Back in the city room, Ginny took a call from Fred the banker. “How you doin’?” he asked.
“Not bad, Fred. Busy, that’s all.”
“Thought you might like to have lunch.”
“No.”
“Everybody eats lunch. You have to eat lunch. Thought you might like.
to join me.”
“Nope. Busy.”
“O.K. I can try some other time.”
“O.K.” They hung up. Ginny had no time for Fred. Not a second. She was totally absorbed in her Devlin project. It was part of her work at hand.
She called Devlin.
“How about I come to see you?” she asked.
“You’re always welcome, lady. What are you sellin’?”
“I mean on Sunday.”
“Never on Sunday. You know me, lady.”
“When you say mass.”
“You comin’ to mass?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Sunday. O.K.?”
“Well, sure it’s O.K. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know. Which mass are you saying?”
“Which one am I saying?”
“You’re cute when you repeat my questions that way,” she said.
“Watch it, lady. I’ll tell the vicar general about you. Then where would you be?”
“Where would you be is the question, Patrick.”
“On the street. Or in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico?”
“Where fallen priests go. To commune with their God, spit out their demons, get straightened out,” he said.
“By the way, what was that straightening out business a while back?”
“Never mind for now.”
“Fine, but tell me what mass. I’m coming.”
He said he tell her when he knew for sure. They hung up.
“Ginny.” It was Eddie on the desk. Not the city editor but his assistant. The city editor was studying pieces of paper, his head bent down. The two womens’ column, “SHRINK,” he called it, was running Monday.
“Thanks, Eddie,” Ginny said.
“It’s nothing,” said Eddie. “Thought it would be some news you could use.”
“You’re too kind,” she said, dialing.
It was her hairdresser. She made an appointment. Little trim, little frizz, little spiffing up. Going to church on Sunday, she had to look her best.
At noon she flew out of the place and headed for Field’s, shopped for an hour and returned to her desk with a small mac, which she ate while reading notes for a story.
Meanwhile, the two women, Mimi Skelton and Carol Goodman were in and out of the building. They sat with editors, who apologized for the delay in getting back to them about their columns. One, a large-headed man with owlish eyes and a wide mouth, suggested they might have been more persistent in seeking an answer.
When the conversation was done, the two women had their assignment: they were to write five more columns in the next two weeks. Mimi blinked when she heard this but kept a straight face. Carol raised her eyebrows. The large-headed man spotted this and assured them the deadline wasn’t set in concrete, but added that if they were smart, they would move before the editors lost everything again.
The two tore out of the building, narrowly missing Ginny, who followed them by seconds but headed directly south down Wabash, over the bridge, while they headed west across the street to the IBM Plaza and State Street.
They were headed back to Oak Park, she to the Loop. They had fame and fortune in mind, gotten through honest work. She had religion in mind, gotten with a curious affection for a celibate minister of religion.
“Ginny,” Eddie yelled. “There’s a fire at 29th and Halsted. Warehouse exploded. Go with John Brown.”
“Ready?” John Brown the photographer said as she moved toward the elevator.
“Ready,” she said, smiling. They found John’s car in the basement garage across the bricked street down below, a street with railroad tracks going down its middle for the rare, off-hours delivery of paper, Ginny thought, but had never checked it out and wasn’t sure.
John pulled out and headed them to lower-level Wacker Drive, where they tooled along in the green-lit, eerie riverside haze of a hot June day. It was moments like this, hustling to the scene of a catastrophe, seated next to a photographer, when Ginny got depressed about newspapering.
She didn’t care about fires and doubted whether anybody did. Then the next day, or later the same day, she saw pictures and text of a story that would catch a reader’s eye and remind him or her what could happen. Not the point at all, she realized. The story was its own end. Even selling papers came second. But she was cursed with a second-look mentality that made her examine why she was doing what she did.
The scene at the fire was the usual chaos. Lot of smoke in the sky and hose on the ground. Streams of water poured forth into flames and smokes. Firemen stomped by in boots and raincoats and their curious hats from another era. She would have to write about fireman’s hats some day, she thought, as she tried to get the lieutenant’s attention for just one minute, so she could satisfy people’s curiosity, tell them how this happened, what made this building go from just another drab brick structure to a panoply of blazing light and smoke. Even now, motorists on the Dan Ryan Expressway were spotting the smoke and turning on car radios to hear what radio reporters were telephoning in to their stations.
Ginny stood in the midst of it all, scribbling. John had left her and gone picture-hunting. She leaned to hear what the lieutenant was saying, then overheard a bystander spouting forth her observations. She took the virtue of having seen the explosion and noted its exact time on the watch she had been given the day before, which was her 55th birthday. Her son, a lawyer downtown — did Ginny know him? — had given it to her, and she was checking everything out, noting the times. She had newly discovered, in her 55 years of marking her life as much by factory whistles as by clocks, the joys of watch-watching.
Ginny tore herself away from this fascinating woman with her lined, Slavic face and house dress and new watch and picked her way through the crowd to the nearest phone, at which stood the Tribune reporter, Ken Cooper, who had tipped the columnist on Devlin’s fight with Fred the banker. Ginny had to wait while Cooper finished calling.
He winked at her as he handed the phone over. She didn’t wink back but dialed and got Eddie, who gave her to rewrite. Reading from notes, she spilled it out, keeping an eye on the smoke a block away from the outdoors phone she stood at. She could hear Paul O’Sullivan’s typewriter’s going tap-tap as he took down her information. She was tempted to tell him about the woman with the watch but decided Paul couldn’t use it. This was for edition. And with all the smoke and fire and people milling about and cars slowing on the expressway for a better look, the story might not even make it to next day’s paper, other than the briefest mention. A warehouse exploded, but attention would be easily diverted. The readers in Schaumburg, to name only a few, couldn’t care less.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Devlin was set to say the 9 o’clock on Sunday morning, but got shifted to St. Denis instead. The assistant at St. Denis had to go see his sick father, who hovered near death, and the new pastor, a friend of Devlin’s, was scheduled to give a talk at his old parish on “The Changing Church: What To Do About It.” The parish’s third priest was committed to a senior-class picnic. So the pastor asked Devlin if he’d return just this once to his old stamping grounds. It would make things much easier, the new pastor explained, since nobody would have to show Devlin the ropes. Dolan got a Dominican to fill in at St. Emma’s.
The ropes to be learned by a newcomer at St. Denis were considerable, especially for the eleven o’clock mass, which got elaborate at times. Devlin had mostly watched it all happen under his pastorship at St. Denis. He hadn’t initiated much but rather had watched in bemused astonishment as people of the parish rushed to be not the last by whom the new was tried. He had to admit there had not been excesses, or none to speak of, at least. The emphasis on being nice to each other, as opposed to dealing directly with God, had certainly alienated some older parishioners while leaving others quietly seething, in some cases not quietly at all.
The alienated sought to discuss the matter with Devlin, who gave them his time and attention but not their way. Miffed, they drifted to other parishes. Some found a home in the Dominican Priory, whose Sunday mass accommodated the more tradition-minded. Nobody made much of any of this. There were 19 different kinds of Catholic around town, and a sort of winnowing process allowed each to find a home. Those who found one at St. Denis were generally ready to have a good time at Mass.
This meant sometimes fairly lighthearted affairs, with laughter and clapping, banners and different kinds of choirs, from white-robed and singing in Latin to blouse-and-skirted and playing a guitar. Devlin had to hand it to them for their (his at the time) Holy Week services, which ended with a baptism by immersion (of the head) of a black, hugely dignified, 50-year-old-or-so woman and the reception into the church of seven other adults, white, black, young, old, men, women, at the height of the Easter Vigil service on Holy Saturday. He sometimes wondered if his sermons on atheism hadn’t been aimed a bit over the heads of people too busy having fun at church to pay attention to such dour considerations as whether there might not be a God after all. In the end he decided to give them more credit for their enthusiasm than blame for their shallowness. Or was he the one who was missing something? He didn’t know.
He did know he was on for the eleven at St. Denis on the Sunday his girl friend was coming to see him say mass, and so he dutifully informed her with a quick phone call.
“They are letting you back to your old place?” she asked. “After they kicked you out of there?”
“The archbishop kicked me out, Ginny. St. Denis had nothing to do with it. They are tolerant to a fault; so I never had any trouble with them.”
He gave her instructions on where to find the place. “It’s the steeple you can see from McDonald’s.”
“Good. I feel comfortable about it already,” she said, promising to make it to the church on time and ringing off till Sunday.
For some reason she needed time away from Devlin to get ready for his mass. Margo encouraged her in this.
“This something special,” she told her in her office. “It’s a celebration, after all. The mass, I mean.”
“I’ve heard that word used,” Ginny said. “Things like ‘He celebrated the mass of the dead or a burial mass.’ What’s that all about?”
“Resurrection. Jesus died and rose from the dead, and so will the Christian. The mass celebrates that.”
“Margo, that strikes a lot of people as very strange, you know.”
“Do I know it? I sure do. It got Jesus hung.”
“I thought he was crucified.”
“On a cross, I mean, till he gave up the ghost.”
“Then he rose.”
“Well, his father raised him. We ought to be precise about it, or at least as precise as Scripture,” said Margo.
“Is this a Sunday school class?”
“It’s a propaedeutic towards your first mass as the wife of a priest. A preliminary investigation, as it were.”
“Wife?”
“For all practical purposes. You sleep with him and are committed to him, and he to you. What’s missing?”
“Getting married. That’s what’s missing.”
“Being joined publicly. You’re right. Well, Sunday, you join him publicly. Or semipublicly.”
“I intend to be discreet, of course.”
“Of course. You are neither iconoclast nor revolutionary, though you are subject to being used by both. Hence you are discreet. It’s the only reasonable way.’
“Margo, you’re incredible.”
“The whole business is incredible. The mass and all. Virtually incredible, which means, for all practical purposes it can’t be believed. I believe it for impractical purposes. You will too, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure I will,” said Ginny, and was amazed to hear herself say it.
She was further amazed to find herself later in the day asking a Kroch’s and Brentano’s clerk for a book about the Catholic Church. She walked out of the store on Wabash with a volume of moderate size whose author was billed on the flyleaf as a priest-theologian who had done everything but singlehandedly direct the course of Catholic progress over the previous twenty years. Fom its title, “Vatican Two Revisited,” and its table of contents, “Sex,” “Worship,” “Authority,” “God” and other titles, she got some idea of Catholic preoccupations over the years. “Warfare” was another title, but she paid little attention to it, figuring there were few things even the church could say about the dread subject that hadn’t been said already and/or weren’t taken for granted by dozens of her contemporaries. Anyhow, it was a subject vulnerable to oratond commentary and posing, and she shied away from it.
She zeroed in on “Ministry,” wondering what a Protestant word was doing in a Catholic book, and found out that Devlin was a minister. That did neither him nor the few other priests she had met justice, she decided. If they were ministers, why were called priests? In her heart she felt there was a big difference. Who ever heard party jokes about ministers, unless it was the kind that compared minister, priest and rabbi in a lost boat or in heaven with Mayor Daley? And then the minister was no more than a foil, representing a reasonable approach to show off priest’s and rabbi’s idiosyncrasies. What got your audience to perk up more readily? “Did you hear the one about the priest?” or “Did you hear the one about the minister?” No mystery in being a minister, thought Ginny. Being a priest was something else, to be sure.
Coming out of Kroch’s, where she had perused and bought the Catholic book, she bumped into Ken Cooper.
“They chewed hell out of my fire story,” he said, picking up with her as they walked toward the river. “Ended up sounding like an autopsy. I swear, they flee drama like the plague sometimes.”
“Editing is too important a thing to be left to editors. You know that by now, Ken. Half of them are misdirected plumbers, I do believe.”
“Most plumbers would treat my drama in a more kindly fashion,” he said. “By the way, speaking of drama, how’s the battling priest?”
“Who?”
“Never mind. If you don’t want to talk about him, that’s O.K., Ginny. I couldn’t walk away from that story, though, could I? It could have been worse, at that. Right?”
“I thought you didn’t mind not talking about it.”
“God, you’re smart. I’ll bet you’re smart enough to work for the Tribune. What a waste, to have you filing gems for the Brand X newspaper in town.”
“Did you see my fire story, Ken? My gems were not wasted. They got into print.”
And indeed they had. Eddie on the desk and O’Sullivan on rewrite had worked together to make a minor naked-city story out of the warehouse explosion. Ginny had sensed something like that in the works. There was something in Eddie’s voice when he said the city council had acted like dead men that day, and she had called back, half apologetically, with the woman whose new watch had replaced the factory whistle for a timepiece. O’Sullivan had suggested she go for some more eyewitnesses, get a brief line on each and make a tableau out of it: explosion on 29th Street or something like it. Ginny managed to nail a half dozen others who had heard and/or seen the explosion, being careful to ignore anything like “It sounded like the explosion of a bomb,” and was back on the phone to O’Sullivan in a half hour. He put them all together, hopping on exact phrases Ginny had given him, and next day’s page one had “Explosion on 29th Street.” For Ginny, preparing for her first mass, it was a good omen.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Nate Goodman knew from a brief reference his wife made that things weren’t going well with Pat Devlin. Something about “trouble in River City, in the St. Denis and Emma branches” as seen through Skelton eyes had set him to wondering about his boyhood buddy, a queer bird who nested in both branches.
“Patrick, what’s up?” Nate said when he called the priest.
“Why Nate, I’m pretty much out of work, that’s what’s up,” said Devlin. “I’ve been thinking of you, in fact.”
“You need a brush up in secular realities, otherwise known as grim?” said Nate.
“The grim realities, yes. I need another short course in what happens if you do this and if you don’t do that, and so forth. My situation is beginning to climax, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Coming from you, I’ll pardon. You want me to be Christian about it, that it?”
“You got it, Nate. Be Christian when you deal with me. When I deal with you, maybe another story. We spoiled Christians are the worst kind. You don’t know what we’ll pull.”
They set up another breakfast, again near St. Emma’s. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Devlin said the next day, taking his first cup of coffee.
“What’d I say?” asked Nate.
“About me and my problems. Getting work.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” Devlin lowered his voice and looked around. “Let’s face it. I have some planning to do.”
Nate looked at him.
“It’s time for me to take stock,” said Devlin.
“I agree. You’ll need money.”
“I need more than money,” said Devlin.
“Like what?”
“Like some work I can live with and find satisfying.”
“Pat, you’re not in a good negotiating position. What do you want to do, anyway, now that you bring it up. What’s your preference?”
“Something worthwhile.”
“That’s a very round category,” said Nate. “Could you be more specific?”
“A service role of some sort.”
“Waiter? Have you thought of being a waiter? It’s nothing but service-oriented.”
“What are you doing to me, Nate? I’m serious.”
“So am I. You are fifty years old.”
“Forty-eight.”
“Forty-eight years old and know how to preach and are good company. You have certain other skills — liturgical? — that might be of use on the stage. A certain presence, shall we say? You have a way with people that I find hard to categorize. It’s a combination of being sensitive to them and of requiring” — he paused. “Yes, requiring a certain response in return. Not from me. I’m your friend. But in general.”
“What are you driving at?” Devlin interrupted.
“I’m driving at the importance of a certain realism as you assess your vocational opportunities at this point. You’ve been performing a highly specialist function for a highly segmented market, I might say. You’re like a bank, that’s what you are.”
