The Good Shepherd (21 page)

Then came the miracle, her gentle compassion, her patience, her understanding. Perhaps it was better for them, this almost-love, perhaps it was all God permitted them. And you agreed, you almost believed, for three weeks now it had been enough to taste, to touch. But how much longer could the hero conceal his humiliation?

The jet engines roared, and the tremendous acceleration pressed him back against his seat. His pulses pounded; his guilt-charged brain seemed to vanish in a flash of fire. Death, death waited for them all at the end of this rain-shrouded runway, death and damnation, and nothing, neither prayers of supplication nor flagellations of contrition, could save him.

They were airborne. Like a huge animal, the jet groaned and vibrated as it devoured altitude. Below them, the city and its suburbs became fantasies, a glimpse of the improbable earth as seen by an indifferent God.

Slowly the terror ebbed from his body. In a few moments, the aisle was full of people with drinks in their hands. He cheerfully joined them, accepting a Canadian Club and ginger ale from a purring stewardess. “Hey, that Cardinal’s a doll,” she said, rolling her eyes. “How did the girls let him get away?”

Did he get away, or did he get away with it? Dennis mused, thinking of the several scented blue letters that had arrived from Rome and the one or two replies from His Eminence, addressed to Mrs. Mary Shea, 41 Via Margutta. Revealing that the Cardinal had a love nest in Rome - that would win eternal admiration from Leo and eternal opportunities from Sister Helen.

It was shocking, even disheartening, to see how callously aware he was of his real motive for playing his brother’s silly espionage game. In fact, he took masochistic pleasure in following the twists and turns of his conscience. After that Easter-night session with His Eminence and Mike Furia and Davey Cronin, he had adopted a selective approach to betraying the inner secrets of Matthew Mahan’s episcopacy. Only decisions, habits, policies, that, in your intellectual majesty, you saw fit to disapprove were communicated to Leo. You had not told him the most damaging story, the one you had heard from His Eminence’s lips the day after he returned from the semiannual conference of the American bishops in Houston.

“
Call Terry Malone and tell him to put $300,000 in my personal account. Tell him I’m giving another $100,000 to Peter’s Pence, and when he screams, tell him I know that’s $50,000 more than we collected. Draw another check for $50,000 to the Propagation of the Faith, and another for $50,000 to the shrines in the Holy Land, ditto to the Bishops’ Relief Fund.”

The expression on his secretary’s face made His Eminence laugh. “I can see what’s going through your suspicious mind. So this is the price you pay for a red hat. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Down in Houston, I got a reading on what the other guys were giving. Wright over in Pittsburgh has handed out a half million to one thing and another. We’ve got to at least match him. If our fund drive was going better, I’d top him by 100,000. We’ve got more people than he has.”

This revelation you concealed in your devious heart, Dennis. Why? It had something to do with the way it was said to you. It somehow connected with the feeling you had on Easter Sunday night when you were invited to join the conclave with Furia and Cronin. A
man among men.
To betray that feeling seemed not only sacrilegious but downright dangerous.

Instead, you gave Leo a Xeroxed copy of the proposed diocesan financial report, which His Eminence had again decided not to issue this year. He was going to wait and see what the ten or twenty other dioceses who were taking this dangerous plunge said first. The thirty-five-page document was laborious reading and almost totally unrewarding from Leo’s point of view. The value of the diocesan stock portfolio was a trifling $2 million, and its blue chips had declined 6 percent in the past eight months. Although last year’s finances were affluently in the black, the $1.5-million surplus had been applied to reducing the $8 million still owed on the last regional high school. Parishes owed another $20 million on recently built churches and grade schools. It was really almost malicious to torment Leo with this sort of thing, but his extremism deserved it.

There were, of course, those two rather large items identified as the Cardinal’s living expenses and travel expenses. But he had diabolically demolished these in an attached memorandum, which explained that the living expenses concealed numerous gifts to priests who needed money for one reason or another, salaries for the housekeeper and assistant housekeeper, and gifts of cash to his sister-in-law and her family. The travel expenses included trips to semiannual bishops’ meetings, conferences in Washington, D.C., and a tour of the archdiocese’s South American missions, where the Cardinal was even more inclined to be munificent with his cash while face to face with his young volunteers.

