Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me Part II: Hostage to the Devil

By Sarah Colwell

This book is the first part of Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me, originally published as one long book under the pseudonym, Sally Hawthorne. The longer book broke down naturally to a trilogy, so each more readable section is available now as Part I: The Encounter, Part II: Hostage to the Devil and Part III: Windswept House. The true story recounts the long love affair between the late Father Malachi Martin, a man whose reputation is, even now, notorious and enigmatic, and the author, a young woman thirty-seven years younger.

All attempts at writing a genuine biography of Martin proved futile, for Malachi Martin was a master of confabulation. Instead, it became a memoir of infatuation, seduction, faith and its erosion, and what it means to tell the truth and to recover autonomy and integrity after living in fantasy world that Malachi fostered in the mind of the author. Martin's brilliance is apparent on almost every page, but the books raise more questions than they answer. Exorcism, extraterrestrials, politics and, of course, religion, are among the major themes of Martin's stories, tales that strain the credulity of even his most ardent lover and fan.

In Part II, Hostage to the Devil, a number of ghastly events unfold and the author begins to realize that Martin is not only unreliable but dangerous and perhaps even insane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Colwell
• Release date: Nov 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370628810

Sarah Colwell

Sarah Colwell is a writer with a background in religious philosophy, research and design. She was born in Texas and completed a master's degree at Columbia University. Since then she has lived in New York, Japan, northern New Mexico, Ecuador and India. Now living in Algeria, Sarah has worked as a librarian, a fashion designer, a Tokyo housewife and a merchant mariner. Her literary mentor and longtime lover was the late priest-author and alleged exorcist, Malachi Martin.

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Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin and Me

Part II: Hostage to the Devil

by

Sarah Colwell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Sarah Colwell on Smashwords

Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin and Me

Part I: The Encounter

Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Colwell

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Dedicated to Robert Blair Kaiser and to all those who find a way to search for faith in the aftermath of spiritual betrayal. Many thanks also to those of my family and friends who have offered patience, rejection of vanity and dedication to telling the truth.

*.*.*.*.*

Author’s Note: I first published this work under a pseudonym, as part of a very long single book. Now, however, the time has come to speak the truth using my own name, for, even in death, Malachi Martin continues to seduce minds susceptible to charisma and wishful thinking, I was once such a susceptible person. The fact that I was a damaged teenager is no excuse for surrendering my autonomy of mind and liberty of spirit to a man who could tell me the pretty things I wished to hear. It took me twenty-seven years to write my story and only now, decades after the events I recount, can I look back on the past with equanimity and regard myself at that time with bemused compassion.

Today, we have new charlatans who derive personal satisfaction (and, too often, great power) from pandering to our fears and what we perceive to be vital needs. It is my task, and yours, in the time that we have, to seek the truth and to practice compassion towards all other human beings in this world. We will inevitably fail many times to discover and to do what is right, but it is our fine and excellent calling to try, every day, to learn more and to do well. To surrender that power, as I did, to someone whose ideas and strength seemed so much greater than mine, is to give away what is, in the end, all that really matters. Sarah Colwell

*.*.*.*.*

Part II: Hostage to the Devil

I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

This is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions.

They come with laws and their codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever,

for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

People blame me and call me heedless;

I doubt not they are right in their blame.

The market day is over and work is all done for the busy’

Those who came to call for me in vain have gone back in anger.

I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.

Tagore, Gitanjali XVII

*.*.*.*.*

Chapter 1: Figs from Thistles

For the next few weeks I walked around in a semi-cognizant daze, doing what I was supposed to, waiting for something more to happen. After all, Malachi and I were lovers now. We were together. That meant that the world had changed. My path had shifted seismically, like the Indus delta after the 1819 earthquake in the Rann of Kutch. Nothing could ever be the same again.

This momentous disruption, however, was not obvious to the wider world. Not yet. On the surface, it all looked the same. I studied, wrote papers, took exams and socialized with my few friends. But my thoughts and activities had become a stuporous routine that made life blurry, as if I had at last, under the influence of temperature and pressure and Malachi Martin, actually become that vapor I’d always felt myself to be. It was strange and disorienting, but not unpleasant, to float above and around myself as I went about my trivial business, aware of identity but indifferent to it. While in this partially disembodied state, I was spared some of the intensity of the continual agony of self-consciousness and doubt. Is this how other people feel all the time, I wondered. With drugs and alcohol, or without? I didn’t conduct any experiments myself. Drugs were trouble, the county was dry and I had too much work to do. Drinking was something I associated with Malachi. I drank to get ready to see him, or to wind down afterwards. I drank while with him because he wanted me to. Otherwise, I never thought about it.

