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7
June 20, 1962
Tick. Tick. Going home summers was like rowing out in a boat chained to the shore. I paddled out only to be jerked back, tethered forever to the land. I was true to my school and for me girls could not exist. I could not run with the hot boys of the town. They always chased down the same one track, luring the girls who actually existed into cars into parks into bushes for short-breathed twitchings in the darkening twilight. I had to go everywhere alone or with a few other seminarians home for the summer from other seminaries that were not as top-notch as Misery. That was the same as being alone.
I sought sanctuary in the dark of movie theaters that disguised my estrangement from a world of couples who saved no place for me. The theater seats could be old and ripped, the floor could be so sticky I couldn’t lift my feet when the mice ran by, the new wide screen could be winging precariously out of the old proscenium arch, but I loved the silver screen and the muted blue lights high in the arc of the movie palace dome.
I laid my head back on the seat and stared up at that hypnotic blue circle, losing all my bearings. The cone of projector light flickered and the stereophonic sound bounced around the walls.
People sat in two’s and four’s and people sat alone, sitting like me two or three times through the same double feature. The world I was giving up really didn’t seem like much, but the world was all some people had. I pitied them. I pitied anybody who hid out at the movies from the world I was sent back to for three months every summer.
Some boys fell in love with the world and never returned to Misery again. I valued the world, but I was not cut out to be part of it. As a priest I would be in the world, but not of the world. I would save people from their worldliness.
October 11, 1962
Pope John XXIII finally opened the Second Vatican Council in Rome on October 11, 1962, while at Misery, the 16-millimeter projector funneled its own ray of light through the darkened seminary auditorium, over our heads, down the middle to the screen. The movie actors’ mouths had to work around a hole where some wild boy had shoved a chair through the grainy canvas. The movies were old, scratched, and wholesome.
The Mudlark, a movie about Queen Victoria, broke off flapping repeatedly during its three reels that had to be switched by hand. The lights came up and the boys moaned and I couldn’t be inside the movie any more.
The sound went out of synchronization. The frames stuck and burned and the black-and-white image on screen turned orange and melted from the center out as we’d all boo. The movies were rated by the Legion of Decency, but the decency of seminarians required even stricter watch.
Whenever anything slightly suggestive came on the screen, one of the priests held a filing card across the projector lens. I always wondered if he watched the scene on the card like his own private peep show. We snickered our first years at every carded scene, when the screen went dark, or almost dark, and the top of actors’ heads bobbed around, and the dialog continued, strident through our one-string-and-tin-can-loudspeaker tethered on a long cord and set under the screen.
In our later years, we laughed up our cassock sleeves because the priests always told us that we were adults who should be acting like adults and then they whipped out the filing cards. At least I was able to retrieve a strip of twelve frames that broke off one reel and save them in my shoe box. The movie was The Left Hand of God with Humphrey Bogart posing as a priest in China. The thought of someone posing as a priest intrigued me and I studied those twelve frames of Bogart’s face over and over, holding them up to the light.
Movies at Misery were far from glamorous: no marquee to stand under, no coming attractions, no popcorn. Most boys filed into the auditorium in bleary-eyed compulsory attendance at movies I called “vitamin-enriched” because they were supposed to be good for us. I had hopes for each movie, but the priests succeeded in making every viewing a season in purgatory.
When we once saw a movie about convicts watching a movie in prison, the movie prisoners acted the same way toward the screen we did. I laughed out loud. I knew the screen was a mirror. I realized that whatever was on screen was really about life, the way novels and plays and art were really about life.
Sometimes the movie provoked discussion afterwards, with all the boys standing in hallways, the older boys smoking one last cigarette in the last few minutes before night prayers and the Grand Silence.
After every movie, Father Gunn stood outside the auditorium, cross-armed, ill at ease, trapped like a watchdog in the hall, forced to make small talk.
“You really picked a doozie this time, Father.” Keith Fahnhorst, the best wrestler in the history of Misericordia, had liked the month’s only feature, The Long Gray Line, a drama about an Irish coach’s life at West Point Military Academy. Parts of the movie mirrored Misery perfectly. “But a couple scenes might have been a little too much for the high-school boys,” Keith Fahnhorst said, “where Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara were kissing and then sat in bed and talked.”
Gunn frowned, recrossed his arms, half-smiled. Uncomfortable. He’d seen the film a few summers before on the ship when he sailed to Europe to visit the Vatican and he certainly hadn’t recalled the marital scenes, which had not seemed suggestive to him on the high seas. He was, he said, embarrassed to have exposed tender minds to such emotions. “But the scene where Maureen O’Hara died,” he said, “with the rosary in her hand, right there on the West Point grounds was excuse enough for the emotional exposure.”
My God, I thought, my God. That movie was approved for family viewing by the National Legion of Decency and these priests carry on like these kids don’t see and do far more when they go home for the summer. “Here comes the double standard again,” I whispered to Lock. He laughed.
“What was that, O’Hara?” Gunn asked. “You aren’t related to Maureen O’Hara, are you?”
Hank the Tank sailed by. “He is Maureen O’Hara.”
“No, Father,” I said.
“I once met a movie star,” he said, “during the war. Ann Sheridan. She rode in my jeep.”
“My uncle,” I said, “also met Ann Sheridan. Their picture was in Life. ‘The priest and the movie star.’”
“Your uncle is,” Father Gunn said, “a true marvel.”
“About tonight’s film,” I said. “Could we send away for some quality films? Some European films. You know, Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini. For the older seminarians. Real movies might be helpful in our study of philosophy and moral theology. We could show them through the winter on Sunday afternoons when there’s too much snow to play or work outside.”
Gunn looked at me in astonishment. “They’re not even in English.”
“Exactly. A chance to use all our Latin, German, French, and Greek.”
“Don’t try to intellectualize simple entertainment.”
Some of the seminarians around me, including several of Tank’s vigilante altar boys, nodded me on with guarded approval, fearful we’d sound like the disappeared Dryden.
“We might raise the standard of viewing,” I said. “There’s immense psychology, real religious psychology at that, behind a director like Bergman. He won the Academy Award. Did you see The Virgin Spring?”
“How high did she go?” Hank the Tank asked.
The room exploded in laughter. Humor, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, is the unexpected juxtaposition of opposites.
“No more suggestive talk,” Gunn said.
“Films examine interpersonal relationships.” I was coming on strong, surrounded by classmates who were quite happy for me to climb out on a limb that allowed them to watch more movies.
“Interpersonal relationships?” Gunn recoiled visibly.
My long-contemplated chance, my opening, my plan to catch him in public, where he was on the spot, had found its natural moment. “Priests are supposed to be educated. The most educated of all. This seems a perfect chance for broadening vicarious experience.”
“I can guarantee you, O’Hara, you don’t want experience.”
“But I do.”
“Experience comes slowly,” he said, “if it comes at all.”
“We clergy must see there’s more to films than we’ve seen tonight.”
“We don’t have to,” he said, “see anything!”
I fell back a step.
He crossed and uncrossed and recrossed his arms.
I took a step toward him.
“Priests need movies like a hole in the head.” He uncrossed his arms, extended his wrist, tapped his watch, held it above his head. “Night prayers,” he announced. “Time for night prayers. Let’s have absolute silence!”
