It was a small wedding with a modest reception and a traditional honeymoon at Niagara Falls.
Perhaps not altogether traditional. Conrad learned that he would never see Grace unclothed, unless she was ill and he had to nurse her. She learned that he wanted no children and would always use a prophylactic. At least once, an accidentally perforated condom failed, resulting in little Hank Hunsinger.
Although Conrad never darkened a church door, Grace continued to attend daily and Sunday Mass. She went to confession each Saturday. Among other sins, she regularly confessed birth control. Regularly she was severely chided, but absolved. Then she would go to communion every day until the inevitable night when Conrad would fit himself with a prophylactic and, in the darkness, work her nightgown up in his practiced manner and quickly reach a grunting climax. Then she would not go to communion again until she could go to confession again and be absolved.
After many years of this frustrating vacillation from a state of sanctifying grace to mortal sin and back, she chanced upon a young Redemptorist priest, fresh from the seminary, armed with the latest in Catholic theology.
Her confession was routine. It had been a week since her last confession. She had lost patience with a neighbor and with her husband several times. She had forgotten and tasted food she was preparing on a fast day. And she had committed birth control once.
The new priest asked if she intended or wanted to practice birth control. No, it was her husband’s idea. Then, Father said, all she had to do to escape all guilt was, first, never instigate intercourse when she knew it would end in illicit birth control and, second, try not to get any enjoyment out of the evil act. Then the entire burden of guilt would be borne by her husband.
It was, for that era, enlightened advice.
She had never been given advice easier to follow. In her entire married life, and before, for that matter, she had never initiated anything that could be described as foreplay. And she had never derived any pleasure from sex. She was not even certain she was supposed to get any pleasure from it. She had paid careful attention as a series of unmarried priests and nuns had taught her about marriage. Their instructions were always couched in vague, cautious, and circumspect terms. For most of these dedicated men and women, intercourse was an act they had read about in theological textbooks, but had never experienced. The general theme of their instructions was that men wanted sex and women were supposed to give it. Since the purpose of sex was the “procreation and education of children,” and since women could not bear children much more often than every nine months, men usually wanted sex more often than was absolutely necessary.
In any case, as long as there was none of the hanky-panky of artificial birth control going on, should either spouse request or demand intercourse, the other spouse “owed” it, because coitus was also referred to as the “debitum,” the debt. In practice, since men were the animals who always wanted sex, the burden of satisfying the debt fell to women. Grace never associated the rendering of a debt with pleasure.
Thus, the knowledge that she could pay the debt accompanied by birth control without sin was a heaven-sent revelation. And it was possible because a young priest had learned the principle of the indirect voluntary, a recent application of traditional Catholic theology. In effect, Grace was materially, not formally, cooperating with her husband in a sinful deed. But because her cooperation was not voluntary, but actually even against her will, she was without sin. It troubled her that this theological conclusion shifted the entire blame to Conrad. But her husband seemed to be bearing up under the burden rather well.
It never occurred to Grace that Conrad’s decision provided her with a canonical reason for a Church annulment of her marriage. There were few enough reasons why the Church would consider a marriage null and void from its inception. Denying a partner the right to that complete action which could produce children was one such reason. Technically, it was termed “contra bonum prolis”- “against the good of children.” It never occurred to Grace to challenge the validity of her marriage because she never got over being grateful that Conrad thought she was pretty and had wanted to marry her.
Then there was little Henry, the ever-present reminder that the better designed forms of birth control do not always work. Even the presence of Henry would not have weakened her nullity case, had she chosen to pursue it. It was Conrad’s decision to deny Grace all but birth-controlled intercourse that constituted the canonical impediment to a valid Catholic marriage. The accident had no bearing on it.
Conrad accepted Hank much as a gambler accepts a loss at the gaming table. Grace greeted Henry as a miracle baby, which, given the odds against his happening, he nearly was. She loved the child with a chaste, carefully controlled love.
Now she became more painfully aware of Conrad’s complete absence from church as she dragged a reluctant son to Mass every Sunday and occasionally on weekdays. When Conrad died, leaving behind a seven-year-old son, Grace was desolate.
If anyone needed the strong influence and guidance of a father, Henry certainly did. He had his father’s large physique and gave every indication he would grow to be an even larger man.
The nuns were a godsend. She knew not what she might have had to do if they had not offered her work in the convent. God knows they paid little. But it was enough. And God knows they tried their best to help with young Henry. But no one could control him. She could not stop him from hanging around with a bad crowd. She worried about him constantly. But worry changed nothing.
Although she did not understand athletics very much, she was proud of Hank’s-everyone called him Hank- accomplishments. And he was always good to her. This, she had to admit, was almost his sole redeeming virtue. Particularly when, after signing a professional football contract, one of the first things Henry-she could not stop calling him Henry-did was to offer to buy a new house for her.
But she insisted that she wanted to live out her days in this house that held so many of her memories. And right across the street from her beloved Holy Redeemer. So Henry paid the mortgage and saw to it that the exterior and interior of the home were kept in tiptop shape. He provided her with more money than she needed or used. She gave much of it to the Redemptorist foreign missions.
She read about Henry’s on- and off-the-field exploits, of course. It disturbed her deeply that he had acquired the reputation of being an unfair and dirty player, as well as that of a rake, a libertine, a womanizer, a playboy. On his infrequent visits, she admonished him. She left notes for him when she went to his apartment to make sure everything was clean.
That, largely, was a waste of time. She did it only because, like many mothers, in her eyes her son would never grow up. Each time she visited his apartment, everything was in perfect order and spotlessly clean. Nevertheless, she would run a dustcloth over tables and shelves.
In her own way, she was as compulsive as he.
Both Grace and Hank had concluded, independently of each other, that he had “caught” his compulsiveness from her. In point of fact, though not in the way they thought, he had. During his adolescence, the conflict between what his mother expected of him and the sort of life he actually led produced an overwhelming conflict within him. Unconsciously marshaling his emotional defense mechanisms, he channeled all that conflict into an obsessive- compulsive neurosis. A relatively mild defense as neuroses go. Obsession fitted in so beautifully with all the numerical truths he was learning in his catechism, it was a natural, if subliminal choice.
As time passed, Grace wondered, with greater and greater frequency, what could be done about Henry. He remained her only son, but he was obviously hurting others. She felt somehow responsible. Something had to be done. But what?
It was a question she had never been able to answer.
Both Lieutenant Harris and Sergeant Ewing were lifelong Detroiters. If they had been Catholic, they would have known that the intersection of Vernor Highway and Junction Avenue was a famous corner in the eyes of westside Catholics. It was at that intersection that the hub of the enormous physical plant of Holy Redeemer parish was located. If Ewing and Harris had been a bit older, they undoubtedly could have recalled a time when Redeemer High School had constituted a major athletic power in Detroit.
But that was history. Now the once financially comfortable parish struggled to stay afloat in a neighborhood where there was no longer at least one Irish-owned bar per block. Long before, when affluent Catholics had begun moving out to the suburbs, the then Cardinal Edward Mooney had mused that he wished some of the larger parochial structures had been built on wheels so they could follow the families that built them to the suburbs. Redeemer would have been chief among these movable edifices.
Harris and Ewing were standing directly across from the mammoth church with its flight of stone stairs