I continued to talk to Malachi on the phone, to him write letters and send him flowers, hoping he’d take the hint and write letters and send flowers to me. The flowers didn’t come, but he sometimes did write. Here’s an example of one of his better efforts:

Sarah:

As a matter of fact, this never happened to me before in any shape or form. And I want you to know what’s uppermost in me, now that it has happened—as you described it: some deepest care that you be not hurt. Life has enough of that. For all of us. Not too much. But enough. Without our adding to it. Odd, I do not find it at all. And be sure of one thing: I want good for you.

always,

Malachi

Laudable sentiments, or so I thought at the time. What I notice now is that Malachi managed to say what I wanted to hear without committing himself to anything specific. Taken out of context, even the subject matter of the note is ambiguous. Willing enough to make preposterous allegations in his books and media broadcasts, he was careful never to complicate his personal life with compromising statements in his written communication with me. In the item above, for instance, he could be talking about a mutual case of food poisoning, or commiserating over stock market reversals. Odd, he doesn’t find it at all.

*

The blissful numbness started to wear off after about a month. I found myself slipping in and out of dissociation, like a restless dreamer on a muggy full-moon night. What precipitated my return to semi-solid status was a crisis I had not foreseen. Malachi stopped calling and his letter-writing ceased. I didn’t know how to reach him in an emergency. He had no answering machine and I had only a dim idea of who his associates were. I told myself that my increasingly frantic concern was for his welfare, but, deep down, I was beginning to inquire: how could you use a poor maiden so? As April seeped into May I began to feel the dull ache of abandonment. My vaporous spirits were pulled back into the density of my body and I reacquainted myself with despair.

On my cranky Smith-Corona I typed out several drafts of despondent recriminations, none of which I kept. What version I finally sent, via express courier, doesn’t really matter. Whining is whining and even the most valid and poetic bitterness isn’t very attractive. No one likes to be reminded of his shortcomings, especially when, despite stated good intentions, they include unbridled selfishness and careless disregard for the feelings of others. Many years later I learned that, by the mature age of fifty-seven, Malachi had broken and discarded many a heart, thrown the cold clay over them and tromped them with his feet, size 8EEE, clearly made for the job. But, in those days, I didn’t know about his amorous history, or even suspect him of being capable of such casual villainy. His stubbornly amoral attitude to less-than-sacerdotal activities, e.g., seducing other men’s wives, dumping them when things got dicey, running away from the situation, then lying righteously about it for years on national television, made it almost impossible to penetrate the moraine of his mind. I don’t think even he had any idea of what was lurking in the darker, icier crevasses. Glaciers don’t readily give up their secrets, and it must have taken a glacial lack of empathy to treat women as he did. On the surface, Malachi’s character resembled a gleaming, pristine snowfield. He was, I now surmise, more oblivious than I of the treacherous fissures below.

Just as I was reaching the point of suicidal resignation, he suddenly called Malachi sounded far away. The connection wasn’t clear and his voice had its own distant tone. He chided me for my lack of faith, as Christ had rebuked his craven disciples during the tempest on Galilee and that last night in the dark garden. It offended him deeply, he said, that I would, even in my loneliest moments, suspect him of anything but noble, loving, well-intentioned behavior on my behalf.

You simply don’t understand, Sarah, the exigencies of my life, he declared yet again.

Maybe you could explain them to me sometime, I said in a last burst of miraculous articulation.

Yes, perhaps. But not now, he said. You simply have to trust me.

Trust him? I didn’t trust anyone. Not my parents, not the government, not the church and certainly not the perverse anthropomorphic forces that are said to govern the universe. To me an act of faith was doing my homework before going to bed, on the dubious, unhappy assumption that the sun might come up in the morning.

Okay, I’ll try, I said with a sigh.

Good. I’ll phone you when I return, he said with purse-lipped finality.

But I wasn’t finished.

Where are you? I asked, knowing better.

He was silent.

Well? I prompted.

Ah, Sarah, after I explain things, I hope you’ll understand, was his exasperated response.

Right. But I don’t understand now. Just tell me where you are, I argued.

Across the water, he replied tersely. I’ll phone you in few days time.

Then the line went dead. I didn’t mind. Malachi could scold me all he liked but scolding didn’t excuse his vagaries. If he had to disappear, he could at least give me some notice in advance, couldn’t he? The cloak-and-dagger life he purported to lead and that he required me to tolerate, if not credit, made curious, unscheduled, inexplicable demands on his time. He was always disappearing without even so much as a hey presto! His other friends might accept this without question but I was still as much of a child as I had ever been, just as frightened and just as insecure. If only in my head, I determined, with juvenile persistence, to keep asking questions: when, where and, above all, why?

