A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For a Catholic, however, from a devout family, the issue isn’t simply belief but the emotional pressure of the family, that one seem to believe; that one behave as if one believed, in the public sense.

  Each Sunday the Catholic mass, each Sunday communion with the family.

  All religions involve such rituals. When it is a family ritual, the wish to deny, to repudiate, to flee is bound up with the wish not to upset, disrespect, antagonize.

  Ray’s devout parents had sent all of their children to parochial schools—of course. Give me a child before he’s seven and I will have him for life—so the Jesuits believe, without irony.

  Ray had been highly impressionable, he’d told me. He was likely to believe what he was told by adults in authority. The Church, in Ray’s lifetime, was characterized by the most intractable demands—the absolute obedience of all Catholics to the dictums of priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal, pope. As young children Catholics were taught to believe that the slightest, most trivial of infractions (i.e., before the Church law was changed, eating meat on Fridays; breaking your fast before communion by allowing even a snowflake to melt on your lips; any use of “artificial” birth control) could constitute a sin for which the sinner would be damned to Hell.

  Venial sins sent you to Purgatory, for an unspecified time. Mortal sins sent you to Hell, forever.

  The Church teaches that you can work your way out of Purgatory, eventually. Like ascending steep steps up a mountain—it will take time, it might take years, but you can do it.

  Also, if you are in Purgatory, your family can help you by praying to the Virgin Mary on your behalf, and by paying for masses to be said for the redemption of your soul.

  Within its straitjacket of absurd canon law, by tradition the Church is curiously flexible, if not whimsical. To be prayed-over after your death is a kind of lobbying and, like lobbying, requires payment to individuals in authority. The Virgin Mary is the soft, feminine, maternal figure to whom you can pray for intercession with the stern, hyper-masculine paternal figure of God. In Ray’s time Catholics believed that if God wished to detain you for a long time in Purgatory, it was possible for Mary to ease you out, into Paradise, through the back door.

  Hence the football term, inexplicable to non-Catholics—Hail Mary pass.

  The “Hail Mary” is the prayer that is exclusively to Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.

  How many hundreds—thousands?—of times had Ray uttered this prayer. How many times had Ray “crossed” himself—tips of fingers to his forehead, to his breastbone, to his left shoulder, and to his right shoulder.

  How deeply imprinted these ritual-gestures. Far more deeply than anything in a Catholic’s more “conscious” life.

  Purgatory is not unlike life. Purgatory is life as a prison sentence, from which one might be redeemed. Hell is a different matter.

  Once you are in Hell, you can’t work your way out of Hell. Your family can’t petition you out. No matter how many high masses your family purchases for you, you will never leave Hell.

  You will suffer such torments in Hell!—physical, spiritual.

  Much of parochial school religion in Ray’s time focused upon the punishments of Hell. Paradise was a vague bright place overseen by God and populated by angels—Hell was a vivid place overseen by the Devil and populated by devils.

  Each sinner could expect to be punished by his/her own devil.

  For brilliantly imagined sadistic punishments to expect in the Catholic Hell, see James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And recall that, for all his repudiation of the Church, and his disdain for such primitive superstition, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus concedes that he’s still afraid there is a “malevolent reality” to what he no longer believes.

  As it was the hope of most Catholics that at least one of their children might enter the religious life—take “holy orders”—so Ray’s father expressed the hope that Ray would become a priest. After graduating from Marquette High School in Milwaukee—a Jesuit-run school with a reputation for academic excellence—Ray entered a Jesuit seminary in the area, at the age of eighteen.

  In photographs, Ray Smith at age eighteen looks so very young—like fifteen, or fourteen.

  Exactly what happened at the seminary, I don’t know—Ray didn’t speak of it except generally, obliquely—Things didn’t work out. I dropped out after a few months.

  Ray’s emotions about the Church, thus about his childhood/boyhood in Milwaukee, were very complicated. A more aggressive wife—a wife who was closer to her husband’s age—might have succeeded in getting him to speak more openly about it, and about his feelings for his parents; a more aggressive wife might have become better acquainted with Ray’s parents.

