THE RECORDER of minor annals, lay and ecclesiastic, making his entries for the Archdiocese of Boston as of Sunday, May 2, 1915, would have had a full but mixed book by sundown.
HOLLOWED-EYED Filomena Restucci, kneeling at the shrine of the Virgin in the basement of St. Margaret’s Church, fixed her eyes on the lily-fringed heart of the Madonna and lighted a candle for the speedy recovery of her sweetheart, Victor Provenzano. If Victor hadn’t been stabbed twenty-four hours ago in a knife fight, he would have married her this day. Now, two months pregnant, Filomena wept natural tears and beseeched a miracle. “Let my Vittorio live, Madonna of Sorrows. Stop the blood coming from his mouth, and I will make to you a perpetual novena of my life.”
She lifted her eyes to Mary’s statue, and screamed as she saw blood dripping from the Madonna’s flower-crowned heart.
ASSISTANT Manager R. W. Bailey of the Boston Streetcar Company strode up and down his office, addressing a small audience of common mozos variegated in height, size, and demeanor, yet all sharing a certain ferretish aspect of nose and eyes. Assistant Manager Bailey, eligible as a case history in any textbook on peptic ulcers, was now giving his listeners some ulcers of their own.
“Conductors all over Boston are getting away with grand larceny,” he screamed. “Unless you spotters bring in a dozen of these dirty-fingered bastards next week, I’ll see to it personally that you’re all fired.” He waved a sheet of paper at them. “These figures show that the company is losing five hundred dollars a month in knocked-down nickels. That figure must be reduced to zero. Zero, you hear?”
Manager Bailey’s tone and manner changed from nagging to suspicion. He pointed a nicotine-yellow forefinger at his huddling listeners. “There’s a law that takes care of spotters in cahoots with crooked conductors. Now get the hell out of here, all of you, and prove that you’re on the level. Go on … get out. …”
MONICA, loveliest of the Fermoyle clan, walked nervously to a secluded part of Forest Dale cemetery to meet her sweetheart, whom she was not allowed to invite to her home. A thin, good-looking Jewish boy stepped out from behind a copper beech and said, “Darling, I thought you’d never get here.” Thereupon he took her arm and led her to a still more secluded part of the cemetery, where they sat on the grassy knoll, talked, kissed, and kissed again till dark.
SPIRIDION LARIOS, proprietor of the Gamecock Café, peeled a ten-dollar bill from an indecently large roll, and handed it to a stoutish young man in an ascot tie and chamois-topped shoes. “Go ‘way,” said Larios. “You giva my customers earache. Pipple say, ‘Mr. Larios, you got nize place here, but who tol’ that Irish Thrush heza piccola-player?’”
Larios laughed at his own misrendering of the old joke and poured himself a giant thimbleful of Metaxa brandy.
His EMINENCE LAWRENCE CARDINAL GLENNON sat at one of the three ebony Steinways in the magnificent study of his episcopal mansion, repeating contemplatively eight sedative measures of Bach. To facilitate the fingering of this passage, which in the Cardinal’s opinion contained the whole secret of counterpoint, he removed the massive sapphire from the third finger of his right hand, and laid it on the music rack. He solved the passage, and, moving on to the next invention, raised his large hazel-gray eyes to an early Mantegna that was gathering to its umbers the last golden rays of an afternoon sun. Tranquillity lay at least epidermis-deep upon the Cardinal’s domed forehead, and softened the diagonal gash of his large mouth. But the involuntary twitchings of the trigeminal nerves, running from the lobe of his ear to the sole (so to speak) of his heavy but not fat chin, would have revealed to any member of his retinue that Number One was about to blow off. No member of the retinue was in the study at the time; they had all taken to their quarters and were busy battening down the hatches in preparation for the coming storm.
