The City Below (25 page)

He tucked the innocent plant back in his arm and returned to the car. For a long moment he sat at the wheel with the gaudy foil bundle in front of his face. Now what?

The crushed foil reflected light from the windows above him. He studied the sharp green flashes in the dark, thought of them as a meager connection with his brother. His brother shooting hoops, alone, at dusk.

Squire raised his eyes to the windows above him. He felt the loneliness, not only of Terry, but of all the men inside those rooms, and then, just as suddenly, though far more unexpectedly, he felt his own loneliness. He placed the plant on the seat beside him, started the car, put it in gear, and screeched away from that house of the dead.

About a half hour later, he pulled into the long horseshoe driveway in front of the Massachusetts General Hospital. There were twenty minutes remaining in visiting hours. He swung into one of the spaces marked
EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY
and left his car there.

The lobby was far more crowded than it had been in the middle of the previous afternoon. Was it possible so little time had passed since his coming here? Returning to where old Tucci had died the day before released the flood of his anxiety. Squire Doyle was a man without an angle, without a plan. Was that Terry's problem too?

In two separate clusters, men in doctors' coats were conferring with relatives of patients. Other visitors, pulling sweaters on, were heading for the revolving door through which Squire had just come. Children too young to go on the wards had been left in the company of older siblings, and they had taken over the squared couches in the corner. A pair of boys, perhaps seven and nine, were happily rocking the standup ashtray back and forth, and it was inevitable that Squire see them as a version of what he and Terry had been, the Doyle boys. All they'd ever needed was each other.

"Excuse me, thanks," a man said. Squire stepped aside, not realizing he'd been blocking the doorway.

He turned his gaze toward the information desk on the far side of the room. Only when he saw her did he realize how little reason he'd had —wasn't this a different shift? —to expect that she would be here now.

He approached slowly, wanting to savor the sight of her profile before she saw him: her thin nose supporting a naturally perfect brow, her luxuriant hair, part blond, part gray, pulled back to display her ear, the understated single pearl at its lobe. He had remembered best her cheekbones, how color rode them like a memory of the sun.

She lifted her face and turned it fully toward him, smiling with a warmth that made him think, This is how, early in their marriage, she had raised her face when her husband came into the room. If her husband mattered now, why would she be here in the evening?

He was certain she would recognize him.

"Hi," he said, so easily.

"Hello."

Her smile held. In fact, it held an instant too long, so that he began to see it as counterfeit, a Brahmin smile.

Why wasn't she surprised?

He peered at her intently, waiting for her color to deepen, for that ever so slightly spotted hand to flutter to her mouth. Her open mouth.

One place he had pictured her was in the paneled elevator of Phillips House. His erotic fantasy had featured a smooth sequence beginning with his throwing the red switch, the two of them alone, stopped in that elegant box, her so much older, yet bracing her heels and shoulders against the wall, arching her body into a bow, leaving it to him to tear her clothes, her breasts leaping against him, her hair, loose at last, flying back and forth as she kept turning her head, her hair whipping him. The smell of her armpits, the taste of her cunt. Mrs. State Street.

"May I help you."

"I came to see someone."

"Of course, but —" She glanced at her watch, turning her wrist so that he could see the blue veins below the pale skin. "There isn't much time."

She was good. She was pretending not to know him.

"I came to see you."

"What?"

"I brought you this." He put the green-wrapped pot on the desk between them.

She pushed away suddenly, her chair scooting back. "I beg your pardon?"

And then he saw it. She had no idea that he had been here yesterday. She had no idea of having ever seen him before. The charge in their encounter, as dazzling as it was improbable, had been all his. He could feel the heat in his ears, knew that he was blushing. He raised his hands, backing off.

She recovered enough to push the plant a few inches toward him. "Please, take this away."

He shook his head. "It's just a wee piece of the Old Sod," he said with a stagy brogue. "I'm just the delivery boy. I lost the card, Missus, and I'm terrible sorry."

Now she was confused. "Card?"

