What VEHICLE, bottle-green in color, arkish in shape, cranky in motion, and dilapidated in repose, was a familiar feature of the Mystic River flatlands between Boston and Medford during the early years of the present century?
That’s easy! Trolley No. 3, of course—a four-wheeled drudge that had lugged some six million passengers, at a nickel a head, to their clerkish warrens in the morning and back to their suburban hutches at night. The strain had taken its toll. No. 3 may have been a mechanical marvel in her youth, but by the year 1915 she was a balky shrew with a notable slippage of her trolley, an incurable slappage of her brake shoes, a profound weakness in her rheostat, and a proneness to fuse-box trouble on cold mornings and hot afternoons. How she found courage to start, stop, grunt, and start again was a mystery to the repair crew at the Medford carbarns where No. 3 lay nightly at her siding like a spavined cab horse gathering heart for the next day’s run.
The theory advanced by Bartholomew (“Batty”) Flynn, chief dispatcher and carbarn metaphysician, was that No. 3 must be held together by a pure act of faith on the part of her motorman, Dennis Fermoyle. To state the proposition in Batty’s own words: “Reason fails us here. Din’s car should now be the fragment of a figment. But faith is beyond reason. Ergo, No. 3 is held together by faith rather than reason, or,” he always added slyly, “good works.”
None of this quiddish logic went on in the hearing of the Fermoyle. Din’s feelings on the subject of No. 3 were well known. His walrus mustaches would stiffen into tusks at the suggestion that No. 3 be junked in favor of the newer, handsomer, sixteen-wheeled air-brake job that his seniority rated. Devotion to Din, or possibly fear of his stern mustaches, kept superintendents docile and repair men gagged. Not even suffering passengers who hung to No. 3’s tired leather straps dared voice the hope that she would blow up, or fall apart, or be put decently out to pasture.
On a spring evening late in April, 1915, No. 3 was lumbering along at its top speed of nine miles an hour toward the Medford carbarns. With Din Fermoyle at the controls, and conductor Marty Timmins on the rear platform, it rounded the Highland Avenue curve with a banshee screech of wheels and plunged down the gentle grade near the end of its suburban steeplechase. As No. 3 careened past the center door of the Immaculate Conception Church, Dennis lifted his right hand from the brake and doffed his motorman’s cap. No perfunctory touching of hand to visor. This was a real off-the-head obeisance to the Presence that dwelt—Dennis Fermoyle could not tell you how—in the tabernacle on the high altar within. He had made this obeisance a dozen times today: six times on the inbound run to Boston and six times on the outbound run to the carbarns. Yesterday, and the day before yesterday, he had raised his hat twelve times. For twenty-five years—ever since the tracks were first laid—he had been raising his hat as he passed the center door of the church. And if the varicose veins in his right leg didn’t murder him entirely, Dennis Fermoyle hoped to keep on repeating the gesture of devotion and respect for twenty-five years more. Well, fifteen maybe. By that time he would have eight service stripes on his coat sleeve. One life, one job. …
To accompany the hat-raising ritual, Dennis always added an aspiration. His favorite was “Blessed be the Holy Family,” but he often varied this with sentiments appropriate to his state of mind or body. If the deep veins throbbed in his leg, as they did now, he would murmur, “Blessed be the wounds of Jesus.” Or if his throat was parched, as it always was, come evening, he would say, “Blessed be His Holy Thirst.” The whole business took but a second and was immediately followed by an uprush of well-being that burst geyserlike into song.
In a true-keyed but husky baritone Dennis now gave off with the first stanza of “The False Bride of O’Rourke,” a ditty of his youth in Cork. The weary passengers smiled as they heard the Celtic melody rise above the clatter of car wheels; they winked at each other knowingly, as characterless people do when confronted by a character. Even “Greasy” McNabb, the company spotter who was dying to nail Marty Timmins in the act of knocking down a nickel, had to wink and smile. He was sure that Marty was knocking down plenty of nickels and professionally resented the veteran conductor’s skill at masking his larcenies. But the sweet contagion of Din Fermoyle’s song soothed the spotter’s rancor, transported him to the wattled glens of Connaught, and caused him to wink knowingly at the very man he was attempting to catch.
A black Protestant should have this job, thought Greasy, unscrewing the wink from his eye.
In mid-melody Dennis Fermoyle shifted his hundred and ninety pounds onto his good left leg, tapped his right toe gingerly against the gong button on the floor, and let his car glide into the network of trackage and switches in front of the carbarn. He had mastered the art of the jerkless halt and now gave a virtuoso performance unnoticed by anyone but Marty and himself. The forlorn passengers streamed palely into the lengthening April sunlight. Two bells from Marty. Ding-ding! Then the slow entry into the long cool carbarn, sliding under the very guns of the big sixteen-wheel jobs, to the special corner that was No. 3’s berth.
Dennis removed the control handle, smooth from long contact with his cotton glove, and slipped it into the side pocket of his blue brass-buttoned coat. Tomorrow at seven A.M. he would fit the handle onto its square spindle again. Till then, none could start Dennis Fermoyle’s car. Or would want to. A poor thing but very much his own.
He walked through the empty car to the rear platform, where Marty Timmins was peering with bloodshot eyes at some figures on the clock-like register above his door. Baggy at the knees and saggy about the coat pockets, Marty was of the pint-sized defenseless breed that juries take pleasure in finding guilty on sight. His mildness would be mistaken for weakness, his timidity interpreted as guile. Thin stubble covered his rabbitish chin, and a perennial drop hung from the tip of his nose. He jotted down a figure on his tally book and snapped it shut before Din reached him.
“Everything even, Marty? All regular and even?”
The conductor scruffed at his nose drop with the back of a dirty hand, and nodded. Wordless rather than silent, Marty Timmins had no language to express the bewildered, lonely dumbness that had come over him in the past year. Ever since he had lost his wife Nora after her sixth baby and third miscarriage, there were only two things that consoled the terrible desolation of his days. One was whisky; the other, Din’s great hand on his shoulder. The hand was on his shoulder now. He would have the whisky later.
A fine delicacy prevented Din from mentioning Greasy McNabb’s presence in the car. Nor could he bring himself to lecture Marty now or at any time about the booze. Thick fingers squeezed thin shoulder; calloused palm patted bent spine.
“Good night, Marty. Go straight home now.”
“Good night, Din. I will.”
Trolley mates. The miles of their common voyaging on No. 3 would have put ten girdles around the earth.
At a little wicket near the gates of the carbarn Dennis Fermoyle thrust his walrus mustaches close to an iron grille. “Would you be having a little something for me, Angus?”