Anyway, the whole purpose of the plot, if it still deserved that heroic name, was to give him access to Sister Helen. This had been thoroughly, if not gloriously, achieved. Again Dennis found himself thinking with savage self-satisfaction that it was somehow fitting to have Matthew Mahan’s unwitting cooperation in solving the problem of priestly celibacy - which he so blithely dismissed. True, he had been one of about twenty of the 300 bishops at Houston who had met with a group of married and shacked-up priests to discuss the celibacy problem. But he seemed unimpressed by what he had heard.
They just aren’t in touch with reality
was his comment. That had produced a secret smile behind the sober mask His Eminence’s secretary habitually wore.

It was amazing how his intoxication with Sister Helen made the thrown pens, the snappish orders, the outrageous hours he worked, so much more bearable. When His Eminence berated him for forgetting yet another telephone call - from Mike Furia, of all people - he was able to smirk behind his pained apology. He had a consolation that made him indifferent to His Eminence, impervious to His Eminence, superior to His Eminence.

How brave you are, Father McLaughlin, he mockingly congratulated himself. How marvelously metallically analytic, now that we are stabilized at 35,000 feet, and the booze is flowing. You can even enjoy yourself, accept the friendly greetings from the titans of the city’s power structure, so many of whom pass through your office to worship at the episcopal throne. There was Jim McAvoy’s sexy blond wife waving to him. Moderately sophisticated, they could chuckle at some of the idiocies of the Church, yet somehow retain an active faith in it. Madeline McAvoy began telling him about a letter that Jim had just received from one of his Notre Dame classmates. The alumnus wanted Jim to give His Eminence a secret solution for ending the Vietnam War victoriously. Massive, carefully tabulated, archdiocesan-wide daily communions. It was based on a tried and true formula developed at the mecca of Catholic education in the late 1940s. They had found an undeniable correlation between the number of daily communions each week and the scores by which the Fighting Irish rampaged to victory on the gridiron.

“Isn’t that fantastic?” Madeline McAvoy said.

“I bet he thinks
Humanae Vitae
is a great encyclical,” Dennis said.

“Oh, he does, he does,” Madeline said with a conspiratorial smile. She had sat next to Dennis at a recent dinner for the women’s division of the Cardinal’s Fund and had, first cautiously, then candidly, confided to him her dismay over Pope Paul’s refusal to change the Church’s teaching on birth control. It was not that she, personally, had any regrets about having her six children. She was fortunate enough to have the money and the energy to cope with them. But she knew too many other women who lacked one or both of these vital ingredients.

And Mike Furia, coming toward him now to clap him on the back. Mike was already a little drunk. His glistening black hair was rumpled, his $25 flowered red silk tie askew on his $50 dark blue handmade shirt. Without his exquisitely tailored coat, the fat on his massive chest and shoulders visibly pressed against the broadcloth. “Hey, Dennis,” he said, “how’s it going?”

The man exuded a kind of animal warmth that made him hard to resist. The big arm was around his shoulder now. It was somehow flattering to find him treating you as an equal.
A man among men.
Although Furia could talk like a tough guy when he was in the mood, he was a shrewd, sophisticated man. Dennis had taken some fundraising reports up to his apartment ten days ago and was amazed to discover the good taste with which the place was decorated. The style was moderate modern. On the walls were Modiglianis, Chiricos (his favorite), and several other names that were new to Dennis - Osvaldo Licini, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Atanasio Soldati. Casually, Furia admitted that all the paintings were originals and quietly intimated that he probably had the best collection of contemporary Italian art in America.

This discovery grew less surprising once Dennis learned that Furia Brothers was one of the ten or fifteen biggest construction companies in the world. They had gotten their start building schools for the archdiocese in the early fifties, with the help of some ardent arm-twisting by Monsignor Matthew Mahan. From there, they had expanded up and down the eastern seaboard, and then across the nation, building dams, apartment houses, office skyscrapers. Next had come a quantum leap to airfields, harbors, base camps in Vietnam, then railroad tunnels, superhighways, and shopping centers across Europe. Today there were Furia brothers, cousins, or nephews running subsidiary companies in Hawaii, Australia, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and London. Furia spent most of his time on planes during the decade - 1955 to 1965 - he spent building his empire. His wife had a pathological fear of flying and never traveled with him. His marriage had broken up three or four years ago. But he had settled - largely at Matthew Mahan’s urging - for a separation rather than a divorce.