The Bach-Mantegna medicine lulled Lawrence Cardinal Glennon for about twenty minutes before he remembered why he was dosing himself. Abruptly now it all came back to him. He rose from his piano stool and jammed the sapphire ring back onto its official finger. He snatched irritably at a copy of The Monitor, the Catholic weekly published under his direction, took a brief vexed glance at its front page, then slapped it against the polished surface of his pearl-inlaid desk.
“Is there no priest in this Diocese who can write English with a bite to it?” he bellowed.
No answer forthcoming, he jerked at a brocaded bell rope. His secretary appeared with Japanese celerity, pencil poised, pad in hand. “Scour every parish in New England for an editor who’ll get some crunch into this paper,” said the Cardinal. “Meanwhile send Monsignor O’Brien in to me. I want him to write a ringing editorial against the murders going on at the Boston Maternity Hospital. Crushing babies’ heads, are they? I want every doctor in Boston to know just where the Catholic Church stands in this matter.”
He ground his massive ring into the palm of his left hand as if sealing the doom of baby-killers. “Send O’Brien in to me.”
IN THE KITCHEN of their five-room railroad flat on Tileston Street, Maiden, large suety James Splaine, stonemason talked hopefully to his wife. “Julie,” he said, “that new young priest is a saint. He talked to me for an hour when I went to see him this evening. Not a word of religious guff. He says to me, ‘Jim, if you had a job in Maiden here, a job that didn’t take you past all those swinging doors on Dover Street, do you think you could stay sober?’ ‘Why sure, Father,’ I said. ‘It’s the whiff of the stuff coming out of those places that makes it so hard.’ Then he says, ‘I’ve put in a word to Pastor Monaghan for a job on the foundations of the new school. You can walk to work and home again without ever passing a barroom. The rest is up to you, Jim.’”
Julia Splaine, stringy-haired, greasy-wrappered, put in a word. “Is it true now what he said about me collecting your pay?”
“True as true, Julie. Every Saturday you just go down to the priest house and get my envelope from Father Fermoyle himself.”
Blessed be die mother who bore him, thought Julia Splaine; she must be a wonderful woman.
THE REVEREND WILLIAM MONAGHAN unloosed the three center buttons of his cassock, stretched his large legs under the roll-topped desk in his room, and lighted his evening cigar. His favorite dinner of barley soup, roast beef, and boiled potatoes lay just behind him, and an evening of “counting up”—the happiest time of the week—lay just ahead. In the top drawer of his desk were four canvas bank bags, three of them fat with bills and coins collected at the nine-, ten-, and eleven-o’clock Masses that Sunday; the fourth bag held the miscellaneous coins, mostly nickels and pennies taken that week from the poor boxes, the votive-candle offerings, and the pamphlet racks.
He was halfway through his first cigar when he started counting; his third cigar was a cold stub when the last penny had been tallied. He added up his jottings: $1156.44. A creditable sum. Deduct the tithes he must forward to the diocesan treasury, and there would still be more than a thousand dollars left to carry on the work of his parish. A payment on the new electric organ, the salaries of his curates, the upkeep of the parish house. Not to mention a little sum that must be set aside for the repair of the church furnace and steam pipes, long overdue.
Not to mention the new parochial school.
The pastor drew out a small deck of bankbooks, unsnapped the elastic band holding them together, and studied the figures therein: Maiden Savings Bank, $5500; Maiden Trust Company, $3500; First National of Boston, $11,000; Medford Savings Bank, $4200. He totaled them: $24,200. His glacial blue eyes thawed when he saw that his cash position amply warranted the start of the much-needed parochial school.
