by Trevanian
So a few weeks later I spent most of an afternoon taking a battery of tests down in the school library, sitting beneath the hand-tinted photograph of a painfully smiling Pope Pius. The results were not revealed to me, but she asked if I would be willing to spend an extra hour after school each day, improving my writing and spelling. I was glad she wanted to give me special help, and I was secretly excited about the idea of spending time alone with her.
Winter came, and by the time the four-thirty bell emptied the school of students, the evening sky gravid with snow was already beginning to draw in around Sister Mary-Theresa and me, alone in her classroom. I would move up to a front-row desk and work at whatever she had assigned, while she sat at her desk in front of me, correcting papers or reading. Every once in a while, she would rise and come to bend over me to see how I was getting along, and I would breathe in the nun-scent of bread and soap, and my concentration would skid. But my spelling improved rapidly. Once I learned a couple of rhyming rules like ‘i before e except after c or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh’, the rest was simple memorization, which rote drudgery I was willing to do to earn her praise, although I secretly considered spelling to be a pretty arbitrary business—as indeed it is in English. But while my spelling became more conventional, her efforts to improve my handwriting were thwarted by the total inability of any left-handed person to write with a dip nib using the Palmer Method.
One day, after the rest of the class had clattered out of the cloakroom and down the hall, and I had moved up to the front row and opened my writing tablet, Sister Mary-Theresa beckoned to me with her forefinger. There on her desk was a tubular object wrapped in a piece (i before e) of flowered wallpaper. It was a fountain pen with a little silver lever on the side that you worked to suck up ink from a bottle. It wasn’t new, but it was very fine nonetheless. And there was a second present, a bottle of blue-black ink. The bottle had a ‘patented hexagonal design’, that made it possible to stand it at a forty-five-degree angle so you could dip your nib in and suck up a load of ink when the bottle was nearly empty. That bottle’s clever design was my first encounter with modern communications technology. I had never written with a fountain pen before, and while I still had to turn the paper sidewards and keep my hand above the line of writing to avoid smearing the wet ink, the fountain pen’s rounded nib glided smoothly over the paper without the point digging in and making splats, and I could guide it easily, without gripping it so tightly that it dented my index finger. Sister Mary-Theresa gave me an exercise to write out, and when she leaned over my shoulder to compare my new work with something I had written the day before (I felt her warm breath stirring my hair, and I closed my eyes and breathed in that sublime essence-of-nun), she said that my writing, if not beautiful, was at least decipherable, save for a big blot where I had fiddled with the pen, wondering how far you could lift this little lever without causing the ink to—oops...not quite that far, I guess.
That night Sister Mary-Theresa appeared in my dreams, smiling down on me, the radiant whiteness of her winged head-dress blurring her features, like an over-exposed photograph. I was lofted towards her until our cheeks touched beneath the wings of her wimple, then she gripped my pen and we floated through space. When I awoke with a great erection—well, as great as I could manage at the age of eleven—I was deeply troubled...yet happy. What the hell was going on here?
It was a rainy afternoon in early spring when Sister Mary-Theresa asked me why I didn’t work harder to make good grades when I had so much ability. I knew she was referring to civics class, where I did not agree with my teacher that we should accept poverty as a ‘trial’ given to us by God to test and strengthen our faith. On my next report card she graded me down for ‘bad attitude’. I explained to Sister Mary-Theresa that grades didn’t really matter because I wouldn’t be staying in school past the age of sixteen, when I would have to get a job to help my family. And anyway, I had the feeling that I would make my way in the world, if I made it at all, by doing something outside the conventional professions and jobs. Inventing things, maybe. Or entertaining people. Something like that. But she was wrong to think I didn’t care about grades. On the contrary, I liked doing well on tests. It was a kind of game, and I liked winning.
