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3
January 3, 1957
The simple truth was my schooling ran like clockwork. I was seventeen, a senior in high school, four years into the seminary, and able to speak Latin and German. Year after year, I traveled from Misericordia once at Christmas and once in June for the three-month summer vacation to test my strength wrestling worldliness.
My return to my parents’ home always reminded me the world was out of joint with my spiritual life, my emotional growth, and my intellectual awakening. I could translate ancient Greek and Latin and modern German, but I could not break the code of life. Unlike Telemachus, the boy in Homer’s Odyssey who searched for his father, Ulysses, to learn how to live, I had to leave my family to learn my life.
My little brother, Thommy, was fourteen, full of war movies, eager to join the Marine Corps Reserve as soon as he turned seventeen. Thommy was distant from my parents and cold miles away from me. “You’re a fake,” was all he said.
I punched him on the shoulder. “How fake was that?”
I was seventeen going on eighteen going on twelve. We were Cain and Abel, like all the pairs of brothers in the movies where one wears Blue and the other wears Gray or one is a gangster and the other is a priest. We kept our distance.
“Ryan,” Dad said. He opened my bedroom door, tentatively, the way he always did at the end of my vacations. Brownie looked up at him with her big spaniel eyes, sighed, and put her old head down on my slippers. Dad moved some torn Christmas wrapping paper. “Mind if I sit here for a smoke while you pack?”
I pulled a stack of new T-shirts off my desk chair. My mother had sewed my laundry number in all my clothes. My number was 66 and the first day of every school year I had to introduce myself to the boy who was the new 99, because the freshmen boys who sorted our laundry, walking around and around wooden racks hung with five hundred laundry bags, rarely bothered to look at the red period dot sewed in after 66. Once a week, I had to meet with 99 to exchange clothes. There seemed to be a curse on 99, because 99 always seemed to quit or get shipped, and my underwear would disappear with the disappeared boy, and I’d be left with his jockstrap and stray socks.
My dad sat down. “I brought an ashtray,” he said.
“Would you hand me those four books?”
He handed over the Modern Library editions of Hemingway, Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. “You read too much, but I bet you’ll be glad to get back to the good old routine,” he said. “There’s a lot you can say for regular hours and plenty of sleep.”
I didn’t say it. I loved my father, but he had grown up on a farm before he married my mother, who insisted they live in a town. One set of my grandparents lived in an apartment. The other owned a barn.
He made business with his cigarette, casting silently about for conversation. “Really think I should go back with you. Yessir, that would be the life. Quiet. Regular. Like the farm.”
This joke he always made I always played along with, because I loved him so much. What we had in common was growing less each year I was gone from the world. Sundays I wrote long letters. Wednesday mornings Annie Laurie ran down the stairs to the green mail box on the big porch, read my typed pages once, then immediately again to my father over the telephone at his work. They bragged to their friends and to my aunts and uncles that my letters were talky and full, but they could not begin to fathom what it was to be away, as they always said, studying to be a priest.
“Here’s the last of your underwear and socks.” Annie Laurie put them on the bed. “I soaked them in practically straight bleach to get them white. What’s the matter with those nuns who do your laundry?”
“It’s top secret,” I said. “We don’t tell anyone what goes on there.”
Through the back of my mind raced the laundress-nun with her note in German that poor literal Father Gunn had read aloud in the refectory, asking if the boys would please stop blowing their noses in the sheets.
“You make it sound like there’s some big mystery,” she said.
I took the laundry from the bed. “Guess what?” I said. “There is. Dad’s going back with me.”
“Me too,” she said. “All that rest you’ll get.”
“Aw, Mom, they’d quick put you to work with the nuns in the laundry.”
“A beautiful woman like me?”
“Ever heard of Cinderella?” I said.
“Your mother as a nun? A German one at that? As if there’s a shortage of Irish nuns.”
Annie Laurie shook her head. “They’re DP’s, displaced persons.” She tucked my last book into the suitcase.
“This book?” my father said. “You’re going to be the priest, so you have to read everything, but won’t this book get you in trouble?”
“Maybe,” I laughed. “But everybody’s reading Grace Metalious. She’s ‘in.’”
“Peyton Place?” my mother asked.
“It’s no different than Peoria Place. The stuff that goes on around here!”
“Hasn’t it been condemned by the Church?”
I tried to act sophisticated. “It’s not exactly on Rome’s Index of Forbidden Books.”
“Priests have to read everything,” my father repeated. “A priest has to do what a priest has to do.”
“Some of your friends have read it.” I snapped the latches on my Samsonite suitcase. If ever a movie is made about Misericordia, the lawns, the buildings, the trees, the classrooms, the gym, the chapel, the boys and young men, all should look the way Peyton Place looked in the movies. Perfect. Clean. Crisp. The idyllic Technicolor Hollywood set.
“Every night this week, since New Year’s, we’ve had a houseful of company,” my father said.
“Ryan, everybody wanted to see you,” my mother said.
“I think everybody did.” I looked at her and she was tired from knocking herself out as a hostess. “This house was a solid procession of guests from Christmas Eve to New Year’s.”
“The more people you see when you’re home, the better,” she said.
“You need anything, son?” Dad asked.
“I have enough to open a general store,” I said.
In the bottom of my luggage lay all my contraband: three bags of Annie Laurie’s cookies, the extra books I could not resist, six 45-rpm records, and my shoe box. I pulled the suitcase to the floor and sat on the bed. I was beginning to work at the loopholes in moral theology. I couldn’t explain to them my smuggling wasn’t a sin, not even of venial disobedience, because it was no serious matter. This disciplinary, institutional rule was only penal law, not moral law. Lock and I had decided that. If caught, I would have to take the punishment. Simple as that. Despite Rector Karg always saying the better thing was to do the better thing.
Besides, reading about the human experience was learning how to be a better parish priest. I could always easily skip the dirty pages, because somebody was always eager to point them out. Besides, all boys knew if you set a library book like the Dictionary of Slang on its spine and held the covers between both hands and let go, the book always fell open to the dirty pages. So a boy could find them or skip them. Something like the dirty magazines in our neighborhood drugstore, Saga and Men’s True Adventure, which I’d never noticed, not once, not until Father Gerber warned us against them.
For a few moments we sat silent in my room, my father smoking at my desk, Annie Laurie and I on the edge of my bed. My spread was brown. I had requested the monastic reserve of that, but it was chenille by her choice. I ran my hands over its tufts, conjuring the cotton covers at Misery, all with the faded sameness repeating itself on eighty beds in row upon dormitory row. An equality was in that and an austerity over all. I ached to leave all the luxury my parents offered me. They could never understand that worldly attachments to chenille of any color might keep me from Christ in His simple seamless linen.
“Well.” My mother extenuated the word with a puff of breath, as if the grand show of the holidays were finally over.
Parents, I thought, never like to let go. I must remember that when counseling.
She patted her lap and rose. “We seem to have run out of things to say.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Or the right to say them,” Dad said, grinding out his cigarette.
“Mmm,” I said, wondering what they meant. I knew Rector Karg sometimes sent general letters to parents instructing them how to act as parents of seminarians.
They stood together near my door, waiting for me to speak or to rise, I didn’t know which. They so much honored my vocation that they had surrendered themselves to let go of me even before I was fourteen, about the same age as Jesus was at twelve when He got lost at the Temple and Mary and Joseph went crazy searching for their lost Boy. On my desk, the forest-green blotter lay slightly flecked with ash. My father held his smudged ashtray in his hand. It was an awkward scene.