The man behind the grille riffled through a small box of envelopes, and shoved one under the wicket. Din felt the flat fold of bills and the hard half dollar inside the envelope. His weekly pay, $27.65—forty cents an hour for an eleven-hour day, six days a week, plus a bonus of twenty-five cents for each of the diagonal gold service stripes on his coat sleeve. He thrust the envelope into his pocket and faced westward into the salmon-colored rays of the six P.M. sun. With the stiff-legged gait of a man who stands in one place all day, he trudged along a muddy unpaved sidewalk fronting straggly three-story houses and vacant lots. To let the cool spring air sponge his forehead, he pushed back his motorman’s cap. A deep red stripe, cut by the sweatband, lay across his forehead. The true service stripe, the wound of vocation.
A lance of pain traveled up his leg from ankle to groin. Din quickened his pace; movement seemed to help a little, speeding sluggish blood through knotted veins. The pain would be all right, it would go away, as soon as he sat down in his kitchen rocker and hoisted the leg onto another chair. Thoughts of coming good sustained him as he turned up an inclined side street, the gentle gradient of Woodlawn Avenue. The best of the day lay just ahead: the bottle of beer that Celia would pluck dewy cold from the icebox when she heard his step on the back porch; the fine fat cod stuffed with bread crumbs that was browning right now in the kitchen oven; the oval supper table, the faces of his children, grown-up now, but still making reasonable concord when he breathed upon them.
“Blessed be the Holy Family…”
Tonight the family music would have a special quality. There would be clean napkins all around, a fresh jar of piccalilli from the cellar, a deeper glow in Celia’s dark eyes. Stephen was coming home for dinner. Stephen the dedicated priest, Steve the proud-walking one, the eloquent first-born of Dennis and Celia Fermoyle; Stephen the motorman’s son who had led his class for four years at Holy Cross. Steve would be at dinner tonight for the first time since arriving home from the North American College in Rome.
They had seen him for a moment when he came off the liner, but that glimpse had been too brief, too full of gulped excitement. Tonight Din would savor his son’s quality in more leisurely fashion, strike the spark of an argument maybe, and come over his son’s elegant learning with a nimble brickbat of his own. He hoped, with all his Irish love of disputation, that Steve would not be too proud to grapple with him in debate.
Din’s soul magnified the Lord as he reached the last house at the top of the street. Boxy, brown, and graceless with its ugly front stoop, 47 Woodlawn Avenue was a whole house, not a flat, and after living in it for almost twenty-five years, Din almost owned it. By scrimping and denial, by putting a dollar a week into the Building and Loan Bank for fifteen years, he had laid eighteen hundred dollars on the line. There was still a twelve-hundred-dollar mortgage. Easier for a camel to enter a needle’s eye than for a motorman with six children to get title free and clear to his own home.
He entered his house, workingman fashion, by the back door. Odors of baking fish, gingerbread, and damp mops in the back closet told him that he was home. Celia at the stove gave a half turn, a half smile, a half kiss that struck the air in the general direction of her husband’s bent-down face. Comely buxom at forty-nine, a trifle gone at the middle and not too tidy about her graying hair, Celia Fermoyle was still airy on her feet. She had been a tireless dancer, the belle of many a Hibernian ball in her day. Now, knowing exactly where she stood with her man and her children, she was a confident woman without a fear in the world.
She held out her hand expectantly. Dennis Fermoyle drew his pay envelope from his pocket, and placed it in her outstretched palm. Celia tucked the envelope into her bosom, then in place of spoken thanks she gave her husband something much better—a bit of wifely service.
“I’ll fetch your beer in a jiffy, Din. Let me clear the sink for you first.” Celia Fermoyle was a good cook and a thrifty manager, but she did not place a high value on neatness. Her kitchen was a clutter of pans, dishes, pails, and unironed clothes. Now she made an open space among her saucepans in the sink, put a tin basin under the hot-water faucet, tossed a sliver of yellow soap into it, and gave the roller towel a swish to bring a reasonably clean sector into view. “There now, Din.”
“Lavabo” intoned Dennis Fermoyle. He hung his hat and coat on his regular hook, rolled up his sleeves, and with narwhal sputterings washed his face and hands. While he dried himself on the roller towel, Celia flipped off the cap of a beer bottle and set it on the kitchen table. She had never learned to pour beer to Din’s satisfaction. He poured it to his own taste now, drained a tumblerful, rubbed the back of his hand across his foam-flecked mustache, and picked up his Globe.
In the manner of an appellate judge reviewing a weighty case he surveyed the news. “Ho-ho, Celia—look at this,” he roared, reading aloud the streamer headline:
BRITISH REEL BACKWARDS TO CHANNEL PORTS
“Von Falkenhayn has the lobsterbacks on the run, Ceil, with their teacups and shooting boxes and all. Right into their precious Channel he’ll push them—wait and see.”
To Din, the British Army was still the oppressor of Irishmen and the historic despoiler of their religion, homes, and children. But to Celia, born in Boston, the feud between lobsterback and bog trotter had no such pulsing immediacy. Other matters—her backward oven, for instance —claimed the front of her mind just now. She pushed her stove dampers this way and that with the preoccupied briskness of a stage manager on a first night.
“Read to yourself, Din, if it’s all the same to you, because I’ve got nothing else to do for the next half-hour but cook a dinner fit for Stevie in a slow oven that won’t heat up because the coal is slaty and the flues need cleaning.”
Piano chords and a tenor voice drifted into the kitchen. Din cocked a critical ear. “Bernie has a new ballad,” he said placatingly to no one in particular. “This I must hear.” He limped into the dining room and ducked under a beaded valance that separated it from the parlor. At an upright piano tucked into the aperture of a bow window sat an overfed young man with hair parted in the middle, wearing a pinch-back suit, chamois-topped shoes, and the high starched collar of the period. Bernard, Din’s second son, a song plugger—and not too good at it if the truth had to be told.
With beer and paper Din sat down in a leatherette armchair and listened as one who reserves judgment, till the singer ended his performance on a true-toned high C.
“New, Bernie?”
The young man nodded. “It’s Chauncey Olcott’s latest, Ireland Must Be Heaven, For My Mother Came from There,’” he warbled. “They’ll be crazy for it at the Gamecock.”
“The Gamecock? That wouldn’t be the fancy house on Washington Street, Bernie?”
“Cabaret, Pa,” corrected Bernie. “I’m getting a tryout there tomorrow night. If I connect, it’s two weeks at twenty dollars a week.”
If I connect! Accent on the if. That was Bernard for you. Din hoisted his leg onto a carpet-covered hassock. “Give us the ‘Fingarry Christening’ like a good boy now.”
