The Good Shepherd (5 page)

As Harold Gargan got out in front of the administration building, he turned and with forced humor in his voice said, “Want to see the bishop before you go?”

“No, I haven’t got time,” Matthew Mahan said hastily. “Give him my best. Tell him I’m going to drag him in for dinner soon.”

The door slammed. “Who’s the bishop?” Dennis McLaughlin asked as they pulled away.

“My one and only auxiliary,” Matthew Mahan said ironically. “Bishop David Cronin. He’s eighty-one. One of my sentimental mistakes, I’m afraid. He taught dogmatic theology when I was here. He sort of became - my mentor. To be honest, he got me through this place. I wouldn’t have graduated without the tutoring he gave me, and not just in dogmatics. I took him along as one of my experts at Vatican II. That turned out to be another mistake. The old boy went from moderate to radical overnight. Every time I talk to him now, he scares the life out of me.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Dennis McLaughlin said, brightening appreciably.

“You will, you will,” Matthew Mahan said. “I have him in for a Sunday night supper every so often.”

But not so often lately, a nasty voice reminded him. He shook it off and asked, “What’s next on the schedule?”

“Seventy-six trombones,” Dennis said.

“What?”

“The Fifth Annual Statewide Catholic High School Marching Band Competition.”

“Oh yes,” Matthew Mahan said.

“Hopefully, it’s almost over,” Dennis said.

“Now, now,” Matthew Mahan said testily, “it won’t be that had. There’s a lot to be said for playing in a band. It keeps kids out of trouble. It gives them a sense of community. Everybody can’t be an intellectual, Dennis.”

Your Excellency is entitled to his opinion, thought Dennis McLaughlin moodily as they took their places in the reviewing stand at Cardinal Beran Regional High School. On the football field in front of them, ninety-two green-uniformed members of Our Savior Catholic High School Drum and Bugle Corps, from the southern end of the state, were performing intricate maneuvers while blasting out “Macnamara’s Band.” Matthew Mahan shook hands with stocky, crew-cut Monsignor Joseph Gumbolton, the forty-year-old principal of Cardinal Beran, and a half-dozen members of the faculty. The crowd in the nearby stands was thin.

“Mostly parents,” Monsignor Gumbolton explained. He introduced him to Beran’s new band mistress, Sister Margaret Kelly, a tall, thin nun with a perky smile. The nuns’ decision to go back to using their baptismal names if they chose, constantly threw Matthew Mahan off balance. She took him down on the field and explained the complicated scoring by which the five judges rated the performance of each band.

Dennis McLaughlin followed the Archbishop, persisting in wondering what it all had to do with Catholic education or any other kind of education. After an hour of deafening brass, the winner was announced: Our Savior for the fifth year in a row. The grinning bandmaster, a popinjay of a man, accompanied by a moon-faced, middle-aged priest who introduced himself as “McGuinnes - the chaplain,” rather smugly accepted the gold trophy. Father McGuinnes told Matthew Mahan it was the twenty-sixth trophy that they had won in the last three years. “We almost went to Washington for the inaugural, but our black brothers from Jackson High School in your fair city beat us out.”

Archbishop Mahan murmured something vaguely sympathetic and went out on the field to shake hands with the angular drum major. Behind him, a half-dozen drum majorettes in net stockings, gold lamé miniskirts, and silvered blouses giggled as Matthew Mahan asked him how he managed to twirl two batons simultaneously.

“Practice, Your Eminence,” said the boy, who was surprisingly shy. “I practice four or five hours a day.”

The Archbishop congratulated him and the rest of the band and headed for his limousine.

In twenty-five minutes - such was the wonder and variety of the American suburbs - they were beyond the one-acre zoned plots and in the world of the really rich. The houses sat in splendid isolation at the head of oval driveways or on one of the rolling hills surrounded by acres of brownish gold meadow in which saddle horses gamboled. The Archbishop amazed Dennis McLaughlin with his knowledge of each property owner. “There’s one of the richest,” he said, pointing to an unpretentious-looking white house on an approaching hill. “Old Paul Stapleton. The family ran our city for a long time. They must be worth 100 million. His wife is a Catholic.”

A red brick imitation of Jefferson’s Monticello. “The Crowells, they made their money in meat-packing.” A Tudor style a half mile back on an immense lawn. “The Duncans, the carpet company.” A cluster of sharp-edged Norman roofs. “The Colemans - electronics.”

