Prince of Peace Read online

  Tishah-b'Ab commemorates the two destructions of Solomon's Temple, the first in 586 B.C. over which Jeremiah wept, and the second in A.D. 70 over which Jesus wept in advance. These events, of course, have new meaning in our century as emblems of that people's fear. On Tishah b'Ab Jews remember all their destructions and their fear gives way, rightly, to their rage. Israelis therefore by the thousand streamed into the city that night to approach the Western Wall, to place their prayers in its crevices and to stroke those ancient stones or, ritually, to strike them.

  The bus driver let out a curse. The slouching boys sat bolt upright. The bus stopped and suddenly the glare of spotlights blinded us. Roadblock.

  The door slapped open.

  Uzi-toting soldiers clambered aboard, two, then three of them.

  The first soldier barked at the driver a word I did not understand, but I heard it as "Goatfucker!" The driver cringed and appeared ready to throw himself at the soldier's feet.

  Another soldier leveled his weapon at the man in the headdress. With great dignity the Arab turned his head slowly away to look out the window. The soldier forced him to stand and frisked him. As the Israeli jammed the snout of his gun into the Arab's neck, the man barely seemed to register his presence. I could see his grandfather turning that impassive face on a two-bit British overseer.

  The third soldier was approaching me. I imagined him demanding to know by what authority I had left the monastery. Instead he shocked me by saying in a friendly voice and American-accented English, "Good evening, Father."

  I couldn't bring myself to answer him at first. Was I afraid? "You're from Holy Cross, I assume."

  "I am indeed." I adopted a cocky tone that in no way corresponded to what I was feeling. "Very clever of you."

  He smiled. He was proud of himself. "I grew up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. There's a Benedictine monastery near my aunt's house. I recognized your habit. Of course, now I know the Franciscans', Trappists' and Dominicans' too."

  "Someone as smart as you are should know better than to call me 'Father.' Don't assume all monks are priests. And don't assume all Arabs are terrorists."

  "Believe me, we don't, Father. These searches are for everyone's protection. Especially tonight, we can't be too careful." "But you've called me 'Father' again. You're not careful enough to listen." I was aware that the other two soldiers had moved together on the three formerly slouching youths. Would the fools resist? Would there be shooting? I looked sharply up at the soldier above me. "We understand that you have to do this, but still it affronts what dignity remains to us."

  Us? Was I throwing in with Arabs?

  He nodded. He had been trained to be patient with the likes of me. We were the ones—the clergy, the Americans—who could cause them trouble. Clearly his job on this bus was to occupy the field of my attention so that his comrades could jam the rods of their guns into the collarbones and ribs of the Arab scumbags. As long as they were not too obvious about it they knew I would not protest. Of course he would attempt to ingratiate himself with me and of course—"Father" indeed!—his ingratiation would insult me. My resentment of his pseudo-deference, I saw too late, served his purpose.

  One of the other soldiers called back to him. They were getting off.

  "Good luck, Father," the Israeli said to me, and he saluted informally.

  I stared at him. To my annoyance I saw that he was waiting for me to speak. "Shalom," I said.

  The King David Hotel, touted spa of the Middle East, but famous first for having been blown up by young Menachem Begin in 1946. Nearly a hundred people died, many of them Jews. But its glory days returned. Nixon, Kissinger and Sadat stayed there. Also Rockefellers, Toscanini, successful salesmen from the Bronx and my daughter. Would I know her?

  Once, in the alley behind our house on Brooklyn Heights, we were playing catch with an old tennis ball. In her exuberance—she was perhaps six at the time—she turned our game into a contest, "running bases" the boys called it, she said. I, not an athlete, was uneasy with her burst of energy as she tore up and down the narrow pavement, dodging my feeble efforts to tag her. She laughed continually. At a certain point I sensed that I would never catch her. She had me and she knew it. Her fuddy-duddy father. What child wouldn't squeal with delight to so defeat a parent? She zigzagged in, then out, daring to come close, but only to show how easy it was to scoot away. I remember how impatient she made me feel until I realized what was happening. My impatience changed in a sorcerer's flash to awe: my child was more alive than I was. She had a grace and fire all her own. I stood there slack-jawed, thinking, She is so fast! Happiness as brief as it was sweet overwhelmed me. Later I found Carolyn reading in the corner of our book-lined living room. Without explaining, I sat on the floor next to her chair and put my head in her lap and gazed up at her, silent until she asked and I said, "We have made a kind of masterpiece."

