Bless the Child (24 page)

“Ah, Maggie,” he answered with a tried smile, “that was so very long ago . . . but it was one of the grandest times in my life.”

“How did it all begin for you?”

“In those days, if you had intellectual ability beyond the norm, you were noticed by your teachers during undergraduate days, and the word was passed to your bishop. Philosophy was the only major permitted for a young man entering the priesthood, and Rome was the only destination, if you had high aspirations.

“I was sent to the North American College to study . . . I thought Heaven could be no more extraordinary than that Eternal City. You must imagine, Maggie, what it was like for me there . . . I was a poor boy, from a provincial blue-collar world, and this was the Rome of the Caesars and the saints! I was utterly bedazzled—bewitched by the majesty, the ritual, the history. And by the fact that I could cut it at the Greg, when so many others could not.”

He turned to face her, eager for her to understand, and his hair fell forward over his forehead. He had romantic hair, she decided; long and shaggy and robust.

“What’s the Greg?”

“The Gregorian University—the spawning ground for the intellectual crème de la crème of the Church. If you couldn’t cut the mustard there, you were consigned to the Angelica, but the Greg was the place to be.”

“What was the Greg like?” she asked, trying to imagine a world entirely made up of ecclesiastical males.

“Heady, intellectual, austere. All teaching was in Latin, of course—all lectures, orals, everything in Latin. Most American students were way out of their depth in ancient languages—so much so, that the best Latin scholars would take notes for the rest. There were even American priests called Repetitors, in residence, who were sent over from the States to tutor the laggards, so the Americans could get through the exams without making asses of themselves and, by extension, their sponsoring bishops. I was lucky—Latin was second nature to me.”

“So the pressure was intense?” Maggie prompted.

“Lord, yes.
Everyone
there was gifted, everyone was feverishly competitive, and the stakes were high. And, of course, there were important decisions to be made like whether to pursue canon law or theology.”

“Come again?”

Peter grinned. “The main road to a bishopric or better, was, unequivocally, cannon law. But if you wanted to be not a bureaucrat but a thinker, you headed for theology. I gambled that if I distinguished myself in academia, I might solve the riddle by finding room in some large diocese, where the bishop was a canon lawyer, and therefore might like to have an auxiliary who was a theologian. I knew that could give me entrée to high places.”

Maggie frowned at the calculation of it, and Peter caught the nuance of disappointment.

“Remember now, Maggie, I was still the young innocent lad from outside Pittsburgh, and I was just beginning to see how the great world worked. I was captivated by the splendor of Rome and by the aristocracy of intellect and experience among the clergy there. These were not provincial prelates, they were earls and princes in service to the greatest monarch of all. And, there was such heady romance to the priesthood in that astonishing city—the history, the panoply, the pageantry of Catholicism—nobody does it better than the Romans.

“The name of the game was
Romanita
—it meant that you must be more Roman in spirit and behavior that the Romans themselves.
Romanita
seduced me . . . and beckoned me to play the game.”

“So in this austere cerebral environment, there were still high passions?”

“Indeed, there were, Maggie. There are always passions in the human heart. Particularly in very smart, very dynamic humans, and such abounded at the Greg.”

“What you’re describing to me Peter is a cloistered, elitist male society. The last bastion. So, let’s see now . . .” she mused playfully, “if all the criteria for accomplishment were male, then
power
must have been the substitute for sex!” She said it excitedly, as if she’d just ferreted out a great secret.

“You tend always to cut to the chase, don’t you, Maggie,” Peter said as he set his cup on the table and grinned at her. “Power
was
sex for us . . . the expression of all our passions.”

She smiled acceptance of that interesting statement. “And the crux of the priestly dilemma must then have been which uncomfortable choices you were willing to make in order to climb.”

Peter nodded. “I began to see that life was meaner and tougher than I’d thought, and that the more ruthless and expedient survived it best. I began to ask my self how on earth I could walk this tightrope and still honor both my intellectual gifts with my need for success, without sacrificing the integrity of my priestly calling. It was an extraordinary crucible, Maggie. A time of refining, sifting; of navigating Scylla and Charybdis.”

“Men so often are forced to kill off the good and the gentle in their own natures as the price of success, aren’t they, Peter, even within the Church?” Maggie asked.

“You learned about the human failing of the power structure,” he answered, nodding affirmation, “at the same time you learned the inescapable grandeur of the
good
that was the basic motivation for the structure—preservation of Christ’s doctrine and spirit. You saw that to survive in this less-than-perfect world, the Church
must
live with certain less-than-perfect choices and yet . . . oh Maggie, it was the sacred repository for Christ’s teaching, for God’s work! A heady conundrum for a boy from the provinces, however bright. Later, when I was in crisis, this very question added to my dilemma, exponentially. You see, I knew they, too, were imperfect . . . but perhaps not as imperfect as I.”

Neither spoke for a long moment, until Maggie broke the silence. “I’d like to know what happened, Peter . . . how you fell from favor with the Church authorities. But I don’t want to open old wounds.”

