Death of a Pilgrim

PART ONE
NEW YORK-LE PUY-EN-VELAY

1

A bell was ringing, somewhere close. As the man struggled towards consciousness he thought he was deep, deep underwater. A ship was sinking slowly beneath him, heading straight down for her last resting place on the sea bed. Maybe it was one of his ships. Ghostly figures, their clothes streaming behind them, were struggling towards the surface through the murky water. Other figures, the fight abandoned, were falling backwards towards the ocean floor. Still the bell rang on. Now the picture in the man’s mind changed. He was in a coal mine. The bell meant danger, a rock fall perhaps, or a collapsed shaft. Miners were running as hard as they could towards the way out, trying to escape before they were buried alive. Maybe it was one of his mines.

Then the bell stopped. The clanging was replaced by a loud knocking on the bedroom door. The man woke up and peered at his watch. It was a quarter to three in the morning.

‘Sir, sir, it’s the telephone, sir! It’s the hospital, sir!’ The butler’s voice was apologetic, as if he felt hospitals had no right to disturb his employer at this time of night. He was still suspicious of telephones.

‘Of course it’s the bloody hospital, you fool,’ shouted the man, beginning to pull on the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before. ‘Who else would telephone at this time, for Christ’s sake? What did they say?’

‘You’re to come at once, sir. I’ve ordered the carriage.’

‘God in heaven!’ said the man. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’

This man didn’t answer telephones. He didn’t open letters. In normal times he didn’t tidy his clothes away. He didn’t clean his shoes. He paid other people to perform these mundane tasks for him. They marked, these triumphs over the trivia of modern life, the milestones on his journey to unimaginable wealth, his town house in New York, his mansion in the Hamptons, his yacht, his servants, the great industrial empire, the mountains of money sleeping in the vaults of the Wall Street banks.

As the carriage rattled through the empty streets of Manhattan, Michael O’Brian Delaney thought bitterly that he would happily give them all away in return for just one thing, the life of his only son.

Michael Delaney was in his late fifties. He was slowly turning into a patriarch. He was over six feet tall and with a great barrel of a chest. Dark eyebrows hung over brown eyes that were liable to flash with anger or excitement. His hair was brown, turning silver at the temples. He radiated a vast energy. One of his employees said that if you could somehow plug yourself into Delaney you would light up like a candelabrum. Oil paintings of a more peaceful Delaney adorned the boardrooms of his corporations.

By the time his carriage drew up at the hospital entrance there was only one candle burning, to the left of his son’s bed. The little ward looked out on one side to the night streets of Greenwich Village, on the other to the main ward for the terminally ill in St Vincent’s Hospital. Not that the nuns or the doctors ever referred to the ward in terms of terminal illness. It was St James’s Ward to them. All the wards on this floor were named after one of the twelve apostles. Only in private did some of the less religious nurses refer to it as Death Row. As Delaney tiptoed into the room on this November evening, nearest the main section an elderly nun, her entire working life spent in tending the sick and the dying on these wards, sat perched lightly on a chair and stroked a young man’s hand, as if her caress could prolong his stay in these sad surroundings.

‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Delaney. We felt we had to call you. We thought the end might be near, you see, but the crisis seems to have passed. He is no better, of course, but at least he’s still with us.’

‘Thank God,’ said Michael Delaney, and sat down on the other side of the bed. These were familiar surroundings to him now, the dim lighting, the crisp white of the sheets, the antiseptic pale green paint on the walls, the picture of a saint – Delaney didn’t know which one – on the wall above the bed, the faint smells of soap and disinfectant, the light rumble of the trolleys outside taking away the dead on their last journey to the morgue, or bringing fresh consignments of the dying into the terminal ward. But he could not sit still for long. He was restless, now leaning forward to peer into the young man’s face, now pacing on tiptoe over to the window and staring out into the snow swirling round the streets of his city.