“What movie is this?” I tried to lighten the moment.
Annie Laurie recouped. “Ryan, would you like some banana-cream pie before we go to the train station?”
“Cut me two pieces. One for the road.”
“Me too.” My father seized upon the offer of pie and coffee together. He put his hand on my arm, lightly, then his full arm around my shoulders, and they walked me down the hall. “Good as school is, Ry, I bet you won’t taste cooking like your mother’s for the next five months.”
“That’s sure. Not till after graduation. Just think, mom, I won’t have to eat any of your cooking. In fact, I refuse to, until I graduate from high school.”
They both laughed. Absurd time jokes were part of our kidding. We saw each other on occasions that were far apart. I was seventeen and winter would turn to summer before I would see them again. My birthday was in June. I had become a stranger to them, maybe even a mystery to them that they had to take on faith.
“Brownie can’t sit up and beg anymore,” Dad said.
“That dog,” Annie Laurie said, “can beg with her eyes.”
“Those great big beautiful eyes,” I said.
“She’s a good old dog,” Dad said.
Annie Laurie’s eyes glistened. Charlie-Pop sniffed and choked. Tears ran down my face. Poor dog. Poor them. Poor me.
“I always really miss you,” I said. I wanted to reassure them their loss of my adolescence, all of us bowing our will to the will of God, would gain them the honor of being the parents of a priest.
Leaving my life with them plunged me on my every return to Misery into aching homesickness. Still, we laughed over the pie and coffee. I felt sorry for them, storing me up, so obviously, for the rest of the winter and the whole of spring. My father ran his hand through my hair and down my neck to my shoulder and his touch was the sweet, strong touch of a father.
During the last four years, I had come home seven times, and still, despite the grandeur of their becoming parents of a young priest, they could hardly understand the days and nights of my new life. Their heads and their hearts had listened to sermons on detachment from worldly associations, but actually letting go of my hand after one last kiss at the train station was a great sacrifice. They believed me without reservation that I knew I had a vocation to the priesthood.
Their reward would be great as mine, each in our own way, having given up, on faith alone, father or mother or son for His sake. Oh, I wanted to reach out, to touch them, to take them away with me. Instead, I ate pie in silence. I loved them. I wanted never to leave them and their warmth, but Jesus was telling me to follow Him, and that it would not be easy. He had left His home to die on a cross. I had only to leave my home to go to a place where the priests promised to make me into an alter Christus, another Christ.
No one, outside the seminary and in the world, could understand such joy taken in such pain. I had to return from my visit to the world to climb the fourth of the twelve rungs toward the priesthood. With high school ending in the spring, I would be one-third of the way to Holy Orders.
Thommy came in from the garage. He wiped his hands on a red mechanic’s cloth. Charlie-Pop liked Thommy using his tools I couldn’t touch. “Take care of yourself,” Thommy said.
“You’re the one,” I said.
“See you in six months,” he said.
“Love you,” I said.
“Love you too.” He scooped up a piece of pie in his fingers and walked out.
At the snowy railroad station, from the train window, I watched my mom and dad, between the white clouds of steam, standing in the freezing wind. The heavy glass between us left nothing but the sad last wavings of good-byes. Annie Laurie moved her arm in the quick jerky fashion of women who are exhilarated by the cold.
I constrained myself, holding my palm up and out, pressing on the cold window glass, in a single immobile gesture. Was the cold suction on my palm worldly vanity, spiritual discipline, or movie-acting? Wearing my new clerical black suit, with other passengers watching, I could not afford any show of scandalous attachment unbecoming a seminarian. Priests and seminarians were supposed to set a good example when out in the world.
But deep inside me the vast homesickness welled to an ache of emptiness. I wanted my mom and my dad and my dog. Even my brother. I wanted to fill the void with something. I wanted God to fill it with Himself and His grace. Outside, Annie Laurie jumped lightly, twice, waving briskly while holding onto my father’s arm, as the train finally pulled away, leaving them on the cold platform.
The priests told us no vocation was given free. Anything of value has its cost, even with God. I paid the down payment on the price, my palm slipping down the cold glass, sadly, willingly, suddenly realizing my celibate life would always be pulling out of stations, steam, whistle, chug, movies, where I loved too much the world where I did not belong.
January 4, 1957
In deep snow, I returned in a taxi stuffed with six other senior-high boys to the red-brick mansions of Misery.
“Yeah,” the taxi driver had said, “the Divinity School.” Only a Protestant would call a seminary a divinity school. “Seven of youse boys is all I can take. What’s with all the fub duck suitcases?”
“Fub duck!” We all laughed. “Fub duck!” We could not stop laughing. Riding all the way back to Misery and up the formal drive where freezing freshmen with shovels were clearing the snow, we chanted, “Fub duck! Fub duck!”
The taxi drove off and we looked up at the huge front door of Misery. “Fub,” a boy said dragging his suitcase up the stairs. The Christmas vacation of our senior year slammed closed. Within two hours, Dick Dempsey and I witnessed a shocking scene between three priests that happened so fast that we ran for cover without losing a single detail.
“I’ve never seen anybody so mad,” Dick Dempsey told Mike Hager. He pointed toward the main entrance to Misericordia Seminary where Father Arnold Roth had made a scene. “Father Arnie went storming down the main hall, red in the face, blown up to twice his size, and stalked right out the front door, straight to his car, dragging two grade-school boys he had brought as visitors to see the seminary.”
The halls had echoed with the young priest’s shouts.
“Arnie struck a nerve,” I said to Mike Hager. “He stood up to that cadre of old priests and their prehistoric rules.”
“They think this world is their cloister,” Dempsey joked. “They’re so fub duck.”
Lock ran up the stairs towards us. “I was leaving Rector Karg’s office,” he said. “Arnie Roth told off Father Gunn right in front of Rector Karg. Arnie said it was too damn bad if the faculty couldn’t arrange for the two kids, as special guests, to eat dinner here with us in the refectory to see what seminary life is like.”
Father Arnold Roth, ordained from Misery only two years before, was from Mike Hager’s Wisconsin diocese. He had driven Mike in from vacation only hours before, along with two eighth-grade boys interested in the priesthood.
“Here I miss the fireworks after traveling with him all day long.” Mike said. “Those two kids are okay—one’s maybe too pious, you know?”
“Rector Karg and the faculty insisted Arnie eat in their refectory,” I said, “but they didn’t want those kids in there and Father Gunn refused to let them eat with us.”
“We might clue them in too much and scare them off,” Dempsey said. “So Arnie says what was he supposed to do with the kids anyway, leave them in the car with the heater running?’
Lock said he thought Arnie was even more rebellious as a priest than he had been as a seminarian. “That’s one great thing about Ordination to the priesthood,” Lock said, “they can’t get at you the way they can when you’re a lowly seminarian.”
“God,” Dave said, “I hope he’s angry enough to tell a few alumni something’s rotten here in lower Denmark.”
“I bet you Rector Karg writes Arnie’s bishop,” I said, “and fawns all around and says, Oh, your excellency, Father Roth came and acted uncharitably.”
“Karg can’t,” Mike said. “He’s got to maintain our sanctified institution’s sanctified reputation with all the bishops.”
“Yessss,” Dempsey’s voice hissed to a perfect mime of Rector Karg, his lower jaw thrust out, looking heavier than all the rest of his head. “Misericordia Seminary enjoys a prime reputation for turning out o-bee-dient, hard-working priests. In every diocese of the country where we have a Misericordia man stationed, the bishop is happy. Yet we must be ’umble, for only true ’umility can keep us that way.”
