Last Things Read online

  Why stay? Because he hoped Father Bourke would concelebrate and he could get another glimpse of his old mentor. Because he hoped that in some unplanned way, some accident, he would find himself again talking with Father Bourke. What the topic would be, what he would say to the old priest, what Father Bourke would say to him—Raymond stopped himself from imagining any of that. But he did wonder whether the old priest’s reception would be like his mother’s or like his father’s. Would he condemn or forgive?

  A few people, about the same number as before, began to arrive, distributing themselves through the church at random intervals, banging kneelers, looking around, getting settled. Raymond checked the desire to criticize these people. They seemed the same ones as before; perhaps like his mother they came every day. What better practice if one believed? Still, they were an unimpressive bunch, the halt and the lame, the old and arthritic, many ostentatiously pious. Were they the elite of the race?

  Mass began with the tinkling of the sacristy bell and the appearance of the celebrant, not the same priest as before. But after a minute, Father Bourke once more rolled into the sanctuary in his wheelchair and came to a stop to the right of the celebrant. The Mass began.

  How many Masses had Raymond himself said? It would be possible to calculate, but the number of Masses said each day around the world was incalculable, the commemoration of the Last Supper and of Calvary, repeated endlessly through the time zones of the world, the words spoken over bread and wine that made Christ sacramentally present on the altar. On this altar and all the others. When he had studied the Eucharist in theology they had talked of the seeming impossibility of this. How could Christ be present in so many places simultaneously? Sacramental presence was different, that was the answer. Raymond had seen the difficulties but had no personal doubts. If God could become man what could he not do? The creator of the universe was not limited by his own laws. As he remembered it, his faith had been untroubled and serene, the air he breathed. Almost with dread he recalled the day when standing at the altar, holding the bread, he could not at first even say the words. How could sound coming from his mouth effect such a miracle?

  In class such a difficulty would have been handled easily. It was not a personal power the priest possessed but one that had been conferred on him by ordination in order to fulfill the command of Christ. Do this in memory of me. But it had been more than doubt that had gripped him. Doubt engaged the mind more than the heart, but his heart had failed him then. Finally he managed to utter the words of consecration. He ascribed it to a sense of unworthiness, but of course that wasn’t it. Or he had not acknowledged the source of his unworthiness.

  He had been in a state of mortal sin as he stood at the altar. He was a fornicator, one who had broken his vows and with a woman who had taken the vow of chastity herself. What was happening with Phyllis had little of mind about it; a condition of its happening was that he not think of what they were doing. And then they were caught in the web of their desires, in their little conspiracy against the commandments and rules and duties of their state of life. Ah, the sweet secrecy of those weeks during which his faith had seeped away, as had hers. He stopped saying the office. He no longer prayed. He avoided saying Mass. He was assailed by a remembered passage in the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila who had seen devils writhing around a priest saying Mass in a state of sin. So much of what he had read and learned had to be put into escrow, kept from his conscious mind. But the time came when conflict had ceased.

  Daydreaming through the Mass. Once he would have called it distraction at prayer. He had sat through the readings oblivious to the words, but then the acoustics in this church had always been bad. Now Father Bourke had wheeled to the altar, and the heart of the rite began. The old arm lifted when the celebrant consecrated in a gesture of me too. He remembered that Father Bourke had been a foe of concelebration.

  “A priest should say his own Mass. There’s only one Mass when priests concelebrate; many when they don’t.”

  The angels danced during the subsequent quarrel in the common room, where drinks in hand, cigars, pipes, cigarettes, the members of the order discussed the ins and outs and pros and cons of concelebration. But whatever Bourke’s misigivings, concelebration was approved and accepted by the Church, and that was the end of it.

  “Roma locuta est …” Father Bourke conceded, but his voice was reluctant.

  Once in class that phrase had been mentioned—Roma locuta est, causa finita est—and Barwell was asked to translate. “Rome is a word,” he had replied uncertainly, “and causes are finite.” It had seemed another argument for the vernacular.

  The pews emptied as the people went up to receive communion. Raymond sat. The familiar had become as strange as some alien rite, but he was becoming used to it. Someone tapped his shoulder. It was John.

  “I told Father Bourke I saw you the other day. He’d like to see you.”

  The earnest expression, the whisper on which rode the smell of tobacco. Raymond was filled with terror.

  “Not today!”

  John looked sad. “He’s going in for an operation tomorrow.”

  Raymond found himself nodding. “All right.”

  John slid in beside him. “I’ll take you over.”

  Raymond felt he was under arrest when John led him under the great oaks to the community dining room.

  “I don’t want to have lunch.”

  “Oh, you and Father Bourke will eat alone. He doesn’t come to the refectory often. He’s in Purgatory.”

  Purgatory was the name given to the building in which the old and infirm priests lived, nurses on duty, medicines administered, doctors dropping in at intervals.

  They turned off the path leading to the community residence building and headed for Purgatory. A faint voice called them, and they turned to see Father Bourke slowly approaching in his wheelchair. John hurried to get behind him and push. Raymond, frozen where he stood, met the gaze of Father Bourke.

