recalcitrant neighbors. (There was the matter of financial privacy, the
threat of hard feelings among men whose children played together,
whose wives might see each other every day.) John Keane had the
names of thirty-three parishioners on his
list, all of them more or less strangers—although he recognized many
of the faces from church when they came to their doors to let him in.
There was the phone call first: on behalf of Father McShane, I’d like to
come by some evening to discuss the new church and gym. Then the
appointment itself, usually scheduled between seven and eight so as
not to interrupt anyone’s dinner. They were for the most part
strangers, but kicking the snow off his heels or brushing the rain from
his hat, he never once felt that he was stepping into their homes for
the first time. They brought him to their dining-room tables, or to the
kitchen. There were children in pajamas on the staircase or stretched
across the living-room floor, or biting pencils over homework on
whatever table their parents weren’t going to use. There were dogs,
usually, pushed behind basement doors or banished to the garage. The
smell of whatever had been made for dinner still in the air—garlic in
the Italian homes and green pepper in the Polish, something fried
among the Germans, broiled meat with the Irish. They offered him
coffee or tea, sometimes sherry or a beer. The wives, for the most part,
hung up his coat and put down the plate of cookies and then
disappeared—or lingered only long enough to admire the architect’s
drawing on the front of the pledge packet. (Only the more observant
asked, “Where’s Krause’s store?” Only the more prescient shook their
heads skeptically when he said Krause had agreed to sell his property
to the church.) He’d hear them walking around upstairs as he made
his pitch to the man of the house, heard the vague repetition of
spelling words or dates or catechism lessons as the men’s
conversations moved, inevitably, away from the financing of the new
church and gym to the war, what service, what theater, what division,
what years.
John Keane was older than most of the men by a decade. None of
them asked him to call them by their first names, nor did he. The
formality—he wore a suit and a topcoat to every call—seemed ap-
propriate for the transaction he was there to discuss. The wives
appeared again only when he rose to leave. They stood beside their
husbands as the men shook hands. He would return in a week to pick
up the sealed envelope, for Father McShane’s eyes only. They were
aiming for one hundred percent participation. In the mimeographed
letter inside the packet Father McShane had asked only for “prayerful
discernment” regarding what each family could afford to contribute.
The men were impossible to read, but the wives’ eyes told him
everything—they were eager or wary or resigned, those of them who
still loved their husbands, or their lives. Others showed him the battle
already brewing, or, far worse, an amused conviction that Mr. Keane
had not seen through them, through their guise of good parents, good
Catholics, of domestic harmony or financial stability. In every case, he
had the sense when he left the house that he had at least given the
family by his presence alone the gift of a single, hushed hour of quiet
civility, good behavior. It was, perhaps, as close as he would ever come
to feeling like a priest.
Now the pledges had been counted (not, it turned out, exclusively
by Father McShane but by Father Melrose and Father Hecht, his
assistants, as well, and by Mr. Marrs, an accountant, whose respect for
privacy—Father McShane had assured them all—was as inviolate as
any confessor’s), and through the power of prayer and (Father
McShane said) good old-fashioned shoe leather, the initial goal had
been more than met. But, he added (nerves or indigestion or simple
displeasure caused him to precede all
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