The Case Against Satan (2 page)

Perhaps because God has become a nodding Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and a spun glass beard; or because television spot announcements coo us into worship; or because posters painted by airbrush smoothies and written by slogansmiths assure us that the family that prays together stays together; or because religion has become an unnatural thing of all light and no shadow, a pious bonbon so nice, so sweet, so soporifically bland that a Karl Marx can call it the opium of the people not without justice; or because dread, blood, awe, the sense of primal forces and the element of terror—without which there can be no great love, great art, great faith—have been slowly and systematically subtracted from religion; perhaps for all or some of these reasons but, more likely, for reasons we are not equipped to understand, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church was put on trial one harrowing weekend in the second half of the twentieth century.

His trial began with a series of minor incidents worthy of remark. It is remarkable, for instance, that the parlor lights of St. Michael's rectory were blazing at the top of their wattage after midnight as the weekend began, for priests are forced by their profession to be early risers and early risers are generally early retirers.

It is still more remarkable that, for something more than an hour, two figures had been walking back and forth on the deserted sidewalk in front of the rectory, as if waiting for something or someone. A large man was one of these, a man burly of build and fiftyish of years; the other was a girl—pretty, pigtailed, in her teens, for her age precocious of figure.

As the door of the rectory finally opened, thrusting a yellow wedge of light into the darkness, these two made sure they were cloaked in shadow. A priest left the rectory. He walked half a block to a parked Buick, got into it, and was soon away. As the car turned the corner, the burly man and the teen-age girl stepped out of the shadows, and began walking up the path in the direction of the rectory door. The girl hung back; the man seized her arm roughly and yanked her along, hissing angry words, but she escaped his grasp and ran away. The man started to call her, but thought better of making noise at such an hour. Resignedly, he walked swiftly after the girl.

It was a Friday night in late September, and unseasonably warm.

Some would say it was Saturday morning, for midnight had come and gone, but Father Gregory Sargent had other ideas. He and his predecessor, Father James Halloran, had returned to the rectory a short time before. Father Sargent, lifting a decanter, had asked, “A drop of brandy, Father Halloran? It's been a long day.”

“No thank you,” Father Halloran had replied.

“Do you mind if I . . .”

“Not if you wish.”

Father Sargent, pouring himself a small pony of the liquor, had smiled. “I sense disapproval in your voice, Father.”

“I'm sorry.”

“And I know why—because you think I'm breaking the rules. But I'm not, really. Let me explain. We're required, of course, to abstain from such refreshments until at least after morning Mass. And because it's just past midnight, it's technically morning. That's your thinking, isn't it?”

“Well, yes . . .”

“Ah!” said Father Sargent triumphantly. “There's the rub, you see. You're working on Daylight Saving Time.”

“And you?”

It was an old set piece of Father Sargent's. He always relished a short pause before springing the punch line. “God's Time, of course! According to Him, you see, it won't be tomorrow for another—” he consulted his wrist watch “—fifty-seven minutes. Therefore . . .” He lifted the glass to his lips and sipped the brandy.

Father Halloran tried, without too much success, to enter into the spirit. “Ingenious,” he said.

Gregory Sargent was all too aware that the pleasantry had—as his theatrical friends would say—bombed. He knew Father Halloran was a rather humorless man, in addition to being in the neighborhood of sixty and thus some fifteen years Gregory's senior. Also, Father Halloran was tired, as was Gregory, for they had just returned from a final series of visits with certain parishioners, an act designed to ease Gregory into his new parish.

“It's too bad,” said Gregory, “that you have to leave just before the parish's big feast day.”

“Yes,” agreed Father Halloran. “I've always enjoyed St. Michael's Day—the special Mass, the special music. But the orphanage needs someone to take charge immediately.”

“Are you sure you won't stay the night? It's terribly late.”

