Fox!”
“He deserved the break,” Koesler said. “
“I’d agree,” Mulroney said. “The tendency is to think of it as a slice of Polish life, because that’s the way it’s presented. But, with minor changes, it could portray almost any ethnic group. And even at that I wonder if it has to be ethnic.”
The waitress returned with their drinks. “Ready to order?” She shifted her weight to her right foot and listed to starboard.
“How’s the soup?” Mulroney asked.
“Like water. It was better earlier. Don’t order it now.”
The four were surprised at her candor. They all grinned.
“Okay,” Mulroney said, “I’ll have the deluxe hamburger, well done.”
“You don’t want it well done,” she replied. “It’ll be like shoe leather. Get it medium.”
“Uh …” Mulroney was not sure how to respond.”… but I … well, okay, if you say so.”
“And,” she added, “don’t get it deluxe. By this time the French fries are greasy. Get cottage fries. And don’t get them on individual orders; get an order for the whole table.”
By now, the priests were laughing heartily.
Their laughter did not seem to affect their waitress one way or the other. But she pretty well managed to order dinner for all of them, one by one,
After she left, Koesler returned to the topic at hand. “Getting back to Mo’s question about whether the play had to be ethnic; I think it not only had to be ethnic, but also a slice of the past. I mean, the kind of home life Ruskowski is portraying seems to me to be typical of what we had in the thirties and early forties, but certainly not sustained after World War II.”
“No, no.” McNiff stirred the ice in his drink with his index finger. “I’ve seen lots of families like that.”
“Lately? Come on!” Koesler said. “There were only two sets in the entire play. The principal set was the home. A living room took up almost the whole stage with one upstairs bedroom where Grandma just lay in bed with her back to the audience waiting to die. Her granddaughter comes home and has to put on a nun’s veil to visit Grandma who hasn’t been told that the girl left the convent years ago. And the other set was the grandson’s room in a rectory. How many families do you know of today with two kids, one a nun, at least previously, the other a priest?”
“Okay,” McNiff conceded, “maybe not a priest and a nun, not anymore. But that wasn’t the point. The fact that the kids had religious vocations was incidental to the point of the play, It was this close-knit family that depended on each other. And that’s not uncommon any time.”
“I didn’t think they depended on each other so much as they devoured each other,” Marvin said.
“Now, pay attention,” Koesler admonished McNiff. “Frank used to review plays for the
McNiff, grinning, drew a large imaginary circle, then mimed someone dealing playing cards.
Marvin laughed. “Okay, I get it: big deal!” He nodded. “Maybe so. But remember Grandma up on the shelf: Everyone and everything eventually had to revolve around that still, silent figure. That signified the unhealthy relationship that bound that family together. There wasn’t much free choice going on there.”
“Yeah,” Koesler agreed, “Grandma was the central character of that play. She was the patron saint of that family. That is, she was the saint until she spoke her last words-which were also her first words in the play.”
“There goes the ethnic thing again,” Marvin said. “She cried out much the same as Christ did on the cross. But her last words were in Polish. Which the mother first translated as ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.’ But to her priest son, she admitted that Grandma’s last words were, ‘Shit! I don’t want to die!’ And there went her sanctity.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Koesler said through his laughter, “like the priest grandson said in the play-minus the vulgarity-that’s about what Christ said through his torment and death: ‘I don’t want to die.’”
“Even including the vulgarity,” Marvin said, “there’s no reason why that should argue against her cause for sanctity. It doesn’t seem to be hurting Clem Kern.”
Koesler choked on his beer.
No one reacted immediately, but as the choking continued, McNiff began to pound Koesler on the back, perhaps more vigorously than necessary.
Koesler waved him away as the breathing passage cleared.
It wasn’t news to Koesler that Monsignor Clem Kern had been nominated for sainthood. When his cause had been initiated years earlier, it had been big news, and played as such by the media. But that was a long while ago. And at the time, Koesler had subconsciously packed the item away in the recesses of his awareness. After all, wasn’t the aphorism something to the effect that one should be slow with unqualified praise after the manner of the Church, which didn’t canonize people until some three hundred years after their death? Since Monsignor Kern had been dead not even twenty years, Koesler had given the cause little thought. Even when Guido Vespa confessed the bizarre entombment of Father Keating with Clem Kern, Koesler hadn’t adverted to the ongoing cause for sainthood.
“You okay?” McNiff wondered.
“I’ll be all right,” Koesler wheezed. “Just went down the wrong way.”
“Clem Kern wasn’t vulgar!” McNiff turned back to Marvin.
Marvin grinned. “He could be earthy when the occasion demanded.”
“Besides,” McNiff said, “what chance has old Clem got? A parish priest from Detroit? Now, if he’d been a martyr …”
“Not so,” said the resourceful Mulroney. “It’s not all that out of the question … at least not today.”
Their salads arrived. There were no further drink orders, and their lugubrious waitress departed.
“For the last thousand years,” Mulroney continued, “Popes have been doing the canonizing all by themselves. Officially, since A.D, 1234-an easy date to remember. But the point is, in all this time there have been less than three hundred saints named.”
“So?” McNiff said.
“So,” Mulroney replied, “in 1988 alone the present Pope named 122 saints. So he likes saints; that’s obvious. He can and he does make lots of them. As a matter of fact, he kind of prods the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to keep the machinery going. As we all know, just from watching TV, the Pope gets around. For centuries, the Popes were the self-proclaimed ‘prisoners of the Vatican.’ Well, Paul VI got around pretty good. But he was a stay-at-home compared with our current guy. And, usually, when he visits a country, he likes to make one or more of the natives a saint.
“Say, for instance, he were to come to the States again-“
“Spare me,” Marvin interjected. “Have we finished paying for his last visit yet?”
That brought an appreciative laugh.
“Seriously,” Mulroney continued, “if he came back to the States, he’d probably want to name a saint or two, Why not good old Clem Kern?”
“Because, for one thing, Solanus Casey is ahead of him,” Marvin observed.
“Well,” Mulroney said, “a doubleheader then. Casey and Kern,”
“Both from Detroit? You’ve gotta be kidding!” Marvin said,
“Not Kern!” McNiff said authoritatively,
“Why not?” Marvin wanted to know.
“He’s just not the stuff saints are made of,” McNiff insisted, “Okay, so he was good with bums. Better than I could be, I’ll admit, But giving bums a meal ticket just ain’t the way to become a holy saint.”
“Pat, you’re not putting down the works of mercy!” Koesler by now was recovered from the shock of being reminded that Clem Kern, who was sharing a room with Jake Keating, was by no means completely forgotten.
“What?” McNiff reacted,
“Give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless; visit the sick, the imprisoned; bury the dead,” Koesler enumerated. “Those are the things that Clem did best and, according to Christ, that’s how you get
