The Prudence of the Flesh Page 8

  “I don’t understand why a man of your ambition would publish something under a phony name.”

  “Wait until you read the book.”

  So he was left with his dilemma. He had a bombshell of a revelation to make about Gregory Barrett, and he had no way to make it public. It was all very well for Gloria to tell him to write a book. Did she think a chapter on Father Dowling and another with the great revelation about Barrett’s fathering Madeline’s child would make a book? Meanwhile, the clerical scandal, far from dying out, seemed to be spreading across the country. Column after column in newspapers was filled with juicy reports on the dreadful things the Catholic clergy had been up to—Catholic as well as secular papers. Were Catholic publications his hope? Some of them salivated over the scandals even more than their secular counterparts, perhaps seeing them as vindication of their own misgivings about the direction the Church had taken since Vatican II. He went down to the Benjamin Harrison branch to do some research, and Madeline put him onto an appropriate volume. He told her what he was after.

  “I’m not sure I want you to write about it, Ned.”

  He turned to her with narrowed eyes. “Did they get to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I suppose they offered more money.”

  She stepped back, really steamed. “I’ll try to forget you said that.”

  Ned tried to soothe her. He did not want the heroine of his story to be angry with him. Of course, given what Tuttle had confided in him, it no longer mattered what Madeline thought. He didn’t need her permission to go ahead. Still, he would prefer to have her as his ally, rather than the victim this time of an intrepid writer who followed the truth wherever it led him.

  “They will try, you know.”

  “I am thinking of myself. And of Marvin.”

  Ned nodded. “I can see that. Well, there’s no harm in just making a few inquiries.”

  He took the reference book LMP—Literary Market Place— to a table and opened it to the index. An overpowering aroma of body odor drifted from the far end of the table, where a disheveled man was sleeping. Ned took his book and looked for a more antiseptic place to consult it. Suddenly it seemed to him that most of the clients of the library were derelicts. They were sleeping at tables, lounging in reading chairs, slavering over the wares they brought up on the bank of computers that they had commandeered. Good God, what a place. How could Madeline stand to work here? She had sought support from the Library Association in her campaign to have pornography blocked on the library computers; they sent her a stinging letter, recounting their long fight against censorship. Better that she should be angry at them than at him.

  “Madeline called to tell me you were at the library today,” Gloria said that night. They were having risotto con funghi e piselli at the Boca della Verità, a little Italian restaurant that had hung several of Gloria’s paintings.

  “What a dump that library is.”

  “She’s having second thoughts, Ned. Maybe we should think of some other subject for you to write about.”

  Ned sipped his wine and stirred his risotto with a fork, causing steam to rise from it. “She got mad when I asked her if they had gotten to her.”

  “I think seeing Father Dowling has something to do with it.”

  “Dowling!”

  “Tuttle arranged for her to go to the St. Hilary’s rectory.”

  Ned sat back to let his risotto cool. He had burned his mouth with it, and a quick sip of wine had done little to put out the fire. “So that’s their game.”

  “Oh, I can see her point, Ned. The truth is, I’ve been having second thoughts myself. Would any of this have come up if I hadn’t urged Maddie to dredge up her past?”

  “Her past? Marvin is very much in the present.” The thought of Madeline’s son was not encouraging. He was not, in a word Ned was seeking opportunities to use this week, a prepossessing figure. On the other hand, he seemed a poster child against impregnating young women and leaving them with the results of their folly.

  “It doesn’t put her in a very good light.”

  Was everyone against him? Well, he would fight on alone if necessary. When he left the library, he had gone home and shot off letters to the Wanderer and the National Catholic Reporter, enigmatically suggesting that he had a story they would certainly want to run. A new wrinkle on the clerical scandals.

  “I wonder if Marvin hasn’t been pointing that out to her.”

  Ah. If Marvin was the problem, he would address it head on.

  So it was that on the following day, after Madeline had gone off to the library, Ned Bunting rang the bell of her front door. From what he had heard, Marvin was sure to be home. Parked down the street, waiting for Madeline to leave the house, he had seen no sign of Marvin up and about. He banged on the door and rang the bell insistently, but there was no answer. He went around the house to find the pajamaed Marvin sitting in the little patio, his hair wild on his head, a cup of coffee before him.

  He looked at Ned with puffy eyes. “She’s not here. She’s gone to work.”

  “Is there any more coffee?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Ned went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. Since he was inside, he made a quick inspection of the house. With the exception of the room that must be Marvin’s, the house was neat as a pin. A paragraph formed in his mind. Abandoned mother provides ideal domestic setting for herself and her son . . .

  Outside, he joined Marvin at the metal table. The chair was chill on his bottom. Marvin sat in sunlight, so his chair must have been warm when he sank into it.

  “We’re making progress, Marvin. I’m sure your mother has kept you informed.”

  Marvin gave an impatient toss of his head. “That’s all crap.”

  Ned drank some coffee. It was delicious, obviously made by Madeline, for herself and her bewildered son. The paragraph grew.

  “Vindication is not crap, Marvin.”

