Clerical Error Read online

  “The people they leave behind are pure, hardcore, underclass. The women are fifth generation unwed welfare mothers, like the Gore family in the projects: every fifteen years they breed: great-great-grandma is a whole seventy-five and the generations count like a multiplication table: 60, 45, 30, and I’m just waiting for the fifteen year old to start gestating.

  “The men are only interested in crime, drugs, a warm place to shit, and a tight pussy.

  “We have been wasting our time on them. Let the righteous right take care of them. It’s about time we found some suitable work for those impossible people. If we burn out enough of the older ‘defenders of the faith’, they will be less of a nuisance when it comes to setting central office policy and, if we’re really lucky, won’t survive to drain the retirement fund. Hell, those people like cleaning sewers.”

  “So where are we going, Mike?” Les asked breathlessly.

  “First the Cathedral, then Washington.”

  The three gasps from his audience pleased him immeasurably.

  “How…when…” Tim lapsed into a mumble.

  “Lousini has made us into a branch of the welfare office. MJ’s confrere at the education office has been doing her victim-of-the-month club mailings for years now and the federal government has made up the majority of the diocese’s budget for the last five years. The next logical step is to go where the money is: first we work on the Cathedral-City Hall nexus until we can guarantee that the diocese will remain firmly under the control of the elected officials who are paying the bills. Once that step is accomplished, then we must look to the ultimate step in the funding process if we are going to stay ahead of these fools.”

  The last time Mike took on the “fools” was at a meeting of the priest senate where he convinced a solid majority to adopt: Resolved: our Catholic hospitals have no right to interfere with staff gynecologists who do abortions in their private practices. To do otherwise violates their freedom of conscience. (The Bishop, when reminded by Rome that he retained his rights as an employer to hire whomsoever he wished, ignored the senate order on the grounds that he should have no fewer rights than the Mayor, who forbade City Hospital doctors from having any private practice whatsoever)

  “Our personal career plans are simpler,” continued Barry modestly. “On March first, the four of us are being appointed to the staff of Brian Hehir at the United States Catholic Conference/ National Council of Catholic Bishops. He has an agenda on peace, justice, economics, and liberation made just for us.”

  The discussion descended into details and only ended when Mike, Brannigan, and MJ left for the night. They agreed to leave Tim where he was, sleeping on the sofa.

  Much later, Mike Barryconcluded that Tim would be alive if he had slept the rest of the week there.

  * * *

  The noise under James’s bed sounded like the dark murmurings of a coven in its cave using gray – not black – magic to contradict the winter morning. Now that he was rested, James because aware of the absence of springiness in the mattress.

  Are there still straw-stuffed mattresses outside of prisons and Trappist monasteries? he wondered as he rolled over to find his watch on the lamp table. 8:09a.m. Tue 2 13 it said. He lay flat on his back, stared at the ceiling, let his eyes range further upward in his skull until he could see the large crucifix over the bed and finally the light bulb went on.

  If the Mary altar is on the other side of the wall behind my headboard, the windows on my right face the schoolyard and those on my left face the street, then the pastor’s suite is over the first floor parlors. Gus’s bedroom is over the common room and –Yikes!—I’m over the sacristy where Mass is going on!

  He bolted out of bed and attempted to wash in little water closet which held only the bedroom sink and a mirror. He wanted to do it all quickly and quietly but these were contradictory ideals inasmuch as the slightest movement made the ancient floorboards groan and each geriatric creak must have distracted the congregation below. The rumbling old pipes in the wall did little better.

  Somewhere along the puppy walk the previous night Father Sadowski had mentioned the small numbers at daily masses. Fuel conservation and limited funds precluded heating the Church for daily Mass.

  “Takes two hours before you even feel the heat. Four hours for heating thousands of cubic feet of dead space for six people for twenty-five minutes is preposterous,” Gus had grumbled last night.

  “Well, so much for assisting him at Mass,” said James to himself. He had bolted his door. (“Lock the door. Take the key. If you are not actually, physically in the room, then someone else may be. There are lots of people who can wander loose in this building once they get in the front door.” What was that, John calculated, Sadowski’s Law Number Nine?)

  But as he reached the head of the staircase, he saw the door to the rectory open. Even though the hinges were closest to James, it took less than a second to see the resident speedwalker enter the rectory proper.

  “Good morning, Father.”

  “Good morning, Doctor.” The priest paused in mid stride and did a quick about face. “I want to show you some things in the sacristy.”

  The next five minutes were an orientation to daily duties. Father began by filling a plastic gallon bottle with tap water, lifting the top on the holy water font (a five gallon metal barrel on legs, with a spigot on the lower rim) and pouring in the tap water.

  In response to James’s raised eyebrows, Sadowski grumbled, “No, I am not watering the Scotch. Canon law specifies that you can dilute holy water as much as you want provided only that what you are adding is clearly less than half of what is already there. Forty-nine percent water plus fifty-one percent holy water equals one hundred percent holy water after each dilution. It’s only when you let the water level go way down that it’s easier to bless a new batch.”

  “Isn’t that perilously close to sophistry? Like how many hairs in a beard?”

