Last Things Page 6

  “No vocations?”

  “That is not a problem confined to the Edmundites.”

  “Indeed not. You knew Raymond Bernardo?”

  “Only in the way you know a youngster. And then he was assigned to the college after ordination and further studies.”

  “What did he study?”

  “Psychology.”

  “Ah.”

  “The witchcraft of our times, Father Dowling. Freud, Jung, Reich, the whole lot as far as I can see needed exorcism rather than therapy. It has made mincemeat of the law, of course. The assumption is that a criminal act cannot be freely performed but is the result of some obscure mechanism that need only be righted. No matter the harm that has been done to society and the demands of justice. The courts have become the anteroom to the counselor’s couch. But I am raving.”

  Father Dowling chuckled. Passionate as Amos’s words might be, his precise elocution and modulated bass voice seemed the very organ of rationality. “Bishops too have fallen prey to it. A battery of psychological tests must be taken before one can enter the seminary.”

  “Raymond Bernardo was named spiritual director of the Edmundite seminary on campus. He changed the title to spiritual counselor.”

  “How long after ordination was he laicized?”

  White brows rose over Amos’s dark rimmed glasses. “That would suggest that he left in an orderly way. Not at all. He commandeered one of the order’s cars and credit cards and went westward with a young nun from campus ministry. Bonnie and Clyde.” Amos closed his eyes. “A dreadful movie I once saw as captive on a flight from Rome.”

  Amos did not know if young Father Bernardo had ever applied for laicization, once easily had for the asking but after the unbroken flow of men from the priesthood made more difficult.

  “He married the nun?”

  “God knows. The Reformation seems almost innocent compared with recent years. Luther and his nun, the vulgar talk at table, German earthiness, but at least it was accompanied by a sense of sin. No one could think less of Luther than he thought of himself. Of course he thought his actions did not matter since he was not truly free. God would throw a cloak over his corruption; that was salvation. I suppose psychiatry is a version of that but without the sense of sin and without redemption. Sanity consists in accepting the actions we do not freely do.”

  “You are becoming a philosopher, Amos.”

  “I am an old man who is heartsick at the spectacle of the times.”

  “A man named Rosmini wrote a book called The Five Wounds of the Church.”

  “Only five?”

  “It brought him under a cloud.”

  “The Church has become St. Sebastian now, more wounds than one could count. Sometimes I fear some great calamity will befall us for what we have done to the Church.”

  Amos did not know if Raymond Bernardo had ever repaid the Order for the expensive westward journey he had taken with his bonny nun. “I was told he considered it just recompense. Occult compensation, as it used to be called.”

  Father Dowling’s degree was in canon law, a subject in which Amos was well read. Once men took degrees utriusque legis, in both civil and church law. Amos was the latter-day equivalent of such a dual doctor, trained in the one, an autodidact in the other.

  They ended their evening in the club library, where Amos could smoke his cigar and Father Dowling light his pipe.

  “You say the college is flourishing?”

  “On its altered terms, yes. The question is, why have Catholic institutions if they are so little different from secular ones? But of course there is a bull market in college students and government loans to encourage young people into debt and fill the coffers of the colleges. I will not bore you with some of the nonsense that has entered the curriculum.”

  “You mentioned Eleanor Wygant earlier. She came to me quite upset with the prospect that her niece plans a novel about the Bernardo family.”

  “Jessica. She is the best of the lot, a very gifted young lady. I cannot say that her fiction is my cup of tea, but it shows obvious talent. And her reviews have been magnificent.”

  “So she has been successful.”

  “Not financially, of course. Few novelists could live on what they earn from their books. She is a lab technician at Sorenson’s Labs. Once pathologists worked for hospitals; now they establish their own laboratories and profit far more handsomely from their work. Not that Sorenson himself has touched a slide in years. That is him over there.”

  A round little man sat in a leather chair frowning at the financial page, a cigar emerging from the exact center of his mouth, which was stretched in a grimace of pain. Amos rose.

  “Come, Father. I will introduce you.”

  And so it was that Father Dowling made the acquaintance of Eric Sorenson in the library of the University Club. The little doctor managed not to stare at Father Dowling’s Roman collar.

  “I am Missouri Synod. Our ministers have stopped wearing those.”

  He meant the collar. Amos said, “I mentioned Jessica Bernardo to Father Dowling, then looked up and saw you, Eric. I thought the two of you should meet.”

  “Ah, Jessica. I love her novels. I wish all my employees wrote novels. It gives one great insight into their minds.” He rolled his cigar in his fat fingers. “I sometimes think of writing a novel myself.”

  “Better not, Eric. It will give your employees insight into your mind.”

  Sorenson laughed.

  “Jessica’s father has fallen seriously ill,” Father Dowling said.

  “Fulvio,” Sorenson said deliberately as if there were dashes between the syllables.

  “Don’t get started on him, Eric,” Amos Cadbury said. “Father Dowling and I are leaving.”

