The Good Shepherd (20 page)

“No,” Matthew Mahan said, shaking his head. “I’ve told you a half-dozen times, that’s not my style. I couldn’t put my name on a book I didn’t write.”

“Why not? Do you think St. John F. Kennedy wrote those books that he published?”

Matthew Mahan shook his head. “I’m sure Dennis has no desire to become my ghost.”

Amen to that,
thought Dennis.

“And will you get it through your head, once and for all,” Matthew Mahan went on, “that I don’t see it as part of my job? I’m a pastor, not an intellectual. I can’t see any point in embroiling this diocese in any more turmoil than it’s in already.”

Cronin was serious now, too serious. “Matt, when will you get it through
your
head that you can’t be the pastor you dream of being unless you stand up to those monarchical bureaucrats in Rome? Do they let you say what you really believe about married love? What the people are desperate to hear? Can you speak to your younger priests honestly about celibacy? Can you lift your hand to help the thousands of divorced and separated? Even the good friend sitting beside you?”

Matthew Mahan shook his head in a way that Dennis had come to consider ominous. He braced himself for another explosion. But the words came from Bishop Cronin.

“Ah! When it comes to taking good advice, there’s nothing worse than an Archbishop. They’re all the same. Hearts of stone and heads of oak.”

Mike Furia roared with laughter. Dennis McLaughlin gulped his coffee and stared at Matthew Mahan in frank astonishment. The Cardinal was smiling. It was a somewhat tense smile. But it was still a smile. At the same moment, Matthew Mahan found himself looking at Dennis, thinking,
Maybe this will convince you that I’m human.

“Well,” said Father Cronin in a gloomy voice, “perhaps we’ll find new answers to our dilemmas - or new dilemmas for our answers - in Rome.”

At the window seat in the first row of the plane’s first-class compartment, Matthew Mahan looked out at the airport lights glowing and flickering mystically through the rainy darkness. Around him in the compartment, and in the tourist compartment behind him, were 130 of his well-wishers and supporters, participants in this “Pilgrimage to Rome.” That was Mike Furia’s name for it. When Joe Cohane headlined it in the archdiocesan paper, the grandiosity made Matthew Mahan slightly uncomfortable. Behind their jet on the runway, he could see a second 707, also loaded with pilgrims. In the glow of the runway lights, the golden griffin of the Mahans reared ferociously, just behind the cockpit window. Both planes had the Cardinal-to-be’s coat of arms painted on them. They remained essentially the same as his Archbishop’s shield. Only the color of the papal hat and tassels had changed from green to red, and the number of tassels running down from the hat had increased from ten to fifteen.

He was on his way to the Eternal City, as the newspapers kept calling Rome, with well over 200 well-wishers to cheer him at this self-described “greatest moment” of his life. Why wasn’t he happier? Why this sagging, soggy sadness even now, when he could look forward to a full week of relaxation and celebration?

The Cardinal sighed. He knew part of the answer. So did Mike Furia, who was sitting beside him. As chairman of the Cardinal’s Fund, Mike had had to tell Matthew Mahan the bad news last week. The big givers simply weren’t coming through this year. The Nixon recession had made the stock market a disaster area. The extra $5,000 or $10,000 that people could skim off the top of their Wall Street profits had vanished. Now the money had to come out of savings accounts or the sale of stock on which they had already taken a bath. Normally the committee depended on the big givers for 2 or 3 million - a third of the fund target. Based on early returns, the computer whiz kids in the marketing department of Furia Brothers Construction Company were predicting a 50 percent drop in this crucial category.

Another reason for the poor public response was the outburst of rioting in Chicago on the eve of the first anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A new outbreak of campus disorders, highlighted by the seizure of Harvard’s main administration building by 300 militants, also contributed to a general feeling that the nation was on the brink of anarchy, and this, in the words of a morose Mike Furia, inclined everybody to “take care of Number One.” Mike also maintained that Pope Paul VI had not made a positive contribution when he said on Maundy Thursday that the Church was in “a practically schismatic ferment.” This made more than a few Catholics wonder if the Church, too, was about to come apart. And people, as an ever more harassed Mike Furia had growled, “don’t like to put their money on a loser.”

The bad news had cast a pall over the trip. Every day that Matthew Mahan was away meant a half-dozen major contributors escaped his personal attention. For the first time, he found himself feeling like Cardinal Cushing, who had remarked to him during Vatican II that every day he was away from Boston cost him $20,000 or $30,000.

