Earthly Powers (112 page)

       "What items?"

       "A set of chessmen, I think. A small picture. You will see when you return. He has flown to Tunis. The keys to the house are with the Grima family opposite."

       "Could you kindly inform the postman I wish to have my mail directed here? I shall be here for some time: 126, Ospedale Fatebenefratelli—"

       "That is all one word?"

       "That is all one word."

       "Do not be away from Malta too long. There are these new housing regulations, as you know."

       "What regulations?"

       "Absence for a certain period of time is regarded by the Prime Minister's Office as permanent abandonment of residence. There is the new law about the confiscation of property."

       "But, damn it, I can't help being broken and near dead. I'll be back when the medical authorities give me permission to travel."

       "Gort verneyflood ablesforth nardfire."

       That was the line breaking. I lay exhausted as if from a two-mile walk.

       After two weeks mail began to come in. Two of the nursing brothers brought me a sack of it. I was not able to open any of it myself, one arm being totally disabled and fixed in the air like a fascist salute. The near imbecilic brother who did odd jobs and had, after a day's journey, brought my luggage from the Raphael, willingly sliced the envelopes open and crooned over the beauty of the exotic stamps. Another brother, quick and terrierlike, collected stamps and snarled for their possession. There were a lot of books—bound proofs which American publishers sent in the hope of a kindly publishable word. I donated them to the hospital library. After six weeks a book came from Geof frey. This I did not donate. With the book was a letter. The letter I was now able to hold, though feebly, in both hands. It was brief. It said: "Dear old dearly and genuinely though intermittently beloved bastard. I'm here in ah should have written the address at the top righthand corner and all that Sunday writing home to dear mater and pater ballocks, shouldn't I, here in the city of Seattle in the state of Washington and very nice too really, the street being Rainier and the number 1075, and I'm with Nahum Brady who is back in his native habitat to research some great scandalous blockbusting shithouse of a book about the Boeing aircraft people. I'm all right really and don't propose seeing you in London if that's okay with thee, so if thou wouldst be kind enough to remit sum in dollars to above address I shall be more than beholden. Which means that I have done what I was asked, old dear, to wit requesting your archives to be copied and sent to Malta, an easy job that one, and then, much more difficult, scrounging around Chicago after this evidence you were after, you know, Pope Buggery's miracle all that way back. Of course, what with it being His Ballsiness, everybody I met in the hospital line was all too ready to declare on oath they'd seen him turn horsepiss into Johnnie Walker, but I was very very firm as you know I can be, and I said there was one particular doctor and he was the man to make the opissial dispissition, I was tight of course, not really been sober since I landed at O'Hare. Anyway, to make a short story long, I got the name, and there was the name in old ledgers and reports, and even on a plaque on the wall in letters of the Purest Gold as one who had served his country, saving life not taking it and the rest of the inflated ordure. This was a certain Dr. B. C. Gimson, M.D., well remembered by the old and admired too because he'd written and moreover my dear actually published a kind of memoir, the one you should have now in your hands or on your lap rather, unless ha ha it or both or all three are hotherwise hoccupied you come along a me sir don't want no trouble do we now-ah, how often those words have been addressed to yours truly. But of course there was just no copy to be found. Published 1948 and remaindered, and then Dr. B. C. Gimson suffers a slight fatality in the sport of gliding whereof he was most inordinately fond. So they send me to the widow, who lives in the posh suburb of Oak Park, where old Hem came from, and still as it was in his day, uncountable churches and no bars—thirsty me, you've just no idea. Nor did she offer me one, not having a thing in the house. Nearly almost completely and totally blind, my dear, but getting along on her own except for the neighbours helping with the shopping. She said look on those shelves there and you may find it—Medic it is called, Medic—1 don't read no more, me eyes, see, charming old lady though really, take it to that table there, copy out what you want and then put it back where you found it, it is one of my most precious possessions, and then bugger off drinkless. Alas I took advantage of the old trout, pretended to scribble a few lines, made as to put the precious volume back but in actual fact, oh cunning shameless me, stowed it under my handsome handknit cashmere pushover. The crimes I have committed on your sodding behalf, you sod. So here it is. Page 153 is where you have to look. Don't forget the cash, be careful of those elegant though brittle limbs. A fall could be very very nasty at your age. I have something good coming up soon, I think, I hope, fingers crossed. Your loving faithless Geoffrey. XXXXXXXXX."

