IN OTHER TIMES and places, had he not been a priest, William Monaghan might have been many things: centurion under Pompey, the master of a clipper ship, or the general manager of a Bessemer steel mill. He had the physical bulk of an Olympic hammer thrower and the vocal cords of Michael the Archangel, roughened, it is true, by long misuse in a large church with poor acoustics. His complexion was of the meaty red rightly associated with choler, and his curly gray hair, which he combed in a roach, would tighten like individual watch springs when his choler rose. Neither curate nor layman dared cross him: he ran the parish of St. Margaret’s as a veteran conductor runs a crack train, responsibly and hard, along the steel tracks of pay-as-you-go discipline.
The city of Maiden, in which St. Margaret’s lay, was wedged like a slice of suburban pie, five miles north of Boston, between the Saugus marshes on the east and a woody, undeveloped section of Medford to the west. The place had been settled in 1631 by a shipload of dour Dissenters; in 1915 the tone of the city was still puritanical and Protestant. Socially, the best people attended either the Baptist church, with its really magnificent cast of bells, or the Episcopalian St. Jude’s that rose in an ivied Gothic pile on Pleasant Street. Numerically, however, William Monaghan’s congregation was the largest in the city. Upwards of four thousand devout worshipers surged in and out of the three Masses said at St. Margaret’s every Sunday—an edifying spectacle from any point of view, except possibly that of the Protestant divines, who pursed their lips enviously as they thought of the bright silver clinking into the collection boxes of St. Margaret’s fifty-two Sundays a year.
The wittiest and least envious of these divines, Dr. Arthur Lethbridge, D.D. (Oxon), had punned rather brilliantly, so he thought, on the name of William Monaghan. “Dollar Bill,” he had called him at a smart, very Anglican luncheon at the Kenilworth Club shortly after his arrival at St. Jude’s. But the wheeze was already ancient among Father Monaghan’s parishioners. They had nicknamed him “Dollar Bill” ten years before, when, on taking over the pastorate of St. Margaret’s, he had baldly declared that pennies and nickels were fit coinage for gum slots only.
“Green in any denomination is a color most pleasing to the Lord,” he was quoted as saying. A canard, probably—yet even the Cardinal had laughed when he heard it.
If the fiscal part of William Monaghan’s soul was somewhat overdeveloped, this could be traced to realistic causes. As a youth he had felt hunger to the marrow of his large leg bones; but even more painfully he had felt the hatred and contempt in which his unpropertied kind, the South Boston Irish, were held by Boston Brahmins. Muckers, Micks, Harps, they were called, and their lot was to dig in the streets, drive garbage carts, or tend bars. Gradually he had seen his people climb the economic ladder to become policemen, firemen, motormen, and—after decades of struggle—lawyers, teachers, and doctors. They had moved away from South Boston, migrated to Dorchester and Roxbury, gained title to houses of their own. If Father Monaghan overvalued property, it was because the society in which he lived overvalued it, too. Ownership of something—that was the badge of membership. A house was a physical monument built on the rock of social acceptance. And a well-constructed church of Quincy granite or a prosperous parochial school of fine brick was an outward sign of substance that could not be blown down or whirled about by winds of prejudice.
That was why William Monaghan valued the dollar and drove hard for it.
The Cardinal, knowing all this about Father Monaghan, had called him in, one day back in 1906, and handed him two slips of paper. On the first piece was written: “Dedham, Parish of St. Jerome. No church debt, a new parish house, a nine-grade school.” On the other: “Maiden, Parish of St. Margaret. $30,000 church debt. Rickety parish house, no school.”
“Take your choice, Father,” the Cardinal had said.
“I’ll take St. Margaret’s, Your Eminence.”
“Thanks, Father.” Whereat “Your Eminence” evaporated, and a grateful administrator held out a very human hand. “Good luck to you, Bill.”
In ten years, William Monaghan had wiped out the $30,000 church debt, and was now incurring a bigger one—with his Cardinal’s consent, of course—for the new parochial school. Meanwhile he dwelt with his three curates in a time-stained wooden structure, and let his mind leap forward to the day when this tumble-down ark would be supplanted by a modern parish house of brick and granite. As a reward for his labors in this once arid vineyard, the Cardinal had conferred upon him the coveted honor of the P. R.—permanent rector—with life tenure on a tough job.
The toughness of the job alarmed William Monaghan not at all, but he had been somewhat dissatisfied of late with the curates sent out to assist him. They were not the men they used to be. They lacked rugged-ness and push; there was no jump to them. One and all, they were too much concerned with liturgical niceties and all manner of clerical bric-a-brac. But at the drudgery of parish work—they were no good at all. Take Father Lyons, for example. “Milky,” they called him, and a blind man could see the reason for the name. Why, if a cupful of rain fell on Milky Lyons while making a parish call, he would rush back to the house in mortal fear of pneumonia. And forever talking about Gregorian music, he was. With two hundred housebound invalids in the parish, all needing the comfort of a priestly voice and hand, why should a curate always be harping on Palestrina?
