Prodigal Father (26 page)
I said in my haste, “All men are liars.”
âPsalm 117
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Jails are like hospitals in the sense that every day, all day, they are passed by people who do not dwell on what others like themselves are undergoing within. Illness, when it comes, is not accompanied by guilt, whereas the jailed are doubly the outcasts of society. Yet how many innocent people might they contain? Starting with St. Paul. But guilty or innocent, Stanley Morgan would want to see a priest to speak of more than just crime and punishment.
Phil went upstairs to the cells with him, smoothing his way, and left him waiting in a visitor's room for Morgan to be brought to him. Morgan came in, stopped, and stared at Father Dowling.
“You wanted to see a priest?”
“I thought they would send an Athanasian, given what I'm being held for.”
“A priest is a priest.”
Morgan laughed an unhappy laugh and sat down. “I hope RichardsâNathanielâwas not a typical priest.”
“Tell me how you knew him.”
The story as told by Morgan was substantially what Father Dowling had already heard from Phil Keegan and Boniface, but with understandable differences of emphasis.
“I was a naive fool from the beginning. I see that now so clearly. How could it have seemed perfectly natural to me that a man who had been a complete stranger days before should offer to set me up in business, finance the whole thing, and himself play only a background role? I knew nothing of the man, but then he knew very little more about me. As with most things that seem too good to be true, our partnership turned out to be just that.”
“When did you learn that he was a priest?”
“Do you know, that's when any doubts I might have had were laid to rest. The way he described his leaving left him with all the idealism he'd had when he became a priest.”
“How did he describe his leaving?”
“Vatican II.” Morgan looked at Father Dowling. “I say that and I realize I don't know what it means. When I was a kid, reference was made to it all the time.”
“So you are a Catholic.”
“The way Nathaniel was a priest,” Morgan said wryly. “I had convinced myself that the Church had failed me, don't ask me how. It was a relief to get away from all the restrictions and rules.”
“Is that all it was?”
“That was my story.”
“And now?”
“When I asked Father Boniface if I could make a retreat with him, I felt that I had already been on a retreat. Being locked
up, even in as easy a place as I was, gets you thinking. The main thing was that I was not free, and for a while at least I welcomed that. Now it no longer depended on me what I did tomorrow or the next day or for months. You ask yourself what use you had made of all that lost freedom. My life didn't make a pretty picture. I tried to do well by my clients, it was easy to think that I was doing them an essential service. I thought I was. But what kind of service is that, helping people to increase their wealth when they already have more than enough? It's a game, finally, trying to take advantage of the market, watching your investments increase in value. But it's addictive. There's no natural limit to it. There is always the desire for more. I was as bad as my greediest clients.”
up, even in as easy a place as I was, gets you thinking. The main thing was that I was not free, and for a while at least I welcomed that. Now it no longer depended on me what I did tomorrow or the next day or for months. You ask yourself what use you had made of all that lost freedom. My life didn't make a pretty picture. I tried to do well by my clients, it was easy to think that I was doing them an essential service. I thought I was. But what kind of service is that, helping people to increase their wealth when they already have more than enough? It's a game, finally, trying to take advantage of the market, watching your investments increase in value. But it's addictive. There's no natural limit to it. There is always the desire for more. I was as bad as my greediest clients.”
“So what did you conclude?”
“Oh, it wasn't a matter of any definite conclusion. More of a negative one. I knew the kind of person I no longer wanted to be.”
“And the Church?”
Morgan smiled. “We had a part-time chaplain, a priest who said Mass on Sunday and came by once in a while. His sermons seemed part of the punishment.”
“He let you down?”
“Touché. I suppose I wanted him to. I didn't want ready-made answers, not that he had any. He spent most of his time wondering what Christianity was, and why we should think ourselves better than others. My experience as a Catholic was that I had thought myself worse.”
“You met Nathaniel's wife?”
“Yes. Marilyn. I liked her. She was thoroughly California, but still a nun in a way, a woman with a message. Only now it had to do with sex. Getting rid of inhibitions was the purpose of life.
My faith may have gone, but I knew that was a pretty limited notion. She worried about me. She had a video she insisted I watch. We watched it together. She and Richards snuggled on the couch while we watched.”
My faith may have gone, but I knew that was a pretty limited notion. She worried about me. She had a video she insisted I watch. We watched it together. She and Richards snuggled on the couch while we watched.”
