WITH FEAST, fast, and changing color of vestments, the ecclesiastical year wore on. September brought crisper weather and the Nativity of Our Blessed Lady. October slipped past in an ocher haze: All Souls’ Day trod upon the eve of All Saints’; the long Pentecostal cycle drew to a close, and the blessed season of Advent began. With purple vestments the coming of the Infant was celebrated—the beginning of a new cycle of joy to the world, and the Incarnation of new hope for man.
How frail that hope seemed under the assault of war! From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, men faced each other at bayonet length. In Flanders, the poppy fields ran red before their season; in the Masurian Lakes, armies perished. The trenches grew longer; the deadlock of Europe dragged on.
In blood-red vestments, on December 26, Stephen celebrated the feast of his name saint, Stephen the first martyr. The Epistle for the day recounted the age-old story of that earlier Stephen who, full of grace and fortitude, saw the heavens open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. But even in that younger age, when the personal splendor of Christ still illuminated the world, men could not sustain the vision. They ran violently upon Stephen, stoned him to death. He fell asleep in the Lord, forgiving his persecutors in words of loving severity. And then, from the Gospel, Father Stephen read Christ’s lament: “How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?”
Smiling at the homely tenderness of the hen-and-chicken simile, Stephen was unvesting after Mass, when young Jeremy Splaine came up. Jeremy had become Stephen’s favorite altar boy. Nothing clownish these days about Jeremy’s handling of the Book and bells. He was a little master of liturgy now, and a daily joy to Stephen at early-morning Mass.
There was a troubled query in Jeremy’s blue eyes, and one of them was black. “Father,” he began, “is it true like it says in the Collect for today that we should love even our enemies?”
“That’s what it says, Jemmy.”
“Does that mean I ought to love some Episcopal kids that make fun of the skates my father gave me for Christmas?”
“I think it includes Episcopalians, Jem. But why should anyone make fun of your skates?”
“Because they’ve got straps,” said Jemmy.
“And what,” inquired Steve, “do other skates have?”
Jemmy burst forth, “These sissy Episcopals have aluminum skates that fasten right onto their shoes. The blades are hollow—they go like blazes. Well, yesterday afternoon me and some other altar boys went up to Spot Pond to play hockey, and these St. Jude kids—they’ve got a choir team—began to laugh at my strap skates …”
“That got your Irish up, eh?”
“It sure did. But I came right back at them. ‘My skates ain’t screwed onto my shoes,’ I said, ‘but me and my brother and Dave Foley here, we’ll beat you playing hockey.’”
“You played them?”
“Yeh, we played them all right, Father.”
“And,” suggested Steve, “they beat the pants off you. Those St. Jude sissies skated all around St. Margaret’s tough guys?”
Jeremy Splaine nodded. “They goose-egged us, fourteen-nothing.”
Stephen pretended to mull over the tragedy. “Did you have a little disagreement afterwards?”
“Well, we sort of threw snowballs”—Jeremy hung his head—”with rocks inside.”
Still stoning each other, thought Stephen. Aloud he said, “Fourteennothing is quite a trimming. Still, it’s not a matter for a religious war. Seems to me that what St. Margaret’s needs is a little coaching.”
“Yeh, I guess we could use some, Father. Dr. Lethbridge, the Episcopal minister, coaches his kids.”
The Groton touch. “Well,” said Stephen, “I haven’t been on skates for four or five years. But when I played forward for Holy Cross—”
“You played for Holy Cross! Geez, Father, I mean gee, Father—would you coach us?”
“I’d do anything to back up that Collect for St. Stephen’s Day. Get your gang up at Spot Pond this afternoon at three-thirty. I’ll be there with skates on.”
The next month was one of the happiest times in Stephen Fermoyle’s priesthood. Full of grace and fortitude, he did great wonders among the skaters of St. Margaret’s. He showed them how to nurse a puck across the ice in the crook of a hockey stick, how to pass the hard-rubber disk in team play from man to man instead of dashing down the pond with it alone. The boys took on style—but no amount of style could keep their cheap strap skates from falling off at critical times. Stephen dreamed of fitting out his squad with hollow-tubed shoe skates; he priced these desirable items at Troland’s Sport Shop, and found that six pairs of shoe skates would stand him two weeks’ salary. Whereupon he called up Cornelius J. Deegan and said to that knightly gentleman:
“Corny, I need thirty dollars to buy shoe skates for six little hockeyplaying demons.”
“Shoe skates, is it? When your dad and me were boys we slid across Liffey ice on the seat of our pants.”