  Handshakes all around. Amos’s car came round, and he took Father Dowling to his rectory where, enjoying a final pipe in his study, the pastor of St. Hilary’s reflected on the connections between what might have seemed a random group of people. Before going to bed he called the hospital and learned that Fulvio Bernardo had slightly improved and was now in a room out of intensive care.

  10

  Thunder, Jessica’s agent, called before she went to work, and even his bored tones could not conceal his excitement.

  “I think this is your breakthrough novel, sweetheart. Diurno loves it. How soon can you get me a one-pager I can get a contract on?”

  Jessica’s enthusiasm for the literary life, never high, had suffered from the events of recent days. It is a sobering experience to stand at one’s father’s bedside in intensive care and see the digital monitoring of his vital signs wink in green and red while fluid drips into his veins from a plastic bag. How evanescent everything seemed.

  “They like it?”

  “Diurno likes it. Meaning he is eager to sign a contract.”

  “How did you describe it?”

  “I? You did. The saga of a Midwestern Catholic family, from order to chaos, from rules to what the hell, disintegration. But with tears.”

  “That was my description?”

  “I paraphrase, of course. You deal with me; I deal with publishers. I know Diurno’s mind, such as it is. The man is a cash register. I doubt that he has read half a dozen books in his lifetime. He knew a man who turned down Gone With The Wind when the novel was only the whisper of a breeze in the mimosa. For him novels are one page long.”

  “So what do you need?”

  “Drama. Gut-wrenching episodes. A dying fall.”

  She thought of her father. Suddenly her great idea seemed an exploitation of her family, of real tragedy. Raymond was at the heart of it, but how could she make Thunder or Diurno understand what it meant for a man to abandon the priesthood, destroy his parents’ pride, flee to California, and join the fruits and nuts? She promised to send the one page.

  “Fax it. When can I expect it?”

  “Give me a deadline.”

  “What time is it there, nine o’clock? How does noon sound?”

  �
��You’re kidding.”

  “I have never been more serious in my life. I nurtured you, sweetheart. I loved your first two novels, you and I and four thousand buyers. Plus two hundred reviewers, which is the important thing. They were the prelude; this novel is the main act. Think big. Noon, okay?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Succeed.”

  He hung up. Jessica had difficulty thinking of what she wrote as a commodity, but of course that is what it was for Thunder and even more for the cash register Diurno. They thought in terms of dust-jacket hype. Had Thunder actually read her novels? His only suggestion was to soften the religious motif. “This is a neopagan age, sweetheart, like it or not. I speak as a lapsed Catholic.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t mention it in Who’s Who. What’s the point? Nobody is what he was.”

  “I am.”

  “Sweetheart, that is your charm, your strength.”

  “This novel could be pretty religious.”

  “I’m counting on that,” Thunder said with breezy inconsistency. “I want you to put the fear of God into us backsliders.”

  She called Sorensen’s and said she wanted to take the morning off. The reaction made her think she could have asked for a week and gotten it. Then she sat at her computer and stared at the screen, but all she could see was the monitor above her father’s bed in intensive care.

  The phone rang. It was her colleague Walter. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No.”

  “I heard you had called in sick.”

  “My father is in the hospital.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Dear Walter—gifted, dumb, unimaginative Walter—who tried desperately to understand that her writing was more important to her than her work in the lab. For Walter Sorensen’s lab was the world; the slides he worked on rerum natura. Make-believe was a distant childhood memory. Their work determined what surgeons would do, what physicians would tell their patients, whether flesh and blood people would live or die. Walter never forgot that.

  “He’s better now. They’ve moved him into a room out of intensive care.”

  “He has prostate cancer?”

  “This was his heart. They don’t think they should operate.”

  She had the feeling she was inserting her father into a carefully calibrated category for Walter’s benefit. That was unfair.

  “Take the day, Jessica. I will cover for you.”

  A good part of her relation to Walter was avoiding becoming beholden to him. He was too good for his own good, too good for her. She had the sense that he was the kind of man she should love, but all she could muster was a profound admiration.

  “Thank you.”

  “I would do anything for you.”

  “I know.”

  She could tell him anything. She had told him about Raymond as well as about the academic squabble Andrew was involved in at the college because of a bumptious colleague named Cassirer. “Apparently he has hired a lawyer.”

  “Are professors insured against that sort of thing?”

  “You would think it the most peaceful life in the world, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m surprised you weren’t attracted to teaching.”

  And compete a second time with Andrew? No thanks.

  She hung up, full of the tranquillity talking with Walter always gave her. She began to plink away on the keys of her computer. She thought of Raymond, coming home at last, to be with his dying father. What a drama that would be. Fulvio had never forgiven his son for what he had done. He could not begin to understand how a man could be so unfaithful to his vows.

  “I will go to Mass when Raymond is the celebrant.”

  That was his position. He was punishing himself in the hope of shaming Raymond into repentance. Did Raymond even know that their father had stopped going to Mass, that their mother wept and pleaded but always got the same answer? He would go to Mass again when Raymond was back at the altar.

  “It would kill your father if you wrote about the family,” Aunt Eleanor had said.

