They were asking the usual questions. Number of children in the family, whether baptized, attending what school, religion of both father and mother, whether all of age had made their Easter duty, whether all regularly employed had received each his own box of Sunday envelopes, and so on. Phil, it soon appeared, had really fallen down on the job of distributing Sunday envelopes, and so the census-takers carried a supply along with them, one man using his attaché case for this purpose, and the other his Northwest Airlines bag.
They were also trying to find out how people felt about a new church at St Monica’s. This, too, was Father Urban’s idea. Since Phil had said that his decision to build needn’t be kept a secret, Father Urban didn’t see why the people of the parish shouldn’t be let in on it, but he presented it only as a possibility, for he wanted to learn their true feelings. So that the response could be easily tabulated, people were given a choice of four answers: Strongly Favor, Favor, Don’t Favor, and No Opinion. The first thing the survey revealed was that too many people would vote No Opinion if left entirely to themselves, and so Johnny was urged to strive for greater accuracy, a closer fit. Father Urban pointed out that several No Opinions encountered by him hadn’t understood the purpose of the survey. It had to be made crystal clear to some people that their response if favorable, or even strongly favorable, was in no sense a commitment to contribute. Not a-tall. Once this was made crystal clear, Don’t Favors sometimes became Favors or even Strongly Favors. This was Father Urban’s experience anyway.
The early returns showed the Strongly Favors and Favors well in the lead. As for die-hard Don’t Favors, they were generally elderly people who attended the uncrowded early Mass on Sunday and said things like, “Wouldn’t a new church cost too much?” and “I just like the old one.” Fortunately, there weren’t too many of this sort.
Father Urban wanted Phil to put out of mind all thoughts — thoughts he’d expressed on the night he left — of bringing in a professional fund-raising outfit. The professional bleeders, able as they were, saw life everywhere in terms of Chicago and Boston, and if Phil hired one, his parishioners would soon be getting cute little notes asking how much they’d donated to the horses in the past year. They wouldn’t even understand the question. If Phil conducted his own drive, he could tailor his approach to local conditions, and there would be less wear and tear on the parishioners. He’d save a lot, too. It would be harder on Phil, yes, but it could be the making of him as a pastor. It was Father Urban’s hope that the survey would help Phil to do the right thing when the time came, and to this end, the early results were encouraging.
Father Urban and Johnny were alarmed, though, by some of their other findings. Both men were out of touch with hearth and home, the one because of his years of itinerancy and more or less public life, the other because of his years in the seminary and his reclusive habits since then, and so they really couldn’t say whether the squalor in which so many parishioners lived, particularly in Orchard Park, was peculiar to them or was now nationwide, peculiar to the times. It wasn’t squalor such as Father Urban had seen in city slums. No, if anything, the Orchard Parkers possessed more than their share of the world’s goods. Whether the women were unable to keep house, or were unwilling, or both, wasn’t clear to Father Urban, but that they didn’t was a fact too often encountered to be ignored — and not to be passed off with a laughing reference to little ones. What embarrassment there was lacked conviction. The shoes and socks and pajamas and dirty glasses and cups that had a way of disappearing from the living room during the course of his visit — they’d all be back again, he knew. Who was to blame? When, in recent years, Father Urban had read that the American male had gone soft, he’d always considered the source — another green-eyed European, another G.I. who’d married an Asiatic — but Orchard Park suggested that there might be some truth in the charge.
It wasn’t rare for women to return to bed after breakfast, if, indeed, they got up for it. They had no more time sense than Mexicans. “Just say the priest was here,” Father Urban would tell the little barefooted creatures who opened the door to him. (In the afternoon, the same thing happened to Johnny. Mama would be taking her nap then.) Sometimes, later in the morning, Father Urban would come upon a gathering of homemakers consuming coffee and pastry. But these easygoing and, for the most part, betrousered queens never guessed what he thought of them, so courtly was his manner. “Ladies, the pleasure was all mine.”
A dog nipped him, a hamster wet on him, a piece of fruitcake played hell with one of his gold inlays, and always he had to watch where he sat down, especially in Orchard Park. It was easy enough to see why Phil, in delicate health, with his rather dismal outlook on life, had excused himself from such activity. Even so, the worst thing about the census was not the taking of it, though at St Monica’s this was aggravated by years of neglect, and by the weather in January and February. The worst thing was the follow-up work. This was why otherwise perfect pastors put off the census. Wouldn’t enough sad cases come to their attention without going out and looking for them? This might become Father Urban’s view if he stayed on the firing line long enough, but this was not his view. A job was being done that badly needed doing at St Monica’s, a tough job. There were days when the temperature never rose above twenty below zero, when thigh-freezing winds raked down from Canada, when the census-takers were tempted to turn back to the rectory. But they didn’t.
“We won’t be crucified,” said Johnny, who tended to think too much in such terms. “We’ll just wear ourselves out, like bees.”
“That’s right.”
Father Urban was pleased with the change in Johnny. In defense of the curate’s past — St Monica’s was his first assignment — it could be said that he’d been following his pastor’s example, by shirking his obligations, and that of a great many saints, by haunting the church. Father Urban, however, by the power of his example, and, of course, by God’s grace, had caused Johnny to question not the lives of the saints but his own life as a parish priest. If Johnny didn’t say that Father Urban had done this, Johnny’s actions did. Johnny only said he’d been suffering greatly from aridity in his spiritual life—“For months now, I’ve been lost in the desert, the Sahara, I think”—and perhaps the change in him would have come about anyway, in time. Johnny, a big, strong young fellow whose father owned a creamery, had good stuff in him. It just hadn’t been coming out.
Casual conversation in the upper room told Father Urban more perhaps than Johnny meant to tell him, more perhaps than Johnny knew. It became pretty clear to Father Urban that Johnny, in his last two years in seminary, had fallen into the clutches of Manichees on the faculty. Unlike them, he had been bold. In fact, he had got so far out of line in his final year — giving up smoking and so on — that he’d come within an ace of not being ordained. For about three years, you might say, Johnny had been in a coma. Johnny had been all right before. In high school, he had been voted all-state in hockey.
Father Urban had learned this from Dave, the crippled janitor, who said that Johnny’s bodychecking had been something to see and hear, and that Johnny’s slapshot, not easy to demonstrate with a pushbroom, had been absolutely professional — that good. It was Dave’s opinion that Johnny might have made the grade as a pro if he’d put his mind to it, and Dave’s regret that he hadn’t.
“How about it?” inquired Father Urban. Johnny, somewhat surprised by Father Urban’s interest in hockey, said it wasn’t only his ability to mix it up but his lack of foot that had caused his coach, a Canadian, to use him as a defenseman. “I never could’ve made it in the big time.”