From the walls of Father Stock’s office, the photographs — mostly group pictures of clergy at class reunions and annual retreats, but a few individuals, bishops and popes — watched and waited, as Joe did, to see what would happen next.
Toohey stood up. “I’ll run along, Father, if that’s all.”
Father Stock nodded. “Be in the sacristy early tomorrow, Michael. Good night.”
So Toohey, who was being sent to Rome for further study, which could mean he’d be a bishop someday, left, and Joe, who was being sent to a parish as a curate, which could mean he’d be a pastor someday, sat tight.
Father Stock answered the phone—“Eight-nine-ten-eleven-it’s-in-the-parish-bulletin”—and hung up. “All right, Joseph. I’m listening. Speak for the Church.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, Father. But for us to take up the collection is to cheapen the Mass and the priesthood, I say.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, I would, and I don’t think I’m alone.” The clergy on the walls, even the bishops and popes who’d frowned when Joe spoke for the Church, were now all for him, especially the dead ones. “Father, won’t it look like we’re cashing in on the occasion? Or that you are?” Wham!
“I’ll make it clear that you aren’t.”
Joe had to like the man for that. Even vice, it seemed, in this case greed, could bring out the good in people. But the man was still wrong. “Father, maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but what do you — what does the parish, I mean — stand to gain? Three hundred dollars? Four hundred? Five?”
Father Stock seemed to think it a fair question, no more than one priest might ask another, and replied with unconcealed regret, “Not five.”
Joe was reluctant to go on, to say what he had in mind, afraid the man would be stung by it and sting back, which was how Joe himself might respond to what he had in mind — which, though, was well calculated to free the man’s will (temporarily) from its long enslavement to merely monetary considerations, enabling him not only to do the right thing but to profit by it. How often, here below, did such an opportunity arise? “Father, I have some money from my folks to buy a car — I’ll need one now that I’m ordained — but I don’t care what I drive. So what would you say — what would the parish, I mean, say — to five hundred?”
Father Stock said, gravely, “The parish is always happy to accept an offering made in good faith, without qualifications. Be in the sacristy early tomorrow, Joseph. Good night.”
Joe was in the sacristy early the next morning, before Toohey, and put away the vestments for Father Stock’s assistant, who’d had the nine o’clock and who, on leaving the sacristy, said, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” But Joe looked on the bright side and hoped that his proposal — his exalted but not exaggerated regard for the Mass and the priesthood — had disturbed Father Stock’s sleep, had perhaps so disgusted the man with himself that he’d decided to call off the special collections, or, if not, to employ the ushers. It even occurred to Joe, when Father Stock and Toohey entered the sacristy together, that Toohey had already been told the good news (that the special collections were off, at least as far as the new priests were concerned), and that the situation, though it could perhaps no longer be improved by an offering from Joe, was still intended to teach him a lesson in faith and hope, in both of which he’d been found wanting, as he would in charity too unless he acted blindly, swiftly, before it could be construed as payola.
“My offering, Father. It’s made in good faith, I hope, but anyway without qualifications.”
Father Stock accepted the unsealed envelope with a nod, but didn’t peek inside or pull out the check, jump up and down, and yell “Yea!”—just put it aside, on the counter of the many-drawered cabinet in which vestments were kept flat, and got busy with the water and wine cruets, topping them up.
Joe — he’d expected something more reassuring than a nod — slipped into his surplice and cassock. He’d brought his own, rather than take a chance on what the sacristy might stock in his size, Men’s 36 short, and maybe wind up in snotty, not to say boogery, altar boys’ issue. And before Father Stock, now lighting candles on the altar, returned to the sacristy, Joe asked Toohey, “Did the man say anything about the special collections?”
“Grow up,” said Toohey, the fink.
Father Stock returned to the sacristy, checked his pocket watch, and gave the word. “Now.”
Server left the sacristy, ringing the bell in the pierced brass globe by the door (but not pulling it down), and led celebrant to the altar, “Introibo ad altare dei,” and so the ten o’clock began.
Celebrant, like server, had practiced saying Mass in the chapel at the sem, but celebrant, unlike server, was a born master-of-ceremonies type, his command of rubrics daunting in the classroom, likewise his quarterbacking, his finger-snapping at rites in the chapel, and so celebrant was in his element.
When it was time for the sermon, celebrant and server settled down on the sedilia, while preacher (Father Stock) came out of the sacristy and climbed into the pulpit. He read the announcements, the last one to the effect that both celebrant and server were newly ordained priests and former members of the parish — nothing about special collections. The sermon, though predictable (happy the parish that gives God and the Church two new priests in a single year, their high calling a difficult one in times like these), was, like the announcements, suspenseful, but like them, in the end, gratifying — nothing about special collections.
The Mass resumed, with celebrant still doing fine, with server, though, distracted by the sounds of the regular collection, never having heard those sounds — the scrape and shuffle of ushers’ shoes, the rustle and clink of dough — so clearly before.
After the ushers retired, there was silence in the body of the church — gratifying to server. Father Stock had returned to the sacristy after the sermon, but he was one of those pastors who, when not conducting services themselves, are all over the place, opening and closing windows, shooing standees into pews, checking the front steps for smokers during the sermon, and evidently he’d left the sacristy by the outside door, gone around to the front of the church, and reentered it there, for server could hear him making a disturbance, crying, “The new priests will now take up a special collection. I’ve asked them to do this. So be generous, good people,” whereupon server turned away from the altar (but so that it was hardly noticeable that he had) in an easy, flowing movement, and saw an usher with two baskets moving up the middle aisle, and heard celebrant, now alongside him, facing the other way (server was facing the altar), whisper to him, “Let’s go, buster.”
So, coming to the usher, celebrant took one basket, server the other. While celebrant went down one side of the middle aisle, doing it, stopping and starting, server went nonstop down the other side — he hadn’t planned this, or this — holding a hand to his mouth as if sick and about to be sicker, and kept going (“Now you’re at the back of the church”), an usher relieving him of the basket and pushing the inner door open for him, into the vestibule.
He ran down the stairs there, shoved the fire door open, and was in the dark tunnel that led to the school, the tiles amplifying and multiplying the sound of his passage so that he didn’t know until he stopped to open the door at the other end, and the lights came on, that he was not alone.
“Joseph!”