Finally, they swung into the driveway of a combination Spanish-Italian villa. A serving girl with a pugnacious Irish face opened the door. In the huge entrance hall, a woman came toward them on a cane. She was a spooky old lady, unusually tall, with a mass of gray hair tied in a sloppy bun at the back of her neck. Her face was gaunt, with deep-socketed intense eyes.

“Miss Childers,” said the Archbishop, with a literally beaming smile, “it’s so nice to see you.”

“Your Excellency,” she said in a surprisingly rich girlish voice.

Father McLaughlin was introduced, and they adjourned to tea in a sitting room that was almost Victorian with its profusion of overstuffed chairs and bric-a-brac. But Miss Childers was remarkably contemporary. She wanted to know what the Archbishop thought of the Vietnam War, now that President Nixon seemed committed to fighting on indefinitely. Dennis had trouble concealing a smile as His Excellency did his best to talk out of both sides of his mouth. And the liturgy? What did he think of these floating parishes? Jazzmen and modern dancers performing on the altar? Once more His Excellency tried to sound both with it and against it. Miss Childers startled him by announcing that she had gone to a guitar mass in the city and loved it. His Excellency hastily conceded that there was something to be said for the guitar as a liturgical instrument. And priests marrying? What about that idea? His Excellency temporized. It was an open question. There was nothing inherently wrong with it.

Again, the Archbishop was obviously startled when Miss Childers said: “I see a good deal right with it. Better to marry than burn, as St. Paul said. For me, that word ‘burn’ has always meant unsatisfied yearning, as much as the fires of hell. Sometimes when I think of the terrible thing my father did to me, I hate him, I really do.”

Archbishop Mahan seemed unduly upset by these words. “It’s very hard - almost impossible - to judge the previous generation. Especially your father” - he faltered on that word and added only us a murmured afterthought - “your mother.”

Miss Childers leaned back in her armchair and belched. Without apologizing she declared, “My father was a selfish old bastard, Your Excellency. I think it’s healthier to say that sort of thing, don’t you, Father McLaughlin?”

“Yes, yes.” Dennis said, hoping there was conviction in his voice. He caught Archbishop Mahan eyeing him and added: “If it’s true.”

“Oh, it’s true, it’s true.”

The Archbishop was obviously eager to get away. He refused a second cup of tea and spoke vaguely about appointments in the city. “You look terribly tired,” Miss Childers said. “Uneasy lies the head and all that, I suppose.”

“And all that,” Matthew Mahan said, forcing a smile.

Out in the car, the Archbishop looked uneasily at his secretary. “I suppose that bored you stiff,” he said.

“No, not at all,” Dennis said. “She’s almost a swinger.”

“She is an amazing old girl. Her father was governor of the state in the twenties. A ruthless crook. Her mother died when she was quite young, and the old man turned her into his companion. He lived to be eighty-three or so.” Matthew Mahan shook his head. “The terrible things people do to each other.”

You should know, Your Excellency,
whispered a nasty voice.

Suddenly the pain was alive in his body again, ripping at him. While those seemingly innocent words tore his mind from the steel shell of the moving car across thousands of miles of water to a woman’s suffering face in Rome.

In counterpoint, another voice, which he also did not control, whispered:
Forgive me, Mary, forgive me.

“I suppose there’s a big bequest there,” Dennis McLaughlin said.

“What?” Matthew Mahan said dazedly. “Miss Childers? Oh yes, we hope so. She’s intimated that it will be around a million.”

Again Matthew Mahan glanced uneasily at the impassive yet somehow accusing young face. “I suppose you don’t think much of the way a bishop has to hustle around buttering up the rich.”

Dennis refused to plead guilty or not guilty to the implied indictment. He decided a simple shrug was the best answer. The Archbishop did not spend all his time chasing bequests. But why say that when he seemed about to make an interesting confession?

“We get 20 percent of our income - about the same as most dioceses - from bequests. For us, that was over 2 million last year.”

A nod this time, Dennis. You may yet emerge unscathed by His Excellency’s acerbic tongue. Now a nice neutral question.

“Would you like to do the rest of the mail?”

“Good idea.”

They were down to the beggars: requests for help from obscure missionaries in Swaziland, Uganda, Pondicherry. The Indians were the worst. They were indefatigable wailers. “Give them the usual,” Matthew Mahan said, which meant a form letter full of blessings and a check for $25.

