The Unspeakable (2 page)

“I warned him,” said the Bishop. “But he thinks this is a democracy.”

I knew that it wasn't, evidenced by my assignment.

“He won't talk to me, despite my being his friend,” I said.

The Bishop just smiled. “He'll talk to you. It's called trust.”

Regardless of the fact of our past friendship, even one so long ago, I cannot claim to have kept in touch with Marbury. The years have separated us, each of us staying in his own little world. Mine was here, at the Diocese, while Marbury pursued other matters. First, a brief stint at a parish in New Ulm, Minnesota, where he received glowing reports for his activities, and then in Minneapolis, where he started and ran a shelter in one of the poorer neighborhoods. His success was something that I had heard about of course. I did follow his career with some scrutiny, especially his growing presence on television and in the print media, where he was popular as a social commentator, but our paths had yet to cross.

Not that I didn't think about him. In a sense, he never left my mind. A word or odd quote would pop up unexpectedly, buried in those long years between youth and middle age, and I would think about him. Perhaps it was something that he never said, just imagined by me to fill in a popular view or a view that I wished I really had, I don't know. At any rate, Marbury was in my mind engaging and captive, a man who if he had never existed would be someone I would create a thousand times over.

But for all the wrong reasons.

When I told Marbury this, my thoughts about him over the years, he just smiled. His long body stretched out in the pew, taking it over. Marbury's church, the church where we were sitting, was a simple one. The seats were made of a rough-hewn wood, hardly varnished. Behind the altar, a black cloth hung from a cross made of bolted-together two-by-fours in anticipation of Good Friday, only a few days away. We sat there and talked.

“I was an asshole back then,” he said. “Didn't you think?”

My own knowledge of sign language, self-taught, I'm afraid, and somewhat rusty, I learned on behalf of the deafness in my own family, namely that of my sister, Sandra. I was the only one in the family who knew it, and as children we spoke often. Now I was
using it again with Marbury, except that instead of replying in sign, I spoke. Words, as if to defy the silence, and to remind him that the church was watching. That I was watching.

“Oh, come now, you can speak. Be glad for that.”

I was diplomatic. “You seemed to be in your own world in seminary.”

“That's because I didn't want to be in yours.”

I looked at Marbury. Studied him more like it. His body was lean, a thin ribbon of muscle and sinew held together by God knows what. His face was thinner than I remembered it, more drawn, though the eyes still had that translucent quality to them. Blue, like the marbles children used to play with. His hair was shorter than it was in seminary. Hardly the chest and chains look before I knew him, before he joined the seminary, though I saw the pictures. A regular hippie, Marbury trimmed the hair and beard to make himself look as if he belonged, though I sometimes questioned whether he ever really did.

I thought about what he said and asked, “Then why did you become a priest in the first place? If you didn't want this world, why be here at all?”

He smiled. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Then curse
Playboy
magazine. I was paging through, getting my fill of the various models, when I found an ad. Only a Jesuit would write an ad.”

“What kind of an ad?”

“For the priesthood. It was famous, I'm shocked you haven't seen it.”

I leaned back, somewhat amused. The ad that Marbury was referring to I had only heard about, not seen, but I knew that it was real. It was somebody's idea of a desperate appeal for more priests, I think, at a time when ordination in the priesthood was down drastically. As good a shot as any, I suppose, though I didn't
think people actually responded to this sort of a thing, something I told Marbury.

This remark must have struck him as humorous, for he laughed. No sounds of course, except for that little croaking, breathing more like it, but I took it as laughter anyway.

“Imagine my shock as well,” he said, his hands almost moving faster than my ability to translate, “looking at a centerfold only to be upstaged by God. Well, not God, not that time at least, but envoys. If you want to call Iowa an envoy.”

“You're telling me that you responded to an advertisement?”

Marbury just smiled. It was his inspiration, the ad. Later he found the addresses of several seminaries and, in typical fashion, just closed his eyes and picked one out by chance. Or rather, God picked one out for him.

