CHAPTER TWO

The news that Edward Courance West’s younger son had been ordained in the priesthood after service in the Korean war had made a large forty-eight-hour splash in the papers. Walter even cooperated to keep the comment strident because he hoped it would flush his father out, but West remained silent and invisible. Then, to get out of the spotlight, he called on Dan to use his influence, and Walt was whisked out of sight to become pastor of a tiny parish in the back country of New Mexico, to work with a congregation of Mescalero Indians. He and his flock got along fine. Walt was a good priest and because he was rich, he provided, as a good shepherd should—a new hospital, community tools, a roof for the school. He was happier than he had ever been. People were calling upon him for love and service. He expanded and fulfilled himself.

Then, without warning, five months after he had been installed, his father began to write long letters to him; intimate, fervent, embarassing letters that repeated over and over how much it meant that his son had taken holy orders, then had expanded that mission of his life into beatitudes of meaning for Edward West’s mother and Edward West’s wife, who were then in heaven glorying in the presence of God, rejoicing with Edward West in the knowledge that Walt was allowing all of them to serve him through a devout son. Walt was elated all through the first three letters, but even they were fairly morbid stuff. Had Walt and his father lived normally together through even a part of their lives, Walt might have considered discussing the letters with the family doctor, but as it was, this great legend of America had finally and formally acknowledged that he was Walt’s father, and the young man was inundated, almost drowned by his gratitude for this. By the time the fourth letter arrived he was receiving a series of direct orders about which there could be no question but of obedience. Mr. West ordered Walt to pray for his immortal soul. Very soon the letters specified the combinations of litanies that were required. The litanies became so complicated that Walt was sure that his father had called upon the hundreds of obligations among bishops, mothers superior, cardinals, the entire curia (including the Pope), for obscure, long, wearying and obfuscating forms of prayers. Finally Walt found that he had become a walking prayer wheel within a numbing wall of confusing words and entreaties and supplications for the salvation of the soul of his earthly father. By his seventh month in the little church beyond Fort Stanton he was devoting three hours to praying each morning and four hours each night, in addition to saying extra daily Masses for his father’s salvation. The church was no longer a church for the Mescaleros. It belonged to a congregation of one, whom he had never seen.

As the brutalizing demands for more and more complicated prayers poured upon Walt, his father would compromise him further by donations for the reservation through the Department of Indian Affairs, then by bestowing scholarships upon the young people (which were made so easily available that the number of Walt’s flock was halved and the labor force of the community seriously threatened as the young people went off to find the world, temporarily subsidized). But the greatest bribe of encumbered money was required to be spent for baroque stations of the cross, shipped from Italy, and fantastically huge, painted statues of the Virgin with bright blue glass eyes, shipped from Cuba. Throughout the constant redecoration of the tiny, remote, country church—gold leaf on the ceilings, marbleization of the pews and the floors, gold-plating of the altar rails—the Indian congregation conveyed to Walt their clear impression that no continued hard work would be necessary by them, that their priest’s historically exalted father was prepared to endow them with everything from the cradle to the grave; and Walt’s purpose as pastor was effectively destroyed. In the fourteenth month after he had arrived in the parish Walt suffered a complete nervous collapse and had to be hospitalized in an institution above Denver for more than three months. He never returned to the parish or to the priesthood or to any religious service of any church.

Later, in Paris, he told Mayra, “My father has developed the tremendous power of controlling people from a great distance. He can’t be accused of cruelty because he is too far away to be really aware of what he is doing. But what he did to me, and must do to others, was the ultimate in refined cruelty. He pressed upon my need for him to take me to him as his beloved son until I had prayed myself out of whatever faith I had éver had. But as I prayed I gradually saw something that enabled me to understand him. I saw that if he really did believe that my mother and his mother had this direct access to God in heaven, then he could not have believed so desperately that he needed my prayers for his salvation. If he had loved his wife, if he had loved his mother, and if they had loved him, then he should have had the faith that they would intercede for him. And as I prayed I remembered popes and princes of the church and bishops and monsignori who had clustered around his money. I remembered the cities of religious buildings he had caused to be built. I remembered that he was such a great benefactor of the church and of individual arms of the church that armies of priests and nuns and lay brothers throughout the world must have been instructed to send up millions upon millions of prayerful pleas, supervised prayers and Masses for the salvation of his soul. And yet, despite all of that tugging at the sleeves of the robes of God, he demanded seven hours of hopelessly complicated prayers from me each day—from me, the son he despised. So I saw that he must have done something unalterably evil and that he must have a scalding reason for fearing damnation throughout eternity. He must have sinned beyond all sinners and he must dread the everlasting fires of his most Catholic hell.”