Prince of Peace (17 page)

"Yes," he said easily enough, but she had spoken straight to his heart. Her simple statement seemed full of connotation, as if at last someone understood what he'd been through. It wasn't that they'd tortured him but that on the merest whim and at any moment they could have. "The question always was, How can this or that serve their purposes? An extra ration of rice or an unexpected move to another camp or a doctor showing up with malaria pills; no matter what they did, even if it was an improvement, you knew it wasn't for you. It was for them. Even when it came time for my release I found myself wondering, How will they use my freedom against me? Even now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't believe there isn't a guard outside my door."

"That's just your mother," Mary Ellen said.

They both laughed hard. Inwood mothers
are
like guards. Mary Ellen's crack punctured his melancholy and he was grateful to her. He felt more and more exposed to her and more and more relaxed.

"You know what I learned?" he asked intensely. He felt as though he was shaking off the lethargy of three years. "I learned how tough we can be, how defiant."

She responded with a slight movement of her brow. What did he mean?

"I thought that we were raised by the nuns and priests, by our parents, to be good little boys and girls, obedient and unquestioning. I mean, wasn't that the point of all the stuff at Good Shepherd, the demerits and the stars, the rewards and punishments, the indulgences and the years in purgatory? I thought the whole system was to keep us in line. But you know what? We've been raised to a standard, and they held us to it so that when the time came we could hold ourselves to it. We weren't raised to be deferential and obsequious at all. We were raised to make judgments and live by them. 'Don't you know that God's people will judge the world? Do you not know that we shall judge the angels?' We're Catholics, Mary Ellen. We stand for something. And it makes us stronger than other people. It really does. I saw it with my own eyes. And the Communists know it too. That's why they hate us. But they also respect us. Catholics have to lead the fight against Communism."

"Like Senator McCarthy."

This was six months before Joseph Welch said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?" And Michael was not equipped to evaluate the performance of the senator, but he wasn't enthralled by him. Unlike Mary Ellen and Inwood Catholics generally, he did not take his virtue for granted. No, the senator from Wisconsin wasn't what he meant at all. But he had a point. It was important to keep your eye on the ball, Michael would have said, and the ball was Communism, and how to lick it. He said as much to Mary Ellen.

Then they both fell silent, having lost the poignant, personal note of their talk in what must always seem by comparison the banality of politics.

After the waiter cleared their dishes and they were smoking their second cigarettes, Michael said, "So they think you're bold."

She nodded and looked at him through the smoke, touching her cigarette to her lips artfully. She
was
sophisticated, and he guessed that she'd had experiences with men that her mother didn't know of.

"Why exactly?"

"Because I don't believe that all the dreams have already come true. I don't believe that all the fabulous new worlds have already been discovered or that all the great ideas have already been thought up."

"I don't believe any of that either."

"I know you don't. It's obvious. You've got your hat set on something special."

"It shows?"

"I'll say."

"I wish you could tell me on what. I'm kind of at sea."

"You should go to college."

"I'm going to, one way or the other."

"And become what?"

Michael had not declared himself even to this extent before, and suddenly it seemed to him the conversation had taken a dangerous turn. "A lawyer maybe," he said. "I'd become a cop like my old man was, but to tell you the truth I've had my fill of guns. I'd like to do something that makes the world better, you know? You don't think that sounds hokey, do you?"

"I like hokey."

He trailed the cinder of his cigarette through the ashes in the ashtray. "Lawyer's work can be kind of dull though. Searching through the fat law books for legal precedents and all that. In the law I think they
do
believe that all the great ideas have already been thought up. I'm not sure."

"What does your friend think?"

Michael looked up sharply. He confessed to me that his first thought was, "Who, Durkin?" Then he realized what she meant. A coy thrust. He said, "She leaves it up to me."

"Smart girl."

"Yeah."

They could see through the windows that the snow was falling heavily now and they agreed it was time to head uptown.

