Death of a Pilgrim (2 page)

Then the bell stopped. The clanging was replaced by a loud knocking on the bedroom door. The man woke up and peered at his watch. It was a quarter to three in the morning.

‘Sir, sir, it’s the telephone, sir! It’s the hospital, sir!’ The butler’s voice was apologetic, as if he felt hospitals had no right to disturb his employer at this
time of night. He was still suspicious of telephones.

‘Of course it’s the bloody hospital, you fool,’ shouted the man, beginning to pull on the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before. ‘Who else would telephone
at this time, for Christ’s sake? What did they say?’

‘You’re to come at once, sir. I’ve ordered the carriage.’

‘God in heaven!’ said the man. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’

This man didn’t answer telephones. He didn’t open letters. In normal times he didn’t tidy his clothes away. He didn’t clean his shoes. He paid other people to perform
these mundane tasks for him. They marked, these triumphs over the trivia of modern life, the milestones on his journey to unimaginable wealth, his town house in New York, his mansion in the
Hamptons, his yacht, his servants, the great industrial empire, the mountains of money sleeping in the vaults of the Wall Street banks.

As the carriage rattled through the empty streets of Manhattan, Michael O’Brian Delaney thought bitterly that he would happily give them all away in return for just one thing, the life of
his only son.

Michael Delaney was in his late fifties. He was slowly turning into a patriarch. He was over six feet tall and with a great barrel of a chest. Dark eyebrows hung over brown eyes that were liable
to flash with anger or excitement. His hair was brown, turning silver at the temples. He radiated a vast energy. One of his employees said that if you could somehow plug yourself into Delaney you
would light up like a candelabrum. Oil paintings of a more peaceful Delaney adorned the boardrooms of his corporations.

By the time his carriage drew up at the hospital entrance there was only one candle burning, to the left of his son’s bed. The little ward looked out on one side to the night streets of
Greenwich Village, on the other to the main ward for the terminally ill in St Vincent’s Hospital. Not that the nuns or the doctors ever referred to the ward in terms of terminal illness. It
was St James’s Ward to them. All the wards on this floor were named after one of the twelve apostles. Only in private did some of the less religious nurses refer to it as Death Row. As
Delaney tiptoed into the room on this November evening, nearest the main section an elderly nun, her entire working life spent in tending the sick and the dying on these wards, sat perched lightly
on a chair and stroked a young man’s hand, as if her caress could prolong his stay in these sad surroundings.

‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Delaney. We felt we had to call you. We thought the end might be near, you see, but the crisis seems to have passed. He is no better, of course, but at
least he’s still with us.’

‘Thank God,’ said Michael Delaney, and sat down on the other side of the bed. These were familiar surroundings to him now, the dim lighting, the crisp white of the sheets, the
antiseptic pale green paint on the walls, the picture of a saint – Delaney didn’t know which one – on the wall above the bed, the faint smells of soap and disinfectant, the light
rumble of the trolleys outside taking away the dead on their last journey to the morgue, or bringing fresh consignments of the dying into the terminal ward. But he could not sit still for long. He
was restless, now leaning forward to peer into the young man’s face, now pacing on tiptoe over to the window and staring out into the snow swirling round the streets of his city.

This elder man was the father of the patient lying unconscious in the bed. Michael Delaney was one of the richest men in America. The patient was his only son, James Norton Delaney, and the
doctors were convinced he could not last more than a day or two. He was suffering from a rare form of what the doctors thought was leukaemia but knew little about. He was eighteen years old, James
Delaney, and this evening he was lying on his left side. He had been on the other side when the father sat on vigil until ten o’clock the evening before. Perhaps, the father thought, the nuns
had turned him over to make him more comfortable. James was a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two. He had, as Michael Delaney recognized every time he looked at him, his
mother’s pretty nose and his mother’s mouth. Only in that high forehead, Michael Delaney thought, had he left his own print on the face of his only son. The young man’s forehead
was lined and wrinkled as if he had added thirty or forty years to his age. He was deathly pale. The light brown hair, almost straw in colour, straggled dankly across the pillow. His father had
lost count of the number of days his James had been in this isolation ward on his own now. Four? Five? Days and nights blended into one another; the vain hope that those light brown eyes might
open, that the lips in his mother’s pretty mouth might part and speak even a few words, was dashed as the ritual timetables of the nurses and doctors measured out their patients’ days.
Still there was no movement. Delaney leant down and kissed his son very lightly on the forehead. Every time he did this he wondered if it would be the last time his lips touched a living creature
rather than a corpse.

