by Paul Clemens
Before we’d left the brownstone, he thought it wise to pack up his car, so that when we got back we could go straight to the airport without having to go inside and get my stuff. His car was parked on the street, right across from the residence. “We’ll put it all in the trunk,” he said. Though the backpack posed no problem, the bike didn’t fit in the trunk, no matter which way we turned the handlebars, or whether or not I took off the bike’s front wheel. “Let’s put the bike in the backseat,” he said. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked, as politely as possible. “If it fits,” he said. It did, and he shut and locked his car’s rear passenger door. I looked at my bike, still concerned. It was clearly visible from the sidewalk. “It’s a pretty safe neighborhood,” he said, and though he didn’t give me the “you’re not in Detroit anymore” speech—it was his hometown, too—he did hint that my concerns may have been exaggerated by my days in Detroit, where the downtown was deserted. This, on the other hand, was vibrant downtown Boston. People everywhere.
I’m not sure which one of us, on our return, was the first to see the glass on the sidewalk. Moving our eyes upward, we saw the rear passenger door swung open, and the window above it knocked out. My first instinct, upon seeing the glass—force of habit—was to grab the Easton by my bed and go after the bastards. But Boston was not Detroit, and Father was not my father.
He went inside, got a bucket and broom, and began to clean up the mess. I insisted on helping, tossing bits of glass into the bucket, and we took turns trading embarrassed apologies while crouched down on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry about your car,” I said, feeling utterly helpless. “I’m sorry about your bike.” “When I send you the check for the plane ticket, I’ll be sure to include money for this.” “Insurance will cover this. Did you have your bike insured?” “No.” “Then there’s no need to reimburse me for the ticket. You’re out enough money already, and it’s my fault the bike got stolen.”
I rode to Logan Airport with broken glass on the floor in front of me and a breeze coming in from the open window behind. During the half-hour ride we discussed books—he knew I was about to go to graduate school at the University of Miami, where the English Department specialty was Joyce—and I was reminded of the dead priest in “The Sisters,” the opening story in Dubliners, which I’d first read back in Mr. Vachon’s AP English class. The story is narrated by a young boy with whom the priest had been close. “He had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest,” the boy says. “Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church.” This was reminiscent of how the man driving me to the airport—who’d once defined the word morality on the chalkboard by using moral in his definition, a circularity to which I’d taken exception—had acted while my high school religion teacher. The boy continues: “The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them.”
And this is the story’s secret. The priest, we learn, had broken a chalice near the end of his life. “They say it was the boy’s fault,” an old woman says in the narrator’s presence, the implication being that it had happened during Mass and that the altar boy had somehow been remiss. “Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing,” she says, meaning no wine—no blood of Christ—had been spilled. Nonetheless, the priest, out of guilt-induced insanity, ends his days “sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself.”
I wondered: If a broken chalice could cause this much trouble, what about a broken window on a midsize American sedan? Father would suffer no crisis of faith over the incident (he’d take a position in Rome shortly thereafter), but the bike and broken window seemed like symbols—overly literary symbols, perhaps—for a break I had been contemplating anyway. After twenty-two years I was leaving Detroit, a city that for me had strong associations with—well, everything—not least broken-out car windows. It seemed fitting that my final adolescent interaction with the Catholic Church, the other dominant factor of my first couple decades, should revolve around the same.
Who Happened to Be
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS after I finished graduate school—making this 1997—I was living on Michigan’s west side with a group of undergraduate friends. On Christmas Eve, during lunch break at the bookstore where I was working, I received a card inside an unwrapped copy of the Irish writer James Stephens’s out-of-print novel The Crock of Gold. The writing on the outside of the card was feminine, the sort of soft rounded script that I’d been deeply in love with since the fifth grade, when I first began to serve as courier for notes from one giggling girl in saddle shoes to the next giggling girl in saddle shoes, two seats up.
The gift’s giver (and I mentally ran through the possibilities as I opened the card) was clearly someone who knew that I’d just gone to graduate school to study James Joyce, and also knew that Joyce and Stephens had been friends. Joyce, a superstitious man, shared a birthday and a first name with Stephens, another Irish expatriate on the continent; that Stephens’s last name was Stephen Dedalus’s first sealed the deal. The kinship ran so deep that, in a moment of despair, Joyce had once asked Stephens, a near midget resembling a leprechaun, to finish Finnegans Wake for him. The last seminar I took in graduate school was devoted exclusively to the Wake, which couldn’t have been any more confusing, it seemed to me, had it had a hundred different authors.
For my final paper, I had been assigned to review a recently published critical study of the Wake, a shockingly au courant take on the book that posited, among other things, that Joyce was forwarding a decidedly progressive political position in his nearly impenetrable (and, to me, apolitical) epic, championing the various causes of the wretched of the earth. This critical stance was a rearguard action, a way to keep “relevant” a dead white male novelist by making his work a template onto which readers could project their own political agendas. As I would not be pursuing a Ph.D., and have never been one to leave a perfectly good bridge unburnt, I decided to blast the book, even though it had been written by a friend of my professor’s, himself a respected Joyce scholar.
