Prince of Peace (3 page)

When I had last seen her she had pleaded with me not to go. Owing to the setting perhaps—she was sitting on the knee of the Hans Christian Andersen bronze in Central Park—she looked even younger than seven. Her hands fiddled in her lap with a twig. I was standing beside her. Her head was bent, but I could see that the stress of what had brought us to that moment had set its stamp on her face. With difficulty she said one last time, "Please don't go, Daddy."

"My darling Molly, I would give anything not to." I raised my eyes and saw Carolyn standing mutely, mournfully, a few dozen yards away, waiting for us to finish. I half expected Michael to be with her, but he couldn't have been.

Molly was sobbing then. I took both her hands in mine and I kissed her cheek. At once I turned and ran. Before I reached Fifth Avenue, I remember, it began to rain.

At Room 722 I stopped. I listened for sounds: music, water running, talking. There were no sounds. I looked down at myself. What would I say when she asked about my being a monk? What would I say when she asked me why I never contacted her?

I knocked at the door.

Immediately she opened it.

Her beauty was complete. She stood there in front of me, perfectly still, like an artifact, but with an expression of such human longing that it stunned me when I realized it was longing for me. In her face sadness showed, but as a resonance, a depth. Her loveliness was wonderfully familiar to me. I saw the fulfillment of the abundant promise that always set Molly apart as a child, but also I saw her mother as she was at nineteen. I wanted only to look at her, but my eyes were blinded suddenly by tears. While outside the hotel throngs mourned the destruction of the Temple, the fiercest grief I had ever felt took possession of me. I had spent twelve full years avoiding that emotion, though, and I simply, by an act of will, warded it off.

Neither of us spoke. She stepped aside for me. Finally when I was in the room and the door was shut and the moment had come when we might embrace, she said, "I am sorry for taking you from your monastery."

I searched her face for an indication of sarcasm, but found none. I couldn't think what to say to her.

She turned from me and walked efficiently to the window which opened onto a small balcony. She stood by a table with her back to me. In the distance, framing her dramatically, were the illuminated towers of the Jaffa Gate, and all too easily I imagined the red burst of an explosion, the chunks of stone over-ending through the air, the screams of wounded pilgrims. The enemy from Beirut had struck back at last. I could see that girl pressing her entrails back into the cavity of her stomach, only now I recognized her as my daughter.

"Molly, why are you here?"

"Mother sent me."

"Why?"

"She wants you to come home. She sent me to ask you."

What could I possibly say?

When I did not respond, she faced me. "Will you?"

The show of longing with which she greeted me was gone, replaced by a studied indifference, no,
detachment,
which seemed unbearably cruel to me. And, of course, familiar.

It was the perfect vengeance. I'd practiced it for years.

I approached her carefully. "Molly, you know, we've jumped into the middle of a conversation we're not prepared for. We haven't even said hello."

She averted her face. The water in her eyes glistened. "I wouldn't have come, but Mother asked me."

When I put my hands on her shoulders she did not resist.

In my
hands
I had held her, she was so small!

"What's wrong, darling? Tell me what's wrong?"

She nodded toward the adjacent table. A newspaper was open on it, the
International Herald-Tribune.
She touched it. "Did you see this today?"

"No."

I made no move to look at it. She picked it up and held the page for me to read.

"China Discards Maoist Vision."

My eyes fell several inches to a headline in the lower right-hand corner. The type was smaller, but I read it easily.

"Michael Maguire, Ex-Priest, War-Protester, Is Dead."

T
O
recover the secrets of one's past and lay them bare in the inchoate hope that even disordered testimony reveals the wider meaning of those events that left us numb—one attempts it feeling a certain desperation. I have found it impossible to resist finally, this strange impulse to sit at my desk—lean to your ear—and speak. It is writing, I know, but it seems like speech to me. An unexpected faith enables me to think I am not talking to myself, for I believe despite the evidence of the blank wall above me that you exist, that you lean toward me, that these solitudes—the writer's in his study, the reader's in his chair—are one solitude. If I am telling you two stories, Michael's and mine, and how despite everything they became this one, can't I also hope I am telling yours?

