Memorial Bridge (6 page)

Father Ferrick leaned across the desk. "There's a bit too much of the harp, lad, in the likes of us."

"I don't lead with my Irishness, Father. But I don't disavow it either."

Ferrick opened his hands. "As you wish. I was only interested in your seeing the thing for a minute the way the managing partner at Lambert, Rowe would see it. He'd never be so crude, of course, as to display discomfort at a candidate's overly ethnic name. Only a fellow Mick on
the make would raise the issue." He grinned. "Let's say I considered it my job."

"And the managing partner's job is to make sure the firm's first Irish Catholic doesn't seem like one."

The priest nodded. "
John
Dillon has just the right ring to it."

"And after I changed my name, you were going to send me down to Moss Brothers Outfitters for a new suit."

"I was going to lend you the money."

"Is it so important to you, Father?"

"You're a young man, Sean. When you get to be my age you'll have grown weary, I'll wager, of the border turf they leave to us."

"When I'm your age, Father, I'll be in the middle of the field, and I'll be there as myself." Sean knew that to any other priest such a statement would have seemed like rank arrogance: Who do you think you are? "I'm Sean Dillon, Father."

"And you live in Canaryville."

Dillon laughed. "Where no one raises the question of my name. It's one advantage of working for a fellow named Gustavus."

"Swift would be lucky to get you for a lawyer. I want you to think about what I'm offering you. But your given name is an obstacle. I'm serious about your changing it. If you want out of the cramped, unpromising world you were born to—it's either that or go back and finish up your studies for the priesthood and get sent to Rome." Father Ferrick leaned back in his chair. "Or stay in Canaryville, Sean, with the sparrows."

Dillon eyed the priest steadily, aware that he was not only "offering" something, as he claimed, but exacting something too. After a moment Dillon said with bemused casualness, "You know about the sparrows?"

The Jesuit laughed. "I know that the birds around the yards aren't canaries, and never were."

The two men smiled at each other, thinking of the same story. In the last century the population of English sparrows feeding on bits of grain in the ubiquitous piles of dried dung had become so large that the area had become known as Canaryville.

Father Ferrick said, "But when I think of sparrows I think of St. Bede's sparrow."

What was this? Dillon raised his eyebrows.

The priest leaned toward him, his large hands entwined. "The story is
in Bede's
Ecclesiastical History,
the story of the conversion to Christianity of what we now know as England."

Father Ferrick's intensity pulled Dillon in.

"The Druid king, Edwin, called a meeting of his councilors to hear what they had made of the preaching of the monks who had come over from the Continent. The king and his barons gathered in a great stone hall illuminated by the flames of torches and candles, warmed by a massive fire at one end. They sat around a table, each man giving his impressions while the king listened.

"St. Bede says that the king and his advisors achieved no understanding of what they were groping toward until one councilor—we don't know his name—stood up when it was his turn to speak. Instead of talking about what he'd heard of the Christian preaching, he said something about human life."

Father Ferrick paused here, as if to plunge into his story. But surfaces to him were a sea to move across. Dillon saw the sea shimmering in his eyes. His story was a ship in which to cross it. Dillon waited, listening.

"He said human life is like a sparrow coming by accident into a great lighted hall in winter. It flies frantically in through a doorway from a world outside that is cold and dark, and it soars through the bright air of the illuminated hall which is so warm..."

Dillon too, in the trance of the old man's description, began to see it.

"...with its flickering candles, its tapestries, its stonework, its quiet fellowship, so beautiful. The sparrow flies quickly through, a perfect arc, and then, like that, goes out again through another opening into the merciless cold, the wind, the dark."

What am I hearing? Dillon wondered. Who am I to have the sea within me, a feeling of the ocean inside my throat?

"King Edwin's councilor said that human life is that interval of warmth and light and peace within the hall. Human life is the sparrow's flight. What comes after life and what goes before it is the winter darkness outside the hall. 'Therefore,' he said, 'if these new preachers have some certainty on these matters, it behooves us to receive it.'"

