by Martin Moran
My mother was standing in the hall, angry, frantic. Getting ready for work. She made some calls. Doctor? Hospital? All was confusion, my sisters and brother gone off to school already. She grabbed her raincoat from the hall closet. I watched all this blurred flurry from the chair. Then, suddenly, my father was there. She must have called for him. She pulled her car keys from her bag. Then she went out the door. I understood that my dad was going to be here, stay home from work. I talked some nonsense to him about a bad flu. I got up, stumbled to the bathroom, and threw up.
I never went to a hospital, never had my stomach pumped. I don’t know how they figured it wasn’t serious enough to call 911. Maybe since I could sort of talk, because I began throwing up. I don’t know. But, as much as that day was a haze, as foggy and thick as the hours were after I took the pills, I remember so clearly Dad standing in the hallway keeping an eye as I came and went, in and out of the john, to get sick. He stood motionless, clueless, the poor guy, hunched near the bathroom, next to the six-inch hole I’d kicked in the hallway wall. He had a cigarette. Swept his hand across his face, over his thinning hair.
“You OK, tiger?”
It was the only, the sweetest, thing he could think to ask this strange boy who’d done such a strange and violent thing. Next time I’d make a more serious attempt. Next time, in fact, I tried to put a .22 rifle to my head, the one Dad left behind when he moved out. Thank God I shot the thing through the paneling of my bedroom wall and the bullet went through the banister of the basement steps and ended up somewhere in the storeroom. But that would be later. Months later. For now there was only this: the two of us alone in a home that was no longer his and a father’s ragged voice gently inquiring—
“You OK, tiger?”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and nodded toward the man with the cigarette at the end of the hall. The man unable to approach, unable to ask his son what happened. And I was relieved he didn’t, because I wouldn’t have known where in the world to begin.
Book II
WAKING
1
HENRY AND I are living now across the street from a New York City public elementary school. We moved in this past winter, in the early days of the new millennium. Nineteen ninety-eight and ninety-nine had been boom years for us, good steady work, good steady life. I turned forty and, after nearly fifteen years together, we’d arrived at the courage and the down payment to become homeowners.
“Steps from the Cloisters,” the Times real estate section had said. “A Cabrini Blvd. Junior 4.” Junior 4. Somehow that sounded cozy and affordable (somehow, I remarked to Henry, it sounded gay) and just the thing for us. As it turned out, there was an ideal space for Henry’s baby grand piano and a small guestroom off the kitchen. We made an offer on the spot.
During the week, students gather on the playground just opposite us before classes begin. Their chatter builds and rises to bounce against the surrounding apartment buildings. The kid noise mingles with the birdsong that drifts along our tree-lined boulevard. The symphony of it sneaks in bits and pieces through our window, across our bed . . . reveille.
Then a whistle blows. Away go the hula hoops and jump ropes. Away go the basketballs and screaming children. The obedient little bodies line up and disappear inside the old building, and everything (even the birds, it seems) goes silent. It’s eight o’clock.
Sometime later, after coffee, a whistle blows again (it almost always takes me by surprise) and out the children spill like water released from a dam. Colored parkas, pleated skirts, and navy blue pants splash across the tarmac. Watching them take to the slide and swing from the jungle gym, screaming with terror and delight, awakens in me a kind of joy. They land and jump and run to do it all again. It’s a dance wild enough, I think, to wake the dead.
I remembered someone telling me that a famous saint was entombed inside the church that stands a few steps up our street. Shortly after we’d moved in and finished unpacking boxes, I went to investigate.
There was a buxom nun with a sturdy blue skirt and black veil standing on the steps as I approached the side entrance of the chapel. “I grew up in Denver, Colorado,” I told her. “I lived not far from the Mother Cabrini Shrine. I always thought she was buried up there in the foothills.”
