Prince of Peace (45 page)

Michael looked at his watch. The car engine was still running and they were sitting outside the
Worker.
Derelicts had already begun to line up along the sidewalk. "I'm sorry, Nicholas, but I can't."

"Come tomorrow then. Come as our guest. You wouldn't have to work the line. I think Dorothy'd like to meet you."

"And I'd like to meet her, but..."

They stared at each other. Each was aware of the charged field between them. To his amazement Michael felt powerfully drawn to the kid. The strange energy that army psychiatrists had found pathological registered on Michael as vitality and eagerness. Nicholas Wiley was more alive, it seemed to him suddenly, than anyone in that crowd of urbane clergy he'd left behind. Wasn't that why in the kid's presence he had faced, if only briefly, the ragged feelings his time in Vietnam had left him with? No priest had yet asked him what it was really like there or how he felt about having left. If he'd gone into the
Worker,
it wouldn't have been to see Dorothy Day. There were domineering saints and mothers enough in every priest's life, and that was why they stayed away. It was Nicholas Wiley Michael wanted to be with. He had an impulse to confide in him right there. Confide what? He was aware that he hadn't even told Wiley explicitly that he'd been in Vietnam. Korea was easier to speak of, and that alone suggested how deep his feelings ran. Too deep, he thought, for a kid like this. But hell, even to himself he was boxes inside boxes, secrets inside secrets. All he knew was that when something shook him, he rattled.

"You're busy."

"I am. Yes."

"Okay." Wiley opened the door and got out. He leaned back into the car and flashed a winning grin. "But if you're ever down in the Bowery again, you know where to come, right? There's always room for one more when you're feeding two hundred and fifty."

"Thanks. I'll remember."

As Michael drove away an acute loneliness overwhelmed him and he thought, But if you're feeding thousands there's never room. He slammed the wheel with the palm of his hand. He was furious, but not with the
Catholic Worker
or the cardinal or the friendly but shallow priests he would now join for lunch. He was furious with himself.

O
N
All Souls' Day, the day of the damned, Jean-Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, both disguised—fittingly, though pathetically—in the cassocks of priests and cowering in the sanctuary alcove of a modest Catholic church in a Saigon suburb, were seized by rebel officers of their own army. The president and his first counselor were then shot and stabbed repeatedly, like victims of mad killers.

The people of Saigon knew that the Ngos were dead when radio stations played Chubby Checker's "Come on, Let's Twist!", a song that had been outlawed as lewd under the Law for the Protection of Morality. They poured into the streets and danced.

Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, the primate of all Vietnam, was in Rome for the fall session of the Vatican Council. He would not return to his native country. We would all forget him, and assume that he was dead until one stunning day we would read in a tiny paragraph on a back page of the
New York Times,
as I did not long ago, that he was at last formally excommunicated by John Paul II. But here's the hitch. He was drummed out of the Church not for having incited the slaughter of Buddhists, but for consecrating as bishop a mad Spaniard who claimed, comicstrip fashion, to be the pope. So much for the New Morality.

Madame Nhu would certainly have been killed alongside her husband and brother-in-law, but, as you may recall, she was in America on a lecture tour, angrily denouncing John Kennedy for having withdrawn support from Diem the month before. In October I had been present to hear her Dragon Lady diatribe at Fordham and to see our right-wing student body, to my intense shame, give her a standing ovation. When, a few days later, she was awakened in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel with the news of the coup and the murders, she ranted maniacally that God would swiftly punish those responsible.

Three weeks later, as she no doubt saw it, using the instrument of Lee Harvey Oswald, He did.

