Prodigal Father (7 page)

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Authors: Ralph McInerny

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: Prodigal Father
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My vows to the Lord I will fulfill before all my people.
—
Psalm 116
 
On Saturday morning, Father Dowling awoke to find it raining. But it had stopped by the time Phil Keegan arrived.
“It's over, Roger. Have no fear. The game is on.”
After saying his Mass, with Phil behind the wheel of the Center minibus they drove to Edna's where she and the kids piled in, the boys full of excitement.
“This is our second game this year,” Eric said.
“There's nothing like Wrigley Field,” Phil said. “Win or lose, it's always a treat to be there.”
“You working on any murders?” Eric asked him.
“Ah, murders,” Phil said. He was on the interstate now and happy to pontificate about the blood and gore that filled his days. “The trouble with interesting murders, you almost never solve them. Does that surprise you?”
“You've got a small department,” Eric said.
Phil didn't like that. Edna told Eric not to bother Captain Keegan while he was driving. A sound suggestion, given the abandon with which Phil was switching lanes and exceeding the speed limit.
“Can a policeman get a ticket?” Jane asked.
“Only if he breaks the law.” Phil let up on the gas and settled into one lane.
“Had Father Boniface come before you left?” Edna asked.
“No. But he'll be in good hands with Marie. She was miffed that Phil and I didn't stay for lunch. I told her we'd have all we could eat at the game. Marie will have a most appreciative diner in Father Boniface.”
“She told me you-know-who is definitely not a priest.”
“That settles it, then.”
 
 
Jane seemed intent on making up for her sullenness on the previous trip to the ball game. She sat next to Father Dowling and they fell into a deep conversation that Edna made a point of not overhearing. How much more joyous an occasion this was. For all of them. She was thoroughly ashamed of herself at having been flattered by Stan Morgan's attention. This game would sweep memories of it from her children's minds. Jane had heard her appeal to Marie Murkin's authority on who was a priest and who was not. She did not want her daughter to think that it had been a former priest who showed such interest in her mother.
Now that it was safely in the past, Edna could take innocent pleasure from the fact that Stan Morgan had found her attractive. She had tried to convince herself that his attention had only the purpose of pumping her about the man he was looking for. There was some of that, no doubt, but it hadn't been all and she knew it. Having emerged from the fire unscathed, she could enjoy the boost to her self-esteem. She had told Earl that Father Dowling was taking them all to the game.
“I'll be watching it,” he said.
“Oh, how I wish we were all going together.”
“We will. We will.”
How often it was she who needed cheering up when she visited him. Earl was resigned to serve out his sentence. He had killed no one, no matter what the court had found, but it was just luck that he had not and that did change the appearance of the evidence. To Edna he seemed like a soul in purgatory, being punished but certain that the day would come when his troubles would cease and he could return to his family. She kept him supplied with recent photographs, but the kids knew him only from the wedding picture on her dresser. How young they both had been, squinting into the sunlight, not knowing what lay before them.
Jane enjoyed the game as much as the boys. And Phil Keegan. He was up and down, cheering, groaning, shouting at the umpire, constantly flagging down anyone selling food.
 
 
Phil amazed Father Dowling. He could watch a game in the rectory and never raise his voice, but he was an active participant today. They had hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn and soft drinks, but when Phil waved down the kid selling Frosty Malts, Father Dowling begged to be excused. So did Edna. Jane sat between them, as knowledgeable about the game as her brothers, explaining everything to Edna, and giving Father Dowling a look at her mother's lack of knowledge. But that certainly didn't diminish Edna's enjoyment. What a good woman she was and how well she was raising her children in difficult circumstances. But then the moral resources of ordinary folk never ceased to amaze him. Tragedy struck without warning—an unexpected death, a daughter in trouble, an intractable son—and people rose to the occasion and saw it through. Who would suspect the burdens
Edna bore seeing the calm efficiency with which she ran the Senior Center? And there was not an ounce of condescension in her treatment of the old people, even when foolish little romances flared up among septuagenarians and elderly men and women acted like children on the school grounds of their youth. Edna might have been anticipating her own innocent susceptibility.
 
 
On the way home, Eric sat next to Father Dowling on the back seat of the little bus, reviewing the game and analyzing why the Cubs had lost despite two home runs by Sammy Sosa. Like Phil, he regarded any loss as the result of bad calls and lucky hits by the opposing team. But finally they all fell silent, weary from the outing. They were nearly at the Fox River exit when Eric roused himself.
“Mom, you know that guy that took us to a game? The reason my Google search didn't work was I got the name wrong.”
“How so?”
“I thought it was Moran. But it's Morgan. I remembered that and got a pile of stuff.”
“Did you print it out?” Father Dowling asked.
“I could.”
“I'd like to see what you found.”
Give me again the joy of your help, with a spirit of fervor sustain me.
—
Psalm 51
 
Marie Murkin continued to sing the praises of Stan Morgan. “I wish he'd come back, Father.”
“I'm surprised he hasn't.”
“The way you treated him?”
“I was thinking of the way you did.”
“Oh, for heaven's sake.”
At least Marie had no inkling of Morgan's interest in Edna. What a thing she would have made of that. It was one thing for her to have tea in her kitchen with the attentive young man, but if she knew Edna had had dinner with him, that he had taken her and the kids to a ball game … Roger Dowling did not like to think what she would have said.
“Why do you call him a young man?”
“Because he is.”
“You mean younger.”
“I mean young,” Marie said and tromped down the hall. The kitchen door banged shut behind her.
 
