“Afraid so.”
“Sorry.”
“Was the News that absorbing?”
He crumpled the paper in his lap. “Not really. Well … I shouldn’t say one way or the other. I haven’t been reading it.”
“You certainly gave a good imitation.”
“One of those times when you find yourself reading the same item over and over with no comprehension.”
“Anything wrong?” She became slightly apprehensive. After many satisfying years of living with each other they had grown finely tuned to the smallest signs. There was, for instance, nothing particularly noteworthy in his not paying attention to what he was reading. It happened often enough to nearly everybody. One becomes distracted and preoccupied with something-anything-and cannot concentrate on whatever is going on at the moment.
But there was something different tonight.
Georgie had been merely playful, toying with him by making up outrageous items to see what it would take to get his attention, to draw him back to reality.
But even after he shook off his reverie something was still not quite right. It was nothing anyone else would catch. But, sensitive to his every mood, she knew something was troubling him.
He hadn’t answered her question. She repeated it a fraction more urgently. “Anything wrong?”
“Nothing of any importance.” He paused, then realized the futility of trying to hide anything from this beloved woman. “Well, there was that meeting this morning.…”
“The staff meeting?”
“Yes. The special topic for discussion was the parochial school system.”
“Oh?” They had discussed the topic before, more frequently recently as he and his department were drawn into bandaging this hollow giant in terminal condition.
“So many of them-the staff members-want to hold on to the schools-even more the parishes. I think perhaps a majority agree on saving the system.”
“But it’s impossible,” she said. “We’ve talked about this before. How about Cardinal Boyle?”
The furrows in his forehead deepened. “I can’t read him on this one. Ordinarily I’m pretty good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing. But not on this issue,”
“And that’s critical, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. It’s not that the department heads are window dressing, as they are in so many other dioceses. The Cardinal really listens to us and weighs the evidence we bring him. But in the end, he is the Cardinal Archbishop of Detroit. By law he runs everything. We go with his decision. That’s all there is to it.”
Georgie thought a few moments. “If the staff is divided and you can’t read the Cardinal, this thing really is up in the air.” She now understood in more depth what was troubling him.
“If my figures are accurate, it won’t be up in the air forever. The schools will close-if not now, eventually. I can see the argument that it is somewhat less painful if they go slowly, one by one. But at the same time, they’re depleting chunks of money just struggling to survive.
“Some of the public schools are in almost as much trouble as we are. But they can turn to the taxpayers, and if they make a good case for their need they may get a millage increase. We have no chance there. We depend on tuition, fundraising, and parish subsidies.
“Our utility bills are high and we’ve got oil burners in our older buildings that have to be replaced. We’ve got leaky roofs and problems with asbestos.” He seemed to be mentally tabulating an unending series of expenses while being too tired to continue enumerating them audibly.
After a few minutes of silence, Georgie spoke again. “Dear, I think your problem is that you’re second-guessing yourself. And that’s not like you.”
He reflected a moment. “You may be right. But there really is another side to this coin. We’re talking about an institution-Catholic education-that began in this country in 1606. Almost four hundred years ago! And I’m recommending ending that institution.” He smiled in spite of his depressed state. “Sort of like killing off the last dinosaur.”
Georgie searched her mind to find facts that would support her husband’s basic belief in himself and his oft-proven financial acumen. “Remember, dear, we talked just last week about the one incontrovertible reality that sealed the fate of our schools?”
“The nuns.”
“Yes, the nuns. Or rather the absence of them. Whereas once nuns and teaching brothers accounted for almost a hundred percent of the staff of the parochial schools, now the figure is down to just above ten percent. And on top of that, according to what you told me last week, our lay teachers are getting about nine thousand dollars a year less than their counterparts in public schools. How can anyone hope to continue attracting quality teachers with that kind of inequity? The lay teachers we’ve got now are practically donating their services compared with what they could be earning in public schools. Pretty soon we won’t have even the lay men and women teaching in our schools. I think it’s been said best: Without the teaching Sisters no one would have given a serious thought to starting parochial schools. And without them now, there’s no way for the system to survive.”
His was a wry smile. “You’re giving me back the figures and reasoning I gave you.”
She returned his smile. “You convinced me of the rightness of your position. I diought if you heard your reasoning coming from someone else, that you’d be convinced all over again. Like I said, the trouble is you’re second-guessing yourself.”
He nodded. “You’re right, of course. But I didn’t realize it until just now. And there’s something else, something that wasn’t clear to me until just now.”
“What’s that, dear?”
“The reason why I’ve been second-guessing myself. I don’t know if! can put it into words.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “This is it. I think. I’m an economist-”
“And one of the best,” she interjected.
“Thanks. I can put me dollars and cents together and come up with answers, answers I’m sure of. I can rely on the bottom line. Always have. But there’s something different here. I caught it this morning at the meeting. I wasn’t sure what it was. Just an added ingredient that emerged from some of the staff …” He drifted off in thought.
After a few seconds, she asked, “What is it? What possibly could make you doubt yourself?”
He smiled. “Faim-ironically, faith.”
“Faith!”
“Yeah. The deacon, Quent Jeffrey, voiced the idea that money tends to stretch. It’s an adman or PR approach. In reality, money doesn’t stretch. If you’re a bum and you’ve got sixty cents, you can get a cup of coffee. But no matter how much you want a steak dinner, you aren’t going to get it with sixty cents. Jeffrey had to be talking about priorities.
“Suppose you and I wanted to add on to this house. Suppose we figured that we couldn’t afford it-that we didn’t have enough money to do it. But then we keep thinking and talking about it until … we do it. Seemingly, we’ve stretched our budget, we’ve stretched our money. In reality, the money was there, somewhere, all the while. You can’t spend what you haven’t got. We didn’t stretch money; we changed our priorities.
“Jeffrey’s suggestion might work if it were properly implemented-which, by the way, I don’t think our communications office could do. But it wouldn’t work forever. Sooner or later, everyone would discover we were pouring money down a bottomless pit.”
“I don’t understand,” Georgie said. “What does this have to dowith faith?”
“Just that I considered Deacon Jeffrey’s solution iffy, ‘If this happens’ and ‘If that happens,’ men the system will be saved, or at least prolonged.
“That got me thinking about what some of the staff were saying during the argument that followed my suggestion to start thinking seriously about shutting the system down altogether.
“They were talking about how this was not a business or an office or a company or any other secular enterprise we were considering. These were Catholic schools, This was the Christian education of children.