“What are you gonna do, Dev?”
“With my life, Terry?”
“Yes.”
“You gonna evict me if I don’t tell you?”
“God knows.” I’m impulsive, irresponsible, weak-kneed, a typical pastor of any faith when it comes to sticking my neck out. Let’s see, what else is there about me to instill confidence?”
“I’ve got to sort things out.” –
“All right. That’s a start.” They sat in St. Emma’s kitchen. It was 10 o’clock or so. The house was quiet. So were the streets outside. It was a warm June night.
“Maybe I should see a shrink, like Kelly did for his drinking. I could do it for my . . . problem.” He hesitated before “problem.”
“You got a problem?”
“You know what I mean?”
“You’ve never quite told me, and I’ve been too polite to ask,” said Dolan.
“You’re polite if nothing else,” Devlin said, with a crooked smile.
“Can we come to terms on the matter?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can we develop a common language. I’m unsympathetic, I admit, but maybe we can come to terms.” He stopped, took a drink of beer.
Devlin said nothing. Dolan began again.
“Can I say that?”
“Sure”
“Good. I’m going for a common language, you understand, giving a little and expecting you to give a little too.”
“O.K., O.K., it’s all right. Go on.”
“You’ve got a lifetime identity, dating from, when? High-school days?”
“Late high school, if you want. You mean when I started to see myself as a priest.”
“Right. O.K. You spend, say, thirty years making an identity for yourself, carving out that little niche you expect to reside in for the rest of your life.”
“No, Terry, I never saw it that way.”
“No niche.”
“No. Too neat. I never saw my life that way.”
“A lot of people do.”
“I know they do, and I’ve never understood it. I’ve envied them but never understood them.”
“You’ve envied me?
“You? No. You’re a grappler, not a niche-dweller. You know what they say about you. You never fit in.”
“Well I think I fit in a little better than you at this point. You’re the one branching out.”
Devlin shrugged.
“Back to your life, O.K.?” said Dolan.
“Shoot.”
“Somehow, nice or not, you saw yourself for thirty years as a priest. Now you don’t.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Devlin, jumping up. “You can’t say that. You can’t say that, Terry. You made a big jump there.”
“You’re the one that’s jumping, Dev. Sit down.”
Devlin sat.
“O.K., O.K., said Dolan. “I made my big jump there, and I got a rise out of you, We’re getting somewhere, I think. I probed around and found a nerve,”
Devlin sat with a wry grin on his face. “Aren’t you proud of yourself.”
“It was clever, wasn’t it?”
“You should be a shrink. Or a lawyer. What a Perry Mason you’d make.”
“Or newspaper reporter. Right? Don’t reporters get you all in candid, in-depth interviews?”
“Now you’re getting personal. Right?”
The two of them sat looking at each other expectantly, seeing which would blink first.
Dolan did. “You don’t want to go into that.”
Devlin nodded. “I don’t want to go into that. It’s too, ah, personal.”
Dolan looked at him. “Too personal. I thought we were getting personal from the start. It’s your life we’re talking about. This is your life, Dev old boy.”
“Terry, I’m tolerating this. I’m not handing my psyche over to you.”
“Shit, I don’t want your psyche.”
“You’re just tryin’ to help.”
“Uh-oh. Sounds like if I say yes to that, I condemn myself. Friendly busybody tries to help. Worst kind of busybody.”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.”
Another pause.
“Back to the question?” said Dolan.
“Back to it.”
“You hit the floor when I suggest you no longer see yourself as a priest.”
Devlin started to say something.
“Wait,” Dolan continued. “You resent the implication, and that’s fair enough.” He paused again. “May I make the slightest reference to your dilemma?”
Devlin waved consent.
“O.K. As a priest, you are expected to go it alone. No romantic involvement.”
Devlin furrowed his brow but stayed quiet.
Dolan continued. “Apart from the, uh, eschatological ramifications . . . “
“Cough, cough,” said Devlin.
“Apart from, you know what I mean, what we talked about on the golf course.”
“And other occasions.”
“And other occasions. Apart from all that, there is the general expectation that as a celibate you don’t carry on in your spare time, et cetera. O.K. But you appear to be involved. Behold your dilemma.”
Devlin sat glumly, first looking at Dolan, then looking past him at a cute little clock on the kitchen wall. The clock fascinated him. It had a cuckoo mounted on it that never said or did anything. Just sat there, watching.
“What should I do?” Devlin said.
“Pat, we go from ‘Mind your own business’ to ‘What should you do?’ I don’t want to tell you what to do. What good would that do?” Dolan got a horrible sinking feeling about Devlin, who threw up his hands.
“Shit,” he said.
“Those are my sentiments too, for what it’s worth,” said Dolan.
The two of them looked at each other and broke out laughing.
“Shee-it,” said Devlin. “Let’s have a beer.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Mimi Skelton called on Devlin the next morning. She’d heard he was at St. Emma’s, between jobs, and wanted to see how he was doing. Devlin welcomed the visit.
He was ripe for some pleasant female companionship that didn’t give him a sense of obligation. Mimi, with all her kids and husband and breezy manner, was good for him. She fluttered about, landing gently now and then, and he didn’t feel oppressed by her.
“What are you doing at St. Emma’s, when you could be running St. Denis into the ground?”
“How’d you know I was ruining St. Emma’s?”
“That’s why they bounced you, isn’t it? You couldn’t bring in the shekels? You didn’t cut the financial mustard, right?”
