“You okay?” McNiff wondered.
“I’ll be all right,” Koesler wheezed. “Just went down the wrong way.”
“Clem Kern wasn’t vulgar!” McNiff turned back to Marvin.
Marvin grinned. “He could be earthy when the occasion demanded.”
“Besides,” McNiff said, “what chance has old Clem got? A parish priest from Detroit? Now, if he’d been a martyr …”
“Not so,” said the resourceful Mulroney. “It’s not all that out of the question … at least not today.”
Their salads arrived. There were no further drink orders, and their lugubrious waitress departed.
“For the last thousand years,” Mulroney continued, “Popes have been doing the canonizing all by themselves. Officially, since A.D, 1234-an easy date to remember. But the point is, in all this time there have been less than three hundred saints named.”
“So?” McNiff said.
“So,” Mulroney replied, “in 1988 alone the present Pope named 122 saints. So he likes saints; that’s obvious. He can and he does make lots of them. As a matter of fact, he kind of prods the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to keep the machinery going. As we all know, just from watching TV, the Pope gets around. For centuries, the Popes were the self-proclaimed ‘prisoners of the Vatican.’ Well, Paul VI got around pretty good. But he was a stay-at-home compared with our current guy. And, usually, when he visits a country, he likes to make one or more of the natives a saint.
“Say, for instance, he were to come to the States again-“
“Spare me,” Marvin interjected. “Have we finished paying for his last visit yet?”
That brought an appreciative laugh.
“Seriously,” Mulroney continued, “if he came back to the States, he’d probably want to name a saint or two, Why not good old Clem Kern?”
“Because, for one thing, Solanus Casey is ahead of him,” Marvin observed.
“Well,” Mulroney said, “a doubleheader then. Casey and Kern,”
“Both from Detroit? You’ve gotta be kidding!” Marvin said,
“Not Kern!” McNiff said authoritatively,
“Why not?” Marvin wanted to know.
“He’s just not the stuff saints are made of,” McNiff insisted, “Okay, so he was good with bums. Better than I could be, I’ll admit, But giving bums a meal ticket just ain’t the way to become a holy saint.”
“Pat, you’re not putting down the works of mercy!” Koesler by now was recovered from the shock of being reminded that Clem Kern, who was sharing a room with Jake Keating, was by no means completely forgotten.
“What?” McNiff reacted,
“Give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless; visit the sick, the imprisoned; bury the dead,” Koesler enumerated. “Those are the things that Clem did best and, according to Christ, that’s how you get into heaven. Or, absent all these things, how you get into hell.”
“Besides,” Marvin added, “Clem wouldn’t let anybody refer to them as bums. They were ‘gentlemen of the road.’ At least mat’s what Clem insisted on calling them.”
Somehow, everyone seemed to be zeroing in on McNiff. Which is how most of these priestly outings usually ended.
“Frank’s right,” Mulroney said. “Clem didn’t just give his ‘gentlemen of the road’ a good word and a pat on the back. He had an arrangement with some of the local motels to house the gentlemen and send the bill to him.”
It was cottage industry time for Clem Kern memories. The harvest of stories had begun. Koesler approved. Monsignor Kern had been so much an embodiment of the Gospel message that it was helpful to remember his goodness. It was, indeed, the memory of this compassion that had motivated Guido Vespa to provide Clem with a companion into eternity. If only these guys knew what I know!
But of course they never would.
“Remember,” Marvin said, “when Clem figured that though there were lots of places to send recovering alcoholics in the AA plan, there weren’t many places for just plain drunks? So he began the process of buying a flophouse in the neighborhood. Some of the small-time merchants in the area objected. So they went to court. And the judge asked Clem, ‘Does anybody in your facility have a history of venereal disease?’
“Clem thinks about that for a while. Then, in that droll drawl of his, he says to the judge, ‘Well, Your Honor, I don’t believe we include that question on any form we asked the people to fill out. But I suppose in any facility that takes care of a large number of men, you could probably find some history of venereal disease. Perhaps in the Detroit Athletic Club, for instance.’
“And the judge says, ‘Father Kern, I am a member of the Detroit Athletic Club,’ And Clem says, ‘Yes …’”
“Then there was the time,” Mulroney jumped in, “when there was a Playboy Club in Detroit and the bunnies went on strike against the club. In the next day’s papers, there was Clem Kern, clerical suit and all, bundled up against the cold, walking the picket line and carrying a strike sign right along with the bunnies.”
“Now,” McNiff objected, “you can’t think it’s a sign of high virtue to be picketing for the rights of naked” — he always pronounced it “nekid” — “women to wait on tables!”
“He wasn’t campaigning for nudity, Pat,” Koesler said. “The girls claimed they weren’t getting a fair share of the tips. Clem was campaigning for justice.”
“Justice!” McNiff snorted. “That’s not what the people think. They think he’s just parading with naked women.”
Everyone but McNiff was laughing.
“First of all,” Koesler corrected, “they weren’t ‘nekid.’ It was the middle of winter and everybody was pretty well covered up. And everybody knows Clem was virtually the patron saint of labor. My God, he was practically the chaplain of the Teamsters.”
“Weren’t you tied up in the middle of that once?” Marvin asked.
Koesler smiled. “Happened while I was at the Detroit Catholic. Our one janitor, who also drove a truck, joined the Teamsters. All of a sudden I found myself bargaining with the Teamsters.
“Now, I’ve got nothing against the Teamsters, but the Detroit Catholic newspaper versus the Teamsters was David and Goliath all over again. Except that we didn’t even have a sling or a stone. So, in a sort of desperation, I called Clem and asked if he could intercede for us. He asked who I was bargaining with and I told him the guy’s name. And Clem said, ‘Oh, I know Claire very well. He always has me say Mass daily when he’s negotiating.’
“So I asked Clem how many Masses he was going to say for the Teamsters so I could say the same number against them.”
Even McNiff joined in the laughter.
“Needless to say,” Koesler concluded, “Clem didn’t ask them to call off the hounds and we didn’t win that one.”
The waitress brought their entrees. She more or less plopped the plates before each of them. It was not an encouraging presentation. However, having taken on faith the presumption that she had saved them from watery soup, leatherish meat, and greasy potatoes, her absence of charm did not foreordain a diminished tip.
As they began eating, Marvin said, “He didn’t take his monsignorship seriously. That alone should argue for his heroic virtue.”
That brought a smile to everyone.
“I’ll say,” Koesler added. “At his own installation ceremony, he arrived at the cathedral late, and he was wearing borrowed monsignorial robes.”
“I don’t get it,” McNiff complained. “All these qualities that you guys seem to think were cute as well as virtuous, were flaws in character. Sure he was late for his own investiture. But he was late for everything. He was late all the time. He smoked too much. And he was a terrible driver. In fact, that’s what killed him: a traffic accident.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing, Pat,” Mulroney said, “you don’t get it. Sure he died as a result of a traffic accident. But no one else was injured. How typical of Clem Kern; he wouldn’t hurt anyone else for the world. Remember the time the con artist hit him up until Clem gave him some money? Another priest who had witnessed the guy’s performance-which was so implausible even the visiting priest could see through it-couldn’t figure why a priest as streetwise as Clem would fall for something so transparent. And Clem just lit up a cigarette and grinned and said, ‘I didn’t want him to think he was losing his touch.’