Free Cecilian Vespers by Anne Emery Page B

terrorize us. And we also heard absolutely hair-raising tales about his father! Everything from organized crime connections to Irish Republican derring-do. Don’t know how much of it was true.” He looked at Brennan and waited. Nothing. “Have you met his father, Monty?”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “Really! So, what’s the story?”
    “My lips are sealed.”
    “There is something behind it. I knew it! Anyway, back to the sem. If we thought things were lightening up in the 1970s, we had reckoned without Brennan Burke.”
    “And a proper thing too,” rejoined Burke.
    “The first thing he did was start quoting from the Summa Theologiae in Latin.”
    “ Summa Contra Gentiles . You obviously weren’t listening.”
    “There was hardly anybody in our class who could understand you.”
    “As I discovered. Don’t get me going on what passes for education these days.”
    “We won’t.”
    “I’m on my way out,” Burke announced, and stood up. “Have to see some of Monty’s clients at the Correctional Centre.”
    “How many times do I have to tell you, Brennan? If they’re in jail, they can’t be clients of mine. What kind of a defence lawyer would I be if I let my clients be sent to jail?”
    “You’re delusional, Collins. But I could be wrong. The same was said of the great mystics, and they’ve stood the test of time.”
    “You still minister to prisoners, do you, Brennan?” Fred asked.
    “Yeah. Keeps me out of the hospitals, ministering to the sick! I’m sure there’s nothing left to be said about me, so ask Fred about his former calling.”
    “What was that?”
    “Fred is brilliant on the baseball diamond.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah, I played a season with the Kansas City Royals before I followed my true calling.”
    “Are you serious? Must have been hard to give up a major league baseball career.”
    Mills shrugged. “This is where God wants me.”
    “I still say you could have done both,” Burke said.
    “Not this again.” It must have been an old argument between them.
    Burke gave us a farewell salute and started up the stairs. He nodded to a man who was on his way down — William Logan.
    “Freddy! I heard I could find you down here.”
    “Hi, Bill. Come have a seat.”
    He sat and turned to me. “Have we met?”
    “Briefly. At the party at my wife’s place. You and Mrs. Logan put on a little, um, product demonstration.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Babs gets these ideas in her head. What a flop. So what’s up?”
    “Fred was recounting his first meeting with Brennan Burke. You used to teach with Brennan, I understand, Bill. When you were Father Logan.”
    “Yeah, I have all the luck. Things were pretty laid-back at the sem in those years. The guy Burke was replacing was the kinda guy who’d let the students do self-evaluations, mark their own papers. Don’t worry about how they’re written, that sort of approach. Then, in mid-term, he was out and Burke was in. Burke had Freddy quaking in his boots.”
    “True. I was given the task of introducing him to the other seminarians but I hardly dared speak to him. To me he was intimidating and almost — I don’t know, I guess ‘exotic’ isn’t quite the word — anyway there I was, little Fred Mills from middle America, never been anywhere, and here was this big black-Irish force thrust upon us. Someone whose family was said to have fled Ireland in the middle of the night, and emigrated to Hell’s Kitchen in New York. And he had that clipped sort of accent that made me rethink everything I had ever heard about the twinkling-eyed, charming Irish. What was he going to do, shoot our kneecaps off if we faltered in the fourth conjugation of our Latin verbs? One guy stood up to him, though, that first week —”
    “Yeah, me. I stood up to him, in case nobody remembers.”
    Fred continued as if Logan had not interrupted. “It was another Irishman, wouldn’t you know? Father Burke was berating us for beingslack in our work, and this Irish guy in the class,