The Prudence of the Flesh (17 page)

“That seems to be what Barrett wants,” Amos said.

“He can be linked with the woman.”

“Surely not in the way she charges.”

“Do you know Tuttle, Amos?”

Amos winced.

“I know, I know. But the rascal has turned up records that you should know of before you proceed.”

“What prompted him to seek such records?”

“That you must hear from him. I asked him to call on you tomorrow. You won't regret it.” Off Barfield went, mission accomplished, squeezing elbows as he disappeared among the crowd.

If Tuttle was at the banquet, Amos did not see him. Several members of the firm were called up to receive awards and recognition. There was a shamelessly long talk by a politician, allegedly expert in legal matters. There were blessedly brief appearances by a rabbi, a monsignor, and a well-known evangelical preacher. Amos saw a number of dear old friends before calling for his car. On the drive home, the one memorable event of the night seemed to be Barfield's remark about Tuttle.

When he told his secretary, Miss Sullivan, that if Mr. Tuttle came by he would be in to him, she reacted as if he had announced that he would be meeting with a member of the Pianone family to deliver or receive a bribe.

“Mr. Barfield has sent him to me.”

Like many legal secretaries, Miss Sullivan could doubtless pass the bar exams, argue a case in court, and do almost everything
else a lawyer does except conceal her true estimate of people. Barfield was not one of her favorites, perhaps more because of the amount of publicity he managed to get than for the bargaining that had made him famous.

“Father Dowling called.”

“Ah.”

“Should I get him on the line?”

“Later.” Into his office he went. Something told him that Tuttle would be here bright and early—well, say ten o'clock—and that he wanted to see the man before he talked with Father Dowling.

Tuttle arrived at 9:45 and was announced in frosty tones.

“Send Mr. Tuttle in.”

Tweed hat in hand, Tuttle entered. He still wore a topcoat; his necktie was knotted several inches below his open collar. His smile was tentative.

“Barfield felt that I should bring you up to speed on what I have learned of the woman who has accused Gregory Barrett.” All this before Tuttle sat on the edge of a chair, leaning toward Cadbury.

“May I ask why you are interested in the matter?”

“Mr. Cadbury, we share a client.”

“Do we?”

“Gregory Barrett. He came to me after he had met with you and asked me to find out what I could about the woman accusing him.”

Here was a situation in which Miss Sullivan would have failed. Indignation, anger, a sense of having been betrayed—these surged up in the Cadbury breast, but his expression did not change. “And you found something.”

Tuttle took a crumpled sheaf of pages from his inner pocket, explaining that his secretary had typed up and printed out his notes. “Maybe I should just read this.”

“Do.”

Tuttle sat in the chair Gregory Barrett had occupied when he came to Amos with his problem. He had been persuasive in denying the charge against him. Now Tuttle, the ineffable Tuttle, while working on Barrett's behalf, had turned up what in the new cliché was called a smoking gun. Barrett had advised and counseled the woman when she was expecting a baby. He had made arrangements for her confinement. “It's all on the record, Mr. Cadbury.” He had been further involved when the woman decided against giving her child up for adoption. All this could be explained in terms of pastoral care, but it was also susceptible of another and damning interpretation.

“Have you conveyed all this to Gregory Barrett?”

“Barfield advised me to talk with you.”

“But Barrett is now your client.”

“Oh, only for this.”

“Detective work?”

“No detective could have found out what I have.”

“You may be right.”

“There is more. Ned Bunting, the man who wrote a piece on Father Dowling, was writing one on Barrett and the girl.”

“The man who drowned?”

Tuttle decided against the tangent of talking about Bunting's death. He nodded.

“Had he found out what you have?”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Well, you have given me a great deal to think of. It was good
of you to make these things known to me. What they portend, what I will now do, I cannot say, but I thank you for coming.” Amos rose and extended his hand to Tuttle.

“What are friends for?”

It was not Tuttle that annoyed Amos now, but Gregory Barrett. Imagine going from this office to Tuttle! But would he himself have had someone look into those records? Perhaps Tuttle was the kind of lawyer needed in such a situation. Still, that could not excuse the duplicity of Gregory Barrett. Or had the man assumed that anything Tuttle turned up would be beneficial to him?

His parents' revelation of what they had been gave Thomas Barrett much food for thought. In the various Orthodox churches, priests have children and one might be the son of a priest without causing comment. The marriage had to be entered into prior to ordination, however, and a married priest could never become a bishop. On his father's shelf, Thomas Barrett had found a novel by Barbey d'Aurevilly called
Un prêtre marié
and tried to read it, but his shaky French did not permit it. Italian or German would have presented less problem: Tom's area of concentration was modern languages.

“The classics would make more sense,” his father had said.
“English has become the lingua franca of the world, so how much use will modern languages have for you?”

“It's the literature I'm interested in.”

