Three Cheers For The Paraclete (21 page)

Nolan was not so happy.

‘Poor boy. Is it an attempt at suicide?’ he asked, blinking at the livid sleeper.

‘Monsignor,’ said Maitland, ‘he’d hardly know what you were talking about.’

And he felt a genuine hatred of the president, who began to tidy up the affair from a sacramental point of view by raising his right hand and muttering an absolution.

‘Conditional absolution I hope, monsignor. I mean
to say, he may not have passed out in the state of grace.’

The president mistook the derision for alarm, ‘Of course, conditional,’ he reassured Maitland. ‘Of course, James.’ And he began the absolution again.

‘Whatever possessed him?’ said Nolan, waiting for the ambulance. ‘Demons,’ Maitland informed him. ‘Demons for a start.’

Nolan boggled at the thought of exorcisms.

Furious at his own negligence, Maitland talked turkey.

‘Demons first off. And carelessness topped it off. If you’re wondering whose, then mine in the last instance, Costello’s in the second. Yours ultimately.’

Demands of Nolan, explanations of Maitland, sleep of Hurst, all continued in the ambulance.

‘Yes, yours!’ Maitland was contending. ‘For a variety of reasons.’

‘I’d be interested to hear.’

‘For one thing, monsignor, making it hard for those you expose to your high-geared system of kibosh to see a doctor and ask him why the hell they can’t sleep of nights and want to mutilate people.’

‘Did Hurst want to mutilate people?’

‘Let him tell you.’

Nolan snorted and inspected the boy, whose jaw was still deliciously slack.

‘Your inimical attitude, James –’ he began.

‘That’s not the point,’ said Maitland. ‘Hurst is the point.’

The attendant, who kept taking Hurst’s pulse, smirked at the blossoming wrangle. Nolan murmured, ‘Maitland, don’t vulgarize
this
affair. Not everyone –’ he waggled his eyebrows towards the attendant – ‘is in sympathy with us.’

‘Me for one,’ Maitland admitted. ‘Now Costello! If Costello had known one end of a human being from another, he would have got Hurst to a doctor months ago. Instead he told him to pray to Our Lady of Victories.’

‘You surely wouldn’t quarrel with that advice.’

‘Only with its utter ineptitude.’

The ambulance man, frowning over Hurst, seemed disappointed by the veer the conversation had taken towards theological debate.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Nolan announced, ‘Dr Costello did approach me some weeks back about a student who spoke of seeing a doctor. No doubt the student was Hurst, because Dr Costello is Hurst’s spiritual director. Now, you don’t realize how much these doctors interfere. We had three students with stomach ulcers last year, and before I knew it the guild of Catholic doctors wrote to me recommending that students should have both a small morning tea and a small supper. I put their recommendation into practice, for all the good it’s done …’

‘It’s done no good for Hurst. He doesn’t have a stomach ulcer.’

Nolan raised his voice. ‘Maitland, if you think I owe you any of these explanations …’ But he went on giving them; the presence of Hurst actually compelled him. ‘There had already been a dozen students to psychiatrists in the first half of the year. Psychiatrists are the last people we want to have butting into our affairs. I asked Dr Costello was it urgent, and he assured me that he thought not. Now, I happen to feel honoured that Dr Costello is a member of my staff. He is, like most men, fallible, but he is never stupidly fallible, and he lacks both a pride and a malice that are prominent in your own make-up, James. I honestly cannot envisage any future for you in the House of Studies.’

‘May it assist you in your orisons, monsignor, to know that it depressed the tripes out of me as a student and gives me the gorblimeys as an adult?’

The ambulance and the debate stopped, and the doors swung open on a neon sign saying ‘Casualty’ as merrily as any sign ever said ‘Ladies Lounge’ or ‘Wine and Dine’. A tired resident, who had been playing Rugby all afternoon, was the first to take delivery of poor Hurst; but by the time the pumps were manned, nuns of high rank were arranging supper and inside information for distinguished Monsignor Nolan. The inside information was that Hurst, apart from the necessary discomfort of the treatment, was quite safe.

