An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  Later, I would read an account of the same incident, although without explicit reference to my father's role, in Iron Eagle, the biography of General LeMay by Thomas M. Coffey. The anonymous letter levied charges of corruption among the highest officers in the Air Force, including LeMay. Coffey writes, "The author of the document was not so anonymous after all. He was identified as a man named Cedric K. Worth, one-time Hollywood script writer who was now a special assistant to Undersecretary of the Navy [Daniel] Kimball." The colonel to whom I spoke told me that after my father's congressional briefing exposing the Navy ploy, the pro-Navy congressman who'd produced the letter apologized, and the committees took their votes. The first nukes went to the Air Force, which led to its ascendancy and, not incidentally, to LeMay's, with the formal establishment of the Strategic Air Command. After that, the colonel said, young General Joe Carroll could do no wrong with the Air Force brass. He could wear any color socks he wanted.

  I have a photograph in front of me that shows my father in his new uniform, shiny brass buttons, flap pockets and all. He is standing on the lawn outside our Arlington apartment. I am standing next to him. He is holding my hand. I am four years old. My father in his peaked cap is looking off to the left with a benign smile that has always made me hope he is looking at my mother. I am wearing a uniform too, a fringed cowboy vest, gun belt, and boots. My eyes are in shadow, but otherwise the expression on my face is slightly stunned, as if I appreciate all that has happened to us in a few short years. Perhaps I know something else already, the other large event, the countervailing catastrophe that instantly and permanently undid every feeling my mother and father had of being lucky. The precise timing has always been unclear to me, but one day in this same period, my brother Joe fell down, and he could not get up again. Our mother took him to the doctor, who knew at once what to look for. Our father was summoned from his office, and this time he came. Their first-born son, the seal of a love that wasn't to have been, the issue of flesh that was weak, a child conceived in the Irish Church's idea of sin, my older brother, my lively partner in the world of radio, in the cult of bunk beds, my teacher and first friend, the one with whom I secretly shared a name—Joe had infantile paralysis, poliomyelitis, Roosevelt's disease, polio.

  I remember the living room of our apartment on South Sixteenth Street, the Lady Davenport on the wall, the red couch, the figurine-laden glass shelves in the window. Four or five years old, I am sitting on the couch when they bring Joe home from the hospital for the first time. My father is carrying him. Joe smiles at me, as if privileged. I refuse at first to get off the couch, where he must lie now. My mother screams at me, the first remembered time. I run from the room, fighting off the consoling pleasure of my knowledge that Joe cannot run after me.

  Behind and above my father and me, in this photograph, stands a telephone pole. This same picture sat on my table when I was a seminarian, and I recall the day I first saw that telephone pole as a crucifix. "The end of learning," Samuel Johnson wrote, "is piety." And the end, also, of a hard-won self-acceptance. There was a time in my life when I saw crucifixes everywhere—in soaring airplanes, in the joints of windowpanes, in radiator grilles, in the fall of toothpicks on a table. Polio brought the cross back into our family, where it belonged. Our religion meant one thing only, that God came onto the earth to show us, so vividly, so unforgettably, that every human being has, as Mom would never tire of saying, "a cross to bear." The phrase deflects from its own meaning, that each of us—"Drink ye all of this"—is crucified. Joe's fate—he would have a severe case of the disease, undergoing a dozen operations over the next fifteen years, forfeiting his childhood and walking with a savage limp for life—seized my parents like claws reaching up from the stockyards bog to haul them back into the fetid world from which they came, a crone chorus—Irish hags, the nuns—screeching, "Who did you think you were? How dare you think you can escape!"

  After Joe got polio, our roles reversed. I did not openly claim the name in which I too had been baptized, but I usurped his place in other ways, a pseudo-older brother, sibling born to lead, to try things first, to help with chores, to mind the baby, and, later, to be the outgoing one, the Carroll boys' little representative. I did everything asked of me, and more than was expected. Yet my every success, since it came at Joe's expense, would feel like failure—a sad pattern grooved into my psyche to this day.

  Mom did mute penance, nailing herself to the cross of her first son's suffering. The rest of us would compete for the dregs of her attention. His having caught one of the three viruses that caused polio—Joe and I agreed that he'd gotten it drinking from the creek that ran near our apartment house—was her fault, wasn't it? What else had she to do in life than protect her children? Or was it somehow my fault? Had I been first to slurp the forbidden water, giving him the idea? It was as if I were already older, guilty for giving bad example. I remember Joe telling me that if one of us had to get polio, he was glad it was he, a sentiment that seemed in no way noble to me. I envied him his suffering.

  Mom became our own Pieta. The spontaneous, wisecracking, affectionate young woman I first knew, as it were, simply packed up and moved out, to be replaced by the Mother of Sorrows herself, a woman privileged to be in pain. Our father, meanwhile, fleeing the sure Jansenist knowledge that his own hubris, not polluted water or "germs," was the true cause of his son's polio—a perfect punishment if ever there was one, just at the time of his great achievement—he fled from us too, Joe junior for sure, a rebuke embodied; and long-suffering Mary; and also me. One might have expected that with our mother entirely taken up with Joe, I would have had more of our father to myself, his attention, talk, play; but not so. I remember sitting in the car with him, outside one hospital or another, waiting for Mom to come out from visiting Joe. He would sit at the wheel ignoring me, compulsively whistling a tune I would much later recognize as "Beautiful Dreamer." I hear it now, and it makes me sad.

