Devlin’s friend Ginny had a fair idea what the story was supposed to be but not a hundred-per cent clear one. It had something to do with psychiatrists and the troubles they have with patients. It had everything to do with that. But she was not sure what the troubles were, beyond the strain of dealing with mixed-up people.
“As a newspaper reporter, you should find the subject very familiar,” said the city editor. “I know that as a city editor, I would. Only difference is, I deal with them on the run, one after the other. The shrink deals with them sitting down in an office. Or lying down, as the case may be. Go to it, Ginny. You can do it. Tell you what. Get the shrink to lie down while you ask him questions. It should be a pleasant switch for the guy.”
“Or woman,” said Ginny.
“Of course. Goes without saying,” he said, looking back down at papers on his desk to signal end of conversation.
“He has the nicest touch,” said Ginny, returning to her desk.
“Inspiring, that’s what it is,” said Betty Smith, at the desk next to hers.
She got on the phone to the Chicago Medical Society, told the p.r. man what she needed, and left her direct number with him for a callback. Measuring the intensity of his boredom as shown in his voice tone, she decided it was acceptably low, and she ought to leave her line free. He might just be calling back.
Her phone rang almost immediately.
“Devlin here.”
“I thought you were the flack.”
“No. I’m your friendly parish priest.”
“I can’t talk now. Waiting for an important call.”
“I wanted to tell you the good time I had Saturday. Met this wonderful woman, and so forth.”
“I’ll bet you did. Sister Ophelia? Of the holy Punch Bowl? Listen. Let me call you back later. I’m waiting to hear from a flack.”
“O.K. Just one more thing. I’m straightening out.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what that means.”
“No, I don’t. You’ll have to explain it. But not now. I’ll call you later.”
What on earth is he talking about, she asked herself when they hung up, then looked down at some articles about psychiatrists she had got from the library. One of them hinted at big trouble for the one whose patient had an attack of the violence-prone anxieties while they were going at it face to face.
Oh? thought Ginny. The patient gets violent? In the presence of the good doctor, who is only trying to help? She remembered the story Devlin told her about the priest-clinician whose patient went at his throat with the peculiar strength of craziness in his hands. The priest, who was also a musician, as calmly as he could suggested that the two listen to some of the nice music they had on tap for that session. The priest was a student of how music calms the beast within us.
Distracted, the throat-clutcher relaxed. He did too want to hear that nice music, it turned out, and the priest got off with a sore throat.
The joys of psychotherapy, thought Ginny. Find out what I’m doing with this crazy priest, who is too distractible and too relaxed for his own good.
The phone rang, and it was the Medical Society flack, aroused enough from his lethargy to sound actually interested. He had “these two guys” who were willing to talk. “Well one of them is a woman,” he said. Ginny appreciated that touch. He gave her names and numbers, she thanked him and hung up.
The woman was free that afternoon, the man not until Thursday. It was Monday. She decided she could wait that long. She looked them both up in clips and found to her great interest that the woman was a former nun who had made a splash with some articles about celibacy.
Two months before, she wouldn’t have cared. But now, with a celibate manqué as part of her life, she did.
She caught the woman psychiatrist at her office that afternoon. It was on the umpteenth floor of an old Michigan Avenue building whose elevators represented the apex of twentieth-century technology: buttons that lit up when you pressed them and a single small screen above them on which flashed the floor numbers as you rose or fell or stopped.
The first time Ginny ran across the buttons you pushed to light up, she had gloves on, and the heat from her fingers, needed to activate the light, etc., didn’t get through. So she pushed harder and harder, and the damn thing still didn’t light up. A senior editorial writer saw her struggling, raised one finger, getting her to back off, and laid it gently against the button. Presto! A little body heat, and the light went on, and progress picked up its dizzying pace.
Ginny had the presence of mind to smile and thank the man, a kindly. soul who refused to recognize her embarrassment. Ever since, she took her glove off when she came to such a button, and such buttons became her friends in the midst of a scurrying world, ready to light up when she touched them.
