The Good Shepherd (8 page)

Dear Gog:

I am glad to see that your determination to save my soul has not lapsed along with most of your theology. But it may be too late. Instead of being picked off by a swinging nun, I’ve been plucked by an Archbishop. You won’t believe it, so I will write it twice. I have become the Archbishop’s secretary. I have become the Archbishop’s secretary. Yes,
secretary.
I, the anarchistic depreciator of all authority, the rebel with or without a cause, have been catapulted by Somebody into the highest councils of the Establishment. I am in a position to acquire an intimate knowledge of the power structure. Before many more moons, I will know precisely where to place my intellectual dynamite to bring the whole system crashing down around our ears.

So much for rhetoric. Now for reality. I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open past 9:00 p.m. Working for this man is like trying to run the mile against an express train. For my own pleasure or enlightenment, I have read nothing weightier than the newspaper since my elevation two weeks ago, and I suspect that I will soon give that up for Total Vacuity (TV, remember?).

Among my duties are the following: 1. Write His Excellency’s speeches - he gives about one a week. 2. Scour the papers and magazines for bits and pieces that will keep him “in touch” with the latest in theology, education, modern morals, student behavior (the two are not interchangeable in his opinion), ecumenical dialogue, and contemporary politics. 3. Draft replies to his correspondence with everyone from the manager of our inglorious baseball team to the Mayor and The Apostolic Delegate. 4. Accompany him almost everywhere to take notes on what is said and decided. He has a horror of being misquoted. 5. Deal with the press, radio, and TV newshawks who are always trying to get him to say something for or against contraception, abortion, divorce, the war, student riots, clerical dropouts, President Nixon, Pope Paul, and whether or not he is ever going to let Catholics receive Communion with Episcopalians.

Let me give you a typical Mahan day. Last Thursday, for instance. We started with a communion breakfast for the Holy Name Society of the fire department at 7:15. Then back to the office for a conference with our education bureaucrats about the ominous signs that the lay teachers are talking union. Then a meeting with a wandering journalist who wanted to know everything about “a day in the life of a bishop.” Next came an hour with the archdiocesan building committee, debating the question, to build or not to build anymore? After a half-hour lunch, at 1:15 came a man who wants to equip all our priests with special credit cards. Baltimore and several other dioceses have bought the idea. At 2:45, we hustled down to dedicate a chapel being opened in the underground part of the Civic Center mall. At 3:30, a conference with our four black priests and six black nuns about getting more non-honkies into the parochial schools. At 5:15, we spent an hour with three state senators trying to get some support for a parochial school subsidy bill. (Not much hope.) By 7, we were at the Garden Square Hotel, speaking to the workers for the upcoming Archbishop’s Fund Drive at a warmup banquet. Back to the residence at 9:30, for two hours of dictating letters, memos, etc., which I have to wrestle with the next morning.

Sounds alarming, no? Even terrifying? But the most unnerving part is yet to come, old friend. I
seem to be enjoying it.
What this reveals about my character or lack of it, you can imagine, after having spent your youth listening to me dissect myself and everyone else within range of my instinctive nay-saying. For the first time in my life, I find myself unable to step back and contemplate that unreal fiction known as Dennis McLaughlin. More and more, I find myself doing, saying, even thinking, and worst of all feeling things
without being aware of them.
Only an hour or two later, when the sacred assembly line has stopped for a meal or some fitful sleep, do I find myself recalling that I felt angry or sad or disgusted earlier in the afternoon, listening to His Excellency exchange banter with the mayor or the governor, or tell the Chamber of Commerce that he will be ready to make his annual Lenten visit to them on April 6.

What do I think of His Excellency? That’s another problem. I don’t know. Some of the things he does and says appall me, others confuse me, and a few I find strangely moving. But there is one thing I can’t forgive him: his colossal self-confidence. He never betrays the slightest hint of doubt, of angst; he moves with stunning aplomb from one social situation to another, as good-humored and as full of sententious remarks as Archbishop Babbit in the flesh.

