The Good Shepherd (18 page)

“No, no. We’ll spend a little time seeing the rest of Europe. Not all of it. But some of France, maybe Ireland. It depends on what we can work out.”

Timmy shrugged, still unimpressed. “Sure, I’ll come. Why not?”

“I wish I could bring all of you,” Matthew Mahan said, speaking to the girls, whose faces had grown more and more forlorn throughout the conversation. “But we’re going by plane and there’s a limit to the number of seats.”

“I wish I could come,” said Matt.

“I wish you could, too. What would you call the Pope if you met him?”

“His Heightness,” said Matt.

“Holiness,” said Alice, his eight-year-old sister. “What a dope you are.”

“I’m not a dope,” said Matt, his cheeks flushing and his eyes swimming with tears. “You’re a dope.”

“Stop it both of you!” said their mother.

Matthew Mahan welcomed the appearance of the waiter with the check. He scribbled his name and audit number on it and in another five minutes was shoveling his nieces and nephews into a taxi. As Eileen Mahan was about to climb in after them, he slipped two $50-bills into her hand. “If you want to buy a couple of dresses for the trip,” he said.

“Oh,
thank
you,
thank
you, Matt,” said his sister-in-law. “I dunno what we’d do without ya.”

No matter how small his gift, Eileen was always effusively grateful. “I wish I could do more. A whole lot more,” he said.

Riding back to his residence in another taxi, Matthew Mahan tried to shake off the depression that seemed to be wrapping itself around him like a huge serpent. The sense of helplessness that had tormented him so often lately only sharpened every time he saw his brother’s wife and children. What could he
do
beyond seeing them three or four times a year for a dinner like the one he had just endured, and send birthday and Easter and Christmas presents, and listen patiently on the telephone to Eileen’s sighs and lamentations. Although he urged them to call him Father, he was nothing of the sort, and he knew it. To them he was a vaguely benevolent figure, an authority whom their mother invoked in moments of desperation, when all other appeals to discipline had failed. Why, why, why, had his brother married such a
stupid
woman? If Charlie were only alive. . . .

But that line of thought only made him more depressed. If Charlie were alive, the situation would probably be worse. Drunks do not make good fathers, and even if you had prayed, exhorted, pleaded, threatened, twenty-four hours a day, Charlie Mahan would still be a drunk if he were alive. You know, too, that those seven children were what destroyed him. Especially the five girls. What did Charlie used to call them? The Weird Sisters. Like many drunks, Charlie had a wicked tongue, especially when it was loosened by liquor. Every cent his wife spent on those five girls was savagely resented and denounced. It was almost pathological toward the end. Not only were they the reason for his self-destruction, they were his excuse. Both had blended into the nightmare in which Charlie had spent the last two years of his life. It was a nightmare into which he malevolently tried to lure Matthew Mahan. Again and again, he had poured out his defeat and self-hatred to him on the telephone.

What’s your opinion on birth control, Bishop? You go right down the line with His Woppiness? You tell your story, and then listen to mine.

After number seven, why my wife said no more. My good Roman Catholic wife, Eileen née Corcoran Mahan. And what did Eileen née Corcoran Mahan do to make sure there were no more? She kicked me out of bed. You and I, dear brother, excuse me, dear Bishop, are now fellow celibates. How does that grab you?

Rhythm? Eileen née Corcoran Mahan is too stupid to keep a chart. Even if she could keep one, she’s too irregular to make one worthwhile. This is the considered advice of her fine Irish-Catholic obstetrician, Brendan O’Reilly Kendrick,
M.D.
So it’s whack off or screw whores for poor old Charlie Mahan. How do you like that, old Uncle Shepherd? I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly. Haw, haw, haw. Haven’t you got anything to say, you fucking miter-headed fraud?

An exception? An exception? There are six guys in this bar, all drunker than me, in the same state of unsolicited celibacy. Tell you what, why don’t you invite us all up to the residence? We’ll get together for a little pray-in. How does that grab you? It doesn’t? Don’t want to rescue your strayed spavined sheep from their distress, Shepherd? We need advice, Shepherd. We need to find out the secret of how you survive without doing it. On the level, don’t you diddle one of those rich Catholic divorcées like Mary Shea now and then? Come on, you can admit it to the kid brother. If a bag of skin and bones like me gets the urge two or three times a week, you must get it every night. Give us the inside story, big husky Shepherd. Don’t some of those little ewes look inviting when they poke their tits at you at confirmation? That’s the real hope of my heart, Shepherd. Someday they’ll catch you fooling around with nine- and ten-year-olds. When that happens, I swear to Christ I’ll stop drinking.

