by Jim Sano
Tom waved toward the church. “I was just going to set up a few things inside. Can you come in and stay a few minutes?”
Outside of his visit to the small church in Stonington, David had intentionally avoided going into a Catholic church, so he expected to feel some sense of hesitation as he crossed the threshold. Again, he felt flooded with thoughts of his father and imagined he was standing beside him instead of Tom. The sunlight was streaming in through the large window over the doors and through the brightly colored stained glass windows along the side. The height of the ceilings and carved columns gave a sense of beauty, of a holy and sacred sanctuary. The wooden pews faced the empty altar at the front of the church and the gold tabernacle that stood behind the altar. Along the walls were statues of apostles and saints, and between the stained-glass windows were wood-carved Stations of the Cross depicting Jesus’s last powerful moments. As David was taking it in, Tom faced the altar and went down on one knee, making the Sign of the Cross across his body.
Tom beheld the sight as if it were the first time he had entered this space. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”
David said, “Some might say the money could better be spent elsewhere.”
Tom responded, “I understand the thought but have come to a different feeling about the answer. Many of these older churches are the result of sacrifices made by hard-working immigrant families laboring to create something sacred and fitting for Christ, their king. This church belongs to the people who need a sense of beauty and holiness. Beauty brings joy and taps into something deep inside of us we don’t need words to understand. Take the vertical architecture. It gives us an immediate sense of God and heaven above. Everything in the church has meaning.”
“Everything?”
“Sure. The baptismal font as you enter the church is where we are baptized in death with Jesus and reborn in the living waters as a member of His body. Reconciliation on the way in is to be forgiven for our sins and ‘reenter’ and turn back towards God.”
“What about the statues you pray to?”
“We don’t pray to statues and we certainly don’t worship them. We are multi-sensory beings who live our faith through all of our senses. We are also reminded of the communion of saints living in heaven, who are one with us as part of the sacrifice of the Mass and model for us Christian virtues. The statues of the apostles remind us that we are an apostolic Church with the truth of Christ passed down to us in a tangible way. The Stations tell us the final journey of Christ in the greatest act of love the world has ever known. While children and immigrants may not always read, they can know the story through these visible scenes.”
Tom gazed at the incredible art and color of the stained glass windows along the sides of the church. “David, did you ever notice, from the outside, those windows look dark and ugly, but once you are inside and the light shines through, they are magnificently bright and beautiful, and you begin to see how each window tells a story? That’s how the Church was to me, dark and ugly when I was outside, powerful and beautiful on the inside. The crucifix is front and center, not to focus on death but on the great sacrifice and love Christ had for us to show us God’s love and mercy for us. It is the greatest act of love and the conquering of death for all of us who choose to follow Him. Jesus tells us He will always be with us and give us Himself in the Eucharist. That is why I knelt in recognition and gratitude of His presence when we came in.”
Tom turned around and pointed up. “And this is one of my favorite things about this church; the rose window above the doors where we entered. I love to come in around this time day because the sunlight shines through that window and makes a matching pattern on the floor right here.” Tom had walked slowly over to the pattern on the floor that was the replica of the window at which they were now both looking at.
“So, what is different about this window except for its shape?”
Tom’s eyes lit up. “I thought you’d never ask. Generally, you see this type of window in Gothic cathedrals. See how Christ is at the center of the window and everything else is beautifully revolving around him? It’s the symbol of a well-ordered soul, where your life is ordered with God at the center and all the other things in your life revolve around him. Before I knew God, I put myself, some desire or things in the center and everything was in disharmony. Now I know that nothing else in the center can ever satisfy me the way only God can. We are created for Him. How could anything else satisfy?”
“You know, normally I would be wary that someone was trying to push their ideas on me,” David replied with narrowed eyes, “but I can sense that you really believe what you’re saying.”
“I appreciate that. I like and respect you too much to do that, but I also care about you enough to share what I’ve come to know as true.” Tom and David walked slowly down the aisle with the sound of their steps echoing throughout the church. Tom sat in one of the pews to straighten out some hymnals and when he didn’t get back up, David sat down beside him and listened to the quiet, the sense of peace of this space.
After several minutes of quiet, David felt moved to broach a topic he had been avoiding for most of his life. “Tom, you asked about my relationship with my father. I’m sure it was obvious that it wasn’t good.”
“I would be interested in hearing about it.”
David breathed in deeply and then exhaled a few times hesitating to answer. He didn’t really want to say anything although he didn’t feel the fear he normally experienced when thinking back to his youth.
For the first time in his life since his mother had pushed him, as a young boy, to move forward and never look back, David opened up. “When I was very young, I loved and adored my dad. He made us feel like we were everything, and at the same time, his faith was everything to him. He spent time with me and taught me to believe in myself. He meant the world to me, as did the rest of my family. If I think back, I loved being in my family. That was how I saw the world as an eight-year-old, believing and trusting in my dad. I also looked up to my brother Jimmy, who was ten years older than I was. He’d take the time out to do things with me or just let me know he was watching out for me; I mattered, and he cared.
