The Cardinal Sins - Softcover

Andrew M. Greeley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0352311010 ISBN 13: 9780352311016

Publisher: Warner Books, 1982

Synopsis

The Cardinal Sins

About this title

About the Author:

Father Andrew M. Greeley, a Catholic priest and sociologist, is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Ireland in Dublin. He divides his time between teaching at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Cardinal Sins, The
BOOK ITHE FORTIESCHAPTER ONE1948Patrick Donahue had been my closest friend since as long as I could remember. We were inseparable all through grammar school and our three years at Jesuit High. He'd been a little guy, much shorter than I, until we were freshmen. Then he shot up and out almost overnight. Grown-ups thought he was adorable when he was little; now they were charmed by his poise and his mature courtesy. Older girls once said he was "so cute" with his towhead, long eyelashes, and silver-blue eyes. Now that he was seventeen, women of all ages thought he was magnificent.Two years before, at fifteen, Pat was tongue-tied and embarrassed with girls; now he seemed to have nothing else but girls on his mind, even when they were only well-developed freshmen like my "cousin" Maureen Cunningham.It was said by everyone in those days that Pat looked like Guy Madison, a comment that will make sense only if you can remember those days or if you watch very late television movies. Guy Madison or not, his laugh was contagious, and his sense of fun made him the center of any group of which he was a part.Pat was not as good a student as I, and not a leader, either. He was--and it is important that I note this--much more devout than I. It was an erratic kind of devotion, marked by closedretreats, sustained periods of daily mass and rosary recitation, complicated reforms of his moral life, and then dramatic relapses into drinking and girl-chasing: the Irish approach to spirituality, my father assured me, disapproving of my more even and casual approach to the deity.Early on a Saturday morning in the humid July of 1948, Pat was walking next to me, talking about my cousin Maureen, when a gray Packard rolled over in the ditch across the road from us and exploded. Pat's courage and quick reaction saved their lives. I stood there glued in the summer dust, waiting for an orange ball of flame and smoke to devour the car. Still, I got the credit.I had been walking down the hill behind the village on my way to church. Pat was climbing up the hill, his handsome face and cheery smile undimmed by a night of merriment on the beach. He offered to walk back down to church with me, mostly, I think, because if we came home from church together, my mother and father might not ask any questions about how he had spent the night. I should have been angry with him; he was my guest, and I was responsible for his spiritual and physical welfare. But Pat's laughter and high spirits, especially in those days, made it hard to be angry at him."Not much in the way of serious necking," he said, grinning complacently. "Not even enough to keep me from Communion at mass.""Beer after twelve breaks your fast," I said primly."You already sound like a monsignor." Pat walloped me on the back in great humor. "Kevin, they're going to ordain you a monsignor.""At least a bishop," I said. "Maybe even a cardinal.""Kevin Cardinal Brennan." He laughed. "I like the sound of it. Make me a papal knight or something?"The asphalt on the road was soft from the heat. I dreaded the walk back after mass. It was going to be another miserably hot day. "And Maureen a papal dame. Dame Mo. I like the sound of that!""She is some dame." Pat shook his head appreciatively. "I know she's your cousin, but for a freshman she's got the hottest lips on the beach.""Not really a cousin," I pointed out. "Our fathers have been law partners for so long that we call each other 'Cousin.' So those hot lips aren't off limits to me, either.""That'd be the day. Kevin Brennan, the pillar of piety, necking all night on the beach."The thought of Mo's lips pressed against mine was far more appealing than I was willing to admit. "Where is Maureen? Too hung over to walk up the hill? Or just too spoiled?"Pat shrugged his shoulders. "Marty Delaney is going to drive them back up in his Packard. I wanted the exercise. Told them you would be angry if I didn't stay in condition for the basketball season.""It's your scholarship, not mine."My reminder sailed by him unnoticed. Pat needed the scholarship to go to college. The Brennans were wealthy enough that money would never be a worry for any of us. I suspected Pat thought it was unfair. I thought it unfair that he possessed ten times as much charm as I did.Before we could say anything more, the Delaney Packard roared around the final curve separating the hill from the village. Marty must have been driving sixty miles an hour. He would have made the turn with a few inches to spare if old Doc Crawford's Buick, on its way to the yacht club, hadn't turned the corner from the opposite direction. Delaney swerved--instinctively, I suppose--to