His gray eyes seemed to unfocus themselves slightly, as if they looked past her to a distant landscape.

“I followed God around a corner,” he said softly, enigmatically, “and I never found my way back.”

Maggie waited for him to elaborate, but he said no more.

“Have I overstepped the boundaries of friendship, with my question, Peter?” she asked contritely. “Please forgive me if I have . . . I had no right to pry . . . it’s just that you know all the secrets of my life so intimately, I suppose I feel as if I need to know you in the same way.” It unnerved her that she felt drawn to him.

Peter looked at her steadily for a significant moment. “I think perhaps there are no boundaries to our friendship, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t know why that should be so . . . I’ve sometimes felt with you like a swimmer who’s ventured out too far beyond the reef and no longer knows if he has the will to turn back.”

Maggie, disturbed, felt the vulnerability and sadness in this man who had once seemed to her so complete. He was priest and friend and teacher . . . what else was he becoming? There was no denying the entanglement of heartstrings that was growing more complex each time they met. It was unsettling to know he felt it, too.

“Once, when I was in college . . .” she said tentatively, “I was at a mixer with one of the local boys’ schools. A young man asked me to dance, and from the moment he put his arms around me, I knew we were born to dance together. Fred and Ginger, Marge and Gower, Pavlova and Nijinsky . . . what can I say, Peter? For one brief shining moment, on a very minor scale, we were the same as they. He knew my moves. I knew his. Everyone else drifted off the floor to watch us, and I was able to perform feats during the dance I’d never done before, and never could again. He disappeared entirely after that night, but for the space of that one dance, Peter, we were
one . . .
and I’ll never, ever forget the magic.” She took a deep breath and plunged on.

“You and I seem to me like that, somehow, but our bond is of the spirit. You’ve changed me, lifted me—altered the way I see the world and life, Peter. It’s as if I’ve always known you, always trusted you, always—“

“My very dear, sweet Maggie,” Peter interjected, halting the plunge into the unknown. “I fear we may be pieces in a game of God’s . . . and neither of us yet knows how this game is played.”

“But we do know the rules, Peter,” she said mercilessly. “We can’t escape the fact that we do both know the rules.”

She folded her arms against a sudden internal chill and got up from her chair, needing to move . . . “I think it’s turning too cold to sit here. Maybe we’d best go inside.”

He was grateful as she for the diversionary tactic. They reached the French doors at the same moment, and Maggie brushed against Peter as he leaned forward to open the door for her; she knew he wanted to touch her, as much as she wanted to be touched. They let the moment pass, and she walked ahead of him through the door.

Inside the house they were teacher and student once again.

Peter’s
hands were plunged deep in the pockets of his overcoat. The Bowery was desolate and sad, as always. Humanity’s gray wreckage littered the streets, more now than ever.
Homeless
. How much that one small word encompassed. Loss of warmth and comfort. Loss of family. Loss of dignity. Loss of hope. It was a bottomless pit of a word that cried out to Heaven for redress

He’d said the early Mass, a task that in the old days of rigorous fasting had gone to the eldest priest in residence. It had amused him to realize that the younger priests had automatically given him the job. Volunteers from the
Catholic Worker
had been at Mass of course—good, stalwart souls, trying to do God’s work on pennies. But it was the homeless who filled the rows of chairs; shuffling in, with their despair, to share an hour with God. It always both depressed and cheered him, to help out in this place of Good Samaritans.

There was a silent ache that was always with him now, he realized, as he walked. A curious hunger that hadn’t before demanded filling. Maggie was in his heart, beating, throbbing, circulating within him, along with his own lifeblood. Maggie’s face was in his head—he had only to close his eyes to see her. Long for her company.
Desire her.
He pushed the unwanted, unthinkable thought away.

What was it about her that had breached his defenses so subliminally? There was a joy in her that even the horror she currently faced could not extinguish. Given just the slightest provocation, it bubbled up to the surface. Perhaps it was that implausible affirmation of life he sensed in her, that he longed to bathe in.

O lord, we beseech thee, Stir up Thy power and come; that by Thy protection we may deserve to be rescued from the threatening dangers of our sins.

His mother had been like Maggie, joyous despite hardship. Kind in the face of poverty and sorrow. Always believing in him, in his gifts, in his devotion to God. His father had been hurt, threatened, by his choice of the priesthood. “That’s no place for a man, son. Eunuchs, the whole damned lot of them! Where the hell do they get off giving orders to real men about anything, much less sex and marriage and kids.” Jacques Messenguer had been embarrassed to tell his macho friends that his six-foot-three-inch virile son was planning the life of a eunuch.

But she had understood. Not only that it was his way out of a limited world that couldn’t cope with his intellect, but that he wasn’t rejecting love, only seeking a higher from of it.

Silently, he blessed his mother’s memory, as he’d done a thousand times, since her passing. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment how much he’d missed the joy of her, through all these years.

Oh Maggie,
Maggie.
What am I to do with you? Even if I were free, I wouldn’t know. And, I do not even know if I
wish
to be free . . .