The City Below (18 page)

"Thanks again."

Breezing past the guard, he winked, as if his purpose here were frivolous. He told himself to bear down. Striking out the pitcher, shit Balling the teacher, that's what it would be. He nearly laughed, amazed at the tricks his mind could play.

Seconds later he came to the flower shop, which was little more than a partitioned-off corner where two broad corridors intersected. A stainless steel cart in the doorway held four measly arrangements of weary-looking carnations and daisies. Inside the room, on stepped shelves, were several other meager bunches for sale. Just because the people here were sick, did the flowers have to be? The candy striper, a stout young woman of perhaps twenty, stood at a small worktable trimming the stems of daisies, cutting them flat instead of at an angle. Squire resisted the impulse to show her. What a waste, he thought A real store would make a killing here.

He stuck his head in. "How you doing, hon?"

The girl jumped.

"The lady out front said I should just run these up." He indicated his own paper cone. "The room is P-something. That's—"

"Phillips House, that way."

"Right Thanks."

He should have known it. Phillips House was the VIP wing. His mother hadn't gotten within a mile of it, but he walled off the old feeling. He headed down the corridor, whistling.

The sterile hospital ambience—the polished linoleum floor, the pale blue walls, the running strip of the wooden gurney guard, the circular neon light fixtures on the ceiling, the unclothed fire extinguishers and the institutional signage—all changed when Doyle crossed the threshold into Phillips House, the lobby of which was the spacious foyer of a pretend mansion. There were wooden floors, broad oriental rugs, a huge fireplace with a black marble mantel, a brass chandelier dominating its center. Portraits hung on the paneled walls on each side of the fireplace.

At a small ebony desk another prim woman sat, her job, no doubt, to welcome wealthy patients with assurances that Phillips House would be like dying at home. Doyle's instinct told him not to even look at this one. He swept past a door marked
LADIES VISITING COMMITTEE
and found the elevator. Luckily the car was there. He went in, pressed five, and the door closed behind him.

He knew Tucci's room from a distance because of the man in the dark suit sitting in a chair by the door. Doyle recognized him as he approached. The guard would know him in turn.

"How's Mr. Tucci doing?"

The guard looked at Doyle, but otherwise did not react.

"I brought these." Squire pulled back a corner of the wrapping from the roses.

"You can leave them with me."

"I was hoping to say a word—"

"No visitors. You shouldn't even be—"

"Mr. Tucci told me to come. Last time I saw him, he said he wanted me to."

The man stood up and turned to the door. He rapped once.

The door opened quickly, but only partway. A man whom Doyle recognized as Tucci's personal bodyguard showed his face in the narrow opening, then he disappeared. Seconds later the door opened fully to reveal the bald, pasty-faced figure of Guido's son. Behind him Doyle glimpsed the tidy furniture of a sitting room. Tucci's room was not visible, nor were the hospital bed, the tubes, stands, wheeled tables, and metal cabinets Doyle expected to see.

"What do you want?" Frank Tucci's eyes were red, but he asked the question with a snarl.

"I brought these because I knew your father likes them."

Frank stared at the roses. He was about forty now. He had been present for most of the meetings between Squire and his father over the years, always quiet at the old man's elbow, the permanent observer, never a confidant, but a trainee. At some point, Squire had realized it was how Guido protected his son, by making him privy to everything, forcing everyone to see how he regarded Frank But to Squire, Frank had become like a thick piece of furniture in Tucci's office. He was aware of the way Frank's eyes glazed over whenever Squire described developments in the Irish neighborhoods. He was utterly unlike his father, whose genius lay, Squire eventually understood, in an acute interest in—devotion to, love of—the details of the lives of the people over whom he held sway.

Once, several years before, the three of them had walked along the boardwalk on Revere Beach on a bright but windy May day. When Doyle had handed over that period's shake, the old man had surprised them both by sending Frank home with the envelope as if he were some flunky. Then Tucci had said an arm inside Squire's. After that, in good weather, the two of them had often walked there, leaving Frank at the house. Squire had hardly dared to think about the strong, forever unarticulated personal feeling that grew between him and old Tucci, each of whom needed something more from the other than the business. Squire understood his own need—the missing father—but not that of Tucci, whose attachment to a young Irishman seemed to come at his own son's expense. Frank had never shown Squire any overt reaction beyond a stolid, morose silence, but it was with a quite open resentment now that he took the flowers. He started to close the door, but Squire put his foot against it. "Your father would want to know I'm out here."