"It said, 'From your secret admirer.'"

And then he turned and headed for the door. Outside, in the first cool phase of darkness, he laughed aloud. "What an asshole, Doyle!"

Making for his car, he laughed again and shook his head, wishing for Terry, only Terry at last, to throw his arm around. "We're both assholes."

Authority which ignores the principle of collegiality does not compel obedience.
Terry Doyle was at the blackboard, underscoring each word with chalk, the
squeak squeak
underscoring his exasperation. "That is the essence of our declaration." The sleeve of his tan button-down was white with chalk dust, like the fingers of his right hand.

Doyle's forty-odd classmates stared at the blackboard, not at him. He had become too emotional, too insistently shrill, and whether he knew it or not, there were a number among them whom he had already lost No one wanted to meet his eyes.

This was a musty basement classroom in a remote wing of the seminary building. The meeting was already two hours old, and they were getting nowhere. They were sitting in the one-armed school chairs that had always constituted the perfect symbol of their degradation. Were they schoolboys or men? The chairs were ordinarily arranged in neatly ordered rows, but during this frustrating session, the space had taken on the look of a storage room, plastic cups and balled paper littering the floor, anarchy in the way they had their legs hooked over the furniture.

One of the few wearing the cassock raised his hand and spoke timidly. "If it is a question of conscience, then we have to find a formulation that respects
everybody's
position."

"That's impossible," someone else called out.

"Then we're screwed," said a third.

"And
that,
" Doyle said, "is why we
have
to stick together.
All
of us." He banged the chalk on the board. The stick broke.

The man in the cassock said, "But we've been at this for hours, and we can't —"

"Who says we need a statement at all? This proves we don't."

Doyle met the challenge by banging his fist down on the desk, causing Jimmy Adler's pen to jump on his yellow pad. Adler had been taking notes the whole while.

"We have to issue a statement," Terry said, "something we all agree with. I
know
we can."

"But if we're silent, then we're like Thomas More. 'Our silence,' he said, 'must needs be read ambiguously.'"

Terry leaned back against the blackboard, soiling his shirt further. "That wasn't Thomas More, Mark. That's Robert Bolt"

Adler lifted his gaze. "Can we leave Thomas More out of this? Considering how he wound up?"

Doyle ignored the small bursts of laughter. "That's because he was alone." He pushed off from the chalk ledge to lean over the desk again. "Two points, fellows. Two simple points. One, we do what we do
together,
and the cardinal has to back off. And two, we explain ourselves in a brief statement, because the Church needs us to. All those men and women out there who are waiting for
somebody
to speak up for them."

"They'll never know, Doyle. They'll never know what we've said or what we've done."

"If we release our statement to the press, they will."

A general outburst shook the room as half seconded Doyle and half derided him. Arguments immediately broke out in several clusters. Their tension, weariness, and anger wafted through the air like fumes.

Jimmy Adler exchanged a look with Terry, one that said, I'm with you, bud.

Doyle allowed himself to flow toward Jimmy, as if that brief, consoling expression on his big-eared, freckled face were a swiftly passing log he could grab hold of.

Jimmy put two fingers to his mouth and shrieked a whisde. The commotion stopped.

Gradually the stolid, mute figure of Terry Doyle drew them back He waited until they were completely still. "I've sought counsel on this with someone in significant authority, someone who knows the whole picture better than we do."

For an instant Terry felt the gentle pressure on his head of Blight's father's hands, and it reassured him. After their hour together in the book-lined study, Terry and Bishop McKay had hesitated at the threshold, a last moment's silence. On an impulse Terry had said, "May I have your blessing?"

"Indeed you may."

Terry had knelt right there in the doorway. It was then, undergoing his first imposition of hands, that he understood about apostolic succession, the passing on of Christ's own healing power, a visceral lesson from a man dismissed by Terry's own Church as standing outside that succession.