He picked Iowa.

Marbury said, “I drove there myself. Someone suggested the Greyhound, God's wheels, cheap, a confession in every seat, but I wanted a way out. Just in case.”

When I started seminary in the fall of 1971, Marbury, already a year ahead of me and years wiser, still had that car. It was an old Volvo with a shredded blue interior. Ten years old at least, the car rattled and clanked when it started, knocking off pieces of the dashboard while warming up. A cab light stayed on all the time as I recall, a weird kind of metaphor that illuminated a backseat that was always packed and ready to go, loaded up with duffels and half-opened boxes, in case the urge struck Marbury to flee. But it never did.

Not that any one of us was firm on staying. We were a small seminary, a hundred students at best, floating in like human balloons from the Vietnam War. Some hiding, others just escaping for a short time. We lived in a series of poorly maintained buildings on a bluff overlooking the Iowa River, near Decorah, in a pastoral community with farms and woodlands. Our seminary was one of the few industries in town, and except for a rival bunch of Lutherans,
the only seat of higher learning in these parts. I arrived, as did many of my peers, excited but somewhat nervous about my future and the challenges that lay ahead. Nervous too about my convictions, which I deemed shaky at best. Naturally I had grown up Catholic, or mostly so, my father embracing the faith of my mother as he got older, and if not for the pressures from both family and country, I might never have chosen such a life for myself. Tradition, they called it. My mother at least called it that—tradition—though I had another name for it.

My mother's side of the family, as I was constantly reminded, had always done their part through the years for God and Nation, supplying both with eager recruits. Recruits for war, recruits for the ministry. As fate would have it, I was born in the midst of change. Vatican II had taken its toll among the growing counterculture that made joining the priesthood, except for reasons to evade the draft or just wanting to be around other men, nearly unthinkable. But my mother, ever the optimist when it came to issues of the faith, especially faith in the holy machinery, summed things up quite differently.

She said, “What an exciting time, Peter. It's a new church, with new opportunities. Who knows where you could go. Bishop, maybe. Dare I even say it? Right to the Holy See.”

I, of course, saw my chances in Rome as remote at best, but my mother had a point. The ministry was calling and it was my duty, indeed my ancestral destiny, to respond. My uncle was a priest, along with some other relatives, each one charting his way through the past like some familial apostolic succession. We Whitmores could trace part of our Catholic lineage back to popes long since dead, and our service was well documented. Monks, teachers, parish administrators, anywhere the calling led us. My mother reminded me of these servants as I boarded the Greyhound for Iowa, ironically the same bus from Minneapolis that Marbury had scoffed at. She
kissed me good-bye, her lips touching my cheeks in the softest manner, as I imagine mothers sending their children off to die. “Carry with you the pride of the family,” she said. I remember those words as the doors swished shut, heavy diesel in the air, a black cloud blocking out everything, my pride included.

Marbury was there waiting for me as I left the bus. We didn't speak except for a hello, but then we didn't have to. His mere presence spoke volumes. In one moment, Marbury had cut down every image I had ever had of the priesthood. Maybe it was the jeans and sandals that he wore, though others had adopted that same way of dressing. Or maybe it was just the way that he carried himself, aloof yet with a watchful eye. He was always alert, on the lookout it seemed. Later I heard stories about him. Other students, apparently feeling sorry for me having Marbury living next door, filled me in on the gossip. Rumors circulated about Marbury dodging the draft, dodging the police as well, with wild stories ranging from theft to drugs. For his part, always coy, Marbury confirmed or denied nothing. And this only made people talk more. Our superiors gave more fuel to the rumors when I heard one of them tell another, “Christ took sinners into the fold. Who are we not to do the same?” And from that moment on I saw Marbury as our very own Mary Magdalene, who traded one life for the best one offered.

When I told Marbury about my first impressions of him, especially just walking off the bus, he smiled.