 
In the old days, they had had nuns who took care of the laundry and refectory, a community of German nuns who chattered away in their native tongue and had only an imperfect grasp of English, much to the delight of the seminarians who were always trying to get them to commit spoonerisms. But Marie Murkin was something entirely different. Boniface had had two sisters, one a nun, the other married, both dead now, and he supposed he had heard female chatter as a boy before he went off to the Athanasians. But Marie Murkin's loquaciousness was a marvel. There was some respite while she was at work in the kitchen, but she sat at the dining room table while he ate, watching each mouthful, anxious for his reaction. But mainly she just talked. Little response was required of him and Boniface considered it a small price to pay for the delicious meal. But he was looking ahead to the solitude of Father Dowling's study before he went over to the church for confessions. And then she mentioned Stan Morgan.
“I'm sure Father Dowling told you of him.”
“No.”
So Marie did. “It shows you the influence a priest can have, doesn't it?”
Was there any secret of St. Hilary's parish that Mrs. Murkin would not divulge to a priest she trusted? When she began about the man who had come looking for a runaway priest, Boniface quelled his conscience and asked her to continue.
“Can you imagine? Now he was as nice a man as you could expect to meet, Father. I gave him tea and we had a good talk. You never know when something you say will strike the proper note. You know what I mean.”
“And you struck the proper note?”
“Oh, I tried to help him. Father Dowling was spending the week with you, and I do what I can.”
“He wanted a priest?”
“Not just any priest. This was someone in particular. A man he had met in California and who had mentioned Fox River … so, of course, he came here to ask.”
“To ask?”
“If I knew the man. Now what was his name … ? Richards. Yes, Richards.”
Boniface managed not to express the surprise he felt. “He was looking for a man named Richards who said he was a priest?”
“That was his story. Do you know what I thought? Well, I was right. It turned out he himself was a lapsed Catholic. It didn't take a genius to figure out that was just a story. He wanted help.”
“Ah.”
She chattered on. The man said he had come from California, but Marie would not vouch for that. Boniface would know what subterfuges people use when they are in need of help.
“Did he say why he wanted this particular priest?”
“When I got out the Catholic Directory, he told me the man was no longer a priest. I think he was afraid I would find someone and the whole point of his coming by would be lost.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, we had a good talk and I hope I did some good.”
“I'm sure you did.”
Eventually he escaped to the study. He sat at Father Dowling's desk and noted the volume of the
Summa
and Dante sitting on it, as if for ready reference. The First Part of the Second Part. What a marvel the
Summa
was, particularly perhaps in its moral part. He opened the book without moving it. Question 16. A bad conscience
binds but does not excuse. A difficult doctrine, though Boniface was sure it was true. Medieval Latin grated on his inner ear, but he was willing to acknowledge this as a fault. In the medieval schools, Latin had been a living language, not a nostalgic return to classical times as it had been during the Renaissance. It was the Renaissance revival of classical Latin that had made it a dead language. C. S. Lewis. This was true. Aquinas wrote in Latin as in his mother tongue, a contemporary idiom, which was as it should be.
But Boniface's mind was full of Father Richards.
Richard Krause? It was not impossible. He got down the Catholic Directory and found several Richards, none of them from Illinois. He admitted to himself that in his heart of hearts he did not want Richard reinstated as an Athanasian. His years away from the Order represented a vast
terra incognita.
What Boniface had learned of it did not inspire confidence in the prodigal returned. And yet there was much in his favor, not least his role in restoring the communal recitation of the office in choir. Richard had been the best Latinist Boniface had ever taught. He remembered the sadness he had felt when he learned that Richard was among the many who had decided to return to the lay estate. Of course one was always a priest,
tu es sacerdos in aeternum,
an indelible mark that lasted into eternity, but a priest could be laicized. And so many had been. They had rushed like lemmings to the sea, in Richard's case to California. Stout Cortez, wasn't it? A financial advisor. It would be quite in order to ask Richard for a detailed account of his life in the world, places, dates, occupation. And to learn more about his marriage, and the former nun he had married who had since died.
How sad any life is when summed up in a sentence or two. A life sentence. He imagined a young girl becoming a postulant,
passing through the novitiate, taking her vows. And then? Boniface had never understood what prompted men to leave the religious life, let alone women. They had come to regard being faithful to the vocation to which they had been called a weakness. Did they want the security of a predictable life? Well, that could be the case. All the spiritual writers warned against it. They had been instructed about such dangers from their first years in the Order. The right deed for the wrong reason. But one could strive to do the right deed for the right reason. Wasn't that the task of a lifetime? Security did not seem quite the word for that lifelong quest of perfection. Why was abandoning the task preferable?