  Though Ray became very fond of my parents, as if he were a blood relative of theirs, I scarcely knew Ray’s parents. He didn’t encourage me, and we visited Milwaukee rarely.

  My memories of Ray’s parents are good ones. Seeing Ray with his family at the time—his father, his mother, his brother Bob—was to see the man I had fallen in love with in another context: son, brother. I did not feel that my claim upon my husband was greater than theirs and I feared—as many young wives do—that it was less.

  After our first visit Ray said, “Did you see how my mother looked at you? Smiled at you? She couldn’t stop touching you . . .” This was pleasing to Ray, and very nice for me to hear.

  For this reason, I always felt close to Ray’s mother whom I would see on only a few occasions in her lifetime. When she died at a very old age—it might have been ninety-nine—the way in which Ray grieved for her suggested that he’d never had any quarrel with her.

  What is eerie, unsettling—as Ray grew older, the more Ray began to resemble his father, Raymond Joseph Smith, for whom he was named.

  The more Ray began to dislike his photographs. The more Ray insisted upon being the one who took photographs, whose photograph was not taken.

  In the first insomniac nights after Ray’s death, when I lay dazed and exhausted and sleepless wondering what had happened to us, as the victim of an earthquake or a wreck must lay astonished and wondering what had happened quite apart from any physical pain or even any fear of what might happen again at any time, for some reason I was thinking of Ray and of his father—I was seeing Ray and his father, as if their faces had almost merged—I was thinking Ray was older than his father when his father died. Ray should have forgiven his father.

  I had no clear idea what might have been “forgiven.”

  I would never have ventured such a thought to Ray.

  Then, I remembered: it wasn’t just that Ray had discovered his father crying, or even that his father had expressed a terror of being “damned” because of Ray; Ray was also upset by his father’s habit of praying aloud when others could overhear, murmuring the ejaculation Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! which is, or was, a Catholic plea for the overcoming of temptation, or for forgiveness.

  Seeing an attractive woman on television, for instance, Ray’s father would quickly look away murmuring Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!—a way of blocking an unwanted/sinful sexual thought.

  To have impure thoughts was believed to be a grave sin, in the Catholic cosmology. If a Catholic did not sufficiently confess his impure thoughts to a priest, and if he took the sacrament of communion, he would be committing a mortal sin and if he died in this state of mortal sin, he would be punished forever in Hell.

  How ridiculous such notions seem to us! To some of us.

  How crucial to life, to others. We must consider that most of the world’s population “believes” in some sort of personal, often punitive God-relationship. The soil of the earth is steeped in the blood of those who have died for their religious beliefs as by those who have been killed by those who believe.

  Ray’s father had fought in World War I, as a young man. He’d been born Catholic and except for illness, he’d never misse
d a Sunday mass or a holy day of obligation in all of his life.

  He was a car salesman in Milwaukee. Even through the Depression, he worked. Ray would say of him He worked so hard. He never stopped working. He was always at the dealership, or he was on the phone. He never rested. He wore himself out. His only happiness was the Church—taking communion.

  I have no memory of Ray calling his father anything other than my father. I don’t recall him addressing his father. Not once did I hear Ray utter the word Dad, Daddy.

  I am thinking now that it was a mistake that I made no effort to urge Ray to be reconciled with his father. I seemed not to have given the possibility any thought. Very likely I took a kind of pleasure in it, that Ray was emotionally estranged from his family and therefore more dependent upon me.

  While we saw my parents often, and were on the very best, friendliest terms with Carolina and Fred.

  Seeing Ray with my parents, seeing how well we all got along, how happy we were together, I might have thought He doesn’t need anyone except us, as a family. He has us.

  This was a naive thought. It was a young-wife sort of thought, the jealousy of one who isn’t altogether certain of herself.

  Now that it’s too late, in fact decades too late, I am sorry about this. I don’t even know whether Ray loved his father, as well as being uncomfortable with him, and angry—and embarrassed. I don’t even know whether Ray’s father was upset about his son living at such a distance from him, seeing his parents so rarely. And there came the day in the late 1960s when Ray’s brother called to say that Ray’s father had died. And we went to the funeral in Milwaukee, and Ray was utterly stunned, silent; and whatever Ray felt, he did not share with me.

