-Aeschylus

They brought her to an ending in a crowded cemetery where the gravestones cried for breath.

The Mass had been lonely as her life. Her brothers from Brooklyn. The grocer on the corner who'd extended her credit. Watching them lower her into the dark of a world without windows, Damien Karras sobbed with a grief he had long misplaced.

"Ah, Dimmy, Dimmy..."

An uncle with an arm around his shoulder.

"Never mind, she's in heaven now, Dimmy, she's happy."

Oh, God, let it be! Ah, God! Ah, please! Oh, God please be!

They waited in the car while he lingered by the grave. He could not bear the thought of her being alone.

Driving to Pennsylvania Station, he listened to his uncles speak of their illnesses in broken, immigrant accents.

"...emphysema... gotta quit smokin'... I ohmos' died las' year, you know that?"

Spasms of rage fought to break from his lips, but he pressed them back and felt ashamed. He looked out the window: they were passing by the Home Relief Station where on Saturday mornings in the dead of winter she would pick up the milk and the sacks of potatoes while he lay in his bed; the Central Park Zoo, where she left him in summer while she begged by the fountain in front of the Plaza. Passing the hotel, Karras burst into sobs, and then choked back the memories, wiped at the wetness of stinging regrets. He wondered why love had waited for this distance, waited for the moment when he need not touch, when the limits of contact and human surrender had dwindled to the size of a printed Mass card tucked in his wallet: In Memoriam...

He knew. This grief was old.

He arrived at Georgetown in time for dinner, but had no appetite. He paced inside his cottage. Jesuit friends came by with condolences. Stayed briefly. Promised prayers.

Shortly after ten, Joe Dyer appeared with a bottle of Scotch. He displayed it proudly: "Chivas Regal!"

"Where'd you get the money for it--- out of the poorbox?"

"Don't be an asshole, that would be breaking my vow of poverty."

"Where did you get it, then?"

"I stole it"

Karras smiled and shook his head as he fetched a glass and a pewter coffee mug. He rinsed them out in his tiny bathroom sink and said, "I believe you."

"Greater faith I have never seen."

Karras felt a stab of familiar pain. He shook it off and returned to Dyer, who was sitting on his cot breaking open the seal. He sat beside him.

"Would you like to absolve me now or later?"

"Just pour," said Karras, "and we'll absolve each other."

Dyer poured deep into glass and cup. "College presidents shouldn't drink," he murmured. "It sets a bad example. I figure I relieved him of a terrible temptation."

Karras swallowed Scotch, but not the story. He knew the president's ways too well. A man of tact and sensitivity, he always gave through indirection. Dyer had come, he knew, as a friend, but also as the presi¬dent's personal emissary. So when Dyer made a passing comment about Karras possibly needing a rest," the Jesuit psychiatrist took it as hopeful omen of the future and felt a momentary flood of relief.

Dyer was good for him; made him laugh; talked about the party and Chris MacNeil; purveyed new anecdotes about the Jesuit Prefect of Discipline. He drank very little, but continually replenished Karras' glass, and when he thought he was numb enough for sleep, he got up from the cot and made Karras stretch out, while he sat at the desk and continued to talk until Karras' eyes were closed and his comments were mumbled grunts.

Dyer stood up and undid the laces of Karras' shoes. He slipped them off.

"Gonna steal my shoes now?" Karras muttered thickly.

"No, I tell fortunes by reading the creases. Now shut up and go to sleep."

"You're a Jesuit cat burglar."

Dyer laughed lightly and covered him with a coat that he took from a closet. "Listen, someone's got to worry about the bills around this place. All you other guys do is rattle beads and pray for the hippies down on M Street."

Karras made no answer. His breathing was regular and deep. Dyer moved quietly to the door and flicked out the light.

"Stealing is a sin," muttered Karras in the darkness.

"Mea culpa," Dyer said softly.

For a time he waited, then at last decided that Karras was asleep. He left the cottage.

In the middle of the night, Karras awakened in tears. He had dreamed of his mother. Standing at a window high in Manhattan, he'd seen her emerging from a subway kiosk across the street. She stood at the curb with a brown paper shopping bag, searching for him. He waved. She didn't see him. She wandered the street. Buses. Trucks. Unfriendly crowds. She was growing frightened. She returned to the subway and began to descend. Karras grew frantic; ran to the street and began to weep as he called her name; as he could not find her; as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in the maze of tunnels beneath the ground.

