Clerical Error Read online

  “And you advised me not to anticipate trouble before it happens.”

  James shook his head as he assembled the frayed bits and pieces of that conversation in his memory. “Not quite. I suggested that you could not make any preemptive moves because you refused to make the only move possible: to demand the upstart’s transfer out of your hair.” He focused on Gus’ face, trying to tie in the new names with the old data. “Which upstart were you talking about? Pedro or Tim? You never did identify which was involved.”

  Gus’ eyebrows went up, surprised. “I didn’t?”

  “No. You may recall that you spent a solid hour explaining how your Spanish parishioners—”

  “Hispanic,” Gus corrected.

  James ignored him and pushed through the correction so he could get a word in edgewise. “They didn’t understand one of their priests keeping banker’s hours and what’s the difference?”

  “Espana is Spain, the mother country. Hispaniola is the entire Spanish-speaking world. Like the Jews and the Diaspora—the global scattering from ancient Jerusalem—or the relationship of the Poles and Polonia. In the case of Hispanola in America, there is a pecking order and rivalries by nation. The Cubanos were near the top because they were professional men here since 1959. We rarely get Chileans in this parish because they are mostly German descendants and deeply committed to their Rhine wine plantations in almost the same way that the Italian immigrants dominate Argentina. American Hispanics are Caribbean basin emigrants and the northern half at that: the Dutch and Hindi populations of Guyana and the southern fringe of the basin don’t show up in large numbers. Mostly, we referee the conflicts among Puertorriquenos, Mexicans, Haitians, and Santo Domingans fighting it out for bottom place.”

  “Because they’re wetbacks?”

  Gus narrowed his eyes. “Never, never, never use that expression. I’ve heard the phrase ‘undocumented immigrants’ used.”

  “But isn’t that like calling a drug dealer an ‘undocumented pharmacist’?”

  “Yes, James. But the church’s job is not to offend anybody. That way, we hope that some can be saved. We can offend them with our beliefs, but not by name calling. Anyway, historically, your phrase would only be apt for those undocumented aliens who swam the Rio Grande from Mexico. For the average Hispanic, the expression is simply double-barreled, reinforced racism. There were never immigration quotas within this hemisphere until 1965, thank you Ted freaking Kennedy and Lyndon Brainless Johnson. First we made it illegal to be a migrant, even though the only reason the workers immigrate is because conditions are even worse at home. Then their wages are lowered because they are illegals, and finally we then tar anybody with a Spanish surname as a possible undocumented alien. Good old fashioned WASP bigotry at its political worst. I’m not sure what promotes it more – racism, the desire for cheap labor, or anti-Catholicism.”

  “I’m sorry I asked.”

  Gus leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “Oh, yes, while I think of it. If INS, Immigration, ever comes to the door looking for a glance at the baptismal book, throw him out. If he protests that parish records are public documents, tell him to come back with a court order. Parish records are only public documents under very specific circumstances. I have always required them to get a court order.”

  “Isn’t that obstructing justice?”

  Father Sadowski barked a laugh. “It’s promoting justice. INS is shady, corrupt, and, like the Italian proverb says, ‘stinks from the head down.’ I’ve run into too many stories from my classmates about private shakedowns. An agent gets an address from the baptismal book, pays the people a visit, and leaves with a healthier wallet.”

  Father Sadowski stopped long enough to relight his cigar, while James tried to backtrack the conversational thread and concluded, “You really do not want to talk about Tim, do you?”

  Gus sighed, and his body sagged in his chair. “Not really.”

  James leaned forward to match Sadowski’s earlier position. “Father, you’re not being fair with me. Either you are alone in the house or you’re not. Either you have a fellow sacerdos to say Mass and do the rest of the necessary or you don’t. It makes no sense for me to spend two weeks in this combat zone if help is available. So stop screwing around.”

