On the Waterfront (12 page)

“Mother, our Mother, help me find a way,” Katie prayed.

A block away the wide black river bowled its deafening answer along the giant alley of water between the Jersey and Manhattan shores as another transatlantic liner (one every fifty minutes, day in, day out) swept down river to the open sea.

MRS. GLENNON WAS DYING
in front of Father Barry’s eyes, a little each day, and her kids were dirty and poorly dressed. Beanie Glennon had been down in the corner bar when Father Pete—as the Glennons called him—arrived, and the oldest boy had been sent down as usual to fetch the old man. The priest dreaded what would happen to the kids when Mrs. Glennon checked out. And he wondered why it should have to be so hard for Mrs. Glennon, suffering illness and poverty and, worst of all, uncertainty for the five kids. He had tried to comfort her, assure her, and his words had helped a little. But again, as with Katie Doyle, were these only words? Was there more he could be doing? Sure it was a hard day, a long day, from five
A.M
., when he began with his own prayers and his preparations for six-o’clock Mass to this last family call at eleven. And an almost endless chain of chores and services performed along the way, a fairly average day in the life of a parish priest in a working-class neighborhood. But doubt nagged him in his end-of-day weariness. Was there more he could be doing? Weren’t these more than a continuous series of needy individual cases? Wasn’t there a pattern here of insecurity, lawlessness, of Cain-and-Abel destruction?

He could have reached the rectory by walking the several blocks along Market Street, but he felt himself drawn down to River Street. The events of the day cut into his mind with sharp edges. He looked into the bleary faces of the men who wandered past him and he wondered: why are they drinking their lives away? Why are there six bars, at least, in every block? Bars, and no playgrounds, no tennis courts, no reading centers? No place to go on the Bohegan waterfront except into a bar or a church? Father Barry’s mind was tired, but the persistent questions would not let him rest. Everything is wrong as hell, and it is more than physical poverty closing in over the port, apathy, amorality. These were fancy words and he didn’t go in for them. Hell, he was a Bohegan kid himself. Who was he trying to fool? It plain and simple stank. A good boy like Joey Doyle could be knocked off and nobody lifts a finger. The men themselves accepted murder as if it was nothing worse than a black eye. Catholics, a good ninety-five per cent of them had accustomed themselves to the idea that a member of the Mystical Body of Christ could be violently removed from its other living parts without their feeling called upon to cry out against this violation of His precious gift. He had felt defensive when Katie had slugged her question at him,
Was there ever a saint who hid in the church?
His immediate reaction had been, Get off my back, sister. You call this hiding? After a tough day I’m here at the wake and then off to the Glennons’. I’ve sat in the kitchens of hundreds of families, and not only the God-seeking ones but the backsliders and forsakers. You don’t have to take my word for it. The Pastor can tell you I’m tryin’ to do a job down here.

Was there ever a saint who hid in the church?
The simple question nagged him and ragged him. It was almost too simple. And yet that Doyle kid had a point. Name five saints and at least three of them make you think of trouble. They knew danger. They were independent souls skirting the abyss of heresy and excommunication. They were desperate men and women, defiers and innovators, reaching out, plunging deeper, taking terrible chances, as Paul chanced, and Stephen and the first Ignatius. And now, on Bohegan’s ginmill row, around this harbor, through the great city and in the sink holes of the world, that kid’s question was actually a charge that we are defaulting the spiritual vitality that had spread the idea of love through the whole world. Father Barry had reached the park in front of his old red-brick church, but he kept on walking.

Outside the Crow’s Nest, a popular bar next to the Sailor’s Home, two burly drunks were pummelling each other’s faces. The smaller of the two was knocked down and as he rose from the pavement he snarled at his assailant through his bloody teeth. “I’ll kill you, ya son of a bitch.” In a moment he was knocked down again. The bigger man laughed. “I’ll fix that sonofabitchin strike-breakin’ sailor. Went through our lines in Fifty-one, huh? Git up ya bum, I aint finished with ya.”

Father Barry could not bear to see the smaller man punished any further, so, somewhat against his better judgment, he moved in like a referee, “Okay, you fellers, break it up. What d’ya say?”