On Fifth Avenue in front of Saint Patrick's Cathedral they paused. A service of some kind—carols perhaps or an Advent Mission—was in progress inside the Gothic church, and the snow was luminous against the brilliant blue windows. Michael and Mary Ellen stood there staring at the cathedral as if, magically, it would reveal its secrets to them. Was this the shrine of an Alpine village? Was it the insides of a spherical glass paperweight? In what way, exactly, was this real? To them at that moment Saint Patrick's was the most beautiful structure in the world and, sophisticates though they were, they shared a swell of pride that Fifth Avenue's masterpiece was their cathedral. Could Michael have imagined that only seven years after that moment he would prostrate himself on the floor of that very sanctuary to be ordained to the holy priesthood, and only seven years after that he would in its offices scandalously refuse to obey the explicit command of Cardinal Spellman? As if he had imagined not only these things but a whole life of heroic loneliness, he abruptly turned his back on Saint Patrick's and took Mary Ellen's shoulders in his hands. He intended to tell her the truth, that there was no other girl, that these hours with her had been his first truly happy ones since coming home, and that for the first time it seemed possible to him that he could do something with his life. Something worthy of his father's memory, worthy of his own having been spared in battle and in prison, worthy even of her!

"Mary Ellen," he began. But words failed him once more. Instinctively he veered into phrases he knew by heart. He spoke them passionately, loudly, his voice rising above the noises of the avenue. "'Then a great sign appeared in heaven ... a woman clothed in the sun ... and ... the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.' But the dragon was angry with the woman and went off to make war on her offspring. 'Then war broke out in heaven! Michael and his angels fought against the dragon who fought back with his angels, but the dragon was defeated.... Then I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, "...Now God has shown his power as king! Now his Messiah has shown his authority!"'"

"Michael, you're making me nervous."

He checked himself and released her shoulders. The intensity of his emotion had him shaking. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was the woman, the idea of the woman. I saw you."

She shook her head. "You said everything they did served their purposes. Maybe the Communists let you keep that Bible to..."

"Make me nutty?"

She dropped her eyes. She had a Catholic's distrust of a Bible quoter.

But he crooked his finger under her chin and lifted her face. "I'm not nutty, Mary Ellen. I know I'm not the archangel and I know I'm not the Messiah. But I do feel like I was spared to do God's work. I think they let me keep that New Testament because He wanted them to. It was His way of introducing Himself to me. I know how strange it seems. It's strange to me. But also very real. I mean, I'm here. That's the basic thing. And why should I be when fifty thousand other fellows didn't make it? Well the answer is obvious to me. Something very important won't get done unless I do it. I know it sounds conceited or pompous, but I have the feeling that the world needs me."

"Maybe not the world, Michael. Maybe just a little part of it."

It was as if he didn't hear her. He said, "It's such an awesome feeling that, well, it's kind of paralyzed me. I haven't known how to get going. But now after talking with you I see that the way to start is just to start. For me it was a start just to walk into Macy's this afternoon."

"What do you mean?"

He reached inside his coat and took out the small gift-wrapped box. "This is for you. I bought it for you.
Je Reviens;
is that how you say it?"

"You mean...?" She stared at the gift, not daring to touch it.

"I don't have a girl, Mary Ellen. Only the dream of one." Michael would say to me later that that was the first moment in his life when he'd stood on the near edge of love. He would stand there again, even more painfully, more happily. He saw her eyes fill. He said, "And she is a woman clothed in snow."

 

"This city," E. B. White said, "which not to look upon would be like death."

Michael and Mary Ellen looked upon it from the second hill in Fort Tryon Park. They looked upon it regularly. As the days lengthened they would meet at Dyckman Street and follow the pathway up the wooded slope and around the peak on which the Cloisters sat. Michael never took her into the museum, never showed its treasures to her as he had to me, and that fact alone would have tipped me off to what was coming.