“You never married?”
“I have been unlucky in love as well.”
He seemed to insist on the banality of his life, and yet it does not require utter tragedy to bring a person low, to the realization that the world is not one's own artifact. Or that where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal cannot be our ultimate treasure. Morgan remembered the passage.
“It's a cliché, of course. Some prisoners read up on the law, others read the Bible. There must have been a dozen new translations of the Bible in the prison library. I settled for the King James version.”
“No Douay-Rheims?”
“What's that?”
“We used to call it the Catholic Bible. A translation of the Latin vulgate less elegant than Cramner's.”
“You seem to think I know things I don't.”
“Well, I don't know why you asked to see a priest.”
“Are you happy in your parish?”
“Yes.”
“Never thought of getting out of the priesthood?”
“My worry is that the priesthood would get out of me.”
“I took Edna Hospers and her kids to a ball game. For a moment there, I was seeing myself as having a wife, kids like hers. And then her boy looked me up on the Web.”
“And you went on retreat.”
“I decided to do what I had come here to do. Confront Richards and see how he would react to seeing me.”
“How did he react?”
“I never found out. For a while I thought I would just let him worry, knowing I was there. We could talk face to face after he'd had plenty of time to wonder why I had come.”
“So you didn't kill him?”
“It doesn't seem to matter if you're innocent once the police get hold of you.”
“You fled the lodge. Where did you go?”
Morgan looked surprised. “Don't you know?”
“I know that you were discovered in my school.”
After a moment, Morgan said, “It was the only haven I knew.”
“You didn't count on Cy Horvath remembering that you had taken Edna Hospers to dinner and had treated her and her kids to a ball game?”
“I didn't even think that I might get Edna into trouble. Oh, I thought of it, why deny it? But I had no alternative. She isn't in any trouble, is she?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That's one good thing anyway.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“You're doing it. I have longed just to talk like this.”
“And that's enough?”
“Did you expect me to ask you to hear my confession?”
“Yes.”
A long silence. “I wouldn't know where to begin.”
“Would you like to try? You've told me an awful lot already.”
Father Dowling took out the miniature stole he had brought. Morgan stared at it.
“You came prepared.”
“Should I put it on?”
A series of expressions fluttered across his face. The final one was resigned.
“Yes.”
O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
âPsalm 118
Â
The superior of the Athanasians had come to the rectory, showing up without fanfare and startling Marie Murkin with his almost ebullient manner.
“Ah, Mrs. Murkin, you are a sight for sore eyes.”
“I have wanted to talk to you so much,” the housekeeper had said, but without any hope of becoming the confidante of Boniface and having him pour out to her the troubles that had visited the Athanasians. Marie had belatedly wondered at the fact that Stanley Morgan had been discovered hiding in the school and developed an explanation of it.
“Had you heard that Edna went to dinner with him?” she had asked the pastor. “Did you know he took the whole family to a ball game?”
“As you always said, Marie, he was a good man.”
“Some people dissemble very well.”
“Stanley Morgan?”
“And others.” And she had expressed her wonder that Edna had been with the man when Cy Horvath made the arrest. “She had the nerve to suggest that he had come here because of me.”
“That's hardly impossible, Marie.”
“Then why didn't he come to the rectory? There's something fishy, Father Boniface.”
“Oh, I doubt that, Marie.”
The fact was that Father Dowling had talked with Cy Horvath, but the lieutenant had been unwilling to say whether Edna had anything to do with Morgan's being found in the nurse's office on the third floor of the school.
“Anyone can just walk in and walk around. As I did when I found him.”
“What prompted you to look for him there?”
Cy's silence could be as uncommunicative as his speech. “It's where I would have gone if I were him. He was a stranger here. How many places did he know of? No doubt he saw he could slip into the school and find some empty room.”
Perhaps Cy thought Father Dowling meant to ask Edna about it, but he did not. Whatever had happened had ended differently and sooner than Morgan had imagined. Nor had Father Dowling pursued that aspect when he spoke to Morgan in the visitor's room of the jail.
When he had heard Father Boniface speaking to Marie, Father Dowling had emerged from his study to greet his unexpected visitor. Marie had watched the two men head back to the study with a forlorn expression.
“I will make tea, Father Boniface.”
“Not for me, Marie. I only drink it during Lent.”
“Lent?”
“I hate tea.”
And so Marie had been shut out and Father Dowling heard the good news of Boniface's meeting with the cardinal.
