Though my father's youthful choice would, without my knowing it, define my own, his refusal to become a priest remains a mystery to me. Domine non sum dignus: was he "unworthy" before he quit the Church or only after? His more secular motto might as well have been the running gag line of a 1930s radio show, "Don't open that door, McGee!" Unlike Fibber McGee, my father never opened his door. To my knowledge, he never discussed the meaning of his early status as a "spoiled priest," but that status and its consequences explain our two lifetimes. I still long to know how he mustered such an act of nonconformity, defying every expectation, every notion of virtue in which he'd been schooled, and, for that matter—what were his alternative prospects in the depths of the Depression?—every apparent note of economic self-interest.
There is a large hint in the fact that he began seeing my mother around the time of his fateful choice. She was a wisecracking, lusciously redheaded working girl from the same South Side Irish enclave. Mary Morrissey was the second-oldest of eight children, a family split by "Irish divorce," meaning her father had simply disappeared. She had quit school at fourteen. She lied about her age, altering the date on her birth certificate, to get a job as a telephone operator. By 1934, aged twenty-three, she was a Ma Bell supervisor in the bright art deco Illinois Bell Building in the Loop, in charge of a whole floor of girls in headsets.
I have a boardwalk-concession photograph of a beach party, a dozen young people in surprisingly sexy bathing suits, taken at the Oak Street Beach off Lake Shore Drive. My father and mother are each leaning into someone else, but he is looking across at her, the one real beauty. It is easy to imagine his being smitten. He once told me that when they were dating, he could lift her up, his hands completely linked around her waist. When I asked her, she said that it was true, but that since then his fingers had shrunk.
Though I asked and asked again, my mother always refused to be pinned down on when exactly they'd become an item. She would discuss his decision not to be a priest no more than he would, but that refusal eventually made me see the truth embedded in it: if she had begun dating the dashing Joe Carroll after his break with the Church, she would h. forever emphasized the fact—much as my own quite American wife, years later, firmly makes the point that she never knew me as a priest. In Irish Chicago, there was shame enough in having married a man who'd once been betrothed to God, but also to have been the occasion of his unfaithfulness—the very corespondent, as it were—evokes a pale green version of the scarlet letter. Unworthy? What does it do to a vibrant young couple when their passion for each other, however conventionally expressed, makes them feel sullied from the start? A song of the day went, "A fine romance! With no kisses! A fine romance, my friend, this is!" From that beachfront photograph, I imagine my parents coming together like Fred and Ginger, but there was no such sexual ease between them by the time I knew what to look for—and I think that "unworthiness" is why.
In any case, my father weathered, but also presumably withered in, the bishop's stare. How it must have accused him of stealing all that schooling, his erudition, and the self-assurance it took to walk out on God. Joe Carroll returned to Bridgeport, to the hedged life into which his boyhood chums had long since settled, as a stockyards shit-kicker. Fluency in Cicero, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas notwithstanding, he was a spoiled priest now, and in Chicago he always would be. His role in life would be to drink heavily and fail.
Yet he rejected that bleak outcome too. Hubris to others, to him a primitive will to survive, it took him downtown most nights for years, bone-weary and reeking of the slaughterhouses. What a relief, finally, to have a shot, if only at the FBI. That it would take him to Quantico, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and beyond could not have been bad news. He and my mother married in 1938. Less than two years later, having replaced themselves on the ward voting lists for the sake of his father's janitor's job, they kissed the world of Swift and Armour, of Edward J. Kelly, of St. Gabriel's parish, and of Cardinal Mundelein good-bye. They were the first of their large families to leave Chicago—a very few would follow—and it is impossible for me to imagine them doing so except with relief.