“Sure, Pa.” Always obliging, Bernie threw back his pomaded head of hair and gave off with the opening verse of a ballad that dealt with the vagaries of certain elegant Celts at the christening of an infant referred to only as “sweet Dennis the boy.” The first stanza was vague in Bernie’s memory, but his mind cleared at the second:
All the aristocracy came to the party,
Bold McCarthy, hale and hearty,
And Bridget Bedelia Fogarty,
‘Twos the French (so she said) for her name.
Din’s glass of beer touched him off. He joined his son in song:
Then they all went into the luncheon,
There was such munchin’ and much crunchin’
While the christeners went about punchin’
On coffee, tea, whisky, and wine.
Their harmonizing, and the peace that rises therefrom, was broken when the front door opened, and a young woman, big of hip and heavy about the lower part of her face, entered the parlor. Florence Fermoyle resembled a not-too-modish policewoman. At twenty-five she had little lightness of mind, manner, or body. For six years now she had been working as a bookkeeper in an automobile office, and her wage was as large as her father’s. In a few months she would pass him as the chief earner at 47 Woodlawn.
“Stephen here yet? Who’s helping Ma in the kitchen? Where’s Mona?” The questions came in a staccato jet as Florrie pulled the pins out of her hat with disapproving truculence at the sight of males lounging in the parlor. Not too subtly she conveyed the feeling that nothing ever got done unless she did it herself. Bossy was the word for Florence. No wonder, thought Din, that she scares the men away.
“You got the chamois tops, I see, Bernie?” she said, edging around to get a side glance at her brother’s feet. “That ten dollars I gave you was for a pair of ‘good substantial shoes,’ and now you turn up with these ‘Pretending Percy’ numbers. What’s the idea?”
“Well—mm—you see, Florrie, I needed something a little bit dressy for my try out.” To nip off further debate, Bernie made a run with his left hand, and soared into song.
In the midst of the feasting, Mike Cronin,
Mighty Cronin, without groanin’
Downed a pound of pâté de foie gras
Made of goose livers and grease—
Again the harmony was shattered by Florrie’s top-sergeant voice calling up the front stairs: “Mona… Mona. Come down here and set the table. Ma’s breaking her back in the kitchen, and Father Steve’ll be here any minute. Come down right away.”
Monica came down. At sixteen she had a fragile porcelain beauty—a doll’s face linelessly smooth, but pouting now with discontent. She had been washing her hair, drying, combing, and pinning it this way and that for the past two hours, and now it lay in a lustrous blue-black aureole around her head. Snatched from her favorite occupation of gazing into the mirror, she half expected her father to defend her against Florrie’s barging. To win him, she planted a kiss on his cheek, then sat kittenlike on the arm of his chair. He put his forefinger under her chin and tickled it as though she were still an infant.
Something about the armchair tableau sent Florrie into a tantrum of anger. She had a barb to throw. She had planned to save it till later, but now she let Mona have it right up to the feather.
“What’s this I hear about you walking round the Reservoir last night? You were supposed to be at Sodality.”
Maiden skill at dissimulation failed Mona completely. Her cheeks were bloodless china. “Who—who said I was walking around the Reservoir?”
“Oh,” sniffed Florrie, “she takes a questioning tone.”
“For heaven’s sake, Florrie,” said Bernie, “quit nagging the kid.”
“I’ll quit nagging her when she stops sneaking off into the woods with Ikey Rampell.”
Mona turned defiant. “His name isn’t Ikey, it’s Benny.”
“Ikey or Benny, what’s the difference? Aren’t there enough Catholic boys in the parish without you running around with a ragpicking Jew?”
Mona sprang from kitten to full-clawed cat. “Benny isn’t a ragpicker. He’s the smartest boy in high school and he’s going to be a dentist.” The futility of defense broke over her; Florrie the prosecutor had her down. Mona burst into tears and fled upstairs.
Vexed by the undaughterly scene, Din lifted voice in reproof. A good drag-down and knockout argument on politics was all very well, but female bickering was something he could not tolerate. “I want no more of this wrangling, do you hear, Florrie? You’ll drive your sister away from you by your barging.”
“It’s for her own good, Pa.”
Blue anger sparked in Din’s eyes. Florrie might contribute as much as he to the family purse, but Dennis was still master in his own house. “Let your mother and me decide what is good for our children,” he thundered, then clamped down on his temper as though he were breaking his trolley car. “Stephen must not find us quarreling. Go cool your face with a wet towel, Florrie. You’ll feel better. Bernie, play the piano.”
“Sure, Pa. Want to hear Too Much Mustard’?”
“I’ll listen to anything that’ll drown out the sound of contention in this house.”
Bernie jammed his chamois-topped boot onto the forte pedal, and bore down on the keys till the upright trembled under the attack. He raced through “Too Much Mustard” (not a vocal number), vamped the first bars of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” and broke into a refrain:
I didn t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
“Louder, Bernie,” advised a quiet voice in the front hall. “They can’t hear you down at the carbarns.”
Bernie whirled round on the piano stool; Dennis dropped his Globe. “Steve,” they cried with one voice, both moving toward the young priest in the doorway. Spare he was, built like the ideal miler—narrow in the hips, long in the thighbones, broad and easy in the shoulders. He had Celia’s lightness of stance and Din’s commanding head carriage, but his coloring was his own. A blackness of hair and eyebrows made white drama of his face. Thin-walled nostrils gave the ascetic clue, heightened by the good forehead climbing straight above blue-black eyes. There was a collectedness about him that one sees in the concert pianist sitting down to his instrument. All of which was laid aside now in the excitement of greeting his father and brother.
“St. Dennis forever,” he cried, producing a red tin of smoking tobacco. “Here’s something for your old dudeen.” Stephen was up to his old habit of making little presents. He handed Bernie a pack of cigarettes, surveyed his brother’s pinch-back suit and chamois-topped shoes with humorous approval.
“Dazzling, Bernie—especially the footgear. It wouldn’t be quite the thing for a young curate”—Steve put a well-shined oxford through the beginning of a heel-and-toe routine—“but in show biz …”
“That’s it,” echoed Bernie eagerly. “In show biz you’ve got to dress this way. Classy! People expect it.”
Celia coming out of the kitchen saw her first-born through the bead-fringed valance. Involuntary tears welled into her eyes. Having grown accustomed to Steve’s being away, Celia must now get used to having him home again.
“Stevie,” she said, holding out her arms in the not-to-be-duplicated manner of mothers. The compass of those arms was too small now; willingly she let herself be encircled by Stephen’s embrace.
“Got something here for you, Mother.” He lifted the cover of a tiny pasteboard box, revealing a delicately embroidered Agnus Dei. “It’s from the Cenacle of St. Theresa, and it’s blessed by the Pope himself.”
“By the Pope himself,” Celia repeated in awed accents, showing the imprinted wax disk to her husband. “I’ll put it away.”
