“Father? What’s wrong?”
“I am tired,” Leo Tunney said slowly. “I was so… moved. Because of them.”
“They haven’t heard a Mass such as that for a long time.”
Tunney looked up, puzzled.
McGillicuddy, still moved, came to the white-haired priest who already looked smaller in the voluminous folds of the chasuble and alb. “Dear Father,” he began, touching his hand.
Tunney stared at him.
“You wouldn’t understand now. Everything that has happened, all the changes.… Father Foley will want to speak to you, no doubt.”
Still Tunney stared because McGillicuddy was smiling. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say it. No, it won’t do at all. But it was glorious, just glorious. To hear and speak those words again—”
“What? What are you saying, Father?”
“—like a miracle, in a small way. Yes, precisely, in fact, because that is what it was.”
Mrs. Jones stood in the kitchen door and watched the old priest eat. She was beginning to understand him. He had been sick is all, she had told her neighbor, Mrs. Custis. In the jungle or some such but sick and his stomach needed gentling, is all, she had said. So she made two soft eggs this morning and corn bread and he seemed able to eat it all. She’d watch over his diet in the future. All of a sudden, she had told Mrs. Custis, the house was filling up again and now there was this young fellow from Rome, in Italy, and he spoke with a real accent. These Catholics were always coming and going, all of it pretty mysterious if you asked her. Mrs. Custis said that she knew a Catholic once and they had ten kids; nice kids but ten kids is a lot of kids, even for Catholics.
“Everything all right, then?”
Leo Tunney looked up as though she were an apparition and then his face seemed to remember something — his eyes stared away, he worked his lips — he nodded to her and tried a smile. “Yes, this is fine. This is fine, Mrs.…”
“Mrs. Jones,” she said.
“Mrs. Jones. Yes, thank you for your trouble.”
“Wasn’t no trouble to do for you, that’s what I’m paid to do, you just speak up and holler when there’s something you want. You were sick, is that it?”
“Yes. Sick. For a time. And so many things have changed—”
“You come from some jungle I heard Father McGillicuddy say?”
“Yes. Thailand.”
“Thailand.” She rested her hands on her apron. “Mrs. Custis lives over the way, that’s my neighbor lady, she has a boy was in Thailand or one of those places, I think. About ten years ago, it was in the war?” She had the habit of making statements sound like questions by ending them with a rising tone. “That boy come home full of hell and fire, if you will excuse me saying that, Reverend. Hell and fire and couldn’t settle him down at all, it was a shame.”
“I’m sorry,” he said as though she had told him of a death.
“Terrible shame.”
“A waste,” he said. “All to no point.”
“Well, I suppose he had to go when he had to go, you couldn’t have told him anything anyway. His daddy was in Korea, seems that there’s always something.”
“Yes,” said Tunney, who placed his fork at the side of his plate. The yellow stains on the plate were all that was left of the eggs, along with the yellow crumbs of the corn bread.
“I was saying to Mrs. Custis just yesterday, I was saying to her—”
Martin Foley entered the kitchen.
Mrs. Jones darted a quick, suspicious glance at him. A handsome young man, she had told Mrs. Custis, but there was a cast to him. Cast to his eye? asked Mrs. Custis. No, a cast to him, as though something just weren’t quite right, about his color or the way he looked at you. A cast to him.
“Father Tunney? If you’re quite finished then?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m finished.” He said it like a man called to an unpleasant task. He looked down at the empty plate and then at Mrs. Jones who still stood in the doorway, frowning slightly at the intrusion. “That was very good.”
“No meat,” she said. “You don’t want no meat yet until we get that stomach put back together, if you’ll excuse me saying so. Meat is for a healthy man. Get you some broth I make special for my church, just the thing for you.”
“Good,” he said, smiling in the way of a stranger who intrudes too much. “Good. Thank you.” He rose and looked at Foley who was the same height but fifty pounds heavier. “When you’re ready, Father Foley.”
Foley led the white-haired priest to the middle reception room, the room where he had waited for Father McGillicuddy on his arrival from Rome.
Tunney sat down in a straight chair with a velvet cushion; Foley sat behind a small desk and stared across at Tunney.
“You said you were too tired last night to talk. How do you feel this morning?”
“Better. Or the same, really, but I have energy in the morning.”
“Good. I wanted to ask you…”
“Yes?”
“Well, we can come back to it. How aware are you of the changes that have occurred since you… disappeared?” He was choosing words carefully, the training in diplomacy combining with his natural caution to create an even greater hesitancy.
“Not at all,” said Tunney. “No, that’s not so. I knew about the war. Obviously. I knew about the death of President Kennedy. Vaguely, I was aware of matters. Protests here and such. But it was always difficult to know what was true and what was propaganda.”
“Ah, true, true,” Foley said, making a cathedral of his fingers, looking at them as though they were the most interesting thing in the world. “And you were aware of the Church? Of changes here in the Church?”
“Changes? What changes?”
“At Mass this morning.”
Tunney stared at him, his eyes faintly quizzical.
“Well, we can come back to that in time.” Foley paused again, staring at his hands. If he began by insisting on the strictures against performing the old Mass, perhaps it would unhinge the old man. He had to proceed carefully; the correct forms of ritual could wait, along with the letter of canon law.
The two priests sat apart in the oak-paneled room, replete with glass and pecan cases full of books, each waiting for the other to speak. On a buffet of maplewood, a Sessions mantel clock ticked loudly; outside, the faint hum of the city brushed lightly against the windows. The sun had returned but the streets were still damp from the morning rain.
“Leo Tunney,” the young man began.
Tunney did not acknowledge the voice. He waited because he knew what it was to be interrogated. He knew the tricks of the inquisitor. Rice, from the Agency, had been his friend and Maurice had acted the role of his enemy. And before them, so long ago, there had been Van Thieu who broke his fingers, one each morning, for ten days. Ten broken fingers that took half a year to heal, the hands swollen with pain, the agony preventing sleep or thought or any sanctuary until the pain could not be endured and the body slipped from consciousness. Then, in the tiger cages they had used, he was crammed and left alone, living in his own filth and excrement, bent nearly double by the boxlike cages until the fire in the muscles of his back and buttocks and legs burned night and day, until he longed for the inquisitors’ visits and for the tricks of the questions as relief from the pain and despair of the cages. That was when he had finally broken, the salve of tears flooding over his wounds, begging for their kindness and forgiveness, crawling to Van Thieu across the broken ground, his legs hanging uselessly from the trunk of his tortured body. That was when he had gone mad, the final mercy of God.