He said, “I was a loose torpedo back then. Still am.”

I nodded. It was something that I couldn't disagree with.

“But then you're here, aren't you? You know that already.”

“Talk spreads. It isn't every day that people feel the presence of God.”

“Oh, that—”

He waved me off with his nonspeaking hand as if a response wasn't even worthy. But then he reconsidered, saying, “That's just
the voice, Peter. Or lack of one. People want to relate. Deep inside they want you to feel what they feel, you know that. Some go too far.”

“And how far is that? Healing people?”

“I never said I could heal.”

“You don't have to. People say it of you,” I said.

“Do you believe everything people say?”

“When it's about a priest, I listen.”

“Then what's the word on you, Peter?”

I looked at Marbury, studied him with a burning glance. “Just that I'm a good priest, I hope. What you should be.”

“Oh, you're questioning my goodness now.”

“Only your intentions, Marbury.”

“My best intentions,” he said, looking away, “I left in a snowstorm a thousand miles from here.”

The snowstorm.

Marbury's trip to Pennsylvania, and the subsequent blizzard that followed, is generally agreed upon to be the dividing line between the old Marbury and this one. Before Philadelphia and the conference that lured him out there, Marbury was a priest like any other, exuding nothing so unusual or scandalous that would warrant the attention of this office. We were naturally aware of his talents, especially the uncanny knack he had for creating interest and furor over any project that he took on. This was particularly true of his shelter, which he started after an encounter with the homeless.

The story went like this:

One night, while walking home from a hospital visit, Marbury came across a man sleeping outside. The man was huddled inside a sleeping bag, freezing and hungry, but Marbury offered no help. He just walked on, like most people do, forgetting the incident altogether. That night the temperatures plunged well below zero
and everything solid froze, including the homeless man whose dead body graced the next morning's headlines. Pictures too. Marbury, telling a reporter this story several years later, saw the event as a turning point in his life, an epiphany. He scraped together enough funds to start his own mission after that, independent from this office, I might add, and he found an old warehouse with a perfectly located storefront to accommodate his vision, which he aptly called St. Francis of Mercy.

The mission grew and grew some more.

What was originally intended for only a few dozen homeless multiplied like so many loaves to many, almost migrating hordes of people. Winter was the worst. On those ice-cold evenings, December and January especially, the thermometer would dictate the evening's turnout. Freezing cold, people abandoned their boxes over heating grates, their riverside caves, the hidden stairwells and rail cars, and made a pilgrimage to the shelter, now consuming half the building, all for a warm meal and a comfortable bed. It wasn't unusual to find whole families huddled together, sharing soup and conversation, maybe even a movie on the television. They could stay as per Marbury's rule for as long as necessary, a rule that quickly became the noose around his own neck. For families grew, demanding more beds, larger kitchens to feed them, more showers, more clothes, et cetera, until a small community began to crop up, hundreds, plus the attendant cooks, volunteers, and social workers. With more bodies came added costs, the constant need for funds, always more money. And Marbury found himself working around the clock until there were no more hours left.

Nathan Stone, Marbury's assistant at the shelter, a man with the stress of his job etched on his face, said that the persistent pressures of constantly battling for money, not to mention the flood of more people, was getting to his boss. Every cot, every pillow and blanket, every morsel of food had to be accounted for, fought for, a war unto itself. Marbury grew erratic. He could no longer sleep,
and often Stone would see him walking through the empty kitchens at night, just looking around, like a general surveying the landscape before the big battle.

But it was a losing battle. Increasingly, Marbury spent more and more time asking for money. He spoke with anyone who would listen. Wealthy individuals, corporations, fiefdoms if he could find any. The sound of him crunching numbers could be heard at all hours, creating the backbone of graphs and charts that he used to lure people in to the solvency, or perhaps the insolvency, of his vision. A vision that included more expansion. More bodies. Battered women. Runaway children. Hospice care. Home care. Day care.