Prince of Peace (73 page)

"I mean that's the point of renouncing feeling. It's the only way to live like this."

"That's the saddest thing I ever heard, Michael."

"But you know it's true."

She wouldn't look at him.

"Don't you?" he pressed.

"Then why live like that?"

"You know why."

"No, I don't, Michael. I honestly don't."

"Well, you did."

Now she faced him squarely, and when their eyes met, he had an impulse to shield his from hers. "Yes, I did," she said. "I knew about the 'Come follow me!' and the 'Not my will but Thine!' and the 'Be ye perfect!' and the
'Fiat Voluntas Tua.'
But I also know about the man who put the Pharisees in their place. And I know who the Pharisees are today. And I know how they maintain their control over good people like you. They make you think that the most precious experience possible to a human being is an evil one. Nicholas Wiley has offered you a chance, Michael, because he's made you
feel
something. Well, don't drown that feeling! And don't talk it away with your Bible quotes!"

"But Carolyn, Nicholas Wiley burned himself to death because of his feelings."

"Is that what you're afraid of, immolating yourself?"

"No." He looked away from her. "But I am afraid of lunacy." Carolyn lifted her gaze to the window. The lights of Manhattan shone in the black, but it was to a reflection in the glass her eyes were drawn. On Michael's face the lines were taut, fierce, unbecoming. She had never seen him in the grip of cowardice before. "Your refusal is the lunacy," she said harshly.

It was the truth between them, the very heart of it. He knew, as I would have, that she meant, beneath the generalities about "feelings," his refusal of her.

He said quietly, "I wish I could change it."

"You can," she said simply.

Michael waited for her to look at him. "I'm afraid," he said.

"I know."

Neither breathed. Already they had crossed the threshold; he closed a door behind them by saying, "Of you."

Silence, what silence then between them. Michael stared at the counter, Carolyn bowed her head. They could still have drawn back. Each small step required another, bolder one. The wind from the river rattled lightly at the window. The wall clock hummed.

Michael raised his eyes to look at her. The nightgown was closed at her throat. Its white cotton shimmered against the navy blue of her robe, a kimono, full sleeved without lapels. She had belted it tightly. Her waist and bosom were defined, not erotically but with unabashed womanliness. He pictured her as she had been when he first knew her, in the black habit of a Sister of Charity, and then he pictured her stepping from the terrace in Dobbs Ferry, in the near nakedness of an ordinary bathing suit, her long legs, her cropped blond hair, her thighs. Was it possible that first vision of her beauty had occurred only six years before? Those six years, with a marriage, a child, a house, a resolute pursuit of painting, had been for her a long time, but for him they had been an eternity, an infinite stretch in which, while worlds ended outside, nothing happened inside. It had been that long since anyone touched him, since she had.

He reached his hand toward hers where it rested by her glass. Shyly he covered it.

When she looked up at him, tears spilled from her eyes. Her crusty assertiveness had evaporated. When she spoke he could barely hear her. "I have been wanting you to do that."

Michael knew that if he continued touching her all was lost, yet he could not remove his hand. This was what he'd feared—being outdistanced by his racing heart. But Carolyn was ahead of him, she was waiting for him. She at least had been consistent from the start.

He leaned toward her and she brought her face to his. He kissed a tear. He raised his other hand to touch her hair. Suddenly that hand closed on the back of her neck and pressed her face against his. Their kiss was like a blow, stunning them both. Carolyn's lip bled at once, and the taste of her blood made Michael wild. Lunacy, he thought, yes, lunacy! This could make a man set fire to himself. But this had nothing to do with Wiley.

Against the image of a man aflame he buried his face between her shoulder and her neck. "Oh Caro!" Immolation of another kind.

The chair fell out from under him. She took his weight and her hands pulled at him passionately. She brought his face up to kiss him again, pushing her tongue into his mouth, but she began to fall too. They went together to the floor, roughly. Their arms and hands never faltered, hers pulling him on top of her, his pressing through her robe and the thin cloth of her nightgown.

"Stop!" she said, "Stop!" and rolled her face away.

He raised himself on one knee, off her. Oh Christ, what are we doing? This is impossible!

