The next day Dolan considered the way the world was going for him and his friends. He did so before, during and after mass, which he said in a somnolent state, half between sleep and wakefulness. The movements were second nature. It was a rote effort that fit in with the moment, before the day had gotten going, in a quiet church with twenty or so people watching. This day he dispensed with the short homily he’d become accustomed to giving even on weekdays, because he had Devlin on his mind.
He held out the wafer at Communion and the people took it from him, putting it in their own mouths. A few held their mouths open, tongue out, head tilted back in the old style, preferring not to touch the sacred host. Dolan didn’t blame them. They’d been brought up with tales of possible sacrilege if even a crumb fell to the floor. As a young priest, he had sent the altar boy running for a “purificator,” a starched white napkin folded in thirds, with which to wipe the spot where a host had fallen. The altar boy who caught one on the paten he held out under outstretched chin was a minor hero. Nothing to match the boy saint who died at the hands of pagans rather than surrender the host, of course. But a hero none the less.
He was thinking how you couldn’t understand some early Graham Greene stories unless you knew about pre-reform reverence by Catholics for the host as he put the chalice away after communion.
“Let us pray,” he intoned, and the mass was over in a few minutes. In the sacristy he stayed and prayed a little bit, kneeling at the cushioned pre-dieu, holding forehead in hand. Prayer was more and more a time for him of reflection interspersed with a few quiet moans of semi-hopefulness. He had long ago decided that either he hadn’t understood the instructions he’d been given about prayer or the instructions were meant for someone else, not him, or the instructions were just stupid. They were probably some of all three, he decided further. So he went his own way, trying this and trying that.
The first thing he pitched was any whiff of forced cheeriness about it. Then he taught himself to think of saints and even Jesus as human beings like himself, who if they didn’t have moods and resentments like his, had their own to contend with. He decided the saints and Jesus had been badly treated by almost everybody who had been written about them.
At the point of this realization, his language began to deteriorate from a priestly norm. From the time as a seminarian when he observed the proprieties, he had descended to his present state in which he cut loose with epithet, excoriation and even curse when the spirit moved in. Not the Holy Spirit, he felt pretty sure, but then how could you tell?
Back in the rectory, he took a call from Barney Crowley of the personnel office, asking if he had room for Devlin at St. Emma’s. They had a replacement ready for Devlin at St. Denis, but nowhere to go yet. Westchester had been taken by a man two years younger than Devlin, who’d been on the West Side for twelve years and wanted out of that ministry.
“Sure I’ve got room for him, Barney,” said Dolan. “Too bad he couldn’t get Westchester.”
“Yes, it is too bad,” said Father Crowley. “But something else will come along, and meantime he has to go somewhere. Staying in Oak Park seems a good idea, and you’re his friend. It makes sense.”
Dolan agreed. They hung up. He called Devlin. “Little golf today?”
“It’s not my day off,” said Devlin, who was planning lunch with Ginny downtown but didn’t care to burden Dolan with that information.
“Well how about making it your day off?” Dolan was struck with the curious sense of duty that kept a prince from golf on a work day in the midst of courting a girl friend. “Or half day? Few hours?”
Devlin did some fast figuring. “O.K.,” he said. “This afternoon.” He’d make hospital rounds in the morning, then get back from the Ginny lunch in time for Dolan. They made a date for three at St. Denis, from which they would head right away for Columbus Park.
Devlin had heard from Crowley also, with word of his replacement and the suggestion that he live with Dolan for the time being. And just when things were starting to look up, he thought. He was clicking all over the place lately, bouncing from teen night to nursing homes to the pulpit and back, spreading cheer all over the place.
He’d known his days at St. Denis were numbered. He’d raised too much hell when he was groping around preaching about atheism. And yet he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d just been careless about his constituencies, especially the one on State Parkway.
“You knew the archbishop would land on you, Pat,” Dolan had told him. “You should have been more careful.”
