LEAVING THE CHURCH

“I HAVE never been as calm in my life,” said Father Trelew. “No, not ever.” He was speaking to Helen, his housekeeper, but she was not much in his mind, even though she had been with him for several years—he could not remember exactly how many. He looked at the sky. “Soon I will be on the plane to New York, and then to Rome.”

“Have you been to Rome before, Father?”

“Yes, I have, in 1925 when Mussolini was in power. You know what I think of him, don’t you, don’t you, Helen.”

“I most certainly do.”

It was hot where they stood, but his clothes were clean and white and his thick hair was white, so he had no discomfort. There was a black spot of oil on the drive. A shimmering desert stretched beyond—his parish. He could smell the hot sand and see waves of heat rising from it, distorting the mountains.

The driver put the bags in the car, and after bidding good-bye to Helen and shaking her hand Father Trelew got in the back and clicked the door shut. The car was air-conditioned. It was taking him to Phoenix for the plane. He was going to Vatican II.

It was years since he had left his parish. In New York before his parents died, they had called him sometimes “The Indian Priest,” but he never heard them, they thought. They were ashamed of him. They wanted him to be an archbishop. Instead he spoke to deep-brown faces in a dark church with no lighting, while the sand blew outside. He could see it through the window sometimes—perfectly white against the blue sky and billowing like foam on the ocean, and yet it was cool and dry. His mother and father thought he would come back from Arizona as if from some foreign campaign, distinguished and likely to advance. The bishops would appreciate his sacrifice. He knew he was not coming back, but he never told his parents. They died in the Depression, sure that at the end of the Depression he would be called back from Arizona.

If he thought about being an archbishop, he clenched his fist and banged it on the table. When he had too much to drink, he thought wild thoughts about seeing God, about golden staircases and whitened plumes rising from the wide floor of Heaven, about places where it was so bright you couldn’t see anything at all. He had such prideful dreams only after wine or whiskey, so he drank rarely.

He arrived in Rome early in the morning. He felt young, for he had slept on the plane and Rome seemed to him not to have changed since 1925, when he was thirty and had been there for two months as a student. Now there were few carriages, but the streets were the same. In Piazza Navona, the old colors still stood; the fountains had been going for almost forty years since he first saw them. He wondered if they ever stopped, for even a moment. Perhaps each time the city died—after the March, or when the Germans were there—the fountains stopped. He thought to ask an old man, but realized that no one man would have watched constantly, and besides, he thought, I am an old man and could tell no one if ever in Arizona the mountains turned pure white or the sky the color of gold, because I have not watched them the whole time. At least, the fountains appear never to stop; at least, I have seen them while they were going.

His budget for this trip was delightfully large. The Vatican paid much of it, his diocese another great part, and his savings the rest. He thought he would live for this short time in a fashion unlike that of his small frame house on the reservation. There the wind came in a steady stream through an unputtied crack of the window. In the morning gold light glinted off his porcelain shaving basin. At these times there was only silence and cold. After he shaved, he opened the window, and after he opened the window he dressed and prayed—but not in Rome. He would pray, yes, but in Rome he would pray in his own good time. There would be no kneeling on hard wooden floors, no fasting, and no cold.

He checked in at the Grand Hotel, which was full of priests and extremely elegant—marble, rich Oriental rugs, chandeliers, and in his room French doors with a view of a piazza and its enormous fountain shooting a hundred feet upward. As the weeks passed, he habitually ate his breakfast on the balcony. With high winds, he felt slight droplets of spray from the fountain. His bed was large, with a satin quilt. As always when he stayed in hotels—even in Phoenix—he wondered what people had made love in the bed, and then laughed good-naturedly at himself. He had learned to live with that a long time ago.

