Death of a Pilgrim (3 page)

Shortly before one o’clock a priest appeared and took Michael Delaney aside. You must go home and rest now, the priest told him. You do not need to rest for a very long time, but you must
maintain your strength for what might happen. I, Father Kennedy, will meet you here in the chapel at seven o’clock this evening. The nuns will have finished their services by then. Please, I
will stay with the boy a while.

Delaney’s carriage and Delaney’s coachman had waited for him outside St Vincent’s. The coachman spent his time playing cards with the porters or reading one of his ever-growing
collection of magazines about motor cars. Mercedes Benz. Ford. Chrysler. Cadillac. Bugatti. The coachman was very fond of his horses but these names took him to another world where he sat proudly
at the wheel of a mighty machine and drove his master up and down the eastern seaboard, hooting his horn at recalcitrant pedestrians, a muffler round his throat and a chauffeur’s cap upon his
head. As they made their way slowly through the crowded streets they were overtaken by a couple of fire trucks, their insistent bells shrieking and echoing round the thoroughfares. Sitting inside
his carriage, Michael Delaney remembered that other bell which had woken him up earlier. He thought suddenly of the numerous funerals he attended as his contemporaries in the Wall Street jungle
died off in their prime. Delaney never missed one of these sad occasions, come, his enemies whispered, to make sure that another of his competitors had really been removed from the earthly market
place. He recalled the words in one of the addresses, usually full of sentimental rubbish about the dead man, now transformed from a rapacious capitalist into a virtual saint and generous
benefactor of the poor: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ Were these bells ringing for him? For his son? Michael Delaney huddled into his greatcoat and tried to
pray.

The Archbishop of New York used to say that the net wealth of Father Patrick Kennedy’s flock was about the same as that of a medium-sized country like Sweden or
Portugal. Delaney was a parishioner of his, a very occasional worshipper at Mass, like so many of his kind, but a generous contributor to church charities, like so many of his kind. Quite simply,
Father Kennedy was the parish priest in the richest part of the richest city in one of the richest countries on earth. He was popular with his congregation, Father Kennedy, with his charming voice
and elegant manners from the Old Confederate State of Virginia. In his youth Father Kennedy had been slim, ascetic almost, a devoted reader of the works of Meister Eckhardt and St Thomas Aquinas.
He was about five feet ten inches tall with a Roman nose and his blue eyes were then fixed on another world. The temptations of the flesh did not reach him in his rich parish, but the temptations
of the table made an impact. Middle-aged now, he was known to his critics as the Friar Tuck of Manhattan. He glided through the Fifth Avenue drawing rooms with his polite smiles and his anecdotes
from his time in Europe a decade before. Father Kennedy was very successful at drawing new converts into the bosom of Mother Church, and as most of his recruits were as rich as everybody else in
the parish, St James the Greater increased yet further in wealth until cynics in poorer parishes referred to it as St James the Richer.

Father Kennedy worried a great deal about the very rich. He saw all too clearly that the leisure of those who lived off the interest on their money, or even, in some cases, the interest on the
interest, without needing to work at all, could be corrosive. Souls could be lost in the fripperies of the season as easily as they could in the brothels and the gambling dens of the Bronx. He
worried a great deal, Father Kennedy, about camels and their ability to pass into the kingdom of heaven. Three times he had asked to be transferred to a parish in one of the slums of New York.
Three times the church authorities had refused. The Archbishop always maintained that remaining in Manhattan would be good for Father Kennedy’s soul. The truth was somewhat different. Father
Kennedy was the greatest benefactor of the poor in the whole of New York. Not personally, but through his parishioners, who would contribute funds for the education or housing of the poor, for the
support of the destitute, for building new churches where none had been before. It was all so easy. The rich just reached for their chequebooks as they might hold out their hands for a glass of
champagne at a Fifth Avenue soirée. After watching this waterfall of charity dollars for years Father Kennedy himself had become cynical. They’re trying to buy their way in with false
currency, he thought. God doesn’t want their money, he wants their souls. So, while he never stopped the cascade of charity, he was beginning to think about deeds rather than dollars as the
way to improve the spiritual health of his flock.