But that was not her meaning.

She stood and took his hand and led him to her bedroom. To our bedroom.

He followed mutely.

She closed the door behind them and by our bed she turned toward him. She opened her robe and let it fall. "We should be undressed," she said. "We should be naked for each other."

Michael unbuttoned his black shirt. No woman would have done that for him. At his bare chest, hanging from a string around his neck, was a small plain cross of wood, Wiley's cross.

He went to her, understanding that this must happen slowly, deliberately. He would have preferred it that way himself, but preference had nothing to do with it. The storm of his arousal broke. He kissed her, pressed her body against his, and the sensation of her breasts rising beneath the thin cotton against his skin unleashed him. He tore at her nightgown, pulling it down feverishly, even while pushing her away to look, to see those breasts, her waist, the hair of her crotch, to see that she was after all the fulfillment of his lust. She fell back onto the bed, and her legs opened.

He threw off his clothing and was on her, but he was too frantic, too new, too at the mercy of his passion, and he could not find her. All at once he was terrified that he would ejaculate outside her. "Help me!" he said. "Help!"

And didn't that plea of his sum up everything? Why he was afraid; why the suicide of his protégé drove him into her arms, her legs; why this moment had been so long in coming, so terrifying. He was the man who helped others. He had never needed help himself. There was his true virginity.

She knew just what to do and did, guiding his penis successfully, seizing it in the mouth of her womb so that when, seconds later, all that he withheld began to pump violently like Gatling rounds, a new terror took hold of him—many first-time lovers have it—that he would kill her.

When she screamed, how could he have known it was not with pain? In his dream of copulation, brutality was muted but there. But now when she thrashed below him, all was violence. Her arms held him as the walls of her cunt held his prick. Her constrictions came in spasms; she gave what she got. She strangled him.

Then he cried out like a gored beast. They were both killers. Was that the recognition that freed him?

He stopped caring finally what would happen if he fucked her, and simply did.

Remorse, when it came, was gentle. They spoke of me, of course, and would surely have felt horror at their betrayal, but their postcoital happiness reduced it to something like regret. It was as if I was a passenger in a car one of them was driving—it didn't matter which—and then the other's car came out of nowhere. Perhaps it was the highway's fault or the weather's. In the collision I was the only victim. What else could they do but console each other for what they'd done? At least I would never know.

Michael dressed before dawn and at the door he said to her, his finger under her chin, "I love you." Then he left. He went to his rectory in Aina, showered, put on fresh clericals and said the early Mass for the repose of the soul of Nicholas Wiley. Later that morning, in his fateful, final meeting with Francis Cardinal Spellman—"I refuse to yield to you in anything related to this evil war!"—he remembered what, on the scale of moral conduct, was the true blasphemy, not disobedience or adultery, but genocide.

Still he felt an overpowering remorse at having failed Nicholas and at having broken his priestly vows and at having, yes, betrayed me. But the bite of those sorrows was nothing compared to the passion set loose in him at last. There was a woman now, and there was a war, and in relation to each he found the precious treasure that he'd counted lost forever, not the Kingdom of God, but his own manhood. His memory and his manhood had been returned to him by Wiley's soul and Carolyn's body.

 

I have had twelve years to understand, and I think I do, although I have perhaps accepted less than I have understood.

It was not their purpose to hurt me. On the contrary, they always sought to lull me in the cat's cradle of their lies. And there were times when they even offered me a crack at the truth, but I rigorously avoided that. When Michael spoke to me on Black Mountain of his dread, his discouragement and sense of doom, I chose to hear him always as the hero of resistance, as if the dread was of prison and not of hell, as if what doomed him was his faithfulness and not his betrayal. I was a cooperator in their adultery, and even a beneficiary of it. I'm certain it was true, as Carolyn said, that she loved me more than ever, even while she deceived me. It was Michael who opened her fully, not me. When at last she had him, her joy overflowed. She could not have feigned her happiness, and I, with Molly, saw more of it than anyone.