“I see,” she said. Then, in what I had come to recognize as her too offhand voice, she asked if I had ever thought about praying for help with tests. I felt uncomfortable that the idea of prayer had come up between us. I didn’t want to think of us as nun-and-kid, but rather as teacher-and-inventor/comedian...or even as man-and-woman. But she went on to say that scholars often prayed to Saint Thomas Aquinas, and youngsters can pray to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, or to Saint Rose of Lima for good luck. When I added that maybe the dumber kids in our class should pray to Jude, patron saint of lost causes, she frowned. “That was an unkind thing to say, Luke.” Then she told me that she’d once had personal experience of the positive power of prayer.37 When she was training to become a teacher, she had been worried about a test she hadn’t studied properly for, so she prayed hard to Saint Rose of Lima, and she did just fine. I suggested that her confidence in prayer may have kept her from the panic that often chokes people faced with important tests. She smiled and said, yes, she supposed that working from within could be one of the ways God answers your prayers. I admired her fast footwork. If she had been born a man, she could have been a Jesuit.
After this first casual mention of the power of prayer, Sister Mary-Theresa began slipping little comments on faith and belief into our afternoon work sessions, and the material she gave me to copy out was no longer taken from a penmanship book, with its awkward sentences contorted by the effort to use all the letters in the alphabet. Instead, the little paragraphs I was assigned to copy out were about boys who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives until somebody, often a wise old priest, advised them to pray for guidance. Then something happened to show them that they had a calling. Maybe it was God’s will that they become...
...She was trying to draw me into the service of God!
At first I resented her oblique slyness, but soon I found myself working up story games about becoming a priest and working in the slums with kids who accepted me because I was tough and street-wise. I would win the kids’ admiration and confidence by beating them at ledgey, the way some Spencer Tracy might.
When I walked down Pearl Street, inwardly playing the priest role and smiling and nodding left and right, kindness and forgiveness in my eyes, I got some pretty strange return stares from other kids, but I persisted in the story game, imagining that the old ladies behind their curtains were looking out at Father Luke and Sister Mary-Theresa walking together, spreading love and charity around the neighborhood. The old dears would nudge one another and say: Look at that fine couple, off on their rounds of good works. They would never imagine that every night the young priest and the nun met in the privacy of his dreams, where their faces drew closer and closer together beneath her winged head-dress and she held his pen firmly as he...No, it was better that the admiring old ladies didn’t know about all that. It might shake their faith.
But by the end of the week the priest games dried up for lack of fresh material, and I began rehearsing the moment when I would tell Sister Mary-Theresa of my love for her. I took my models from the women’s films my mother dragged us to every other Thursday night. After trying out variants of their avowal scenes for a week, muttering both my lines and Sister Mary-Theresa’s responses, I decided that I would wait until our after-school session was over and it was time for me to go home. I would open the door, then turn back and say: “Oh, by the way, Sister Mary-Theresa?” She’d look up from grading her papers and say: “Yes, Luke?” And I’d say in a gentle, grave voice: “Oh, nothing. It’s just that...well, I love you.” And I’d turn and leave, closing the door behind me. She’d sit there at her desk, stunned, overwhelmed, speechless, nonplused...or maybe she’d rush to the door and op
en it, but I’d already have disappeared into the swirling mists, so she’d close the door and, like women do in movies and nowhere else, she’d press the door closed with her butt and lean back against it, a dreamy smile on her lips as she envisioned our glowing future as man and nun confronting a suspicious world.
By the time my baffling, never-quite-innocent dreams of Sister Mary-Theresa brought me to daydreaming about revealing my feelings for her, she and I had been co-workers in the spiritual vineyard for nearly a year, ever since I joined the corps of altar boys at Saint Joseph’s.
As soon as my training was over I found myself dragooned into serving the ill-attended six-o’clock low mass, a task the older altar boys avoided because Father Looney, the old priest who said these low-status masses, was notoriously crotchety and eccentric. (And don’t imagine that his name escaped comment in the vestry.)