The Jesuit leaned back, unfolding himself into his chair, moved.

"Did they?" Dillon asked. When Father Ferrick failed to respond he said, "Did they have some certainty?"

"Of course."

"What was it?"

"Why, our certainty."

And Dillon sensed that
this
was the test, and if he was now required to take it, he would not pass.

"Our certainty," the priest said, "is that
outside
the hall it is light, True Light of True Light.
Here,
inside, is where it is dark."

"I'm not sure I believe that, Father."

"I know. That's why you stopped short of the priesthood, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"What you believe in is the sparrow's flight."

Dillon answered carefully, unsure now whether this man was a professor or a spiritual director. "Instead of a certainty of faith, what I have is eagerness, Father. I want a flight of my own. Is that wrong of me?"

"No. But you don't get off the ground by hesitating, lad. You came so far in the Church and hesitated. Now you've come so far in the law, and I fear you're hesitating again."

"Because I won't change my name?"

"Because you won't
act
on your eagerness and get out. Why are you still in the stockyards? Why would you even think of working for Swift? Because it's so familiar to you, that's why. And because for the likes of us it's so safe and comfortable."

"I pulled the rotting corpse of a man out of a blood pit at Swift's this afternoon, Father. From the mark on his hand I know he was a Hibernian. That's how safe the stockyards are for the likes of us. You assumed before it was an accident, but he'd been flogged. That corpse was a little warning against thinking too much of yourself. If so, it's a warning I reject. I don't know who the fellow was, but maybe his offense was a Canaryville version of refusing to change your name simply because your betters don't like the ring of it, if you receive my meaning, Father. Besides, it took a hell of a lot—" Dillon's anger surprised him. Was there something true in what the priest was saying? Hesitating? Again? Dillon shook the question off. "I'm not talking about narrow loyalty, Father. I broke more rules of the tribe in leaving the seminary than I would in changing my name."

The priest nodded, accepting Dillon's point. After a pause he said softly, "The sparrow's flight through the hall, whatever else one believes or doesn't believe, is all too quick, gone in a flash. I'm sorry about the man you found. I'll pray for him. I'll pray for you too, if you don't mind.

Don't waste another moment of your time, that's all I'm telling you. Be what you can be, Dillon."

"It's not advice I'm used to getting, Father. Didn't Jesus say His Heavenly Father watches over the sparrows—not the ones that find it possible to fly, but the ones that fall? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do now? Get off the ground so that I can fall?
Then
God will love me? Then the Church will take me back?"

The priest shook his white head slowly. "I had the impulse to send you over to Lambert, Rowe because I didn't think you would fall. I see now..." He hesitated. "...that I was more right than I knew." He slapped his desk and stood abruptly. "Now go home and study your notes. Start from scratch with them. I don't want you embarrassing me in that exam tomorrow after I stick my neck out for you."

A few minutes later, after leaving Loyola, Dillon was riding the El, rattling south away from the Loop, looking out across the western stretches of the hard-ass, indifferent city. The last glow of twilight faded above the silhouettes of the roundhouses and smokestacks and grain elevators and mills. This had been a day on which the slow coming of summer darkness seemed for once completely wrong. The darkness should have come hours ago.

He'd left Father Ferrick feeling the way, as a boy, he'd felt leaving the confessional. He'd wanted to savor that sweet catharsis, but the feeling didn't last. The image of what had sullied him intruded, and with it a wholly different, and unwelcome, set of feelings.

The dead man.

The murdered man.

The darkness.

Against the darkness outside the window, against the shocking image he saw reflected in the darkness of his own pupils, Dillon closed his eyes. He had left the dean's office resolved to go directly to his workman's bare room in a boardinghouse on Halsted Street and study through the night—a perfect exam!—as he had so many times before.

But what were the requirements of school now if not a mockery of what Dillon knew to be the truth about himself? Something irresistible was drawing him back toward that foul abyss into which, for a moment, naked as the day he was born, he had plunged. No mere idea or hope or feeling or metaphor—the darkness outside King Edwin's castle—that blood pit was a fact, a fact about the world, like it or not,
to which he—"Sean"—belonged. It wasn't over yet.