“That’s all you lay people ever think of, money. You should be more concerned with spiritual things. It’s your heaven-can-wait attitude that destroys the foundations of parish life.”
“Now Father, you betray the heritage of a long line of Irish pastors when you talk that way. If they didn’t make heaven wait while they piled on the bricks and mortar, who did?”
“I can’t win an argument with the modern Catholic layman. He’s too smart. Overeducated. Some of the women too.” He winked. “We should never have educated them. It was a mistake. We should have kept them dumb and stupid in the kitchen and ditches.”
“We had to be educated in order to rise socio-economically, didn’t we? How could we rise from the bogs and patches otherwise? And bring the clergy with us? It was a cruel dilemma the clergy faced.”
Devlin laughed. “How you doin’, Mimi? How are the kids? Last time I saw Tom and Donna, they were at a party, Donna enjoying herself immensely and Tom running things. Very serious about it. Wonderful kids.”
“We’re all fine. Ted’s wonderin’ when you’re goin’ to the basketball game again. To watch all those black players.”
“Ah yes, De Paul’s black Demons. That’s a natural result of equal opportunity, you know.”
“How so?” she asked.
“Equal opportunity leads to unequal results, because ability isn’t distributed equally. Give black kids a fair crack and there goes the basketball team — black, victorious, good enough to put a school in the big time, et cetera. I’m for equal opportunity, with its unequal results, even if it does lead to envy and backbiting.
“What about you? Are you the victim of envy and backbiting?”
“No, of equal opportunity. I’m caught in the backwash of progress, shelved and rotting.”
“I don’t believe it. You’ll have to come to dinner. I went to see Father’s place, you know.”
“In deepest Lawndale? Stout woman.”
“Nothing to it. Had a good time. Saw his school — their school. Walked around the place. Saw his new boiler too.”
“The one he cadged off the St. George’s laymen last fall? That little effort shook me to my foundations. Pious Jerry groping, stumbling through the jungle of lace-curtainism and finding the pot o’ gold.”
“Ted helped.”
“Your husband too. Taught me something about the children of light.”
“What?”
“That Gospel saying. Children of this world on the one hand. Children of light on the other. Jesus’s people. They plunge ahead, think not about what the morrow may bring. That’s people like your brother-in-law Jerry.”
“Sounds like the way to be.”
“I don’t know,” said Devlin, smiling.
“You’re waiting for an assignment? Is that it?” she asked, hesitant.
“Awaiting assignment, right. They are, uh, leery of me, it would seem.”
“It’s those sermons you preached. Is that it?”
“No, stealing from the Sunday collection. They have strong suspicions they can’t quite prove. So they hide behind ideology. I’m off on doctrine, they say, but the real problem is thievery. I keep my bank accounts all numbered, however, so they will never catch me. Never.”
Mimi laughed. “You dare speak that way here? In St. Emma’s? Where the walls hear?”
“Yes, because my friend Father Dolan is in it with me, and he sweeps the place regularly. If there are bugs, he knows about them. In those rooms we play loud music all day, like in spy books.”
“Have you ever thought of becoming a spy?”
“A Reverend Mata Hari, wheedling secrets in the confessional?”
“Or out of it. In church parlors. Who knows where?”
Mimi laughed. “I’ve noticed that.”
Smart woman. Shrewd. Mimi looked good. Trim and slim, with only enough widening to make her figure more interesting. Devlin enjoyed her company. Sexually, she was attractive. But he was less mindful of that part than before he connected with Ginny. Before, it was a constant barrage he had to deal with when talking to a beautiful woman. Now it was a melody in the background, adding to the enjoyment but not distracting.
He was freshly awakened to sex, as if a new friend had entered his life. But it was a fairly unobtrusive entrance. Not a demon, as he had once imagined. He did, however, briefly think of Ginny, and he found that distracting. There was nothing unobtrusive about Ginny. She made a lot of waves in his life, none of them yet subsided.
“Hello there. Hi there. It’s me, your devoted parishioner. Hi there.” Mimi was waving her hand in front of his face. “Are you there?”
“Oh. Sorry,” he said, smiling. “Mind wandering. Thinking of a good sermon topic. When you’re dedicated the way I am, you never know when you’re gonna go off.
“It must be.” She looked at him quizically. “Are you all right? I never saw you do that. You’re always on the alert. As if you might miss something, But just now you faded away.”
“I’ll never do it again.”
“It’s not bad. I mean, it’s not all bad. It’s just — not you.”
“Spies do that all the time. They communicate that way with their superiors, who sit in darkened rooms all day, tuning their minions in and out. They’re not actually doing that, you know. Actually, they are listening to transistor radios, staying up with the news.”
“Patrick . . . Do you mind if I call you Patrick?”
He wrinkled his brow as if very upset.
“Patrick, you do carry on. They should make you a roving ambassador to far-flung parishes.”
“I could spy for the archbishop.”
“Cheering up the troops.”
“Like Bob Hope in Korea.”
“Sure. Help with morale.”
“Father Pat’s happy hour. Come in a grumpy, go out a happy priest or nun, What if I got atheistic about it? Slipped in an untoward comment or two?”
“That would be part of it. You would offer them something new and different. Refreshing.”
“It could give them a chance to flirt with atheism, see how the other half believes. No.”
“No?”
“No, Mimi, none of that, because I’m getting out.”
“Out?”
“Of the priesthood.”
(end of chapter 17)
Blithe Spirit 