“I know, Corny. But my altar boys are playing the Episcopal hockey team.”
“Episcopals!” exploded Corny. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
The next day St. Margaret’s swarmed onto the ice in aluminum shoe skates, while the Knight of St. Sylvester stamped up and down the edge of the pond warming himself with the fire of Irish pride. The ragged jackets of Stephen’s boys troubled Corny. “You’ll be needing sweaters with a big gold St. M. on the breast of each and every one,” he burst out—and straightway the team had sweaters.
“Arrange the game, Jemmy,” said Stephen after two weeks of practice. “St. Margaret’s as ready as she’ll ever be.”
The game was played on a day of iron New England cold. Sharp skates rang against blue ice as hard-muscled boys, inheritors of the world’s toughest tradition of play, struggled against each other. It was strictly a North American clash; as Stephen watched the two teams play he knew that no Greek or Italian boys had ever moved so rapidly or with equal grace. With the score 6-6 and a minute to play, Stephen saw Jeremy Splaine snatch the puck from a scuffle of hockey sticks and streak down the pond like a zigzag wind. But now the St. Jude captain, a longshanked blond youth, shot in obliquely, hooked the puck away from Jemmy, and was off toward St. Margaret’s goal for a heartbreaking score.
Episcopals, 7; Catholics, 6.
But no religious war broke out. When the game was over, Jeremy Splaine shook hands with the St. Jude captain. Even Corny Deegan, setting up hot chocolates for both teams at Morgan’s Drugstore, had to admit that the Protestant lads had an honest bit of an edge somehow.
Dog-tired when he went to bed that night, Stephen turned back the pages of his Missal to the Gospel for St. Stephen’s Day. “How often”, he read, “would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?”
Would it ever be otherwise? Would men one day drop the stones of hatred, forget the names of sect and nationality, and join in praising one Name forever and that Name alone? Stephen Fermoyle doubted that they ever would, but the last image in his mind before he fell asleep was that of a red-cheeked Jemmy Splaine extending his hand in a sportsman’s embrace to the St. Jude hockey captain.
PILL HILL is the irreverent name given to a steepish incline in the heart of South Boston. It is a street of doctors; every door sports a medical shingle, and the higher a patient climbs, the larger the fee he pays. Major surgeons crown the hill; halfway down are the consultation rooms of wellestablished general practitioners; clustering at the base of the slope are the dingy offices of physicians young in reputation, green in judgment, or shady in practice.
On a shabby door at the foot of Pill Hill hung a sign bearing the simple legend: John Byrne, M.D. By Dr. Byrne’s location, medical bargain hunters knew that his fee was one dollar. In the year since the sign had gone up, an increasing number of patients with or without a dollar bill (mostly the latter) had passed through the paintless portal into Dr. Byrne’s office, where they received as thorough a going-over and as thoughtfully written a prescription as could be had all up and down the hill. John Byrne’s fame was growing and if his income would only grow in proportion, all would go well with Dr. John and his newly taken wife, Rita, born Fermoyle.
It was nine thirty-five, one April evening, when Dr. Byrne closed the door behind his last patient, a Mrs. Julia Twombly who suffered from dropsical legs and a chronic tanning of her liver, brought on by drinking twenty cups of tea a day for thirty years. Julia Twombly also suffered from another long-standing ailment, lack of cash. She tendered Dr. Byrne a coin characterized by her as “my last half dollar in the entire world, except one.” By pressing the coin back upon her, John Byrne had kept his evening receipts just under four dollars. He had seen fifteen patients and had collected a total of $3.85.
He walked through the railroad flat to the kitchen, where his wife sat having an aftersupper visit with her priest-brother, Stephen Fermoyle. The men greeted each other affectionately. “Don’t see you often enough, Steve,” said John. He kissed his wife, then handed her the little wad of money he had taken in that evening. Rita counted the bills and silver, then helped her husband out of his white surgical jacket.
“Your coat’s the wrong color, darling,” she teased. “It should be black like Steve’s here. Then you could work for nothing all week, but drag down a swalloping big collection on Sundays.”
“A percentage player,” said Stephen. “What do you do with all the money your husband gives you?”
From a shelf over the kitchen table, Rita took down a red spice tin marked Cinnamon and popped a dollar bill into it. “In this house,” she announced to Stephen, “Cinnamon means Rent. Whereas Clove”—she took down a yellow tin—“means installment on office equipment.” Rita put a dollar bill into the yellow tin. “And Nutmeg means baby clothes.” She dropped the loose change into the nutmeg tin. “Which leaves a dollar for food and other unnecessaries.” Rita waved the remaining bill triumphantly.