That should have been that, an arrow-straight midcentury American story, from the old to the new, from the parish to the world. But after training, and a brief assignment to Knoxville, Tennessee, the Bureau in its wisdom sent my father back to Chicago, a curve in the story. By 1942, Joe and Mary Carroll were living Back of the Yards again, not far from Mayor Kelly's. They were voting on the machine list in old Dike's name, as if they'd never left the parish. But the truth was that Mary, for one, felt a need to be near her mother, and an unexpected freedom to be. Mary and Joe had had their first son, Joe junior, on New Year's Eve of 1940. Only with the birth of my own first child thirty-nine years later could I imagine the transformation made possible by such an event. There is a signal of their transformation in my parents' self-affirming impulse to name the baby for its father. Unworthy? The saint for whom that baby was named was not Jesus' father but the baby's own. And why not? It became a joke with them: Joseph and Mary, and a baby whose initials would be J.C. A baby whose robust perfection and even beauty stunned everyone; a baby who could be taken only as a sign of God's approval, no matter what the parish biddies thought. Joe junior rebutted every notion of unworthiness.
The experience of parenthood, and perhaps even its consolations, were mysteries Mary contemplated more or less alone, not mainly because of the era's restrictive gender roles, but because the world emergency of the war proved to be as transforming for Joe senior as Joe junior's birth had been for her. He was working the fugitive squad out of the field office on the nineteenth floor of the Bankers Building in the Loop and, since Pearl Harbor, was rarely home. He wouldn't say it, but the irony of his position had to be like a carcass carrier's weight: enforcing the wartime Selective Service and Training Act meant making sure the South Side goof-offs he thought he'd left behind got out of Chicago while he stayed. FBI men, more essential than ever, were draft exempt and discouraged from enlisting. Joe Carroll assumed that he would never wear a uniform.
A million men had registered for the draft, and then the boards had begun issuing classifications and calling men up. My father could not have imagined how it foreshadowed the last large reversal of his own life—one son a draft dodger, another son an antidraft conspirator—but Joe Carroll's early work as an FBI agent was the knuckle-dragging humdrum of tracking down dopes who did not understand that events in Europe east of Wicklow had changed everything—that the draft law was for real. Those who knew that this Hitler meant more than Luke Appling saw big changes looming in the future, but the big change in my father's life came then from the past.
In September of 1942, Roger "Terrible" Touhy broke out of Joliet. His escape pushed the German installation of Petain off the Chicago front pages. As an antidote to the gloomy news from Europe and the Pacific, the Bureau prepared to launch a glory-days gangster hunt again. But FBI jurisdiction was a prickly issue because, unlike the tax evader Al Capone or the border crosser Clyde Barrow, Touhy had never been convicted or even charged with a federal crime. Then my father had an idea. Touhy, in escaping from state prison, had failed to notify his draft board of his change of address, a violation punishable in wartime by federal imprisonment for up to five years. Thus Joe Carroll, a thirty-two-year-old junior gumshoe, but an expert at catching draft dodgers, was assigned to the Bureau's biggest case.
In the 1930s, FBI gangbuster exploits had been deliberately publicized as a way of acclimating citizens to the idea of an activist, interventionist federal government. Despite his legacy as an icon of the right wing, J. Edgar Hoover, master publicist, had been an enabler of the New Deal, implicitly preaching to traditionally wary Americans that Washington was a friend. By the early fall of 1942 other forces were at work. The Allied counterattack in Europe had yet to come—Torch Day, the Montgomery-led invasion of North Africa, was November 8—and so the hunt for Touhy took on a subliminal meaning as a kind of substitute pur
suit of the as yet unchallenged Hitler. Roger "Terrible" Touhy became familiar to newspaper readers across the country.
But then weeks went by and the Bureau had not caught him. Hoover sent more agents into Chicago. Torch Day came and went, but not even the Allied offensive got the Bureau off the hook. Agents were looking for Touhy all over the Midwest. My father, meanwhile, as head of a small squad that had honed its skills on draft fugitives, moved steadily through the old networks of the South Side Irish in Bridgeport and Canaryville, where the gangster had been based a decade before. One night, in an event that would become a family legend, Joe Carroll made the mistake of showing up at his own apartment still toting his submachine gun. Mary, with her new baby, would not let him in until he ditched the thing. We never knew what he did with it.