  The King David Hotel had its name marked on its entrance in English, Hebrew and Arabic, an ecumenical gesture, but the doorman in his martial red jacket looked at me suspiciously. A monk on the loose? Apostata et fugitivus? You might think my Benedictine habit was what put him off, but the eccentric dress of religion was ubiquitous in Jerusalem. I nodded at him and pushed through the oversized revolving door.

  I was uneasy because of the war and because of my daughter, but also because it was years since I had been in a city at night. It was all like a dream to me.

  In the lobby, mammoth pillars of pink stone supported the massive beams of a blue ceiling which could have been the canopy of a Semite chieftain's throne room. King-sized chairs of cedar and leather spread across the lobby. Sitting in the chairs or strolling between them were impeccably tailored guests. The men were large but not portly. They were smoking. The women glittered. Everyone looked rich to me. At each pillar huge sunflowers, bunches of them in front of floor-to-ceiling swatches of damask, arched over us from antique pots. A group of American Jews clustered at the reception desk in front of me. Those men were wearing yarmulkes, those women sensible shoes. All seemed to clutch guidebooks and they nodded in unison while the concierge explained in accented English how the adjacent road snaked across the valley into the Old City. Even those tourists were going to the Wall to grieve.

  Finally I caught the eye of the clerk behind the desk.

  "You have a guest registered? A Miss Molly Durkin?"

  He flipped through the file. He looked up blankly. "No, Father."

  I resisted the urge to correct him. "Are you certain?"

  "Quite, Father."

  "Would you check again? I'm sure she's here."

  The clerk made a show of fingering the registration cards. Suddenly, at a particular one, he stopped and looked up. "You said 'Molly...'?"

  "Durkin."

  He shook his head and continued through the cards.

  "What was that one?"

  He flipped back to it absently. "Maguire. Molly Maguire."

  It must be that the color drained from my face because he was staring at me. Molly Maguire? I could not grasp it. Molly Maguire? As in the Irish equivalent to the Stem Gang? Her very name was an assault, a bomb.

  Why had it never occurred to me that once Carolyn married him, Molly would have taken Michael's name? Michael Maguire. How long had it been since I'd thought of him? Did Molly call him "Daddy"? Had he legally adopted her? Involuntarily, my mind threw up a picture of his face, smiling with such fondness. Michael, you bastard! You fucking bastard! You always said you loved us both!

  The clerk was looking at me wearily.

  "That's her." I smiled. "Her married name. I knew her parents. I still think of her as Durkin."

  "Room 722. You can call from the phone-bank there." He pointed to a shelf in a corner ten yards away.

  I approached the phones slowly, knowing I would never use one. Because I could feel the clerk watching me, I went through the motions of calling her room, all the while depressing the engage button. If even clerks cast a disapproving eye upon me, how would my daughter lo
ok at me? She rejected my name?

  As I crossed the broad sweep of marble floor toward the massive bronze elevator doors, it was like walking back in time. Memories tugged at me the way Arab boys did in the marketplace. I shook them off as I had ruthlessly now for ten years, but they clutched this time.

  My daughter's four-year-old face was streaming with water. Her soaked hair framed her eyes. She had just climbed up to the float and now, arms spread, she was about to throw herself back into the lake where I waited to catch her. Her trust in me was absolute.

  The elevator doors opened. The operator was short and obsequious. His bellhop's uniform looked wrong. Then I realized that his pitch-dark hair was cheaply dyed. His skin was not ruddy but flushed with age. He was too old to be dressed like that. I wanted suddenly to ask him, Were you here when Begin bombed the place? Were any young girls killed?

  The elevator doors opened again, then closed behind me. I felt like a sleepwalker. How could my Molly have taken another name?

