The Cardinal Read online

  “The man galls me, Stephen,” he said. “His whiskers, the stuff he sprays them with, and that guff about the stars. They’re bad enough.” Corny’s agitation seemed to shake brick dust from his hair. “But what I cannot stand is a man who wears a ring on his forefinger.”

  Stephen Fermoyle considered the justifiable state of his older friend’s feelings. How much could Sir Cornelius stand—or understand? The past forty-eight hours had put a trying strain on the Deegan system of values. But then again, Stephen’s own patience was beginning to chip at the rim. Loyally, he took up his burden.

  “Wearing a ring on the index finger is merely an old Italian custom, Corny. Every Renaissance gentleman from Lorenzo down wore one. It’s all part of a very great tradition.”

  “About that I wouldn’t know,” said Mr. Deegan, rooting desperately for expression in his one-syllabled vocabulary. “But I still don’t like the fellow. That big fat pride he has—it rubs me the wrong way, Stephen.”

  “I know what you mean.” The young priest was noncommittal. He understood very well what Cornelius Deegan meant, but as a guest he didn’t feel like disagreeing with him further.

  “And was I proud of you, Stephen, when you knocked him off his perch with that Lucifer comeback.” Cornelius Deegan’s cheek glowed with pleasure. “The Cardinal will hear of it from my own lips when I pay my respects to him in Boston.”

  “Please, Cornelius, no,” begged Stephen. “Promise me you won’t mention it to anyone—particularly the Cardinal.”

  “And why not?” The Deegan wind was rising again.

  “The fact is, Corny, I’m a little bit ashamed of that business on the bridge.”

  “Ashamed? Here you turn the laugh on an Italian show-off, and make him treat you with the reverence due a priest. What’s to be ashamed of in that?”

  Stephen was finding it increasingly hard to explain certain things to his host. For a moment he regretted joining the Deegans. But no—they were goodhearted, generous folk. He must try to make his position clear.

  “Listen, Corny,” he said, “when I asked, ‘Which is Lucifer?’ I was inviting trouble. I meant the question to be a kind of lunge at the man’s vanity. He felt the attack, and, naturally enough, parried it by turning the laugh against me.” Stephen paused. “And of course I was showing off a bit myself when I put the question in Italian.”

  “It’s his own language, isn’t it?” asked Agnes Deegan.

  “But he was speaking English at the time,” Stephen pointed out.

  Cornelius Deegan shook a puzzled head. “You certainly figure things funny, Steve. Not like an American at all. Did they teach you to think that way in Rome?”

  Stephen traced with his finger the ornate pattern of an inlaid table. “It’s not any particular thing they teach, Corny. But after you’ve lived in Rome awhile, you begin to see and feel a richness of design—the mosaic on this table is as good an example as any—that you don’t encounter anywhere else. Take this Captain of ours. I don’t blame you for being irritated at his self-conceit. But you must realize, Corny, that Gaetano Orselli is a remarkable specimen of a culture that we can’t grasp, much less duplicate, in the United States.”

  “Remarkable? Would you be specifying now?”

  “I would. Over and above Orselli’s accomplishments as a navigator and shipmaster, he’s a linguist, a poet, a gourmet—it was a joy to watch him eat that plover tonight—as well as a connoisseur of wines, gems, cigars, and”—Stephen sounded them to see if they had caught the mezzo-soprano overtones—”the opera. He probably can sing, or at least hum, every important aria in Wagner, Puccini, Verdi. …”

  The Deegans were dumfounded. How should a priest—and a young priest—be knowing about these worldly matters? And not only knowing about them, but including them in a litany of high regard.

  Stephen sensed their disapproval. “Oh, I suppose Orselli is a villainous agnostic, a rabid anticlericalist, and a man of no morals. I’m not defending him, Corny. I’m only saying that there’s something about these Italians that awakens the memory of a dream that’s pretty well faded from the Western world.” With fresh enthusiasm Stephen went on:

  “You’ll laugh when I tell you, Corny, or get angry maybe, but at Rome I had a professor of sacred theology, Monsignor Alfeo Quarenghi, the most ascetic, the most scholarly man I’ve ever known—ringless, un-scented, utterly unselfed by prayer and abstinence. Yet somehow these two men, so utterly different, resemble one another. I’ll put it this way: Quarenghi—elegant, fascinating, unforgettable—is the spiritualized counterpart of our captain.”