From the altar at High Mass that morning he had made his announcement to a crowded upper church. “Dear Parishioners,” he had said in his hoarse pulpit voice, “by virtue of God’s grace and your generosity, we will start digging tomorrow on the new school. Ten long years—years of bountiful giving on your part and stewardly saving on mine—have brought us to this propitious time and place. But though a beginning will be made, ’tis only a beginning. The school will cost three times as much as we have on hand, and though the local banks have promised to see us through, this means, my dear people, that you must continue to give, and I must continue to save. Meanwhile the regular expenses of the parish do not—y’mm—decrease. This church in which you now worship needs new heating equipment; the furnace and the pipes are almost beyond repair. And the house in which your pastor and curates live needs tearing down completely, it’s that old. How often I’ve been stopped on the street and had people say, ‘Father Monaghan, when are you going to build a new parish house for St. Margaret’s? The old one is a disgrace.’ And my answer always is, ‘St. Margaret’s will get a new parish house after the parochial school is built and paid for.’ Meanwhile don’t worry about me or the curates. None of us will be rained on in our beds—you can be sure of that. I will now read the Gospel for this Sunday. But before that, I want to make one more announcement. If any among you are looking for jobs on the new school, don’t come to me. McBurney Brothers, the well-known contractors, are in charge. See them. I’m running a parish, not an employment agency. The Gospel for this Sunday …”
From a pigeonhole in his desk Father Monaghan drew a tube of blueprints, spread them out lovingly, and gazed at the plans of the new school. Three stories high, faced with finest Quincy granite, thirty classrooms, a gymnasium, a recreation hall, a chapel for the nuns. All modern, fireproof, up-to-date. It would be called the Cheverus School, in honor of that long-dead fighting missionary bishop of Massachusetts, Louis Cheverus. The Cardinal himself had chosen the name.
Outside Pastor Monaghan’s window rose the clatter of voices, shrill, foreign-sounding, hysterical. He glanced at his watch: nine-forty-five P.M. What tumult was going on at this hour? Monaghan flung up his window and saw a throng of people milling about in the bricked areaway at the entrance to the basement church. Unseemly. Disorderly. Must be stopped. Pastor Monaghan stepped to his door and called in a shipmaster’s voice: “Father Fermoyle.”
Steve appeared at his own doorway. “Yes, Father.”
“Go down into the areaway and see what all that shouting is about. Sounds like a lot of Pastafazoolis drunk on dago red. Get them out of there. Do you hear?”
“Right away, sir.” Steve clapped on his biretta and slipped downstairs. At the edge of the bricked areaway he heard cries of, “Miracolo! Miracolo! … La bella Madonna ha fatta uno miracolo.” Steve shouldered his way through the mob till he saw Val McGuire braced against the door of the basement church.
“What’s going on here, Val?”
Whey-faced, the sexton explained. “They say a miracle has happened, Father. Some girl came in here this afternoon, lit a candle in front of the Blessed Mother. Then she went home and found that her boy friend, good as dead from a stiletto stab, was sitting up in bed, asking for his spaghetti. These wops have been flocking up in droves here ever since. I’m trying to get them out so I can lock up.”
A woman, shawled, with an infant in her arms, pushed toward Father Stephen. “My baby vomiting these-a three days,” she cried. “The Blessed Madonna will make him keep milk down.”
“Wait, little mother,” said Father Stephen. “We’ll go in together.” Facing the crowd, he lifted his voice and addressed them in the language they knew best.
“Children of the Miraculous Queen of Heaven,” he cried in the declamatory style matching their mood, “listen to your priest.”
“We listen. Speak to us, Father.”
“The Virgin has performed a deed of great wonder here today. You, her children, weeping and wailing in this valley of tears, wish to honor this most tender of advocates. You come to light candles, to pray, to ask her intercession. That is most pleasing to her. But all this must be done in the spirit of orderly devotion. I will lead you. Follow me, in reverent silence, to the feet of the Madonna.”
Sexton McGuire tugged at Stephen’s elbow. “But it’s ten o’clock, time to lock up,” he protested, pulling out his watch.
“Come on, Val, put that ticker in your pocket. Miracles don’t happen by the clock. Help me form them into a single line now, that’s the good man.”