avoid the big red car, skidded towardthe side of the road where we were walking, then back across the slippery asphalt and into the ditch. The Packard rolled over like a turtle at the end of a stick, its wheels spinning helplessly in the air.Pat raced toward the car. "Let's get them out of there," he shouted.My feet felt as if they were cemented in the ground. I finally trudged after him, each stride taking an eternity.Inside the car, people were screaming. Pat wrenched the door open. "Give me a hand, Kevin," he yelled to me.We pulled Marty Delaney out from the driver's seat. His face was a mask of blood. Sue Hanlon was next to him, unconscious, her dress torn and her slim legs twisted beneath her at an unnatural angle. I helped the battered but conscious Delaney to the side of the ditch as Pat gently set Sue in the dust.We were dragging Joan Ryan and Joe Heeney from the back seat when the fuel tank blew. The force of the explosion knocked all of us into the ditch. Joan's thin dress caught fire, and she wailed hysterically as the flames leaped to her long, blond hair. Joe lay silently by the side of the road. For a moment I thought we were all going to die. Then Pat knocked Joan down and rolled her over in the dust, extinguishing the fire, and I carried Sue to the safety of the road. I stood there dumbly while Joan, her hysteria spent and her freckled face streaked with dirt and soot, and Pat dragged the two boys away from the crackling flames.Doc Crawford, who had managed to stop his car only a few yards from the accident, was suddenly next to me, trying to get Sue out of my arms. I struggled for a while and then put her down on the grass. I sat next to her while Doc probed and grunted and shook his head. Acrid smoke from the burning automobile tore at my nostrils and stung my eyes.The State Police ambulance arrived after what seemed like hours. Ted Smith, the police lieutenant, and Father O'Rourke, the alcoholic pastor of our village church, stood next to the smoldering wreck, shaking their heads."If we had been a few seconds later," Pat was breathing heavily, "they all would have gone up in smoke." His face and hair were black, his white shirt and slacks ripped and dirty."And us with them," I said. Only then did I realize that Maureen had not been in the car."None of them have a right to be alive," said the lieutenant in a nasal, rural-Wisconsin drawl. "Damn fool kids, drinking all night and then doing sixty miles an hour in a twenty-mile-an-hour zone. Lucky you were here, Kevin.""You saved their lives and maybe their souls, Kevin," added the haggard old priest, rolling up a soiled purple stole. "If they'd died without the last rites, after what they were doing on the beach, they would have gone straight to hell.""How do you know?" I demanded. "Anyway, it was Pat who saved them."They didn't seem to hear me. I saw a spasm of pain cross Pat's face."Two of them look like they're goners, the girl especially," said Ted, fingering his trim, Tom Dewey mustache. "If they make it, Kevin, it's all your doing."Still in a daze, I walked back to our house, at the top of the hill, vomited the knots out of my stomach, and went to my room to sleep away the rest of the day."They're all going to be fine except the Hanlon girl," my mother said when she woke me for supper, her red hair glowing in the rays of the afternoon sun. "Sue Hanlon will probably be crippled for the rest of her life."For years I saw Sue's legs, twisted beneath her, in my dreams.Now I can't distinguish them from the butchered legs of another woman who also haunts my dreams. 
 
Pat returned to our summer house at the lake the last week in August, after the excitement about the accident had died down. One afternoon he blew a softball game against some of the local kids; he was the tying run coming in from third, and he tried to skirt around a half-pint catcher instead of knocking him down.I sulked at supper that night, angry at him for losing the softball game, although Pat, as usual, joked with the rest of the family. After supper, he asked if he could borrow the Studebaker to see what was going on in town. I knew, of course, that he wanted to go pick up Maureen on the property next to ours. Mrs. Cunningham thought Pat was a charming young man and raised no objections to her daughter's roaming around southern Wisconsin with the son of a sanitation worker.Silently I gave him the keys."You want to come?" he asked tentatively, his face turning the bashful pink that so charmed the ladies. "We could find Cunningham and Foley."Ellen Foley, to whom I was assigned for the week by Maureen and Pat, was the runt of the litter. Maureen had taken the poor thing under her wing, and I had got her by default."Forget it," I said sullenly. I settled in a rocking chair on our open front porch, which overlooked the village and the lake. My grandfather and Maureen's had bought several square miles in the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Warner Books
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0352311010
• ISBN 13: 9780352311016
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368