My evidence? Not overwhelming: a hand gesture of Joyce’s, in fact, one that Richard Ellmann records in a footnote near the end of his biography of the novelist. In conversation with fellow Irishman Thomas McGreevy, Joyce once said: “I love my wife and my daughter and my son. For the rest of the world—” And here he held up his hands. How I loved that! And how, I asked in my paper, which I read aloud to the seminar room, does one square those words and that gesture—Joyce had expressed similar sentiments to others—with the man this critical study asks us to accept, concerned to his very core with the plight of the proletariat? Suffice it to say that no one was quite as impressed by my logic as I was. How could anyone have been? Could I have said to them that Joyce’s holding up his hands meant as much to me as it did because it reminded me of my own father, the only man I respected more than Joyce, someone I had often seen use a slight hand motion or a shrug of the shoulders to signify (something that is anathema to the academy) his being socially and politically disengaged? A week after delivering that paper I’d packed my bags and, armed with an unusable M.A., traded Coral Gables for yet more Michigan winters.
I’d gone down to Miami on a graduate teaching assistantship, which I viewed as a good way to postpone adulthood for two additional years on someone else’s dime. I had no intention of pursuing a Ph.D.; I wanted to be a novelist, and I’d use these two years to string the scenes I’d sketched out into a narrative. I had no idea how I’d do this, but I knew I needed primary characters besides my narrator. I decided to give him a couple of friends—a smar
t-ass intellectual who likes to steal statues of the Virgin Mary from old ladies’ backyards; a deeply stupid tough guy given to beating the shit out of punching bags and black people—and I had an ending in mind. The three of them would buy some eggs and drive into Grosse Pointe, where their mothers were cleaning ladies, and exact a little class-conscious revenge. When this got boring, the smart-ass would have a better idea: Let’s drive downtown, he’d say, and egg The Fist.
I’d decided, after leaving graduate school, not to settle in Detroit for several reasons, the main one being that no one I knew still lived there. My parents now lived outside the city limits, and the corner of Detroit that I’d called home was home no longer. Better, I thought, to leave the area altogether than live in a suburb. When people asked where I was from and my answer produced in them the usual uncertain smile and hesitant response—“Really? What was that like?”—I no longer took much pleasure in the exchange. It was like growing up anywhere else, I said, and it was, even though Detroit was like nowhere else.
I knew that I had to stay away from the city if I wanted to write about it; this was received literary wisdom, proven by generation after generation of expatriate genius. So when I read about Coleman Young’s death a few days after Thanksgiving 1997, I was living at a couple-hundred-mile and two-year remove from the city. I gave it only glancing notice—no one around me knew, or cared, who Coleman Young was. Ever disobliging, Young, who suffered from a congenital respiratory condition, was almost four years out of office before he got around to doing what so many in our neighborhood had wished he would while he still occupied the Manoogian Mansion. Over the previous summer he had contracted pneumonia, a complication arising from emphysema, itself the result of a lifetime of heavy smoking. (“I had the pleasure of being teargassed at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago,” Young wrote, “and it drove me back to smoking.”) Toward the end, there were reports of a heart attack. He was tended at home for a time by his cousin, Dr. Claud Young—later a board chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—and the privacy that surrounded the mayor meant that information had a tendency to leak out, as if he were dying the static-in-the-phone-lines death of a Third World dictator. To some, this was a fitting end.
I was a Catholic Detroiter—at least this was how I still thought of myself—who no longer lived in Detroit and whose connection to Catholicism was slipping by the day. I’d gone to Mass a few times in Coral Gables with an Irish girl from San Francisco, but this had had more to do with the old Catholic school strategy of sitting in the pew next to the cute girl, so that you could shake her hand during the sign of peace, than it did with actual piety. Accustomed as I was to answering questions about the manner in which I was conducting my life, it was a bit of a shock to find, at the age of twenty-four, that no one asked me anymore about my level of religious observance—that no one cared, that no one would inquire, and that, as an adult, I was free, on this and other fronts, to do as I damn well pleased. The Marist Fathers were no longer my teachers, and neither were the grade school nuns; and the aunts, uncles, and grandparents who’d asked after the state of my mortal soul simply weren’t around anymore.
In the spring of 1994, my cousins and I served as pallbearers at Father Hec’s funeral, at St. Paul in Grosse Pointe. After coming out of the church with his casket and sliding it into the hearse, I continued to walk down the grassy slope toward Lake St. Clair, where I read the historical marker on the lawn near Lakeshore Drive. One side concerned the rectory and parish house where Father Hec had lived: “St. Paul Rectory was built in 1911. The parish house was built around 1900 as the home of former (1876–77) Detroit Mayor Alexander Lewis. Stove manufacturer Edwin Barbour acquired the house in 1913. Barbour’s heir sold the house to Saint Paul Parish in 1959.” Even Detroit’s nineteenth-century mayors, it seemed, moved out of the city just as soon as they had the chance. Father Hec was cremated, and his ashes placed behind the parish house.