“Told you so,” Hank the Tank said.
As I stood by Father Gunn, I let the other seminarians walk away.
Father Gunn was perturbed. “What do you want now, O’Hara?”
“I just wanted to say,” I whispered, “that I really like your new toupee.”
Communication is a brief encounter, I thought. That was my sole meditation before bedtime and it wasn’t a good one: too many negative un-Christlike thoughts about too many negative people. Why try to change the seminary at all? We had agreed to bring light after, not before, Ordination.
I was angry at Father Gunn for his mean sense of discipline. Every move was a battle of wills. I had been thwarted all evening because I hadn’t wanted to attend the picture. The mailman had lost the film for a week, delaying the screening to the very last night before first-quarter exams. Where was the faculty’s logic? First they cut our films from ten to six a year so the movies wouldn’t interfere with our studies, and then they pulled a trick like this, forcing us to watch sentimental drivel when we should have been studying moral theology, physics, and German.
I hadn’t wanted to go to the movie because of studies and because the last time, some puling high-school boy had sat on the floor between the chairs with his back to the screen, holding his ears to protect his purity from Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe. I mean I try to be pure, but some of these boys are ridiculous!
I had to stop myself. I was thinking again. Or reacting. I had to stop reacting; that was childish. I would become a sane viable adult only when I began acting. Well, dammit, I had tried after the movie and received for my grown-up stand a paid religious announcement that it was time for night prayers. I hadn’t wanted to see The Long Gray Line because of its sentimental reviews. I wasn’t some stupid Danny Boy interested in a corny take on being Irish.
Actually, I was twenty-two and in my ninth year at Misery, almost a year past college and well into the graduate courses in Misery’s Theology Department, studying old-style Dogmatic Theology and Moral Theology and Canon Law. In Pastoral Theology, I was learning how to hear Confessions and how to say Mass. I was on to the last leg of preparation for the priesthood with less than thirty-two months until my Ordination Day.
So much to do, I cried out to the Lord, so much to do before I was turned loose to minister to the world. Urgency and responsibility and insecurity drove me to study what they offered, to read what they didn’t, to write continually the papers they didn’t really care about.
“Misery’s grading system is so strict,” Rector Karg said, “that if you were studying anywhere else your grade would be ten points higher. Even at Ohio State.”
I tried to polish myself by writing stories and feature articles with which I could effectively extend my ministry to spread Christ’s word and love on earth. So what, I said to myself, if priestly writing puts art at the service of religion. So do stained-glass windows and Gregorian Chant. Writing’s purpose is goodness. Someday after some remarkable visitation of Christ, I’ll actually have something to say. Something great and inspired and revelatory to help the world. Something just short of an epiphany or, maybe, an apocalypse. People always brag they have something to say, but when it comes time to say it, they take a pencil and go blank and drive people crazy on trains and busses with their life stories. I knew God called me to invent a special vocation for myself inside my vocation to the priesthood.
All of America had watched Bishop Sheen sweeping his cape across the black-and-white TV screen talking to millions in prime time. I was driven, sanctioned even, by grace to make the tools of journalism sharp against the day when the great message would come to me and I, the best editor in the Catholic press, could spread it in headlines from the worker-priest garret, where I lived, to the very ends of the diocese. Writing sermons was almost the same as writing articles and stories.
Certainty of this special calling, of this vocation within a vocation, had come already. Almost. I had seen its faint glimmerings on my knees before the tabernacle where the Word Made Flesh, Love ineffable, Jesus Himself, the Prisoner of the Tabernacle, reigned in terrible confinement. Love would be everything. If only I could find love certainly and translate divine love into human terms to all men, Christ could come to them through me. But to be a vessel, I had to grow into a rich relationship with Jesus so He could fill me to the brim, even then to overflowing, so that the thirsting thousands I would touch could drink and wash and be refreshed in the abundance and overflow. My excess of spilling grace could change deserts into green pastures.
In the chapel I begged I might become fully human, fully a man, that in such perfection an abundance of grace might be founded.
Grace builds on nature, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica.
That was the key. That was one secret revealed. If it was so, because it was so, I prayed, then make my nature the more perfect that my grace might be increased and I might be a better, self-effacing instrument moved by the hands of Christ. The hypostatic union of His Person had been so perfect that Godhead could be joined straight to manhood.
His body had to be perfect to match His perfect divinity. From foot to sacred head, He had to become, and be, the most perfectly formed body to have such a perfect informing soul as deity itself. On the cross over the altar, the athletic Christ hung crucified but all-powerful, the almighty God in the perfect body of a man.
“Misericordia’s main crucifix,” PeterPeterPeter told guests on tour, “was carved in Northern Germany from 1929-1932. The Cross is fifty feet tall, carved from black oak, and the Corpus is forty feet tall, carved in blond oak. The sculptor, actually the sculptors, several monks, chose an Olympic diver as the model for the idealized Body of Christ. Hung originally in the Cathedral in Berlin, the crucifix, so decreed by Pope Pius XII, was shipped to Misericordia for safekeeping in the spring of 1939.The Pope formally pronounced the crucifix a permanent gift to Misericordia, to honor the seminary’s unspotted German heritage, during the Holy Year, 1950.”
The world waited, not for me as a person, but for all boys called to the priesthood. It is a terrible vocation, frightening, majestic, more self-defying than self-defining.
I knew that most people cannot be reached by most priests. I knew that certain people can be reached by certain priests. I knew that if I struck a tuning fork in the key of G and put it near another tuning fork in the key of G, it would start the second tuning fork humming.
But if I put the humming tuning fork in the key of G next to a tuning fork in the key of C, nothing would happen. No energy would be transferred.
So, all people can only be saved by some priest who is in their key. That’s why the world needs so many different kinds of priests, because there are so many different kinds of people. That’s why there are so many different kinds of vocations.
I shuddered to think where the people Hank the Tank might be in tune with would hang out, because I wanted to stay away from that place. A priest needs to go out in the world and find the kind of special people he is called to save, whoever they are. Only that priest, and only those special people, in some kind of divine destiny, would fill certain spots of place and time in the world, in history, in the tumble-down mad affairs of humans.
Only the right priest could bump into them on special street-corners, hello, and special Confessionals, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, at three o’clock on Saturday afternoons and hear the hot muttered admissions of guilt and sorrow, alone and with others, and repentance. Only a special priest could raise them from the stifling despair, my husband, and sweaty loss of, my wife, eternal hell. One thing I know: hell is not fire and flames. Hell is isolation, loss, despair, and depression when nobody loves you.
Responsibility for creating my specific priestly vocation rolled down upon me. Already I prayed for souls I would meet at some future date. That our coincidence, our mad falling together in the human chaos of a divinely planned world would be grace-ful. I always hyphenated that word. The punctuation made clear to me its real metaphysical meaning. I tore down the walls of myself day by day to grasp my true metaphysics, to bring my true self to the fore. I had so much to prepare to bring Christ to the world.
I talked to Him on a level of personal relation that soothed me with sweet rushes of grace. I cut dialogue short with the unfeeling, unthinking seminarians about me. To only a few could I express these thoughts. Someday I’d tell everyone about divine love in wonderful sermons. I was so full of raw thought and soaring feeling that I was frightening myself with a divine panic.