And this new chap, Fermoyle, the fine imported article from Rome. A theological disputant, no doubt, a learned wrangler on canon law, with a varnish of Italian and a lively admiration, like as not, for the sound of his own voice box. The Reverend William Monaghan had never been to Rome, but he had seen plenty of young curates fresh from the North American College there, and they were all cut from the same bolt: “All finish but no fabric,” he grumbled to his fellow pastor, Flynn of Lynn. “Their feet are too small, Gene, for the heft of their ideas.” A Hibernicism—but one that found ready understanding in the crypt of the Flynn ear.
Peevishness heated William Monaghan’s red neck as he paced his study on this rainy April evening, dreaming of the ideal curate with big feet and tireless hands. Other matters, too, were putting a tighter curl in his roached hair. Italians in great numbers were flooding into the parish of St. Margaret’s; the whole region west of the B & M tracks was swarming with Neapolitans—noisy, wine-drinking brawlers, quick with their steel but slow with their silver. True, they were Catholics, and therefore welcome in God’s sight. But in the sight of William Monaghan, who was not God but merely the rector of a self-sustaining parish, they were definitely not welcome. And for two reasons: first, they didn’t support their rector generously; and second, he didn’t know how to get along with them. They were excitable, superstitious, dirty, and cynical, not in the decent fashion of Celts, but in some outlandish manner of their own. To put it briefly, they were not Irish. Worse yet, they were pushing out the Irish! The fine old names of Finan, Finnegan, and Foley were giving place, on the baptismal roster, to Castelucci, Foppiano, and Marinelli. Unless Michael the Archangel or some other Saint Militant defended Bill Monaghan in the battle against his Latin parishioners, St. Margaret’s was doomed.
Saint Militant? Pastor Monaghan would have settled for a good curate.
The ormolu clock with the fine Waltham movement chimed ten-thirty, and a deeper burn of irritability reddened the pastor’s neck. Where was this new curate Fermoyle at such an hour? Monaghan glanced at the Mass schedule for the week, written out in Father Ireton’s tall clerical hand. Praise be for Paul Ireton, a steady priest and a fine assistant. Plain as day the schedule showed that Father Stephen Fermoyle was assigned to the six-thirty A.M. Mass tomorrow morning and that Jimmy Splaine was to be his altar boy. Wouldn’t you think now that a young priest, on the eve of celebrating Mass in his first parish, would be in his room, on his knees, preparing himself by prayer and meditation? But where was Father Fermoyle? Ah, yes, this elegant limb was at home visiting his parents in West Medford, regaling them no doubt with marvelous stories about his doings in Rome—how he saw Cardinals Vannutelli and Merry del Val just leaving the Vatican arm in arm with His Holiness on their way to sing High Mass in St. Peter’s. Or some such sculch.
Monaghan’s wrath climbed with the rising minute hand as it swept toward eleven o’clock. This night-owl business must be checked. The ormolu clock was chiming the hour when the front door opened and the new curate came tiptoeing upstairs. Bill Monaghan jacked his huge body out of its pastoral armchair and started for the brown crockery knob of his study door. The whole duty of pastors being to discipline and regulate curates, Monaghan was about to tear the door off its hinges and do his whole duty, when his ireful blue eye alighted on a small photograph in an oval silver frame.
The photograph was of a young priest with roached hair and a square, cleft chin. The eyes of the young priest were neither raised to heaven nor cast down to earth. They were level with hope, steady with purpose. The photograph of Father William Monaghan was taken the day after his ordination. How proud his father and mother had been of that picture! They had placed it in the silver frame and kept it on the parlor mantelpiece in South Boston till they were both dead and gone. A long while now. Neither they nor William Monaghan had ever realized that this photograph was a composite picture of all the big-footed, capable-handed curates that had built the Archdiocese of Boston, a brick at a time. Pastor Monaghan had no such notion even now. The picture merely reminded him that most young curates have parents somewhere, and that no great harm comes to the priestly cloth when stroked by a mother’s admiring hand.
The thought did not entirely blunt his intention to give Father Fermoyle a good dressing down. He jerked open the door and, in the manner of a clipper-ship captain asking a second mate why in God’s name the vessel wasn’t getting anywhere, queried:
“Are these your usual hours, Father Fermoyle?”
A soft answer, thought Stephen, is indicated here. “I’m sorry if I’m late, Father. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it does not.” Monaghan was about to close the interview and his door when he noticed that the hair of this long-legged young priest was slightly shower-sprinkled, as though he had been walking in the rain. In contrast to Milky Lyons’ dread of dampness, this sign of hardihood in a curate was almost endearing. Certainly a matter to be investigated.
“Step into my room, Father Fermoyle.” Monaghan’s crafty eye estimated the probable amount of water glistening in Stephen’s hair. He ventured a testing remark. “I see you’re not afraid of a little rain.”
“I like rain,” said Steve.
“Sit down,” said Monaghan.
Into a sag-bottomed Morris chair Stephen sank unevenly, and gazed about the room. Study, office, bedroom, Monaghan’s lair had the incoherent no-period look that only a hard-working celibate can give a place. Nothing matched anything else. An ancient roll-top desk of fumed oak, its pigeonholes crammed with envelopes, ledgers, blueprints, and canvas coin bags, clashed with a surly black walnut bookcase full of unread religious periodicals. The lumpy four-poster bed disagreed with the brass hatrack on one side of it and an oleograph of St. Cecelia playing the organ on the other. A mangy carpet covered the floor; from the ceiling hung a crystal chandelier of the Welsbach gas-mantle era, now wired for electricity. The crystal pendants of the chandelier carried on the feud by jangling noisily whenever a streetcar rumbled past.