  “Look, my father was a sailor. I don’t know where all this stuff about the priest came from. She never mentioned it to me. Her stories were all about my father the sailor. There are photographs in the living room.” Marvin sat forward, fully awake now.

  “Do you know his son had the guts to call me up and suggest we get together?”

  “His son?” The sailor’s? There wasn’t any sailor, Ned knew.

  “Thomas Barrett.”

  “He called you!”

  “I told him I was too busy. So he threatened me.”

  Ned sat forward. “What did he say?”

  “DNA.”

  “DNA?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “As you say, it was a threat. They’re getting worried.”

  “He asked about you, too. What have you written, anyway?”

  “About your mother?”

  “Don’t write about her, understand? Don’t. What good can it do her? She could have had a pile of money and she said no. That sounds crazy, but I admire her for it. It isn’t as if we’re independently wealthy.” He tried to laugh and settled for coffee instead.

  “She didn’t take the money because then no one would have known . . .”

  “And you think everyone should know? I mean it, Ned Bunting. Get interested in something else.”

  “The Barrett boy got you worried?”

  “Oh, I calmed him down. I told him we were on the same page.”

  Madeline wanted out, Gloria had cooled on the project, and now Marvin was giving him orders as to what he could write. Ned Bunting was damned if he would sit still for that. He stood. “The First Amendment is a powerful weapon, Marvin. I will write what I write.”

  It wasn’t a bad line to leave on. He executed an almost military about-face and went out to his car. But his zeal had thinned. For a week and more he had felt like the paladin of the downtrodden, the Upton Sinclair of the victims of priestly abuse. Gloria had encouraged him. His story about Father Dowling, a first salvo in his project, had g
ained notoriety, and then had come the revelation about Madeline’s child. Now everyone seemed to be deserting him. He was treated with disdain by the likes of Quirk and Gregory Barrett. Must he give it all up? And for what? His writing aspirations had never materialized. Even Monsignor Sledz had ridiculed him. But by God, facts were facts, and no matter what anyone thought, friend or foe, he would go forward.

  20

  When Tuttle showed up at the studio, Gregory Barrett’s first impulse was to get him out of there in the way he had Ned Bunting. Whatever persona he had developed through his program had been enhanced when he moved back to the Chicago area, and such visitors struck a discordant note. He took the little lawyer out to a bar, where Tuttle ordered root beer.

  The bartender stared at him. “How about O’Doul’s?”

  “You’re the boss. I usually have A&W.”

  Gregory ordered a scotch and water and began to explain why he had called himself William Arancia when he came to Tuttle’s office.

  Tuttle displayed a palm. “Think nothing of it. It happens all the time. Clients often say they have come because they’re worried about someone else.”

  Barrett took little comfort in being classified among dissembling clients. How he regretted having gone to Tuttle at all. What would Amos Cadbury say if he knew he had consulted another lawyer? Not that it was easy to see the patrician Cadbury and Tuttle as members of the same profession.

  “I should tell you that Amos Cadbury has agreed to represent me. At the request of the archdiocese.”

  Tuttle nodded, as if in approval. “Amos Cadbury.”

  “So if we can settle now . . .”

  “But you haven’t heard what I’ve learned.”

  Barrett considered his drink, where ice cubes jostled and pinged. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. “I’m listening.”

  Once Tuttle began, Barrett suggested that they move to a table away from the bartender. In the shadow created by the brim of his absurd tweed hat, the little lawyer smiled. They settled at a table, more lawyer and client than ever. During the narrative, Barrett concentrated on the unlit candle on the table between them, a votive light whose flame might have warded off evil. The tiny wick was bent, and he had trouble lighting it with his cigarette lighter. Since he had it out, he lit a cigarette as well.

  The knowing vulgar voice went on, undistracted by these movements. “So there is a record of your knowing her back then.”

  The theory of repressed or at least forgotten memory gained plausibility as Barrett felt the shards of the past rise within him. A troubled girl had decided to bear her child, and he himself had done the right thing. Of course he had arranged for her to have her baby.

  “She has told others that the child is yours.”

  He simply dipped his chin and looked into the shadowed face.

  “There are records of what you did.”

  Records that would redound to his credit, except with the more rabidly prochoice. It occurred to him that Amos Cadbury would certainly approve of what he had done, but to Cadbury he had denied ever knowing the woman. His denial had been solidly based on the fact that he did not remember her. How could he be expected to remember everyone he had encountered in his life as a priest?

  “You say she has said this to others?”

  “And to me. Of course I wanted to talk with her.”

  “What is she like?”

  “A bit of a fruitcake. She works in a library. Bookish. She lives alone with her son. It was hearing your program that brought it all back.”

  “A son.”

  “She kept the baby. The plan was to give it up for adoption, but . . .”

  “I remember.” He did remember now.

  Tuttle lifted his bottle and almost immediately put it down. “This is beer.”

  “A nonalcoholic beer.”

  “Ugh.” Barrett himself drank as if from real need. His companion was a menace now, armed with this seemingly damning information from the past. “As you say, there will be records.”

  “I will look them up,” Tuttle stated.