We all laughed at his imitation of the ashen-faced rector, who was a simple man, pious, Hoch Deutsch, High German, and very nineteenth century. Two weeks of Christmas vacation out in the world had passed since we’d had a good laugh together at an inside joke. Suddenly I was missing my family. The homesickness always swirled up a tornado sucking my breath away.
My heart melted toward my classmates because we shared the same goal. God had talked to each one of us, even the ones like Hank who made you wonder what God was up to. I loved them and I loved being with them. My heart leapt up. Sometimes I could forget the priests had warned us particular friendships could be somehow sinful, our times together could be so good.
“Be ’umble,” Dempsey mimicked and we roared again, so loud the echoes rang up and down the stairwell.
Hank and John Kowalski, outside our private joke, pushed past us. They carried a length of heavy pipe. “Out of the way, Ryanus,” Hank said.
“What you gonna do with that?” I asked. “Shove it up your own wry anus so you’ll have a happy new year?” Then I added, “Asshole.” Some words were more uncharitable than impure.
Hank banged the pipe against the railing and turned up the next flight. “Who writes Ryanus’s script?” he said to Kowalski. “Ski, baby, I remember, don’t you, when sweet baby Ryanus would never have said ass much less hole.” He dry-hawked spit down on us. “Ain’t none of your damn business what we’re doing.”
“Hey, big, strong, and stupid,” I said, “You’re a real two-ton Teuton. You’re a real tank. You’re big Hank the Tank.”
“Says you,” Hank shouted.
Hank and Ski disappeared around the upper landing.
“Why do you antagonize him, Ryan?” Mike said.
“Ryan gives as good as he gets,” Dempsey said.
“Hank, Hank the Tank, he antagonizes me.” I held my ground. “My dad says when I was three years old I stood on the sidewalk in front of our house and said to anyone walking by, ‘I’m rough and I’m tough, and I’ll beat you all up.’”
“Forget it.” Demspey pulled me around. “Let me show you what I smuggled in from home.”
Mike went on down the stairs to spread the Roth story. I followed Demspey off the stairs through the hall, a little mad he was so obviously changing the subject.
After he had stopped wetting the bed, Dick Dempsey got to be one of the most popular boys in our class, except with Hank, who kept doing things to him like putting a pair of panties he’d bought on vacation into Dick Dempsey’s bed. “What’s that word dick mean?” he’d say. “Is that a name or a description?” Despite Hank the Tank, or maybe because of him, Dempsey’s stock rose.
Some boys thought Dempsey was a saint.
Little cliques opened and closed and opened again. Gossip put some people up and gossip knocked some people down. Down was always easier.
Every boy had a reputation created by all the other boys. A whisper could cause a scandal or an ostracism. Any weakness in any boy was picked like a scab.
All of Misery watched with only one comment: “A boy needs to have his corners knocked off.”
My greatest fear, anxiety, and thrill was to try and find out what the other boys were saying about me behind my back. I didn’t want my corners knocked off. Who does? I was no Dick Dempsey, because Dempsey would do anything for any boy, even for Hank, sometimes, even, especially, for Hank who ruled him. His charity was noted by some of the priests.
Once in religion class Rector Karg asked Dick, what if some boy vomited in the study hall and Father Gunn told him to clean it up. We all, except Dempsey, started to laugh. He said, “I’d try to see Christ in the sick person and pretend it was Jesus I was wiping up after.”
Saint Dick.
“What’d you bring back?” I asked.
“Some records,” he said as we entered the senior locker room. “They’re in my trunk.”
The stowed luggage lay banked on racks against the wall opposite the door. In between in green rows stood the lockers, thirteen inches wide, seven feet high, with one shelf and a tie rack inside the door, stuffed with sweaters and jackets and black khakis. We used to be glad when somebody left Misery, emptying a locker, though using more than one locker per student was strictly forbidden by the mimeographed rules.
If Father Gunn or Rector Karg had known what happened right before Christmas, they would have wished all the lockers had been filled with clothes: one free afternoon four seniors jumped the best athlete in our class, ripped off his shower robe, and shoved him naked into an empty locker. Everybody thought it a great joke except the seminarian in the locker. He wasn’t released till after supper.
“Albums or singles?” I asked.
He pulled the records from his footlocker, shuffling through an Oklahoma soundtrack, Mantovani’s Music from the Movies, and three Presley singles.
“Gunn will never pass the Elvis records,” I said.
“I’ll play those when he’s sure not to barge in. He okayed Mantovani and Oklahoma, except for a couple of songs like ‘Everything’s up to Date in Kansas City,’ that he made me promise to skip when I played the score in the recreation room.”
The door banged open and he slipped the Presley singles into his trunk. Porky Puhl confronted us.
“Heil, Hierarch!” I said.
Porky didn’t laugh. Before vacation, in a class meeting, we had sent money to a missionary he didn’t approve. South America, not Africa, he had said, was where our first charitable allegiance should be. The Spanish Church was more deserving than the African Church. He called us immature and threatened to resign from the hierarchy of the class. We all stamped our feet and laughed for days. “Hierarchy!”
“A little contraband, I see,” Porky said.
“Records.” Dempsey closed his trunk. “Gunn approved them.”
“So did I,” Porky said.
“What? Approve them, or bring some contraband back?” I asked.
He looked hurt, as if he had been slapped trying to equalize something. He shifted his hierarchy across his fat shoulders, intending to “maintain it on our level” was how he’d say it. He never recovered from Father Gunn choosing him our class president the fourth day of our freshman year, and everyone realizing by the fourth month what a mistake that was.
“I came back with some educational reading materials.” He opened his suitcase, which hadn’t been unpacked. “Remember the clipping Rector Karg posted on the bulletin board last month about the Hungarian Revolt?”
“I read about it over the holidays,” I said. We saw no newspapers September to June. Television sets were so new and expensive that no priests at Misery had television, and even if stores had given sets away, television was too worldly for us to watch. The radio in our recreation room could only be turned on, by a priest, with permission, for sports or opera broadcasts.
“Look at these,” Porky said, producing a notebook pasted fat with clippings like nothing personal I ever had hidden in my little old shoe box of souvenirs from the world. “The Commies shoved the rebels through meat grinders and washed them out through the sewers. Look at this one, Madam Meatball. She shoved glass rods inside the men prisoners and broke the rod so they felt like they were dying when they urinated.”
“That I didn’t read,” I said. Could printed words about bad women cause impure thoughts like dirty pictures?
“Glass rods like chemistry class?” Dempsey asked.
“That’s nothing.” Porky retrieved the notebook.
“The sins committed in a country’s name,” I said.
“You bet your sweet life,” Porky agreed. “My brother was in the War and he says the Nazis nailed American soldiers to trees right through the groin.”
“Stop,” I said.
“Then tied wire around their waists to jeeps and drove away.”
“God!” Dempsey breathed.
“Do you guys know any more about this stuff?” Porky was breathing through his mouth.
“It sounds like the sufferings of the saints in The Roman Martyrology,” I said. Every noon, as we sat looking down at our meal, a priest read aloud how the early Christian martyrs were tortured and killed. Saint Agatha had her breasts torn off one day, and by the next lunch, forty Roman soldiers who had converted to Christianity were left exposed to die naked on a frozen lake. “All of them perished,” the Martyrology said, “except for one soldier who renounced Christianity and then died anyway in a bath of tepid water.”
Suddenly, the room shook.
