FLYING LOW across the Archdiocese of Boston early in February, 1917 the Angel of the Lord might have remarked the following not-unrelated events.
ALDEN P. KIMBALL, president of the Maiden Trust Company, and a fine old cravatted specimen of the McKinley school, rose to greet the maker of the ninety-day note that lay on his desk. The note, in the amount of $7500, was due tomorrow; the signature on the note was that of William J. Monaghan, and the stated purpose of the loan was to pay for the plumbing of the new parochial school. Banker Kimball half expected Pastor Monaghan to ask for a renewal, and was fully prepared to accommodate him. (“With that signature, gentlemen,” he pointed out to his directors, “how can we go wrong?”) He was not surprised, however, when Dollar Bill tendered him a perfectly good check for $7500 drawn on the Old Colony Trust Company of Boston.
“Done is done,” said A. P. Kimball, returning the note to its maker. “The only question, Father, is—how do you do it? The man before you—Haley, Hawley?—what was his name?—wasn’t quite up to it.”
Dollar Bill tucked the canceled note into his wallet. “The name was Halley—Edward Everett Halley,” he said distinctly, as if unwilling to slur over a precious syllable of that name.
“Ah, yes … E. E. Halley. His signature didn’t mean much in this shop.”
“St. Francis’ signature wouldn’t have meant much, either,” grunted Monaghan. With a that’s-neither-here-nor-there wave of his hand, he came down to cases. “I’ve a bit of a favor to ask, Mr. Kimball. Next Monday we dedicate the Cheverus School. His Eminence Cardinal Glennon will be the guest of honor, and it’s my hope that some of our local personages will, ah—ornament the platform.” Dollar Bill laid his blue eyes on the president as a carpenter lays his spirit level on a joist. “Will you represent the banking fraternity, Mr. Kimball?”
A. P. Kimball was on a bit of a hook. Father Monaghan was a good customer, but several of the Maiden Trust Company’s directors didn’t quite approve of parochial education. True, it took a load off the public-school tax (and that was desirable)—but then again, these R. C.’s were coming might-ty fast. Too darn fast, if you asked Mr. Kimball. He tugged at his cravat.
With no design in the world other than to take A. P. Kimball off an embarrassing hook, Pastor Monaghan said casually: “I suppose you’ve heard that His Eminence is making large deposits of diocesan funds in some of the better-grade suburban banks?” Dollar Bill had no need to add that one hand washes the other. But at the dedication of the new parochial school, Banker Kimball was on the platform to greet His Eminence. They seemed to get on together. Anyway, $40,000 from an entirely new source was deposited in the Maiden Trust Company a week after the Cheverus School opened its doors.
LEW DAY sat in his sacristy cubbyhole trying to gather courage for the thing he must now do. Lew’s job as sacristan was over; henceforth his duties would be performed by others. With the completion of the new parochial school, a community of nuns had come to St. Margaret’s; they would teach in the school, and, as the sweetest part of their prerogative, take charge of the altar. Monaghan had broken the news a month ago. This was the last day of grace. Lew must go.
Lew began packing his few belongings: spools of colored thread, embroidery scissors, some assorted needles, and various remnants of material left over from the repairing of priestly vestments. Scarcely an armful altogether, yet that armful embraced everything that had kept Lew Day alive since his rejection from the seminary. An old red chasuble, too shabby for repairing, hung from a hook; Lew folded it reverently, placed it in the suitcase. “Clothe others, Lord, in shining garments,” he murmured, “but for Lew Day, only shreds and patches.”
A bit of metal polish remained in a can. How use it most fittingly? Lew went to the cabinet where the sacred vessels were kept, and removed the chalice. Returning to his high stool, he spread the last of his metal polish over the golden vessel, and rubbed it with a worn piece of chamois until the chalice gleamed like a king’s cup.
