Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  I became my father’s miniature mannequin soon after I learned to walk, and during winter I was draped in sturdy worsted coats and jackets with squarish shoulders and hand stitching on the edges of my lapels; and on my head was a feathered felt fedora—slanted at an angle favored by my father—that was occasionally knocked off by the rowdy students with whom I rode the bus to parochial school.

  Nearly all of my classmates were the children of the Irish Catholic families who lived in white bungalows along the south Jersey marshlands on the other side of the bay; and although Catholicism was still a minority religion on the island, the Irish Catholics brandished absolute authority over my early education and my often flattened fedora.

  Each night I went to bed dreading the next morning’s ride on the bus, a rusting vehicle of a purplish black that precisely matched the robes worn by the nuns who dominated the classrooms. The school’s bus driver, Mr. Fitzgerald, was a crusty Dublin-born janitor who wore a tweed cap and whose breath exuded a sour blend of oatmeal and whiskey. In addition to his weekday job as driver and school janitor, he appeared each Sunday morning in the vestry of the church to help the elderly pastor dress for Mass and to help himself surreptitiously to the sacramental wine that the pastor stored in a closet stacked high with white altar linen.

  One Sunday morning in the vestry, before the ten-fifteen Mass, as I was buttoning up my cassock in preparation for my duties as an altar boy, I watched, riveted, while Mr. Fitzgerald (after lifting a lace-trimmed gown over the pastor’s head and shoulders) took quick, squint-eyed swallows from a tiny silver flask that he slipped in and out of his jacket. He assumed that his furtive drinking was observed by no one—until he turned to catch me staring at him from the far corner of the room.

  Mr. Fitzgerald glared at me with fury in his bloodshot blue eyes; then his pale lips began to form words that, although I could not hear them, I took to be curses in response to my indiscreet curiosity.

  Although I was momentarily stunned, I knew immediately that I should convey some gesture of apology. But as I took a step toward him, Mr. Fitzgerald signaled with an upraised palm that I should keep my distance. Then he jabbed his index finger toward me and pointed toward a wall hook from which was hung a thin, six-foot-long wooden pole topped by a taper. It was used to light the tall candles that stood above the altar. I realized that I had forgotten to light the candles. It was nearly ten-fifteen, and the pastor was now fully dressed and placing holy wafers in a gold receptacle. Mass was about to begin.

  Quickly I moved through the doorway and, after lighting the taper at the end of the pole, entered the main body of the church. Among the waiting parishioners were my mother and father, sitting close to each other in the third row, two well-tailored Italians in a humble Irish Catholic parish on a Protestant island, a minority within a minority.

  Holding the front of my cassock above my ankles, I climbed five steps to the base of the altar. I could barely see the highest points of the six towering candles, and I had no view whatsoever of the wicks because they were concealed within heavy gold rings that encircled the candle tips, to prevent the wax from dripping.

  Standing on my toes, I extended the long pole above my head toward the gold ring that rimmed the first candle. I waited resolutely, expectantly, gazing up at the burning end of the pole and watching as it emitted black wisps of smoke. But the obstinate wick failed to ignite. I stood there for what seemed like several minutes, stretching higher as my arms ached and my eyes watered. Less cautiously I now pressed the end of the pole harder against the ring, but still there was no sign of light—and I heard the rustle of the congregation. Rather than feel self-conscious, I began to take a perverse satisfaction in commanding the attention of the entire church.

  No longer the bumbling acolyte who could not light a candle, I imagined myself a graceful exemplar of perseverance and fortitude, a circus performer who played with fire and soared to daring heights; and, just as suddenly, I envisioned the elusive little wick as a poisonous spider lodged in the head of the candle whose long white neck I wanted to choke and singe, to torture as I had seen conspirators coerced in war films.