  Our parents would be sexually intimate again, but lovers? Properly unprotected prophylactically, they would be protected from each other in every other way from now on. I can claim only intuitive knowledge here, but my conviction is that the shock of my brother's illness broke the spell of the golden escape—the beautiful dream—they'd woven for themselves. They would be alienated from each other hereafter. She would be giving her all to her children. He would be saving the Free World from Communism. I would be the secretly beloved child of a quietly scorned woman, which would lead years later to a boundless embarrassment around sexual assertion. Now I understand my mother's forever unstated difficulty with male sexuality, mine in particular. The lesson of polio to all of us was that our bodies were plainly not to be trusted. Devastating as my brother's illness was in itself—year after year of his real agony—its resonance as a kind of Irish curse against a spoiled priest, his woman, and their children is what made it the radioactive mushroom cloud of our family. Certainly it hung over me.

  Friends and relatives from Chicago stopped visiting. Mom stopped packing us into the Studebaker to go pick up Dad at night. Instead of wonder tours of Doric Washington, she did her driving now to doctors' offices and hospitals in Alexandria and Washington. Instead of past the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue, she now drove the Studebaker every chance she got to the far northeast of D.C., an area around Catholic University called Little Rome because of its concentration of seminaries, convents, monasteries, and oratories. When Joe was in the hospital, she took me and a succession of my infant brothers to the Franciscan Monastery, where visits to the papier-mache catacombs and concrete-over-mesh grottoes of Lourdes and Fatima earned something called "indulgences," which Mom flamboyantly "offered up," as she said, for Joe. I once asked a Friar Tuck monk why he had hair on his chin and not on his head, and the relieved pleasure I took in my mother's laughter makes me realize now that it had become unusual. Sometimes, in a wheelchair or on crutches, Joe would come with us. He could be imperious, ordering me to fetch, to wait, or to carry, but I had develop
ed the habit of responding instantly. To do so solved the ache of my not being crippled myself.

  If it wasn't the Franciscan Monastery or the Poor Clares Convent we visited, it was the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in those days a crypt church still under construction. Completed, it is the largest Catholic church in North America. Even incomplete, the Shrine had a well-stocked religious goods store, where my mother bought scapulas and miraculous medals for Joe to wear, sacred oil and relics to rub on his scarred and withered legs. I went along mutely, increasingly agnostic as I saw no improvement in Joe's condition. Mainly I was learning the great lesson that religious faith has everything to do with suffering and unhappiness. I was four years old, five, six ... eleven, twelve, going to and from these places with my mother and brothers. The Shrine especially was the North Star of my childhood. When Joe was in the hospital, it seemed we went there after every visit. I knelt below the crucifixes, all that writhing, legs as bruised as Joe's; I said my rosaries and learned carefully to deduct my time from purgatory. With the cultivated appearance of a fervor I never felt, I imitated my mother in lighting candles at the snake-ridden (virus-ridden?) feet of the Blessed Virgin Mary. After a while, and without ever believing any of it was helping Joe, I realized that these rituals had become for me what they were for my mother, a bond with her after all, and a rare—perhaps the only—source of consolation.

  Latin Masses and communally recited rosaries were unintelligible rituals to me, but the act of kneeling next to her was emotionally comprehensible. I learned to bury my face in my hands, a dark focus that offered a release I had no way of understanding—and which is still available to me when, in certain circumstances and blank-minded, I assume that posture all these years later. Faith in a crucified God, son of a heartbroken mother, consoles without providing any particular hope of salvation, solution, fix, or escape—that was the first principle of my credo, and it remains the last.

  Two blocks down Fourth Street from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, behind a pair of looming stone pillars past which we drove every time, was a pseudo-Gothic, crenelated mausoleum that had already branded itself on my unconscious. It was St. Paul's College, a seminary. Seminary: when I first heard the word, I took it to be "cemetery," another Arlington, like the one sprawling up the hill behind my father's office at the Pentagon. Seminary: at the word I always looked for grave markers. St. Paul's College on Fourth Street was the institution where, years later, in my pathetic effort to resuscitate the mortal happiness of that fugitive young couple and their first son, their first Joseph, I would, a willing mystic Houdini, entomb myself.

  4. THE POPE SPEAKS

  THE MAN WHO embodied everything triumphant, timeless, and secure about the Catholic Church also embodied everything rigid, morose, and moralistic. He was Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, and he figured in my life as the avatar of a piety to which I felt both drawn and condemned. His photograph—a severe face in profile, eyes cast downward, lost in the glint of rimless spectacles—was everywhere in my world: the classrooms of St. Mary's School in Alexandria, the altar boys' robing room behind the sacristy, the cover of The Pope Speaks, a monthly magazine that came home with us from Mass, and framed cheaply on the wall above the plastic holy water font in the front hallway of our house in Hollin Hills.