Next came the problems of the diocesan priests who were serving in Brazil. They were there in response to Pope John’s call and their Archbishop’s urging. John had asked 10 percent of the priests from every United States diocese to volunteer for service m South America. But diocesan priests were not enthusiastic about missionary life. Less than 1 percent had responded. Matthew Mahan had recruited twenty-five - twice as many as any other diocese. Father Tom O’Hara reported the final collapse of his car. What he really needed was a jeep. “Send him 3,500,” Matthew Mahan said. Father Jerome Lang had a bright boy who said he wanted to be a priest, but could not afford a university education, which Lang felt he should get first. It would cost 3,000 to support him for the first year. “Send it to him,” Matthew Mahan said. Father Edward McMullen wanted to build a chapel for an outlying village. “Send him 5,000.”

Matthew Mahan could almost hear the groans of protest from his money-manager, iron-jawed Chancellor Terence Malone. He knew he was too generous with these young priests. But it made him feel better - and not many things made him feel that way these days.

There were a half-dozen letters from Washington, D.C., enclosing reports from various committees on which he was serving under the aegis of the National Conference of Bishops. More night work, Matthew Mahan thought glumly. A letter from Father Peter Foley, chaplain of the state prison, introduced one of his model prisoners who was about to be released after serving ten years for armed robbery and felonious assault. The man was totally reformed. Would the Archbishop help get him a job? Matthew Mahan groaned. “Write to Mike Furia. You’ll see a dozen previous letters in his file. He manages to hire a lot of these poor guys for his overseas companies.”

He twisted his episcopal ring, a habit that Dennis had learned to interpret as a sign of uneasiness. “I wish I could get Foley out of there. He’s the only guy in my seminary class I haven’t settled in a good parish. He says he
likes
being chaplain.”

Dennis found it hard to tell whether the Archbishop was simply baffled by Foley or disapproved of him. “I told him at our last reunion I may not be around forever. My successor may decide he’s too old and leave him there for the rest of his life. It didn’t seem to bother him. What’s next?”

A long letter from the pastor of St. Malachy’s parish described the trouble he was in with his parish council, which was in the hands of superconservatives who barely tolerated the use of English in the mass. A sociologist wanted to find out how many priests the diocese had lost in the last five years, with case histories, if possible. Finally, there were the usual random letters from various lay men and women, about everything from lack of heat in St. Joseph’s parochial school to accusations against two or three priests, alleging they were about to be - or should be - caught
in flagrante delicto
with lady friends.

“Five years ago we could file 90 percent of those sex letters in the wastebasket,” Matthew Mahan said. “But these days every one of them sounds true. Send them to the vicar-general and ask him to make the usual investigation.”

Dennis McLaughlin nodded obediently, but there was a drop of disapproval on his sensitive mouth. Suddenly Matthew Mahan found himself wishing he could stop the frantic daily treadmill on which he and Dennis were running. If somehow, somewhere, they had time to sit down and relax for a clay or two, to talk about things in a casual, honest man-to-man way, he was sure that they would find themselves in substantial agreement. Dennis would be surprised to discover that the Archbishop had been something of a rebel in his youth and understood - or tried to understand - the impatient feelings of young priests and laymen. They would even share a mutual laugh or two if he managed to explain that he didn’t really enjoy always playing the solemn upholder of dignity and authority. But there was no way to turn off the treadmill; there did not even seem to be a way to slow it down.

A batch of letters offered Matthew Mahan a number of supposedly rare seashells and almost as many offers to swap. He was one of the world’s foremost collectors of shells, and his letters abounded with references to tritons, conches, turbans, volutes, whelks and miters.

“Tell that guy I’ve already got an episcopal miter and papal miter. But I wouldn’t mind getting a Cardinal miter,” he said, flipping the top letter into Dennis’s lap.

“Should I send a carbon to the Vatican?” Dennis asked.

“It would be a waste of paper,” Matthew Mahan said, smiling.

The rest of the malacologists were swiftly dispatched. Yes, the Archbishop had a Purple Drupe and a Spiral Babylon whelk. But he would like to see an Eye of Judas, from the Galapagos Islands. No, he did not want a Grinning Tun or a Wide-Mouthed
Purpura,
and hence declined to trade his Magnificent Wentletrap from Japan for either of them.