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Feature
The Day My Brother Was Murdered
Memoirs of a shattered hope.
(Page 4 of 10)
Dad had said the New York Times had two stories in Thursday’s paper, on pages 7 and 42. I pulled on a sweater and went out into the hotel in search of a paper. The elevator went very slowly. The elevator man didn’t know where I could find a Times at this hour; maybe at the kiosk down the block. This man, this sleepy boy, didn’t seem to realize that my brother Dick was dead. There was numbness and indifference in my whole body, a sense of unbearable sickness. Didn’t he feel it at all?
No papers in the lobby. Outside, the corner kiosk was closed up for the night. I ran across the broad street to a hotel across the way. The man at the desk was contemptuous: Of course there were no papers. How should he know where I could find a paper? Ask the girl over there. The hostess at the entrance to the bar, her face masked with gray cosmetics, and her silver eyelashes grotesquely extended, didn’t know where I could find a paper.
It seemed fitting to have to wait until morning for the news dispatch about my brother’s death.
In the lobby of our hotel, however, I found the rubbish cart of the cleaning lady. There was a Times on top of the pile of emptied papers. I rescued it and began to leaf through its pages. I found the general story on the rioting in Pakistan: a subdued story, reporting in vague, general terms riots that admittedly had been going on for weeks. Whole villages were being burned. Deaths were estimated in the thousands. The rioting was the most serious since the partition of Pakistan from India. But the story was deep on the inside pages. Part of the difficulty was, my father had said, that strict censorship had been imposed by the Pakistan government on news about the bloodshed.
Back in our room, I could not find the story about Dick. I searched every page ending with a "2," and then every single page, column by column. The Times was very full that day. But, even after an hour, I could not find the story.
The next day, reporting again at my publisher's to turn in the last chapter of my manuscript on the Second Vatican Council, I was given a copy of an earlier edition of Thursday’s paper. The short dispatch was as Dad had said: missing and presumed dead. The cold print seemed to make the news more real.
There was just a little work to be done, Betty Bartelme had said, to shorten my manuscript. But before tackling that, back in my room, I telephoned both the New York Times and Time, trying to see whether they had any further dispatches that might reveal his fate. Nothing.
My parents wanted Karen and me home as soon as possible. They had learned that a funeral mass was going to be sung in Pakistan on Monday, January 27. Father George DePrizio, C.S.C., Dick’s provincial superior, encouraged Mother and Dad to schedule a funeral in Johnstown on the same day. "It will take away the tension and uncertainty," he told me by phone. "In Dacca, they seem to be certain that he’s dead. But they cannot cable any details." Actually, Father DePrizio soon had many more details, which out of mercy he did not share with my parents--as my sister Mary Ann discovered in researching community archives.
That day a report came that a body had been found, believed to be that of a Westerner and probably Dick's. It seemed a relief to have something definite. Fantasies of his prolonged suffering or helplessness were much more terrifying than news of his death.
Reluctantly, Mother and Dad agreed to the funeral. The bishop would preside. Father DePrizio and other Holy Cross priests would come.
Then the report proved unfounded. The body was not Dick's. Nevertheless, the funeral Mass in Dacca was not postponed. This seemed right to me. They were in a position to assess the situation. The Holy Cross priests had been in East Pakistan for more than a hundred years. They had seen the fury of the January riots. Dick’s body, presumably, had been thrown in the river or in some paddy, where it would never be found.
My brother, Dick.
I felt guilty for not having written him more often, for all the neglect and slighting I had ever shown him, and for still being alive.
Saturday morning, Karen and I took the train to Princeton where we had left our old, green Plymouth with friends, and then drove to Johnstown. It was a cold afternoon, and up in the mountains the air was full of gusts of rain turning to snow. But the snow didn’t pile up, not even on Bedford mountain, and we started down the other side of the mountain towards Johnstown knowing that we would make it without mishap.
Mother and Dad seemed to relax the moment we came in the door. We were the first of the family to return home. Ben would come in from Penn State on Sunday. Jim, a lieutenant in the Armored Corps, would fly home from Germany, courtesy of the Red Cross, just in time for the funeral. Mary Ann, who was fifteen and had been home all along, was especially tender and affectionate when she embraced us at the door.
About the Author
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He wishes to express his indebtedness to his sister, Mary Ann Novak, for her tireless researches, which have uncovered many heretofore unknown facts.
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David Govett| 12.24.08 @ 11:38AM
Perhaps you are starting a tradition by telling a Christmas Eve murder story. Whatever next, I wonder.