Father Steve looked at Din; both laughed. Celia’s habit of “putting things away” was an old joke in the Fermoyle family. Tablecloths, sheets, towels, china, silverware, glasses—everything was “put away” for a future that never quite arrived. It was part of her hoarding instinct, a hangover from the poverty of her childhood.
“Why put it away?” asked Steve. “Use it for a place mark in your missal and pray for your son every time you see it.”
“Ma!” Florrie’s voice came from the kitchen. “The cod’s all but done.”
“Merciful Mary, I forgot the cod. Go upstairs, Son, and get washed. Here, let me give you a towel.” Celia darted toward the sideboard drawer where she had “put away” her best linen.
“I can find a clean place on the roller, Ma.”
The idea of an ordained priest using a roller towel violated Celia Fermoyle’s sense of the decencies. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said, handing him an embroidered guest towel she had won fifteen years before at a parish whist party.
“There is laughter from certain quarters when I put something away,” she said, looking at her husband, “but the laughter freezes when they see what I put it away for.”
Towel maniplewise on wrist, Steve passed through the kitchen on his way upstairs. Florrie, flushed from the hot stove, was peeling jackets from boiled potatoes preparatory to mashing them. Competent, on-the-job Florrie. Steve hugged her with one arm. “Hello, Steve,” she said, going on with her work. A rivalry, or offishness rather—chiefly on Florrie’s side—had always lain between them. Should I soften her now, thought Steve, with the little phial of perfume in my pocket? No, that was for Mona.
“Be down in a jiff,” he said, climbing the back stairs two at a time. The same old linoleum was on the steps, the same cracks were in the plaster. Had nothing changed during his four years in Rome? Not, at any rate, the plumbing fixtures at 47 Woodlawn! The same slow trickle of water from the thin faucets, the same zinc bathtub with the cast-iron legs. The permanence of impermanent things! Stephen lathered his hands on a curled chip of blue soap, splashed some water onto his face, then dried himself on the linen towel. He felt hungry, glad to be home, eager for family food and talk.
Familiarity woven of a thousand boyhood yesterdays lay over the back of the house. Here was the brown patternless wallpaper, grease-smudged and peeling at the baseboard; the bedroom doors with their cocoa-colored knobs; the frayed runner of carpet—how elegant it had seemed to his bare feet when it was first laid! And over everything the indefinable smell of one’s own family.
Here at the left was Ellen’s room, unoccupied since she had gone away to the Carmelites to live out as a garbed nun the dream of mystical love that had possessed her since childhood. Through the closed door shone the radiating purity of his sister’s life. How could so frail a taper burn with such an energizing ray and still not consume itself to ash? The secret fuel of the heart …
Across the hallway, a flight of steps mounted to the attic bedroom that Stephen had shared with his brother George. Some impulse bade him climb the stairs and see again the garret room—“the boys’ domni-tory,” as Celia called it—where he had slept and studied till he was eighteen years old. The garret was neater now; a student lamp, a new armchair, and rows of lawbooks told him that his brother George used it as a study. But the dormer window looking out upon the roofs and rhubarb gardens of Woodlawn Avenue revived in Stephen emotions deeper than recollection. It was in this room that he had decided to become a priest. Beside this lumpy bed he had knelt in prayer, dedicating his life to the service of the Master who had beckoned with an imperious finger, “Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
He knelt again now, lightly, momentarily, on one knee in a genuflection of gratitude, then left the attic room and hurried downstairs.
A snuffling sobbing sound caught his ear as he passed Mona’s door. Tears? He tapped gently, turned the knob, and saw his youngest sister lying face downward on her single bed, weeping. Silently he sat on the bed beside her, put his hand into the hair at the nape of her neck.
“Monny darling”—it was his special name for her—“it’s me, Stevie. What’s the matter, Monny?”
Mona kicked her toes in a small fury against the foot of the bed. “That Florrie! She’s hateful.”
“Florrie’s tired, upset about something. She doesn’t mean the things she says.”
“She’s spiteful, that’s what she is.” Mona pressed her tearstained face into the pillow. “She treats me like an infant.”
“A most beauteous infant,” said Steve. “Here, roll over, and let me see you.”
Lying on her back, Mona gazed up at her brother. Tears, like drops of belladonna, had made her eyes lustrous and dark.
“Do you really think I’m beautiful, Steve?” Vanity, catching her halfway between child and woman, snatched at this almost unknown man looking down at her.
“As beautiful as one of Raphael’s angels. No one should be as beautiful as that—but you are. Don’t all the boys rave about your dark eyes and black hair?”
“I wish I was a blue-eyed blonde,” sighed Mona.
“A blonde? Blue-eyed? Ridiculous. I guess you never heard what a pretty good poet said about his Dark Lady.”
“What did he say?”
“What didn’t he say! He practically rifled the language, looking for similes in praise of black. Images of pearl and gold were tossed into the wastebasket—nothing but ebony damask and ravens’ wings would suit him when he wrote about his mistress’ hair and eyes.”
Stephen couldn’t quite decide how much emotional pressure Mona could stand. He didn’t want to frighten her by plumping out the sonnet in all its glorious rhetoric—but anything that would soothe her grief was worth trying. He’d give her the opening lines for a sample. Muting all but the barest note of tenderness, he recited the first quatrain:
Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,
Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
Magnetized by language she did not understand, spoken in a tone she had never heard before, Mona lay silently looking up at her priest-brother. She had neither curiosity to ask the name of the poet who had written the lines nor the intelligence to make any comment on their substance or quality. All that she conveyed to Stephen was a kind of astonishment that such words should exist, or that a priest should utter them.
Stephen changed the note. “Got something here for you, widgeon.” He pressed the little phial of perfume into her damp palm. “The drugstore man said to use it with caution. Up you come now—they’re waiting dinner for us downstairs.”
“You’re awful sweet, Steve,” said Mona. She wanted to add that somehow, in a different way, of course, he reminded her of Benny Rampell. But the moment passed. She rose, dabbed at her eyes with Stephen’s clean handkerchief, and with his arm around her went downstairs to dinner.
DINNER at the Fermoyles’ was strictly a one-dish affair, a solid work-ingman’s meal with no date-and-nut nonsense about it. Barely had Father Steve finished grace when Celia began heaping the first plate with cod, mashed potatoes, a cascade of egg sauce, and a big spoonful of piccalilli for color and relish. In this home Din was always served first; even now with her priest-son at the table Celia gave her husband precedence.
“A hungry man is an angry man,” she said, passing Din his laden plate. Without waiting for the others, he fell to his food with zesty trencherman manners.
“Do you know, Steve,” he said between forkfuls, “things haven’t changed much around here. There’s still nobody that pours tea like Florrie. She makes it hot, black, and strong”—he held out his cup to his oldest daughter—“the way I like it.”