“The summer of 1971, when we moved to the North End, Jimmy was 18 and started going out at night a lot. Dad went out on those same nights, and Mom trusted him and didn’t ask where he was going. She thought he might be getting part-time work to pay for a costly operation that my sister, Abbie, needed. Mom had taken a part-time job to save up as well. She told me later that she saw my father talking to a man called Mo Diavolo, someone whom she was sure my Dad didn’t even like. She said they looked as if they were making some agreement. She blames herself for not asking him about it, especially since she thought something was odd.”
David breathed in deeply again. His eyes began to well up a little, something that hadn’t happened until recently when he saw Tom at the cemetery. “On Columbus Day, we spent the day at the parade and out joining in the festivities, but nothing prepared us for that next day. I guess the long holiday weekend meant a very large sum of cash would be deposited into the Bank of Boston vault that Tuesday morning for a noon pickup by the Dunbar Armored Truck—” David held his breath a moment. “—but something must’ve gone wrong in the bank. I don’t know what it was, but Jimmy was shot and killed along with one of the bank guards. Mom could never figure out why Jimmy was there, but he was there with his security guard uniform on, covered with blood. Mo, two other guys, and my father took off with the cash in a van that had been parked in front of the armored truck. They sped off from police pursuit, leaving Jimmy to bleed to death. Evidently, Mo Diavolo and my father were the masterminds of the heist.”
Tom sat frozen and appeared in shock as this story unfolded.
“They made it as far as Virginia, where a gun battle left a police officer dead before they were finally apprehended. The police found an old .38 Colt Police special revolver with a wooden handle that my father had kept hidden above his bedroom clos
et. It had his fingerprints all over it. This was the same gun that shot and killed my brother and then the police officer. At the trial, Mo Diavolo testified that my father had shot Jimmy by accident and then killed the police officer in the shootout. Despite denials by my father, the accomplice, Gino Cappelletti, confirmed Mo’s account of what happened, and my father was sentenced to the death penalty. The furor over the shooting of the police officer brought the case to trial and execution very quickly in Virginia. That was the end of my family as I knew it.”
Open-mouthed, Tom stared at David. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry you and your family went through such a tragedy. I can’t imagine what you went through as an eight-year-old.”
“I think I was just shocked and too young, but my mom felt disgraced, so she moved us to Lynn without telling anyone. We never saw our grandparents after that. Even when they died, we never even attended their funerals.” He gazed off to the side, unfocused, adrift in memories. “After that, my mom was a completely different person. She never smiled. She was always tired and short with us. She taught us to be strong and protect ourselves by never looking back. She changed our last names to Kelly and left no trail for anyone who knew her to contact us. She was driven to survive and bury the past with Jimmy.”
Tom shook his head. “That’s a seriously traumatic experience for a young boy. Broken trust like that can be devastating. It can even prevent us from risking intimate relationships.”
David turned to face Tom. “I think I have done okay to get past it and make something of myself.”
“You certainly have worked to use the positive energy in your life in an impressive way.”
“Isn’t that the point, to deal with the difficult things in life and make the best of it?
“One thing I’ve learned is that we all need to find a way to initially cope with trauma. Some withdraw from people to protect themselves from future hurt, while others take a more proactive approach, building a protective false self, and filling their lives with power, money, or prestige to never get hurt again. There are people who choose more destructive ways to escape, numbing themselves with drugs, alcohol, or sex, because the feeling is so overwhelming at the time. A young person can develop a healthy adaptation to help them cope and survive, but as an adult, those same adaptations can then become mal-adaptations.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that these coping mechanisms of withdrawing, being busy, or creating a protective outer-self can be helpful in the beginning to cope but end up working against us actually living life with real relationships as an adult.”
David shrugged. “So, what else can a person do?”
“It really depends,” Tom said, gazing at the crucifix, “but they need to relearn to trust, to recognize and accept their true self, and develop healthy relationships with others. Have you heard of something called ‘affect tolerance’?“
“What in the world is affect tolerance?”
“Someone once said that our most serious problems come not from our negative emotions or experiences, but from our attempts to avoid or escape them.”
David sat in silence, thinking for a moment. “Are you saying that all the ways we come up with to avoid dealing with reality, so we don’t get hurt again, are a bigger problem than our actual fears or negative experiences themselves?”
“Something like that. In order to grow, a person needs to be able to bear the discomfort of dealing with a scary or painful feeling. You have to be willing to be displeasing to yourself at times in order to recognize and accept your authentic self and move past your deepest fears and overwhelming feelings. In a situation like yours, where you had a truly traumatic experience of broken trust and loss, it can be a process you do slowly to avoid being too overwhelmed. You regain a sense of your dignity, your unique goodness, self-worth, and challenge some of the ‘truths’ that drive your emotions and beliefs about yourself and others. I‘m throwing a lot at you after you have poured your heart out to me.”