This elder man was the father of the patient lying unconscious in the bed. Michael Delaney was one of the richest men in America. The patient was his only son, James Norton Delaney, and the doctors were convinced he could not last more than a day or two. He was suffering from a rare form of what the doctors thought was leukaemia but knew little about. He was eighteen years old, James Delaney, and this evening he was lying on his left side. He had been on the other side when the father sat on vigil until ten o’clock the evening before. Perhaps, the father thought, the nuns had turned him over to make him more comfortable. James was a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two. He had, as Michael Delaney recognized every time he looked at him, his mother’s pretty nose and his mother’s mouth. Only in that high forehead, Michael Delaney thought, had he left his own print on the face of his only son. The young man’s forehead was lined and wrinkled as if he had added thirty or forty years to his age. He was deathly pale. The light brown hair, almost straw in colour, straggled dankly across the pillow. His father had lost count of the number of days his James had been in this isolation ward on his own now. Four? Five? Days and nights blended into one another; the vain hope that those light brown eyes might open, that the lips in his mother’s pretty mouth might part and speak even a few words, was dashed as the ritual timetables of the nurses and doctors measured out their patients’ days. Still there was no movement. Delaney leant down and kissed his son very lightly on the forehead. Every time he did this he wondered if it would be the last time his lips touched a living creature rather than a corpse.

Shortly before seven o’clock in the morning the order changed in the Hospital of St Vincent. The elderly nun was replaced by a younger one. Delaney was conscious of shadowy figures flitting silently to their places along the main ward. The Matron of the hospital materialized by his side and led him away.

‘You must have a change for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘Come with me.’

She led him through a series of passageways, the walls now pale blue and filled with paintings of the Stations of the Cross or scenes from the Gospels. Then she slipped away and he nearly lost her. The Matron, Sister Dominic, was a considerable force in St Vincent’s. Almost all the male patients she met, even the very sick ones, were absolutely certain that she had chosen the wrong profession. Think, they said to themselves, of those translucent pale blue eyes. Think of that face with its delicate features and that soft blonde hair. Think of that figure, alluring to some of them even through the folds of the habits of her order. Quite what the right occupation for Sister Dominic might be they had no idea, but central to it, in the male view, was non-nunnery. No veils, no wimples, no rosary beads, no strange garments, no prayers, let her be just another example of that great institution, American womanhood, available for courting, wonder, romance and, for the lucky one, love and marriage. Often the male patients would dream about Sister Dominic, coming slowly back from drugged sleep after visions of nights spent in her company. Matron herself was well aware of these strange currents of male interest, even male desire, that flowed invisibly around her person. She prayed regularly that God would punish her every time she thought about her appearance. There was one quality, central to her personality, that most of the male patients did not see. Her faith was the most important facet of her life. And she had a deep, intense, very personal calling to heal the sick. Sometimes she would tell herself that somebody in her care was just not going to be allowed to die. It would be too unfair. Sister Dominic never told any of her colleagues about these missions of salvation. When all her efforts failed she would repair to her bare cell and weep bitterly until she was next on duty, sometimes refusing to eat or sleep for days at a time. Failure did not come easy to the Matron of St Vincent’s Hospital.

‘Where are we going?’ Delaney whispered.

‘We are going to the chapel,’ she replied. ‘We are going to pray.’

The man stopped suddenly. He told her he had forgotten how to pray. Bitterly he remembered the times he had ignored all forms of religious instruction as a boy and had played truant, the church services where he had deliberately ignored the words and the responses, the Sunday mornings he had managed to flee from the Church of the Blessed Virgin and gone to hang around the waterfront, the beatings from his father for not taking his faith seriously. He remembered too his father shouting at him that one day he would be sorry he had not paid attention to the priests. One day the sins of his past would come back to haunt him. Well, Judgement Day had finally arrived, here in this place where the sheets were changed twice a day and crucifixes and rosary beads were as common as top hats on Fifth Avenue.

Matron told Delaney he should not worry about the praying on this occasion. She would find him something else to do. She asked him to wait for a moment outside the main entrance to the chapel. When she came back there was a ghost of a smile about her face. She led him into the little church, for so many of the nuns the very heart of the hospital. There were enough pews to hold about forty people. All of them were filled, mostly with kneeling women. All of these Sisters, she told him, had come to pray for his son James. It was a special effort for a special young man. When Delaney asked her what he had to do, she gave him a box of matches. She pointed to the great banks of candles inside all the side chapels and below the paintings on the walls.