He’d known that but had pressed too hard. One part of him felt unfairly treated, but the other told him he should have known better. Dolan railed against Archbishop Houlihan as much as anybody, and his position was well known. But he never gave the old man a handle with which to fling him about, as Devlin was being flung about. The personnel board, priests like himself, knew that, but they also knew Devlin had given cause. Not sufficient cause but cause nonetheless, and they had other fish to fry. So Devlin was being moved. So find him some place else. He hasn’t lost his health insurance, has he? No. O.K., let him flourish, his suspension finally lifted, in Westchester or Justice or Bloom Township. They weren’t the ends of the world.
When Devlin was floating around emotionally, he agreed with that line of thought. Now he wasn’t so sure. So Crowley’s call caught him unawares and gave him a bad feeling in the stomach. Then Dolan called, and now he had a full day ahead of him.
– – – – – – – – – –
Dolan came promptly at three. The two decided to walk to the golf course, a few blocks to Jackson, the street where Devlin, jogging, had been overtaken by Arthur Williams, and then a few more east to the golf course itself.
They looked out of place in the middle of a week-day afternoon, the two of them lugging bags of clubs, dressed like workman. As they crossed Austin at Jackson, they caught a few yells from a pickup-load of city workers on their way to plug a pothole or two. The proper response was a middle finger held straight up, followed by waving golf clubs if the truck stopped to unload its offended passengers, followed by street melee if the spirit (not the Holy one) moved all concerned, all of it a typical city-street confrontation of the 1980s between well-meaning adult males.
Instead, the two priests ignored the yells and went their way, reaching the first tee and finding nobody there but the attendant, who took their money and waved them on.
The game was their usual hacking exhibition. The talk was guarded, because the main subject was becoming unmentionable.
“How’s your teen club coming?” asked Dolan, addressing the ball with an old driver.
“Not bad,” said Devlin.
Dolan hit his drive and didn’t pursue the teen-club topic, Devlin said no more about it.
“How are the Skeltons?” Dolan asked.
“That reminds me,” said Devlin. “I was supposed to —” He stopped. Dolan was taking a shot and so was somewhat distracted.
“What’d you say?” he asked, when he’d swung and sent the ball on one of his low line drives.
“You asked about the Skeltons,” said Devlin. “They’re fine.”
“You started to say something about what you forgot,” said Dolan.
“That was nothing,” said Devlin. It was that he was supposed to press Ginny again on what was happening to Mimi Skelton’s columns at the Sun-Times, but he didn’t want to go into that with Dolan.
“How’s your friend?” asked Dolan.
“Wait a minute,” said Devlin, who was making extended efforts to line up a five-iron shot. He did so, took the shot, and clucked satisfaction as the ball landed on the green, rolled a few feet and stopped.
“She’s fine,” he said, smiling and looking at Dolan, but adding nothing.
“Good,” said Dolan, who then swung viciously with his five-iron and took a huge piece of turf, which went almost as far as the ball. Thin-lipped, he picked up his bag and stalked the ball the twenty yards it had flown, attacked it again, this time sending the ball in a beautiful arc up and past the green by the twenty yards he had just achieved. Devlin got the divot and replaced it, eyeing his friend as if to keep him from doing any more damage.
Neither said anything as Dolan, white-faced, propelled the ball in his next shot to the side of the green from which he had just come and in another managed to dribble onto its edge, gaining extremely long-putt distance to the cup.
Devlin was only a few yards from the cup. Dolan’s first putt was true but very short. His next was the right distance but well off the mark. His third stopped at cup’s edge. Devlin’s only putt was on the button. It would have sunk in a cup half the size, so centered it was. Devlin loved the hollow clicking sound the ball made as it fell in, but he didn’t say so. It was no time to take bows. He was travelling with a wounded lion.