  But before I could further indulge my fantasies, I was startled by a loud snap behind me. Lowering the pole and turning toward my audience, I saw eight dark-robed nuns in the front row tilted forward in their seats, frowning. Standing above them was the Mother Superior, snapping her fingers and leaning over the altar rail, trying with her upraised eyes and jutting chin to direct my attention to the candle that held the spider of my imagination.

  I moved back a few paces on the platform and looked up to see that the wick was burning brightly above the candle’s ring—and perhaps it had been burning the entire time I had stood daydreaming under the pole. I heard someone snicker and glanced back toward the Mother Superior. But she had now taken her seat, and her eyes were rigidly focused straight ahead into space. Behind the nuns were dozens of parishioners who sat with their faces pinched in expressions of pique, or with their mouths open as they yawned—except for my parents, who sat with their heads slightly bowed, their eyes lowered as if in prayer.

  Aware that I had lost my audience as well as whatever might have passed for my aplomb, I turned to the five other candles—but not before noticing Mr. Fitzgerald at the vestry door, pointing frenetically at his wristwatch. Mass was now ten minutes late, thanks to my incompetence, and seeing Mr. Fitzgerald in such agitation caused me to panic; in haste, I began to swipe the fiery black pole back and forth through the air, perilously close to each of the five unlit candle wicks. Twice I clanged against the gold rings that encircled the wicks, and each time it appeared that a reeling candle-holder might topple. Had it not been for the intensified sighs of the alarmed audience that prompted me to regain my composure, I might well have desecrated the entire altar with the wayward oscillations of my pole.

  Finally, having grazed the sixth and final candle, I waited for my hands to stop shaking. Then I turned and climbed down the red carpeted steps, and, without looking up to see whether or not I had ignited the wicks, I headed toward the side door into the vestry. But as I disappeared through the doorway, my curiosity made me turn at the final moment to peer over my shoulder and sneak a peek at the upper ledge of the altar. The wicks of the candles were all miraculously aglow.

  As Father Blake feebly picked up his chalice and readjusted his tricornered black cap, I took my place in front of him and walked out to the altar—to begin the Mass that was now almost twenty minutes late.

  For most of the next hour I performed my functions by rote. I held the hem of Father Blake’s long vestments as he climbed the altar steps. I genuflected at the proper times. And I adroitly handled and poured from the cut-glass cruets the consecration water and the red wine that Mr. Fitzgerald had mercifully not consumed. I did not fail to ring the bell three times when the priest raised the host—nor did I forget my liturgical responses to the priest, even though, like most altar boys in the parish, I could translate hardly a word of the Latin I had been forced to memorize.

  But at the point of the Mass when I was to lift a heavy, cumbersome prayer book with its wooden stand and carry it from the right side of the altar to the left, I tripped on the hem of my cassock. I fell heavily across the book and its stand, and I heard the sharp sound of splintered wood—and heard as well the groans of the congregation as my chin hit the floor behind the black heels of Father Blake.

  Gallantly he did not turn around, possibly because of his partial deafness; and as I slowly rose to my feet hoisting the book on its fractured stand, and carefully placed it atop the altar—where it rested at a lopsided angle—the old priest closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross, while I slinked down the steps, prepared to occupy my rightful place in the purgatory of errant altar boys.

  How I continued to serve out the rest of the Mass on that most miserable Sunday of my young life I will never know. For years, the mere recollection of the morning could bring blood rushing to my face. But I remained on
the altar to complete my chores, oblivious of the people, aloof from the spirit of the Mass, my body like a piece of flotsam pushed back and forth along the shore by the tide. When Mass finally ended, I felt relief but no escape from my humiliation.

  Ignoring the dour glances of Mr. Fitzgerald as he stood behind Father Blake removing the priestly gowns, I pulled off and hung up my short white surplice and my cassock, then quickly put on my topcoat and fedora, and departed through the side door of the church without saying good-bye to anyone.

