As distant as all this was from the effulgent heat and color of Jewish life, the real surprise to me was a certain deeper similarity. At breakfast Mrs. Slattery, reading in the Plain Dealer that a man had been arrested for falsifying his company’s books, said, “I hope he isn’t Catholic,” just as my mother would have, only substituting “Jewish” as her worry. For the first time, Catholics, despite their Christianity, their cathedrals, and their political clout, appeared as a minority to me, and a defensive one at that. And I saw Mary and myself more deeply related than I had until now imagined. It was only dawning on me what courage she must have had to break from this, and all alone, with no allies in some surrounding of dissent! From this vantage America seemed an unbroken tapestry of conforming obedience, of clenched teeth, of exhausted sleep from days and years of submission.
The “relationship” gathered in the evening on the front porch, aunts and uncles and cousins, to look me over, their first heathen. (The scheduled ceremony came under the official heading “For Moslems, Heathen, and Jews” who were marrying a Catholic.) Some stayed an hour or so, others just shook hands, nodded a welcome, and left. All in all there must have been more than twenty visitors, and the strain was telling on everyone. The women fanned themselves in the rockers and Mr. Slattery spat tobacco juice onto the lawn while his wife nearly groaned in despair and glanced over at me as I pretended not to have seen. Relief from it all came with the arrival of Mary’s cousins, young men and women her own age who were simply glad to see her and talked with me as though we were all citizens of the same nation.
And now the young parish priest who would be marrying us arrived for his formal visit. He happened to appear at an interesting moment: Uncle Theodore Metz, recently retired as chief of police, a small, jocular, muscled man, was telling how he had put one over on his son, Barney, a new police lieutenant and Mary’s favorite cousin. Through high school, she had been his frequent shipmate aboard the many small boats he loved to sail on nearby Lake Erie. Theodore had ordered Barney, as a neophyte cop, to don civilian clothes and investigate a report of systematic ripoffs of customers at the local whorehouse. Utterance of the word itself sent all eyes flitting my way to see whether I could bear up under the sound and roused a fluctuating burble of giggles and a nervous exhaling of pent-up air from the lungs of the ladies. Then all went silent as Theodore Metz unraveled his plot; he had sent a detail of cops to the whorehouse while Barney was inside, ordering them to rush the building suddenly, burst into the rooms, and collar everyone in sight—including his son, whose protests could not convince the cops that he was in the place on business. The uproar from the crowded porch clamored up and down the quiet block as Barney’s indignant explanations were repeated by his laughing father. “I had the fellas put him in the paddy wagon with the girls!” Oh, it was all delicious, but anxious glances were still coming my way to see if my opinion of the family had collapsed.
It was when the laughter was billowing up that the priest appeared. I was surprised by his youthfulness; he seemed younger than my twenty-five. But more surprising was the suddenness of the awed silence at their first sight of him, so pale and adolescently thin, coming up the stoop from the narrow path to the street. He said his good evenings, shook my hand and, immediately turning away, held Mary’s hand a bit longer and sat down. A propriety approaching real anxiety seemed to grip them as they leaned forward to catch every one of his softly spoken remarks, and his least attempt at humor brought immensely relieved laughter. “I have had a very long day” was greeted by a long sympathetic “Aaahh,” and “It’s been so hot I’ve been tempted to take a swim in the lake” created a thrilled flutter of amazed laughter, a vastly appreciative compliment to his simple humanity. After ten minutes or so he said his good nights and left, allowing the former chief of police to finish his whorehouse story.
Later that evening, after the relatives had gone, Mary and I escaped for a walk through the neighborhood. She seemed grim and daunted by the lengths to which her parents were carrying their inane notions of decorum and their subservience to what they thought the Church required of them. I now saw them, however, as victimized people with whom we could end up as friends. She apologized for putting me through all this, but her mother would probably collapse with guilt if some touch of the Church’s sanction, however slight, was not set upon her daughter’s marriage. In the unremitting heat of the night a kind of desiccation of the spirit oppressed both of us at the prospect of this pretense we had to continue to play out.