 

FATHER TRELEW’S role at the Council was not very exciting; indeed, the Council itself was not very exciting. He was just a priest. From where he sat near the entrance of St. Peter’s the Pope was only a white spot and the Dove of the Holy Ghost a needlepoint of light—a ray. When he removed his glasses, the sea of cardinals before the Pope was a mass of red, and when they stood their motion made them look like red waves. They were seated on both sides of the aisle. It was as if Moses had spread them back into the galleries. But whom would Father Trelew tell? Helen? Helen thought only of her child, who broke windows and stayed alone in the hills at night even when it was cold. Perhaps Father Wohlen from Los Angeles, who was Father Trelew’s friend simply because they were both at the Grand Hotel; Father Wohlen had an idea that anyone from west of the Mississippi was somehow a loving brother. But Father Trelew did not like Father Wohlen, for he ate too much and had an unconvincing laugh. There was no one to tell. “There is no one to tell,” he said. “Maybe I will sketch it.” He had not sketched since he had last been in Rome. He was in a drawing class then. He was mainly interested in architectural form; Rome offered him that, while the desert did not. He had tried to paint the Indians and the things they did, but there was not much left of them by that time, and he suspected not much left of him—or, rather, of his talent to draw.

Did he dare begin again? “I must,” he said, the blood coursing to his face. The hair at his temples was silver. When his face lit up, he looked like giltwork. I am the only priest in the world, he thought, who looks like a church. He would have to buy a pad and charcoal.

One day, he left the Council early and began to walk back to his hotel. He passed through Piazza Navona, and somewhere off it on a side street he found an art store. “Could I have,” he began but found that he was not able to speak the words. “Could I have...” and then, like a madman, he rushed from the shop.

He was disturbed by this, knowing precisely what it was. He tried not to think, flooding his mind with words that formed in silence on his lips, like the cries of men in dreams of sinking ships. “Flood it with good cheer. Fill it up, fill it up, for life is short.” If he could somehow get supplies, he could sit by the fountain and sketch.

What is the power of a priest’s life? It is that he need not fear. “Father Wohlen,” he said next day, too nervously, “do you think that on the way back from the Cathedral tomorrow you could stop in an art shop and get me a large pad and some charcoal?” He gasped for breath. “Because I must stay late for chapel vespers. I don’t mean to trouble you...”

“No trouble, no trouble,” said Father Wohlen. “I’ll do it. You just give me the money, tell me where to go, and I’ll do it.”

Father Trelew did not go to vespers; he did not even go to the Council that day. It was an important day, too. He stayed in his room, and it seemed to him that God was working wonders with his body. If he had been a proud man, he might have presumed that he was undergoing Divine revelation, that he was receiving saintly visions. Only once in his life, only once, had the rest of his body responded to his mind and made him tremble. No, it was the body responding to the heart which caused trembling.

He sat on the edge of his bed, with his glasses off, and the blur of outside sunlight made him feel the enlivened world. “Oh my God, my dear God,” he prayed, “I am not having visions, am I?” He said this to a shaft of sunlight in his room at his feet, and the golden dust danced in center beam.

When Father Wohlen gave him his materials, Father Wohlen thought Trelew was sick. Something was wrong with the man.

Father Trelew ran his hands over the pad, took the charcoal out of its box, and felt the smooth rectangular blocks. The cool of the blocks reminded him of the desert at evening, their blackness of the night, but the night was full of white stars. That was an advantage he would not have had as an archbishop—seeing the Milky Way stretched as a shimmering band over the great dome of his little life. The power of a priest’s life is that he is unafraid. All is concelebration. “I am beginning to realize this,” said Father Trelew. “That all is concelebration—all of the city, all of the stars. The Church is for me. A man need not fear his loneliness. He need not fear his loneliness, for God is strong and all is concelebration. The power of a priest’s life is that he need not fear.”

The next day he was up very early. He read most of La Stampa. A bus took him to the Vatican.

It would not be right for him to sketch in the Cathedral. His idea was to study a particular scene and commit it to memory for drawing. Back in Arizona, he would paint it. Somehow he got very dose to the Pope. Though it was thrilling to see him, it was not the Pope he chose to study but the under-secretaries close to the Papal Throne, seated at a table next to the balustrade of the Confessio.

Another priest from America was determined to guide him. “That is Bishop Wilhelm Kempf of Limburg,” he said, “and Archbishop Villot of Lyons, Archbishop Krol of Philadelphia, and the archbishop of Madrid—I do not know his name.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Father Trelew to the other priest, who wanted to say more, and then to escape he stepped much closer to the scene than he would ordinarily have dared. He was the foremost of observers; between him and the undersecretaries was only a slight and terrible plain of marble. The Pope was not far. I am so near greatness, he thought. Princes! He studied the scene. He had always had a good architectural memory. He was fine on detail, but here he was impressed by grandeur, which was glowing, descript, calling out to any man.