“No, dear,” she said. “They have the mountain, we have Mother.” She pointed toward the altar inside the church. Sure enough, there was the holy corpse, encased in glass, laid out front and center, for all to see. I was ready for a good bit of Catholic gore, like in Italy. The head of Catherine of Siena, for example, which is as creepy and desiccated as any monster out of Edgar Allan Poe. What I found, though, was a small body covered with gray robes. Her hands were folded delicately over her breast, rosary beads entwined in the fingers. Besides her hands, her face was the only visible flesh, and it all looked decidedly waxy, very Madame Tussaud’s. I stepped down the hall into the Cabrini Gift Shop, where there are countless books telling and retelling the story of Mother’s struggles, of her great work with poor immigrants and lost orphans. I asked the young woman at the cash register, “So that’s really and truly Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini in there?”
“Si, si,” she said, continuing to nod as she counted and stacked small blue pamphlets entitled: How to Pray the Rosary. I picked one up, my head suddenly filled with the image of my grandmother and great aunt Marion (both long dead now) sitting on the green couch in the den, fingering their black beads, saying their daily rosary. The pamphlet explained that Mondays and Thursdays are reserved for meditation on the Joyful Mysteries, Tuesdays and Fridays the Sorrowful Mysteries, Wednesdays and Saturdays the Glorious Mysteries, with Sundays being reserved for any and all mysteries depending on the season. Only fifty cents a pamphlet. I dug for two quarters.
“The thing is,” I said to the girl in the blue flannel skirt, who, I guessed, attended school next door at Cabrini High, “Mother’s head looks fake, somehow. You know . . . like wax.”
This made her stop what she was doing. She turned her young, dark eyes toward me and then, with one swift motion of the hand, she made a clean chop across her throat and said: “Mother here, head Rome.” With that she took my fifty cents and I pocketed the pamphlet.
“Why is her head in Rome?” I asked Henry, who, having been raised that way, is wise to many things Catholic.
“Oh, they do that as part of the beatification process. I think. They watch how the head decomposes, or something, to be sure she’s the real deal.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. It’s part of counting up the required saintly miracles.”
“So saints not only live differently than we do, they rot differently too?”
Henry shrugged. “God only knows.”
I’m watching the kids again. I figure noon recess must be nearly over. There’s a boy out there alone at the edge of the playground, one hand hooked around the chain-link fence. I’ve noticed him often this past spring. He almost always has a book, and when he’s not reading it, he holds it by the front cover so that it flops open, pages dangling, as he observes the passing traffic. Sometimes his lips move as if he’s recounting a story or memorizing the lines of a play. A little Huck? I wonder. A little Hamlet? I wish I could hear him. I wonder what the story is. A sanitation truck catches his interest. He follows it with his eyes until it takes a right off our little boulevard and disappears. At times he glances up toward my window and I wonder if he can see the middle-aged man at his desk trying to string together a few decent sentences. The boy’s hair is a brown mop, bangs cut straight across the brow. He’s adorable—a little miracle frozen there at the fence. I’m twenty yards, thirty years away from him, but I swear I was there—same playground, different city—five minutes ago, hanging at the edge, looking at the world going on.
There’s the whistle. Loud. I wonder if the saint down the street hears it. I wonder if she sees all the bodies lining up, all the living getting back to business.
Once, not long ago, my moth
er looked at me with such tears in her eyes that I felt my heart crack open. We’d just gotten out of the car and were standing in the drive of her brand-new New Mexico home. Her two acres of hard-won peace and retirement. She was holding some groceries. Her fingernails, I noticed, were short and unadorned except for the soil of her land, the evidence of her effort to make green things grow on her bit of beloved desert. The snow-mantled Sangre de Cristos rose jagged and blue in the distance, framing her beautiful face. She’d been talking of her Boston childhood. How horribly lonely she’d been, how frightened when she walked home from school, not knowing whether her mother would be fine or knocked by drink to the kitchen floor. “God, I’m sixty-five years old and still speaking of this,” she said, tears filling up and spilling out her blue eyes. “Still longing for a mother, I guess. Trying to figure it all out. Forgive me—I just need to know that, before I go to the grave, someone has heard my story.”