Saint Joseph’s was only four blocks from our apartment, but despite its being on the edge of the slums it was an important church with a large, fairly prosperous congregation. In the 1870s priests from Ireland managed to supplicate, bully, threaten and shame the faithful into paying for the vast, echoing neo-Gothic cavern of Vermont granite that was Saint Joseph’s, located in the southern end of the thirty-square-block area then known as Irishtown. Over the years, most of the Irish prospered and assimilated into the American ethno-cultural salad. They dispersed west and north, away from the river and the docks, leaving behind a handful of feckless bog Irish marooned on North Pearl Street. This is how Albany’s ‘Irish church’ ended up in what most of its adherents considered a tawdry part of town. But still they came to hear the soft, curling accents of our priests, who continued to be supplied from Ireland.
The ladies of Saint Joseph’s Altar Society were locked in pious competition with those of nearby Saint Anthony’s, where Italians went because its priests could shrive and console in Italian, a great comfort to the older women who could not help feeling there must be some advantage in praying and receiving blessings in the Pope’s (and presumably God’s) native language. The kids of my block thought the Italian kids were lucky to have Saint Anthony of Padua as their special advocate because he was the patron saint of Lost Things and kids are forever losing or mislaying things and so have special need for his gifts of location and recovery. I never really believed in all that hokum, but once, just as a test, I shot off a quick prayer to Saint Anthony on the occasion of losing a nickel through a hole in my pocket. Although I didn’t immediately find my nickel, I did come across three pennies over that summer (one flattened by the wheels of a trolley car), and this suggested that there might be some value in praying to Saint Anthony...about a fifty-percent value, assuming that a flattened penny is worth half of a normal one. So the Italians’ Saint Anthony interceded usefully on behalf of people who had suffered losses, while our Saint Joseph championed more mundane groups: fathers, carpenters and cuckolds—although in reaching out to protect this last constituency, Saint Joseph reveals a refreshingly wry view of his relation to his eldest son.
As a gesture of sisterly solidarity, the Altar Societies of Saint Joseph’s and Saint Anthony’s exchanged visits once each year. These included attending a high mass followed by triangular sandwiches with the crusts cut off and tea (which the Italian ladies didn’t like) or coffee (which the Irish ladies mistrusted). These visits provided opportunities to score points in their on-going competition, which was fought out over the number and thickness of candles, the invention and abundance of floral decoration, the richness of fabric and fineness of stitching on the vestments, the volume of song, the lavishness of display, and the general cleanliness, glitter, polish and shine. Determined to be fair (‘giving the devil his due’ was how they saw it), the women of Saint Joseph’s conceded that Italians had a certain innate decorative flair (a euphemism for their Mediterranean penchant for the garish and the gaudy). But Saint Joseph’s could also pull off an impressive display on High Holy Days: forests of glittering candles; procession vestments of green, red and gold silk; swirls of dense incense tumbling over the edge of a swinging thurible; walls of sound erected by the organ whose bass notes were so low that they vibrated your bench and buzzed in your testicles as the massed voices of the Women’s Chorus, the Men’s Chorus and the Children’s Chorus of Our Lady of Angels drenched the congregation with thick, luscious sound. High mass would be served by as many as four of the priests for whom our widows and spinsters nourished feelings that were largely, if not exclusively, maternal. These smiling, smooth-voiced priests were served by half a dozen stars of the corps of altar boys, mostly older lads who were seriously considering The Calling.
Father Looney was not smiling and smooth-voiced. An irritated frown was the expression into which his brow collapsed when he relaxed, and the papery cackle of his worn-out voice was better suited to reprimanding than to guidance and consolation. And his lone helper was unlikely to be ‘called’ to a vocation and, even if he had been, was unlikely to answer. The bleary-eyed early-morning masses that gruff old Father Looney and I ran were a down-market, off-the-rack version of those up-lifting spectacles that were the pride of Saint Joseph’s and, our ladies felt sure, the secret envy of Saint Anthony’s.
Father Looney with his scowling face and his unforgiving eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses was the parish’s doyen. Over eighty years old and by turns vague, eccentric and prickly, he should have been retired years earlier, but as a zealous young priest at the turn of the century, Father Looney had taken upon himself the task of raising the money for all the church’s stained glass; and no one, not even the bishop, had the courage to tell him that he could no longer serve in the church he had so richly illuminated. Instead, they restricted him to one early morning low mass each Sunday, with its small catchment from the seedy southeast edge of the parish: a handful of shelter-seeking bums and a scant score of pious old women, none of whom were ever seen by the grandees who attended high mass, that glittering ninety-minute feast for eye, ear, heart and spirit.