       The book was still in its dustjacket. Medic, yes, with the rod of Aesculapius to whom Socrates owed a cock on the cover, and on the back a cheerful photograph of the author in military uniform. The face was not familiar. I was reluctant to get to page 153 too soon, so I leafed, with some pain, through the earlier pages. Here was a medical practitioner who, after fifteen or so years of varied hospital and private experience in Illinois, served as a medical officer in the U.S. Army from Pearl Harbour to the end. His aim was to show, rather in the spirit of Carlo, how good came out of evil, how he learned to believe in the essential benevolence and certainly courage of ordinary human beings, and how, after an adolescence of glum agnosticism, he came to accept the notion of a God sometimes enigmatic but always loving. As for his own craft of curing diseases, the area of the inexplicable grew as he practised: patients died when they should have lived and vice versa. On page 153 he mentioned an inexplicable remission of disease in a Chicago hospital and followed it with a glib paragraph on the possible meaning of the term miracle. On page 155, which Geoffrey evidently had not read, he stated the name of the child cured by prayer and speculated on the possible future of one so signally picked out by the Lord for special favour. Here I felt my eyes must be deceiving me.

       I asked that a call be put through to Monsignor O'Shaughnessy at his private apartment on the Via Giulia. When I got through to him I talked of the good old times. Those bridgeplaying days in Paris? How could he ever forget? The voice sounded slurred by whisky. Whisky, whiskey rather, had perhaps hindered his advancement. He was not even a bishop. He had a variety of odd jobs in obscure departments of the Vatican. One of the jobs was the making of saints. There were not, of course, many occasions for saintmaking. He said he would come round and see me, though he found getting about difficult these days. Anno domini, you know. He was seventy-nine, he said. I'm eighty-one, I said. Are you now, who would have thought it?

       He shuffled in two days later. Old, yes, whiskeypickled, the long Irish neck I remembered, the eyes like watered milk blinking in Irish neurosis, the face a map of an unpopulous Irish county with dusty tracks leading nowhere. He sat down by my bed.

       I said, "About the canonization of our late friend Carlo. I'm ready to sign the appropriate form. I definitely witnessed a miracle. And here, in this book just sent to me from the States, is corroborative evidence. The doctor himself. Page one fifty-three. Could you read it out to me? I had a bad accident. My sight isn't so good."

       He put on horn-rimmed glasses and smacked his lips. He was not particularly interested in my bad accident. "Fell, did ye? Ach, that's all too easy at our age. Giddy fits, then the bones break. Here we are, then." He held the book near his eyes and read: "'I remember the name of the priest. He was the brother of a certain Mr Campanati, a well-known Chicago businessman. Father Campanati was in the hospital, along with an English friend or relative, I forget which, because his brother was a victim of the bootleg racketeers who flourished in those unhappy days. He could do nothing for his dying brother but he went into the public ward near by where a child was dying of meningitis. This child was my patient and was in the hopeless terminal stage of the disease. With nothing more than a prayer Father Campanati reversed that stage and the child began to recover. The recovery was incredibly rapid. In two more days the child was sitting up and taking light nourishment. He had come to us from the Saint Nicholas Orphanage, a non-religious establishment despite its name, Saint Nicholas of course being the patron saint of children. As a bonus to his recovery the child was adopted while still in the hospital and left it with a new father and mother.'" Monsignor O'Shaughnessy looked up. "That seems definite enough. That can certainly go on file." He looked down at the book again. "Then he goes on about his skepticism about miracles and how it was cured by this event. Miracles he saw as a medical officer in the army. How one man said he'd drink himself clear of pneumonia and did. That's interesting, but it's not a miracle."

       "Look at page one fifty-five," I said.

