Was talking to a fellow the other day who was celebrating his “epiphany” of twenty-some years ago, he being 70-ish now. Something of a mid-life crisis that turned out well.

His arm went out, the doc couldn’t get it back in, Doc and three others spread-eagled him at Oak Park Hospital. It’s where modern medicine meets grunt ‘n groan. Very painful. The fellow prayed, and arm returned to socket.

In his prayer, he had seen himself on the cross with Jesus, seen himself as Jesus, asked Jesus to take on his pain. Zip, in went arm to socket.

Nurse on scene: Don’t know what you did, but it worked.

Two pain-filled weeks later, reading in the gospel where Jesus wept over Lazarus, he had his revelation — epiphany. Saw that he too should weep, at least figuratively, over other people’s pain. Not crocodile tears either, as political feelers of others’ pain.

No, he remembered one whom he had not helped when he should have, was struck with that recollection and conviction, not a vision but something better, that he should not let that happen again.

His life has not been the same, he said on the Green Line on the way to the Loop. The conviction has remained, regularly renewed. It has not gone away. He remembers more and more people he knows for whom he could have done and could do something helpful.

Years ago, Andrew Greeley, for 18 months now in his own time of spread-eagling since he was dragged by a taxi and banged his head on a curb, wrote once about how many have such prayer experiences as my friend had.

Greeley the social scientist and gatherer of information — a noble calling in a world of, ah, disinformation — had found that lots of people, including the kind we bump into on the street, have reported their own such momentarily heightened awareness of the divine.

My friend is a very thoughtful individual who reads, writes, and discusses issues of life governance. He has put in a lot of time at this sort of behavior. On his figurative cross at the hospital, he was ripe for the picking by the Divine Gatherer.

The hound of heaven, the poet Francis Thompson called God, but not before having a very rough go of it as an addict.

Better yet is the case of Ignatius Loyola, for whom a cannonball to the leg was a deciding factor. Recuperating, he ran out of tales of soldierly derring-do and read saints’ lives. Impulsive chap, he managed to find a cave where he could live and investigate himself and his future as a Christian. From that came the Spiritual Exercises and later the Jesuits.

My friend of the Green Line conversation has no such plans, for what it’s worth.

When he died a few years after this, he was the subject of heartfelt remembrance by others he had helped.

April of ‘97, my friends, when the city probably never looked better . . .

Neither seashore nor mountains . . . What a piece of work is man! And what a trip to Brooklyn and Swarthmore! Normally shrinking from crass memorializing of daily activities, I am moved nonetheless to tell that most elementary of tales: what I did on my vacation. Listen up.

Round one, Brooklyn . . . First, we got a cab, then we got a plane, then a “car.” A “car” is a reasonably priced cab-like vehicle you call and tell to come and get you at La Guardia from Brooklyn Heights. It’s a “car service” named after that neighborhood’s main street or near-main street, Montague. He dropped us at 37 Schermerhorn — say “Sch” as in skirmish. Time for tired old joke about fighting your way around New York? Sorry, I am in the market for an “I love NY” sticker.

At #37 lives #3 Daughter with four other young women. Our #3 works for the city, helping it develop economically. Later we visited her work place and met others who help that cause, hearing about the price of fish as affected or not by a crackdown on mob involvement at the Fulton market. History!

In short order we were strolling the B. Hts. Promenade overlooking the river. This is old country, remember. There’s something always on the edge of musty and littered about NY, kept in control and giving a weathered look. Lots of bricks in place for a hundred years, etc. From heights is s a view of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, which our #3 can take on foot on her way to work downtown.

The fun of getting around . . . Our three days were full of subways, as were some of us by half week’s end, but not me. They are frequent, fast, and full or half full, even at off hours. You can’t get nowhere fast on four wheels in that teeming metropolis. So subway’s the way, at $1.50 a token. As keeper of the petty cash, I was doling out the 15-spots right and left, for the ten-token package.

Subways are clean too. Some graffiti but not much. Nearest we saw to skirting legality was Korean peddlers, young man or woman moving briskly through the cars snapping a sort of cricket to (barely) announce her presence. The natives know who they are. Their wares are knick-knacks.

This is Babylon? . . . Saturday night to Union Square, downtown Manhattan, for a tap-dance show out of which I walked after five minutes. Eight or ten Australian men banging away on a wired stage in work shoes, with no music. Ears protesting and mind wondering what a piece of work this stuff was — and with only 50 years to live and not ready to spend 75 minutes of it to find out — your correspondent walked out onto the busy street.

In not too long, he found what could pass for a five-story public library and reading room, high-ceilinged and with a coffee bar, where a paperback “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V” went for $3 each, plus (splurge time) a Loeb Library volume of Horace for $18.95. The first Henry neatly supplemented the Part 1 I had bought off a Waterstone’s shelf at O’Hare. (What a piece of work that Waterstone’s is.)

This Union Square (14th Street) public reading room, by the way, is the Barnes & Noble Temple of Literacy, another nice piece of work. It had people in it reading. True, there was some chatter in the coffee shop and elsewhere. But throughout this store were people wholly absorbed in books. I conceived an image of Union Square as one big campus.

Easter Day in the morning . . . On Sunday at St. Francis Xavier church, in the same general neighborhood, on 16th Street, however, the expected Jesuit influence showed itself mostly in liturgical tone (relaxed and enthusiastic) and music (damn good choir if I do say), not in the sermon. The Jesuit pastor was more Johnny Carson (or J. Leno) than John Courtney Murray (eminent theologian, Vatican II expert on religious liberty), which is I suppose as it should be. It’s a media-driven society, and people eat it up.

However, if those people I’d seen at the Barnes & Noble temple had been there and had been polled about the sermon, they would have coughed and changed the subject, I feel. Anyhow, it was better than Cardinal O’Connor delivering a political speech, as I heard a few years ago at the Cathedral. O’Connor’s OK, and he may have been 99% right in what he said, but I like my sermons reasonably pious. The St. FX preacher was pious enough but dealt too much in slogans. It was one bumper sticker after another, with a lot about “life” and “spirit” and “risen” — all pretty much a blur.

Our kids liked it, however. So I’m through complaining.

Watching your language . . . Each Brooklyn Heights morning, I went out for coffee and muffins. #1 Daughter was with me one day. Her order took a little longer. The fellow called it a “crim chizz” bagel. In the constant talking over and around people that is New York, I told her, puzzled, that her “crim chizz bagel” would be ready in a flash. “Cream cheese,” she explained to me. Of course. I felt sheepish, intending no slight.

Later at an Irish restaurant, the FBI (foreign-born Irish) waitress listed what was on tap, including Bass Ale, which she pronounced “Bahss” but I always say so as to rhyme with “crass.” Quick as wink, I said I’d have a “Bahss,” again intending no mockery. I swear, it just came out.

Immigrants all . . . On Sunday we picnicked at the marvelous park next to the Cloisters, a reinstalled monastery full of medieval art, way up on Manhattan, about 200th Street, again over a broad expanse of river. That was a mere subway ride into never-never land.

Next day we ferried to the Statue of Liberty (great ride, standing on the deck in wind and driving rain) and Ellis Island, which has a top-of-the-line exhibit about the 1890-1922 immigration screening.

A day or so later in Philadelphia, the papers were telling of the court-appointed “master” who ruled that Ellis Island belongs in large part to New Jersey. A revoltin’ development, Jimmy Durante would have said.

Getting to Philly called for a subway ride to Penn Station, where we bought a ticket for (a) a New Jersey line (trains festooned over the Ellis Island victory) and the Southeastern Pa. commuter system known as SEPTA, which I say is too close to septic for comfort.

Falling trees . . . From Philly we entrained to Swarthmore, where spring greeted us foursquare and we might have asked what is so rare as a day in April but didn’t, as far as I recall.

Here we were to visit #2 Daughter, who helps the college stay on good terms with its alumni and alumnae, of which she is herself one.

This was bucolic territory, where a major happening was the falling of a huge tree on two parked cars, which were taken away in briefcases, I believe. (No one was hurt. We returned to Oak Park on time for an empty River Forest house to blow up because of leaked gas. No one hurt there either. Phew.)

