Prince of Peace (46 page)

I turned to the window. It seemed unfair to watch them and, frankly, I did not want to see. The sun was shining that day, and I fixed upon a bright pigeon smoothing its tail-feathers on the ledge of the building opposite. The pigeon leapt into the air without warning, dipped, then rose, disappearing above the roof lines. Behind me David Brinkley was describing the riderless horse. I hugged myself and turned.

Michael and Carolyn were both watching the television. They had dropped each other's hands. Michael had lit a cigarette. The woman in the next bed, though her curtain was drawn, could be heard saying into the telephone, "They're bringing him now. Do you see it?"

To muffled drums, the cortege wound into view. The ceremony for which we had all been longing had begun, though this was only the transfer of his body from the White House to the Capitol. I remember the formation of soldiers ahead of the horse-drawn caisson. I remember that stallion, "Black Jack," with the empty saddle and the boots reversed in its stirrups. The military trappings were unfamiliar, but altogether the impression was one of a traditional, well-known ritual and it soothed us. The army band struck up the Death March as the formation turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue by the Treasury Building. Behind the caisson were the limousines. What could his wife possibly be thinking? What could she be saying to her children?

Michael said, "So many people went to Confession at Saint Patrick's yesterday that they set up confessional screens in the sanctuary. There were even more penitents than during the Cuban missile crisis."

"Why do people feel so guilty?" I asked, somewhat bitterly. I could have spouted my own theory. They're Catholics, aren't they? And isn't it easier to condemn yourself and endure any punishment than to believe that perhaps God cares nothing for the world? But that would have been my oh-so-worldly self speaking, the one who wasn't surprised when cruel things happened. My other self, the one into whom Michael had pressed belief at his ordination and to whom both Carolyn and now Molly were miracles of affirmation, knew that people feel guilty because they are not worthy of the gifts God gives.

"I don't think it's guilt, Durk. I think people are afraid to die. If it can happen to him..."

"That's how I feel," Carolyn said abruptly, surprising us both.

I expected Michael to respond with something perfectly consoling, but he didn't. He was as inarticulate as I was, which relieved me. I crossed to her side and took her hand. She looked up at me gratefully.

For some moments we simply watched, one man on either side of Carolyn, as the funeral cortege made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, which was lined with throngs of silent, wounded people. It was like a dark parody of an Inaugural parade.

I resented it when the network switched us back to Dallas, the announcer explaining that Lee Harvey Oswald was being taken to another jail and promising us a glimpse of the man who had done this to us.

A crowded corridor; "There he is," the newsman said. I craned, despite myself, to see the piece of shit.

And then that moment of alarm, chaos, shouts and a wildly tilting camera. The reporter kept screaming, "They've shot him! They've shot him!" and all I could think was that by some mistake technicians had rerun, yet again, the awful sound from Friday.

A woman screamed in the corridor outside Carolyn's room, and then loud footsteps. Michael immediately went out, as if he knew someone needed the last rites. I remained with Carolyn and with that first-ever televised act of murder. I sat on the bed with her and she clung to me, and I thought, This is what it's like when we all go crazy.

"Is Molly all right?" she asked suddenly.

I'd forgotten her completely, and now the commotion in the corridor—an assassin loose in Saint Vincent's!—was a threat. I went out. Two orderlies were arranging a woman on a stretcher by the nurse's station. Michael was holding her hand.

Through the broad nursery window I saw that Molly was sleeping contentedly.

"She's perfect," I told Carolyn. "Sound asleep." I resumed my place on the edge of her bed, and she held on to me again, so fiercely it made me happy. The news reporter was more coherent, but he was still near hysteria and he kept repeating, "Oswald was just shot! Lee Harvey Oswald is lying on the floor! He's been shot! There are policemen everywhere here. I did not see who did it!"

I realized that only seconds had passed. I had apparently run to the nursery and back, and I was out of breath.

The confusion on the television screen continued. It was impossible to think of any image that crossed it as real, as it would have been impossible to anticipate that all the most devastating of those images would become cliches, these cliches. David Brinkley came on and stammered at us. And then we were watching the spirited riderless horse prancing its stately way up Capitol Hill.