       "Let's see. 'I never saw the child again after his adoption and discharge from hospital, but I often wonder what happened to him. I remember his first name, which was Godfrey. The surname he came in with I cannot remember, but I remember the name he went out with—Manning. The childless couple who adopted him were not rich but they were clearly loving. They took him away to live in a humble but loving home in Decatur, Illinois. Godfrey Manning it seemed to me was a good name, bringing God and Man together.'"

       "Well," I said, with a mixture of emotions which I felt might break my body entirely if it had not been strongly encased in gesso and bandages. "Does the name mean anything to you?"

       "It's a good name, I agree. Not that names mean anything. No, wait, the name rings some kind of little bell at the back of me mind. Wasn't the name in the newspapers?"

       "It was in the newspapers about the time of the death of Carlo, His late Holiness I should say. A very terrible business. The body of Christ administered as a cyanide tablet. Nearly two thousand slaughtered in the name of the Lord. My great-or grandniece among them. And her baby."

       "Oh Jesus. Oh holy mother of God. That was the man. Oh may the Lord save us. Oh sacred heart of our blessed Saviour." He crossed himself many times but wildly, as a man might cross himself when suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. And then, "Ach, it's not possible. It's a coincidence. It couldn't happen that way at all."

       "And if it's not, which it's not, a coincidence?"

       "The Lord gives all human creatures free will. If a man comes to a bad end it can't be blamed on the Lord. This is just a terrible thing that a human creature cut off from the Lord has done. You can't blame God for that terrible Hitler, can you now? Or for that Mussolini and the rest of the terrible people this terrible century's thrown up. Man's a free creature, and sometimes he uses his freedom in terrible ways."

       "Yes," I said, not believing that affirmation. Had I been free? Not for one solitary moment of my life had I been free. "But if God deliberately chooses to interfere in his free-running creation, which is what a miracle means, if he saves one life rather than another, what then? Doesn't it mean that he has a special intention for that life? That he puts on the foreknowledge he usually denies himself to ensure human freedom?" That last sentence exhausted me. Enough for one day; let me rest, let me not think on the matter. "Like," I said, "that legend of Saint Nicholas, since Saint Nicholas has come into it. Ah, never mind."

       "What you're trying to say about God it seems to me cannot be said ever ever, do you understand, about God. I read a novel about the life of Lazarus once—a wicked French novel I picked up on the quai in Paris. It made out that Lazarus had been brought back from the dead in order to live a life of riot and fornication. That was a wicked book. The human imagination is capable of a terrible amount of evil. God bless us, God save us from harm. Yes, yes, I know that story about the blessed Saint Nicholas. That Anatole France was a clever man but like so many clever men capable of great mischief."

       "He kept it," I said, "in the realm of the imagination. God prefers the realm of action. If God hadn't saved that child—Oh, let it pass. Let me sign whatever has to be signed in order to speed Carlo on the road to canonization. And then let me be done with him."

       "We have," Monsignor O'Shaughnessy said, "a lot of other miracles on record. Well, you know, things that will have to be looked into. An old woman in black recovered her sight when praying near his tomb. This communist leader in Bracciano found he could walk again. His Holiness had come to him in a dream. It didn't make him any less of a Communist. His Holiness himself was a Communist he said, forgive his stupidity. I think we can let this business go, very controversial. I think you'd best control your memory on that point, I know, I know, difficult at our age when our youth is the only thing we remember. I think this book had best be forgotten about. It's twenty-odd years old from the date on it I see, there can't be many copies around. There'll be enough support for his beatification which is the first step without bringing controversy into it."

       "It could be entered on the side of the advocatas diaboli."

       "There you're joking. That would make him out to be really diabolic. No, we forget all about it. For the good of the lot of us. Isn't that the best way?"

       "Fathers," I said, and it did not seem at first to be a pro posito, "are terrible people. We can do without fathers." Coming at me with redhot forceps, had that been it? "Mothers are altogether different. Our Mother the Church. Our Father in Heaven. I wonder whether it's time for me to come back into the Church."