‘You must light these,’ she said, ‘and as you light each one, you must pray to God in his mercy to save the life of your son. Do not worry if we have gone before you have finished. You must light them all and then return to the bedside. Later on this morning I am going to find you a priest or a chaplain to teach you how to pray.’

With that Matron knelt to the ground in the pew beside him. Delaney turned to the candles to his left and began lighting them very slowly. Please God, spare the life of my son James, he said to himself, feeling coarse and awkward as he did so. Gradually, as he repeated his prayer, he began to weep. The tears poured down his face and would not stop. Sometimes they would drop on to his match and extinguish the possibility of lighting another symbolic message before it had even begun. The nuns took little sideways glances at the weeping tycoon but left him to his ordeal. At eight o’clock the Sisters began to peel away, walking quietly back to their nunnery or their places on the wards. Matron sent word to a Father Kennedy, asking him to come to the hospital and to James Delaney’s ward later that day. Michael Delaney had not finished yet, though one wall was a blaze of light, dancing off the faces of the saints or the waters of the Lake of Galilee. It was so strange for Delaney, asking an unknown and invisible God to save the life of his only son. His was not a world made up of these religious or metaphysical certainties. His was a world of balance sheets, of strike-breaking, of amalgamations, of mighty trusts, of personal enrichment, of power, power over the lives of the thousands of people who worked for him, power over the local politicians who might need a subvention to help them through their next election, power over grander politicians, aspirant statesmen perhaps, whose need for invisible assistance was often as great as their hunger for high office. Alone in the chapel with his matches and his candles he thought of Mary, the boy’s mother, who had died three years before. She too had come to this last resting place of Manhattan’s Catholics and been tended by the nuns until she died. There had been, he shuddered slightly, a great deal of pain. It was a mercy, they said, when she was called home. Delaney didn’t think it had been a mercy then and he didn’t think it was a mercy now. This God person, he reckoned, reaching up to the top of a sconce almost out of reach, He had a lot to answer for. If He took James as well, Delaney thought, he would write God out of his account books, sell Him off to a competitor, even at a knockdown price, put Him out of business, close this God outfit down once and for all.

Just before nine o’clock all the candles were lit. Delaney sat down in one of the pews and looked around him. He tried to remember the words but they had gone. Hail Mary, that meant something, he was fairly sure of it. The same went for Our Father. But of what those nuns said as their knees rested on the stone floor he had no idea. He turned back at the door and looked one last time at the candles. He wondered if their light would go out before his son’s life. Suddenly his brain took off into a strange mixture of his own world and the very different world of the hospital. Did they have enough candles here at the hospital? Did the other hospitals? This was something he, Michael Delaney, could do. His mind set off on a journey round the economics of candle production, possible advanced production techniques that could reduce the cost of manufacture and the numbers of employees, candle transportation routes and freight rates, distribution of candles round the churches and hospitals of New York. Would it be cheaper to amalgamate candle supply into general delivery lines of food, linen and so on, or simply have one outfit responsible for distribution? What about the competition in candle land? Could he buy them out? Could he drive them out of business?

As Delaney pondered these questions on his way back to the ward a whistle blew less than a mile away at one of New York’s great railway stations. A mighty passenger train moved slowly out on its way to Chicago. The train was nearly full and promised to be a busy one for the stewards and the cabin staff. This railway line was one of many owned by Delaney’s companies. This section of his three and a half thousand railway employees across the eastern seaboard of the United States was clocking on for work on the normal ten-hour shift with no breaks, which would see them travel halfway across a continent. And, in the rear part of the train, there was a steward who rejoiced in the name of Patrick or Paddy Delaney, a cousin of the proprietor on the Irish side of the family though the two had never met.

The boy had hardly moved in his bed when his father returned. The new Sister on his left was also stroking his hand. Delaney paced up and down the room, staring into the face of his son, doing more planning for his schemes for a candle monopoly, then peering out of the window. Sometimes he cried and wished he knew the words of the prayers. Ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock passed, and by noon Delaney’s train with his cousin on board was well into upstate New York. Occasionally a doctor would come in and look at the young man, feeling his pulse and taking his temperature by the heat on his forehead. None of the doctors had seen a version of the disease like this. They were acutely conscious that any new treatment might not cure the young man. It might kill him instead.

