The Good Shepherd (15 page)

Of course, His Excellency had been ready to sound off whenever they needed him. Such as the year he helped the boys at the Hall defeat a new state constitution which would have required public officials to reveal their personal wealth. Six months later His Excellency had politely accepted a check for $1 million for his Seminary Fund. Maybe, Matthew Mahan decided, his anger subsiding, it was better to have a mayor who told him off to his face than one who mixed money and phony subservience to buy him up like any other power broker.

Still it rankled, the way the mayor put a sneer into that word “politician” when he threw it at him. Before they were through, Matthew Mahan vowed he would teach Mayor O’Connor at least one political lesson.

Dennis McLaughlin in his green sports jacket hesitated at the door, the prescriptions in a gray paper bag. Matthew Mahan ripped it open and gazed distastefully at the neon-red Seconals, the tiny white Donnatals, the big brown bottle of liquid Titrilac, and a brown plastic container full of aspirin-size Titrilac tablets. The humiliation he had felt leaving Bill Reed’s office reawakened. It must be a dread of becoming a child again, of losing control of your life, he thought. For a moment, he was tempted to send it all back to the drugstore and rely on prayer and cream of wheat.

“Do you know Father Vincent Disalvo?” he asked Dennis McLaughlin.

“I’ve heard of him. Who hasn’t? But I’ve never met him.”

“You will soon. I want you to put on your clericals and go down to St. Sebastian’s parish right now. Bring him back up here with you. I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing. If you’re wondering why I don’t telephone him, the explanation is simple. He’s never in the rectory, and he never returns calls.”

As the door closed, the telephone rang again downstairs. With uneasy prescience, Matthew Mahan knew who was calling. A moment later, the red light glowed, and he picked up the receiver. “It’s your sister-in-law,” Mrs. Norton said. “Shall I -”

“No. I’ll talk to her.”

“Father Matt?” said the tired, familiar voice. Matt? I didn’t want the whole day to go by without at least callin’ you to tell -”

“I should have called you, Eileen,” Matthew Mahan said, guiltily remembering that her name had been on the list Dennis McLaughlin had read to him on the way to Mount St. Monica’s, “but I’ve been up to my ears in reporters.”

“I know. I’m lookin’ at you on television right now. I can’t help thinkin’ how proud Charlie would be.”

Would he really? Matthew Mahan asked himself, trying to imagine what his brother would have said on this triumphant day. He could only remember the hate-filled diatribes that had been flung at him over the telephone at three in the morning. The ruined political career.
They didn’t see me, they saw my big brother the bishop; I never had a real friend. They were all your friends.
“I wish he were here. I wish it with all my heart and soul, Eileen. But we have to accept God’s will, even when it makes no sense to us. How are you feeling?”

“Oh. Pretty well. The job’s boring, ya know. Ya get tired sayin’ hello t’people all day, and never really gettin’ a chance t’talk t’them. They only stay in the reception room a minute or two, mosta the time.”

“How’s Timmy?”

“Matt, I don’t want to spoil your big day. I didn’t call to talk about him. But -”

“Don’t be silly. Tell me.”

“Oh, Matt I’m terribly worried. He won’t - he won’t talk to me. He seems to be in another world most of the time. I found some pills on his dresser. Bright red little tubes. I was so scared. I threw them down the toilet.”

“How’s he doing in school?”

“I don’t know. They’ve adopted pass-fail at the university, so he doesn’t get any marks. I never see him study. He’s never home. And he won’t tell me where he goes. Sometimes I get so worried I - I just sit and cry.”

Matthew Mahan was staring at bright red Seconal pills on his dresser, and simultaneously picturing his nephew, Timmy Mahan, as he last saw him, six months ago. The urchin face, the half-wise, half-mocking smile - the same smile that he had seen on so many faces at Mount St. Monica’s earlier today.

“I’ll call you in a day or two, when things quiet down. We’ll have a good long talk. Incidentally, tell your boss that you want a leave of absence, so you can take a trip to Rome.”

“Rome? You mean for your -”

“Of course. I want you and Timmy to come. We’ll get a nurse to take care of the younger kids.”

“Oh gee, I can’t wait to tell him. He’ll be so excited -”

“Good night, Eileen. I’ll remember Timmy in my mass tomorrow morning. I always remember his father.”