As if talking directly to me, Gunn preached a sermon in chapel, and eyes turned my way. I looked down at my hands. Gunn thundered that seminarians had no business writing or reading extraneous materials, especially the works of rogue theologians.
“You will only hurt your grades and your spiritual life.”
But my grades were excellent. I wanted to stand up in chapel, to cry out, to protest. I was stopped only by a tremendous interior discipline that made me quietly strong against him and his kind. A splendid sense of mystic isolation thrilled through me. I liked not being him.
I kept to myself at free periods after supper and before rosary. I was effortlessly able to sit tight at my desk, writing in my room, resisting outside in the early October twilight a guitar and a couple of ukuleles pounding out “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” while those who didn’t know, who hadn’t found the secret, sang and yelled around the drinking-water fountain outside the back stairs, screaming occasionally as a water balloon tossed from an upper window exploded among them, wetting the ankle-length flaps of their black cassocks.
The Great Either-Or reared its head. The clock was ticking toward Ordination Day. Time was short. Choices had to be forced. Would I serve God or the world? I could take vows of chastity, but what of obedience? I could dedicate my body, but my mind kept on thinking. Either total dedication or nothing.
Why couldn’t I be like the other boys who had become men certain of their path toward the priesthood? Why should I sweat making real analysis of the priestly vocation they were moving toward in obedient ritual? Hank’s only dilemma, perfect for an adolescent gorilla, was asking either-or questions at table in the refectory like, “Hey, Ry, would you rather slide naked down a fifty-foot razor blade into a pool of iodine, or suck snot from a dead Protestant’s nose until his head caved in?”
December 5, 1962
The night St. Nicholas appeared annually with Ruprecht, Hank the Tank, in the merriment of the Free Period before Night Prayer, walked up to me, smiled, said, “Merry Christmas,” and pushed my chest, shoving me backwards over a boy kneeling on all fours behind my knees, to make sure I was flung back, out, and over, falling on the concrete floor.
I felt the lift-off from his hands raise me in slow-motion in wonder, in surprise, until I cracked down on the floor, trying to catch myself, the laughter around me already screaming funny, and broke my finger, felt the middle finger of my left hand snap back, crack through my hand, the beautiful hands of a priest, with the middle finger bent back over the ring finger and the little finger, swelling up fast.
Lock, the wonderful, lifted me up, took me to Father Gunn, who explained he’d try to find a priest to drive me to a doctor in the morning.
“It was only a prank,” Hank said.
“Boys will be boys,” Gunn said.
“But what about my broken finger?”
At Christmas Midnight Mass in Peoria, I walked out on the altar, the less-than-perfect altar boy, to serve with Father Gerber, hands folded, with my middle finger, the dirty finger that had made all the seminarians laugh, sticking up stiff in a metal finger-splint cast. Nothing was ever more embarrassing. In the front row of St. Philomena’s was a small mercy.
Danny Boyle was too busy to laugh at my hand. He was holding a wiggling infant on his shoulder, trying to hand it off to his wife, Barbara, with her hands folded on top of another pregnancy under her cloth coat. A third child, a toddler, clung to Danny Boyle’s leg.
Charlie-Pop asked Father Gerber if my injured hand might disqualify me from Ordination. Father Gerber told him to have my Uncle Les telephone Rector Karg. Uncle Les told us all to relax. He was, he said, spending the holidays on vacation in Key West. My broken finger concerned him less than that for the second New Year’s in a row he had not been able to go to Cuba since Castro turned Communist. What a shame, he said, because at first he had so approved of Castro’s revolution against the Batista government he felt was irretrievably corrupt.
“But what about my finger?”
“What,” he said, “about Cuba?”
March 17, 1963
Saint Patrick’s Day
The Jesuit priest, our new spiritual director, sat wild and wiry and full of life behind his desk. He was what Jesuits are supposed to be: the Marines of the Catholic Church. The huge desk and windows dwarfed him. He was Irish, of the redheaded and strong kind, a drinker and a smoker, sitting in a rolling blue cloud of smoke. A large ashtray, half-full of butts, lay under his tapping fingers. The toasted smell of his cigarettes saturated the room. He had lived in this suite at Misery only four months, and his bright, freckled, fearless personality lit up the room.
“Ryan Steven O’Hara. What’s a Mick like you doing in a seminary full of Krauts?”
“Father, we pay no attention to that. We’re all American boys, Catholic boys.”
“Do you smoke?” he asked.
“No, Father.”
“Good. It’s an indulgence and indulgences aren’t good for the young. I smoke.”
I wanted to say, “You’re not young. You’re forty.” But I didn’t. I thought he might laugh, think it humorous, and be yet another priest who every time I tried to talk with him held me off with a joke. I didn’t need another punster who saw two meanings to words but only one meaning to life. I hoped as mysteriously as this Irish priest, whose name was Sean O’Malley, S. J., Society of Jesus, had come to Misery, just as mysteriously he could help us all.
His predecessor, a pink ancient German priest predilected to saying hence, till all we could do when he preached was count the hences, had explained spiritual counseling to me definitively. When the German Jesuit was more than eighty, and I was only fourteen, he told me that I’d see him for spiritual guidance once a year and when I had twelve marks for twelve visits, I would be ordained a priest, and he’d be nearly a hundred years old. Then he talked about Maumee in Ohio and how he used to swim there, centuries ago, before the turnpike ruined everything.
I didn’t want to talk about Maumee then with that old German Jesuit and I didn’t want to talk about superficialities with the new Irish one.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
“People and me. And God. I’m almost twenty-four and I’m in love.”
“With a girl?”
“No.”
“With someone here.”
“Oh no.” I looked at him. “Of course not.”
“Thank God and Saint Patrick. Go on.”
“All last fall semester I thought of coming to see you, but I was busy. Studies, and editing the Misery newspaper, and sports. After Christmas vacation I thought I’d procrastinated long enough to have committed at least a venial sin of omission.”
“Don’t be scrupulous, boy, finding sin where there is none.”
For an older man he had a fresh tone for a priest.
“This is March.” He lit a cigarette. “March first. March fourth. March forth. A month whose dates are a command to go forward.” He exhaled clouds of blue smoke. “And March 17, the day for driving snakes out of Ireland.”
“I have made progress. I’ve meditated and thought and prayed a thousand hours to get where I’ve gotten. I care about people and about God and I’m hurt because so many other people here don’t care at all. About anything. I’ve written editorials about apathy in seminary life. That went over big. Rector Karg screamed at me that I might be the editor, but he was the rector.”
“Priests and seminarians don’t like criticism.”
“I wasn’t being critical. I care. That’s all. I see this tremendous sense of social responsibility. Don’t I have a responsibility now to awaken seminarians the way later I must awaken my parish? We all need to care. I don’t think most people realize their potential for caring. They never stretch their lives.”
“You know your potential?”
“Not yet. I’m discovering it. Pushing the sides out farther and farther. It’s…” I stopped because the Reverend Sean O’Malley, S. J., didn’t act as if he understood.
“What?”
“Oh, convoluted, involuted, upside down. Nothing’s either black or white to me any more. I see an awful lot of gray. I see meanings to life, and double meanings to everything, and the meanings have been so hard to come by that I want to explain them to everyone else.”