  Cornelius Deegan thought that the cooling time had come for such warm comparisons. Linking a Monsignor with Orselli? Why, if Father Stephen went any further, he’d be dabbling in heresy! Sir Corny grasped the moral bell rope and chimed ponderously.

  “Background they may have in common, and a way of policy such as we don’t come by in America. But take my word for it, Father”—Cornelius Deegan permitted his opinion to ring out loud and clear—“take my word for it, this Captain Orselli is naught but a windbag. No moral fiber. Put on the pressure, and he’ll crack wide open.”

  Stephen nodded. “You may be right, Cornelius.” The folly of contesting with the stubborn contractor-Knight made him feel more than slightly ridiculous. Smiling, he held out a good-night hand to his host.

  Something about Stephen’s gesture of surrender soothed Cornelius Deegan; the gruff pomposity of the Knight evaporated, and the parochial self-esteem of the contractor vanished quite away. All that remained on his face was the broad County Wicklow smile that he had brought to America forty years ago in the steerage of a twenty-day ship from Queenstown.

  “Steve,” he said, grasping the young priest’s hand, “you’ve got quite a touch of the Italian about you, yourself. You know when to hang on and when to give in. It’s a trick your father never learned. I’m wondering now what Dennis Fermoyle—Dennis the Down-Shouter we used to call him—will be saying when he finds himself crossed in argument by his Rome-educated son?”

  The proud edge of Father Steve Fermoyle’s intellect was blunted by the question. “I’ll never cross him, Corny. He can win every argument he starts with me. That great fist of his pounding the table and the gun-flint anger snapping in his blue eyes are the things I’ve missed most these four long years. God make me worthy to be his son.”

  “GOD make me worthy to be his son.”

  Stephen Fermoyle knelt beside a gilt chair in the solitude of his stateroom, bowed his head, and humbly meditated on the unbelievable wonder of being a priest. No prayer could frame his joy; no spoken words were strong enough to bear the tribute of love and thanksgiving that he wished to offer God the Father. For many minutes he was silent, then with his mind and heart at full stretch he said the Our Father very slowly, praising with every syllable His Name, His Kingdom, and His Will.

  Stephen now opened his breviary and read Matins and Lauds in anticipation of the morrow. First he said the prayer before Office:

  “Open, O Lord, my mouth that I may praise Thy Holy Name; cleanse my heart from all vain, perverse, and distracting thoughts; enlighten my mind and inflame my heart that I may pray this Office worthily, attentively, and devoutly, and that I may deserve to be heard in the presence of Thy divine Majesty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.

  “O Lord, in unison with that divine intention which Thou, whilst on earth, didst Thyself praise God, I offer Thee this Hour.”

  Into the spiritual world of the Office, contrasting with the vain contentions of the world of men, Stephen entered. As he read Matins and Lauds, the strength and purity of his vocation was renewed; the essential nature of his drive toward the priesthood became clear to him, as it always did when he knelt in prayer. Stephen Fermoyle’s relationship to God was as direct and immediate as the relationship of a well to a spring. In him throbbed no mystical desire to lose his identity in the Father; instead, almost overwhelming in its intensity, Stephen felt the need of declaring himself as an outf
low of the Source. As a son and lieutenant, he again resolved to bespeak and represent God the Father among men.

  “Father they call me. Father I will be,” he vowed. “To the Blessed Virgin and to Mother Church, all loyalty and devotion I shall give. But expressly to you, First Person of the Trinity, do I dedicate my being.”

  His Office over, Stephen rose from his knees and went out into a night of stars. He leaned over the rail and gazed into the mysterious beauty of the sea. A line from Keats swam into his memory:

  The moving waters at their priestlike task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores …

  Priestlike task. Ever since Stephen Fermoyle could remember, he had wanted to be a priest. The call had come early—he was barely fourteen when he first knew that his heart was in the sanctuary. Stephen was one of those fortunate souls, not uncommon among Americans of Irish parentage, on whom the Holy Ghost had descended surely and soon. All through high school and college, the sacerdotal imprint had been clear. Inwardly consecrated, yet without excessive piety, he had been at twenty-two an outstanding candidate for special training at the North American College in Rome.

