The Assassini by Thomas Gifford Read Free Book Online Page A

street the next day.”
    “By Jove, laddie, you may be this Antichrist we’ve all heard so much about. What a red-letter day for me … still, you might make the perfect Jesuit yet. Except you fight for your piddling little idea of the great truths too zealously. You never learned to speak your piece and shut up. The truth is you never understood what the Church was about. You were never able to force the cuddly little lamb of idealism to lie down with the fierce lion of realism and make nice-nice. Which is what the Church is
all
about.”
    “What a happily pragmatic fellow you are!”
    “Have to be. I’m a priest.” He leaned back and grinned at me. “I’ve gotta live with this mess. And it is a mess; the Church is not a tidy place. Because man is never tidy. We all just run around doing the best we can and if we’re right fifty-one percent of the time, well, hell, that’s about all you can ask for. Believe me, the Dowager Harbaugh wanted the Society to have this moola. And if the old bat didn’t, she should have.”
    What mattered to Vinnie and all the other Vinnies was that they
believed
. Halloran’s faith was intact. He’d always told me that I’d had a faithectomy somewhere along the line. His belief and faith were not only in God-maybe not even mainly in God—but in the Church itself, which was where we really parted company. I’d observed them at work and I’d learned you could find God a convenient myth or you could believe He lived in your dishwasher and spoke to you during the hot-dry cycle, none of that mattered. But, by heaven, you’d better believe in the Church.
    After lunch I stood in the corner office I’d occupied for most of a decade and looked out at Battery Park and the towers of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty, which was only barely visible through the fog and mist that was thickening by midafternoon. It was the kind of office Hugh Driskill’s son was expected to have, and expectations were very much a part of our lives at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. There was an English partners desk from Dickens’s day, a Louis XV refectory table, a Brancusi on top of it, an Epstein bust on a pedestal, and a Klee on the wall. It could give you the shakes if you weren’t feeling pretty confident. Gifts from my father and my former wife, Antonia, and all very eclectic and smashing.
New York
magazine had once done a piece on power offices, and mine had been among them and it had taken me a long time to live it down. I’d picked the carpet and both Hugh and Antonia thought it looked like the bottom of the canary cage which was, if memory serves, just about the only thing they ever agreed on. In the end all that Antonia and I had shared was a deep distrust of the Roman Catholic Church, but ithadn’t been enough to save our marriage. I always felt that she had inherited her attitude at birth while I’d acquired mine the old-fashioned way. I’d earned it.
    The fog was rolling in from the direction of Staten Island, blurring familiar landmarks, like clouds of memory overtaking the everyday trivialities. When you reached the middle of your life, one of the revelations concerned memories, or so it seemed to me. They seemed so important and they would not be pushed aside. They exercised their claim on you and you began to wonder if they held all the keys to all the locked doors in your psyche. It was a little scary.
    There had always been lots of priests hanging around the house while Val and I were growing up. By the time Father came home from the war in 1945 I was ten, and it was summer. In those years when Father was out of the country and we couldn’t see him except on leaves, there was an elderly priest with a great deal of white hair billowing from ears and nostrils who made an impression on me. He was Father Polanski, who came to say mass in our chapel. He sometimes puttered about in the gardens with Mother and me and once gave me a trowel of my own but we didn’t really