“Through Christ.”
“Of course. He was a worker. I want to create and run before the wind. I want children. Not my own. Not just the selfish satisfaction of one child. But hoards of everybody’s children. And everybody.”
He chain-lit another cigarette. He said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I talk to you like this. Without any preface. But I talk this way to my closest friends. We had to learn to counsel each other.”
He looked hard at me. “I’ll not be saying anything bad about my predecessor.”
“You must know, it’s been so long, it’s been never, actually, since we’ve had adequate spiritual counseling.”
“You boys are vain and demanding boys.”
“Forgive me, Father. Don’t get mad at me. I’ll be ordained in two years and haven’t the time to waste in preliminaries, in getting to know you. I welcome your objectivity. I open to it. I need direction. I’ve gotten this far. To this plateau. Where from here?”
“You hide behind too many metaphors, too many images. Where is this plateau? What is it?”
“It’s love. I work out of love. That’s the meaning of everything. To feel deeply and strongly enough about the world so that Christ can work through me. I know who I am. I’ve solved all that. About identity, I mean. I’m a child of God. Plain and simple. I arrived at that nearly two years ago and it still satisfies me. But that’s a state of being. Where’s all the action of life itself to be filled in? I want to give myself. I must give myself. There’s no choice any more. My vocation has passed the chance of choice. Only how do I give myself? How do I know myself? Maybe I’ve never felt anything deeply. I’ve worked hard studying, reading, writing, praying, to prepare myself for my priestly life in the world. But that’s not enough. I don’t want to be a standard-issue priest growing fat living isolated in a rectory.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“I’m sorry. Why do I want to reinvent the priesthood? What can you tell me? What is the secret knowledge and the secret power of priests? Somewhere there’s a short circuit. Am I dumb or numb, or do I feel too much?”
“You are having a spiritual crisis.”
“Yes, Father.”
He talked for a few minutes and said we could both read, think, pray, and make a novena to Our Lady of Knock.”
“Knock? Knock?”
“Don’t mock me, boy. You Americans!” He handed me a holy card with a drawing of the Blessed Virgin appearing in the village of Knock in Ireland. He would be able to see me again in two weeks and I should continue to work at God’s will, discovering it and expressing it.
Two weeks! Damn nondirective counselor! Exiting his door, I asked for his blessing and knelt before him outside his threshold. He made the Sign of the Cross and put his hands on my head and gently closed his door. Clouds of his blue smoke, incense, rose off my cassock. I actually felt better. I believed in the craft of Jesuits over ordinary priests. I had dared express myself to a complete stranger. I was a twenty-three-year-old boy and he was a grown-up. Adult help was at hand, even if he was in the FBI of the Foreign-Born Irish priests working in the States.
I went straight to my room and impulsively wrote a short letter to the long-departed Dick Dempsey. Word had come back through the grapevine that he was sick. The implication was he had a…drum-roll…nervous breakdown. I thought Dempsey and I had been so alike, I had a vague fear that if Misery made something go wrong with him, the same thing might go wrong with me. I wanted to get in touch, to be of some help; but even Vatican II had not quite loosened the ban against writing, under pain of expulsion, to any former students. So I took the letter, reluctant to let go of my concern for my former friend, signed it whimsically, “Yours truly, Untouched by Human Hands, Raised by Monkeys,” and folded the note paper in a kind of silly ritual, and obediently filed it away in my shoe box of historical treasures, knowing I’d never see him again.
Work clears the head. I resolved to stretch my capacity. Once again, the sympathetic older priest, who was himself a writer, hired me at ten cents a page to translate a second volume of Bernard Häring’s German moral theology book. The practice at being a working-priest distracted me from the abstract thing I could not grasp.
The first day after the nine-day novena to Our Lady of Knock, actually four days before the two weeks to the next appointment with the Jesuit, I pounded on his door. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I simply sat down in his chair and tore page after page out of my copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica while I sang the blues and he stared at me.
“You’ve got the Irish flu,” Sean O’Malley, S. J., said.
“What?”
“Most fellas think the Irish flu is drink. Truth be told: it’s depression.”
“I’m not depressed. This place is depressing.”
He gave me a bottle of pills.
I was turning into Russell Rainforth.
I could see stern priests coming to take me away tied to a chair, carried on their shoulders, bleeding from a punch in the face. Soon enough they’d be stashing me in the loony bin between Rainforth and Dryden and Dempsey, in one of those special loony bins for wayward priests we heard whispers about.
It was weird how the core of me dried up, midway through March, into the spring when life is supposed to bloom. Somehow the buoyant balloon of my life deflated and clung to my face like the gas mask of the doctor who had circumcised me as a child. Somehow I went dead emotionally. I was paralyzed. Totally unable to feel. Only fit to curl up and ask why. I stood outside my body and myself and my soul and my mind. I was a question mark left over after everything had been said and nothing had been explained by mystics writing about the dark night of the soul. I committed my entire being to my vocation, but God in His immense silence said nothing. Would I never be able to sink the whole of myself into whatever this mysterious vocation was? I became a spectator of the movie of my life, watching the daily rushes unreel. I could only compare this to Christ’s agony in the garden when He sweat blood and begged His Father to reveal the secret reason for such despair and isolation and fear.
I crashed flat on the bed in my own room, trying to breathe, too panicked for tears.
I lay on the bed.
I stood across the room watching this happening to me.
I cursed because I wasn’t insane. This is what I got for pushing God for fast answers. A goddam cut-rate breakdown. Step right up, folks. I could feel the Librium. Father Sean O’Malley, redhead from the Society of Jesus, fresh out of Dublin, had liberated me with Librium. Lovely Librium, caught knock-knock, in my chest. Damn capsules. Lovely capsules. Damn freckled, flat-top Jesuit! Lovely Jesuit.
All I could think of was Annie Laurie saying that the first day she held me, newborn in the hospital, the vegetable man’s horse crashed into my father’s car parked out front and ruined it and made a great noise and made me cry. On that day of my birth, for little reason I cried. My poor parents would never understand this. Suddenly, I was stone.
I will. I will. Through clenched hands and teeth, I will my way through this. If this is the way from the plateau, then I will that this dark night clarifies my vocation. I will that it shall pass. And pass. And pass. And pass. Mir Mir untha whull, hustha ferst uthum ul? I felt light. Outside myself. Silly. Giddy. Dizzy. Spinning. Happy. Sad. Tangled in life. Threaded. Nobody loves me. Me, not nailed big and strong to a cross, but threaded. A child’s beads strung tightly on taut string. March. The river melts and floods. Life is young, poised, free. Threaded. Young goats rolling in long wet grass. Tearing up the mountainside, tumbling down. Unthreaded. Laughing wind in trees, water and spray bubbling near moss beds and skimming over shallow cool sand. Claustrophobic shepherd trapped. Poised, balanced rock, ready to fall. Either way. Either. Or. Confiscated. Not really poised at all. Unthreaded. Marbles caught up in a leather pouch. Discontinuous bits of movie film. Fish in a bowl. Time snowballs. To another time. I will. Life and time and what? Responsibility. What the hell are you talking about? Fancy ramrods. Through a small splintered crack streams a coveted wisp of promise. Bits of songs. Typing ribbon eternally winding and rewinding itself. Paint oozing from tube to palette. Delicious are tastes and smells of dream. Picasso on the sidewalk. Existentialism on a picket fence. Not everyone wears a melted watch. Haunchers along a stone wall. Whispers under the droning harangue. Self-appointed Gantry. Yoo-hoo, Elmer! Fighting in others what afraid to fight in himself. I’m not like other men. Everybody sing. Vienna psychologist down for count of ten. Faith means I don’t have to understand. Take it from the top! God said to Moses, Beat me, daddy, eight to the bar.