  “Not sophistry but casuistry in the best classical sense of case law. There are clearly more important things in life than holy water but I can not convince my parishioners of that. If I had to do it from scratch each time, I’d be blessing a new fontful three times a day. Just remember to add water after each time you dispense it.”

  Father opened the closet door to reveal the sacristy safe. Five feet high, three feet deep and vintage Jesse James.

  I figure this safe could be opened with a stethoscope but not dynamite, speculated Dr. James, who was no relation to any bank robbers that he knew of.

  “The only thing to remember is to spin the dial (tightens the tumblers) and the numbers twelve, twenty-four, and ninety-something. It doesn’t matter if you go left-right-left or vice-versa, somewhere between ninety-three and ninety-seven the pin will drop and you can open it.”

  Gus swung opened the safe door and pointed out items of interest. “I will assume that setting up the altar for evening mass will now be your responsibility because I can see no sense in giving the combination to every spare priest that Clancy sends over and, anyway, it wouldn’t be very hospitable toward fellow sacerdotes who are doing me a favor. Here’s the tabernacle key but you’ll find that the celebrant will just count the house and consecrate the numbers of wafers to match. The chalice is there. behind it is the wine.”

  “You keep the wines in the safe?”

  “Weren’t you ever an altar boy?”

  “I was an acolyte for fourteen years,” responded James so stiffly, even he was aware of his own pomposity in using the precise technical terminology.

  “Ever imbibe the altar wine?”

  “Comes with the territory,” responded James casually, making a conscious effort to loosen up, “but usually nothing more than emptying the leftovers from the cruet.”

  Gus scoffed. “Well, our kids think nothing of emptying the whole bottle. And with our budget, we have to pour the unconsecrated leftovers back into the bottle.” Father slammed the safe. “Let’s have breakfast.”

  The dining room
was a right turn at the foot of the basement steps. The dark wood of the buffet side-board, the table and the china closet must have done some nineteenth century pastor proud. Even the lace doilies and the Irish linen tablecloths designed to let only the slightest glimpses of the wood peek through must have been the delight of some little old lady donor sometime within the last forty years. What little showed of the wood hinted at its being in that no-man’s land between antique and junk.

  Father sat with his back to the street windows whose lower frame was level with a small fenced-in front garden. James figured that it must have been on his left as he ascended the front steps last night but hadn’t noticed in the dark. James sat on the pastor’s right with his back to the dining room door.

  On the table were individual boxes of cereal, a pitcher of milk, sugar bowl, and a pot of coffee. Both of them ate their cornflakes in silence, James trying to adjust himself to his host’s sense of time and his quite variable temperament. The only claim to virtue James would ever dare to make was his willingness to adjust to others. His mnemonic skills were a gift of nature. The drive that made him a full professor was the gift of an emotional trauma which encouraged him to hide in his books[4].

  I must be tired, he thought, because I don’t otherwise let my guard go down into self analysis. When I do that I only maximize my failures and minimize the successes. The confessional is the only way to handle this: get forgiven and then forget it as soon as possible.

  James was pulled out of his wallow, indeed, almost jumped, as a big, beefy black arm came into his field of vision and dropped a platter of French toast onto the table. He twisted around to look up at the biggest, fattest, black woman he had ever seen in his life.

  “Luraleen, this is Dr. James. He’ll be with us until the Bishop sends somebody else to replace Fr Pedro.”

  Hold on there! James thought, I didn’t write you or anybody else a blank check.

  “Dr. James,” Gus continued, “this is Luraleen, chief housekeeper and cook.”

  “Hiya, doc,” said in a tone of ultimate indifference.

  “Good morning,” James responded in what he hoped was a friendly tone.

  She shoveled six slices of toast onto his plate. “Aren’t you the skinny one? Here, you just start in on these and I’ll go fetch ya the syrup.”

  James looked at the pastor and gestured helplessly at the mountain of food now in front of him.

  Gus shrugged. “Do your best or she’ll be hurt. I should have warned—Oh, Millie, that’s fine, thanks.”

  James waited until she wandered away again, and whispered, “Where did you get her?”

  “I inherited her,” said Gus, and then gestured for silence.

  James took a bite of the French toast and gagged. Whatever liquids had been added to the bread, the net effect was a dough the consistency of gefilte fish, sweetened to the taste… the taste of a sugar-maddened, toothless, six year old child.

  James attempted to reclaim his dignity with a cup of black coffee and a distracting question. “It’s almost nine. What happens next? Are you actually going to act on my advice or at least get off the dime and do something?”

  Gus sighed like a man willing to finally adopt a course of behavior which he would rather avoid. All James could think of was the expression about someone being ‘unwillingly willing,’ the classic example of which was the poor pilot of a single-engine aircraft who reluctantly jettisoned his cargo to gain altitude and avoid a crash.

  Surely a little painting can’t be such a traumatic decision, concluded James in as false a prophecy as he would ever make.

  “We are going to empty one of Tim’s rooms into the other and get it ready for the painters.”

  “Good for you!” responded James with more enthusiasm than he felt, but which he felt his friend needed to hear.