Does it have to be as dreary as this? thought Steve. He remembered Quarenghi’s study: white-walled, bare except for a flat table, a hard chair, a shelf of books in red and gold. The cell of an anchorite. But this room —what was it trying to say about the man who lived in it?
Collarless, carpet-slippered, hands locked behind his back, and his great meat-colored face thrust forward, Monaghan began pacing the track between window and door. He was trying hard not to glance at something—and that something was his curate’s feet. The attempt failed. Monaghan left off his pacing, and stared point-blank at Stephen’s shoes.
Ten B’s. H’mm, y’mm … a touch on the narrow side. Will broaden a width or two, maybe. Must recommend ground-grippers with vici-kid tops. … Later. …
“Arches ever trouble you?” asked Monaghan.
“Never.” What’s he getting at? Steve wondered. Monaghan’s gait and posture reminded him of a huge ox dragging a remorseless plow. The pastor made another furrow to the window, peered through the lace curtains.
“I hope,” he said, “that you don’t come to St. Margaret’s all burthened with—attitudes.” (He pronounced it “attichudes.”)
“Attitudes? What kind of attitudes?”
Monaghan flung out a heavy arm like a man knocking clutter off his workbench. “Oh—stained-glass attitudes, Gregorian attitudes—the niminy-piminy attitudes they try to come over you with at Rome.”
Stephen mastered everything but puzzlement. “I don’t understand, Father. All that I feel or know about the Church goes much deeper than ‘attitude.’”
“We weren’t talking about the Church,” snapped Monaghan. “We were talking about curates. Rome-cured curates, that is.”
Fuses of anger crackled along Stephen’s spine. Rome-cured! So that was Monaghan’s idea of a body punch, was it?—a coarse, punning attack on the system that produced men like Pecci, Rampolla, Merry del Val—scholars, diplomats, princes of the Church. He wanted to retort with scathements beginning: “Listen, Ox-neck—” But he closed his teeth on these Din-the-Down-Shouter locutions, and what he said was quiet but stubborn.
“No one in Rome tried to ‘come over me’ with anything. I merely took the regular course of studies offered at the North American College.”
“Aha!” said Monaghan in a “now-we’re-getting-at-it” tone. “And would you mind running over the list of those studies for me?”
Stephen decided to keep cool and impersonal. “Not at all. We studied sacred theology, canon law, moral philosophy, and had some special lectures on ecclesiastical diplomacy. Then, of course, there was the usual work in hermeneutics—”
“Herman who?”
Steve disregarded the Weber and Fields clownery. “Hermeneutics,” he repeated, “the science of interpreting the Scriptures.” He let fly at Monaghan’s big jaw. “We compared St. Jerome’s translation of the New Testament with the Aramaic and the Greek.” Bang, that should fix him!
“Did you so?” Unshaken, Monaghan nodded at the silver-framed photograph as if to say, “See the training a curate gets nowadays.” “And what else did they teach you at Rome?”
“During the last year, some emphasis was laid on liturgy and rubrics.”
Gleefully, like a prosecutor who hears a witness convicting himself out of his own mouth, Monaghan rubbed his hands together. The mass of mixed evidence pleased him. Father Fermoyle’s fondness for rain and his reasonably large feet were more than outweighed by the fanciness of his education. More testimony must be gathered.
“In the course of your elegant education, Father Fermoyle, did you ever”—he paused with forensic intent—“did you ever drive a milk wagon?”
Stephen conveyed large uninterest in his “No, I never did.”
“Well, there, at least, my experience cries on top of yours. For in my youth I drove such a wagon. In those days we poured the milk from open cans into such household containers as dippers, or pitchers, or whatever our poor Mick customers might have handy. But I will pass over that part of my story and come to the advantage enjoyed by those who have driven a milk wagon over those who haven’t” Pastor Monaghan rubbed a didactic paste into the palm of his left hand with the pestle of his right forefinger. “That advantage lies in being able to tell a good milk-wagon horse ten blocks away. Do you take my meaning, Father?”
“As a kind of homely parable, yes.”
“My parable goes on to say, then, that many a fine-spirited animal breaks down between the shafts of a milk wagon. Not gaited to the task. Another breed, of still higher mettle, tries to run off with the milk cart as though it were a tallyho or rubber-tired vehicle of some kind—which, as you can see, Father—”
“It is not,” murmured Steve.
“No resemblance. Not the faintest. Now, what is needed on a milk wagon, Father, is a docile, steady creature who can carry the load up hill and down dale, start at a cluck, and stand without hitching. Which, to drop the parable once and for all, is what the work of a curate amounts to here at St. Margaret’s.”
Stephen’s nostrils flared, but he kept the good silence.
“This disturbs you, Father Fermoyle?”
“A little.” Rising from the sag-bottomed chair, Stephen unconsciously put his feet in the furrow worn by his pastor, and paced off the width of the room. “I know, of course, that a curate is not a steeplechaser, and that my job at St. Margaret’s is no rubber-tired sinecure. I expected drudgery. I welcome it. But”—a trolley car rumbled past, and Stephen waited for the crystals in the chandelier to stop jangling—“but do you have to be so horribly explicit about the milk wagon?”