‘Did I hear you admit, James,’ Nolan asked drolly after a time, ‘that you actually hold yourself partially to blame for what has overtaken Hurst?’

‘Indeed,’ Maitland showed some enthusiasm in admitting. ‘I sent him off to the doctor but didn’t take the trouble to find out exactly what the doctor said. As they say at tennis classes, my execution was good but my follow-through lacked strength.’

‘Has it occurred to you then that Hurst could not have put himself in this state if you had not violated my authority?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Maitland said, ‘if you find in Hurst’s room a letter from the doctor telling you or me or whom it may concern that Hurst should be immediately hospitalized.’

‘Yes,’ said Nolan, smiling after a hard victory. ‘You refuse to answer my question.’ He sat back saying, ‘Obedience, James, obedience is better than any other thing on the earth.’

I
N
J
ULY THERE
were to be examinations for the students. It was certain now that Maitland, once he had his history papers corrected, would be sent into some parish accustomed to rugged fund-raising clergy who trained the youth organization football team to a grand-final pitch and held boxing evenings. For himself, Maitland felt afraid; but he was sorry also for the salt-of-the-earth people on whom his few half-learned uncertainties were soon to be foisted.

He thought it discreet to stay away from the meeting in the parlour held annually to decide, by vote, whether each student be allowed to go on to a higher grade of Orders. No one accused Maitland for his absence. No one except Edmonds ever spoke of it.

Edmonds had come to say good-bye.

‘Good-bye?’ Maitland asked.

‘They’ll never admit me to Orders. This is the second year the vote has gone against me. Even an Edmonds comes to understand in the end.’

Maitland said nothing.

‘No condolences?’ Edmonds wanted to know.

‘No. If you have a reason to go, thank God and go. Sit down.’

Edmonds slung himself indolently into a chair.
Already he seemed to be back with the sweet life – debenture issues, Niagaras of whisky.

‘There’s a rumour you weren’t there at the vote.’

‘That’s right.’

Maitland could see that Edmonds half-considered the absence as a merely secondary form of treachery.

‘What keeps you here, doctor?’

‘In this college?’

‘In the cloth.’

‘Listen, if I had gone to the meeting I would have spoken up for you. And that would have merely confirmed them in their intentions. They would have rejected you with even greater certainty.’

‘Why do you stay, though?’

Maitland wound up his alarm clock which had stopped two days before at some insignificant hour.

‘It’s my life.’

‘Is it?’ Edmonds doubted that.

‘I’m an institutional being. I have been from childhood. My one hope is to wait for my institution to re-establish some contact with the … living truth again, that’s all. Some individuals – mystics, prophets, saints – outgrow institutions. But I never will, unless I become a mystic or prophet or saint. And there aren’t any indications.’ He laughed. ‘I suppose you think it’s a funny thing that I call myself an institutional being. After all the trouble I’ve caused here.’

Edmonds said, ‘I know what you mean.’ But, immune now, he dared to say, ‘You’re a waste, though.’

Maitland shook the reawakened clock and agreed negligently. ‘Almost entirely. But I have to wait for the revelation within this framework. I wouldn’t be any less of a waste anywhere else.’ He set the clock down. That much was a small triumph. He’d felt sure it was broken. ‘I have to wait and see.’

‘And what do you suppose you’ll see? Costello made an archbishop?’

‘No, I don’t think that will happen. Perhaps, though, I’m waiting to be endowed with the type of certainty that Costello has. But that won’t happen either.’

Edmonds nodded. He was no longer as recklessly bitter as he had been when he first walked in. ‘Just the same,’ he said, ‘you and I … we’ve been ghosts here, we’ve scarcely existed. And no one is bound to remain a ghost.’