Any opposition his father felt dissolved after that remark. If there was anything Thomas had absorbed from his upbringing, it was his father's bookishness. The move from Cairo had involved the transfer of the vast Barrett personal library and the building of shelves in almost every room of the new suburban house; mere furniture was a lesser problem. It was after they settled in Chicago that his parents had sat Thomas down and told him what he had vaguely suspected for years: His father was a priest and his mother was a nun.

There was an undeniably guilty note to the narrative. Both his mother and father expected him to see what they had done as needful of explanation.

“You have to understand what it was like, Tom. What I had been educated for, what I had looked forward to doing, was changing radically. A classmate of mine put it well. ‘This is not the cruise I signed on for.' There was an exodus from the priesthood, and I was part of it. Your mother's case was even more compelling.”

“My community decided to disperse, to live in apartments, to take jobs. What was the point of being a nun in such circumstances?”

Thomas found that he was trying to make it easy for them to tell him their story. If they had deserted their vocations, they had not lost the faith, and they had passed it on to him. He thought of all the Masses they had attended and wondered if his father ever thought that it could be him at the altar, vested, performing the altered but still ancient rite. When the great revelation was
made, both his father and mother insisted that they had never regretted what they had done. Nor, of course, could he. His existence had followed from their decisions. They had known one another in their previous roles, they had discussed together what they intended to do, and they had done it together, and that formed a bond perhaps as binding as their marriage vows. Could they have repudiated those later promises as easily as they had the others? He doubted it.

“We have agonized over not telling you, Tom. But now that we are back in Chicago, you have to know.”

What did they want from him—approval, censure, curiosity? He didn't know. Still, he was glad it was all in the open now. As for themselves, in Chicago they might at any time meet someone who had known them before, and that carried the threat that Tom would learn of their past in an accidental way. No, they were right to tell him, and he told them so.

Then there arose the question of his education. Would he continue in the school where he had a year to go? Already they had talked of where he would go to college. His parents favored Notre Dame. When his father was taken on at Loyola, it was decided that Tom would finish high school at Loyola Prep. A month after they made the move, they visited the campus at Notre Dame. After that, Tom's greatest fear was that he would not be admitted. Both his parents had visited the South Bend campus years ago. No need to say that it was when his father was a priest and his mother a nun. Not that they had been there at the same time.

There was no greater fan of
End Notes
than Thomas Barrett, not least because many of the programs developed from conversations he had had with his father. He was the only child they would ever have, and they doted on him, but not in a spoiling
way. At least that was his judgment. His mother had been in her late thirties when she bore him and was warned against another pregnancy.

“You came into the world with a struggle,” his mother said.

In the final semester of Loyola Prep, waiting to be accepted by Notre Dame for the following fall, the great blow fell. His father was accused of sexual misconduct during the years he was a priest. Discussing that was far more difficult than telling him of their previous lives. The chancery called, and the lawyer Barfield came to talk with his father. The woman had refused to become part of a group of victims the archdiocese was prepared to compensate for their traumatic experiences.

“What does she want?” his father asked.

“Do you have any memory of her?”

“As far as I know, I never met her.” Barfield had brought a photograph, and his father studied it with puzzlement.

“Of course, that is a recent photograph,” the lawyer said.

Barfield left it with his father, and Thomas later went into the study and looked into the photographed eyes of the woman who wanted to destroy his father. If it is possible to hate a stranger, Tom hated the woman. The mere accusation jeopardized the life his father had built during the years since he left the priesthood. NPR would not want to continue a program by a man considered guilty of taking advantage of a young woman while he was a priest. In the bio prepared by NPR, his father's education was recorded, but there was no spelling out of the fact that Mundelein was the major seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago, graduates of which were ordained to the priesthood.

One Sunday they went to Mass at St. Hilary's in Fox River. His father wanted to get a sense of the classmate he had decided
to consult about the problem he faced. He returned from his visit to the rectory encouraged, as if a cloud had been lifted. The further development of the charge against his father was discussed in whispers by his parents, and it was days before they could bring themselves to tell him that the woman was now ready to claim that Gregory Barrett was the father of her child. A son. It was clear to Tom that even his mother was shaken by this new charge.

“It's preposterous, of course. Tom, your mother is the only woman I have ever loved, and I mean in the full sense of the term.”

So the cloud, a far darker cloud, returned. Tom believed his father, of course, but he could not keep himself from wondering if it were possible that he had a half brother. The resolution grew in him that he would find out who the woman was, find her, and get at least a glimpse of her son.

Amos Cadbury asked Father Dowling to dinner at the University Club and told him the new developments. It was clear that Amos was not amused that Barrett had enlisted Tuttle to find out what he could about the woman. What Tuttle had turned up looked devastating for Gregory Barrett. Father Dowling thought otherwise.

“Amos, a baby is a pretty definite thing. Whatever the charges have been until now, they are as nebulous as memory itself, but a child is real. I am assuming that he is still alive.”