“I’m not put out at all.”
“Well, then. Thank you, Father Burdock. I’ll get back to my typing.”
Mrs. Reed went out and shut the door behind her. When she was in her office, the door between their two rooms never remained open. Dan rubbed his forehead again and thought that it had all seemed so simple when he was in the seminary, what he wanted to do, what he had to do. It had just been a question of making a decision, and never for a moment allowing himself to look away from the decision he had made.
It hadn’t occurred to him, then, that loneliness could be like a black pit on the surface of the moon, cold and dead and silent, going on forever, so that all he had to look forward to were the sounds of himself making the bed creak in the night, and of his own voice calling out the words of the Matins prayer in an empty kitchen.
2
If there was one thing the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia did not like, it was having to rely on someone—anyone—to do things for him. He had learned to accommodate the need in small things. He could let Sister Marie Claire type his letters and take his phone calls. He could let Father Doheny handle the negotiations about the electric bill and the talks with the reporters about upcoming archdiocesan celebrations and the schedule and curricula for the parochial schools. It was things like this, things that involved money, or reputation, or the future, that he could not let go of, even when he knew he should. He knew he should let go of this. He even tried to tell himself that he would have let go of it, if he had been able to, but it was a lie, and he was not good at self-deception. There was something a monastery taught you, especially a Carmelite one. When you entered, you took on the discipline of never again looking into a mirror, but you looked at yourself, all the time. It was incumbent on the man in his position to meet with major donors. The donors expected the courtesy. It was part of what they got in return for handing over their money. Even if it hadn’t been, though, he would have wanted to be there when the deal was done. He could never trust the people around him to do what was right when it needed to be done. He could never feel sure that the important things would be handled if he didn’t handle them himself.
In this case, of course, the problem was that the important things might not be handled if he did handle them himself. He was not in the mood for this now. He didn’t have the patience. Worst of all, his nerves seemed to be strung so badly they were about to snap. He had too much on his plate today to coddle Andrew Sean O‘Reilly, the King of Discount Furniture, the man who Put Philly on the Home Furnishings Map. He had two strains of music running in his head, in that way that meant nothing he could do would get rid of them. One was the “Hosannah” from Bach’s B Minor Mass. The other was the jingle from Andy’s furniture ads. The ads ran every fifteen minutes all night long from the end of the eleven o’clock news to the start of the network morning shows on every local station. It was as if Andy had decided to make himself famous in the only way he knew how, by making and starring in his own movie, except that it was a movie that lasted only thirty seconds. The Cardinal Archbishop thought his head was going to split open. It hurt that badly. If he had been able to do anything he wanted to do, he would have retreated to the chapel, put the Bach on so loudly they would have been able to hear it at Avery Point, and dropped out of sight for a week. Except, of course, that that wasn’t what he would do if he could do anything at all. What he would really do was to let Andy O’Reilly know exactly where he stood in the grand drama that was Western Civilization, and in the even grander drama that was the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Out on the street, a wino had started to walk on the edge of the sidewalk near the parked cars. Any minute now, the Cardinal Archbishop knew, he would begin to urinate on the tires. There was a cultural statement for you. You could think what you wanted about it, but it had a lot more directness—and a lot more honesty—than Andy O’Reilly’s ads.
The door to the office opened and Father Doheny stepped in. “Your Eminence? Mr. O’Reilly’s here. Finally. I put him in the conference room.”
“In a minute,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“When I was young, laypeople weren’t late for appointments with cardinals. Not even if they had a pile of money.”
“You can’t be thirty years old,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Mr. O’Reilly has us by the short hairs, and he knows it. He’s behaving accordingly. You should never overestimate human nature. Celebrate it, when it exceeds expectations, but never overestimate it.”