The American Jesuits: A History

12 The Golden Age

12 The Golden Age Death on a Winter Night The evening of March 9, 1956, was clear, cold and Lenten. The Bowl looked as it had since the first snow back in November. Stockbridge Mountain stood out against the faded blue winter sky, its long flank mottled with snow patches and the black of jutting ledges. The snow from several recent snow storms lay out over the frozen lake, bright in the weak sun, but dull and gray in the distance down by the island and Interlaken. —F. X. Shea, S.J., “The Shadowbrook Fire,” SJNEews, December 1973 It was about half past midnight, and Father Bill Carroll thought he smelled smoke. But he had been wrong before—last year he smelled something burning in the middle of the night, but the house had been searched and no evidence of a fire found—and maybe he was wrong again. Actually a second search, four days later that year, had discovered a hidden beam in the ceiling of the scholastics’ toilets that had been smoldering for four days. But Bill Carroll had a tendency to be nervous anyway. Several years before, he and Father Stephen Mulcahy had been badly smashed up in an auto accident and both now lived conscious of the possibility that they could die at any moment. They were among 16 priests in a community of 127, including priests, 100 scholastics—novices and juniors in their college courses— and 11 coadjutor brothers at Shadowbrook, the New England Province novitiate in Lenox, in the lovely Berkshire Mountains. Once dubbed the “largest family home in America,” former summer “cottage” of Andrew Carnegie, the sprawling Tudor castle estate, with its own farm and livestock, was in its last years as a Jesuit house, and fundraising had begun to build something more up-to-date. In fact, the house was a fire trap. 170 The men had ended a standard day of class, some skiing on a slight slope or slipping around on the icy paths during an evening walk, and were kidding one another at evening recreation. At dinner, Walter Young, a junior, had delivered a sermon honoring the fourth centenary of the death of St. Ignatius, entitled “Go Set the World on Fire,” the words St. Ignatius reputedly said to Francis Xavier when he sent him to Japan; but, rather than comment on that, the fathers kidded Mulcahy, a Boston College man, about his having to sit with Holy Cross men at the upcoming Ignatian alumni dinner. After litanies at 9:00, the novices retired to their dormitories, where, three times a week, they self-administered the “discipline”—whipping their bare shoulders with a knotted cord for as long as it takes to say a quick “Hail Mary”—before bed. While the central wing housed the classrooms and ascetories, the common study hall where each one had a little desk, the west wing had the fathers’ rooms with the novice infirmary on the top, third, floor, and the east wing had the chapel on the first and the juniors’ and novices’ dormitories on the second and third. By now, however, Father Carroll knew he was right. He jumped up, crossed the corridor, and broke in on Father Sullivan, and he smelled smoke, too. Sullivan hurried down the stairs toward the kitchen to check and was confronted by a wall of flame. In this kind of crisis Jesuits, at least in New England in 1956, run to the men in charge —to wake the minister, Father Arthur B. Tribble, and the rector, Father Francis Corcoran; and then each man, without one duplicating another ’s efforts, took an initiative. They knocked on doors, remembered who was most vulnerable, sought them out, reminded one another to stay calm, called the fire department by means of the town switchboard , as the corridors quickly filled with smoke—first in a blue haze hovering about the ceiling light bulbs, then in dark, roiling clouds that plunged the corridors into darkness, then followed by the spreading flames. Among the calmest was Father Tom Kelly, a quiet gentleman of inner intensity. He was the first to reach the novice dormitory in the far wing, which the smoke and flames had not yet reached. He woke the manuductor (in Latin, one who leads by the hand), the head novice whose bed was by the door, and told him there was a “small fire.” The manuductor simply switched on the lights and told the novices, “Get up and go...