Stanislaus Mackey
Hours after the gala, Stanislaus Mackey was waking up in the back seat of his limousine on the opposite, and wrong, side of town. Soon he would be talking to himself. He was not a talented listener, and he was an especially incompetent listener when he talked to himself. Lately he was talking to himself and not listening more and more.
A man who lives in a bubble like him is unaware of many things he might otherwise talk to himself about and not listen to. It would take a while for his staff to list everything about which old Mackey was oblivious. Like those new personal computers and technologies people were talking about. Those smartphones. Molly and steroids. Solar power. As one of his admin assistants once sputtered in disbelief to a coworker, “Get this. He asked me who’s this Jennifer Lawrence person. Who doesn’t know JenLaw? I respectfully suggested he should Google her. He looked shocked, clutching his pearls, like Googling her was some kind of sex act. Man totally lives in a vacuum cleaner.”
Take this instant, for example. The man was unaware that a few feet away somebody was determined Mackey pay a price for how he mistreated innocent people.
—
At least the rain stopped. That turned into a serious storm tonight.
He had never grown comfortable being in the public eye. The jaundiced public eye. He had been a public relations question mark from the first moment he arrived in town, and he had ceased reading what they said about him in newspaper op-eds. He would never have clicked on the websites or blogs blistering him, either, because he didn’t have command of a keyboard or know anything about websites or what a blog was. Nonetheless, his animal instinct told him what adversaries were likely to say, so his meager attention skills came in handy. Not that he would have preferred being cast away on some desert island. Fifty thousand souls were in his pastoral care and submitted to his authority, depending upon how loosely you defined souls and care and submitted and authority. That’s because Stanislaus Mackey was the new bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese and when people spoke to him, he was addressed Excellence. Being addressed Excellence predictably puts a certain twisty spin on one’s self-regard. In his case, it spun him toward gloom, reminding him all over again of shortcomings and failures and his anything but excellence.
He may have been Bishop Mackey, but no member of the flock considered him beloved and nobody for a second ever regarded him as a man of the people, unlike, say, Pope John Paul II, who was a bona fide international rock star. But then Pope Benedict one day would swoop in, God’s Rottweiler, muddying up everything with his big paws. All in all, it was not an ideal time to be Catholic and quite possibly the worst epoch in which to be a bishop.
“Brendan,” he called out to his driver on the other side of the limousine’s partition, “what are we doing, stopping here? Engine trouble, flat tire?”
A minute ago a groggy Mackey opened his eyes, alone in the back. He had enjoyed better wake-ups in his sixty years on earth. Doing as much, he found himself in that curious corner of his personal cosmos, the intersection of Dumpster Dive and Night Crawl, on the outskirts of the sketchy neighborhood of Buzz Kill. He’d been in this place before if not technically, and aspirin was called for even if he didn’t have access to any and, besides, nothing could help now. He always woke up alone but until now never in a car in what seemed to be the middle of the night. Before long, he was talking to himself again and not listening, robotically taking stock. The principal item on his personal inventory might as well have been flashing in neon on the window of a bar and grill: Drunk. His parched mouth tasted like the beach and his teeth grinded with grit, but on the upside he was not quite as intoxicated as when he tumbled semiconsciously into his waiting limousine after the big event. He occupied himself with an unspoken question, but if it had been spoken it would have been along these lines:
How the hell did I get here?
He must have dozed off for a few minutes, and it wasn’t the first time he had asked himself how the hell he got there and not answered the question. Something else was eating away at him. Excellence was suffering a vague, haunting recollection of his miserable, inept performance at the big diocesan fundraiser—and this despite all the donations that somehow rolled in that night. He recalled making the singularly tone-deaf remark to almost every supplicant, kiss-up, and serial social climber whose hand he shook, whose back he slapped, whose cash pledges he shoved in his pocket or lodged in his memory vault. The words that tumbled out of his mouth tonight included:
How much money are you worth?
When are you expecting?
Now that you divorced your wife, when are you going to petition for annulment?
An antisocial hat trick. The answers that people, biting their tongue, wanted to give:
None of your business.
What makes you think I’m having a baby?
Why the hell do you care?
His achievement was typical when it came to occasions like that, when the moneyed set descended upon him in force. Nothing wrong with raising money, as far as he was concerned, or with the people from whom he raised it. It all depended on what their money was to be used for. And he had big plans for the money. And noble goals.
No, really, his were noble goals. Even unpopular Catholic bishops drowning in their cups can occasionally have them.
This has to stop.
He was referring to the drinking, and by extension his record of sloppy performances in public, but the This in This has to stop encompassed more than that, what it was that had to stop. He was fooling nobody. If he didn’t straighten up, it was only a matter of time before…
“You hear me? What are we doing, Brendan?” he said. “Brendan? Brendan!”
