Thomas M. Disch (13 page)

The detainee in Cell 2, Janet Joyner, seemed to Hedwig no more than a child, though obviously in a biological sense she was a woman. How Janet, who was only twelve years old, had become pregnant was not something Hedwig wished to discuss. Indeed, she often had to ask herself which was more shocking: that a child so young should be pregnant, or that she should have, on her own initiative, tried to secure an abortion? Fortunately, the girl had called the Abortion Information Hotline, which she and Gerhardt had set up, and so it had been possible to intervene by having Father Cogling approach the girl’s parents. They had been horrified when they’d been informed of their daughter’s condition and of her sinful intention, and had agreed at once to Janet’s transfer to the facility at the Shrine. Not all parents were so immediately cooperative.

Temperamentally, Janet was the opposite of Mary. She was a kittenish child, pathetically eager to chat, or play games-or even to say the rosary along with Hedwig, though she had obviously not been brought up with a proper sense of her religious obligations. Hedwig felt sorry for the poor little creature. No girl of twelve wants to spend all her time with no companion but a woman of sixty-three. Later, when there was a larger staff at the Shrine, and other girls as young as Janet, it should be possible to allow the more trustworthy girls to spend a certain part of each day together in the recreation room on the floor above. But with only Hedwig here through most of the week, that was not yet feasible. For now, little Janet would have to learn to develop her own inner resources. There was a wide choice of good books from the library that had belonged to the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, not to mention that most sustaining inner resource, prayer. The times that try our souls most sorely are also those that give us the greatest strength. Hedwig had learned that lesson as often as she had brought her own unfortunate children to birth, then seen them taken from her. Now she could be at hand to help others learn the same lesson and to show them by precept and example how to embrace their own crosses joyfully and with thanks.

Of the four detainees, Hedwig was fondest of the girl in Cell 3, Tara Seberg, who appeared to feel a sincere remorse for the sins that had led to her forcible detention. She prayed a great deal, and often wept while she was at her prayers. Many girls possess the gift of facile tears, of course, but Tara wept when she supposed herself unobserved, so it wasn’t likely that she was feigning. She had read the books Hedwig had urged her to read,
Unto Us a Child Is Born!
and
Accepting the Gift of Life
, and she had taken their message to heart. While the other three girls fretted about the constraints of their life at the Shrine, Tara’s most urgent concern was that she might see a priest and be able to go to confession. It did Hedwig’s heart good to be able to minister to Tara’s needs, not just her physical needs but her spiritual needs as well. For man lives not by bread alone, and woman doesn’t either.

It was the girl in Cell 4 who was the bane of Hedwig’s existence. Her name was Raven Peck—an absurdity, but it was actually her legal name and appeared on her birth certificate. Not only was the girl wholly unrepentant, but she seemed determined, even now, to induce the miscarriage of the five-month-old child in her womb. Consequently, she had to be kept almost completely immobilized, with padded leather restraints buckled around her wrists and ankles and a kind of harness about her shoulders and rib cage that kept her confined to her bed. She had to be spoon-fed and, what was nastiest, assisted in going to the bathroom. And all the while Hedwig would be caring for her in these intimate ways, the girl would say the most blasphemous and insulting things, using such foul and abusive language that sometimes Hedwig could not even comprehend the meaning of the obscenities.

Christ commanded us to love our enemies, and to do good to those who intend us ill, and to turn our other cheek, but had Christ ever had to deal with Raven Peck? That was a foolish question, of course. He had been reviled, and whipped, and crowned with thorns by His tormentors, while Raven Peck had done nothing more harmful, physically, than to spit gobbets of warm oatmeal into Hedwig’s face. And Hedwig did return good for evil. She read aloud to Raven from
Accepting the Gift of Life
, ignoring the girl’s jeers and blasphemies and simply wearing her down until she listened, unprotesting, to the message that must, eventually, change her life. Hedwig fed her—and the life within her—anything she asked for that was within Hedwig’s power to prepare. And Hedwig prided herself on her cookery. If Raven had an urge for gingerbread with mounds of whipped cream, Hedwig made fresh gingerbread. If she fancied Belgian waffles, Hedwig made Belgian waffles. Lentil soup? Hedwig had an excellent recipe for lentil soup. Raven only had to ask, and each time she did ask, Hedwig felt she had won another small victory. She was the rain and Raven was the stone, and gradually the rain will wear away the stone.