He waited for his sobbing to subside, and then fumbled for the Scotch. He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.

He remembered a telephone call from his uncle:

"Dimmy, da edema's affected her brain. She won't let a doctor come anywhere near her. Jus' keeps screamin' things. Even talks ta da goddam radio. I figure she's got ta go to Bellevue, Dimmy. A regular hospital won't put up wit' dat. I jus' figure a coupla months an' she's good as new; den we take her out again. Okay? Lissen, Dimmy, I tell you: we awready done it. Dey give her a shot an' den take her in da ambulance dis mornin'. We didn' wanna bodda you, excep' dere is a hearin' and you gotta sign da papers. Now... What?... Private hospital? Who's got da money, Dimmy? You?"

He didn't remember falling asleep.

He awakened in torpor, with memory of loss draining blood from his stomach. He reeled to the bathroom; showered; shaved; dressed in a cassock. It was five-thirty-five. He unlocked the door to Holy Trinity, put on his vestments, and offered up Mass at the left side altar.

"Memento etiam..." he prayed with bleak despair. "Remember thy servant, Mary Karras...."

In the tabernacle door he saw the face of the nurse at Bellevue Receiving; heard again the screams from the isolation room.

"You her son?"

"Yes, I'm Damien Karras"

"Well, I wouldn't go in there. She's pitchin' a fit."

He'd looked through the port at the windowless room with the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling; padded walls; stark; no furniture save for the cot on which she raved.

"...grant her, we pray Thee, a place of refreshment, light and peace...."

As she met his gaze, she'd grown suddenly silent; moved to the port with a baffled look.

"Why you do this, Dimmy? Why?"

The eyes had been meeker than a lamb's.

"Agnus Dei..." he murmured as he bowed and struck his breast. "Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant her rest...."

As he closed his eyes and held the Host, he saw his mother in the hearing room, her hands clasped gentle in her lap, her expression docile and confused as the judge explained to her the Bellevue psychiatrist's report.

"Do you understand that, Mary?"

She'd nodded; wouldn't open her mouth; they had taken her dentures.

"Well, what do you say about that, Mary?''

She'd proudly answered him:

"My boy, he speak for me."

An anguished moan escaped from Karras as he bowed his head above the Host. He struck his breast as if it were time and murmured, "Domine, no sum dignus.... I am not worthy... say but the word and my soul shall be healed."

Against all reason, against all knowledge, he prayed there was Someone to hear his prayer.

He did not think so.

After the Mass, he returned to the cottage and tried to sleep. Without success.

Later in the morning, a youngish priest that he'd never seen came by unexpectedly. He knocked and looked in the door.

"You busy? Can I see you for a while?"

In the eyes, the restless burden; in the voice, the tugging plea.

For a moment, Karras hated him.

"Come in," he said gently. And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that rendered him helpless; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself unbidden at the cry of someone else's need. It gave him ¬no peace. Not even in sleep. At the edge of his dreams, there was often a sound like a faint, brief cry of someone in distress. It was almost inaudible in the distance. Always the same. And for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled.

The young priest fumbled; faltered; seemed shy. Karras led him patiently. Offered cigarettes. Instant coffee. Then forced a look of interest as the moody young visitor gradually unfolded a familiar problem: the terrible loneliness of priests.

Of all the anxieties that Karras encountered among the community, this one had lately become the must prevalent. Cut off from their families as well as from women, many of the Jesuits were also fearful of expressing affection for fellow priests; of forming deep and loving friendships.

"Like I'd like to put my arm around another guy's shoulder, but right away I'm scared he's going to think I'm queer. I mean, you hear all these theories about so many latents attracted to the priesthood. So I just don't do it. I won't even go to somebody's room just to listen to records; or talk; or smoke. It's not that I'm afraid of him; I'm just worried about him getting worried about me."

Karras felt the weight easing slowly from the other and onto him. He let it come; let the young priest talk. his knew he would return again and again; find relief from aloneness; make Karras his friend; and when he'd realized he had done so without fear and suspicion, perhaps he would go on to make friends among the others.

The psychiatrist grew weary; found himself drifting into private sorrow. He glanced at a plaque that someone had given him the previous Christmas. MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM, he read. A failed encounter. He blamed himself. He had mapped the streets of his brother's torment, yet never had walked them; or so he believed. He thought that the pain which he felt was his own.