Occasionally he paused as if listening for footsteps outside his door. If only Father Fermoyle would walk in with supporting courage and a touch of heart-strengthening love! But Father Fermoyle was away, making a spiritual retreat with the Cistercians; he would be meditating in his cell now, or joining others at Compline. Lew Day stopped listening with his ears for Father Fermoyle’s footfall. In his heart he had stopped listening long ago.
The metal polish was all gone now; no brighter glow would ever be rubbed into the vessel’s golden cheek. Like a child trying not to cry, Lew sat for a long time with the chalice in his hand. Twilight was wrapping the sacristy in violet gauze when he carried the sacred goblet back to the cabinet. This final service completed, Lew stood at the bottom stair of the altar in the manner of a priest about to commence Mass.
“Introibo ad altare Dei,” he murmured. “I will approach the altar of God.”
It was dark when Lew stole out of the church, carrying all he owned with him on his one-way journey. Next morning they found him hanging in the coalbin of his mother’s rooming house, attired in the vestments worn by a priest while celebrating Mass. The vestments were old, shabby, and red (the hue of martyrs), and they had been terribly slashed by small, sharp embroidery scissors held by rejected, self-loathing hands.
BURNING with mystical devotion and tuberculosis, Ellen Fermoyle was carried up the steps of 47 Woodlawn Avenue on a stretcher. The mother superior of her order had made a wise and humane dispensation in Ellen’s case. “To our beloved novice and spiritual sister, Humilia Theresa, now in the last extremity of illness, we grant permission to return to the home of her earthly parents.” No surer death warrant could have been written; its date, stamped on the flaxen parchment of Ellen’s body, was short.
Dennis Fermoyle took one fiercely proprietary look at his daughter, and determined to tear up the contract between her and death. Single-handed Din was powerless. But connections he had. The best. He decided to use them shamelessly.
“Celia,” he said to his wife, “our plea must be lifted to the Virgin herself—then handed up, wet with her tears, to Him who cannot refuse His Mother anything she asks in the name of love.”
Kneeling together in their bedroom, they stormed heaven with the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Din led off; Celia responded. Their voices echoed through the house.
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Christ hear us
Christ graciously hear us
They beseeched the Virgin most prudent, venerable, and renowned; they pleaded with Mary, Queen of Angels, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs; they begged Mary—Mystical Rose, Morning Star, Tower of Ivory, Health of the Sick, and Comforter of the Afflicted—to intercede for their child Ellen at the throne of Her Son.
The Virgin did not intercede in vain. Ellen hung on, sank, burned, sank once more, and hung on again while Din’s preposterous plea and Celia’s unflagging antiphon rang through the house:
Mirror of Justice,
Pray for us
Cause of our joy,
Pray for us
Singular Vessel of Devotion,
Pray for us
Mystical Rose,
Pray for us
The Litany, repeated every night—supported by the medical skill of Dr. John Byrne and Celia’s heroic nursing—began to justify Din’s celestial connections. At the end of February, Ellen was still alive. Death’s chattel mortgage had been torn up, dissolved, abrogated, and spat upon by Dennis Fermoyle.
Stephen, bringing his sister the spiritual comfort of the Eucharist, marveled at the flaxen stem that had refused to wither in the fires of tuberculosis. An unbelievable victory. At what point, he wondered, did Ellen’s spirit make its unconquerable stand against the awful batteries of disease and death? And what had supported her in the battle? Only to hear Din’s voice ringing through the house, and one knew the answer. Din might call it faith, and faith indeed it was. But Stephen felt that love was also having its way here—a love so God-partaking in its authority, so steely terrible in its Father-resolve—that neither flesh, nor hell, nor death could prevail against it.
Lacking such love, Lew Day had killed himself. Possessing it, Ellen Fermoyle could not die.
Yet, as if undecided about which sphere she inhabited—the world of mystical dream or fleshly reality—Ellen developed strange symptoms of somnambulism. She lived, but became a sleepwalker. Once Celia found her kneeling before the statuette of the Holy Family in the living room.
