Prince of Peace (44 page)

"Yes. I was just out of high school."

Wiley calculated. "Were you in Korea?"

"Yes. I wasn't a C.O."

"I gathered that. Cardinal Spellman refuses to support C.O.s. As Military Vicar, he orders his chaplains not to write letters for them. Did you know that? He thinks we're cowards. Is that what you think?"

"That you're a coward? No. You seem to have the courage of your convictions. I know what guts it takes to buck the army. Cowards are people who go along with the crowd."

"You really think that?"

"Yes."

"Then why weren't you an objector?"

"Hey, look, Nicholas, I'll grant you your point of view. You grant me mine. Okay?"

Traffic slowed for a stoplight, which turned red just as they approached. Neither of them spoke until it turned green again and they were going. Michael knew that he had to be wary of his anger at the kid. The self-righteousness of purists always got to him. "I'll tell you, Nicholas, Korea was a bitch. We did stuff no human being should ever have to do, but there was no choice. Even in a Just War, you do what you have to do, number one, to survive and help your buddies to survive, and, number two, to get it over with quickly so the killing stops."

"What stuff?"

"What?"

"That human beings should never have to do?"

"Blow up bridges with people on them."

"You did that?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you became a priest? To atone?"

The question infuriated Michael, but he channeled his surge of feeling into his grip on the wheel. "Christ atones, Nicholas. We don't."

"But you're running the Children's Relief Fund. Was it children you blew up? Is there a connection?"

Michael drove mutely, but he knew the set of his mouth would give him away. No one had ever asked him questions like this before. What upset him was not the young man's effrontery, but the knowledge that these were questions he'd wanted to ask himself. Even to ask if there were connections between his past and his present was to see them. The orphans in Vietnam were, of course, the children of the Koreans he'd killed. It was a link he'd never allowed to come to consciousness while he'd been in Vietnam, but now, perhaps because that conflict had become somewhat remote and therefore manageable, it seemed obvious. But the orphans for whom he worked were something else too. They were the
anawim,
the least of God's children; they were the sheep whom Jesus said to feed.

"I guess I'm off base, asking that."

Michael shrugged. "Sure, there's a connection. Everything is connected to everything else." He looked at Wiley as he stopped the car for another light. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"I was twenty-two when I entered the seminary."

"Delayed vocation, eh?" Wiley grinned.

It struck Michael how young he'd been—as young as this kid—but he remembered feeling so old. Already the army and the war and the time in China and even Mary Ellen Divine had been behind him. Now it was ten years later and he felt much younger, as if that grim distant past belonged to someone else. When he looked at Wiley part of what seemed familiar was his premature weariness. Barely an adult, yet he solemnly carried, as Michael had, the weight of the world's great sins. Well, wasn't it that a certain kind of Catholic boy imagines at twenty-two that he is the Messiah come again? Whose shoulders wouldn't stoop under that burden? "So I went in the seminary, and you joined the
Catholic Worker
." Michael put his car in gear. "Two sides of the same coin. 'Be ye perfect.'"

"I don't think so. I'm not trying to be perfect."

"You're trying to be pure."

"The difference between us..." Wiley had adopted the lecturing tone he'd used with Spellman. "...is that you're satisfied to pick up the victims of the violence. I'm trying to stop it. The Church has always served the State as a kind of ambulance service. It's like at an intersection where people keep getting run over. The Church will nurse their wounds. It will even build a hospital on the spot. But what it
should
do is go downtown and speak the truth to power until they put up a stoplight at that intersection so that people will stop getting run over. But that would be politics. And the Church doesn't involve itself in politics."

"It seems to me that Dorothy Day has picked up a few victims over the years. I didn't know she was opposed to that."

"She isn't. But Peter Maurin says that serving the poor has to lead to political action in behalf of the poor. The mission of the
Worker
is twofold. The soup kitchen is only half of it."

"And you're the other half?"

"You know, you're just like the cardinal. You people think the
Catholic Worker
is this weird bunch of zealots. You pat us on the head for the soup line, but you go 'tsk, tsk,' just like Wall Street when we push against the systems that keep our soup line crowded. You think our ideas are naive and you hold Dorothy Day in contempt."