After a sleepless night, he decided to shorten the trip to give himself four extra days. The visit to Ireland and the stopover in France to take a nostalgic look at some of their old battlefields were abandoned. He had spent the extra days in a near frenzy of telephoning and conferring and cajoling, but the results had been meager. Earnest promises were all he got most of the time. If
the market goes up, Your Eminence, even twenty points, I swear -
So here he sat, exhausted, depressed.

Stop it, now,
he told himself. He forced himself to think of Rome, only six or seven hours away. Think of it as a city of refreshment, he told himself, a city where you will regain your spiritual balance by visiting churches that still echo with Pope John’s husky voice. You would stand before the altar of the cattedra in St. Peter’s and feel once more those heavy peasant hands consecrating you a bishop, see the serenity in those dark brown eyes, hear the words
To help you remember this moment, to help you hold fast to the hope and faith I see on your face, Matthew, let me make you a promise. I will be in Paradise long before you. Think of me as your friend there. When you join us at last, I will be the first to greet you.

As
a young priest, John had explained later, he had been the secretary of a bishop who had received a similar promise from an earlier pope. It had been a source of constant reassurance to the bishop and “wonderfully consoling” on the day of his death, a difficult death, from cancer.

Four years after he had told that story, John himself had died the same difficult death. Was it that memory and the memory of his father’s death from cancer that made Matthew Mahan wish during the unpleasant poking and X-raying of his gastrointestinal series that Bill Reed’s diagnosis was wrong? You are so persistently arrogant, Matthew Mahan told himself. You even insist on the right to choose your fatal illness. Reproachfully, for the hundreth time, he made a vow to accept his ulcer as God’s will.

How little he had thought about Pope John in recent years. When he was packing for the trip, he had found crumpled against the back of a bureau drawer a list of quotations that John had given him to meditate on, during the retreat he made before his consecration. He had told himself ten years ago that he would use this wisdom to sustain himself and enrich his episcopacy. But the nonscholar, the old smoothie, the whirlwind organizer, the Irish charm boy, had managed to forget all about this noble resolution before the year was out.

And Mary. Mary Shea would be waiting in Rome, greeting you with her enigmatic smile.

Matthew Mahan began feeling better. He started kidding Mike Furia, who was cheerfully pouring airline Bourbon into one of several silver flasks in his $500 attaché case. Mike always filled his flasks when he traveled first-class to Europe. Good Bourbon was practically unbuyable on the Continent. And the absurd price the airline charged for first class made him determined to gouge them in every possible way. “Once a Mafioso always a Mafioso,” the Cardinal said.

“Don’t knock it, it’s in your blood, too,” Mike replied. “The assistant chaplain thinks it’s a good idea.”

Red-haired Jim McAvoy, almost as slim and definitely as freckle-faced as he was during his dangerous year as Chaplain Mahan’s assistant during the war, was doing the same thing with the airline’s scotch. The equipment in his attaché case was not as expensive as Mike Furia’s furnishings. But Jim was doing very well, with some subtle help from Matthew Mahan. The Cardinal had used his friendship with several local bankers to help Jim buy control of the state’s biggest Cadillac agency. Beside Jim sat his chic blond wife, Madeline. Her Dresden doll prettiness belied her remarkable personality. In spite of six children, she had a coed’s figure. She ran her family - and to some extent her husband - and was simultaneously head of the woman’s division of the Cardinal’s Fund and president of the Marian Guild, the city’s poshest Catholic women’s organization. An honors graduate of Mount St. Monica, she could discuss church history and politics as intelligently as any layman - and many priests - that Matthew Mahan had ever met. With so many Catholic couples taking the divorce court route these days, it always reassured the Cardinal to see Jim and Madeline McAvoy together. They never made a public display of their affection for each other, but it was obviously there, still solid and dependable after twenty years of marriage.

“I was hoping you’d say something, Your Eminence,” Madeline said. “I think they’re acting like a couple of six-year-olds. Maybe it’s going back to Europe with you. They think they’re in the Army again and are planning to spend all their time raising hell.”

“That was my department,” Mike Furia said. “Jim had to behave. He was exhibit A for the Padre’s sermons.”

“That wasn’t it, and you know it, Sarge,” said Jim. “I never had
time.
When I wasn’t ducking shells and bullets, I was lugging some guy to the rear on a stretcher.”

