The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (26 page)

“Yes.”

“Don’t you know that France fell because of birth control?”

“No.”

“Well, it did. Was it your husband’s fault?”

“You mean—the birth control?”

“Yes.”

“Not wholly.”

“And you’ve been away from the Church ever since your marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Now you see why the Church is against mixed marriages. All right, go on. What else?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Is that what you came to confess?”

“No. Yes. I’m sorry, I’m afraid that’s all.”

“Do you have a problem?”

“I think that’s all, Father.”

“Remember, it is your obligation, and not mine, to examine your conscience. The task of instructing persons with regard to these delicate matters—I refer to the connubial relationship—is not an easy one. Nevertheless, since there is a grave obligation imposed by God, it cannot be shirked. If you have a problem—”

“I don’t have a
problem
.”

“Remember, God never commands what is impossible and so if you make use of the sacraments regularly you have every reason to be confident that you will be able to overcome this evil successfully, with His help. I hope this is all clear to you.”

“All clear.”

“Then if you are heartily sorry for your sins for your penance say the rosary daily for one week and remember it is the law of the Church that you attend Mass on Sundays and holy days and receive the sacraments at least once a year. It’s better to receive them often. Ask your pastor about birth control if it’s still not clear to you. Or read a Catholic book on the subject. And now make a good act of contrition . . .”

Father Burner climbed the three flights of narrow stairs. He waited a moment in silence, catching his breath. He knocked on the door and was suddenly afraid its density prevented him from being heard and that he might be found standing there like a fool or a spy. But to knock again, if heard the first time, would seem importunate.

“Come in, Father.”

At the other end of the long study the Archbishop sat behind an ebony desk. Father Burner waited before him as though expecting not to be asked to sit down. The only light in the room, a lamp on the desk, was so set that it kept the Archbishop’s face in the dark, fell with a gentle sparkle upon his pectoral cross, and was absorbed all around by the fabric of the piped cloth he wore. Father Burner’s eyes came to rest upon the Archbishop’s freckled hand—ringed, square, and healthy.

“Be seated, Father.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“Oh, sit in this chair, Father.” There were two chairs. Father Burner changed to the soft one. He had a suspicion that in choosing the other one he had fallen into a silly trap, that it was a game the Archbishop played with his visitors: the innocent ones, seeing no issue, would take the soft chair, because handier; the guilty would go a step out of their way to take the hard one. “I called Saint Patrick’s this morning, Father, but you were . . . out.”

“I was visiting Father Desmond, Your Excellency.”

“Father Desmond . . .”

“He’s in the hospital.”

“I know. Friend of his, are you, Father?”

“No, Your Excellency. Well”—Father Burner waited for the cock to crow the third time—“yes, I
know
the man.” At once he regretted the scriptural complexion of the words and wondered if it were possible for the Archbishop not to be thinking of the earlier betrayal.

“It was good of you to visit Father Desmond, especially since you are not close to him. I hope he is better, Father.”

“He is, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop got up and went across the room to a cabinet. “Will you have a little glass of wine, Father?”

“No. No, thanks, Your Excellency.” Immediately he realized it could be another trap and, if so, he was caught again.

“Then I’ll have a drop . . .
solus
.” The Archbishop poured a glass and brought it back to the desk. “A little wine for the stomach’s sake, Father.”

Father Burner, not sure what he was expected to say to that, nodded gravely and said, “Yes, Your Excellency.” He had seen that the Archbishop wore carpet slippers and that they had holes in both toes.

“But perhaps you’ve read Saint Bernard, Father, and recall where he says we priests remember well enough the apostolic counsel to use wine, but overlook the adjective ‘little.’”

“I must confess I haven’t read Saint Bernard lately, Your Excellency.” Father Burner believed this was somehow in his favor. “Since seminary, in fact.”

“Not all priests, Father, have need of him. A hard saint . . . for hardened sinners. What is your estimate of Saint Paul?”

Father Burner felt familiar ground under his feet at last. There were the Pauline and Petrine factions—a futile business, he thought—but he knew where the Archbishop stood and exclaimed, “One of the greatest—”

“Really! So many young men today consider him . . . a bore. It’s always the deep-breathing ones, I notice. They say he cuts it too fine.”