They walked to the next tee in silence. Devlin could hear Dolan taking deep breaths. Devlin drove, continuing his amazingly good play with a long, straight shot that lifted in steps as it roared down the fairway, then seemed to hang there a fraction before landing softly and then rolling a few yards.
Dolan watched it as if hypnotized. He gave Devlin a look of half amazement, half spite and went past him to the tee, plugging his ball into the ground with a vicious twist, standing in front of it squarely and sending his ball off into the distance over the tops of trees that led back to the densest wooded section of the course.
He stood watching it disappear, then looked at Devlin, who watched with a strained seriousness. He saw his opening, however, and took it: “You really hit that one, Terry,” he said, and they both dissolved in laughter.
“You bastard,” said Dolan, and teed up another one.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Devlin was past discussing Ginny with Dolan. He wasn’t sure exactly when this became his decision. Maybe during the Sunday-night session in which Dolan let his hair down about the whole question of Dolan-cum-girl-friend and related matters.
At no point that night was Devlin angry at Dolan. He accepted his friend’s rejection of the Ginny business, no questions asked. Dolan was keeping himself away from consideration of “alternate life style” as an option for himself. When Devlin began to move toward such a change for himself, it was too close to home for Dolan. He couldn’t go along, Devlin decided.
“Hello, my love,” he said, talking into the telephone in his room at the rectory.
“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Buster?” Ginny said, talking from the city room.
“No surer than is reasonable for a genial, fortyish cleric who has found a friend.”
“Fortyish sounds a bit generous in the direction of thirty, one, and two, you found your friend in Jesus a long time ago, Buster. Don’t give me that stuff.”
“I love it when you call me Buster. It’s so, uh, intimate.”
She laughed. “Bullshit. Intimate. Hah.” She laughed some more.
“Dinner?” he said.
“No. Lunch is enough for one day. We don’t want to overdo anything.”
“We don’t? You don’t go along with that comedienne, what’s her name? Tomlin. The counterculturist?” he said.
“Nine to Five.”
“Yes, but not that. I didn’t see that. I saw her live in concert or some such, at the Goodman. She trashed her mommy and daddy, and the other counterculturists ate it up,” he said. “Lots of witticisms, like ‘Don’t believe it when your mother says enough is enough.’ That sort of thing.”
“Well it’s always fun to trash your parents. You get them back for trashing you. Anyhow,” she said, “I have work to do, and so do you, remember? Teen Club or whatnot? Right?”
“Whatnot. I’ve got lots of whatnot tonight. Schedule loaded with whatnot,” he said.
“Which you can handle easily, I’m sure. G’bye.”
Devlin hung up, smiling, and sat back, hands folded in back of his head. By all odds, he should be feeling intolerable strain, he thought, but he didn’t feel any strain, or he felt very little. Something must be wrong. He felt as if he ought to have his conscience checked, to see if it had sprung a leak or needed a new fan belt.
Where were the agonies of indecision? Even modern heroes have pangs, not to mention Shakespearean. His conscience was making no coward of him at all. He was plunging ahead with abandon, alacrity, panache even. Where had this newfound panache of his been all his previous life?
Telephone. Nate Goodman, the Skeltons’ friend and his from boyhood days in Columbus Park. Last time he saw Nate was at Skeltons’.
“Hello, Buddy, how you doin’?” Devlin said.
“My complaints are few. How about you?”
They covered a few bases, asking after mutual friends. Nate’s timing was right. Only when he began talking to him did Devlin realize he welcomed a break from his thoughts. He was feeling good, but still he was about to burst with his thoughts.
Nate’s wife Carol was working at home, on something she was writing. The kids were staying over at friends’. How about the two of them getting a bite to eat? Discuss Irish-Jewish relations. Something like that.
“I’ll bring my map of the Middle East?” said Devlin.
“And I mine of Ulster,” said Nate. “And of course, you’ll have yours of Ireland with you as usual.”
“On my face. Yeah, yeah, I know.”