“I’m warning him,” Madeline said, “if he goes off with the boys, I’m going to spend my time shopping.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Matthew Mahan said. “For every hour he leaves you alone, Madeline, we’ll penalize him $100, payable to the Cardinal’s Fund.”

Madeline laughed delightedly. “The women’s division of the Cardinal’s Fund. You watch. This year we’re going to beat the socks off these big-businessmen.”

“That won’t be hard,” Mike Furia said.

In the first row of the tourist compartment, Dennis McLaughlin savored the high-cushioned back of his seat and looked forward to seven hours of rest. He was totally exhausted. For the past week, he had worked every night until 3:00 a.m. “getting ahead,” as His Eminence-to-be put it, on reports, memorandums, speeches, and random thoughts that the Great Man confided to his dictating machine.

Beside Dennis sat the Cardinal’s sister-in-law, Eileen Mahan, and her son Timmy. He was still wearing his hair shoulder length but had succumbed to his mother’s pleas and was wearing a new suit. Timmy’s reading material consisted of Zap comics, which his mother feebly remarked were “awful.” Dennis hoped to vacate his seat the moment they were airborne. The thought of listening to Eileen Mahan’s drone for seven hours horrified him. She was plaintively disappointed because Monsignor Frank Falconer, her pastor, was not on this plane. He was with his fellow members of the Cardinal’s seminary class in the jet behind them. But Dennis was not particularly troubled by being on the losing side of the implied comparison between him and Monsignor Falconer. He had more alarming emotions churning through his body.

For several days and nights, Dennis had been trying to prepare himself for his first flight across the Atlantic. It made his previous plane trips - to New Haven, to Florida to see his mother - seem trivial by comparison. The thought of hurtling out across those thousands of miles of empty ocean awed and chilled him. Would the claustrophobia be proportionately worse this time? What was it, after all, but the strangulating fear of sudden death, extinction, when life, love, had been barely touched? Now, Dennis thought uneasily, now you have a double reason for terror. Death may mean more than extinction; it may include - in spite of all your denials and rationalizations - damnation.

Looking around him, Dennis wondered if any of these well-fed and soon-to-be well-drunk Americans with their complacent wives and rebellious children felt even a touch of the fear that crept through him, as he contemplated both the metaphor and the reality. How hopeless it was to think of yourself as a priest to these people. You were outside them, hopelessly outside them all. And what has happened during the last three weeks has only widened the distance.

In a momentary lull from the first-class compartment, he heard Bishop Cronin’s rich Irish brogue proclaiming the need for Vatican Council III. What was the source of that old man’s fire? Did he draw something from that primary ancestral soil, something that you with your city feet and your city lungs can never touch or breathe? But now, now, you have touched - yes, and even breathed - a different kind of fire, and what has it done for you?

Mordantly, he let his mind recreate the recent scene in Matthew Mahan’s office when His Eminence asked him for a report on what was happening between his secretary and Sister Helen Reed. Would you be on this plane now, Dennis, if you had blurted out the truth? You know the answer. No. Neither would you be wearing this tight white round collar that so effectively neutralizes all your words and thoughts.

What was it you had said to her that first night, when you picked up your collar and flipped it off the bed? You know what I always think when I see a priest in one of those collars? I think it’s a kind of spiritual chastity belt that divorces his head from the rest of his body. That’s why only pale, neutral abstractions come out of his mouth. No gut thoughts or heart thoughts or testicle thoughts. No man thoughts.

I want to love you. Do you love me?

Of course. Just let me look at you, just look at you. And touch this, and this, and this.

Who are you, Dennis, now that she has given you her body to explore like a geologist, hunting buried pleasure? It had never been innocent, from that night when she had kissed you. No, admit it, you hurried to your conference, notebook in hand and hot hungry desire in mind, telling yourself that there was nothing particularly new or startling about this except the discovery of an object for your familiar gnawing lust.

The apartment had been empty. Only you and Sister Helen, knee to knee, you in the easy chair, she on the couch in the lamplight. Green eyes glowing with expectation. She knew. She awaited you, ripe with rebellious love.

And what happened next? Fear, Dennis, the fear of the celibate, the unmanning fear, Mother’s hand still clutching, slapping you there, preventing what your lurid imagination had proclaimed a thousand times, what your dreams had evoked into how many soiled sheets. For a moment, the shame had been unbearable. Suicide, madness, had loomed in the shadows.