Another happening at Swarthmore was a men’s lacrosse game (sock-’em, bust-’em) vs. Western Maryland, clearly the better team. Lots of passing of that little ball, net to net, like the Bulls when they’re on, and open-field running, ball in net, like in football. On a sunny, crisp day.

Yes.

That afternoon about three, they sat in the place, inside because cold drizzle was washing off the beer-garden slates. Inside it was dark, with a lot of small, heavy-wooden tables and low rafters. Nice imitation of someone’s vague impressions of an English roadside inn. It was comfortable and cozy, and the drink in Devlin’s hand was some good bourbon on ice. And the woman before him was not the object of his pastoral concern.

“Hello there,” she said after they had greeted outside and come in and sat down and ordered and been served. She was sleep-rested. Her eyes were green and big, her hair red and fluffy.

“Hi there,” said Devlin, relaxing and sitting back. Many’s the time he’d sat in a rectory kitchen or in a golf club house after a round, shooting it with his clerical buddies. “I was just thinking how different this is,” he said.

“From what? How?” she said, leaning forward, alert.

“From the way we do it in the priesthood.” He wore an open-necked flannel shirt and a windbreaker. The place had a few other couples at tables and a a pair of guys at the bar. The other conversations were low murmurs like theirs.

She grinned. “How do you do it in the priesthood?” She stopped. “Do what, anyhow? What are we talking about, Patrick?”

He loved to hear her talk to him like that. Just a few words provided an intimacy he had never had. He was a thirsty man drinking it up.

“Sitting and drinking and talking. You, me. Alone together. No guffaws or horseplay. Relaxed.”

“Hmmm. You like it this way?” she said.

“Yep.” He looked around the room. A white guy sat with a stunning black woman. She was fingering his hand. Sunday afternoon, rainy. A place for fugitives.

“Did I tell you how I heard about the column?” he asked her. She’d been watching him.

“No.” She bent forward, resting her chin on her hands.

“Mike the usher. Came up while I was vesting.”

“While you were what?” She screwed up her face in disbelief. “Vesting? For some kind of routine?”

“For mass.” He looked almost startled. “I was getting dressed for mass. Putting on the vestments. So, I was vesting. Get it?” He wasn’t used to explaining such fundamental matters.

She smiled. “Go on,” she said.

“I’m at the vesting table, and up comes Mike.”

“Was he going to vest too?” she asked.

“Ushers don’t vest, Ginny.”

She nodded, easing up on her smile. “0.K., 0.K.”

“’Did you read the Tribune, Father?! Mike asks me. He’s all red and bald and popping out of his white shirt. ‘No, I didn’t, Mike,’ I told him, tying the amice.”: He saw she was about to ask something and said quickly, “The amice is a neckpiece you put over your shoulders and tie around front, like this.” He held his hands in front, chest-high. “See?” He said it with a quizzical look,

eyebrows raised and looking slightly irritated to boot.

Ginny threw back her head and laughed. Tears came to her eyes. “I see, I see,” she said. “Enough, enough. The amice is a neckpiece. I get it. Go on, go on.”

Looking past Ginny, Devlin saw the stunning black woman look up as Ginny laughed, amused, then turn back to her friend.

He continued. “’There’s something in there about an Oak Park priest on Rush Street slugging some guy who made a pass at a girl he was with,’ says Mike. He holds on to my arm as he says it, real intense.”

“Making it hard for you to tie your amice, I bet,” she said.

“It would have been hard in any event, let me tell you.” He sipped his drink. “’I didn’t see the paper yet, Mike,’ I said. ‘Do you know who the priest was, Father?’ he asks me. I said I didn’t.”

“You didn’t say, all bright and bushy-tailed, while vesting before nine o’clock mass on a cheery Sunday morning, ‘Why Mike, it was me. My girl friend Ginny and I were making the rounds, and some drunk looked too long down the front of her low-cut dress, breathing gin and vermouth’?”

He laughed. “Super-priest here, at your service, ma’am.”

“What if he popped in here right now?”

“Who, Mike?”

“Oh I never thought of that. I’ll have to work on that one. No, I mean my friend from Corona, the one with the broken hand.”

“Broken hand?” He almost shouted. A few heads turned.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? He broke his hand on your jaw.”

“He barely hit me.”

“Whatever it was, it caught something wrong, or right, depending on your point of view, and now he’s got a broken hand. Can’t hit the computer keys like he’s supposed to.”

“He’s one of those?”

“He’s a banker, at Continental.”

“The little bank inside the big bank?”

“What?”

“It was a TV ad they had some years back. Before your time.”

“You are an old-timer, aren’t you?” she said.

“Old enough to know better, as the saying goes.”

“Than to sit with some chippy on a Sunday afternoon, describing esoteric garments. Vestments? Is that what they are?”

“Super-priest does everything,” he said. with a wink.

“Everything?” she asked, then, quickly: “Forget that.” She gave a wry smirk. “If you can, please. Use your storied self-control.”

“Storied self-control?”

“Don’t priests all have it? Or do they take something?” she said.

“Pills? Sex-control pills? That’s it. Birth control no, sex-control yes. No pill the one, pill for the other. Priests give ‘em out, taking large doses themselves ‘tween times.”

“Between what times, for God’s sake? You don’t mean . . . ?” She stopped, showing mock horror.

“Lapses,” he said. “Storied lapses. Come on. There are more stories about the lapses, aren’t there. Fallen sparrows and all that.”

“No,” she said. “Women are sparrows, priests are, say, eagles. Fallen eagles. Rolling along in the dust by the wayside of life.”

“’Spoiled’ is the word, like food gone bad on a shelf, full of cobwebby crap. ‘Optima-pessima’ that sort of thing.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said. “Latin, right? Talk some Latin to me. I love it. Had it in high school. ‘Optima’ is optimal, right? Optimist? Optical?”

“No. Not optical. That’s Greek. Refers to eyes. ‘Optima!’ is Latin for best. ‘Pessima’ is ‘worst.’ ‘Corruptio’ is the other word in the

saying. ‘’Corruptio optimi pessima.’ ‘Corruption of the best is worst. Or . . . .”

He paused, surveying the darkened pub and returning his eyes to Ginny, sitting with a contented smile. “’The bigger they are, the harder they fall’” he said. “Clever, eh?”

She laughed and looked at him, then let her eyes wander, holding her glass with her fingertips, then sipped the cold bourbon..

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Terry Dolan was on the phone to Devlin as soon as the last mass was over, but Devlin was reported out for the day. He tried again about three and again about five, with no luck. He ate alone at the rectory, letting the associate go his way, and by eight was on the phone again. Devlin finally called back about nine.

“Old sock, how are you?” he greeted Dolan.

“Where the hell you been?” asked Old Sock.

“To London to visit the queen. Where else does an Irishman go on a rainy Sunday afternoon? God save the queen.”

“Bullshit. What are you doing now?”

“Preparing my morning meditation. What else?” said Devlin. “It takes a long time to prepare a good meditation, right? But you’re looking for some spiritual guidance, I can tell. And souls come first, before meditation, even the souls of priests. Come visit me, my son, and unburden yourself.”

Dolan promised he would do just that, in no more than fifteen minutes.

In fourteen minutes he was at St. Denis’s back door. Devlin let him in, got a beer from the fridge, and sat down with him at the kitchen table.

“Shoot if you must, my old gray friend, but spare the country’s flag, he said,” said Devlin.

“Was that you in the Trib column?” Dolan asked.

“Terry, there are, let’s see, a dozen resident parish priests in Oak Park, right? Plus assorted order priests. Dozens more of them — Dominicans, Jesuits, Viatorians, not to mention Episcopals and Orthodox. The column didn’t say it was a Roman, did it? And not to mention the ex-priests, at least half of whom consider themselves priests, married though they be. There must be twenty-five of them, Oak Park being the liberal community it is. And what else? Let me see.”

Dolan took a drink of his beer and otherwise just sat and looked.

“But all that being the case,” Denvir continued, “nonetheless you come to me your old gray friend and put to me that leading question.” He paused. “How’d you know it was me?”