I jumped, almost knocked from the trunk rack. A loud crashing came from the storage room directly above us: metal, and bits of metal, falling on the concrete floor above and rolling in every direction.
Dempsey and I ran from the locker room.
Porky sat staring at us.
We ran up the stairs. The door was locked. “What do they do in here?” I said. We pounded on the door, then listened.
“Locked doorssss,” Dempsey said in his hissed Rector Karg imitation, “are not permitted at Missssericordia.”
“Where’s Porky?” I whispered.
“Still downstairs catching his breath,” Dempsey said.
I pounded again. No answer.
Another smaller piece of metal fell, rolled, was snatched up into silence. Someone inside giggled and someone else told him to shut up. I recognized Hank and Ski. Ha! Caught! Perfect! I pounded again to make them uneasy. Someone shifted close to the door, then moved away.
Dempsey whispered, “Gunn better not find out they locked one of Rector Karg’s blessed doors. You can get shipped for locked doors.”
We fled on down the stairs. Porky waited for us outside the locker room.
“Ski and Hank are up in the storage room with the door locked,” I said to him.
“Not smart,” Porky said. “Nobody gets shipped if nobody tells.”
“What’s going on?” Dempsey asked him. “What are they doing?”
“Lifting, that’s all,” Porky said.
“Lifting what?” I wanted to know.
“Weights Hank made, Jerkwater,” Porky said. “They’ve got these muscle-building magazines from Charles Atlas.”
“Oh,” I said. “What do you know!” If I ever wanted to get even with Hank for anything, I had him right where I wanted, behind what Father Gunn, USMC, disliked most, a locked door. “So what do you know,” I said. “Hank the Tank has fub duck.”
February 1957
Saturday our classes ran until lunch, and our afternoons were free until our five-o’clock study hall. Gunn programmed Saturday afternoons down to fifteen-minute play-and-work periods. His intramural teams did double-duty for the Father-Treasurer as paint-and-scrub crews, washing out the jakes, or painting window sashes in periods between their games. Ski’s team painted while Hank’s played basketball until two-thirty when they reversed their positions.
During the autumn of my first year, all ninety of us freshman boys alternated playing football and dismantling an old brick house on Misery’s property that had been part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. It was kind of fun and kind of spooky, especially around Halloween, going down into that cellar and feeling the souls of scared black folks running away, escaping, free.
We chipped all the white mortar off all the red bricks, and loaded each others’ arms up with six to eight bricks, and carried the bricks a hundred feet to a big truck, and then ran back to be loaded up with more bricks. From the twenty-story bell tower, we must have looked like busy worker ants. In the deepest snows, our lines of boys carrying bricks circled around a big bonfire to keep us warm. By the spring of that freshman year, some of us could carry ten or twelve bricks, balancing them, and running toward the truck.
“Ora et Labora” was the rule: “Pray and Work.” Ora et Labora had been the monastic rule in the Middle Ages. The senior boys warned us snidely that the German translation at Misericordia of “Ora et Labora” was “Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes you free.”
At work and at play we were platooned like Gunnie Gunn’s Son-of-a-Gunn Marines, kept moving and busy as boots. He blew his whistle and signaled us out onto the field, no equipment but the mud and the goal posts and the ball he tossed us. I didn’t like getting knocked around to begin with, but Gunn drilled us all to play because, after we got ordained, one of our main jobs, he said, would be coaching grade-school teams, because athletes made the best recruits for vocations. That seemed reason enough, but I liked it even less my junior season when Hank the Tank kicked out my two front teeth during our big annual Thanksgiving game, “The Misery Mud Bowl.”
In the fourth quarter, our clothes sucked so wet with mud we could hardly move. Mud caked our faces, twenty of us, our breath heaving out in wet puffs of steam, point, set, hike. I looked up at Hank’s pink hole of a mouth wide open in his face, his big shoulders, back, butt, legs, behemoth rising from the mud, coming toward me in the slow-motion of muck, deliberate, aiming himself, his big boot, toe-first, into my teeth, and in the melee of the play, our side gaining a yard, less than a yard, but gaining, no one noticed that my beautiful teeth, so protected by my mom and dad, shined white, shot white, uprooted, falling from my bruised lips through the mud and blood spitting out of my mouth.
Afterwards, after the shock, after the blood, after the dentist, after my permanent dental bridge, after my parents paid a lot of money, Peter Rimski said, “It sort of makes you feel like a real jock to be able to brag your teeth were kicked out in a football game.”
“Yeah,” Hank the Tank said, “and you were sitting in the stands.” Ka-boom!
I hated Hank Rimski so much it would have been a mortal sin except I couldn’t help my own true feelings. He had injured my body permanently. My hands were perfect, but my front teeth were not. His kicking out my teeth was our secret. I never reported him, because I didn’t want to give him credit, especially when he said he did it on purpose. I was afraid of what he might do next.
The pecking order was pecking.
Father Polistina, our classical Latin teacher, began calling on me every day, five days a week, in a class of thirty-eight boys.
Singled out, I prepared my translation of Cicero’s Pro Milone. Daily I had to be ready to stand up in my desk, the second desk in a long row of six desks, and line-by-line recite my translation and explain the grammar, sometimes for twenty minutes of the hour.
“Be prepared,” Lock warned. “Polly’s got it in for you.”
During my recitations, oftentimes the four or five boys in the row of desks behind me horsed around, joking, putting their feet on the desks in front of them and, slowly pushing with their four or five sets of legs, shoved the connected row of desks, with me standing in the row, forward inch by inch, foot by foot, until the boy in front of me, the boy in the front desk was only twelve inches away from the face of Father Polistina.
“Polly hates me,” I said to Lock. “And I hate him. What did I ever do to him?”
For reasons I could not divine, Polly Polistina found my mere existence fearsome, but to me he was only another kind of bully. I vowed he’d never win whatever contest we were playing. He would never catch me unprepared. I honed my daily Latin class performance always to earn B’s and sometimes A’s. I grew to love my slow-shuffle advance toward Polly as my classmates pushed the row of desks, causing me to tip-toe baby-steps closer to him every day, inch by inch, two feet up to his face.
Father Polistina, Misery’s mystic, was a mystery to me, but I obeyed him, studied for him, and hated him, personally hated him for personally hating me for no reason at all.
I thought about the priestly mystery behind things the priests made us do. Especially in the shower. I could go in a stall and be alone, the only time I really was unseen by someone. I could pull the plastic curtain and listen to the water run down all over me, not minding the flaking paint on the Army Surplus sea-foam-green walls or the voices singing four different songs in the other stalls. It was worth it to play a hard game, or endure the slave labor on the free afternoon, to get to take a shower and be alone.
The luxury was kind of a reward, a treat added to the maximum two showers a week. I dawdled a long time even though Rector Karg counseled us to enter, briskly scrub down, towel off, and exit. He said not to luxuriate.
But I refused to hurry, even when other sems scuffed by in shower shoes impatiently flicking, hard, harder, hardest, at the plastic curtains with their towels, or sloshing buckets of pee over the shower top to drown boys in sport. I wasn’t luxuriating or interfering with myself or polluting myself. I was drenching myself in privacy, wondering at what Lock termed the nondirective failures of the priests. I was simply being alone for a while in the wild communal world of boys.
The shower and the Confessional were almost alike, except the priest was there to listen when I went to confess twice a week, late on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” I was kneeling.
The darkness of the Confessional smelled like the wet hair and aftershave of the seminarian who had confessed in the box before me.