“What’s John’s share of all this?” asked Stephen.
Dr. Byrne’s arms were around his wife. “Ever hear of Allspice, Steve? That’s what I get.” He kissed Rita twice. “It’s a rather unbalanced diet! How about some quick carbohydrates as in Shredded Wheat?”
Stephen had never seen his brother-in-law in such buoyant spirits. Marriage had brought color to his sober personality. Now as they sat around the kitchen table, eating cereal from blue-ringed bowls, John impersonated one of his dead-beat patients reading a list of symptoms from a slip of paper.
“Oh, Doctor”—John mimicked the whiner’s recital—“I suffer the pangs from green and yellow spots before my eyes, a mortifying drip from my nose, a knifelike pain between my shoulders, and an empty, gone feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have a strain at stool; scanty, hot urine in the morning, and a bathing, cold sweat at night. I need a little something for a general weakness in front and a rash behind—not to mention the carbuncle big as an egg under my right knee, the torments of rheumatism in my left big toe, and a twinge of numbness in the soles of both feet.” John Byrne grinned. “Can you imagine trying to diagnose a case like that in twenty minutes?”
The patient’s mixed bag of ailments somehow reminded Stephen of the hopeless catalogues he so often heard in the confessional. How did a medical man handle such cases? “I’d be interested to know what you did for him,” he said.
“What could anyone do? He was a malingerer with alcoholic complications—broke, undernourished, and determined not to work. I lanced his carbuncle and wrote him a shotgun prescription—strychnine, caffeine, and cascara—which ought to hit everything but the numbness in the soles of his feet.”
So much doldrum misery in the world—stagnant grief that neither medicine nor religion could move. Sometime, thought Stephen, I’ll explore the matter with John Byrne. For the present he was content to keep the conversation on a shoptalk level. “How’s the surgery coming, John? Getting your share of gall bladders and appendectomies?”
“Haven’t opened a belly for three months, Steve. You’d think at least one derelict would collapse on my front stoop with perforated ulcers—the stuff they drink would burn holes in a tin roof. But no such luck. I open my office door hoping to see a nice thyroid or emergency hernia—and what flashes before me? Running noses and numbness in the soles of both feet.” John’s grin was on the rueful side. “I guess the story’s got around that I’m strictly a pill-and-powder man.”
“Don’t believe a word of it, Steve,” protested Rita. “Make him tell you about the new outpatient clinic he’s just started at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the wonderful surgery he’s doing there, free.”
John was his old sober-sided self again. “Rita makes it sound too altruistic. The fact is, Steve, that the better-known surgeons on Pill Hill—like anywhere else—hog the major operations for themselves. It’s next to impossible for a new man to get a bowel resection or even an appendix. The only things left are the minor specialties.” John Byrne crunched another Shredded Wheat into his bowl. “That’s why I’ve gone in for peripheral vascular surgery.”
“What would that be?” asked Steve.
“Varicose veins, mostly. It’s a wide-open field. The big fellows aren’t interested, and the quacks murder people. But new surgical techniques are coming along fast, and I’m practically the only man in South Boston that knows about them.”
“Where does the free clinic at St. Joseph’s come in?” asked Steve. “Aren’t you doing enough charity work right here in your own office?”
John Byrne explained. “Surgeons need hospital connections, Steve. They can’t work without a hospital any more than a priest can function without a church. But here’s the catch—most surgical staffs are full up. A newcomer has to win a place for himself. Well, I made my varsity try about a month ago by suggesting to Sister Domenica—she runs the show at St. Joseph’s—that her hospital needed a free varicose-vein clinic, and that John Byrne was the man to run it.”
“He got the job,” said Rita. “Three mornings a week, no money, but plenty of operating. See how a surgeon gets his knife inside the door, Steve?”
Stephen regarded his sister and brother-in-law with new admiration. Yokemates, eager to make the hard, rugged climb together. “You two can’t miss,” he said.
Pill Hill was dark when he came down Dr. John Byrne’s stoop, a few minutes later. The patients had all gone home; the diagnosing and prescribing were over till tomorrow. As Stephen climbed the steep ascent, his mind was filled with cheering thoughts of men and women paired for love and work, fulfilling themselves in daily acts of human goodness and mutual consolation. What though the world be plagued by physical disease and its spiritual counterpart, sin? While people like John and Rita Byrne loved each other, the forces of hell could not prevail against them or the world in which they lived.