Shortly before seven o’clock in the morning the order changed in the Hospital of St Vincent. The elderly nun was replaced by a younger one. Delaney was conscious of
shadowy figures flitting silently to their places along the main ward. The Matron of the hospital materialized by his side and led him away.

‘You must have a change for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘Come with me.’

She led him through a series of passageways, the walls now pale blue and filled with paintings of the Stations of the Cross or scenes from the Gospels. Then she slipped away and he nearly lost
her. The Matron, Sister Dominic, was a considerable force in St Vincent’s. Almost all the male patients she met, even the very sick ones, were absolutely certain that she had chosen the wrong
profession. Think, they said to themselves, of those translucent pale blue eyes. Think of that face with its delicate features and that soft blonde hair. Think of that figure, alluring to some of
them even through the folds of the habits of her order. Quite what the right occupation for Sister Dominic might be they had no idea, but central to it, in the male view, was non-nunnery. No veils,
no wimples, no rosary beads, no strange garments, no prayers, let her be just another example of that great institution, American womanhood, available for courting, wonder, romance and, for the
lucky one, love and marriage. Often the male patients would dream about Sister Dominic, coming slowly back from drugged sleep after visions of nights spent in her company. Matron herself was well
aware of these strange currents of male interest, even male desire, that flowed invisibly around her person. She prayed regularly that God would punish her every time she thought about her
appearance. There was one quality, central to her personality, that most of the male patients did not see. Her faith was the most important facet of her life. And she had a deep, intense, very
personal calling to heal the sick. Sometimes she would tell herself that somebody in her care was just not going to be allowed to die. It would be too unfair. Sister Dominic never told any of her
colleagues about these missions of salvation. When all her efforts failed she would repair to her bare cell and weep bitterly until she was next on duty, sometimes refusing to eat or sleep for days
at a time. Failure did not come easy to the Matron of St Vincent’s Hospital.

‘Where are we going?’ Delaney whispered.

‘We are going to the chapel,’ she replied.
‘We are going to pray.’

The man stopped suddenly. He told her he had forgotten how to pray. Bitterly he remembered the times he had ignored all forms of religious instruction as a boy
and had played truant, the church services where he had deliberately ignored the words and the responses, the Sunday mornings he had managed to flee from the Church of the Blessed Virgin and gone
to hang around the waterfront, the beatings from his father for not taking his faith seriously. He remembered too his father shouting at him that one day he would be sorry he had not paid attention
to the priests. One day the sins of his past would come back to haunt him. Well, Judgement Day had finally arrived, here in this place where the sheets were changed twice a day and crucifixes and
rosary beads were as common as top hats on Fifth Avenue.

Matron told Delaney he should not worry about the praying on this occasion. She would find him something else to do. She asked him to wait for a moment outside the main entrance to the chapel.
When she came back there was a ghost of a smile about her face. She led him into the little church, for so many of the nuns the very heart of the hospital. There were enough pews to hold about
forty people. All of them were filled, mostly with kneeling women. All of these Sisters, she told him, had come to pray for his son James. It was a special effort for a special young man. When
Delaney asked her what he had to do, she gave him a box of matches. She pointed to the great banks of candles inside all the side chapels and below the paintings on the walls.

‘You must light these,’ she said, ‘and as you light each one, you must pray to God in his mercy to save the life of your son. Do not worry if we have gone before you have
finished. You must light them all and then return to the bedside. Later on this morning I am going to find you a priest or a chaplain to teach you how to pray.’