  When I had last seen her she had pleaded with me not to go. Owing to the setting perhaps—she was sitting on the knee of the Hans Christian Andersen bronze in Central Park—she looked even younger than seven. Her hands fiddled in her lap with a twig. I was standing beside her. Her head was bent, but I could see that the stress of what had brought us to that moment had set its stamp on her face. With difficulty she said one last time, "Please don't go, Daddy."

  "My darling Molly, I would give anything not to." I raised my eyes and saw Carolyn standing mutely, mournfully, a few dozen yards away, waiting for us to finish. I half expected Michael to be with her, but he couldn't have been.

  Molly was sobbing then. I took both her hands in mine and I kissed her cheek. At once I turned and ran. Before I reached Fifth Avenue, I remember, it began to rain.

  At Room 722 I stopped. I listened for sounds: music, water running, talking. There were no sounds. I looked down at myself. What would I say when she asked about my being a monk? What would I say when she asked me why I never contacted her?

  I knocked at the door.

  Immediately she opened it.

  Her beauty was complete. She stood there in front of me, perfectly still, like an artifact, but with an expression of such human longing that it stunned me when I realized it was longing for me. In her face sadness showed, but as a resonance, a depth. Her loveliness was wonderfully familiar to me. I saw the fulfillment of the abundant promise that always set Molly apart as a child, but also I saw her mother as she was at nineteen. I wanted only to look at her, but my eyes were blinded suddenly by tears. While outside the hotel throngs mourned the destruction of the Temple, the fiercest grief I had ever felt took possession of me. I had spent twelve full years avoiding that emotion, though, and I simply, by an act of will, warded it off.

  Neither of us spoke. She stepped aside for me. Finally when I was in the room and the door was shut and the moment had come when we might embrace, she said, "I am sorry for taking you from your monastery."

  I searched her face for an indication of sarcasm, but found none. I couldn't think what to say to her.

  She turned from me and walked efficiently to the window which opened onto a small balcony. She stood by a table with her back to me. In the distance, framing her dramatically, were the illuminated towers of the Jaffa Gate, and all too easily I imagined the red burst of an explosion, the chunks of stone over-ending through the air, the screams of wounded pilgrims. The enemy from Beirut had struck back at last. I could see that girl pressing her entrails back into the cavity of her stomach, only now I recognized her as my daughter.

  "Molly, why are you here?"

  "Mother sent me."

  "Why?"

  "She wants you to come home. She sent me to ask you."

  What could I possibly say?

  When I did not respond, she faced me. "Will you?"

  The show of longing with which she greeted me was gone, replaced by a studied indifference, no, detachment, which seemed unbearably cruel to me. And, of course, familiar.

  It was the perfect vengeance. I'd practiced it for years.

  I approached her carefully. "Molly, you know, we've jumped into the middle of a conversation we're not prepared for. We haven't even said hello."

  She averted her face. The water in her eyes glistened. "I wouldn't have come, but Mother asked me."

  When I put my hands on her shoulders she did not resist.

  In my hands I had held her, she was so small!

  "What's wrong, darling? Tell me what's wrong?"

  She nodded toward the adjacent table. A newspaper was open on it, the International Herald-Tribune. She touched it. "Did you see this today?"

  "No."

  I made no move to look at it. She picked it up and held the page for me to read.

  "China Discards Maoist Vision."

  My eyes fell several inches to a headline in the lower right-hand corner. The type was smaller, but I read it easily.

  "Michael Maguire, Ex-Priest, War-Protester, Is Dead."

  TWO

  TO recover the secrets of one's past and lay them bare in the inchoate hope that even disordered testimony reveals the wider meaning of those events that left us numb—one attempts it feeling a certain desperation. I have found it impossible to resist finally, this strange impulse to sit at my desk—lean to your ear—and speak. It is writing, I know, but it seems like speech to me. An unexpected faith enables me to think I am not talking to myself, for I believe despite the evidence of the blank wall above me that you exist, that you lean toward me, that these solitudes—the writer's in his study, the reader's in his chair—are one solitude. If I am telling you two stories, Michael's and mine, and how despite everything they became this one, can't I also hope I am telling yours?

