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6
Winter 1961
The pages ripped off the calendar like months passing in an old gangster movie. In February, to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day, we watched Glenn Ford in Torpedo Run. In March, the movie for Saint Patrick’s Day was canceled because of Ash Wednesday.
“We have to keep it bent for Lent,” Mike said.
He was no closer to his vocation, but I was. Mike’s questioning of his vocation clouded his quest with even more doubts. My questioning my vocation drove me closer to my calling, my surety in the priesthood. It was Lock, not Mike, who first lost interest in prying into the case of Father Dryden. No boy in our college department admitted to anything even worth telling in Confession. Seminary life thrived on hot juicy gossip that was forgotten with the new scandal of the next day. But about Father Dryden the talk was all about the golden priest.
“I was rash,” Mike said. “I got excited.” He shuffled around. “I guess Gunn’s military methods have gotten more to me in eight years than I like to suspect. Father Dryden’s a good guy after all. Very intellectual, satirical, ironic. Maybe I took him too literally.”
“You’re as literal as a fundamentalist Protestant,” I said. “Never accuse me of confusing literature class for life again.”
“I never…”
“You always make fun of me when I tell you one thing can mean two things.”
“Father Dryden is a strange man,” Lock said, “but a good one. He’s opening the intellectual window to blow some air through this place.”
“Thank you, Sherlock Holmes,” I said, satisfied, and went off, grateful everyone was being true to his vocation and obedient to the purity required. I knew unprovoked nocturnal emissions were not sin, but I never touched the deep sweet privacy of myself. I let God and nature surprise me with the natural nights in the throes of sleep. I woke with only vague images, saying, “Oh, my God, I take no pleasure in this!” Impure imaginings quickly disappeared under the icy shower spray. Quick towel. Buffing. Secrets ever silent. Temptation. Thoughts. Star. Starlet. Starlet’s chest.
Our new Jesuit spiritual director, Father Sean O’Malley, S. J., suggested that impure thoughts could be driven out by thinking analytically of something else: how many boat trips to get four elephants across a river if the boat can only hold a thousand pounds and the two grown elephants each weigh a ton-and-a-half and the babies five hundred pounds apiece.
In Father Yovan’s class in Moral Theology, five hours a week, two semesters, everything was either good or bad. A morality to everything. Nothing natural allowed for priests. Uuh. Nothing unnatural allowed for Catholics. Uuh. Amorality was worse than immorality because amorality was nothing, neither hot nor cold and worthy to be vomited from the mouth of Christ. A moral dimension for everything. No situation ethics. Nothing ever neutral or what personal subjectivity made of it. No private interpretation of the Bible: look at the Protestants’ Bible-thumping problem with that.
No telling ordinary Catholics, because the laity doesn’t understand specifics, that Rome discreetly permitted abortions in cases of rape or incest, because the fetus was an unjust intruder inside the woman’s body, so she could use self-defense.
No allowance for imagination while discussing in Monsignor Undreiner’s droning class in Dogmatic Theology, six hours a week, two semesters, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I shouldn’t have asked Monsignor Undy what style of dance? Ballet? Modern jazz? I received good grades in the Introductory Sermon class, but Undy warned me away from too much creativity.
I looked up at him over the pages of the forbidden book I was reading in his class, under his nose, Fifty Stories by Ernest Hemingway, and said, “Yes, Monsignor.”
May 1, 1961
By May first, May Day, the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, in the month dedicated to the Mother of God, we were very near final exams for our last semester in college. Because Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary, was a carpenter, Rome honored him on May Day as a retort to the Communists’ celebration of May first as International Workers Day. French priests honored Saint Joseph as a patron saint of worker-priests.
Lock and I hardly bothered that our exams would determine which of us graduated at the top of the class. Our college graduation’s real import meant we had eight years down and only four years till our day of Ordination to the priesthood. The last third of the way to the priesthood was all that was left. Making it to Ordination was our work. My goal was to become a worker-priest living in a bare room, praying, helping the poor and the sick and the dying reach peace in this world and heaven in the next.
I stood on the edge of Misery’s pond, Lake Gunn, where my crowd hung out, listening to Lock and Mike, not watching them. The Ohio twilight lingered longer in the spring evening. On the smooth mirror of water, Misery’s tower and its lights rocked upside down on the surface, disturbed only by night creatures. The full moon hung low enough to touch twice: once wet, once dry. It washed down the beautiful slate roofs of Misery far up on the hill. Bats, whipping through the air, swooped close to the water’s surface, visible for an instant, then lost in the darkness rising from the pine woods around the small lake.
“Forgive me, Ryan, for telling what happened,” Mike said. “Lock and you.”
I laughed. “Something happened? Nothing ever happens.” Oh, God! I suddenly realized this was one of those awful spontaneous Confessions. “What happened?”
His eyes glistened. “You and Lock,” he said, “will understand. You said something’s got to happen to you this year, Ry. Well, something happened to me.”