  “He’s going to have lunch with you,” John said over the old priest’s shoulder.

  A hand stretched, and Raymond took it. “I heard you were back.” His slurred voice was intelligible enough.

  “My father is ill.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. You can tell me everything over gruel.”

  Raymond took over from Purgatory, wheeling Father Bourke up the ramp to the door, over which in Latin was engraved Domus Sanctae Marthae, recalling the semicloistered nuns whose convent it once had been, the cooks and maids and launderers for the community. John scooted off for lunch at the residence.

  His earlier question was answered when they settled in at a table in the refectory of Purgatory. Father Bourke’s reception was like his mother’s. You might have thought Raymond had been on priestly assignment elsewhere for a time and now was back. Around them, in various stages of senility and dementia, other old warriors toyed with their food and looked vacantly about. Some had obviously had strokes. Young uniformed girls helped those who could not help themselves. What a job.

  “How changed you must find everything, Raymond.”

  “Yes.”

  “How ill is your father?”

  “Very.”

  “I will pray for him.”

  “What’s this about an operation?”

  He dismissed it. “I had an operation a year ago. They did a biopsy and had to cut out my prostate.”

  Old Father Bourke’s reproductive organs had been as superfluous as his appendix during his long life so he could bid adieu to his prostate without regret. Raymond could not help but think of himself in the condition Father Bourke now found himself. The sight of his father on his apparent deathbed had not brought such thoughts, but now he thought of himself grown old, helpless, in need of care. That would happen to him, if he were lucky, as it would happen to Phyllis. It happened to everyone.

  “What is it this time?”

  “Open-heart.”

  “Good Lord,” he said, but Father Bourke dismissed it with
a wave of his hand.

  “How good it is to see you,” the old priest said suddenly. “This is an answer to a prayer. I have missed you very much.”

  “I disappointed you.”

  “Yes. How have you been?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “And what do you do?”

  Describing the practice he and Phyllis had developed in this setting was unreal. He could hear himself with Father Bourke’s ears, and he realized how weird it must seem that a man who had deserted his priesthood should be making a comfortable living advising California neurotics. He did not want to go into details of the advice he gave.

  “Have you married?”

  “Civilly.”

  Father Bourke nodded. Suddenly Raymond found himself telling the old priest about the meeting with his parents, of his father’s taunting demand that he give him absolution.

  “You could have.”

  Raymond shook his head. “He was just being theatrical. He has seen a priest.”

  “Thank God.”

  His own reaction when he heard of Father Dowling’s visit had been relief that now his father would leave him alone on that matter. Now he could almost share Father Bourke’s reaction. After all, if it were all true … But life is not lived on the basis of hypotheticals.

  “When you left things had not gotten too bad, Raymond, but dear God, today. Sometimes I think you were wise to go.”

  He wanted to protest. It was one thing not to be condemned, but he did not want approval, not from Father Bourke. The old priest would die with his boots on, at his post to the end, and that is how it should be. But the old priest went on, a lamentation about these dark days, the state of the Church, of the Order, of the college.

  “You wouldn’t believe the stories. It’s a mockery of one’s whole life.”

  How could he not sympathize with the old priest’s sadness at the changes he had lived to see? But this was not what he wanted to hear from him. He wanted the vibrant confidence of old, the enormous solidity with which he had lived his vocation. He wanted to hear that all the changes could not touch the essential thing, that in any case one must be true to the vocation to which he had been called. And Father Bourke had been faithful. For over fifty years he had kept his vows, done his work, said his prayers. Raymond felt that these complaints were an excursion out of character. Were they meant to ease his own sense of guilt?

  Guilt. Not even the imagined witness of Phyllis could make him disguise what he felt.

  “I have caused so many people pain.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes. And you.”

  “God bless you, my boy.”

  Tuna salad on a lettuce leaf. Father Bourke ate little. Raymond had no appetite at all, but he cleaned his plate. In the community, one did not waste.

  “Come see me again,” Father Bourke said. “I’m off for my nap.”

  “I will come see you in the hospital.”

  The old hand squeezed his.

  It was with a riot of conflicting emotions that Raymond walked to his car. He saw nothing. His eyes were swimming with tears. He stopped, lit a cigarette, and blinked his eyes dry.

  With his father in intensive care and Father Bourke just down the hall awaiting his operation, Raymond felt that he had come home just in time to bid good-bye to the two most important men in his life. Father Bourke had pretended the other day to understand why Raymond had left, exculpating him, as if the prospect of the coming dissolution was more than a loyal Edmundite could bear. It made his defection seem a blow for integrity. But it was Father Bourke, the person, he heard rather than these supposedly consoling words. Hunched in his wheelchair, living with men in the advanced stages of senility, at the door of eternity as they all believed, Father Bourke somehow seemed to stand tall in the courage with which he bore the unpalatable changes in the college and order. The simple fact was that he had given the lifetime to God that he had promised.