Ohmarywecrowntheewithblossomstoday.
Sixteen millimeter. Queen of the Angels. The wreck of my happiness. Queen of the May.
Every night, I pulled on my flannel pajamas.
Every morning, I woke up naked.
May 1, 1963
May Day, May Day
An evening rainstorm was approaching in a curtain across the Ohio valley, sweeping across the winding river, the wild, deep, flooded river, over the blowing trees, and up the windy hill. I could dare the spring rain and wait till the very last minute, the very last second, to pull my window closed. The edge of the storm hit, pounded pellets on the glass, washed down the beautiful May twilight. The sky grew orange when the front passed. Behind the clouds, the sun had set, leaving us all bathed in the trailing after light.
Outdoors, arm in arm, two quartets of boys stood in lamp light, sheltered under the stone vault of an entrance stairs, catching the echo, harmonizing German lieder and the sweet, sweet air from Fiorello, “Twilight descends, everything ends, till tomorrow.” Out on the wet walkways, other seminarians strolled back and forth, and forth and back, cassocks snapping like windsocks about their ankles, talking shop, they called it, smoking, and waiting for the call to rosary. I did not follow them to chapel. Out of self-defense.
By the Irish Jesuit’s orders, I took a vanishing powder. Now you see me. Now you don’t. I disappeared for nearly five weeks into an underground of my own making. In theology lectures, I perfected a look of attention while I read novels under the priestly noses of ancient professors droning on about the Council of Trent and the horrors of Albigensian heresy. I filed with the boys into chapel often enough to keep up appearances. This too on Jesuit orders.
The crowd of five hundred seminarians and priests praying in unison, alternating the responses of the rosary in the dark, the beautiful hum of religious male voices chanting code, or spinning at Mass in rich vestments swirling in pirouettes of liturgy and clouds of incense, stole not my breath away, but my credulity. Ritual was surface. What was the secret behind it? What were they really up to?
Among so many seminarians, all dressed in black, hair cut in flat-tops, my withdrawal from their subjectivity to my objectivity, as a spy on them and on myself, went unnoticed. In the huge conformity, even Rector Karg had trouble keeping track of who was absent from morning prayers and mass; from chapel visits after breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, and after supper; from rosary; and finally from night prayers.
Rosary ended. I sat in the dark in my nine-by-twelve-foot room. I listened to the thudding lockstep of hundreds of boys marching silently from chapel, reluctantly turning into their rooms for the last study period, slamming doors. A tap sounded lightly on my door. I didn’t answer. Always some trickster, in a tiptoe sprint down the hallway, knocked once on fifty doors causing fifty boys to break from their studies, open their doors, and all have a good ape laugh. The tap came again. The door edged open a crack. A figure was backlit by a sliver of hallway light.
“Friend or foe?” I asked.
“Ryan, you awake?” It was Lock.
I grunted.
“Where are you?”
“Over here by the window.”
“Why so dark in there?” Lock reached only his hand into my room and flipped the switch to the overhead light. My windowful of wonderful twilight dissolved into a mirror reflecting me sitting in my room, desk and bed and wash sink, cassocks and black corduroys and white T-shirts neatly folded, a piece of driftwood Dick Dempsey had given me carved so subtly Rector Karg could never accuse me of collecting art, books all over, spilled, purposely spilled, with theology and philosophy books prominently strewn, hiding almost in plain sight the forbidden novels and plays from the secret library of Sean O’Malley, S. J., who claimed his own father had met James Joyce, in fact, had bought James Joyce himself a drink in a pub.
“Another sinus headache?”
“Yeah.” Nobody’s sinuses could act up so much, but Lock was kind.
“I thought so.” Lock counseled me more than once that I had been communicating less and disappearing more. Lock knew how to play what game there was. Our classmates had begun to miss—not me so much—as my class lecture notes that I shared with them. They figured, because I could write and type, they didn’t have to take notes. A true community, they informed me at a class meeting, should share everything beginning at Mass in the morning right on through to study notes and meals in the refectory. One thing was meaning two things. They were literal boys; I was a walking metaphor. I didn’t want to be their secretary, but I wanted to be really well-liked by them, so I could levitate and wake them. I even made up subliminal messages hidden in my class notes to motivate them from apathy and fundamentalism. But a chasm gaped between us. Words didn’t focus.
I had taken my vocation into my hands to make something individual of it in the seminary itself. I tried to warn them away from the institutionalization of priests. They were the sons of farmers and factory workers who had survived the Great Depression and many of them wanted to raise their station in life. They talked about not wanting to worry where the next meal came from. They competed about the real estate of their future dream parishes where they’d live in the biggest house in the neighborhood waited on by a housekeeper, a cook, and a gardener. They were not amused by the Christian Family Movement in Chicago. They shook their heads over Canon Cardijn’s beginning of the Christian Workers Movement.
Many, choosing designs from Romanesque and Byzantine styles in sample catalogs, had already paid one or the other of the traveling salesmen from the competing liturgical supply companies for their own personal gold chalices. They examined the competing salemen’s chalice displays the way customers shop jewelry.
They compared designs of Mass vestments, especially vestments for their own First Mass after their Ordination, at modest little vestment fashion shows, staring at themselves, parading out in the invited salesmen’s finest traditional vestments and newest Vatican II styles.
They staked out bragging rights on the monsignors they knew, and predicted how they themselves would climb up the ranks of the clergy. They talked of the apostolate, about working with people, as if they were going to be sociologists or psychologists, not priests. Their vocations were defined by the world. The most ambitious boys loved the study of Canon Law and were set on becoming powerful ecclesiastical attorneys serving bishops and cardinals and the Pope. God told them so.
My very panic was caused by expecting that God should be speaking to me, whispering reassurances about my vocation in my ear. Why was God apparently using semaphore flags to tell them to be canon lawyers, dragging their rich vestments down the halls of bishop’s mansions, when He wasn’t even speaking to me? The panic grew worse when I recalled that only saints heard voices, well, saints and crazy people. So, knowing I wasn’t a saint, and estimating that I wasn’t yet crazy, I should have been happy I wasn’t hearing God’s voice.
I wanted to hear what the other boys heard, but I didn’t really want to hear the voices of the boys themselves, because, as they grew more mature, many of those German farmers’ sons became hard silent dour athletic sergeants on the Misery construction crew, or worse, porky gossiping biddies singing along with opera on stereo recordings in the community room where they auditioned boys with perfect enough pitch and graceful enough hands to be picked as cantors leading Gregorian chant in chapel.