Dolan rolled his eyes, throwing back his head, then sat staring past Devlin.

“I’m calming down,” said Dolan, breathing deeply.

“Do you always look like a zombie when you’re calming down?”

“Sometimes. As a matter of fact, sometimes I do. I go into a trance, and it makes me look funny.”

He took some deep breaths and sat back, his hands in his lap. It was quiet in the house. Devlin didn’t say anything.

in his lap. It was quiet in the house. Devlin didn’t say anything.

“Wasn’t it in this kitchen?” Dolan asked.

“What?”

“Wasn’t it here we were sitting the night the special delivery letter came from Bolan? With word you were suspended?”

“It was here,” said Devlin.

“And then we prayed, with Jerry Skelton leading it? You, Jerry and I?”

“Right,” said Devlin. “I was glad you two were here, and the prayer part fit in. I was glad we prayed.”

Dolan leaned forward. “Well look, Terry. I’d like to think there’s some connection between something like that and my wondering what’s what with the Trib business. Now if I’m off base, tell me.”

“Terry, you’re not off base. Not in anything you’ve said. I’m with you all the way. You have not lost me. I’m with you, old buddy. O.K.?”

“O.K.” Dolan sipped the beer. Devlin sat there without any, waiting. “You want me to put my question again?” asked Dolan.

“Yes. Put your question.”

“Was it you in the Trib?”

“Yes,”

“Out of excruciating curiosity if nothing else, what the hell happened?”

“I was eating at the Corona with the Williamses, from the parish, and Ginny Morgan.”

“Who’s Ginny Morgan?”

“Newspaper reporter, friend of mine.”

“Oh.”

“On our way out, we ran into this bozo who knew Ginny. He pressed his attentions, I took his arm, he swung on me, I got hot and grappled with him. Somebody finally pulled us apart.”

He paused.

“Pulled me off him. And then we all left the place. Oh yeah, a Trib character came along as we were leaving. He knew Ginny and apparently put together his story. Which my fans and I greatly appreciated, by the way.”

Dolan sat shaking his head. “Baby, you’ve come a long way from ordination day, that’s all I’ve got to say. Shit, brawling on Rush street over a woman. I don’t think that’s what the bishop had in mind when he called you forth.”

“Have I betrayed my vocation, Terry?”

“You’ve strained the hell out of it, at least. Who’s Ginny Morgan?”

“Friend of mine, a newspaper reporter, I told you,” said Devlin.

“I know you told me, and I still don’t know.” Dolan looked at him.

“You want to know if she’s my girl friend. In the usual meaning of the phrase.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Pat, if you’ve decided to have a girl friend at this stage in your life, yes, to be perfectly frank with you, I would like to know. It might affect your availability for golf or late-night drinking or saying an early — or late — mass. Who knows? It might even interfere slightly with your functioning as a priest in the Roman Catholic church as we know it.

As one who might call on you. to fill in on a funeral, in a pinch, I mean, I think I would like to know whether you have a girl friend or not. I also would like to know when I might be reading about you in the Tribune, so I can alert my flock, as it were. You know, that sort of thing. Nothing personal, of course.

Dolan widened his eyes and sat back and took a short drink of beer.

“Feel better now?” said Devlin. “Look, Terry, I don’t expect you to give three cheers about all this . . . .”

“I hope you don’t,” Dolan interrupted.

“I don’t,” said Devlin, unperturbed. “And frankly, one part of me says you are out of bounds. Wait,” he said, seeing Dolan start to react. “Wait. Hear me out.”

He stopped for a few seconds, continued, “One part of me says you’re off base, that this is me personally involved in this, and there’s no discussing it with you. But I’m rejecting that idea. It’s a bad idea. I want to be able to discuss this business with you the way I’ve discussed other things. It’s not good for man to be alone, the saying goes.”

“That’s Scripture, Pat.”

“I know it is, Terry. Calm down, will you?”

Dolan sat still, fuming.

“It’s not good for me to start some wholesale cutting off process. I know I’m a big boy now, and big boys have girl friends, but big boys also have other responsibilities. You know I’m not a romantic, Terry. The last thing I am is a romantic. Right?”

“You know I’m not, and you’re saying that just to butter me up.”

“Now if I were as mad as you about this, I’d end the conversation right there,” said Devlin. “But I’m not. You’re the one who’s mad, and I’m not. So it’s my job to stay cool.”

“You’re up to it, I’m sure. You got some coffee?”

Devlin made him some instant and put it in front of him, shoving the cream and sugar towards him.

Meanwhile, Dolan took some deep breaths and held himself in, standing up and looking out the window at the floodlit parking lot. He drank some of the coffee. “Look, Pat,” he began. “I’m glad to hear you’re not a romantic. I know you’re not. But you ought to decide a few things. Are you in passage, or what?”

“I’m in some kind of passage, yes. I’m glad you said that. I’m on my way to something new. Hell, maybe it’s a monastery. I don’t know.”

Dolan laughed. “Well, somehow I don’t think it’s a monastery. Jesus, a monastery.” He said the last part almost under his breath, looking into the distance. He sighed and took some more coffee. “I think I’ll become a coffee fiend,” he said absently. “Good stuff.” He held the cup up as if in salute.

“Do you want to hear some more?” asked Devlin.

“Yes, I want to hear some more,” said Dolan. “Shoot.”

(End of Chapter 12)

Gabriel will warn me . . .

Often enough through the consoling elements of liturgical and other elements of Catholic prayers and sacramental functions of faith, hope and charity, especially hope, aka trust!

Indeed trust, you miserable sinner you. How else, you fool? You are in the midst of an eternal understanding, even if a puny part, but treated by the Great Facilitator as the only part that matters.

Go for it, you fool. Not stand in line for it. What line? Right, there isn’t any. Speak to your Maker, and you are listened to as if He had nothing else to do.

He loves you, wants the best for you.

Believe Him, trust Him, respect Him, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Depend on Him (Them) for everything, what you ask for and strength to hang on and carry on if He does not give you what you had in mind when you talked to Him.

Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and when all is said and done, die.

It was nine o’clock or so when Devlin, Ginny and the Williamses finished their coffee and prepared to leave.

“Same time tomorrow?” said Devlin, enjoying a well-fed glow and relaxed from all the laughter and runaway wit.

“We can meet for breakfast. How’s that?” said Ginny, smiling and nudging him.

“After running in Columbus Park,” said Arthur. “How about a run in Columbus Park in the morning? Run with the brothers, O.K.?”

“I got my own brother right here,” said Melissa, squeezing Arthur’s arm.

“You love him like a brother, right?” said Ginny.

“Not quite,” said Melissa, with a stage grimace.

Arthur paid for his wife and himself. Devlin and Ginny went dutch. They pushed their chairs back, got up and headed for the door, where the smiling host hoped they had enjoyed themselves and was further wishing them a “nice evening” when the big guy whom Devlin had seen in the men’s room came around the corner from the bar, heading downstairs to the men’s room again.

He started to push his way through the four friends and the host, bunched up near the door, and then spotted Ginny and stopped.

“Well,” he said with a humor-free chuckle. “Well, well.” He stood blocking the door, looking at Ginny. “My friend the drink-spiller. I been waitin’ at Ric’s all night and you never showed. What’s the matter, Baby, don’t you like me any more?”

He looked around and spotted the Williamses and Dev. “Which one’s the boy friend?” he asked. “Him?” He nodded toward Arthur. “No, I don’t think so. He probably goes with her.” He nodded toward Melissa. “This the guy?” He looked at Devlin, a few inches shorter than he.

The rest stood, stunned.

The big guy moved toward Ginny and started to put an arm around her. “Come on, Baby, let’s you and me talk,” he said. Ginny moved away, slipping his arm off her. He advanced some more. “Hey, come on, what’s the problem?”

Devlin, recovering, put his arm out and took the big guy by his shoulder.

“Hey.” The guy turned to Devlin. “Hey. Get your fuckin’ arm off me. Get your God-damned arm off me.” His tone went from cajoling Ginny to threatening. He took on the look of the abused.

