Suspecting these speeches are going to continue for a while, I address myself to my catered meal, which is chunks of the lord crucified on a tall Golgotha of green beans. I eat with gusto. Jason passes me his plate and I polish his off too. I look fondly at my sister across the table as I chew, and think how much we have in common. We both make this little snort in the back of our throats while we eat, a sort of airy hog sound that comes and goes at will. I’m sure it’s the result of some inner deformity. Absorbed in thoughts of my heritage, I forget myself for a moment and shove an entire medallion of christ into my mouth at the exact moment I hear the words “We’re very lucky to have Father Greg’s daughters with us tonight. Stand up, girls!” I gulp, and the medallion lodges halfway down my gullet. I shake my Fashion Hitler playfully at the bishop, as if to say that modesty does not permit me to make such an exhibition of myself. “Go ahead, let the people get a look at you!” I stand with all the grace I can summon, and Mary, her keen medical eye alerting her to the fact that I am choking, whacks me on the back as if to congratulate me. Tears begin to trickle down my right cheek. I raise my arm and wave to the congregation, which murmurs with approval and appreciation. I press my hand to my lips, as if overcome with emotion, and spit a whole wet mouthful of meat into it.
A teenage quartet erupts into jazz, signaling the end of the speeches and the beginning of the party. The teens are dressed as Bible salesmen, in black slacks and black ties and white shirts, and the jazz they’re playing sounds suspiciously Christian—there’s no heroin or adultery in it at all. What are they doing here on a Saturday night? We should all be out drag racing, having knife fights, and getting arrested. We should be playing chicken on a deserted road up by the old quarry, then dying intoxicated in the arms of our busty, pink-sweatered girlfriends. Instead, we’re trapped together here. I walk past them and hurl a dollar into their midst, hoping it will persuade them to let loose and play something a girl can get pregnant to.
“Jazzon,” Jason says, standing up and executing a vigorous male pirouette. “What if I spelled it Jazzon.” He used to play the horn himself when he was younger—perhaps that was his first step down the path of immorality. Jazz presents many temptations. The stand-up bass is shaped exactly like a woman, and the saxophone is just a trumpet that’s trying to blow itself. No wonder the seminarian had to give it up.
The room, I regret to report, is drunk. Very irresponsible of it. It’s whirling around, and it keeps flinging parishioners at me. “I could feel your intelligence shining at me all the way across the basement,” one woman tells me, leaning close to deliver her message, smelling of baby powder and church flowers and her smile a wide watermelon slice. I forgot that to members of the congregation, my sister and I are Celebs. They are indifferent to the existence of actual Celebs, with their sideboobs and their gay divorces, but at the approach of anything belonging to the priesthood, their faces lift and bloom. They touch you shyly, with a hint of timid ownership. They tell you things about yourself that you’ve always suspected to be true, such as “You wear an aura of holiness wherever you go,” and “You look like that one girl on TV.” My intelligence DOES shine, I flatter myself. My aura of holiness is so bright even bats can see it. I DO look like that one girl on TV! Our voices change when we talk to them, they fold themselves up into white linen napkins. We sound as polite and well-bred as our mother. “Thank you,” we say, “thank you so much!”
I suddenly feel a claustrophobia I haven’t felt since I was a teenager and still a believer. There is the clamor of so many human lives in one room. There is the panic that always rises in church places, that I’ve been shut up in a dark stall, herded into a stable with my kind. When you are born, you walk on the ark. The ark is the earth. From there, the elephants go with the elephants, and the little gold mites with the little gold mites. It makes me long to see a different animal, from a different story. I wish Grendel would burst into the hall and eat us.
Another parishioner toddles up to us. His name is George and he has been in a war. He points an accusing finger at me. “She’s cute,” he pronounces in a sly, sepulchral voice, then toddles away again, having unburdened both his heart and his loins.
The compliment from George recalls me to my lighter self. I throw a wink at one of the female caterers, but the wink is unfortunately intercepted by the bishop. He smiles with encouragement, as if I just expressed interest in entering the convent. I wonder what would happen if I sent a Mountain Vodka Dew over to him with my regards. We haven’t gotten to chat as much as I would like! I have a few things I want to say to him about condoms.
I glance at Mary and notice her pumping her pelvis subtly in her chair. She’s trying to hide her true nature from the bishop, but this is difficult when a teenage jazz quartet is releasing such smooth and carnal music into the atmosphere. My dollar worked! We both feel it is important to express ourselves through dance, and begin to edge our way to the center of the floor. We are interrupted, however, by the approach of a slow-stepping but determined George, who is back and eager to resume our conversation. He points at me. “She’s cute,” he repeats, and then toddles away again, just as before.
The room is finally so wasted it’s barfing all the people inside it into the night. Time to go home. The bishop bids us good-bye. “I will look up your poems,” he tells me, and I physically restrain myself from saying, “Please don’t do that.” Mary makes a gentlemanly move to kiss his ring, but I grab her by the hand and drag her behind me. She has passed the point of no return, and if I don’t get her out of here soon, who knows what will happen.