Doctor Margo Gibson shook Ginny’s hand and invited her to sit on her couch, an L-shaped affair that Ginny noted would suit her living room quite nicely. Ginny expected somebody very serious and self-assured — if you took people’s psyches into your hands, you must be self-assured — but instead found Dr. Gibson a petite woman with expressive eyes.
“You found me all right in this corner of the floor?” she asked Ginny, smiling.
“I followed the signs and arrows,” said Ginny. “You are tucked away, though.”
The doctor smiled. “Well, I’m not selling jewelry or eyeglasses; so I can do without prominence. Then maybe a patient might feel better finding me in a corner of the floor, where I go into corners of his mind.”
“Is it scary?” Ginny asked, surprised at her own jumping into the issue.
“You can run from corners of the mind, but you can’t hide. Joe Louis said that, more or less, talking about himself, in there. It helps you forge ahead.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Ginny. “It might inhibit you.”
“That’s where someone like me comes in. I’m a traffic policeman, giving stop and go signals. It’s a labyrinth, after all. A head-doctor — I shouldn’t talk that way — a psychiatrist presumably has been through it, many times. She knows her way, again presumably, and has developed a feel for the terrains.”
“Of the mind. What about emotions?” .
“Ginny — you don’t mind if I call you Ginny, I hope. I’m Margo — there are times when I want to ask, ‘What’s the difference? It’s the Great Inside, one way or another.”
“Inner space,” said Ginny.
Margo pointed in agreement. “Yes, that’s good. Inner space. I’ve heard that, and it’s good. To be explored. But not to get lost in.”
“You explore it with care, do you?”
“Ginny, I do everything with care,” Doctor Gibson said.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Mimi Skelton had called Carol Goodman and said, “Let’s talk.”
Carol, in the midst of putting up strawberries, had wanted to say no, but Mimi had insisted, and they were sitting in Mimi’s kitchen on the last day of school, seizing the moment before children came home for the summer.
“T feel like I’m waiting to go over the top, having my last smoke before we fix bayonets,” said Mimi.
Carol laughed. “It’s just as well I’m not in the middle of strawberries.
“I said I wanted to talk.”
“Talk,” said Carol.
“My friend Father Devlin,” Mimi said.
“Is giving up fatherhood.”
“How’d you know? Does everyone know but me?”
“He and Nate talk. You know. They’re old friends. I don’t pry, but I ask Nate how Father Devlin’s doing, and he gives me what he considers an evasive answer. There are no evasive answers in marriage, not in ours anyhow. Plus he’s different. Father Devlin. A likely prospect for quitting it.”
“Oh my.”
“I shouldn’t be so matter of fact. He’s your priest. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. Do others know?”
“I don’t know. I suspect. Do you know?”
“He told me.”
“Oh my.”
“He wouldn’t be specific.”
“Is he happy, upset, what?” asked Carol.
“He’s Father Devlin. Same old Father Devlin.”
“Does he have a girl friend?”
“A girl friend? What a thing to say! She stopped. “I never thought of that.”
“Well that proves you’re Irish, Mimi.”
“But he’s a priest.”
Carol didn’t say anything. Mimi gazed out the window at nothing.
“You think he might have a girl friend?” she asked Carol.
“He wouldn’t be the first,” Carol said, then bit her tongue.
“Now wait, Carole You don’t know – – – ”
“The first man, I mean. He’s a man for all that, Mimi, priest or not.”
“Oh Carol, I’ve got to say you’re out of your depths on this one. Or sailing in strange waters or something.”
Carol didn’t say anything.
“Priests are different, is what I mean.”
“Different?” Carol screwed up her face.
“I don’t mean queer. I mean different. They have a commitment. They can handle it. Besides, he’s forty-five if he’s a day.”
