The City Below (29 page)

"Nick Doyle," Squire said, offering his hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you. We're all proud you came to Boston."

"Thanks, Mr. Doyle." Nicolson was just a needy kid. He accepted Squire's affirmation gratefully. After shaking hands with Squire, Nicolson said to Terry, "Father, some of the guys —"

"Hold it, Bean. Hold it I'm not 'Father,' okay? Not yet anyway. Call me Terry."

"Oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, anyways." Nothing. Nicolson would call him nothing. "We thought you, uh, might come Friday after practice to the Hofbräu."

"The kickoff party? You still do that?"

Nicolson grinned. "The last blast before the season is official."

"Thanks, Bean. Tell the guys thanks. I can't do it, though. No."

"It's against his religion," Squire put in.

"Have fun, Bean." Terry raised his hand, that concluding wave again. "Your last chance to tie one on. Watch out for those Hofbräu schooners. Another reason for making our next session Monday. You'll have the weekend to recover."

Nicolson grinned so innocently it was clear the high life was not his thing. He headed up the path toward Roberts with his gawky, disjointed gait.

"Nice to meet you," Squire called.

But Nicolson seemed not to have heard.

"Christ," Squire said, "inviting the clergy to come drinking. Wild bunch, these Eagles."

The brothers stared after Nicolson in silence. Soon he and the other players had all disappeared into the gym.

Squire said, "Listen, I'm sorry."

"Forget it Actually, you had a point, and I heard it I want you to tell Gramps that" —Terry looked helplessly at his brother —"well, that I love him."

"That's your job, bud. But I can do something else." He pressed Terry's arm. "If things wind up ... you know ... with you on your ear, I can help."

"On my ear? On my ass is more like it."

"I can get you a job."

"Well, Gramps may not want me."

"I don't mean at the stores, Terry. Hell, you don't want to sell daffodils. I know that much."

"You sell flowers, that's what you said a few minutes ago. But you're not offering me a job in the stores? What do you have in mind for me, Nick?"

The coldness with which Terry asked this question made Squire wonder how much he knew. But then he told himself, Terry knows nothing. Squire shrugged. "You're a War-on-Poverty type. Great Society, all that shit Right?" When Terry did not respond, he went on. "The new breed city hall, jacket off, sleeves rolled up. You're a Kevin White wet dream."

"And you have pull with the mayor?"

"Not me. I'm just a flower man. But Louise. Kevin owes Louise. And Louise owes me."

"I despise Louise, Nick."

"Doesn't matter. She'd be glad to —"

"No, thanks." Terry looked at his hands, at the slivered welts where his nails had been digging in. "She's a goddamned racist"

"Don't believe everything you read in
Newsweek
about Mrs. Hicks. And don't forget,
she's
what you and I come from."

"No she's not."

Squire shrugged. "I'm just reminding you, you got options."

"So that I'll go quietly? So that I'll quit?"

Squire shook his head sadly. "If you quit, the biddies in the parish are wrecked. If you don't, I guess Gramps is."

"Unless I eat the shit."

"Go
around
the shit, Terry. Go
around.
" Squire held his arms out for Molly, taking her back. "I don't want you to quit either. It works for me, Charlie, you being a priest"

"Why is that, Nick?"

Squire shrugged. "Same for me as if Ma were alive. You a priest, I see you on Sundays when you come home for dinner."

"I'm still in the family? When this is over, Nick, I may not be."

"That's what I'd like to avoid."

"Me too. But what the hell, I'm seeing this through the best way I can. I'm not the one who made the encyclical an issue of conscience —"

Squire's eyebrows shot up.

"—of conscience, dammit! They did. I have no choice."

"We all have choices, brother. Keep that in mind. There are consequences too, and not just the ones you expect." Squire glanced at Molly, as if somehow her fate was also tied to this.

Then Terry saw it Not her fate, but her future as his niece. It was true, his standing in the family was at stake.

"So take good care," Squire concluded. And he walked away, with his daughter perched on his shoulder so that she could stare back at her uncle, blankly.

B
Y FRIDAY
the number of men ready to protest the birth control encyclical had dropped to eleven. "The Twelve," Hal Forrester, one of the protesters, cracked as they left St. John's, "if you don't count Judas."