“Dryden!” Lock said.
Mike nodded. “Today for my regular conference—every Thursday I see him—I told him: ‘It’s the end of the year almost. I want to really talk to you.’ He said, ‘We have been talking.’ I told him, ‘You’ve got to help me. No one else is here to help me.’”
Mike had the Catholic need to confess details I can recall more vividly than a movie, but then the story was told and retold so many times it became a famous scene, an inescapable, probably obligatory scene in the history of Misery.
“Michael,” Father Dryden says, “we’ve worked all year, changing your doubts into, well, an examination of what actually is a vocation to the priesthood. The puzzle is solvable.”
“Solvable?” Mike asks. He lights a cigarette.
“I think you’re afraid of your feelings.”
“You’d be afraid of them too.”
“Michael. Michael. You’re so much unlike everyone else. And so much like me.”
Mike sits silent before the ornate desk and the Italian ceramic in the tasteful drawing room lit only by the small pools of light from the mica shades on the copper lamps.
“What do you think has been my mission here at Misericordia this year? I have caused this institution to vibrate. I have come back to bring it freedom.” He leans intent over his desk. “Why do you think I work an eighteen-hour day, by my own choosing and authority as a priest, counseling enough of the student body to keep three full-time counselors busy?”
Mike sits silent, biting his lip.
“Are you going to sit not saying anything?” Father Dryden leans back and laughs. “You little fool. You poor little fool. You think you’re going to come out of this with Ordination bells ringing. Well, Michael Joseph Hager, I am going to be honest with you. I am going to be so honest with you your head will reel.” He leans forward over the ceramic. “But you’ve got to trust me.” He pauses. “Will you trust me, Michael?”
Mike nods.
“You are afraid of your Self, Michael. Afraid of your body.”
Mike shakes his head.
“Of course. You’re thinking of all those things you told me. That business of the girl at the lake and so forth. But don’t you see, you only did that because you were running scared.” Dryden stands up and walks around the desk. “I know, Michael. I know how it is. I was once the same my Self. When I was a boy, my father locked me in a broom closet for fourteen hours because he caught the child next door examining my body.” He sits on the desk and leans over Mike. “Which do you suppose was worse? The examination or the punishment?”
Mike blows out huge flumes of smoke. “What did you do?” Mike asks.
“I found my own true Self,” the priest says. “In that tiny broom closet, I began to find my Self. After years of guilt and torture, I found my Self.”
“You found yourself?”
“Yes. My Self. And the seminarians that come to me? I let each find his own Self. Gnothi sauton, Know thy Self. After that, the rest is easy.” Dryden walks across the room to a closet door. “Stand up, Michael.”
Mike rises.
“Jesus loves you, Michael. Body and mind. Jesus loves you.” He opens his closet. “Take off your cassock, Michael.”
“Why?” Mike asks.
“I want to hang it up. I want you to look at your Self. Here in this mirror on the door.”
Mike hesitates. He begins to unbutton his cassock.
“Trust me,” the priest says. “This is different than you think.”
Mike hands him the cassock. He sees himself standing in the mirror, black khaki trousers and white T-shirt.
“Jesus loves you, Michael.” Dryden stands next to the mirror. He and Mike’s reflection stand together. “Your body is good, Michael. Good as your soul. Jesus loves both, because both are you. Jesus loves you. Do you believe that, Michael?”
“Yes,” Mike says. “Yes, I believe it.”
“Do you believe your body is good, Michael?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Have you ever looked closely at your body, Michael?”
“Yes. Kind of, well, athletically, like, am I strong enough for football.”
“Take off your shirt, Michael, and look at your body.”
“I don’t really think I should,” Mike says.
“Relax, Michael. Your virtue…”
“Yes, Father.”
“Virtue.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Virtue comes from the Latin word, vir, a man, a male, the quality of a man, goodness. Trust me.” The priest advances a step. “Jesus cured many by virtue of His touch. Open your shirt. Let me touch you, Michael. Give me your shirt.”
Mike retreats behind a chair.
“Don’t be afraid,” Dryden says. “Trust me.”
“Look, Chris, I’m twenty-one-years old. I don’t think you’re right about this.”
“You’ve got to believe.” Dryden spills a stack of Holiday magazines across the floor. “The others believe.”
“I’m not the others,” Mike says. “I’m myself. I have that much identity.”
“I’m a priest and I love you as I love the others.” Father Dryden’s bright eyes burn in his athletic face. “You’ve all been isolated here with no adult attention. Now you wonder what is the connection between a priest’s natural body and the chastity of his soul. The other priests touch your intellect. You let them. The spiritual director guides your soul. You let him. But none of those priests really loves you. A priest needs to love the persons under his care. They need to know a priest loves them. Really loves them for what they are.” He falls kneeling to the floor looking up at Mike. “Michael, I love you for what you are. A real priest loves you, loves you all.” His hands palm-to-palm implore Mike. “Michael, you must experience true ens-qua-ens, true being-as-being, true beauty, true virtue, true manliness, true Self…”
In the May moonlight, Mike turned to Lock and me. “I knocked over his palmetto fans, dodged him to grab my cassock, and beat it out the door. That was two hours ago.”
