Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  I may as well give in and acknowledge a certain hunger for symmetry that feels like the distilled essence of my freighted and shame-crooked childhood faith.

  The expression is “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” I am forever running into certain loops and knots in my thinking that suggest my hard drive has been formatted a certain way, with a Catholic operating system installed. If honesty is the antidote to all that smoky mumbo jumbo, then it begins with an acknowledgment of how at odds with yourself it leaves you to have turned away from it—ah, there! Turned away. I’m a turned away Catholic. Perfect. It is impossible to tell if I turned away, in the sense of repudiating the past, or was turned away like a guy at a restaurant without a jacket and tie. And that’s, honestly, the truth: I’m not sure myself.

  I’m left with tribal scars, axioms inscribed on the body, deep in the cortex from which ideas arise. I have long dismissed my yearning as mere nostalgia for the “smells, bells, and spells” of the Latin mass, and it is that, but also so much more. I am a captive of these first premises, the starting point for my consciousness, the cardinal directions making any map, and any journey at all, possible in the first place.

  I once called myself an estranged Catholic. Asked why I’d left the Church, I replied that the Church had left me, that it had taken a hard right turn and kept on going where I couldn’t, in conscience, follow. This is at least partly true.

  There’s a torn place, a jagged space between the faith that remains mine and the beliefs that made it all so seamless and comfortable. That space fills, now, with yearning. It is why my eyes well up whenever I listen to the chanting, the prayers, the several missae of Bach, Mozart, Lassus, Vivaldi, Palestrina, and others. Those tears may be the real fruit of my Catholic acculturation—now doctrineless or at least heterodox to the point of bewilderment—I’m left with sadness, wonder, compassion for myself and others, all of us doing what we can to understand how we came into being, where we’re going, if we’re going anywhere at all, whether life is what it seems, or more, or even denying, refusing, rejecting those questions.

  Mainly, I am left with the unshakable conviction that life is a moral contest that will be judged at the hour of my death. I say unshakable because I know: I have tried to shake it off like a dog emerging from a lake. I have rolled on harsh ground, writhed against rough bark, all the while looking rabid and dangerous to those who find the idea of such a Dies Irae an embarrassing superstition in one they otherwise took to be an intelligent, rational person. But for myself, having tried to excise this expectation of a reckoning and finding it safely lodged out of reach deep in my own heart, I’m about as content as I believe a human being can ever be: I choose from among first principles what is already mine. As a man must eat and breathe, I accept what I require.

  Is there such a thing as a post-Catholic Catholic?

  “I keep a separate Sabbath,” as the poet said. Often I go into Catholic churches and sit in that quiet with the scent of incense, the shimmering tiered trays of votive lights. I sit. I do not kneel. I do not genuflect and cross myself as I was taught to do. The holy water in the fonts is not for me, has not been for me for more than four decades. I remind myself that I am not superior to those who light tapers and kneel (slipping a dollar in the slot.) But I have to remind myself, and I am humbled, shamed, by that knowledge of my own pharisaical pride.

  I tell myself I am admiring the architecture, the art, the ways that the stained-glass panels form a narrative, the sculpted bas-reliefs of the Stations of the Cross on the walls, the craftsmanship; but for better and for worse the stamp of this belief system, its culture, its aesthetic and ethical precepts, is on this helpless soul forever.

  Henry is circling Father Marty, his camera making a soft whirring sound as he shoots him over and over again.

  At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, when some of the assembled have veered down the Protestant road: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory . . . trailing off when they realize they are fewer voices than before, Father Marty segues to a hymn, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Two, maybe three of my cousins, Aunt Kitty’s daughters, know it and join in, along with Mrs. McFadden and one or two others.

  Love Divine, all loves excelling,

  Joy of heaven, to earth come down

  Father Marty, singing loudly, gestures with his arms, coaxing. He moves closer to the assembled and strides across the front of the area to appeal to others who are not singing. “Everybody!” he says.

  Fix in us thy humble dwelling

  I might sing, just to join in and because I love to sing, but I don’t know the words. Father Marty is moving back across the front in a semicrouch, palms up, singing even louder, wheeling his arms as if exhorting everyone to scoop deeper, maybe for the lyrics.

  All thy faithful mercies crown

  I don’t look at my brother. It might set us off. I do bump shoulders with him and clear my throat. “Oh, Lord,” he says.

  “No pun intended.”

  I can’t keep myself from laughing, though. I have to hold my nose. Then I realize that if I put my handkerchief to my face and let it come no one will be able to tell the difference between laughter and tears. I feel brilliant.

  But in the next moment, and for several after that, I can’t tell, either.

  After a while Robert puts a hand on my back, and I am instantly quiet. I wonder if I was ever as calming to my father. I only know I meant to be.