Into the dimly lighted church, down the side aisle to the Virgin’s statue, Stephen led the hushed throng. They packed the pews nearest the shrine, overflowed into the aisle, buzzing like excited hornets. Stephen approached the triple tier of candles blazing in fiery apostrophes before the little niche sheltering the figure of the Virgin. It was a tawdry chalk statue in the style prescribed by local taste and tradition. A gilt-pronged crown sat on the Virgin’s head; beneath a face of serene purity, she held the nestling Infant in the hollow of her right arm, while her left index finger pointed toward the apex of her lily-crowned heart. Kneeling at the shrine, Stephen gazed upward at the statue.
Blood-red drops falling from the Virgin’s heart were splashing in a tiny pool at the base of the statue.
“If I could only dip my finger into that stuff,” thought Stephen. But a buzz like the flight of asthmatic hornets rose behind him. No time for scrutiny now. Emotions were bubbling dangerously. He must drain them off somehow. How?
By prayer. What prayer? The Rosary, of course.
Stephen turned to the people. “This is the first Sunday of May,” he said. “The month of Mary song.” The feeble wail of a retching baby was the only sound in the church. “Let us garland her with flowers—the flowers of the Five Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary.”
Father Monaghan, storming into the basement to find out for himself what was going on, saw five hundred bent heads, and heard his curate’s clear voice uttering the first part of the Angelical Salutation:
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
To which five hundred voices responded:
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Father Monaghan tiptoed out of the church. “He’s sure got a way with these wops,” he murmured.
Father Stephen Fermoyle said the Rosary five times before the crowd was completely calm. Meanwhile the drops continued to fall. There was awe in the eyes of the Italians as they filed singly past the Virgin’s statue on their way out. The last to leave was the woman with the retching baby. “Look,” she said to Father Fermoyle, peace in her voice and eyes, “he has not thrown up since Rosary began.”
It was one A.M. before the church was empty. “Now,” said Father Steve, “we’ll see what goes on.” He opened the gate before the Virgin’s shrine, came close to the statue, and reached out to touch the crimson heart with his finger. As he did so, a soft red splash fell on his fingernail.
He looked upward into the ceiling shadows, high above the Virgin’s head. Rusty water, falling from a steampipe, was leaking down, a drop at a time, onto the heart of Mary! It struck the cheap brilliant color in a solvent splash and continued falling to the floor.
“Wait till Dollar Bill hears this,” said Father Steve.
“The Miracle of the Leaking Steam Pipe,” as Paul Ireton called it, was nipped early next morning by a crew of plumbers. Under the sound of their hammers the mystical music died, but its echo lingered on. It lingered in the heart of Filomena Restucci, who was married to her Vittorio a few days later at a nuptial Mass celebrated by Father Stephen Fermoyle. It lingered in the heart of the shawled woman whose baby died of an intestinal obstruction. And especially it lingered in the memory of Pastor William Monaghan.
“I’ve got myself a curate at last,” he told his crony, Flynn of Lynn. “A funny combination he is, too. A proud-walking American—if carriage is any sign, Gene, he’ll end up with a miter at least—and sprung from good Irish stock, the Fermoyles of Medford. His father is on the cars, I hear, and he has a sister with the Carmelites. But the luckiest part of it, Gene”—Pastor Monaghan put it to his colleague as one Leinster man telling a tale of wonder to another—“the luckiest part of it is … he knows how to get along with those Eyetalians.”
HAVING GOTTEN HIMSELF a curate, Father Monaghan now proceeded to put him to work. There was plenty for Steve to do. With his priesthood honing in him like a trident, he waded chin-deep into parish waters. He celebrated Mass daily, alternating with Father Lyons at the six-thirty A.M. service. He baptized babies, and was quite expert at soothing their shrieks after the holy water had been poured over their soft pink heads. “Where’d you learn that trick, Father?” asked an admiring young mother after Stephen had hushed her squalling infant.