“Ellen dear, come back to bed,” said Celia softly.
“Yes, Mother. But let me venerate the three of us before I go.”
“What three, darling?”
“Stephen, me, and Father. See, Father carries him so lamblike, Stephen, I mean. But his other arm supports me, too.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect us,” said Celia Fermoyle, chilled with fear at the very names she uttered.
THE KETTLEDRUMS of war were really thundering now. Every day brought a new crisis: an American merchantman spurlos versenkt, a larger loan to Britain, a more agonized plea from France. All Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy had failed to shackle the U-boat; fresh atrocities and galling ultimatums incensed the American people. Events stood in a narrow place when the President read his fateful message to Congress on April 2, 1917.
Stephen heard the news as he came out of the sacristy into the bricked areaway between the church and parish house. Aloysius Quinn, the waddling youth who delivered the Globe, thrust the paper into Steve’s hand and was off again without touching the visor of his cap. Father Steve was about to call Aloysius back and give him a brief lecture on manners when his eye fell on the streamer headline: WILSON ASKS CONGRESS FOR WAR. Transfixed, Stephen read the President’s message:
The world must be made safe for democracy … right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy … for the rights and liberties of small nations, for universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations.
Stephen paced up and down the bricked areaway, studying the periods of the noble stylist whose idealism had set the tone of American war-thinking. Moving though the message was (and beautifully timed to coincide with the peal of public opinion), Stephen saw that it lacked the one element which alone could bring peace and safety to the world. That element? Recognition of God’s primacy in the affairs of men. Nowhere was that primacy mentioned. Democracy, the rights of small nations, peace, safety, and freedom—all good and desirable in themselves—were merely parts of a vaster whole which had somehow escaped the notice of President and people. Stephen Fermoyle was neither a cynic nor a pessimist, but he shook his head with foreboding of disaster yet to come.
He entered the house, folded the Globe in the special way that Bill Monaghan liked it folded, and wedged it between the doorknob and jamb of the pastor’s door. Then he went into his own room and looked up a passage in his breviary:
Come, behold the works of the Lord … He maketh wars to cease; unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
Four days later, the American nation was at war.
MILITARY ENGINES began to grind out the materials and personnel of war; the newly discovered art of propaganda became a bellows that fanned America’s temper to martial heat. Four-minute men, editorial writers, cartoonists, and song pluggers transformed the war into a crusade. To insure adequate marchers in the crusade, a compulsory draft became operative on June 5, 1917. Almost ten million Americans registered, and the mass trek to training camps began.
Bernie Fermoyle’s flat feet kept him out of combat duty, but his honey-boy tenor got him employment as a camp entertainer. George Fermoyle didn’t wait to be drafted. He went into one of the first overseas detachments and got his second lieutenancy at once. Stephen waved him off at a Commonwealth Pier debarkation to the mingled tunes of “Washington Post March” and “Over There.”
The single greatest surprise was Paul Ireton’s volunteering as a chaplain. He knocked at Stephen’s door late one night and announced quite simply, “I’m going away with the Twenty-sixth Division tomorrow, Steve. May I come in and say good-by?”
“Come in, Paul. Take my chair.” Stephen sat on the bed and waited for his friend to open up. Paul Ireton was a man you didn’t catechize; he either disclosed the springs of his action, or he didn’t. Usually the latter. But tonight his reserve was broken by a deeply charged impulse to talk.
“Quick-change Ireton, they’ll be calling me,” he began, “out of the cassock and into the tunic. Different uniform, but same old discipline. ‘Right by squads … forward, march!’ I’ll catch on quickly, don’t you think?”
“No doubt of it.” (What’s he so bitter about? Steve wondered.) “If you can think up some deathless phrase like ‘Fire when ready, Gridley,’ you may go down in history as the ‘Cast-Iron Chaplain.’” Steve tried to keep it light. “What rank are they giving you?”
“Captain.” Paul Ireton’s false zip fell away. “I suppose you wonder why I’m going?”
