Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 103
target and out the door came three acolytes, a monsignor in black,
and the cardinal himself, a man either graced by God with great
dignity and beauty or singled out by the diocese for these
distinctions. He raised his hand. His ring flashed with spiritual and
political power. “I seen better rings on hustlers,” Chicken Number
Two whispered. “No fence would give you thirty. The last time I
hit a jewelry store I fenced the lot for—” Looks shut him up.
Everybody turned and put him down.
The crimson of the cardinal’s robes seemed living and pure and
his carriage was admirable and would have quelled a riot. He
stepped out of the helicopter, lifting his robes not at all like a
woman leaving a taxi but like a cardinal leaving his airborne
transport. He made a sign of the cross as high and wide as his
reach and the great spell of worship fell over that place. In nomine
Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Farragut would have liked to pray
for the happiness of his son, his wife, the safety of his lover, the
soul of his dead brother, would have liked to pray for some
enlargement of his wisdom, but the only word he could root out of
these massive intentions was his Amen. Amen, said a thousand
others, and the word, from so many throats, came up from the
gallows field as a solemn whisper.
Then the public address system began to work so well that the
confusion that followed could be heard by everyone. “Now you go
first,” said the commissioner to the warden. “No, you go,” said the
warden to the commissioner. “It says here that you go.” “I said
you go,” said the commissioner angrily to the warden, and the
warden stepped forward, knelt, kissed the cardinal’s ring and,
standing, said: “The graciousness of Your Eminence in
endangering life and limb in order to come and visit us in the
Falconer Rehabilitation Center is greatly appreciated by me and
the deputy wardens, the guards and all the inmates. It reminds me
of how when I was a little boy and sleepy my father carried me
from the car into the house at the end of a long trip. I was a load