Michael Delaney’s staff pressed anxiously around him as he returned to his mansion. None dared to ask the question they most wanted to – how was James? Was he
still alive? The young man’s father refused all offers of refreshments except for a large glass of bourbon and took himself off to bed. He slept badly. He dreamt he was in a cemetery looking
at his wife’s grave, the two marble angels he had had erected a year after her burial towering above the marble tomb. But now, by her left side was another tomb, to his son, passed away in
the month of November 1905. This month. Then he noticed what was happening by her right-hand side. Four gravediggers were excavating a third burial place for another Delaney. It could only be
himself, last of the line. There was no inscription yet on his grave, he realized. He might have years to go still. With that comforting thought he woke up to a darkened city at a quarter to six in
the evening.

He was early at the chapel in St Vincent’s Hospital. Somebody had removed the guttered candles and replaced them with fresh ones. Delaney began to light them, remembering to say the words
the Matron had told him earlier that day. Father Kennedy came and sat down with Delaney in the very first row, a large silver cross in front of them. Just repeat the words after me, he said to
Delaney, that’s all you need to do for now. They started with Hail Mary.

Two doctors, one middle-aged and one very young, were examining James Delaney. The nurse had moved unobtrusively to the back of the room. They agreed that he looked a little better, that the
terrible chalky colour of the previous day was less pronounced.

Father Kennedy and Michael Delaney had moved on to the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them who trespass against us . . .

And so a strange ritual evolved. Early in the mornings Delaney would pray with Father Kennedy in the chapel and relight the candles while the doctors looked at his son. He would wait by the
bedside during the day and early evening, departing occasionally to care for his business or buy out a competitor. One of the nuns would sit on the other side of the young man and stroke his hand.
Delaney now had reading matter, a missal provided for him by Father Kennedy. He also had a special prayer of his own. It was, he knew, somewhat unorthodox, owing more to contemporary business
practice than to the Gospels. If God would save his son, he would, in return, make a mighty offering to God. The nature of the offering was to be determined by Father Kennedy, who smiled
delphically when told about the Delaney Compact. Early in the evening all the nuns and Matron would pray for James for half an hour. His father would light the candles and say some of the new
prayers he had been taught by Father Kennedy. As the priest watched the intensity of Delaney’s concern, the depth of his grief, he wondered if there might be other grounds for sorrow and
remorse in his past, now mingling with anxiety for his son James.

As Delaney became a part of this medical world, so different from his own, he found his eyes roaming the wards and the corridors for a sight of Sister Dominic. Even in her formal Matron’s
clothes, he thought, you could still discern the woman underneath. Lust began to flow through him as the medicines and the drugs flowed through the veins and arteries of the patients. Damn it, man,
he said to himself, not here, not now. All your life you have followed your basic instincts. The temporary delights of fulfilment have all too often been followed by recriminations and remorse.
This is neither the time nor the place for such base thoughts. Here, above all else, you must focus on the life of your son, James. But it was no good. His lust did not grow weaker. It grew
stronger. Fantasies filled his mind, of those clothes falling to the floor, of his holding such a beautiful creature in his arms. Matron, for her part, was not insensitive to what was happening to
Michael Delaney. She knew. She had seen this phenomenon all too often before. She took great care to pay even less heed to her appearance. That, had she but known it, inflamed Michael Delaney
further, clothes slightly out of place, hair not properly tucked in yielding up yet more erotic thoughts. Sister Dominic did change her ways in one respect. Every evening when she and her Sisters
prayed for James Delaney in the little chapel, she prayed for Michael Delaney too.