 

Now, looking back on it, one is tempted to see in President Kennedy's death meanings which at the time were irrelevant to it: if Kennedy's ascendance epitomized the triumph of American Catholicism, his assassination on the heels of Pope John's death and that of Spellman's protege, Diem, revealed the hollowness of that triumph, nay, the utter vanity of it. If Kennedy's appeal to youthful idealism mobilized a generation to work for civil rights at home and the Peace Corps abroad, his absurd death made their disillusionment—their "days of rage"—inevitable. If Kennedy had in fact been the young god we considered him in our first grief, then he had been taken from us because we were mere mortals not worthy of him; worse, in the downward spiral of our selfdoubt, we wondered, Weren't we all somehow guilty of his murder? And wasn't it therefore meet and just that after it, as after Diem's slaying in Vietnam, all the devils were loosed upon both lands? When the anointed king is killed, the law of nature is rent, the heavens open, the earth splits and the plagues come. Vietnam got "Big" Minh and the curse of a renewed American "friendship." We got Big Lyndon, whose own death would take place a decade later on the very day that the American phase of the Vietnam war—the fruit of that "friendship"—would end.

It was impossible at the time of Kennedy's assassination to arrange that avalanche of events and feelings in any intelligent pattern. All we could do was behold and ache, and marvel at the shock, the largest shock our generation would experience. We hadn't even known he was in Texas.

What were you doing when you heard the news?
Even now, twenty years later, we ask that question and thereby reestablish for each other, for a moment, that bond. The loss we felt made us friends. A vast illusion of intimacy—we were a 190-million-member family—was what we got that day instead of meaning. We ask each other what we were doing when we heard the news, but we don't have to ask what we did then, because we know. For three days we all did the same thing—sat groggily before our televisions and watched.

Me? When I heard, I was pacing ritually in the fathers' waiting room at Saint Vincent's Hospital in the Village. Carolyn and I had been married for two years. We'd moved to a small apartment on Cherry Lane, across from the theater. We considered ourselves very
avant,
me with my poetry, she with her painting. Sometimes I would pose for her in the nude, but only on two conditions, that she not paint my face and that she take off all
her
clothes too while standing at her easel. She never would, of course, being a "serious" artist, but sometimes we ended the session by making love. It was my reward. But however Bohemian we considered ourselves, Carolyn and I reacted to the discovery that she was pregnant like a pair of Micks from Inwood. What happiness! What a relief to think we could begin now to live the way we'd always really wanted to, the way, in truth, our parents had. Didn't we set about turning our ascetic, ill-furnished flat into a cozy nest, doilies, rockers, throw rugs and all! A nest to which we could bring our baby home.

I had intended to be with Carolyn throughout the birth, but her labor ended abruptly in an emergency cesarean, and I had been expelled from the operating room. I still find it nearly impossible to relate the two events, but our daughter was born less than an hour after the president was shot.

By the time the doctor came into the waiting room to tell me all was well, it was crowded with nurses, staffers and other doctors, all gathered around an old chocolate-colored Philco. It was still assumed that an elaborate plot had unfolded in Dallas, and there were reports that Lyndon Johnson had been shot too. No one seemed to know where he was.

"You have a beautiful daughter, Mister Durkin," he said. "And your wife is fine. I think they'd like to see you." He shook my hand, then moved toward the radio.

How can both of these things be true? I thought. But that was the extent of my reflection. I was tempted neither then nor later to see them as elements of one mystery, as a metaphor of the ambiguous, life out of death, that sort of thing. The events were completely separate, of totally other orders, yet each one left me numb.

The corridor was deserted. From inside the patients' rooms sounds of the morose narration wafted from radios and televisions, but the recovery room where Carolyn lay was unfurnished, empty except for her bed and medical paraphernalia.

Her eyes were closed. I approached and touched her arm and only then did a flood of relief and gratitude course through me.

But I had another, more powerful experience. It is like admitting to the foulest blasphemy to say now that I, alone of all Americans perhaps, thanked God that afternoon that He'd taken Kennedy. It could have been Carolyn, I thought, as if in the Divine economy—this was the irrefutable given of that moment—it had to be one or the other.

She opened her eyes and smiled at me. Then I wept.

"Have you seen her?" she asked finally.

I shook my head, trying to grasp both that there was this baby now, and that Carolyn knew nothing of Dallas.

"Go see her. She's beautiful."