A new surprise each day. Now it appeared that we were to take instruction from the young priest in the Church’s rules of family life. Growing grimmer by the minute, Mary led me to the priest’s office next morning, where we sat listening to him asserting the ban on birth control and the Church’s insistence that our children be baptized and raised as Catholics, none of which we had any intention of carrying out. Youthful as he was, after a few minutes he got the message of our silence, hurried through a few more rote sentences of admonition, and asked if we had any questions. I did, in fact—a genuine one. Several years earlier, Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times drama critic, had reported a front-porch conversation with a Kentucky farmer. Atkinson asked the farmer, a devout churchgoer, if he had any idea what the Holy Ghost was. The farmer thought a moment and replied, “I figure it’s sort of an oblong blur.” For some reason the Atkinson story had set me off on a brief, fruitless search for a clear definition of this mysterious entity. Now that I had this expert before me, I eagerly asked what was meant by the Holy Ghost.
He pursed his lips and glanced out the leaded windows, whose watery light emphasized the gauntness of his cheekbones and his tight skin. Turning, his blue eyes flickered away from mine in clear resentment. “I think we’d better conclude now and maybe take that up on some other occasion. But I have a duty to tell you”—and now he turned to Mary, seated beside me—“that our experience shows these marriages never last.”
Both of us were so stunned we could not answer or even move. The priest stood up and took Mary’s hand and said goodbye, then nodded a distant farewell to me and left us to walk out of the office into the open air alone. Outside, Mary laughed as though a cord had at last been cut by something real, an authentic expression that had brought life back. She seemed to straighten up, shedding a furtiveness that was so uncharacteristic of her. “Aren’t they something?” she said, grinning. She knew where she was again. Once more the line had been drawn for her, the old line that she had crossed at fifteen and would not cross again. The priest’s challenge had clarified her loyalties and her present duty, which was simply to do a kindness to her mother’s sensibilities. And so all that remained now was to go on avoiding conflict for two more days until Friday and the wedding
Or so we thought. After an agonizingly empty day of driving us aimlessly about in the killing heat, Mr. Slattery announced, as napkins were being folded following the sliced ham dinner, that there was apparently some foul-up with the dispensation. It was even possible, although not yet sure, that the wedding would have to be postponed over the weekend, from Friday to Monday. The prospect of three additional enforced days in what by now threatened to become a corrupting dishonesty snapped something in my head, and I heard myself telling Mr. Slattery across the table that I couldn’t possibly stay past Friday since I had important business in New York first thing Monday morning, a happy invention that seemed to raise my standing at the table. Mrs. Slattery’s eyes remained demurely lowered to her hands, which were smoothing a napkin. I was surprised and confused by Slattery’s nodding encouragingly as I spoke.
The reason for his agreement soon appeared—he would lose his two-hundred-dollar deposit on the reception he had arranged in the local hotel, and two hundred dollars was not easily come by in those days for a retired city employee. This thin bald man, who had been as nervously formal with me as if I were a large bird that had flown into his house, now rather mechanically strove for intimacy, stretching his lips away from his dentures and t
ouching my elbow with his fingers as he asked me, in an almost conspiratorial hush, to have patience. But wasn’t there anyone he could appeal to? I asked. Yes, he was thinking of trying to call on the monsignor—but this was clearly something he had just that minute dredged up out of his shame.
Next morning at breakfast we were all quickened by the prospect of action, and the mood lasted through the ride downtown and up to the top of a tall office building in the Cleveland business district where we sat for an hour in a dark oak waiting room. His name called, Slattery nearly leaped up and soundlessly hurried through a door. Twenty minutes later, after his interview, he apologetically explained that he was still not sure we would have the dispensation by Friday as the papal delegate in Washington, who alone could issue it, was on a golfing vacation and could not be reached. Only halfheartedly now, he swiped at making this excuse seem reasonable, and riding back to Lakewood, I realized in the silence between him and his daughter that he was experiencing a deep humiliation before me, a stranger. Getting out of the car in front of his house, I could not bear to meet his flushed, evasive gaze.