Then the doctors moved. For over a week they had monitored every medical detail they could measure about the condition of James Delaney, still lying motionless in his hospital bed. Neat folders
recording his current state were tucked away in the cupboard beside the bed. The following day was a Saturday. They asked Delaney to a meeting in the library at ten o’clock in the morning. If
he wished, Father Kennedy could accompany him. Matron was to attend too. All that evening the nurses and the Sisters looked at the Delaneys with great pity. All too often they had seen mothers and
fathers or husbands and wives coming out of that that room, holding on to each other in desperation, weeping their way down the corridors and out into the fresh air. The library was the place the
doctors brought close relatives when they had to tell them that their loved ones were about to die.

The library of St Vincent’s was on the top floor of the hospital, looking out over the tall buildings of the city. A storm was brewing outside, angry bursts of rain
battering at the windows, gusts of wind blowing the hats off the pedestrians and rattling and shaking the cabs as they made their way around the streets. As Delaney and Father Kennedy filed in for
their ten o’clock meeting that Saturday morning, the senior doctor, George Moreland, waved them into a couple of comfortable chairs by a low table in the centre of the room. Dr Moreland was a
graduate of La Salle University, summa cum laude, and had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Harvard Medical School. He was six weeks off his fortieth birthday. He was short and his hair, to his
great regret, was receding rapidly. His colleague, Dr Stead, was ten years younger with exactly the same medical pedigree as his superior. Together they represented one of the most formidable
medical teams in their field in the United States.

‘Thank you so much for coming at such short notice,’ Dr Moreland began, a slight smile moderating his look of extreme gravity. ‘Believe me, I can only imagine how difficult a
time this must be for you, Mr Delaney.’

Delaney was trying desperately to stop himself looking at Matron’s eyes. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I am so grateful for all you are doing here for my James.’

‘I’m afraid I am going to be frank with you this morning, Mr Delaney,’ said Dr Moreland, who had to steel himself for these difficult encounters with a small shot of brandy
before they started. ‘I want to put a proposition before you. You know by now, of course, of the difficulties we have with James’s condition. We believe it to be some form of leukaemia,
but we do not what form, what shape it is taking. His illness does not a have a name. If it did,’ he pointed at the lines of books that lined two whole walls of the room from floor to
ceiling, ‘there would be articles about it in places like the
Lancet
or the
New England Journal of Medicine
or the
Proceedings of the Harvard Medical School
which line
the walls here. But there is nothing. We are working in the dark, groping our way to some form of treatment that might effect a cure. So far we do not believe we have found the answer.’

Delaney brightened slightly. ‘If it would help, Dr Moreland, I could endow a Chair for the study of this strange disease at the university here in the city. Or I could establish a
Foundation to look into it.’ This world of self-interested philanthropy was one he knew all too well.

‘Please, please!’ Dr Moreland held up his hand. ‘Your offer is most kind and most generous but I do not feel this is the right time or place to raise such questions. We are
concerned with one life here, a life that is, as we speak, ebbing slowly away a couple of floors beneath us.’

Michael Delaney winced. Wealth was not going to save him here as it had saved him so often in the past.

‘You see, Mr Delaney,’ the younger doctor cut in, ‘we know so little. If I could draw a very imperfect example from your own world, let us suppose that you are going to build a
new railway line across some difficult mountains.’ The young man did not see fit to mention it, but his father was the senior engineer on the Kansas, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. ‘When
you come to work up your plans, you have a pool of knowledge to draw upon: surveyors who have mapped similar lines in the past, engineers who can estimate the optimum route to avoid the high places
where possible, men who have designed the rolling stock and the engines to carry the trains most efficiently across the difficult terrain. Others have trod the path before you. But with James, we
have nothing at all, no maps, no charts, no previous experience. We have been changing James’s treatment all the time. Nothing seems to work. Very slowly, little by little, he is becoming
weaker every day.’

There was a distant peal of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the New York skyline for a brief second. Delaney, Matron thought, sneaking a surreptitious glance at the man in case direct
eye contact should set him off again, was looking miserable, more miserable than she had yet seen him.