They settled on Richard’s, in Forest Park, one of the last bastions of German beer-—drinking in a village that once had nothing but, with names like bungalow-filled streets.
“Remember Gottlieb Schwab’s?” Devlin asked as they sat in the rear of Richard’s, at formica-topped tables.
“The place on Circle Avenue. Dark beer and all. It’s a gay bar now, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard there’s one around there. It was gay then, for my money, in the old meaning of the word,” said Devlin.
“Before liberation and enlightenment,” said Nate.
“Exactly. Spoken like a true reactionary.”
“I do my best,” said Nate, looking around.
The waitress brought two schooners.
“Anyhow,” said Devlin, wiping foam off his lip, “When it was Gottlieb Schwab’s, 1957, I think, a hot week night. I was almost newly ordained. With some pre-seminary school buddies, married mene Boys! night out, that sort of thing. Me in soft clothes, of course.”
“Reverting,” said Nate.
“Right. Returning to my disgusting origins. You get it. The primordial ooze.”
“Slime?” asked Nate.
“Good. Slime. That says it. Ah, you Jewish fellows are so smart. You get that way from studying Hebrew when you’re little kids. Right?”
“No,” Nate said. “Latin makes you smarter.” He smiled.
Devlin grinned. “Why do I joust with you? Where does it get me? All I ever do is lose.”
They ordered soup and sandwiches.
“Back to Gottlieb Schwab’s,” said Nate.
“Yes. So we sat drinking beer for an hour or so, reliving past triumphs and all that, and at some point one of us, maybe me, spilled some and called to the young-guy bartender — who wasn’t any part of this, you understand,
We were a bunch of outsiders, maybe dimly understood to be Micks —”
“At least he knew you weren’t part of his immediate family,” said Nate.
“Right. He knew we weren’t -— what’s the word? —- landsmen.”
“You didn’t live on his block, mainly,” said Nate.
“We were not among his familiars. Anyhow, one of us called for something to wipe up the beer, and he pitched a rag at us, and it brushed my face?”
Devlin said it almost as if looking for confirmation, and Nate nodded. Devlin continued, moving around to make gestures. “And you know how after a few beers the veneer wears off?”
“Of civilization,” said Nate.
“Right. The controls aren’t there. Well, the rag brushed my face on the way to our table, and I was up in a flash at the guy.”
“You went for him?”
“No, thank God. But I braced him. You know, I looked at him with cold and unblinking eye and so forth and told him what I thought of his hitting me in the face with the rag.”
“What’d he do, pull a shotgun from behind the bar?”
“He didn’t do anything. Just stood there.”
“Looking at you in cold, Teutonic fashion?”
“Right. While I looked at him in hot, Celtic fashion.”
“Geez,” said Nate. “It’s enough to cause rain. Then what?”
“Then I guess I satisfied myself with taking the guy’s measure and/or ran out of steam and went back and sat down.”
“Wow. End of crisis in the OK corral. Lucky thing too, for the hapless barkeep.”
“You kiddin’?” said Devlin. “He probably had a sap under the bar, ready to slap me with if I made a move. I’d ‘a been caught cold. I was
lucky I went back to drinking beer.”
“Not to mention the nice start to your priestly career,” said Nate. The Oak Leaves could have given you a nice play. ‘Local boy, newly ordained, is sapped by bartender. Refuses to press charges. Takes free beer instead as balm for troubled psyche.’”
Devlin laughed. “Oh boy, Nate, you should be in the newspaper business instead of a lawyer. You’ve got a great touch.”
He thought of Ginny as he said it, and a sweet wave swept over him, as of nepenthe he had drunk, he thought, mixing some poetry he had memorized as a school kid years ago with the friendly bullshit he was enjoying with his friend Nate.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
The days wore on for Devlin, to the few he had left at St. Denis. Crowley had given him two weeks, and then he would move to Dolan’s place
a mile away, deeper into the village, away from the city’s edge. Travelling light as he had over his years of the priesthood, he faced the change with a fair degree of detachment. That’s what the spiritual counselor had talked about at Mundelein, the ancient Jesuit who had studied theology at Innsbruck and recommended long walks after dinner followed by a tall, cold glass of water before digging in for the night’s study.
