The Banished Children of Eve (79 page)

Ecce terriculum.

All gone. Mother Seton. Dubois. Years before. What was left? Only what the mirror beheld. An image to frighten birds, not men. No red hat. Half-built church. Sickness. Old age. Now this. Undone in a week what had taken a quarter of a century to build.

The Mayor, the Governor, the newspapers: You must tell the mob the Church is against them. Command them to stop.

As if they would listen. As if they would desist at one word from him.

What else did they expect him to say?

All my fault.
Mea maxima culpa.
Note of humility and contrition. Atonement for his arrogance, harshness, threats.

Nineteen years before, in 1844, they expected the same. Philadelphia in flames. Two Catholic churches burned. A Catholic library destroyed. A dozen people dead, scores wounded. A na-tivist delegation on its way to New York with a bloodstained flag. Fliers everywhere:
Rally to Be Held at City Hall Park! Papists and Foreigners Be Warned!

Went to see Mayor Morris.
James Harper, the Mayor-elect, also there. Twin smirks. Can't hide their glee that the chief Paddy has come to beg their protection. Don't even offer a chair.

“Are you afraid that some of your churches will be burned, Reverend Hughes?” the Mayor asks. A serpent's solicitude.

“No, I'm afraid some of
yours
will be”

They rise together out of their chairs.

“Is that a threat?” asks Mayor-elect Harper.

Only a fact: If you countenance a nativist demonstration in this city, the consequences belong to you, and if a single Catholic church is burned,
New York will become a second Moscow.

They turn in unison to the window as though the conflagration might already be under way. Park Row can be seen through swaying, leafy branches. Bustling, not burning.

Mayor-elect Harper: “I have never encountered such villainy in a clergyman! It is intolerable!”

Chief Paddy: “Sir, if I wished a lesson in villainy, I should think of no better teacher than a publisher like yourself who is so ashamed of printing the vile and lurid lies of the likes of Maria Monk that he sets up a separate publishing house to spew such anti-Catholic filth. Good day, gentlemen. You are forewarned.”

Words burned in their brains. The prophecy of Dagger John:
New York will become a second Moscow.

Now it was.

Rumble of artillery, pitched battles in the streets, murders and mutilations, lynchings, looting, mass drunkenness, arson, larceny. Cries of newsboys:
Massacre on Second Avenue! Terrible Battle in the Fourteenth Ward!
“The Arch-Hypocrite himself,” Mr. Horace Greeley proclaims, “let him tell his people to stop!”

Just like that: Jesus telling the waves to be still. Did Greeley and the others know the lie of it? Was that what they wanted to see? For him to say “Stop” and for it to continue? A public hu-miliation. Or did they really believe that the mobs would halt in their tracks and go to their homes at a word from Dagger John, the High Priest of Paddydom?

Dictated a statement to
Corrigan.
In spite of Mr. Greeley's assault upon the Irish, in the present disturbed condition of the city, I will appeal not only to them, but to all persons who love God and revere the holy Catholic religion which they profess, to respect the laws,
etc.

Published it. Not enough, they said. Some of his own priests come to him. Walk the streets, they pleaded. Make an appearance.

In a few moments he would step out onto the balcony. Could hear the voices below. Needed help in order to walk. Would have to sit as he spoke.

Not enough, they would say. Waited till Friday, when the army had the situation in hand.

Damn them all. What did they know?

The day Hughes had met with Morris and Harper, he'd walked out of City Hall down Park Row, barely aware of where he was headed. It was midday, and the crowds grew thicker as he approached Chatham Square and the Bowery, the saloons more numerous. A block away, the Five Points was as filled with revelers as it would be at midnight. Whores beckoned from doorways. Street musicians and beggars competed for the sidewalk. In the middle of the block, two muscular Negroes carried on a pugilistic demonstration. A semicircle of spectators egged them on, tossing pennies as the bigger of the two beat the other to his knees.