“Oh yes, Matt, I know. Thank you -”

It would be better, Matthew Mahan thought as he hung up, much better, if she hated you and told you so. Hate could be conquered by love. But what can love do with a cringing defeated blob? No, that was too harsh. Eileen Mahan could not be blamed for her defeat. She was doing her best to bear a heartbreaking burden of sorrow, a burden she was too weak to carry and, alas, too stupid to understand. But Matthew Mahan knew, even as he tried to right his spiritual balance, that Eileen Mahan had been defeated before she married his brother. In some strange, unfathomable way, she had perfectly suited the methodical self-destruction that Charles Mahan pursued all his life. Why, why, why?
O Lord, we grope here in the darkness. Have mercy on us.

He picked up his breviary and saw he was on the last page of the day’s reading.

Come let us return to the Lord,

For it is He who has rent, but He will heal us.

He has struck us, but He will bind our wounds.

For a moment, Matthew Mahan’s eyes blurred with emotion. He wiped away the tears and read the final prayer of the day.

We want to be strong enough, Father

to love You above all

and our brothers and sisters because of You.

Upstairs, Dennis McLaughlin put on his black suit and round collar. He called Eddie Johnson and asked him to bring the car around to the residence. Eddie groaned and remarked in a resigned voice that he was on his way to bed. “That man we work for don’t know the dark from the light, he really don’t. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I could take a cab.”

“Oh no. When he say he want the car, he want the car.”

A half hour later, Dennis McLaughlin sat in the back of the Cadillac as the limousine bounced from pothole to pothole along the downtown streets. At last he was going to meet Vincent Disalvo, the city’s radical priest. He had marched to City Hall in one or two protests led by Father Disalvo, protests against the war, against inadequate public housing for blacks. But he had never tried to become a member of the inner circle, a name on the letterhead of his Council for Peace and Freedom. In fact, Dennis admitted gloomily to himself, his career as a revolutionary thinker-activist was pretty much over when he returned to the city from Yale last year. His marching and protests had been reflex reactions, largely at the behest of his brother Leo.

This thought led to some depressing recollections of his outing with Leo earlier in the evening. They had gone downtown to a converted warehouse called The Place, where lesser faculty, students, journalists, and others committed to saving the world gathered for liquor and mutual support. He had stood there, beer glass warming in his hand while Leo conferred with ad hoc committee heads and assorted spokesmen and spokeswomen. A feeling of futility had seeped into his veins as Leo smiled conspiratorially and swept each one close in the casually physical style of his generation. Arm around the shoulders of the men, around the supple waists of the long-haired girls. A hug-and-kiss hello or goodbye.

It reminded Dennis all too painfully of a visit Leo had paid him at Yale two years ago. Then Leo had been the pale, smiling observer, while big brother-father Dennis demonstrated how he spent his days and nights concocting manifestos and denunciations, manufacturing protests, marches, marathon discussions. In vain, Dennis told himself that his reasons for giving up this heady way of life were good and sufficient. He was thirty years old, and the appalling egotism, the superficial thinking, the neurotic hatred of so many radicals, their substitution of hysteria for politics, had rightly chilled his fervor.

It did not work, this dutiful reminder. He did not like playing pale observer. But now if - as was (theoretically) his privilege - he decided to change his mind, he could not play the other game, the save-the-world-or-at-least-the-country game. He was a man under obedience. At Yale, he had been the clerical civilian, reveling in the opportunity to demonstrate to the WASPs and Jews that a Catholic priest could not only think, he could feel. But thinking, feeling, were verboten now, except as directed by Cardinal-designate Matthew Mahan. He and Father Vincent Disalvo and Fathers Novak and Cannon and all the rest of them, some 2,600 lesser shepherds, were vowed to obey Supershepherd, the man who guarded the sheepfold and who (theoretically) controlled the water of life for both sheep and shepherds.

Stop, Dennis told himself, stop. It was not
that
bad. You are out of humor, as the poet would say. Leo had gotten to you; he was making up for those years when Dennis had been mother’s darling, the model to be perpetually emulated and praised. Leo’s condescension was almost blatant. Now he was the man of action, the mover and the shaker, while poor old big brother-father Dennis was the pathetic captive of the Establishment.