“Vagueness,” said Monaghan, “would be no help at St. Margaret’s. Better to be clear—explicit, as you say—at the beginning than to lallygag around with attitudes.”
For God’s sake, Stephen wanted to cry, stop using that word. So I’m a milk horse. Fine. I’ll start at a cluck, and clop about the parish till I’m a wind-broken old hack like yourself. But, meanwhile, what about scholarly exercise of the mind, personal dedication to God the Father, spiritual fellowship with the saints? Are these unavailing at St. Margaret’s?
The questions surged toward utterance, but went unspoken as Stephen gazed about the dreary room. How could he convey himself to the heavy-footed man who inhabited it? How breach the ghastly wall of Monaghan’s parochialism?
Tr-ranggg!
Someone was yanking hard at the front doorbell. “I’ll answer it,” volunteered Stephen. He flew down the rickety stairs and opened the front door. A breathless little man, with the flannelette collar of a nightgown showing under his jacket, and deathbed news in his eyes, began to gasp out a telegraphic message:
“Mrs. Fitzgerald … sinking fast. … Dr. Farrell says for Father Monaghan … come right away.”
The pastor’s hoarse voice rumbled down from the head of the stairs. “Would that be Annie Fitzgerald of 14 Brackenbury Street?”
“It would,” said the flanneletted messenger. “This is me, Owen Fitz, her husband. Come quick, Father, please.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” said Monaghan.
In a double bound Stephen was up the stairs. “Let me go, Father,” he pleaded. “I’m dressed.” He could not bring himself to add, “I’m younger … my arches are springier than yours.”
“Dollar Bill” Monaghan, buttoning on his rabat, shook his head. “Thank you, Father Fermoyle,” he said, “but this call I must take myself. Annie Fitzgerald has lived in pain for three years, and the dear woman wouldn’t know how to die without me now.” He pulled on his No. 13 vici-top shoes with the elastic inserts. “But if you’ll be so kind, Father, just run down to the sacristy—the key is hanging on the bulletin board—and fetch me up the case of holy oil. Mrs. Annie Fitz will be needing the last sacraments tonight.”
Stephen ran. When he returned with the case, William Monaghan was backing his new Packard out of the garage. “Get a good night’s rest, Father Fermoyle,” he advised. “You’re saying your first Mass at St. Margaret’s tomorrow, and nothing gives greater scandal to our Saviour than the sight of a priest yawning and gawping all over the altar. You take my meaning, Father?”
“I do,” said Stephen. He stood bareheaded in the driveway till the crimson flicker of Monaghan’s taillight disappeared in rainy darkness.
IMPARTIALLY gilding objects sacred and profane—the cross on the pinnacle of St. Margaret’s and the ugly brown cylinder of the municipal gas tank behind it—a May sun was well sprung from the Mystic Flats when Father Stephen Fermoyle in cassock and biretta, breviary in hand, came down the three steps of the parish house next morning. His chin glistened from the razor as he inhaled the fresh spring air and breathed it out again in a canticle of thanksgiving to the Maker of Days in general and this spring day in particular. For on this day, indeed in a few minutes—at six-thirty A.M., to be exact—Father Stephen Fermoyle would enter into the special glory of a priest’s life. He would celebrate his first Mass as a curate in the parish of St. Margaret’s.
He crossed the narrow strip of brick courtyard between the parish house and the church, unlocked the door of the sacristy, and let himself in. Odors of myrrh and spikenard lay on the almost chilly air; in the ruby flicker of the sacristy lamp he saw the high, broad chest containing the vestments of his priestly office. Stephen was glad that the Sexton Val McGuire had not yet opened the basement chapel, and that the altar boy hadn’t yet arrived. The young priest wanted to be alone while he prepared himself for the central act of his being, toward which he moved now with secret exaltation and almost tremulous joy.
He knelt at the worn prie-dieu, bowed his head, covered his face with his hands, and inwardly supplicated the Divine Father to make him a worthy priest. This private devotion over (he kept it brief to avoid sentimentality), Stephen offered up the Mass for the special intention of his mother. Arising, he washed his hands, murmuring the humble “Da, Domine,” as he did so. Then he laid his biretta on the prie-dieu and approached the vesting bench to attire himself for his office as celebrant.
Stephen Fermoyle had received his instruction in rubrics—the prescribed rules for the conduct of sacred ceremonials—from that great perfectionist, Guglielmo Zualdi, S.J. Under Zualdi’s tutelage, Stephen had acquired a full and intimate knowledge of the august tradition surrounding the solemn sacrifice of the Mass. Exactness and reverence, combined with a high degree of esthetic sensibility, were focused now in the clear white flame of the celebrant as artist. Every inflection of voice, every movement of head, hands, and body, would be perfectly executed in this first essay of his priesthood.