“Pa’s tea blarney” was a remnant of the time Florrie was a little girl with the privilege of snuggling into Din’s lap as he read his Globe. Ousted from this seat of affection by later girl babies, Florrie had kept some part of her emotional security by taking on certain semiwifely duties. Pouring her father’s tea was the sole reminder of the earlier father-daughter love that had existed between them. Steve remembered the violent quarrel that had once broken out when his sister Rita had attempted to pour the tea. Now as he watched Florrie perform the vestal role unchallenged, he knew he was watching a devotional rite. That flush of pleasure on her cheek—the first, the only relaxation of her face that evening—told Steve more than he could understand about Florrie’s thwarted love for her father, her tension, and her bad temper.
“How do you like Monaghan, your pastor, Steve?” Din was asking.
“I’ve only been at St. Margaret’s a day or two,” said Steve, “and the rector hasn’t yet invited me into his private parlor. As a matter of fact, he was pretty gruff when he greeted me. I guess he didn’t like the Italian Line stickers on my suitcase.”
“You’ll soften him up.” Celia’s confidence was magnificent, airy.
“I hear he’s one of the biggest money raisers in the Diocese,” said Din. Only a very good Catholic had the right to say anything like that, and Din, a man of great piety but little reverence, was always the one to exercise his rights freely.
“Father Monaghan’s not exactly El Poverello,” laughed Steve. “But when you consider that he’s putting up a new school, and plans to build a parish house when the school is finished—why, I’d say he has plenty of need for money.”
“That parish house at St. Margaret’s must be ninety years old,” said Celia, who knew every church in the Diocese. “It ran down terrible under Father Ned Halley, sainted man. The threshold was worn hollow when I went there to stand up for Delia Doherty’s second child Annie, in May, 1907, it was, nine years ago. Has anything been done since to it, Steve?”
“It’s still pretty much of a barracks, but Father Monaghan has made a lot of improvements, I hear. Painted it up and put in some new plumbing. He’s quite a manager.”
“Managed himself a new Packard last week,” observed Florrie. “Paid cash for it, too.”
“The pastor of a big parish needs a good automobile,” said Father Steve stoutly.
“Father Halley before him had no automobile,” said Celia. “He made his sick calls on foot—ankle-deep in slush he walked—all over the city of Maiden and without rubbers either. He’d give them away to the first poor man he met, so they say.”
Stephen Fermoyle looked at his mother curiously. “I’ve heard that about Father Halley.” A special interest in the last end of priests prompted his question: “Whatever became of him?”
“Oh, he was bundled off to a poor place somewhere near Taunton—I forget the name of it now—with a lot of French Canadians for parishioners. Delia Doherty went to see him there, and came back with some story or other about his church falling apart. She sent him a dollar for Christmas once, then she lost track of him.”
With the deft step of one who knows dangerous ground when her feet are on it, Celia changed direction. “And how do you get on with the other curates in the house?”
“I’m going to like both of them, I think. Especially Father Paul Ireton. He’s a handsome, quiet priest, doing a grand job as assistant pastor. I—I rather get the feeling that he’d like to have a church of his own.”
“He’s got a long wait ahead of him,” said Din. A truculent pre-argument jut stiffened his jaw. “If the Cardinal in the augustitude of his wisdom would only break up the big parishes and squeeze some of the lard out of a few old pastors I could mention, then the young priests could have churches of their own in jig time.” His eye was hopeful. Would this elegant son of his, with the fine top-lofty brow, snap at the bait of argument?
It was Celia who snapped. “When His Eminence wants advice about laying out new parishes, he’ll come down to the carbarns and ask for it,” she said, peppering her cod so violently that she burst into a fit of sneezing. “Forgive me, Son. My pepper hand slipped. What about the other curate?”
“The other curate”—a half smile laid hold of Steve’s mouth—“is a gentle, pious chap called ‘Milky’ Lyons. He’s interested in Gregorian music and wants to start a plain-song choir, but”—Steve’s black eyebrows went up in sympathy for a hopeless cause—“Monaghan will have none of it.”
“Why do they call him ‘Milky’?” asked Monica.
“Because his skin and voice have all the resplendent color of a glass of milk. Either he’s genderless or—“ Father Steve’s answer was interrupted by a voice of great carrying power ringing through the house.
“Stephen … Stuff … You’re here!” George Fermoyle, a full-grown man at twenty, flung an armful of books onto the sideboard and came toward his older brother, both hands outstretched in greeting. They hadn’t seen each other for four years. Now they embraced, pounding each other like football players after a touchdown. Then they stood off to appraise each other.
“Where did you bury that pimply kid?” asked Stephen, taking in George’s breadth of shoulder, long jaw, and clear skin.
“The same place you buried that pie-faced seminarian. Why, Stuffy, you’re bigger, better-looking. Rome’s marshy, I mean martial, air must have agreed with you.”
“It did, Gug. Sit down, eat some of Ma’s patented cod—it’s wonderful—and tell me all about yourself.”
“Haven’t got much time, Stuff.” George craned his neck to get a look at the kitchen clock. “My class in ‘Bills and Notes’ starts at eight. But I had an hour after work, so I thought I’d run out and see you.” George sat down at the place Celia and Florrie fixed for him and began on his cod.
“You’ve changed, Gug,” said Steve. “When I slept with you on that three-quarter bed in the attic, you wouldn’t even move over. And now you go five miles out of your way just to see me. Ego te absolvo … How do you like the law?”
“She’s a stern mistress, Steve. As Cicero said, ‘Advocati nascitur non fit.’”
“Advocatus, Georgie. In Latin, as in English, subject and predicate must always agree in number.”
“You see what happens”—George appealed to the table—“in the case of Upside-Down Collar vs. Gentleman and Scholar. The defendant—me, the gentleman Latiner—hasn’t got a chance against a professional. Stuffy, remember the time you sat up all night coaching me for my Latin entrance exams at Holy Cross? Showed me just what verbs to study and what syntax to bone up on? Well”—George drew his listeners into the magnetic realm of his anecdote—“when I got the examination paper next day, I could have sworn that Stevie must have snitched it in advance. Every detail. Come clean, Steve, how’d you know those questions ahead of time?”
“I didn’t know the questions, George. But I did know the questioner —Lawrence Burke, S.J. A merciless Jebby. So I figured out what a merciless Jebby would ask—”
“And bejabbers, the Jebby asked it,” said Bernie, screwing up his features in mimicry of a vaudeville Irishman. The crude caricature was good enough to make everyone laugh. Din, well pleased by his three sons tossing the ball around, caught Celia’s eye. “Ours,” the glance said. The moment was one of those perfect gifts which only family life at its best can offer. It swelled for a slow second of ripeness, then Din held out his teacup again to his eldest daughter.
