“President for life.” Bishop England looked up to the statue of the avenging Saint Michael atop the Castel Sant’Angelo. “At least he’s brought unification and peace. But thecost!”
“More bloodshed?”
“No. Did you realize, Joseph, that in order for France to recognize Haiti’s independence, in order to finally secure peace, Boyer had to agree to pay reparations to the slaveholders for their lost property? The indemnity is 150 million francs!”
For a moment, Joseph stared down at the muddy Tiber. He hadheard about this: as the heirs of a Saint-Domingue planter, Joseph’s father, his sisters, and Joseph himself were eligible to receive part of the indemnity. But his father had refused to apply for it. Joseph had been relieved—surely such a claim would risk exposing his father’s illegitimacy and their true color. “By ‘lost property,’ the French don’t mean only the land,” Joseph murmured.
Bishop England shook his head. “France has forced the people of Haiti to purchase themselves.”
Joseph and his Bishop agreedthat he would depart from the College of the Propaganda the following year, so that His Lordship could confer on him all three of the major orders. Joseph would spend his months as a Subdeacon and Deacon in Charleston and complete his studies at the seminary there.
Before he left Rome, Joseph visited Santa Maria della Vittoria one last time. He found with alarm that the church had been invaded by scaffolds, tarps, and workmen. A fire had ravaged the apse and licked at the crossing. The high altar had been reduced to ashes, but Saint Teresa and her angel remained untouched, luminous in the gloom. Joseph knelt before the altar-piece that now seemed more miraculous than ever.Help me to be like you, Saint Teresa, he prayed.
A saint would have recognized the money his father had sent him as an occasion of sin and put most of it in the offering box. Instead, Joseph left the Papal States and did something that certainly was a sin for the pleasure he took in it: he attended an opera, Donizetti’sL’elisir d’amore. As soon as he reached Paris, Joseph sinned again, twice. A Mozart aria was almost worth eternal damnation.
He’d come to visit the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes. Joseph learned that its board of directors was discarding the deaf teachers and suppressing the language of signs. The Abbé de l’Épée, who had founded the Institute, would not have approved. He’d celebrated Masses in the manual language of his pupils.
In response to the school’s hostile new board, the deaf community decided to commemorate the Abbé’s birthday. That year of 1834, sixty men gathered for their first annual banquet: printers, engravers, painters, cabinetmakers, farmers, teachers—their only commonality was their deafness, but this made them immediate allies.
The deaf men invited Joseph and two other outsiders, but this night was to celebrate sign, so they agreed not to use their voices.
‘Do you ever dream that you can hear and speak?’ Joseph asked one of the deaf men with his hands.
‘No,’ the man answered with a wistful smile. ‘I dream that everyone in the world can sign.’
In this, Joseph’s father had been right: these deaf men amazed him. Their difference gave them a place to belong, yet they did not let it limit them. Every day they fought tirelessly to prove themselves proud and intelligent Frenchmen, who deserved nothing less than the rest of their countrymen.
Joseph returned to Charlestonthrough the port at Nantes, in order to make a pilgrimage to the place of his Great-Granduncle Denis’s martyrdom during the Terror. Only forty years ago, in the country of Joseph’s own birth, to be a true Priest had meant treason, and treason meant death. Before his capture and execution, Denis had been forced to live and minister in hiding, sleeping in caves and celebrating Mass in stables. With one simple oath to the Republic, he could have saved his life by damning his soul.
Joseph could not help but wonder what he would have done in Denis’s place. Would he have been a martyr, or a coward? What price washewilling to pay for his faith?Help me to be like you, Father Denis, Joseph prayed.Help me to be worthy of carrying your name. Help me to be worthy of the Priesthood.
CHAPTER 17
Do you really think…that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.
— Oscar Wilde,An Ideal Husband(1895)
From his childhood in Charleston, Joseph knew he must remove his soutane when he left Catholic Europe. For the first time in nearly a decade, he wore only a black woolen coat, waistcoat, and trousers over his shirt and drawers. He felt lighter but practically naked, like a knight deprived of his armor. Until Joseph’s hair grew out, his hat would cover his tonsure—that too was abandoned in hostile countries. The true badge of a Priest was his conduct, not his dress.
Joseph soon learned the new pitch of American persecution toward the true Church. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Protestant citizens believed nuns were being held against their will, or at least the mob used this fiction as their excuse. Fifty men dressed like Indians rampaged through the Ursuline Convent and school, setting it alight. The nuns and their pupils fled in terror. Firemen were called, but some joined the mob, and the others simply watched theconvent burn. Thirteen rioters were arrested, but all were acquitted or pardoned to applause in the courtroom.
Four Ursulines had just arrived in Joseph’s Charleston to set up a girls’ school. The Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy had established themselves five years before. Perhaps Bishop England had invited these holy women in order to ease the loss of his own sister Joanna to stranger’s fever. His Lordship had retained Castalio, a quiet negro about thirty years of age, who served as his valet and also as coachman when the Bishop toured his diocese. Father McEncroe had returned to Ireland to recover his health.
Their church on Hasell Street had taken the name St. Mary’s. But His Lordship had given Joseph’s family permission to attend Mass at St. Finbar’s Cathedral now, since Joseph would be serving there. He suspected this decision had been painful for his mother and grandmother. Even if it was the cathedral, St. Finbar’s lacked the pedigree of St. Mary’s. Most of its congregation was lower-class Irish instead of upper-class French.
The changes Joseph noticed most keenly were those in his own family. His black-haired nephew, David, was already learning to read. Cathy and her husband had also welcomed a daughter named Sophie. Peregrine McAllister had grown up in the Scottish Highlands and spoke with a brogue, but his love for his wife and children came through clearly.
Joseph decided to forgive Perry for compromising his sister, though the Scotsman had little to offer her. For now, he worked as a carpenter. Cathy was learning how to cook and clean from Agathe and May. When the McAllisters moved out to Missouri, they would begin a very different life. Cathy understood that wives must submit to their husbands. But she did not always obey with Christian fortitude. Sometimes she snapped like a cornered animal.
When Joseph found an opportunity to speak to his sister alone, it was wash day. Cathy was in the yard, her sleeves rolled up and her hands submerged in a tub.
“Perry is good to you, isn’t he, Cathy?” Joseph asked.
“Of course,” she answered without looking up. She seemed tobe scrubbing one of Sophie’s diapers. “Most women would count themselves lucky to have such a husband.”
“You don’t?”
Cathy dropped the diaper. Soap splashed on her pinafore. “Do you thinkthisis what I dreamt about when I was a girl?” She thrust her fists toward him, glaring at Joseph over her inflamed hands. “Do you think Iwantto be a drudge on some farm?”