  Young Rocco explained open-heart surgery to Raymond with clinical relish. How could the old priest survive such a massive shock to his system?

  “He could go at any time if he doesn’t have the operation.” Father Bourke would doubtless have been prepared if death suddenly came upon him, but Father John had accompanied him to the hospital, Cronin had supplied the oils, and John had given the old priest the last rites, with Raymond in attendance. As he annointed Father Bourke, John acted with dispatch, an artisan at work. Had the young priest ever wondered if the life he lived was worth it? Probably not. It did not seem a failing. Raymond spoke to his old mentor briefly before he was wheeled away.

  “God bless you, Raymond.”

  He choked at the old man’s goodness, leaned over, and touched his lips to his forehead.

  “I’m so glad you came back. I had thought I would never see you again.”

  The taste of oil came with the kiss. Raymond mentioned it.

  “The Four Last Things,” the old priest murmured.

  “You’ll make it.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “A prayer.”

  And it was. He realized that he was more moved by the fact that Father Bourke was at death’s door than by his father’s condition, arguably worse. Father Bourke was taken away, doors swung shut, and Raymond turned with tears in his eyes to face John. John patted his arm as if he were the chief mourner. Perhaps he was.

  “He managed to say Mass before being brought here.”

  Father Bourke had once told him that he had never missed saying daily Mass since his ordination. Raymond remembered that, in his final days before leaving, he had avoided the altar, unable to confront his own lack of faith in what he would do there.

  The Four Last Things, the old priest had said. Jessica had mentioned them as well. Death, judgment, heaven, hell. For millennia those words had summed up the facts of life, inspired art and literature, Dante notably. What do we know that has rendered them obsolete?

  The following day, Father Bourke was apparently doing well despite the seriousness of the operation. “They’ll open him like a clam,” Rocco had said. “Saw through his breastbone …” Raymond had stopped him. But Father Bourke was so heavily sedated there was no chance of talking. Again Raymond pressed his lips to the old priest’s forehead.

  His father seemed suspended in a stable condition, hovering near death but holding on. His mother alternated vigils at the bedside with prayers in the waiting room. What would become of her after his father died? Of course, there were Andrew and Jessica. Would she live on alone in the old house, among the bric-a-brac and memories? The thought of himself in far-off California seemed a kind of desertion.

  Andrew seemed distracted when Raymond saw him and he asked why.

  “I’m okay. So you went to see Father Bourke?”

  “It just happened.”

  Andrew nodded. “What does he think of the modern world?”

  “What you’d expect.”

  “He may have a point.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Just because Dad’s in intensive care and Mom’s a frazzle?” Andrew smiled wryly. “I don’t feel I’ve been much of a son to them.”

  It might have been an accusation, but it wasn’t. Eleanor came. She seemed to come and go throughout the day. It had taken a while, but finally Raymond had admitted to himself what he had seen the afternoon he came by the house unannounced and his father scrambled off the couch and got between him and a flustered Eleanor. At the time, he would have imagined his father was well beyond the temptations of the flesh. Did such a time ever come? Had he been shocked? When he quit trying to kid himself about what he had seen, he found he really wasn’t surprised. Eleanor did seem to cling to his father on all occasions. How long had it gone on? Looking at Eleanor now, the well-groomed older woman, economically comfortable, not much to do, just busy being a busybody, he wondered what his father had seen in her. He decided that Eleanor must have been the aggressor. Not that his father would have put up much opposition.r />
  “Has Jessica spoken to you of her new novel?”

  “Do writers talk about what they’re writing?”

  “It’s about all of us.” She looked at Raymond meaningfully.

  “They’ll never publish it.” He laughed. What did he seem to Jessica, really or in imagination? His going and the manner of it could occupy a large place in her musings about things. But he did not feel threatened.

  28

  Hazel plunked a pile of pages on Tuttle’s desk and folded her arms, awaiting praise. Tuttle glanced at the top sheet and nodded. “Good.”

  “Good! Take a look, for heaven’s sake. Get a legal education. This could be your big chance.”

  The only tolerable thing about Hazel’s office behavior was that there were no witnesses, by and large. He looked at her formidable presence and what he saw was a buxom obstacle to his friendship with Peanuts Pianone. He had just come from lunch with Peanuts: great platters of fried rice, cold Mexican beer, and the joys of wordless fellowship. He briefed Hazel on his visit to the campus, in the course of which she sat down.

  “You might have told me.”

  “I just did.”

  “Lily St. Clair sounds as if she can be a real ally.”

  “She’s nuts about Cassirer, that’s all.”

  “All? That’s plenty. Now read that stuff, and we’ll talk about the next step.”

  She rose and sailed from the room on a cloud of perfume. It was a time to brood about the dark day when he had hired her from a service providing temporary help. Temporary! Now he couldn’t blast her out of the office. She took care of the books and paid her own salary, such as it was, so there was no way for him to cut her off without a major battle. Sighing, Tuttle pulled the papers she had brought to him and began listlessly to leaf through them. But Hazel came back.