Maybe a tow truck was on its way. Damn, he yearned to go home, have a nightcap, get a good night’s sleep. On second thought, the nightcap would be overkill. Tomorrow, more meetings with more lawyers tomorrow. These days, lots of hours with lawyers were blocked out on his calendar. And when not with lawyers, then politicians, or project managers, or architects, or consultants. He never grasped what a consultant did. He doubted anybody had a clue what had been accomplished when their invoices arrived.
“Damn it, Brendan!”
The driver didn’t care that the bishop’s famous temper was flaring. The driver wasn’t even Brendan.
—
Outside the event tonight a couple of dozen placard-carrying protestors shouted at the bishop when he made his studied entrance. The rain seemed to exasperate them and intensify their sense of injured merit and they stood sentry, soaked in indignation. Mackey could hardly miss the signage: STOP SHIELDING PEDOPHILES and SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME and JUSTICE FOR SURVIVORS NOW! He was all too familiar with such insolent public reception. He could appreciate they believed he richly deserved hostility. As he customarily did, he approached them open-armed, determined to be humble, civil, transparent. Then again at that point he’d had only one drink, at most two. He assured them that he was doing all he could, that he understood their justifiable fury. His strategy—which was no strategy—invariably backfired. Tonight a white-haired woman spit on him, a first. He flashed, furious, but restrained himself. He wiped the suit front and crucifix with a handkerchief, which he would throw away as soon as he could, and didn’t offer a word in self-defense.
He turned and came face-to-face with somebody he recognized.
“Hector,” he said.
“Excellence,” Alessandro said.
“You sure you should be here?” Mackey would consult with the attorneys to determine whether or not Hector was breaking the terms of his binding agreement.
“Nowhere else I would rather be.”
“Peace be with you.”
“And with your spirit.”
Mackey walked off. He believed that’s what Jesus would do. Sometimes he wondered if Jesus, a very good Jew, would have become Catholic. Or a Catholic priest. Of one thing he was certain: Jesus would never have allowed himself to be anointed bishop. Too much paperwork. Too many meetings with those consultants. Jesus would never call upon the services of a driver or a limousine or a damned consultant. And He may have miraculously transformed water into wine for that Cana wedding, but He wouldn’t have been sloshed, either.
Some of those malcontents, professional complainers, and bandwagon-jumpers outside the gala were loony tunes, but not all of them, Mackey conceded. If they only had a grasp of nuance, if they only appreciated how difficult everything was. Not that those renegade criminal priests were nuanced in the least. The fact was, the situation was worse than those protestors could have imagined. And if the bishop didn’t know better, if he hadn’t been on the inside of the whole muddled, sordid process, he might be walking the lines himself, holding up his own protest sign.
This might not be saying much, but he’d put his record up against any bishop in the country when it came to accepting responsibility for the Church’s transgressions. Despicable bishops tiptoed around, denied and prevaricated and finessed, and then inserted their pointy mitered heads in the sand. Stanislaus Mackey did nothing of the sort. This in itself was not something to be proud of. He wouldn’t want any critic to misconstrue. There was no room for anybody, particularly the pastoral leader of a diocese, to take any credit whatsoever or assume the mantle of respectability, much less innocence. And he wasn’t pleading for understanding, not for a second. But the truth was the truth: he had done all that a bishop possibly could in the aftermath. He slashed the red tape, he settled claims even if the statute of limitations had kicked in—and even if it wreaked havoc with the diocese’s bottom line, and even if it temporarily hindered the Church’s work with the poor and the needy. There existed no statute of limitations, as far as he was concerned, when it came to doing the right thing. And without fanfare and away from the eyes of the press, he personally sat down with victims—whom he learned chose to call themselves survivors—and he apologized and abjectly beseeched their forgiveness, forgiveness he made clear the Church did not remotely deserve. And he resisted the advice of his inner circle who wanted him to broadcast his contrition. To Mackey’s way of thinking, these survivors had suffered enough and his hand-wringing would amount to cheap public relations.
He admired the survivors’ passion, their willingness to come forward, in some cases many years after the crimes had been perpetrated. He agonized with them. He cooperated with law enforcement. He instructed the bulldoggish diocese lawyers to take the defensive legalistic umbrage down a few notches—and if they wouldn’t they could take a hike. He’d seen firsthand the damage those rogue priests had inflicted upon children who trusted them with their souls, and their bodies. He couldn’t take away the survivors’ pain, but he could acknowledge its reality. He could give them money, too. He could also systematically rid the diocese of the guilty priests—which he did.
In a strange way, his biggest personal challenge lie in managing his own rage, his anger over these reprehensible priests. But fury begets only more fury. Sin, more sin. Hatred, more hatred. How does that help anybody, least of all the victims? Check that. The survivors! These criminal priests would pay the price they deserved to pay. In his darkest hours, he tried to forgive them. In honesty, he mostly failed. A better man would do better, Mackey knew.
He also knew he was a lightning rod for the discontented, such as Hector Alessandro, whose dismissal now seemed, upon further reflection, more justified. Alongside the survivors’ supporters that night gathered a foolhardy group of enraged teachers, riled over the new provisions introduced last-minute into their employment contract, which he had overseen and which they excoriated as constituting nothing less than a Catholic so-called loyalty oath. If they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to sign on the dotted line that they would uphold Catholic doctrine not only in the classroom but also in their private lives. Of course, the teachers coined a new name for Bishop Mackey. Some of their signs derided him as Bishop Joseph McCarthy. Others were less indirect.