“It’s three days since my last Confession.” Outside the heavy green curtain, I heard the shuffling sounds of the thick-soled, thick-souled lines waiting to confess. Through the Confessional screen, I saw the priest bent over, his ear close to the screen, an inch from my mouth.
“These are my sins,” I whispered into his holy ear. “I’ve especially been watching against sins of uncharitableness and have fallen fifteen times since my last Confession. I was inattentive at morning prayers twice and was careless in saying the rosary three times. For these and all the sins of my past life, especially sins of disobedience, or any unknown sin of impurity, I am heartily sorry.”
I looked at him, the side of his head, the white hair crested well back on the crown, hoping this time he would say some secret code word that would unite the natural in me with the supernatural outside me.
“My son,” he said from beneath his hand, “you do well to guard against sins of uncharitableness.”
I locked my fingers together in front of me.
“For it was uncharity that condemned Christ to die so ignominiously on the cross. His precious blood was spilled to fill that very cup of charity that we must offer one to another.”
I reached up to touch the crucifix hanging above the screen which framed the priest’s profile. My fingers, my priestly thumb and forefinger, touched the painted body of Christ crucified and I thought, “I hold Him now as I will hold Him later in the Host.”
The priest hissed at me horribly, “Young man! What are you doing? Put your hand down!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was very sorry I had the longing to touch.
“Be quiet,” he said. “Pay attention! For it is in loving others that we love Jesus. In others, we find Jesus.”
“I love Jesus,” I prayed. “Directly, I love Jesus.”
“Are you deaf, boy? I told you once. You can’t love Jesus directly. You can only love Jesus through loving others.”
“Forgive me for that then too, Father.”
“For your penance say three Our Father’s and three Hail Mary’s. Now make a good Act of Contrition.”
“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, My God, who…” I touched my fingers contritely together on Jesus’ feet, hoping the word would come.
“Knock it off,” the priest said, and slammed the slide closed across the screen, leaving me in darkness while I finished.
“I firmly resolve,” I said to the closed screen, “with the help of Thy grace to sin no more, and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
The screen slid open. “Go in peace,” he said. Again the screen slammed shut.
I said, “Thank you, Father” to the dark, stood up off my knees, and with a swimming breast stroke pulled open the heavy green curtain and walked out through the twenty lines of three hundred repentant boys waiting, shuffling, murmuring outside the ten Confessionals.
I knelt in a back pew near a pillar. The medieval dark was musk and damp as March. I shivered watching the far-ahead flicker of the red sanctuary lamp casting shadows through the darkened church across the marble altar. Once again a priest had failed to say any key word. Perhaps no one would ever tell me. Perhaps boys who never heard any word of revelation lacked a true vocation. Jesus could not pass by like that, words unspoken between us. I’d find the words to Jesus directly: with nobody between Him and me.
The Lord would take me.
Oh Lord, do take me. My life. My vocation. Wreck me. Break me anew in You. Bring me close to You and Your Virgin Mother and pronounce me a priest forever. To hold You in my hands, having said the consecrating words, while the world crashes in its own violent sins around us. To move out through the streets, to the sick and to the sinners, carrying You in my heart. Oh God. Jesus God. Let the priests themselves deny me the way to You. I’ll only crawl onward on hands and knees to Your altar rail. Crucify me with fewer words than You spoke crucified. Let me will nothing but what You will. Let my will be Your will or Your will be my will—or however it goes. See, Lord, I can make jokes with You and talk to You as my friend and brother. You are all I have. My whole family is You. Your souls must be my children because I am not like other men. Let me suffer the fearful violence of Your life in my life. And, Lord, the one thing, oh no, the only thing I ask is You deliver me safe from the awful temporal possibilities of temptations. I’m afraid to be too free. I might change or be changed and lose You. So if anything should ever go wrong, I don’t, if I should commit a serious sin and be about to die, I beg You to remember, don’t want, that this once, this actual moment, I loved You intensely, this pleasure, with all my heart and soul and never really meant to take my heart and soul away. Save me, Lord, from the fires of hell. Oh, omigod, take me, Lord. Take me now into Your changelessness.
In the phosphorescent dark, the sanctuary lamp flickering light without heat, real as anything, breathless, I slipped down onto the pew, half-kneeling, half-sitting, hardly breathing, excited, gasping for air, panting, that the whirlwind of grace had passed, leaving me sated and triste-ful, a mystic in the Mystical Body of Christ.
Outside the chapel windows the soft urgent cry of doves soothed me against the ruzzabuzza praying of other seminarians entering and exiting from the ten Confessionals.
When the supper bell rang in the church, I walked down the unheated terrazzo stairs to the refectory vowing to speak no uncharitable words to anyone at the table, under penalty of eating no dessert in reparation.
March 15, 1957
The Ides of March
Eight of us boys sat at each table, three to a side, a single at both ends. Every day a different boy started the big plastic bowls of steaming food. Gunn had regulated the drill after a feud at one of the tables grew to such proportions that for almost a week the south end of the table had only potatoes and dessert cookies while the north, who always marched into the refectory first from chapel, hoarded the meat and bread and vegetables and milk. Gunn heard about the feud when the leader of the south stabbed the leader of the north in the hand with a fork. From then on, Gunn himself ate alone, standing on a raised podium in all his Marine Corps presence, keeping watch that all the food started with a different seminarian each day, traveling clockwise, seconds returned counterclockwise, hardly ever making it a third of the way back.
Of the twenty-nine tables, we high-school seniors sat farthest from Gunn’s platform, exemplars to the younger juniors, sophomores, and freshmen of Absolute Silence, while a priest read to us, over the clatter of silverware on china, from the Lives of the Saints and from spiritual books like Thomas Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain and The Life and Death of Maria Gorretti, the newly canonized Italian saint who at eleven, no, it’s a sin, had been killed by her rapist, Allessandro Serenelli.
We ate seven hundred meals September to June listening to the readings in silence, except for Saturday and Sunday nights, and lunch on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays when we were encouraged to practice the social graces we’d need living in our future parish rectories with other priests.
At silent meals, after saying grace, the last boy to be served that day was allowed to call, in the sign language of food, his tablemates’ portions. When we could speak, boys announced, “Fair share is two scoops of the noodles and whatever the meat in it is.” A miscall meant his starvation. If he were cunning, he could call a fair-share portion small enough to insure that he received a double share before the counterclockwise return. Noodles were hard to capture in two scoops, but hungry boys created tricks like loading a tablespoon with a balanced stack of eight apricot halves while suctioning an extra bonus half onto the bottom of the spoon. Hank invented that, and Porky perfected it.
Gunn, always knocking the corners off, realized how his carefully planned seating arrangements threw mismatched boys together. Inevitably Hank sat across from me, sometimes with Ski and a few of the joy boys from the farm crew, or worse, the elegant boys from the choir, glee club, and opera society who ran around singing snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan like they were always starring in Misery’s all-boy version of The Mikado.
“There’s a new prof coming next year,” Hank the Tank said. “Peter told me.”
“We’ll have him for history.” Ski ate like a Clydesdale horse.
“His Ordination picture’s in an old yearbook,” Dempsey said. “I saw it.”
“Looks full of tricks, doesn’t he?” Porky Puhl asked.
“He’s a friend of Arnie Roth who’s no longer a friend of the faculty,” Hank said, “after that shouting scene over those boys.”
“Pass the bread.” Lock was not interested in the gossip.
“I think he looks tricky,” Porky insisted.
“Bull!” Hank said. He skimmed the enameled metal bread plate across the table toward Lock. “Peter says he’s a real good guy. He can tell.”
