Thomas M. Disch Read Free

though he were idle. He still said two Masses on Sunday, still heard confessions, still attended as many parish events as Father Pat himself, if not more. The hard part had been surrendering the habit of authority and deferring to judgments he knew to be mistaken or illconsidered. He often wondered if it would have been easier spending these years of semiretirement in another parish than St. Bernardine’s, but when he considered the other priests he might have had to deal with, he knew that God had been merciful to him. Father Pat might be lax in some doctrinal matters; he might err on the side of novelty in his approach to the liturgy (altar girls, indeed!); but he was sound in the things that counted. He didn’t equivocate about abortion or sins of unchastity or other matters. Father Cogling had no patience with those priests—and they were no longer exceptions to the rule, they had become the rule—who sided with opinion poils against the Holy Father. Were there opinion polls in hell? Probably! And probably one hundred percent of the damned were of the opinion that they should be in heaven, and the results of the polls were published every morning in hell’s own newspaper and broadcast on TV, and there were protest rallies organized by demons, and long processions of the damned wailing and singing “We Shall Overcome.”
    The two couples in attendance had arrived together, five minutes late.
    The younger girl, whose name was Alison Sanders, explained, “We waited outside for the others, but then…” She smiled an apologetic smile and glanced sideways at her boyfriend.
    He finished Alison’s sentence for her. “They didn’t come. We figure they must’ve got scared off.”
    “Sometimes,” Father Cogling observed, taking the joke in earnest, “our second thoughts are wiser than our first impulses.” He remembered now that this one, with the Clark Gable mustache and the Spanish-sounding surname (which he’d forgotten), was the smart aleck. Not an arguer, like the Jew who hadn’t come back, but a scoffer, a smiler, a know-it-all.
    “I mean to say,” the priest went on, “that you may decide as a result of these talks that marriage is not the right path to take at this point in your life. You may decide that it would be wiser to achieve more financial security before you take on the responsibility of raising a family. You may find that you haven’t prepared yourself spiritually for what will be the most important day in your life. These talks aren’t like modern high schools that have to graduate every student who manages to sit through four years of classes whether they’ve learned anything in those classes or not.”
    The other couple nodded their heads in unison, assuming an expression of submissive attentiveness. The man’s name was Robert Howell, he’d been brought up Catholic, and he was a rookie fireman in the suburb of Eden Prairie. The woman’s name was Denise, and she’d had no religious upbringing. “Though,”
    she’d said at the last meeting, “I do believe in a Higher Power.” She’d said it in that confiding, sugary tone of voice that implied she was doing God and Father Cogling a favor. Father Cogling didn’t like her, but he thought she could eventually be converted and would make a suitable wife for Robert Howell.
    “Before we begin,” said Father Cogling, folding his hands and lowering his eyes, “let us prepare our hearts with prayer.” He waited until the four of them had also assumed an attitude of prayer and then prompted: “Our Father. .
    .”
    Of the lot of them, only Alison Sanders articulated the phrases of the prayer in a crisp and audible manner. She also, to her credit, dressed in a manner both modest and becomingly feminine, in a flowery dress that showed her figure to advantage without being in any way too bold.
    The same could not be said of Denise, who had dressed for the occasion in blue jeans, a Twins sweatshirt, and tennis shoes. Her fiancé, with his