"No. No, he wouldn't."

"Tell him."

"Get the fuck out of here, Doyle." Frank looked at the guard. "Get him out of here, Jerry. What the fuck do I have you sitting out here for?"

The guard responded at once by locking Squire's arm and pulling him away.

Squire could not quite hold his ground. "You've got to tell me how your father is!"

He almost added, He'll be all right, this is a Harvard hospital. For an instant his mind was taken over by an image of that woman at the desk. She was naked, on a bed, her legs together modestly, but the whiteness of her thighs was dazzling.

"Get the fuck away from here, and don't bother me," Frank said. "You get it? Forget coming to Revere. I'll send people to you from now on, you get it' And the vig is going up. Changes, Doyle. You got changes coming."

That's
how Tucci is, Squire thought. Dying. Or dead already. Nothing else could account for Frank's spasm of authority. It was what Squire had come here to learn. It was what Squire had been dreading. The personal grief, yes; despite himself, a bit of it But more, far more—the prospect of fronting for this asshole, the need to placate him.

Tucci dying. Dead. Also, all these years—his plan would prevail over any sense of loss, over any move Frank made—it was the moment he'd been waiting for.

C
OMING OUT
of the cathedral had been like coming out of a movie theater, everyone blinking in the bright light of late morning sunshine, blinded for a moment but still in thrall to the adventure, the romance, or, as in their case, the dread of what they had just beheld.

They moved out of the glare quickly, into the cold shadow of the old iron superstructure of the elevated train. Those tracks had been a Protestant-sponsored blight on the cathedral since early in the century. Soot and noise had ruined the church, and the Irish still held the faded Brahmin establishment responsible. Even these young men were attuned to the primordial feud, taking for granted the special Boston meaning of the chill of that shadow. But today the chill they felt was more Roman than Yankee.

The seminary bus waited in the dead zone between the girders that grew like rusted, leafless trees in the middle of Washington Street Doyle's classmates milled uncertainly at the curb, reluctant to cross to the bus yet They clustered in small groups. Some looked toward Doyle, as if he would call them around and explain what Monsignor Loughlin meant.

But what could Doyle say? He held the folder gingerly, as if expecting it to burst into flame.

He caught Jim Adler's eye and raised a finger. Adler came over. His wide-eyed expression said, At your service. His big ears and freckled face kept Adler looking young, and in that crowd where studied world-weariness was a mode, Terry found Jim's boyishness irresistible. As he had previous head students, Adler served as Terry's unofficial factotum, drawing on his considerable gift for ingratiation. The culture of seminary life forbade overt ass kissing of the rector or faculty, but within the pecking order of student seniority, the ethos encouraged it. Terry had begun by finding Adler's eagerness useful, but by now he considered him a friend and confidant.

"It's in Latin, Jimmy." Doyle opened the folder and read, "
In semi-narium ab Ordinario ...
"

"'Ordinarily.' I don't believe you said that."

"Me either." Terry looked at the others, aware that they were watching him. Once on the bus, out of sight of the cathedral, of the monsignor, they would explode. Doyle was not ready to deal with that. "Do me a favor, will you?" Terry handed over the manila folder. "We need to know exactly what this says. Will you bring it to Roger? Ask him to translate it precisely, would you? Then run copies off on the mimeo, get them around to everybody."

"The guys are going to want to know ..."

"Post a sign at lunch. Meeting at four in the common room. Closed to everybody but our class."

"Then you better not say the common room."

"The music room, then."

"You're not coming back to St. John's with us?"

"I've got an errand to run for the Liturgy Committee."

Adler flipped the folder open, puzzled over the closely typed page, then whistled. "
'De dimissionis.'
Even I know what that means."

"When you get back, go to Monsignor Carey's office for me. Tell him, since we were already downtown, I went over to Campion's for copies of the new rite."

"Yeah,
right.
We already have those."