A vague nausea mixed with pain stirred in Matthew Mahan’s stomach. Please, Charlie, please be quiet, he prayed. Every three or four
months, this rancid ghost’s voice awoke inside him to recite the same searing words. It was enough to make a man wonder about evil spirits and diabolical possession. Or at least to half believe that some souls are too misshapen to enter Heaven, too tormented on earth to deserve Purgatory, and too innocent to be condemned forever. So they wandered the world recalling the lies and delusions and rages that had destroyed them while living.

When it came to tormenting his elder brother, Charlie Mahan might as well have been sitting beside him in this taxicab, instead of lying silent beneath a stone in Holy Name Cemetery. But it was understandable, Matthew Mahan told himself, struggling to regain control of his mind, perfectly understandable. There was the Kit Kat Lounge on the corner of Van Nostrand Boulevard and the Parkway. Four years ago Charlie had stumbled through those doors at 3:00 a.m., into the path of a Parkway bus. Although Matthew Mahan had been in South America when the accident happened, the sight of the semi-fashionable saloon with its neon cats blinking alternately on a flickering seesaw was instantly transmuted into sound. He could hear the shriek of brakes, his brother’s drunken dying cry.
Lord, Lord
,
have mercy on us. Lord, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

“At’ll be three twenny, Ya Eminence,” said the cabdriver.

Matthew Mahan gave him $4 and trudged up the walk to the residence. As he pulled open the heavy outer door, a wave of total gloom engulfed him. What had happened to the confidence with which he had taken command of the archdiocese ten years ago? He had been so sure he could do a better job than old Hogan. Perhaps there had been too much arrogance in that confidence. God was on record as being distinctly unfond of arrogance. Did He insist on failure as the only alternative?
Maybe losing is better,
Dennis McLaughlin had remarked in the car the other day. If that were true, Cardinal Mahan could only confess his total inability to understand it.

A strange sound reached his ears as he hung his coat in the hall. Laughter, filtering through the closed doors of the sitting room. Was someone giving a party? Had Dennis invited a few friends without bothering to ask permission? Had the revolution finally reached his residence? But those voices were vaguely familiar. As he stood outside the door, he heard an unmistakable Irish brogue declare: “He may send us into the night with a volley of anathemas.”

Matthew Mahan opened the door and found himself a witness to a crime. An aged cleric with a long nose which stopped just short of looping into a beak was cheerfully demolishing the archdiocese’s supply of Irish whiskey. In one of the period armchairs sat a large dark-haired man in a very expensive monogrammed shirt with his tie askew. “Don’t worry, I’ll write him a check and calm him down,” he said in a cheerful rasp.

“The hell with anathemas,” Matthew Mahan said, stepping into the room, “I may just call the cops.”

“Matthew me boy,” said Auxiliary Bishop David Cronin, raising his glass high.

“Padre,” said Mike Furia, rising from the chair to extend a ham-sized hand.

Bishop Cronin remained close to the Irish whiskey bottle, eyeing his former pupil warily. “‘Tis all his fault, Your Eminence,” he said. “I told him a man who will soon be hobnobbing with the Pope had no time for the likes of us.”

“I decided I’d take him out for Easter dinner and give him one more chance to turn wop,” Mike Furia said. “It’s his only hope of getting past St. Peter. But, he still thinks the devil is better company.”

Matthew Mahan absorbed all the nuances of these remarks with a smile. In earlier years, the three of them had spent more than a few cheerful Sunday evenings in this room with their feet up on old Hogan’s antiques, simultaneously insulting each other and solving the problems of the archdiocese. But in the last three years, the parties had become more and more infrequent and in the last year had dwindled to a full stop. Old Davey Cronin’s radical rage at the way things were going in the Church had become an embarrassment for Matthew Mahan, even in private. Since last July, when Pope Paul had issued
Humanae Vitae,
his birth control encyclical, his former mentor had become totally berserk. Mike Furia, who had no interest in the theology but knew that Cronin was hurt by Matthew Mahan’s avoidance tactics, was simultaneously rebuking him and trying to restore their old camaraderie. Fortunately, Matthew Mahan was able to greet them wholeheartedly. They had come to him at a moment when he was desperately in need of remembering better, happier days.