The seminary was an institution, but I could not surrender to institutionalization. I thought a priestly vocation was a personal calling. I had found, vague as it was, a tempest of self that needed protecting. I’d be content, as Sean O’Malley, S. J., had asked me, to be a wee assistant priest in a wee parish in a wee town, living the wee hidden life of the Carpenter Himself.
“You missed the comedy after supper,” Lock said. “Down by the kitchen, Alfred Doney was sitting naked in his room, painting by numbers, and everybody stopped in the stairwell. You could see right in. The jackals in our class thought it was hilarious.” Lock leaned casually against my door.
The Doneys, mother and son, worked in the kitchen. She really had mother love to come to a place like Misery to be able to keep him with her. Alfred had a syndrome and looked like Mickey Rooney. He could have been any age, short, with vacant pink rabbit eyes and a high-pitched voice. His hair was cut under a bowl like a medieval monk. Mrs. Doney was as small as he, far older, with a shock of steel gray hair also chopped like a monk. She was sharp and but for Alfred would have taken the first bus out, migrating to some trailer park down among some sheltering palms in Sarasota or Phoenix. We were not allowed to speak to the lay help, especially this one female, but Mrs. Doney repeated within all earshot, loud enough and often enough for the dead to hear, that for us boys she had given up on ever having her sunglasses, her beautician’s rinse, and her Mai Tai. I thought she blamed us for what she could not blame Alfred, whose room was filled with paint-by-numbers.
“Tomorrow night,” I said, “you’ll see Mrs. Doney standing on a table, posing for Alfred, with a rose between her teeth.”
“She’ll have numbers on her body….”
“So Alfred can paint her!”
“We could move the numbers around.”
“That’s what they did to Picasso’s mother!”
“Move one eye here.”
“Move the other eye there.”
“Here an ear.”
“There a nose.”
“We’re so uncharitable,” Lock laughed.
Suddenly, Lock was shoved aside. “That’ll be all, Mr. Roehm.” The Full Gunn thrust my door open the rest of the way. He held Lock by the nape of his blond neck. “Your foot’s over the threshold, Mr. Roehm. A mortal offense. Not even the toe of a shoe enters another seminarian’s room. When I come down a corridor and see you visiting anyone, I want to see your full body in the hall.” He shoved Lock away, and turned full on me. “You should have told him, Mr. O’Hara, to stand back.”
He pulled my door closed with a slam and made a great noise bitching Lock out in the hall. All the other boys could hear, but everyone knew Lock Roehm was too golden to ever be shipped. He was temporarily stuck at Misery while the Vatican old guard and the Vatican new guard fought over him.
A guy couldn’t win for losing. Screw them all. I picked up one of the many novels the Jesuit had bundled over to me from his private collection, still stowed in his unpacked trunk. He warned me if Father Gunn or Rector Karg caught me with his books, he would have to deny he ever had such worldly goods.
“But this is,” Sean O’Malley, S. J., confided, “best for you.”
Priests know best, and Jesuits trump ordinary priests. Wasn’t that why the Pope himself had ordered the Jesuits to be spiritual counselors to make Misery’s seminarians into parish-ready priests who belonged to no religious order? My nerves, my underground books, my blue pills, my big recovery were all top secret; privileged, entrusted, professional secrets for Sean O’Malley and necessity for me. Misery and Gunn and Rector Karg looked with disfavor on any personal crisis. We were supposed to come to Misery in a state of perfection and remain so. Latitude for crisis and growth frightened them. Somehow they had missed or forgotten the physical and spiritual crises of their youth. No potential priest was supposed to destabilize into damaged goods; that was why the priests kept the contents under pressure for twelve years.
But how, I wondered, can even the Pope expect seminarians, who come to the seminary at fourteen, not to suffer not only the normal crises of adolescence, but also the additional ones caused by struggles in the religious life? Realism says seminarians have to develop as much as anyone else. Karg can’t expect us to have any interpersonal relationship with Jesus if we can’t have one with our friends. Would Jesus want an interpersonal relationship with some boy who had only a stunted, inhibited persona to bring to the relation?
I wrote journal notes to myself on stationery I stuck into my translation papers for the book on moral theology whose German author, that renegade priest, Häring, speculated a forward thrust to the evolution of Christianity. Maybe the electricity of the wild May storm shocked me up like Frankenstein’s monster. Maybe Gunn had gone too far. I felt wonderful. Screw them all! I tore open Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Someday I’ll remember all this and it won’t be any of that Mr. Chips crap.
May 14, 1963
Two weeks into May I told my Jesuit, my Jesuit, that I felt restored enough to begin a gentle preparation for final exams. All-important grades I couldn’t fake. The clock was ticking. The calendar was turning. My third-to-last year, drawing to a close, promised a summer dedicated to apostolic work, maybe in some Negro parish on the South Side of Chicago. Ordinations to the priesthood for the twelfth-year deacons approached, propitiously, I announced to everyone, on President John Kennedy’s birthday. That was a good omen.
They stared.
My Jesuit gave me copies of two recent Broadway plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and Suddenly Last Summer. He said that the author understood human nature, Christianity, and God. “Literature,” he said, “precedes psychology and theology. Freud turned to Greek drama to find names for his conditions. In these plays you may rather quickly find the face of God.”
Actually, rather quickly I felt bound to study for finals, so I skipped the plays, but after four days of deep study, I fell suddenly depressed. The Fathers of the Church in the “Patrology of Ancient Christian Literature” were dry texts we studied in Latin and were tested on in Latin. The Fathers lived in caves and sat fasting on top of stone pillars and cut themselves with sharp stones and whipped the cuts. I threw them aside and read Suddenly Last Summer which frightened me because, if literature was life, suddenly those Latin histories of martyrs and saints, and especially mystics mutilating themselves and starving themselves and living in solitary confinement of their own choosing, seemed insane, like psychosis transubstantiated into something believed to be bigger than our human experience, when they were just nuts.
I needed my upcoming summer vacation. The thought of twenty-four semester hours in “Church History,” “Exegesis of the Old Testament,” and “Ascetical Theology” sucked the breath right out of me.
Suddenly that spring, I started thinking with a southern accent.
I had a vision of heaven and a vision of hell, and either the Virgin Herself appeared to me, or I ate a leftover Easter egg that poisoned me so that I voided myself top and bottom in the white porcelain hand-sink in my little seminary room, wishing Saint Dick Dempsey was around to clean up the mess of pretend-Jesus.
I was dizzy, mystical even, beyond making any excuse to Gunn or Karg or the Jesuit. I lay exhausted on my bed, without my black cassock, in only my shorts and my T-shirt, holding the Jesuit’s Suddenly Last Summer.
This attack was finally the tuberculosis I once hoped for, to delay my studies, to stretch time to think about being, and becoming, and love, and death. Months of rest someplace. Someplace existential with a veranda. Months defining me in terms of calling and ability. My vocation was absolute surety. A fact. But toward that fact I had so much to do.
I trembled, head to foot. God was speaking to me. This was a sign. I would be a priest.
The ceiling revolved, going round and round, spinning faster and faster around the light fixture. The transcendence was wonderful.
Like the last time, the first mystical time, I ate a stale Easter egg and threw up all over the shower room. Only this time I didn’t throw up.
I remembered I had only one mystifying Easter egg left in my shoe box.