Farther along Chatham Street, at the corner of Roosevelt, a horde of dirty, half-naked children gamboled around a trench that overflowed with garbage. Old men sat on rickety wooden steps and talked with one another in Irish. Women shouted out of windows at the children in the street. Hughes crossed to the other side. A horse lay dead, its head on the curb. Two small children squatted beside it. Little more than infants, dressed only in sacks, they clapped with delight as two older boys stuck crumpled newspapers under the horse's tail and mane, and set them on fire. None of them saw Hughes as he crossed the street. He grabbed the biggest boy by the collar and spun him around. The threadbare collar ripped loose, and the boy fell backward on the sidewalk. The other boy ran away, and the infants began to cry.

Hughes straddled
the boy. “What's your name?”

The boy. tried to stand. Hughes drove a foot into his chest. “You aren't a savage!” he shouted. “Your parents gave you a name!”

“Toss, me name is Toss Brady.”

Hughes took away his foot and helped him up. “Get out of my sight, Thomas Brady, and don't let me see you near this animal again.” The boy took the wailing infants by their hands and hurried away. The air was filled with the acrid smell of the horse's burned hair.

A second Moscow.

He had measured the reaction in the faces of Morris and Harper to those words. Their rat's noses twitched with fear. They believed he could give the order and it would be done, the Paddies emptying from shebeens and cellars to do his bidding. But these streets contained the truth of the diocese of New York. A mass of people, few of whom knew him by sight, the most wretched of them in loose contact with the Church and the handful of priests he had to tend them. He would never apologize for what their oppressors had made them into. He must goad, push, guide them all. He knew what they were now, destitute, disorganized, and without discipline; but they were flesh of his flesh and he knew what they could become, and he would show the way, clear their path, so that they might be exemplars of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the moral superiors of their Yankee tormentors, the light that would lead America to the True Faith. Let the priests tend them in their particularity, consoling the broken and the doomed, baptizing, forgiving, burying. He would tend them as a flock, thousands upon thousands, use their strength of numbers to see to it that their hunger and exile, their suffering and sacrifices, their mourning and weeping in this vale of tears, weren't without consequence in this life as well as the life to come.

*

“Your Grace, it's time,” Corrigan said.

His sister crossed the room,
stood beside them, picked the lint off his sleeve, swept his shoulders with her other hand. Saw her in the same mirror as himself. Both in black, birds of a feather, more crows than scarecrows.

Took Corrigan's arm. Flabby, without muscle.

A few days before, Father Kavanaugh had stood in this very spot, tears in his eyes. Went on about the treatment of the Negroes. “What is being visited upon these people is shameful be-yond words.”

Sent him away. The cheek of him. What other priest had ever worked beside them in the fields, shared the same cup of water? Or written a poem as he had, in their defense, a poem that was published years ago in a newspaper in a small town above the Maryland border called Gettysburg?

Wipe from thy code, Columbia, wipe the stain;

Be free as the air, but yet be kind as free;

And chase foul bondage from thy southern plain;

Oh, let Afric's son feel what it is—to be.

Youthful dreams. Let freedom be. In America, things were taken, not bestowed. Shove your way in, shoulder against the door. The Negro had his friends. Let them help him. He would speak for his own people. Before the children of Africa were conquered and enslaved, hadn't the Saxons plundered the kingdom of Ireland? And though slavery rescued the African from his pagan superstitions and gave him the light of Christianity, hadn't Ireland's conquerors tried to extinguish the Faith, to uproot the foundations of northern Europe's oldest Catholic realm? And though the Yankees wept and ranted over the sin of slavery, what tears had they shed over Ireland's oppression, the exodus and mass starvation of her children, the destitute women and children left to die in ditches or to beg some small sustenance? What abolitionist had offered them a single crust of bread? What true friend of humanity had extended them a hand? Or had anything in his heart for them save derision, ridicule, disdain?

Let nobody lecture
him about the Negro or the war.

What bishop had done more than he?.

