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

A fine Franciscan! Didymus snorted, causing a flurry of vapors. He had the despicable caution of the comfortable who move mountains, if need be, to stay that way. Here he was, cowl up and heavy woolen socks on, and regretting the weather because it exceeded his anticipations. Painfully he stubbed his toe on purpose and at once accused himself of exhibitionism. Then he damned the expression for its modernity. He asked himself wherein lay the renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, the whole point of following after St Francis today. Poverty, Chastity, Obedience — the three vows. There was nothing of suffering in the poverty of the friar nowadays: he was penniless, but materially rich compared to — what was the phrase he used to hear? — “one third of the nation.” A beggar, a homeless mendicant by very definition, he knew nothing — except as it affected others “less fortunate”—of the miseries of begging in the streets. Verily, it was no heavy cross, this vow of Poverty, so construed and practiced, in the modern world. Begging had become unfashionable. Somewhere along the line the meaning had been lost; they had become too “fortunate.” Official agencies, to whom it was a nasty but necessary business, dispensed Charity without mercy or grace. He recalled with wry amusement Frederick Barbarossa’s appeal to fellow princes when opposed by the might of the medieval Church: “We have a clean conscience, and it tells us that God is with us. Ever have we striven to bring back priests and, in especial, those of the topmost rank, to the condition of the first Christian Church. In those days the clergy raised their eyes to the angels, shone through miracles, made whole the sick, raised the dead, made Kings and Princes subject to them, not with arms but with their holiness. But now they are smothered in delights. To withdraw from them the harmful riches which burden them to their own undoing is a labor of love in which all Princes should eagerly participate.”

And Chastity, what of that? Well, that was all over for him — a battle he had fought and won many years ago. A sin whose temptations had prevailed undiminished through the centuries, but withal for him, an old man, a dead issue, a young man’s trial. Only Obedience remained, and that, too, was no longer difficult for him. There was something — much as he disliked the term — to be said for “conditioning.” He had to smile at himself: why should he bristle so at using the word? It was only contemporary slang for a theory the Church had always known. “Psychiatry,” so called, and all the ghastly superstition that attended its practice, the deification of its high priests in the secular schools, made him ill. But it would pass. Just look how alchemy had flourished, and where was it today?

Clearly an abecedarian observance of the vows did not promise perfection. Stemmed in divine wisdom, they were branches meant to flower forth, but requiring of the friar the water and sunlight of sacrifice. The letter led nowhere. It was the spirit of the vows which opened the way and revealed to the soul, no matter the flux of circumstance, the means of salvation.

He had picked his way through the welter of familiar factors again — again to the same bitter conclusion. He had come to the key and core of his trouble anew. When he received the letter from Seraphin asking him to come to St Louis, saying his years prohibited unnecessary travel and endowed his request with a certain prerogative — No, he had written back, it’s simply impossible, not saying why. God help him, as a natu-ral man, he had the desire, perhaps the inordinate desire, to see his brother again. He should not have to prove that. One of them must die soon. But as a friar, he remembered: “Unless a man be clearly delivered from the love of all creatures, he may not fully tend to his Creator.” Therein, he thought, the keeping of the vows having become an easy habit for him, was his opportunity — he thought! It was plain and there was sacrifice and it would be hard. So he had not gone.

Now it was plain that he had been all wrong. Seraphin was an old man with little left to warm him in the world. Didymus asked himself — recoiling at the answer before the question was out — if his had been the only sacrifice. Rather, had he not been too intent on denying himself at the time to notice that he was denying Seraphin also? Harshly Didymus told himself he had used his brother for a hair shirt. This must be the truth, he thought; it hurts so.

The flesh just above his knees felt frozen. They were drawing near the entrance again. His face, too, felt the same way, like a slab of pasteboard, stiffest at the tip of his nose. When he wrinkled his brow and puffed out his cheeks to blow hot air up to his nose, his skin seemed to crackle like old parchment. His eyes watered from the wind. He pressed a hand, warm from his sleeve, to his exposed neck. Frozen, like his face. It would be chapped tomorrow.

Titus, white hair awry in the wind, looked just the same.

They entered the monastery door. The Rector stopped them. It was almost as before, except that Didymus was occupied with feeling his face and patting it back to life.

“Ah, Didymus! It must be cold indeed!” The Rector smiled at Titus and returned his gaze to Didymus. He made it appear that they were allied in being amused at Didymus’s face. Didymus touched his nose tenderly. Assured it would stand the operation, he blew it lustily. He stuffed the handkerchief up his sleeve. The Rector, misinterpreting all this ceremony, obviously was afraid of being ignored.

“The telegram, Didymus. I’m sorry; I thought it might have been important.”

“I received no telegram.”

They faced each other, waiting, experiencing a hanging moment of uneasiness.

Then, having employed the deductive method, they both looked at Titus. Although he had not been listening, rather had been studying the naked toes in his sandals, he sensed their eyes questioning him.

“Yes, Father Rector?” he answered.

“The telegram for Father Didymus, Titus?” the Rector demanded. “Where is it?” Titus started momentarily out of willingness to be of service, but ended, his mind refusing to click, impassive before them. The Rector shook his head in faint exasperation and reached his hand down into the folds of Titus’s cowl. He brought forth two envelopes. One, the telegram, he gave to Didymus. The other, a letter, he handed back to Titus.

“I gave you this letter this morning, Titus. It’s for Father Anthony.” Intently Titus stared unremembering at he letter. “I wish you would see that Father Anthony gets it right away, Titus. I think it’s a bill.”

Titus held the envelope tightly to his breast and said, “Father Anthony.”

Then his eyes were attracted by the sound of Didymus tearing open the telegram. While Didymus read the telegram, Titus’s expression showed he at last understood his failure to deliver it. He was perturbed, mounting inner distress moving his lips silently.

Didymus looked up from the telegram. He saw the grief in Titus’s face and said, astonished, “How did you know, Titus?”

Titus’s eyes were both fixed and lowered in sorrow. It seemed to Didymus that Titus knew the meaning of the telegram. Didymus was suddenly weak, as before a miracle. His eyes went to the Rector to see how he was taking it. Then it occurred to him the Rector could not know what had happened.

As though nothing much had, the Rector laid an absolving hand lightly upon Titus’s shoulder.

“Didymus, he can’t forgive himself for not delivering the telegram now that he remembers it. That’s all.”

Didymus was relieved. Seeing the telegram in his hand, he folded it quickly and stuffed it back in the envelope. He handed it to the Rector. calmly, in a voice quite drained of feeling, he said, “My brother, Father Seraphin, died last night in St Louis.”