The smell of sin was fresh. My breath came short. I wanted to plunge my body like a hot poker into the cold pond.
“What a scandal!” Lock said.
“Why did you tell me, Mike?” I said.
“Finally,” Lock said, “we see the tip of the iceberg.”
“I hate stuff like this,” I said. I walked away.
“God, Ryan,” Lock said. “You’re such a damn baby.”
“Sure,” I said, “and you’re Lochinvar Roehm, Vatican Detective.”
“Dryden admitted,” Mike said to Lock, “there are others. A lot of boys try…”
“Don’t say it!”
“…expressing themselves and if they feel guilty, he hears their Confession.”
“Uuh,” I said.
“Absolutio complicis,” Lock said. “If a priest in Confession absolves his accomplice’s sin, he violates Canon law.”
“And commits a mortal sin,” I said, “so they both require forgiveness from yet another priest. It’s endless! I…don’t…understand…this!”
“I can’t tell Father Gunn or Rector Karg,” Mike said. “I’m trapped. I can’t lie. I actually dropped my pants.”
“They have to be told,” I said.
“But Mike can’t do it,” Lock said. “Don’t you see? They’d suspect him, because he went so often to Dryden for private conferences….”
“You dropped your pants?” I said to Mike.
“I can’t lie.”
“…It would be Dryden’s word against his…”
“You dropped your pants?” I said. “You can’t tell the truth either.”
“…It can’t be Dryden’s word against his.” Lock turned to me.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because,” Lock said, “this is Byzantine, Roman, and maybe very Vatican II.”
“We need someone who was never alone with Dryden.”
Both Lock and Mike turned to me.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me.”
“You qualify, don’t you?” Lock asked.
“So do you,” I said.
“You handle it, Lock.” Mike begged him. “This has to be handled right. I might or might not have a vocation, but I don’t want to get shipped. If I leave, I want to leave by my free choice.”
“You handle it, Lock,” I said. “You’re the most respectable seminarian at Misery.”
“You’ve got clout,” Mike said to Lock.
“You’re actually ship-proof,” I said. “You’re the golden boy.”
“I bet you, Lock,” Mike said, “those old priests would believe anything you said.”
“This is a temptation,” Lock said, “to vanity.”
“That’s better than impurity,” I said.
“But harder,” Lock said, “to resist.”
Mike swore us both to secrecy, which we sealed by each throwing a rock into the mirror of the lake sending Misery’s reflection out in loony rings of moonlight.
The next afternoon, after Hank the Tank and his bevy of choir boys and sacristans had erected a lavish white silk May altar, the annual May Crowning of the Virgin Mother wound in long procession through the main chapel. In crisp white surplices over black cassocks, wearing our black biretta hats foursquare on our heads, we carried a hundred vases of lilies and lilacs and peonies and roses in procession to the statue of the Virgin Mary, singing in unison to the Mother of all priests.
“Bring flowers of the fairest!
Bring flowers of the rarest
from garden and hillside
and woodland and dale!
Our full hearts are swelling,
our glad voices telling,
the praise of the loveliest
Rose of the vale!
Oh, Mary, we crown Thee
with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels!
Queen of the May!”
The next morning, Lock entered Rector Karg’s office. From down the corridor, Mike and I spied Rector Karg rise quickly and close his ever-open door. Within fifteen minutes, Lock came out for Mike. “You have to go. You have to tell.”
“Why did we have to tell at all?” Mike said. He started running down the hall.
“Why does anyone confess?” I asked. Lock and I ran with him. Our cassocks whooshed around our legs.
“In a school,” Lock said, “where five hundred boys each go to Confession twice a week, you better confess to cover yourself.”
“Lock’s right,” I said. We ran around a corner. “That’s how Porky Puhl was caught.”
“Confession is perfect, isn’t it,” Mike said, “for controlling a bunch of boys.”
“Tattletales,” I said. We picked up speed running for a stairwell.
“Dryden was right about one thing, at least,” Mike said. “Communists and Catholics both rely on informants.”
“But why do we have to tell?” Mike said.
“Because,” Lock said, “we’re good Catholic boys.”
“It’ll be the Inquisition all over again,” I said.
We stampeded up the stairs as if we were somehow going to escape.
Mike disappeared into Karg’s office. Doors banged shut. Mice scurried into holes. Sanctuary candles flickered. Priests whisked down hallways and disappeared.
Lock and I sat through the day’s classes fearful that parts of the precious world of Misery were about to blow. Around our ears. After eight years of being good. A month before college graduation.
“I wonder,” Lock said, “how many seminarians took, uh, interpretive dance lessons from Dryden?”