“No,” Father Halloran said. “If I start driving now I'll be at the orphanage before dawn, in time to get my work started. You see, they're expecting me in the morning, and I don't want them to be disappointed in me at the very beginning. It has taken longer than I planned to finish up things here at St. Michael's.”

“But when will you sleep?”

“I don't sleep very much these days.”

Nor do I
, thought Gregory,
but what's your trouble?
Aloud, he asked, “Do you think you'll like the orphanage?”

“I think I will be useful there. I am looking forward to it.”

“I can see that,” said Gregory. “One might even say you can hardly wait to get away from St. Michael's.”

“No,” Father Halloran said quickly, “not at all. The people here are very good people, on the whole. Oh, there have been vexations, of course. A man named Talbot, a pamphleteering hate-monger, for instance . . .”

“But no parish is complete without one of those,” said Gregory.

“That's right. I've made friends here. I've been happy. There have been only the usual problems.”

“Well,” drawled Gregory, “perhaps a
few
unusual ones, eh?”

Father Halloran looked up suddenly. “What do you mean?”

Gregory smiled. “That business executive we met today, what's his name, Mr. Glencannon?”

“Yes.”

“I can see he, at least, is going to present a unique problem. Has he ever approached
you
with that idea of his—that he be allowed to mail in his confession on a dictation record and receive absolution by phone?”

Father Halloran nodded. “Once or twice. He is hard to discourage.”

“And the druggist—does he always expect you to deliver prescriptions if you're ‘going that way'?”

“You mustn't be hard on him. He only does that when he knows I'm going to visit an ailing parishioner who happens to be one of his customers. I don't mind. This parish is something like a small town, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“That's one of the pleasant things about it.”

“That very old gentleman,” Gregory continued, “Mr. Sowerby. I'm glad you prepared me for him. It must have been unnerving for you to administer last rites on three separate and distinct occasions, only for him to rally and live happily ever after, each time.”

“Yes, that has been extraordinary, I will admit.”

“What about this Barlow family? The husband seems nice enough, rather placid, but the wife's personality struck me as being—well, distilled to triple-strength. Is she always so forceful, so domineering?”

“Mrs. Barlow is a very respected woman,” said Father Halloran, “and considered somewhat of a leader among the ladies of the parish. She is quite active socially. In a way, I suppose she is an attractive person.”

“I suppose.”

“The family I worry about,” said Father Halloran after a short pause, “is not the Barlows, but the Garths.”

“Isn't that the family we just left? The man and his daughter?”

“Yes,” said Father Halloran. “It's a difficult problem, and complex. The girl—she's sixteen, mother dead—is very disturbed, mentally. She has—fits. She's seen doctors, and I strongly urged her father to take her to a psychiatrist as well. . . .”

A sixteen-year-old girl with “fits.” Gregory smiled inwardly: it was such a quaint, old-fashioned word, “fits.” In young women,
they were so often rooted in sexual hysteria. Sex, that great raw force that seethed and snarled for release, took strange forms.

Gregory had often thought of it as a wildly onrushing river terminating in a roaring waterfall. Two men, coming upon the tumult of that waterfall, might react to it in two different ways. One man might be unconsciously repelled by such a display of mindless ferocity, of nature unrestrained; his inner reaction, though he himself might not know it, tends toward a desire to somehow stop it, or, failing that, to block off the rushing river, make it go away so he won't have to look at it. It is too big and unharnessed for him, it offends him.

The other man, of quite different stamp, says to himself: Ah! What a wonderful, wild, untamed force! But how wasted. This divine giant's power can be channelled and used for good works. So he builds a dam that does not stop the raging water but makes it work for him, turning wheels, generating electric power, irrigating parched lands. That attitude toward the waterfall is the Catholic attitude toward sex, Gregory had always liked to think; the other attitude was Protestant. (“But then,” he was in the habit of shrugging, “I'm prejudiced.”)

Father Halloran was looking at his watch. “I'm afraid I must be going,” he said. “Daylight Saving or God's Time, it's getting late. I have quite a drive ahead of me.”