At last the visitor looked at his watch. It was time for lunch in the campus refectory. He rose and started to leave. Then paused to glance at a current novel on Karras' desk.

"Have you read it?" asked Karras.

The other shook his head. "No, I haven't. Should I?"

"I don't know. I just finished it and I'm not at all sure that I really understand it," Karras lied. He picked up the book and handed it over. "Want to take along? You know, I'd really like to hear someone else's opinion."

"Well, sure," said the Jesuit, examining the copy on the flap of the dust jacket. "I'll try to get it back to you in a couple of days."

His mood seemed brighter.

As the screen door creaked with his departure, Karras felt momentary peace. He picked up his breviary and stepped out to the courtyard, where he slowly paced and said his Office.

In the afternoon, he had still another visitor, the elderly pastor of Holy Trinity, who took a chair by the desk and offered condolences on the passing of Karras' mother.

"Said a couple of Masses for her, Damien. And one for you," he wheezed with the barest trace of a brogue.

"That was thoughtful of you, Father. Thank you very much."

"How old was she?"

"Seventy."

"A good old age."

Karras fixed his gaze on an altar card that the pastor had carried in with him. One of three employed in the Mass, it was covered in plastic and inscribed with a portion of the prayers that were said by the priest. The psychiatrist wondered what he was doing with it.

"Well, Damien, we've had another one of those things here today. In the church, y'know. Another desecration."

A statue of the Virgin at the back of the church had been painted like a harlot, the pastor told him. Then he handed the altar card to Karras. "And this one the morning after you'd gone, y'know, to New York. Was it Saturday? Saturday. Yes. Well, take a look at that. I just had a talk with a sergeant of police, and--- well... well, look at this card, would you, Damien?"

As Karras examined it, the pastor explained that someone had slipped in a typewritten sheet between the original card and its cover. The ersatz text, though containing some strikeovers and various typographical errors, was in basically fluent and intelligible Latin and described in vivid, erotic detail an imagined homosexual encounter involving the Blesses Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.

"That's enough, now, you don't have to read it all," said the pastor, snapping back the card as if fearing that it might be an occasion of sin. "Now that's excellent Latin; I mean, it's got style, a church Latin style. Well, the sergeant says he talked to some fellow, a psychologist, and he says that the person's been doin' this all--- well, he could be a priest, y'know, a very sick priest. Do you think?"

The psychiatrist considered for a while. Then nodded. "Yes. Yes, it could. Acting out a rebellion, perhaps, in a state of complete somnambulism. I don't know. It could be. Maybe so."

"Can you think of any candidates, Damien?"

"I don't get you."

"Well, now, sooner or later they come and see you, wouldn't you say? I mean, the sick ones, if there are any, from the campus. Do y'know any like that? I mean with that kind of illness, y'know."

"No, I don't."

"No, I didn't think you'd tell me."

"Well, I wouldn't know anyway, Father. Somnambulism is a way of resolving any number of possible conflict situations, and the usual form of resolution is symbolic. So I really wouldn't know. And if it is a somnambulist, he's probably got a complete posterior amnesia about what he's done, so that even he wouldn't have a clue."

"What if you were to tell him?" the pastor asked cagily. He plucked at an earlobe, a habitual gesture, Karras had noticed, whenever he thought he was being wily.

"I really don't know," repeated the psychiatrist.

"No. No, I really didn't think that you'd tell me." He rose and moved for the door. "Y'know what you're like, you people? Like priests!" he complained.

As Karras laughed gently, the pastor returned and dropped the altar card on his desk. "I suppose yon should study this thing." he mumbled. "Something might come to you."

The pastor moved for the door.

"Did they check it for fingerprints?" asked Karras.

The pastor stopped and turned slightly. "Oh, I doubt it. After all, it's not a criminal we're after, now, is it? More likely it's only a demented parishioner. What do you think of that, Damien? Do you think that it could be someone in the parish? You know, I think so. It wasn't a priest at all, it was someone among the parishioners." He was pulling at his earlobe again. '"Don't you think?"

"I really wouldn't know," he said again.

"No, I didn't think you'd tell me."

Later that day, Father Karras was relieved of his duties as counselor and assigned to the Georgetown University Medical School as lecturer in psychiatry. His orders were to "rest."