He had preached the war and the draft from the pulpit: “For my own part, if I had a voice in the councils of the nation, I would say, ‘Let volunteers continue and the draft be made!' This is not cruelty; this is mercy; this is humanity—anything that will put an end to this spilling of human blood across the whole surface of the country.”

Gone to Europe at the behest of Seward and Lincoln, to press the country's cause with the French Emperor and the Pope. “You speak their language,” Seward said.

In Paris, the Emperor hardly said a word. Sipped brandy and watched the Empress as she leaned toward Hughes and pointed to a small scar next to her eye, a tiny crease in her milk-white skin. “Here, Bishop Hughes, here is a souvenir of the Republicans, something I have to remember them by, a sliver of iron from one of their bombs. They came close, but they forgot that it is not the gendarmerie who protects the Emperor, but God!”

“The Republicans in American don't throw bombs,” Hughes said. “Our President upholds order, he does not subvert it.”

“Not throw bombs! Mr. Lincoln not throw bombs!” The Empress's cheeks turned red. “Why, I wonder what Monsieur Davis and the good people of Virginia would think of your assertion! And tell me, Your Grace, is it a love of order that brings Mr. Lincoln to support Juarez and his Republicans in Mexico? They butcher priests and nuns, expropriate private property, and run out on the country's debts, but I suppose from your point of view, Juarez has the interests of the Church at heart.”

In Rome, Cardinal Antonelli swiveled slightly in his chair and turned his profile toward Hughes. The image of Mother Seton jumped into his head, a memory from long ago, her severe profile behind a screen, image of a virgin martyr. Antonelli's face was the other side of the coin. Imperial nose and forehead, the smooth features of a Roman emperor: a maker of martyrs.

The Cardinal folded his hands
together in front of his face, the index fingers joined together and pointed upward. He leaned back in his chair and glanced toward the dark and distant recesses of the ceiling. “Pardon me, but I am perhaps a little confused,” he said. He unfolded his hands and held out his left palm. “On the one hand, you are a true supporter of the cause of the Holy See, which no one can doubt. But on the other, you travel on the business of President Lincoln, a friend to the Holy Father's enemies, and you take it upon yourself to visit the Emperor, to insult both him and his wife, and in so doing to endanger the very future of the Church.” Antonelli moved each hand up and down as if it were part of a scale unable to come into balance. “Where is the true weight of one's loyalty?”

“I insulted no one. I conveyed to the Emperor the President's wish that we avoid war between our two countries. And who dares accuse me of disloyalty to the Holy Father?”

A cold smile from the Cardinal. The face of a gombeen-man, a scheming seminarian who had mastered the papal books and, without being ordained, fixed it so that the Pope couldn't buy a pair of socks without his approval.

“My friend, you are loved and respected in this city, but, well, because of the great distance between Rome and America, a certain confusion has been allowed to arise, and essential matters have become obscured and blurred. It is regrettable but not incurable, I assure you. The time is coming when the Holy Father will dispel all doubt, when he will clarify his authority for the educated and uneducated alike, and there shall be no trying to disguise error as truth, and disloyalty will be expunged.”

“Who is it who says I am disloyal? Give me one name!”

“Please, Your Grace, we must go. We have placed a chair on the balcony.” Corrigan again. Pudgy folds of the neck protruding around the starched and immaculate collar, a nun's labor.

Outside, a Roman sun, pitiless. Across the way, houses shuttered against the rioters, against the sun, perhaps against him. He sat, felt the humiliation of it as soon as he did. Gripped the balustrade, tried to pull himself up. No strength in his arms. This would have to do.

Cheering
from below.

“They call you rioters, but I can't see a rioter's face among you …”

Christ, it was all a jumble, words, ideas, past, present. “If I could have met you anywhere, I should have gone. But I could not go. My limbs are weaker than my lungs …”

The pulpit in the cathedral would be as high as this balcony. A marble perch. It would face a great rose window in the western facade, a circle of light, the eye of God, the unblinking Judge.

O
Christ, what sin was so great that You should turn away Your face and abandon Your servant like this?