Flaubert said the artist, the soldier and the priest face death every day. I say, bully for them! The rest of us face it once, maybe, and after that isn't everything just fucking awful? But also ... aren't we aware only then that we're alive? How often can one glimpse that open secret? And how often is the structure of its story revealed? Pity the sacred trio—artist, soldier, priest—if they do this every day. They could not possibly sustain the grief, the awe or the understanding, so death, shorn of its intensity, must become like flossing, like brewing coffee, like mail falling through the slot. Death; the artist paints it. The soldier wears it with his ribbons. And the priest douses it with holy water.

But you and I watch death cross the land like a shadow once or twice in a lifetime, changing everything, and then we withdraw to our studies, our chairs, or to our lubricating wakes to tell the raucous and irreverent stories that alone make us know that we survived. You survived. I survived. Even if they don't know it anymore, the artists, soldiers and priests survived. And by God because
story
outweighs
history
—if I didn't believe that would I even begin?—so did the dead survive.

But dear old Henry James says, Don't state! Render! Don't describe what happens, let it happen!

So, my friend, I catch myself. No fustian pronouncements here, no lecture on the salvific effect of narrative impulse, no discursis on Coleridgean
biographia.
Don't explain, create!
Ex nihilo?
Not quite. The events and the people are real. And the time was that stretch of years in which we both came of age and went to the-edge. This is the beginning, like all good ones, which contains the end.
Eschaton,
therefore. It was August of 1982. I was in Israel. And Michael Maguire was dead.

And with Molly, riding from Jerusalem, I could barely speak. I was filled with grief for Michael, but also for what I had not had with her. An infinity of tender moments seemed to have been squandered. I watched Molly's sparkling eyes and saw her mother's, that finely formed face, but every memory of Carolyn was a rebuke and I turned from it as I had ruthlessly for a dozen years.

Molly waited in the taxi down on the public road. She assumed I would accompany her back to America that night. She thought we'd returned to the monastery so that I could change from my habit into lay clothes. But what lay clothes? My overalls? How could I have explained to my daughter that her once distinguished father had returned to Holy Cross to ask the old goat prior for permission? The crunch of gravel under my feet was the only sound and it filled the night. It was only midnight, but not a light showed as I approached the monastery. Surely they had noted my absence at Compline. In more than a decade I had never missed an exercise.

With the hem of my habit in hand I leapt the stone wall and circled furtively behind the building toward the prior's room. Once beyond the chapel corner I saw that his light was on. I imagined him talking on the telephone to the Israeli police. But they would have been too busy on that feast night to come out until the morning. A search of the wadis would have been impossible in the dark in any case. If I had just secretly gone off with Molly wouldn't they have assumed I'd wandered into the desert in a mystical trance like Bishop Pike? They would have revered my memory. Monks and prelates
should
disappear without a trace, like Elijah.

This train of thought stopped me. I was standing in the ludicrous arrangement of stone and cactus that the prior referred to as his Zen Garden. The door of his room stood open to the night, and I could see him, a small, frail figure. His bony shoulders protruded under his Benedictine robe. He was bent at his table, like an old man over the wheel of a car. He was not on the phone. A wedge of light fell toward me, inviting my entrance, but I could not bring myself to approach him because suddenly I realized there was every likelihood that this man for whom I had such disdain was praying for me. And all at once my impulse was to throw myself upon him and cry, "Michael is dead!"

 

Michael was on Nixon's enemy list. J. Edgar Hoover denounced him before Congress. He was the most famous priest in America for a time; the priest against Vietnam. You remember him surely as one of the leading opponents of the war. But there was a secret Michael whom many fewer knew. Despite his reputation as an activist, he was sought out as a Confessor by many Catholics throughout his years as a priest. The elegance of his sensitivity drew people, and not only from among the antiwar crowd. I never confessed to him myself, but Carolyn did. Certainly their encounters in the Sacrament sustained their intimacy and the irony in that, in hindsight, seems particularly poignant to me.

