Prince of Peace (15 page)

Catholics are schooled to make much of conscience from an early age, although even our notion of it as the one faculty that sets the individual apart from the community derives from Luther. We learn at first to treat conscience like a domesticated animal, a house pet always ready to bark a warning but also slightly underfoot and often damned inconvenient. But there comes a time when conscience turns on us, clawing, and we are perhaps more shocked when that happens than our neighbors who never regarded conscience as a friend. That shock, of course, serves the Church's purpose, for likely as not we seek refuge from the attack in the Sacraments, and for a time the ritual of Confession rescues us, renewing the very world and reestablishing our cozy place in it. But eventually even the Sacrament of Penance falls short of what we need, and that crisp joy at being part of a total system that works—an answer for every question, a word of absolution for every sin—begins to fade. Some of us begin our serious drinking then: "Booze ain't my problem, Father. It's my solution." And some seek new shoulders or bosoms on which to lay their heads: "No one's ever really understood roe, darling, until you." And some rededicate themselves to the old ways. They continue to confess, but as an act no longer of renewal, but of nostalgia. Catholicism is the progression of conscience experienced first as childhood chum, then as irascible boss, then as the invincible enemy, then as the familiar adversary who loses to us now and again, and finally as the old acquaintance rarely brought to mind.

I knew already that Michael was not going to be like the rest of us, accommodators, arrangers, moral amnesiacs. His conscience was no leprechaun on his shoulder or prick at the base of his spine; no fog of guilt rolling in after drink or sex or a particularly snide crack about the Jews. Conscience defined his capacity for grappling directly with life itself, including but not limited to what was flawed about it. Saint Thomas says that we are drawn instinctively toward the Good, like plants to light, and it was that trait, more than a dark moralism, though he had streaks of that too, that set Michael apart. At a certain point, later in his life for a brief moment, he became the compass rose for America herself because he could make the right thing known as the only thing.

Even as a kid in Korea he made his moves like the natural he was. He had the moral equivalent to the acute physical coordination that made him an exceptional athlete. Grace; he was a man of grace. It was impossible not to follow him—"Go, Michael, go!"—whether on a fast break toward the basket or, despite all one's inhibitions, into an act of civil disobedience. But that came later.

Once in a heated argument I demanded to know how he could be so cocksure as to what was right and what was wrong. He said, "I'm sure because I breathe." Yes, his conscience was like his breath or the circulation of his blood. Despite what it cost him and others who were influenced by it, nothing could ever impede its steady rhythmic insistence. At various times he would be ignored—he was dismissed once by the exquisitely condescending
New York Times
as "a man of good conscience but bad judgment"—and even condemned. But for some of us the effect of his example was permanent. A compass rose? Perhaps he was more like Polaris itself. We understood what I sensed inchoately at the Cloisters that day. I glimpsed his determined struggle not to justify what he'd been part of or to excuse it or to condemn it even, but simply to shape it into the great point of reference—his own Polaris—by which he would steer for the rest of his life. Conscience? That cauldron into which he poured his considerable knowledge of killing and torture and despair and loneliness. Conscience? It overwhelmed every other faculty of his: intelligence, memory and feeling. It stripped him of his ability to moderate, as I learned both happily and not so happily, either his rage or his love. Conscience? We knew that Michael Maguire did not have a conscience. A conscience had him.

It was the book of course, the small volume of tissue pages, that rooted him. At first I took his feat of memorization as mere memorization, the mind's equivalent of his fifteen hundred pushups every day. But it was far more than that. Over the two and a half years, he had copied the Gospel line for line, in Paul's phrase, on the fleshy tablets of his heart. As meaning is present in the word, so that book became present in him. It provided margins within which war and death and deprivation and the destruction of his own innocence could all be faced and, finally, used. It was an instance of what had happened to Israel herself when all at once, within a generation of Moses, its Book occupied, like an army occupies terrain, the center of her awareness. From then on every political, religious, aesthetic and personal judgment was submitted to what-was-written. Naturally writing implies the writer whom Michael was as reluctant as Israel to name.

