The Good Shepherd (13 page)

“Calm down, I’ll give you the standard press release. Maybe you can pick up a few things from the vidiots.”

A wave of hot air enveloped them as they stepped to the door of the television room. The Cardinal was now talking to Carl Magnum, the stocky, gravel-voiced roving reporter of station KPOM. Magnum was not a Catholic, and he made no secret of his far-out (on local terms) attitudes on war, race, and other potentially explosive topics. But Matthew Mahan seemed to be handling him as easily as he had dealt with Jack Murphy.

“I’m always ready to admit I’m
not
infallible, Carl.”

“Does that mean you’ll never be Pope?”

Perhaps Magnum thought this was a difficult question. If so, it only proved his imbecility, Dennis McLaughlin thought gloomily. Incredible, how little so many supposed sophisticates knew about the Church.

Gravely smiling, Matthew Mahan corrected Magnum like a benevolent pastor talking to an altar boy. “The Holy Father’s infallibility is a theological gift, and it only applies to matters of faith or morals. As a human being, the Pope can make mistakes just like I can. But I’m sure I make a lot more than the Holy Father.”

What could Magnum say now? Confronted by this confession, he could only change the subject. “Do you approve the idea of married priesthood, Your Eminence?”

“For an old man like me, the question is rather irrelevant. Let me say this. I don’t approve of it, but I don’t oppose it, either. If married priests can make the Church more effective, I’m for it. But I’d like to see some real evidence before I make that judgment. The tradition of a celibate clergy is a 1,000 years old. You don’t throw that sort of thing away like a wrapper on a candy bar.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said Magnum, outdistanced once more.

Why, Dennis McLaughlin wondered moodily, why did they all put him on a pedestal? Why couldn’t someone talk to him as one human being to another human being? When would he (and his brother bishops) face a jury of their peers?

“The whole thing bores me,” Leo said, collapsing into a leather chair beside Dennis’s desk. He waved a copy of the Hard Times
Herald
at his brother. “Here’s what I really should be writing for. They want some more stuff from me.”

Under the transparent pseudonym Leo the Great, Leo had done a number of articles for the
Herald,
diatribes on the Church’s failure to condemn war and join the revolution, the sort of journalistic trash that was ruining the underground press, in Dennis’s opinion.

“I hope you put some facts into your next effort,” he said.

“I thought you were going to stop playing Big Brother-Ph.D.–Jesuit-Junior Jesus,” Leo said.

Last year they had had a bitter argument about Dennis’s fondness for giving Leo large amounts of unwanted advice. Dennis had been shocked by the bitterness of Leo’s resentment and had tried to abandon the role. But Leo’s headstrong tendencies did not make it easier. Nor did his recent inclination to attack his older brother and put him on the defensive in almost every conversation.

“Sorry,” Dennis said.

Leo tried to restore their earlier cheer. “I thought old Pope Placebo was going to let the title of Cardinal wither away. What the hell are they but glorified flunkies?”

“Andy Goggin calls it the godfather complex. You don’t see Luciano or Luchese dismissing his capos. Why should you expect more from a Montini?”

“How’s old Gog? Enjoying Rome?”

“Moderately.”

“You could be there with him. Any regrets?”

“An occasional twinge.”

Leo laughed mockingly. “Poor old brother Dennis. He quits the Jesuits, turns his back on intellectual prestige to become a priest of the people. Two months later, he finds himself handing out episcopal press releases. The tragedy of a would-be saint. It happens every day all over this lousy country. Guys start out like you, determined to make the organization go straight. You generate some attention, and they decide you’re brilliant. The next thing you know, you’re running the goddamn show. Or helping to run it. So bye-bye idealism.”

“Maybe I’m more interested in finding out where idealism ends and realism begins,” Dennis said a little testily. “Maybe you ought to get interested in the same thing.”

“Now, now, Big Brother, no lectures,” Leo said with a mocking grin. His eyes grew wild and he pulled a pad and pen out of the pocket of his khaki jacket, threw one denimed leg over another, revealing that he was wearing no socks with his army hiking boots, and said, “I’ve got a better idea. I’ll interview you. An off-the-record with one of the Cardinal’s intimate deputies. Confidentially, what was His almost-Eminence doing when he heard the
news?”