‘Yes,’ Maitland said, ‘we’ve been pallid beings. We’ve nothing to set up against their dogmas. And I find I can’t even resent them effectively. I can be angry, I have been. But it doesn’t last. I’m prejudiced against myself in that way. I judge
them
good because they’re sure. I feel that being sure is a superior moral state, the sort of state a person should be relatively humble in front of.’

‘We all feel that way. It’s the upbringing.’

At the sink for a glass of water, Maitland was moved to Antarctic imagery. ‘I’m like Shackleton caught in the pack-ice. All I can do is wait for a lead, an indication. Sometimes I almost believe that I’ll be damned for not going into a South American slum and sitting down merely to share death with the people. But there’s never a strong enough indication in that direction.’

‘And why a South American slum? There are pretty presentable half-caste slums within drive of most of our towns. You can share things somewhat less glorious than death in those places.’

‘Long live the financial columnist,’ Maitland laughed. ‘The cure for romance.’

‘Besides, you can’t sit down in any hovel. Because you’re wed to a bishop and bound by canon law not to be absent from your parish.’

‘Ah, the administrative ironies of the Church! In any
case, I’ve a whale of a suspicion that a man must find his way within his own civilization. That it’s no use going off imposing your destiny in alien places.’

Edmonds said, ‘What about Xavier? What about Albert Schweitzer?’

‘I don’t know them,’ Maitland told him arbitrarily.

They shook hands, making doomed promises to meet at a later date.

It was the safer of two unsafe courses to keep Egan’s secret limited to Egan, Egan’s American, the Supreme Pontiff, and himself, Maitland.

What Maitland went to Nolan for was to offer to pay for some of Hurst’s medical expenses. Hurst was now in what Maitland’s parents used to call a nerve hospital. Under a strong drug that smelt like ether, he had tossed and spoken of nothing but the evils of inordinate castration, had sweated, railed, begged God, spoken of suicide as of a safe harbour, repented of this, begged God again. All other areas of the young cleric slept, except these that accused, were barbarous, or feared God. Whose God?

No matter whose. Hurst would be in hospital for months.

Maitland made the offer. He was especially anxious that his wish to save the archdiocese an expensive medical bill should not be misread as an attempt at buying a reprieve for the remainder of the year. He said contentiously, ‘I feel I have a large
but not exclusive
part in Hurst’s present state.’

‘I understand that your motives are of the highest order, James,’ the monsignor conceded. ‘But I can’t allow it.’

‘Can’t allow?’

Maitland decided that Nolan hadn’t understood the offer. Or was he now such a pariah in the archdiocese
that his money could not be accepted by an organization which, to be frank, would accept nearly anybody’s money? He explained the proposal once more and saw the tenderness, traditional to the face, drain like a tide. Maitland stared at the two hard nodules of cheek-bones left high and dry by the old man’s anger.

‘It’s no use trying to argue it, James. Your offer is against policy. If you or any of us paid for Hurst, the family of every young man who fell sick here would expect payment from us.’

Maitland squinted from Nolan to the desk, to the typewriter advertised and caressed by nubile blondes in international magazines.

‘Do you mean the archdiocese does not intend to pay for Hurst’s care?’

‘James, the archdiocese has problems of its own.’

‘Hurst
is
the archdiocese’s problem.’

‘Look, James, thinking out of tune with the rest of us is a speciality of yours. The truth is that Hurst’s ecclesiastical education is at an end through no fault of ours, or should I say, through no fault of the organization as a whole. The archdiocese cannot pay. And if it doesn’t, would you expect individual members of the staff to do so?’

‘Yes. Though I suppose I’m old-fashioned.’

Nolan said slowly. ‘Let me assure you, James, that you are not anything like old-fashioned.’

‘It seems I’ve come to the wrong agency.’

‘Yes. And, James, I am not a superior in the monastic sense. You are not bound to obey me as a monk obeys his abbot. But let me warn you that if you do contribute to Hurst, you are setting a dangerous precedent for the members of the staff, who –’

‘Have enough on their hands,’ supplied Maitland, ‘buying six-cylinder cars, Gregory Peck pontificals and typewriters favoured by blondes.’

