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61
I wandered through a church that was small in dimension but burning bright with accoutrements. I stood looking at an altar that must have used up five million dollars’ worth of gold and silver. The Christ figure up front, if melted down, could have bought half of the U.S. Mint. It was while I was standing there stunned by the light coming off that cross that I heard Father Kelly behind me.
“Is that the screenwriter who telephoned with the problem?” he called quietly from across the pews.
I studied the incredibly bright altar. “You must have had many rich worshipers, father,” I said.
Arbuthnot, I thought.
“No, it’s an empty church in an empty time.” Father Kelly plowed down the aisle and stuck out a big paw. He was tall, six feet five, and with the muscularity of an athlete. “We are lucky to have a few parishioners whose consciences make constant problems. They force their money on the church.”
“You tell the truth, father.”
“I’d damn well better or God will get me.” He laughed. “It’s rough taking money from ulcerating sinners, but it’s better than having them throw it at the horses. They’ve a better chance of winning here, for I do scare the Jesus into them. While the psychiatrists are busy talking, I give one hell of a yell, which knocks the pants off half my parish and makes the rest put theirs back on. Come sit. Do you like scotch? I often think, if Christ lived now, would he serve that and would we mind? That’s Irish logic. Come along.”
In his office, he poured two snifters.
“I can see by your eyes you hate the stuff,” observed the priest. “Leave it. Have you come about that fool’s film they’re just finishing at the studio over there? Is Fritz Wong as mad as some say?”
“And as fine.”
“It’s good to hear a writer praise his boss. I rarely did.”
“You!?” I exclaimed.
Father Kelly laughed. “As a young man I wrote nine screenplays, none ever shot, or should have been shot, at sunrise. Until age thirty-five I did my damnedest to sell, sell-out, get-in, get-on. Then I said to hell with it and joined the priesthood, late. It was hard. The church does not take such as me off the streets frivolously. But I sprinted through seminary in style, for I had worked on a mob of Christian documentary films. Now what of you?”
I sat laughing.
“What’s funny?” asked Father Kelly.
“I have this notion that half the writers at the studio, knowing about your years of writing, might just sneak over here not for confession but answers! How do you write this scene, how end that, how edit, how—”
“You’ve rammed the boat and sunk the crew!” The priest downed his whiskey and refilled, chortling, and then he and I rambled, like two old screen toughs, over movie-script country. I told him my Messiah, he told me his Christ.
Then he said: “Sounds like you’ve done well, patching the script. But then the old boys, two thousand years back, did patchwork too, if you remark the difference between Matthew and John.”
I stirred in my chair with a furious need to babble, but dared not throw boiling oil on a priest while he dispensed cool holy spring water.
I stood up. “Well, thanks, father.”
He looked at my outstretched hand. “You carry a gun,” he said, easily, “but you’ve not fired it. Put your behind back on that chair.”
“Do all priests talk like that?”
“In Ireland, yes. You’ve danced around the tree, but shaken no apples. Shake.”
“I think I will have a bit of this.” I picked up the snifter and sipped. “Well … Imagine that I were a Catholic—”
“I’m imagining.”
“In need of confession—”
“They always are.”
“And came here after midnight—”
“An odd hour.” But a candle was lit in each of his eyes.
