The Good Shepherd (10 page)

Dennis smiled. “I want the scorecard concession.”

Matthew Mahan was half inclined to laugh. Instead, his eyes fell on the dark red hair that vanished unwillingly beneath Dennis’s round white collar, and he became serious. “Mike’s a wonderful guy. But a little too enthusiastic. I have to rein him in a lot. The poor fellow’s been having all sorts of trouble with his son Tony. Mike and his wife are separated, which is probably the root of the problem. Last year Tony dropped out of Georgetown. Mike put Pinkertons on his trail. They finally located him in a commune down in Hutchinson County.”

“Hard Times Haven?”

“Something like that.”

“They publish a newspaper - the Hard Times
Herald.
Everybody reads it out at the university. Would you like to see some copies?”

“No thanks.”

Wrong, Matthew Mahan thought. You made it sound like a rebuke. He fiddled with his episcopal ring. “Well,” he said, “you’ve been on the job almost two weeks now. How do you like it?”

“A lot more than I thought I would,” Dennis said with a slightly strained smile.

“Good. I thought you’d like to know that I’m satisfied. Quite satisfied.”

There was no evidence of pleasure, much less warmth, on Dennis McLaughlin’s face. He ran his hand through his unruly hair and nodded. “Good - good. I’m - glad,” he said.

“Let’s see,” Matthew Mahan said, “who else did I have on that list?”

Dennis took an index card from his coat pocket. “Your sister-in-law, Bishop Cronin at the seminary, the mayor.”

“You take care of him,” Matthew Mahan said.

“The president of the City Council.”

“Ditto.”

Matthew Mahan picked up the phone and dialed the seminary number. A querulous voice answered. “Rosewood?” It must be Mary Malone’s fiftieth year at the switchboard. Matthew Mahan decided to see if she was as ornery as ever. “I’d like to speak to Bishop David Cronin, please,” he said.

“He retired five years ago,” replied Mary.

“Isn’t he still living at the seminary?”

“How should I know,” said Mary. “I ain’t got time to keep track of all the old nuts they got parked around hee-uh.”

Matthew Mahan sighed. Someday he would become indignant enough to fire Mary. But today was not the day. “This is Archbishop Mahan,” he said. “Ring Bishop Cronin’s room, will you, please? If he isn’t there, try the library.”

A series of clicks and buzzes followed, with no commentary from Mary. With his free ear, Matthew Mahan could hear Dennis McLaughlin saying, “Yes, your Honor. His Eminence just thought - no, nothing special, I can assure you. He just thought you might like to prepare a statement. It doesn’t hurt to get one step ahead of the reporters. Yes, certainly, I’ll let him know.”

A dry voice rasped in his other ear. “Cronin here.”

“Mahan here. I thought you’d like to hear some interesting news I just got from the apostolic delegate.”

“Now what could that be?” said Auxiliary Bishop Cronin in his ripest Irish brogue. “Is he bringing over his sister and her twenty kids, and wants you to get the pack of them city jobs? Or worse, has he set them up in a Roman palazzo and wants you to send them everything you collect for the propagation of the faith?”

“No, nothing like that,” said Matthew Mahan. He caught a glimpse of his own smiling face in the rearview mirror. The pain stirred menacingly as if it were watching, too.

“Then it’s got to have something to do with the heretofore unused miraculous powers of the papacy. From now on, you’ll be able to ban books before poor fools like me have even written them.”

“Oh, he knows all about you,” Matthew Mahan said. “I told him a long time ago that if anything happened to me, he’d better consecrate the commandant of the Marine Corps to keep you in line.”

“All right, all right,” said Bishop Cronin, “let’s get to the point. I planned to spend the day demolishing old Pio Nono, and I don’t want to waste a minute of it.”

“From now on there’ll be another name I won’t let you call me.”

“Eminence? By God, don’t tell me a wandering particle of actual grace has pierced the Roman miasma and inspired them to do something intelligent for once? That’s the best news I’ve heard since Vatican II ended with a whimper.”

“I’d like you to come to Rome with me for the consistory.”

“Out of the question, Matthew me boy. Aside from the fact that a man of eighty has no time to waste, I don’t trust myself to stand up to the triumphal pretensions of that accursed city.”

“Nonsense. Don’t make me pull rank on you. I want you to come.”