But Leo’s cruelest gambit, the one for which Dennis found it hard to forgive him, was the celibacy probe. Last year, in a moment of careless candor, Dennis had confessed to his anguish - yes, you had revealed your need, your wound - and Leo never let him forget it. As the liquor flowed, Leo made a point of giving certain girls more than a casual fondle, and then suggesting that they were ready to solve Dennis’s problem, at his, brother Leo’s, earnest request. And all big brother-father Dennis could do was play the dry stick, smiling wanly, no thank you, I prefer - what?

What do you prefer, Dennis? That is the unanswered question.

“This here’s St. Sebastian’s,” Eddie Johnson said.

It had started to rain. Dennis peered through the blurred windows at the lights of St. Sebastian’s rectory. He rang the bell once, twice, three times. Finally, a short, bald-headed priest with a large paunch opened the door. Dennis introduced himself and asked for Father Disalvo.

“He’s over in the school conferring with his black beauties,” was the answer. “But probably not in the first-grade classroom, where they belong.”

St. Sebastian’s school was separated from the church and the rectory by a large blacktop playground, illuminated by glaring white lights. The pastor was obviously trying to keep away prowlers. The school was dark except for five glowing windows on the top floor. He trudged up six flights of stairs. On the final landing, he heard voices passionately arguing. “I say we gotta let the brothers do their thing, man. Screw this discipline.”

Father Disalvo and his lieutenants were scattered around the eighth-grade classroom. Disalvo was sitting on top of a desk in the first row. Others were sitting sideways in their seats, their feet up on the seat across the aisle. Two lounged against the rear wall. About half of them were black. Along the wall nearest the door were two shaggy-headed young whites and a slim scowling blonde wearing granny glasses. Student leaders, no doubt. One of them looked vaguely familiar. On the other side of the room, surrounded by blacks, sat Sister Helen Reed. She had the same expression of intense dislike on her face that she had been wearing when they parted at Mount St. Monica’s earlier in the day. Trying to avoid her glare, Dennis found his eyes on the furniture. For a moment, the scarred brown desktops, the curlicues of black iron on the front and back legs, numbed his mind. He was a boy again, reliving those lost years when he sat at one of these desks, devoutly believing everything Sister said about God and man.

“What can we do for you, friend?” Disalvo asked.

His rather high pitched voice was disconcerting. Father Disalvo was wearing a dark blue work shirt and dirty chinos. The outfit was made doubly incongruous by his looks. He had wavy dark hair and a cherubic olive-skinned face. “The Pretty Ginny” was what his is fellow priests called him behind his back. No matter how tough he tried to look or act, Disalvo still somehow suggested a Christmas-card choir boy on his night off.

Inwardly Dennis was nonplussed by Helen Reed’s hostile eyes. But he had always amazed himself by a strange ability to conceal inner turmoil behind a cool, even an icy, facade. “I’m Dennis McLaughlin, the Cardinal’s secretary,” he said. “His Eminence sent me down here. He wants to see you immediately. The car is waiting outside.”

“What does he want to see me about?” Disalvo asked tensely.

“I have no idea.”

Disalvo glowered down at his feet for a moment. Dennis noticed he was wearing dirty white sneakers. “I would like to finish this meeting.”

“His Eminence is not feeling very well. I think he’d like to get to bed early.”

“Oh my, now would he?” mocked a tall, thin black in the rear of the classroom.

“Okay,” Disalvo said. “If you cats don’t mind waiting. This shouldn’t take more than a half hour, maybe an hour at the outside.”

There was evident dismay on every face, but they murmured vaguely that they would wait for their leader’s return. On the way, down the darkened school stairway, Disalvo said, “I guess I’d better change into clericals.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Dennis said, recalling the brisk admonition about his green sports jacket that he had gotten earlier in the evening.

Father Disalvo trotted down to his rectory in the rain and came hurrying back five minutes later in black, his white collar shining in the streetlight’s glow. “What’s on the great man’s mind?” he said as Eddie Johnson headed uptown.

“Something about a march or a demonstration he’s heard that you’re planning tomorrow.”

“It’s not a march. I promised him there wouldn’t be any marches. I guess you’d call it a patrol.”

They sat in chilly silence for a minute or two. Eddie Johnson stopped for a red light at Delaney Street on the northern edge of the ghetto. A half-dozen black teen-agers stood huddled in the doorway of a candy store. One of them dashed out and ran his hand clown the rain-slick front fender. Eddie Johnson blew his horn angrily and shouted, “Get your hand off this car, boy.”