Entrenched in the blackness of distant high walls, the red table of the under-secretaries glowed scarlet; ringed with gold and tasseled, its colors moved in front of the eyes. The undersecretaries, in pure white with upswinging conical hats of flattened design, did not rest upon their red ribbons banded about them in curves and sweeps like water falling. They worked at papers, and they were in different positions, so that the tall conical hats pointed together in a smooth indication, like the crest of a wave, to the Pope. And beyond them was a swirling black column edged with a rotating blade of gold. It was so bright it made Father Trelew shudder. He stood for a good half hour, intent upon the secretaries. His gaze was powerful. He was having the time of his life, for he knew he would soon begin to draw.

One of the Papal secretaries noticed Father Trelew when he first came, and then again after half an hour. He thought perhaps he was wanted and crossed the forbidden marble at a glide. His robes were such that his feet did not seem to move. “Is there anything I can do for you, Father?” he said curiously.

Father Trelew, who had tried and failed to escape when he saw the bishop coming, could not answer. His steadfastness had provoked the great man, but he could not answer. His mouth hung open.

“Are you all right?” the bishop asked. He laughed pleasantly and touched Father Trelew, who felt again like sinking ships, and whose mouth was still open while the bishop returned to his table, silent and smiling.

Father Trelew managed to close his mouth as he walked back into the crowd. Everyone looked at him as if he were in some way connected to the Pope. He might have enjoyed that had he been able to answer the bishop, but he was expressionless and numb. And yet he did not panic. He wanted to get back to the hotel to draw, and then the next day to Piazza Navona, with his pad, to sketch the central fountain. He could use his material freely there. He was marvelously excited. He quickly forgot the incident with the bishop, bent down to tie his shoe, and strode like a master through St. Peter’s to home in the hotel. He did not think, Oh, I am such a little man, until he arrived in his room and could not draw what he had remembered.

 

FATHER TRELEW had many times told weeping Indian women that sleep helped the troubled. He had many times watched tears travel down a face like wind-cut brown granite—sparkling black eyes in the church’s dimness—and thought how deeply the woman would sleep. Always the next day he saw her going about her business, which is precisely what he did the next day.

Late in the afternoon, he found himself in Piazza Navona. He thought to draw the fountain and the buildings vanishing in perspective, to test his draftsmanship. He planned to have dinner at one of the restaurants there so popular with Roman families (fairly well-to-do, he assumed) and clerics, and perhaps find an acquaintance with whom to chat as it got dark.

He took a seat at one of the smaller fountains and put his legs up on the stone wall. In his freshly pressed white suit he looked as if he might have been a missionary from the Congo or Asia. “Perhaps they think I am a jungle priest,” he said happily. “But I am not a jungle priest, I am a desert priest—and how many of those are there? Very few in the Sahara, none, as far as I know, in the Gobi, and none in the Nafud. That leaves me, and a few others. I should find out who they are, write to them, perhaps start a journal.”

He was a good priest, and did his job well. He thought of photographers he had seen on the reservation, who paid people small sums to be photographed and recorded their humiliation and discomfort only to pass it off to the world as the pathos of humankind. In the operations of caring for his flock, Father Trelew tried to avoid the photographers’ fallacy. Only rarely did tragedy face them. There were complaints and sorrows, but not much passionate loss. He had to accept that. It was a small population, and not a battlefield—he was truly needed once in a great while, but he refused to buy the illusion that when they came to him aching from life in the world he was doing great service. In that way, when he did great service he felt he could vault over mountains. In other words, he was a lean man.

He thought, My dreams can be dreamed in forty-five minutes, and then I become either tired or empty and stop dreaming—again, leanness. In the weakening sun he began to sketch Piazza Navona, and his hand moved rapidly, surprising him with what it had remembered. He included cars and carriages, and the horses, drawn well. After several hours, when it was dark, he closed his pad and put a little piece of charcoal into the box, which he then put in his pocket. Putting the box in his pocket was like the sheriff putting his gun back in his holster after a shoot-out. When he swung his legs back to the ground it was as if they had boots and spurs. He had drawn the Piazza, and it was therefore his.