He and Mary Ellen went up the hill to watch the sun set behind the George Washington Bridge. They held hands but only once they were inside the park, as if the streets of Inwood would whistle at them. Often, once the golden mist of evening had faded to black, they would sit on a favorite bench and kiss. As the weather grew warmer and the color returned to the tips of the trees and the smell of forsythia hung above the hillside and the earth underfoot grew dry again, they sat on patches of grass to be alone. They stared out at New York, talking, held in place by the sight of the city that embodied their longing.

One balmy evening in May he took her hand and led her, unopposed, to a remote grove. He took her into his arms and they held each other. Her strong, narrow body matched his, pressed against him. Her hair was against his face and through strands of it, as through the wispy young leaves, he looked out upon the city. It was timé for them to be lovers.

They had begun this before and stopped. Michael had discovered her breasts and explored her waist, the curve of flesh at her hip and the patch of rough hair between her legs. Mary Ellen had rubbed herself against him purposefully, to the point of his ejaculation, mortifying and stunning, inside his trousers. They courted, in other words, like what they were, children of another age, taking for granted their inhibition as well as their acute sense of sin, and paradoxically taking extreme delight, one lost to the present generation, in both. They were in no hurry, as if they knew that in sex anticipation is sweeter by far than what follows. They would take possession of each other as lovers, in other words, only when the rites of passion, longing and trespass had been fulfilled.

Tonight.

He undressed her even as they remained standing. She shivered when he drew her sweater back and off her shoulders. She let him find the clip of her bra. That his hands shook pleased her. She would never have permitted a man of experience to do this to her. When her skirt fell and she bent to remove her pants, then straightened, naked, he stepped back to look at her. This body, he felt, which not to look upon would be like death.

And she closed the distance between them. She fixed her eyes on the buttons of his shirt as she undid them. And she spoke. Her voice seemed distant, disembodied. "Michael, you have to tell me one thing." He waited. When she had his shirt unbuttoned she stopped and looked in his eyes. "My mother told me you're going to be a priest."

He nearly fell. "Oh, Mary Ellen, that's not true. That's not true at all."

"Monsignor Riordan told her. He told her I should leave you alone."

Mary Ellen laughed awkwardly, as if she'd brought the subject up against her will. She was only trying to dispel the ghosts of Inwood, ghosts she was sure could never claim Michael Maguire.

He took her into his arms and pressed her. Her breasts flattened against his chest. But suddenly she was wooden. She sensed that he'd drawn her into his embrace so that he would not have to look at her. "Oh, darling, you know how I feel about you. I love you. Everything else is far away and unimportant."

It stunned her that he hadn't denied what they were saying. His deflection seemed like an admission, and it panicked her. "He said you've applied for the seminary, that they've accepted you, that you begin in the fall. He said he's been tutoring you in Latin. Is it true?" Her voice was a whisper. Her weight was on him and her mouth was by his ear.

He did not answer. He could have said, "I haven't quite made up my mind to do it." Or he could have said, "What else can I do with my life?" Or he could have attacked the monsignor and her mother; why can't Catholics leave their bright young men alone? Why do they fold us in, corral us, ruin all our options but one? Of course he knew why; it was the genius of the system. His generation would be the last of which it was true, but the best, smartest and bravest boys were tracked inexorably toward one thing. The Great Vocation. Even angels bent their knees to priests. No one ever asked, Since when do angels have knees?

"Help me," he could have said, "to tell them no." But say no to God? He said nothing. He could not answer her.

She dressed herself. He watched her. It was as if a door closed slowly on a room. He would always think of it as the best room in the house.

Before she turned away she said, "I'm the one who helped you make your mind up, aren't I?"

He nodded. She had given him not the courage, but the will.

Tears overflowed her eyes. She was so hurt.

She said, "And you wanted to make love to me so that you'd have done it once. Right?"

He didn't answer.

"Right?" she insisted. Her voice rose sharply, and all at once her anger swept her hurt aside.