"We have a class full of Judases," Moose Moran, another protester, said. "Right, Terry?"

"What the hell, guys. Everybody makes his own decision."

They fell informally into line, some carrying posters, some carrying stacks of the leaflets they had run off. The posters read
Honesty in the Church, Keep the People in "The People of God," Vox Populi,
and "
Humanae Vitae" Is Not Infallible.

Each one wore his good black suit and his Roman collar; his shoes were shined; a photographer could find a point of focus in the part of his hair. But they were a dispirited group, and even those who'd sought to layer anxiety with repartee fell silent now that they were out of doors, actually doing it at last. It was late morning of an overcast day.

Terry looked up at the leaden sky. "That's all we need."

But it wasn't raining, and maybe wouldn't.

Other seminarians watched from the bay windows of the library. A group of junior students at work period, leaning on shovels near the statue of Saint Patrick —a bishop standing on a snake —stared openly as Doyle and his classmates trudged up the hill toward the cardinal's residence.

The plan was to form a picket line on the Comm. Ave. side of the mansion, actually the back of the building. Hedges and a low wall stood between the house and the street Neither the cardinal nor anyone else of importance had rooms on that side, but they were no longer the point The people passing in the street were the point, anyone who might notice and ask, What are you doing? Reporters were the point. The sidewalk behind the house was public property, so nobody could stop them.

Forrester had proposed reciting the rosary as they walked, but the others had merely groaned. Someone had suggested Psalms, but no one had seconded the motion. So now they moved solemnly but silently at the edge of the grounds, in and out of the chilly, faint shade of huge old elm trees, following the graceful serpentine of the long, sloping asphalt roadway. Some of the seminarians were blank-minded, putting one foot in front of another, a dreamlike procession out of a long subservience, but also out of the closest thing to paradise they would ever know.

To a man, the eleven had found themselves wanting the priesthood more than ever this week —the odd effect, perhaps, of quickened consciences, but also of knowing it might be forfeit now. Tomorrow they would be not deacons but spoiled priests, and their big problem would not be birth control but the U.S. Army draft. But that was tomorrow. This, this was today.

They were coming to the crest of the next hill, an invisible border between their own turf —their turreted, dark-ages building, their ball courts and fields, the wooded corners in which they prayed —and that of the senior clergy staffing archdiocesan offices —the parking lots and the fresh brick, flat-roofed structures, fifties modern, built to look efficient and up-to-date but resembling in the end a soon-to-be-seedy motel complex. Terry could not bring himself to look at the windows, for he knew that to the assistant chancellors, tribunal judges, canon lawyers, and their blue-haired secretaries, he and his fellow protesters —protestantr —were Judases and nothing else.

At last, following one more turn in the roadway, the cardinal's house itself came into view, sited majestically at the top of yet another rolling hill, crowning a sweep of broad, open lawn. The vista was punctuated here and there by lone trees, cypresses and poplars. In the valley from which the grassy plain sloped upward were a pair of chipped Roman columns hinting at Old World ruins, since they upheld nothing. The isolated trees and the columns seemed positioned in relation to the cardinal's residence, a deliberate framing of the
palazzo
intended to evoke Tuscany, the Umbrian Hills, the rare country near Assisi. To young, untraveled Boston eyes, it succeeded utterly. Only the futuristic antenna disk plunked on the roof, with its oddly protruding arms aiming, no doubt, at the hills of Rome, undercut the impression that this was a domicile of another era.

As they approached the spot where the roadway would take them past the mansion, Terry could hear a trolley rumbling by —his trolley, what he'd ridden to school each morning years before. But all he could see still was the building itself, the three-story, sand-colored brick façade, the bright balustrade marking the roofline off from the gray sky, the formal portico before the driveway, an entrance fit for
principati.

Ahead was a statue of Mary, and as they approached it, Terry looked forward to getting that image of compliance behind them. Oh, to be off the grounds, beyond the house, out into Boston, into —here was the feeling —America.

But not so fast.