STOP WITCH HUNTS ON TEACHERS
It was okay, he could take heat from the teachers, too, because he was doing the right thing, which was never the easiest course to take. That was no damn morality oath. The revised agreement was not essentially changed, he would argue. It clarified what it meant to be a Catholic educator of children. If they wanted to teach in a Catholic school, they were required to live up to Church dogma all the time and everywhere. What could be controversial about affirming the truth? The gay “lifestyle” for him was nothing less than, as he put it on the record, “gravely evil.”
GRAVELY EVIL TEACHERS UNITED!
GRAND INQUISITOR MACKEY
He had a job to do and he was going to do it. He would run the diocese the right way. He wasn’t striving to score points in a popularity contest. His self-confidence and the pure power of his incontestable convictions didn’t help. Nothing helped. Why should the truth start helping now?
Well, as much as he would hate admitting, drinking did help, for a little while. If the situation critically deteriorates, for a little while is long enough, and everything about the diocese’s situation was infinitely worse than bad enough. Not that this mattered to anyone other than himself, but the bishop hadn’t been a serious drinker before he was appointed bishop. Since then he made up for lost time.
—
Stan, you’re a loser.
It was a measure of the depths to which he had descended that hardly anyone after his parents died dared call him Stan, except for Stanislaus Mackey when he was talking to and not listening to himself.
If the bishop had lived another life, in another time, he’d be the guy on the squeaky barstool mumbling at the bartender, who also wasn’t listening and cared less about the mumbler than about the cocktail glasses he had been wiping with a suspiciously soiled towel slung over his shoulder. In another life, Mackey could also be the bartender.
He formed resolutions to completely cease drinking and, when they failed to achieve traction, resolutions to cut back, and when he couldn’t manage that, resolutions to get professional help one day. To get help, to be precise, one day. Resolution consultants—there must be such con artists, no? The hypothetical resolution consultants would tell you one day is a tomorrow that never dawns. When the house is on fire, who says one day I’ll call 911?
Members of the bishop’s inner circle were beginning to whisper, growing more alarmed. Last thing the scandal-ridden diocese needed was yet another controversy. The Chancery staff didn’t use the word drunk to refer to the bishop, they said alcoholic—obviously not to his face. Why such a clinical distinction made a difference was unclear, but it did. To the bishop, the term alcoholic would have amounted to an effort to take everybody off the hook for validating the contempt they felt for somebody who drank the way he did—manically, sportingly, exhaustively, and, all right, religiously. All this goes to explain why his staff secreted away his car keys and assigned him a chauffeur. They found the ideal employee, too. As a teenager, Brendan, the new driver, once stayed at Caring Street House and had since served as handyman and custodian in the diocesan schools.
—
The bishop’s black Town Car was parked in darkness, lights and engine off. The driver shifted to the side on the front seat and drew down the window separating him from the lone passenger in back. They were on a deserted street in the industrial part of town, where no streetlight shone down on the ill-fated proceedings ordained to pass.
“Brendan, damn it. Let’s get the hell out of here. Brendan?”
Tonight’s serious martini intake explains why only now did it dawn that someone who wasn’t his driver was behind the wheel, someone who had pulled the car to the curb on this bleak and desolate street—someone wearing a black ski mask, someone twisting awkwardly from his right shoulder and brandishing a gun in a black-gloved left hand. The bishop achieved instantaneous sobriety. Having a weapon trained on you was not one of the approved twelve steps, but it will sober most people up fast.
“You know,” said the driver, “ever notice how some people look like bugs? Big bulging eyes in their pinheads, spindly arms and legs.”
“Who are you? Where’s Brendan?”
“And some people look like birds, all sharp beak and helium hair.”
“What are you talking about?”
“And others look like dogs, all furry and mouthy and wiggly butts.”
“Why is there a gun in your hand?”
“Like I was saying, when it comes to you, more I think about it, I say you’re a bug.”
“What are you doing, my son?”
“Your son? You’re a sorry excuse for a man, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I am. Who the hell are you?”
The gun was trembling. If it was indeed a gun and not the product of the bishop’s frenzied, boozy fantasy life. Stanislaus Mackey was almost hoping this was yet another phantasmal visitation on the part of the lugubrious drinking denizens of his occasional delirium. Because the only thing worse than having a gun pointed at you was one being held by an unsteady if hallucinated hand. He was listening as he never had before.
“Me? Who the hell do you think I am, Excellence? Let’s say I’m somebody leading you up to the Lord’s gold and bejeweled heavenly throne.”
The ignition motor fired up and the engine turned over.
“Where are you taking me?
“Buckle up, Bishop Mackey.”
Through his teeth the bishop sucked in all the air he could. It sounded like a fuse had been lit.