The important thing, Stephen saw, was not to be oppressed or deceived by the multiple symptoms of evil, but to search beneath these appearances for the divinely implanted realities of courage, faith, and charity that throbbed in the heart of man.
It was well past eleven P.M. when he entered the parish house in Maiden. A letter and a package were lying on the table in the front hall They were postmarked ROMA and addressed to the Reverend Stephen Fermoyle. He snatched them off the table, bounded up to his room, and read the long-awaited letter from Alfeo Quarenghi.
CARISSIMO STEVE: [the letter began]
Did you think I had entered the order of Sepulto Vivo and taken vows of eternal silence? I would not blame you, dear friend; your Roman correspondent has indeed been remiss. Yet I speak truly; not until this hour of snatched pleasure have I had a free moment to answer your letter, so kindling with news and warmth that it makes a little glow among the dreary tundra of papers on my desk. I envy you, Stephen. All that you tell me about St. Margaret’s and your incomparable Monaghan makes me realize that a priest’s greatest happiness is found in parish labor. Whence, curator of souls, springs my joy at your good fortune, and my longing someday to taste a crumb of that priestly fortune myself. I pray only for a swept room, a small altar, the faces of my people. Deo volente, the day will come.
But it will not be tomorrow. I had hoped, after ten years of teaching (not altogether barren if they helped bear fruit such as you, Stefano), for an assignment to parish work. But war comes, and in the search for men who can pass muster as linguists, I am combed out of pedagogy and pressed into service as a minutante, a kind of upper clerk in the Vatican Secretariat of State. The Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with forty countries. Even in peacetime this calls for an enormous amount of correspondence, but I really can’t describe the avalanche of detail that has fallen upon us since the war began. As a minutante, I spend sixteen hours a day working up the raw material of notes and dispatches to French, German, and English ambassadors. I then hand my scrivenings up to my immediate superior, a diplomatic genius, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli. He gives my clumsy phrases the gloss of diplomacy, then presents them to our overworked Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacobbi, a tireless Titan who hurls Vatican bolts in the name of our Holy Father.
These bolts have, of course, no temporal power, yet they do have an effect in the realm where politics touches upon morals. Let me cite an example. Last week His Holiness protested to General von Falkenhayn that the German treatment of Belgian noncombatants was needlessly cruel. Monsignor Pacelli delivered the note in person to von Falkenhayn, and absorbed the usual amount of Prussian bullying. Finally our Nuncio told von Falkenhayn that if Germany persists in its inhumanity to defenseless women and hungry children, it will forfeit the moral support of the Christian world. A weak argument? It worked! Might not one recast the wisdom of Archimedes: “Give me a moral lever, and I will move the world”?
Stephen remembered a similar lever in the hands of another Italian. A gray battleship, bristling with guns, rising and falling in a North Atlantic swell. What force could oppose its temporal majesty? Then Orselli’s innocent question: “How would it look in your London Times—‘British Warship Fires on Italian Liner’?” That lever had worked, too. Yes, undoubtedly a power existed above and beyond the temporal. If one only dared use it to the full, thought Stephen.
The saddest part of the Vatican’s position [the letter went on] is this: No matter what truth the Holy Father utters, it is distorted and misinterpreted. If he says: “Loving all our children equally, we must by necessity and logic remain neutral when they quarrel” —then the British press abuses him for not condemning Germany! Does he beg for disarmament? He is accused of mouthing pieties! Yet when he offers his very practical and impartial skill as a mediator, he is warned not to meddle in matters that do not concern him. The Holy Father was shocked—stricken is a better word—to learn that the secret treaty between England and Italy (the very treaty which won Italy to the side of the Allies) contains a clause barring the Vatican from any part in peace negotiations. Is it not ironic that the voice whose only plea is Pax should be excluded from the shaping of the peace prescribed by Christ, and longed for by man?
But enough of this dismal strain. In your last letter you asked what progress I was making with my volume of essays. I can report that the Speranza Press has just published it under the title La Scala d’amore. I send you a copy with this letter. What I’ve tried to do in this thoroughly unimportant book is to show the various rungs of mystical experience—some orthodox, others not quite so sanctified—recorded by souls in every age and climate. We Catholics are apt to think of mysticism as our monopoly. But witness the case of E. Swedenborg, or again, the strange experience of your Mormon-founding American, Joseph Smith. Wherein does his vision of the “two glorious personages” who accosted him differ from those of Theresa or Augustine? Don’t answer till you’ve waded through the book, Steve. Then tell me what you think. It will give this mumbling cogitator fresh courage if, far off in a country I have never seen (but someday hope to see), a priestly colleague is mulling over the awkwardly set down conclusions of La Scala d’amore.