"That's not true. I don't know a single priest in the archdiocese who holds her in contempt." Michael looked at the blade in Wiley's hand. He'd been cutting at the wood furiously, and now he was gesturing with it. Threateningly?

"Oh, yeah? Well, why hasn't a single priest in this archdiocese joined her on the picket line?"

"Because priests have other things to do, Nicholas. If you don't know what, ask Dorothy. She'd be the first to tell you that the members of the mystical body have different gifts and different responsibilities. Do you really think she would welcome priests on the picket line? I don't."

"Peter Maurin says priests belong in the world."

"Peter Maurin is a Frenchman, isn't he? He's a Personalist, right? The masses are saved by leaders who embrace renunciation and serve through the purity of their intentions. Et cetera."

"Personalism is the philosophy underlying the
Worker.
That's right. Peter Maurin is a disciple of Emmanuel Mounier's."

"Well, I'll tell you something funny, Nicholas. Ngo Dinh Diem is a Personalist too. Personalism underlies his regime. Ngo Dinh Nhu was a friend of Mounier's in Paris. The Ngos consider themselves moral exemplars, and that's their problem. Personalism is the root cause of the evil in Saigon."

"Evil? You think Saigon's evil?"

"How can I not think that after what they've done to the Buddhists and the students?"

Wiley stared at Michael. "I don't understand you, Father. I mean, you keep coming at me from different places."

"I just think it's ironic that Dorothy Day and Ngo Dinh Diem have something in common."

Wiley nearly gasped. "Diem's a dictator!"

But when Michael looked at him, Wiley burst into laughter. Dorothy Day in her sphere was a dictator too, and no one knew it better than the people who worked with her. The difference between her and Diem was that she imposed the Divine Truth she possessed on a small group of disciples and by force of her personality, while Diem imposed it by force of an ever-increasing American arsenal on an unconverted nation. Michael said, "I just think people should be a little less inclined to take their own virtue for granted. You know why I like Kennedy? Because he's not that great a Catholic. Good Catholics make me nervous." Who was he now, John Howe?

"But Kennedy backs Diem."

"Not for long. You watch. Diem's days are numbered."

"I hope so."

"Yeah, but you also hope for Ho Chi Minh, and I'll tell you something, that bastard is doing his best to see that that society collapses completely. And then he'll walk in and set up his utopian state in the rubble. Terrific. Maybe so. A humane socialist society out of what's left. Fabulous. But what about the kids whose parents have been killed? What about the kids who have to live like animals now, fighting over rat meat in back alleys, or selling their sisters to the highest bidder? I know of fifty thousand kids over there right now who are going to starve to death by the end of the year if I don't come through with something for them. Malnutrition, disease, famine, not to mention what the actual warfare is doing to them. You know what we're seeing now? Adolescent suicides! Unheard of in Asia! Children killing themselves because their lives are so horrible, or maybe because they figure their younger sisters and brothers will have a little more rice with one less mouth to feed. See, I think those kids matter, Nicholas. I doubt that your friend Ho does. To him, they're just more casualties of history on the bloody road to Revolution in the sky. Not me, though. I don't even care about Democracy, Nicholas. Or Land Reform, or elections, or the goddamn Geneva Accords. I care about the kids, that's all. And I'll tell you something. Their two best friends, maybe in the world, are fellows name of Spellman and Kennedy, who refuse just to brush off their clothes and walk away."

Wiley said nothing, and Michael's emotion receded behind the abrupt cloud of his embarrassment. He had not so exposed those feelings before, not to a layman and not to his fellow priests. In front of priests it was permitted, even expected, that he would display his surliness or his frustration, but not his exuberance, not his extravagant commitment. In front of lay people he was to display his moderation, his reserve. But about the children in Vietnam he had none.