We think of joy as the opposite of sadness, but it isn't. The sadness of that afternoon was monumental and, in a way already sensed, permanent. It did not yield to happiness, but neither did it make happiness impossible. The joy I discovered beholding my daughter was unexpected and unprecedented, but it seemed so natural that I gave myself over to it as if I'd always planned to.

Molly fit in the crook of my arm, a perfect loaf, and I loved her without limit from that first moment. I have referred already to the "ontological change" that traditional theology claims as an effect of ordination, a notion I had dismissed as meaningless. But to my amazement that arcane phrase described what had happened to me. The birth of that child made me a new person, a different sort of being altogether. She taught me in that first encounter that the most radical separation of all is between people who have brought children into the world and those who haven't; is between the way I was before that moment and the way I was after it. You probably think of me as an opinionated snob, but believe me I am humility itself compared to what I was before my daughter's birth. She called forth from me primordial hope such that even the president's death could not shake.

I returned to Carolyn's room. She was sleeping and so I stood above her and watched. She stirred and smiled and slept on. Her bliss, partly of the drugs, was total. When she awoke she squeezed my fingers and mouthed, "I love you."

I kissed her.

She said, "I dreamt that the president was killed."

"You didn't dream it, darling. He was."

"Is that why you were crying?" she asked. Disappointment dulled her eyes. She'd thought I was crying just for her. I knew I couldn't explain that, in fact, since I had thought she was going to die, I was.

Soon they moved her to the room she shared with another woman. The television, of course, was on. And we, like everyone, stared at it, as at shadows in the cave.

Carolyn drifted in and out of sleep. Periodically nurses brought Molly in, and Carolyn held her. Then, since sedation prevented Carolyn's breast-feeding her, I fed our baby until she slept. I took her back to the nursery because it was my wife, I thought, who needed my attention. Even when she was awake we hardly talked. I sensed that as the grim reality registered on her, Carolyn began to hate Oswald for what he'd done not just to Kennedy or to America, but to us. He had destroyed the purity of her joy. Was this a world into which a child should come? To her, the juxtaposition of the two events made them equally absurd, and by that night she was in the grip of a depression I could not penetrate.

When I returned the next day, that gloomy Saturday during which the rain fell everywhere in the East, she was withdrawn still. There were of course physiological reasons for her state. The ferocious labor alone would have sapped her strength, but the traumatic cesarean on top of it left her nothing with which to fend off the tidal wave of feeling. The spinal had caused an immobilizing headache and that, as well as her abdominal wound, required further sedation.

I knew what she'd been through and what she was on, but again and again I thought she was having such intense reactions to the assassination and to the birth that she simply couldn't share them with me. She seemed such a distant, passive stranger that I feared at first our baby would be affected by her detachment. But not so.

All day long we craned up at the television set while dignitaries filed past the flag-draped catafalque in the East Room. When Jackie appeared, Carolyn touched my hand and said, "She lost her baby in August." When I looked at my wife, she was biting her lip so fiercely I asked her to stop.

She brightened once, when Michael Maguire called to ask if he could visit. His call was a stunning surprise. We'd had no idea that he was back from Vietnam.

 

It was Sunday, early enough that no visitors were allowed, except fathers and, naturally, clergymen. After rapping softly on the door, he pushed it fully open and stood there. He had lost weight and his black suit hung on him. His Roman collar no longer fit and his eyes were like grottoes. I found the sight of him shocking. He looked unwell to me, haggard and nervous the way he had when he first came back from China.

Carolyn raised her arm toward him. He went to her, took her hand, then visibly checked his impulse to lean down to her.
Oh, kiss her!
I thought.
Kiss the poor woman!

The blur had gone from her eyes. "We have the most beautiful baby," she said. In the vibrant timbre of her voice happiness at last displayed itself, and I was profoundly grateful to Michael for having come.

She looked at me. "Oh, Frank, take Michael to the nursery. Show him Molly."

"No," he said, still holding her hand. "First, let me look at you."