By supper Mike had returned. He looked terrible at table, but he hadn’t been shipped, at least before supper. Maybe he could make it to our graduation.
Hank the Tank nosed around Mike’s disappearance. “Where were you all day? You missed your classes.”
“None of your beeswax where he was,” I said.
“Mike had an appointment with the doctor in town,” Lock said.
“He has polio,” I said.
“Simple as that?” Hank made his bubble gum smack.
“Simple enough for you,” Lock said.
“Drop dead,” Hank said. He fisted his closed thumb and forefinger up against his belly and belched.
Everyone laughed, ha ha.
After supper, Lock cornered me. “Tomorrow, Rector Karg is bringing in the Bishop himself. Mike and I both have to sign depositions to the Holy Office in Rome. Keep pretending you know nothing.”
“I really don’t know anything.” I feared our very innocence might be used against us. Like The Crucible. Awful to be accused of something you did. Worse to be named something you weren’t.
“We’re under oath,” Lock said.
“They’re acting fast,” Mike said.
“Festina lente,” I quoted the Latin maxim. “Make haste slowly. That’s what they will do.”
“Chips will fall where they may.” Lock looked worried. “Heads will roll.”
The little sanctuary of our lives ignited with anxiety, tension, and excitement. The drum roll of changes coming from Rome was interrupted by the whispered scandal we could not name. Priests fighting over Vatican II suddenly closed ranks. Purity was stronger than politics. Purity was ancient, legendary, basic. We had no words to discuss what could not exist. I knew purity was somehow at the heart of the Dolce Vita matter with Father Dryden, but how he had tempted Mike in his room threw my imagination akimbo. All the priests and all the boys once again knew something I didn’t know, and I was too afraid of losing my purity to ask.
Mike had dropped a rock onto the still, perfect, mirrored surface of the deep waters that were Misery. The rock splashed and sank hard. Concentric rings rolled out across Misery’s identity. For three breathless days, I saw priests skulking through shadows in the halls, whispering, and disappearing into rooms where we boys were not allowed. From our watchful vantage point, I was actually happy that the usual dissension among the faculty decreased as the priests prepared a united front for the coming investigation into what Lock called “The Secret Life of Misericordia Seminary.” Yet, in reality, the secrecy was so tightly managed that even Hank and his gang of vigilante altar boys failed to notice how Mike and Lock appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
“I can keep,” I said, “the seal of the Confessional.”
“We can’t tell you,” Mike said.
“If the Bishop knows you know,” Lock said, “you’ll get shipped.”
“So you don’t know anything, do you!” Mike laughed.
“I know nothing about what you’re talking about.”
“God made us,” Lock said, “and He matched us.”
They both laughed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“We’re worse off than Dempsey ever was,” Lock said. “How did we become the Friends of the Friendless Friends?”
“Fub,” I said. “The Fubs of the Fubless Fubs!”
Hank the Tank, yodeling Gregorian chant, ticked up from his hymnal, eyes alert. “I sniff the blood of long knives,” he said.
“You sniff your own shorts,” I said.
Hank noticed that the Reverend Father Christopher Dryden was sick and confined to his ornate rooms. The following Sunday afternoon Hank tried to sneak up to see him, but a do-not-disturb sign hung sideways from his door knob, and an old retired priest sat half-asleep on a chair by Dryden’s door.
“What happens to priests when they get old?” I asked.
“They die,” Lock said.
“I mean before that.”
“Not much.”
“That’s cynical.” Father Gunn preached that cynicism ruined vocations.
“As you live, so shall you die.”
“I can live lonely, but I don’t want to….”
Led by Father Polistina, Misery’s priests showed up on the hour for each and every class, keeping to the Latin grammar and the Church history and the geometry theorems and the philosophy texts exactly. Discipline ruled work and work was ruled by prayer. Our school year ticked like the clock. Tick. Tick. The humming big hand crossed the little hand. Tick. Tick. Tension mounted, yet nothing extraordinary seemed to be happening. Tick. Tick. Classes dragged on toward final exams in Greek, physics, and the philosophy of German Idealism. I wanted to go home to Charley-Pop and Annie Laurie and Thom and my four-year-old sister, Margaret Mary.
In the halls at Misery, I posted flyers announcing “The Theology Students’ Year-End Musical Concert” for the next Sunday night in May. Whatever performer had been scheduled was not canceled.
“Appearances are everything,” Lock said.
In the auditorium, I pushed Mike and Lock into theater seats directly in front of Hank the Tank and Ski Kowalski, so we could sit real tall, rock back and forth, hold up our programs, and generally obscure their view of the stage, because Tank’s brother PeterPeterPeter was singing. The last of the student audience was filing in.
We heard Ski ask Hank, “Where’s Dryden? He’s late.”
“He’s either feeling better or he’s dead,” Hank said deliberately. “Chris never misses any student function.”
“Ain’t that the truth!” Mike whispered. “Function! Function! Who’s got my function?”