  In four years Stephen had grown to love the Holy City. Its tide rip of past and present—of Trajan, Bramante, and Canova, of Hildebrand, Sixtus, and Michelangelo—had stirred in him a profound sympathy with the grandeur and timelessness of Rome. Its temporal monuments had fascinated him—but more fascinating than the architecture, more permanent and abiding than the cathedrals, was the Roman mind itself.

  The Roman viewpoint! What was it exactly? Stephen had tried to label the thing, but failed, as others have failed, in the attempt to characterize this compound of universal awareness and calm assumption of centrality. The intuitional scope of the Roman mind! How he admired its ability to operate like a piece of weatherproof mechanism in all latitudes! From one teacher in particular, Monsignor Quarenghi, he had drawn the universal wisdom of the Church—a vision that he had not previously imagined and could not wholly grasp even now. In Quarenghi’s elegant voice and hands, in the ascetic planes of his forehead, jaw, and shoulders—high narrow shoulders, straight as the hilt of a Toledo blade—Stephen had found his model of the priesthood. The axle of the cosmos seemed to pass through Quarenghi’s mind. Knowledge of this world, political insight, and social vision were matched only by his attachment to the Church. Part diplomat, part teacher, and all priest, this remarkable man had been the chief influence on a young seminarian.

  Other memories, unconnected with human personality, rushed into Stephen’s mind as he gazed into the dark sea below. His progress through the minor orders of the priesthood were spotless stones marking his approach to the fulfillment of ordination. The chrism, the words of the ordaining bishop, “Thou art a priest forever”—and the concelebration with others of the priestly ritual—these had left indelible imprints on Stephen Fermoyle’s soul.

  And now he was on his return to America to take up his duties as a parish priest. Normally he would have sailed second class with a band of fellow students; but on the eve of departure Corny Deegan had appeared at the seminary, resplendent in a morning coat and striped trousers that contrasted hugely with the overalls in which Stephen had remembered him. As an old friend of the family, Corny had requested that he be allowed to take the newly ordained priest home on the Vesuvio. Corny Deegan’s standing as a papal knight had not been without weight. The request had been granted, and instead of sharing a berth with a fellow seminarian, Stephen Fermoyle was now occupying a stateroom in the Ildefonso Suite, homeward bound to America.

  He was twenty-six years old, strong-bodied, proud in spirit. Too proud, perhaps, for the humbling labors that lay ahead. Quarenghi’s last words came to him now. “Be careful, Stephen, of the First Sin—Pride, that greatest of temptations to the intellect. Make your stature small before men that it may be greater in the eyes of God.” Quarenghi had pointed to the crucifix hanging by a silver chain on his breast. “This act was the final abnegation of self. By it, the Son is made worthy of the Father.”

  Made worthy of the Father!

  “Grant,” prayed Stephen for the second time within the hour, “that I may be made worthy to be His son.”

  THE PARALLEL BARS clewed to the deck in front of Gaetano Orselli’s cabin trembled under the assault of the Captain’s hundred and ninety-eight pounds. Sweat dripped from his beard as he thrust his feet skyward in a handstand, then lowered himself with a slow bulge of deltoids and biceps. With a graceful shoulder roll, he somersaulted off the end of the bars and landed on the balls of his feet. It was the maneuver of a practiced gymnast; very dangerous to the neck if it didn’t come off.

  Basking in a deck chair, Stephen struck his palms together in mock exhaustion. “Another workout like this, Captain, and I’ll be worn out. You asked me up to play Mühle, remember?”

  Orselli snatched up a towel, blotted the runlets of perspiration streaming from his face and chest. It pleased him to display his physical prowess before this young American priest. Like all exhibitionists, Orselli needed an appreciative audience, and Stephen had unexpectedly supplied him with the knowingest mixture of discernment and irony that the Captain had received in many years. The attraction was mutual; for three days now the two men had promenaded, dined, debated, played handball and Mühle while the Vesuvio cut a white furrow across the Atlantic.

  “So you want another ‘licking,’ as you call it, at Mühle. Good. There is just time for me to trounce you before luncheon. Step into my parlor, Messer. This sun deck is much too warm for anyone but thin-blooded Englishmen.”