Carol shrugged. “A lot of priests have gotten married, Mimi.”
“Well they left when they thought God wanted them to begin a new life, I know that. They moved to a new vocation. Marriage,” she said convincingly.
“Well I can’t quarrel with what people think God wants them to do. It’s always struck me as pretty high-flying stuff. But some people fly that high, I suppose.”
“It isn’t all that high-flying, Carol. Every Christian is supposed to do it.”
“Well every Jew isn’t, as far as I know. But then my rabbi might have a different view. I remain suspicious, however.”
“Of people who do God’s will?”
“Of people who think they do,” said Carol.
“Even if they’re sincere?”
“The more sincere they are, the more suspicious I am.”
“Oh my. And once we were going to write a Catholic-Jewish column.”
“Whatever became of that, by the way?”
“Father Devlin was going to ask . . .” She stopped.
“Pardon me?” Carol thought she missed something.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
They both sat, silent. A robin twittered in the yard. Carol’s look of mystification began to melt away. As it passed, her eyes widened for a second or two, and then she turned towards Mimi, intent.
“Father Devlin was going to put in a word for us, wasn’t he? With that reporter? What’s her name? Morgan?” she asked.
‘Mimi wore a strained look. “What reporter?” she asked.
“You know. The one that wrote him up a few months back.”
“Oh. Her.”
“He was going to have her ask what happened to our columns over at the paper. Remember?”
The phone rang and it was Devlin. “Mimi?”
“Yes,” she said, recognizing the voice.
“Pat Devlin.”
“Yes, Father,” she said.
“Ginny found out about your columns,”
Mimi kept quiet.
“They got lost in a pile of things. But the editors are interested.”
“They are?”
Yes. They’d like you and Carol to come downtown and talk about them. Ginny could meet you and take you in to see them.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Mimi.
Devlin hesitated. “Well it won’t be necessary, I suppose. But I thought you’d like it.”
“No, I wouldn’t like it,” she said
Devlin gave her a name at the paper and a phone number. They hung up.
Mimi turned to Carole “It was Father Devlin.” She told Carol about the breakthrough with the editors. Carol raised both her hands in tight little fists about ear-high, in delight.
“Ginny Morgan’s his girl friend, isn’t she?” Mimi said.
“I think so,” said Carol.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Terry Dolan was not having a good day. A woman from outside the parish boundaries had signed up as a member of St. Emma’s because Dolan, the pastor, had been good to her when her husband committed suicide some months before. Dolan did not object to this parish-hopping, which was once anathema to a good Catholic but was now acceptable. But in the case of this Mrs, McGee, he was beginning to wonder whether the old ways weren’t better.
What he had in the person of this red-haired, stout, bereaved woman was a personal fan, flattering but threatening at the same time. Where an ordinary territorial parishioner showed up at the front door with a problem, it was an appearance at the church door, as it were. The confidence was in the church as such, meaning the 2,000-year-old institution. In that case someone in Dolan’s position mainly had to be there and not do something stupid.
But when a personal fan showed at the rectory door, it was to feed off an individual. Such a fan put the individual priest, etc. on the spot. He — or she where a nun had the fan — had to produce from his or her own personal riches. But Dolan often felt as if he had no riches to spare. He had trouble enough making it to bedtime some days, without squandering his resources on a fan.
Mrs. McGee was a fan. “She’s after my meagre riches,” he told Devlin, who downplayed the idea.
“She loves you for the two thousand years you represent,” Devlin said.
“In that case, she should have at St. George’s. It’s a scandal the way people feel free to shop around these days. Don’t they know the sacraments don’t depend on who administers them?”
“They never did know it, Terry. It always was a hoax. An illusion, I mean. Cherished by the clergy. People always knew the difference between a priest who cared and one who punched a clock.”