Alone with Mary, I felt that she too was humiliated but as powerless as her father. Her submission was intolerable. I went to the phone book and found the number and called the monsignor’s office. Slattery, standing only a few feet away unabashedly eavesdropping, looked on wide-eyed as I asked to speak to the monsignor himself.
The unperturbed voice on the other end replied that the monsignor was occupied. I felt an uproar rising in me, an anger fed in part by the long hot train ride from New York, the tasteless unseasoned food in this house, the idiocy of sleeping in a hot furnished room, the appalling mood of unrelieved blame that emanated from my crucified kinsman hanging on the wall, the repression of every human instinct in these people, my insecurity about my unknown future as a writer, the fall of France to the Nazis just weeks before, and guilt about marrying without my family present—for they had made no mention of wanting to come, and the expense of it all was beyond my means anyway. Anger created a new reality here, the reality of Mary, whom I felt myself falling in love with in a way I had not when she had seemed so strong and resolute a girl rather than the foundering and vulnerable young woman she was now. I was happy.
“I am calling,” I said as quietly as I was able, “to inform you that we will be married tomorrow whether there is a dispensation or not.”
“Just a moment,” said the voice, quite as routinely as a moment before, when it had announced the monsignor unapproachable.
During the wait it was probably inevitable that I thought of the constitutional prohibition against the establishment of religion. Suddenly, the obvious fact that one could, if one desired, marry outside the Church, that its writ was limited to those who professed belief in it, was a miracle and a blessing.
Another voice, announcing itself as the monsignor’s: “What seems to be the problem?”
I explained that Slattery had this deposit and that we had come from New York and all the rest.
“But the papal delegate has gone for the weekend and can’t be reached,” the monsignor explained with a certain blind reasonableness!
“Well then, we’ll have to be married by a justice of the peace.”
“ She can’t do that.”
“But can’t a telegram be sent to Washington? This is very important to the family.”
“My dear sir, the Catholic Church has been doing business this way for nearly two thousand years, and you are not going to change that before tomorrow.”
“I am not trying to change it.”
“You will have to make up your mind to wait through the weekend.”
“We are marrying tomorrow, sir. If you want it done with a dispensation, it will have to be here before then.”
There was silence. “I’ll inquire again, but I am sure there is nothing to be done.”
“Well then, thank you very much.”
In his excitement, Slattery unloosed a veritable flood of spit into his cuspidor, and a new energy seemed to charge Mrs. Slattery, who forgot her weakness and marched into the kitchen to make some cheerful iced tea. They wanted to know exactly what the monsignor had said, and I had to reenact the conversation several times. Suddenly the phone rang. Hardly an hour had passed. Slattery picked it up, and his small blue eyes widened. As he covered the mouthpiece he loudly whispered the caller’s identity: the young local priest. Back into the phone, all he could say was “Thank you, Father. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.” The dispensation would be arriving in time for the wedding tomorrow. Oddly, my having to win Mary like this had blasted away whatever doubts I had that we belonged together.
But Mrs. Slattery’s fears were not so easily downed. As the pale priest next morning read off his special service, her tensioned fingers managed to break her rosary and the beads bounced all over the polished floor, causing everyone to look around for them while the reluctantly uttered words rolled on. She looked guiltily at me, paralyzed by this prophetic symbol of destruction that her hands, all by themselves, had unloosed upon the ceremony.