So late the hour, so drugged with sleep the world! Soon the first day-shallows of the sun will lap at the turrets of the Leonine Wall, and new clamors of diplomatic and military strife will begin again. Forgive me if I sound weary-hearted. Really I’m not, Steve. Just weary-headed. I shall fall asleep now, trusting as always that our days are in His hands. Good night, dear friend. Write soon and fully to
Yours devotedly in Christ,
ALFEO QUARENGHI
Stephen let his breath escape in an exhalation of delight. By some epistolary sleight, Quarenghi had conveyed his heart and mind to the heart and mind that needed them most. He smoothed out the letter, and started to read it again. “Carissimo Steve … this hour of snatched pleasure … I envy you … a priest’s greatest happiness is found in parish labor. … I pray only for a swept room, a small altar, the faces of my people.”
Pious cliches dispensed for the benefit of the lower orders? On two counts, no. Quarenghi’s patrician soul could distill no untruth. And odd though it seemed, Stephen realized that this distinguished scholardiplomat, destined to glorious preferment in the Church, was somehow being deprived of his birthright as a priest.
Would I change places with him? thought Stephen.
He read the letter three times before unwrapping the package that accompanied it. La Scala d’amore (The Ladder of Love) was an octavo volume of 168 pages, wide-margined and beautifully set in Aldine type. Eagerly Stephen riffled through the pages, snatching a title here, a sentence there. One essay, “The Pears of Augustine,” particularly fascinated him. He read the opening paragraph, translating freely from Quarenghi’s flexible Italian. The essay told of Augustine’s boyish prank—how, with a band of “lewd companions” he pillaged a pear tree in his native village, took great loads of the fruit, and flung it to the hogs. Normal enough for boys in any climate, comments Quarenghi. But thirty years later the saint is still lamenting the theft of those pears. “O Lord, my God, I inquire what in that theft delighted me,” he cries over and over in his Confessions. And now Quarenghi begins unraveling a skein of fine argument. “Augustine’s rapined pear tree and its penitential aftermath cut to the very quick of the saint’s character, and reveal in a blossomy flash the psychic travail of all who climb the ladder of love.”
Emphatically not to be gulped down, thought Steve. He spent that evening and the next reading in Quarenghi’s book. Then late in the third night, he came to a decision.
“I will translate La Scala d’amore into English,” he said aloud and quite suddenly. He had no other motive than the literary challenge of rekindling in his own language the ardent flame of Quarenghi’s thought. He seized a pencil, began translating the title essay, “The Ladder of Love.” To render its precise color and meaning was like trying to pick up globules of quicksilver between thumb and forefinger. At the end of two hours, Stephen had an imperfect page—the beginning of an affectionate labor that went on in his room every night after the work of the day was done.
ON A particularly handsome June afternoon in 1916, Dennis Fermoyle stared open-eyed at the ceiling of the operating room of St. Joseph’s Hospital while Dr. John Byrne excised the ulcered saphenous vein of the motorman’s right leg. The vein had ruptured that morning, and Din had been rushed to St. Joseph’s for an emergency operation. The pain was nothing to the elder Fermoyle. His physical safety was in the hands of an able son-in-law, and his spiritual well-being had long ago been consigned to the care of the Holy Family. Nevertheless, Din had a worry, and it was this worry that he now communicated to his priest-son, standing beside his bed.
“Watch over Marty Timmins,” was Din’s injunction to Stephen. “Like a good boy now, Steve, see that he doesn’t knock down any company nickels.”
Din enjoined in vain. Two days later the heavy hand of Greasy McNabb fell on Marty Timmins’ thin shoulder. “Come along,” said Greasy, with the spotter’s relish at having finally caught his man. “Manager Bailey’s waiting to see you. Like myself, he’s been waiting a long time.”
They clapped Marty in jail on a charge of grand larceny, and fixed his bail at twenty-five hundred dollars. Stephen carried the bad news to Dennis Fermoyle.
“Go down and plead with Bailey,” Din urged his son. “Explain the cause of Marty’s little slip-up and say that I’ll guarantee his behaving when I get back on the job.”
Stephen got a fairly accurate notion of what was in store for him when General Manager R. W. Bailey kept him waiting forty minutes in his anteroom. Mr. Bailey did not rise or greet the young priest by word, sign, or even a grunt when he was finally admitted into the presence. As a freethinker and stanch follower of Ingersoll, Mr. Ralph Waldo Bailey had two ideas about the Romish clergy: (1) maidens were ravished in the confessional by priests; (2) maidens were ravished by priests. Mr. Bailey furthermore resented the fact that Father Fermoyle would take up much valuable time pleading for that sniveling, pint-sized nickel thief, Marty Timmins, who was now languishing without bail in the local dungeon, and could languish there, for all Mr. Bailey cared, until the grand jury met in September.