  Gus stopped to ponder this ultimatum and then his face changed as if he were deciding what he could say. “Timothy Evelyn Lessner is a ‘priest in transition,’ to use the current euphemism. In simpler words, he doesn’t know whether or not he wants to stay a priest… The whole situation is messy. You see, the bishop tells pastors to keep hands-off of a guy who is ‘in crisis.’ There’s no pressure to stay in or out. Orders are to not look cross-eyed at the guy.

  “As a result, Tim has had three homes since Christmas: his married sister’s place, his friend’s Mike Barry’s rectory over at Lepanto—the bishop couldn’t get any volunteers, so he made Mister Barry the acting administrator. When I was young, the old were the favored clergy; now that I’m sixty it’s the newly ordained that get the preference. You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t drop out of the game,” sighed Gus.

  James clapped his hands together to get Gus’ attention, hoping to get him on track and answer a question for once. “And his third home is here?”

  Gus shrugged. “During certain weeks, in no fixed pattern, he might be found to have spent a night or two in the room upstairs. He might wander in about one in the morning on a Wednesday and disappear sometime Friday. What bugs me about it is that I’ve spent two years getting enough money together to paint the house and his are the only two rooms which haven’t been painted or paneled in the last ten years.”

  “Let me guess – Tim’s room is only the room immediately over my head?”

  “Not quite. Over your head is the bedroom. Across the hall, over where my front room is, is a study where he keeps his other junk.”

  James rolled his eyes at the nitpicking. “Then consider the following as a possible solution: let’s open his study and move all of his stuff into the bedroom until the study is painted. Once that is done, we move all the stuff back again, add the bedroom contents and do that room next.”

  “NO,” responded Gus firmly, “I’m not leaving his possessions vulnerable to the sacristan or the housekeeper for looting.”

  James blinked in disbelief. “Really?”

  “There’s also the right of privacy, my friend. On one hand the bishop wants the rectory to be ‘homey’ and on the other hand, the central office issues rules for per-person living space, the right to privacy, and is now talking about creating a standard contract which will set forth the rights of curates and the obligations of pastors to curates.”

  James frowned. “Except you run the space.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “And they’re making a contract … that will state exactly what you have to do for your curates?”

  Gus nodded, clamping down on the cigar.

  James rolled his eyes so hard they hurt. “You know? Few deans ever go after faculty who jump contract. Because who the hell wants somebody in the classroom who hates being there? Forcing them just creates the potential for them to take it out on their own subordinates.”

  Gus nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “But you mean to say that this contract would have no obligations of what your employees, your curates, have towards you? And thus this Tim Lessner isn’t obliged to do anything? At all? What blundering idiot thought that up?”

  “Watch your tone of voice with me, Doctor? In this state, the Diocese is a corporation sole with Bishop Lousini as Chief Executive Officer; in Church law, all priests are extensions of the bishop and derive their powers from him. Take your pick, Church or state, he owns the bat, the ball, the ballpark, and makes up the rules as he goes along… or he delegates it to other idiots. Do you realize that for his delegate to the junior clergy, his personal representative to the Priest Senate, he picked the man least liked by the junior clergy? He’s got one set of rules binding
on us foot-soldiers and another set of principles for picking the people who will enforce those rules.”

  James shrugged. “So where is it written in all of these miscellaneous rules that we can’t go upstairs and change the locks after we open the room—to protect Tim’s stuff, of course,” he said with a small smile.

  “And if he comes in at three in the morning and cannot get into his room and lodges a protest against me with the Vicar?” Gus asked dryly. “You may not realize it, but one reason they have a Monsignor over this area is that none of the auxiliary bishops wanted these problems; just like we have trouble getting anyone under forty to serve in an area parish. Dammit, for four hundred years, we worked with an ideal of the priesthood that was one part Jesuit scholarship, diluted with nine parts of that Centurion ‘used to being under authority.’ Now with the military model giving way to ‘collegiality,’ good old ‘Moon’ Mullins can’t see himself—as head of the freakin’ Priest Personnel Office, do you believe!—he ‘can’t see himself’ ordering anyone to go anywhere, least of all to a neighborhood which the particular guy finds offensive. When ‘Moon’ or Vicar Marty get the protest, it’ll be my head—or rear, whichever they think will be more discomfited.”