They crossed Brooklyn in silence. When the towers of the bridge came into view, Michael's eye lifted. Being back in the city still exhilarated him, and his love of New York ambushed him regularly, the way it had when he'd come back from Korea. The sun glistened off the steel web of suspending girders, cables, stays, shrouds and wires. For a moment Manhattan was mere backdrop to this marvel, and the airy skyline only served to emphasize the gothic solidity of the stone towers. The achievement of engineering and imagination represented in the span took his breath away. It made him think of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and indeed it had been built by the same Irish artisans, masons, stone-cutters, steelworkers and hod-carriers. Many of them died at their work.

Bridges! Michael and I grew up under their spell. Perhaps all island-folk do. From Inwood we'd climbed on dares up the parapets of the George Washington, and we'd dropped water-balloons on boat traffic from the New York Central Railroad Bridge and we'd smoked our first cigarettes in the dank riverbank shadow of the soaring arches of the Henry Hudson. New Yorkers never outgrow their enchantment with bridges. Carolyn and I, after our Village phase and when we'd had Molly, would buy a house we couldn't afford on Brooklyn Heights just because from its living room we could see the bridge, this one, Thomas Wolfe's bridge, Hart Crane's, Maxwell Anderson's and Arthur Miller's. Michael used to sit with me and watch the sun set behind it while I'd recite from Wolfe: "The Bridge made music and a kind of magic in me, it bound the earth together like a cry; and all of the earth seemed young and tender."

"Wonderful, isn't it?" I'd ask at last.

And he would tilt his glass like an old vaudevillian. "Hell of a lot of trouble to go to just to get to Brooklyn."

Crossing with Wiley that day, Michael went back in memory to that other bridge. With its pig-iron girders and stumpy pilings and its jury-rigged center span, it was nothing compared to this American masterpiece, not material for metaphors, poems or songs, no music, no magic.

His memory of that Korean bridge had come to him over the years with a certain regularity, and unconsciously he had ritualized it, had transformed it into the slow-motion climax of an arty war film. At the center of his memory was the explosion, the simple loud clap, the iron girders somersaulting through the air amid the millions of splinters and the dust of railroad cinders and the billowing smoke. He knew that there had been people on that bridge, and he had seen some of them in their particularity at the time—the Pappa-san, the shrieking old lady—but he never pictured them when he remembered the explosion.

But now as the car crossed with a bump the first metal-expansion joint—the threshold of the span itself—he remembered for the first time in years that other scene at the threshold of the Korean bridge. Lieutenant Barrett had just rammed his jeep into the throng. Michael had stooped to free a howling child from the straps tying it to the mangled body of its dead mother. He had taken that child in his arms, and he remembered that it refused to stop crying no matter how he jiggled it or cuddled it. Tears gushed out of its tiny almond eyes and oh what piercing shrieks that baby made. And suddenly the face he was seeing was an old man's face, its frozen look of horror, Thic Nhat Than's face, his severed head. Involuntarily he said out loud, "Oh, Christ!" And then he heard Barrett ask, "Oh, Christ, what have I done?"

"What?" Wiley asked.

"Nothing." The car rattled onto the iron grate, and the loss of solid roadway registered as a dangerous swaying, a drifting of the wheel in his hands, a loss of confidence in the car. He leaned forward over the wheel to concentrate on driving. Now it was the Manhattan skyline that dominated the field of his sight, Wall Street to the left, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the right. From Brooklyn the jagged magnificent row of skyscrapers always reminded Michael of the rows of gravestones in his father's cemetery, but that was an association he veered from, and he felt his control slip further.

Control; John Howe had said the question was how to control Diem.

But now Michael's question was how to control himself.

He tightened his grip and focused on the infinite detail of the great bridge as they went not over but through it. Finally his eye settled on the bright sky at the end of the tunnel the weave of girders made.

 

"Have you ever visited Chrystie Street?"

"In fact, I have."

"When you were a seminarian, right?" Wiley was folding his block, knife and the chips of wood back into their cloth. As he'd promised, he hadn't left so much as dust on the seat or floor.

Michael wanted to ask what he was carving, but it seemed, ironically, given their conversation, an overly personal question. He said, simply, "That's right."

"Funny thing, Father. You guys come like pilgrims to the
Worker
when you're in the seminary, but you never come back after ordination. Why don't you reverse the trend? Come on in and have lunch with us."