Stephen placed the fine linen amice over his shoulders, and arranged the alb evenly, so that it fell chastely white to his ankles. He girded himself with the cincture, saying in Latin as he did so, “Engirdle me, Lord, with the cincture of purity, and extinguish in my bowels every libidinous desire, that I shall be filled with the strength of continence and chastity.”Taking up the maniple, he kissed the cross in the center and placed it on his left forearm as the symbol of the worldly sorrows the priest must bear. Then taking the stole in his two hands, he said, “Give back unto me, Lord, the stole of immortality, lost by the sin of our first parents.” He was about to place the sacred vestment around his neck when the sacristy door burst open, and a breathless small boy rushed past the prie-dieu, knocked Father Steve’s biretta to the floor, picked it up again, and stood panting in the middle of the sacristy floor.
“All right, Jimmy,” said Father Steve without turning his head. “Get your surplice on.”
In the act of crossing the stole on his breast, Father Stephen looked around and saw a nine-year-old boy unwashed and uncombed, covered to his knees by an emerald-green coat-sweater buttonless and clasped at the middle with a horse-blanket safety pin.
“I’m not Jimmy,” panted the youth. “I’m Jemmy.”
“Jimmy was sick last night,” gasped the boy. “He threw up twice all over the bed. Pa said it was the pig’s knuckles Ma gave us for supper, and they had a fight, but anyway Jimmy told me to come down and be the altar boy this morning.”
Jimmy looked in amazement at the biretta he had picked up. “Must’ve knocked it off,” he volunteered.
Father Stephen tried not to be unduly distracted. “Put it on the prie-dieu, and get into your surplice, Jemmy. You’ll find it in that closet by the door.” Calmly Father Steve put on the chasuble, passed the strings behind his back, and tied them inside on his breast.
Out of the corner of one eye he saw Jemmy Splaine fighting his way out of the oversized sweater. Behind him he heard Sexton Val McGuire peeping into the sacristy to see what was holding up the Mass. Annoyance began to gather between Father Steve’s eyes. But he let none of it appear in his voice as he addressed his young server: “You know the responses, of course, Jemmy?”
“Pretty good, Father.”
A dubious instrument, thought Steve. “Hand me my biretta, please.”
He took the chalice in his left hand, placed his right hand over the burse and veil, and held the sacred vessel in front of him, neither touching his breast nor far removed from it. Motioning to Jemmy to lead off, then falling in behind the boy, Father Stephen walked gravely toward the altar, his mind fixed on the sacred ritual of the Mass.
Scarcely had he uttered the Introibo ad altare Dei when the quality of Jemmy’s Latin was revealed as something less than elegant. For the first two responses, Jem’s memory served him moderately, but at the Quia tu es Deus, it began to crack, and long before the Introit, the substitute acolyte was floundering hopelessly. As the Mass progressed, the boy’s responses, his mismanagement of his feet, hands, and tongue, became pitiful. A minor catastrophe occurred while he was transferring the missal from the Epistle to the Gospel side: ascending the steps of the altar, he stumbled, and only Father Steve’s outstretched hands saved Book and boy from an ignominious tumble.
A tide of anger rose in Father Stephen Fermoyle as he saw his first Mass being ruined by this mumbling, stumbling clown. The spiritual work of art was being daubed by dirty paws; the oblation conceived as a masterpiece of rubric, and offered up with purist punctilio, now lay hacked to pieces around his feet.
Desperately Father Stephen fought to ignore the distractions arising from the sorry movements of his altar boy. During the Canon of the Mass, he strove to forget all else but the Host that he held in his hands. Secretly, and with particular attention, distinction, and reverence, he uttered the five words, Hoc est enim corpus meum, from which the mystery of the transubstantiation radiates into the lives of men.
Mercifully, Jemmy did nothing to destroy the moment, but later at the Communion he again disgraced himself by failing to extend the paten while Father Steve placed the sacred wafers on the tongues of the few early communicants.
So exasperated was Father Steve as he left the altar at the conclusion of the Mass that he yearned to plant his boot squarely in the seat of Jeremy Splaine’s corduroy pants. As he entered the sacristy, sharp words of rebuke sprang to his lips. But he choked them down, placed the chalice on the sacristy altar, and began taking off his sacred vestments. At first his wrath could barely consume itself, but as he removed the handsome garments—the brocaded chasuble, heavily embroidered with gold and silver, the rich satin maniple, and the alb of fine linen—a strange realization came over him.
He saw that he had put on these garments not in humility but in pride, and that he had approached the altar in a spirit of haughty elegance fatal to the fulfillment of his priestly function. From a complete display of vanity he had been saved by Jemmy’s uncouth stumbling. Unconsciously the boy had stretched his frail body like a living bridge across the pit of arrogance that had yawned at Father Stephen’s feet.
“Jemmy, come here.”
With uncombed head bent in consciousness of failure and disgrace, Jemmy obeyed. He had removed his surplice, and had not yet donned the sweater of emerald green. His upper body, thin as a picked pullet, was covered by a torn and dirty undershirt; a piece of clothesline, in lieu of a belt, held up his corduroy pants.
Vestments of a kind, they were—vestments not spiced with myrrh and spikenard, nor stored away in the cool precincts of the sacristy, but worn next to sweating, corruptible flesh in the heat and dust of common day.
Stephen put a consoling finger under the boy’s peaked chin, lifted the large head with its wild shock of hair, and gazed into the tear-streaked face.