Matthew M.| 12.24.08 @ 12:18PM
David, it is said that the wood that cradled Christ in the manger was the wood of the cross upon which he was crucified. This story is a sobering balance to an overly sentimentalized Christmas.
Ken| 12.24.08 @ 6:41PM
A tale of family loss, set against the hope and glory that is Christmas. You can't expect people like Paddy or David G. to understand or even appreciate such a story. In their world, personal sacrifice is anathema to them. It is for people such as Paddy and David G. that we should pray. Merry Christmas.
David Govett| 12.24.08 @ 10:36PM
Ken: You evidently derive satisfaction from flaming complete strangers on the Web. If indeed you are as callow as your behavior evinces, experience probably will remedy your boorishness. If not, not. In either event, please consider behaving civilly toward your fellow humans, even though they are not you.
wanda keith| 12.24.08 @ 11:05PM
Mr. Novak,
Thank you so much for sharing your sad, yet beautiful story. It is clear your family has many happy memories of your brother. The world is poorer for having lost him.
Stephen Eakin| 12.25.08 @ 4:18AM
Mr Novak
I was educated by the Dominicans, the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits.
There were a few loonies in all those groups, but the majority were straight up and down, with problems, as described about your brother.
I am a better person to having been through the system. It didn't scar me. It made me a better person (for which I am truely thankful).
We are Anglo-Celtic stock full of Catholics, Anglicans, Hueguenots, Presbyterians, Welsh, Maronite Lebanese, left and right Oz's, and the only punch-up's (metaphorically) are are birthday
parties, weddings, christenings and funerals.
Why can't other groups accept the way that we do it?
Our story is the story of your family.
We have been so fortunate that we have not had to have undergone your family's bereavement.
We just have a refeeeeend punch up because of our Celtic female backround.
Our attitude is that you do your own thing. Your are on your own from the time you pop.
However, in our family there are squillions of
rellos to provide support.
Is this not the reason why God invented the extended family?
God works in misterious ways.
'Tis a pity that your brother was not here to listen to such a brilliant eulogy.
lillith| 12.26.08 @ 8:01PM
Father Richard gave his life doing what he knew he needed to do.
We are lesser in the lose, but he is in a better place.
My your family receive the peace the passing understanding.
L
Peregrinus| 12.26.08 @ 8:02PM
I write this from a place just a few miles from Stonehill, and, like Mike and Dick, as someone who, in "the old days," went very young to the seminary of an Order that drew into Community the most diverse group of individuals and made us a remarkable, if somewhat "weird" family of brothers who, across the years and miles and myriad changes are still in touch today (thanks to email and the Internet!).
The week of the Christmas Octave features in the liturgical calendar, the Saints who are dubbed the "comites Christi," the companions of Christ, a royal retinue for the newborn King, Saints who suffered: Stephen, John the Evangelist, the Holy Innocents, Thomas Becket.
What a worthy addition to that procession your brother Dick is, Mike! Thanks to you - and to your sister - for letting us share the story.
And, as TS Eliot wrote of one of those Christmas Saints in his Murder in the Cathedral: "It is this which forever renews the world, though it is forever denied. For wherever a martyr has shed his blood, there is holy ground, and the holiness shall not depart from it."
May his intercession help bring peace to the land and people he loved - and to ours!
Tim Allen| 1.9.09 @ 7:27PM
A sacred thing, this story. I am reluctant to even slightly touch it with comments, so I'll simply say thank you, Mr. Novak.
Irving M.Levine| 1.12.09 @ 10:19PM
Friend Michael. What a moving and fascinating tribute to a brother long gone but well remembered Once again, in our episodic history of knowing one another, I owe you gratitude for sharing from a rich Catholic life to this unreconstructed, but sober liberal who reads you with occasional disagreement but with abiding affection .
G| 1.28.09 @ 7:47PM
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Angela V. McDonnell| 2.26.09 @ 2:02PM
Dear Mr. Novak,
I am Johnstown Catholic High School classmate of Dick's.
I talked with your Dad once when he called to ask me to organize with him a reception for Dick after his ordination. I was sorry that I could not help, as I had recently had a third child.
Later, the news of Dick's slaying was too sad.
His was a unique personality; many of us knew him in such different ways. I enjoyed his droll sense of humor; I saw him as laidback, carefree. I was in many classes with him, he seemed always to be prepared.
Angela v. McDonnell
guo| 7.1.10 @ 5:06AM
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