But all was changed again by lunchtime. After the morning reception ended, with its scant few whiskey bottles and canapés spread as far as they could go on a table, we were off inland to Berea and the old family farm where Mrs. Slattery was born and raised. The square Victorian house stood under elms and old maples whose limbs stretched over a broad yard surrounded by flat fields of hay and sugar beets and corn. Braces of small children raced in and out among some fifty people, including a dozen of Mary’s adult young cousins, some of them broad thigh-slapping laughers and others with introverted and sad faces, and immensely fat farmers and small-town folk, all of them feeding on slices of roasts and turkeys and chocolate cakes six inches thick.
Overlooking the crowd, seated on the deep porch rocking rapidly back and forth, Mrs. Slattery’s eighty-year-old mother, Nan, looked with darting eyes from face to face, her expressions changing as she recognized some rarely encountered member of the clan. She wore a flowered blue cotton print dress that was obviously brand-new and still stiff, and an old-fashioned, high-crowned tucked bonnet of the same material with a visor ten inches deep. Thin as a whip, she gripped the chair arms with her gnarled hands as she excitedly rode it back and forth. When we arrived Mary had kissed her feelingly and she had looked into Mary’s eyes and said, “You were always smart.” Now, when I happened to be alone on the lawn for a moment some yards from the porch, I heard her shriek, “Arthur!” I turned and saw her beckoning me surreptitiously, and I came up onto the porch and sat beside her as she began to tell me her life. At a table not far off in the crowd, Mary’s mother kept glancing over at us with a nervous smile, but Mr. Slattery seemed an altogether different man, waving to me from time to time with the secret smile of a co-conspirator. In his eyes, I was now a go-getter, a type he looked up to from the shafts he had been strapped to all his life.
When I said the farm looked beautiful to me, Nan told me it had been rented out for years now; all the girls had married and gone off—there had been six daughters and no sons, a calamity for a farm couple—and her husband had not lived a long life.
“We come out here on a wagon from New York State, don’t y’know, and we arrived over there by the lake and I liked it fine right there, but he wanted a heavier soil so we come back in here, and the clay was what killed him. The spot I wanted to settle turned into the middle of Cleveland.” She chuckled, stared out at the mob, and suddenly yelled toward a passing man at the top of her lungs, “Bertie!”
Mary’s mother was instantly on her feet coming over in embarrassment to tell her not to scream like that. The old lady listened studiously to this instruction, and Mary’s mother returned to her table and sat again, but her eyes were open in the back of her head.
The old lady continued. “My husband liked that heavy soil they had in Alsace, that’s in the old country where he come from, but the clay is what killed him …” She seemed to see something to one
side of the porch and got to her feet, and I followed her over to the railing where a chicken house stood fenced around with wire. Now I could hear some restive clucking from within. She went to a glider couch standing against the house wall and, bending far over, drew a hatchet out from underneath and went back to observe the chicken house. I asked her what was happening, and she said, “They’s rats been gettin’ in there.”
“What do you do with the hatchet?”
“Why, I throw it,” she said, as though I must be stupid.
Mary’s mother was suddenly behind us, blushing and taking the hatchet from the old lady. “Now, Mother, you don’t have to today …”—and led her back to her rocker, where I sat beside her again. Quite mortified, Mrs. Slattery climbed back down the stoop and returned to her table, wearily wiping her hair away from her face, stretched in a slow agony between her husband’s spitting and her mother’s throwing hatchets at rats.
“Who’re you voting for?” Nan suddenly asked me. I told her it would be Roosevelt.
“Yes. Well, he’s the best around, I guess. But I always voted Farmer-Labor, and always for Bob La Follette when I could, although he never got close for president. But I was a member of the party, and he was always my man.”
“Are you a socialist?”
“Oh, sure. But them”—she waved toward the party of people—“they’re all conservative and Republicans now.” Suddenly she half stood up and started to scream someone’s name but stopped herself and sat, impatiently waiting for the person to turn her way. Then she waved properly and said, “Hi!” in a softened voice and returned to rocking rapidly as though she were on horseback with her eyes roving across an interesting horizon.
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