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Ash Wednesday

A Father Dowling Mystery Series

St. Martin's Press

"Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return."

Father Dowling murmured this formula as he traced a cross on the foreheads of the old people who advanced up the middle aisle of St. Hilary's on this Ash Wednesday. Remember, man. No feminist had ever objected to this inclusive term, perhaps wanting to think of it as gender specific. Like All men are mortal?

It was the rheumy eye of Monica Garvey staring into his as he applied ashes to her forehead that prompted these irreverent thoughts. Monica was known to complain about the Church's treatment of women, thereby earning the friendly enmity of Marie Murkin, the parish housekeeper. Monica turned and made way for the next penitent. Roger Dowling switched to the Latin formula when Kevin Brown stood before him, eyes closed, head thrust forward.

"Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris."

Kevin's lips moved as he repeated the words silently. Kevin had given Father Dowling a subscription to the magazine Latin Mass at Christmas, and the first issue had arrived some weeks before. Father Dowling said Vatican II's Novus Ordo in Latin once a week, on Mondays, and the attendance noticeably rose.

"Why only once a week, Father?" Kevin asked.

"After years of English it takes some getting used to."

"People love it."

It was partly nostalgia, of course. There were few people who, like Kevin Brown, understood Latin. He had studied it as a boy at Quigley when he had thought of becoming a priest. But he had gone on to Loyola and then to law school, prospered, married, had half a dozen disappointing children about whose souls he now fretted. "Thank God, Bridget never saw how they turned out." It seemed that none of them went to Mass anymore. With Kevin there might have been an element of affectation in his championing the return to Latin in the liturgy. A pharisee thanking God he was not like the rest of men? That was unfair. Kevin seemed to think that it was the Church's dropping of Latin that had led to the falling away of his children.

Father Dowling finished distributing ashes and went into the sacristy feeling that his Lent was off on the wrong foot. Uncharitable thoughts, first about Monica and then about Kevin. God knows he had few aggravations in his pastoral work. Other pastors had to contend with the uprising of laypeople, women lectors who altered the Scriptures as they read, male clerical wannabes hovering about the pastor, a platoon of aids called ministers. Father Dowling realized he was in charge at St. Hilary's as others longed to be in charge of their own parishes. A mild feminist and a man who missed the Latin of his youth scarcely added up to a cross. Most of those who had been to the noon Mass and stayed for the distribution of ashes would now return to the parish center in the former school.

A man shuffled into the sacristy, a smudge of ashes on his forehead. Father Dowling remembered him; he had been the last in line.

"I hope it was all right, Father." He pointed to his forehead.

"Why wouldn't it be?" The man had not come to communion. Did he think he must confess before receiving ashes?

"I'm not a Catholic, Father."

"Ah."

"I meant no disrespect."

"It's perfectly all right," Father Dowling said. "It's not a sacrament. Just a reminder of our mortality as Lent begins."

"Quite a turnout."

Father Dowling guessed him to be in his late sixties, maybe more. His complexion was colorless and seemed paler because of his white hair.

"Most of them came over from the parish center. You might want to look into it."

The man seemed puzzled, so Father Dowling explained the use to which he had put the school when there were no longer enough kids in the parish to justify keeping it open.

"What is it exactly?" the man asked.

"Look, come have lunch with me. Mrs. Murkin doesn't like me to be late."

"Mrs.?"

"The housekeeper."

"I don't want to intrude."

Father Dowling said, "She likes it when I ask people to join me." She liked anyone with an appetite greater than his. On the way to the rectory he asked the man his name and so was able to announce it when they passed through the kitchen.

"Mr. Green, Marie. Nathaniel Green. He has agreed to have lunch with me."

Marie harumphed. "On Ash Wednesday? Some treat."

"I'm not Catholic," Green said.

Marie gave him the fish eye. "I made no provisions for that. You'll have to fast and abstain with Father Dowling."

Marie made it sound like bread and water. But it was a broiled white fish and mixed vegetables, peas and corn, that Marie put before them.

"I was telling Mr. Green about the parish center, Marie."

"You retired?" Marie asked their guest.

Green smiled. "Is that a requirement?"

"No," she said, "and you don't have to be Catholic, either. Many of them will be older than you."

Marie's manner with Green was brisk and oddly distant. She swept into the kitchen; the door swung to and fro and then stopped.

"I have been in a rectory before," Nathaniel Green said. "Before I married."

"You married a Catholic?" Father Dowling said.

"I used to be a Catholic myself."

"Did you get tired of it?" A light note seemed best, given the way Green had introduced the subject.

"After her death, I just let it go."

Father Dowling nodded. Every life had its tragedies, sooner or later.

"I gather that wasn't recently," he said.