“Looking forward to kissing Il Papa’s ring?” Furia asked.

“Not really.”

“Just between you and me, I think the whole papacy rigamarole ought to go. It’s ruined Italy. I’m not kidding; it really has.”

Furia had a remarkable ability to sense a person’s mood. He had been saying things like this to Dennis every time they met. “I don’t have the nerve to tell that to your boss.”

“Why don’t you try it sometime,” Dennis said. “Bishop Cronin gets away with it.”

Furia laughed. “That old screwball could get away with thumbing his nose at God. On the level, is there anything to that book he’s writing?”

“It’s hard to say. I only spent a couple of hours looking through the material last week.”

“He’s had my people in Rome shipping him stuff by the trunkload. We’ve run up an air freight bill of $1,000. I told him I’d pay a $100,000 to knock a few holes in that crummy setup.”

“What do you hear from Tony?”

“The usual bullshit. Excuse my French.”

From his refuge in the Hard Times Haven commune, Furia’s son Tony made a habit of writing his father outrageous letters, calling him a tool of American imperialism and an agent of the military-industrial complex. Furia had shown a recent letter to Dennis at the residence and asked him for some advice. With that cool objectivity that both intrigued and repelled him, Dennis had put aside his personal opinions and given Furia an unorthodox suggestion. Start returning Tony’s letters unopened, cut off his allowance, and in general start acting more like an outraged father - which he was - and less like a patsy, which was what Tony was intent on making him.

“When I get back, I think maybe I’ll take that advice. About getting tough with him. I’m just afraid - you know my wife works on the kid all the time, turning him against me. I hate to give him more ammunition.”

Dennis nodded sympathetically. “It’s a tough decision. I just thought it was time to try something different.”

“Anyway, I appreciate your interest.” Furia’s beautifully manicured fingers slipped something in the pocket of Dennis’s coat. “Buy yourself something in Rome. Something you don’t need.” The big hand banged him on the back, and Furia was moving past him down the aisle, calling cheerful insults to Herb Winstock whose gnomish face evoked Jewishness as totally as Furia’s satiny olive skin and gleaming black hair said Italian.

Sitting in an aisle seat talking to Winstock was Kenneth Banks, member of the City Council and a power in the NAACP, the city’s leading Oreo. Sitting behind Banks was Mrs. Dwight Slocum, wife of the city’s richest Protestant. Her gaunt, horsey, rather oddly handsome face could easily have joined any collection of Early American portraits in the city’s art museum. All of these people, devout Jew, black Baptist, idealistic WASP, served on the executive committee of the Cardinal’s Fund. It was fascinating, how thoroughly Matthew Mahan had studied the money-raising style of Francis Cardinal Spellman and adapted it to his native city. Ecumenical? You bet. There is nothing more ecumenical than cash. That was His Eminence’s (unspoken) motto.

In his pursuit of the dollar, Matthew Mahan had had an advantage that even the prince of New York would have envied. Furia, McAvoy, Winstock, and almost every other man on this plane, reserved for the mostly rich, had served with Matthew Mahan in the 409th Regiment or at least in the 113th Division. It had provided him with a fantastic city-wide ecumenical head start which no one in the archdiocese, including the resident Archbishop had been able to match. No wonder he waxed sentimental about G. I. Joe at the annual division reunion dinner and steadfastly refused to say a word against the war in Vietnam.

“Hey, Dennis. Dennis.”

Mike Furia was waving to him. “We wanna check something. Your boss ever talk to you about the war?”

Dennis shook his head.

“That’s what I mean,” said Mike Furia, bringing a formidable fist on the back of Winstock’s seat. “He’s so afraid of bragging, he won’t tell anybody anything. You ought to write a book about him, Dennis. You really should. Somebody should. I mean - the things we saw him do.”

You are going to spend the night listening to these stories, yards and yards of them, Dennis told himself. He ordered himself to look interested.