“He was about to have a scotch and soda nightcap and go to bed,” said Matthew Mahan. He was standing in the doorway, a not quite believable smile on his face. “The phone rang. It was the apostolic delegate calling from Washington, D.C. He sounded us surprised as I was.”

“Your Eminence. This is my brother Leo,” Dennis McLaughlin said, feeling painfully foolish.

“I know him. I know him,” said Matthew Mahan. “I like what he writes, too, most of the time.”

“I skipped your press conference, Your Eminence,” said Leo. “I thought I’d rely on a little nepotism to get a story with some new journalism feel. You know, personal details.”

“Let’s see,” said Matthew Mahan with pseudo-solemnity. “I drank my scotch and soda and decided it might be better to keep the news a secret until the next morning. Then about ten o’clock I realized I was being silly. I wasn’t important enough to play the secrecy game. I decided to have a little celebration with the people who are working their heads off for me, day in, day out. So I called in Chancellor Malone and Vicar-General Petrie and the rest of the chancery crowd, and we hoisted a few.”

“Usquebaugh - the water of life. Do you think that’s what Jesus meant when he said, ‘I am the good shepherd. I come that you may have life and have it more abundantly’?”

“Somehow I doubt it,” Matthew Mahan said. “But I’m sure we could find a theologian at Catholic University who’d agree with you.”

“Give me his name, rank, and serial number,” Leo said.

Matthew Mahan’s laugh was a little forced. He patted Leo on the back and said, “I’m glad you don’t write the way you talk. We’d have to change the name of the paper to the
Asylum.
Dennis, would you be a good fellow and call Dr. Bill Reed for me? Tell him I’d like to stop by his office tonight. I’m going to lie down for a while. I’m not feeling very well.”

“I’m sorry, terribly sorry. Can we - I do anything?”

“No. If Bill asks what’s wrong, tell him I’ve got an awful pain in my belly.”

With another forced smile, he wagged a finger under Leo’s nose and said, “That’s off the record, you understand?”

“
Credo ut intelligam,
”
said Leo.

“I beg your pardon?” said the Cardinal.

“St. Anselm,” said Leo. “I believe, in order to understand.” His brother’s cockeyed grin was close to derisive, Dennis thought nervously, but His Eminence did not seem to be offended.

“Oh yes. Oh yes,” he said. “I haven’t heard that for a long time. Sometimes I wish you intellectuals would remember that most bishops are just parish priests who got lucky. We’re working stiffs, like the rest of the troops.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. Leo obviously did not know what to say. Matthew Mahan took his silence as agreement and turned with a weary smile to Dennis McLaughlin. “Tell Mrs. Norton I won’t be down to dinner tonight.”

Dennis nodded and watched the Cardinal walk out of the room with the plodding step of a very tired man. Why was he continually noticing these details, he asked himself angrily, details that seemed to lure sympathy out of the recesses of his mind, no matter how harshly he ordered it to keep its distance? He told himself to remember the angry rebuke in the car at Mount St. Monica’s and was forced to recall that Matthew Mahan had apologized to him at lunch. “I’m off my feed today,” he had said, and as if to prove it had eaten only a few bites of his ham and potato salad.

Leo McLaughlin watched the Cardinal-designate’s departure with a very different emotion. “So much for the hierarchy’s opinion of the intellectuals. Who needs to think when you’re a working stiff?”

Dennis McLaughlin eyed the doorway. “Lower your voice a little, will you?”

This only made more mockery dance in Leo’s blue eyes. “Have you heard the latest from the Vatican? Or have you been too busy grinding out your own propaganda here? The Pope has announced an enormous step forward, a massive reform.”

“What now? Antibiotics in the holy water?”

“Nothing quite
that
drastic. They’ve replaced ‘I do’ with full marriage vows, just like the Protestants use. They even adopted some of the Protestants’ service, word for word, as - I quote - ‘an expression of Christian brotherhood.’ However, non-Catholics are still required to swear by all the angels in heaven that they will raise the offspring as devout R.C.s.”

“That’s what I call statesmanship,” Dennis said.

“Which is another word for crap.” Leo peered at his non-working watch and untangled his elongated legs. “Listen,” he said, “it’s almost five o’clock. Five o’clock,
Saturday.
You must be off duty. Let’s have a few beers.”

“I’ll have to get out of uniform.”