"No."

"And now you've come back."

"You make it sound easy."

No need to press it now. If Green had come to church on Ash Wednesday, that might mean something, and then again it might not.

"Why don't you let Marie take you over to the parish center and introduce you around?"

"Oh, I'm sure she's too busy," Green protested.

From the kitchen came a voice. "Give me five minutes and I'll take him over."

Madeline Clancy had taught school, fourth grade, until she had had enough. She took early retirement, tried a number of fill-in jobs, but the compensation was hardly worth it, and besides, she could live comfortably enough on her pension. Fifty-seven was young for a retiree, and it seemed even younger when, prompted by her Aunt Helen's unctuous accounts, she came to the St. Hilary senior center.

"You want to volunteer?" Edna Hospers had asked.

Madeline wasn't quite sure why she had come, but the fact that most of the people were at least as old as Aunt Helen explained Edna's assumption. "What would I do?"

"That depends on how much time you could give."

"I'm retired," Madeline said.

Edna stepped back, a look of surprise on her face.

"I took early retirement." She was flattered by Edna's reaction. If she volunteered to help Edna, she could have the advantage of coming to the center without having to explain her relative youth. "What does anyone do here?"

"Oh, the old folks are content enough just being together. Bridge, shuffleboard, gossip."

They were standing in the doorway of what had once been the school gym. There were several tables of bridge; a man and woman were playing shuffleboard against imaginary opponents. One old fellow frowned over a game of solitaire. In the corner three men and a woman were watching a ball game on television. They seemed to be asleep, but then something happened on the screen and they erupted into cheers. Edna led her down the hall and up the stairs to her office.

"This used to be the principal's office," Edna said.

"I taught school."

"Here?"

"Oh, no." Madeline paused. "I did go to school here, though."

Madeline had noticed the class pictures lining the lower hallway, wondering if her own class was there.

"Sometimes we have talks," Edna went on. "Lectures, mini courses."

Madeline shook her head. "No teaching."

"What did you teach?"

"Fourth grade. Last year I taught creative writing for six weeks. Night school."

"Why not try that here?" Edna asked.

As therapy? That's pretty much what the course last winter had amounted to. Everybody seemed to want to tell everybody else all about themselves. Well, the least they could have done was put it into English. But her students had resented what they regarded as tampering with their creativity.

Edna didn't press it. "Once a week we have an excursion, to the mall, to a museum. Can you drive a minibus, Madeline?"

"I never have."

"It's really not much more than a station wagon."

It was too late now to say that she had come in the expectation that she would just be one of the old people. A little bridge was pretty inviting, and there had been a row of women sitting in chairs against the wall, knitting, talking. Aunt Helen was arguing with a man in a corner. They were the only ones who took notice when Edna and Madeline looked into the gym.

"Helen Burke is my aunt," Madeline said. "It was she who told me about the center. Who's the man?"

"Kevin Brown." Edna smiled. "Probably a theological argument. Ever since the Motu Proprio on Latin in the liturgy came out, they've become defenders of the faith. Usually against one another."

Madeline could believe it. "I'll be whatever help I can."

"Good, good. For now, why don't you just get acquainted. I try to keep organization to a minimum. Older people don't like being treated like kids."

Neither did kids, in Madeline's experience.

"Tea?" Edna asked.

"I'd love some."

So they had tea. Edna made a little ritual of it. No tea bags, a metal tea egg she filled with carefully measured spoonfuls of tea, the water put on to boil. That first time, there had been the careful exchange of trivia as each woman tried to find out about the other.

"How long have you been directing the center?" Madeline asked.

"Since it opened."

During the following weeks, tea in Edna's office had become a daily event. Madeline learned about Edna's husband, Earl, who had spent time in Joliet but was now free at last.

"It was like getting married all over again," Edna said.

Madeline grew uneasy, fearing that Edna was alluding to marital lore and might want to confide. Marriage was a great mystery to Madeline. She found men, except for Jason, and he was her cousin, an almost alien species and got along with them only as long as she thought of them as pupils.

In her creative writing class an overweight woman with braided gray hair and a voluminous dress had turned in stories that verged on the pornographic. There were complaints from the other aspiring writers when Deirdre read her stories to the class.

"With your imagination you should try science fiction," Bailey grumbled. He justified his own formless compositions as Chekhovian.

"Wachovian, you mean. "

Bailey had been a financial adviser, and his stories usually stressed the importance of prudent investments. "You should try Esperanto," Deirdre advised.

Not that any of them was really interested in what the others wrote. They suffered through the readings in order to earn an audience for their own efforts.

