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

Working with Mac would be action of a positive sort, better than continuing his fruitless correspondence, better than following such advice as he’d had from acquaintances — or even from the confessional, where, too hopefully, he’d taken his problems. There he had been told to go into business or science and get ahead, or into government and make a success of that , after which, presumably, he could come — tottering — before the bishops of the land as a man of proved ability and, what was more important, a man of stability. When the wise old confessor realized, however, that Myles not only had been cast aside by the Church but was likely to be wanted soon by the State, there had been no problem at all. His counsel had flowed swift and sure: “Enlist! Don’t wait to be drafted!”

“Don’t think of it as just a job,” Mac said now. “Try to think of it as the Fathers do, and as I hope I do. Think of it as the Work.”

Myles, thinking of it as a stepping-stone to ordination, said he’d like to be considered for the job.

Mac said that of course the Fathers would have the last say, but his word would carry some weight with them, since Myles, if accepted, would be working under him — at first, anyway. He then asked Myles to bring a glass of ice water, and easy on the water. Myles, returning with a glass of ice, noted a bottle in bed with Mac, tucked under the sheet at his side like a nursing infant. He left them together, behind the screen.

Two days later Myles was summoned by telegram to an address in the Loop. He found the place, all right — an old building with grillwork elevators affording passengers a view of the cables. Mac was waiting for Myles at the cigar stand downstairs. As they rode up to the Fathers’ floor, he advised Myles to forget all about his past as a seminarian, reasoning that if this was mentioned to the Fathers, it might make a bad impression. Myles had to agree with that, if reluctantly.

At the fifth floor, which the Fathers shared with a number of tailors, publishers, and distributors of barbers’ supplies, Mac hustled Myles into the washroom. Myles’ black overcoat, suit, and tie were all wrong, Mac said. He told Myles to take off his coat and then he suggested that they switch ties. This they did, morosely. Mac’s suit, a double-breasted Glen plaid with a precipitous drape and trousers that billowed about his disproportionately thin legs, would “just carry” the black tie, he said, and presumably his tie, with its spheres, coils, and triangles suggesting the spirit of Science and Industry, would carry Myles’ black suit. “Don’t want ’em to think they’re hiring a creep,” Mac said.

There was no trouble at all with the Fathers. Mac evidently stood high with them. He told them that Myles had gone to the University of Illinois for a time, which was news to Myles. He let it pass, though, because he remembered a conversation at the hospital during which, assuming Illinois to be Mac’s old school, he had said that he’d once attended a football game at Illinois — or almost had. He had been dragooned into joining the Boy Scouts, Myles had explained, and had marched with his troop to the stadium for the season opener, admission free to Scouts, but on reaching the gates, he had remained outside, in a delayed protest against the Scouts and all their pomps. He had spent the afternoon walking under the campus elms. “Then you were there,” Mac had said, which Myles had taken to mean that Mac felt as he did about those beautiful old trees.

Mac delivered a little pep talk, chiefly for the benefit of the three Fathers in the office, Myles suspected, although the words were spoken to him. He could think of nothing to say. He was more impressed by the charitable than the catechetical aspects of the Fathers’ work. And yet, little as he might value their radio program, their pamphlets, their dim magazine, it would be work with which he could associate himself with some enthusiasm. It would suit his purposes far better than going into business or staying on at the hospital.

“The Work is one hundred percent apostolic,” said one of the Fathers.

Myles remembered that the Fathers ran several institutions for juvenile delinquents. “I know something of your trade schools,” he said quickly.

“Would that we had more of them,” said the Father sitting behind the desk. He had bloodied his face and neck in shaving. “You have to move with the times.” He seemed to be the boss. On the wall behind him hung a metal crucifix, which could have come off a coffin, and a broken airplane propeller, which must have dated from the First World War. “How do you stand in the draft?” he asked Myles.

“All clear,” said Mac, answering for him. Myles let that pass, too. He could tell Mac the facts later.

When Myles heard what the salary would be, he was glad he had other reasons for taking the job. The money would be the least important part of it, Mac put in, and Myles could see what he meant. But Myles didn’t care about the money; he’d live on bread and water — and pamphlets. The salary made him feel better about not telling Mac and the Fathers that he intended to use his new position, if he could, to meet a bishop. The expense allowance, too, impressed him as decidedly prewar. Mac, however, seemed to be hinting not at its meanness but at Myles’ possible profligacy when, in front of two more Fathers, who had come in to meet Myles, he said, “You’ll have to watch your expenses, Flynn. Can’t have you asking for reimbursements, you understand.” As Myles was leaving, one of the new arrivals whispered to him, “I was on the road myself for a bit and I’d dearly love to go out again. Mr McMaster, he’s a grand companion. You’ll make a great team.”

Three days later the team was heading north in Mac’s car, a lightweight black Cadillac, a ’41—a good year for a Cadillac, Mac said, and the right car for the job: impressive but not showy, and old enough not to antagonize people.

Myles was not sorry to be leaving Chicago. The nuns and nurses at the hospital had been happy to see him go — happy, they said, that he’d found a better job. This showed Myles how little they had ever understood him and his reasons for being at the hospital; he’d known all along that they had very little sense of vocation.

Speaking of the nurses, Myles told Mac that the corporal works of mercy had lost all meaning in the modern world, to which Mac replied that he wouldn’t touch nursing with a ten-foot pole. Nursing might be a fine career for a girl, he allowed, and added, “A lot of ’em marry above themselves — marry money.”

They were like two men in a mine, working at different levels, in different veins, and lost to each other. Mac, who apparently still thought of Myles as a doctor, wanted to know how much the interns and nurses knocked down and what their private lives were like — said he’d heard a few stories. When Myles professed ignorance, Mac seemed to think he was being secretive, as if the question went against the Hippocratic oath. He tried to discuss medicine, with special reference to his diet, but failed to interest Myles. He asked what the hospital did with the stiffs, and received no pertinent information, because the question happened to remind Myles of the medieval burial confraternities and he sailed into a long discussion of their blessed work, advocating its revival in the modern world.

“All free, huh?” Mac commented. “The undertakers would love that!”

Myles strove in vain for understanding, always against the wind. Mac had got the idea that Myles, in praising the burial fraternities, was advocating a form of socialized medicine, and he held on to it. “Use logic,” he said. “What’s right for the undertakers is right for the doctors.”

They rode in silence for a while. Then Mac said, “What you say about the nurses may be true, but you gotta remember they don’t have it easy.” He knew how Myles felt about hospital work, he said, but instead of letting it prey on his mind, Myles should think of other things — of the better days ahead. Mac implied that Myles’ talk about the corporal works was just a cover-up for his failure to get into anything better.