“Shut up,” Lock said.
I turned around in my seat and waved my program in Hank’s face. “Your favorite priest is scheduled right here to play piano in the second act.” I pointed to Christopher Dryden’s name on the program I had mimeographed only the day before. No priests had dared break their secrecy by telling me to remove his name. I had received the typed original before the unspoken scandal broke. No priest said not to print the bill, and I couldn’t very well suggest editing out Dryden’s appearance without indicating I knew he was being ostracized. Or disciplined. Or worse.
“Chris will play as promised,” Hank said. “Plague wouldn’t stop him. Peter said Chris knows the show must go on.”
I looked at him: “Why must the show go on?” I repeated the sentence five times with five different inflections.
“Shut up,” Hank said.
“Hank’s suspicions are dangerous,” Lock whispered to me. “He knows we know something.”
“If Chris doesn’t show,” Hank said, “I’ll bet ten to one he’s finally in Dutch with the powers that be.”
“The powers that be!” Mike repeated.
“Oh no!” Lock said, “Not the powers that be!”
The auditorium lights dimmed.
Hank hit me on the back of the head.
I slapped him across the face with my program.
He popped his gum and belched.
“Stop it,” Lock said.
“Chris is forbidden to eat with the other priests,” Hank said to Ski.
The Misery pit orchestra of six boys hit the overture with bass and drums and piano and a blat of trumpet. The stage lit up on PeterPeterPeter, dressed like the Music Man, pattering out “Trouble. Right here in River City.” Oh yeah.
“What?” Ski could not hear.
“Forbidden to eat…aw, wait till intermission,” Hank said. “Watch my brother.”
PeterPeterPeter ran and danced across the stage. I was jealous of him, or any boy who could sing and dance, but I was glad I couldn’t because I felt sorry for boys that men out in the world might think made strange priests. Bing Crosby playing a priest in a movie was different from a priest playing Bing Crosby in a parish. PeterPeterPeter tap-danced his way off the stage to the wild cheers of all the seminarians.
The Theology Choir walked out on stage and climbed the three steps of the choir risers singing a romantic German drinking song, “Du, Du Liegst Mir im Herzen,” then burlesqued themselves with “Wunderbar.” The auditorium burst into applause and the applause rose when Father Gunn announced to the audience that the Reverend Mister Peter Rimski, who was only two weeks away from final Ordination to the priesthood, was making his last stage appearance at Misery.
Amid the polite applause, Lock and Mike and I cheered. “Good-bye! Good luck! Good riddance!”
The Theology Choir, arranged in three rows on the risers, parted in the middle, as PeterPeterPeter appeared on the top stair. The Choir applauded him. The stage lights dimmed as one of the vigilante altar boys in the light booth hit PeterPeterPeter with a pinpoint blue-white spot causing PeterPeterPeter to shimmer vibrato like an angel singing on the head of a pin, “Ave Maria.”
“Gounod,” Lock whispered, “is not good enough.”
Hank the Tank leaned forward, his tobacco breath between our two heads. “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”
The whole choir joined together for a selection of difficult Palestrina, concluding with an upbeat medley from the Broadway musical Camelot. When PeterPeterPeter burst into a histrionic “If Ever I Would Leave You,” waving good-bye to the Misericordians, Lock and Mike and I were practically busting a gut laughing. We had more fun, off with our secret little crowd, singing along with Tom Lehrer, “Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!,” satirizing Vatican II to the tune of “The Vatican Rag.”
At intermission, I stood alone near Hank, who was holding court in the lobby.
“Chris is in Dutch with them,” Hank said. His eyes burned holes into me. “Peter told me the whole long scandal.”
Ha! Hank the Tank didn’t get it!
“They’re all mad he’s brought fresh air into the place. The structure can’t abide his civil disobedience.”
Lock came up to me and stood with his back to Hank, listening to him.
“The faculty won’t even let Chris eat with them,” Hank continued. “All because he’s so intellectual and has done so much for us.”
“I saw Chris back in the kitchen tonight,” Ski said. “He didn’t say anything. He kept eating out of a quart box of ice cream near the freezer.”
“Peter says that’s all he’s eaten for days. He has to raid the kitchen.” Hank pulled his fan club in closer. “Gunn and old Rector Karg and their clique never did dig his ideas and now they’re rebelling against him.”
“Because,” Lock said, “they can’t rebel against Rome.”
“Because of Vatican II, Chris has to eat it raw?” Hank the Tank said.
“You eat it like they feed it,” Ski said. “I know how this works.”
“Maybe this time…” I paused to yank their attention. “Maybe this time…they’re shipping a priest!”
Phlewww! Hank blew raspberries at my idea. “Ship a priest! Ryanus!” Tank of the Imperial Roman Empire was entertaining his courtiers. If any boy was going to tout gossip, it was going to be him. “Misery gives you the dirty end of the stick. You eat it or else.”
Was that the definition of a vocation? Eat it or else?