To his surprise it was the smaller, far more battered one who most resented the intrusion. “What’re you doin’ here, Father? Why doncha get back to ya choich where ya belong? Comin’ down here ’n buttin’ in.”

The bigger man, with whom the priest had expected to have the trouble, was apologetic.

“Don’ mind him, Father. He’s been at it all day. He don’ know what he’s sayin’. He’ll sober up in time for Mass, you watch ’n see, Father.”

“Okay, boys, the fight’s over. Go back to your corners.” Father Barry pulled out of it and walked on, with the same long, rapid stride he always used, as if he still had a half dozen calls to make. He was tired in his head and his muscles from the long physically and emotionally draining day. But he wasn’t ready for bed. The questions nagging him were a bottle full of Benzedrine.

Take those two rummies beating each other’s heads in. Probably perfectly good Catholics, in a formal way. Go to Mass every Sunday, well, nearly every, and receive the Eucharist to fulfill their Easter duty.
This is my body which is being given for you …
Good God, we go looking for pagans in Africa and China and our own neighborhood parish is overflowing with them.
If you do it to the least of mine you do it to me.
How deeply Father Barry had felt that once! But how easy it had become to say it, recite it, without feeling it, without living it. Just as the stolid, sleepy faces at the six-o’clock Mass received Christ in an obedient way, merely because they had been baptized and had made their First Communion. But ours is the religion that preaches and teaches the dignity of man, the preciousness of man. What was it St. Bernard had called him, a noble creature with a majestic destiny? Get a load of these noble creatures! Here is our flock. This is what they’ve come to, defeated, drowning their miseries, bashing each other’s faces generation on generation. How, this priest was asking himself, can we figure our batting average: by the number of worshippers tradition pulls in on a Sunday morning? Or do we score our cards according to the quality of the lives they are living in this dark corner of the harbor? “
If somebody takes a life
,” the girl had lowered the boom on him, “
if there’s all this evil on the waterfront, how can you pretend you’ve got a Christian parish?
”

He was close to the water now and could hear its rippling against the shore. At the next pier down a freighter was working under powerful lights. What were the dangers of working the bottom of the hatch at night? What was their overtime for keeping the cargo moving while the city slept? Was it true that every one of them had to buy his job each day from this fellow Johnny Friendly? But Father Barry had heard Monsignor O’Hare speak very well of Johnny Friendly as a generous contributor to Catholic causes. Was the opposition to Johnny Friendly “a bunch of Communists,” as the Monsignor had suggested? If Joey Doyle was a leader of the local opposition, he was indeed a strange breed of Communist, never missing Confession and dying in a state of grace.

Pete, stay with this, he was thinking. You’re catching hold of something. Hang on to it, Pete. He had been feeling a vague dissatisfaction with the routine of the Masses for the past year and had even talked to Father Donoghue about introducing the dialogue Mass, so as to intensify its meaning for the parishoners. But now the angry eyes of Katie Doyle were looking into his mind. They were accusing him of failure. Never mind the mere improvement of the Mass. Had he brought Christ and what He stood (and died) for into the lives of these people? Had he, Father Pete Barry, made them aware of Him and each other here on the waterfront. Hell, every family he touched was affected by this problem, the question of whether or not they worked, and how they worked. Under what conditions of degradation, and to what extent they were in danger for daring to improve those conditions. This was no political problem to be piously avoided by smoke-pot swingers. Hell, no, this was a moral-religious problem! And you, Pete, you’ve been ducking it. You’ve been afraid to plunge in. The river was dark and treacherous and unknowable, like the river of humanity into which Paul plunged when he went out from Jerusalem into the unfriendly gentile currents in search of brothers.

Brother, we’ve got another first century on our hands, and converts to reconvert. Man redeemed must be redeemed again. My God, what a different place Bohegan would be if these harps really knew in the innermost depths of their beings what it means to take Christ’s Flesh and Blood as food and drink. Let the Commies talk about their revolution, economic salvation by purge trial and forced-labor camps. What a revolution we could make if Christians in name should ever develop into Christians in deed! We’ve been missing the boat. Every few days a ship comes in, turns around and goes out, and we’re not on it, not with it, waiting for the faithful to come to us instead of throwing a line out to them.