"We need a couple more, Jimmy. Just tell him, would you? Will you do it all, like a pal?"

"Hey, famous for it, doing what I'm told." Adler dropped his eyes to the arcane text again. "But even I have a line in the sand somewhere, one I won't cross."

Terry laughed. "That's not your line, that's your head."

"Jesus, Terry, this is—"

"Don't jump the gun, Jimmy. Let's see what Roger says it says, exactly. Maybe we can play the Roman game too, like Küng and Rahner do, like the Cush, hiding in the thickets of linguistic ambiguity. The fact that it's in Latin may give us all the out we need." Terry slapped Adler's shoulder, making him feel that, despite Loughlin's air of ultimatum, things were going to be all right Which was how Doyle often made them all feel.

***

Terry had once liked going to Campion's, the religious goods store behind Jordan Marsh. It was a mark of how much he had changed, and how little Campion's had, that now he detested the place. With its gaudy plaster statues, its mawkish pictures of the saints, the medals and icons and plastic holy-water fonts and dashboard figurines; with the rosary beads in a hundred colors, the pious pamphlets and the mindless spiritual books, Thomas a Kempis,
Sayings of the Little Flower,
a revolving rack of K of C comics featuring the jailed priest-heroes of the war against atheistic communism—Campion's was a shrine to the Church that was dying.

The salesmen were stooped, effeminate, and old beyond their years, overgrown altar boys. The cash register clerks were talc-ridden sodality ladies. He could not pass those people in the narrow, cluttered aisles, whiffing their too sweet odors, hearing their dentures clack, without the sinking humiliation he'd have felt if they were his own aunts and uncles. He knew very well that, to detached outsiders, to those girls in their September dresses passing in the street, say, this cramped, musty world and
his
world were one and the same. Never mind the Berrigan brothers, Mass Facing the People, or the New Theology. Especially never mind them now.

Terry's liberation from the old Jansenist constraints was relative. Out of a pained impulse to be alone, he'd fabricated an excuse to come here, and so then he'd felt obliged to. Given what had transpired in the sanctuary of the cathedral, Campion's seemed more oppressive than ever. Surely the new encyclical meant just what they'd all first feared, that they'd been kidding themselves, that
this
—the Word become plastic—was the true Church, the One True Church, the Bride of Christ to whom he himself was engaged to be married.

When he noted the dandruff on one clerk's shoulders, he checked his own and was mildly surprised to find them clean.

"There you are!" The familiar voice startled Terry. It was Father Collins. With a sweep of his arm, he took in the rows of books that covered the nearby wall. "Looking in vain for any publication that acknowledges, much less celebrates, what we have accomplished in this decade alone."

"Hello, Father," Terry said calmly, but he could feel his face heating up, as if he'd been caught eyeballing
Playboy
at the drugstore.

"Jimmy Adler told me where you said you'd be."

Terry started: what was Jimmy doing telling Collins? "I told him I need some copies of the revised psalter, but frankly—"

"But frankly, I never thought I'd really find you here. You just had to get the hell out of there, and so did I. I'm glad for the excuse, tracking you down." Father Collins looked around, amazed. "Cherubim and seraphim, all ye holy nuts and bolts. Christ, I haven't been in here in years."

"Get used to it, Father," said Terry, "it's coming back."

The priest shook his head sadly, but before he could reply, one of the salesmen who had so successfully ignored Terry, thinking him a layman, presented himself. "Welcome to Campion's, Father. What can I do for you?"

Father Collins instantly dropped his face to peer over the top of his eyeglasses. "Something on the intact hymen of Mary, please."

"I beg your pardon?"

"In childbirth, how she remained a virgin, biologically speaking, how nothing broke when the baby came out. What do you have?"

"I, that is ... we have ..." The salesman glanced at the wall of books, devotions, nosegays. "I'll have to ask Mr. Drew."

"Yes, do."

The salesman shuffled off.

Collins turned his attention to the phalanx of foot-high statues on the counter behind him, each of a baby king, each clothed in silk robes, doll dresses. "God, these things. They still have these things." He lifted the hem of one statue's dress. "This is it, Terry. You know this is it, don't you?"