Was it fair, what had happened to her? Was it fair that murderers, rapists and pedophiles were walking the streets while she was here, frying burgers made of meat she wouldn’t give to a dog? Was it fair that she’d given twenty years of her life to trying to make the world a better place, and in return had been given half an hour to pack up and go?
It wasn’t just Mara she’d grown to hate, of course. It was everyone who worked the system for their own ends, and then blamed that very system whenever they didn’t have the courage to take responsibility themselves. It was lawyers who made people terrified of using common sense; it was media executives who broadcast whatever got them ratings, no matter the harm to those involved; it was judges who gave light sentences; it was doctors who kept alive people any decent society would have executed. It was all these parasites, and more.
Jesslyn sought solace where she always did, in the Book; Ecclesiastes 3: 3–8.
‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’
Saturday, October 30th. 9:32 p.m.
Patrese’s sisters had gone to dinner with Bishop Kohler. Patrese had turned down the invitation. There were probably ways of spending Saturday night which he’d find even less appealing than listening to Kohler mouth platitudes by way of trying to offer spiritual succor, but he couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.
Instead, he stood on the balcony of his apartment and looked down over the city.
He lived in a block called The Mountvue on Mount Washington, the hill on the city’s south side which rises so giddily that only cable cars can make the ascent. He paid $1,200 a month for the place, at least a third of which was surely for the vista over the city skyline, which would have made postcard sellers kill their grandmas.
Dusk was his favorite time; the moment when the city was held suspended in all its contradictions; halfway between day and night, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid.
The heart of downtown was called the Golden Triangle, sandwiched between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and tapering to the point where the two met and joined the Ohio. On crisp fall evenings like this it did indeed seem golden, the sunlight making the thrusting skyscrapers glow as though in belief that the day to come would hold more than the day just passed.
There was the medieval castle of PPG Place, all battlements and crenellations; there the four interlocking silver octagons of the Oxford Center; there the tallest of them all, the USX Tower, a behemoth of exposed steel columns and curtain walls; there the Grant Building flashing P-I-T-T-SB-U-R-G-H in Morse code over and again; and there the blue light on top of the Gulf Building which signified that the temperature was falling.
Patrese loved this city. Always had, always would.
He loved the way Pittsburgh held high the best of American values: hard work, unpretentiousness, renewal. Time was, in the heyday of the steel industry, when it had been virtually uninhabitable: palls of smoke so thick that streetlights had burned all day; desk jockeys who’d left their offices for an hour’s lunch downtown and returned to find their white shirts stained black; rivers so choked with chemicals that they had burned for days on end.
One writer had called Pittsburgh ‘hell with the lid taken off’. He hadn’t found much dissent.
But by the early 1980s the steel industry had shut down, and now hillsides above the mill sites had grown lush and green again. Pittsburgh was a riot of hills and valleys, slopes, hollows, streams, gulches too. It spilled out cockeyed across the landscape’s folds, taking its cues from the terrain.
It was therefore a city of neighborhoods, little worlds of their own separated by earth or water and rejoined by bridges. Pittsburgh had more bridges than Venice, something of which the tourist board was inordinately proud; that, and the fact that the ’Burgh had been voted America’s Most Livable City.
That kind of shit was always double-edged, Patrese thought. The surest way to stop it being Most Livable was to attract all the people who came here because it was Most Livable.
There was a sudden explosion of light from below as the sun reached just the right angle to fizz off one of the plate-glass corners on PPG Place. Patrese didn’t know whether the architect had designed it so, but he caught his breath every time he saw it happen.
He just wished Pittsburgh looked as good in Homewood as it did from up here.
Sunday, October 31st. 9:24 p.m.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,’ I say, ‘but I have some sins I’d like to confess.’
Bishop Kohler turns to face me.
I see two competing strands of thought in his expression: the temporal, which says it’s late and he wants to be leaving; and the spiritual, which demands he give what succor he can to a sinner.
‘Of course, my child,’ he says, biting down on his annoyance.
‘I won’t keep you long. I know you must want to get home.’
Home, in this case, being an eleven-bedroom mansion set in a couple of acres on the border between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.
Far too large and ostentatious for a man of the cloth, you might think, and you’d be right. I read an interview where he defended his decision to live there. The mansion was given to the church just after the war and has been used by every bishop since; Giovanni Cardinal Montini stayed there once, and later he became Pope Paul VI; it’s useful for meetings and putting up visiting dignitaries; and on and on and on.
And yet he knows, as I know, as everyone knows, that what he should do, if he was as humble and holy as he makes out, is go and live in a seminary among those training to be priests, and sell the mansion, using the profits to help with the church’s work. The place would fetch a couple of million on the open market. Imagine what good could be done with that amount of money.
So forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of Bishop Kohler’s spiritual commitment.
Still, in the same interview, he said he liked to spend time alone in the Cathedral of Saint Paul, the diocese’s mother church out near the university in Oakland; that he preferred on occasion to do the locking-up rounds himself, solo, the better to be alone with God in His house.
Which is why I knew I’d find him here, now, and without witnesses.
Kohler leads me in silence to the confessional. He asks me nothing about myself, I think, the better to maintain the anonymity of the confession. He may know my face, but not my name, nor anything else about me.
He’s not to know that, in a few minutes, all this will have ceased to matter for him.
He motions me into one door of the confessional, and himself steps into the other.
The confessional is in classic style; two compartments separated by a latticed grille on which is hung a crucifix. I kneel on the prie-dieu.
I don’t know how to begin. I’ve always thought confession should be between the sinner and their God, with no other human present, so this is difficult for me.