“Had plenty of practice as a kid,” said Steve, laughing. “I played first base with a baby in my arms till I was fourteen years old. It’s all in the jounce. Here, let me show you. No, not straight up and down—babies like the horizontal jounce, stomachside up. But when you bubble them, lay them over your shoulder—like this.”
On three evenings a week he stood house watch, patiently listening to the troubles of garrulous old women who came in to have a medal blessed, then launched forth upon the unselected details of their life. Getting them out the front door with their tale still in the telling was a triumph of tact. Observing Steve’s manner with these “old biddies,” Monaghan promptly made him spiritual adviser to the Married Women’s Sodality.
“But what’ll I say to them?” Steve was genuinely puzzled.
A cheerful grunt rumbled out of Monaghan’s chest. “Your mother and father had a big family, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And when your father came home from work, your mother had a hot supper ready for him, didn’t she? Night after night, no matter what else happened, there was the supper, and he always got served first, didn’t he?”
“Why, yes, he did. She always used to say, ‘A hungry man is an angry man,’ as she handed him his food.”
“A smart woman. And when supper was over she washed the dishes while he read the paper in his stocking feet, didn’t she?”
“Usually.”
“Then they had a few words, maybe about money or the children, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so pleasant—which might have ended in a family brawl if one of them hadn’t given in to the other. Isn’t that the way it was with them?”
“Just about,” said Steve.
“Then around nine or nine-thirty your father went to bed while she worked around the house, darning socks or making a batch of bread while she spoke with her children. And when it was all done, she went upstairs, or wherever their bedroom was, and laid her tired head on the pillow beside him.” Pastor Monaghan’s blue eyes sought confirmation in his young curate’s face. “Isn’t that about the way things went, Father Fermoyle?”
Stephen nodded. Justness and knowledge, uncolored by sentimentality, were in the picture that Dollar Bill had drawn.
“I think now,” said Monaghan, “you’ll have no trouble in saying the few words required of you at the Married Women’s Sodality.” The tight curl in the pastor’s hair seemed to loosen a trifle. “In my judgment, Father, the best training for the priesthood is to be brought up in a big family by a good father and mother. The values are sound. They can be applied anywhere. And were I the Pope, writing an encyclical, I’d say that these values are the hope of the world.”
Stephen did not tell his pastor that a great Pope had already written such an encyclical. Monaghan wouldn’t have read it, anyway. He wouldn’t have to, thought Steve. Thereafter, when the new spiritual adviser to the Married Women’s Sodality lacked material for his homilies, he merely tapped the gusher of his old knowledge of Celia and Dennis Fermoyle.
BY LONG TRADITION, the supervision of Sunday school was automatically taken over by the junior curate. Every Sunday afternoon Stephen heard children lisp, stammer, or reel off the answers to questions in the blue-green catechism. (Q) Who is God? (A) God is the Creator of heaven and earth and all things. (Q) Why did God make you? (A) God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
How simply the penny catechism stated the essential terms of the covenant between God and man! In its taut counterpoint of question-and-answer Stephen heard echoes of Aquinas the Angelic Doctor thundering out his divinely inspired propositions. And here, seven hundred years later, those propositions, unchanged and unimpaired, were being given new utterance in a Western tongue of whose existence Aquinas had never dreamed. Might it not come about that these same questions and answers would one day be recited in languages yet unformed on the tongue of man?
Stephen found special delight in examining his Sunday-school pupils on points not covered by the catechism. One Sunday afternoon he propounded a puzzler to a class of thirteen-year-old boys:
“Can Protestants go to heaven?” he asked.
Young faces, blank, bewildered, gazed up at him. What kind of trick question was Father Fermoyle pulling? Stephen saw a bright talkative boy, Charlie Boyle, holding up his hand.
“Well, Charlie, can Protestants go to heaven?”
“Of course not, Father,” said Charlie. “Everyone knows”—his voice broke in a comical adolescent croak—“that only Catholics are let in.”