“That was a pretty bad performance all around, Jemmy.”
“Yes, Father.”
“But before we’re through, Jem, you’ll be a better altar boy”—salt dimness blurred Father Stephen’s eyes—“and with the help of God, I’ll be a better priest.”
EXACTLY what it was that Sexton Val McGuire whispered into William Monaghan’s ear, no one will ever know. But somehow or other Sexton McGuire conveyed the impression that the new curate didn’t know how to celebrate Mass properly.
That noon the rector sat down to the luncheon table, hungry for his meat and potatoes. He cut a large triangular wedge of veal from the cold joint and turned the silver-plated Lazy Susan till he came to his bottle of caper sauce. “I hear,” he said, not using his Arcturus-blue eyes on anyone in particular, “that the six-thirty Mass this morning was turned into a circus.” The pastor sliced his veal slowly. “But with this difference”—he shot out his indictment—“that a circus starts on time!”
Father Paul Ireton, having slept until seven that morning, said nothing. Just an innocent bystander, not even in the line of fire. Milky Lyons put on a brightly surprised expression as if to say, “Can such things be?” The silence left Father Steve exposed on both flanks, a position especially reserved for new curates in Monaghan’s house.
Yesterday in the lustihood of his young powers, Steve might have offered half a dozen parries. Even now he was tempted to say: “So, we have talebearers at St. Margaret’s?” Instead, he looked quietly at his pastor. His tone was apologetic as he said:
“There was a bit of delay, Father. I wasn’t quite familiar with the vestment racks.”
Pastor Monaghan was out for a disciplinary ride that noon. “How about the antics with the Book? I hear”—it was a favorite elocution with him—“that you and your server were practically juggling it between you. Is that the latest thing with the American College crowd at Rome?”
Paul Ireton came to the rescue. “It was the altar boy’s fault, Father. Jimmy Splaine got sick last night and had to send his young kid brother as a last-minute substitute. I got the whole story, along with several yards of other material, from Mrs. Splaine in the Square this morning.”
This information, instead of salving the Monaghan burn, only scraped more flesh off. “So Jimmy Splaine gets sick and the Mass is disrupted. In the name of God, have we but one altar boy in the parish? Can’t some of you curates organize the altar service—teach half a dozen kids how to serve Mass?”
Monaghan’s irritation, Steve felt, had a measure of reason. Hip-deep in parish finances, the pastor might fairly expect one of his assistants to take over the training of altar boys. Steve wanted to volunteer then and there—but now Frank Lyons was making a pallid gesture.
“I’d like to instruct some boys in plain chanting.”
The proposal infuriated Monaghan. “There’ll be no plain chanting in St. Margaret’s. This is a parish church, not a—a basilica.” He pronounced the word as though it were the name of a disease.
Father Lyons sipped weakly at his glass of milk. Stephen stepped into the breach. “I’ll train some altar boys, Father.”
“The job is yours. And no fancy stuff, mind you. Just the responses in decent Latin, and some sense of respect for what they’re supposed to be doing up there on the altar. You understand?”
“I understand, Father.”
Pastor Monaghan said grace hastily and rose from the table, eager to get at the cigar that he kept locked in a humidor in his room. The three curates sat silently looking at each other.
“What’s he got against plain chanting?” the milky one asked petulantly. “It’s very beautiful. And important, too. Pius X wrote a Motu Proprio about it, you know.”
“So he did,” said Steve. “Isn’t that the one where he says that mechanical instruments are no substitute for the glories of the human voice?”
“That’s it,” said Milky eagerly. “The Sovereign Pontiff urges upon all Catholic pastors the importance of training choirs of children in plain chanting. Furthermore”—evidently Father Lyons had the document by heart—“he inveighs against the laxity of responses from the congregation and says that—”
“Listen, you two,” put in Paul Ireton. “Consider the facts surrounding the writing of that Motu Proprio, will you? In the first place, Pius X was a Patriarch of Venice. Remember Venice, the place that held the glorious East in fee? No motorboats in the canals, no electric lights—just a lot of gondolas, singing boatmen, palaces on stilts, and all that. Fine. That’s the tradition Pius X was working in. But now you get a man like our pastoricus here, a gadget-loving Westerner who doesn’t know a square note from a round, living in an industrial town where electricity is cheap. Why in heaven’s name should he prefer plain song to the nice ten-thousand-dollar electric organ he’s just installed?”
“But plain singing is a heritage from the earliest Church,” said Milky. “It has centuries of medieval tradition behind it.”
“Plus three centuries of British—that is to say, Anglican—tradition,” said Paul Ireton. “You wouldn’t expect a man sprung from landlord shooters to embrace the practices of the landlord, would you?”
“You’re being rather parochial,” sniffed Milky.
“You mean,” corrected Paul Ireton, “I’m being rather Boston-Irish.”
Steve sipped his coffee, reserving judgment. He had always wondered what curates talked about; surely it couldn’t always be as good as this. Both sides of the argument were familiar to him: Father Ireton was only repeating parochialisms of Din Fermoyle, Corny Deegan, and Monaghan himself, while Father Lyons was pleading, ineffectually enough, for the universal viewpoint that Stephen had acquired at Rome. Could the two ever be fused? Would America ever grasp the larger meaning of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church—an organization transcending national tongues, arts, and boundaries? And would Rome ever appreciate the peculiar vigor and quality of the transatlantic Church?