  Flaubert said the artist, the soldier and the priest face death every day. I say, bully for them! The rest of us face it once, maybe, and after that isn't everything just fucking awful? But also ... aren't we aware only then that we're alive? How often can one glimpse that open secret? And how often is the structure of its story revealed? Pity the sacred trio—artist, soldier, priest—if they do this every day. They could not possibly sustain the grief, the awe or the understanding, so death, shorn of its intensity, must become like flossing, like brewing coffee, like mail falling through the slot. Death; the artist paints it. The soldier wears it with his ribbons. And the priest douses it with holy water.

  But you and I watch death cross the land like a shadow once or twice in a lifetime, changing everything, and then we withdraw to our studies, our chairs, or to our lubricating wakes to tell the raucous and irreverent stories that alone make us know that we survived. You survived. I survived. Even if they don't know it anymore, the artists, soldiers and priests survived. And by God because story outweighs history —if I didn't believe that would I even begin?—so did the dead survive.

  But dear old Henry James says, Don't state! Render! Don't describe what happens, let it happen!

  So, my friend, I catch myself. No fustian pronouncements here, no lecture on the salvific effect of narrative impulse, no discursis on Coleridgean biographia. Don't explain, create! Ex nihilo? Not quite. The events and the people are real. And the time was that stretch of years in which we both came of age and went to the-edge. This is the beginning, like all good ones, which contains the end. Eschaton, therefore. It was August of 1982. I was in Israel. And Michael Maguire was dead.

  And with Molly, riding from Jerusalem, I could barely speak. I was filled with grief for Michael, but also for what I had not had with her. An infinity of tender moments seemed to have been squandered. I watched Molly's sparkling eyes and saw her mother's, that finely formed face, but every memory of Carolyn was a rebuke and I turned from it as I had ruthlessly for a dozen years.

  Molly waited in the taxi down on the public road. She assumed I would accompany her back to America that night. She thought we'd returned to the monastery so that I could change from my habit into lay clothes. But what lay cl
othes? My overalls? How could I have explained to my daughter that her once distinguished father had returned to Holy Cross to ask the old goat prior for permission? The crunch of gravel under my feet was the only sound and it filled the night. It was only midnight, but not a light showed as I approached the monastery. Surely they had noted my absence at Compline. In more than a decade I had never missed an exercise.

  With the hem of my habit in hand I leapt the stone wall and circled furtively behind the building toward the prior's room. Once beyond the chapel corner I saw that his light was on. I imagined him talking on the telephone to the Israeli police. But they would have been too busy on that feast night to come out until the morning. A search of the wadis would have been impossible in the dark in any case. If I had just secretly gone off with Molly wouldn't they have assumed I'd wandered into the desert in a mystical trance like Bishop Pike? They would have revered my memory. Monks and prelates should disappear without a trace, like Elijah.

  This train of thought stopped me. I was standing in the ludicrous arrangement of stone and cactus that the prior referred to as his Zen Garden. The door of his room stood open to the night, and I could see him, a small, frail figure. His bony shoulders protruded under his Benedictine robe. He was bent at his table, like an old man over the wheel of a car. He was not on the phone. A wedge of light fell toward me, inviting my entrance, but I could not bring myself to approach him because suddenly I realized there was every likelihood that this man for whom I had such disdain was praying for me. And all at once my impulse was to throw myself upon him and cry, "Michael is dead!"

  Michael was on Nixon's enemy list. J. Edgar Hoover denounced him before Congress. He was the most famous priest in America for a time; the priest against Vietnam. You remember him surely as one of the leading opponents of the war. But there was a secret Michael whom many fewer knew. Despite his reputation as an activist, he was sought out as a Confessor by many Catholics throughout his years as a priest. The elegance of his sensitivity drew people, and not only from among the antiwar crowd. I never confessed to him myself, but Carolyn did. Certainly their encounters in the Sacrament sustained their intimacy and the irony in that, in hindsight, seems particularly poignant to me.