  “You really are the complete organization man, aren’t you?” marveled James. “I’ve seen employees in corporate mergers where half of the staff were going to be fired who were less worried about the boss’s good opinion than you are.”

  “Who told you?” Gus demanded.

  “Who told me what?” asked James, suddenly dislocated by another conversational lurch. It must be past my bedtime, because I’m losing this thread altogether.

  “About the Bishop’s pet shrink.”

  James blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not. Good old ‘Louie the louse’—and you never repeat that nickname in front of anyone— As I was saying, our dear Bishop Louis Pasquale Louisini is in the tradition of those social engineers and social worker types that Spellman got appointed all over the United States. I will grant you that he got his Masters in Social Work when an MSW still meant something, but he remains a believer in sociology and psychology over philosophy and theology.

  “But Louie doesn’t know enough theology or canon law to try experimenting with new arrangements without getting Rome’s approval first. The only trouble with going through Rome these days is that you never know whose opinion you would be getting: has Paul VI made any decisions lately? From all I hear he’s a sick, and probably dying man. So the net result is that he makes half-assed and halfhearted changes and lets the lower level fanatics run their little fiefdoms as they wish unless and until they get complaints from Rome or his money men—such as the liturgical commission, ICEL (which my colleagues insist stands for International Conspiracy against English in the Liturgy), or the Committee on ‘Social Justice,’ which believes that being a Republican is an excommunicatable offense, or Personnel. Last time the Bishop got burned was when a fast food chain withdrew a million dollar contribution after the ‘social justice’ people led a public demonstration against the company because they did business in South Africa. And, of course, Louie regularly squelches the pro-life clergy lest the diocese lose its cut from the United Way campaign.”

  Gus took a breath.

  James interjected “About the psychiatrist?” so fast that it sounded like one word.

  “Psychologist,” Gus grumbled, irked at being pulled away from a gripe. “A classmate of Louie’s in graduate school. I checked him out with some people in academe; they never heard of him. Anyway, this clown gets a questionnaire filled out by however many hundred we have in the diocesan clergy. I don’t know what he said about the other guys, they are very closed mouthed about it, but on the carbon copy of the report he sent in on me, I was criticized for ‘over-identification with the establishment!’ Nowhere in my ordination ceremony did I take on the obligation to be a rebel.

  “Anyhow, Chris Shanahan blew up over his evaluation, and Shanahan is a bad man to cross: he knows his canon law up to yesterday’s rulings and he can give you a pretty shrewd guess as to tomorrow’s. Shanahan went straight to Louie and explained to him that—if those psychological profiles, done by a man with poor professional credentials, were ever put in our files at the Cathedral, or were ever used in any way, shape, or form, for purposes of promotion or appointment—that Chris would just have to go straight to the Apostolic Legate in Washington and file an official protest. Chris studied canon law in Rome with Cardinal Legate DeContini, and Louie knew it, so, of course, the Bishop immediately reversed himself but it was too late, the damage was already done.”

  James had a sinking feeling about this. “How?”

  “Half of the clerical staff in the personnel office are junior clergy.

  “Louie thought it was a good idea to bring them into a ‘power-sharing mode’ and I’m told he has even quoted approvingly that vulgar quote from Lyndon Johnson about how ‘it’s better to have your opponent inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.’ Thanks to the junior clergy, there were leaks all over the place. I’ve caught Tim using phrases from my evaluation, and I know of other pastors who have gotten even rougher treatment from their curates.”

  James through up his hands in a signal to stop the madness, he wanted to get off. This was more than he ever wanted to know about internal diocesan politics. Gus’s inability to keep a conversation going in a straight line was distressing.

  “Getting back to the original problem with Tim?” James started. “The solution to the three a.m. problem is simple. Everything goes into one room. New locks are put on both doors. The room we paint is left with the windows opened for ventilation, door unlocked, with the bed left in it so he can sleep in peace whenever he gets in—and so can you.”