“There’s only one way you’ll get me. You’ll have to import a half-dozen of the holy blatherer’s Swiss Guards and a straitjacket.”

“I may do it. We’ll take you along as a Sister of the Divine Heart complete with wimple.”

“I dare you. I dare you,” said Cronin, laughter breaking through the last words. He caught his breath. “Well, it’s glorious news, lad. You know you’re always in my prayers. It just shows you how much pull I’ve got with His Infinity upstairs.”

“Stay in contact with him for my sake, will you please?” Matthew Mahan said.

“You know I will. God love you now. Thanks for the call.”

Matthew Mahan dropped the phone back into its cradle. The pain had mysteriously subsided. They were on the expressway now, moving rapidly past the ugly outskirts of the city, humming across the miles of meadowland created by a meandering fork of the city’s river. Matthew Mahan pointed to four sets of steel rails that crossed the meadows on a cindery embankment several dozen feet lower than the expressway. “I can remember going down to the shore on summer excursion trains during the depression. These meadows were dotted with tin shanties that men were living in.”

“Sometimes when I hear stories about the depression,” Dennis McLaughlin said, “I wonder why we didn’t have a revolution in this country.”

“People were too - too defeated, I think,” Matthew Mahan said. “I remember in 1938 a half-dozen of us in the seminary came down here to the meadows to see what we could do for those poor devils. It was heartbreaking. They’d lost all hope. All they wanted was an unlimited supply of smoke, cheap fortified wine, to keep them semiconscious until oblivion. You couldn’t even get them to go to confession.”

“Is that what you did?” Dennis asked. “Tell them to repent?”

“Of course not. But we thought that if we could get them back to the sacraments, it might be a step on the road to rehabilitation.”

A suggestion of a sarcastic smile formed on Dennis’s lips. “I guess the theory was sound. How did it work in practice?”

“It didn’t. They were too far gone. Too broken. It was - a terrible time.”

“I wonder how they would have reacted if you took them back to the seminary, gave them your rooms for a weekend, and lived in their shanties.”

“In those days the seminary was run by Monsignor Walter Kincaid. He was about six feet four and had a voice like a diesel engine whistle. He would have expelled every one of us.”

“Oh well,” said Father McLaughlin, “just brainstorming.”

With no warning, the pain exploded again, filling the center of Matthew Mahan’s body with cold fire. They were in the suburbs now, still on the expressway. At the wheel, Eddie Johnson was relaxed, guiding the big car with one slim black hand, humming a song that the wind from his half-open window obliterated. Eddie loved the expressway. They were doing well over seventy, Matthew Mahan suspected. Two or three days ago a state cop had pulled Eddie over. When the lawman saw who was in the back seat, he had waved them on with profuse apologies. Dennis McLaughlin had sat there silently, commenting only with his enigmatic smile. Matthew Mahan had angrily suspected what he was thinking. These were the kinds of privileges that the Church must cease accepting.

What should he have done? Matthew Mahan asked himself, growing angry all over again. Insist on the trooper giving Eddie a ticket? If a judge suspended his license, he would be out of a job. He had six children to support. That was the kind of practical dilemma Father McLaughlin’s generation blithely ignored.

“Easy, Eddie, easy,” Matthew Mahan said. “We’re in no hurry.”

The car slowed perceptibly - from seventy-five to sixty was a highly probable guess. Matthew Mahan began to think about their destination, now only ten or fifteen minutes away, the College of Mount St. Monica. “This is the last time I’m going to make this trip,” he told Dennis McLaughlin. “I’m trying to prove my good faith in this thing, but if I don’t make any more progress than I did last week -”

He groped for the ultimate word or phrase.

“Sister Agnes will have to come to Canossa?” Dennis said.

Matthew Mahan looked blank.

“Pope Gregory VII made the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV stand outside his residence for three days in a snowstorm before he talked to him.”

“I’ll settle for one day, to show my moderation,” Matthew Mahan said with a quick smile. “The truth is, I think I’m still afraid of Agnes. I sat next to her for a year in St. Patrick’s. She was so damn smart she gave me a permanent inferiority complex.”

“I wonder if the Pope could get President Nixon to Canossa?” Dennis McLaughlin murmured.

“He’d be a fool if he tried it,” Matthew Mahan said. “Nobody wins in confrontations.”

“But what if winning isn’t the name of the game? What if losing is better?”