  I find myself dismayed, not only by Father Marty’s cartoonish attempts to get everyone singing hymns they don’t know, but also by the absence of beauty, as if my father doesn’t deserve it. There are bouquets, refrigerated, arranged by strangers; there is nondescript and inoffensive music playing softly. Maybe this is what my cousin Margaret was feeling earlier: here is the corpse of one we loved; what do we have to put in the other pan of the balance but beauty, however we define it?

  I had not planned to eulogize my father. I told myself he would not have wanted it. But now I begin to feel that it’s just too easy to snigger about the priest’s buffoonishness, smile at my grandson, and patronize my cousin’s husband and his morbid photography. I tug at my brother’s sleeve. An inescapable charge is suddenly mine: as firstborn son I am required to say something. The mandate is not coming from the room of uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors sitting in rows of chairs, dabbing at their eyes with folded and refolded tissues, who might have been just as happy to leave it all to the saccharine offices of Father Marty. “I think I’d like to speak,” I say to my brother. “I feel like I ought to say something,” I add. Joe gives a slight shrug and raises his brows as if to say, “Go ahead, then.”

  But say what? I rise with the fullness of duty upon me. Duty to whom? To what?

  My family and neighbors, my father’s friends, seem to flinch slightly when I come forward, and a little breeze of worry, a brief uh-oh seems to pass over them. I have a reputation. I am the “yes, but” man. Nobody, in any family, welcomes the “yes, but” person. They may love that person, they may even appreciate his or her candor, but they do not welcome his impudence. For a good while, at least since the local distress caused by my memoir, Half the House, died down, I agreed with what I took to be their tolerant judgment: “That’s enough out of you now, Dickie. You caused enough trouble.”

  I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to say, not the first word of it. I only know that I will regret it forever if I let the moment pass in silence. I have, somehow, the rusty taste of blood in the back of my throat, so that I wipe my nose on a tissue and glance at it, expecting to see the bright red I can taste there. No. The room is full of expectation, apprehension, here and there some anger: Here he is, the son who shamed his father, who hung out the family laundry, who complained. Or so I imagine.

  I turn to the casket for a moment, and my father smirks at me. “This oughtta be good,” he seems about to say.

  It’s a familiar interaction. If I’d been caught doing something forbidden, or
coming in late, my father would demand an explanation, and during my stammering or throat clearing, he’d say, “This oughtta be good,” as if expecting me to fabricate an alibi, almost as if not at least making a good effort would have disappointed him.

  I blurt, “I loved my father very much,” and stop, not sure where I’ll take it from there. I can almost hear him behind me. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, that’s the best you can come up with?”

  I went on to improvise for about five or ten minutes, but I can’t remember much of what I said. I spoke about games, about fairness, about the sense of justice modeled by games—by fair play, boundaries. I mentioned my father’s striped referee’s shirt and black leather officiating shoes, his whistle on a lanyard I made him one rainy day at the playground. I remember that I said he loved my mother and that his favorite ice cream was butter pecan. That his life was shaped by poverty and war. That he didn’t expect life to be fair, only that the rules be the same for everyone. I talked about his caring for my brothers in their illnesses, how hard he took their deaths. I said he was a complicated man. All the while I felt as if one of those Buddhist sky funerals were taking place in my head, in which a deceased monk’s body is carried to the top of a mountain by his fellows, who then watch and meditate upon the great feast it provides for the birds of the air; their terrible hooked beaks and screeching appetites were the need I still had to know and understand him, alighting upon his life from this angle and that, pulling and tearing at his now-inanimate history. As I was talking, trying to be coherent, trying to keep it simple, say something true, speaking without knowing what I would say next, and what after that, or if I had already gone on too long, or if there was any way I could bring this to a close, the wheeling birds got louder and louder, and I knew that I would have to write about my father again.

  There is one more opportunity to approach the bier before the undertaker closes the casket. Only a few people do. Veronica approaches and kneels there for a moment, crying, and D runs across the open space to her. She sniffs, wipes her eyes, and picks him up, then continues to kneel another moment while he stares, sucking his thumb. Does he, can he, recall the weekend three months before, when they met? Veronica rises and turns, and D twists in her arms to point at his great-grandfather with his wet thumb. He blurts a syllable, a cry, a sound almost a word.

  Back at the house, Joe sat down in my father’s chair by the window. I sat across from him on the sofa. The TV’s vast expanse of olive drab reflected and distorted both of us. “I thought Father Marty was going to take off!” I said.

  “Yeah, he looked like he believed that if he flapped his arms enough, we all might fly.”

  “Nobody knew the words! I felt sorry for him.”

  “Yeah, right. You weren’t laughing at him, you were laughing with him. Gimme a break.”

  “At least we have a photographic record!”

  We both laughed again at Henry’s picture taking, shook our heads, and fell silent.