“So?”

“All right. Give me ten minutes.”

Dennis McLaughlin trotted up another flight of stairs to his room on the third floor. Quickly he snatched a navy blue turtleneck shirt out of a drawer, threw off his tight white collar, black coat, and rabat, stepped out of his sweaty pants, and pulled on a pair of dark blue gabardine slacks. On went a bluish-green tweed sports coat, and he stood before the bureau mirror transformed from cleric to civilian.
If only it were as easy to change the inside as it was the outside of your persona, Father McLaughlin.

“Does that hurt?”

Bill Reed’s stubby fingers pressed down on Matthew Mahan’s abdomen. The pain lolling drowsily beneath his flesh leaped into angry life again. “Yes,” he said.

It seemed to hurt almost everywhere Dr. Reed’s fingers probed. Matthew Mahan was lying on the leather-covered examination table in Bill Reed’s office. He looked past him at the gleaming instruments on the white cupboard in the corner, the shiny aluminum sterilizer beside it. The white walls beneath the glaring overhead light, Bill Reed in his white coat, all this whiteness in contrast to the somber black of his coat and pants, hanging from a hook on the back of the door. His mind roved in unexpected directions, as in a dream.

Why this humiliation, this reduction by pain to the status of a child on this day of all days? Perhaps God was trying to tell him something, perhaps the pain was a coded message, warning him against the most obvious sin that might tempt him now - pride, complacent self-satisfaction. But did he really need the warning? The way things were going in this archdiocese, every day seemed to send him a similar message. Still, there was a distinction between pride of office and a purely personal pride, and perhaps the pain was intended to demolish the latter. Matthew Mahan was not conscious of this offense, either. Perhaps that was not an acquittal but an indictment. He would listen. He would watch himself more closely for evidence of this all too common flaw.
Thy will be done,
he prayed as Bill Reed finished his probing and told him to sit up. Bill took the stethoscope around his neck, put the spokes in his ears, and listened for a moment to Matthew Mahan’s heart. Then he told him to breathe in and out, in and out, while the cold metal disk moved up and down his back.

“Okay,” Bill said. He scribbled his conclusions on the chart that was spread out on a white metal table beside the examining table. “Okay,” he said again, his shrewd eyes glinting behind his silver-rimmed glasses, “what’s eating you?”

His dour, sallow face, with the faint tracing of a scar on his right cheek where a shell fragment had ripped it just before they crossed the Rhine, almost made the question an accusation. But Archbishop Matthew Mahan and Dr. William Reed had too much in common to let a tone of voice trouble them. For eleven harrowing months, June 6, 1944, to May 8, 1945, they had shared a special agony. Young Dr. Reed had been in charge of the forward aid station where the 409th Regiment’s wounded were brought. When Matthew Mahan was not in the lines with the men, this was where he spent most of his time. How many awful nights and days had he watched while Dr. Reed, his face saturnine, separated the wounded according to the heartbreaking but lifesaving triage system, working first on the seriously wounded, next on the slightly wounded, and last, when he had time, on the men who were almost certainly going to die.

With his fondness for the sardonic, Bill had called the mortally wounded Matthew Mahan’s patients. “Three more for you out there, Padre,” he would say as the medics carried a writhing figure to the operating tent. Chaplain Mahan would stumble into the darkness or the daylight and kneel beside the dying men and give them his blessing and, if they were Catholics, absolution from their sins.

On slow days, Dr. Reed and Chaplain Mahan discussed God. Dr. Reed did not believe in Him. He called himself “a scathing atheist from birth.” Chaplain Mahan and the Protestant chaplain, Steve Murchison, dismissed Dr. Reed’s verbal hostility.
“When I see you talking to the wounded, Bill, I know you’re not an atheist,”
Matthew Mahan used to say. This inevitably made Dr. Reed furious and would inspire even more vehement denunciations of the “God stuff” that the chaplains were “selling.”

After the war, at Matthew Mahan’s urging, Dr. Reed had migrated from his downstate hometown to the city. Father Matt had not a little to do with making him a very successful internist. Reed had married a local girl, a shy, dark, Irish beauty who remained a devout Catholic and raised their only daughter, Helen, almost too strictly, Matthew Mahan thought, as if she were constantly afraid that her unbelieving husband would steal the girl’s soul. Otherwise, the marriage had been extraordinarily happy. When he was with his wife, Bill Reed became almost sociable.

