“I ask you, Father,” Lynn protested, “isn’t that a crime? This man normally couldn’t care less about Hollywood. He lives for the stage. And he’s talking about it as if it were an avocation. I mean!”
Mitchell smiled at his wife. “Anyway, my agent talked me into it—to enter a play I wrote last year. It’s been staged a few places—one of the new requirements of the Humana. I didn’t really expect that much from it. But, on the other hand, there’s always hope.”
“What he didn’t expect, Father, was to be screwed!”
“Now . . .”
“What do you mean, Lynn?” Koesler asked. “What happened?”
“One of the critics there,” Mitchell clarified, “was Ridley Groendal.”
“Ridley!” Things suddenly began to get a lot clearer for Koesler.
“Yeah, Ridley. Lynn came up with a scenario that I’m afraid is stranger than fiction.”
“It is not my imagination! That Groendal did everything he could to destroy you at that festival. And from what I learned, he’s been doing the same thing for years, every chance he gets.”
“Lynn . . .”
“It’s true! I was the one who went around to the various producers, after I found out what he was up to in Louisville. Face it, Mitch, it hasn’t been you all these years. It’s been Ridley Groendal. Your plays have been good. It’s been Groendal working hard and wielding all of his clout.”
“I can’t believe that, Lynn. Could you believe it, Bob? You know Ridley; hell, the three of us were classmates once!”
Koesler hesitated. “I don’t know, Mitch.”
“I can’t bring myself to believe such a thing,” Mitchell said, “To me, the biggest argument against it is motive: Rid would have absolutely no reason to do anything like this . . . I mean, what reason could he have? I’ve never done anything to him. If anything, on the surface at least, I owe him: After all, he got me booted out of the seminary.”
Koesler betrayed a surprised look.
Mitchell laughed. “Oh, it’s all right, Bob. I told Lynn all about my most daring escapade in the sem. In fact, when things are glum, we laugh about it.
“But I don’t even hold a grudge about that anymore. Hell, I ought to be grateful to Rid, the way it worked out. If I hadn’t been booted and told never to darken the seminary’s door again, I would have missed out on Lynn and the kids and the grandchildren. And I owe all this to Rid and his scheming mind.
“And that’s what it comes down to, Bob. I long ago forgave what he did to me. And I didn’t do anything to him.” Mitchell looked reflective. “And God knows I could have.”
Catching Mitch’s eye and directing his gaze briefly at Lynn, Koesler asked, “Have you ever told—?”
Mitchell shook his head. “No reason to. It’s between Rid and me.”
Interesting, thought Koesler. Mitchell had freely shared with his wife a most embarrassing and compromising incident that had happened to him. If he had been in Mitchell’s shoes, he might have hesitated many times before telling his wife about having been in bed with another woman, no matter how innocent it might have been or how long ago it had happened.
Yet Mitchell told Lynn that, but hadn’t revealed to her that the man she so heartily disliked, the celebrated critic, had once been guilty of a most deliberate and flagrant plagiarism.
Koesler’s respect for Mitchell increased; he had done very well, indeed, at keeping secrets.
“What it comes down to, dear,” Lynn said, “is that you can’t think of a reason why that creep has done this to you. So, because you can’t come up with a motive, you deny a proven fact. I talked to them! I talked to producers, directors, even other critics. Some of them weren’t even all that aware of what had been going on until I came right out and asked. Then, almost all of them could recall times when Groendal had put you down, denigrated you, both personally and as a writer; made it evident that they would be fools or jackasses to stage any of your work, or even to be kind—much less fair—to you.
“He let it be known—made it very clear—that were they to ignore his advice, his future reviews—not only of your plays, but of all their productions in general—would be critical and belittling. And because he wielded a long pen—and a long memory—it would have taken a very gutsy—foolishly gutsy—director to cross him.”
She turned to her husband. “These are the facts, whether you can find a motive for them or not!”
Mitchell didn’t reply, though the conversational ball was definitely in his court. Finally, he said, “I can’t help it. It just doesn’t make sense . . . oh, don’t get me wrong, Lynn; I don’t doubt for a moment that the people you talked to said what you say they said. And I’m not ungrateful for all your legwork. But it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe they’re confused. Or maybe they’ve got an axe to grind with regard to Rid. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know.” He looked at Koesler. “What do you think, Bob?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Rid always had a . . . different mind. It’s just hard to tell.”
“Hmmm. Well, you know him better than I do. Hell, you both came from Redeemer parish, didn’t you? And now . . . God, now he’s your parishioner! But I just can’t see it.”
“Well, it’s very interesting,” Koesler said. “Tell me, Mitch: Suppose it were true. Suppose what Lynn discovered is absolutely true. Supposing Rid has effectively blocked your whole career as a playwright. Just suppose, for whatever reason it’s true. Then what?”
A long period of extended silence followed while all three pondered the question, What if . . .
“What if, eh?” Mitch said, finally. “What if Rid has actually blocked me from what I love most next to Lynn and the kids? What if he’s done that?
“I’d kill him!”
Lynn laughed, a bit nervously. “Well, that just proves that Mitch can keep up his sense of humor.”
They all laughed.
But Carroll Mitchell and Father Koesler both knew the laughter was not genuine.
19
“The body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
Father Koesler had been distributing Communion for slightly more than thirty years. Unlike many other priests, he never tired of it.
The distribution of Holy Communion had gone through many stages, as had almost every other ritual in the liturgy since the Second Vatican Council.
At the time Koesler was ordained, and for hundreds of years prior to that, Communion was given by the consecrated hands of a priest alone. Outside of the most dire emergency, no lay person ever touched a consecrated host. That was a time when there were, proportionately, more priests and fewer communicants than today. When the balance tipped in the other direction, the laity was urged to exercise the “priesthood of baptism” and become “extraordinary ministers” of the Sacrament. It was, Koesler believed, a variation of Parkinson’s Law. In this case, lay sacramental functioning tends to multiply in direct proportion as there are fewer priests around to perform sacramental tasks.
The pre-Vatican II formula for distributing Communion was a comparatively long Latin invocatory prayer. Now, the minister of the Sacrament merely held aloft the consecrated host and announced, “The body of Christ.” And the recipient responded with the affirmation, “Amen.”
Koesler remembered well when that formula was in transition and the current form was in vogue but still in Latin. He recalled a Sunday when he presented the host to a young lady, saying “Corpus Christi.” To which she responded, “Texas.”
Gaffes like that could be expected but not foreseen. But it added a measure of innocent humor to what could easily become stuffy repetition.