Father Steve nodded solemnly at the upturned faces. “Do you all believe what Charlie says?”
“Yes, Father,” came the obedient chorus.
“Sorry,” said Steve, “but you’re all wrong. No matter what you’ve heard elsewhere, the Catholic Church teaches that anyone—Protestant, Jew, or Mohammedan—who sincerely believes in his own religion, and who lives up to its teachings, can get to heaven.”
He let this astounding fact sink in, then continued: “It is true that God has given special blessings to the Catholic Church and has made it the divine instrument of salvation. But wouldn’t it be hard to believe that this same God who loved mankind well enough to send them His Son would turn His face away from billions of His children?” Stephen paused, wondering how much their young minds could absorb. “We must honor the religion of our neighbor just as a great modern missionary, Cardinal Lavigerie, honored the Mohammedans he went to convert. He sought earnestly to win them to the Catholic faith, but so great was his respect for their religion that whenever he passed a mosque, he alighted from his carriage and walked!”
The boys heard what Father Fermoyle said, and they saw that he meant it. But they were still unconvinced. After he had gone, Charlie Boyle spoke for the lot of them by mumbling: “If it’s true like he says—that any old hard-shell Baptist can get into heaven—what’s the use of going to all this trouble to be a Catholic?”
ONE OF Monaghan’s insistencies was the “house call”—that constant round of visits to every home in the parish. “Look to your flock” was a cardinal point in his pastorate; as a younger man he had been a tireless roundsman of the Lord, ringing doorbells or knocking at doors without bells. But he had long ago delegated the chore of parish visitation to his curates, requiring from them a weekly list of the homes they had entered and a general report of the conditions they found there. One day he called Stephen into his study and instructed him on the art of the house-to-house visit.
“You’re familiar with the chief spiritual works of mercy, Father?” Dollar Bill began.
“Of course.”
“Run over them, just to refresh my mind.”
Stephen felt like one of his own catechism scholars. “The chief spiritual works of mercy,” he replied, “are seven: to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful—”
“That’s fine,” interrupted Monaghan. “Now look you, Father, these spiritual works are prescribed for the layman, which is not to say that they don’t apply to a priest. The best means of practicing them—far and away the best—is the house-to-house call. It’s an institution with us here at St. Margaret’s. No special hours or days are set apart for it, but whenever you’ve got an afternoon that you don’t know what to do with, or a morning that hangs heavy on your hands, just devote it to the honor and glory of God by making a few parish calls.”
“I’ll do so, Father.” Stephen started to go, but Monaghan recalled him with a pastoral finger.
“After you’ve admonished, instructed, or just listened to troubles as the case may be, you will sometimes be offered a bit of refreshment in the way of tea or coffee, bread and butter. This I would strongly advise you not to accept. First, because often enough it’ll be a drain on their pantries. And in the second place, the drinking of tea and the munching of cakes may lead to—y’mm—relaxations of tongue and mind that don’t always turn out to a curate’s advantage—if you take my meaning, Father.”
“I do,” said Stephen.
“And one last thing, Father Fermoyle. These poor women—and they’ll be mostly women you’ll meet—will be forever trying to press a little money into your hand as you take your leave. They’ll say, This is for yourself, Father,’ or, ‘Here’s a little something for your special charity.’ It’s their good heart prompting them to piece out the meager pay they know a curate gets.”
Dollar Bill weighed his next words as if measuring out his own blood. “You’re under no obligation to take this money, Father; and oftener than not, the poor souls who offer it need it more than you. But if you do take it”—and here Monaghan spoke with the force of a man who had thrown the devil of indecision over a cliff—“I want all such money turned over to me! It belongs to the parish. If you weren’t a curate at St. Margaret’s, you wouldn’t be getting it. Is that clear?”
“Quite clear,” said Stephen. He closed the door and went to his own room to sort out the curiously mixed instructions his pastor had given him. What a marvelously consistent piece of work the man was! A true shepherd of his flock, a master in the niceties of official conduct, a veteran calculator of probabilities, and the unrelenting collector of the coin of parish tribute.