Outside, the moon is casting a powdery round halo, the kind that draws you up toward it like the silhouette of a wolf. Mary, responding to its call, regresses to full bestiality. She wiggles out of my grasp and is gone like a flash across the parking lot. Despite all her clothes, she gives the impression of streaking. When we catch up to her, we find her engaged in gleeful and wholesale destruction of the front yard. “Fuck the police!” she shrieks, kicking crazily at the poison sumac. “Ahahaha!” She wrenches one of the decorative stones out of the landscaping and hurls it at the rectory. With a warlike cry, she leaps three feet in the air and high-fives the American flag that hangs above the door. Jon wrestles her down with one neat motion and carries her bodily into the house.
My father is spreading his legs wide on the couch and my mother has two bottles of champagne in her fists and is attempting to drink out of both of them at once, punctuating her refreshment with unlawful whoops. She raises one of the bottles to The Stobart, as if to christen its prow. She had only one glass at dinner, but she has the exquisitely low alcohol tolerance of all Flamm women, the tolerance that is currently causing my sister to crawl seductively across the floor on all fours, mouthing come-ons at the tiger painting. Not that I’m any better. I found a crayon and a scrap of paper somewhere, and I’m writing it all down.
“I think that went well,” my father says, showering the great big blessing of a smile all over us. He has known us since the minute we were born. We are bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and just bad enough to keep him in business. God made us; we are little green apples.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, to the accompaniment of a mental marching band, I decide to look up the bishop, since waking up with a hangover is the closest I ever get to feeling like a detective. I sit cross-legged on the bed in the middle of wild white sheets and read newspaper clipping after newspaper clipping, several from The Kansas City Star, which my father has accused of having a particular vendetta against the Church. (The only newspaper he doesn’t consider unforgivably liberal is The Cincinnati Enquirer, which I think endorsed a crucifix in the 2004 election.) The clippings are not under the impression that the bishop is a living saint.
In 2012, Robert Finn was the first American bishop to be criminally charged for failing to report suspected child abuse. After a Kansas City priest named Father Shawn Ratigan tried to com
mit suicide by running his motorcycle in a closed garage, Finn and his diocese learned Ratigan had hundreds of pictures of children on his computer, including a photo of a toddler with her diaper pulled away to expose her genitals. This wasn’t their first warning: the principal of the Catholic school next to the parish where Ratigan served had previously sent a memorandum to the diocese, saying of the priest: “Parents, staff members, and parishioners are discussing his actions and whether or not he may be a child molester.” After the suicide attempt, Finn and the diocese waited five months before informing police. Instead of turning in Ratigan, Finn ordered him to undergo a psychological evaluation and then sent him away to a convent, with orders to have no more contact with children. During that time, Ratigan took more pictures of kids he met through the church. He was eventually sentenced to fifty years in prison after pleading guilty to five counts of producing child pornography. Finn was sentenced to two years of probation for shielding him.
• • •
I CONNECT THE NAME RATIGAN with a bizarre snippet I heard floating around the house: “They took his computer, and they found panties hidden in his planter.” “Panties in a planter?” I thought at the time, not knowing what they were talking about. What was he trying to do, grow more? I drill down into those details: panties in a planter, a motorcycle in a garage, a computer in a convent. Beloved daughters and trusting parents. If you live with the details, even briefly, the newsprint vanishes and the real scene appears, impossible to dismiss or forget.
Bishop Finn is the man I met last night, who asked if I wanted a picture with him. He really thought I might; many of the people he meets do. Here is the smile, here is the hand that signs the documents, here is the measured voice that tells the priests they must go away until everything dies down. Nothing permanent, of course, nothing ever permanent. Here is the little hat, which confers total power. Here are the glasses through which the eyes scan the numbers, how much it is worth, how much must be paid out. Here is the compassion in the face, that flowed toward the sinner and never the sinned-against, that forgave before justice had even been meted out.
How am I still held by the code of silence? Why do I feel it’s a betrayal to even write this down, these facts that float freely in the public domain? “Oh, a member of the media,” as if the collection, arrangement, and publication of the facts is the real crime.
Renata Adler wrote: “‘He has suffered enough’ meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too.” To the best of my knowledge, no bishop or archbishop my father ever served under was innocent of participating in cover-ups, shuffling papers, hushing up victims, sending offenders away for rest and rehabilitation. When I looked up Bishop Finn, I held my breath until I came to the sentence that laid it bare. I held my breath because I knew it would come.
• • •
THOSE SNIPPETS ALWAYS FLOATED through the house. We knew things the way you know about that one high school teacher or that one babysitter or that one coach or that one scout leader, except our neighborhood spanned the whole country. The topic of which priests had been removed from their parishes, which priests had been ordered not to interact with children, which priests had been sent off for counseling, and who had been arrested was discussed over the dinner table. When the first wave of scandals broke, in 2002, I felt briefly confused. Didn’t everyone know? Or was it just that no one had access to that accumulation of information, that stack of maybe and possibly and definitely, that constellation of things we knew and things we guessed and things we suspected?
