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)
Blithe Spirit 