From these pragmatic woolgatherings Stephen was aroused by the knock of Bridget Loonan, the housekeeper. In the unenthusiastic voice reserved for new curates she said, “Your sister Rita phoned while you were in with him.” (Mrs. Loonan always referred to her employer by the third-person pronoun. “ ‘He’ wants to see you.” … “The Cardinal is begging ‘him’ to take a bigger parish.”) “Your sister says to call her right away at Beacon 1218.”
Stephen called the unfamiliar number. Rita’s voice, tremulous with anxiety, was saying, “Steve dear, I’m at Dr. John’s, 12 West Newton Street. Can you get over here this evening? John’s in trouble.”
“What’s he done?”
“It’s what he hasn’t done. Oh, Steve, they want him to kill babies with forceps or some such thing. If he doesn’t promise to kill them, he’ll lose his appointment, and we won’t be able to get married.” Rita checked her panic. “Please come over, Steve. Dr. John’ll explain it all to you.”
“I’ll be there at eight.” Steve made his calculations to get out of house duty that evening. Would Milky Lyons stand in for him? No, the Milky one couldn’t—he was playing whist that evening at the home of Annie K. Regan, chiropodist and arbiter of the medium-high social circle of Maiden. How Milky was permitted to spend so much time munching cakes and relaxing his mind was something Stephen couldn’t quite understand. Distracted, Steve turned to Paul Ireton for help.
“Sure, Steve. I’ll take over for you. Say nothing about it to Monaghan. What he doesn’t know will never hurt him.”
A few minutes after eight o’clock Steve rang the doorbell of a shabby brownstone house on West Newton Street—a region of Boston almost entirely taken over by medical students and interns. He climbed three flights of dark stairs, saw the crack of light at an open door. There was Dr. John Byrne, paler, gaunter than ever, greeting him. Rita, in tears, arose from a lumpy horsehair sofa and threw her arms about Stephen’s neck.
“What’s this I hear about killing babies?” asked Steve.
“Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” said Dr. Byrne. “But it’s true. If you can bear hearing another man’s troubles …”
Stephen loved him for that. He sat beside Rita while Dr. John got into the middle of things.
“As you know, Steve, I’m beginning my last year of residency at the City General. It’s a fine appointment. Among other things, I see a lot of obstetrics, rare cases that would baffle the average practitioner. Of course, most births are normal, but in the past month we’ve run into an unusual series of big-headed babies—so big-headed (to keep it nontechnical) that they just can’t get through the birth canal.”
“I thought they performed Caesareans in such cases.”
“Smart, foresighted doctors who take measurements in time can perform a Caesarean. But a great many mothers never go near an M.D. till the day a child is born. Then it’s too late for measurements. If the birth is started, and the infant’s skull gets wedged in the pelvis”—Dr. John’s hand closed over Rita’s—“then you’ve got something serious. And that’s exactly what’s happened three times in the past month.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Routine practice among non-Catholic doctors calls for a craniotomy —that is, the crushing of the infant’s skull.”
“But that’s murder,” said Stephen.
Dr. John Byrne sat dejectedly on the edge of his desk. “I know. That’s why I refused to perform one yesterday. The mother died.” Memory racked him. “Her husband made a terrible scene. Took a punch at me. I don’t blame him much. Now he’s suing the City General. In self-protection the hospital will hereafter require every intern to sign a paper saying that he’ll perform what’s known as a ‘therapeutic abortion’ when, as, and if the situation demands.”
“And if you don’t sign?”
“I’ll lose my appointment.”