  Somewhere in the detritus of this house there is an ironing board, somewhere the glass bottle I sprayed with blue enamel and, after it had dried, painted orange and yellow flowers on it and fitted it with a ceramic sprinkler, a Cub Scout project my mother used forever after when ironing. Somewhere in a corner of the middle room closet, deep in the dark, is a long-idle vacuum cleaner. On the windowsill above the kitchen sink is a plastic watering pot with a long spout, inside it the powdery residue of the limestone water in that part of Pennsylvania, useless in a house where nothing grows. Pots and pans and baking sheets, a flower sifter, many wooden spoons, unmoved for twenty-five years, beyond their use, as past, as dead as my mother.

  Once again I’m steeped in grief, not only for my father, but for my mother and my brothers. The house is filled with the stale air of past mourning. I can hardly breathe. And I am struck, again, by my brother’s strong resemblance to our father, sitting there by the window in his chair.

  My father rose every morning for twenty-five years, made himself a pot of coffee and a piece of toast, turned on his gigantic television, and sat in that chair. For a man given to extremes of grief and rage, to violent turns of emotion, the safety of that chair, that calm against the many years of crisis, that precarious psychic equilibrium, was no small achievement, and no small reward for years of bitter injustice, profound fatigue, incessant obligation, and acute desperation. Goddamn it, he was going to savor every minute of it. We called it depression; he thought he’d earned the right to do nothing. He seemed to have found a deep and comfortable repose. Stuck in that chair—he could yank on the lever and rock back into his favorite position—he was in fact returning to the difficult balance he’d found, like a spirit level, bubble balanced steady in the middle. Nothing was wrong, so everything must be all right.

  I have come to think of it as the injury chair—my grandfather took to it when he was injured and disabled, my father when he had had enough, when the deaths of his sons and his wife had undone him, and even me, in the hand-me-down recliner, nursing a stiff Jim Beam, keeping the rapes and the beatings unremembered. The injury chair.

  Recently I discovered that the root meaning of the word injury is “not fair.”

  The phone rang. Several times. “You want me to get that?” I asked.

  “Let the machine answer it.”

  The next voice was my father’s. “You have reached the Hoffmans. No one can come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back.” The sound of his voice was no comfort. It was the funeral home, asking my brother to call back.

  The funeral director was sorry to report that the gravediggers refused to dig the grave, that they required more notice.

  “The man died on Friday!” Joe shouted into the phone. The funeral director said she would see what she could do.

  “What the hell?” my brother said to me. He looked desperate, as if we had gotten this close to getting our father safely in the ground and now—of course!—everything was going wrong. He looked as if he expected to be blamed for it. Absurdity and outrage and grief collided. It turns out that it’s possible to laugh in anger and sorrow, and we did.

  “What the hell, do they want you to schedule when you’re gonna kick now?” my brother says.

  “Maybe we should have told him to hurry the hell up or something.”

  “Gravediggers are pro-fesh-ionals now. You can’t just die without an appointment!”

  “You can’t just drop in!”

  I remember that we laughed and laughed, unless that was crying.

  Burials are a weird business these days. Flaps of carpet cover the walls of the grave itself, and the casket rests on straps on a frame of brass, where it will remain until the last door of the last car with its lights on midday thunks shut, and the procession crunches gravel toward the gate. Levers are released and, just like jacking down a car after fixing a tire, the departed is more or less smoothly lowered to the bottom of the grave.

  Even so, standing there on the strip of faux grass, between my son and my brother, I could smell earth. The pile of dirt that had been removed was covered by a tarp. Still, I could smell the earth as fresh as the backyard dirt I played in as a boy; and the scent of late-summer grass, of broken turf. I put a hand on Robert’s shoulder as I lean forward to place a red rose on my father’s grave, my mother’s as well—she under him, my parents’ beside my brothers’ graves—and I know that I am now but one remove from earth.

  No longer the fruit, but the tree.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Kathleen Aguero, Veronica Aguero-Hoffman, Robert Aguero-Hoffman, Ashley Alexander, Richard Cambridge, Helen Fremont, Joseph Hoffman, Lee Hope, Joe Mackall, William B. Patrick, Frederick Reiken, Michael Steinberg, Mimi Schwartz, Karen Wulf, and Mako Yoshikawa for reading and commenting on portions of this book.

  I want to thank Emerson College, particularly president Lee Pelton, for a leave of absence during which the final draft of this book was written.

  As always, I am grateful
to “the soup group”—Mike, Thom, Ellen, Steve, and Zoya—for their personal support.

  Abundant thanks to my editor, Alexis Rizzuto; this is truly her book, too.

  Beacon Press

  Boston, Massachusetts

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books

  are published under the auspices of

  the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 2014 by Richard Hoffman

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 16 15 14 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Excerpts from this book have appeared in River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction and in the Ocean State Review.

  Text design by Yvonne Tsang at Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hoffman, Richard

  Love and Fury : a memoir / Richard Hoffman.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8070-4471-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-8070-4472-8 (ebook)

  1. Hoffman, Richard, 1949—Family. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3608.O4785Z46 2014