Just before three, he went over to the church and took up his post in the visitor's confessional. And then they came, one after the other, with their little menus of sins, their fear of punishment, so often a calculating attitude as they argued with themselves and with God whether they had really done anything wrong at all. Boniface listened patiently. The fact that a person was in the confessional was prima facie evidence of repentance. It was one of the rules he had learned. And it was true. He accepted the recitation of sins and tried to direct the penitent to sorrow and a firm resolution to amend his life. Or her life. His or her life, as the phrase now was. The different genders did not seem so different in the confessional. Boniface assumed the role of an alter Christus, welcoming the sinner, whispering encouragement. Between penitents, he prayed for them all, the ones who came and the ones who feared to come, certain their deeds were unprecedented in their depravity. A species of pride, that. Who has not sinned? Who is not capable of any imaginable sin?
Between penitents, thoughts of Richard returned, negative thoughts. Richard had lobbied the community on the matter of working out some sort of deal with Anderson. It now looked deadlocked,
half for, half against, and, of course, opponents were thought of as antiprogressive, conservative, stuck in the mud. When had change as change come to seem unquestionably good? Most changes brought both good and bad. Sticking with the tried and true doubtless did the same. Yet it was the nature of such division that the opposite side had to be seen as benighted. Surely there were persuasive reasons to sit down with Anderson and talk.
The most powerful argument turned on the greed and selfishness involved in so small a community, a community that would dwindle before it ever grew large again, if it grew at all, possessing a vast piece of real estate. The main building was closed off on all its upper floors, floors that contained the dormitories and rooms that had once housed the student body. The whole second floor had been allotted to members of the community then, but now they all lived in the mansion, each with a suite—bedroom, sitting room, private bath. Boniface had been told that all the new houses going up in the area around them contained multiple bathrooms, six, seven, even more. He thought of his own home with its one bathroom on the second floor, more than enough for his parents and sisters and himself. Mention of the new trend in bathrooms had been meant to cushion the guilt they all seemed to feel to some degree at taking up residence in a house that truly deserved the name mansion.
It had a horseshoe form, the wide front made to appear smaller because of the overhanging eaves and the front porch whose descending roof seemed to take the house with it. Large, fat pillars supported the porch roof, green-tiled as was the roof above, the sides of stucco. The irony of the house was that when old Corbett could afford to build it he had few years left to live in it. Can a man in his sixties build with thoughts of only his own future? Boniface did not know. In any case, Maurice Corbett had unwittingly
been building a house for a religious community he would not have heard of at the time of the house's construction. The entry from the county road gave little sense of what awaited as one came up the driveway. The unimpressive little woods through which the driveway wended soon gave way to an expanse of lawn on both sides that rose in broad terraces to the house. The trees became more numerous as one neared the house, decorous trees, trees selected for their variety and beauty. And, of course, the magnolias, their pride and joy.
The chapel was the first addition when the Athanasians took possession, and then what came to be called the main building, one designed to house every aspect of the Order's work. That building had gone up the year before Boniface's entry. When he first came up the drive what he saw had a look of permanency, of having been there forever yet he had seen it in its first years. Was he seeing it all now in its last? It was an odd thought that institutions, too, have lifetimes, a natural inevitable cycle from infancy through childhood to maturity and finally decline. But other orders had lasted for centuries and were still around. It would have been unthinkable to him as a young man that he had boarded a sinking ship. Well, all ships are sinking, nothing is forever in this world, we have here no lasting city.
There was the creak of the kneeler as a penitent settled in. Boniface slid the little panel aside to open the grill.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
You could guess the age of penitents by the way they confessed. Once nuns had drilled such formulas into children and they remained for a lifetime. Very likely the same sins had been confessed over the years as well, with every now and again some great eruption of misbehavior, but then settling down again into the uneasy mediocrity that marked most lives.
 
 
Father Dowling seemed refreshed rather than exhausted by his outing, though Captain Keegan soon went yawning into the night, leaving the two priests alone. Marie had finally accepted their refusal of a snack, a drink, tea, coffee.
“Good night, Marie.”
“Well, if you're sure.”
And she retreated to the kitchen and then up the back stairs to her apartment.
“Mulier fortis,”
Boniface murmured.
“Fortissima.
Do you use the Web, Father?”
“Only when first I practiced to deceive.”
Father Dowling smiled appreciatively. “Neither do I. The young are all adepts now, of course. Certainly Edna Hospers's son Eric is. This is something he found and, as he put it, downloaded.”
The pages on Stan Morgan contained news stories from various California papers, accusations, complaints of peculation, fraud, misleading of clients. There were half a dozen pictures of Stanley Morgan, the object of all these accusations. Boniface looked at Father Dowling.
“It's buried in the story.”
And so it was, mention of a silent and suddenly absent partner in the firm that was the object of such obloquy. Richard Krause.

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