At my father’s current parish, he took the place of a priest who was under suspicion, and I don’t think that was the first time he was ever sent somewhere to restore a congregation’s faith. People place more trust in him—he’s married, he has children. He wouldn’t want you to draw a lesson from that, but I don’t see how you could help it. At his last assignment, the previous priest had covered his walls with pictures of boys torn out of Norman Rockwell books, their peachy faces scrawled over with crazed capitalized words about “temptation” and “the youth.” “When we first moved in,” my mother told me, “every surface of the house was covered with collages and writing, even the mirrors.” She cleaned the house from top to bottom until it was livable again. Somehow, that had always been part of her duties.
• • •
I REMEMBER THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA of last night, the feeling that I was too much with my kind, that I had been shut up with people who had as many spots as I did. When I left the church originally, was it because suddenly those spots seemed of a different nature? Did I leave in protest? That would have been foolish, any priest would tell you. That would have meant I had lost my perspective, had misplaced the blame, was ultimately only punishing myself. But religion, above all, must recognize the power of the symbol. It must recognize the power of standing up and sitting down. If the church teaches anything, it’s that sometimes we have to answer for what other people have done. Let me do it by standing up and walking out of the countinghouse, and saving my number for the smaller side.
All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.
You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine—it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?
• • •
IN THE NOT-SO-FAR FUTURE, Bishop Finn will be forced to resign by Pope Francis, who is proving to be a figure worthy of some study. My father will publish a letter of staunch support in the church bulletin, suggesting that the bishop was being persecuted for his conservative beliefs, that in fact he had committed no crime at all, and that the prosecutor in his case was a mercenary with “strong ties to the abortion industry.” I will be so disheartened by this that I can barely speak to him or meet his eyes for weeks. Though later he will tell my mother, with perhaps the first stirrings of doubt, “I’m beginning to think any one of them would have done it. That the position is more powerful than the man.”
7
PUT IT IN PRINT
At the end of July, when the air outside is sweltering and the air inside is the approximate temperature of a glacier, the online magazine The Awl publishes a long poem of mine called “Rape Joke.” I wrote it in a strong fluent flood down in Savannah, sitting in a white towel on the edge of the bed while afternoon sunlight lavished over my shoulders and my coffee left a cold ring in its cup. Poetry is a companion: you sit with it mostly in silence, and look up from your reading every once in a while and nod to it, and sometimes there are great rushes of like-minded, sentence-finishing conversation. It came all at once, the lines racing off the edges of the pages as if to jump back into the stream of present time: all of it happened again, red and fresh, but I could move my body through the narration as I could not move it through that night. Beads along a razor blade, but this time I controlled the cut. I didn’t know if I ought to publish it, because I never wrote about the things that really happened to me, the real things. But after enough time passes, you can publish a poem like that without feeling your own palpitating heart is doing the New Year’s drop in Times Square, watched by a million people, reflecting back a face to every one.
Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache—no one really notices, and it might be better that way. Something about this one catches, though, and in the space of a day it is
everywhere. Thousands of replies, messages, and emails pour into my various inboxes. A dozen girls send me their own versions of the poem, filled in with their own details. One friend writes, “The same thing happened to me, except a week later he gave me a book about the Beatles with the words ‘I’m sorry’ written in it.”
Finally I come downstairs, wrung out from responding to this avalanche, and see my mother sitting in the dimness of a soft, bruised dusk, her face illuminated by her laptop screen. There are tracks down her cheeks.
“I just read it,” she says, quiet, below the sound of my father’s voice in the next room. He and the seminarian are discussing the case of a priest in St. Louis who was recently caught forcing a fourteen-year-old girl into his car and kissing her—in the parking lot of the cathedral, no less, because the scene would be incomplete without that one grotesque detail that makes everything rouse to life. “She shouldn’t have put him in that position,” I hear a male voice say, and an old familiar wildness flutters up my chest and into my throat, sending feathers and flames into my voice box until I cannot speak, that same phoenix heat that still rises up in me no matter how many times I force it down.
“I just read it,” my mother repeats in her lowest and most doom-filled tone. “THE RAPE JOKE.”
This would be the wrong moment to laugh, but I almost do, remembering the time we drove past a bridge in Cincinnati that was famous for being painted purple, and my mother turned to me with enormous, electrified eyes and said, “Someone got raped, Tricia. Someone got raped on the Purple People Bridge.”
She stands and embraces me, more to give herself comfort than to impart it, and her hands describe small circles all over my back. I do not melt into it—the memory of the original pain, and the night I snuck into my parents’ room to tell them, and their reaction, is still too vivid. It prickles over the skin like a sweat, or a flush. My mind fixes on the indelible image of kneeling next to my mother’s side of the bed, in that bedroom filled with decorative gold balls, and telling her what had happened, and her asking with a sob, “But you didn’t sleep with him beforehand, did you?” And when I told her I had, of my father rising, holding me against his great patriarchal stomach, and making the sign of the cross over me to absolve me of my sins. It moves next to the image of sitting in the cold, clinical office of the pro-life gynecologist my mother had designated for all her daughters, and telling him what had happened and hearing him say, “Well, now you’ve learned that you can’t trust everyone, can you,” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy, as he squared my file with two brisk taps against his desk and stood to leave. It must have been then I began to suspect, something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.
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