“Other than patriotism, I can’t think of any reason a thirty-nine-year-old priest should be dashing off to the wars.”
“ ‘Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country,’ as Horace says. But that’s not my real reason for going, Steve. You came nearer it when you mentioned my age. In a few months I’ll be forty. You can’t imagine what it feels like to be pushing forty—and still without a parish of one’s own.”
Father Ireton must have remembered his earlier strictures on the subject of priestly ambition, for he burst out, “It’s not a big church that I’m after, Steve. I’d gladly take the meanest ark in the diocese, sleep on the ground beside it, if I could only call it mine.”
“I understand, Paul. It’s the Jacob in you, craving a flock of his own. But here in St. Margaret’s the flock happens to belong to another Biblical character named Monaghan.”
“And what a grip he keeps on his shepherd’s staff! He’ll be pastor here for another thirty years.” Ireton rubbed his blue-black chin ruefully. “Let’s see—that would make me his assistant till I’m seventy.”
“Will marching off to war speed things up any?”
Paul Ireton had evidently asked himself that very question; he laid down his answer like a well-considered card. “Maybe it sounds calculating, Steve, but I figure that after the war there’ll be a big shake-up in this diocese. It’s got to come. The present pastors are holding on to their parishes like baronial fiefs. They’re getting too—too proprietary. It’s my hunch that the Cardinal is just waiting for the right moment to split the old parishes in half, and give the younger men a chance to build new churches.”
This passion for building! Stephen had yet to feel it, but sooner or later every priest was consumed—as Paul Ireton was now—by the need to build a church.
“If ever a man deserved the opportunity to put up a church, it’s you, Paul. And if I were Number One, I’d stick a pin in the toughest spot on the diocesan map and bellow: ‘Build it there, Father.’” They both laughed at Stephen’s fantasy. “Wait and trust, Paul. When the flag-waving is all over, your day will come.”
Paul Ireton put out a hard-palmed hand. “Good-by, Steve. You’ll pray for me?”
“In all my orisons.”
Four hands were clasped now, around, above, and below each other in the wordless supporting embrace that close friends often use in parting.
PAUL IRETON’S going away left an empty place in St. Margaret’s—and in Stephen’s heart. Thrown together oftener now with Frank Lyons, Stephen discovered that Milky, despite a pallid complexion and fear of rain, was quite up to carrying his full share of parish burdens. Though Father Lyons was not (as Monaghan put it) “the discoverer of dynamite,” he was zealous and hard-working in the discharge of his priestly office. There hung about him, however, a certain air of immaturity that caused Stephen to withhold the final measure of confidence and affection.
Other than music, Father Frank Lyons had few internal resources. The only book he ever read was his breviary. Ideas of more than parochial scope terrified his inexperienced soul. He spent most of his free evenings visiting the homes of a select group of parishioners, where he made himself welcome by his willingness to play the piano and be a fourth at whist. It was all innocent enough, though Bill Monaghan might have been somewhat disedified if he could have heard his curate splashing about sentimentally on the best parlor uprights of the parish.
Milky kept begging Steve to join him in his forays among the whist-playing nobility. Busy with translating Quarenghi, Steve cut him off several times. “I don’t play whist well enough, Milky. Let me off this time, will you?”
Milky would take the rebuff as though he expected it, and Stephen would turn once more to his task of translating The Ladder of Love. The deeper he plunged into the work, the more he discovered that it was not a mere literary exercise nor a theological treatise. Instead, it was a celebration of love, a new Convivio investigating the mysterious relationship between body and soul. Which dominated which? Where in man’s clayey tabernacle did the soul reside, and was it master or tenant in the house? Quarenghi, mystic and realist, sang the triumphs and limitations of life as men actually lived it. Clear and warm, the stream of his thought glided between banks of flesh and spirit, touching both affectionately in the passage.