Shortly before one o’clock a priest appeared and took Michael Delaney aside. You must go home and rest now, the priest told him. You do not need to rest for a very long time, but you must maintain your strength for what might happen. I, Father Kennedy, will meet you here in the chapel at seven o’clock this evening. The nuns will have finished their services by then. Please, I will stay with the boy a while.

Delaney’s carriage and Delaney’s coachman had waited for him outside St Vincent’s. The coachman spent his time playing cards with the porters or reading one of his ever-growing collection of magazines about motor cars. Mercedes Benz. Ford. Chrysler. Cadillac. Bugatti. The coachman was very fond of his horses but these names took him to another world where he sat proudly at the wheel of a mighty machine and drove his master up and down the eastern seaboard, hooting his horn at recalcitrant pedestrians, a muffler round his throat and a chauffeur’s cap upon his head. As they made their way slowly through the crowded streets they were overtaken by a couple of fire trucks, their insistent bells shrieking and echoing round the thoroughfares. Sitting inside his carriage, Michael Delaney remembered that other bell which had woken him up earlier. He thought suddenly of the numerous funerals he attended as his contemporaries in the Wall Street jungle died off in their prime. Delaney never missed one of these sad occasions, come, his enemies whispered, to make sure that another of his competitors had really been removed from the earthly market place. He recalled the words in one of the addresses, usually full of sentimental rubbish about the dead man, now transformed from a rapacious capitalist into a virtual saint and generous benefactor of the poor: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ Were these bells ringing for him? For his son? Michael Delaney huddled into his greatcoat and tried to pray.

The Archbishop of New York used to say that the net wealth of Father Patrick Kennedy’s flock was about the same as that of a medium-sized country like Sweden or Portugal. Delaney was a parishioner of his, a very occasional worshipper at Mass, like so many of his kind, but a generous contributor to church charities, like so many of his kind. Quite simply, Father Kennedy was the parish priest in the richest part of the richest city in one of the richest countries on earth. He was popular with his congregation, Father Kennedy, with his charming voice and elegant manners from the Old Confederate State of Virginia. In his youth Father Kennedy had been slim, ascetic almost, a devoted reader of the works of Meister Eckhardt and St Thomas Aquinas. He was about five feet ten inches tall with a Roman nose and his blue eyes were then fixed on another world. The temptations of the flesh did not reach him in his rich parish, but the temptations of the table made an impact. Middle-aged now, he was known to his critics as the Friar Tuck of Manhattan. He glided through the Fifth Avenue drawing rooms with his polite smiles and his anecdotes from his time in Europe a decade before. Father Kennedy was very successful at drawing new converts into the bosom of Mother Church, and as most of his recruits were as rich as everybody else in the parish, St James the Greater increased yet further in wealth until cynics in poorer parishes referred to it as St James the Richer.

Father Kennedy worried a great deal about the very rich. He saw all too clearly that the leisure of those who lived off the interest on their money, or even, in some cases, the interest on the interest, without needing to work at all, could be corrosive. Souls could be lost in the fripperies of the season as easily as they could in the brothels and the gambling dens of the Bronx. He worried a great deal, Father Kennedy, about camels and their ability to pass into the kingdom of heaven. Three times he had asked to be transferred to a parish in one of the slums of New York. Three times the church authorities had refused. The Archbishop always maintained that remaining in Manhattan would be good for Father Kennedy’s soul. The truth was somewhat different. Father Kennedy was the greatest benefactor of the poor in the whole of New York. Not personally, but through his parishioners, who would contribute funds for the education or housing of the poor, for the support of the destitute, for building new churches where none had been before. It was all so easy. The rich just reached for their chequebooks as they might hold out their hands for a glass of champagne at a Fifth Avenue soiree. After watching this waterfall of charity dollars for years Father Kennedy himself had become cynical. They’re trying to buy their way in with false currency, he thought. God doesn’t want their money, he wants their souls. So, while he never stopped the cascade of charity, he was beginning to think about deeds rather than dollars as the way to improve the spiritual health of his flock.

