The Banished Children of Eve (19 page)

“It may rain again, Your Grace. It will aggravate your rheumatism,” Corrigan said. He felt himself sinking into the mud. He lifted his left foot, and the mud almost pulled off his shoe. Water dripped from the scaffolding onto his hat.

The Archbishop stood with his hand against the wall. He seemed not to hear. Corrigan cleared his throat. In the time he had been the Archbishop's secretary, Corrigan had never raised his voice to him. As unthinkable as Peter raising his voice to Our Lord. But now he had no choice.

“Sir, I must insist.” He said it so loudly he felt himself stiffen from the sound. Hughes didn't move. Corrigan repeated himself. “Sir, I must insist you step out from here.” Nothing. “Sir, Your Grace, your sister gave me specific instruction: ‘Keep the Archbishop out of the rain.'”

She had stood by the door, arms folded beneath her small bosom, like a mother superior talking to a novice. She had all the haughtiness of her brother. “Madam Archbishop,” some of the priests had taken to calling her since Hughes had moved into her home on the top of Murray Hill, a three-story town house with a commanding view of Brooklyn and the lower city. At first it had seemed a good idea. When they had returned from Rome in February, the Archbishop had been sick. His sister said the old residence on Mulberry Street was drafty and the neighborhood unwholesome. It was hard to argue with her. The squat brownstone cathedral and its grounds were wedged in the narrow streets between Broadway and the Bowery, an insignificant collection of buildings lost amid the tenements, factories, and saloons that surrounded it.

The Rodrigue
house was only twelve blocks from the new cathedral. A short drive. The Archbishop can visit it when he wishes, Mrs. Rodrigue said. It will lift his spirits. Besides, this is a home more like the one he will occupy when the cathedral is finished. She was right. Stately, tall, with a corner location that let its rooms fill with southern light, it was a home fit for an archbishop, a long way from the cramped quarters downtown. It was enjoyable at first. The fine carpets, the warmth, the private chapel. Only gradually did the visitor begin to detect the uniformity in Mrs. Rodrigue's voice: She addressed priests and house-guests as she did the light-skinned Negro servants. She and her husband used French with the servants; but it didn't matter, the tone was the same. Clipped, unpleasant, an undercurrent of annoyance.

In the vestibule under the cut-glass chandelier, she had unfolded her arms and put her hands on her hips. Her gray hair was pulled back severely from her face. Always the peasant wife talking to the spalpeens, acting as if she were better than they. Corrigan struggled to maintain an impassive face.

“The Archbishop is not to get out of the coach. He is to be kept out of the rain. Is that clear, Father?”

“We must return to the coach this minute,” Corrigan said.

Hughes didn't move. He ran his fingers over the wall. The stone was wet and cool, like a tomb. The day wasn't far off. They would carry him in procession to his grave. The priests in black chasubles with gold crosses embroidered front and back. The altar clouded by incense. But where? Not here. No altar, no roof, no floor, no windows, no vault with the chiseled words
JOHANNES, ARCHIEPISCOPOS PRIMUS NEO-EBORACENSIS
Would he be put beneath the floor of the old cathedral on Mulberry Street? Forgotten. Left behind. When Hughes's sister Mary had died in county Monaghan, the law had forbidden Catholic priests to enter the gates of a cemetery. The procession had stopped at the stone wall, and the priest had reached down and scooped a handful of dirt from the road. The priest blessed the dirt and poured it into Hughes's hands. It made a sad, empty sound when he dropped it onto his sister's coffin. They never raised a marker above her grave. They began leaving the next year. His father went first, to a place called Maryland, a place where they had been told Catholics could live well. A long time ago. Mary waiting all these years beneath the wet grass. No stone to remind passersby to pray for her soul. Her family gone, the last of them driven out by the Famine and the Orangemen. The wind moved through the door-less portal of the cathedral. A sad, empty sound.

“Your
Grace, please, I am begging you.” Corrigan gently touched Hughes's sleeve. “Step out from here.” Large drops of water continued to drop from the scaffolding onto the broad rim of his hat. He kept his hand on Hughes's sleeve. The Archbishop walked away from the wall. Corrigan followed behind him. More rain was imminent. To the west, heavy clouds were skirring low across the sky, their black bellies seeming to scrape the earth as they approached the horizon. There was a long, distant rumble. Lightning crossed the sky.

Corrigan circled the Archbishop like a dog herding sheep. He stayed at his side, directing him toward the wooden fence, then moving him back toward the gate. Corrigan realized he was perspiring. But slowly they were moving in the right direction. You must help guide the Archbishop, Cardinal Barnabo had told him, and he put his hands together like a ship and moved them in a zigzag fashion. Keep him on the narrow path. The Cardinal's hands moved smoothly ahead in a straight line.

They walked side by side back to the gate. Corrigan relaxed a bit. The cheek of Heaney. Sitting in the coach and leaving him to escort the old man alone. Always so polite with the Archbishop, a fawning, cloying, false man. As lazy as any Negro. He always reeked of horse manure and whiskey. His favorite tactic was to engage in conversation as a way of avoiding work. The sort who give the Irish a bad name among the Protestants. He would have to bring this up with Mrs. Rodrigue again. Simply refuse to take him as driver. But Heaney now had this incident to use against him.
Father Corrigan left your brother, His Grace, to wandering in the mud and rain, and it's a miracle he didn't catch the death of it.
Heaney would employ any tactic. Shameless as well as shiftless. They approached the lake of mud. Corrigan began herding the Archbishop away from it. But it was useless. The Archbishop seemed once again determined to part it. Corrigan looked down at the Archbishop's shoes. They were caked in mud. So were the bottoms of his cape and pants. Mrs. Rodrigue would know right away. Corrigan felt small beads of sweat run from his armpits down his sides.