  Stephen entered Orselli’s cabin. He liked this horseshoe-shaped, glassed-in compartment permitting vision from all points of the compass. Mahogany, brass, and Burgundy-hued leather struck the correct masculine tone set for the Western world by Edwardian clubs. A gim-bal lamp swinging from the ceiling and a long spyglass on a fixed tripod supplied the only marine clues. The walls of the cabin were covered with autographed photos: Orselli standing beside ambassadors, presidents, royalty, actresses. Stephen examined them. A letter from Victor Emmanuel. A snapshot of Theodore Roosevelt, his arm around the Captain’s shoulders. After a bully crossing. A studio photograph of the Divine Sarah was signed A Gaetano Orselli, mon Capitaine favori, Bernhardt. A company of handsome women, unknown to Stephen, completed the gallery.

  Orselli was placing the Mühle board on a little table. “My sorrow is, Father, that your vows of poverty do not enable you to play for stakes. What a murdering I could make on this voyage!”

  At Mühle, a combination of chess, checkers, and ticktacktoe, Captain Orselli was adept. The trick of the game lay in outguessing and outfeinting one’s opponent at least three moves in advance. They played two games. Stephen lost both of them, then pushed the board away.

  “I don’t give you much competition, Captain. Something in the game eludes me.”

  “Mühle is very old, very European,” consoled Orselli. “Your American mind does not grasp its central idea. You are too transparent; you expose yourself. There are no shadows in your thinking. Well, in another hundred years perhaps, you will learn the value, the necessity, of shadows.”

  Stephen gazed through an open window at the sparkling sea. No shadow there—only sunlight breaking in galaxies of diamonds against a sapphire swell. The beauty of sky and ocean sponged him with contentment. He had no desire to argue with Orselli about the function of shadow in life and art; he only knew that this was the most perfect day that had ever been made, and that he was both the laziest and most sentient part of it.

  “Fa bella,” he murmured.

  “Fa bella, indeed,” said the Captain. “No weather is more beautiful than the Atlantic in spring. Too bad”—he waved at the horizon—”that it does not lie in the public domain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Orselli’s voice distilled rancor. “Haven’t you heard? It is the private property of the British Navy. We sail on it only by their leave. Ha! Have you never heard
the story about His English Majesty’s bos’n?”

  “Never.”

  “A bos’n was being court-martialed for striking a captured U-boat commander. His defense was a classic.” Orselli turned on a Tuscan conception of a cockney whine. “‘I didn’t mind when this ’ere blighter tried to torpedo us, sir. And I took it as a matter o’ course when ’e refused to answer our Capting a civil question. But when ’e spit in our ocean, sir, then I let ’im ’ave it.’”

  Stephen laughed at Orselli’s crossing of Florence with Houndsditch. “My father would enjoy that story, Captain. He still thinks of the British as the oppressor under Cromwell.”

  “Cromwell, Clive, Rhodes,” said Orselli gloomily. “What does it matter? The oppressor is always British.”

  “Yet if Italy goes to war, it will surely be on the English side.”

  Orselli fingered his beard thoughtfully. “My country’s best interests would be to stay out of this war. She is not prepared, either in material or ideas. War will be fatal to her. Yet it is only a question of days now.” He patted his midriff. “Did you think I was sweating over those parallel bars for fun? When Italy declares herself, the officers of her Naval Reserve must not be lard barrels.”

  Italian contempt for other nations warred with Orselli’s realization that Italy’s great age lay behind her. “When we enter the war, we shall lose—in addition to prestige and territory—the one institution that lifted the world out of barbarism.”

  “What is that?”

  Orselli broke into Italian. “The idea of l’uomo unico. Man, unique and glorious, the creature who came to life in Florence in the thirteenth century. Man the artist, the city-maker, the poet, the fame-hungerer—man the paradise-stormer and celebrator of this world’s beauty. The mold was made in Italy; the original stuff was poured in the city of my birth and spread northward. But nowhere was man ever so flowering, so complete, so universal, yet so individualized as in Italy.” The Captain’s voice saddened. “L’uomo unico was our glory. Today it is our tragedy. There are so many unique men in Italy, partisanship is so violent, the counsels so divided, that no clear voice can be heard.”