  James noticed that Gus was patting his pocket in the usual preliminaries to finding and lighting a cigar.

  “Shall we continue this in the common room?”

  Father took his mug of coffee and James headed straight for the bathroom to dispose of the remains of the French toast. He returned to find his host settling into the armchair and elected to sit at the desk, figuring that the prevailing drafts would keep him upwind of the cigar smoke.

  “To repeat, where did you get her and, more to the point, why do you keep her on your staff?”

  “I inherited her,” Gus said with a shrug.

  “Then I suggest that you dispose of your inheritance as quickly as possible.”

  “Things are never quite that easy, Jimmy me boy,” responded the priest in a mock brogue.

  James made a face.

  “You object to ‘Jimmy’—or to my brogue?”

  “The latter is incongruous…”

  “Not tat tall,” interrupted Sadowski. “If I can be a charter member of the Diocesan Polish Clergy Society, then why can’t I learn a brogue in an area where Irishers are a large segment of the clergy?”

  “…and the former because ‘Jimmy’ belongs to kids, country and western singers, Cagney, and Valentine…”

  “Anyway, you look Irish.”

  “…and James is not my last name, which is now what Luraleen thinks it is. Why?”

  “Because neither she nor the rest of the parish would be able to pronounce that God-awful last name of yours. What the hell is it again?”

  James sighed in full surrender. He now knew that he would be lucky to ever finish pressing an idea or finishing a sentence in his host’s presence. “When my great-great-grandfather left Europe in 1848, it was because he backed the wrong horse during the revolution. Then it was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so feel free to pick any one of the seventeen nationalities you like. If it isn’t too indelicate—I’ve met blacks named Murphy and Kelly, but… Sadowski?”

  “Light up your pipe, doctor. This one’s a barn-burner,” began Sadowski smugly. “My mother was the family genealogist before that Roots man encouraged millions to ransack parish records. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have some poor confused fool wander in on a busy Saturday with convert classes, parish organization meetings, and the usual walk-in traffic for Masses, baptismal records, certifications, and what-all-else, and, usually in a mild voice, not knowing that he’s asking for the impossible, said fool wants to sit in the common room and wander through three years of parish baptismal records because he once thought he heard his senile great-grandmother mention that his grandfather was baptized here? And ‘all he wants to do’ is to look through the nearest five years in which he thinks it happened!”

  James focused on the start of the monologue. “And what did your mother find about your ancestors?”

  Gus shrugged. “She traced one side of the family all the way back to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608.”

  James held up a hand. “Wait a minute. I know enough history to question your mother’s research. The first boat from Africa didn’t arrive until 1619. I always remember that they got here before the Mayflower descendants who call themselves the Boston Brahmans.”

  “Wait for it,” responded Gus patiently. “As I was saying, 1607 was a bad year and Captain John Smith complained to his exploration company that, unless a dozen real workmen were sent from London, that his party of inexperienced ‘gentlemen’ would bring the colony to failure. The Goodspeed delivered six people who we would now call ‘colony salvage experts’ by September 1608.

  “These six chopped wood, set up a furnace, distilled tar and pitch from pines, created a soap factory, and a sawmill and taught one hundred and four English gentlemen how to support themselves. These first teachers, factory men, et cetera, were Jan Bogdan, Michael Kowicki, Jur Mata, Zwibigniew Stefanski, Karol Zrenica, and Stanislaus Sadowski—the six Poles who saved the Virginia colony.” He drew on his cigar in a manner appropriate to the raconteur who has just hit the punch line of a well honed story.

  “Of course,” Gus continued, “now that the name is traced the pigmentation requires an explanation. Recall that sl
avery didn’t become an official institution until decades later when the laws were passed. The Poles didn’t give a … darn who they married, as long as she was Catholic. Sadowski was the least bigoted of the bunch: as far as my mother could tell, he must have converted his wife, baptized her himself, and eventually got around to convalidating the state-licensed marriage in the Church when a Catholic priest finally showed up.”

  “The family kept marrying interracially for generations, moving as each state tightened up its slavery laws. By 1812, some of Stanislaus’s descendants were in sixteen different states, with my branch of the family in Boston, Massachusetts, no less.

  “So my mother came from South Carolina and my father was a Chicago fireman, but ultimately my roots are in Poland and Africa.”

  The cigar was finished and so was the story. James finished his coffee. “Tim’s room?”

  Sadowski studied the cigar in his hand. “Did you by any chance notice the Santa Barbara Botanica on your way in?”

  James flinched inside. On the one hand, he wanted to get Tim’s room over and done with. On the other hand, his curiosity ate away at him. He sighed. “I saw it when was driving in. Seriously, what the hell is that? I’ve been wondering since I saw it. The oversized statues of Mary and other saints made it look like an elephant burial ground for Tridentine brick-a-brack. I could never figure out how they stayed in business. How much of a market is there for four-foot-tall plaster statues?”

  “A very good market… in certain circles.

  “Such as?”

  Father Gus grinned, bounding out of his chair with that relentless enthusiasm which was starting to depress James. “Come with me. Let me show you.”

  James followed Gus out the door. “We have the time? What about Tim’s—”