It’s a bomb. Father Dan must know that. He has put two and two together by now. Anyway, with just that small arithmetic he could count the house. Friday afternoon at Bronx Community College, a class B farm club in the city educational system. The overlarge auditorium is maybe 15 per cent full; a 5 a.m. Mass draws better. And everyone has received two neat, persuasive mimeographed sheets at the door: Berrigan an antisemite. It doesn’t seem, well . . . propitious. Priests used to get tithes; now lecture agents do. But the clown from Creative Artists Public Service who arranged this dog probably booked Christians into the Colosseum. Read the poems, grab your white envelope, and exit pursued by a Jew. Lord, can any good come out of the Bronx?
He’s got an odd build. Slim in the thigh, yet unwieldy, barrel-sized at pap level. He walks to the lectern, coccyx outthrust, as if still jammed in a chair. Blue shirt and blue jeans; his frayed cuffs cost extra at the mod shop. And a bolo tie. On the slide, near his Adam’s apple, some predatory bird in outline, wings spread. From Row D it could pass for a feathery crucifix. Father Dan’s skin appears mascaraed: orange, with third degree wrinkles, unhealthy. Plus the Vandyke beard, a second-string Shakespearean villain, Oliver or Don John. But the teeth are nice, amiable and rabbity, his best feature. The sort of things you might dice cabbage with. They work a busy cud inside his lower lip. The hair is neat and flat as a yarmulke: crew-cut for the Seventies. And don’t tell me the Almighty hasn’t His sense of humor. There’s an embryonic bald spot, tonsure-shaped, on top. His scalp refinding its vocation.
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