  Cold gusts of salty ocean air met me as I raced along the sidewalk toward my parents’ car, which was parked a block away. It was a two-year-old 1941 blue Buick coupe that my father had bought one month before the government stopped automobile production. I climbed into the backseat, slumped low, and pulled my hat forward, hoping to avoid the notice of passersby who might have witnessed my pathetic performance in church.

  Through the windshield I spotted my parents a half-block away approaching with my seven-year-old sister, Marian. After a few paces they stopped and turned to face the church, expecting to see me leaving from the side entrance. They stood close together near a large leafless tree, seeking shelter from the wind, watching the church; they continued to wait as I observed them, distantly, without moving. I did not want to be with them now. I did not want to talk to them, did not want them to invade the quiet enclosure of the car.

  My mother, I noticed, was wearing a beaver coat that my father had recently made slimmer and remodeled with a mink collar and cuffs—the coat had hung unclaimed for years in the fur storage vault of my parents’ store and had once been worn by a portly Philadelphia dowager who had died in Ocean City without heirs during the summer of 1937. This was one of several fur coats that my mother had, some having been purchased on discount from a designer friend of my father’s in Atlantic City; others had been inherited, more or less, from storage customers who had died without claimants, or who had bartered their furs in exchange for new dresses and suits during the Depression, or who had long abandoned them in the vault because the coat or cape or boa, with head and tails, had now become outmoded and was no longer considered worth the cost of several years of unpaid storage bills.

  Thus did my family’s legacy become festooned with fur pieces of every size and shape, texture and tint, and during sweltering summer afternoons I liked nothing better than to unlock the frosty vault that extended along one side of the store and to sidle swiftly down the rows of coats while nuzzling my face into the variegated pelts: the luxurious mink, the curly broadtail, the bristly raccoon, the deep, incredibly cool softness of chinchilla.

  Hundreds of them were hung in the alphabetical order of their owner’s names within the vault’s lunar blue light and camphor-scented air; and here I imagined myself in almost spiritual communication with the wildlife of the world—African leopards and Persian lambs, Alaskan seals and Scandinavian foxes, Canadian badgers and Russian lynxes, Siberian squirrels and Asian cheetahs. And here I also contemplated many animals’ being mangled in metal traps, or being fatally shot during safaris. At my age I was not so far removed from my illustrated childhood books in which animals were invariably personalized, and even humanized, that I could be dispassionate about the final destiny of these animals in my parents’ vault, a gray stone-walled confinement that suggested an extermination factory if one focused on the rows and rows of hanging heads, feet, and tails of the fox boas. The boas were formed by the remains of three foxes linked in a loop—with the tip of each fox’s tail locked in the jaws of the fox behind it. It was a grotesque pretense to realism that both demeaned and mocked those once sly creatures which now adorned suited shoulders with their claws clipped, their eyes replaced by glass, their noses flattened, and their upraised ears long deaf to the horns and hounds of the hunt.

  There was one coat in the vault, a long leopardskin with a brown leather belt, that hung apart from the others and bore no name tag. It had last been worn by a woman who had herself been hunted. She was a blond waitress who worked in a luncheonette around the corner from my parents’ store, and she had been given the coat by her lover, a balding entrepreneur who had a few shops on the boardwalk and a jealous wife whose doubts about his fidelity prompted her to hire a private detective.

  One night the detective, accompanied by a photographer, followed the husband by car across the bridge and up the coast to Atlantic City. There, in a hotel lobby, he was seen meeting his lady friend wearing the leopard coat, and then walking arm in arm with her toward one of the elevators. But before the detective and the photographer could catch the couple in a compromising position, the concierge had called their room from the house phone and warned the couple—and immediately the blond woman fled down a back staircase, leaving her coat in the hotel room closet.

  Later, and more casually, the man left the room carrying the coat concealed in a hotel laundry bag; and, after strolling through the lobby with affectations of nonchalance, he locked the coat in the trunk of his car and drove home. The news of this incident soon circulated throughout Ocean City, and in my parents’ store I overheard numerous versions from the town gossips who were friendly with my mother—who, to be sure, always pretended to be hearing about the incident for the first time.

