The Cardinal Sins
by Greeley, Andrew M.
Cardinal Sins, The BOOK I THE FORTIES CHAPTER ONE 1948 Patrick Donahue had been
my closest friend since as long as I could remember. We were inseparable all
through grammar school and our three years at Jesuit High. He''d been a little
guy, much shorter than I, until we were freshmen. Then he shot up and out almost
overnight. Grown-ups thought he was adorable when he was litt≤ now they
were charmed by his poise and his mature courtesy. Older girls once said he was
"so cute" with his towhead, long eyelashes, and silver-blue eyes. Now that he
was seventeen, women of all ages thought he was magnificent. Two years before,
at fifteen, Pat was tongue-tied and embarrassed with girls; now he seemed to
have nothing else but girls on his mind, even when they were only well-developed
freshmen like my "cousin" Maureen Cunningham. It was said by everyone in those
days that Pat looked like Guy Madison, a comment that will make sense only if
you can remember those days or if you watch very late television movies. Guy
Madison or not, his laugh was contagious, and his sense of fun made him the
center of any group of which he was a part. Pat was not as good a student as I,
and not a leader, either. He was--and it is important that I note this--much
more devout than I. It was an erratic kind of devotion, marked by
closedretreats, sustained periods of daily mass and rosary recitation,
complicated reforms of his moral life, and then dramatic relapses into drinking
and girl-chasing: the Irish approach to spirituality, my father assured me,
disapproving of my more even and casual approach to the deity. Early on a
Saturday morning in the humid July of 1948, Pat was walking next to me, talking
about my cousin Maureen, when a gray Packard rolled over in the ditch across the
road from us and exploded. Pat''s courage and quick reaction saved their lives.
I stood there glued in the summer dust, waiting for an orange ball of flame and
smoke to devour the car. Still, I got the credit. I had been walking down the
hill behind the village on my way to church. Pat was climbing up the hill, his
handsome face and cheery smile undimmed by a night of merriment on the beach. He
offered to walk back down to church with me, mostly, I think, because if we came
home from church together, my mother and father might not ask any questions
about how he had spent the night. I should have been angry with him; he was my
guest, and I was responsible for his spiritual and physical welfare. But Pat''s
laughter and high spirits, especially in those days, made it hard to be angry at
him. "Not much in the way of serious necking," he said, grinning complacently.
"Not even enough to keep me from Communion at mass." "Beer after twelve breaks
your fast," I said primly. "You already sound like a monsignor." Pat walloped me
on the back in great humor. "Kevin, they''re going to ordain you a monsignor."
"At least a bishop," I said. "Maybe even a cardinal." "Kevin Cardinal Brennan."
He laughed. "I like the sound of it. Make me a papal knight or something?" The
asphalt on the road was soft from the heat. I dreaded the walk back after mass.
It was going to be another miserably hot day. "And Maureen a papal dame. Dame
Mo. I like the sound of that!" "She is some dame." Pat shook his head
appreciatively. "I know she''s your cousin, but for a freshman she''s got the
hottest lips on the beach." "Not really a cousin," I pointed out. "Our fathers
have been law partners for so long that we call each other ''Cousin.'' So those
hot lips aren''t off limits to me, either." "That''d be the day. Kevin Brennan,
the pillar of piety, necking all night on the beach." The thought of Mo''s lips
pressed against mine was far more appealing than I was willing to admit. "Where
is Maureen? Too hung over to walk up the hill? Or just too spoiled?" Pat
shrugged his shoulders. "Marty Delaney is going to drive them back up in his
Packard. I wanted the exercise. Told them you would be angry if I didn''t stay
in condition for the basketball season." "It''s your scholarship, not mine." My
reminder sailed by him unnoticed. Pat needed the scholarship to go to college.
The Brennans were wealthy enough that money would never be a worry for any of
us. I suspected Pat thought it was unfair. I thought it unfair that he possessed
ten times as much charm as I did. Before we could say anything more, the Delaney
Packard roared around the final curve separating the hill from the village.