You had to be detached, the bent old guy would explain, himself a fair model of it, to the point sometime where Devlin wondered what made him tick. He’d go on about the love of God which surpasseth all understanding during a retreat talk, and Devlin had no cause to accuse him of insincerity. But he always wondered anyhow if the man was misguided one way or another. Something about him didn’t fit, but what did he know, a sprout in his twenties, looking the graybeard up and down, seeking chinks in armor?
But Devlin had bought the idea of detachment. If you go for the spiritual, then you better guard against the material. The old Jesuit quoted St. Augustine right and left. Someone else said Augustine was a Platonist, with was logical if nothing else. Any other approach seemed harder to grasp. Later, in the ‘60s, he heard the “Which Side Are You On?” song of the civil-rights protesters, lifted from old labor struggles.
That appealed to him also, with its clean break between right and wrong, or right and left, for that matter. And of course, there was the old radical himself, Jesus, with his uncompromising “He who is not with me is against me.” All had their appeal over the decades for Devlin, though he had been in and out of the civil-rights business without any heavy commitment. He had been no one to count on. In the end, they had their revolution, such as it was, without him.
‘That’s all right, Dev. It’s the thought that counts,” Dolan had told him.
That didn’t bother Devlin. He was used to Dolan’s observations. He wasn’t used to Dolan’s being upset, however, and though the most recent had golf-match exchange had cleared the air between the two, the last exchange before that one, about the various purposes to be achieved in life without a wife, still hung there.
As for Devlin and Ginny, that exchange or series of them went apace, to the detriment of the various all-or-nothing theses that Devlin had embraced during his life. This life went from one of apparent total dedication to one of fairly obvious compromise. He and Ginny, after all, had something going.
“You have a knit brow,” she told him one Sunday afternoon as he lay beside her in her apartment. “Prithee, why so wan?”
“Prithee?” He looked at her quizzically.
“Sure, ‘prithee.’! Why not? Good poetic language. Lover’s lament and all.”
“Lament?”
“Patrick, you’re being difficult,” she said.
“I know.” From flat on his back, he pulled up to resting on an elbow and facing her. “I must have been thinking negative thoughts,” he said.
“You’re not sure?”
“Well, it becomes a hard philosophical question. One man’s negative is another man’s something else. It’s very complicated.”
‘l’ll bet,” she said.
“Oh yes. Very difficult. The whole question of right and wrong, for instance.”
“Just to grab out and reach for a handy, pocket-size item to chew on. You feel guilty about going to bed with me?”
“Oddly, no.”
She laughed, her red hair jouncing about. “Oddly, you say. Oddly?”
“Sure. Hell, here I am your friendly Catholic pastor, in bed of a Sunday afternoon with Miss Voluptuous of 1983. Better men than I have felt twinges. Let’s face it.”
“Miss Voluptuous of, say, 1973? Maybe. But 1983? Not sure.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Anyhow. To answer your question, while many a lesser man might feel guilty, or better for that matter, I do not. Not as far as I can determine, at least.”
“It’s the sort of thing you’d know, I think.”
“You’re right,” he said. “And I don’t. Which as any counselor knows, makes me a hard case.”
“A lost soul. cherchez la femme.”
“And no need to cherchez very far at that,” he said.
“I’m here,” she said, hiding under the cover, then peeking out, green eyes merry.
“Is that where you are?” he said, plunging under the covers, where he nuzzled, squeezed and poked to the accompaniment of Ginny’s paroxysmic laughter, twisting and moaning. The right and wrong of it were laid aside for the moment.
Blithe Spirit 