Michael Delaney’s staff pressed anxiously around him as he returned to his mansion. None dared to ask the question they most wanted to – how was James? Was he still alive? The young man’s father refused all offers of refreshments except for a large glass of bourbon and took himself off to bed. He slept badly. He dreamt he was in a cemetery looking at his wife’s grave, the two marble angels he had had erected a year after her burial towering above the marble tomb. But now, by her left side was another tomb, to his son, passed away in the month of November 1905. This month. Then he noticed what was happening by her right-hand side. Four gravediggers were excavating a third burial place for another Delaney. It could only be himself, last of the line. There was no inscription yet on his grave, he realized. He might have years to go still. With that comforting thought he woke up to a darkened city at a quarter to six in the evening.

He was early at the chapel in St Vincent’s Hospital. Somebody had removed the guttered candles and replaced them with fresh ones. Delaney began to light them, remembering to say the words the Matron had told him earlier that day. Father Kennedy came and sat down with Delaney in the very first row, a large silver cross in front of them. Just repeat the words after me, he said to Delaney, that’s all you need to do for now. They started with Hail Mary.

Two doctors, one middle-aged and one very young, were examining James Delaney. The nurse had moved unobtrusively to the back of the room. They agreed that he looked a little better, that the terrible chalky colour of the previous day was less pronounced.

Father Kennedy and Michael Delaney had moved on to the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them who trespass against us . . .

And so a strange ritual evolved. Early in the mornings Delaney would pray with Father Kennedy in the chapel and relight the candles while the doctors looked at his son. He would wait by the bedside during the day and early evening, departing occasionally to care for his business or buy out a competitor. One of the nuns would sit on the other side of the young man and stroke his hand. Delaney now had reading matter, a missal provided for him by Father Kennedy. He also had a special prayer of his own. It was, he knew, somewhat unorthodox, owing more to contemporary business practice than to the Gospels. If God would save his son, he would, in return, make a mighty offering to God. The nature of the offering was to be determined by Father Kennedy, who smiled delphically when told about the Delaney Compact. Early in the evening all the nuns and Matron would pray for James for half an hour. His father would light the candles and say some of the new prayers he had been taught by Father Kennedy. As the priest watched the intensity of Delaney’s concern, the depth of his grief, he wondered if there might be other grounds for sorrow and remorse in his past, now mingling with anxiety for his son James.

As Delaney became a part of this medical world, so different from his own, he found his eyes roaming the wards and the corridors for a sight of Sister Dominic. Even in her formal Matron’s clothes, he thought, you could still discern the woman underneath. Lust began to flow through him as the medicines and the drugs flowed through the veins and arteries of the patients. Damn it, man, he said to himself, not here, not now. All your life you have followed your basic instincts. The temporary delights of fulfilment have all too often been followed by recriminations and remorse. This is neither the time nor the place for such base thoughts. Here, above all else, you must focus on the life of your son, James. But it was no good. His lust did not grow weaker. It grew stronger. Fantasies filled his mind, of those clothes falling to the floor, of his holding such a beautiful creature in his arms. Matron, for her part, was not insensitive to what was happening to Michael Delaney. She knew. She had seen this phenomenon all too often before. She took great care to pay even less heed to her appearance. That, had she but known it, inflamed Michael Delaney further, clothes slightly out of place, hair not properly tucked in yielding up yet more erotic thoughts. Sister Dominic did change her ways in one respect. Every evening when she and her Sisters prayed for James Delaney in the little chapel, she prayed for Michael Delaney too.

Then the doctors moved. For over a week they had monitored every medical detail they could measure about the condition of James Delaney, still lying motionless in his hospital bed. Neat folders recording his current state were tucked away in the cupboard beside the bed. The following day was a Saturday. They asked Delaney to a meeting in the library at ten o’clock in the morning. If he wished, Father Kennedy could accompany him. Matron was to attend too. All that evening the nurses and the Sisters looked at the Delaneys with great pity. All too often they had seen mothers and fathers or husbands and wives coming out of that that room, holding on to each other in desperation, weeping their way down the corridors and out into the fresh air. The library was the place the doctors brought close relatives when they had to tell them that their loved ones were about to die.