David Dickinson: Death of a Pilgrim

‘You must light these,’ she said, ‘and as you light each one, you must pray to God in his mercy to save the life of your son. Do not worry if we have gone before you have finished. You must light them all and then return to the bedside. Later on this morning I am going to find you a priest or a chaplain to teach you how to pray.’

With that Matron knelt to the ground in the pew beside him. Delaney turned to the candles to his left and began lighting them very slowly. Please God, spare the life of my son James, he said to himself, feeling coarse and awkward as he did so. Gradually, as he repeated his prayer, he began to weep. The tears poured down his face and would not stop. Sometimes they would drop on to his match and extinguish the possibility of lighting another symbolic message before it had even begun. The nuns took little sideways glances at the weeping tycoon but left him to his ordeal. At eight o’clock the Sisters began to peel away, walking quietly back to their nunnery or their places on the wards. Matron sent word to a Father Kennedy, asking him to come to the hospital and to James Delaney’s ward later that day. Michael Delaney had not finished yet, though one wall was a blaze of light, dancing off the faces of the saints or the waters of the Lake of Galilee. It was so strange for Delaney, asking an unknown and invisible God to save the life of his only son. His was not a world made up of these religious or metaphysical certainties. His was a world of balance sheets, of strike-breaking, of amalgamations, of mighty trusts, of personal enrichment, of power, power over the lives of the thousands of people who worked for him, power over the local politicians who might need a subvention to help them through their next election, power over grander politicians, aspirant statesmen perhaps, whose need for invisible assistance was often as great as their hunger for high office. Alone in the chapel with his matches and his candles he thought of Mary, the boy’s mother, who had died three years before. She too had come to this last resting place of Manhattan’s Catholics and been tended by the nuns until she died. There had been, he shuddered slightly, a great deal of pain. It was a mercy, they said, when she was called home. Delaney didn’t think it had been a mercy then and he didn’t think it was a mercy now. This God person, he reckoned, reaching up to the top of a sconce almost out of reach, He had a lot to answer for. If He took James as well, Delaney thought, he would write God out of his account books, sell Him off to a competitor, even at a knockdown price, put Him out of business, close this God outfit down once and for all.

Just before nine o’clock all the candles were lit. Delaney sat down in one of the pews and looked around him. He tried to remember the words but they had gone. Hail Mary, that meant something, he was fairly sure of it. The same went for Our Father. But of what those nuns said as their knees rested on the stone floor he had no idea. He turned back at the door and looked one last time at the candles. He wondered if their light would go out before his son’s life. Suddenly his brain took off into a strange mixture of his own world and the very different world of the hospital. Did they have enough candles here at the hospital? Did the other hospitals? This was something he, Michael Delaney, could do. His mind set off on a journey round the economics of candle production, possible advanced production techniques that could reduce the cost of manufacture and the numbers of employees, candle transportation routes and freight rates, distribution of candles round the churches and hospitals of New York. Would it be cheaper to amalgamate candle supply into general delivery lines of food, linen and so on, or simply have one outfit responsible for distribution? What about the competition in candle land? Could he buy them out? Could he drive them out of business?

As Delaney pondered these questions on his way back to the ward a whistle blew less than a mile away at one of New York’s great railway stations. A mighty passenger train moved slowly out on its way to Chicago. The train was nearly full and promised to be a busy one for the stewards and the cabin staff. This railway line was one of many owned by Delaney’s companies. This section of his three and a half thousand railway employees across the eastern seaboard of the United States was clocking on for work on the normal ten-hour shift with no breaks, which would see them travel halfway across a continent. And, in the rear part of the train, there was a steward who rejoiced in the name of Patrick or Paddy Delaney, a cousin of the proprietor on the Irish side of the family though the two had never met.

The boy had hardly moved in his bed when his father returned. The new Sister on his left was also stroking his hand. Delaney paced up and down the room, staring into the face of his son, doing more planning for his schemes for a candle monopoly, then peering out of the window. Sometimes he cried and wished he knew the words of the prayers. Ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock passed, and by noon Delaney’s train with his cousin on board was well into upstate New York. Occasionally a doctor would come in and look at the young man, feeling his pulse and taking his temperature by the heat on his forehead. None of the doctors had seen a version of the disease like this. They were acutely conscious that any new treatment might not cure the young man. It might kill him instead.

Shortly before one o’clock a priest appeared and took Michael Delaney aside. You must go home and rest now, the priest told him. You do not need to rest for a very long time, but you must maintain your strength for what might happen. I, Father Kennedy, will meet you here in the chapel at seven o’clock this evening. The nuns will have finished their services by then. Please, I will stay with the boy a while.

Delaney’s carriage and Delaney’s coachman had waited for him outside St Vincent’s. The coachman spent his time playing cards with the porters or reading one of his ever-growing collection of magazines about motor cars. Mercedes Benz. Ford. Chrysler. Cadillac. Bugatti. The coachman was very fond of his horses but these names took him to another world where he sat proudly at the wheel of a mighty machine and drove his master up and down the eastern seaboard, hooting his horn at recalcitrant pedestrians, a muffler round his throat and a chauffeur’s cap upon his head. As they made their way slowly through the crowded streets they were overtaken by a couple of fire trucks, their insistent bells shrieking and echoing round the thoroughfares. Sitting inside his carriage, Michael Delaney remembered that other bell which had woken him up earlier. He thought suddenly of the numerous funerals he attended as his contemporaries in the Wall Street jungle died off in their prime. Delaney never missed one of these sad occasions, come, his enemies whispered, to make sure that another of his competitors had really been removed from the earthly market place. He recalled the words in one of the addresses, usually full of sentimental rubbish about the dead man, now transformed from a rapacious capitalist into a virtual saint and generous benefactor of the poor: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ Were these bells ringing for him? For his son? Michael Delaney huddled into his greatcoat and tried to pray.

The Archbishop of New York used to say that the net wealth of Father Patrick Kennedy’s flock was about the same as that of a medium-sized country like Sweden or Portugal. Delaney was a parishioner of his, a very occasional worshipper at Mass, like so many of his kind, but a generous contributor to church charities, like so many of his kind. Quite simply, Father Kennedy was the parish priest in the richest part of the richest city in one of the richest countries on earth. He was popular with his congregation, Father Kennedy, with his charming voice and elegant manners from the Old Confederate State of Virginia. In his youth Father Kennedy had been slim, ascetic almost, a devoted reader of the works of Meister Eckhardt and St Thomas Aquinas. He was about five feet ten inches tall with a Roman nose and his blue eyes were then fixed on another world. The temptations of the flesh did not reach him in his rich parish, but the temptations of the table made an impact. Middle-aged now, he was known to his critics as the Friar Tuck of Manhattan. He glided through the Fifth Avenue drawing rooms with his polite smiles and his anecdotes from his time in Europe a decade before. Father Kennedy was very successful at drawing new converts into the bosom of Mother Church, and as most of his recruits were as rich as everybody else in the parish, St James the Greater increased yet further in wealth until cynics in poorer parishes referred to it as St James the Richer.