With that Matron knelt to the ground in the pew beside him. Delaney turned to the candles to his left and began lighting them very slowly. Please God, spare the life of my son James, he said to
himself, feeling coarse and awkward as he did so. Gradually, as he repeated his prayer, he began to weep. The tears poured down his face and would not stop. Sometimes they would drop on to his
match and extinguish the possibility of lighting another symbolic message before it had even begun. The nuns took little sideways glances at the weeping tycoon but left him to his ordeal. At eight
o’clock the Sisters began to peel away, walking quietly back to their nunnery or their places on the wards. Matron sent word to a Father Kennedy, asking him to come to the hospital and to
James Delaney’s ward later that day. Michael Delaney had not finished yet, though one wall was a blaze of light, dancing off the faces of the saints or the waters of the Lake of Galilee. It
was so strange for Delaney, asking an unknown and invisible God to save the life of his only son. His was not a world made up of these religious or metaphysical certainties. His was a world of
balance sheets, of strike-breaking, of amalgamations, of mighty trusts, of personal enrichment, of power, power over the lives of the thousands of people who worked for him, power over the local
politicians who might need a subvention to help them through their next election, power over grander politicians, aspirant statesmen perhaps, whose need for invisible assistance was often as great
as their hunger for high office. Alone in the chapel with his matches and his candles he thought of Mary, the boy’s mother, who had died three years before. She too had come to this last
resting place of Manhattan’s Catholics and been tended by the nuns until she died. There had been, he shuddered slightly, a great deal of pain. It was a mercy, they said, when she was called
home. Delaney didn’t think it had been a mercy then and he didn’t think it was a mercy now. This God person, he reckoned, reaching up to the top of a sconce almost out of reach, He had
a lot to answer for. If He took James as well, Delaney thought, he would write God out of his account books, sell Him off to a competitor, even at a knockdown price, put Him out of business, close
this God outfit down once and for all.

Just before nine o’clock all the candles were lit. Delaney sat down in one of the pews and looked around him. He tried to remember the words but they had gone. Hail Mary, that meant
something, he was fairly sure of it. The same went for Our Father. But of what those nuns said as their knees rested on the stone floor he had no idea. He turned back at the door and looked one
last time at the candles. He wondered if their light would go out before his son’s life. Suddenly his brain took off into a strange mixture of his own world and the very different world of
the hospital. Did they have enough candles here at the hospital? Did the other hospitals? This was something he, Michael Delaney, could do. His mind set off on a journey round the economics of
candle production, possible advanced production techniques that could reduce the cost of manufacture and the numbers of employees, candle transportation routes and freight rates, distribution of
candles round the churches and hospitals of New York. Would it be cheaper to amalgamate candle supply into general delivery lines of food, linen and so on, or simply have one outfit responsible for
distribution? What about the competition in candle land? Could he buy them out? Could he drive them out of business?

As Delaney pondered these questions on his way back to the ward a whistle blew less than a mile away at one of New York’s great railway stations. A mighty passenger train moved slowly out
on its way to Chicago. The train was nearly full and promised to be a busy one for the stewards and the cabin staff. This railway line was one of many owned by Delaney’s companies. This
section of his three and a half thousand railway employees across the eastern seaboard of the United States was clocking on for work on the normal ten-hour shift with no breaks, which would see
them travel halfway across a continent. And, in the rear part of the train, there was a steward who rejoiced in the name of Patrick or Paddy Delaney, a cousin of the proprietor on the Irish side of
the family though the two had never met.

The boy had hardly moved in his bed when his father returned. The new Sister on his left was also stroking his hand. Delaney paced up and down the room, staring into the face of his son, doing
more planning for his schemes for a candle monopoly, then peering out of the window. Sometimes he cried and wished he knew the words of the prayers. Ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock
passed, and by noon Delaney’s train with his cousin on board was well into upstate New York. Occasionally a doctor would come in and look at the young man, feeling his pulse and taking his
temperature by the heat on his forehead. None of the doctors had seen a version of the disease like this. They were acutely conscious that any new treatment might not cure the young man. It might
kill him instead.