The Assassini (6 page)

“Don’t get moralistic on me, Ben,” he said blandly. “It’s a doggie-dog world out there.”

“Dog eat dog,” I corrected him. We’d been doing that bit for years.

“The Church is no different from any other big organization. You know that. The Church, and the Society, we have to look out for ourselves because sure as hell nobody else will. I do my part by rounding up odd bits of loose change here and there. The Church has got to own itself—”

“Vinnie, Vinnie, this is me, Ben. The Church hasn’t owned itself since the days of Constantine. It’s always out whoring for someone. The pimps change but the Church is always back on the street the next day.”

“By Jove, laddie, you may be this Antichrist we’ve all heard so much about. What a red-letter day for me … still, you might make the perfect Jesuit yet. Except you fight for your piddling little idea of the great truths too zealously. You never learned to speak your piece and shut up. The truth is you never understood what the Church was about. You were never able to force the cuddly little lamb of idealism to lie down with the fierce lion of realism and make nice-nice. Which is what the Church is
all
about.”

“What a happily pragmatic fellow you are!”

“Have to be. I’m a priest.” He leaned back and grinned at me. “I’ve gotta live with this mess. And it is a mess; the Church is not a tidy place. Because man is never tidy. We all just run around doing the best we can and if we’re right fifty-one percent of the time, well, hell, that’s about all you can ask for. Believe me, the Dowager Harbaugh wanted the Society to have this moola. And if the old bat didn’t, she should have.”

What mattered to Vinnie and all the other Vinnies was that they
believed
. Halloran’s faith was intact. He’d always told me that I’d had a faithectomy somewhere along the line. His belief and faith were not only in God-maybe not even mainly in God—but in the Church itself, which was where we really parted company. I’d observed them at work and I’d learned you could find God a convenient myth or you could believe He lived in your dishwasher and spoke to you during the hot-dry cycle, none of that mattered. But, by heaven, you’d better believe in the Church.

After lunch I stood in the corner office I’d occupied for most of a decade and looked out at Battery Park and the towers of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty, which was only barely visible through the fog and mist that was thickening by midafternoon. It was the kind of office Hugh Driskill’s son was expected to have, and expectations were very much a part of our lives at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. There was an English partners desk from Dickens’s day, a Louis XV refectory table, a Brancusi on top of it, an Epstein bust on a pedestal, and a Klee on the wall. It could give you the shakes if you weren’t feeling pretty confident. Gifts from my father and my former wife, Antonia, and all very eclectic and smashing.
New York
magazine had once done a piece on power offices, and mine had been among them and it had taken me a long time to live it down. I’d picked the carpet and both Hugh and Antonia thought it looked like the bottom of the canary cage which was, if memory serves, just about the only thing they ever agreed on. In the end all that Antonia and I had shared was a deep distrust of the Roman Catholic Church, but it
hadn’t been enough to save our marriage. I always felt that she had inherited her attitude at birth while I’d acquired mine the old-fashioned way. I’d earned it.

The fog was rolling in from the direction of Staten Island, blurring familiar landmarks, like clouds of memory overtaking the everyday trivialities. When you reached the middle of your life, one of the revelations concerned memories, or so it seemed to me. They seemed so important and they would not be pushed aside. They exercised their claim on you and you began to wonder if they held all the keys to all the locked doors in your psyche. It was a little scary.

There had always been lots of priests hanging around the house while Val and I were growing up. By the time Father came home from the war in 1945 I was ten, and it was summer. In those years when Father was out of the country and we couldn’t see him except on leaves, there was an elderly priest with a great deal of white hair billowing from ears and nostrils who made an impression on me. He was Father Polanski, who came to say mass in our chapel. He sometimes puttered about in the gardens with Mother and me and once gave me a trowel of my own but we didn’t really know him any more than we knew the man who kept the skating pond neat and smooth or the fellows who came to do the lawn, mow it and rake it and prune the trees in the orchard.