With dinner, he ordered a bottle of white wine. He was not used to it; it was a mistake, he told himself halfway through, but drank it anyway. Then everything began to fall into place as he watched the lights of Rome in the heat of September and wandered about like a young drunk.

He was a good-natured man, had always been a good-natured man. His father, who was ambitious for him to the point of hating him, said once, “Michael, what have you got, what the hell have you got?” Father Trelew had wanted to reply that he was a good man, could draw, and loved God. But he wept instead, and only later, half weeping, did he say to his mother, “Tell him, by my honor, that I am just a man,” and left for the train to the West.

He was good-looking. He had a wonderful face. Even at his age, and he was almost seventy, women were not unmoved by his glance. When he was younger they had frequently fallen in love with him, especially the troubled ones, who always fall for priests of one sort or another. There had been one in Rome in 1925, when he was thirty and had rebuffed already a good many trouble-seekers and those testing their power. A priest is familiar with that. He can handle that. It is the guileless ones, the ones who really love, who make things difficult.

 

IN 1925, the library of the old Accademia was farmed with sea-green reader’s lamps, which glowed in the day. The walls were so old one might have been sorry for them had they not been painted with angels, gardens, and bursting suns.

Father Trelew was not merely appreciative but ecstatic. He often stayed in the library all day and well into the evening. He was writing a paper on Oderisi da Gubbio, a miniaturist of the thirteenth century. When he left the library he saw only the colors he had seen all day in illuminated manuscripts. It seemed to him that he sailed home without a word, simply gliding and brimming.

One was assigned a seat, and results were not always pleasing. Harvard undergraduates dying for the sunburnt girl in purple who sometimes wore black were placed across the room from her facing the other way into a bunch of nuns. Father Trelew could hardly breathe for two weeks; he was the only man at a table for Radcliffe girls. One of them fell in love with him, just by looking.

“What is your name ... Father?” she asked, since there was no one else at the table.

“Michael Trelew,” he said, frightenedly.

“And where are you from?”

“From. From. I’m from Ossining, New York. Perhaps you have heard of us—I mean it, as it is the home of Sing Sing Prison. Where are you from?”

“Forty-nine East Eighty-sixth Street,” she said, waiting.

His fear was beginning to bore him, and in anger he wanted to be reckless, if only not to be dull. But he could only stare at her. She was thin, and blond. He could not decide if she looked like the Madonna. She was very brown and her dress was white.

She said, and with her green eyes, “Can we eat together tonight?” It was for her a difficult request, and she blushed. She felt like what she thought of popular music—brash but finally very beautiful. She was embarrassed by her own directness, expectant, and altogether very open and tender.

Father Trelew was taken. Yet he answered as if from a prepared hollowness, “I have no money. I am a priest...” He hesitated, because he was no longer interested in what he was saying. Instead, visions of neutral Switzerland flashed at him and he entertained the profoundly impossible notion of running away with this girl.

The weeks that followed were very sad for both of them. They were both gaining, but they were also losing, and perhaps what united them so strongly at first was that they felt they knew what the other was relinquishing. And then they had that particular camaraderie which exists among schoolboys, soldiers, and outlaws.

It did not take long before they were speeding to Switzerland in a touring car he had rented with the remainder of his grant for study in Rome. He told her the speedometers thin red needle reminded him of a hummingbird’s tongue. They stopped at a dam in a valley of the Alps. Across the spillway was an automobile bridge that led nowhere, and fog from the rushing water cascaded in a convection arch over the bridge, over the two of them.

The time together in Rome had made the priest and the girl heady. She was young, and he not so young but it was new to him. When he removed his collar he sighed in relief and walked out into the warm sun where she was waiting in the open car in a hat and heavy coat ready to head north. There was singing all the way. In one inn, Father Trelew, having had too much wine, told the porter that he was a priest. The porter raised his arms as if to say, “That is very serious, but so what?”

They stayed in Switzerland for more than a month. He was going to give up the Church, when she left him. There was no comfort. Everything had failed. He had not written his paper and could show nothing for his summer in Italy. The bishops at home would have his head for that. There would be nothing he could say; he could see himself gaping at them.