He felt as though he were being buried alive. As though he were in a pit dug deep in loose, sandy soil, and when he would try to shore up one side of the pit, the opposite side would cave in on him. At the first crisis, two years ago, when Bishop Massey had called him on the carpet about the lawsuit being threatened by the parents of the Petrosky boy, he had marveled at his own coolness and composure in the face of what had then seemed certain disgrace and a possible criminal prosecution. Eventually, the boy’s father had come around—or, more accurately, the diocesan attorneys had come up with enough money for the outof-court settlement—and Father Bryce was let off the hook. But that had really been a transfer from frying pan to fire, for though the Petroskys’ silence had been secured, Father Bryce found himself at the mercy of a much shrewder and more ruthless adversary, Bishop Massey himself.

As teenagers they had attended minor seminary together, vying for the same honors and the same teachers’ favors. They had played on the same basketball and baseball teams. They had completed their theological studies at the North American College in Rome in the heady aftermath of the Vatican Council. Upon ordination, they had been considered among the likeliest candidates for advancement to high office within the diocese. In the way of such rivals, Father Bryce and Father Massey had maintained a fiction of being the best of friends while doing all they could to avoid each other’s company.

Their first assignments made that easy, for Father Bryce was appointed assistant pastor to the rural parish of Leech Lake, with teaching duties at nearby Etoile du Nord Seminary, while Father Massey had been appointed to a post in the Chancery with the duty of developing a new, post-Conciliar liturgy for the entire diocese.

It was clear to Father Bryce, even then, which of them was slated for rapid advancement. Was it uncharitable of him, or merely realistic, to think that Massey owed his greater success to the fact that he was black? That he was personable, a good politician, and black after the café-au-lait manner of Harry Belafonte rather than in the Sidney Poitier style—these were also advantages. To be fair, Massey did all he could to emphasize his ethnicity. He wore his hair in an Afro long before Afros became respectable. He favored civilian clothes, and even vestments, with an “African” flavor, wearing long-flowing dashikis even as other priests were abandoning cassocks. He cultivated a style in his sermons that called to mind the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., though he’d grown up in Shakopee, Minnesota, and had no direct experience of charismatic black religion until he went to Rome and became friends with African-American seminarians studying there.

During the seventies Father Massey had moved up the ladder of promotions at a rapid clip, alternating service at the Chancery with increasingly prestigious pastoral appointments. Father Bryce, in the same period, was involved in the decline of the Etoile du Nord Seminary, as vocations diminished and a new breed of seminarians began to set a new tone. That tone was gay, and Father Bryce did not like it. He did not like the word itself, which was just then becoming the accepted euphemism for
homosexual
, as
black
was replacing
Negro
. And he did not like what the word stood for—a tolerant, smiling acceptance of sodomy as an accepted “lifestyle.” Of course, the new breed of seminarians did not come right out and declare
themselves

gay. They used other code words for their own transgressions. They spoke of a need for intimacy, of the joy to be realized by becoming “available” to others. Father Bryce himself was not beyond the reach of temptation, and sometimes, when he had exceeded his three-cocktail limit, he would succumb to one of the seminarians who’d made himself too readily “available.” But he’d always repented afterward, and he’d never allowed such falls from grace to become “relationships.” Indeed, he did all he could to avoid the young men who had led him into sin, though this could prove difficult when they were students he had to encounter on a weekly basis.

At last, at his own request, he’d been transferred from Leech Lake and his seminary duties and become an assistant pastor at one of the largest parishes in St. Paul, Our Lady of Mercy. It was there that his desire for young men had become his scourge. Indeed, the objects of his lust were no longer, properly speaking, young men but, rather, youths, generally between ages eleven and fourteen. Usually, they were altar boys who attended the OLM

parochial school, but there were also a few who attended public schools, whom he came to know through the confessional. There was nothing that so transfixed him as hearing the voice of a boy who had never come to him before for confession haltingly explaining that he had been guilty of sins of the flesh.