“You know what he’s just telling me?” Mike Furia said. “Christ visited Ireland.”

“‘Tis a strong belief among the peasants in the West,” said Bishop Cronin. “And there’s historical evidence for it. The wine in Palestine was the strongest of its day. According to the story, sometime between his twentieth and thirtieth year the young rabbi perambulated to the Emerald sod and brought the formula for it back with him. Which explains why no one could tell the difference between the water and the wine at the marriage feast of Cana.”

“You’re a terrible old man. You’re lucky it’s not the thirteenth century. I’d have you out there on a pile of faggots, cooked to a turn.”

“Ah yes, holy freedom. Wasn’t it nice of good Pope John to discover it just in time?”

“Just in time for what?” Matthew Mahan said.

“In time to keep the whole bloody works from going up by spontaneous combustion.”

“I used to think so, but I must confess I’m starting to wonder if holy freedom wasn’t a phrase that would have better been forgotten.”

“By God, he’s got the glooms for sure. What’s happened, have the Giovannicides in Rome withdrawn your red hat? Saying it was all a clerical error? You could get much worse news than that, believe me. The more I think of it, the more I dread the thought of you associating yourself so closely with the present occupier of the Chair of Peter.”

“Now, there you know we disagree. He’s doing the best he can.”

“The best he can what? The best he can to turn a mess into a disaster, and a disaster into a catastrophe. The man’s a fool, Matt, and it’s better to face it. He knows no more about leadership than I do about atomic physics. Take old Pacelli by comparison. Much as I disliked the cold Roman bastard and everything he stood for, such as business as usual while the Jews were getting cooked and his castrated connubial bliss while Africa and Asia and South America were already drowning in babies - with all of that against him, the man was still a leader. He knew you couldn’t prance six paces forward and tiptoe five back, then pirouette three to the left followed by a pas de deux to the right. He went straight at the objective and carried the whole church militant, whatever the hell that means, banners high behind him.”

“He could do it because he had the people with him from the start.”

“Oh, the hell he did. No one ever has the people with him. The people have all been home drinkin’ beer and listenin’ to the radio or the tom-toms or watchin’ television or a rain dance since the bloody planet cooled down enough to begin having babies. The people are only with you when you grab them by the throat and convince them that their worthless souls or their even more worthless skins are in deadly danger unless they listen to you.”

“But how do you get them to listen to you these days?”

“You whisper,” said Bishop Cronin, getting up and pouring himself some more Irish whiskey. “Did you know that was how Dan O’Connell rallied the Irish in the last century? He’d come to a great assemblage of country clods, all scratching and gabbing about the weather and the latest English outrage. Now, O’Connell had a voice that could be heard from Dublin to Killarney - had he raised it. But where would he be then? Just one more yowling fool among the mob of them. No, he began to speak in a quiet, steady voice. Couldn’t be heard beyond the length of his arm at first, and those in the first row would pummel those behind them and tell them to shut up, and those followed suit upon the fools behind them, and soon the lot of them, 100,000, perhaps, were as silent as so many tombstones. That’s what you must do, Matt. Not rush out among the mob and add to the clamor with advice on this and advice on that. Take your stand on whatever the matter in the quietest, simplest way. But let it be your stand until that cursed cathedral next door turns funereal black.”

Matthew Mahan smiled. “That would happen in about six months if I didn’t keep paying those sandblasters. Do you know what they get? Forty dollars a day.”

The evasion was deliberate. Old Davey was tireless in his determination to turn him into the nation’s leading liberal Catholic spokesman. It saddened Matthew Mahan to realize that his refusal to cooperate had become a threat to their friendship. But it did not alter the determination of his refusal. In the 1940s and 1950s, it had been exhilarating to be the public spokesman for largely Cronin-selected causes. How many hours they had spent together, working out speeches aimed at jarring the smug complacency of the city’s Catholics - and incidentally infuriating Archbishop Hogan. When Hogan was replaced by Archbishop Mahan, Davey seemed to assume that the next step was to take on Cardinal Spellman and the rest of the hierarchy. It was then that Matthew Mahan saw, not without pain, the gap between the intellectuals and the pastors.