It would not be the first time he had found himself mute. The first was the time he and the girl had been unable to resolve an argument and it grew wider and wider, until she was on a platform waiting for a train and nothing he could say made anything better. He felt untrained for that sort of thing. The argument had started while they were drawing by a lake, and he threw his picture to the ground. He was angry. She had too many plans for him. She had him in the White House when he was not yet even just a defrocked priest. He threw his picture on the ground because he realized that she was young and nothing could be done about it. When the train came, she was crying, for she did love him, and perhaps because she was crying and she was young she struck a blow she had not meant to strike. She was not even Catholic but Episcopalian. She said through the steam and rain which soaked them both and was warm and very much like their tears—she said on that hot misty August day so uncommon for Switzerland, “And you are such a little man.” It was then that his mouth dropped open and he could say nothing. She cried and cried, and as the train left he ran after it halfheartedly with his mouth still open and tears streaming down his cheeks and the steam from the gaskets making his suit smell as if it had been just pressed.

He looked at the high white mountains, and his smallness choked him. He boarded the next train to Rome after waiting in the station for seventeen hours. He did not eat, nor did he return for his belongings. It stayed misty and warm until he left.

They sent him to Arizona. They would have thrown him out, but they needed someone there. He was perfect for the job. He could have left on his own. They offered him that, but he was afraid. The archbishop made him afraid. Offices made him afraid. Even cathedrals now made him afraid.

The only thing that calmed him was the desert and its silent, dry heat. In the desert he started to seek God as he had not ever sought Him. In some ways he stayed weak, and in others he became very strong.

He watched the blue mountains and the billowing sand, which was like the foam on the ocean when he came home from Italy, but cool and dry.

 

A MAN from the desert is not a dry man, but he keeps what is wet inside him, like a cactus, so that visitors to him wonder how in such a world he can be alive and have enough. Father Trelew had not been born in the desert, but his forty years there taught him much. Although there will be some who might deny that a man may be taught such a thing, it is a fact that Father Trelew was calm, quiet, and gracious during his first heart attack. It occurred while he dined with several other American priests near the hotel in a restaurant they had all frequented during the first weeks of the Council, and then abandoned, then remembered and rushed to, as Father Trelew had done with his drawing. He ate prosciutto and melon, scaloppine alia zingara, and drank gaseous mineral water and cold white wine. He was contemplating dessert and had his wineglass raised to his lips when he felt the first pain. It seemed as if the entire restaurant had been jolted by an earthquake, and the electricity somehow savagely unleashed to attack the assembled priests. At first he thought there had been an earthquake. He kept his glass to his lips, afraid to move. He would put it down, slowly. He would go without dessert, excuse himself, and walk to see a doctor. He did not want to trouble his companions, because they were younger and he felt they did not like him; he had said hardly a thing in the course of the meal while they burned with the politics of Council.

But he could not move his arm to put his glass down. It was there for a full minute and no one noticed until he fell to the ground, for he could not stand the second wave. He fell to the ground still with the glass in his hand, apologizing and begging the pardon of the assembled priests, who were younger and who had ignored him.

When he awakened in his hospital room, he was grateful that the walls were not white. Rome is a yellow color, an old saffron-powdered sun color which seems always rising upward. His room was a comforting beige, the color of a lightly done roll in the oven.

He was happy to be alive and would not move his head until later, when a nun told him it was safe. He saw by turning his eyes the tops of pine trees and green hills in the not so far distance. He judged himself to be on a mountaintop. “Splendid,” he said. “I’m on a mountaintop.” He could hear birds and the clicking of crutches in the garden. After a few weeks he was up and about. He could see most of Rome from the garden and some of Rome came up to meet him, although that part of Rome which traveled up the hillside to him was not people but houses and streets.

When he had been a priest in Arizona and visited parishioners in the hospital, he thought because of its bustle and crowded corridors that a hospital was a social place. He had often thought of going to a hospital on some physical excuse to cure his loneliness, but in Rome (and he assumed that hospitals were spiritually the same everywhere) he discovered himself more alone than he had ever been. The face of his nurse was constantly changing, and there were eight doctors who cared for him in varying degree, none with particular intensity. He was alone during the day, and in the night. He did not dare draw. He was afraid to look in the mirror. No one paid him any attention, because he was old.