I passed out, halfway, or fell asleep.
Perhaps only minutes, seconds, later, an hour maybe, the door opened. Rector Karg stood there. I saw him, felt him, two hundred pounds of him, staring down. I could not move. His enormous chin protruded out of all proportion. The rest of his face, his eyes, peered down from behind his chin, like peepers over a huge cliff. The light burned in his eyes the way it had when he preached his sermon about self-denial, telling us how one day, years before, a house where he lived burned to the ground destroying all his books and papers and dead parents’ pictures. He had offered his loss up to the will of God. But standing, watching everything burn, he had clenched his features into an expression of hard resignation and when the fire was out he could never remember how to unlock his face.
Looking down at me, he seemed to be seeing the fire engines of hell arriving again and again too late.
He looked immensely funny. I could not care to move. I was inside the transcendence of egg.
“Why aren’t you in class?”
He put his huge hands on my shoulders and sat me up on the bed.
“I didn’t feel like going.”
“You didn’t feel like going? Is that a reason or an excuse?”
“I have a headache.”
He yanked me up from the bed.
“Get up. Get your cassock on.”
“Get your hands off me.”
“What kind of strange little boy are you?”
He slapped me hard across my chest.
The flat of his big Iowa farmer’s hand stunned me. Nobody had ever hit me before.
“Get downstairs with the other boys.”
My eyes burned with tears, but I held back, so tight, the tears stung like steam evaporating.
“Why don’t you fit in here?”
“I fit in here fine.”
“Don’t contradict me.”
“I fit in here fine.”
“You’re not one of us.”
“What the fuck do you want?”
He slapped me across the face. He screamed: “Are you the Boy Anti-Christ?”
Water, not tears, ran down my cheeks.
He hissed: “You’re the reason Jesus wept.”
He watched me silently vest, take my theology books, and leave him standing alone in my room.
When I returned after class, the novels and plays were gone. The driftwood sculpture was splintered. The bed lay ripped to shreds. My shoe box was tossed spilled-out across the floor. I slammed the door on the mess he’d made.
The Jesuit clucked and shook his red head. “When Rector Karg calls you to his rooms tomorrow,” he said, “be honest.”
“You like contests, don’t you?” I said.
“Are you one of the fighting Irish?”
Rector Karg had focused my resolve. God had spoken to me, but a man had slapped me. I meditated all night: Ryan, old boy, you had enough emotional strength to survive ten years in Misery. Hold together and win. He’s a stupid ass. Be careful: that stupid ass has the power, stupid ass or not, to ship you out and ruin your vocation for good. In the long run, Ryan old boy, that’s what counts. It’s not God who decides you have a vocation, it’s Rector Karg. Dear God, o-boy, help me now. You’ve got to, because if You don’t, no one will. God helps him who helps himself, I repeated over and again. I vowed to forgive him.
Finally Karg called me to his suite.
He was prepared to torture me, and I was prepared to play martyr to ensure my vocation, like centuries of seminarians and priests before me.
“I don’t like you,” he said. He sat behind a carved mahogany desk. On it lay a prayer book, a letter opener, and a manila folder. Long ago when he first was made rector, he had inherited the room as his quarters. Nothing in it matched his personality. If anything, the room defied him completely. Misery’s antique German wooden pieces, the brocade draperies, the ornamental carvings spoke of lush medieval days that had enjoyed the meadhall but had not yet learned of Port Royal and its doctrine of Jansenism that stripped art and images from the churches. The hot blast of his personal asceticism was too obedient, too institutionalized, too ’umble to assert itself to a point of exterior expression in his rooms, so he turned his insane discipline hard in on his own soul. He could not bring himself to empty his sumptuous suite that Rome had years before assigned him. He tolerated its luxury as another cross to bear. Deep back the small human part of him was strictly Inquisition.
He opened the folder, obviously mine, and paged through it. He had spent the night scrupulously examining the little he knew of me officially: my Baptismal Certificate; my parents’ marriage license, because no bastard could be ordained a priest; my grade sheets, all more than satisfactory, even if ten points less than at Ohio State; a few letters of official correspondence with my bishop concerning Ordination of each of my four minor orders as Lector, Porter, Acolyte, and Exorcist. I felt strength that before him I stood, an exorcist, ordained by the Church to cast out demons.
It wasn’t working.
He reached for another sheet of paper.
“I don’t like you,” he repeated.
“I love you,” I said. “In Christ’s name.”
“I also hold you…in charity.”
“Thank you, Rector.”
“You’ve been taking Librium.”
“No more than I was given by my spiritual director, Rector. It’s like an aspirin for nerves.”
“You have a nervous condition?”
Not till now, I thought. I was still my own best observer. “I was working very hard. Studying. Writing. I had begun translating a German moral theology book, but stopped already early in the spring. My studies come first.”
“Yes. That book by that heretic Häring.”
“I was told, Rector, that he is one of the new theologians.”
He glared at me. “Häring is a radical rogue priest.” He pulled a sheaf of loose pages from his desk drawer. “These pages came from your room. There’s words in here. Words that…one word…mentioned twice. You have dared to write it.”
“I only translated it, Rector.”
“No seminarian should even know that word exists.”
“I looked in the dictionary, Rector.”
“That word does not exist.”
“When I become a priest, hearing Confessions, that word…”
“Do not listen to everything you hear in the Confessional. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Rector.”
“I shall take these pages and burn them myself.”
“Yes, Rector.”
He was an assassin. I sat across from him, intent on playing his game, intent on outmaneuvering him. This was about survival. I was certain I had a vocation, and if God were trying to tell me I didn’t have a vocation, God would certainly find a better messenger than the pietistic Rector Karg.
If I was not to be a priest, which negation I sincerely doubted, then I would leave Misery by my own will. I would not let this assassin twist ten years of my pure motives of study, prayer, work, and virtue into some weird pattern that would justify his shipping me.
If I were to be removed, I would remove myself. All my life I lived to protect my vocation. Could I be faulted for grooming my specific vocation as a worker-priest, writing for my supper, in the general calling to the priesthood? I would not relinquish my lifetime of focus now. Not to an assassin who knew me only as a name in roll call, another mouth to feed, and a brain that was so cogito: ergo sum, I think: therefore I am, that he feared, what? My powers of analysis?
“You’re the most analytical little boy I’ve ever seen,” he had said, “and that’s not good in the spiritual life!”
He knew nothing of my heart and my soul. He shuffled the sheets of my ten years of excellent grades and solid reports on my behavior. He mumbled over the early chapters of the discontinued translation. I felt secure because my purity was unassailable. Sex alone, or with others, was a mortal sin of impurity against the sixth commandment, and against the priestly vow of celibacy. I was a pure boy. I had never ever even touched myself, never ever interfered with myself, so even if I didn’t have a vocation, no one could question my purity which the Church declared the barometer of a vocation.
“More seriously, however, I find this other matter.” He paused expectantly.
“May I ask, please, Rector, what that is?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. No, Rector, I don’t.”
He reached again into his drawer and pulled out a folded piece of stationery that had never been placed in an envelope.
I found this letter in your room.” He handed it to me. “This is your handwriting?”