Boniface was a changed man, no longer despondent and beaten, and Father Dowling understood why when his old friend told him of his meeting with the cardinal.
“Do we never stop being children, Father Dowling? I realized that I had been seeing everything in terms of its effect on me. If my life was coming to a close, then that of the Athanasians, too, would soon be over. Nonsense. It is the destiny of an order to outlast its members. I feel I have been an utter failure as superior. The Order has been in melancholy hands. But no more.”
Clearly Boniface was eager to lay out the lines for the renewal of his Order and report to the cardinal. But his next appointment would be a very different one. And his attitude toward the tragic happening at the grotto had also changed.
“They have the murderer in custody. Doubtless the trial will prove a sensation for the press, but it is merely an event. Not that I downplay the death of poor Nathaniel.”
“I am sure the murder will be solved and the one responsible prosecuted.”
“How I lament the way I treated the return of Nathaniel and the way I reacted when he began his little campaign. I should have stopped it immediately as I did eventually.”
“Let us hope that proves to have been the turning point for the Athanasians.”
“I think I may have been unjust to Nathaniel.”
“How so?”
“Perhaps he was not acting out of the hope of personal gain.”
“Was that unclear?”
“Or perhaps he did not see it for what it was.”
“May he rest in peace.”
“Amen. Amen. I suppose I should show more responsibility for poor Morgan, although I cannot think what I can do for him.”
“If he is tried, you will be called to testify.”
“Oh, my God.” And for a moment the beaten Boniface was back. But not for long. “I will do what I must do. You have visited him?”
“He wanted to see a priest.”
The implications of putting it that way were not lost on Boniface and he did not pursue the subject. What would Boniface's reaction have been if he had heard the man's confession? Father Dowling asked him to say more about the plans for renewal. They were indeed exciting and, the more one thought of it, possible of realization. But the attempt alone was worth it and the prospect had transformed Boniface.
An aspect of Boniface's previous downheartedness was that the drama of the Georges had passed him by. His only mention of them was that the new plan would be reassuring to the Georges, father and son.
“I shall also propose to the cardinal that we resume pastoral work for the archdiocese. Not a parish, of course, not yet. But helping out, for example. Would you want someone here, Father?”
“Only if it's you, Boniface.”
The superior beamed. “That is what I was going to propose. I want to set the example. I won't be in your way?”
“A Mass on Sundays, perhaps?”
“And Saturday confessions.”
And so the bargain was struck. But Boniface was not done.
“Whatever Morgan's motive, the reason he gave for wanting to stay with us, plus the memory of your recent retreat, suggests another avenue to be explored.”
A retreat center. For priests, but for laity as well. “Separately, of course. This will acquaint people with our new lease on life.”
“If you need a recommendation with priests, I shall be happy to give one.”
He himself had found the melancholy Boniface a good retreat master, the task enabling the Athanasian to put aside for the nonce his gloomy forebodings and draw on a lifetime of spiritual development.
“And I look forward to teaching Latin again. Did I ever tell you of the visit I once made to Horace's villa near Tivoli?”
He hadn't and he almost chattered as he recalled the sunny day he had climbed into the hills and seen the remains of the country redoubt where the Roman poet had escaped from the suffocating patronage of Augustus. “Of course he had Lalage there,” Boniface said. “His slave girl. You remember the phrase,
Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, dulce loquentem â¦
Of course, that is an ode I never dwelt on with my students. Young George was my last great success as a teacher.”
Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, dulce loquentem â¦
Of course, that is an ode I never dwelt on with my students. Young George was my last great success as a teacher.”
“Michael?”
“He was educated with us. There were only a few seminarians then, many of whom left, but I went on with Michael. He is a gifted Latinist.”
A delightful surprise. When Boniface left, Father Dowling felt that he had been given a glimpse of the bright future awaiting the Athanasians.
“Well, he was cheerful enough,” Marie said.
“Indeed he was.”
“Odd.”
“Do you prefer melancholy visitors?”
“I mean, after what's happened.”
“He is putting his mind to what is going to happen.”
“The trial? Oh, I dread being asked to give testimony. I hope nothing I say hurts the man half as much as he has hurt himself, but justice must be done.”
“And mercy bestowed.”
“Not by a court of law, Father Dowling. That is not its purpose.”
“How hard you are becoming.”
“I hate to be made a fool of.”
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