“Those kids could be in trouble before the night’s over,” Disalvo said. “St. Peter and Paul parish, just two blocks away, has a gymnasium that could be turned into a social hall. Instead, it’s open two nights a week, once for the Catholic Boy Scouts, and once for a parish dance - whites only.”

“I know,” Dennis said. “I was a curate there for a couple of months. The pastor, Monsignor McGuire, is a beaut. During baseball season, he’s out at the stadium four or five days a week.”

“Did you tell that to your lord and master?”

“No. I gather he’s one of his best friends. They were classmates at the seminary.”

“It’s worse than the Mafia,” Disalvo said bitterly. “You don’t say a word against anybody around here if he’s got the Godfather’s okay. How do you stand working for him?”

“So far it’s been bearable. Interesting. You know, seeing the power structure from the inside.”

“Doesn’t the arrogance get to you?”

“Not really,” Dennis said.

Is that because you more than match it with an arrogance (intellectual brand) of your own? he wondered.

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to take it,” Disalvo said. “Getting dragged up to the palace in this goddamn car like a tribune summoned by the Emperor.”

“Time to become a tribune of the people?”

“You’re goddamn right it is. Time and past time.”

They were at the residence. The Cardinal awaited them in his office, his feet up on his Louis XVI desk, his high-backed leather chair tipped precariously. “Hello, Vinny,” he said in a hearty voice that struck Dennis’s ear as totally phony.
“Buono sera, caro.”

Defiance, ferocity, vanished from Disalvo’s demeanor. “Hello, Your Eminence,” he said, holding out his hand. “Congratulations.”

Matthew Mahan shook hands without bothering to take his feet off his desk. “Sit down, Vinny, sit down,” he said. “Would you like a drink?”

“No, nothing,” Disalvo said, his eyes roving nervously around the shadowed office.

“I hope I didn’t get you out of bed, Vinny.”

“No, no. As a matter of fact, I was having a meeting. Of the Peace and Freedom Council.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to interrupt it. Maybe you could tell me what it’s about now, and save yourself the trouble of reporting to me.”

“Well - we were discussing this trip - that we’re going to take out to the university tomorrow. Talking about how we could break through the apathy out there.”

“Trip?” Matthew Mahan said. “Are you going by bus?”

“No. We thought we’d go on foot.”

“A march?” Matthew Mahan said. His voice was still cordial, but there was a definite threat in the tone. “Remember what I told you about marches, Vinny? You’re not going to turn this archdiocese into another Milwaukee.”

“This isn’t a march, Your Eminence. We thought of it as - well, a kind of patrol. No more than a few dozen people. According to the city’s statute, you have to get a parade permit only if you have more than fifty people.”

“Vinny, don’t try Jesuit logic on me. I’ve been through that mill. Are you going to carry placards?”

“Well - we thought we might carry one or two.”

“No,” said Cardinal Mahan in a voice that eliminated an argumentative reply. The Cardinal lit a cigarette. “How many people do you expect to have on the campus?”

“I have no idea,” Disalvo said. “A hundred. Maybe 200.”

Matthew Mahan roared with unfeigned laughter. For a moment, Dennis felt enraged. He had no great love for Father Disalvo. He was one of those rhetorical terrorists with which the nation abounded these days. A clerical Mark Rudd who sometimes veered close to the absurdities of Abbie Hoffman. But the man was probably sincere. It was bad enough to cow him. Laughing at him was detestable.

“I’m sorry, Vinny. I’m not laughing at you,” Matthew Mahan said. “I’m just thinking of old Flappy Reagan, as we call him around here. Always in a flap about something. He told me they expected you to arrive with 10,000 screaming blacks to join at least 5,000 inflamed students. Do you see what I have to put up with?”

The Cardinal took a deep drag on his cigarette and looked at it ruefully. “I’m not supposed to be smoking these things anymore.” He stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Okay. Let’s settle this right now. What do you want to do, Vinny?”

“I want to lead a delegation from the Peace and Freedom Council. An integrated delegation. Maybe twenty blacks and about sixteen whites. From St. Sebastian’s Parish Hall to the university campus, where I’m scheduled to make a speech at 3:00 p.m.”

“Take a bus. The thirteen bus will drop you off right at the campus gate.”