  There was a touch of the thespian in my mother, and it served her admirably when the man himself arrived at the counter carrying the leopard-skin coat, still in the hotel laundry bag, and asked her to place it in the vault. This she did, without raising an eyebrow; and there the coat hung through the rest of the winter and the entire following year, and through the subsequent changing seasons of my adolescence in Ocean City—an isolated coat, exiled in the vault, spotted with scandal.

  The car door opened, and my mother in her beaver coat got into the front seat with my little sister ahead of her.

  “We were outside all this time looking for you,” my mother began, seeming more concerned than irritated. “Why didn’t you wait for us along the side of the church?”

  “I was too cold,” I replied.

  She said nothing as we all waited for my father to finish wiping the windshield with the classified-advertising section of the Sunday edition of the Atlantic City Press, a paper he sometimes purchased after Mass at the newsstand across from the church. The dim sunlight that had shone through the glass was now subdued by clouds, and a sudden strong breeze blew dust and sand across the hood of the car, causing my father to close his eyes and hold on to his hat. He tucked the newspaper tightly under his arm, opened the door, and glanced toward me in the backseat, as if assessing my mood.

  “We could drive to Philadelphia and have a good dinner, if we had the gas,” he said, alluding to the wartime fuel shortage. “But instead we’ll go tonight to Atlantic City.”

  “They have homework to do,” my mother said promptly.

  “They have all afternoon to do their homework,” my father said. “We’ll go early enough, and be back before ten.” Smiling at me in the rearview mirror, he seemed to understand my desire to escape, however briefly, the narrow boundaries of this island.

  My mother unbuttoned my sister’s snowsuit as my father started up the Buick. We began the ten-minute ride to our apartment above the store in the midtown business district. I gazed at my family in the front seat—my father in a tweed overcoat and brown fedora, my mother with her fur coat and black leather curve-brimmed hat, and my sister in a pink snowsuit trimmed with pieces of white rabbit fur that had been left over from one of my father’s alteration jobs.

  He wasted nothing. The fur scraps left on his cutting table after he had shortened one customer’s coat would later reappear to decorate the pocket flaps or the collar or the hem of another customer’s cloth coat he had been paid to remodel. The creative skill he had once exhibited as a designer and cutter of men’s custom-made suits, a skill that in the current economy was reduced to a pauper’s art, was now put to profit in the repair and restyling of ladies’ wear.

  Earlier that year, when fabric of every kind was
rationed because of the war, I had watched my father one afternoon tear about one hundred small swatches of woolen material out of several sample books; then, after he had laid out the swatches on a table and arranged them into an interesting mosaic, he sewed the varicolored pieces together to form a large section of material from which he created a most uncommon hacking jacket. After lining it with satin, he proceeded to wear it around town with a vivid silk handkerchief sprouting immediately from his breast pocket.

  The Buick continued slowly uptown past several small white hotels and large rooming houses that were closed for the winter. Most of the houses had turrets topped by finials that sea gulls stood on, dormered roofs, and spacious porches cluttered with upturned wicker sofas and deck chairs tied down against the whip of the wind. Hardly anyone was walking along the sidewalks, and there were entire blocks in which not a single car was parked at the curb. Except for the pharmacy and cigar store, there was a Sabbath ban on all businesses, including the town’s single cinema, where the marquee’s lettering read: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME … CHARLES LAUGHTON, MAUREEN O’HARA.

  I listened absently while my parents exchanged shoptalk over my sister’s head as she snuggled between them reading the Sunday comics. The radio was tuned to a Philadelphia station that specialized in classical music, but there was so much static that the music was barely audible. Still, I knew that my father’s commitment to that kind of music would prevent him from switching to one of the clearer stations featuring such popular bands as Benny Goodman’s and Tommy Dorsey’s, or the modern vocalists I liked to hear, such as Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra.