Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (46 page)

“I’M STILL HERE, you sons-of-bitches!”

And, after that, Polly Esther was cleaned out, drained, purified; no more triangles haunted her. She turned off the stereo, yawned contentedly, and padded back to her bed.

Her lover was still sleeping, twisted around in the covers so that her right leg stuck out, decorated with
goose pimples from the cold air. Polly Esther rearranged the bedding to cover the girl, and climbed in beside her, hugging her tenderly once, but not enough to waken her.

Then there were only a few remembered bars of the
Hammerklavier
and one more trio drifted up (Wyatt, Morgan, and Vergil, the Earp brothers), and then Polly Esther slept.

Dr. Dashwood, as usual, began Friday by scanning the mail.

The first letter said:

Dr. Dashwood made a mistake. He assumed this was another hoax by the enigmatic Ezra Pound.

   Polly Esther Doubleknit was a devout Roman Catholic and went to Confession that Saturday.

“I did a naughty-naughty with a Secretary again,” she said.

“How shocking,” said her Confessor in a profoundly bored tone. “Was she cute?”

“She was an absolutely adorable little blond creature.”

“I hope you both enjoyed yourselves,” said the priest. “But why are you telling me about this hedonic little escapade?”

Polly Esther whispered, “I guess I feel guilty. I was raised Baptist, you know.”

“But you’re a Catholic now,” the priest, Father Starhawk, said. “And as a convert, you probably know the theology better than people who were born into it. Now, tell me: What is a sin?”

“A sin,” Polly Esther recited promptly, “is to knowingly hurt a sentient being.”

“Except where it would be a greater sin, a greater hurt, to refrain.” Father Starhawk went on. “That’s why it’s no sin to kill a virus, remember. Now, did you hurt your cute little blond playmate?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you make her happy?”

“I think so,” Polly Esther said wistfully. “She wants to see me again Monday night.”

“Then I think you made her happy,” Father Starhawk said. “How many times did she reach Millett?”

“Six or seven, I think.”

“Then I’m
sure
you made her happy,” the priest said kindly. “As a mere male, I must say I envy the female capacity for multiple Millett. Now, obviously, your little party with this Secretary was not harmful, but joyful. So it was not a sin, but the opposite of a sin, a work of virtue. And you know the teachings of Moral Theology well enough to understand that, so why are you wasting my time?”

“I guess it’s just my Baptist upbringing,” Polly Esther murmured.

“You must clear your mind of all superstition,” the priest said, “because such nonsense muddies the intellect and keeps you from thinking clearly about Real moral issues. Now, do you have something Real to confess?”

“Yes,” Polly Esther said nervously.

“Well?” Father Starhawk’s jovial tone suddenly turned stern.

“I think some of my money comes from slum properties.” Polly choked, then sighed deeply. It was a relief to say it, to have it out in the open.

“You
think?”
the priest cried angrily. “You haven’t found out for sure? How long have you had this suspicion?”

“Since about a week ago last Thursday.”

“And what efforts have you made to find the facts about this grave matter, which may be, I remind you, a mortal sin?”

Polly Esther trembled. “I tried,” she said, “but the way corporations are these days … I get twelve different stories every time I ask the lawyers … but I really think we own some of the worst parts of Newark.”

The priest was silent for a long time. “It’s my fault,” he
said finally. “I was never strict enough with you. What is the first moral law about money?”

“To ensure that no human being was being hurt in acquiring it, and if anyone was hurt, to return the money to them and make whatever other restitution is morally necessary.”

“To
ensure
,” Father Starhawk repeated solemnly. “Saint Francis Xavier said that many centuries ago, a great and holy saint, and he specifically instructed priests to be certain that nobody received Absolution until they had given up all monies acquired from usury or other social injustices. That was long before Pope Stephen, my child, and it is the moral backbone of the Church. I cannot give you Absolution until you have examined your conscience on this matter and made whatever change is morally necessary.”

“I’ll have a special Board meeting and get to the bottom of it,” Polly Esther said. “Thank you, Father, for restoring my vision of Reality.”

“That is the function of the Church,” Father Starhawk said.

And then he added, softly:

“Pray for me, please. I am a sinner, also.”

   Father Starhawk was a Cherokee Indian and a Stephenite.

The Stephenites were the most radical of all the Catholic clergy and made even the Neo-Jesuits, under General Berrigan, seem like milkwater liberals by comparison. There was virtually no nation on Earth which didn’t have several Stephenites in prison for what the Stephenites called “following the laws of God rather than the laws of man.”

Members of the Stephenite order absolutely refused to countenance any behavior that fell short of the ideals in the late Pope Stephen’s encyclicals on Social Justice; and
what the Stephenites would not countenance, they would resist. It was the passive, nonviolent nature of their resistance that made the Stephenites so troublesome to persons in authority; it is impossible to jail nonviolent idealists without a large part of the world sympathizing with them.

Father Starhawk had served three terms himself, for passively resisting Unistat’s wars against Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the People’s Republic of Hawaii.

Like all Stephenites, he wrote the familiar lapel button with a photo of Pope Stephen, the famous black patch over his blind eye, and the sainted Pope’s famous remark, “What—
me
infallible?”