  I was young then, and naive. I may have imagined, since Ray said so little about his father, that Ray wasn’t grieving for him. That when I asked him how he was feeling, and he shrugged and said All right, that was a reasonable answer.

  It’s a fact, a man will love his father—in some way.

  Snarled and twisted like the roots of a gigantic tree—these are the contortions of familial love.

  Yet even now, if Ray were to return—could I ask him about his father? His family? Would I dare? Or would the slightest frown on Ray’s part discourage me, and deflect the conversation onto another subject, as it always did?

  As a wife, I had never wanted to upset my husband. I had never wanted to quarrel, to disagree or to be disagreeable. To be not loved seemed to me the risk, if a wife confronted her husband against his wishes.

  And now, I am not loved. And what a strange lucidity this seems to bring, like disinfectant slapped on an open wound.

  ***

  From Ray’s notes, handwritten:

  BLACK MASS. Title: double meaning—requiem mass and Satanic inversion of mass. V. working at a poem of this title at the time of her suicide, P. discovers it in her journal . . . The poem (incomplete) describes their sexual encounter in terms of a witch’s black mass; her ironic projection of the guilt she imagines he felt . . . P. is about eight years older than V., a professor and a priest . . .

  The manuscript Black Mass contains about one hundred typed pages, irregularly numbered. Included in the folder are numerous pages of notes and detailed outlines. Some pages are typed in red ink, others in black. Considering the age of the manuscript, the ink hasn’t faded much, though there are paragraphs that have been x’ed out as if impatiently and the author’s marginal notes are near-unreadable.

  A kind of trance has overcome me, reading these notes of Ray’s. The single-spaced typing gives Ray’s writing an air of intensity, urgency. I feel as if I am overhearing Ray talking to himself and the sensation reminds me of the sensation I felt as a girl wandering onto rural property posted NO TRESPASSING.

  There are two principal characters in Black Mass—V. (Vanessa), a poet (who bears some resemblance to Sylvia Plath?) and P. (Paul), who bears some resemblance, except for the fact that he is an ordained priest, to the young novelist Ray.

  V.’s poetry is sincere, with a distinct voice . . . Her writing gives her an identity; it is a psychological outlet. She sees with the poet’s eye, continually assembling words in her head—“ordering the world.” She meets Paul at Wisconsin. She meets him several times, once at a grad student Christmas party; he shows an interest in her writing, encourages her . . .

  Is this a coincidence? Only a coincidence—Ray and I met at a graduate student reception, not at Christmas but in October. And it can only be a coincidence, Paul is eight years older than Vanessa. As I read further it seems clear that Paul is Ray’s alter ego, the center of consciousness of the novel; the story is being related retrospectively, after Vanessa’s death/suicide, as Paul, at this time forty-one, a Jesuit, looks back upon their (not quite consummated?) love affair, which he’d broken off. Most of the notes focus on Paul:

  He comes from a middle-class family in Milwaukee, Irish mother, father discontented with the “burden” of wife and children . . . Paul’s formal religious duties consist of saying mass every morning and saying his brievery [sic] . . . which have become mechanical to him . . . He feels that he functions “religiously” mainly when he helps other people . . . He is one of the “new” priests. Paul meets Vanessa in his fourth year when he is working on his dissertation . . . He thinks of her as superior to the other graduate students he knows and feels a certain protectiveness toward her. He is happy to read her poetry and offer criticism.

  This, too, is coincidental—I think—for when Ray met me, he was in his fourth, final year as a graduate student, and he was writing his dissertation. Ray, too, volunteered to read some of my writing—not poetry, but fiction—including a story that had been published in Mademoiselle when I was nineteen. And I think that he felt “protective” toward me. . . .

  What is fictitious about Paul is his career as a Jesuit academic: after leaving Madison, Wisconsin, he acquires a position at the University of Detroit (!) and later becomes chair of the English department at Fordham, a Jesuit-run university in New York. Vanessa, the troubled poet, drops out of graduate school after having failed her M.A. orals—she’s too brilliantly independent-minded to give her questioners the answers they expect . . . (Surely this is a coincidence, though I didn’t fail my M.A. orals in the spring of 1961 I was given a difficult time by my [male, smug] interrogators, and advised not to seek a Ph.D.; Ray was incensed on my behalf, more than I was, since I had not the slightest interest at the time in continuing the grim dull ordeal of graduate school.)

