William Kienzle - Sudden Death

“You know,” said McNiff as he loaded tartar sauce on the fish, “I got a document yesterday in the mail from the Tribunal. They wanted the document to be put in the parish’s secret archives. Put me in mind of when I was at St. Mary Magdalen in Melvindale-”

“With old Jake Parker.” Koesler was relatively certain that McNiff would not be coming up with any old Jake Parker stories that hadn’t been told before. But, what the heck, they were good stories.

“Right.” McNiff warmed to the memory of old Jake Parker. “So, anyway, I got a document then, too, from the Tribunal, to be placed in the secret archives. So I went to Jake, told him the problem, and asked where the secret archives were. And he said, ‘Father, they’re so secret, even I don’t know where they are.’”

They laughed. Good for the digestion.

“Didn’t you miss Melvindale your first time out?” Koesler recalled.

“Yup. Drove right through the little suburb. Finally asked a cop where Melvindale was, and he said, ‘Father, you just left it.’

“But that’s the way Jake looked at it too. Once I got another missive from the Tribunal. This time they wanted me to do a notary job on a marriage case.”

“You don’t get those as much now as you used to. . at least I don’t.”

“That’s right. But back then, I was getting them almost every week. And I’d have to go out and call on somebody-who was usually pretty hostile-and ask a lot of personal questions. Well, anyway, I’d had it, so I went in to see Jake and I told him, ‘I’ve had it with these notary jobs. What would they do to me downtown if I don’t do it? If I just refuse to do it, what could they do to me downtown?’

“And Jake says. ‘Father, they couldn’t do anything to you; you’re already here.’”

They laughed again. As anticipated, Koesler had heard the story previously. But when consummate raconteurs such as Myron Cohen or Flip Wilson begin to tell their stories, one looked forward to hearing one of their familiar anecdotes.

“Actually”-McNiff had polished off the fish and was working on the few remaining fries-“I think old Jake was ashamed about being in Melvindale, though I don’t know why; it’s a nice enough little town. But for some reason, he just didn’t think anything good happened in Melvindale.

“Now that I think of it, it might just have been something in old Jake’s personality.

“I remember for years I used to get at him to ask for another assistant. We had almost three thousand families and there were just the two of us. But he wouldn’t do it because he was afraid of being turned down. Finally, one fall, he broke down and asked the Chancery for another priest. Well, his worst fears were realized: he didn’t get one. They turned him down. And those were the years when every September and June they shifted hundreds of priests to different parishes and all the new appointments were published in the Detroit Catholic. ”

“I remember it well. I was the editor. I used to publish those new assignments. We’d start on page 1 with pastoral appointments, then stick all the assistant assignments on page 2. It always took at least the entire page. Sometimes they ran over onto page 3.

“I remember once our reporter wrote a mock account, which opened, ‘Seven tons of priests were transferred. .’”

“Exactly. Well, the day the new assignments were published-none of them being to St. Mary Magdalen, Melvindale-old Jake sat at the dining-room table all day long with the Detroit Catholic in front of him, opened to the assignment page. And every time somebody would pass by, old Jake would call him over and point to the page and say, ‘Look at that! Just look at that! You couldn’t put your finger on one of those assignments and say, ‘Now there was a smart move.’”

Koesler hadn’t heard that one before. “It’s rationalization like that that can lead to mental health.”

Having finished the ground round, Koesler was sloshing the fries in mushroom gravy. Oh, yes, it would have to be some walk tomorrow. “Reminds me of when I was at Patronage of St. Joseph parish. It was just me and the pastor, Father Pompilio. Then a monsignor from the Chancery was going to take up residence at Patronage. He was offered a single room, just like the one I had. But a Chancery monsignor wasn’t about to take that lying down-literally. So Pomps was obliged to surrender his very nice three-room pastoral suite to the monsignor. Later, he explained to me how, in the end, he had outsmarted the monsignor: The single room was closer to the ceiling fan in the hallway than the suite was.”

The busboy asked if they were finished. Silly question, thought Koesler; he knew he was supposed to ask, but still it seemed obvious that all that was left were the empty plates.

He cleared them away and Kay Marie ascertained that McNiff would have coffee and Koesler decaf and that neither would have dessert. Koesler considered the thought of dessert obscene.

McNiff patted his tummy appreciatively. “We haven’t got a corner on the sort of logic that, as you say, leads to mental health. Before we had our own school in Melvindale, a bunch of nuns used to come in several times a week to teach catechism in the church. And that, of course, was fine with me. I’ve always said the art of being a truly fine catechist is finding somebody else to teach catechism.”

Koesler nodded approval.

“But old Jake Parker insisted that we go over at least once and talk to the little kids who were going to make their first communion. So this one time I went over, reluctantly, and waited while this nun, their teacher, introduced me. She said, ‘Children, Father is going to talk to you now. And I want you to pay good attention to what he’s going to say. After all, he spent twelve years getting ready to teach you.’ I wondered why she brought that up and where she intended to go with it. Then she added, ‘Of course, I spent twenty-three years in preparation. . ‘ I felt like the village idiot. But I guess she managed to preserve her mental health.”

Kay Marie brought the beverages. McNiff asked for the bill.

“Well,” said Koesler, “I doubt you’d find many nuns that uptight today. Maybe it’s as simple as back then some said there were three sexes: men, women, and nuns. But today they know they’re women. They dress like women instead of like ancient statues. They’re permitted, even encouraged, to be mature, much more in charge of their own lives than ever before in history.

“But back then, you’re right: they could be a bit stiffnecked. One of the toughest groups I was ever associated with were the nuns at Patronage. Even for those days, those gals were on the strict side. I spent most of my time trying to talk our parochial kids into sticking it out and staying in school.

“Being with that group is probably what made the two funny ones stand out as much as they did.”

“You had two funny Salacians? That may be a record.”

McNiff began to compute the tip.

“Yup, two; count ‘em, two. One Tuesday, after Our Lady of Perpetual Help devotions, the two of them came back into the sacristy. They were the sacristans, which post became the only outlet they could find for their humor. One of them, a Sister Dulcilia-hard to forget a name like that-asked me if, when I blessed religious articles after the devotions, did the blessing include crosses. I said sure it did. So Dulcilia, pointing to her companion, said, ‘That’s fine; next week I hold Sister here on my lap.’

“Another time, I arrived in the sacristy to prepare for Perpetual Help devotions. As usual, the Sisters had laid out the appropriate vestments on the vestment case. I was already wearing my cassock and collar. So I put on the surplice and found that the Sisters had pinned to it one of those ribbons from a funeral floral arrangement with the word ‘Friends’ on it.