“You're all packed?”

“My bags are in the car.” He stood up. “Good-bye, Father Sargent.”

“You're sure you won't stay the night?”

“I really can't.”

Gregory accompanied the elder priest to the door. “Good-bye, then, Father Halloran. And thank you again for easing me into my new post here. I'm very grateful.”

At the door, Father Halloran turned and said, “Her name is Susan.”

“Whose name?”

“The Garth girl. The one with the fits.”

“Oh yes. Susan. I'll remember.”

“I wish I had time to go into her problems in more detail. I'm afraid I wasn't much help to her. But you're a smart man, Father,
you're versed in psychology and such things. I've read some of those magazine articles of yours . . . I think you are more qualified than I to help the child. Be very kind to her. Please.”

“I will.”

As Father Halloran shook hands with Gregory for the last time, Gregory gently ribbed the more eccentric parishioners, and Father Halloran managed to summon a flinty smile. They parted on a key of ersatz joviality.

But when the door clicked shut, Gregory's gay mood dropped from him like a cape. He tossed off the remainder of his brandy in a gulp, and fell into a chair, his face buried in his hands.

Then he raised his head and looked about with distaste at the parlor of his new rectory. He took in its scattering of vases and ash trays and doilies, its aggressively middle-class wallpaper, its bad holy pictures, its obtrusive pillars of dark wood. Sighing, he lifted himself from the chair and fetched his breviary from a nearby table. Before settling down to read his Office, he removed his jacket, for the weather was oppressively close.

He found it hard to concentrate on his Office. His mind kept drifting, his eyes wandering from the pages of the book. He found himself again taking in the crushingly bourgeois look of the rectory. He couldn't help comparing it to the rectory of St. Francis, with its large, beautifully appointed rooms, its décor a tasteful balance between traditional and contemporary design. He remembered his friends of the other parish: men and women with lively minds, writers, architects, stage directors, actors, musicians, teachers. He remembered his select little rectory dinners and after-theatre suppers, the fine cuisine, the old wine, the hours of stimulating, satisfying talk. The plans to collaborate with a psychoanalyst friend on a book.

Gone, all gone.

He was starting from scratch again, in a small parish, among good gray people whose simplicity and warmth could not replace the vigor of the people he had known. Starting from scratch at forty-five.

Music, that might help. Gregory rose from his chair and snapped on the hi-fi set. He poked desultorily among his record collection. Respighi was not among his favorite composers—indeed,
Gregory found him to his taste only in his arrangements of old Italian tunes—but now he pulled out a recording of the
Vetrate di Chiesa. “Church Windows,”
Gregory said drily, aloud. Perhaps it would be salutary, he told himself, slipping the record out of its liner and over the turntable spike.

He sat down and opened the book again. Respighi's first movement,
The Flight into Egypt,
lulled him into a receptive state with its gentle, nocturnal blandishments. The strains were almost Gregorian, a kind of music which Gregory (not, he hoped, because of the accident of his name) found peaceful and from which he was able to draw profound serenity. The flight into Egypt.
The little caravan proceeded through the desert, in the starry night, bearing the Treasure of the World
. Gregory, his Office read, closed his eyes and let the tension seep slowly out of his body. He floated on the music and his mind was mercifully empty. The movement quietly ended.

A howling whirlwind smote him: a rising and falling whine of immense size. He frowned, jolted out of his calm. The second movement,
St. Michael the Archangel
,
had begun with a surge. The spiral of sound—at once divine and infernal—reached high, plumbed low, dizzily spinning and twisting.
And a great battle was made in the heavens: Michael and his Angels fought the dragon, and fought the dragon and his angels. But these did not prevail, and there was no more place for them in heaven
.

No place in heaven. The battle music swirled around Gregory like a palpable thing, like Godwrath, like Hellfire. His moment of peace had been brief. His eyes grew wet and two words escaped his lips. “Dear God.”