“But they weren’t so blatant about it. They grinned and bore it and stayed with the institution where they found it. They weren’t so intent on instant relief of whatever ailed them. Whatever happened to good old Catholic stoicism? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“It disappeared with Protestant, Jewish and atheistic stoicism, Terry. There are no stoics any more, just people looking for relief,”
“Is that good, Dev?”
“Who am I to say, Terry? On the face of it, it’s bad. It means we’re effete. We’re ripening on the tree for some Marxist bastard to pick off, easy, without resistance. Or.” He stopped for emphasis. “It means we’ve decided there’s no point in beating our heads against the wall.”
“And besides us two clerics sitting here on St. Emma’s front porch, there is almost certainly no one else in Oak Park worrying about it,” said Dolan.
“Oak Park?” said Devlin. “Hell, the entire metropolitan area.” He laughed.
It was 10 o’clock or so on a mild midweek June evening. The village appeared to be sleeping already. St. Emma’s rectory was set back from a through street by a long, narrow, lush lawn that ran next to the Gothic church. Not even the through street had much traffic. The side street had almost none. If crickets were chirping, however, neither priest heard them, having long ago tuned out such sounds of nature. They did hear a breeze rustle some leaves in the big tree on the lawn. Otherwise it was silent.
“How’s Mrs. McGee doing anyhow?” Devlin asked.
“The shock’s been over for a few months. It was more than bereavement, of course. Self-shooting in the living room and all that.”
“At least they missed the trial.”
“Which must have been one purpose in McGee’s final act. He produced a final solution to his problem.”
“Too bad.”
“Yes,” said Dolan. “Well. As I say, she’s over the shock. The initial shot, as they say, and is now groping for guidance and comfort.”
“In the person of Father Dolan.”
“Yep. None other.”
“Is he doing his best?”
“Doing his best. Turning neither to drink nor women nor song.”
“Unlike some others you can name.”
“Unlike some others I could name, if I wanted to.”
The two sat in the semidark, silent.
“You think I’m a shit?” Devlin asked.
“Shit? No. You’re no shit, Dev. You’re my friend and you’re no shit. Let it be said that I, Dolan, do not think my friend Devlin is a shit.” He got up, shook Devlin’s hand, and sat back down.
“I’m touched,” said Devlin. “You say I’m no shit.”
“I’m figuring out another approach to your dilemma.”
“Tell me.”
“You are taking it on yourself to force a growth-leap of maturity on the Catholic community.”
“Me? I’d never do a thing like that. I like the Catholic community.”
“No. You are in the process of pulling away a support beam from the house of God.”
“Jesus.”
“Sure. And the house of God is just going to have to get along without you, that’s all. You go off with your bimbo and let the house of God fend for itself. And the house of God, the people of God, whatever, learns to stand up and be a man about it.”
Devlin threw back his head and laughed. Dolan looked at him expectantly.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Devlin came out of his laughter. “Listen. I’m still trying to get around this house learning to be a man.”
“My metaphor astound you?”
“Yes, your metaphor astounds me. All right. Me and the house of God. Pillar removed, house learns to stand without it.”
He paused, thinking. “I like it,” he said. “Salves my conscience.”
“Then it must be a good idea. Anything that salves a relatively upright conscience can’t be all bad. I’m glad I came up with the idea.” Dolan sat back.
Devlin thought he heard a cricket chirp. He dismissed the idea.
The two sat in silence.
“Terry.”
“Yes, Dev.”
“It’s not a hundred per cent clear to me.”
“That you’re leaving.”
“Right.’ I’m in a so-so mental condition.” He tilted his hands back and forth, palms down, in an uneven-keel gesture. “I don’t have my decks entirely cleared yet.”
“I didn’t think you did. The point is, have you reached the point of no return? That’s the big question.”
“That’s what I don’t know yet.”
“Oh,” said Dolan. “Hmm.”
They sat silent again. A heaviness descended on them. Peaceful in its way, but still a heaviness.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Dolan.
(end of chapter 19)
Blithe Spirit 