Perfect love, Quarenghi said, was that divine infusion which inclined men to cherish God for His own sake—not as a source of help, or reward, or propitiation, but as an infinite good in itself. Such was the mystical love of Bonaventura, Theresa, and Bernard. But Quarenghi knew also that other kinds of love existed; that human hearts hungered, pitiful hands reached out, and voices pleaded for the mutual consolation that the children of earth are commanded to show each other.
“Yet this consolation,” wrote Quarenghi, “sweet though it be, is but a human accident of love, and not to be compared with Love itself. As neither the color nor the perfume of a rose is the Veritable Rose, but merely suggests the perfect flower, so the mortal aspects of love serve only to remind us of Love’s immortal splendor.”
Stephen was meditating one June evening on Quarenghi’s definition of love, when Milky Lyons popped into his room, waving a pair of theater tickets like a conductor’s baton. Theater tickets were enough of a rarity in Stephen’s life to warrant a decent curiosity.
“Where’d you get them?” he asked.
“Luck of the Irish,” exclaimed Milky. “I just dropped in at The Maiden News with a sodality announcement, and Leo McKinnon, the city editor, asked me if I could use a couple passes for tomorrow night.”
“You are in luck. What’s playing?”
“A revival of Victor Herbert’s The Only Girl. Gorgeous melodies.” Milky started to hum “When You’re Away, Dear,” the hit song of the show, accompanying himself on an imaginary violin. “Listen” …
When you’re away, dear,
How weary the lonesome hours!
Sunshine seems gray, dear!
The fragrance has left the flow’rs!
Stephen smiled leniently at the sentimental lyrics … springes to catch woodcocks. “Whom are you taking?”
Milky dropped his airy fiddle and pointed the tickets straight at Stephen. “Who but you, Father Fermoyle?”
“N-nuh.” Stephen rumpled the manuscript on his desk. “I’ve got my work cut out for me here, Milky. This Italian prose is music enough for me. Try someone else.”
Frank Lyons let his temper flare. “Now look, Steve,” he protested, “you just can’t keep on refusing civil bids from a pal. You’ll either come with me tomorrow night or—I’ll tear up these damn tickets right in front of you.” Milky held them aloft in the manner of a man about to keep his word. “Are you coming?”
Steve wished that Milky Lyons would stop using the word “pal,” and stop waving invitations at him. Still, he hadn’t been inside a theater since his seminary days … it might be fun. …
“Don’t be sacrilegious, Milky. I’ll come.”
Next evening two expectant curates were sitting in row C, center aisle, when the orchestra struck into the lush overture of The Only Girl. Settling back in anticipation of the delightful sights and sounds ahead, Stephen forgot that certain eyebrows in the audience were raised askance at the Roman collars in the third row. Steve’s conscience was clear. He had his rector’s permission, and was in the decent company of a fellow priest. If a grown man couldn’t withstand the impact of some oversweet music! …
Milky, however, was in a lyric heaven. Things musical affected him much as a plumber’s torch affects solder. At the end of the first act he was an unprotected, fluxing rod of sensation. Milky had never seen a musical comedy before; the standard libretto of lovers, romantically plighted and tragically parted, struck him with the raw force of novelty. But the book was merely the first rung on the ladder of Father Frank’s delight. The many-throated orchestra, now breathing tenderly with muted reeds, now swelling into bosomy yearning from the strings, transported him into a world of emotion never previously entered by the pallid curate. The frou-frou costumes and bare shoulders of Andrea Feme, the prima donna—a really handsome girl—added the final intoxicating elements to Father Frank’s glass of experience.
During the intermissions, Stephen noticed Milky’s agitation, but chose not to comment on it. Even an inexperienced curate had a right to his private state of feeling. Father Frank would snap out of it in the open air. As for Steve himself, he felt a lulling overhang when the play was over. The music had seeped into his nerves, and visual images of the handsome prima donna moved delightfully through his mind. Refreshed, he stepped out onto Boylston Street as though returning from a long vacation in some never-never land of fantasy.