“Chris was crazy to come back to teach,” Hank said. “Really off his nut. He knew what Misery was like.”
“Isn’t that why he came back?” a sophomore boy asked. “If the alumni don’t cause change, who will? He’s sacrificing himself.”
“He’s a regular martyr-saint,” Mike said. “He missed the triple crown: virgin-martyr-saint.”
“Most of us will get ordained,” the sophomore said. “We’ll leave Misery behind and forget it.”
Hank spun the sophomore’s idea. “Our seminary years will be the best years of our lives.”
“Because,” Mike said, “we’ve such poor memories.”
“After I’m ordained,” Ski said, “I’m blowing the whistle.”
Everybody laughed, ha ha.
“Like hell,” Hank swore. “Your bishop will crap daily so you’ll always know where your next meal’s coming from. You’ll never tell anybody anything about the inside dope of seminaries.”
“What priest would?” Lock said. “Seminaries make us weak, dependent on the institutional Church for bed, board, and shelter. We obey, because where would we go? We’re unemployable. How would we live?”
The foyer lights flashed.
“Worker-priests know,” I said.
“Mark me.” Hank the Tank’s eyebrows that had begun to meet in the middle glowered ominously. “Something’s going on,” he said. “The old guard is afraid of Chris’ intellectual revolution. They don’t know how to handle this new, serious, Christianity. I know what this is.”
“What is this?” Mike Hager said.
“This is all nerves about Vatican II.”
Like Meredith’s nerves during World War II.
Christopher Dryden was a no-show in the second act. At the grand piano, a high-school boy with four thumbs and nine fingers substituted for the missing priest.
The next morning, the old priest sitting guard outside Dryden’s suite was gone. The chair was empty. Hank dared knock and push on the door. He came running back to our classroom. “It’s locked,” he said. “There’s no sound. It’s like no one’s there.”
“They’ve martyred him,” Ski said. “Behind our backs, they’ve martyred him sure.”
Lock looked at me dramatically, as if to say, Oh God. Rector Karg had privately informed him and Mike that, last evening during the concert, about the time the dearly departing PeterPeterPeter was transfiguring his way through the “Ave Maria,” Father Dryden had been cornered in his apartment, buckled into a straightjacket, and driven off to an institution. They were to tell no one, but they told me about his complete nervous breakdown. They put him in the booby hatch tied up next to Russell Rainforth.
The next four days were final examinations. The tension caused by the mystery of the missing priest raised conjecture to a fever pitch. Ski made a candle-lit shrine out of a can of Dryden’s tennis balls you’d have thought were third-class relics. In a closed community where everyone knew everyone else’s business, for once no one had anything right.
“This is being handled very badly,” Lock said.
“What exactly is a nervous breakdown?” I asked, genuinely, because I had long feared I might have one.
“A nervous breakdown is what people say you have,” Lock said, “when you don’t agree with them.”
“And,” Mike said, “when they can’t get rid of you any other way.”
Mike’s mother and father, Julia and Doc, always said his sister had a nervous breakdown.
“Sometimes what you have,” Lock said, “is a nervous breakthrough.”
“A nervous anything,” I said, “can cost a priest his vocation.”
“Wrong,” Lock said. “A vocation is a personal calling from God. Lots of men have vocations to the priesthood, but not everyone answers, or is allowed to answer.”
“You think Christopher Dryden has a vocation?” I asked.
We stood looking at the bulletin board. Gunn had tacked up new specific mimeographed rules. He renewed the ban on fiction books, and, backed by the faculty, stipulated only textbooks and authorized collateral reading in our rooms. Protestant and Jewish theologians, who had crept in during the year, were collected by very senior boys and locked away in a cage in the library.
“Pogrom,” I said. “Inquisition.” Philosophers like Paul Tillich and Martin Buber returned underground with the transistor radios. “Do not ask the ‘I’ for whom the ‘Thou’ tolls.”
“Karg and Gunn are missing the point.” Lock was disgusted. “Never throw the baby out with the bath water.” He was tearing up a copy of Sartre which in itself was Sartrean. “Rules of grammar and laws of theology they understand, but anything modern proves they’re more medieval than this wonderful new Pope.”
“But look at their logic,” I said. “The worst sin has indicted the whole progress of theology.”
“Vatican II and Father Dryden. Sheer coincidence.”
“Were those priests spying on us all year?” I could imagine Gunn and Karg rooting through our underwear drawers, flipping through my notebooks, picking at my treasures in my shoe box. “Dryden maybe proves them right in their caution.” Many boys’ rooms in the last twenty-four hours had been ransacked. “Dryden ruined whatever he was trying to do.”
“You never liked him,” Lock said. “Ever.”
“He scared me.”
“You’re amazing, Ryan. What is it about you? It’s like you can smell a sin of impurity at a thousand paces. I’m not sure that’s a virtue.”
“I hated him, even though he breezed through in a fresh way.”