Meanwhile, beyond the episcopal residence (in which yours truly has a maid’s room on the third floor) the city is smoldering, and our once docile Romans are as combustible as the rest of the populace, perhaps more so. The blacks are beginning to hint that they make us another Watts or Detroit. The students are even more rancid over our endless war, and old Pusillanimous Paolo’s ruling on birth control has three-quarters of the women in the diocese seething. I doubt if there is a priest our age who can follow Il Papa’s logic, much less agree with his conclusions. We may have another Washington, D.C., on our hands if His Excellency tries to get tough and order conformity in the confessional. (Living in the first century, you may not be aware that the D.C. Cardinal, O’Boyle, suspended about forty priests down there last fall in a brawl over
Humanae Vitae.
)

Let me give you a quick description of His Excellency. He is about 6′2″, slick black hair, on the beefy side, with exceptionally long arms and big hands. He has an interesting face, very Irish in its general configurations - a square jutting jaw, high prominent cheekbones, small intense eyes, a mouth that’s extremely mobile, breaking easily into a Gaelic smile, with an upward curve to the right corner, a cocky, don’t-kid-me expression. In the next moment, the lips can become a hard, harsh line. Only in the nose have his mother’s Italian ancestors made their contribution: No Irishman, not even those putative westerners who intermarried with the survivors of the Spanish armada, ever wore Mahan’s nose. It comes down in its strong bridge and delicate structure from some forgotten senator who strode the Forum with a pride and no doubt with an arrogance that equaled Caesar’s.

As you can see, I mingle psychology with my physiognomy, as usual. But I am fascinated by how everything about His Exc.
fits.
It is all so beautifully interwoven, the manner and the appearance, the effortless exercise of authority. I used to think of power as crude, as well as cruel. But watching him in action for only two weeks now, I realize that the really good ones disguise the cruelty and modulate the arrogance beautifully.

Even when he gets mad, it is part calculation, I think. Whether this is correct or not, when the episcopal temperature rises, he is
très formidable.
A few days ago, he got into an argument with a recalcitrant pastor over a big bequest. It involved shares in a western copper company, worth over $1 million. The pastor, a smooth-talking mick named O’Connell, had persuaded the dying Dives to leave the shares to him personally and then tried to argue that the take belonged to his parish and not the archd. His Exc. summoned O’C. to the episcopal office and argued calmly with him for a half hour, referring several times to Cusak and Snee’s
Documents and Data for Estate Planning,
the only book he has on his desk. When O’C. still balked, the large Mahan head suddenly lowered, and began shaking back and forth like a bull about to charge. The decibel level rose about 30 percent, and he started telling O’C. what he would do to him if he did not sign papers transferring the shares to the archdiocese, now. Within five minutes, O’C. signed.

He is prone to unleash this temper on his immediate underlings, such as yours truly. One of my more menial tasks is keeping the battery of six pens on his desk full at all times. Nothing drives him into a frenzy more than an empty pen. Remembering such details is not one of my strong points, as you well know, and I’ve had to rescue several empty pens from far corners of the office, where they have been unceremoniously flung. I think he fancies himself a little as the Lord Jehovah hurling thunderbolts in these moments of irritation. He is also prone to be rather snappish when I forget to give him telephone messages, or forget to call someone to cancel or change an appointment. I try to remind myself that the greatest man of them all, George Washington, treated his subordinates in the same way. But not having a revolutionary cause to console me, I wonder how long I can last before I pull a Benedict Arnold.

Most of the time, he
tries
to be polite to me. I’ve been recruited largely because he has sensed he is on the wrong side of the generation gap with his younger priests, and he sort of practices on me. You can imagine how cooperative I am. In spite of all his efforts to be republican, there is something inescapably
royal
about him. Maybe it’s the setting in which we labor.

The episcopal residence is nothing much to behold from the outside. Just another fake medieval mélange. But inside, you, the antiquist, would spend hours silently drooling. Even I, who profess to have no interest in anything not made in America, am reluctantly impressed by the splendor. Most of it, perhaps all of it, was gathered by the previous Archbishop, who had Renaissance inclinations à la Cardinal O’Connell of Boston. In the dining room, there is a lacquered William and Mary cabinet vitrine, containing a collection of Capo Di Monte porcelain, circa 1770. Not the best artistic match, you’ll say, but think of the prices. Beside it is a chiffonier by Gaffieri decorated with medallions and arabesques of satin-wood. The mahogany dining room set is early French Renaissance, the chairs in the caqueteuse style. Facing each other at the end of the room on either side of the door that leads to the kitchen are two magnificent
cabinets à deux corps.
The carvings are all classical motifs, with caryatid supports at the corners of the lower units. On the floor is a sixteenth-century German Renaissance carpet, on the walls a couple of gold girandoles, with double mirrors and center cases decorated in chinoiserie.

