They brought her to an ending in a crowded cemetery where the gravestones cried for breath.
The Mass had been lonely as her life. Her brothers from Brooklyn. The grocer on the corner who’d extended her credit. Watching them lower her into the dark of a world without windows, Damien Karras sobbed with a grief he had long misplaced.
“Ah, Dimmy, Dimmy…”
An uncle with an arm around his shoulder.
“Never mind, she’s in heaven now, Dimmy. She’s happy.”
Oh, God, let it be! Ah, God! Ah, please! Oh, God, please be!
They waited in the car while he lingered by the grave. He could not bear the thought of her being alone.
Driving to Pennsylvania Station, he listened to his uncles speak of their illnesses in broken, immigrant accents.
“… emphysema … gotta quit smokin’ … I ohmos’ died las’ year, you know dat?”
Spasms of rage fought to break from his lips, but he pressed them back and felt ashamed. He looked out the window: they were passing by the Home Relief Station where on Saturday mornings in the dead of winter she would pick up the milk and the sacks of potatoes while he lay in his bed; the Central Park Zoo, where she left him in summer while she begged by the fountain in front of the Plaza. Passing the hotel, Karras burst into sobs, and then choked back the memories, wiped at the wetness of stinging regrets. He wondered why love had waited for this distance, waited for the moment when he need not touch, when the limits of contact and human surrender had dwindled to the size of a printed Mass card tucked in his wallet: In Memoriam … He knew. This grief was old.
He arrived at Georgetown in time for dinner, but had no appetite. He paced inside his cottage. Jesuit friends came by with condolences. Stayed briefly. Promised prayers.
Shortly after ten, Joe Dyer appeared with a bottle of Scotch. He displayed it proudly: “Chivas Regal!”
“Where’d you get the money for it—out of the poor box?”
“Don’t be an asshole, that would be breaking my vow of poverty.”
“Where did you get it, then?”
“I stole it.”
Karras smiled and shook his head as he fetched a glass and a pewter coffee mug, rinsed them out in his tiny bathroom sink.
“I believe you,” he said hoarsely.
“Greater faith I have never seen.”
Karras felt a stab of familiar pain. He shook it off and returned to Dyer, who was sitting on his cot breaking open the seal on the bottle of Scotch. He sat beside him.
“Would you like to absolve me now or later?” asked Dyer.
“Just pour and we’ll absolve each other.”
Dyer poured deep into glass and cup. “College presidents shouldn’t drink,” he murmured. “It sets a bad example. I figure I relieved him of a terrible temptation.”
Karras swallowed Scotch, but not the story. He knew the president’s ways too well. A man of tact and sensitivity, he always gave through indirection. Dyer had come, he knew, as a friend, but also as the president’s personal emissary.
Dyer was good for him; made him laugh; talked about the party and Chris MacNeil; purveyed new anecdotes about the Jesuit Prefect of Discipline. He drank very little but continually replenished Karras’s glass, and when he thought he was numb enough for sleep, he got up from the cot and made Karras stretch out, while he sat at the desk and continued to talk until Karras’s eyes were closed and his comments were mumbled grunts.
Dyer stood up, undid the laces of Karras’s shoes and slipped them off.
“Gonna steal my shoes now?” Karras muttered thickly.
“No, I tell fortunes by reading the creases. Now shut up and go to sleep.”
“You’re a Jesuit cat burglar.”
Dyer laughed lightly and covered him with a coat that he took from a closet. “Listen, someone’s got to worry about the bills around this place. All you other guys do is rattle your rosary beads for the winos down on M Street.”
Karras made no answer. His breathing was regular and deep. Dyer moved quietly to the door and flicked out the light.
“Stealing is a sin,” muttered Karras in the darkness.
“Mea culpa,” Dyer said softly.
For a time he waited, then at last decided that Karras was asleep. He left the cottage.
In the middle of the night, Karras awakened in tears. He had dreamed of his mother. Standing at a window high in Manhattan, he’d seen her emerging from a subway kiosk across the street. She stood at the curb with a brown paper shopping bag and was searching for him, calling out his name. Karras waved. She didn’t see him. She wandered the street. Buses. Trucks. Unfriendly crowds. She was growing frightened. She returned to the subway and began to descend. Karras grew frantic, ran to the street and began to weep as he called her name; as he could not find her; as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in a maze of tunnels beneath the ground.
He waited for his sobbing to subside, and then fumbled for the Scotch. He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.