Father Paul Ireton stuffed his napkin into an imitation-bone napkin ring with the finality of a man who’ll argue no more that day. Stephen felt a quickening admiration for this sober, scholarly priest who knew all the arguments but refused to be drawn into speculative debate.
Paul Ireton lifted a beckoning finger to the new curate.
“Confessions this afternoon,” he said. “We’ll start you off with the kids. Take the box on the west aisle at four P.M., and be ready to hear the quaintnesses that spring ex ore infantium.”
A TREMOR such as he had never felt before seized Stephen as he opened the door of the confessional and sat down in semidarkness. He made his final plea to the Confessor of Saints and Angels. “Let me not judge harshly, Lord, as in mercy Thou hast not judged me.” He pushed back a small sliding panel, covered his eyes with his hand. Stephen Fermoyle’s work as a looser of sins began.
Through the fine-meshed screen came the hasty, almost inaudible murmur of a twelve-year-old girl: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s a week since my last confession. I went to Holy Communion and said my penance.” Then she poured out a little throatful of venial sins. “I talked in church three times. I got angry with my sister when she took my stockings. I slapped my brother once, no … twice. I answered my mother back when she told me to do something, and I was vain in front of the mirror while dressing.” A pause. “I … sinned against purity …”
“In what way?” asked Stephen gently.
“Playing post office—at a party—I let a boy kiss me on the mouth.” A little sigh. Glad to have it over and done with. “For these and all the other sins I may have committed, I ask forgiveness, Father.”
In a minute the child had unreeled the commonplace scenario of her life. The slaps and bickerings, the budding female vanity at the mirror, the adolescent rebellion, the first kiss clumsily given, awkwardly received —Stephen saw them all. How comment on these undistinguished faults? —not faults even, for the word was too strong to characterize the things the child had done. What counsel could he offer this innocent soul? Vanity at the mirror gave Stephen a clue.
“These little misdeeds of yours are like tiny flaws in a beautiful complexion,” he said. “When the Blessed Mother gazes into the mirror of your heart, will you try not to have even the slightest blemish there?”
“Yes, Father. I will try.”
“For your penance, say three Hail Marys. And now make a good act of contrition.” He lifted his right hand in the gesture of absolution.
For two hours Father Steve heard the confessions of children—a monotonous catalogue without variation or enormity of any kind. “I lied, I swore five times, I had impure thoughts twice, I peeked at my sister while she was dressing.” And so forth, in the manner of earth’s newest angels, in saecula saeculorum.
At six P.M. Father Steve emerged from his box, blinking like a mole as he stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight. There, pacing up and down in the bricked courtyard, was Father Paul Ireton, taking a breath of air before supper.
Father Paul was in a twitting humor. “Ah, the young cure of souls, fresh from the Children’s Hour.”
Steve fell into step beside him. “If this afternoon is any example, the kids of Maiden, Mass., are a fairly undistinguished bunch of sinners.”
“It’s a sort of merry glissando compared to what you’ll hear tonight.” Paul looked at his watch. “We’ve just got time for six fast turns before supper. Come on, let’s step out.”
Seven-thirty found Steve back in his box for the evening stint. The first half-dozen penitents were pious married women who repeated, on a slightly more adult level, the trivial offenses of their children. “I gossiped twice; I envied my neighbor the new piano she got on installments; I was late for Mass once, but I could have got there if I got up in time. I ate meat on Friday because nothing else was in the house but eggs. I took sixty-five cents from my husband’s pocket and lied about it afterwards. I—I refused my wifely duty to my husband on two separate occasions, because …”
Stephen found that the women were more apt to extenuate their offenses than the men. The men would come right out with it: “I committed adultery four times.” But the women would beat about the bush with all manner of fancy locutions. Stephen was beginning to think that something about the feminine soul made plain statements difficult.
Just when he was feeling secretly complacent about his handling of things in general, Stephen got his comeuppance. As he opened the slide to his left, a faint attar of good perfume—vaguely carnation—struck his nostrils. The delicate voice of a young woman began a pianissimo recital of the usual minor offenses. Intelligent, a trifle sulky. After the briefest of hesitations she said with neither shame nor pride:
“During the past six months I’ve had sexual relations with a man. Many times.”
Steve asked the natural question. “Why don’t you get married?”
“He’s a Baptist. My family doesn’t want me to marry outside the Church.”
“Have you asked him to become a Catholic?”
“I’ve begged him to turn, Father. But he hates the Church. He says terrible things about it.”
“Yet you continue to go with him.”
“Yes, Father.” She made a stubborn declaration. “I love him very much.” Then the fabric of her stubbornness gave way, and she uttered a miserable, “What shall I do?”
The classic Montague and Capulet dilemma, complete with sectarian complications.
Stephen wanted to rise, walk about while he thought out an answer. But motor release was denied him; he must sit still. And not only must he remain inside the physical boundaries of the confessional. More important yet, he must remain within the doctrinal bounds of his faith. In advising this erring daughter of the Church, his plain duty as a confessor was to set forth some well-established truths. Tenderly he began his instructions.