Surely at some level I knew what had happened. They were secret lovers for three years. I have described already times when the truth—"I
do
love you!"—all but raped me. But I never allowed it entrance to the center of my heart. It was writing in the sand in the wind, and before the last letter was formed the first was always gone. I refused to hold the literal image in my mind; Michael and Carolyn naked with each other? Fucking? Not once in a fit of passion, but every chance they got? Every chance I gave them? Settling into a long, easy liaison that made them not less loving, as the "old morality" swore it would, but more? Carolyn became a great wife and mother, and Michael became a hero-priest because of—who could have explained this?—in a word, sin.

When at last I was made to face what was obvious, I simply could not do so as myself. I became someone else. I became what the FBI man thought I was, and what he wanted.

I watched the tape reels spinning, silent now except for the
flick flick flick
of the tailing brown ribbon. The room, stark white, unornamented, the light glaring fiercely above me, was like the set of a play. One of those modern things, Pinter or Beckett, in which the antagonist representing absolute evil or absolute good— it is never clear and doesn't matter—inflicts his torment from outside the room. He never enters.

But if I was a Pinter character, I would have dismissed what I had just heard with an ironic remark—"Golly, but the good Father paid close attention in Confession all these years!"—and I'd have resumed my life with Carolyn, my friendship with Michael, as if nothing happened. But I'd have become the absolute antagonist outside
their
stark white room.

But I am out of Ibsen, not Pinter. I had no choice but to shake heaven, to bring it down, even if on myself. This was the betrayal I'd foreseen, expected, made possible. Yet it was the one event—even including, say, the arrival on our cities of Russian missiles—for which I was utterly unprepared. There had been no air-raid drills for this.

My reaction watching those reels was no more a matter of choice than it was for the end of the audio tape to go
flick flick flick.
I was possessed by the simplest reflex, the oldest one, an absolute impulse. It taught me the only wisdom I would need in Israel when I got there, the only relevant truth of the Nuclear Age: that when the enemy strikes and we are defeated totally—our cities razed, our future ash—it will not matter that no purpose is served by our destroying in return and with our last effort a Beirut or a Moscow or a My Lai for that matter. Retaliation is the rule of life. That's all.

The door of the interrogation room opened—theater of the absurd now utterly—and the mode of mine walked in.

M
ONHEGAN
Island is a whale-shaped rock twelve miles off the coast of Maine, only a few miles around and reaching perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the sea. For three hundred years it has maintained a cruel, stolid indifference to the pounding waves of the Atlantic, to the shrouding weather, to the fierce fishing people who have made it home, to the artists and rare summer tourists who defy the twin hostilities of nature and native, and to the hardy traffic of lobster boats, trawlers and cargo ships for which it remains a fearsome navigational hazard. Nearly a hundred vessels have piled up on its rocks. The story of Monhegan's wild shore is the story of shipwreck.

No savvy fugitive would have gone there, and I could not imagine why Michael would have chosen it. Carolyn and I were clinging to the same stanchion, the upright pipe that supported the flimsy roof of the lobster boat we'd hired to take us out from Boothbay Harbor. It was early in April, much too soon for tourists, and the lobsterman had eyed us warily when we'd approached him. But for fifty dollars he swallowed his qualm. He could be out and back in four hours. It was a Sunday and he couldn't haul traps anyway. What was it to him that the island's one small hotel didn't open up until June? What was it to him that the Monhegan people would shun us? We didn't explain that we had reason to think that a friend of ours was out there already, expecting us.

I pressed the ends of my collar together at my throat. The spray had saturated my citified raincoat, and I dearly wished for a hat. I was freezing, though the day had begun as balmy and bright. I tried to focus on the island, which seemed to undulate mystically ahead of us, though we were the ones who rose and fell. Our boat was at the mercy of swells and I considered it a miracle that I had not gotten sick yet. For the first hour it had frightened me that I could not see the island through the fog, and all that time the lobsterman's boat had seemed less seaworthy the farther from land we got. How I wished for radar. I did not trust his compass or his skill until suddenly the island appeared ahead of us, like an apparition. I looked at the man to offer the homage of a nod, but he ignored me. Carolyn raised her eyebrows with relief. We were strictly Circle Line sailors. This was fucking awful.