“More of the same, Florrie.” Tea drops clung to the ends of his mustache. Steve watched Florrie as she leaned toward her father, napkin in hand, to wipe the drops away. Love and criticism were in the gesture. Poor Florrie.
“Tell us about the Holy City, Son,” Celia was saying. “Is it so wondrous as I’ve heard? Full of shrines and cathedrals all blazing with candles, and services going on at every hour of the day and night?”
Stephen swallowed a mouthful of salty cod and sweet bread crust. How convey in a few dinner-table sentences the grandeur and timelessness of Rome, its temporal monuments and abiding purpose—all in words that Celia could understand? He must try.
“Rome is even more wonderful than you’ve heard, Ma. Time runs both ways there—backwards to the beginning of history, and forward to—well, a promise of something world-wide, universal.” He geared his description closer to her needs and understanding. “You should see the churches, hundreds of them, named after saints we never hear about in America—Apollinare, Filippo Neri, Cosmas and Damian—every one a hymn in a different kind of stone.”
“Did you make visits to all the churches, Steve?”
“Many of them, Mother.”
“And the Holy Father—have you seen him, too?”
“Many times. When Benedict XV was crowned, all the seminarians lined the aisles of St. Peter’s. What a procession! Golden candelabra flaming like the tongues of the Paraclete; music brought down straight from the choirs of seraphim, and cardinals of all nations in their great purple copes all swinging censers as Benedict approached the Fisherman’s throne.” Stephen paused to let the color run. “And right in the midst of all this grandeur, what do you suppose happened?”
“What happened, Son?”
“Just when the ritual was becoming almost unbearable, a cowled monk stepped in front of the Pope and halted the whole procession by holding up a little twist of smoldering oakum—a half inch of burning rope.”
Celia’s mind couldn’t grasp the symbolism. “Why did he do that, Stephen?”
“The twist of oakum represented the temporal glories of the world, destined to pass away, burn to ashes in a tick of time.”
Celia sighed. “’Tis wonderful, Son, how you explain things. You always had the gift. Once when you were a little boy you told me how lightning rods work—all so clear that I never forgot it. And do you know,” she added, “I’ve never been afraid of lightning since.”
“That’s because you were well grounded, Ma,” said George. Only Steve got the pun. Bernie, mystified, found solace in buttered gingerbread, and longed for the simplicities of sheet music.
“What do you make of the war, Steve?” asked Dennis. Maybe this fine talker would make a false move. Then the battle could begin.
“We’ll be in it sooner or later,” said Stephen calmly. “American loans to the English are too big, too binding. We can’t let our dear British cousins down, you know.”
Din’s gingerbread stopped halfway to his mouth. “American loans to—to who did you say?”
“To the English. A billion dollars. Don’t they know about it yet in Boston? Isn’t it in the Globe?”
“It is not. And where did you hear this monstrous business?”
“I heard it first from Monsignor Quarenghi, my professor of sacred theology, way back last fall after the British defeat at Mons. It’s his belief that Wilson is being led down an alley by the Morgans, and won’t be able to turn back.” Steve looked around the table. “It’s common talk in every chancellery of Europe. ‘Wilson’s pickle,’ Quarenghi called it—meaning the grim cleavage between the President’s ideals and the position he’s being forced into by the international bankers. Surely I’m not telling you anything new.”
“It’s news to me,” said George.
Steve could see that it was news to Din, too. The idea that America was lending money to the hated lobsterbacks took the starch out of the Fermoyle mustaches, dampened the flints in his eyes. His great fist did not pound the table in rebuttal. Steve’s news had subdued him quite, though how his son could have information not found in the columns of the Globe was something of a puzzler. Din munched his gingerbread, a temporarily broken man.
“Any news from Ellen, Ma?” Steve’s question was the gesture of a duelist firing into the air.
Celia Fermoyle fished in the pocket of her apron and pulled out a letter. “This came in the afternoon mail, Steve. Your father hasn’t seen it yet. Read it out loud to us, Son.”
Steve drew a single sheet of dime-store paper from its envelope and gazed for a moment at his sister Ellen’s familiar handwriting—ethereally light, almost floating, as though the writer were too gentle to bear down even on the nib of a pen.
DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER, BROTHERS AND SISTERS:
I know you will all share my great joy when I tell you that I am preparing to take my first vows in a few days. With the permission of my Superior, I have chosen the name Humilia Theresa, the first to signify my lowly unworthiness, and the second in honor of the Great Soul who founded our Order. I ask you all to pray for my special intention so that my own poor pleadings will be supplemented by your loving devotions.
My heart is overflowing with mixed feelings of fear and delight as I approach this great moment in my life. Please believe, dear earthly loved ones, that I think of you constantly, but I want you to know also that I am never lonely in the service of One who possesses all my heart. With increasing devotion through Him, to you, I am
Your loving daughter and sister,
ELLEN
In every member of the family Ellen’s letter struck a private chord of feeling. In Dennis Fermoyle it awakened the old unhappiness his daughter had caused when she first entered the convent. It had meant that he was losing her forever; the rule of her order decreed that its members should leave the world behind, never see their families again. It was bitter to lose Ellen’s gentle presence; Din had never reconciled himself to the parting. As for Celia, she worried constantly about Ellen’s weak lungs. How could such a sickly girl stand up under the stern Carmelite regime? Florrie, though she couldn’t admit it, had experienced a definite feeling of relief when Ellen left for the convent; it meant that another rival for Din’s affection was out of the way.
Stephen caught the note of ecstatic rapture rising from the cheap gray paper. Here, authentic and rare, was the voice of the true mystic whose goal was to lose her own identity in a larger Being, to become a drop of water in the vaster sea of God’s love.
“I hope her health holds out,” Celia was saying. “Walking without shoes on those cold floors. And the long fasts they go on, too.”
Steve comforted her. “Don’t worry, Ma. The genuine mystic is the toughest thing in the world. Why, St. Theresa practically never ate—but listen now to what she did.” Father Steve launched into a description of St. Theresa’s life and achievements. “She reformed the Carmelites, built convents, found time to write her autobiography, and all this, mind you, while she was in such bodily agony that they had to carry her around in a sheet.”
“She must have been a very holy woman,” said Celia.
“She was more than a holy woman. She was a saint. A genius, too. Sanctity is only part of the secret. Theresa was a creative artist as great as Raphael, Shakespeare, Dante, or any of those fellows who moved the world.”
The names meant nothing to anyone but George. Only Celia’s desire to hear her priest-son keep on talking prompted her question, “We don’t seem to have any saints these days. Why not, Steve?”
Celia could always bring out the exhibitionism in her oldest son.