What sins exactly, he would have to know, and how many times, and where, and what acts had the boy
imagined
as he’d masturbated? Had he ever thought of doing such things with other boys, or with men? Had he thought of touching them? If he were to touch his own private parts, at that moment, in the darkness of the confessional, would sinful thoughts take hold of him? He would lead his young penitents along the path to where he lay in wait for them, in his own little darkness so close by, and it was rare that one completely escaped him. Some might not be given to feel the actual pressure of his flesh on theirs but, really, the most exciting part was stimulating their imaginations. He had read that an exhibitionist achieves orgasm at the moment he makes eye contact with the person to whom he’s exposed himself. For Father Bryce the moment of release was the moment he could feel a boy’s will yielding to his. It was not necessarily a carnal moment, though carnality might well be the end result.

It was, however, always a
priestly
moment, for a priest is also a bender and shaper of wills. He is someone called on to exercise authority and to lead souls toward the condition Saint Paul speaks of in First Corinthians, when he tells of the two kinds of bodies, the corrupt and the incorruptible, and how we are able through Christ’s love to change the one kind of body to the other. The nature of the incorruptible body was a mystery of the Faith, but there were moments when Father Bryce had felt as though he stood before the very Tabernacle of that mystery and saw the veil begin to be parted, and then—.

And then the veil would close and he would discover himself to be a sinful beast, guilty of acts that even the lavender priests of Etoile du Nord and Bishop Massey’s Chancery considered shameful and regarded with contempt and even horror. It galled him that such men— effeminate, epicurean, hypocritical—could think of themselves as pillars of the Church and of Father Bryce and those who shared his fleshly needs as diseased members fit only for amputation. They were the sheep, and he was a goat. Their love was holy and redeeming, and his stank of shit. And there was a part of him that agreed with them, that shared their contempt for and horror of the acts he was compelled to perform.

With the Petrosky boy he began to feel the madness of love. Before Donny his sexual feelings had been like the weather, with longer and shorter stretches of calm and of stormy weather. Once he had initiated a boy into the rudiments of sexuality, Father Bryce tended to lose interest. Their innocence was the wine for which he thirsted; once he’d slaked his thirst, the boys were like empty bottles, an embarrassment to be tidied away. He would insist on hearing their confessions and then, under the seal of the sacrament, swear them to a secrecy they were usually all too eager to agree to.

But Donny Petrosky had been different. Donny would not be coerced into postcoital shame. He declared himself to be in love with Father Bryce, and called him on the phone at all hours, and appeared as a communicant each morning at Mass, even after Father Bryce had told him he could no longer serve as an altar boy. At first Father Bryce had been alarmed and angered, but then the boy’s obsession began to kindle similar feelings in himself. He invented reasons why Donny had to spend the night at the rectory. He took him on fishing trips to Rush Lake. He bought clothes for him and helped fabricate lies that would account for his frequent absences from the Petrosky dinner table. He interceded with Sister Fidelis, Donny’s seventh-grade teacher, so that Donny would not be required to take a summer course in remedial math as a condition of advancing to eighth grade. Donny began to speak of the possibility that he might have a calling to the priesthood, inspired by his mentor’s example. Father Bryce felt a strange joy at the thought of Donny’s vocation, a feeling that was at once priestly and paternal.

And then Donny Petrosky exploded. Father Bryce never knew what triggered the outburst, for there had been nothing amiss between them. The boy had had an argument with his parents, who’d told him he would not be allowed out of the house after dinner for the rest of the summer. Donny set the Petrosky house on fire the same night. Fortunately, the fire department prevented any serious damage, but Donny was sent by a family court judge for psychiatric evaluation, and the cat was Out of the bag. Donny told the psychiatrist about Father Bryce, the psychiatrist told Donny’s parents, they hired a lawyer, and the lawyer went not to the OLM rectory but directly to the diocese of Minneapolis. Only a month earlier Father Bryce’s erstwhile friend and longtime nemesis, Father Massey, had been appointed Bishop of Minneapolis.