“I’ve come to ask what can be done in the case of Martin Timmins,” Stephen began.
“Wasting your breath,” snapped Mr. Bailey.
“The facts surrounding this case are worth considering, Mr. Bailey. Marty is an old employee, and this is his first offense.”
“The man’s been knocking down nickels for years,” countered Bailey. “We’ve just caught up with him, that’s all. The company intends to prosecute to the full extent of the law. Nothing you can say or do will get this man off.”
Stephen caught the implacable note of hatred in the manager’s voice. “You’re pretty sure of that, aren’t you, Mr. Bailey?”
“Dead sure,” said Bailey. He slapped some papers on his desk. “And now, sir, I’m a busy man. Good day.”
In the street, Stephen boiled over. “Mr. R. W. Bailey isn’t going to get away with this!” All very fine and indignant—but how begin to euchre the highhanded Mr. Bailey, who held all the cards and Marty, too?
For the first time in his life Stephen felt bewildered by a set of facts. Here was a man in jail: exactly how did one go about getting him out? The ground was unfamiliar; the procedures new and strange.
I need advice, thought Stephen. A lawyer might help. Do I know any lawyers?
Georgie! George Fermoyle, the night-school lawyer who worked by day on the fish pier. George should know something about these matters. Half an hour later Stephen Fermoyle was picking his way among the lobster pots on Long Wharf, looking for his younger brother. He found George, stripped to the waist, repacking and icing a shipment of Maine lobsters. Independent, hard-working George! Another year on Long Wharf, another year of night school, and he would take his bar exams.
“Salve, advocate!” cried Stephen.
“Stuffy!” exclaimed George. “What are you doing down here? Anything wrong with Dad?”
“The old boy’s fine. It’s his side-kick Marty that’s in trouble. I need some legal advice, Gug.” Stephen told of Marty’s dereliction and Manager Bailey’s hard heart. “Now just where do I begin, Counselor?”
George Fermoyle tossed a chicken lobster into a barrel, covered it with a scoopful of cracked ice. “Easy. First you bail your man out—”
“Wait a minute. By canon law, priests aren’t allowed to go bail for anyone.”
“Interesting idea.” The student in George was wondering how that got started. “Then get someone else. Bail commissioners do it for a fee.”
“Fine. Except for twenty-five hundred dollars, we’ve got Marty bailed out. What happens next?”
With judicial detachment, George packed some seaweed into the barrel. “Next, he comes before the grand jury for indictment. And make no mistake, he’ll be indicted all right. Every member of the grand jury probably owns stock in the Boston Streetcar Company.”
Stephen’s spirit was damper than the seaweed in his brother’s hand. “No way to stop the indictment?”
“Tamper with a grand jury? That’s bad, Stuffy.” George tossed in another lobster. “Now the way I’d handle it if it were my case, I’d let the grand jury indict. Then after that august body had expressed its property-holding indignation, I’d work a little psychology on the D.A.”
“Psychology? D.A.?” Stephen was floundering in strange waters.
“Sure. No district attorney likes these public-utility cases. You can see why—big corporation bears down on little runt to get a nickel back. Doesn’t look good.” George went on scooping ice and seaweed. “Whereas if all this were set in a favorable light before a smart prosecutor, he might never bring Marty’s case to trial.” Doubt beset George at this point. “Still, with a guy like Launceford Chalmers pressing the case …”
“Who’s Launceford Chalmers?” asked Stephen.
“A big mogul in the Streetcar Company … a tough man to shave.”
More ice, more lobsters, more seaweed. And Marty still in the toils, unbailed, his case studded with legal quiddities and contingent ifs, ands, and buts. All very chilling.
“So that’s what they call ‘due process of law,’” murmured Steve. “I never realized the ins and outs of it before. Well, thanks for the legal advice, George. Now that I know where we stand, I’ll rustle around for Marty’s bail.”
George Fermoyle’s sea-blue eyes read the concern in his brother’s face. “There’s another way of handling it, Stuff. You could save yourself a lot of wear and tear by mentioning the case to a certain friend of yours.”
“Who?”
“Cornelius J. Deegan.”
“Corny? What can he do about it?”
