The next morning Joe got up at the usual early hour, took a hot bath, and after Mass and a light breakfast (three orange juices), he got back in bed. But he couldn’t sleep, or even rest — he had to find out, if possible without asking, whether he’d committed himself and Charities to Buzz and his firm. So he got up, took a hot bath, and went to his office, where he headed straight for the phone, but made himself sit down, thus disciplining himself, before using it.
“What’s the name of Buzz’s firm? In fact, what’s Buzz’s name?”
“Just a minute. His card’s here somewhere.” After a bit—“Here we are”—Joe was given the information, including the firm’s phone number.
“Thanks, Father.”
“Father, is something wrong, Joe?”
Joe hung up and called the firm. “Like to speak to Buzz.”
“He’s at a meeting.”
“When’ll it be over?”
“God knows.”
“That’s true. I’ll call back.”
Joe did this later that morning from Juvenile Court, between cases, but Buzz was still at the meeting. A little before noon, Joe tried again, but Buzz had gone to lunch.
Joe had his lunch in the Sawdust Grill of the Hotel Garrison, a roast beef on rye with two steins of Würzburger, which he took standing at one of the high tables with the idea of keeping his weight down, and was back at the office before one.
Mrs Hope, dressed to go out, looked in. “Father, would it be all right if I visited Monsignor?” (Paddy was in the hospital again.)
“Trouble, Mrs Hope?”
Mrs Hope gave Joe the latest bad news about her daughter’s family, and he made her another loan. An hour or so later, he tried again, but Buzz hadn’t come back from lunch yet. Before leaving for the bank, which closed at three, Joe tried again and was told by an unfamiliar voice, “Buzz didn’t come in today.”
While Joe was at the bank it occurred to him that the vibrator might help his head, and so he went downstairs for a trim.
“Ah, Father. Aren’t you about ready for a parish?”
Joe just looked at the man under the sheet.
“Nothing to say, Father?”
“Tell you the truth, I thought you’d lost my file. I mean—thanks, Your Excellency.”
That evening Joe went to the hospital to see Paddy about updating the letterhead, which also lacked balance.
“It’d mean a great deal to the man, Monsignor.”
“In that case, Joe, let’s do it.”
Joe then told Paddy his good news.
“Oh, yes. Albert was asking about you, Joe.”
“Thanks, Monsignor.”
“No, no. I had nothing to do with it. You’ve had it coming, Joe—too long. I’m sorry about that.”
Later that evening Joe called his folks in Florida and told them his good news (theirs too, conceivably, not that they would’ve been left penniless), and then he called Father Butler.
“I’ll write a check in the morning. It’ll be made out to you.”
“To me?” said Father Butler.
“For reasons I won’t go into. I don’t want the pastor to know it’s from me. Bread on the waters, Father.”
“O.K., Father. Thanks a lot. Nothing’s come in since I talked to you.”
Joe wrote the check before he retired, in case he died in the night, and then went downstairs to mail it, in case he changed his mind in the morning.
PART TWO
8. THE RECTORY AND THEREABOUT
AT THIS TIME (1968) there were a half-dozen more or less new churches to be seen in the archdiocese, even a couple of new schools and convents if you were still thinking along those lines, but the prime movers, the clergy, were the forgotten men in building programs at this time, and you had to drive out to Joe’s (Church of SS Francis and Clare, Inglenook) if you wanted to see a new rectory.
Architecturally it was tame stuff, in the same frosty orange brick as the school and convent, and did not interest the clergy, a rather advanced group architecturally. What did interest the clergy — since many a man had gone to the Arch and his reverend consultors with a more heartwarming project than putting up a house for himself and come away thinking himself a fool and a dangerous one at that — was why this roomy low-rise structure had risen at all in a parish where a glorified Quonset hut still did for a church.
Why?
Well, few men — none still active and building — could say with Joe: “I’ve always held the contractors to the original estimate and got everything called for in the plans, including copper plumbing.” Or: “When those guys walk in here, they figure it’s going to be like working for the U.S. government without inspectors — until I walk in.” Once, after he’d walked in on some electricians and told them off for playing hell with his insulation and walked out, he’d been pleased to hear Steve, his janitor, respond to the question “What’s wrong with that mother?” in kind, “Father, he don’t take no shit.” True. And Joe’s school and convent were being paid for on schedule. As for a new church: “With more and more people moving out to the suburbs”—a big point in Joe’s presentation to the Arch and his reverend consultors—“why not, I say, wait until everybody arrives?” “Bingo!” the Arch had said, his reverend consultors nodding away. So Joe, then living in a room in the school and quite prepared to go on living under such conditions if advised to build a new church but dearly wishing, as he’d told the Arch and his reverend consultors, to keep the best wine till last (“Wine, Archbishop? Did he say wine?”—“Means a new church, you dummy!”), had got his rectory.
Upstairs, the architect had simply gone about his business: pastor’s suite (study, bedroom, bath), curate’s bedroom and bath (for the curate Joe didn’t have but hoped to get), guest room and bath (occupied on Saturday nights by Father Felix, the elderly monk who helped out on weekends), living room (seldom used), dining room, kitchen. (The housekeeper, Mrs Pelissier, a widow, was well paid, ran a car, and lived out, in her own little house.) Downstairs — that is, in the basement but surprisingly airy — was the rectory’s outstanding feature, the office area: two offices (each with lavatory), waiting room, two conference rooms, and two (to use the architectural term) powder rooms.
The office area was all Joe’s idea, which he could be passionate about, particularly with clerical visitors.
Just as the heart of the church is the altar, he’d say, so the heart of the rectory is, or should be, the office. Offices, rather, for pastor and curate don’t sleep in the same bed, do they? No, but all too often, even in old rectories where space was not a problem, even where several men were in residence, what did you find? One office. And it a no-man’s land, used by one and all, or a den for the pastor or whoever met the public, with everything in it pickled in smoke or otherwise smelling of him — no place to take a woman. (On the other hand, Joe knew of a rectory where, until recently, the office was also the housekeeper’s sewing room.) There were still rectories where the action took place in the front hallway, with everything—Mass cards, baptismal and marriage certificates, pamphlets, rosaries, stoles, birettas, and hats—on the hat rack. There were still rectories where parishioners and salesmen, for want of a waiting room, waited in the dining room, roosted on the stairs, rectories where converts, Scouts, and sodalities, for want of conference rooms, conferred in ill-lit church basements with steam tables, echoes, and mice. “Fortune-tellers do better! I ask you”—so Joe in his presentation had asked the Arch and his reverend consultors, moving them visibly—“is this any way to carry on the most important business in the world? The only business in this world that’ll matter a damn in the next!”