Marty must have been driving sixty miles an hour. He would have made the turn
with a few inches to spare if old Doc Crawford''s Buick, on its way to the yacht
club, hadn''t turned the corner from the opposite direction. Delaney
swerved--instinctively, I suppose--to avoid the big red car, skidded towardthe
side of the road where we were walking, then back across the slippery asphalt
and into the ditch. The Packard rolled over like a turtle at the end of a stick,
its wheels spinning helplessly in the air. Pat raced toward the car. "Let''s get
them out of there," he shouted. My feet felt as if they were cemented in the
ground. I finally trudged after him, each stride taking an eternity. Inside the
car, people were screaming. Pat wrenched the door open. "Give me a hand, Kevin,"
he yelled to me. We pulled Marty Delaney out from the driver''s seat. His face
was a mask of blood. Sue Hanlon was next to him, unconscious, her dress torn and
her slim legs twisted beneath her at an unnatural angle. I helped the battered
but conscious Delaney to the side of the ditch as Pat gently set Sue in the
dust. We were dragging Joan Ryan and Joe Heeney from the back seat when the fuel
tank blew. The force of the explosion knocked all of us into the ditch. Joan''s
thin dress caught fire, and she wailed hysterically as the flames leaped to her
long, blond hair. Joe lay silently by the side of the road. For a moment I
thought we were all going to die. Then Pat knocked Joan down and rolled her over
in the dust, extinguishing the fire, and I carried Sue to the safety of the
road. I stood there dumbly while Joan, her hysteria spent and her freckled face
streaked with dirt and soot, and Pat dragged the two boys away from the
crackling flames. Doc Crawford, who had managed to stop his car only a few yards
from the accident, was suddenly next to me, trying to get Sue out of my arms. I
struggled for a while and then put her down on the grass. I sat next to her
while Doc probed and grunted and shook his head. Acrid smoke from the burning
automobile tore at my nostrils and stung my eyes. The State Police ambulance
arrived after what seemed like hours. Ted Smith, the police lieutenant, and
Father O''Rourke, the alcoholic pastor of our village church, stood next to the
smoldering wreck, shaking their heads. "If we had been a few seconds later," Pat
was breathing heavily, "they all would have gone up in smoke." His face and hair
were black, his white shirt and slacks ripped and dirty. "And us with them," I
said. Only then did I realize that Maureen had not been in the car. "None of
them have a right to be alive," said the lieutenant in a nasal, rural-Wisconsin
drawl. "Damn fool kids, drinking all night and then doing sixty miles an hour in
a twenty-mile-an-hour zone. Lucky you were here, Kevin." "You saved their lives
and maybe their souls, Kevin," added the haggard old priest, rolling up a soiled
purple stole. "If they''d died without the last rites, after what they were
doing on the beach, they would have gone straight to hell." "How do you know?" I
demanded. "Anyway, it was Pat who saved them." They didn''t seem to hear me. I
saw a spasm of pain cross Pat''s face. "Two of them look like they''re goners,
the girl especially," said Ted, fingering his trim, Tom Dewey mustache. "If they
make it, Kevin, it''s all your doing." Still in a daze, I walked back to our
house, at the top of the hill, vomited the knots out of my stomach, and went to
my room to sleep away the rest of the day. "They''re all going to be fine except
the Hanlon girl," my mother said when she woke me for supper, her red hair
glowing in the rays of the afternoon sun. "Sue Hanlon will probably be crippled
for the rest of her life." For years I saw Sue''s legs, twisted beneath her, in
my dreams.Now I can''t distinguish them from the butchered legs of another woman
who also haunts my dreams. Pat returned to our summer house at the lake the last
week in August, after the excitement about the accident had died down. One
afternoon he blew a softball game against some of the local kids; he was the
tying run coming in from third, and he tried to skirt around a half-pint catcher
instead of knocking him down. I sulked at supper that night, angry at him for
losing the softball game, although Pat, as usual, joked with the rest of the
family. After supper, he asked if he could borrow the Studebaker to see what was
going on in town. I knew, of course, that he wanted to go pick up Maureen on the
property next to ours. Mrs. Cunningham thought Pat was a charming young man and
raised no objections to her daughter''s roaming around southern Wisconsin with
the son of a sanitation worker. Silently I gave him the keys. "You want to
come?" he asked tentatively, his face turning the bashful pink that so charmed
the ladies. "We could find Cunningham and Foley." Ellen Foley, to whom I was
assigned for the week by Maur