“Well, Ma, it seems that sainthood as a career fell off rather sharply, oh, around 1400. Plenty of reasons why. For instance, when Petrarch stood tiptoe on a little hill and conceived the notion of dedicating his poems to Laura—an earthly mistress instead of a heavenly one—a different set of values began to prevail. Geocentric, earthbound values, reflected in the paintings of Giotto and Masaccio. That’s odd, too, when you come to think of it, because very soon afterwards Galileo clearly demonstrated that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe at all.”
For a moment Steve glimpsed the lean brown profile of Monsignor Quarenghi nodding encouragement; this was the kind of thinking his teacher liked. But the vision faded as Steve felt his immediate audience falling away from him. Ashamed of his intellectualism, Father Stephen subsided. He was not talking to Quarenghi now, but to some rather ordinary people that he happened to love very much. This was no time for showy learning. His words and thoughts from now on would have to be those that simple minds and hearts could understand. The winged horse of speculation must put on the harness of the parish hack.
“Let’s have a little music, Bernie,” he suggested.
“A God-marked and constructive idea,” said Din.
George peeked at the kitchen clock. “I’ve got to be ducking out, Stuffy, or I’ll miss my class. Sorry to bust this up.” He kissed his mother, swept up an armful of books. Steve followed him to the front door. “Let’s see a lot of each other, Georgie,” he said, shaking his younger brother’s hand.
“As much as you can take, Father.” He put his arm affectionately around Steve, then ran down the front stoop.
RITA, with Dr. John Byrne behind her, came in around nine o’clock. Dark like the rest of the Fermoyles, she was slenderer than Florrie, not so fragile as Ellen or so beautiful as Mona. But of all Steve’s sisters she was his favorite, his counterpart, and his emotional equal. A public-school teacher, Rita struck the good balance between sense and sensibility not uncommon among American girls of the middle class. Pleasure rayed from her face and voice as she threw her arms around her brother in a full-sized hug.
“Stevie… it’s so good to feel you. You’re so handsome. The girls of St. Margaret’s will be mad for you.”
“That’s what you tell all the young curates,” laughed Steve. “Hello, John.” He held out a cordial hand to Dr. Byrne, tall, bony, and too pale with the labors of internship; the seal of undramatic honesty was on Dr. John’s forehead. A good man to have in the family.
“Nice to have you back again, Father Steve.” Having said so much, Dr. Byrne quietly sat down on the sofa in order to give the highly charged Fermoyle current a freer opportunity to flow about the room.
The current leapt in polar exchange from Rita to Stephen. There was no rivalry between these two; each supplemented and advanced the other without competitive tension. She showed Steve her engagement ring, a thin gold circlet with a tiny chip of a diamond clutched in a Tiffany setting. Stephen had never seen a smaller stone. He thought of the old wheeze, “Love is stone-blind,” but could not mar Rita’s happiness by repeating it. “It’s beautiful,” he murmured.
“We’re getting married as soon as John finishes at the Maternity.”
Steve addressed himself to Dr. John, “Isn’t that one of the best internships in Boston? I thought the Back Bay Brahmins kept those jobs for themselves.”
“They can’t turn down brains,” said Din. A cramping pain passed upward from his swollen leg veins, pinched his mouth into a grimace. It occurred to him that he had better get into bed before Dr. John’s professional eyes could focus on him too closely. He lowered his leg from the chair and started to rise. Something about his eggshell manner caught Dr. Byrne’s diagnostic eye.
“Veins still troubling you, Mr. Fermoyle?”
“A mere whinge of a twinge now and then.”
Celia, sensing the presence of allies, put in a word. “May the Holy Ghost forgive you, Dennis Fermoyle, for the lie you’ve just spoken.” She turned to Steve. “Lumps big as eggs stand out on his legs, and he’ll do nothing about it.”
“Lumps big as eggs, is it?” said Steve. “If we had a doctor in the house—”
Dr. John Byrne gravely caught the ball. “Varicose veins can be dangerous, Mr. Fermoyle.” He put his hand on Din’s shoulder. “Let’s go upstairs and have a look.”
No escape for Din now. Cross as a mustached bear, he limped upstairs with Steve and Dr. John behind him.
“Get undressed and into bed,” said Dr. Byrne. A moment later his bony fingers and impersonal eyes were moving clinically up and down Dennis Fermoyle’s right leg, noting the blue distended veins, knotted and ugly-looking. He turned Din’s foot this way and that, bent it gently at the ankle, pressed his finger under the arch of Din’s knee.
“This has been neglected too long. You need surgical attention, Mr. Fermoyle.”
“In a hospital?”
“You’d get better care in a hospital, Mr. Fermoyle. There’s really not much to the operation. The Mayo brothers report success with it—and I’ve had good results with a few cases myself.” Dr. Byrne was one of those surgeons who believed in explaining things to a patient. “We excise, that is, cut out the damaged vein, and keep you in bed till the circulation finds its way back to the heart through smaller veins. The whole business won’t take more than two weeks.”
“Two weeks!” Violent agitation seized Dennis Fermoyle. He tried to rise from his bed. “No, no, I couldn’t stay away two weeks.”
Steve pressed a restraining hand against his father’s chest. “Look at it this way, Pa. It’s either two weeks now—or,” he turned to Dr. Byrne for confirmation, “or a permanent lay-up with open sores and crutches maybe. You can’t run a trolley car on crutches. Which’d you rather be, a martyr or a motorman?”
Din temporized. “There’s a cost to these things,” he mumbled.
“The hospital bed will be two dollars a day,” said Dr. Byrne. “You’ll get no bill from me.”
“That’s kind of you, Doctor. But—“ Din struggled to get off the surgical hook.
“But what?” asked Steve. He sensed that something other than the expense was troubling his father. Something as yet unstated, and not plain stubbornness, either.
“How about an elastic stocking?” The craft of the devil was in Din Fermoyle tonight.
Dr. Byrne wasn’t the man to talk a patient into an operation. “In my judgment your leg has passed the elastic-stocking stage. Still, if you want to try one”—he undipped a pen from his vest pocket, wrote a name and address on a card—“go see this fellow McGuire. He’ll fit you.” Dropping the card on the bureau, Dr. John left the room.
Alone with his father, Steve boiled over. “Pa, you’re as stubborn as O’Shaughnessy’s pig. What’s all this nonsense about elastic stockings and expense? Tell me now, what’s really holding you back?”
Dennis Fermoyle grinned up at his son. “Is it in the confessional we are?”
“The confessional of father-and-son confidence. What is it, Pa?”
Dennis took his son’s fine hand between his calloused palms. “Sit down on the bed, Stevie, and listen to what I’ll be telling you. It may be that you won’t understand—though it’s no fault in a young man, even though he’s a priest, to lack understanding. That comes only with age.”
