I eye him curiously. “May I ask you something, Father?”
“Fire away.”
“Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic priest?”
For the first time he seems surprised. He stops his isometrics, cocks his head. “How do you mean, Tom?”
“Why are you?”
“Why am I what? Oh. You mean why am I a Catholic — Tom, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember what a sacrament is?”
I smile. “A sensible sign instituted by Christ to produce grace. I can still rattle it off.”
The priest laughs. “Those sisters did a job on us, didn’t they?”
“Yes. Maybe too good.”
“What? Oh. Yes, yes. Do you remember the scriptural example they always gave?”
“Sure. Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you will not have life in you.”
“Same one!” says the priest, again laughing, then falls to musing. “Life,” he murmurs absently and under his breath. “Life. But that’s the trouble, the words—”
“What’s that?” I ask the priest, wondering if he’s still talking to me.
“Oh,” he says, giving a start. “I’m sorry. To answer your question—” He frowns mightily.
What question?
“Are you forgetting about the ancient Romans?”
The ancient Romans. My nose is running badly. I have to go.
“Aren’t you forgetting that the ancient Romans, who were, after all, not stupid people and were right about most things though not very creative, were also right about us.”
“I suppose I had forgotten.”
“The historians say they mistook us for a Jewish sect, didn’t they?”
“Sure.”
“Was it a mistake?”
Now he’s clear of the trapdoor. I give the rung a yank.
“The Jews as a word sign cannot be assimilated under a class, category, or theory. No subsuming Jews! Not even by the Romans.”
“Right.” I yank again. What’s wrong with this damn thing?
“No subsuming Jews, Tom!”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“This offends people, even the most talented people, people of the loftiest sentiments, the highest scientific achievements, and the purest humanitarian ideals.”
“Right.”
“You have to turn it,” he says, noticing my efforts to open the trapdoor.
“Thank you.” No, that doesn’t work either.
“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign which could not be evacuated.”
“Right.”
“Who remembers the Ukrainians?”
“True.”
“Let me tell you something, Tom. People have the wrong idea about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as people see it, is a myth.”
Oh my. My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those? I try harder to open the damn door.
While he is talking, he has taken hold of my arm.
I remove his hand. “Goodbye, Father.”
“What’s the matter, Tom?”
“Are you telling me that the Nazis did not kill six million Jews?”
“No.”
“They did kill six million Jews.”
“Yes.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that the origins of the Holocaust are a myth—”
“Never mind. I’m leaving.”
“Very well. What are you going to tell Father Placide and Dr. Comeaux?”
“I am going to tell Father Placide that you are too disturbed to be of any use to him at St. Michael’s. I am going to tell Dr. Comeaux that you are also too disturbed to operate the hospice and that I hope you will sell it to him. Now will you let me out of here?”
“I appreciate your frankness,” says the priest, nodding vigorously, hands making and unmaking fists in his pockets. “Shall I be frank with you?”
“Sure, if you’ll open this damn door.”
“I will. But please allow me to tell you something about yourself for your own good.”
“Please do.”
“You are an able psychiatrist, on the whole a decent, generous, humanitarian person in the abstract sense of the word. You know what is going to happen to you?”
“What?”
“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind — and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you’re going to end up doing? You a graduate of Harvard and a reader of The New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation’s Program for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?”
“No,” I say, relieved to be on a footing of simple hostility, “—even though I did not graduate from Harvard, do not read The New York Times, and do not belong to the Ford Foundation.”
The priest aims the azimuth at me, but then appears to lose his train of thought. Again his preoccupied frown comes back.
“What is going to happen to me, Father?” I ask before he gets away altogether.
“Oh,” he says absently, appearing to be thinking of something else, “you’re going to end up killing Jews.”
“Okay,” I say. Somehow I knew he was going to say this.
Somehow also he knows that we’ve finished with each other. He reaches for the trapdoor, turns the rung. “Give my love to Ellen and the kids.”
“Sure.”
At the very moment of his touching the rung, there is a tapping on the door from below. The door lifts against his hand.
“That’s Milton,” says Father Smith in his workaday ham-operator voice and lifts the door.
A head of close-cropped iron-gray hair pops up through the opening and a man springs into the room.
To my astonishment the priest pays no attention to the new arrival, even though the three of us are now as close as three men in a small elevator. He takes my arm again.
“Yes, Father?”
“Even if you were a combination of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt rolled into one — no, especially if you were those guys—”
“As a matter of fact, I happen to know Charlie Kuralt, and there is not a sweeter guy, a more tenderhearted person—”
“Right,” says the priest ironically, still paying not the slightest attention to the stranger, and then, with his sly expression, asks, “Do you know where tenderness always leads?”
“No, where?” I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.
“To the gas chamber.”
“I see.”
“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”
“Right.”
The stranger has sprung up through the opening with no assistance, even though he’s carrying a plastic pail of water in one hand and an A&P shopping bag in the other. Evidently he’s used to doing this.
“Well—” I say, stepping down. We needn’t shake hands.
“Here’s the final word,” says the priest, taking hold of my arm.
“Good,” I say.
Now we three are standing facing in the same direction, the stranger evidently waiting for me to leave, not even having room to set down pail and shopping bag.
“If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure, right?
“Right.”
“If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”