“I’ve never thought so, Your Excellency.”

“Indeed? Well, it’s a question I like to ask my priests. Perhaps you knew that.”

“No, I didn’t, Your Excellency.”

“So much the better then . . . but I see you appraising the melodeon, Father. Are you musical?”

“Not at all, Your Excellency. Violin lessons as a child.” Father Burner laughed quickly, as though it were nothing.

“But you didn’t go on with them?”

“No, Your Excellency.” He did not mean it to sound as sad as it came out.

“What a pity.”

“No great loss, Your Excellency.”

“You are too . . . modest, Father. But perhaps the violin was not your instrument.”

“I guess it wasn’t, Your Excellency.” Father Burner laughed out too loud.

“And you have the choir at Saint Patrick’s, Father?”

“Not this year, Your Excellency. Father Quinlan has it.”

“Now I recall . . .”

“Yes.” So far as he was concerned—and there were plenty of others who thought so, too—Quinlan had played hell with the choir, canning all the women, some of them members for fifteen and twenty years, a couple even longer and practically living for it, and none of them as bad as Quinlan said. The liturgical stuff that Quinlan tried to pull off was all right in monasteries, where they had the time to train for it, but in a parish it sounded stodgy to ears used to the radio and split up the activity along sexual lines, which was really old hat in the modern world. The Dean liked it though. He called it “honest” and eulogized the men from the pulpit—not a sign that he heard how they brayed and whinnied and just gave out or failed to start—and each time it happened ladies in the congregation were sick and upset for days afterward, for he inevitably ended by attacking women, pants, cocktails, communism, cigarettes, and running around half naked. The women looked at the men in the choir, all pretty in surplices, and said to themselves they knew plenty about some of them and what they had done to some women.

“He’s tried a little Gregorian, hasn’t he—Father Quinlan?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Father Burner said. “He has.”

“Would you say it’s been a success—or perhaps I should ask you first if you care for Gregorian, Father.”

“Oh, yes, Your Excellency. Very much.”

“Many, I know, don’t . . . I’ve been told our chant sounds like a wild bull in a red barn or consumptives coughing into a bottle, but I will have it in the Cathedral, Father. Other places, I am aware, have done well with . . . light opera.”

Father Burner frowned.

“We are told the people prefer and understand it. But at the risk of seeming reactionary, a fate my office prevents me from escaping in any event, I say we spend more time listening to the voice of the people than is good for either it or us. We have been too generous with our ears, Father. We have handed over our tongues also. When they are restored to us I wonder if we shall not find our ears more itching than before and our tongues more tied than ever.”

Father Burner nodded in the affirmative.

“We are now entering the whale’s tail, Father. We must go back the way we came in.” The Archbishop lifted the lid of the humidor on the desk. “Will you smoke, Father?”

“No, thanks, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop let the lid drop. “Today there are few saints, fewer sinners, and everybody is already saved. We are all heroes in search of an underdog. As for villains, the classic kind with no illusions about themselves, they are . . . extinct. The very devil, for instance—where the devil is the devil today, Father?”

Father Burner, as the Archbishop continued to look at him, bit his lips for the answer, secretly injured that he should be expected to know, bewildered even as the children he toyed with in catechism.

The Archbishop smiled, but Father Burner was not sure at what—whether at him or what had been said. “Did you see, Father, where our brother Bishop Buckles said Hitler remains the one power on earth against the Church?”

Yes, Father Burner remembered seeing it in the paper; it was the sort of thing that kept Quinlan talking for days. “I did, Your Excellency.”

“Alas, poor Buckles! He’s a better croquet player than that.” The Archbishop’s hands unclasped suddenly and fell upon his memo pad. He tore off about a week and seemed to feel better for it. His hands, with no hint of violence about them now, came together again. “We look hard to the right and left, Father. It is rather to the center, I think, we should look—to ourselves, the devil in us.”