Six months after bearing Father Hec’s coffin, we did the same for our Grandpa Saulino, whose funeral service was out in the redneck section of Macomb County that he and my grandmother had moved to. After the funeral Mass, as we escorted his casket out of the church and into the cold November morning, a souped-up Camaro drove past, blasting AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” the sublimely lewd lyrics to which I’d been singing since the age of seven. Over our grandfather’s casket my Macomb County cousins and I exchanged quick smiles, and one of them executed a barely noticeable headbang, which he made into an act of benediction. The old Catholics might be dying off, but heavy metal was forever.
The final direct link to an afterlife upstairs was severed in the fall of 1997, shortly before Coleman Young’s death, when Sister Marcia died at the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth, on the outskirts of Kalamazoo. I hadn’t seen her since leaving Detroit for graduate school. Our last meeting, in fact, had been at Bon Secours Hospital in Grosse Pointe in the spring of 1994, during Father Hec’s final days. “You should become a doctor,” she told me as we stood in the hallway outside Hec’s room. “You’ve got the right disposition for it.” “I’m an English major, Sister.” “That doesn’t mean you can’t go to medical school.” “True.” As she’d once been stationed at St. John Hospital, her words carried the authority of experience. “Just promise me you’ll think about it.” “I will,” I said, knowing better than to disagree with a nun. There’s no percentage in it.
“She always thought a lot of you, you know,” my mother said when she called with news of Sister’s death. “I know that, Ma.” “She thought you were just as smart as could be—not to mention a nice boy.” “You might have mentioned something about this before.” “Your sister and I are going to the funeral. Dad’s got some things to do, so he won’t be able to make it. Everyone’s busy, and no one will hold it against you if you can’t come.” I wasn’t the least bit busy, and Kalamazoo was only an hour from my apartment; the trip from Detroit was twice as far. Still, I begged off.
“It was sad,” my mother said afterward. “Almost ninety years old, and no family, no kids, nothing.” Among the few possessions Sister had left behind were a wooden statue of Jesus and a rosary, both of which my mother claimed, as if we didn’t already have enough of both. “It was her rosary,” my mother said. “It was broken, and missing beads, but it was hers. She used it all the time—that’s why it was pieced together like that.” And then, as the Saulino girls tended to, my mother passed the rosary along to my Aunt Marianne, receiving I don’t know what in return.
I’d settled in the kind of place, smaller than Detroit or Chicago, where people are proud of their minor league baseball stadium and their new opera house but still, each year—especially on the outskirts of town—are sure to pick up the Farmers’ Almanac to see if the prediction for winter snowfalls corresponds to what is being prophesied by trick knees and migratory patterns. Though not Ann Arbor or Madison, it was still a kind of college town, with students from three or four smaller schools and a nearby community college moving, on average, two and a half times a year, leaving a trail of broken leases and best-forgotten boyfriends and girlfriends in their wake.
Apartments were plentiful, and cheap; that many were also exceptionally nice was usually lost on the guys, but the female students and alums, more closely attuned to the value of such things, could often be overheard discussing, with great excitement, the beveled windows, high ceilings, hardwood floors, and doorway detailing in their new place. Not that they would admit to a nesting instinct. These were progressive young women, the planners of peace marches and “Take Back the Night” rallies, girls who did their shopping not at the supermarket but at the food co-op, from which they carried home their kidney beans and couscous in the backpack they had picked up the summer of their junior year, while on a trip through the Asian subcontinent in search of poverty-stricken oneness.
My future wife, painfully thin when I met her, had just returned from a semester in Ireland, where she’d read Jam
es Stephens and his Crock of Gold. A week after she’d given me the Stephens book, as I was getting ready to go out the door and drive to Chicago to celebrate New Year’s Eve, my roommate said, “Oh, that girl called.” “What girl?” “That girl you’re seeing.” “I’m not seeing anyone,” I said, though I knew to whom he was referring. “You spent Christmas Eve with her, didn’t you?” This was true. I had spent Christmas Eve with her, quite platonically, in the company of a mutual friend from the bookstore where we worked, a guy who never had anything better to do. A snowstorm had thwarted my plans to drive back to Detroit that night and kept me in town until Christmas morning. We stayed up late talking, and around eleven o’clock, while it continued to snow big, slow flakes, we began serious discussions regarding Midnight Mass—they wanted to go, had heard it was lovely, and hoped I could show them when to kneel, stand, cross themselves, etc. But I didn’t know any Catholic churches in the area, so we just kept talking and lighting candles.
During the week between Christmas and the New Year it became clear that we were building toward something. Though I hadn’t yet read the Stephens book, I couldn’t stop reading the accompanying card: “May the splendors of Detroit be yours this holiday season.” Still, we hadn’t made plans to spend New Year’s Eve together. My old high school locker partner was driving over from Detroit and picking me up on his way to Chicago, where there were some vague plans to meet friends. I really didn’t care what happened. I’d brought a list of telephone numbers of people I knew in Chicago, figuring someone would be home and have a floor I could sleep on.