Nolan’s hand strayed onto the keyboard of the impugned machine.

‘Besides,’ Maitland added, fairly alight, ‘I think you underestimate the pride of people.’

‘I don’t think I can devote any more time to you, James,’ Nolan said.

Not being a monk, and having the contempt of the young for that middle-aged fear of setting precedents, Maitland found Hurst’s address and wrote a letter to his family. He wrote, ‘Every priest is a man who believes, one way or another, in retribution. I am partly to blame, by neglect, for your son’s present state, and therefore face the retribution. If you could afford me the luxury of forgiving me and accepting this contribution …’ He knew that if they were anything like his father there was no way of convincing them that they shouldn’t hurl it back in his face.

Within a week, a polite note came by registered mail setting down the family’s gratitude but returning the four hundred dollars. He thought then, for a crazed second, that he might contact some famed hotel, might hire a reception room called ‘Conquistador’ or ‘Alhambra’ and there gather the outsiders he had met that year, his cousins Brendan and Grete, Egan, Hurst, Sister Martin, Joe Quinlan and Morna, even Edmonds and Nolan’s sister, Mrs Clark. Yet the next day, feeling defeat in every bone, he was at the bank to re-deposit his money.

He climbed the hill home, thinking warmly of his notebooks.

Costello, the vessel of election, beamed throughout June. He had his ring and pectoral cross now. These things were shown off of an evening in the staff parlour, where Maitland came each night to drink one cup of
coffee. The mere and relentless courtesy of the other priests, who all knew that he was culpable over Hurst – had even admitted so – could not quench him. What came close to quenching Maitland were the more and more thinly disguised spasms of hope in which Egan spent whatever days were not given over to resentment – resentment of those who would be sure in the future to question his wisdom and his motives. Within the
defensor
, extremes were developing of such a size as made it wholly necessary and wholly impossible to deflate him.

‘Nora is very well,
and
very hopeful,’ Egan would say on a typical morning of hope. ‘She is making a novena for the success of our petition. That rather destroys your criticism, James.’

‘I made no criticism,’ Maitland would say, putting down his pen, for he would not get anything done for some time. ‘I merely suggested a possibility.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Egan would chuckle. ‘You’re forgiven.’

‘Maurice, what are you going to do with yourself? That’s what I can’t help asking.’

This would make no mark on Egan’s enamelled visions.

‘I don’t know, exactly. I could manage one of the hotels.’ He would laugh and Maitland couldn’t help but laugh too at the vision of Egan controlling spreeing fettlers in the saloon bar. ‘I might take an interest in grazing.’ Maitland would not give room to the barbarous urge to laugh a second time. But Egan, down for the wool sales in big sheepman’s hat and the best of tweeds (from which the Sacred Thirst badge would be removed) also tickled the fancy.

Then Maitland, wriggling in his seat and shaking his long head, would be bound to ask Egan not to be so sanguine, and Egan would take it as a judgment and rush to his room, where some days, curiously weakened
and hollowed, he would sleep as much as fourteen hours. The staff guessed uncertainly that he was sickening for one of those sane diseases which are the only ones canon lawyers are prone to. Maitland, keeping a close watch, found that his friend had taken to two unhabitual things – napping in the daytime – napping in the daytime in devoutly creased shirt and black suit-trousers.

Always he would return to speak with Maitland in the end, and would say with the sham jauntiness of the man just managing to conceal seasickness, ‘I know you have no sympathy for my little expedient, James. However, I want you to know that I will never cease to have a special regard …’

So, trapped in yet another man’s incipient madness, Maitland even considered handing his friend into Nolan’s care. It was the equivalent of choosing a short death for lingering kith. But Egan was a choice lambkin, a chancery priest; and Nolan would take a narrow view, infect His Grace with it, have Egan doing penance in a monastery and ending in some
ne plus ultra
parish.