  Gus nodded slowly. “It just might work. At least it sounds good. Let’s go see Buttercup.”

  “Father! It’s eleven at night and you want to go out?! And who the hell is Buttercup?”

  “My puppy,” smiled Gus as he bolted from the room in the sublime assurance that James was following.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DARK INTERLUDE

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13TH, 1976

  It was midnight when James finally threw the bolt and enjoyed the blessed silence.

  “Buttercup” was a direct descendant of the Hound of the Baskervilles: part mastiff, part German shepherd, and all attack dog. The dog came to James’s waist and weighed-in at one hundred and fifty pounds, and he had no doubt that her fangs would figure prominently in any dreams he had this night. Father Gus kept her in the deserted school building. She was fed at dawn, walked at noon by the sacristan and at 11 in the evening by the pastor, and then allowed to prowl the building, hungry, all through the night.

  For the last hour, James’s only concern had been to keep the priest between himself and the beast at all times, a not-inconsiderable task as the animal kept backtracking his walker, wanting to a make a meal out of the new kid on the block. Gus was oblivious to all of this of course: he was too intent on his narration of his own first days with the hound to realize what the nervousness of his new assistant was all about.

  James stretched out on the bed, and thought about the last six hours.

  First conclusion, Gus Sadowski must have been a terrible lonely man in addition to being a night owl. How many friends and confidants can he have if he talks to me like a fellow priest of equal age? No, that doesn’t follow, James corrected. Maybe it’s just the nature of this problem which makes him reluctant to share it with another priest, where I’m out of the system completely.

  Second conclusion, was that he had better do something about getting back into church attendance. Gus would probably be horrified, no, make that disappointed, to learn that I go to church as social pressure dictates.

  Third conclusion, Gus is a nervous wreck. Displaced nervous energy expended on running everywhere, more adolescent than pre-geriatric in his loves and hates, prodigious alcohol consumpt
ion, but all it does is take the edge off of him. He’s a probable candidate for tranquilizer therapy but too ornery to comply with the doctor’s orders.

  Fourth, Sssssslllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppp…

  * * *

  [1]In the rectory of Our Lady of Lepanto a very different meeting was taking place that same evening, a meeting better described as a war council.

  Mike Barry[2] called the meeting to order.[3] “Ok, folks, we’ve done justice to MJ’s wine and cheese fondue. Les has turned out to be a better pastry chef than we had any right to imagine, and Tim has fulfilled his duties as bartender. As your host, I must insist that it is now time to get down to business.”

  Father Barry’s speech had predictable responses. Sister Mary Jane Neuhaus glowed with a mixture of white wine, girlish pride, and some less appropriate female emotions as the nun snuggled closer to Father Tim Lessner.

  Father Tim’s eyes were a glaze compounded of lust and alcohol, which added more plague to an unhealthy looking appearance. Tim was a tall man, wearing dark corduroys, moccasins, flannel shirt, and greasy hair of such an indeterminate color that it denied the recent proximity of shampoo or a comb. His face was pasty, contrasted with a walrus mustache, and eyes so glassy, they were nearly mirrors.

  Mr Leslie Brannigan, thin legs crossed over elegant knees, almost simpered at Mike’s compliment. He once more regretted that a hunk like Barry was only a practicing heterosexual.

  Oh, well, staying in his confidence will give me time to teach him that we’re all bisexuals at heart. I’d even be willing to share MJ if that were the only way to Mike. His dreams of a menage a trois highway to gayer goals were interrupted by his fantasy object’s voice.

  “I think it’s time we got out of this neighborhood.”

  His listeners gasped in shock.

  Mike let the wave pass and then continued: “The poor in this area are no longer worth our time and trouble. The federal government has exhausted its social welfare funding and, let’s face it, these people are obnoxious. We only get to work with two kinds of client. The church-and-family people are just passing through. They work, save, and pray, and get the hell out of here into the better areas as fast as their savings will carry them.