“Get away from here,” said Devlin. “Go away. You’re not wanted.”

“The fuck I’m not wanted. Who the fuck are you, anyway?” he said, and swung on Devlin.

He only grazed Devlin’s chin, but the move enraged the priest, who grabbed the man with both arms and began to wrestle him. The two banged against the stand with the reservation listings and rolled into a dessert tray, falling to the floor after knocking several custard puddings to the floor.

Devlin held on to the guy as the two rolled to the floor amid screams from several women and breaking of glassware. He felt the guy reach down for his face to pull him away, but the guy didn’t gouge or poke, as he could have.

Hands grappled at him and the other guy. Shouts and curses filled the air. Finally, Devlin felt himself pulled off and held by someone very strong and saw the other guy held by somebody else. Waiters scurried around.

Devlin was heaving with anger. The other guy looked more hurt than anything else. Devlin was pushed out the door into the night air. Arthur and another man got him outside.

“Take it easy,” said Arthur. Devlin heaved with exertion and emotion. His coat was torn. “Your coat’s torn,” said Arthur.

“Cheap coat,” said Devlin, engaging in the trivial as people do sometimes, when the main event is something they’d rather not think about.

Devlin felt awful, though somewhat cleansed. Ginny and Melissa joined them right away outside. The big guy was kept inside, though apparently he was not fighting to get at Devlin — or Ginny either, for that matter.

The host came out, calm as hell for the circumstances, Devlin thought. He apologized profusely and asked if he could do anything. They were telling him no, when a friend of Ginny’s came by, a reporter for the Tribune.

“What’s the matter, Al, wouldn’t they pay? You have to chase ‘em on to the sidewalk?” he asked, grinning, then stopped when he saw Devlin’s torn jacket and general disarray. “What’s up, Ginny, a rumble?” he asked.

“Hi, Ken,” she said. “Oh, nothing. Forget it.”

“Forget what? Gimme somethin’ to forget?”

“Let’s go,” said Ginny, heading them down Rush Street. Ken stood in front of the restaurant. Al went back in. Ken followed him to see what was going on.

“Nosy guy,” said Arthur as they headed for their cars.

“It’s his business to be nosy,” said Ginny. “Let’s hope he gets nothing for his trouble. You all right?” She turned to Devlin.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Devlin, stopping to test a few muscles.

“Everything seems to be working. My mind is scrambled a bit. But the rest seems to be O.K. How you doin’?”

“Terrible,” she said. They walked along, silent. “At least you got to meet my old flame.”

Devlin stopped again and felt his chin. He tapped away at it gingerly, with two fingers held together, looking in the distance as if measuring some reaction. Then he very carefully moved his jaw around, increasing the movement until he did it rapidly and in its full circle.

“There,” he said. “That’s all right. I couldn’t stand a broken jaw. You have to eat with a straw and worst of all, you can hardly talk. All you can do is mumble. I’d hate that.”

“Where’s you car, Ginny?” asked Arthur. “How you gettin’ home?”

“Down the block, in a lot,” she said, pointing. “I’ll get home same way I came. No problem.”

“Now wait a minute. With that madman back there, you don’t want to just go off by yourself. Do you?” asked Arthur.

“He’s through for the night.”

“You don’t think he’ll follow you?”

“No. He didn’t before.”

“Before?” Devlin asked.

“When I . . .” she paused. “. . . treated him badly once before.”

“We should go with you,” said Devlin. “Let us follow you. Let me come with you in your car, and Arthur and Melissa can follow us to your place, and we’ll take it from there. Tuck you in, or whatever.”

“O.K.,” she said. She liked the idea of Devlin coming with her. Wanted to thank him, for one thing.

They found Ginny’s car. Then Arthur and Melissa got theirs and came up behind them, and the two cars took off for Ginny’s place, whose address the Williamses had too.

Devlin sat back in the front seat while Ginny headed to Grand Avenue, then turned to La Salle Street and then headed north.

“You all right?” she asked him.

“Yep.” He sighed.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “You didn’t need that, running into some of my past that way.”

“Old flame?”

“Of sorts,” she said. “We had something going for a very little while, not long ago. Finally, he got to me very badly, and one night . . .”

“You threw a drink at him.”

She looked at him quickly. “How’d you know?”

He smiled. “I heard him complaining in the men’s room. You wounded the hell out of him. When did it happen?”

“Week or so ago. It was the night you called me about your friends the columnists. Night of the fire across the street from you. That you didn’t even know about, resting in your back bedroom as you were.”

“I don’t feel so good about all this,” he said.

“Well if you wouldn’t wear that turtleneck, things like this wouldn’t happen to you,” she said, stopping at North Avenue at a light.

“You mean if I dressed like a priest, I wouldn’t get into fights with wounded, unrequited lovers.”

“Right. Unrequited lovers would leave you alone because they would know you weren’t one yourself. Or would assume you weren’t.” She looked ahead.

“On the other hand, my position is not entirely clear in the matter, is it?” he asked.

“No, it isn’t,” she said quickly, looking ahead.

He sat there with 20 years of his life, no, really, his whole life, weighing him down. He reached out, holding his hand between them. She saw it out of the corner of her eye, left it there for a minute, then took it with her right hand, holding the wheel with her left. Later, she was to describe the touch to Devlin as electric. To him at the moment, it was more explosive than anything. It blew up a lifetime of carefully nurtured restraint. He didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t know if he liked it or not.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Three days later, on Sunday, the Tribune’s gossip column featured an item about Devlin and Ginny. “Pardon us for asking,” the column said, “but was that a Sun-Times reporter (female) on Rush Street the other night with a priest (male)? And didn’t that priest have to deck an obstreperous admirer of the good-looking reporter when the admirer pressed his attentions a bit too hard? We thought you were supposed to call a priest in case of accident, not have one with you to keep the wolves at bay. This could be the start of something: Have collar, will deck obstreperous admirers. But the gallant cleric, from Oak Park, we hear, was in turtleneck for the evening. So it goes. . . . . ”

Devlin heard about it when he came into the sacristy to vest for mass. One of the ushers, a bald, red-faced fellow who looked like he was about to burst out of his starched white collar, asked him, “Father Devlin, did you read the Tribune? There was something there about an Oak Park priest with a woman on Rush Street, coming to her aid or something? Crazy story. Did you read it, Father?”

“I didn’t, Mike,” Devlin said quickly, doing what he could to hide his utter surprise.

Mike asked in what was a combination of curiosity and devilment. He had to know it was a provocative question to ask an Oak Park priest, but he didn’t necessarily know anything at all. But priests to him were one solid mass of anointed humanity, distinguished by their various idiosyncrasies if they had any, otherwise all wonderful fellows.

Devlin excused himself, pretending the need to pray before mass. He fumbled with the various strings and over-the-head lace-bordered garments he had put on hundreds of times, stunned with the news. |

Sweet Jesus, in the Tribune, he groaned inwardly. It wasn’t a prayer — or was it? Jesus, he said to himself. Shit.

It wasn’t a prayer. What did he have to pray about? It was past time for prayer. The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. Nay further, he thought, pulling the chasuble over his head, the fool hath said in his heart, I can have dinner out with a lady friend and not read about it in the Tribune. Geez.

He said mass as well as he could, looking out at the sea of upraised faces and wondering morosely which had read the paper already, before nine o’clock mass. He preached about charity, the greatest of all virtues, the rock-bottom, unassailable Christian preachment.

Who could knock charity? Who could take exception to his tried-and-true observations? No one could, which is what made the sermon insipid and ineffective — as if the two didn’t go together and furthermore as if anyone knew what made a sermon effective in the first place.

Still, as he laid out the Christian truisms — “observed in the breach by all of us every day,” he said — every last unassailable observation seemed to him mired in double meaning and telling all those faces that he was the Oak Park priest in question.

He was a man obsessed. Every look from the congregation, whom he normally ignored as much as he could, every hesitation by the servers as they brought and handed him the book, every glance from the leader of song, checking for a cue — everything told him, “You’re the one. You’re the one. At best you’re nuts. At worst you’re a scandal.”

He was in agony.

