J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“What a pity.”

“No great loss, Your Excellency.”

“You are too… modest, Father. But perhaps the violin was not your instrument.”

“I guess it wasn’t, Your Excellency.” Father Burner laughed out too loud.

“And you have the choir at Saint Patrick’s, Father?”

“Not this year, Your Excellency. Father Quinlan has it.”

“Now I recall…”

“Yes.” So far as he was concerned — and there were plenty of others who thought so, too — Quinlan had played hell with the choir, canning all the women, some of them members for fifteen and twenty years, a couple even longer and practically living for it, and none of them as bad as Quinlan said. The liturgical stuff that Quinlan tried to pull off was all right in monasteries, where they had the time to train for it, but in a parish it sounded stodgy to ears used to the radio and split up the activity along sexual lines, which was really old hat in the modern world. The Dean liked it though. He called it “honest” and eulogized the men from the pulpit — not a sign that he heard how they brayed and whinnied and just gave out or failed to start — and each time it happened ladies in the congregation were sick and upset for days afterward, for he inevitably ended by attacking women, pants, cocktails, communism, cigarettes, and running around half naked. The women looked at the men in the choir, all pretty in surplices, and said to themselves they knew plenty about some of them and what they had done to some women.

“He’s tried a little Gregorian, hasn’t he — Father Quinlan?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Father Burner said. “He has.”

“Would you say it’s been a success — or perhaps I should ask you first if you care for Gregorian, Father.”

“Oh, yes, Your Excellency. Very much.”

“Many, I know, don’t… I’ve been told our chant sounds like a wild bull in a red barn or consumptives coughing into a bottle, but I will have it in the Cathedral, Father. Other places, I am aware, have done well with… light opera.”

Father Burner frowned.

“We are told the people prefer and understand it. But at the risk of seeming reactionary, a fate my office prevents me from escaping in any event, I say we spend more time listening to the voice of the people than is good for either it or us. We have been too generous with our ears, Father. We have handed over our tongues also. When they are restored to us I wonder if we shall not find our ears more itching than before and our tongues more tied than ever.”

Father Burner nodded in the affirmative.

“We are now entering the whale’s tail, Father. We must go back the way we came in.” The Archbishop lifted the lid of the humidor on the desk. “Will you smoke, Father?”

“No, thanks, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop let the lid drop. “Today there are few saints, fewer sinners, and everybody is already saved. We are all heroes in search of an underdog. As for villains, the classic kind with no illusions about themselves, they are… extinct. The very devil, for instance — where the devil is the devil today, Father?”

Father Burner, as the Archbishop continued to look at him, bit his lips for the answer, secretly injured that he should be expected to know, bewildered even as the children he toyed with in catechism.

The Archbishop smiled, but Father Burner was not sure at what — whether at him or what had been said. “Did you see, Father, where our brother Bishop Buckles said Hitler remains the one power on earth against the Church?”

Yes, Father Burner remembered seeing it in the paper; it was the sort of thing that kept Quinlan talking for days. “I did, Your Excellency.”

“Alas, poor Buckles! He’s a better croquet player than that.” The Archbishop’s hands unclasped suddenly and fell upon his memo pad. He tore off about a week and seemed to feel better for it. His hands, with no hint of violence about them now, came together again. “We look hard to the right and left, Father. It is rather to the center, I think, we should look — to ourselves, the devil in us.”

Father Burner knew the cue for humility when he heard it. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

With his chubby fingers the Archbishop made a steeple that was more like a dome. His eyes were reading the memo. “For instance, Father, I sometimes appear at banquets — when they can’t line up a good foreign correspondent — banquets at which the poor are never present and at which I am unfailingly confronted by someone exceedingly well off who is moved to inform me that ‘religion’ is a great consolation to him. Opium, rather, I always think, perhaps wrongfully and borrowing a word from one of our late competitors, which is most imprudent of me, a bishop.”

The Archbishop opened a drawer and drew out a sheet of paper and an envelope. “Yes, the rich have souls,” he said softly, answering an imaginary objection which happened to be Father Burner’s. “But if Christ were really with them they would not be themselves — that is to say, rich.”

“Very true, Your Excellency,” Father Burner said.

The Archbishop faced sideways to use an old typewriter. “And likewise, lest we forget, we would not be ourselves, that is to say — what? For we square the circle beautifully in almost every country on earth. We bring neither peace nor a sword. The rich give us money. We give them consolation and make of the eye of the needle a gate. Together we try to reduce the Church, the Bride of Christ, to a streetwalker.” The Archbishop rattled the paper, Father Burner’s future, into place and rolled it crookedly into the typewriter. “Unfortunately for us, it doesn’t end there. The penance will not be shared so equitably. Your Christian name, Father, is—?”

“Ernest, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop typed several words and stopped, looking over at Father Burner. “I can’t call to mind a single Saint Ernest, Father. Can you help me?”

“There were two, I believe, Your Excellency, but Butler leaves them out of his Lives .”

“They would be German saints, Father?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. There was one an abbot and the other an archbishop.”

“If Butler had been Irish, as the name has come to indicate, I’d say that’s an Irishman for you, Father. He does not forget to include a power of Irish saints.” The Archbishop was Irish himself. Father Burner begged to differ with him, believing here was a wrong deliberately set up for him to right. “I am not Irish myself, Your Excellency, but some of my best friends are.”

“Tut, tut, Father. Such tolerance will be the death of you.” The Archbishop, typing a few words, removed the paper, signed it and placed it in the envelope. He got up and took down a book from the shelves. He flipped it open, glanced through several pages and returned it to its place. “No Ernests in Baring-Gould either. Well, Father, it looks as if you have a clear field.”

The Archbishop came from behind the desk and Father Burner, knowing the interview was over, rose. The Archbishop handed him the envelope. Father Burner stuffed it hastily in his pocket and knelt, the really important thing, to kiss the Archbishop’s ring and receive his blessing. They walked together toward the door.

“Do you care for pictures, Father?”

“Oh, yes, Your Excellency.”

The Archbishop, touching him lightly on the arm, stopped before a reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. “There is a good peasant woman, Father, and a nice fat baby.” Father Burner nodded his appreciation. “She could be Our Blessed Mother, Father, though I doubt it. There is no question about the baby. He is not Christ.” The Archbishop moved to another picture. “Rembrandt had the right idea, Father. See the gentleman pushing Christ up on the cross? That is Rembrandt, a self-portrait.” Father Burner thought of some of the stories about the Archbishop, that he slept on a cot, stood in line with the people sometimes to go to confession, that he fasted on alternate days the year round. Father Burner was thankful for such men as the Archbishop. “But here is Christ, Father.” This time it was a glassy-eyed Christ whose head lay against the rough wood of the cross he was carrying. “That is Christ, Father. The Greek painted Our Saviour.”