“Dearly Beloved: we are reminded by the best commentators that Lazarus was not a poor man, that he lived comfortably with sisters in a home that he owned. Our Lord himself, remember, was not a social reformer, said nothing about freeing the slaves, nor are we obliged to.”
After the sermon Monsignor Schleifkopf announced triumphantly that this week the congregation had paid off the debt on the new church, the air-conditioning, the electronic carillon that can be heard for five miles, and the new parochial school
Moon Mullins, who is an usher, greets me in the vestibule. He stands around in true usher style, hawking phlegm and swinging his fist into his hand.
Monsignor Schleifkopf prays for victory over North Ecuador and for the welfare of our brothers in Christ and fellow property owners throughout Latin America and for the success of the Moonlight Tour of the Champs in the name of “the greatest pro of them all.”
I begin to think impure thoughts. My heart, which was thumping for no good reason, begins to thump for love of Lola Rhoades and at the prospect of seeing her this very afternoon and later inviting her out into the gloaming.
When the congregation rises for the creed, I see my chance and slip out.
Christ have mercy on me. Sir Thomas More, pray for me. God bless Moon Mullins, a good fellow, a better man than I. Lord have mercy on your poor church.
Goodbye, Pius XII. Hello, Lola baby, big lovely cellist. Let us go out into the gloaming and lie in one another’s arms and watch the constellations wheel in their courses.
Father Rinaldo Smith is sitting on the tin-roofed porch of the tiny slave-quarter chapel. In his rolled-up shirt sleeves he looks more than ever like Ricardo Montalban. He is waiting, I suppose, for his tiny flock. The Roman Catholics are a remnant of a remnant.
We sit on the steps.
“You know what we need, Tom?” he asks with a sigh.
“What’s that, Father?”
“A bell.”
“Right, Father. And I have an idea where I might lay my hands on one.”
“Splendid,” says Father Smith, kicking a cottonmouth off the steps.
Though Father Smith is a good priest, a chaste and humble man who for twenty-five years had baptized the newborn into a new life, shriven sinners, married lovers, anointed the sick, buried the dead — he has had his troubles.
Once he turned up in the bed next to mine in the acute wing. It seemed he had behaved oddly at the ten o’clock mass and created consternation among the faithful. This happened before the schism, when hundreds of the faithful packed old Saint Michael’s. When he mounted the pulpit to make the announcements and deliver his sermon, he had instead — fallen silent. The silence lasted perhaps thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is a very long silence. Nothing is more uncomfortable than silence when speech is expected. People began to cough and shift around in the pews. There was a kind of foreboding. Silence prolonged can induce terror. “Excuse me,” he said at last, “but the channels are jammed and the word is not getting through.” When he absently blew on and thumped the microphone, as priests do, the faithful thought he was talking about the loudspeaker and breathed a sigh of relief. But Father Smith did not continue the mass. Instead he walked to the rectory in his chasuble, sat down in the Monsignor’s chair in a gray funk and, according to the housekeeper, began to mutter something about “the news being jammed”—whereupon the housekeeper, thinking he meant the TV, turned it on (strange: no matter what one says, no matter how monstrous, garbled, unfittable, whoever hears it will somehow make it fit). Monsignor Schleifkopf later said to Father Kev Kevin, the other curate, “Beware of priests who don’t play golf or enjoy a friendly card game or listen to The Lawrence Welk Show—sooner or later they’ll turn their collar around and wear a necktie.” This was before Father Kev Kevin married Sister Magdalene and took charge of the vaginal computer in Love.
So there was Father Rinaldo Smith in the next bed, stiff as a board, hands cloven to his side, eyes looking neither right nor left.
“What seems to be the trouble, Father?” asked Max, pens and flashlight and reflex hammer glittering like diamonds in his vest pocket.
“They’re jamming the air waves,” says Father Smith, looking straight ahead.
“Causing a breakdown in communication, eh, Father?” says Max immediately. He is quick to identify with the patient.
“They’ve put a gremlin in the circuit,” says Father Smith.
“Ah, you mean a kind of spirit or gremlin is causing the breakdown in communication?”
“No no, Max!” I call out from the next bed. “That’s not what he means.” What Max doesn’t understand is that Father Smith is one of those priests, and there are a good many, who like to fool with ham radios, talk with their fellow hams, and so fall into the rather peculiar and dispirited jargon hams use. “When he said there was a gremlin in the circuit, he meant only that there is something wrong, not that there is a, um, spirit or gremlin causing it.” Priests have a weakness for ham radio and seismology. Leading solitary lives and stranded in places like Pierre, South Dakota, or the Bronx or Waycross, Georgia, they hearken to other solitaries around the world or else bend an ear to the earth itself.
“Yes, they’re jamming,” says Father Smith.
When I spoke, Max and the other doctors looked at me disapprovingly. They had finished with me, passed my bed. I am like a dancing partner who’s been cut in on and doesn’t go away.
“They?” asks Max. “Who are they?”
“They’ve won and we’ve lost,” says Father Smith.
“Who are they, Father?”
“The principalities and powers.”
“Principalities and powers, hm,” says Max, cocking his head attentively. Light glances from the planes of his temple. “You are speaking of two of the hierarchies of devils, are you not?”
The eyes of the psychiatrists and behaviorists sparkle with sympathetic interest.
“Yes,” says Father Smith. “Their tactic has prevailed.”
“You are speaking of devils now, Father?” asks Max.
“That is correct.”
“Now what tactic, as you call it, has prevailed?”
“Death.”
“Death?”
“Yes. Death is winning, life is losing.”
“Ah, you mean the wars and the crime and violence and so on?”
“Not only that. I mean the living too.”
“The living? Do you mean the living are dead?”
“Yes.”
“How can that be, Father? How can the living be dead?”
“I mean their souls, of course.”
“You mean their souls are dead,” says Max with the liveliest sympathy.
“Yes,” says Father Smith tonelessly. “I am surrounded by the corpses of souls. We live in a city of the dead.”
“Are the devils here too, Father?” asks Max.
“Yes. But you fellows are safer than most.”
“How is that, Father?”
“Because you don’t know any better,” says the priest, cheering up all of a sudden. He laughs. “Do you want to know the truth?”
“We always want to know the truth, Father,” says Max gravely.
“I think it is you doctors who are doing the will of God, even though you do not believe in him. You stand for life. You are trying to help us in here, you are good fellows, God bless you all. Life is what—” begins the priest and, as suddenly as he laughed, now covers his face with his hands and bursts into tears.
The doctors nod silently, pat the foot of the bed, and move on.
But today at Natchez-under-the-Hill the priest is his old self, sits fully clothed and in his right mind, a gray-faced gray-haired gray man with flat hairy forearms like Ricardo Montalban. He looks at his wristwatch and, explaining that it is time for him to go into the confessional, makes as if to rise.