“Realistically,” Matthew Mahan said, irritation welling in his chest again, “that makes no sense to me.”

“Speculative theology,” Father McLaughlin said with another fleeting smile.

“Freedom and order. The Church stands for both. The Church must have both.” The new Cardinal emphasized his point by bringing his big hand down on his thigh.

Dennis nodded, but his eyes drifted away from Matthew Mahan to the suburban scenery. “Fantastic,” he said. “Look, those trees, they’re beginning to bud and it’s not even the end of March.”

“It’s been a short winter,” Matthew Mahan said.

They rode in silence for a few miles, until Eddie Johnson whipped the big car around one of those looping expressway exits, paid the toll, and swung onto a two-lane blacktop that ran through woods filled with bare birches. In a few more minutes, Eddie eased the limousine through a set of massive iron gates. On some iron fretwork above them was a plaque that read:

They rolled up a curving path through a half mile of open woods and emerged onto a wide lawn, dull green beneath the overcast sky. The massive main building, Sacré Coeur, was six stories high. Its gray fieldstone walls were topped by three weird white cupolas which made it look like something from a berserk fairy tale. The other buildings ranged from vaguely Colonial to a stridently Gothic chapel, complete with fake flying buttresses. “Every time I come out here,” Dennis McLaughlin said, “I wonder how they managed to create such ugly buildings.”

As Eddie slowed to a stop in front of the main entrance of Sacré Coeur, the chapel bell began clanging mightily. Instantly, a horde of young women came racing out of the building to swarm around the car. Many of them were wearing blue denim shirts and overalls. More than a few were in miniskirts that drew a pleased “Wow” from Dennis McLaughlin. Now the doorway of Sacré Coeur was filled to capacity with a clump of older women, headed by the president of the school, plump, placid-faced Sister Agnes Marie. Only a half-dozen older nuns were wearing the traditional black robes and high white wimple. The others, including Sister Agnes Marie, were wearing tweedy, conservatively cut suits.

Inside the car, Matthew Mahan was temporarily stunned. “What the devil -” he muttered.

“Maybe they’re going to burn us at the stake,” Dennis McLaughlin said. “Or at the Cadillac.”

The pain stirred greedily in Matthew Mahan’s stomach, flickering up his chest and turning the palms of his hands cold. Summoning calm by an act of the will, he said, “They’ve heard about me. It was probably on the eleven o’clock news.”

Matthew Mahan opened the door and climbed out of the car, forcing a smile. “What’s this? What’s this?” he asked Sister Agnes Marie.

Sister Agnes Marie raised her hand, and 500 feminine voices simultaneously cried: “
Congratulations,
Y
our Eminence.”

“Now, now,” he said to Sister Agnes Marie, “you shouldn’t call me that until I get down on my knees before the Holy Father, and he makes it official.”

“We like to be a few steps ahead of the Church,” said Sister Agnes Marie.

A wave of laughter rippled through the crowd. Everyone obviously understood both meanings of the remark.

“You will say a few words, won’t you, Your Eminence?” said Sister Agnes Marie.

There was no hope of escape. Matthew Mahan walked up the steps and turned to look down on the crescent of smiling young faces. For some reason, the innocence he had grown used to seeing in his visits here over the years was no longer visible to him. Was it because he had changed? Or was it the cascades of black, brown, blond, red hair, the proletarian blue jeans that seemed to flaunt an alternative lifestyle? Although they wore less makeup than their sisters of earlier decades, their faces somehow seemed more knowing - yes, even slyly knowing - the smiles subtly mocking. For a moment, Matthew Mahan doubted his ability to say anything. What was the use of trying to communicate his real feelings, his desire to reach into their hearts with the healing power of grace?

“This is - a delightful surprise,” he began. “I don’t feel I deserve those congratulations. I don’t feel the honor that the Holy Father has said he plans to confer upon me is in any way a personal tribute. It is a recognition of the steady growth of this archdiocese, not only in numbers, but in loyalty to the Church and the word of God that she preaches. I mean that, I really do. It heartens me - heartens me tremendously. Without the support of young Catholic women like yourselves, all the titles in the world will not do me or the Church any good. Without you, I am nothing.”

There was a scattering of applause, not very enthusiastic, Matthew Mahan thought. Then, out of the crowd at the front of the car stepped two girls with guitars. They strummed the opening bars of a melody, and everyone began to sing.