*

When Malachi returned, he hinted at having been in the region of the Persian Gulf but, for all I knew, it could just as easily have been Bermuda or Santorini or Park Avenue. He dropped little hints indicating that he had, at the very least, been glancing at the occasional newspaper while lounging on the beach, or whatever it was he was doing. The dramatic failure of the attempted rescue of the hostages in Iran he described as a shameful situation, something he couldn’t discuss, at least not until we met again.

We’re all struggling behind the scenes to take care of this business once and for all, he said. I’ll fill you in when we see each other again.

While I took a genuine interest in the hostage crisis, our seeing each other again became my primary focus. The semester was about to end and I had to make plans. Summer courses at Texas Tech were mandatory. My mother wanted me out of college and off the family payroll as soon as possible, and I was just as eager to emancipate myself from what I thought of as a miserable state of dependence on people who hated me. In the interval, however, I had a couple of weeks when there were no classes scheduled. With Malachi’s encouragement and help I might be able to get away from my minimum wage job filing work orders for the failing family enterprise, and spend a few days with him in New York.

That would be lovely, poupee, he said when I explained my idea. I’m desperate to hold you in my arms once more. If you only knew how terribly lonely I’ve been you’d make every effort to be here as soon as you’re free.

You mean I should just fly up there, without permission, I said, half-teasingly.

Oh, no, Sarah. Don’t do that again, he said.

I won’t, I assured him. But I’ll need your help.

I’ll do what I can, he promised.

His eagerness lifted my spirits and gave me nerve. Together we schemed and came up with dates that seemed to suit us both. Then, with his encouragement, I raised the subject with my parents. They were aware of Malachi Martin’s interest in me but they were, at the same time, baffled. It had long been my practice to confide in them just enough to appear to compromise my privacy, as though I respected their judgment enough to trust them. It was humiliating, pretending to tell them my secrets, but it kept them at a more tolerable distance and established an almost bearable equilibrium of scrutiny and neglect. Even laden as it was with distortions and outright lies, I was convinced my proposal didn’t stand a chance. But this time my mother surprised me. She was willing to consider the idea of me going back to New York if Malachi himself would provide the information she suspected me of concealing. My father’s skepticism was obvious—and appropriate. He didn’t approve, but what my father thought didn’t matter. In matters such as these, he was a check-writing automaton.

Malachi agreed to cooperate. The prospect of deceiving my mother made him seem almost gleeful as he undertook to assure Mom that his interest in me was strictly avuncular.

I told her that my interest in you was ‘strictly avuncular,’ he said, and that I hoped to encourage your scholarly aptitudes.

You think she fell for it? I asked, squirming as I imagined him talking to my mother. My scholarly aptitude consisted of a freakishly good memory for exam material and an ability to write what my professors wanted to read.

Oh, yes, I won her over completely. You need have no worries on that score.

I’d already noticed that Malachi had a way with people. He could exploit the smallest frailty of ego and enjoy it. It was his conspiratorial seduction—making you feel that you were in his confidence, that he’d let you in on a secret—that charmed my mom. Playing natural adversaries against each other was another talent he put to good use in my situation. My mother and I had never been friendly. I didn’t trust her and I was convinced she didn’t like me. Deceiving her was another way to pander to me.

It did occur to me, however, that my mother’s willingness to go along with the deception further indicated to Malachi that there was no caring, competent adult in my life able or willing to intervene on my behalf. I was the stereotypically neglected child on offer to any vaguely plausible predator who could charm a weary mother frustrated with the lack of glamour in her world. When she gave her consent for me to go to New York for a week, I was pleased, yet shocked by her apparent disregard for sound custodial judgment. She too, it seemed, was star-struck. Malachi Martin was famous. That was enough to persuade my parents that anything he did must be okay.

In spite of these misgivings, I eagerly packed my bags. I was to have a whole week alone with Malachi. There would be shopping trips and little meals and pillow talk of clandestine exigencies, I imagined. Malachi assured me that not even the deadlines for work on his latest manuscript, the fictionalized biography of King David, would keep him from my company. The room he booked for me at the Barbizon Hotel, then a residence for respectable young women and a convenient three blocks from his apartment, was only for show, he claimed.

When I said goodbye to my parents at the airport, a familiar, detached sense of guilt and alarm gnawed at my empty stomach on that bright, hopeful morning. This was the biggest lie I’d ever foisted on anyone, and I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it. I was almost dismayed. No other parent I knew—not even Maureen’s single mom-- would have let an only daughter take off on such a questionable holiday. This scared me just a little. I was getting what I wanted and I was delighted, but something about the whole dishonest business didn’t seem right. As I nursed a double whiskey on the short hop to Dallas/Ft. Worth, I asked myself if I would allow, much less encourage, a child of mine to spend a week alone with someone like Malachi Martin. I didn’t have to reflect long. The answer was clear: not a chance.