The train accelerated as it hit the downward slope at Archer that marked the end of the elevated section of the line. Now the train rumbled into his home neighborhood, and Dillon felt a rare dose of longing for it. This
was
his place. These
were
his people: the canaries, the yarders, the Irish, the Catholics, the human beings. He was involved with them. He was not alone.

Doran's was one of a dozen saloons on Exchange Avenue in the block across from the Stone Gate. It was like other back-of-the-yards taverns in its dinginess and in the thick, layered odors of cigar smoke, hoghouse and stale booze. The men who came to Doran's before and after work were not coming for decor.

They weren't coming just for booze either. Like many pubs, Doran's had a back room the door to which was open during the day. The back room men, wearing headphones and punching tabulators, could be seen then from the tavern proper. The room was a betting parlor. Discarded gambling tickets covered the floor of the entire saloon.

Now the back room was closed. Affixed to its door was a poster featuring a bespectacled orator in clerical collar whose twisted mouth and extended fist indicated the heat with which he was speaking. On the wall behind his pulpit was the carved legend "Christ Crucified," and text above and below the priest's image read, "I have taken my stand," and "Social Justice."

It was Father Coughlin. The bread-box-sized Philco on which Doran's customers had listened to the radio priest every Sunday for most of the decade stood on the near end of the worn shiny bar that ran the length of one wall.

Arranged along the bar at intervals were a complimentary jar of
pickled pigs' feet, a salt shaker, a half-empty bowl of boiled eggs and the donation box from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Tarnished spittoons stood at like intervals along the footrail. Against the opposite wall were benches and narrow tables, hardly more than hoisted planks.

Most customers began their serious drinking standing up, but by now the benches were crowded with woozy, indifferent day-shift men who'd come in hours ago. More recently arrived drinkers at the bar, in contrast, tossed back ale and whiskey while talking energetically, or even arguing, pounding the smooth wood or each other's shoulders. These had mostly come in since supper.

As in all taverns that had betting parlors in back, the windows were papered over to keep passersby outside from indulging their curiosity, although not patrolmen, since the bookies operated, in effect, in partnership with police. The blanked windows fixed the place in the constant artificial nighttime that daylight drinkers liked. But now, since it was nearly nine o'clock and finally dark outside, the tavern door was open to the authentic night. For once a balmy breeze wafted through the crowded room, swirling the smoke and carrying the noise out to the street.

Cassie Ryan stood in the doorway. Most young women in such a threshold, and ordinarily Cassie herself, would have felt afraid. The roughness of the room and the crudeness of the men, with their brutal faces, loose jaws and bloodshot eyes, were not lost on her, but Cassie forced herself to recall that these same men with this same brainlessness crowded the vestibule of St. Gabriel's every Sunday. The wave of feeling that had carried her this far was not going to break now on girlish timidity. Cassie Ryan had come with a question and she was going to ask it, no matter of whom.

She watched the yardmen in the tavern gesticulating at one another, indifferent to their filth; it was their liveliness that struck her. These men were so reserved in the presence of their women and children—she thought of them mutely hunched over one knee in the back of St. Gabe's—that it was a shock to come upon them in a moment of their vigorous camaraderie. How they prefer each other! How they sting each other's shoulders with their slaps, these fathers and sons who never so much as stroked a cheek at home. No wonder they love their whiskey and beer if this is what it does for them.

A barrel-chested off-duty policeman pushed by her, turning his broad
shoulders sideways to enter, touching his cap at her and letting his eyes hesitate on hers for a moment. She recognized his concern at once, his assumption that she was one form or another of the perennial waif sent by an irate mother for an oafish drunken father. She deflected the policeman's gaze, but not before it called up a choking sensation she hadn't felt in years, which was how long it had been since she or anyone had bothered to haul Mike Foley home from one of these dives. To her knowledge her uncle had never done his drinking at Doran's.