Three Cheers For The Paraclete (8 page)

‘“Pope Pius the Ninth confirmed the spirit of stagnation that dominated the corridors of the Vatican for the greater part of the next hundred years,”’ the man read. ‘Any Catholic is surely on safe ground protesting against that sort of thing.’

His Grace, very straight and chin up, the
zucchetto
riding his scalp as if it had been there from birth, frowned even more and needed to be answered.

‘Your Grace,’ Maitland began, ‘the idea could be more happily put, but the sentence Mr Boyle has taken the trouble of reading comes from a section where he – Quinlan – complains that the Church has tended to look on truth as something static and unchangeable both at the divine end of things and at ours. I believe there’s a document of John Twenty-third’s which warns against this very tendency. I agree the use of the word “stagnant” is a little emotive, but –’

‘You can’t see your way clear to write this article, James?’

‘No, Your Grace.’

His Grace nodded like a gentleman.

‘It would do nobody any benefit,’ Maitland amplified.

‘But Dr Maitland,’ Boyle said, ‘what benefit will
this
do?’ And he began to read some more Quinlan, for, though neither a fool nor arrogant, he had simply never met a priest who let a Pontiff be impugned.

‘“While truth itself remains constant, the human perception of truth must grow and change or else become a cipher. The Church was sure that it had the great fish Truth firmly held for all time in a mesh of theological formulae, that neither the fish nor the net would ever grow and change, or appear to grow and change. That being so, it enforced on its subjects the study of the strands of the net as the only safe way of holding the fish. And the fish was, ultimately, God.” That struck me as rather a sacrilegious figure of speech. However … “As the Church’s primary system of thought calcified, God became more and more rationalized, more and more finite, more and more only a part of a supernatural cosmos. The movement known as modernism was an attempt –”, and so on. The rest is in praise of the modernist heretics of the late nineteenth century. Enough said.’

In the silence all three held, a last dribble of organ music stirred beyond the window, which was St Sebastian prickling with praetorian arrows. The sound and the stained glass spoke of the happy days when right stood out as sharply as the stuck limbs of the martyr, when all the clergy were tediously orthodox, when minds roamed free of the influence of mass media, and none of the vagrants who knocked at presbytery kitchens had heard of Marx.

‘He writes very strongly,’ Maitland admitted, a little amazed despite himself. ‘All young men write vigorously and overstate their case.’

‘He’s a
young
man, is he?’ His Grace asked, not altogether with sympathy.

Boyle went hunting for a potted biography at the rear of the paperback.

‘It doesn’t say anything here, I don’t think.’

‘Oh, it’s a young man,’ Maitland insisted. ‘A person can tell from the style. Besides, the idea isn’t original. It’s surely stolen from Tillich, the theologian.’

‘Tillich,’ the prelate wondered. ‘I’m not familiar …’

‘He’s a Protestant, Your Grace.’

‘My God. Oh well, the world’s opening up, I suppose.’ His Grace suddenly went sour at the corners of the mouth. ‘Come on, Dr Maitland, surely you can help. Catholics are Catholics, all of one mind. Des and I are Catholics and we ask you, a Catholic, for assistance. Surely that’s easily enough given. I
could
demand it, you know.’

Now if he did, a voice that was wisdom or sense or fraud told Maitland, a clean breast would be the only possibility. But he’s too genial for it to come to that.

‘I know, Your Grace,’ Maitland said.

Boyle announced softly, ‘I can’t help but admit it’s a disappointment.’

‘We must all bear our crosses,’ said Maitland, incipient irony having, as yet, merely made him paler than usual.

But Boyle was provoked back to his notes, finding it hard to believe that Maitland
was
properly informed on Quinlan’s full range of malice. ‘“Whilever the Church – ”,’ he read.

‘Mr Boyle,’ Maitland called to him, ‘if you continue to attempt to embarrass me in front of His Grace, I’m sure to lose my temper.’

‘James, there’s no need …’ said the archbishop.

With a small chirping noise of regret, Boyle tidied
the pages and cocked an eye at the top of page one. Then he closed the folder and placed the book on top. The front cover creaked open and revealed paragraphs underlined in red and marked with symbols, each symbol meaning a distinct grade of heresy.

‘I mustn’t keep you, Your Grace. I think that’s all we wanted to discuss.’

‘We’ll have to let the matter lie, Des. I suppose we can’t win all the arguments.’