  Eventually, I went for high school to the Priory School at a Benedictine monastery, one of the rarefied religious communities near the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Joe preceded me at Priory. It was a small, demanding school for a would-be intellectual elite, run by English monks on a British model. I was always sure I had been admitted because of Joe, who had compensated for the impairment of his polio by becoming a good student. I had compensated by doing what I was told. I hated Priory but never said so. Even here, a place of cultural sophistication, His Holiness was revered. On the wall inside the front door hung his gilded portrait. To me, by then, the pope had become a figure of such familiarity that I felt I knew him.

  Pius XII was a decidedly foreign figure to other Americans—brooding, austere, authoritarian. He could have been the stereotyped figment of priest-baiting nativists for whom the papacy had long been the devil's den. Pacelli had been the apostolic delegate to Berlin and an admirer of the Germans. His scrupulous neutrality during World War II—to him the Nazi death camps were a moral horror, but so was the Allied bombing of urban populations—should have made him even more hated in America. But long-standing anti-papal prejudice and leftover resentment from the war gave way in the raw climate of the 1950s to broad American recognition that Pius XII was a crucial ally in the greatest struggle of all, the one against what we knew as "atheistic Communism." It was a telling phrase, a key to understanding the odd difference in Catholic responses to Fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Marxism on the other.

  The premise of twentieth-century papal politics, from the Vatican concords with Mussolini in 1929 and Hitler in 1933 to Vatican condemnations of class-struggle liberation theology in the 1980s and 1990s, is that Bolshevism is a greater threat than Fascism. That is so precisely because, in its ideology, the former explicitly targets religion. Demonstrating what he could have done against the Fascists and Nazis but never did, Pius XII in 1949 solemnly excommunicated, with one pronouncement, every Communist in the world.

  Coming within months of the Soviets' first atomic-bomb test, Stalin's final takeover of Czechoslovakia, and Mao's capture of Peking, the pope's decisive act endeared him to most Americans. Neutral no longer, the pope was a powerful ally, and as news broke of priests and nuns being murdered and bishops being imprisoned in China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, Americans realized that Catholics were on the front lines for them. A Catholic doctor, Tom Dooley, sounded alarms about Communists in a place called Vietnam; a Catholic senator, Joseph McCarthy, exposed them in the State Department; a Catholic bishop, Fulton Sheen, preached on television the old dogma of martyrdom in its new form: "Better dead than Red." And a Catholic cardinal, Francis Spellman, would profess the new American faith—"Our country, right or wrong"—by citing half of Stephen Decatur's toast.

  Pro Deo et Patria —first my father's motto, then mine. The old threat of conflict embedded in that "et" evaporated in the warmth of American appreciation for Pius XII. His merciless rigidity and stern moralizing were not derided now, but admired as the very virtues the Cold War called for. Alliance with the Vatican had the practical consequence of undergirding the American sense of moral purity, even as blocks of the American strategy of nuclear deterrence were put in place. In the 1950s, Pius XII set aside his earlier abhorrence of the deliberate mass targeting of civilians. He powerfully reiterated the Catholic Just War theory for the Cold War context, emphasizing its notion of the acceptability of "unintended but predictable consequences." The deaths of millions in a nuclear exchange were predictable but, according to this casuistry, unintended, and therefore acceptable. Thus a morality with roots in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas was used to justify—and my father could articulate it better than anyone—what became known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD.

  Silencing what little dissent there was, as for example from Dorothy Day's ragtag band of Catholic Workers, Pius XII declared in 1956 that "a Catholic citizen cannot invoke his own conscience in order to refuse to serve" in a legitimately declared war. That absolute repudiation of conscientious objection reinforced the U.S. government's, and depriving them of the appeal to religion that Quakers and Mennonites had, sealed the fate of many Catholic boys. Like his colleagues in the Bureau and the Pentagon, my father welcomed the pope's statement, I'm sure. As an American he believed in the right of conscientious objection, but as a Catholic he accepted the subjugation of conscience. Doubtless he took the pope's edict as an affirmation of one of his own core principles—Roger Touhy arrested for draft violations!—and as yet another reinforcing of ranks against godless Communism. Who could have known—unintended and unpredictable—that eventually it would make of two of his sons
an outlaw and a half?

  As I approached adolescence, however, I shared my father's view entirely. That is why the grim and ascetic pope—Cornelius Jansen in a white skullcap, fierce symbol of a judging God who, for your eating meat on Friday, would send you to hell forever, to the unconsuming and inextinguishable fire, to infinite pain and an infinite ability to feel it—why this calculatedly inhuman figure made me proud.

  But then the unthinkable happened. In October 1958 His Holiness died. It was as if the natural law had been not fulfilled but violated. In the minds of American Catholics, Pius XII was identified with their own clear self-definition, the clean authority that made their Church a standard against which all other organizations, and especially other Churches, fell short. The leadership of Pius XII had been perfectly matched to an institution that unapologetically proclaimed itself "a perfect society," unchangeable and "out of time."