Helping Edna at the center brought back memories of Madeline's school days at St. Hilary's. She found her class picture in the lower hallway and stood for a long time staring at the mousy little girl in the front row smiling shyly into the sunlight. In sixth grade, she had actually thought of becoming a nun, largely because Sister Rose Alma was such a wonderful teacher and recognized Madeline's gifts. Well, she had become a teacher if not a nun. Now such memories and the convenience of Father Dowling's noon Mass had given her faith a shot in the arm. On Ash Wednesday, she and Edna went over to the church for a well-attended Mass and for ashes afterward. When was the last time she had started Lent with a smudge of ashes on her forehead? When was the last time she had thought of observing Lent seriously?

It was early in the afternoon when Marie Murkin brought Nathaniel Green to the center.

"Oh my God," Aunt Helen said when the two of them entered. "What's he doing here?"

"Who is he?" someone asked.

Helen inhaled deeply before answering. "Nathaniel Green!"

After turning Nathaniel Green over to Edna Hospers, Marie Murkin beat it back to the rectory. Father Dowling looked up from his breviary when she burst into his study.

"Do you know who that was?" Marie asked.

He slanted a ribbon across the page and closed the book. "That depends on whom 'who' refers to."

"Nathaniel Green! You did know, didn't you?"

"Help me," Father Dowling said.

Marie dropped into a chair. "The man who murdered his wife!"

Father Dowling's eyebrows lifted. That was all the encouragement Marie needed. Sometimes of late she got to the supermarket and forgot what she had come for, but her memories of anything connected with St. Hilary's parish during her long tenure as housekeeper were sharp and detailed. She told Father Dowling about Nathaniel Green as if she were reading a script.

It had all happened almost ten years ago. The Greens were parishioners, always at Mass on Sundays, but that was about the extent of their involvement in the parish. Who could blame them, with the flaky friars in charge, flopping around in their open-toed sandals? Oh, lots of parishioners had liked the Franciscans, and why not? They made getting to heaven sound as easy as a trip to the Loop in Chicago. And the sermons! Rambling anecdotal narratives of whatever in the previous week had caught the preacher's fancy, about as religious as a car commercial. A used car commercial. And they treated Marie pretty much the way they treated the janitor. For several years Marie had agonized about staying, losing hope that she could shape up the friars, and then, as if in answer to her novena to St. Anthony of Padua — she had decided to fight friar with friar — a miracle. The Franciscans told the cardinal they could no longer spare men for St. Hilary's, and for the first time in years a priest of the archdiocese was assigned as pastor. Roger Dowling, the best boss Marie had ever had, not that she would tell him that. Ever since, Marie had felt that she and Father Dowling were a team, bringing sanity back to St. Hilary's. Of course, the death of Florence Green had been before his time, but you'd think he would have read about it in the paper or caught it on television news.

Anyway, she told Father Dowling, Florence Green fell ill, cancer. The diagnosis, the prospective treatments, and the likelihood that they would do little but postpone her death had brought on depression and then despair. The friar who was then pastor, Father Hyacinth, was summoned to her hospital room. Florence's refusal of treatment became the favorite lugubrious topic at the dining room table, and Marie had been privy to it all, storing it away in the hard drive of her memory.

"She refuses treatment," Hyacinth announced at table.

"Isn't that her right?" asked Placidus.

"It's like suicide," said Boniface.

"She has cancer," Hyacinth said.

"There's no cure for cancer," Placidus pointed out.

Hyacinth said, "The doctor thinks that with radiation and chemotherapy it could be brought under control."

"But for how long?" Placidus wanted to know. "It would only be a postponement, not a cure."

Eavesdropping, hovering around the table, keeping the kitchen door ajar, Marie had followed it all, trying to decide whose side she was on. She sympathized with Florence. She told herself that Florence was doing what she herself would do in the circumstances. Cancer spelled a death sentence, and Marie had known of parishioners who went through months and months of treatment and died anyway. That view was represented at the dining room table.

"Everyone's going to die sooner or later," Hyacinth said.

"Not everyone has cancer," Placidus observed.

The topic had not diminished the appetite of the friars, and Marie was in and out of the dining room, half tempted to join in the discussion but not sure what tack she would take.

"What would you have said, Father Dowling?" Marie asked.

He tipped his head to one side. "It would just be a general problem for me now. The friars were confronted by a concrete case."

"Oh, come on. Does someone with cancer have a right to refuse treatment?"

"Why don't you just tell me the story, Marie. Did she refuse treatment?"

"Finally she left it up to her husband."

"And?"

"The treatments began," Marie said.

"Would the doctors recommend that if there was no hope?"

Marie dropped her chin and looked at him over her glasses. "How many oncologists do you know?"

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Excerpted from Ash Wednesday by Ralph McInerny. Copyright © 2008 Ralph McInerny. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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