Relic of Time (5 page)

“But they found the shroud to be authentic,” Don Ibanez said.

“Most drew that conclusion. But there were members of the scientific team who drew a negative conclusion.”

“And Phelps is among the deniers?”

“That puts it rather mildly.”

If her father had known this when Phelps was buying his land, he would have had the sale canceled, something he could easily have done. Now, he had half a mile up the road a skeptic, an atheist, an enemy.

Clare shared her father's religious beliefs and his devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe but not his weakness for unusual religious phenomena and his tendency to make Marian apparitions the center of his creed.

It was on her morning jog that she had first encountered Phelps, puffing along on his bicycle, keeping mortality at bay. She stopped to talk to him.

“I want to stay hearty enough to finish my work,” he said, breathing heavily.

“Your work?”

He explained.

“But can't you get someone to do that for you?”

“Oh, I could never entrust it to anyone else. A helper, yes. A helper I could use. But in this remote region . . .”

He looked at her through unkempt eyebrows.

“What do you do all day?” he asked.

She laughed. “This and that.” She would not mention the novel she was writing. It had seemed a kind of therapy to begin it after she had broken up with George. “Come home,” her father had said. “What you want is peace and quiet.”

Was it? In any case, she came home, not intending to stay, but doing so, for nearly half a year. What an indolent life it seemed, how luxurious and carefree, after working in the Catholic Worker house that George ran in Palo Alto. How she admired him. He seemed a saint, otherworldly, totally disinterested in money or prestige or any of the things that drove others their age. When she praised him, he looked at her with his deep, deep eyes.

“Come and help.”

She was a student at Stanford, as he had been. She stopped going to class. She spent much of her day there, helping George and the others with the “guests,” drunks and addicts and derelicts who had reached bottom without any hope of rising again. So the point was simply to be of help to them as they were, without expecting some great transformation. “Sufficient for the day is the soup thereof” was one of George's maxims. And he wasn't being cynical.

Clare had kept her apartment and that led to George's suggestion that she live in the women's residence. Besides the building in which the guests were received and fed and clothed, there were two houses, one for men, the other for women. George lived in the first, and he suggested that she take a room in the second. He showed her through the place. He was very proud of it. In the kitchen was a woman with a baby on her hip and a neckline that was not daring but serviceable, facilitating breast-feeding the child she held. The boy seemed to have some sort of rash.

“Infantigo,” the mother explained.

George took the baby and the woman showed Clare the upstairs. It was all she could do not to shudder. Here was poverty indeed. There was nothing romantic about it. It was squalid and unclean and . . . But why go on?

“So what do you think?” George asked when she came down.

“Nice.”

“Did Sandy show you your room?”

“I think I saw them all.”

She went to the door and outside, where George joined her. “You don't like it.”

“George . . .” She searched his face for understanding. But how could you explain to Saint Francis that you just couldn't live his way?

“It takes getting used to.”

She could believe that, but why should one get used to squalor and dirt? It was the beginning of the end of what had promised to be something very serious between her and George. Eventually she fled to her father and the haven of the Napa Valley.

On their second morning encounter, Professor Phelps formally asked her to come help him with his accumulated papers. She agreed.

“The man's an atheist!” her father cried.

No doubt. But he was also considerate, fastidious, grateful, and witty. And it gave Clare something to do now that she had despaired of her novel. Dorothy Day had written a novel, before her conversion; that seemed to be the genesis of the idea. Working with Professor Phelps on his papers was less demanding.

The bishops of the United States had earned Neal Admirari's grudging approval by the way in which they defended illegal immigrants. The hierarchy had been notably timid and tepid on most moral and social issues, with exceptions of course, but the exceptions were not Neal's cup of tea.

“You think Catholic politicians who are cheerleaders for abortion and all the rest should be given communion?”

This from the recently widowed Lulu van Ackeren, once the love of his life and now returned to journalism as a contributor to
Commonweal
.

“Let's not politicize the Eucharist,” Neal said unctuously.

Opposing Lulu's views was something he did as much to stir her into anger as to express his own thoughts. When she was angry, the years seemed to wash away and she was once more the girl she had been. Her hair was still blondish, doubtless due more to art than to nature now, and the great blue eyes still sparkled with youthful fire. It had always been argument that had lit the fire of love between them. Ever since her return, Neal had been wondering whether their grand passion would know a second act. Patience was the watchword now, because of his indecision and the fact that she was, after all, still in mourning of a sort. Besides, if it came to that, he would be husband number three.

“Read the Catechism,” she urged.

“First chance I get. How about Catholic politicians who support an unjust war?”

“There are two schools of thought on that, and you know it.”

“There are two schools of thought on everything.”

They were in the bar of the hotel in El Paso where the media had gathered, but their table was off in a corner, a small table, which made it difficult not to keep knocking her knees with his. Their argument now was a diversion, just getting into practice again. They were on the same side so far as immigration went. And Benedict XVI, bless his former Holy Office—formerly the Inquisition—heart, was clearly on the side of the poor who defied the law and swarmed across the border. The pope had made the telling point that the way to stop immigration was to make things more tolerable in the immigrants' native lands.

“Two more, kiddo,” Neal called to a passing waitress.

“I don't want another,” Lulu said.

“These are for me.”

Of course she'd have another drink. It was a professional obligation to have a snootful if one were to protect the public's right to know.

“I had forgotten what rowdies the media are.”

“One does one's best.”

“You.” She dropped her chin and gave him the benefit of an approving look. They had met that morning at an early Mass, and that set them apart from their colleagues. Most of them had no idea who Our Lady of Guadalupe was.