George started icing another barrel of lobsters. “What couldn’t he do? Next to Number One himself, Corny has more political say-so than anyone in Boston. D.A.’s, mayors, even street-railway lawyers are but clay in his hand.”
“No!”
“Ask anyone. Better yet, ask Homomagnus Deegan himself. Here’s a nickel. There’s a pay station at the end of the wharf.”
In a daze Stephen called Corny’s number. The contractor-Knight himself answered.
“I want to see you, Corny,” said Stephen.
“And what’s to prevent? Come right over, Father.”
CORNY’S HEADQUARTERS in Pemberton Square was a ground-floor layout so accessible to the street that it seemed to Stephen—and indeed was—little more than a vestibule off the sidewalk. The outer office had the look of a public waiting room; a stale brown smell hung on the air, and high brass cuspidors quivered under a steady drumfire from the legmen, bagmen, and camp followers of Cornelius J. Deegan, Knight of St. Sylvester, Boss of Bosses, and contractor with full portfolio to the city of Boston.
There was a momentary cessation of spitting as Stephen entered. Regard for the cloth caused some of the men to reach for the brim of their hats; more could scarcely be expected, since the hats were of the iron-pot type which, once jammed on in the morning, could not be removed till the wearer lay down to sleep at night. Stephen approached a purple-faced, sergeant-at-armish fellow leaning against a door on the further side of the room.
“Is there something I can do for you, Father?” asked the man, getting his suety shoulders respectfully off the door panel.
“Please tell Mr. Deegan that Father Fermoyle is here.”
A business of opening door slightly and thrusting derby through crack reminded Stephen of the quick-change vaudeville act in which the head goes in Bill Sykes and comes out George Washington. But the purple face that went into the crack came out unchanged.
“The boss’ll see you.” He flung open the door a full eighteen inches, and Stephen squeezed through into the presence of Corny Deegan.
The contractor-Knight, sitting comfortably in two chairs, arose as Father Stephen entered. His freckled hod of a hand was out, and his face glowed like a kiln-fresh brick. It glowed with good reason—two good reasons. First, he was seeing Stephen (almost pleasure enough for one day), and second, the city council had just accepted Corny’s $900,000 bid for the paving of Causeway Street with granite cobblestones. “Accepted” was scarcely the word; Corny had snatched the contract bald-headed from a New York paving company that had neglected the little matter of getting a pocket majority in the city council.
News of Din’s operation had already reached Corny. A bonfire of candles lighted by his own hand was blazing at this very moment before the shrine of St. Anthony in the Cathedral; and on a more material level, tins of pipe tobacco, fine cut-plug, and boxes of cigars were making the journey from S. S. Peirce’s humidors to Din’s bedside.
“He’ll have the leap of his old hurling days in that leg when he gets up again,” said Corny reassuringly. “So rub the worried look off your high forehead, lad.”
“It’s not Din that’s worrying me. It’s Marty Timmins.” Briefly Stephen told of Marty’s unbailed plight. “Din said something about the Whiteboys of Hoodie Head marching against the Orangemen.”
“March, they shall,” said Corny. He bellowed the single word “Hector” into a side office about as big as a butler’s pantry, where a pallid hare of a man sat on a high stool, scratching away at a ledger. The man hopped down off the stool and came running as though the beagles were after him.
“Hector, this is Father Fermoyle.” Corny inserted a footnote of explanation: “Hector’s a hard-shell Baptist, Father, but more to the point, he’s the best double-entry bookkeeper in Boston. Double entry, ha-ha … eh, Hector?”
Hector scrunched up his high shoulders in appreciation of a good thing often said. What’s Corny got on this fellow? thought Stephen. Embezzlement at least, the way he hops. Stephen’s speculations were interrupted by a businesslike change in the Knight’s manner.
“Hector, what mortgages have we on hand?”
“Residential, city of Boston and suburbs, seventeen parcels totaling $195,670,” recited Hector. “Business properties, Boston proper, eight parcels amounting to $210,500.”
“Pick me out a nice $5000 residential, top cut,” said Corny.
Hector darted into his office and reappeared with a warranty mortgage in his hand.
“Best bail in the world.” Corny tapped the document as though it were a sovereign cure for all ills. “Ask Joe Faye to step in here.”
Joe Faye turned out to be the suety twin of the doorkeeper. Same iron hat, sliding manner, and blue veins on bulb of nose. A type.
“Joe, there’s a friend of ours—Father Fermoyle’s and mine—lying in the Suffolk County lockup,” said Corny.
“The one we supplied gravel for?” asked Joe Faye, a kind of horror in his voice.