  Reading Ray’s notes, hearing Ray’s voice—questing, questioning—the author addressing himself on the subject of his characters—(who are invariably as “real” as individuals in the “real” world, to the novelist)—leaves me terribly moved. It’s so clear that Paul is Ray—the Ray who’d lived out his father’s hope for him, and became that most elite of Catholic priests—a Jesuit. (Among the Catholic religious orders, the Society of Jesus is the Brahmin caste. Perversely, Jesuits take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—but Jesuits have traditionally/historically moved in the highest social classes in both Europe and the United States and have exerted political influence disproportionate to their numbers. Among Ray’s priest-friends were several Jesuits, my colleagues at the University of Detroit.)

  It seems clear that Ray may have felt a strong attraction to the Church, despite his intellectual rejection of it; and that Ray identified with the “celibate” Paul, attracted to a young woman in defiance of his vows.

  The crux of the novel is Paul’s rejection of Vanessa, and Vanessa’s subsequent suicide, not immediately but several years later. The present tense of the novel is the requiem mass Paul says for his former lover and his realization belatedly that he loved her—“If she could be brought back to life, would he leave the Church for her? Would he leave the priesthood to save her?” Amid much speculation is the blunt statement:

  He has not left the priesthood for her. She is dead.

  Paul and Vanessa are meant to suggest Abelard and E
loise, the fated lovers of medieval Catholic tradition, whose letters Ray had read and found deeply moving. Clearly there is a parallel also with the life and early death of Sylvia Plath, for Vanessa like Plath commits suicide by turning on a gas oven in a rented flat in London. (Recall that, when Ray was writing this novel in the late 1950s, the vogue for Sylvia Plath had only just begun and this material, far from being over-familiar as it would seem to us now, was quite daring for a novelist to explore.) Paul, however, is no Ted Hughes—his sexuality is self-conscious, thwarted. He’s a Catholic steeped in a sense of sin, as Ray was, by his own account, in adolescence; when he feels desire for Vanessa, and gives in to that desire, he is inadvertently condemning her to death—suicide: “To what extent is P. implicated in V.’s suicide? He has encouraged her in her poetry, which was life-giving to her . . . But when he realized he loved her, he decides not to see her again. . . .” And, the final note in the first section: “What about the Journal? How does P. get hold of it? V.’s point of view—helps fill in last days. No answers here, however.”

  Following the typed notes are a dozen tablet-paper pages covered in Ray’s handwriting, twenty-three numbered paragraphs. I am not able to read more than a fraction of this handwriting—I am beginning to feel dazed, disoriented—how sad it seems to me, that Ray worked so hard on this novel, cared so much for his characters!—who must have dwelt deep within him, for years. Isolated queries—“Have V.’s voice recorded some way????”—“Would it be too idealistic for V. to give P. up?—remove herself from his life?”

  Heartbreaking to see so detailed an outline for the novel—twenty-six chapters indicated by place names (London, Madison, Madison, London, Detroit, London, New York, London, etc.) with intercalations from the poet’s Journal (“poetry circuit in Midwest,” “midnight walk on George Washington Bridge,” “last days before suicide & poem ‘Black Mass’ ”)—chronologies of the lives of the characters—an obituary from the Sunday Times on the poet’s death, and much, much more . . . There is even an alternative ending, in which V. only just attempts suicide, and P. hurries to her, in London: “How can I show Paul making his choice—partially by the fact that he’s in London? Hopes she will recover, there won’t be brain damage, wonders whether she’ll be sorry she’s alive” (This breaks off without a punctuation mark.) The novel begins in medias res with a densely typed page of which most has been crossed out, though I can read what has been crossed out if I peer carefully at it. The prose is flat, blunt, affect-less and reportorial in the Hemingway mode, as a means of creating subtextual tension, but the author must have been dissatisfied with this beginning because in a few pages the scene evaporates and he begins again from another perspective.