Din hesitated. “The fact is, Steve, that Marty Timmins, since his wife passed away, has taken to knocking down company nickels.”
“What’s this got to do with your varicose veins?”
Din gazed at the ceiling. “You don’t know, Son, the thing that grows up between men who’ve run the same car for a million miles. They lean against each other. Even dumb animals pulling the same beer wagon know the feeling. Well, as long as I keep my eye bent on Marty, he runs straight and honest. But if I were to leave him alone a couple of weeks, he’d begin knocking down company nickels, and get caught at it. Lose his job. They’d send him to prison. That’s why I must stay on the job with him, Steve.”
“You’ve talked to Marty about all this—warned him what will happen?”
“Many times. He weeps, promises he won’t even let himself be tempted. Then next day he comes and tells me that he’s tempted again. It’s a running fight, Steve, and Marty may fail in the battle. It gives me the good feeling, Son, to help him over the bad places.”
A muteness came over the ready tongue of Father Stephen Fermoyle. What could he say to this large stubborn man on the bed? No counsel would solve the problem of Marty’s temptation, or free Din from his duty to support a stumbling friend. He wondered what Monsignor Quarenghi would have made of the problem? Was there anything in Aquinas or Liguori applicable to the case? Steve’s glance traveled about the shabby room and came to rest on the small ebony crucifix on the faded wallpaper above his father’s bed.
“We’ll try the elastic stocking for a while,” he said.
He might be able to tell this man many things about the British war loan, the influence of Petrarch on Western thought, and the chitchat of European chancelleries. But there was nothing he could add to Dennis Fermoyle’s understanding of the Sermon on the Mount.
He said good night to his father and closed the door of the stuffy bedroom very softly.
A ten-o’clock hush lay on the lower floor as Stephen went down the backstairs to the kitchen. Bernie had gone to the Gamecock. Florrie and Mona were in bed; Dr. Byrne and Rita were making the most of the poor privacy of the living room. In the kitchen Celia Fermoyle was kneading dough, tossing it lightly from hand to hand before putting it in the baking pan. The maker of daily bread gazed up at her son with a matter-of-fact affection. Loving she could be, mawkish never. Her concern now was for her husband.
“What did Dr. John say about Pa’s leg?”
“He advised an elastic stocking.”
Celia patted an oval loaf into its pan. “Lizzie Gillen says hers gives her great comfort. Sit down now, Stevie, and have a piece of bread and molasses before you go.”
“Will it make my hair curly, Ma? You used to tell me it would.”
Stephen sat at the kitchen table and watched his mother set out the bread and molasses. Her hair had become disarranged during the evening, and the dark pigmentation of her skin was purplish under the shade-less electric bulb. The knuckles of her hands were red and cracked, her nails unattended. As she moved about the kitchen, it seemed that she had lost something of the tireless resiliency Steve remembered as a boy.
“You must be tired, Ma.”
“No,” she said cheerfully. “I was tired an hour ago, but I’m all right now, Son. Florrie did the dishes, and baking a batch of bread is no work at all. A good night’s sleep will fix me fine.”
The old bounce! An inheritance more valuable than gold.
Celia cut bread, poured molasses into a saucer, then sat down opposite him. Her forearms, still plump and shapely, lay on the figured oilcloth; her eyes, brown as the liquid she had just poured, were fixed on her priest-son as he mopped up molasses with a slice of homemade bread.
“Remember how I used to wade through this stuff?” he asked.
“I remember everything about you, Son. The magic-lantern shows you were always giving in the dark pantry, the printing press down cellar, the telescope in the attic, the rabbits in the back yard, the mandolin in the parlor, the candy-making in the kitchen, the baseball in summer and the hockey in winter, the tap dancing, the yodeling, and that time you tried to be a ventriloquist. I remember the wet battery you made for the front doorbell, the bobsled you almost killed Mona on, taking her down Crescent Hill, and the string telephone you rigged up in the back yard. I remember every bit of it, Son—including the girls you were wild about, not to mention the ones that were wild about you.”
Celia paused in her nostalgic cataloguing, a question in her eyes.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Steve, ever since you told me you had a vocation. Maybe I won’t get the answer I expect. But tell me, Son—tell me truly—did my wanting you to be a priest make you decide to be one?”
Stephen pondered the answer he should give his mother. Dare he reveal the hard truth that his love for her, great as it was, could not be compared with the mightier devotion that had drawn him, and now bound him, to the priesthood? How could he tell her that the depth and power of this greater love was immeasurable, that it filled and dominated him, that it was stronger than any love a son could feel for a mother?
He spoke as honestly as he could to the tired woman opposite him. “No, Mother, your wanting me to be a priest didn’t make me one. I used to wonder about it when I was younger. But now I know I’m a priest because there’s nothing else on earth that I want to be. It’s as simple as that, and it will never change.”
The worn corners of Celia Fermoyle’s mouth trembled slightly. “That’s the answer I hoped for, Steve. I’ve known mothers who were forever at their sons to be priests, and because the sons loved them, or were weak, they sometimes mistook that love for a vocation. Unhappiness is their lot afterwards.”
Courage and good sense, plenty of both, were in Celia’s voice. But Stephen felt that his answer had somehow disappointed her. Well, he would try to make it up to her in a thousand loving ways. He started to say, “I’m offering my first Mass for your intention tomorrow,” when he glanced at the kitchen clock.
“Ten-thirty! Monaghan will murder me. I’m supposed to be in before eleven.” He snatched his black hat from its hook and bent down to kiss his mother’s cheek.
“Give me your blessing, Son.”
He made the sign of the cross above her bowed head. “Give me yours, Mother. It’s worth more.”
He could still feel her thumb-cross on his forehead as he walked swiftly down Woodlawn Avenue to the carbarns. The lightest of spring rains was falling. An indescribable joy, an exuberant sense of work ahead, made Stephen feel like running. And when he saw the headlight of the trolley leaving the carbarn, he did run, and leapt aboard it surefooted.
As the car jolted toward Maiden Square, Stephen read the Office for the Time, then closed his breviary with the echo of Matins in his ears.
“I am the true Vine,” the echo said, “and you are the branches. He who abides in me bears much fruit, Alleluia, Alleluia.”
A few minutes later, Stephen Fermoyle let himself into the parish house of St. Margaret’s, and started to tiptoe up the thin-carpeted stairs. He heard the chime of a clock striking in Father Monaghan’s room, and saw the pastor’s door open slightly.
Then at the head of the stairway appeared an apparition of great bulk—the towering figure of William Monaghan himself.
“Are these your usual hours, Father Fermoyle?” the rector was inquiring in a sarcastic, bullying tone.