As they drew abreast of the statue, a cassocked figure stepped out from behind the rampant rhododendron and blocked their way. Father Collins, tired looking, rheumy-eyed as ever, stood with his hand up, less like a cop than a timid pupil. Terry had not seen him since leaving Dini's. "Wait a minute, fellows," he said.

The group stopped. The men holding posters kept them face down. Terry met his eyes directly. "Father, we've thought it through. There's no point in —"

"I'm not here to argue, Terry."

Thirty yards beyond was the point where Cushing's driveway crossed the sidewalk of Comm. Ave. Out there, a group of men and women were peering toward them, perhaps a dozen. And a pair of Boston policemen stood by too. A blue-and-white was blocking the driveway, its lights flashing.

Father Collins opened his hands as if saying
Dominas vobiscum,
an unconscious imitation of the posture of the sculpted Virgin behind him. "We were hoping you'd come in for a minute. That's all."

"We?"

"Me," the priest said, "and the cardinal."

"Cardinal Cushing?"

"No, Stan Musial."

"We weren't expecting —"

"Just a minute, Terry." Father Collins's eyes moved across the group. "What do you say, fellows?"

This was what they'd wanted earlier in the week, but what was the point now? Still, Father Collins was the priest they'd all depended on.

"I don't know, Father."

"Just for a minute," Father Collins said with a note of pleading.

Terry nodded. "Okay." He doubted no more than the priest that the decision was his to make. Father Collins led the way between the pungent shrubs, past Our Lady, to whom not one of the men raised his eyes.

***

In all those years, they had never been inside that place. The ornate foyer, its polished marble floor and curved staircase sweeping up to the second story, put them in mind of a municipal building or the Museum of Fine Arts. Father Collins pointed to a small room off the entrance. "Do you want to leave your things there?"

The posters, he meant, the leaflets. They did so.

And then, single file, they followed him down the long corridor. Their footsteps echoed on the terrazzo. Oil portraits lined the walls, popes and prelates, expressions fixed in disapproval.

At the far end of the corridor, Father Collins opened a door and stood aside. The men filed past, aware of his whiskey breath, into an opulent dining room. A multitiered Waterford chandelier overhung a long, gleaming table at which Doyle, and then each of his classmates, instinctively picked a chair to stand behind, as if this were the seminary refectory. One broad wall was paneled wood, mirrors, and crystal sconces. The other featured a bank of four ten-foot windows that overlooked the sweeping lawn and O'Connell's Gothic chapel on the hill. The airy vista and the manly dark elegance of the room were countered by its aroma, a stench of cigars, overcooked food, and the generalized odor —altar wine, sacristies, the musty drawers of vesting cases, the mold in old missals —that the seminarians had associated with priests since they were altar boys.

Father Collins did not follow them into the room. For a few minutes nothing happened. Terry stared out the nearest window, wanting to finger his collar, but he felt observed and didn't move. Finally, at a stirring in the doorway, they looked toward it in time to see the startlingly red figure of Cardinal Cushing appear.

He entered the room stiffly, but at a clip, and he was carrying a large white cardboard, holding it gingerly by the merest corner. The men, to their common horror, recognized it as one of their posters.

Cushing was always taller than they expected, thinner and more physically agitated, his hands never settled, his eyes constantly darting about. His pockmarked complexion, sallow gauntness, and crooked teeth always amazed for combining somehow into a rough loveliness. The blue depth of his eyes pulled them in. He seemed in pain. There had been rumors: arthritis, migraines, something with his kidneys. Doyle and the others could not look at him without feeling a blast of guilt.

"Sit down," Cushing said with no more than his usual gruffness. He remained standing at the head of the table. Collins had come into the room and now hovered in the corner behind the cardinal, like a waiter. Cushing did not speak at first He centered the poster flat on the table before him. Even upside down, the seminarians could read it:
Honesty in the Church.

At last he raised his face to look at them. "I got one thing to say to you fellows." Cushing fingered the poster, aligned it with the table edge, before adding quietly, "You're the damnedest..." His voice faltered. He glanced out the window. "You're the best damn men I've got" He brought his eyes back. "And I can't afford to lose you." He shook his head. "Not over this birth control, anyways." Then he banged the table with his fist. "I will not have it' Not from you, and not from them! Do you understand me?"