resting in that one thought like a bike chain gone slack. He put his hand on my knee. I didn’t know what to say, so I put my hand over his. “It’s your birthday,” he said, and he held my hand tighter.
Somehow I got some presence of mind. “Why don’t we go outside and walk around for a bit?” I said. Then he said a very strange thing: “It’s your birthday, your feast day, and this is why I have come. Today is the day of Frances Reardon, orphaned child of Brigid’s isle, patron saint of frigid knees. Of unmet wishes, of idées fixes, of withering eyes, of docile guise.” He had continued staring at me as if I were one tree in a forest of many, but after he delivered this speech his look sharpened into something cruel. I’d felt what he was saying to me was cruel, and the look confirmed it.
Then he stood and started walking up the outer aisle. He began to shout, and said even stranger things. He said that this place—meaning the church—was no better than a bar room. “This place is a place where the people come to drink,” he shouted. “They drink to forget, to die to what is real, they slump over in prayer, drinking and drinking in remembrance of me.” I sorely wished for the gift of fainting from shock. He went down the center aisle. “I am turning you out!” he said. Two women got up and hurried out of the church, and at this point I found the courage to get up and walk as fast as I could to find the priest. I walked back to the door that leads from the sanctuary to the church office, and there stood the priest, white head bowed, shrugging on his robe. It’s always like seeing them in their underwear when you see them in their belted slacks and dress shoes. He looked up. I saw eyes that were younger than his hair, and I felt relief. I told him what was happening and he went out with me, and this small white-haired Irish man managed to wrestle Bernard to the ground. The organist, who is a statuesque, almost stout, redhead, helped the priest keep Bernard there. At least they did for as long as it took for me to run out and find a cop, who then called an ambulance. When I came back in, Bernard had of course escaped the bonds of the priest and the organist and was throwing missals everywhere. It took four ambulance attendants to get him on a stretcher. He bit one of them. And now Bernard is in a hospital outside of Boston. He has been there for nine days.
John Percy, who has been to see him, tells me the doctors say he suffered a manic episode. When I think about all I have known of Bernard, and what I have now read of his disease, I see how his illness has been lying in wait for him. It will come for him again, and again.
As far as John can tell, Bernard came down on the train that afternoon. He told me that Bernard rang him up shortly before he came to see me and told him some addled things. John said he called me to tell me this and was going to offer to come over because he had a bad feeling about Bernard but I had already left for Mass. Apparently Bernard told John that he had received a revelation in a church in Boston that I was a saint, that I was the only pure thing in New York City, couldn’t John tell, couldn’t John tell that there was light around me because I had not sinned, I had not been touched, that I knew the true purpose of the Church, I was its defender, I was not drinking the blood like milk, the host was solid food for me, that I was a saint and when my book was published everyone would know that. John has been to see Bernard and tells me that Bernard does not remember saying any of this. When John told Bernard what he’d said, Bernard groaned and put his face in his hands and did not speak for a long while. John asked me to go see him because he thinks if Bernard does not hear from me he will not do as well as he might. John Percy does not say much, so