   Pope Stephen had totally revolutionized the Catholic Church during his brief five-year reign. Indeed, as the French feminist Jeanne Paulette Sartre said, “This one man has single-handedly turned the most reactionary church on this planet into the most progressive.”

It was due to Pope Stephen that the “social gospel,” previously preached only by a minority of far-out Jesuits and worker-priests, became the official Vatican policy. By being the first to denounce Hitler and Mussolini, and excommunicating their supporters, Pope Stephen had knowingly risked the biggest rupture within the Church since the time of Luther; but, while nearly 30 percent of the Catholics in Germany and Italy continued to follow their national leaders, over 70 percent obeyed the Pope, and both dictators fell from power.

Adolf Hitler became a portrait painter again; and Benito Mussolini, deprived of power, returned to his early belief in anarchism and spent his declining years writing fiery journalism against all those who did manage to achieve and hold on to political power.

At the time of Pope Stephen’s death in 1940, it was estimated that the wealth of the Vatican was less than 10
percent of what it had been when he took the Chair of Peter, but its prestige about 1,000 percent higher.

The Pope had spent 90 percent of the Vatican’s wealth in projects for the abolition of poverty, disease, and ignorance.

Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with “I am a sinner, also,” which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended
all
his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence.

It must be admitted, however, that the first Irish Pope did have his own brand of arrogance: He believed he was the best Latin stylist since Cicero, and was rather vain about his command of English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Danish, and Hebrew, also. He was also convinced that he was a greater psychologist than James or Jung, and it was only when their names were mentioned that a tinge of uncharitable sarcasm would enter his speech.

Pope Stephen, in fact, had a habit of listening far more than he spoke, which led many to regard him as a bit aloof. Actually, he spoke little because he was so busy
observing.
This passion for studying other human beings had gradually turned him from a disputatious young intellectual into an almost pathologically sensitive middle-aged man, because the more he observed people, the more he liked them, and the more he liked them, the less able he was to bear seeing or hearing of injustice to anyone anywhere.

On one occasion a learned and erudite French Cardinal said to the Pope, referring to the steady parade of visitors to the Vatican, “You must find most of these nonentities profoundly boring.” He was making the usual mistake of interpreting the Pope’s long silence as a sign of ennui.

“But—there are no bores,” Stephen said, shocked.

“You are being paradoxical,” the Cardinal chided.

“Not at all,” the Pope said dogmatically. “I have never met a boring human being.”

It was the only time anybody ever heard him pontificate.

It was due to Pope Stephen that every Catholic priest was not only allowed, but encouraged, to get married. “Living with the mystery of the feminine mind,” he said, “is the best training for trying to cope with the greater mysteries of the Divine mind.”

He himself had married a peasant girl from Galway, who was said to be barely literate, and his love for her was legendary.

Nobody knew what the Pope and his wife ever found to talk about, since she obviously did not share any of his intellectual interests.

Actually, with his wife, as with most of humanity, the Irish Pope spent most of his time listening, not talking.

Because of the liberality of his sexual views, the Irish Pope was still controversial among conservative Catholics, who claimed he was a pervert and were forever trying to have him posthumously excommunicated.

They also spread rumors about his private life, which had gained so much currency that whenever his name was mentioned somebody would mutter “garters, garters, garters.”

Pope Stephen’s whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas:

Which may be rendered:

It was Stephen’s thought that the universe, as the product of a Great Artist, must be comprehensible in terms of
integritas, consonantia, claritas
—wholeness, harmony, radiance. Why, then, he asked himself, does it not appear so to the ordinary human mind? The only answer he could find was that
we are not paying attention.
We have not learned to observe closely enough. We do not have the Artist’s eye for detail.

And so Pope Stephen paid very close attention to everything that entered his field of perception.

At the time of the Irish Pope’s death in 1940, obituary writers all over the world compared him to every saint and sage in history: Buddha, Whitman, Plotinus, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart, John of Arc, St. Terrence of Avilla, and so on, and on; but the one who came closest to categorizing how Stephen’s mind worked was an obscure Canadian professor of literature who wrote, “The only mind in history comparable to Stephen’s was that of a fictitious character—Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.”

Like Tobias Knight, Pope Stephen had spent all his life “trying to find out what the hell was really going on,” although he never expressed it that way.

He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

The Stephenites called themselves “Seekers of the Real” and were always watching very closely to see what was going on. They all had posters in their rooms with the sainted Pope’s famous remark: “If you don’t pay attention to
every little detail
, you miss most of the jokes.”

   When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was stopped on the street by a haggard and wild-eyed minor bureaucrat who said his name was Joseph K.

“They have everybody mind-warped”
Joseph K. said, clutching Dashwood’s sleeve desperately.

“Yes, yes,” Dashwood said, trying to disentangle himself. “But I really must hurry—”

“What are the charges against me?” Joseph K. demanded. “What are the charges against any of us? We all try to obey their rules, don’t we? Of course we do; we know what will happen at the slightest, the most minute, the most
microscopic
infraction, do we not? Not that I mean to imply that they are wrong, necessarily, or unjust—you won’t find any subversive literature or pornography in my room, I can assure you absolutely—no, certainly not
unjust
or in any way
unfair
, but it must be admitted that in the application of the rules, in the
application
, I say, they are sometimes overfinicky, a bit
strained
and literal, if you take my meaning.”