It was a long time before he spoke to me of his crisis in Korea as a religious conversion—who'd have thought a Catholic could be converted? I assumed at first the aura I sensed that day in the Cloisters was an effect of the piped-in Gregorian chant or the medieval art. But it wasn't. As I followed him into the Gothic Chapel I realized the aura I was aware of came from him. I sensed for the first time the presence in him to which he rarely referred but to which, to my knowledge save once, he habitually and absolutely deferred.

There was no sanctuary lamp in that chapel and instinctively I registered the absence of the Blessed Sacrament. So despite the magnificent windows and the marble high altar below the barrel-vaulted ceiling and the statues of the saints, the chamber seemed sterile to me. Despite my sophistication I'd have still preferred the BVM side altar at Good Shepherd, holy card art and all.

I drew close to Michael, who was standing between the laid-out tomb-effigies of a knight and a lady, the one encased in armor and the other reposed with hands folded on a great pair of breasts. But he was ignoring the breasts and the effigies. "Something eerie," he'd said.

At that moment, profiled against a small arched window with clear glass,
he
seemed eerie. A fucking saint? My old buddy? It was bad enough he was a hero.

My mind fled the thought. My eyes went to the window and out to the grassy slope of the promontory of Fort Tryon Park. Maybe Michael would see it as a mountain in Korea now, or as a hill in Galilee. But I didn't. From the south side of that peak one could look out on the most seductive city in the world. As teenagers Michael and I, like other rakes of Inwood, had brought girls up there. Furtively, without swagger, we'd coaxed them into bushes, and we considered ourselves wild as pagans when we pushed our tongues against the gates of their teeth and pressed the heels of our hands against their wire-mesh bras. The truth was that our inborn inhibitions were near infinite, yet made worse by the looming Cloisters. We knew it was a museum, but it looked like a tower from which nuns were watching, if not God.

It seemed to me that Michael was still in the grip of those inhibitions, as it seemed to me that I was free of them. That freedom was what I'd gone to Greenwich Village to obtain. Three and a half years of the life at NYU had confirmed what I'd gleaned from the fierce denials of the priests and nuns at Good Shepherd—that sex is all. Though it would have mortified me to admit it, my sexual experience in the Village was episodic and unsatisfactory, but the illusion of my liberation was in place. I had an image of myself as one who knew what was what between the sheets. It was an image I would lose, of course; having discovered that sex is all, one discovers later that all is chaos. But at the time I considered myself an initiate, and that was enough to make me feel like a man.

I was more a man in that regard, I thought suddenly, than the famous Michael Maguire. Hell, he wasn't a hero or even a saint. He was just a virgin. What Michael needed was to get laid.

He was staring at a gray tomb-slab attached to the wall of the chapel just there. I could discern on it the scratched outline of a monk—the cowl, the tonsure, the steeple of his hands; the smug posture.

"Look at that," he said. "It's eerie."

I read the Latin inscription.
"Hie pacet venerand Pater Michel."

"Here lies the venerable Father Michael."

"S
OMEBODY
I've never forgotten or forgiven myself for," Michael said to me many years later, "is Mary Ellen Divine. Do you remember her?"

I did vaguely, but I didn't answer him. He was in a confessing mood and I wanted to hear his story. I didn't want to short-circuit it with one of my cynical cracks. We'd been discussing an article of mine called "Sex and the Single God" in which I'd suggested that priestly celibacy was not only an aberration but a practical heresy since it implicitly denied the essentially sexual dynamic at work between the Persons of the Trinity. What claptrap! And I knew it at the time. I insist now that I was being at least partially ironic, although also, I admit, I'd allowed myself to think for a while that it mattered both whether priests got laid with permission or not and whether the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were real folks or just names we put on
Ipsum Esse.
I was happily married then, or thought so, and in the first throes of paternal bliss, and was inclined to reify both my family as the ultimate symbol of the tri-une God and fucking—"intercourse," we called it—as the great symbol of the divine interaction. "In His own image created He them; male and female He made them." It was a ludicrous twisting of traditional notions. In my scheme the Son became the feminine principle in the Trinity. But Michael took it seriously—he could be so fucking earnest—and it led to his impulse to tell me about his experience with Mary Ellen. My impulse to pile high the theological bullshit fell at once before an intense, slightly prurient curiosity. I'd have made an unworthy confessor because I wanted to hear the good stuff in detail and at the top. What had he done to her? And when? I would not realize until much later that what he really wanted to confess to me that night but couldn't was his love for Carolyn.