“How?” I asked. “White horse? White hat?”
“Funny as a wicker bedpan, Ryan, that’s what you are,” Hank said.
“Compared to the professors we have now, anybody’s better.” Dempsey ticked me off sometimes agreeing with his own enemy. I liked him better talking about movies or something innocuous like his family’s peanut farm and how one summer during a drought it was so hot they planted hay in Lake Dallas.
“Look! It’s alive!” Ski pulled a hunk of meat, gristle organ attached, dripping with gravy hemorraging from the noodles. “What is it?” He threw it down on the plastic tablecloth. It wriggled and shook and I turned away.
Porky muttered something low. Boys nearby laughed.
“What’d he say, Lock?” Dempsey asked.
“I couldn’t care less,” he said, “about the cheap double entendre’s.” Lock was senior class president and an A student, who had spent the previous Christmas and New Year’s with his pastor, who was his mentor, at a ritzy hotel in Havana, Cuba, where they had seen stage shows that were probably a mortal sin, at least for me, because at the New Year’s eve show at the Tropicana Hotel, a nearly undressed showgirl had been dropped into Lock’s lap and make-up smeared on his good suit.
Hank, who had spent Christmas in New Jersey, pushed his plate away after two helpings. “They call this food?”
“Look,” Lock said flatly, “I went to Gunn officially last week and complained about the food.”
“So go again.”
“The kitchen nuns need time to reorder.”
“It’s your duty as class president,” Ski said to Lock.
“I’ve got a lot of duties,” Lock said. “Lay off.”
“Those Hun-nuns from Deutschland only give us more of the same.” Hank was working his way up to one of his stentorian scenes. He took a plastic serving plate and licked the lead of one of the dozen pencils he always carried with his slide rule in the plastic pocket at his chest.
“Tank,” Ski said, “what you doing?”
“Writing a note to the kitchen.” He licked the pencil again.
“Chills, thrills, and vibrations,” I said.
“What’s it say?” Ski asked. “Let’s see.”
“We want food,” Hank read, “real food—no more of this crap Kraut Schweinscheit, German pigshit.” He held the lettered plate up to view. “Sign it, Ski.”
Ski looked at us. This was about choosing sides.
“Go ahead, chicken-dick, sign it.” Hank the Tank shoved the plate at him. “I signed it.”
Ski took the pencil and signed it. He handed it with the pencil to Porky. They looked at each other, then laughed. The plate passed hand to hand around the whole table, gathering signatures, even Dempsey’s. Lock set the plate down, decisively, unsigned. His good example was enough for me.
“Hell, “ Hank said, knowing better than to push more than his match. He picked up the plate from where Lock had placed it. “Go on, Ryanus. You chicken-dick to sign?”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because if you all jumped off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone has to applaud.”
“Come on, Ryanus,” Ski entered in, “You chicken to do something for a change?”
“Say ‘chicky-dick,’” I said. “That’s the way Hank the Tank says it. ‘Chicky-dick.’”
“Why won’t Baby Ryanus sign it, why not?” Hank patted my arm.
I arched my elbow sharply at him, clipping his shoulder.
“Watch it, Ryanus.” Hank held out the plate. “You sign this or I’ll pound the living shit out of you.”
Deep inside my chest, my vagus nerve twitched, the way my dad said his twitched, full with adrenalin. I half rose. “Try it,” I said, “and die!”
Everybody laughed.
“Try it,” I repeated.
“Sign it.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Hank the Tank knew full well I would sign nothing he had cooked up, not even a good idea. “You’re nothing but an ass-kisser,” he said, “Gunn’s ass-kisser.”
“Kiss mine,” I said.
“Bare it.”
“So you could sign your name there too? Fool’s names, Hanko, and fool’s faces are always found in toilet spaces.”
“Eat shit,” he said.
“Then what would I do with your clothes?” If there was one thing a boy learned in the seminary, it was the snarling way to use his mouth.
Far across the refectory, Gunn rang the bell signaling us to stack the dishes at our tables’ ends. The clatter of two hundred of us high-school boys passing china and silverware began. I touched the underside of my fork handle to a blot of mustard and passed it directly to Hank.
He winced like an old maid when the mustard soiled his fingers that were more mechanic’s than priest’s. He cursed and tried to wipe his hand on my black sweater. I pulled my chair away. He glared. Daggers, crude like angry boys draw in notebook margins during class, shot from his eyes.
The stacking noises died and we sat in silence, turned at various angles to hear Gunn’s announcements, rising finally to stand for the prayer, “Grace after Meals.”
“Grace after Meals. Grace before Meals. That’s how Prince Rainier likes it.” The funniest thing about Hank the Tank’s level of humor was how funny he thought he was. “Monaco is a state of Grace.”
“A pun is the lowest form of humor.”
In the cattle crush of boys funneling to the narrow refectory exit, Mike Hager, seated at another table, had already heard about the fight.
“What’s going on?” he whispered.
“Mutiny,” I said.
“Why didn’t you sign it, Ryan?”
“You’re kidding,” I said, not turning my head.
“You could have been one of the boys.”
Hank the Tank stepped hard on the heel of my shoe, pulling off my loafer. It was an old trick, done every day to break someone’s syncopation in the fast march-step of seminarians double-file down long hallways. I wheeled. The two of us stood, stock still, facing each other smack in the middle of the silent crowd of boys pushing out the door past us. My tongue licked across my two new teeth. In the free-for-all fury of the Mud Bowl, nobody but me knew exactly who had kicked me in the mouth. He knew. I knew. But I never told anyone. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He was afraid to claim the bragging rights.
His kicking out my teeth gave me the power to get him shipped anytime I wanted. So did his locked door.
The secret bonded us.
“Screw you,” he whispered.
“You are more pathetic than boring,” I said.
Around our little movie scene, the crowd of milling extras sniggered.
“Silence in the ranks!” Gunn yelled from half across the room. “Close up the file or I’ll bring you all about-face.”
In a high-pitched ventriloquist-whisper into the fist of my thumb over my forefinger, I said, “No! No! Not that! Not the ‘about-face.’ I might turn and see Hank.”
All the boys near me laughed into their hands and into the crooks of their elbows.
I turned and walked out.
Hank the Tank was hard behind me as we filed two-by-two up the stairs, into the chapel where we all knelt together for our after-supper visit to the Blessed Sacrament.
March 17, 1957
Saint Patrick’s Day
In the refectory, after supper, on the Feast of Saint Patrick, Rector Karg, in his schnapps, ordered me up the ten steps to the lectern, all the boys looking up, and made me sing “Danny Boy.” Ha ha ha.
The Irish, Karg liked to say, missed twenty-five percent of Catholic history, because the Micks were pagans until 500 A.D. In the last election for U. S. president, when all the priests liked Ike Eisenhower, Karg had not liked me liking Ike’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, because he was governor of my home state. If Karg had a wrong side, I was always on it.
“Sing ‘Danny Boy’ again,” Karg commanded. “This time, louder, in German.” Ha ha ha.
Lock stood up and joined me, and saved me.
March 19, 1957
Feast of Saint Joseph
Two days later, in the middle of lunch, Father Gunn, the once-and-always Chaplain to the United States Marine Corps, strode like a Fury into the refectory. He rang the brass hotel-desk bell on his table—pounded it repeatedly, a touch of urgency—to silence the grand Peter Rimski who was reading from the Martyrology about the Patron Saint of Dentists, Saint Apollonia, the Egyptian martyr. After the anti-Christians broke out her teeth with pliers, she was given the choice of renouncing Christ or being burned alive, so she leapt onto the fire herself. Saint or not, she was no miracle worker, because when I had prayed to her, spitting mud and blood out of my mouth, she had not saved my two front teeth.