“Dryden’s ruined everything,” Lock said. “At least because of him everything’s ruined.”
“He told us,” I said, “about T. S. Eliot, and then he went and did the wrong thing for what reason I don’t understand.”
In the room, the boys come and go, posing for Michaelangelo.
“Rector Karg has acted even worse,” Lock said, “handling this situation with all these gossiping boys. Old-guard priests don’t like to see the new-guard church replacing them.”
“Maybe,” I said, “Father Dryden really did nothing wrong. No more wrong than me translating Häring. Maybe he’s only a symbolic target.”
“But Mike said…”
“Mike has a great imagination. Nobody has actually proven Father Dryden committed any sins. In my vocation, I want to be sensible about hysteria.”
“Ryan,” Lock said, “If you write stuff like that in our moral psychology exam tomorrow morning, I’ll graduate top of the class.”
“You want to fight for number one?” I said. “You can have ‘Valedictorian, Misery, college class of 1961.’ Help find me an extra packing box. Tomorrow I’m taking home anything they can object to. I’m purifying my life.”
“Ryan, you’re afraid too, aren’t you?”
“It’s ironic. The minute I started to understand the requirements of a vocation to the priesthood in the Catholic Church…”
“Deep down,” Lock said, “you feel maybe Gunn and Karg and all the old fogies in this sterile hothouse are right to hold off change.”
“A vocation happened to me this year,” I said.
“Ha! You…don’t…want…to…change!”
“I don’t know whether I’m protecting my vocation running with them or from them.”
“There’s many kinds of priestly vocations,” Lock said.
“So which kind’s mine?”
“You’ll be the first beatnik priest. That’s the beauty of the new Church.”
“As God is my witness,” I said, “I will be a priest, and if you want valedictorian, you’ll have to kill me.”
Lock jumped me with a full nelson. We wrestled and laughed and ran down to the swimming pool and raced each other in furious laps through the slapping bright chlorine water.
Hank the Tank stuck his head out of the lifeguard’s booth and flicked the overhead lights on and off. He was stealing a pair of flippers to go swimming himself down at the river, where he and his kind had started to hang out to separate themselves from our crowd, who had taken over the pathway circling around little Lake Gunn.
“I dare you to come race me down at the river!”
He turned the pool lights out.
“I’m the king of the river!”
He slammed his way out the door, and left us bobbing in the dark.
May 31, 1961
Three mornings after Mass, which I offered up so I’d score good grades, I carried my school books and suitcase to our rented car. Mike was to drive a Ford with three passengers to Chicago, drop us individually on Randolph at the Greyhound Terminal and for trains at Union Station and LaSalle Street Station. I hung around Mike’s car under the mulberry trees, waiting for him to come unlock the trunk. He had packed everything he owned, finished with Misery and the priesthood, he said. Doc and Julia would have to eat it.
I brushed several fallen mulberries from the white car.
Hank the Tank stormed up. “Have you heard,” he said, “what they’re doing and what they’ve done?” He set his valise on the ground.
I tried to look shocked as he spouted old news that was new to him.
“They canned Dryden. Framed and trumped-up. God, they were always jealous. Half the seminary stopped confessing to the old priests. All the best seminarians went to Chris for counseling and Confession. Rector Karg knew that Chris found out more in two years what was going on around here than they knew in two generations.”
“Confession is information,” I said. “Even if you can’t break the seal of the Confessional, you can’t help acting on what you know, like if a priest’s mother confessed adultery to him, he’d look at her differently, even though he could never mention he knew.”
I tried not to picture the images Mike had conjured of Dryden kneeling before his Danish modern crucifix praying to a half-naked Jesus for dreams of release. Hey, Father, is that a serpent in your cassock or are you just glad to see me? Engorgement, Christopher Dryden had said, was a richness, an overflow like grace, to be attended with no less joy than running naked through goldenrod or drinking cream and feeling full and good and human and like men. Actually, I was incensed that Hank gave the distinct impression he knew more than the rest of us.
“Who told you?” I asked him.
“It’s out,” Hank the Tank said. “My brother, Peter, found it out.”
“And what is it?” I asked him directly.
“What it always is,” he said. “S-e-x. Rumors of s-e-x.”
“You say Dryden was framed?”
“Some truth to tell. Certain activities were politically reinterpreted for Rector Karg’s convenience in reporting to Rome.”
“It can’t all be true,” I said to Hank’s fat face, “because if it’s true, it means you were involved. And who’d have sex with you? Isn’t that why you came to Misericordia, because girls ran away.”
Hank the Tank rumbled toward me. I shoved him. I pushed us apart. He let me push us apart. For the first time.
“I’m not involved in anything, Ryan.”
“Deny me three times.”
“Screw you, Virgin Mary.” Hank the Tank tugged at his shirt. “It’s true!” He wouldn’t stop. “The old priests manufactured the story, twisting it the very way they wanted. They already smashed his piano and the Broadway original cast albums.”
