“That’s put color in your cheeks,” McGillicuddy said, finishing his dessert and reaching for the cigar. “Now, Father, I don’t want to rush you, you take all the time you need, but there was a fellow here today from the St. Petersburg Times, the word is out that you’re down here and let me tell you, you are something of a celebrity.”
Tunney stared at him in silence.
McGillicuddy waved the cigar after lighting it, creating a wispy brown cloud in front of him. “I sure would like to set something up, sometime. Something dignified, that would let the people around here know we’re still here. You can’t imagine the controversy we’ve had in this region about religion. This outfit calls itself the Church of Scientology, they came down here and set themselves up in Clearwater to practically take the town over, there was a lot of scandal about it and you know who pays, it’s the legitimate churches that pay for it. Talk about taking over the city, that’s what they said in the papers, making this a church-state.…”
Tunney listened but did not hear more than sounds. This had happened in the days before, during the Agency interrogation when he was still in confinement. He had suddenly departed from the present, the words had become as garbled and meaningless as the background sounds in the jungle.
“Another reporter came by yesterday but I shooed her off. You remember Rita Macklin, the woman who took your picture up in the Watergate?”
McGillicuddy’s tone of voice had changed and Tunney looked up. The fat face was still cherubic, pink and clean, smiling. But something had appeared in the priest’s eyes, and his voice reflected it.
I must be careful now, Leo Tunney thought.
“Said she wanted to do something really good, really in depth, not just a smash-and-grab — you should hear the phrases they use — she said they wanted to do something really good with you. So I called up this editor of hers and you know what he said?”
Tunney waited. He remembered the woman surprising them, remembered her small, delicate face with fine features reminiscent of a figurine in a temple of Buddha, full of color and come to life.
“Well, I’ll tell you. His name is Kaiser. Yes, he runs a small syndicate up there. I talked to him. I checked up on him. This girl is acting on her own, she’s not even part of that agency anymore. What do you think?”
The words seemed gibberish again, his attention faded. And then Tunney remembered what he wanted to ask.
“Father. I would like paper, please.”
“The papers? We get the Times delivered and in the morning—”
“The newspapers? No. I would like to write. I would like — well, Father, let me make this confidential. I would like to write down some things, matters.”
“What you were doing in the jungle,” McGillicuddy said. The cigar had stopped waving. The face, still smiling, was set and intent, the eyes shrewd.
“Perhaps. But not that. I would like—”
Cyrus McGillicuddy saw the body at the other end of the table becoming smaller, seeming to shrink into the white cloth, retreating from the brink of confidence-giving. He moved the cigar in his hand again. “No, I understand completely. I have just the thing for you. We have journal books in the office; let me get you one. A nice blank book in red leather. And pens. Would you prefer a fountain pen or a ballpoint? We have felt tips now, didn’t have felt tips when you… when you left the States. A lot of things have changed.”
“Yes, if you would be kind enough—”
“I understand, I understand. We can go to the office after we’ve finished dinner; I’d like to show you our little church as well—”
“I would like to… offer Mass, if I—”
“Yes, yes, I thought you would. We have the facility. Father Clement is on loan in the mornings to St. Martin’s up in New Port Richey, you know how it is, we just don’t have the priests to go around, but if you’d like to offer Mass in the chapel, well, I think when you see it it’ll knock your eye out. And Father? If you want to confess, I would—”
Tunney shook his head. Too quickly. The eyes of the Father Superior caught the lie in the quickness of the rejection. “No, I have taken care of that. Before. But—”
“Yes, I understand, Leo — can I call you that?”
Leo. The name was so unfamiliar to him; it had not been used for twenty years and the generation in the jungle had erased it from his memory. They had called him Li. Half a lifetime. Leo. White rice without taste, forks, and pale beer.
“The woman? They struck her?”
For a moment, McGillicuddy seemed confused. “Oh, you mean — yes, this Macklin woman. She followed up on it, she is persistent. She got you the release from the Agency, if you ask me. They were embarrassed to hold you any longer. A spunky girl. Got on TV, in the papers, did you see it?”
“I didn’t know. I asked, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
“I understand,” McGillicuddy said. “It must be terribly confusing.”
“All of it,” Tunney agreed, weakening for a moment, allowing himself to be soothed by Cyrus McGillicuddy’s voice.
“So much has happened in those years, since you left here. We’ve had a war since then, I can’t believe it as soon as I say it—”
“I believe it. I saw it.”
“And you didn’t come out.”
Silence. There was nothing to say to him, nothing to explain.
After a while, McGillicuddy took him to the darkened office and found a journal book, bound as promised, with numbered pages. The priest handed him three pens.
“We keep the chapel locked at night, you can’t be too careful,” McGillicuddy said, leading him across an open portico to the little church. The day had been soft, the heat lush like the heat of the jungle. And now, at night, the heat lingered with just a trace of water on the breeze blowing up from the Caribbean.
McGillicuddy turned on a small group of lights at the door that illuminated the altar in the middle of the room. “This was built in 1963, after Vatican Two, we followed all the dictates.”
“I don’t understand,” said Leo Tunney, not for the first time.
“No. You will though. There’s a lot to learn.”
Without a word, Tunney shuffled slowly up the aisle to the altar railing and knelt down on his thin knees, sinking into the vinyl kneeling cushion. He blessed himself. With some reluctance, Father McGillicuddy followed and stood behind him.
The chapel was stark. The marble altar was plain except for the small golden tabernacle in the center flanked by two elaborate candlesticks. The front of the altar was decorated in ceramic tiles that formed the image of a lamb, a cross, and a fish.
McGillicuddy stared at the altar and at the golden crucifix hanging by a golden chain above it. All had been built in the glory days of the Order when the halls were filled with young men fresh from their seminaries, awaiting instructions and assignments to the missions of the Order that were marked in red on a map of the world in the central refectory hall. There was an exciting international air to the place then; good days and good years, McGillicuddy thought as he stared at the altar. And then decline, the investigation by the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith, the cutoff of funds from the Agency, the general falloff in numbers of clergy entering the service of the Church.
Tunney’s eyes were closed, his hands clasped.
McGillicuddy looked down at the frail old man. A journal with a red leather cover. And pens.
He thought again of Rita Macklin at the door yesterday.
McGillicuddy turned at last, leaving Tunney alone in the half-darkness of the church. He walked quickly to the door, dipped his hand in the holy water font, and made the Sign of the Cross as he left the church. He crossed the open portico to the main hall of the rectory.