“Feel like walking home?” he asked Milky.
“Five miles?”
“Do us both good. Let’s hit across the Common.”
Milky had no objections. Something was on his mind, and a long intimate walk with Stephen would give him a chance to blow off some emotional steam. The two struck out across Boston Common; its summery foliage dimmed the city lights and spread a turfy enchantment across the grass. Stephen felt wonderfully elated.
“What a performance!” he exclaimed. Romance sprayed by a full orchestra in music sugary but hummable. “ ‘When you’re away, dear, how weary the lonesome hours,’ da-da dum de-de—how does the rest of it go, Frank?”
No answer from Milky. At the bottom of his adolescent soul he was framing an overwhelming question. Walking beside Stephen on this summer night, he wanted desperately to bring the conversation around to the important half of creation that had always baffled and bothered him. Girls! Milky made a timid opening move.
“What did you think of Andrea Feme?” he asked.
“Eye-filling. A positive beauty. What else could I think?”
They walked under three elms in silence. Time for another try. “I wonder what they’re like, Steve.”
“What who’s like?”
The risk of offending Stephen was great, but Milky took it. “Girls,” he said compulsively.
Stephen caught the green-sick odor, unpleasing in any grown man. He felt sorry for Milky, ashamed of himself for his cavalier comment on Andrea Feme. Pity, and refusal to develop the theme further, were in his reply.
“There’s quite a literature on the subject, Frank. Experts from Ovid to Dante have described women in all moods and tenses.”
A park lamp obscured by an elm trunk threw a corona of light over Milky’s tormented face. “That’s not what I mean, Steve. Books don’t tell me what I want to know. But hearing that girl sing tonight, looking up at her bare shoulders”—an ague shook him—“believe it or not, Steve, that’s the most I’ve ever seen of a woman—filled me with a, a—misery that I never felt before.” Frank’s voice was charged with loneliness and longing. “Why should I feel this way, Steve?”
Surprised by his own question, Frank Lyons stood still; tears, blue under the park lamp, streamed down his cheeks. Until this moment he had slipped through nearly thirty years of life, scarcely aware that women were in the world. Taken young by the seminary, he had been shielded from the polar currents flowing between the sexes. Milky’s experience with women was simply nonexistent; he had never danced, played tennis, or swung in a hammock with a girl. He had never touched or kissed one. His only emotional release, other than a genuine devotion to the priesthood, was music. And now, suddenly, the power and mystery that stream from women had struck at him, and the hurt—shafted with Andrea Feme’s voice—was twisting in his nervous system.
“Do you feel the way I do, Steve?”
“No,” said Stephen honestly.
Stephen Fermoyle was neither afraid nor ignorant of women. This evening he had looked with enjoyment upon Andrea Feme and seen her exactly as she was—a delightful creature gifted with feminine graces of voice and body. Happy for the world that such women existed! And happier yet for Stephen Fermoyle that their existence did not seriously disturb his greater love.
But here was Frank Lyons tangling himself into emotional knots about the newly discovered wondrousness of women. Steve recognized Milky’s problem as one of those personal, never-quite-to-be-resolved matters that every man (priest or no) must solve for himself. The belated ferment now bubbling in Frank would doubtless make him a maturer person, and therefore a better priest. Yet right now, crossing Boston Common, Milky needed a bit of emergency treatment; Steve decided that the treatment of choice was to let his colleague talk freely till the throbbing pressure of his curiosity was reduced.
In another setting, Stephen’s decision might have been wise. But around them on the darkened Common the night air reeked with aphrodisiacs of turf and summer. Human forms were stretched on the grass; lovers embraced on every bench. Stephen himself began to feel the earthy contagion of the place.
“Let’s get out of here, Frank.”