In our time Mary Ellen Divine was considered the most sophisticated girl in Inwood. She was a flat-chested, spidery girl, and this was well before the type was fashionable. But her dark eyes and bony face gave her a look of such intensity that other, more conventionally attractive girls seemed uninteresting by comparison. After high school she got a job downtown in Macy's. Her looks were so striking that eventually they put her behind the makeup and perfume counter. With artfully arranged hair and applied eye shadow and rouge she was like something out of a magazine. During high school she and Michael had been friendly but they'd never dated. I assumed that they didn't see each other again after he went in the army. Not so. Michael didn't tell me at the time, but he went down to Macy's not long after our encounter in the Cloisters hoping to find her.

It was the week before Christmas, and he went into the store on the pretense of buying a gift for his mother. He approached the perfume counter obliquely, one of the throng, as if he didn't know she would be there.

"Michael? Is that you?"

He feigned surprise. In truth he was not prepared for the sight of the glamorous woman, not girl, she'd become. He noticed her lips first, how red they were, opened in surprise as she stared at him. She wore a formal black dress that emphasized her slimness, and jewelry at her wrists and throat that flashed like the seasonal lights against the department store glare. At first Michael thought he'd made a terrible mistake. He felt she'd left him far behind. He stood there, surrounded by women, staring back at her, unable to remember what he was going to say. His speechlessness reinforced the impression that he was completely startled.

"My God!" she said, moving toward him along her side of the counter. "It
is
you!"

"Mary Ellen Divine!" he said, and he grinned.

They shook hands across the counter.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

Suddenly it seemed juvenile to him to say he was shopping for his mother. It rankled that his mother expected him to go on living with her on Cooper Street after he got out of the army, which was one good reason for staying in. "I was just doing a little shopping."

She smiled at him. "For someone special?"

He nodded.

She gave him a look, as if she wanted to read his secrets, and then she asked casually, "Want suggestions?"

"Sure. Why not?"

She led him along the length of the counter. He had to weave between other shoppers to keep up with her. Finally she stopped. The display case featured small dark bottles of exotic fluids. Michael made a show of studying them.

"What's she like?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know what she's like?"

He looked up sharply, blushing. "Oh. No. I misunderstood. I don't know what she likes."

"If you tell me something about her perhaps I can make a suggestion."

"Well, she's ... hard to describe." Michael lowered his eyes. He knew that he seemed smitten and he regretted the deception he'd stumbled into, but he was simply overcome by inarticulateness. Once he'd charmed girls with his talk, but that was before. "Should I tell you what I like?"

"Sure."

"I like this." She reached down for a small bottle and brought it up to the counter top. She placed it carefully, as if it was fragile. "It's by Elizabeth Arden. It's called 'Garden of Delights.' It seems French, but it doesn't cost so much. It's cologne."

"That's nice."

"You haven't smelled it yet." She opened the bottle and briskly upended it on the inside of her wrist, then held her wrist for him to sniff.

He bent toward her. The sensuality of her pose, more even than the scent, was what struck him. He had never had the offer before of the inside of a woman's wrist. Her flesh there was whiter, and the veins were visible. It made him think of the inside of her thighs.

"It's what I'm wearing already, actually."

"'Garden of Delights'?"

"Yes. Silly name, isn't it? But it's rather nice for seven dollars, don't you think?"