"He thinks," Terry was saying now, "that we are absolutely right to stand up to Monsignor Loughlin. His hunch is the cardinal
wants
us to. He thinks we have a chance of helping the cardinal emerge as a spokesman for the American Church on birth control. The cardinal agrees —"

"What 'authority'?" someone demanded.

"I can't say."

"Then let
him
send out a press release, goddamnit!" The seminarian in the cassock came forward, his face purple with anger. "Your adviser is anonymous? Well, we aren't! Why doesn't
he
take on the pope?"

Terry remembered how Bright's father, after blessing him, had drawn him up with both hands. For the first time, Terry had bowed and kissed his ring, and the bishop had squeezed his hands. "You and your classmates have a moment of
kairos
here. You are called to this. The whole Church needs you, not just Rome." And then, leaning closer, bringing the deep umber of his face within inches of Doyle's, Bright's father had added, "I need you."

"This guy is a coward if he won't —"

"He's no coward," Terry shot back. "He can't address the issue, because he isn't a Catholic."

"Oh, well, shit."

"Shit?" Terry moved closer to his classmate, his fists clenched. "Shit? Is that what ecumenism means? The other churches have no stake in —"

"A stake for burning heretics. Who are you, Doyle? Martin Luther? Ninety-five Theses? That's what a press release amounts to, and it will get us all kicked out."

Adler had Terry's arm, but Terry calmed himself. Win these guys over, he told himself, make them agree. He said, "Public pressure is our only chance. And it will
help
die cardinal. He can turn to Rome and say, 'See?' But in secret, there's no way he can do anything but back up His Holiness. If we take this on, we
have
to make noise about it" Terry began to walk among his classmates, aware that the reluctance of a few had begun to spread. He touched shoulders and forearms as he moved and spoke. "People will rally to us. Parish priests who feel alone out there will join us."

Two or three in back began drifting toward the door.

"Hey, guys, come on," Terry said.

But others joined them.

The room suddenly reeked of fear and despair, and Terry's anger returned, not at the blindsiding pope but at these, his only friends. "What have all these years been for, if now we can't —"

One of the exiting seminarians, having opened the door, gasped audibly and fell back On the other side of the threshold, where they'd obviously been listening, were two figures in black cassocks with red piping at the seams and broad red sashes, Monsignors Loughlin and Fenton, the chancellor and the rector. Behind them, even more dramatically outfitted in a crimson cassock and skullcap, a gold pectoral cross stuck in his sash, was stout, crimson-faced Bishop Cowley, the auxiliary.

Doyle waited for them to show some sign of embarrassment, but there was none. The faces of the prelates were like a triple set of radar dishes sweeping across the stunned figures, pointedly avoiding Doyle to settle on the blackboard with its scrawl of interdicted words and phrases.

Monsignor Loughlin, ice in his voice, broke the silence. "Gentlemen," he said. His gold cuff links flashed as he pulled at his sleeve. He was famously proud of his resemblance, especially in that getup, to the acetylene-eyed Fulton J. Sheen, but to Doyle, all he lacked were the steel-rim glasses and a cigarette held aloft in his fingertips to be the very incarnation of a Nazi. "To your rooms," he said, and it struck Terry as strange that he lacked a German accent. "Consider yourselves in
magnum silentium
room restriction until further notice."

The men filed out of the classroom, abject and silent, like prisoners. Doyle was last to go. Great silence? Why then, as he walked past the three priests, was there that ringing in his ears?

The next morning an index card appeared under his door.
Report to me,
it said, above the dread initials
I. F.
Terry opened his door quickly, but no one was there. He crossed the hall, rapped once on Jimmy Adler's door, waited for the grunt from within, then opened it He remained in the corridor, as the rule required.

Adler was at his desk The long row of cassock buttons was half undone. Under the formal black garment, his dull white T-shirt seemed shabby.

"Here it is," Terry said, holding up the index card. "I've been drafted."

"Jesus Christ, Terry, be carefid, or you might be for real. That's what's waiting for us all out there."

"We'll be okay, Jimmy. We just have to stick together."

"I don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"There was a meeting of some of the guys this morning."