He struck westward, setting a rapid pace toward the Charlesway. His new plan was to walk Frank Lyons into sheer breathlessness, and for fifteen minutes Steve set such a clip that Milky was tagging half a length behind in a desperate attempt to keep up. Now they were stepping it out heel-and-toe, following the car tracks across the Mystic Marshes. This was familiar terrain to Steve; he felt secure here. Over these steel tracks, glistening under carbon arc lights, his father had driven Trolley No. 3 (curious, that Triune number) for a quarter of a century. As a boy, Stephen had often stood beside him at the controls; now his thoughts followed Din as an obedient obbligato follows a soloist. Memories of Din the Down-Shouter, Din the table-pounder, the no-sayer, the Lawgiver, the God-surrogate, filled his mind. Lighter, more laughing memories flocked, too. Din’s love of song and prayer, his old-fashioned wit and fondness for puns and wordplays came to mind. Steve remembered his father’s favorite conundrum, a kecksy-whinsy straight out of Dublin. He tried it out on Milky:
“What opera reminds you of a trolley line?”
“Give up,” gasped Milky.
“Rose of Castile.” Stephen laughed aloud, more in remembrance of Din than at Milky’s puzzlement. “Rows of cast steel—get it?”
The pun was doubly unfortunate because it brought up both the name of a woman and a musical performance. Milky snatched at it eagerly to reopen the conversation. Anything would have served; itched by devils of pruriency, he dug his fingernails into the theme once more.
“Don’t you think, Steve, that priests should have—more firsthand experience of women?”
“Why should they?”
“Well, in order to understand them better.”
“A sophist’s argument. You might as well say that a physician must have heart trouble himself before he can diagnose or treat it in others.”
The road narrowed as they crossed a drawbridge over the Mystic. “Let’s lean on the rail a minute,” said Milky. “I’m too out of breath to think.”
They leaned over the iron railing of the drawbridge, gazed down at the black tide slipping out to sea. A marshy smell, oldest of aphrodisiacs, rose from the brackish flatlands, assailing the membranes of their nostrils with associations more ancient than man. Frank Lyons struggled in vain against the suggestions of that primal odor. Then the inevitable question. “What are women really like, Steve?”
The point-blank anguish in the question saved it from being a piece of outrageous impertinence.
“I could give you half a dozen answers to that question, Milky. But none of them would have any bearing on the matter that’s really troubling you.”
“Why not? If a pal won’t tell me anything about women, how am I ever going to know about them?”
The hateful word “pal” irritated Stephen. Annoyance edged his voice. “Are you sure it’s women you want to know about, Frank? Aren’t you itching with curiosity about something else?”
“What else? What else could it be?”
Straight from Quarenghi’s pages, the answer came. “Love,” said Stephen, “and the need to love.”
Milky was more puzzled than before. “But aren’t love and women the same thing?”
“Not necessarily. Women are the usual objects of love—wonderful and essential objects to most men. Women have the power of reminding ordinary men that love exists. That’s as God intended it to be. But as priests, Frank, we are moved by another power—not the physical accidents of love, but Love itself.”
They were walking again now. Frank Lyons, struggling to keep pace with Steve’s longer strides, was silent. Inside his narrow rib cage, his lungs and heart were gradually stretching to unaccustomed fullness as Stephen went on:
“You said back there, Milky, that poets couldn’t tell you what you wanted to know about women. You’re wrong. Poets and artists have the remarkable power of changing love from flesh into idea. El Greco does it in paint; Dante in poetry—yes, and whoever wrote the Litany of the Virgin was flaming with love when he invented those glorious names for her: House of Gold, Morning Star, Mystical Rose. …”
“Tower of Ivory, Singular Vessel of Devotion,” added Milky, realizing for the first time how beautiful the names were.
“The artist is always part saint, part proselytizer for the ideal. In the Paradiso, Dante’s love for Beatrice is consummated, not in sweaty grapplings such as we saw tonight on the Common, but in a blinding vision of light. In that vision Beatrice appears to him as a petal of the Sempiternal Rose. And Dante, who had loved her and longed for her all his life, cries out:
By virtue of love’s power
From servitude to freedom thou hast drawn me.