After mass he called Ginny, who was asleep. She hadn’t seen the Tribune. He read her the passage from his room.

“That bastard,” she said.

“Bastards. It’s a jointly written column,” he said.

“I mean Kenny Cooper, the guy we met in front of the place, from the Trib. Crap. Anything for an item.”

“How’d he know I was a priest?”

“Geez, I don’t know, Pat. But you do get up in front of hundreds of people every week, and all it took was one of them there that night, blowing your cover.” She laughed. “’Have collar, will travel.’ Where do they get that stuff? You’d think you were my bodyguard. At least they didn’t make you for a playboy.”

“But ‘priest with woman on Rush Street’ says a lot, wouldn’t you say?” Devlin said.

“Rush Street,” she said. “We ate at the quietest place practically in Cook County, which happens to be on Chicago’s hot street. Well, what you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. But let’s do something today.”

“Good.” She brightened.

“Quiet drink somewhere,” he said.

“You and me.”

“Me and you, right.” They set a time, early afternoon. He was to come by her place. She knew a beer garden pub on Clark Street. They would go there and rest up and regroup. Devlin hung up, the Tribune item out of his head completely.

(end of chapter 11)

Ginny’s day went well. Downtown, she picked up with a photographer and drove with him south to the mills where the steelworkers were on strike. She milled among the strikers herself, making easy interviews. Nobody wants to be interviewed more than a striker, who is dying for an outlet for his beef, while the photog got candids.

The two ate lunch together after phoning in. The photog was a black guy, John Brown, with a sweet, easy manner. Ginny asked about his kids. He took out pictures, taken by him and very good, of three smiling, happy ones. They headed back, she to write up her next-day story, he to develop.

Luckily, the radio remained silent on the way down the Dan Ryan, and they didn’t have to leave it for a fire, kidnapping, or other unscheduled event. “Thing about newspapering is all the unscheduled events,” Ginny said as they tooled along.

He smiled. “They do interfere with your day, don’t they?”

“I mean, I could be back at the office looking words up in the dictionary, and the damn editor wants me out asking people how they feel about it.”

“That’s what they do, tell you to see how people feel about it?”

“Not first off. They want to know what happened. Then they want to know how people feel about it.”

“How did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln? That sort of thing?”

“Yeah, or how does that bullet feel in your head, Mr. Jones? Does it hurt more or less than your worst toothache?”

“Or just the same,” added Brown. They both laughed.

Back in the city room, she bent over her notes and began to pick and choose, counting on impulse and first impression to decide the best interviews. What she had to do was supposed to be doable in an eight-hour day. She knew this because she would be expected in at nine o’clock the next morning, ready to do it again.

Another sure indicator was that she was working for a daily newspaper, not a weekly or monthly. Another was the 4 p.m. deadline. Another was her date that night with Father Devlin.

She answered her phone. “Ginny?” It was him.

“Yes,” she said breathily.

“You got a cold?” he asked.

“No, I just sound that way.”

“Oh. Listen, we still on for tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Good. How’s your day going?”

For some reason she was stunned by the question. It seemed ages since anyone asked her that. “Oh, it’s going, uh, O.K.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

They settled on where they’d meet and when, and she hung up, just slightly rattled. He’d caught her at her most vulnerable time, when she had opened herself to the breezes of creation. The interview story would not be fine art, but it would be the best she could do, and it would be the result of as much concentration she could bring to bear in the next hour or so.

His call came as that concentration was building up, when she was half asleep with it. That’s what the concentration was: focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. Wonderful experience, wonderful — she was careful of the word — therapy.

She brushed aside thoughts of her priest friend and attended to the words on the paper in front of her and her memory of the men and women who had spoken to her in all earnestness just hours before.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

“You don’t feel just a little bit uncomfortable about tonight?” Melissa Williams was quizzing her husband Arthur in their living room. She sat on the couch with one arm stretched across its back. He was in a chair. “I mean, when was the last time we double-dated with a priest?”

“Not recently, that’s for sure.”

“Arthur, I know it’s not recently. What I want to know is how you feel about it.”

“I don’t feel uncomfortable.”

Melissa sighed and looked out the window, then turned back. “Well don’t you wonder what’s going on?”

“Yes. Now that you mention it, I do,” said Arthur. “But that’s partly Father Devlin. It seems half the time I’m wondering what’s going on with him. He is not your normal, predictable, upward-mobile priest. He’s different. Frankly, I feel sorry for him.”

“Well he’s a grown man living with his choices. Same as the rest of us. What’s there to feel sorry for?”

“I don’t know. Just something about him. Like he’s going through something he should have a gone through a long time ago.”

“Puberty? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, but her half-meant apology was lost in her laughter and Arthur’s too.

“Oh Melissa,” he said. “You are so mean and vicious. Ugly. Evil. He got up and sat next to her on the couch. “C’mere,” he said.

“What? ‘C’mere’? What you mean, ‘C’mere!”

Arthur reached over and pulled her to him by her arm and nuzzled her. She closed her eyes as he did it. The front door flew open. It was Artie, eight, looking for supper. He plowed through the front hall past the living room where his parents sat and headed for the fridge.

“C’mon,” said Melissa. “Let’s go. Later. He’ll be full of peanut putter before you know it if I don’t get them supper. Later.”

“But I’ve reached puberty,” said Arthur, a woeful look on his face. His wife fled, laughing, to the kitchen to peel Artie away from the fridge and begin ladling out the soup.

Arthur called the other two from upstairs, and in a few minutes the three of them were seated around the kitchen table.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Arthur and Malissa were to get Devlin at the rectory. The three of then were to meet Ginny at a restaurant on Rush Street, near the river. It was convenient for Ginny and not bad for the Oak Parkers, who would take the Eisenhower downtown, which at that hour in that direction was a twenty-minute run.

For a week night dinner out, the evening had developed somewhat beyond Arthur’s original intentions, which had been to enjoy a quiet dinner in the neighborhood. At first it was to be just he and Melissa. They would hold hands and rub knees under the table, eat and drink delicately and return to their Humphrey Avenue house with son Harold in charge, probably sleeping next to the telephone, to enjoy one another’s company in the tenderest fashion.

Then Arthur decided to add Father Devlin, the veteran celibate whom they both enjoyed and who would add a piquant sauce to their social intercourse. Then Father Devlin added Ginny, who would add God knew what to an evening now past all bounds originally set for it.

Melissa knew Ginny from some years back, when they and the times were different. She knew her well enough to have some memories to share worth about five minutes conversations From then it would be a hopeful probing of and by each other, looking for common ground. It had been there once, and there was reason to think it would be there now, but you never knew.

Still, that was life in a big city, and both husband and wife were relaxed about the evening as it concerned them. Melissa was worried about Father Devlin. So was Arthur in his way. Neither was prurient about the possibilities. Nor did they gleefully await an outcome that would put the priest beyond the priestly pale. They knew and liked him wholly as a priest. Chances were, as in the Melissa-Ginny relationship, they would like him also as something else. But the possibility of major change was still unsettling.

The feeding of the children went apace, followed by the washing of the dishes and the dressing of adults and children — the latter for bed, the former for Dining Out.

This dining out had gone from an upper-middle-level North Avenue west of Harlem (suburban-elegant) to Rush Street near the river (Downtown). Nobody noted the difference. There was an unexpressed awareness of slipping past the boundaries of one sphere into the wider boundaries of the next, which surrounded the smaller. A nice little excitement attended the shift. It had something to do with choice of shirt and tie, dress, shoes.

In the middle of dressing, between bra and slip, Arthur embraced his inside smooth-skinned wife, slipping his hands below waist level and panty elastic for a soft squeeze.

Melissa was distracted by preparations. “Please,” she said.

“But you’re mine,” said Arthur, “Yes and no,” she said, moving away after a tongue-rattling kiss.

“Oh?” he said, buttoning his shirt. “There’s someone else?”

“Me,” she said.

“Oh my,” he said. “Her own woman. I married a woman who’s her own woman.” He stood, distracted himself, picking over his tie rack. It was the idlest of chatter, by two people who knew each other’s moves from long exposure to them.