Stephen knew that to toss away a residency at the City General was to ruin all prospects of advancement among the surgical elite of Boston. The Harvard crowd that controlled the best hospitals might occasionally admit an Irish-Catholic of unusual promise—as they had admitted John Byrne. But if for any reason he lost his place, it meant a second-grade career, the rat race of minor surgery: tonsils, hemorrhoids, fifty-dollar deliveries, with an occasional hernia or appendix as the ultimate top. No chance at the nice thyroids, bowel resections, or end-to-end anastomoses. You stepped aside, even in the Grade B hospitals that took you in, and watched a man from City General coolly enter a belly, and considered it a wonderful break if he asked you to sew up after him.
Obliged by every canon of faith to uphold the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Stephen could not bring himself to exert pressure on a good man faced by such a choice.
“When do you make your decision?”
Dr. John Byrne gazed at his scrubbed bony hands as though apologizing to them for the hack work that stretched ahead. “I’ve made it already, Steve. I told Dr. Kennard this morning I couldn’t sign.”
Rita’s full fresh lips pressed against Dr. John’s cheek. “My man’s no baby-killer,” she said.
Stephen was wrothy. “You can make an issue of it,” he flared. “If the Cardinal knew that murder was now mandatory at the City General, he’d break the thing wide open. The more I think about it, the madder I get.” He seized John’s high bony shoulders. “How about my nailing this right onto the Cardinal’s door as a test case?”
Dr. John shook his head. “No—that’s not the way to handle it, Steve. You’d only get a name for meddling in affairs beyond the jurisdiction of a curate. Besides, I happen to know that the attitude at the Chancery is ‘hands off.’ There’ll be a ringing editorial about it in The Monitor, but as for interfering with the internal management of the City General, well —Number One is too smart for that.”
John Byrne’s diagnostic turn of mind let him see the other side of the case. “I can understand why, Steve. To the lay mind, the Church’s position in this skull-crushing business is a nasty one to defend.” He hooked a long arm around Rita’s waist. “Most men, myself included, feel that a living wife is more valuable than a dead baby.”
Watching Rita’s head find a natural place under Dr. John’s collarbone, Steve understood very well. “What’s your next step, John?”
Humor too grim for smiling, too controlled for bitterness, played through John Byrne’s reply. “Oh, I’ll open up shop in South Boston and write prescriptions for people with sniffles and hangovers. I may even get some life-insurance examinations at a dollar apiece. And don’t forget, I’m supposed to be an obstetrician. People in South Boston have a lot of babies, and at the last minute they’ll be asking Dr. Byrne to kindly step around with his little black bag, and please bring his own soap because the rats ate the last piece in the house. There’ll be plenty to do, once I get started. Meanwhile, Rita and I—well, I guess we’ll just keep on waiting.”
For the first time in his life Stephen wished that he had a great deal of money. He would say to this wonderful pair: “Look, you two. Here’s twenty-five thousand dollars. Get married right away and buy a house in Brookline, with enough room for five or six kids. Then you, John, set yourself up on Commonwealth Avenue, with waiting rooms, receptionists, and nurses—out-Brahmin the Brahmin doctors at their own game of high-priced surgery.”
How childish! No, salvation didn’t come that way to people like John Byrne and Rita Fermoyle. Steve said the thing he really believed. “I’m glad you made the decision, John. It’s tough—but there’s nothing else you could have done.”
He kissed Rita, shook hands with Dr. John, and felt his way down the dark, banistered stairs. He knew that as soon as he closed the door, Rita’s consoling mouth would be under her John’s. The knowledge brought only gladness. In a world of grief, frustration, and loneliness, when men and women kissed and clung to one another for mutual support, Stephen felt neither alone nor unsupported.
A sea of greater love buoyed him; he floated on its sustaining wave.
Yet as he reviewed John Byrne’s decision, Stephen saw quite clearly that God’s weather was not always halcyon. The sea of faith could buffet as well as sustain. To accept its salt chastisement without whimpering required extraordinary self-discipline and perfect trust.
“When my test comes,” prayed Stephen, “grant, Lord, that I shall not murmur against the rigors of Thy love.”