It wasn’t until our father came home from the war that we really noticed a priest as a human being, and that was a matter of comparative necessity. He brought one with him, an actual Italian who spoke English with a heavy accent. Val and I somehow got it into our heads that Father—or was he Monsignor?—Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, in his long cassock and high-topped, bulbous-toed, thick-soled black shoes, was a trophy of the war that Father had bagged in some peculiar way—akin to the dusty, moth-eaten stuffed bear standing in one corner of the tack room and the lion and rhino heads in the lodge in the Adirondacks. In some childlike way little Val, who was nearly four, and I figured that Father D’Ambrizzi belonged to us. He seemed to enjoy the relationship, too.
There’s no way to count all the piggyback rides, the games of checkers and animal lotto and croquet he played with us that summer, how many hours he spent with us in the first autumn of peace, taking hayrides and learning to bob for apples along with us, carving jack-o’-lanterns and trying to get the hang of ice skating out on the pond beyond the orchard. He seemed as innocent as Val and I certainly were. If the other priests I came to know had shared his virtues, I suppose I’d be a priest now, but that kind of supposition is pretty much of a dead end these days.

Father D’Ambrizzi liked doing things with his hands and I used to sit by the hour, entranced, watching him. He built a swing out in the orchard, hanging the ropes from the stout limb of a large apple tree. I’d never seen anything quite so wonderful—but then he surpassed himself with a tree house reached by a rope ladder. And even more impressive than that was watching him lay bricks, the way he slapped the mortar around and leveled them with such certainty. He did some work on the chapel, which had taken to crumbling in a couple of places. I was spellbound. I took to dogging his footsteps wherever he went other than when he closed the study door to do his “work.” I could tell that his work was terribly important. No one ever bothered him when he was at his work in the study.

But when he emerged, there I’d be waiting for him. He would pick me up in his long, hairy, simian arms as if I were a doll. His hair was thick and black and curly, cropped close to his boulder of a skull like a cap. His nose was like a banana, his mouth curled like a prince in a Renaissance painting. He was a good six inches shorter than my father. He was built like Edward G. Robinson, according to my mother. I asked her what that meant and she thought for a moment and said, “Well, you know, Benjy. Like a gangster, darling.”

Father didn’t have D’Ambrizzi’s easy grace with children. He must have felt moments of jealousy at the crushes Val and I had developed on this exotic specimen. We never thought to wonder why he’d come to stay with us: we were just content to worship him. And then, one
day, he was gone, had gone in the night as if we’d made him up, as if he’d been a dream. But he left us each a cross of bone, Val’s filigreed like lace, mine solid and masculine.

Val still wears hers. Mine is long gone, I suppose.

Father talked to us about D’Ambrizzi a little later in what for him was a pretty subtle tactic. He didn’t mention D’Ambrizzi’s name, but Val and I exchanged a glance because we knew. Father was explaining to us why we shouldn’t confuse priests—“men of God”—with God Himself. While the one had feet of clay, the other had no known feet at all, not so far as anyone knew. That’s what it boiled down to, though it was quite a long time in the telling. Afterward I can recall sneaking looks at the feet of the priests drinking scotch in the library with Father or marching off to say mass in the chapel for Mother. Never saw any of the clay, and that confused me. Val in her quiet, little-girl way went to work with her jars of modeling compound and produced quite a remarkable rendering. Mother came into the playroom, stopped, did a double take, and asked what those things were. Val piped up, clear and sweet, “Feet of clay!” Mother found that extravagantly amusing and had Father come take a look. Later on she brought a friend from the Church to see them, but Val said she’d scrunched them all up to make something else. I knew it wasn’t true. She’d hidden the feet of clay inside her big bass drum with the clown painted on the side panel. She had pried one of the panels up and used the space inside as her most secret place. It was years before she discovered that I knew about it. I never found a great place like that, but then, I never had any great secrets. Val was the curious one, the one who had stuff to squirrel away.

I was remembering Val as a little girl, learning to skate on the pond with a kind of natural ease while I floundered around like a fool, cold and wet and bruised and generally irritable. Winter sports always struck me as unhappy pursuits, punishment for unnamed offenses, but Val thought I was a goof.

And I suppose I was.

* * *

I was thinking about Val when Miss Esterbrook, my secretary, came in and cleared her throat behind me. I turned back from the fog and memory.