“You didn’t buy me,” she said, stepping into a dress.

“Rented you?”

She laughed. “No, you didn’t rent me either.”

“That’s because you’re a person not a commodity, right?”

“Right.” She checked a dress hem. “You know what I’m tired of hearing, actually?”

“Me complain? The kids fight? Dickie play the violin?” Dickie was the boy next door, who practiced in front of an open window.

“The word ‘person.’”

“Why ‘person’?” He stood tying his tie.

“We don’t say ‘woman’ or ‘man’. Have you realized how people have shied away from ‘woman’ and ‘man’? It’s as if those words have to be sanitized. Instead, we say ‘person.’ It’s become a convention, like ‘water closet’ for bathroom or ‘limbs’ for legs. It’s our new prudery. We shrink from ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood.’ It’s silly.”

Arthur stopped in the middle of a knot to look at her. She had the hem right and was turning in front of a mirror. In a few seconds she noticed he was watching. “What you lookin’ at?” she asked, smiling.

He just smiled back and returned to his knot. She finished her examination and went to check the kids, who were finishing a desert of sliced oranges. They had groaned when she announced oranges but as usual had eaten the slices with both hands, reveling in their juice and sweetness.

She got them out of the kitchen with rinsed hands and faces, stacked the dishes and sponged the table. She gave Harold some last-minute instructions, including the number of Dickie’s mother next door in case of emergency. Nothing ever happened to warrant calling Dickie’s mother, but you never knew.

Meanwhile, she stood at the ready, as she did when she and her husband went out. When both couples went out and left their kids, neither gave a backup number. The system simply broke down. There were always the Skeltons, some blocks away, or 911.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Arthur rang the rectory door and came back to the car in a few minutes with Devlin, who greeted Melissa with a kiss on the cheek and sat in the back. Melissa turned in the front. Arthur pulled away, down Austin Boulevard, eyeing traffic. He caught a light at Madison Street, a half block away. It was a warming night, dry and spring-like.

Devlin wore a maroon turtleneck under a slightly wrinkled tweed jacket and gray flannel slacks. The return of the turtleneck had solved a nice problem for priests relaxing in public without benefit of collar: they needn’t don tie and go all the way to layman’s status, but they could be more or less dressed up and non-clerical all the same. He was admittedly a cut below his friends in dressiness, but not enough to make him a sore thumb. Eccentric maybe.

“You’re lookin’ good,” he told Melissa, turned toward him, nodding to Arthur to include him in the comment.

“Thanks, my friend,” said Melissa. “When you go downtown, you try harder.”

“I don’t fit,” Devlin said, looking down at himself and grimacing.

“Yes you do,” said Melissa.

He shrugged and sat back.

Arthur got them to the Eisenhower, where they turned left and headed for the Loop.

“It’s a nice night,” said Melissa.

Devlin looked at her. “Did you get me here to tell me it’s a nice night?” |

“No, but it is a nice night, isn’t it?” she said.

“Melissa.” He stopped. “Arthur. Is this the same wife you had a week ago? The one full of bon mots and insights, the scorner of small, meaningless tidbits, telling me it’s a nice night?”

“Same wife, Father,” said Arthur, looking straight ahead.

“Pat.”

“Hm?” Arthur turned around, then turned quickly back to the road.

Melissa gaped. Her worst fears.

“Pat,” Devlin said. “Not Father.”

Arthur turned quickly and looked at Melissa, then looked ahead again.

Melissa turned and faced the front.

“Is there a problem?” asked Devlin. “What’s the problem?”

“No,” said Melissa.

“No what?” Devlin said.

“No Pat,” she said.

“Why not?” asked Devlin.

“Because it’s not you and it’s not me,” she said, still looking ahead. “I still call priests Father. Sorry.”

Silence.

Devlin finally said something. “With or without collar, having dinner downtown?”

“With or without a wedding ring, I’m still Mrs. Williams. And Arthur is —” She stopped.

“Mister Williams,” said Devlin. They all laughed. “Now really, Melissa, it’s the age of ‘Ms.’ and all that, and I have news for you: I will not be the first padre to get along without the title.”

“Can we? That’s the question,” said Arthur.

“Get along without calling me ‘Father’? Well if that’s the question, I don’t know the answer,” said Devlin.

More silence. They rode along the expressway in the last light of the spring day.

“O.K.,” said Devlin. “Call me Father.” He paused. “Where were we?” he asked, “I think this evening is not off to a good start. Arthur, can you explain me a few things?”

“Yes, I was about to, in fact. You’re right. Not a good start,” said Arthur, watching the road. Melissa turned around, the beginning of a sheepish look on her brown, angular face.

“We’re adjusting, but we don’t know to what,” Arthur said.

“Me and my friend and so forth?” asked Devlin.

“Yes,” said Melissa.

“Well look,” said Devlin. “She’s a friend who happens to be a girl, O.K.? I’m still a priest, even if I prefer being good ol’ Pat for the evening. Take it for a quirk, O.K.? And take my friend for a friend, O.K.?”

Melissa gave a sigh. “We’re not going to hear an announcement or anything drastic?” She smiled.

“You are not. You are going to hear wit and wisdom. I have no announcement. I am betraying some of the accepted behavior of a priest, but chalk it up to eccentricity. I*m eccentric. And looking forward to a fun-filled evening with Art and Melissa.”

“And Ginny,” said Melissa.

“And Ginny,” Devlin said. He smiled. “O.K.?”

“Is Ginny going to become a nun?” asked Arthur, grinning.

“Ginny is going to become a nun, yes. She is joining the Sisters of the Holy Typewriter and is going to be Mother Superior of a bunch of reporters. To prove you can be a reporter and still be a moral person, yes.”

“A moral woman,” said Melissa.

“No, person,” said Devlin. “Being a moral woman means you aren’t fallen. If you ‘fall’ as a woman, we know what that means, You have embraced a fate worse than death and have lost your virtue. And a woman without her virtue is a rudderless ship.”

“Stop, stop,” said Arthur.

“I can’t,” said Devlin. “To be a moral person, on the other hand, covers the whole range of morality, but with special attention to honesty and justice. Ask me how I know this.”

“How?” asked Melissa.

He put on a long, serious face. “I know,” he said, and let his eyeballs wander in their sockets in a weak imitation of Groucho Marx.

“That’s just the point I was making with Arthur earlier,” said Melissa as they approached the bridge over the river.

“You were?” said Arthur.

“Yes. People shrink from ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and instead say ‘person’ because they shrink from the varying implications,” she said.

“Well what Father said explains why they do use ‘person’ and not the other. They aren’t the same thing,” said Arthur.

“Bigotry explains it all,” said Melissa. “Sexist bigotry. Women as sex objects and all that. That business about women’s morality being one thing and a man’s another.”

“Well look at Eve,” began Devlin.

“The one that came out of Adam’s rib?” interrupted Arthur, turning the car into the Wacker Drive lower level, where a green light suffused everything.

“The same,” said Devlin.

“Rampant sexist bigotry,”’ said Melissa, “At the heart of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Can you imagine.”

(end of chapter nine)

Second Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Paul to Timothy, Chapter 4:

Standard greeting, urges Christ-like behavior.

I adjure thee in the sight of God, and of Jesus Christ, who is to be the judge of living and dead, in the name of his coming, and of his kingdom, preach the word, dwelling upon it continually, welcome or unwelcome; bring home wrong-doing, comfort the waverer, rebuke the sinner, with all the patience of a teacher.

Woe.

The time will surely come, when men will grow tired of sound doctrine, always itching to hear something fresh; and so they will provide themselves with a continuous succession of new teachers, as the whim takes them, turning a deaf ear to the truth, bestowing their attention on fables instead.

Persevere.

5 It is for thee to be on the watch, to accept every hardship, to employ thyself in preaching the gospel, and perform every duty of thy office, keeping a sober mind. 6 As for me, my blood already flows in sacrifice; the time has nearly come when I can go free.

He’s ready, says let it happen.

I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have redeemed my pledge [kept the faith] I look forward to the prize that is waiting for me, the prize I have earned. The Lord, the judge whose award never goes amiss, will grant it to me when that day comes; to me, yes, and all those who have learned to welcome his appearing. Make haste, and come quickly to me.