He remembered a telephone call from his uncle:
“Dimmy, da edema, it affected her brain. She don’t let a doctor come anywhere near her. Jus’ keeps screamin’ things. Dimmy, she even talk to da goddamn radio. I figure dat she got ta go Bellevue, Dimmy. A regular hospital won’t put up wit’ dat. I jus’ figure a coupla months an’ she’s good as new; den we take her out again. Okay? Lissen, Dimmy, we awready done it. Dey give her a shot an’ den dey take her in da ambulance dis mornin’. We didn’ wanna bodda you, excep’ dere is gonna be a hearin’ in da court and you gotta sign da papers. What? Private hospital? Who’s got da money for dat, Dimmy? You?”
Karras didn’t remember falling asleep.
He awakened in torpor, with memory of loss draining blood from his brain. He reeled to the bathroom; showered; shaved; dressed in a cassock. It was five-thirty-five. He unlocked the door to Holy Trinity, put on his vestments and offered up Mass at the left side altar.
“Memento etiam…,” he prayed with bleak despair: “Remember thy servant, Mary Karras…”
In the tabernacle door he saw the face of the nurse at Bellevue Receiving; heard again the screams from the isolation room.
“You her son?”
“Yes, I’m Damien Karras.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go in there. She’s pitchin’ a fit.”
He’d looked through the port at the windowless room with the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; padded walls; no furniture save for the cot on which she raved.
“… grant her, we pray Thee, a place of refreshment, light and peace…”
As she saw him and met his gaze, she’d grown suddenly silent; then got out of the bed and slowly moved to the small, round, glass observation port, her expression baffled and hurt.
“Why you do this, Dimmy? Why?”
The eyes had been meeker than a lamb’s.
“Agnus Dei…,” Karras murmured as he bowed his head and struck his breast with a fist. “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant her rest…” Moments later, as he closed his eyes and held up the Host, he saw his mother in the hearing room, her little hands clasped gentle in her lap, her expression docile and confused as the judge explained to her the Bellevue psychiatrist’s report.
“Do you understand that, Mary?”
She’d nodded; wouldn’t open her mouth; they had taken her dentures.
“Well, what do you say about that, Mary?”
She’d proudly answered him, “My boy, he speak for me.”
An anguished moan escaped Karras’s lips as he bowed his head above the Host. He struck his breast as if it were the years that he wanted to turn back as he murmured, “Domine, non sum dignus. Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.”
Against all reason, against all knowledge, he prayed there was Someone to hear his prayer.
He did not think so.
After the Mass, he returned to the cottage and tried to sleep.
Without success.
Later in the morning, a youngish priest that he’d never seen before came by unexpectedly. He knocked and looked in through the open door. “You busy? Can I see you for a while?”
In the eyes, the restless burden; in the voice, the tugging plea.
For an instant Karras hated him.
“Come in,” he said gently. And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that so frequently rendered him helpless in the face of someone’s plea; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself out to rescue at the call of someone else’s need. It gave him no peace. Not even in sleep. At the edge of his dreams, there was often a sound like the faint, distant cry of someone in distress, and for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled.
The young priest fumbled; faltered; seemed shy. Karras led him patiently. Offered cigarettes. Instant coffee. Then forced a look of interest as the moody young visitor gradually unfolded a familiar problem: the terrible loneliness of priests.
Of all the anxieties that Karras encountered among the community, this one had lately become the most prevalent. Cut off from their families as well as from women, many of the Jesuits were also fearful of expressing affection for fellow priests; of forming deep and loving friendships.
“Like I’d like to put my arm around another guy’s shoulder, but right away I’m scared he’s going to think I’m queer. I mean, you hear all these stories about so many latents attracted to the priesthood. So I just don’t do it. I won’t even go to somebody’s room just to listen to records; or to talk; or to smoke. It’s not that I’m afraid of him; I’m just worried about him getting worried about me.”
Karras felt the weight shifting slowly from the young priest and onto him. He let it come; he let him talk. He knew he would return to him again and again to find relief from aloneness, to make Karras his friend, and when he’d realized he had done so without fear and suspicion, perhaps he would go on to make friends among the others.
Growing weary, Karras found himself drifting into private sorrow. He glanced at a plaque that someone had given him the previous Christmas: MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM. A failed encounter. He blamed himself. He had mapped the streets of his brother’s torment, yet never had walked them; or so he believed. He thought that the pain he felt was his own.
At last the visitor looked at his watch. It was time for lunch in the campus refectory. He rose and as he started to leave, he glanced at the cover of a current novel on Karras’s desk.