“The same. They’ve trumped up a charge of larceny against him. Marty Timmins is the name. One of our own.” Corny held out the mortgage bond. “Trot down to the clerk of the court and post this bail for the dear man. Find out if he needs any small thing, some groceries, or a pint maybe, to cheer him up when he steps out onto the hot street. And tell him that the Whiteboys said not to worry.”
Joe Faye stowed the bond into the inner breast pocket of his cardigan, buttoned it to his neck, and was off.
The whisking celerity of the business amazed Stephen. “Corny, you’re a deus ex machina, a ‘god from the machine,’ as the Greeks used to say.”
Corny’s hair crackled with pleasure at Stephen’s praise. “In Boston we give it a shorter name, Stevie. The ‘fix.’ Watch me now, while I pin a large farewell bow on the case of Marty vs. the knocked-down nickel.”
Corny unlocked the top drawer of his desk and consulted a small black book, too confidential, apparently, for Hector’s double-entry gaze. “Tackle we have for every fish, Stevie. I’ll bait this hook myself.” He thumbed through his private directory. “Ah, here’s the speckled beauty we’re looking for. …”
The Knight of St. Sylvester popped a black cough drop into his mouth. “Sweetens the pipes,” he explained, reaching for his phone.
“This is Cornelius J. Deegan,” he announced clearly, after getting the number. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Launceford Chalmers.”
Stephen recognized the name, unfamiliar to him an hour ago, as that of the Streetcar Company’s official. A large fish indeed. What kind of hook would Corny be baiting for him now?
“Top of the afternoon to you, Launce.” Corny’s tongue was pivoted in the middle and greased at both ends with butter. “I have news for you, news cheering in nature, I think you’ll say.” Corny let his voice find a confidential level. “The city council has just voted a new tenyear issue of paving bonds, par 100 to yield 7.3. We’re letting a few of our old friends in at 65.” Corny paused to let the good tidings resound. “Write you down for the usual? Double the usual? A pleasure, Launceford.”
Corny grimaced at Stephen, made a hooking motion with his forefinger. “And while I’ve got your ear, Launce … there’s an unfortunate case … my old friend and countryman, Martin Timmins … conductor for twenty years on your Medford run … seems to be in a bit of a jam … I think your Mr. Bailey can tell you the whole story. Mrs. Deegan and myself would take it as a personal favor if the company … Oh, restitution, of course. Thank you, Mr. Chalmers.”
Corny hung up. “Well,” his grin asked, “and what do you think of us now?”
Stephen shook his head in puzzlement and distaste. “Is—is this the way things are done in Boston?”
“It’s the way they’re done the world over, Steve,” said the contractor cheerfully. “Boston, Washington, Rome—anywhere you go.”
The Deegan formula for universal fixery brought a protest from Stephen. “I don’t like it, Corny.”
“What don’t you like?”
Stephen had some trouble stating the precise nature of his scruples. After all, he had come here for the express purpose of getting Marty (an acknowledged thief) out of jail. And now, mission accomplished, he was suffering moral qualms. Why?
“I think what bothers me most”—Stephen tried hard to put his finger on the sore spot—”is the bribe you offered Launceford Chalmers just now.”
“Bribe is too harsh a word, Steve. In politics we call it ‘a little favor.’ Three little favors gets you one big one.” As if to apologize for his thick-skinned realism, Corny spread his hands, palms upward, across the desk. “Callouses are nothing to be proud of, Steve, and they’d be out of place on the hands of a young priest. But in a life of toil and battle, ordinary men sometimes develop them. They’re the mark of Adam, you might say, and I don’t know that they’ll ever disappear.”
Corny wound up his little homily by pulling a fat butter-gold watch from his pocket. “Come along, Father, hop into my new Caddy, and we’ll drive over to see Din the Down-Shouter while he can’t lift hand or foot against us.”
DIN’S LEG healed, but the leap of his old hurling days never came back into it. And when he returned to duty, his beloved No. 3 was no more. They gave him a brand-new, sixteen-wheeled monster, a one-man job fitted up with a mechanical contrivance for taking nickels at the front door. With Marty gone (Corny Deegan gave him a berth as timekeeper—no money to handle, out of temptation’s way), Din’s voice was not the joyous organ it had been. He continued to sing “The False Bride of O’Rourke,” but pianissimo and sadly, as if commenting on the passage of temporal loves. Yet, he still lofted his hat proudly a dozen times a day as he passed the center door of the Immaculate Conception Church, where, on the high altar within, dwelt the Everlasting Presence—Dennis Fermoyle could not tell you how.