!

There was no kissing now. No forgiving.

 

Organ music behind me. And a congregation resonant but removed, as if in another sphere, singing, "The strife is o'er, the battle done; Now is the victor's triumph won. O let the song of praise be sung, Alleluia!"

Dean Evans, vested in black cope, motioned at the pallbearers and they came forward.

Carolyn and I stood aside. We should have slipped out then to join the laity, to let the clergy splice their rubrics, but we could not, either of us, leave him.

One of those strangers closed Michael's coffin.

When the pallbearers had it hoisted and began the slow unsteady procession out into the ambulatory, Dean Evans gestured toward me and Carolyn. "Walk with us," his hand said. Holding each other we fell into step behind the gleaming box.

I was numb. I was as a man upright but asleep. I merely followed, with only one sensation, that of a chill on my face, a frosted patch where I'd expected the warmth of Michael's breath. Outside the baptistry, in the main body of the cathedral, the procession suddenly became elaborate. Ahead of the coffin were dozens of robed choir members, and ahead of them was a huge borne cross, a pair of torches and a white banner emblazoned, "Blessed are the Peacemakers." Interspersed between the choir and the coffin and between the coffin and us were a thurifer carrying a smoking incense vessel and two pairs of surpliced acolytes. And waiting to walk with Dean Evans were vested deacons and more acolytes, candles flickering off every face.

And they were all singing with rolling robust voices, "On the third morn he rose again, Glorious in majesty to reign; O let us swell the joyful strain, Alleluia!"

Slowly we moved. Instead of cutting directly across the near aisle to the sanctuary, however, the procession wound into the north aisle, into the nave, among the pews where the mourners sat.

And it was there that the first jolt hit me, the first surprise, the first miracle. The frontmost dozen rows of chairs—not pews—were full of albed priests, some with stoles crossed on their breasts and gathered in cinctures, some with stoles hanging in stripes from their shoulders. Others wore the vestigial Benedictine cowls, that serve professors now and low church preachers. As the coffin appeared, their eyes displayed their loss. They were like firemen, policemen, soldiers gathered by the death of a brother. After the choir passed they began to file out into the aisle ahead of the coffin. As I watched I could feel my concentration slowly coming back, a focus of mind, to grapple with this mystery. Who exactly were they? But at once, recognizing the cut of the albs and stoles, the flash of cassocks and habits under outer vestments, I understood that they were Jesuits, Paulists, Franciscans, defiant priests of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, as well as Episcopal vicars and canons, Lutheran pastors and Baptist ministers. I saw familiar faces, priests from Michael's seminary class—Gene O'Mally—and veterans of antiwar demonstrations. They were clergy of every stripe from New York, but not only New York. Monsignor Egan, the famous Chicagoan, was there. Interspersed among the men were women, similarly vested, the new
ordinandi,
the new prophets of several denominations. There were parish priests and teachers, pastors, curates and missionaries. There were the famous ones whose names came back easily as they passed: Harvey Cox, Daniel Berrigan, William Sloane Coffin, Monsignor Fox, Bishop Alcott of the Episcopal diocese, John Ferris Smith, Robert MacAfee Brown, Henri Nouwen, Paul Lannan, and Michael Hunt. There were more than a hundred, ordained all, brother and sister priests of the excommunicant.

And with full strong voices they were singing, "O Risen Lord, all praise to you, Who from our sin have set us free, That we may live eternally, Alleluia."

The second jolt—miracle—came when our part of the procession resumed, behind the concelebrating clergy, and I saw at last, moving into the heart of the darkened nave, that the vast cathedral, the second largest church in the world, was full.

Full of people. Men, women, children, students, nuns, old, young, ex-priests, journalists, politicians, peace workers; a dominance surely of the middle-aged, looking slightly worn, faded, but above their hymnals, looking also strong, clear-eyed, resolute. They were Parthians, Medes and Elamites. They were Jews. There were thousands of them.

And I was stunned. Archbishop Timothy O'Shea was not there. Terence Cardinal Cooke was not there. Pope John Paul II was not there. But their people were. People come to bury Michael Maguire; come to send him on his way.

Who, therefore, were the outcasts? Who the excommunicants?

"Alleluia, the strife is o'er, the battle done..."

The song soared above us.

The procession turned the first corner and then the second.

"Who from our sin have set us free."

And we were striding now down the main aisle, toward the altar and the pulpit. Carolyn had both her hands linked in the crook of my arm and when I looked at her, I saw those eyes, brimming over, fixed upon the coffin.

I saw also, for the first time, what we were doing here, why she had sent for me.

Yes, Michael was dead.

And yes, we were alive. The Church, having died, was reborn. We were the Church, that throng gathered in memory, and also by it. We had been remembering ourselves, becoming part of each other once more. This had been the work of Michael's ghost and the work—Ah, Bright Wings!—of the Holy Ghost. That alleluia there and then outweighed all unfinished business, every anathema and each harbored wound of betrayal. That alleluia outweighed what we had done or not done, what we had lost, had found or had forgot. That alleluia outweighed death.