Four years ago, Shelagh Reed had died of cancer. The effect on her husband had been catastrophic. Each time Matthew Mahan saw him, Bill seemed more dry, empty, laconic, a man going through the motions of living. Studying the drawn face now in the harsh light of the examining room, Matthew Mahan saw that things were no better.

“Don’t you know what’s eating you?” Bill asked, his eyes glinting upward beneath the glasses. “Or are you afraid to tell me?”

“How about giving me your diagnosis first.”

“You’ve got an ulcer. I’m 95 percent certain of it. I want you to go into the hospital Monday. We’ll do a gastrointestinal series and take some X-rays to make sure I’m right.”

“Monday? I can’t possibly do it, Bill. It’s the beginning of Holy Week. We’ve got the Archbishop’s Fund Drive coming up in two weeks. I’ve got speaking appointments scheduled right straight through, three and four a day.”

“When was the last time you took a vacation?” Bill asked, tapping his ball-point pen on the metal table beside the chart.

“I went to Brazil last year -”

“And spent all your time in the bush visiting missions.”

“What else could I do?” Matthew Mahan asked. “We’ve got twenty-five priests down there. I had to go see all of them or none of them.”

“When was the vacation before that one?”

“I made my
ad liminem
visit to Rome in sixty-seven.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Every five years or so, a bishop has to go to Rome and report on how things are going in his diocese.”

“That’s no vacation, either.”

“Oh, I took it easy. I hit all the best restaurants.”

“And between meals worried your ass off about what the Pope was going to say about your report.”

No, Matthew Mahan thought,
not about that, Bill, I worried about a woman.
A
woman with haunted eyes who responded bravely, always bravely, to my perpetually fatuous question: Are you all right, Mary?

Bill Reed sighed and looked at the ceiling, as if he were invoking an unknown god for assistance. “I can see that we’re not going to settle anything here. A lame-brain atheist like me can’t win this kind of an argument. But, generally speaking, there are only a couple of reasons why people get ulcers. They’re either drinking too much or worrying too much or working too hard. Usually, it’s a combination of all three.”

“I like a scotch and soda in the evening,” Matthew Mahan said, “but that’s about the only drink I take regularly. Unless I’m eating in a restaurant or speaking at a dinner.”

Bill Reed gave him a fleeting smile. “Okay, Padre. I know you’re not on the sauce. It’s obvious to me and everyone else who knows you that you’re working too hard. Frankly, if I had a choice of diseases for you, I’d pick this one. It’s a lot safer than a coronary. Put on your duds and let’s go into the office and talk this over.”

In his wry way, Bill told Matthew Mahan how an ulcer worked. The new Cardinal only half listened. His eyes were on the furrows in Bill Reed’s haggard face. The man looked like he was dying of some mysterious disease that dried out the flesh and annihilated the spirit.

“Now, this Titrilac comes in liquid form and in pills,” Bill was saying. “Use the liquid whenever you can. Carry the pills in your pocket. Take the pills any time you feel like it. Take the liquid a half hour before eating.”

“This second prescription is for some pills called Donnatal,” Bill said, scribbling as he talked. “They cut off the nerve that pumps acid into your gut. They have a side effect you don’t have to worry about. Periodic impotence.”

“I wish you’d prescribe it for a few curates I know.”

“Are you having trouble sleeping?”

“I wake up around 4:00 a.m. an awful lot of nights and never get back to sleep. I lie there solving problems.”

“And you feel lousy for the rest of the day. I do the same thing. Here’s a prescription for my favorite sleeping pill, Seconal. Don’t use them every night. Wait until you feel really sleep-starved, then take one and arrange things so you can sleep about ten hours. It’ll put you back on your feet.”

Matthew Mahan nodded glumly. Next Bill handed him two mimeographed pages listing foods he was forbidden to eat and sample meals of what he was permitted to enjoy - if that word still meant anything. Matthew Mahan doubted it as he glanced clown the pages and saw veal, spaghetti, lobster, and a half-dozen other favorite foods on the forbidden list. “Booze is out, and so is smoking,” Bill said.