Just across the hall, in a little wing that connects at the rear with the chancery office, is the chapel. It is a baroque jewel, imported in toto from a French chateau. The frescoes on the ceiling are a veritable orgy of baby flesh and wide-eyed ethereal angels. The altar is mahogany, carved from a single piece of wood, with incredibly intricate filigree work around and above the tabernacle. The stained-glass windows are all done in purple and blue, in imitation of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

Are you still with me? The parlor is mostly Louis XVI. We have a Martin Carlin cabinet in rosewood, with Sèvres porcelain inlays, cartouche back chairs and a
canapé à corbeille
(love seat to you) upholstered with Beauvais tapestry, a cabriole leg secretary of gilded walnut by Georges Jacob, and a pair of bergères (low armchairs) upholstered in yellow satin by the same
mâitre-d’ébéniste,
and several of those small tables called, I believe,
guéridons à crémaillère.
The walls are covered with boiserie, with the woodwork in gilt in the style of Germain Boffrand (of course, you remember he decorated the Palais Soubise for the Prince de Soubise). In the hall, by the front door, we have a canopy chair, early sixteenth-century French, worthy of the Archbishop of Paris himself. In the upstairs hall, we have a cassapanca from fourteenth-century Florence with painted front and back panels and all sorts of
caso rilievo
carvings. Also a sixteenth-century
chaise à bras
by Jacques Du Cerceau.

On downstairs and hall walls, we have a few paintings, a Correggio, a Zurbaran, a Pisanello, a small El Greco, all sacred or ecclesiastical in subject, but worth a bundle.

In His Exc.’s bedroom are two sixteenth-century French Renaissance
chaises à haut dossier
, fantastically carved, with backs at least six feet high. Perhaps he uses them to converse with fellow bishops when they call. Beside these are matching
commodes en tombeaux,
massive, squat, tombstone-like dressers with a lot of satinwood inlays and exquisitely carved bronze handles. His Exc. sleeps in a Chippendale four-poster with a pleated valance of black silk with mother-of-pearl decorations on it. Oh yes, and he hangs his purple cassocks in an oak armoire by Robert de Cotte (restorer of the choir of Notre-Dame de Paris).

In his office, which he enters from his bedroom, His Exc. sits at a lovely Louis XVI
table de l’anglaise
made of tabanuco (that’s a light-colored, beautifully grained West Indian hardwood) designed by Dugourc in the Pompeii style. On either side of the doors are two mahogany varguenos, those seventeenth-century Spanish folding desks, the fronts inlaid with velvet panels. His Exc. uses them to store and partially display his collection of seashells. He is apparently one of the top concho aficionados around, regularly corresponding with other collectors, such as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In front of the desk, usually occupied by the sacred rear ends of chancery monsignors, are two eighteenth-century
fauteuil de bureau
desk chairs, upholstered in leather.

The rest of this room is unmentionable from a decorative point of view. His Exc. has plunked a big leather swivel chair behind the desk and covered the walls with personal mementos, pictures and plaques of the sort that local politicians accumulate. This, of course, brings up one of the oddest things about His Exc. He doesn’t seem to
see
any of the expensive stuff. For him, it is invisible. How else can you explain a swivel chair behind a Louis XVI table? Or (I forgot) a Barcalounger beside his
commodes en tombeaux
in the bedroom? I have yet to hear him so much as comment on a piece of furniture or a painting.

In case you’re wondering where I suddenly acquired all my antique-ology, the data on each piece is readily available in the files. Also the insurance figures. The whole joint is worth a million if it goes up in smoke.

Not bad for the son of an Irish saloonkeeper, eh? That is what I gather His Exc.’s father did for a living (this picked up from a random remark). The question is, how long can he remain ensconced here in monarchical splendor while the archdiocese smolders around him?