Father Looney was notorious for his tendency to divert his sermons from the text for the day onto his pet peeve: those evil children who played baseball in the street outside his church, their foul balls a constant threat to his precious windows. By the end of each sermon he would be hanging over the front of the lectern, his round eyeglasses askew and flashing as he assured the congregation in his broad west-of-Ireland brogue that putting the church’s stained glass into jeopardy by playing ball in the street was a sin! Wanton destruction of God’s house, that’s what it was! Theft, pure and simple! It was stealing from God every bit as much as if you pulled out a gun and stuck the Baby Jesus up in some back alley! And don’t you imagine for a minute that God doesn’t see what you’re up to. He sees! He knows!
The old women in front pews would shift their eyes nervously, and the bums at the back would turn up their collars and pull in their chins.
We were a team, Father Looney and I. I viewed myself as the smooth, nearly invisible facilitator of Father Looney’s star turn...something like the black-clad puppet handlers of Bunrako. But I also relished my solo time, when all eyes were on me, or so I hoped. While Father Looney was in the sacristy, tugging his vestments on with impatient grunts, I would enter alone and genuflect as I passed before the tabernacle lamp. I always genuflected very deeply, bringing my nose to my knee, and holding the posture for a long moment to let its significance sink in for any onlookers. Then I would take up the long wood-and-brass candle lighter/snuffer, light its wick from one of the squat votive candles that flickered within red glass and, moving as gracefully as I could, I would touch my flame to each of the six candles that were our meager allotment. I always moved my wick away from the candle as soon as the flame caught, because I had noticed from out front that it never looked as though the candle was alight just at first, so I could create the near-miracle of candles seeming to light by themselves in the wake of my snuffer’s passage. I would then return to the sacristy to give Father Looney’s
vestments a quick glance, because he was careless and often got things on crooked or wrongly tucked in and I, his theatrical dresser, would have to pull them around straight while he snorted and complained, after which I would assume my most severe and pious mien and follow him in to begin the service.
When I shook the little silver bell as Father Looney elevated the Eucharist, I tried to make the movement invisible, hoping that some of the celebrants might think the tinkle of the bell was a magic accompaniment to the miracle of transubstantiation. Father Looney was always impatient to get away as soon as mass was over, so he never stood outside the entrance, harvesting compliments and bestowing blessings. I would follow him to the sacristy, take his stole and chasuble and carefully fold them into his locker, then undo his rope girdle and hang it up. He insisted on grunting his own flailing, arthritic way out of his alb with a grumpy irritation that threatened to rip the seams. As he sat back, breathing heavily after his struggle, I took off my own starched surplice, so that I was in the all-black stage-hand’s cassock when I returned to the altar to snuff out the candles, which I did in a new rhythm, the efficient motions of the workman cleaning up after a job well done. As I lifted the cup of the snuffer from each candle in turn, a thread of silvery smoke would wriggle up and vanish into the darkness above. I discovered that moving the candle wand away quickly after snuffing out a candle would drag the thread of smoke after it, crumpled and twisting, and the moment of miracles was over for another week.
For me, the smell of just-snuffed candles will always be the scent of sanctity...of mystery...of faith...of century upon century of secret fears and hopes whispered into the darkness.38
I liked the evocative sound of old-fashioned holy days like Quinquagesima Sunday, the Epiphany of the Magi, Pentecost and Childermas. When I came across the character Quasimodo in Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, I thought I was probably the only kid in Albany to know that the hunchback’s name came from the Quasimodo Sunday introit that begins, Quasi modo geniti infantes: “As newborn babes...” For me, Eastertide ran from Quinquagesima, the Sunday before Lent, to Quasimodo, the Sunday after Easter, not because the season actually included those two bookends, but because I liked the sound of them.