Others?

Demas has fallen in love with this present world; he has deserted me, and gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia, 11 Luke is my only companion.

Instructions.

Join company with Mark, and bring him here with you; he can help me with the exercise of his ministry now that I have sent Tychicus away to Ephesus. When you come, bring with you the cloak which I left in Carpus’ hands at Troas; the books, too, and above all, the rolls of parchment.

More bad news.

I have had much ill usage from Alexander, the coppersmith. As for what he has done, the Lord will judge him for it;15 only do you, too, be on guard against him; he has been a great enemy to our preaching.

Keep in mind . . .

At my first trial, no one stood by me; I was deserted by everybody; may it be forgiven them. But the Lord was at my side; he endowed me with strength, so that through me the preaching of the gospel might attain its full scope, and all the Gentiles might hear it; thus I was brought safely out of the jaws of the lion. Yes, the Lord has preserved me from every assault of evil; he will bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom; glory be to him through endless ages, Amen.

Finally . . .

. . . greetings to Prisca and Aquila, and to the household of Onesiphorus. Erastus has stayed on at Corinth; Trophimus fell ill, and I left him behind at Miletus. Make haste, and come to me before winter. Eubulus and Pudens and Linus [who was to succeed Peter as bishop of Rome] and Claudia and all the brethren send their greeting. The Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Grace be with you, Amen.

This Paul is someone to pray to. Let us pray.

In the Apocalypse.

1 Be sure of this, that in the world’s last age there are perilous times coming.

2 Men will be in love with self, in love with money, boastful, proud, abusive; without reverence for their parents, without gratitude, without scruple,

3 without love, without peace; slanderers, incontinent, strangers to pity and to kindness;

4 treacherous, reckless, full of vain conceit, thinking rather of their pleasures than of God.

5 They will preserve all the outward form of religion [!] , although they have long been strangers to its meaning. From these, too, turn away.

6 They count among their number the men that will make their way into house after house, captivating weak women whose consciences are burdened by sin; women swayed by shifting passions,

7 who are for ever inquiring, yet never attain to recognition of the truth.

This prognosis helps in perceptive.

More of same from the day’s 2nd Paul to Timothy 2: 8-15 :

Beloved: Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David: such is my Gospel, for which I am suffering, even to the point of chains, like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained.

Therefore, I bear with everything for the sake of those who are chosen, so that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, together with eternal glory.

This saying is trustworthy: If we have died with him we shall also live with him; if we persevere we shall also reign with him.

Hope springs, yes.

Devlin got over to the parish hall at six-thirty. The kids were due at seven. He opened the place up, put the basketball at one end under one of the baskets, lowered that basket while leaving its opposite-ender bent up against the steel ceiling supports. He checked out the record-player and pop machine.

At quarter to seven, the Skelton kids came, Tom arranged chairs the way he wanted them. Donna looked over the records and put the first one on, something croony and swoony in Devlin’s view, almost a dirge but with some heavy thumping in the background, It was one of dozens he would hear that evening that would sound that way to him, all of them merging into one continuous roar of swoony, dreamy stuff punctuated by thumping.

Donna Skelton wore excitement on her sleeve. She had that wide-open, perpetually grinning way about her that some kids get when the party’s on its way.

“How are you tonight, Father?” she asked, not dying to know but glad to include Devlin in her general good will and good feeling.

“Doin’ fine, Donna,” said Devlin. “You look like you’re doin’ 0.K. too.”

“Oh yes.” Her eyes wandered. “Yes, I’m doin’ fine too. It’s been a nice day, hasn’t it?” She smiled benevolently on the good father.

“As a matter of fact, it has been,” said Devlin. It was almost as if the nice day was his. Or were they talking about the weather? No matter.

Devlin basked in Donna’s delicious love of her life. He was refreshed by it.

Her brother Tom puttered with some chairs. He seemed absorbed in achieving just the right formation. “It’s got to be right,” he said when Devlin asked him what he was doing. “How the seating is arranged makes all the difference.”

“You sound like you’ve given the matter some thought,” said Devlin, half kidding him. “How people sit at parties can make or break one.”

Devlin remembered it wasn’t good to kid the young folks too much. He was a kid who attacked problems as if there were no time left at all. He’d been beaten up by black thugs when he wandered out of curiosity where he had no business going. He’d run away once, for a wild half hour or so, when he came on Devlin and his mother embracing — rather, on Devlin being embraced in a fit of girlish enthusiasm by Tom’s hearty, zesty mother. He’d come upon his friend Alex McGee’s’ father dead of a gunshot by his own hand in the McGees’ living room. He was as committed to interracialism as Alex was to bigotry. Tom Skelton had same already gotten in a fair amount of living for a 15-year-old. It didn’t do to josh him too much.

Harold Williams came promptly at seven. Tom greeted him warmly. He eyed Donna, who was over talking to Devlin with her back to him. “You brought the better part of the Skelton family with you,” he said to Tom.

“She brought me,” he said.

By seven-fifteen there were a dozen kids, by seven-thirty two dozen. The music got turned up somehow. A few shot baskets at the far end of the jamnasium-dance floor. There was some horseplay in one corner as two planted one foot next the planted foot of the other, and tried to pull the other off balance. Some black girls danced with each other in another spot. And Tom Skelton sat in one of the chairs he had arranged, by himself.

He was being stubborn about it, but Devlin wasn’t about to comment. He did go over and sit down (he had to go somewhere), cross his legs and look ready for conversation. He did this convincingly enough to draw a few boys thinking Father Devlin might. So they gave it a shot.

Devlin got all the names straight, first. He was not a regular at this “What do you know, Harold?” he began. “I’m going to be with your parents tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, they said something about it. You’re bringing a friend, they said?”

“Yes, a newspaper reporter,” said Devlin, unsuspecting.

“Gonna write you up, Father?” asked another kid, grinning.

“Already did, Jasper,” Devlin responded. “That story last fall about my sermons.”

“Oh yeah, I remember, Father, when you got atheistic.” Jasper grinned some more. He was a jabbery kid, good to have around.

“What do you mean, Jasper? I haven’t got an atheistic bone in my body.”

“Your head, Father, your head. That’s where the atheism comes.” He got up and pointed at Devlin’s head, touching his scalp slightly with a finger.

“That’s what my mama says. You think too much, you go atheistic if you don’t watch out. She thinks you sounded funny, way you preached there for a while.”

Jasper grinned.

“What’d you think I sounded like?” Devlin asked.

“I thought you sounded great,” said Jasper. “What’d you say?”

The others burst into laughter. Jasper joined them. Devlin laughed the hardest he had in a long time. Others turned to see what was going on over by the chairs.

Tom was vindicated. His chair-arranging had worked out. He relaxed and laughed with the rest at Jasper’s question.

“She’s your date?” It was Harold Williams.

“Who?” Devlin asked.

“The reporter. Tomorrow night.”

“No,” Devlin said. “She’s my friend.”

“Girl friend?”

The evening went apace. After some very strange maneuvering, some girls danced with some boys. Harold paired with Donna Skelton, who seemed to like his attention but seemed also to want more and more of party as such. This girl loved the excitement of it, Devlin saw.

At nine-thirty he flicked lights. By nine-forty-five the two Skeltons, Harold Williams and he were cleaning the place up. By ten o’clock he was on his way to the rectory to catch what he could of the news.

He fell asleep listening to Walter Jacobson give a civics lesson to the fifth-graders he talked to every night over the heads of the rest of the listeners. He woke at eleven-thirty and stumbled to bed, regaining enough consciousness to worry for a few seconds about whatever was bothering Harold Williams and then to smile as he fell asleep thinking about the woman who was his friend but not his girl friend, whose memory warmed his heart and with a little luck might show up in a dream or two before the night was over.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Mimi Skelton slipped into the front seat of their Chevy Nova and pulled away from the curb. She was on her way to visit her brother-in-law in his ghetto parish. Her friend Carol Goodman had planned to join her but at the last minute had excused herself. One of her children had chicken pox. She had to stay home.