“Oh, you’ve got Shadows,” he said.
“Have you read it?” asked Karras.
The young priest shook his head. “No, I haven’t. Should I?”
“I don’t know. I just finished it and I’m not at all sure that I really understand it,” Karras lied. He picked up the book and handed it over. “Want to take it along? You know, I’d really like to hear someone else’s opinion.”
“Oh, well, sure,” said the Jesuit, examining the copy on the inner flap of the dust jacket. “I’ll try to get it back to you in a couple of days.”
His mood seemed brighter.
As the screen door creaked with the young priest’s departure, Karras felt relief. And peace. He picked up his breviary and stepped out to the courtyard, where he slowly paced and said his daily Office prayers.
In the afternoon, he had still another visitor, the elderly pastor of Holy Trinity Church, who took a chair by the desk and offered condolences on the passing of Karras’s mother.
“Said a couple of Masses for her, Damien, and one for you as well,” he wheezed with a lilting Irish brogue.
“That was thoughtful of you, Father. Thanks so much.”
“How old was she?”
“Seventy.”
“Ah, well, that’s a good old age.”
Karras felt a faint flash of anger. Oh, really?
He turned his gaze to an altar card that the pastor had carried in with him. One of three employed in the Mass, it was covered in plastic and inscribed with a portion of the prayers that were said by the priest. Karras wondered why the pastor had brought it in. The answer came soon.
“Well, Damien, we’ve had another one of those things here today. In the church, y’know. Another desecration.”
A statue of the Virgin Mary at the left side altar of the church had been painted over and made to look like a harlot, the pastor told him. Then he handed the altar card to Karras. “And then this was found in mid-morning right after you’d gone, y’know, to New York. Was it Saturday? Yes. Yes, it was. Well, take a look at it, will you? I just had a talk with a sergeant of police, and—ah, well, never mind that now. Have a look at this card for me, Damien, now would you?”
As Karras examined the card, the pastor explained that someone had slipped in a typewritten sheet between the original card and its cover. The ersatz text, though containing some strikeovers and various typographical errors, was in fluent and intelligible Latin and described in vivid, erotic detail an imagined homosexual encounter involving Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
“That’s enough, now, you don’t have to read it all,” said the pastor, snapping back the card as if fearing that it might be an occasion of sin. “Now that’s excellent Latin; I mean, it’s got style, a church Latin style. Well, the sergeant says he talked to some fellow, a psychologist, and he says that the person’s been doin’ all this—well, he could be a priest, y’know, a very sick priest. Could he be right?”
Karras thought for a while. Then nodded. “Yes. Yes, it could. Acting out a rebellion, maybe, in a state of complete somnambulism. I don’t know. But it could be. Sure. Maybe so.”
“Can you think of any candidates, Damien?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well, now, sooner or later they come and see you, wouldn’t you say? I mean, the sick ones, if there are any, from the campus. Do y’know any like that, Damien? I mean with that sort of illness.”
“No, I don’t, Father.”
“No. No, I didn’t think you’d tell me.”
“No, I wouldn’t, but on top of that, Father, somnambulism is a way of resolving any number of possible conflict situations, and the usual form of resolution is symbolic. So I really wouldn’t know. And if it is a somnambulist, he’d probably have total posterior amnesia about what he’s done, so that even he wouldn’t have a clue.”
“What if you were to tell him?” the pastor asked cagily. He lightly plucked at an earlobe, a habitual gesture, Karras had noticed, whenever he thought he was being wily.
“I know of no one who fits the description,” said Karras.
“Yes, I see. Well, it’s just as I’d expected.” The pastor stood up and started shuffling toward the door. “Y’know what you’re like, you people? Like priests!”
As Karras gently chuckled, the pastor returned and dropped the altar card on his desk. “I suppose you could study this thing, don’t ya think? Go ahead,” he said as he turned and started away again, his shoulders hunched over with age.
“Did they check it for fingerprints?” Karras asked him.
The elderly pastor stopped and looked back. “Oh, I doubt it. After all, it’s not a criminal we’re after, now, is it? More likely it’s only a demented parishioner. What do you think of that, Damien? Do you think that it could be someone in the parish? You know, I’m thinking now maybe that’s so. No, it wasn’t a priest at all, not at all; it was someone among the parishioners.” He was pulling at his earlobe again. “Don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know, Father.”
“No. No, I didn’t think you’d tell me.”
Later that day, Karras was relieved of his duties as counselor and assigned to the Georgetown University Medical School as a lecturer in psychiatry. His orders were to rest.