“Patroness of the Americas,” Neal had said authoritatively when the question arose.

“North and South both?”

“You got it.”

Background stories on Theophilus Grady and his Rough Riders had appeared in most of the media represented here, cobbled together by researchers in New York and Washington. Neal had needed to do little research for the two pieces he had written for his syndicated column. Was Lulu impressed by the heights he had reached? A syndicated column was the dream of every member of the print media. Several websites had tried to lure Neal away but he still couldn't bring himself to believe that that was where the future lay.

“The print media is dead,” Nicholas Pendant had assured Neal.

“Are.”

“Is that right?”

“You got fact-checkers?”

“Of course we've got fact-checkers. Papers are dying all over the country, Neal. And it's not just the general illiteracy. It's far easier and quicker to log on to Mercury to get the news.”

Mercury was the up-and-coming website and Pendant could prove it.

“You have links to my column now.”

“See? You log in yourself.”

For the nonce, Neal settled for being wooed by Pendant.

“You all use the same arguments, Nick.”

“Who you been talking to?”

“I never kiss and tell.”

“I'll top any offer, Neal. I mean it.”

“I'll remember.”

“Don't sign with anyone without talking to me.”

“I promise.”

Lulu was unimpressed by the possibility. “The web? Come on.”

“It may be the future, Lulu.”

She was as baffled by talk of podcasts, YouTube, and all the rest as he was. Once journalism had been simply a matter of putting words on paper and shooting them off to the printer. Now news was immediate and sent out in ways that only kids seemed to understand. For all that, Neal used a laptop now and could zing his column off as an e-mail attachment to the syndicate and that was that. But in the end, his stuff appeared in print, as it always had. If newsprint was evanescent, what could be said of what appeared on a computer screen?

“I'd rather be a dinosaur,” Lulu said.

“Your skin's too smooth.”

She snatched her hand away when he covered it with his own. A good sign, if a good sign was what he wanted. A pliant Lulu was an oxymoron. Two more drinks arrived and Lulu took one, poured what was left of her previous drink in it, and lifted the glass in a toast.

“To the pope,” Neal said.

“To the pope.” She drank deeply. “I haven't had this much to drink in I don't know how long.”

“It's only a venial sin.”

“Drinking?”

“Not drinking.”

She put her hand on his. Her left hand. The rings were gone. Were they really back to square one again?

“I just did a piece on the rosary crusade,” Lulu said.

The crusade, announced on EWTN, was the idea of Miriam Dickinson, an ageless Catholic apologist, alleged descendant of the poet.

“How can you be a descendant of the Maid of Amherst?”

“Obliquely.”

“Indeed.”

The crusade had caught on; several bishops had blessed the idea. Storm heaven with prayer so that the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe would be restored unharmed to its shrine.

“Neal, what if it is never recovered?”

“Say your rosary.”

“I do.”

He believed her. Lulu was the most delicate arrangement of appetite and piety. Her hand still lay on his. He pushed his knees against hers, and she turned sideways in her chair.

“Watch your knees.”

“I'd have to bend over. Did I tell you of my replacement?”

“Really?”

“No.”

She made a face, a cute face. Her knees came back into contact with his.

On the various television sets around the bar a large man with a florid face appeared.

“Halvorson,” Lulu groaned.

There were cries of “Turn it up” from bar stools and tables. Something like a hush fell and the fruity tones of Halvorson, a minister, but one of the guardians of the separation of church and state, filled the bar.

“We have no dog in this fight,” Halvorson intoned. “The might of the United States of America cannot be engaged in a religious quarrel of no interest to the mass of Americans. I know that some of our fellow citizens share the beliefs of those who do homage to this picture, and that is their right and I will fight for it to the death. But it is a private right, not a public matter.”

Halvorson had been galvanized by a bipartisan group in Congress demanding that the president send troops to the border. The governor of Louisiana had called up the National Guard, merely a gesture; there was no border of that state that was plagued with immigrants. But the idea that federal troops would be involved in what was now happening on our southern border filled Halvorson with righteous rage.

The argument of the bipartisan group was that armed foreigners were threatening to invade. So far, the Minutemen had kept them pinned down, but they did not have enough forces to both defend the border and handle the rear-guard action mounted by those stirred up by Miguel Arroyo.

The image of Halvorson faded; the television sets were muted; serious drinking resumed.

Neal said, “Prayer is fine, but Ignatius Hannan has the right idea.”

Those who come out of modest backgrounds and then find themselves wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice react in various ways. One is to mimic the life of a late Roman emperor or former president, cater to the flesh, make an ass out of oneself, pile up possessions—houses, cars, horses—and marry or at least mate regularly. Professional athletes, the affluent gladiators of the age, are often drawn to this path. But if money and earthly goods cannot fully satisfy the heart, the flesh does little better. Drugs and the oblivion they offer are only a desperate last resort.

Another path is political, advocating government policies and bankrolling the politicians who promise to enact them, policies that are often aimed at the economic status of the donor; hence the huge number of zillionaire liberals. “Soak the rich” is a slogan that exercises an almost mystic attraction on the affluent. Accountants with an eye for loopholes and shrewd financial advisers can of course cushion the blow.

A third path is less frequently traveled. Once unlimited wealth has revealed its limitations, thoughts turn to the questions posed to rich and poor alike. What does it all mean? What is the purpose of life? Or, more relevantly, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his own soul?” Out of this questioning religious conversion can come, with the added blessing that one is able to contribute to all kinds of worthy causes. Huge unpublicized benefactions soothe the soul and one returns enthusiastically to the religious practices of his youth. The last was the path that Ignatius Hannan had taken.