There was a man dying of some unknown disease, a violinist in a symphony orchestra in the north of Italy. He looked as if he were made of old loops and patches. He smelled of death. It came from inside him—from his bowels, from his throat, even from his legs and fingers. Father Trelew had smelled the same smell in Arizona when some boys cut open a deer they had shot in the mountains several days before. Every day the violinist sat in the garden and played. He was particularly fond of the Andante of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and he played it again and again. The officials allowed it because it helped those who recovered recover, those who were dying to die, and those in the middle of the road to pass the time. Father Trelew wanted to talk to the man whose music was so beautiful; he had never before heard any Prokofiev. When he went to him in the garden, he found the old man unable to speak. But the patterns of the music were so strongly ingrained, and his hands so powerful, that he played, he played, until the day of his death—not always correctly, often out of time, but always with much passion.

Father Trelew was not afraid of dying. He was afraid of what he might be before he died. When he first realized that he was dying he stayed in his chair—an old man in a chair—and tried frantically to remember all the parts of his life. He thought that when a man dies a man reviews what he has seen. He expected memories to jolt his frame, and visions to seek him and turn him, and shower the room with light.

But it just didn’t happen as he expected, which he might have expected but did not. He became whimsical, prided himself suddenly on his sense of humor, and found the truth in sayings. He would say, “Love makes the world go round,” and laugh. He was generally good-natured. Every four hours a nurse, never the same one, came to ask him if he had moved his bowels. He thought this was hilarious.

“Father Trelew.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Have you moved your bowels in the last four hours?”

“Moved them where?” he said, and burst out laughing.

He was happy for no particular reason, and for that reason he adjudged himself particularly happy. One would have thought he was getting better. He said, “I want to have a good time on earth while I can,” and spent the days in the garden, in the sun, watching flowers and delighting in the smell of rich grass, which was green as if on a riverbank. At night, he looked from his window at Rome, and because he remembered his memories so well he did not think of them, or need to. One look at Rome from a moderate distance was to see his life, but it was past and he had no need for that.

A week after the death of the violinist who could not speak, Father Trelew died. The bishops in New York sent a militant priest who had been embarrassing them to fill his place in Arizona. He died in late afternoon. It had been raining. He knew from years before in his student days that there is a special name for raindrops in Rome because they are often so big, but he could not remember it. He was admiring the light coming off the wet buildings, and he was calm, listening to the wash of the rain. The bushes in the garden glistened with drops, and when someone went by and hit them the water flew off like water off a vibrating dog. Streams of warm water coursed down the gray stone streets of the mountain—or hill—of the hospital. All across Rome flocks of pigeons were seeking the rays of sun, which came from holes in the clouds, and they flew in great masses, looking for light that quickly vanished with new configurations of the dark sky. Father Trelew listened to the work of the rain, to the wash of the rain, and to a car going through a puddle. The water is warm, the blood of the earth. He was a man resting for the afternoon in his chair. Warm breezes thick with invisible mist moved his white gauze curtains, and he faced the wind. He turned his head to it and breathed it in.

Then it seemed again as if there were an earthquake. For an instant he imagined that lightning had hit him, for his vision had flashed white at first, but then he knew, and when the bolts kept on coming he knew he was dying and he became very excited.

He tried to think of the girl he had once loved—of her face, of the heat and their well-being—but he could not do it. He had not enough time. He realized that dying takes away time, and that is all, and he was dying when fear gripped him and his mouth dropped open in its customary manner. He had planned to die with a vision, but there was no vision. The rain had stopped, and the water ceased to flow as rapidly inside the gutters. He noticed that. The walls seemed to him a very dark olive green instead of tan. His mouth hung open, but he raised himself in his chair of a sudden and said, “Damn you, shut, damn it!” and it did shut and he was so surprised that he smiled and his eyes came alive. It seemed to him that he was a new man, that he was no longer a priest, no longer Michael Trelew. He was only sorry that they would bury him as Michael Trelew, Priest. He had gone out of those doors.

He lived that way for the short span of time between the lighting of his eyes and the entrance of a priest who was rushing in the door to administer last rites. Father Trelew saw the priest through the corner of his eye, but by the time he would have had full view he was dead. The last thing he thought was how beautiful the summer rain in Rome—and he died, and he died with great courage.