But Maitland was damned if he was going to be shamed, though his hands trembled slightly.

‘May I say, Your Grace, that if we persist in starting the wrong arguments, we’ll never win any.’

The ringed hand bunched itself. ‘Come now, James, you mustn’t expect men of good faith not to protest when they see need of it.’

‘I don’t want to seem arrogant, Your Grace, but it’s possible that Quinlan is a man of good faith protesting where he sees need of it.’

‘Without ecclesiastical permission?’ asked His Grace, and Maitland shook his head and hung it. ‘Could you stay a moment, James?’

Slowly and as if coerced to it, Boyle was drawing on a thick overcoat. As he buttoned it, both the archbishop and Maitland rose, and he genuflected and cursorily bussed the ring. As president of the Knights, he was accustomed to this exercise.

‘Des,’ His Grace told him, ‘you know how much I respect and value the support of the Knights. As I say, though, perhaps we must let the fight die out now.’

‘Nothing else for it, Your Grace,’ Boyle said, rising.

‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ Maitland told them both.

‘It’s no good unless your heart is in it, Dr Maitland,’ the layman announced, and seemed to imply a fault of the heart.

‘That’s right,’ a very bluff Maitland agreed.

‘You mustn’t think that the Knights would carry any sort of spite or that you wouldn’t be as free as any other priest to ask our help if it were ever needed.’

‘I always presumed they didn’t carry spite, especially without cause.’

His Grace confessed, perhaps not guileless but at least attempting to seem so, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without them. And what is most blessed about them, they don’t let their right hand know what their left is doing.’

It would have been perilously easy to say that if the left were writing unauthorized letters-to-editors, the right had better make a point of knowing.

So Boyle left, giving Maitland the minimum farewell a Knight could in honour give a priest. Maitland preceded him down the room and held the door open for him. Passing through, Boyle left behind a carping breath of Californian Poppy.

‘Are you over your peevishness?’ His Grace called down the length of the table.

‘I’m sorry, Your Grace. But it’s not the Knights’ business.’

‘Who says so?’ His Grace seemed jaunty, but wanted answers and reassurances. ‘What sort of stuff do you teach the students, James?’

‘Simply history, Your Grace,’ Maitland told him, thinking in cowardice but perhaps also in wisdom that if the book remained an issue, a fortnight’s time would be time enough to confess; that if the issue died, wasn’t he entitled to keep his one wild oat secret to himself?

‘
Church
history,’ His Grace amended.

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, the Church can stand up to its own past and beside the pasts of other bodies politic.’

‘I suppose so. But be careful.’

Frowning, the prelate shrugged and rang for supper, rang with a bell-pull plaited from wool in all the liturgical colours. In the long distempered room, near the wide fireplace, gobs of light from the chandelier resting with the tranquillity of drowned moons on the habitually polished table, he looked like the Bishop of Artois or Autun on a cold night in a Balzac novel. It begged an act of faith to believe that beyond St Sebastian’s window acquisitive fires of neon splashed the avenues and jack-hammers barked on floodlit construction lots.

‘You know, James, you speak of yourself as if you were, say, a university teacher of some independence. But if anyone has independence, it isn’t you. There is obedience in your case, the obedience you owe me. What if I’d
ordered
you to take a stand against this Quinlan?’

‘I have to admit I would have tried to dissuade you, Your Grace. And I’d have been very confident of success because you’re too wise to put your money on a dead horse.’

‘Am I? Well, what if I still insisted?’

‘Your Grace, I certainly do believe in blind obedience as a last resort. If it were the last resort, I would obey.’

A resort somewhat this side of the last would be to admit to being Quinlan. But while they waited for His Grace’s call to be answered, Maitland’s emergent tactical streak kept urging that others might not see why he had used a pseudonym; might not grasp the genuine wisdom of not burdening a book with a real name or a real name with a book.

An Irish spinster came in. ‘Let me see, Molly,’ said His Grace. ‘Cocoa, I think, please. Dr Maitland hasn’t got an overcoat with him.’

The woman made a sympathetic mouth while Maitland said, ‘No, no, Your Grace, whatever you have …’

‘It’s all right, Molly. Cocoa.’

The woman gone, His Grace told Maitland wryly, ‘I, like the Knights, don’t carry spite. But be careful!’