A filthy, slightly bent-over, one-armed river rat staggered backward out of a bar as if he had been pushed. When he saw the priest his hand extended automatically. “A dime. One thin dime for a cuppa cawfee.”

Father Barry reached in his pocket for a coin, part of his carefully hoarded cigarette fund. Every day he bought a pack and scrounged a pack. Here was his brother with no right arm and no money and probably no place to flop, one of a thousand drifters in the harbor. Here was the least of mine, pushed from bar to bar, from gutter to gutter. Father Barry remembered seeing him at Mass occasionally. He had had to walk him out of the church one morning because he was disorderly drunk in the confession queue. Mutt Murphy, that was his name, a little off his rocker from drink and the kicking around he had taken. Yes, but again, where was the Church? Where was Father Pete Barry himself? What was he doing to protect the least of mine?

“Here,” Father Barry said. “Go have a beer on me.”

“God bless ya, Father. God bless ya,” Mutt mumbled through his swollen lips. Then he looked into the face of the priest. “Oh, Father, you was the one give Joey Doyle his last rites.”

When Father Barry nodded, Mutt brought his face so close to the priest’s that the sour breath offended him. But Father Barry did not pull his head back.

“That Joey Doyle was a saint, Father, ya know that? Went right in the union office t’ try ’n get me me compensation. Them bums threw him out. They woik hand in hand with the shippers. Ya know that, Father? They aint inter-rested in
this
”—he slapped his stump roughly—“even if I got it on board ship. All them bums is inter-rested in is
this
…” He put out his good arm and rubbed his fingers together to make the ancient sign of greed for money. “Jesus Mary ’n Joseph, if we had a honest t’ God union down here instead of a bunch of safecrackers, I’d be drawin’ a hundred bucks a month easy. I aint no bum, no beggar in me heart, Father, that’s the God’s truth. But I can’t get no job and I never stood in good enough with Johnny Friendly. What’s a fella gonna do, Father?”

“This kid Doyle,” Father Barry asked, “you’re sure he was pushed?”

Mutt Murphy took an unsteady backward step. “Are you kiddin’, Father? What you lookin’ t’ do, dump me in the river?”

Mutt withdrew rather haughtily. On his way toward the corner bar he turned and cried out in an ugly croaking voice, “Jesus’ll save me! Jesus’ll save me!” Then he disappeared into the brief shelter of the bar.

Father Barry walked on. He walked out to the end of a railroad pier and stared at the broken pattern of little square lights twinkling in the massive buildings across the river. There was the mightiest city in the world half sleeping, half reveling. Millions and millions and millions of people and not one of them aware of Mutt Murphy and his lost arm. Or of Joey Doyle and his lost life. And if they were to know—if the morning papers were to headline at breakfast the terrible deed done to Joey Doyle
(for these sheep I lay down my life),
who would really care? A tabloid banner and a few sensational pictures and then—who cares? Who really cares? If even here in Bohegan, where they knew him, nobody cared enough? Increase our church attendance and you improve our moral climate, the glib ones were always saying. But here were the churchgoers following Christ in such a slipshod way that it was a cruel joke on Him to call them Christians. And the priests, even some priests, intoning but not feeling the least of mine—even some priests.

By God, Father Barry now realized, he had come from the poor and had gone into the priesthood to serve the poor. But the years had made him prudent. Hiding in the church, Katie had said. Father Barry had only walked a few miles but he had come a long way from Katie Doyle’s angry question. Now he was asking himself the questions. Man, St. Bernard had insisted, was a noble creature with a majestic destiny. Was it Joey Doyle’s majestic destiny to go hurtling down through the tenement clotheslines, tossed into the filthy courtyard like an empty beer can?

So that Katie’s blunt question “What are you going to do about it?” linked the priest to God on one side and man on the other. You could call it politics or a police problem and hide from it in the church, but you were in it, brother, you were in it, in it deep, just as sure as there was the Mystical Body of Christ and everyone a member, one of another. Joey’s death and the search for the meaning of it, the motive of it, the cure of it, would lead his parish church back into the streets of Bohegan where the people were Christian for one hour on Sunday and enemies one of another all week long.