Finally, in a fleabag hotel they found a man named Stewart who'd been part of the Joliet jailbreak, and he told them where to find Touhy. "I was sleeping like dead," Touhy would write in his autobiography, The Stolen Years, "when a hoarse, bellowing voice awakened me. I thought at first that Banghart or Darlak had turned on the radio. It was that kind of voice ... It was the voice of doom—the reveille bugle calling us back to Stateville.
"Touhy! Banghart! Darlak!' the voice said, with an ungodly tone that must have been heard half a mile away. 'Touhy! Banghart! Darlak! This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are surrounded. You cannot escape. Come out with your hands up—immediately. If you resist you will be killed.'"
Touhy and the others surrendered. He wrote that when he was cuffed, "The FBI kids looked at me blankly—a habit of theirs. That was it. The big escape was all done. The date was December 29th."
The FBI kid with the "hoarse, bellowing voice" threatening to kill and with the habitual blank look was my father. I have on the wall above my desk a photograph of him, taken during that period. He is standing tall and lean, in a trimly cut, dark three-piece suit. The steeple of a white handkerchief pokes out of his breast pocket. A gold chain, doubtless attached to a badge, not a watch, curves across his waist. His tie is knotted like a gemstone. A black curl falls on his forehead. He is standing in what could be a gravel pit. Behind him are a rotund black automobile, running boards and all; a low hill covered with scrub grass; and, on the ground, the long, thin shadow cast by his own figure, indicating that the time of day is early morning or late afternoon. His torso is presented to the camera, but his head is turned so that his face is in profile. His right arm is stiff, pointed away, and his hand holds a revolver off which the sun glances. The revolver hammer is cocked, and so is his eye. This is a photo taken at a firing range. His feet are slightly apart. His left hand is tucked casually in his trouser pocket. The ease of his marksman's stance contrasts with the rigidity of that gun hand and aiming eye. In this picture I sense the presence already of tensions I will much later label as between aggression and affection, between courage and compassion, between law and grace. Roger Touhy heard the bellowing voice and saw the blank stare, as I would, but even this photograph of a man at arms displays something else. I see it most clearly in the joyous relaxation of that left arm and hand, which have swept the jacket back to rest in that pocket. The tensions in this "kid," not conflicts, are the structuring principles of his identity—a Jansenist who chose love. If I sense anything here, it is what Touhy sensed, and what the bishop sensed before him—that this kid is more firmly anchored in who he is than he has any right to be. If he says no, even to God, it's what he means. If he tells you he will kill you, count on it. And if he uses the word "love"—but he almost never will. Suffice to say at this point that the organizing tension of this story is embodied in the movement over decades from, among other things, the pursuit of draft dodgers to the defense of one.
After my mother died two years ago, I went through her boxes, and in addition to the soiled linen bands in which my anointed hands had been wrapped by Cardinal Cooke at my ordination, I found a half-century-old letter addressed to my father from J. Edgar Hoover: "I want to express to you both officially and personally my commendation for the very excellent and efficient services which you rendered at Chicago on the Touhy case. Your assignments in this case were most important and were extremely dangerous ... The courage and fearlessness displayed by you were far beyond the ordinary call of duty."
Touhy's arrest solved a big problem for Hoover. Still, his commendation might be taken as a manager's hyperbole, but within a year he ordered this FBI kid to Washington, out of Chicago once and for all. He named him chief of kidnapping and bank robbery investigations for the entire Bureau. Because of Touhy, Joe Carroll became one of the director's trusted intimates, and the trajectory of his rise to the top levels of government was set.
My father remained absolutely loyal to Hoover, even after the director had become a parody of himself, and no wonder. J. Edgar Hoover did for young Joe Carroll what the birth of Joe junior did for Mary, offering affirmation just when, having forfeited the affirmation of the Church and a felt sense of the affirmation of God, he needed it most. Hoover's letter concludes with the news that "as a result of the commendable manner in which you performed your duties in this particular case, I have recommended that your salary be increased from Grade Caf-11, $3800 per annum to Grade Caf-11 $4000 per annum, to be effective January 16, 1943."