“Don’t apologize. Somehow, I’m actually feeling that the heaviness has been lifted a bit from my being just by telling you what I have never even said to myself. Up until this summer, I had felt good about everything, but lately, I’ve started to question the path I’ve taken over the past years. I’ve started to notice that I’ve pulled back from relationships and hurt people I don’t want to hurt. I keep wondering if all the effort I put into work and play means anything, or if I’m really just keeping busy until it’s all over. I’ve never known anyone I could share any of this with and I’ll say that you have been a pain in the ass pushing me to do so. Oops, sorry. I forgot where we were.”
They got up from the pew, stepped into the aisle and walked to the back of the Church. David turned to Tom. “If you could give me one piece of advice, what would it honestly be?”
They had reached the center of the church where the light coming in through the rose window rested on the floor. Tom stopped and pointed up. “I would figure out what goes into the center of your life and then put everything else in relation to that. As a friend, that is what I would honestly recommend. Things make a lot more sense when we do that and you can begin to peel off those protective layers that keep you a prisoner.”
They walked outside into the warm sunlight; it felt good to be out in the autumn air. David didn’t know how or why he was able to share his family’s dark secret with Tom. He had no illusions that he was a changed man. There were too many years of building his safe public self to have a short conversation undo it, but he felt as if he wanted to meet the real David now, even if it hurt to get there.
Chapter 31
Tuesday was a long day of catch up at the office. David didn’t leave work until close to 9:00 p.m. and Trooper was glad to see him when he finally showed up at the door. He took Trooper for a walk, and when he returned, searched the house to see if anything was out of place. In some odd way, he was a little disappointed when he didn’t find anything. What if he never found out who had left the messages or even more interestingly, how they had managed to get in?
He flipped through Jimmy’s diary just to make sure no further messages had been left and walked through the rooms once more but found nothing. He sat at the kitchen table eating a takeout dinner and glanced at the freezer door. Among all the other pictures was the postcard photo of the same old white building that had been left in Jimmy’s diary weeks before. How did that card get on his refrigerator? He finished his dinner while continuing to stare at the picture. The large building wasn’t attractive. It was made of cement, painted white, with non-descript windows on each side. When he finally got up to pull the postcard off of the freezer, he noticed that the writing on the back wasn’t the same as before.
Within these unmoving walls, know that for these many years I have voyaged on an odyssey to make it home to you and to let you know that you have been loved.
As life was unfair to young Telemachus trying to become a man without the love and guidance he deserved, know that he had good reason to remain unwavering in trust as did his lonely mother at her loom.
My hope is that your own journey is one that learns to trust your own weaver and that when you string the bow to remove your false suitors, you will know that I have faith in the son I have always loved.
David glanced down at Trooper, who returned a concerning expression. David sighed, “I guess the journey continues, boy.” Trooper nodded in agreement. The next morning David woke up feeling more rested than he had in a while. He no longer dreaded the messages. Now he felt more curious than ever and when he left work early to walk to the church gym at 4:00 p.m., he was feeling a bit lighter.
When he arrived at the school, Sister Helen was inside the doorway as usual. He was expecting the Irish Gestapo treatment again without his chaperone to vouch for him. To his surprise, she gave him a teary-eyed hug and then walked down the hall to help out a student who had been waiting for a parent to come to take her home. A lot of confusing things had happened over
the past several weeks, but this had to top them all as he headed to the gym doors while scratching his head and turning back to look at Sister Helen for a clue.
As David opened the doors, he could hear the semi-rhythmic sound of basketballs being dribbled and Tom blowing the whistle to bring them into a huddle. David walked towards them while Tom and a few of the boys smiled as they saw him join the huddle. This week went better with the drills and games. You could tell the boys had been taking the time to work on the basic skills, and it helped with the flow of the practice, making it more enjoyable to the boys. Some boys, however, seemed to continue to be tentative or were holding back to avoid looking bad.
David called the boys over to sit on the first bench of the wooden stands and said he was pleased to see progress but wanted to tell them about an NBA game he had seen. “Everyone knows that the NBA team with the worst record has the best chance to get the top player in the draft, right?” Most of the kids nodded as they leaned forward to listen. Tom watched with curiosity as David continued, “Well, I went to that last game of the season when the Chicago Bulls were playing against the Golden State Warriors. The loser would be the last place team. Everyone was wondering what was going to happen during this game. Usually, players have a competitive spirit that makes them want to win and have too much pride to play to lose, but this game was different.”
“So, what happened, coach?”
“The ref held the ball for the opening jump and tossed it up in the air, but neither player jumped to tap it, it dropped to the floor and bounced until it stopped right on the half-court mark. Each team just stood there and didn’t touch the ball. The refs couldn’t start play because the shot clock wouldn’t start until someone took possession of the ball.”
“That sounds tense!”
The rest of the boys laughed, but their eyes didn’t leave David’s face as he continued, “The crowd was completely quiet, the tension built as minutes literally went by and then it happened.”