Father Burner knew the cue for humility when he heard it. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

With his chubby fingers the Archbishop made a steeple that was more like a dome. His eyes were reading the memo. “For instance, Father, I sometimes appear at banquets—when they can’t line up a good foreign correspondent—banquets at which the poor are never present and at which I am unfailingly confronted by someone exceedingly well off who is moved to inform me that ‘religion’ is a great consolation to him. Opium, rather, I always think, perhaps wrongfully and borrowing a word from one of our late competitors, which is most imprudent of me, a bishop.”

The Archbishop opened a drawer and drew out a sheet of paper and an envelope. “Yes, the rich have souls,” he said softly, answering an imaginary objection which happened to be Father Burner’s. “But if Christ were really with them they would not be themselves—that is to say, rich.”

“Very true, Your Excellency,” Father Burner said.

The Archbishop faced sideways to use an old typewriter. “And likewise, lest we forget, we would not be ourselves, that is to say—what? For we square the circle beautifully in almost every country on earth. We bring neither peace nor a sword. The rich give us money. We give them consolation and make of the eye of the needle a gate. Together we try to reduce the Church, the Bride of Christ, to a streetwalker.” The Archbishop rattled the paper, Father Burner’s future, into place and rolled it crookedly into the typewriter. “Unfortunately for us, it doesn’t end there. The penance will not be shared so equitably. Your Christian name, Father, is—?”

“Ernest, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop typed several words and stopped, looking over at Father Burner. “I can’t call to mind a single Saint Ernest, Father. Can you help me?”

“There were two, I believe, Your Excellency, but Butler leaves them out of his
Lives
.”

“They would be German saints, Father?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. There was one an abbot and the other an archbishop.”

“If Butler had been Irish, as the name has come to indicate, I’d say that’s an Irishman for you, Father. He does not forget to include a power of Irish saints.” The Archbishop was Irish himself. Father Burner begged to differ with him, believing here was a wrong deliberately set up for him to right. “I am not Irish myself, Your Excellency, but some of my best friends are.”

“Tut, tut, Father. Such tolerance will be the death of you.” The Archbishop, typing a few words, removed the paper, signed it and placed it in the envelope. He got up and took down a book from the shelves. He flipped it open, glanced through several pages and returned it to its place. “No Ernests in Baring-Gould either. Well, Father, it looks as if you have a clear field.”

The Archbishop came from behind the desk and Father Burner, knowing the interview was over, rose. The Archbishop handed him the envelope. Father Burner stuffed it hastily in his pocket and knelt, the really important thing, to kiss the Archbishop’s ring and receive his blessing. They walked together toward the door.

“Do you care for pictures, Father?”

“Oh, yes, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop, touching him lightly on the arm, stopped before a reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. “There is a good peasant woman, Father, and a nice fat baby.” Father Burner nodded his appreciation. “She could be Our Blessed Mother, Father, though I doubt it. There is no question about the baby. He is not Christ.” The Archbishop moved to another picture. “Rembrandt had the right idea, Father. See the gentleman pushing Christ up on the cross? That is Rembrandt, a self-portrait.” Father Burner thought of some of the stories about the Archbishop, that he slept on a cot, stood in line with the people sometimes to go to confession, that he fasted on alternate days the year round. Father Burner was thankful for such men as the Archbishop. “But here is Christ, Father.” This time it was a glassy-eyed Christ whose head lay against the rough wood of the cross he was carrying. “That is Christ, Father. The Greek painted Our Saviour.”

The Archbishop opened the door for Father Burner, saying, “And, Father, you will please not open the envelope until after your Mass tomorrow.”

Father Burner went swiftly down the stairs. Before he got into his car he looked up at the Cathedral. He could scarcely see the cross glowing on the dome. It seemed as far away as the stars. The cross needed a brighter light or the dome ought to be painted gold and lit up like the state capitol, so people would see it. He drove a couple of blocks down the street, pulled up to the curb, opened the envelope, which had not been sealed, and read: “You will report on August 8 to the Reverend Michael Furlong, to begin your duties on that day as his assistant. I trust that in your new appointment you will find not peace but a sword.”