“
Smoking,”
Matthew Mahan said. “Come on, Bill, give me a break. You remember what happened when I tried to give it up two years ago. I didn’t sleep for a month.”

“How much are you smoking now?”

“Oh, about a pack a day.”

“Cut it in half this week, and cut that in half next week.”

“Okay. But if the condemned man can make an observation, I think you’re taking entirely too much pleasure in giving these orders.”

Bill almost smiled. “How often does anybody get a chance to order a Cardinal around?”

“How are things with you, Bill? You look awfully tired yourself.”

“What the hell is this? Are you trying to play witch doctor on me in my own office?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Matthew Mahan said. “When is the last time
you
took a vacation?”

“Oh, I go up to my shack in the woods and putter around on weekends during the summer.”

“Alone?”

Bill’s eyes were on the blue and silver ballpoint pen that he kept turning around and around in his hands. “Yeah. It guarantees you a real rest.”

“I never see you at dinner parties, lunches. Nobody does anymore since Shelagh died.”

A nerve twitched in Bill Reed’s drawn cheek. He gave a little sigh. “I know, Matt. I just don’t have the heart for it anymore.”

“Bill, you’re a young man. You can’t be more than fifty. Why don’t you get married again?”

A dry sound, something between embarrassment and distaste. “Mrs. Right just hasn’t come along, Matt. Maybe I’m a hard man to please.”

It was hopeless. He was like a turtle retracting into his shell. Matthew Mahan groped for a new approach. “I saw your daughter today. Sister Helen.”

A mistake. Bill’s already saturnine face became a mask of fury. For the next ten minutes, Matthew Mahan sat there while Dr. Reed told him that the Catholic Church had destroyed his daughter’s mind. Intensely conservative like so many doctors, Bill’s temperament fed upon the nostrums of the far Right. He was too intelligent to join the John Birch Society, but he was ready to believe that the American system was threatened by wild-eyed critics who seemed to be sprouting like weeds everywhere. He had seen too many men die for the country to tolerate wholesale castigation of “Amerika.”

Six years as a nursing nun at St. Clare’s had turned his daughter, Helen, into one of the castigators. She was now living with four other sisters in a rat-infested slum in the heart of the First Ward. She totally rejected everything her father stood for, everything she had enjoyed so casually in her girlhood - the baronial house on the Parkway, the beach-front mansion at the shore, the yacht clubs and country clubs, the sports cars and stylish dresses that Daddy’s money had munificently supplied. Worse, she called him a hypocrite, a parody of a doctor, because he spent most of his time peering down the throats and tapping on the stomachs of the Establishment. Understandably, Bill was hurt, confused, outraged.

“Bill, if it makes you feel any better, I can’t figure out what’s going on in their heads, either. People her age. I’ve got a secretary, Dennis McLaughlin. A very bright young kid. At least three or four times a day he says things that are totally incomprehensible to me. Something’s - snapped, Bill. The links, cords, whatever you want to call them that we assumed were there, connecting us to the next generation. Kennedy’s assassination, this war, Nixon in the White House.”

“Not everybody thinks that’s so bad, you unreconstructed Democrat.”

Matthew Mahan forced a smile. Now Bill was trying to cheer him up. He was also trying to tell him that no matter how bad he felt about his daughter, they would always be friends. It was a consolation, a deep consolation, Matthew Mahan thought ruefully as he involuntarily rubbed his aching stomach, to know how many men like Bill, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and men of no particular faith, were his friends in this city, friends on a deep, unshakable level reached a quarter of a century ago in that fiery trial they had all endured in Europe.

Gruffly, Bill Reed demanded a firm date for the gastrointestinal series. Matthew Mahan told him he would have to consult his appointment book, shook hands, and departed. Walking back up the Parkway to his residence, six blocks away, he felt vaguely humiliated by his illness. A sense of personal defeat dogged him - something he had rarely felt before. It was multiplied by an even more unpleasant feeling, helplessness. There was nothing he could
do
to solve this problem except take his pills and stay on his diet. A servile, mindless kind of obedience. Beyond that, the solutions seemed to lie in not doing, in not working so hard, in not caring so much, ideas that only seemed to compound the feelings of failure and futility that were haunting him these days.
Lord
,
Lord, thy will be done,
he prayed, but why this, why now? When he needed all his strength, all his physical and emotional resources to hold back the waters of chaos?