Waiting for the beverage, both men were largely silent and rather exposed to each other by the large simplicity of the conference table. Then His Grace asked, ‘Of course, you know to whom your scholarship belongs?’

Maitland came close to smiling at the pretentious word. His scholarship might perhaps have been vast enough, if he were a layman, to allow him to teach history to senior boys.

‘It belongs to me,’ His Grace said, ‘as much as it belongs to yourself, and if ever there was a question of obedience, it would belong to me or my successor more than to yourself. Remember that and your safety is assured.’

T
HE NEXT DAY
Maitland had a small letter of thanks from his cousin, Joe Quinlan. ‘We upped and invested in some land,’ said Joe. ‘For which much thanks to you.’ The letter evoked summer and the day of what was for Maitland a truer homecoming than a mere disembarking onto a wharf could ever be. The day had been a Thursday late in February on which he caught a train towards those flat towns he had known as a child. The sets of lines ran out molten blue to the suburb where his maternal cousin, Joseph Quinlan, lived.

In Europe he had remembered the sun but forgotten the summer. So, as he sat through fifteen station stops and watched old men’s brave morning collars travelling home sodden, the exact flavour of the Februaries of his childhood returned in a rush and remained. February, the crude exposer of the mortal and the makeshift, of the mortal and makeshift shirt and floral dress, of mortal and makeshift James Maitland, the sun boring at his left, window-side ear.

He was all prickly heat by the time a station came with Joe Quinlan’s address on it. Outside an empty supermarket stood the right bus. Rolling off at last, it showed him all the things he could have predicted. Down flat streets jury-masted with power poles, the bus was hailed by neanderthal wives near looted phone
booths, joyless service-stations, abject corner shops.

He got out at a street of plaster-board houses. Plaster-board might have done well in dainty Japan but could assert nothing under the massive censure of this sky. On his corner in the desert, he could hear a television set promising a trip to Tahiti for the neatest correct entry opened.

Maitland could not remember the seventeen-year-old who had gone to become a priest and himself at twenty-nine; could not even remember what the seventeen-year-old had believed (though it was bound to be nearly everything). But he knew that in that young lost mind marriage had meant a suburb like this one, out of which the clean eternity of the priesthood had called him. Maitland stood a second being sad for the boy, forgiving the boy’s zeal.

The Quinlans lived in 27, whose side had been barricaded with an iron gate. Beyond this he saw a fowlhouse and could hear the furtive birds. He climbed the barricade and came to the back of the house. Here a woman, hidden from him by oddments of family underwear, pegged out clothes. Sensing him, she pushed through the washing, and a small dog charged from beneath hung bedsheets.

‘Oh, father,’ said the woman, ‘you gave me a scare. They’ve been so many attacks in this district.’

She was a square, dark little woman, very tired, hardly a welcome left in her. But she had not had the scare she claimed. Maitland could tell she knew that if he were the local curate seeking money or sacrifice, she had him at a disadvantage by reducing him to a part of the general male threat.

‘You should use the front door, father. I’m not to know you’re a priest, am I?’

‘Mrs Joe Quinlan, isn’t it?’

She nodded and folded her arms, on the left of which hung a red plastic bucket of pegs meaning that she couldn’t give him much time.

‘Yes. We go to Mass up here at Saint Bernard’s, but Joe hasn’t got the time to join societies and things.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’m Joe’s cousin. My mother was a Quinlan. My name’s James Maitland.’

She said without pleasure that she was pleased to meet him.

They stood in silence. You could hear only the soft mourning of Joe Quinlan’s and a hundred other fowls in other yards.

Maitland managed at last to ask, ‘Will Joe be home soon?’

‘About a quarter to five.’

‘Do you mind if I wait and see him?’

‘I’m Morna,’ she said. It seemed that someone might have told her, long ago and well, never to give direct answers to men in uniform.

‘Don’t you believe me, Morna, when I say who I am?’

The small dog, tensed back on his hindquarters, kept his rage close to the boil and showed Maitland yellow but functional canines.

‘Oh, I know Joe had a cousin a priest. You’re him?’

‘Yes. I’ve been overseas. That’s why I haven’t seen him lately. There were two Christmases when we were ten or eleven, that Joe and I used to spend all our time together. My people lived on this line, only further down. Joe and I exchanged the blood-brotherhood once.’ He laughed.

‘How do you mean?’ she asked without tolerance.

‘Well, you know how an Indian and a white man would slit their wrists and mix their blood and become blood-brothers? Joe and I did that once. Joe’s mother beat the hide off us for it.’

‘If I had a boy did that, I’d beat the hide off him myself. I haven’t got any time for that sort of thing. This violence on the television is why a woman can’t be safe in her own yard.’

Maitland coughed to acknowledge the battle well lost.

‘Would you like to wait inside?’ she asked.

‘If you don’t mind.’ She had her doubts, you could see. He might want Joe’s time, mind, money. This blood-brotherhood business was only a way of establishing a claim – or so she feared.

‘All right. The kitchen’s in a bit of a mess. Roddy’s in there in his high chair. Don’t frighten him.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘Morna.’

She smiled briefly. At least she was sure from his long, untanned body and soapy hands that he was not some marauding piece-worker.

At the back door Maitland took off his black coat and stock. He must avoid scaring his small kinsman who had made a compost of milk and sodden bread on his meal-tray and was furrowing the mess with his forefinger.

‘Hullo, Roddy,’ James said. ‘I’m your cousin. I used to know your father.’

Roddy did not move. His hand remained suspended on one finger, like a stork, in the mess of his lunch.

Behind him, stew bubbled on the gas stove. Torn hollands hung above the sink and clotted fat lay on the draining-board. Farther inside the house, a television set performed to an empty room. ‘And how often,’ a professional voice asked, on a programme of live agony, ‘how often have these fights ended in a physical assault by your husband?’

At last Morna came in and picked up a teatowel from the floor. Her slippered foot herded dust and crumpled paper and spent matches out of the way under the stove.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, father?’ she said.

Suddenly the old flesh-hatred of his youth turned his stomach and he was aware of what the inconsolable sacrifice was – to live in plaster-board with such a woman.

‘It’s all right, Morna,’ he told her urgently, and took improper comfort in knowing that he would be home in Nolan’s house by seven.

By a quarter to five the sunlight had taken on that level and quite stable glare which threatens never to set. Home came Joe Quinlan in his grey post-office uniform. They heard him enter as if he were in the act of taking the inadequacies of his home very much to heart. They heard him taking the barricade to heart and telling the children, for Christ’s sake that was the last time he was going to tell them to leave the chickens alone.

He blinked to find Maitland in the kitchen, sitting at the table in white shirt-sleeves but inescapably clerical with his black coat hitched on the chair and his stock among a mess of children’s drawings on the table-top.

Morna seemed edgy.

‘This is Father Maitland, Joe,’ she said; and then, unscrupulously, ‘He says he’s your cousin.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said.

As if trapped into it by his jagged distrust of Maitland, he kissed his wife. When he held out his hand to the priest, it was like a defence. ‘Glad to see you again,’ he said; but he waited for Maitland to present the barbed demand, for piety or cash or something else beyond him. God forgive, thought Maitland, priests and insurance agents who have taught man so well that their greetings are merely feints.

‘You remember me, don’t you? Jimmy Maitland. I was telling Morna how we were blood-brothers. I don’t think she approved.’

Joe ventured a smile. ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. He meant, that was before everything changed; it doesn’t give you any claim. ‘That’s a long time ago.’

‘We were ten, I suppose,’ Maitland supplied. Before puberty, which, in boys, voided previous friendships.

‘Had a cuppa?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Morna, why didn’t you hang father’s coat up for him?’

Morna frowned. Awe and suspicion – that was why.

Maitland said, ‘It’s all right. I have to go soon.’

‘You can’t stay for tea?’ the husband asked joyously, and sweated on the answer.

‘I’ve got to get back to the House of Studies by about seven. It’s a long way.’

‘That’s a pity. Look, father.’

‘Jim.’

‘Look, Jim, I’ve just got to fix up the chooks. Do you mind? Just a few minutes.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Maitland said quickly.

Joe fetched bran from under the house. Just beyond the limits of the yard began a haze and an opalescence that gave a false remoteness to the rest of the flat suburb. Morna, seeing this, by some instinct called the children in, Joe’s small girl would not obey but ran after him, while Morna yelled threats from the door. She was more frantic than angry. The phenomenon of the priest, topped by this starchy tide of heat in which her neighbours’ homes rode, warned her to make her house tight and get her children in. Maitland apprehended her fear and expected Joe to turn to her, But Joe carried the bran, and the small girl trailed Joe.

She said, ‘Are you going to feed the chooks with father?’

‘I’m going to feed ’em with bran. Can’t you hear your mother? By Christ, you’ve been asking for it lately.’

Over his shoulder Maitland saw the girl limp away with a pubescent type of disdain, ten years ahead of herself at seven. An instinct nagged him that there was something to be done with the child, something immediate that he would be able to identify if he were any sort of being. The girl, however, was quicker in reaching the back steps than the instinct was in coming to a head. It ceased to press, and he and Joe were alone then, which was what he had come for.

Maitland, outside the coop, kept the door closed while Joe went in to his birds. They rushed him, tocking with avarice, and he took offence at them and broadcast their food behind their backs and hated them even more fervently when they wheeled back to it.

‘Joe,’ Maitland called. He looked around him for a gradual way of telling a poor man that you wanted to give him twelve hundred dollars, being your advance on the sales of a paperback you wouldn’t admit to having written. You could, with ease, give a sum such as that to the Red Cross, to archdioceses or other bodies inured to thousands, who could be trusted to spend or save it efficiently. But an archdiocese did not have the pride of a poor Quinlan.

‘Joe, I have a bank cheque for twelve hundred dollars. I wonder could you accept it from me?’

‘How do you mean?’ Joe said, visibly a man who had heard this sort of thing before.
How would you like to own your own swimming-pool? With every one of our $65 suits sold, we will give away free a ticket which could …
Joe had never met the owner of a ticket which did.

‘If you can use it you can have it.’

The fowls squeaked close to the man, who aimed his
boot at them without intent and began to come to his own conclusions.

‘Oh, I know what you mean, father. It’s kind of you to offer. But we couldn’t even pay interest on it.’

‘I don’t mean it for a loan. I mean, do you want it?’

Joe laughed through his nose.

‘Who are you trying to string along, father?’

‘Jim,’ said Maitland.

‘If you
are
father, I’d rather call you father.’

‘Joe, please take it. If you don’t, I’ll have to take it to some charity.’

Joe picked up the birds’ drinking-tin and shook the water out. It fell like a pattern of shadow on the dust. He still smiled.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he said idly.

‘Nothing. I’d rather you had it and did whatever you liked with it. For once.’

‘We’re not good Catholics.’ With the white-hot sun niggling his left shoulder, he went further, ‘We’re never likely to be.’

Behind them, in the house, a child began sobbing while Morna said she’d told it often enough and it could damn-well expect the same every time.

‘You don’t understand, Joe.’

‘I’ll say I don’t, father.’

‘Say that while I was in Europe I did some writing and got this sum of money for it. That is exactly what did happen, in fact. Well, I don’t want it, that’s all. And I thought you might do me the honour of using it for me.’

‘Do you the honour? Come off it, father!’

‘It’s indecent for priests to have big sums of money, that’s all. It’s not a priest’s business.’

At least he was being taken with seriousness now. He wished to God that Joe would hurry the decision, for he felt sick from the heat, and the thick air hung as
palpable as cotton wool. He heard with some longing an evening train going home on the distant line.

Joe kept arguing.

‘You don’t really mean that, father. Look, you might be a priest, but that’s no excuse to muck me around. It’s indecent for a priest to own money, you say. How many of your mates believe that?’

‘You’re being too hard on them, Joe. I feel I’m not allowed to keep this, the way I’m not allowed to keep a woman.’

‘Say I took it?’

‘Say you took it off my hands.’

‘Yeah, if I did, how am I supposed to spend it? You don’t know me. I mean, that blood-brotherhood business is a load of cock. For all you know, I might just do the lot on booze.’

‘Spending it is your business.’ Maitland took an envelope from his pocket. ‘The bank cheque’s in there, very official, made out in your name, Joe. I took the liberty …’

Joe considered complaining, but accepted the envelope instead, just for a look.

‘Twelve hundred’s a decent deposit on land.’

‘Whatever you say, Joe. It’s your affair. My God, though, I’d be grateful.’

But Joe was still merely considering the outside chance of his accepting the gift and had hold of it only with thumb and index finger. ‘There are charities,’ he suggested. ‘Why …?’

‘Why is my business and spending it is yours.’

For Maitland couldn’t say that he had felt it necessary to find someone unlovely and not blatantly pitiable nor compellingly deserving, wise or frugal. That Joe might be inept or even stupid in the spending was what made the giving peculiarly worth while.