When Michael came back into the room he said, "Did you hear her scream?"

"Yes. What happened?"

"She had a seizure of some kind, epileptic, I think. Did you hear what she said?"

"No."

"When she regained her senses she looked up and saw me kneeling over her and she screamed, 'A priest! Oh, God! Am I dying?'"

Michael's weary face broke into that familiar grin of his. "I'm the harbinger of death," he joked.

I felt a pang for him and opened an arm. He came into our embrace, more mine than Carolyn's. Once more the feeling we had for each other, that essence of friendship that would sustain us through nearly, but not quite, everything, asserted itself. While Lee Harvey Oswald breathed his last and while President Kennedy's remains approached the place from which he had said, "Let the word go forth...," the three of us laughed quietly and shared thoughts, as Mrs. Kennedy would describe them, "that lie too deep for tears."

 

"She's beautiful," he said, though Molly was sleeping on her stomach and wrapped in the tight sleeve of blanket so that only the dark crown of her head was showing. We each leaned on the glass as if to draw as close to her as possible. "What a weekend to be born in. Durk, you should save the papers for her."

My impulse was the opposite, to shield her from those events, even to deny them. I changed the subject. "How long have you been back from Vietnam?"

"A few months."

"And you didn't call us?" I stared at him.

"I've been busy," he said, but he was blushing, looking at his feet.

"What have you been doing? You seem exhausted."

"I was in Los Angeles Friday. I took the Red Eye Special home. I could have stayed out there, but I wanted to be in New York. It was dawn when I got back. There was a message at the rectory from Mom about your baby. That news redeemed the other news. It made me very happy for you both. In fact it made me happy for the world. The Talmud says that when a funeral procession intersects with a wedding march, the mourners must give way."

"You've become ecumenical, Michael. I remember when you only quoted the New Testament."

He laughed. "'Now war arose in Heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon.'" Facing me, he said soberly, "I was so glad they were both all right."

"It scared hell out of me, what Carolyn went through. Still does. Seems like that dragon has drawn close this week, waiting to snatch people we love."

"I felt that way. My first impulse yesterday was to go see my mother." He rolled his eyes self-mockingly, as if he of all people was a momma's boy. He was in fact a dutiful son. "Then I walked downtown from Good Shepherd."

"In the rain?"

"Yeah." He smiled. "The rain was good, purifying, cleansing, you know?"

"Yeah, like a carwash."

"I wound up at Saint Patrick's and went in to pray. That's when I saw all the folks at Confession. I went to Confession myself."

"I assumed you'd been hearing them."

"It's the first time I actually just went, you know? Like one of the people."

"I hope the priest gave you the same kind of shit he gives us."

"I chickened out." He smiled again and, leaning on the glass, cupped his hand to light his cigarette. "I figured I could either tell him I masturbate or tell him I'm a priest, but I couldn't tell him both."

"Let me guess."

"I said I'm a priest and confessed that four times I prayed the breviary without paying attention, and I genuflected twice without actually touching my knee to the floor. Oh, and that I've said Mass without wearing the maniple four hundred and seven times."

We laughed softly for a moment, but when he put his hand on my arm it was sadness we shared.

"So then you left the cathedral and found a phone booth and called us because it was the loneliness you felt that seemed sinful."

He met my eyes. "That's right."

"We've missed you, Michael.
Why
didn't you call us? And you never wrote. We were going to be your family."

"I don't know how to answer that, Durk."

"Just don't tell me how busy you are. I'll have one of those cigarettes. Thanks."

We stood in silence, smoking, looking at the baby. Finally he said, "You just never know what's going to happen, do you? I mean we all thought we had everything laid out. Kennedy was just hitting his stride. He was just getting control of things."

"Are you talking about Congress, or what?"

"I'm talking about Vietnam."

I stared at him, I'm sure blankly. I wanted to ask him what it was like there. Had he seen those monks burn themselves? I wanted to tell him that I'd been worried about him. But I didn't know how, thinking, still, in those days, that you didn't just say so.