The unpleasant musings didn’t last long. I changed planes in Dallas and tried to doze but I was far too nervous to sleep. My relationship with Malachi was progressing to a new stage. All the dazed uncertainty of the spring was over forever. We were to spend a whole week together, alone, under the auspices of parental approval. There would be no need to borrow money or sneak around and, as for lying, that was what I had to do to protect Malachi’s privacy and to gain some of my own. I was almost an adult and I deserved that, I told myself, after nearly two decades of having people walk in on me in the bathroom. Whatever anyone else might make of the affair it was, as of that morning, official: Malachi and I were together. I didn’t have to worry anymore about what would happen next.

But I did. This time, I knew, sex would not be the perfunctory rite it had seemed like the last time we’d been together. Malachi’s concerns about complications that might arise from future rituals had already complicated my life more than he could have guessed. It was my job, he said, to make sure I was protected. It took several rounds of cryptic suggestions on his part before I figured out what he was talking about: contraception. I wasn’t exactly a prude, but I was still quite shy. Going to the gynecologist was torture for me but Malachi insisted.

We must cover our tracks at all costs, he’d told me when it became clear I would be coming to New York.

I was shocked. Malachi was a Roman Catholic and they didn’t believe in that sort of thing, I thought. Moreover, he was a priest--when it suited him. I’d heard him defend Vatican policy on this issue and, while I, as a Protestant, didn’t share his views on birth control, I’d convinced myself that I ought to respect them. I’d been reading up on the rhythm method and had worked it out that my visit to New York fell within the lunar safety zone.

I was dumbfounded when he suggested that I get an IUD.

An IUD? Are you kidding? I asked.

It’s by far the surest way, he said.

But…they’re dangerous, aren’t they?

Oh, not the modern things. They’re very safe, and, what’s more, foolproof.

You don’t trust me to take a pill?

You might forget. We can’t risk it. And your mummy might find them. We can’t have that.

He had a point there. But I still had reservations.

But…but it’s how they work, I said. You don’t have a problem with that?

What do you mean, poupee? he asked.

Did he really not know, I wondered. Discussing the morality of various methods of birth control with a priest who was also a lover was awkward. But I couldn’t let the subject drop.

IUD’s just prevent implantation, I said. Not contraception.

Yes, Sarah, I know that, he said, sounding impatient. What is your point?

Well, isn’t that…isn’t that sort of a problem for you—as a Catholic?

He hesitated, then laughed. Aren’t we a bit beyond worrying about that? he said.

Somewhere in my guts I felt a twinge. This was not the first time that Malachi the man had failed to live up to my vague ideal. But this went beyond the hand on my leg and the corduroy trousers: this was an abstract moral issue that didn’t involve taking advantage of me. This was important. The little metal gadget in question did nothing to prevent the sacred union of contraception that initiates life. All it did was prevent implantation of the newly formed soul, like some perpetual abortion machine. And, back in those days, it wasn’t considered safe, much less appropriate for teenage girls who hoped to have children someday.

As I sat on the plane, reviewing these events in my mind as I drank whiskey and flipped through a magazine, it occurred to me that it is sometimes easier to overlook mortal sin than it is the transgressions of small-minded mores. My moral outlook, based loosely on a confusing combination of a knee-jerk desire to please and a dim devotion to Kant’s categorical imperative, had undergone considerable upheaval in recent weeks. I hardly knew anymore what was wrong and what was not.

I remembered that the nurse at the student health center had had more definite opinions.

What kind of jerk would make you get an IUD? she asked, regarding me with suspicion.

Oh, I just read about them somewhere, I lied.

We’ll fit you with a diaphragm, she said, and if the chauvinist pig doesn’t like it, he can go out and buy a pack of rubbers or get a goddamn vasectomy.

I was afraid to contradict her and relieved that I didn’t have to get the IUD. Female trouble had tormented me since menarche and I wasn’t eager to create more for myself, even if it meant defying Malachi’s express wish.

It was with these guilty recollections and a compensatory desire to please that I fidgeted in the taxi that bore me from La Guardia. Malachi had asked whether I needed him to meet me at the airport and, eager to please, I’d said no. He did come down to pay the cabbie and haul up my bags, however. I was grateful, nervous and ashamed as I followed him up the stairs. The instant we were alone he greeted me enthusiastically. I believe that he was genuinely happy to see me. Before I had a chance to inspect my hair and makeup in the bathroom mirror, he poured me a drink, extinguished his cigarette and asked,

Will you lie down with me, Sarah?

Eager to please, I complied

*

Some hours later, late in the afternoon, we went out together so I could check into the Barbizon Hotel for Women, which, as it turned out, was not merely a pretence to pacify my curious parents. As we were leaving his apartment, Malachi gave me what seemed to be a large book, wrapped