I reached over and took her hand. I told her that I was glad to listen. That I believed I knew exactly what she meant.
2
MOM PICKED ME up at Regis on Wednesday afternoon, the week after I’d taken the orange and yellow pills. She was in a panic about what I’d done and wanted me to get help. She insisted I see a psychiatrist. The doctor was warm and plump. Somebody’s grandmother, easy to talk to, easy to charm. I told her how my parents’ divorce had set me off, sent me into a terrible depression. But that I was fine now. In fact, I was planning on running for president of the Catholic Youth Organization. I had lots of plans, I felt much better. Even as I spoke, I believed my chipper song. I was good at it. There was truth in it—the pulling up of the bootstraps. Somewhere down below, though, down there in the pit of my stomach, I was aware of a burial going on, the kind of forgetting you do in order to go forward. I was determined to smother the facts of what happened and to entomb the worry of turning out wrong.
There was one specific idea I chose to share with the psychiatrist. Public high school. I said I thought I’d do better there. I said it, knowing that it would get back to Mom. The notion of attending the local school had begun at some point to shine in my head as a kind of beacon. My older sister, Chris, had recently made the switch to public and I think that inspired me. Gave me courage. And there was that steady inner voice (that mysterious companion) that had grown up within me since the moments and days I’d so suddenly come of age. And I heard it telling me, like a crossing guard standing on the corner, pointing up the street: Walk this way, this will save your life.
To hike five blocks east, along with the neighborhood kids, seemed such a simple course of action. And I wanted simple. I wanted to get out from under, start anew. I wanted to distance myself from the weighty world that had delivered a slew of saints and one troubled man to my doorstep. In the vaguest way, I understood that attending public school would contribute to the forgetting I longed for.
My parents took the request seriously. They were glad, it seemed, to have a concrete suggestion from their sullen son, this overachieving kid who’d made such a strange and bungled mess of things.
I walked that September morning to George Washington Public High School and it was as if, in an instant—by dint of one decision—the earth went from black and white to color. There stood a shiny, secular building, a four-story structure without a cross, without a bell tower, built by the grace of public taxes. A big new school with not a Roman collar in sight. The size, the sheer multiplicity of its beings, loosened something within my chest. The world is vast, this place seemed to suggest, there are limitless possibilities. And, at least initially, I enjoyed the anonymity. And I realized that I harbored a hope that among all these beings, I might find someone like me. Whatever that was. I didn’t know. Someone unholy, perhaps, but good. Good in a secular sort of way.
In those first weeks, I would stand against the wall of the giant lobby and observe the life-forms as if I’d landed on the surface of Mars. A busy planet not five minutes from my own house. After all those months with Jesuit boys, the colored skirts and ponytails left me dazzled. There were young men wearing yarmulkes who toted basketballs. There were high-tops and high heels, saris and Afros and radios, dreadlocks and sweethearts and six-foot black men who called each other nigger. There were boys with beards and hair longer than Cher’s. Elephant pants and bell-bottoms embroidered with peace signs. Here was a catholic world.
The bulletin board near the office listed clubs beyond my imagining. With the Jesuits there’d been Sodality, of course, and choir and sports. Here there was Greenpeace and Caduceus, Drama and Golf. There was the Black Students’ Alliance and Amnesty International and even a collective for Transcendental Meditation. The rules and warnings regarding absenteeism and weapons, crimes and expulsions, were so different from Regis’ demerits and JUG for not completing an assignment or for having your shirttail out.