Preserve in me thy pure magnificence,
So that my spirit, cleansed of all desire,
May, thanks to thee, be loosened from my body.
The difficulties of coming back to earth, of refraining from comment that would sound priggish or patronizing, were not lost on Stephen. He saw the dangers of descending into preachment and parable, but the fisherman’s net placed in his hands at ordination (or at birth) had already closed around Frank Lyons. Steve drew him in without a struggle.
“Is not this the ideal to which we are both dedicated, Frank? Tonight you were reminded of it, if not for the first time, then more powerfully than ever before, by sensual beauty and music. No man is immune to such reminders. Count yourself lucky to have felt them this night. But remember, Frank, that these are the fleshly accidents of love, and not the Love which is our special study and pursuit.”
Around a bend of the tracks, the lights of the Medford carbarn glinted. Bells clanged. “If we run, we’ll catch the last trolley to Maiden Square,” said Steve. They caught the moving car, swung aboard pantingly. Frank Lyons fell onto the cushion, mopped his forehead, and smiled •weakly at his companion.
“The long-walk part of the treatment was fine,” he said.
“Wait till you try the cold shower,” grinned Steve.
They had a tall orange phosphate, double strength, at Morgan’s Drugstore, and reached the parish house just as the clock on Monaghan’s mantelpiece was striking twelve. At the top of the creaky stairs, Milky held out a frail hand.
“Thanks, Steve, for helping me over a spot.” There was nothing mawkish about his gratitude.
Alone in his room, Stephen stripped off his clothes, showered, and sat by the open window of his room to relax and cool off. But now the mixed tensions of the evening began to put in their delayed claim. The spiritual tourniquet, tightly applied for Frank’s benefit, was slowly released; a mortal tide flowed back into Stephen’s limbs and organs, bringing unbearable pain. Andrea Feme’s wonderful shoulders and seductive voice, the sweethearts sportive on the grass of the Common, the lofty (perhaps too lofty) discourse on Love—all these began to tumble and churn in Stephen’s blood stream. A persistent fugue, the theme song from The Only Girl, whirled through his brain:
When you’re away, dear,
How weary the lonesome hours!
How lonely, indeed, the uncompanioned hours of a priest’s life!—hours that most men solaced with common love. All very well to fix one’s gaze upon a petal of the Veritable Rose, but meanwhile, what of the summery earth night and the flowers of here and now?
Sunshine seems gray, dear!
The fragrance has left the flow’rs!
What flowers? Elbow on sill, Stephen gazed out upon Main Street; there, in full bloom under dreary arc lights, he saw a gray stretch of car tracks. Rows of cast steel. Unperfumed flowers of duty and obligation!
Over the municipal gas tank climbed the pale profile of a new moon. Stephen remembered that moon climbing from another part of the heavens, gazing at another part of the earth. A fête de bal in the gardens of the Conte Falerni, a Roman nobleman. Ghislana, his wife, herself a noble beauty. Stephen remembered her gardenia-fleshed shoulders, bare against green chiffon. He had walked barely thirty yards with her down a formal garden path fringed with ilex. What was he then? A young cleric in minor orders confiding to an older woman (two years older, maybe) his hopes and dreams. She had listened …
Ever I hear you in seeming,
Whispering soft love words to me …
She had looked at him, and her eyes had filled Stephen with knowledge of an unsayable loneliness.
A thirty-yard walk. An answered look. No more. But now in his celllike room, images of Ghislana Falerni, the only woman who had ever disturbed Stephen’s priestly ideal of love, wove through the melodies of The Only Girl.
Stephen lay down to sleep. The melodies became a dream. Not a dream of platonic conversings, but of Ghislana Falerni moving toward him unshod across the grass.
Ah, if I knew ’twere but dreaming
Ne’er to be!
From this happy-companioned sleep, Stephen Fermoyle was awakened by the wheels of the five A.M. trolley rattling across the tracks beneath his window.