Gunn himself climbed up into the lectern. A shaft of noon sunlight blazed down on him from the high Gothic window. He and his strawberry toupee glowed in a dazzle of a thousand-watt divine wrath.
He held a plate.
“You’ll never hear the end of this,” Mike Hager whispered to me from the next table.
“Saint Apollonia,” Lock whispered, “had it easy.”
The priest elevated the gray plastic serving plate above his head as if he were elevating the Host saying Mass. “This,” he said, “is the height of vulgar ingratitude. The good nuns are shocked. They were in displaced people’s camps. And you shock them! The Father-Treasurer is beside himself with anger. We brought those nuns here, rescued them from those camps. And yet you, you, you insult them!” He read the inscription. “This seems to be the best that educated young Catholic gentlemen can do.” He flourished the plate. “Who is ‘Tank’?” he shouted.
He knew. Everyone knew. Everyone looked at Hank squirming next to me. He was a boy big in size trying to make himself very small. He raised his arm up, sheepish, not very far.
“Stand at attention, Mr. Rimski,” Gunn ordered.
Hank’s chair squawked back across the terrazzo floor and he stood.
“Who is ‘Porky’? We know, don’t we. Stand up, Mr. Puhl.”
Three names later, five boys of our whole table of eight were standing in ignominy except for Lock and Dempsey and me. Every eye in the refectory turned toward us.
“Hey, Tank,” I whispered. “You fub-duck.”
He looked his famous daggers at me.
Gunn studied the plate, then looked down upon the room, the tables spread with the interrupted noon meal. “I need not say,” he said, “how outraged Rector Karg has become at this terrible insult to the good sisters. It must be Providence that this note was found. Providence that the dishwashing machine did not scrub off the vulgarity, letting us discover at last the low ingratitude I always knew lurked among you. You come from nothing and we try to make you into something.” His strawberry hair flashed in the sunlight as he rocked from one foot to the other.
“Gott in Himmel, God in heaven! The good sisters try,” he said. “God knows they try with what time and money Rector Karg gives them. Anyone taking grievance about their valiant efforts certainly lacks the worldly detachment necessary for the priesthood. You should know the real hardship of soldiers at war, of nuns at war. Then you might appreciate what’s given to you.”
He began the Father-Treasurer’s story of the blind German lady, but I hardly heard him, remembering Hank’s bravado the night before. I started to laugh because Hank and his cronies stood shamed by the fable of the little old lady’s quarter. I laughed harder and harder, Gunn up in the lectern waving the plate, unable to see me, because of the five disgraced boys standing all around me.
Lock poked me, worsening my laughing jag. “Nuns at war!”
When Gunn announced that the gang of five had to wash every window and every light fixture in the high-school building, even if it took all their free time till June, I dropped my head to the table. Tears rolled down my face. I was on the side of the angels. Maybe Gunn was right about Providence. This was almost a sign of something.
Lock poked me again as Gunn stormed down upon us. I regained some composure while he broke up the table, moving into exile, at a disciplinary side table, everybody but me and Lock and Dempsey, who the night before had, sly as a fox, rubbed out his signature during the “Grace after Meals” with the blot of mustard from my fork.
April 15, 1957
Even Hank the Tank looked a little broken after a month of climbing ladders to wash the high-hung electrical fixtures, especially when the first warm spring weather blew up the river valley to the hill. So long after the offense, the five disciplined boys began to gain a general sympathy. Misery had more than two thousand ornate light fixtures. Lock, as class president, had knocked on Father Gunn’s door to get the stiff sentence commuted. The priest refused out of hand. He cautioned Lock not to abuse his position as president in matters that concerned higher discipline.
“Gunn is really down on the class.” Lock felt dejected. “Karg backs him up.”
“Hank caused it,” I said.
“But it seems more than that,” Lock said. “I thought we had Gunn to where he’d listen to us, or actually hear something about what’s happening to us.”
“That was earlier, much earlier, this year,” I said. “It’s probably the same hope every senior class begins with, to win the disciplinarian’s heart.”
“Institutions don’t have hearts,” Lock said. “None of the faculty wants our opinions. But I thought we could change Gunn’s personal hard-line attitude and maybe achieve an actual ‘first,’ a high-school graduation this year. That’s what I’ve been working towards. A graduation ceremony could symbolize our intellectual progress toward the priesthood. But no! Last night, Father Gunn told me in no uncertain terms there will be no high-school graduation this year, because there has never been a high-school graduation at Misericordia, and as long as there is an Ordination Day, there will never be a high-school graduation, because our focus at Misericordia is on the priesthood, and that, he said, closes the subject.”
The next day the breach between students and faculty became even more strained. Gunn stripped Porky Puhl’s last tatters of hierarchy. He shipped him out of Misery, on an hour’s notice, for performing a scientific experiment on some sophomores.
Porky had put eight boys—each in a separate shower stall—and measured their privates. One kid got scared and told in Confession to a priest who refused him absolution until he told Gunn.
After that Gunn treated us like we all knew, I mean really knew, what Porky had done in the shower and all. Father Gunn rounded up the bunch of us senior boys and wondered, he said, about group guilt and one bad apple. It was one of his longest spiritual lectures, lasting over two hours.
Lock sniggered that Porky must have really been concerned about “the shortage of priests.”
April 16, 1957
Late the following night, after lights out, I slipped out of the dormitory in my pajamas and robe. I carried my hard-heeled bedroom slippers in my hand until I stood barefoot outside Father Gunn’s dimly lighted door, where I stuck my toes into them and stood on my sloppy crushed heels. I knocked and knelt down on both knees on his threshold.
He opened his door and looked down at me, kneeling, looking up at him. “Tell me,” he said, “everything.”
“Father, I think you ought to know…in view of what’s been going on and all that Hank and Ski…Mr. Rimski and Mr. Kowalski, that is…have been caught locked in the storage room…Sometimes Porky Puhl was in there with them. They’ve been exercising, I guess, is all they’ve been doing, because here’s this book I found on gymnastics that’s from the library stacks. It’s been taken out without being stamped…Also there were some, I think, secular periodicals, health magazines from Charles Atlas, stuck under the stored mattresses until yesterday, but today they’re gone, except for this one called Tomorrow’s Man.”
To keep from smiling, I ran my tongue over my bridge of front teeth.
May 1, 1957
What I hadn’t figured was how cleverly quick Hank could be appealing to German discipline. Gunn was so impressed with Hank’s quick-flexing explanation of physical fitness that every boy in our class had to come up with seven dollars, so Hank the Tank could order us each a rubber strap with a handle on both ends to build up our chests and lung capacity. For the first week, our senior-class wash room, where twenty wash bowls stood side by side under a wall of mirrors, was dangerous with boys holding the red rubber strap straight out at arms’ length and stretching—three, four, five, ten repetitions—till our faces exploded.
Hank the Tank, of course, had no trouble pumping the red rubber strap that looked like he was stretching a huge hot water bottle.
I waited my chance and when Hank the Tank was at full explosion, I snapped my red rubber strap like a locker-room towel at his backside and we both went chasing down the stairs, falling over hooting boys.
May 24, 1957
Lock called a senior class meeting and announced that we deserved to celebrate our high-school graduation with an actual ceremony. Dick Dempsey made forty-two diplomas out of typing paper, lettered them, and rolled them up. We all came together in our senior classroom the last Sunday afternoon in May. Actually, our intellectual independence was sad. Lock and Dempsey tried to make the occasion solemn and real. Father Gunn refused to come. The other priests said they were busy grading final exams or preparing for Ordination, except for one priest, who came and stood uneasy near the back door and left, embarrassed, as soon as all the rolled typing paper was distributed.
He was a young priest, new that year, quiet and unreachable. Maybe he ran out on us because it made him sad we were just a bunch of kids, just kids, trying to make something out of something that was forbidden. Lock, pleased that at least one faculty priest attended, ad-libbed into his valedictory speech that he was glad some older, more adult interest was being shown us.
But I felt more like a kid than ever, even if I was graduating, facing another summer in the world. I made up my mind. I was seventeen, about to be eighteen, feeling my innocence ridiculous. I had to know. One seminarian from Philadelphia was playing forbidden race records, Negro music, like Mickey and Sylvia singing “Love Is Strange.” I was intellectual enough to know. I wondered how strange. I geared myself up and made up my mind and went without stopping to the priest in the Confessional and asked him point blank how it was done, how the two, like Charlie-Pop and Annie Laurie, got together for sex.
He told me all it was, and it was somehow terribly disappointing, because I had felt some tedious obligation to know one of life’s big secrets.
Trying to be pure had been terribly difficult, because I had no idea of what the temptation was supposed to be. Sin had something to do with girls, but no one spoke clearly.
I had to know what it was besides interfering with myself that celibacy required I give up, so knowing that, I could leave it, not needing it, and be free to search in myself for the priestly self that needed finding.
My need to know was real enough. My mother wrote me a special letter. Charlie-Pop was so proud, she said. She was pregnant. I could hear the pitter-pat of little feet walking in to replace me.
They could have asked. Thommy was bad enough. I felt the way all first-borns feel, forever falling from being the only child.
“We’re so happy with you and Thom,” she wrote, “we thought we’d try again.”
May 29, 1957
“I’ll never forgive you, Ry-baby!” Hank the Tank jumped down from a ladder, his hands wringing a wet rag he threw at me. “I’ll never forget.”
He had me cornered on the third floor alone.
“Don’t say anything, baby. You talked enough already. Ski and me came near to getting shipped out of here. Twice, because of you. And we would have, yeah, you would have succeeded, but my father’s name saved us. Rector Karg didn’t name you as choir boy, baby, but we all know, don’t we, what you are and what you sang to Gunn. Don’t flinch up. I’m not even going to threaten you, O’Hara baby. You’d only run and sing again. You’re so effing pure. No man, I don’t need to threaten you. You’re so busy playing white knight to that pansy Dempsey, because I ride his tail. You wait till I ride yours. You like your new teeth? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Fub your fub duck. I’m gonna fuck you up.”
“Try it,” I said. “You expect me to knuckle under? To you? I mean, how do you want me to play it? Get down on my hands and knees and worship you by burning incense in your big belly?” I threw the wet rag back at his face. “You found your vocation: washing light fixtures. Like father, like son. Your father washed out of Misery. What do you expect?”
“Not what I expect, O’Hara. But what you don’t. This time you got me big.”
“Confession,” I said, “is good for the soul.”
“You’re supposed to confess your own sins.”
“Oh,” I said, “I always get that mixed up.”
“You’re gonna get it from me in the ass when you least expect it.”
“I think my Confessions always are about my own sins.”
“Remember that, baby—when and where you least expect it. And never mention my father again.”
June 1, 1957
Baiting Hank the Tank was a thrilling contest. Hank and his crowd of glee club and choir boys and opera fans had those kind of ecclesiastical ambitions that made me wonder what was God’s point in such a calling of such a lewd boy with such social-climber friends who all seemed like they were having forbidden special friendships, always together, the way Father Polistina—who could have caught mystical fire for all I cared—never went anywhere without Father Yovan, who taught theology, and had a giant body topped with a head even so much more giant he seemed deformed, even though he was overall very handsome. As if the priesthood itself weren’t elevation enough, Hank’s crowd wanted to be monsignors and bishops and cardinals, and Porky had wanted to be pope.
Actually, what is a vocation, but making the improbable probable?
God told me I had a vocation.
I told people God told me that and they all believed me.
As those years in Misery’s high-school department changed into four years in Misery’s college department, doors opened and closed. Many boys quit. Many more boys were shipped out. The priests were shaping the next generation of clergy. Some boys like Hank the Tank began to work the church-strings that would set them up for the four last years in Misery’s theology department, and then in their diocese for life.
One older seminarian, everyone knew, had already played his cards right. He’d be a grand priest, they all said, a very young bishop, and an astounding American cardinal, called to Rome itself, and he’d be a boy from Misery. I understood his ambition, but I had studied his face and wondered under his impeccable grooming what was his secret heart.
We all knew how to reach Ordination to the priesthood, but I wondered about our personal identity and our individual integrity, and who that older seminarian really was behind the pose, the mask, the vestments, the incense, the music, the candles, the lighting, the architecture.
Hank’s clerical ambition seemed to me to be a worldly vanity, because he was the kind of boy who, having survived public disgrace, could only rebuild himself up by tearing other boys down. In the end, I figured, even a priest had to confront his human heart.
June 6, 1957
As soon as I arrived home, as if she’d been waiting for me, Brownie died.
My poor little dog. Asleep forever. Sometimes when I was five or six or ten, I forgot you with a small boy’s carelessness. Many’s the time I buried my tears in your fur, laying my head on your warm and curly side. Sitting those last afternoons, reading, with you lying in the cool ground-cover of my parents’ back yard. You lifted your head, looked at me, and rested your nose on your paws. Nearly fourteen years old. Ninety-eight in human years.
Finches and butterflies flew around the still pair of us. What a lovely afternoon was the last afternoon. I put my bare foot on your left forepaw. You looked at me and smiled, yawned, and put your nose down on my toes. I touched your head and said, “Such a good girl. You’re such a good dog.”
She was in no pain, but she would not eat. Last night I put my forehead to her forehead and said, “Whoever you are in there, I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you. I’ll keep you easy. You’re still here, honey dog.”
Starting on this somber little journey, where goes a little dog’s soul? Moving inexorably to the inevitable. Soon no more cold wet nose resting forepaws on my mattress edge each night. You love me. Only you love me. No more being watched as we eat until the last fork is set down on the last plate, and you stand up for your turn. Your last night on earth.
My little dog died last night. I sat with her, breathing heavy and staring at me until 3 AM, finally falling asleep until at 4:30 she called out in four rising cries: mmm, Mmmmm, MMMmm, MMMM! I bolted up and held her, lay with her, comforted her, falling asleep together, knowing in the morning we’d have to decide something, falling deep asleep on the floor, holding her, waking at seven with my father, kneeling next to me holding her, rousing me.
Brownie? Brownie? She was dead. Still warm to my touch, kissing her, holding her, until my mother came with a red wool blanket and we all knelt around her, crying, stroking her familiar curves, our fingertips touching in her fur. “Our little girl is gone.”
Her shoulders were still warm, her paws still so soft and tender. Her eye caught the light, but she was not looking at me.
I clipped some brown fur from her soft neck. My father brought his wheelbarrow. My mother cut bouquets of flowers from the yard and we lay the flowers, red and yellow and purple and pink, and fresh green leaves, all around her beautiful brown body, and wheeled her solemnly into the shade under her favorite tree where together my father and I shoveled silently in the brilliant light of a warm June morning.