There were countless wings and stairwells with little arrows and numbers stenciled discreetly up on the walls to help you find your way. Even after I got my bearings, I had this habit of looking up for direction, as if looking for something I’d missed. The starkness, the lack of adornment, was startling. No bloody martyrs, no drama nailed to the walls. The one splash of artful color in the hallway was a portrait of our most famous politician, George himself, father of our country. I stopped once in front of the glass-enclosed case that held shelf upon shelf of gold and silver figurines. Metal-muscled athletes, compact little heroes dribbling or kicking or passing. Not a bloodied arrow or a plucked eyeball in sight. These were the tough men and women with their eye on the goal, going for the gold. And standing there looking at the taut little statues, the public crowd rushing by, I had to admit that some part of me yearned for the broken bodies and melancholy eyes of the men and women who gazed heavenward. That army of souls whose deeds, whose fervent wishes, had so little to do with this world and nearly everything to do with the next.
I just don’t know how to live, I remembered my mother saying. I fretted that this was true for me too. That I was damaged goods, not fit for this existence. The idea that, soon, I’d have to get out would not leave me. And that when the moment came, I’d have to come up with the courage to do the job right. I kept my head down, trying to hide the dark, ungovernable feelings shooting up from within as well as all the crushes that I knew were flashing across my face. The brilliant boy in front of me in history, the quiet guy next seat over in AP English, the handsome tennis coach. God, stop with the guys! I told myself continually. Stop. As I put my nose to the books and worked to get As and keep up appearances, I thought incessantly of suicide.
It was near the end of that sophomore year, on a bleak night when no one else was home, that I pulled Dad’s .22 rifle from its rack. It wasn’t any one thing, beyond sheer terror and loneliness, that incited me to take the gun down that night. It was an abiding desire to give up the act. The exhaustion of hiding the truth. But I didn’t follow through. At the last second I put the slug in the wall and not in my head. I found my way to the next day, and the following. I continued my trudge through the school year. I remained a steady and quiet kid, getting good grades, getting the lay of the land.
I look back at the months and years after the pills, after the dark night with the rifle and the new days at public school, and I see now that certain elements began to rise and converge. Life-saving elements.
Luck is a matter of character, a teacher once told me when I dared to say how lucky I felt I’d been. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that my life began to lift again, to change. What do you call it when human events and, most remarkably, human beings start showing up to bless your life and you’re able to open your eyes enough to see it? Blind luck? Good fortune? Fate? Here’s what I do know. A kind of light emerged and something within me was smart enough to move toward it.
I trace the first glimmers to a moment at the kitchen table on a Friday evening early in my junior year, just after tuna noodle casserole. The four of us Moran kids were finishing up dinner. Th
e TV was blaring at the end of the table where Dad used to sit. The younger kids were arguing about what channel should be next when they came upon a special presentation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The characters were singing their cheery Oompa Loompa melody, a tune easy to follow and, as I put my dishes into the sink, my throat opened and I sang along. The sensation in my chest, the sound coming out of me, made me giddy. I turned circles in front of the fridge, mimicking the choreography on the screen. My older sister’s face was buried in an algebra book, her features hidden behind her long, blond hair. Suddenly, she lifted her head, enough so I could see the glint of blue through the tangle of hair. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “you’ve got a loud voice.” My little brother and sister seemed amused, grins growing across their faces as I continued to bellow and dance. I’d never, in any way, thought of myself as a singer. I’d joined in the hymns at church, of course, and sung a bit with Sister Christine during guitar lessons, but that was it. Now my siblings were applauding as I took a little bow. It was this odd, spontaneous moment in which (as happened when reading at Aunt Marion’s Mass), some ham in me dared to swell up and pop out. Standing there on the linoleum floor, putting the milk back in the fridge, I laughed. So did my siblings. It was a sudden burst of delight on an otherwise dreary school evening. I went to my room humming, pondering the strange statement from my distant sister. “You’ve got a loud voice.” And I wasn’t mistaken. She’d been smiling when she said it.
Two weeks later I was walking through the lobby at school when I noticed a bright orange poster. On it was drawn a large cartoon figure of a hefty man kicking up his heels. He was wearing a toga, or something Roman-like, and was running, apparently being chased by a scantily clad, large-breasted blonde. His sandals were skimming along large red letters that said: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Below, in the right-hand corner, was printed the following information: