Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser Read Free Book Online Page A

There are things they don’t tell you about, prepare you for, in the Seminary. He wants to say, “Young woman, your soul is in mortal peril.” To say that would be a duty done, the warning properly issued, responsibility discharged:
pray for us in our futility.
But he won’t say it; he’s sure she’ll laugh, blaspheme, and he’s probably right. He ministers daily to the dying, the condemned to die, most of them pathetically grateful for his comfort, reproof, penance, absolution, so eager to undo the sad threads of vainglorious lifetimes; it must signify—well, we know what it’s
supposed
to signify. He suspects it may mean something else to Marie Tyrell. (One day, years from now, he’ll write a book called
The Psychology of the Damned
; it will enjoy a considerable success in liberal Catholic circles; the chapter on Marie Tyrell will be widely praised for its “compassionate objectivity.”) In fact, she reminds him uncomfortably of Bernadette, his sister, before she died. The same proud mouth, unrepentant eyes, the same heresies flickering back there in the mind’s hollows, cave-fires he foolishly never found it in his heart to extinguish. Presently, in beneficent middle age, he will resign himself to these failures, these unaccountable lapses of conviction. Now, they’re painful. He knows: Good Christ, yes, people really do die young. For all the wicked, prideful reasons. And are not necessarily welcomed into Heaven. It happens in books, magazine fiction; it happens. Father Reagan smiles at Marie Tyrell, nervously; can it be that he’s afraid of her? This disobedient orphan? It can be.
These people are dangerous,
he can’t help muttering to himself.
    â€œThe Glory of God,” Marie Tyrell says. She is watching the floor, studying it, tracing a mandala of thin lines, cracks in the concrete. “Aren’t you going to tell me about the Glory of God?”
    What about that?
    The assumption evidently is that man is perfectible, or in any event improvable. The Kingdom of Heaven is nothing if not a meritocracy. “What are you doing, storing up Kingdom Credits?” one of her lovers said, when she was being more than usually righteous. Now he’s 4,000 miles away, working for a loan company, bringing up children. And Gerard Macklewain, no doubt, is out somewhere getting drunk, inventing his own version of history for the entertainment of his bold companions, talking: “I did love her … It was enough to see, in our own bodies, the configuration of the death we’d come to, each day’s depletion,
always less and less of everything, all the time;
it was enough to have that knowledge, if only to turn from it, into her arms, her generous arms …” She summons all her will, to banish the vision. Now it’s just Father Reagan here, a composition in grey and black, in this room, this Cell. Interesting that we referred to our group as a “cell.” Interesting that we met, most of the time, in bars, or behind them. God, it’s lonely.
To see the world in a grain of sand, eh, Father
…
    Father? (Any voice is better than none at all, any answer will redeem the question.) He is sitting on the bed, legs crossed, hands folded in the prescribed manner, eyes uneasy. She is standing, vulnerable.
Hang in there, babe.
No. Historical inevitability decrees that she won’t hang in, won’t be allowed to. There was a message she still receives, scratched that first time in chalk on a schoolyard wall: MARIE TYRELL GOES DOWN. In a way, it was true enough: you had to do what you could to redeem the bleakness, or push it away. After the dances (St. Anne’s gym, reeking sweat and repression, loud hot music, the purposeful rubbing of guilty bodies), after that, who didn’t go down? At least she had the strength to lie, not to say: I have committed impurities. Or whatever word they had for what she was doing, those many Saturday