Once I admitted to him that I no longer believed in God. Such a statement seems entirely unmomentous now, but I remember trembling as I said it then. Our certainties had all flaked away like dried skin. Michael sat in silence for such a long time that I began to wonder if he'd heard me. I was unable to read his face. Finally he replied with a voice so sad as to be completely unfamiliar. "None of us believes in God, Durk, but we act as if we do because we love each other. Otherwise..." He checked himself, as if he'd said too much already. I never asked him, Otherwise what? But I must have known. We have to help each other cling to God while we can, because eventually we do each other in and then God is all there is.

What desolation I felt, standing there outside the prior's room, watching him. That old monk had been my spiritual father now for more than a decade. We had never overtly expressed affection for one another. I'd hidden from him in my wry irreverence; the trouble with religious superiors, I'd say to myself, is they think they are. He had shown me only his stern mask. His habitual expression had for years been a version of a desert shrub's. Yet, watching him at his psalter and imagining him praying for me, I felt a rush of, yes, love for the man and for the company of brothers who had received me as one not merely welcome but wanted. That I dared allow myself at last to feel such love for those men was how I knew that I was leaving them and their monastery forever. Leaving without a word. It would have been impossible for me to explain. What? That I had a daughter? That she was waiting in a taxi? That she'd come to take me to America? That I was going to my wife's side at her husband's grave? That he was my dearest friend, my enemy? How explain such riddles? What could I have said? Not so much to make the prior let me go—I was beyond permission—as to make him understand. But weren't we beyond understanding too? Hadn't we always been? When I'd arrived years before, a vagrant refugee in flight from dingy rented rooms where for months after Carolyn had left me I'd groped for a way to live and for the bottles of cheap booze that were always rolling under the bed. I'd told the prior nothing then. I could tell him nothing now. He would be shocked to find me gone, hurt perhaps, but not really surprised. What monk ever presumes to know in the dark shroud of his vocation what the old
Deus Absconditus
is up to now?

"On the river of tears," Picard says, "man travels into silence." That was what I had done, going there in the first place. And now, grief-struck, stunned at Molly's reappearance, at the summons she'd brought not from Carolyn, but from my own life, I was doing it again. I was leaving the silence in silence.

I stifled yet another urge to burst in on the prior to throw myself before him for his blessing. Instead I stepped back from his door into the shadows of the desert. Goodbye, dear father, I muttered. God keep you, I prayed, since I cannot.
Ad multos annos.

I turned, faced Bethlehem for a moment. The stars were spread above me like a jovial throng, but like applause in church, affirmation from the night seemed wrong. This was loss, all loss. First Michael, my friend. Now Holy Cross, my only brothers. Gone, all gone. Already my years in the place were sliding away. I knew that I would someday account for myself to Father Prior and to my gracious confreres, but not then. In fact, of course, these pages are my accounting, and finally my mouth is at the grill of their cloister. Their ears are pressed against it and I am whispering, Oh my brothers, this is why I came to you and why I left.

I didn't need a blessing. I didn't need permission. What I needed were my passport—I was Frank Durkin now, not Brother Francis—and something to wear. I circled the monastery and entered it by the proper door. The halls were quiet. In a few hours, but long before daylight, the monks would rise and sing the nocturnal psalms and they would pray for an absent brother. I stopped in the chapel to pray for them.

And then, in the laundry room, I traded my habit for a denim shirt.

 

"Why did you stay there so long?" she asked.

I looked past Molly to the desert nightscape we were leaving behind. The taxi was halfway to Jerusalem, and the garish suburban settlements were coming into sight. "Because no one asked me things I had no answer for." I laughed modestly, just glad to be with her, and despite herself she laughed too. Such questions could only make fools of both of us, her for asking, me for never being able to respond. When I looked at her silhouetted against the window I wanted it to be that I'd just awakened and that she and I were two of a family which had survived the harshest winter without wood for a fire. We'd stayed together through awful times. Her mother was a spinner, and I was a miller and she was the girl the prince was wooing. We were going home now. My wife would be in the corner at her wheel, making clothes for me.