“But that stuff’s his!” I said.
“Not in their minds.” Hank moved in closer. “Did you know they’re saying Chris had an open affair with one of the most famously flaming maître d’s in Rome?”
“What’s a ‘flaming maître d’?’” I said.
“You are impossibly naive,” Hank said, “and maybe even really as innocent as you act, you poor fub duck thing.”
Mike returned and opened the trunk. He looked me full in the face. “I’ve heard,” he said. “Everyone knows. Roman Holiday turned into La Dolce Vita, with a lot of dolce. Get in the car. I need out of here.”
“And last night!” Hank oozed up against the white car, practically performing “The Snake Dance” from The Garden of Eden Ballet. “Last night, nineteen high-school boys were shipped out under cover of darkness.”
I reeled with the news. Sunlight hurt my eyes. The cars of parents arriving to pick up their sons roared in my ears. “It’s true,” Mike said. “Nineteen. Gone so fast they couldn’t even take their luggage. Some of these parents arriving today to drive little Johnny home will find little Johnny disappeared last night on a Greyhound bus.”
“This is disgusting.” Lock walked up to the car. “A real witch hunt.”
Off to the side a mother of a shipped boy cried out. “Where’s my son?” A father grasped his chest. “Shipped?” An old priest talking to them pointed to their son’s suitcase. “Perhaps another seminary will take him.” Three or four other sets of parents were leaning against their cars in shock and despair. “You sent him away last night knowing we’d be here today?” One father kept slamming his car door. “What kind of people are you?” A mother fainted. “You’re supposed to care for my son.” A shipped boy’s little sister, no more than eight, started a wailing cry. “Where’s Bobbieeeeee?”
A bird, crammed full of mulberries, dropped a load that splat across the shiny white car and dirtied Hank’s fat fingers spread on the hood. So much for the wonderful hands of a priest.
“Stop laughing,” Hank said. He wiped his hand in the green grass. “I’m not stupid. I don’t know about you guys, but I suspected something. Those old priests were not paying attention. Gunn was checking our legs for Bermuda shorts while half the high-school department was being raped.”
“You can’t rape boys,” I said.
Hank the Tank grinned. “Maybe for one or two it was rape. Chris is a very attractive role model.”
“Oh, jeez,” Mike said. “I’m beginning to get it.”
“Every ring,” Hank said, “has a ringleader. You’re never sure who it is.”
Mike walked around to the driver’s side of the white car. “I’d say, ‘Be seeing you,’ Hank,” Mike said, “except I won’t ‘be seeing you.’”
“Better you should know who’s on first.” Hank picked up his valise. I thought it was like his mind, a tight little box full of dirty linen and bound with straps. “I must find the new Reverend Peter Rimski. His Ordination means a lot to our father.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. PeterPeterPeter was a priest! I picked a handful of mulberries from the tree and bit into them, their little grits pricking my mouth. Mike’s exit from Misericordia was final. He was driving home for good, but I had my vocation. If PeterPeterPeter could be a priest, what was the nature of Christ’s call? My vocation would not be lost because of outside forces that suckered those nineteen shipped boys into whatever happened. Inside my soul I was growing more secure. Christ, with time, was drawing me close, fitting me with less pain into the molded vocation He desired.
Our two freshmen-college passengers climbed into the back seat, slammed the doors, lit up their cigarettes, impatient to leave Misery. Mike and I shook hands with Lock, who was flying out on a plane to New York and then on to a summer internship as a page boy at the Vatican in Rome.
“Don’t let it get you down,” Lock said to Mike. “You did right. Never think you didn’t.”
I got into the car. The two freshmen were combing their hair from the way they’d worn it all year to the way they wanted to wear it for the summer.
“Good-bye, Lock,” I said. He was standing, framed by the perfect geometry of Misery’s tall red bell tower. I wanted to tell Lock I loved him, the real way a priest loves a brother priest, the way my Uncle Les loved his priest friends from the War. I had the feeling he would go to Rome, be liked, study there, be ordained, join the Vatican diplomatic corps, turn into Tom Tryon in The Cardinal, meet Sophia Loren and President Kennedy, resist the Dolce Vita, and never come back, maybe never even approve of a worker-priest from miserable Misericordia.
Mike slid behind the wheel. He turned the key in the ignition, looking straight ahead. “So long, suckers!” he said.
The two freshmen laughed like he was the funniest guy on earth.
“We’re dropping out too,” they said.
I stared straight ahead. I was the last and only vocation left in the car. What difference did it all make? They had to do what was right for them. God bless them. Their exit didn’t threaten my vocation. Mike slowly drove us, his last time, down old Misery’s drive out onto the two-lane stretch of highway. On the car radio, Andy Williams was singing “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was summer. We were free.
I quickly put my fear of Rector Karg out of my head, waving over my shoulder at him, at him, der Herr Rector, watching out his windows with the pontifical binoculars of God.