  That might not be necessary. What had struck Jessica was the intensity of Eleanor’s concern. Did she really care that much for the family she had married into? Uncle Joe had died and Eleanor had married Alfred Wygant, much to her father’s disgust.

  “What does he have but money?”

  Uncle Joe had been the black sheep of the family, dependent on her father. When he died there had been an insurance policy worth five thousand dollars.

  “I’ll take care of Eleanor,” Fulvio had said, the prosperous brother asserting his authority. But she had married Alfred Wygant. When Alfred died, Eleanor had considerably more than five thousand dollars.

  A call came from Leonard Bosch, literary editor of the Tribune, Chicago, not Fox River. “Sorry about your father.”

  “He’s somewhat better.”

  “Good. Is this a bad time to talk about my suggestion?”

  “Yes.”

  Leonard wanted her to do a column for the Sunday book section or if not that to agree to be a regular reviewer. “You are a local asset, Jessica. You have to accept that. And I have an obligation to be sure our readers know it.”

  “Andrew would be the one to write a column.”

  Silence. And then, “What I like about the Bernardos is that they stick together.”

  Was that true? Raymond had gotten Andrew the job at St. Edmund’s not long before he left. It seemed a compensatory gesture. No, that wasn’t fair. Andrew knew so many things she didn’t; he loved literature. Too much. His writing was impasto, spread with a knife, overwritten, aimed at God knew what reader. Whom did one write for, after all? What reader did she herself imagine when she sat at her computer and followed the fortunes of imaginary people? Only they did not seem imaginary. Not real, more than real. She wrote for them, her characters. That seemed the answer to her question. Andrew wrote for critics.

  She typed a title on the screen: Last Things. And stared at it. What were The Four Last Things? That was something she felt she had known but now could not remember. Whom could she ask? She smiled, remembering Aunt Eleanor’s plea. She found the number for St. Hilary’s and dialed it.

  “Father Dowling? Jessica Bernardo.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Better.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I called to ask you a question.”

  “All right.”

  “What are The Four Last Things?”

  A pause. “Death, judgment, heaven, hell.”

  “Wow.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I am planning a novel I want to call Last Things.”

  “Is this the one Eleanor Wygant spoke to me about?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And that is the theme? She said it was a family novel.”

  “I wish I had never told her about it.”

  “She wanted me to talk you into dropping it.”

  “No!”

  “I think I’ll stop by the hospital this morning.”

  “Maybe I will see you there.”

  Thunder and Diurno could wait. But suddenly she began to type, and the story idea was all about Raymond and how what he had done affected his family. Of course that was the story of the Bernardos. Jessica wrote swiftly, acknowledging what her brother’s defection had meant to her, knowing what it had meant to her parents. Was Andrew unaffected? How could he be? But he probably saw it in turgid Graham Greene tones. She finished the page and printed it out and faxed it off to Thunder with scarcely a change.

  Then she called Andrew and told him she was going to the hospital.

  “I am meeting Raymond’s plane. I’ll bring him there.”

  11

  O’Hare was LAX without sun or half-dressed people. Raymond felt that he was not dressed properly for late October, a pale green jacket, yellow shirt, black trousers, and loafers. No familiar faces, but then only passengers were admitted into these long ganglia t
hat led out to the flight gates. Everything seemed larger than he remembered, not that he had flown much in the old days. It was always more attractive to take one of the cars and be in complete charge of one’s destiny. He smiled as the memories came back. Once he visited a high school in Indiana … He stopped, and grumbling travelers went around him like a rock in a stream. He got out of the traffic, entered an uncrowded waiting area, and sat. The trip he remembered had been a recruiting one, talking with boys about the priesthood as a possible vocation. He looked at the people going by and realized that the world was full of people whose only contact with him had been as a priest. The full importance of this return came home to him. In Chicago he had been a priest; in California he was a counselor. Two worlds that could not overlap before, but now anyone, not just his father, could look at him with double vision, seeing both the priest that was and what he had become. If it had been possible he would have retraced his steps to the plane and asked to be taken back to Los Angeles. He rose and continued slowly to the baggage claim, where Andrew awaited him.

  The two brothers looked at one another across a gap of nearly ten years. What did Andrew see? Raymond saw a paunchy, tweedy academic trying to disguise his little brother. In a moment they were in one another’s arms.

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Better.”

  His heart sank. “How much better?” The question sounded as if he were asking if he had made this trip in vain.

  “He’s still in the hospital.” Andrew looked away. “He won’t be coming home again, ever.”

  “What exactly is it?”

  They stood away from the carousel where passengers already stood three deep although no bags had yet appeared.

  “He had a heart attack, a mild one, and if he were younger and stronger they would do open-heart surgery because of all the clogged passageways. I don’t know what I’m talking about, you understand. Jessica can explain.”

  “How is she taking it?”

  The question seemed to surprise Andrew. Jessica was just their sister, beautiful and smart and all that, but a girl. Andrew must have felt that way toward her too. They had learned it from their father.