“Your sister’s calling, Mr. Driskill.”

She left and I sat at the desk for a moment before picking up the phone. I do not trust coincidences. “Hello, Val? Where are you? What’s going on?”

My sister sounded funny and I told her so. She laughed and called me a goof but her heart wasn’t in it. There was something wrong but she said only that she wanted me to get out to Princeton, to meet her at the house that evening. She had something she wanted to talk over with me. I told her I’d thought she was in Paris or someplace.

“I’ve been all over. It’s a long story. I just got home this afternoon. Flew in with Curtis. Will you come tonight, Ben? It’s important.”

“Are you sick?”

“I’m a little scared. Not sick. Ben, let this wait until tonight, okay?”

“Sure, sure. Is Dad there?”

“No. He’s got a board meeting in Manhattan—”

“Good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just the usual. I like plenty of advance warning if he’s waiting in the shadows to bushwhack me.”

“Eight-thirty, Ben. And, Ben? I love you, even if you are a big goof.”

“Earlier today Vinnie Halloran told me I was the Antichrist.”

“Vinnie always erred on the side of overstatement.”

“I love you, too, sis. Even if you are a nun.”

I heard her sigh and then she hung up. I sat for a while trying to remember if I’d ever known her to be afraid before, with the fear seeping into her voice. I decided I never had.

I left the office a little early for me since my customary day had a tendency to wind down between eight and nine. I wanted time for a shower and a change of clothes before I ransomed my Mercedes for the drive to Princeton.

The cab dropped me at Seventy-third and Madison. The light had faded behind the fog and the streetlamps were on, glowing their moist penumbrae. I walked toward the park, still trying to figure out what was going on with my sister. The streets were slick and shiny. The World Series had ended just over a week before and suddenly it was cold as winter and the mist was turning to biting little pellets.

Sister Val … I knew she’d gone to Rome to get started on a new book, had then sent me a postcard from Paris. I hadn’t expected to see her in Princeton until Christmas. She stuck fiercely to her research and writing schedule, yet here she was, taking a break. What had scared her enough to bring her home?

Well, it looked like I’d be finding out that night. You could never be sure what kind of hell my sister Val was raising. All I knew was that she’d been researching the Church’s role in World War II. Had that brought her home? It was hard to imagine how. But you never knew about Val. She wasn’t the kind of nun we knew at St. Columbkille’s Grammar School. That thought always put a smile on my face and I was grinning like a fool when I got to my brownstone. There wasn’t going to be anything Val and I couldn’t handle. There never had been.

I crossed the Hudson by way of the George Washington Bridge, headed toward Princeton, and felt the cold and the damp and the tension of my foot on the gas pedal setting off the old ache in my leg, a souvenir of my Jesuit days. The Jesuits had left their mark, all right. The traffic finally thinned out and I was alone with the sweep of the windshield wipers and the Elgar cello concerto coming from the tape player. It had become a foul, slippery night, the rain turning to a slushy half-ice, the car always on the verge of aquaplaning me into the next world.

I was thinking of another night rather like it, twenty-odd years before, only then it was the utter dead of winter and white not dirty gray, but there had been the same feeling of things out of kilter. I’d been heading back to Princeton then, too, dreading the talk I was facing with my father. I didn’t want to tell him what had
happened and he certainly didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t much for sob stories and failures, which in his view were always nothing but goddamn cowardice. The closer I got to Princeton the more I wanted no part of it. There I was, in the middle of what Bulwer-Lytton might have called a dark and stormy night, ice and snow sealing me off, running like a thief in the night from the gloomy, crenellated battlements where I’d tried to be a Jesuit. Tried to be the man my father had always wanted me to be.

Hugh Driskill liked the idea of my being among the Jesuits, liked knowing I was entwined in the rigorous discipline, the demanding intellectual life. He liked knowing I was taking my place in a world that he understood. It was also a world that my father felt he could control to some extent. He liked to believe in his own egocentric way that he, because of his wealth and devotion to the Church and the accomplishing of good works and the wielding of influence—he liked to believe that in the end he was one of those who defined the Establishment, the Church within the Church. I always felt that my father rated himself rather too highly but, hell, what did I know?