The Archbishop
stopped at the edge of the puddle and turned around. In the distance, over the fence that ran along Madison Avenue, he could see the upper stories of a row of brownstones sited where a farmhouse had once stood. Thirteen years ago, before the rumor of the new cathedral led to a fever of land speculation, before Mr. Renwick had been consulted, a stooped, hatless man had come out onto his porch and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. An ancient, solitary Yankee with a white beard, he stayed there for nearly an hour as the three strangers had walked across a field of wildflowers. He watched them as they got back into the coach and drove away.

He was a well-known character in this area, said Mr. Curran, the diocesan lawyer, on the trip home. Amos Greene. As a boy of six or seven, he had helped his mother fill a wagon with food and cider and drove over to the Bloomingdale Road to feed Washington's soldiers as they retreated up Manhattan away from General Howe. His mother had hoped to find her husband amid those men. But he had been captured in Brooklyn. At one point, as they were doling out their food to the retreating Continentals, an advance party of redcoats came up on them, and, Greene claims, he grabbed a musket and fired it at them, killing one of the British soldiers and alerting the Americans. Says he was the youngest person to fire a musket in the Revolution. He's been telling that story forever. Mr. Barnum has agreed to sign him up as an exhibit at his museum. “
THE YOUNGEST HERO OF THE REVOLUTION.
” Someone to go alongside General Washington's Negro wet nurse.

Nothing
left. No farmhouse. No fields. No Amos Greene. Who remembered him, the youngest soldier of the Revolution?

Corrigan stood behind the Archbishop and waited. The wind cut through his clothing. The sweat was a cold film against his body. He would be the one who would end up getting sick. It was Heaney's fault. He shivered. At least the Archbishop was wrapped in his black cape. At the base of the Archbishop's skull, Corrigan noted, were two slight indentations, as if the flesh had wasted away. Hughes was a small man but had the thick, hard body of a laborer, the result of a childhood and young manhood spent as a hired hand. An awkward strength, too concentrated in the arms and chest, it had made him seem larger than he was. But the muscle was disappearing, the Archbishop's body sagging like the framework around his cathedral.

The year he had come over from Rome and taken up his duties as the Archbishop's secretary, Corrigan had driven up from Mulberry Street with Hughes for the laying of the cornerstone. They had put on their vestments in an old farmhouse across from the field. It had been sold by its owner, the boy hero of the Revolution, to a speculator, who had rented it to the diocese for the day. An exorbitant price. But they had no choice. Thirty priests were to be in the procession. They needed someplace to dress. When they had vested and come out on the porch, they were shocked at the size of the crowd that was still gathering. People were streaming up Madison and Fifth. A vast throng already filled the field, a sea that lapped around the wooden island erected near Fifth Avenue on which the dignitaries were to sit.

The Feast of the Assumption. August 15th. It was not yet midmorning, but the heat was blistering. On the fringes of the crowd, the odd tent sprouted up where beer and whiskey were being sold. Hughes called over the Commissioner of Police and demanded it be stopped. But as soon as the police closed one tent, another would open somewhere else. One German beer vendor, with a cask roped down in the back of his wagon, began to scream loudly when the police moved in and tried to lead him away. The crowd surged around him, and the police backed off. Hughes stood motionless on the porch. From behind, Corrigan could see the muscles in the Archbishop's neck as they tightened. Above the white of the stola, his skin was crimson.

Corrigan
walked next to Hughes as thurifer. There was barely enough room for them to pass. The people in front pushed back against the solid wall of humanity behind them. There was shouting, and it seemed as if the crowd might surge forward and overwhelm the Archbishop and his priests. Hughes kept moving at a deliberate pace, turning right and left to give his benediction. One man fell to his knees as the Archbishop drew near. The sway of the crowd sent him sprawling. Hughes stepped over him and moved on.

A layer of brown dust began to cover the white vestments of the priests. It filled their mouths. Corrigan thought he would have to put the censer down. With the smoke and the dust, he could barely breathe. He kept moving, his eyes down, and followed the silver-tipped spike on the bottom of Hughes's crosier as it struck the dry, brittle earth. It was frightening to look up. The flushed faces covered with matted hair. Mouths of broken teeth. The smell of a barnyard. Some of them were reeling drunk. Their heavy woolen pants and jackets, hideously ill-fitted, were soaked with sweat. An old woman with a heavy black shawl and a pipe stuck between her teeth held up a pair of rosary beads. She put her face into Corrigan's. “Bless me beads, Father,” she said rapidly as she stepped backward. She repeated it over and over. “Bless me beads, Father.” The stench of her breath almost made him vomit. He kept the censer in his right hand and blessed her beads with his left.

They drew near to the platform. The crowd was thicker than ever. As people shuffled backward to make way for the procession, others were pushed against the platform. They screamed loudly. Hughes went up the wooden stairs first. When he reached the top, a thunderous cheer went up. Corrigan came up behind him. Governor King was standing there, holding his tall hat in his hand. Behind the small silver circles of his spectacles, his eyes were wide with fear. The dignitaries all stood and crowded around Hughes, as if for protection. In the middle of the platform was the cornerstone. It sat there like an altar. The priests came up behind him and filled the platform. Corrigan stood directly behind Hughes and swung the censer. A priest came forward and opened the book from which Hughes was to read the prayers.