"I don't know what his death will mean," he said. "Something terrible, I'm afraid."

I watched him smoke. He was already considering the consequences of Kennedy's assassination for the nation, for the world, for his own work. I saw how we were different. I was still in the grip of that present. Implications and consequences were nothing to me. Our brush with death—for what is childbirth but that, and what was Dallas?—had made the future an enemy to whom I was going, eventually, to lose my wife and daughter. Therefore I refused to think about it. I preferred to bask in the baby's presence—she was the present tense itself. Otherwise, like most Americans, I preferred the suspension of time in television that weekend; we knew instinctively that if we prolonged that awful moment, before it ended it would soothe us.

"What do they have you doing now?"

"Fund-raising." He smiled. "I'm a bingo-priest at last." He smoked his cigarette for a moment, then said, "I run something called the Children's Relief Fund. The idea was to build orphanages over there, but we can't keep up with the numbers. Since Diem's death, thousands of homeless Buddhist children are showing up. They were afraid before to show themselves to Catholic priests. Imagine."

I sensed the fury that filled him, but I barely understood it. Vietnam was more than I could think about.

We smoked and looked through the glass at the room full of babies. I remember thinking they looked like potatoes wrapped in foil.

"Molly. Carolyn said you're naming her Molly."

"Yes. Molly Saint Vincent Durkin." I laughed, but Michael missed my joke. "Edna Saint Vincent Millay was born here. Her parents named her for the hospital."

"You're kidding."

"No, really. Well, I'm kidding about naming Molly that. Carolyn and I laughed at the thought because Saint Vincent was a patron of Mother Seton; Mount Saint Vincent's was to be her exile. Just being here as a new mother is joke enough for her. Molly's middle name is Anne, for Carolyn's mother."

"And 'Molly'?"

"Snagged from the mists of our Irish past. We're lucky she was a girl. We hadn't agreed on a boy's name. I wanted 'Cornelius.'"

Michael laughed. "No wonder you didn't agree."

"Caro wanted 'Michael.'"

He froze with his cigarette halfway to his mouth.

"I'm kidding. She wanted 'Earl.'" I grinned at him.

He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. I wanted him to admit that the reason we hadn't heard from him or seen him till now was that he still loved Carolyn. Now, of course, I understand that I wanted him to admit that as a way of punishing him. I wanted to see the pain he felt. I wanted to see the extreme of his loneliness. I'd have said at the time, though, thinking myself sincere, that I just wanted an honest conversation; I wanted the source of our awkwardness out in the open so we could deal with it. I'd convinced myself that since I loved him too, it was no big problem that he and Carolyn loved each other. I was custodian of Carolyn's love, not its proprietor, and I always knew it. But I'd have said that was more than enough for me. I was there day after day, and I was certain that over time familiarity alone would soften her heart to me.

Carolyn and I had not talked about Michael, and his absence since our marriage had made it impossible for any of us to normalize our feelings, to grow accustomed to them, to tame them. His being away kept the issue alive for both of us, kept him a figment, a dream, a threat, which now I see was why, whether innocently or not, he did it.

"It's the worst thing about celibacy," he said. The direct, abrupt reference to his condition surprised me. He lit another cigarette, and I realized he wasn't going to finish the thought, as if he'd begun it aloud inadvertently.

"What is?"

"Not having children."

Because of Molly, I saw that he was right, but I rushed to reassure him. "You have all those children whom you help."

He laughed. "Do you know who I spend my time with, almost all of it? Monsignors. Church bureaucrats. The heads of Catholic Charities or Offices for the Propagation of the Faith. In Sioux City one day and Mobile the next, and L.A. the day after that. Always in chanceries. You know what a chancery is in wrestling? Any hold that imprisons the head." His bitterness surprised me.

"But you're building orphanages," I said. "You're taking care of children whose fathers are gone. You're a father, Michael, to thousands of them."

"But I never get to hold them." He looked at me. "Could I hold her, Durk?"

"Sure you can." Even if I'd known that one day Molly would have his name instead of mine, I'd have let him do it. He was my friend, and, having seen his pain, I wanted to take it away.