“Hard though it is to break your relationship with this man, you must give him up. There is no other way to lasting happiness for either of you. If you marry him outside the Church it means a lifetime of spiritual grieving, not to mention the emotional antagonisms that mar so many mixed marriages.” Stephen paused. “And of course you must stop this business of illicit relations. It is dangerous, immoral—cheap.”
Unsubmissive, the young woman lifted her chin. “It isn’t cheap at all, Father.”
“But you intend to stop?”
The girl shook her head. “I can’t.”
“In that case,” said Stephen, “it is not within my power to grant you absolution. You cannot receive the sacrament of penance until you have made a firm resolution to give up your sinful way of life.”
The girl rose from her knees. “Why did I come here anyway?” she murmured angrily. “I might have known.” Leaving behind her a scent of carnation, she flew from the confessional.
Stephen’s instinct was to run after her, catch her by the arm, beg her to be patient with the Church and himself. But he could do none of these things. He knew he had been technically correct in refusing absolution, but he knew also that he had been too brusque, too unbending, not tactful enough. His want of skill had caused a troubled soul to slip through his fingers. He scarcely heard what the next few penitents were saying.
“I slapped my son in anger …”
“I refused my wifely duties …”
“I was slothful about the house …”
He was jerked out of his daze by a sourish, stale reek of alcohol, the aftermath of prolonged and excessive drinking. The man kneeling in the penitent’s booth was so large that sheer bulkiness brought his head and face close to the screen. A hangover breath, and a bad one, assailed Father Stephen’s nostrils. He drew out his handkerchief, held it to his nose. The man was sober enough now, but desolation and remorse were in his bent head and discouraged voice.
“I broke my pledge again, Father,” he announced in a mumble of self-loathing. “It started last Saturday … a week ago.”
More cautious now, Father Steve waited.
“I spent my pay, and gave my wife the back of my hand when she asked me where it all went. She cried bitterly, not at the blow so much, but the sight of me lying drunk in front of my children, with no job left and a broken pledge besides.” He breathed heavily. The flood of self-pity subsided.
“Where do you do all this drinking? Maiden has no saloons.”
“I go to Boston. Around Dover Street mostly.”
Stephen knew the region—a sink of derelicts. “Why do you pour this terrible poison into your body, made in the image and likeness of God?”
The big man shook his head hopelessly. “I don’t know, Father. If you asked me, like you are now, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t mean to get drunk. I don’t want to. But I do.”
Just like that. No convivial glass lifting, no cheerful clink to the accompaniment of song. Only a compulsive alcoholic, fumbling for the neck of his bottle. Stephen, helpless, without answer, almost overpowered by the man’s breath, begged inwardly for a spark of God’s grace to fall on him.
“How old are you?” Stephen sparred for time. This one must not get away.
“Forty-one.”
Still no spark. Instead, physical nauseating revulsion. “What’s your job?”
“I’m a stonemason, Father. A good one. I can always get work when I’m sober.”
The odor was making Stephen ill. In another moment he would have to break out of his box and run for the fresh air in the bricked courtyard. St. Stephen, the patron saint of stonemasons, must have seen his namesake twirling a withered branch of helplessness—for the spark did fall. The glimmering of a plan.
“Come around to the parish house tomorrow afternoon,” said Stephen. “I’ll have a talk with you. Perhaps I can find you a job helping Father Monaghan on the new school. Then you wouldn’t have to pass all those swinging doors on Dover Street.”
“Would you do that, Father?”
“We’ll see. Now make an act of contrition and ask God to have mercy on you and your family.”
Wretchedly, the last confession heard, Father Stephen stumbled out of the box at ten-thirty P.M. Every muscle in his body was aching, every nerve taut and exhausted. His head was split by an ax of pain, his cheeks were flushed, the membranes of his throat dry as old flannel. And his spirit, which had soared with exaltation at suppertime, was now flat in the dust.
Dizzily he straggled into the open air, strode up and down the strip of bricked courtyard.
“I never knew. I never knew,” he kept saying to himself. “God forgive me. I never knew.”
Paul Ireton fell into step beside him, solicitous but silent.
“No one ever told me, Paul.”
“It can’t be told,” said Father Ireton.
Steve’s finger pressed his throbbing temples. “In all the books,” he said, “sin was an abstraction, a remote depersonalized theory about man’s failure to realize God’s will. But here it’s an ulcer burrowing in the flesh, a rage in the blood, a mortal itch in man’s brain, a rank wind in his belly.”
“Bend with that wind, Stephen, or it will knock you over.”
“I’m not thinking of myself, Paul. It’s the people, with their dirty laundry bag of little sins and the cancerous burden of the big ones. How can anyone help them?” Stephen’s grief was half guilt, half sweating sorrow for his fellow men. “What does one do?”
“Got you down, has it?” said Father Paul.
“Flat on the ground.”
Paul Ireton put his arm around the young curate’s shoulders. “There’s this much to be said for the horizontal attitude, Steve. It has a long tradition behind it. Don’t ever forget that Christ, too, spent a bad night flat on the ground, under some olive trees a long way from Maiden, Mass.”
They took a few turns up and down the brick areaway. “Come into the house,” said Paul Ireton. “I’ll give you a couple of aspirin.”