I looked at the letter I had never mailed to Dick Dempsey. It was an invitation for him to come some visiting Sunday. I had thought his talking to an old friend might help. I thought I might play a bit of the worker-priest, and be very Vatican II, and maybe help him. “I wrote this,” I said. “Actually, I should say that I composed it. I never mailed it. I think I never thought to mail it.”
“Why did you write to this boy? He is a former student. The rule forbids you to correspond with former students.”
“Yes, Rector. But I wrote that note hoping the Vatican Council might allow…”
“You dare contradict me?”
“No, Rector.”
“You still know this student?”
“I knew him, Rector. We were friends while he was here.”
“Friends?”
“We were classmates, Rector. For seven years, Rector. We knew each other quite well.”
“Then you know this man has been afflicted?”
“I heard he was not well.”
“You knew it was not physical?”
“He was physically sick quite a lot when he was here. I thought perhaps he was a little emotional.”
“You know what is wrong with him?”
“No, Rector. What is it?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, Rector.”
“I won’t say.”
“Say what, Rector?”
“If you are innocent, your innocence will protect you.”
Suddenly, something unspoken leapt up in the room.
Rector Karg pulled himself up to his giant size. “Are you like him, boy? Are you like him?”
Dick Dempsey was nothing but innocence when he was at Misery and so nervous he wet the bed and was often in the infirmary, absent from class. I knew nothing unspoken about him. But everyone else knew. All of them, I bet, Lock included. Their goddam community. It was some strange Christian charity, all right, that kept them from telling me. Just because we had been friends. They told me only enough to make me feel a priestly responsibility to reach out to a friend in distress. How could I tell that to this assassin? How could I tell him an unmailed letter dated two months previously, written in hopes of the openness of Vatican II, had not been mailed because in the tension between the call of charity and the call to obedience to the holy rule, the rule had won out.
“Are you like him, boy? Are you?”
“No, Rector.”
I did not lie. I was not like Dick Dempsey. I was not like that at all. Sean O’Malley, S. J., told me I was “maybe a wee bit soft from seminary living,” but he thought I was “not like that at all, not at all, at all.” O’Malley had asked me, “When you draw pictures of boys, are they erect or not?”
I was shocked. “I don’t draw pictures of boys.”
Suddenly Rector Karg slapped my records closed and terminated the interview. “We’ll meet again tomorrow. You have placed me in a delicate situation of conscience. I must pray over this.” He stood up to his full height in the big room of big furniture and big walls. “Tell me. How many other rules have you broken? I have confiscated your so-called literature books. I suppose you have a transistor radio.”
I didn’t say, “Every single seminarian has one.” I didn’t say, “Couldn’t you find it?” I simply promised to surrender my only connection to music and the news within the hour.
“Give the radio to Father Gunn,” he said. “We shall have to confer much about you. Your status is extremely precarious. We may have to ship you, boy. I suspect you may have lost your vocation. “
“Thank you, Rector,” I said, “for your kindness.” And screw you. I was in mortal danger. My soul and heart and intellect left my body and I watched myself walk out of his suite. Oh dear God, protect me. I went directly to my Jesuit, who to that moment had been only my spiritual director and not my confessor.
“Let me hear your Confession,” Sean O’Malley, the clever priest from the clever Society of Jesus, said, and sealed his lips with the seal of the Confessional forever.
I confessed misdemeanors of the radio, and venial sins of unkind thoughts about Rector Karg, and how one time I had stood for three hours inside the tiny cupboard where the priests locked up their television so I could watch the Academy Awards. I confessed the same venial sins I confessed twice a week every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon waiting in the long lines of boys standing in the chapel at the curtains of a dozen Confessionals. I really and in truth had never committed a mortal sin in thought or word or deed. That was my ironic, intellectual problem: without knowledge of sin, how would I ever grow up emotionally and know anything about life in the world?
I was not like any boy at all.
I became even more fierce in my self-defense.
For a week Rector Karg, Father Gunn, and Sean O’Malley, S. J., rummaged about in my life. I pictured us all sitting at a round poker table covered with green felt, each one fitted with an eyeshade. I held my cards close. I was playing for my spiritual life, my soul, and my vocation. The Jesuit played by proxy; because of his privileged knowledge as my spiritual confessor, he could not talk directly to Rector Karg, who had to believe what I told him the Jesuit told me. Rector Karg was bound in conscience to believe me. His fundamentalism made him dangerous. He was a literalist trying to keep his balance in a trickster world of spirit.
“You,” Sean O’Malley said to me, “are facing the world you said you wanted to embrace.”
“I thought Librium was like aspirin. We have no newspapers, no radio, and you didn’t tell me about it.”
“I knew what you needed.”
They all seemed to know what I needed.
“How did Karg find out?”
“I have to report any medicine I dispense.”
“You didn’t tell me that either.”
“I’m a Jesuit,” he said.
I actually short-circuited into laughs, big ones and small ones. Ryan Stephen O’Hara, I thought, you do get yourself in fub duck situations. In mortal danger of losing my vocation, I laughed, standing outside myself. Even fighting for elemental survival, I could not walk into a believable grown-up version of myself, because some grown-up was always standing in my way. My only strength lay in my creative resistance to Rector Karg. Again I felt like a moviegoer, watching myself act out the opening reels of my life done with smoke and mirrors. What he saw was not me. It was what I let him see. What I knew he wanted to see. What I knew he needed to see if I were to save my vocation.
Finally, Rector Karg called me to his suite. “Your grades are good,” he said. “Your faculty recommendations are high. You tell me the Jesuit spiritual director says your interior life is progressing. There may have been some circumstantial misunderstanding. Your uncle, who is a priest not without influence, spoke up for you, both as a priest and a relation. However, we have uncovered enough that we can only encourage you to work to full capacity, that is, to full responsibility of Christlike perfection.” He folded his hands. “If you are concerned about your status, let me ask you, do you feel the grace of God?”
“I do, Rector. I really believe I do. That I have all along. Even in the depths of this trial.” I sensed he approved such dialogue.
“Do you feel you truly have a calling from God?”
“I’ve never felt my vocation more strongly than I have this past year. This last week has increased my sense of its value immensely. I had to make a concrete fight for it.”
“Then you should rejoice, my son. Let me counsel you to take your examinations with a full heart and join in next week with all your soul when the Holy Spirit shall be called down on the candidates for the priesthood who are only two classes ahead of you. Ordination Day is a time of great hope and grace for all.”
“Yes, Rector,” I said and I knelt on the floor before him. I directed the movie perfectly. “Will you please give me your blessing?”
Rector Karg moved toward me. His shoe tips touched my knees. I could smell the hot metal of coins in his pockets. I imagined nickels and dimes and pennies tangled in with his rosary beads and some lint. My eyes crossed, focusing directly on his Knights of Columbus belt buckle. He put the palm of his left hand against his chest and with his raised right hand made the Sign of the Cross in the air over my head and then rested both his thick cold priestly hands on my hair. “No one of us,” he said, “can stand the close scrutiny of God.”
“None of us,” I intoned.
“There is one condition more.”
Still kneeling, I looked up at him with his hands open in the gesture of priestly blessing.
“Yes, Rector?”
“I forbid you to write one more word.”
I wanted to punch him in his consecrated groin.