  “Don’t!” The word flew from his mouth. Checking the record of that pregnancy and birth would lend credence to the woman’s absurd accusation.

  “Others will check as well.”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone can hire a lawyer.”

  “Who else has she told?”

  “A man named Ned Bunting.”

  “My God.”

  “You know him?”

  “He wrote that article about Roger Dowling.” Tuttle seemed surprised that he knew this. “Roger Dowling and I were classmates.”

  “You were?”

  “I have talked with him about this. Before I went to you. Tuttle, I will be frank. Amos Cadbury is no doubt a distinguished lawyer.”

  “The best.”

  “He clearly finds all this distasteful. He is an exemplary layman, but one doesn’t have to be that to lament the kinds of stories that have become prevalent about priests preying on the faithful. He said what is doubtless true, that it is hard to prove a negative. My simple denial is just what would be expected. I went to you because I had been told . . .”

  “That I am no Amos Cadbury.”

  “I wanted to know what I could about the person saying such things about me.”

  “You came to the right man.”

  “I wish to God I hadn’t.”

  “If I were you, I would thank God that I did. What would you do if all this were simply sprung on you, records produced, the boy brought forward, and you unprepared?”

  Barrett sank back in his chair. This was the worst conversation he’d had since he talked with Hennessy, the auxiliary bishop, and applied for laicization. The process was still more or less routine in those days.

  “It goes more quickly when a marriage has already been entered into,” Hennessy had said.

  How do you tell an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago that you have not broken your promise of celibacy? And he hadn’t. He and Nancy had talked, walking in the evening on the playground of the parish school, two young people suddenly wanting to get out of the lives they led. This desire had grown because of their talks. Once he had put his arm around her and tugged her to him, but that was the extent of it. He had told Hennessy the truth, as he had to Roger Dowling, and Dowling at least seemed to believe him. How often in the years since had he and Nancy marveled at the innocence of those conversations when it became clear that the decisions they were about to make were a single decision, a joint one, a promise of a future together. And so it had turned out. But even Nancy had been shaken when that woman telephoned her and made her accusation.

  “Does that sound like the man who took you for evening walks on the parish playground?” Barrett asked his wife.

  She squeezed his hand, her doubts, if doubts they had been, gone. “But what can you do?”

  “I suppose I could wish that she would let the archdiocese buy her off. It would be blackmail, but maybe that would be an end of it.”

  “I think she wants publicity more than money.”

  The accusation would have been bad enough at any time, but now when day after day stories appeared about what priests had done, stories that could not be doubted, that were in many cases acknowledged by the accused, he would seem merely one of a platoon of wayward clerics. How many had at first denied what was later proven of them? On the other hand, there was the case of Cardinal Bernadin, who had been accused by a young man of inappropriate sexual behavior when he was in Cincinnati. He had denied it calmly and met with the young man, and eventually the charge was withdrawn, admitted to be the product of a mind stirred by all the talk of repressed memory; for a time the man actually believed that he had some kind of affair with Bernadin. The upshot had given a tremendous lift to Bernadin’s reputation. His meeting with the young man, like the pope’s visit to the one who had tried to assassinate him, was a vivid example of Christian forgiveness.

  He must meet this woman. It looked co
wardly to screen himself from her with lawyers and inquiries into her life. How could she look him in the eye and make that accusation? He was on the verge of expressing this resolve to Tuttle, but that would be ridiculous. From now on it must be between him and Madeline Murphy.

  “My secretary is typing all this up for you.”

  “Good.”

  “I will let you know what records there are of her giving birth—”

  “No. Let’s drop it here.”

  “Drop it? That makes it sound as if it is simply up to us.”

  Us. How the pronoun seared his soul. But the only way he could rid himself of Tuttle was to confront his accuser and persuade her to withdraw her charges.

  Tuttle stood and picked up the bottle from which he had not drunk. He shook his head, adjusted his hat and turned away, then stopped. He came back to the table.

  “Do you know Ned Bunting personally?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Avoid him. He’s trouble.”

  21

  Many of those Roger Dowling had known when he worked in the archdiocesan marriage court had gone on to the greater things that had been thought to be in store for him as well. First they had been auxiliaries, then got dioceses of their own, lifting into a clerical stratosphere that made it unlikely he would encounter them in his daily work as pastor of St. Hilary’s. An exception was old Bishop Hennessy, already at that time one of the senior auxiliary bishops in the archdiocese and more than content to remain.

  “Leave Chicago? Do you know the legend on the gates of Amalfi? When Amalfitani enter heaven, they have the sense of coming home. That is how I feel about Chicago. Can you see me as the ordinary of Boise?”

  “I can’t see you as ordinary anywhere.”

  As he did once a month at least, Roger was visiting Hennessy in his retirement. The now elderly bishop had resisted entering a retirement home and was now the chaplain for a house of Poor Clares.

  “They are saints, Roger. This is the kind of place one wants to prepare for death in.”

  “I feel the same about St. Hilary’s. Not that we have many saints there.”

  Hennessy loved to hear about Roger’s parish and could not get enough of stories about Marie Murkin. “I wish I’d had sense enough to do what you did, Roger.”