Mimi’s last had gone out the front door to his first-grade classroom not ten minutes before she drove away. Her husband Ted had been kind enough to drive for milk earlier, and then thoughtful enough not to put the car away when he got back. She was off to the West Side, eager to be instructed in the ways of the semi-foreign nation that abutted her home village and mildly worried about making it to St. Albert’s and back.

In minutes she was on the Eisenhower heading east. Minutes more, and she was leaving it at Independence Boulevard, heading south to Douglas, then east again a few blocks to the old stone church and rectory where Irish once worshiped and where an Irish priest still lived in solitary splendor.

“I wouldn’t say it’s splendor,” said her brother-in-law Jerry when she commented on the place at the door.

“Well I mean it once was splendid, wasn’t it, Jerry?” she asked.

“Yes, it once was.” Jerry spoke slowly, not wanting to douse Mimi’s commentary but loath to concede the point.

“How’s the boiler?” she asked as they sat in the dark-velvet-covered, high-ceilinged parlor.

“Want to see it?” He got up. He was used to showing off the new boiler, bought for the parish in the nick of time by some men from St. George’s parish in Oak Park, with enthusiasm he once reserved for the Blessed Sacrament. Or so Father Terry Dolan, an Oak Park pastor, had observed to him and Pat Devlin one day.

“A boiler does not a parish make, Jerry,” said Dolan. “You have to remember that as you plow through life.”

Jerry had smiled and continued in his praises of the treasure he had come into at the 11th hour. “It’s a quarter the size and four times as efficient,” he said.

To Mimi he repeated this, which he made part of his litany of benedictions for what Zarofsky the boiler man and the St. George’s group had wrought in the St. Albert’s rectory basement.

“And we’d be closed down by now without it, church, school and everything,” he added to Mimi. Would have been a real blot on the church on the West Side.”

To the basement. “How’s your column project coming, Mimi?” he asked.

“Well, it’s nice of you to ask, but it’s not coming at all. We haven’t heard anything.”

“You could write about St. Albert’s,” he said. Mimi cringed. People were always telling her what she could write about, when she didn’t even have an outlet and was groping for one more desperately by the day.

Jerry showed her the school, a shabby-genteel version of what the Catholic, mostly Irish, schools of thirty, even twenty years ago, looked like. The kids wore uniforms. Some of the sisters did too. Some didn’t but clearly were sisters. Some didn’t look like sisters at all but were, she deciphered from Jerry’s running commentary.

The shabby part was the wood that needed finishing, the floor boards that creaked, the occasional cracked or broken window, the general air of repair having staved off disaster, as the boiler had done.

The genteel part was the good order, the seriousness of the teachers — not all sisters, not all women — and the overall air of professionalism. Mimi, in fact, was shocked. She found seriousness here she hadn’t found in the school her kids attended.

There the mood of the day was cheerfulness. A cheery attitude permeated all. And she frankly resented it. She wondered what there was to be so cheery about. She wanted a more serious, even sterner approach to the business at hand.

Laughter was 0.K. but it ought to be part of a generally more businesslike atmosphere. Her kids’ school seemed well organized. She had bumped into kids in the halls who were helpful and courteous. In general, good order prevailed, though she felt supervision could be more conscientious at recess and other more relaxed times.

But apart from one or two teachers whom she’d heard criticized by parents for being too stern or demanding, the staff seemed intent on being cheerful and relaxed, first and foremost. At St. Albert’s that was secondary, though it seemed to follow well enough. The dominant attitude was an alert seriousness, which the kids sensed, accepted and in the end, liked. She mentioned it to Jerry.

“I think so,” he said. “They are serious. Part of that is religious life, you know.”

“I suppose so.”

“I don’t mean it’s a guarantee. But it’s a way of promoting dedication. I hate that word. It’s one way of fostering a serious attitude. The frivolous teacher is the problem. You have to defeat frivolity. It doesn’t meet anyone’s needs. We have our problems, though. You ought to realize that.”

One of them shot by Jerry and Mimi in the hall, with a nod to both of theme She was a woman of 40 or so, white and hot-eyed, pulling along with her a black boy about eleven years old — by his ear. The boy’s face was screwed up, not as if he were in pain but as if he were angry. He was angry.

“Let go my ears Let go my ear. You let go my ear.” He kept muttering while the woman pulled him along down the hall to an office at its end.

Mimi watched, fascinated, until the two disappeared into the office.

“There’s not room in this school for the two of them,” she said quietly.

“You said it,” said Jerry as they continued down the hall in the other direction. “We’re working on it.”

“Is she a dedicated sister?”

“She’s a dedicated sister, yes,” Jerry said, opening a stairway door and pointing her upstairs.

“Then dedication isn’t everything.”

“You said it again,” he said, smiling. He opened a classroom door and walked in after getting a high sign from the teacher, in the front of the room.

Mimi followed him. The children all stood as they entered. He motioned them to sit down.

“Thanks for letting us interrupt, Sister,” Jerry said in the direction of the woman at the front, a sandy-haired, blue-eyed 35-ish woman who gave an impression of shyness right off.

“Children, this is my sister-in-law, Mrs. Skelton. She came here to see what a good school looks like.” He didn’t smile when he said it. “She lives in Oak Park, where they are trying hard to have good schools. If you see her in the building or around it later in the day, be nice to her.” He smiled.

Mimi looked out on a pond of black faces, sixth-grade boys and girls, some smiling at her, some not, none surly or blank-faced.

“Thanks, Sister,” Jerry said. “Sorry for the interruption.” The woman nodded, and they left.

“That was quick,” said Mimi as they made it back to the rectory for coffee.

“Well I can’t bust in on classes too often or too long,” he said. “They’ve said I can do it on the basis you just observed: in-out and nothing elaborate in between.”

“The teachers?”

“Yes, I’m the pastor, but there are limits, even considerable.”

“What will happen to the ear-puller?” she asked as they sat at the kitchen table. “Or the ear-pulled?”

“Don’t know. The ear-puller is not dumb. She just came from a school where they pulled ears. On the southwest side. The parents pulled ears, the teachers did, or felt free to. We don’t horse around here. I mean we’re not permissive, as you saw. And our parents give us a free hand. But we aim to succeed, not bludgeon the opposition. Ear-pulling doesn’t usually succeed. As for the kid, he’ll come around. He’s got bad habits, but he’ll learn, and not just to keep his mouth shut either.”

“It’s not what I’d call a light-hearted place,” Mimi said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s a sober place. I’d like to say a mature place, except these are still just kids, and mature is a rubbery word. It’s a serious place. The world presses in on us, you know. The kids hop and skip to school like where you live, but they see more broken windows and fewer trees.”

Mimi connected her street, with its big trees, with the cheeriness of her kids’ elementary school, or tried to. It connected in a sense, but in another sense it didn’t. Couldn’t we be more serious where I live, even with windows and trees? she thought. Couldn’t we pay more attention to what we’re doing and less to —she groped — how good we feel about everything?

She put her conundrum to Jerry, who nodded knowingly. “I remember the civil rights agitator — I wouldn’t call him a leader — on the Near West Side, back in the ‘sixties, when white folks used to come from the ‘burbs to sit in his Roosevelt Road storefront to be wooed by the street orators for their contributions. When the white folks were gone, he’d talk about how white folks are smiling all the time. He enjoyed applying to whites what had been partly said about blacks.

“But he was right. We did smile a lot. Partly because we were nervous — as smiling blacks were nervous on whites’ turf — but partly because that’s our happy-go-lucky style. You know, that old suburban — and Irish makes it more so — easygoing style. Immigrants don’t smile a lot, but later generations do, because things generally have gone better for them.”

“Sometimes I think that without pressure there’s no achievement,” said Mimi. “It’s a vicious circle. Without affluence you don’t have the opportunity, and with it you lack the incentive.”

They talked some more until lunch time, which they had with the teachers, and then Mimi and Jerry walked a little around the neighborhood afterwards, then she went on home to Oak Park, wondering how a little St. Albert’s seriousness might rub off on her and the school her kids attended.

(End of Chapter 8)