The letter is dated January 18, 1943. Four days later, in a South Side hospital within range of the stench of the stockyards, and not far from the grubby apartment in which Roger 'Tough" Touhy was arrested on the eve of my older brother's second birthday, I was born. Eventually Mary and Joe would have five sons, although she would have perhaps twice that many pregnancies. Not that my arrival was simple: I was a blue baby, deprived of oxygen in the birth canal, and they feared for my life. My father was present as the priest went into the operating room to baptize me. The commotion of the event is made palpable in the fact that the hastily summoned priest misunderstood what my name was to be and mistakenly christened me "Joseph." But Joe was already Joseph: what was this, Jacob and Esau? It speaks volumes about the choke hold of ecclesiastical legalism that the priest, having uttered that name over me while pouring water on my blue forehead, insisted that "Joseph" was it, no matter about my brother. The priest entered that name on my birth certificate. 'James" was added later, after another priest, in the counterbalancing but only ceremonial church ritual, rechristened me. The confusion of names was an accidental but potent foreshadowing not only of my fate as the usurper of the eldest son's role, but of the soon-to-come disaster that would make such a fate inevitable.
I never imagined what my frightened parents thought while I struggled for breath, not until forty-three years later when a child of my own went through a version of the same thing, but unluckily. Her name was Jenny, and she spent almost her entire life in my arms, dying an hour and twenty minutes after she was born. In that brief period, I repented everything and promised everything, desperately bargaining with God. To no avail. So yes, now I can imagine my own parents reacting similarly, repenting and promising to beat the band, beat the devil. Promise Him anything, but give him your son. When I pulled through, a second healthy child at last, surely they took it as another confirmation, together with the almighty Hoover's, that the course they'd set for themselves, however fraught, was good.
3. STATE AND CHURCH
WHEN I WAS two years old, my mother held me in one arm at FDR's last inauguration. With the other she clutched my brother Joe's hand. He was four. She was determined that her two sons would glimpse the president once, and the odd arrangement of that inauguration gave her the chance. FDR had ruled that, because of the war, a large celebration would be inappropriate, although it was also likely that his unpublicized declining health—he died of a stroke a few months later—would not permit it. Roosevelt's health would, in fact, emerge as a contrasting thread in this story, but at that point my mother was like most Americans in feeling only admiration for the stoic reserve with which the president kept his affliction not hidden precisely, but in the shadow
s of public awareness. In 1921 he had been stricken with poliomyelitis. He'd been paralyzed from the waist down ever since. Very few knew of the severity of his condition. Of the 125,000 photographs of FDR on file at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, only one shows him sitting in a wheelchair. We are expected to look back on the reticence of that era's press corps—those photographs not taken—as a better way, but would the disease of polio have been so consistently and universally taken as shameful if the president had stood openly in his braces, with his crutches, and declared, "I do not govern with my legs"?
In 1945 there was no inaugural ball and no parade. Roosevelt took the oath on the south portico of the White House. He spoke for five minutes to members of the public gathered on the lawn, the smallest audience ever to hear an inaugural address—a few hundred people, three of whom were Mary Carroll and her sons Joe and Jimmy. It is as if I can remember being there, so much have such events featured in my life. In 1949 our mother took us to the swearing-in of Harry Truman, a person, like her, of no schooling—the only president of this century not to have gone to college. Like her, he was of the unvarnished and unpuritanical Midwest—his Edward J. Kelly was named T. J. Pendergast Jr. Famously a man of plain talk, Truman was proof to a woman who needed it that, even in Washington, virtues of directness and common sense could triumph. For Truman, we stood in the throng at the Capitol, and images of my mother's beaming face and of the gleaming white dome play off each other in one of my first true memories.
Brian, Dennis, and toddler Kevin kept her home in 1953, so that year Joe and I, aged twelve and nine, went to Ike's inaugural on our own. That is the one from which I cherish images of the marching bands and soldiers, baton-swinging girls and cowboys on horseback—and Eisenhower's Homburg. I remember someone saying Ike was the first not to wear a top hat. Like good Democrats—Back of the Yards Democrats, Mayor Daley Democrats—Joe and I wore buttons that said, "I Like Everybody."
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