“How am I like a bank, smart guy?”
“You’ve had a niche for decades, where nobody could touch you. You had a market sewn up and were in turn protected from competition. You were ordained; so were banks. You’ve found out you can, or at least want to, do more; so you’re branching out. But you’re moving out of a protected environment. You’re excited about that, but you’re scared. Right?”
“At this point, since you’re being so smart about it, I am not ready to agree to anything you say, Nate. Keep talking.”
“Don’t mind if I do. I think I’m on to something.”
The waitress filled the coffee cups. Nate continued.
“What you need is a shtick. You are useless in a corporate sense. Most corporations, if you’d been with them twenty-five years, they’d be looking to fire you for old age by now, unless you were the one doing the firing. You need a shtick, something you can do that’s distinctive. Then sell it. That’s a shtick.”
“From your secret language, Yiddish.”
“How’d you know? See? Smart guy like you can make it.”
“What’s my shtick?” Devlin asked.
“We have to see. It’s got to match a market, of course. So we should look at markets where you might fit — where your shtick would fit.”
“Mimi Skelton once tried to do that for me, a few months ago. Wanted me to hang out a shingle, The Belief Doctor, or something like that.”
“Then you preached atheism. Hell of a belief doctor.”
“I didn’t preach atheism. You weren’t even there. I said, let’s take the position seriously. I was aiming at people who already did and could use some straight talk from the pulpit.”
“Jesus. Straight talk. From a pulpit? That’s always been the quickest route from preacher to cabdriver. Who wants to hear straight talk from a pulpit? You think people come on Sunday to hear that? Unless you can intellectualize it. That’s what Jews do. Then we talk it to death.”
“Talk what to death?”
“Whatever the no-bullshit, simple statement might have been before it got put in round-about phraseology.”
Devlin looked away. “I’m not in the mood to hear complaints about preachers.”
“Neither am I. We got off the subject. Mimi Skelton had a shtick for you? You know, I thought you were sweet on her a few months back. And she on you.”
“Mimi? She’s married with seven kids, belongs to the parish. Has live-in husband, feisty, good-looking, smart.”
He stopped.
“Right. You just hit it off together,” said Nate.
Devlin threw up his hands and looked away.
“Anyhow, now it’s you and Ginny, right? And you on your way to a new and wonderful life.”
“Like a bank.”
“Yeah. That’s it.” Nate laughed. “Like a bank. You and banks. New life, new challenges, new opportunities. The world is your oyster.”
“If I come up with a shtick.”
“What can it be?” said Nate, getting serious again.
“I don’t know. I’m not full of ideas today.”
“Let’s blue-sky,” said Nate.
“What do you mean, blue-sky? What kind of funny language are you talking?”
“Brainstorm. Try ideas on each other. Throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks,”
“O.K. Brainstorm in a blue sky. Stormy weather it.”
“Stormy weather?”
“Forget it. Private joke.”
“Between you and some meteorologist. No. You and some reporter.”
“Me and some reporter. Right.” Devlin looked out the window of the little restaurant. It was going to be hot today, he thought. Might rain. “Nate,” he said. “I don’t feel like blue-skying right now.”
“Don’t have to right now. Let’s think about this. Think what you can do to keep the wolf away.”
“That’s a depressing way to look at it,” said Devlin.
“Christ, don’t get depressed,” said Nate. “Do banks get depressed?”
“Banks aren’t starting something entirely new.”
“Why should you, therefore? Don’t start all over. Look at what you’re doin’ and start there.”
“What am I doing?”
“What are you doing?” Nate repeated. “Do you need me to tell you that?”
“No, but I need you to ask me. I need someone to ask me.”
“Exactly. You need someone to blue-sky with so you don’t get lost in stormy weather.” He stopped. “That’s it,” he almost shouted, slapping the table.
“Waitress,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Another round of coffee. It’s time to brave the elements.”
(End of Chapter 21)
Blithe Spirit 