An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  His Holiness dead? But Pius XII had bridged—a "pontifex" precisely—the centuries-old gulf between America and Catholics. Indeed, under his reign, while the Catholic Church was quietly collapsing in Europe, it was coming into its own in the United States. Since 1950, this nation's Catholic population grew by 44 percent; the number of students in Catholic schools grew by 66 percent. In 1950 there were 43,000 priests in the United States. A decade later there would be 54,000. Seminaries grew in number from 388 to 525, and seminarians from 26,000 to 40,000.

  Pius XII dead? His "apocalyptic pessimism" had, despite all these triumphs, been proved accurate after all. Yes, His Holiness was dead, and the American Catholic reaction, an instinctive sense (which I recall very well) that something ominous had happened, would be proved accurate too.

  Smoke rose black from the Sistine Chapel repeatedly, indicating that the Consistory of Cardinals was having trouble choosing the next pope. Some said, outrageously, that the cardinals were deadlocked between liberal and progressive factions, but such secular political analogies defiled the workings of the Holy Ghost. We knew that the cardinals were seeing to nothing less than the apostolic succession, the central fact of Catholic supremacy, the spine of the faith, and the Holy Ghost's way of staying with the Church through time. Critics would call that dogma of the literal chain of hands-on-heads going back to Peter an absurdly mechanistic notion, but not until later.

  One afternoon in late October the bells in seminaries and convents and parish churches around the world began to toll. The smoke in Big Rome had come up white at last; the cardinals had burned their ballots without wet straw. "Habemus Papam!" An old man whom no one had described as papabile had been elected pope. Indeed the cardinals had been deadlocked, and if the Holy Ghost tapped the aged, ineffectual Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, it was because the crimson-hatted power brokers knew they could control him for the few years he would last. Then they would put a real pope, one of themselves, in the shoes of the fisherman.

  Mom would surely have taken us all out to Washington's Little Rome to hear its bells pealing, the American Catholic subculture's resounding celebration. But that fall we were living in Germany, in a baroque mansion in the lovely spa town of Wiesbaden, nestled between the Taunus Mountains and the Rhine. Dad was a two-star general now, and although I could not know it, his promotion from the still marginal OSI to the position of chief of staff of the Air Force in Europe did not signal full acceptance into anything. He was in charge of pilots, of warplanes and nuclear weapons. As always, the officers and staffers who worked for him were enthralled by the unusual warmth that was still a mark of his public mode, and some colleagues valued his forthright lack of curves. But others, and certain of his superiors, feared him. He was "that cop" to them, forever a threat with his broad authority to investigate everything from carelessness to informal graft—bringing an extra duty-free Mercedes home to sell, billing Uncle Sam for family trips to the Alps—to real breaches of security. It's likely that his assignment to an overseas line position was made in the hope that he would learn what a general's life in the off-the-books Air Force was really like—and lay off. If so, the hope was disappointed.

  The day Pius died, less than two months after my start at the Air Force-sponsored high school in Wiesbaden, the assistant principal announced that Roman Catholic students were excused from study hall to attend a special service, to be conducted by Colonel Chess—Monsignor Chess to us—in the chapel across the street. What I remember most about the service is that the girl I sat next to in English class did not attend. Delivered as I'd been from an all-boys school, such stirrings in class were new to me, and I was at their mercy. The curve of that girl's calf had kept me from my prepositions, nouns, and verbs. Once she'd caught me looking at her, then had looked away before I could. I had learned in the corridor to watch her at her locker, how her skirt hiked when she stooped for books—a thigh, the press of her ass. And not only that. I had never seen such a neck before, how long it was, and her perfect throat at the center of which was a cameo medallion, the profile of a queen. I'd begun to dream of futures built around this girl, but then ... I knew enough to be sad about His Holiness, but what crushed me in the chapel was her absence, proof that the secret object of my true devotion was not one of us.

  Us: the word still meant, primarily, Catholics.

  I remember kneeling in that chipper new church, which would have been the pride of any suburb, as that bright American enclave in a still ravaged Germany would itself have been the suburb. I remember burying my face in my hands, the one sure spiritual act I knew how to perform. And I remember the surprise it was, the unexpected satisfaction—despite having just realized that my dream classmate was not a Catholic, or because I had—that here in the dark warm cave of my hands where before I'd always found God, the omnipresence of a consoling spirituality, I found instead the face of a girl. The body of a girl. Was this a first, fully admitted sexual desire, or "lust" as I was conditioned to call it? Certainly it was a wish for a fate other than the one I'd seen coming since the nuns had seconded my family's assumption about my "vocation."

  In the seventh grade, at St. Mary's School, I won a nun-sponsored speech contest, a first achievement of my own—but not really of my own. The theme, forced on all contestants, was "Many Are Called, but Few Are Chosen." My particular oration was written with a large assist from Dad. I do not know whether I asked for his help or whether he volunteered it. "Indubitably" is one of the words he imposed on the text, and I can only imagine what the nuns thought of an eleven-year-old using such rhetoric. I remember what a nightmare that word was to pronounce, and I remember wondering why I didn't just say "undoubtedly." That I won the contest seemed proof that Dad's word was right. That I won seemed proof, as well, that I was "called" and "chosen" both.

  Vocation: it was a word I'd carried into high school like a hidden birthmark. If I'd found it on an antonym quiz, I'd have paired it with "sex." The nuns. The priests. My father. My mother. Especially her. I learned early that to follow my own sexual desire would be to abandon her to a world of power—male power?—that would abuse her. An unspeakable dread surrounded these feelings, so naturally I did not speak of them. Nevertheless, the feelings efficiently packed themselves into that one word, vocation. Unlike all these other happy kids, I had one. Vocation was a word without windows, a word with bars on the door, a word I associated above all with the dour, rimless-eyed profile of the pope who, as he wanted to, embodied the very Church to me and my place in it. The pope is dead—here was the outlaw feeling I was having suddenly—but I'm not.

  The years in Germany were our family's best. The nation, defeated and disgraced, nevertheless worked a spell on us, and so did the shock of aristocratic living for which we were in no way prepared, but which senior generals took for granted in those gravy days early in the Cold War. When our ship docked in the harbor city of Bremen, we were met by blue-uniformed baggage carriers, drivers, and limousines that took us to a waiting U.S. Army train. We were shown into a posh lounge car staffed with orderlies and stewards. In our prior life in the cheery Virginia suburb, fifteen miles down the Potomac from D.C. and the Pentagon, our only contact with the military had been the uniform in which Dad left the house each morning—and that sergeant whose paper I delivered. When the mood between our parents was right, we checked his socks to be sure they matched. Otherwise, for the way Mom, Joe, I, and my little brothers lived, centered on the parish school and church activities, Dad could have been an insurance broker or a meat salesman.

  But now—at first we were impressed that Dad's rank entitied us to our own railway car, until we realized that the entire train, locomotive, sleeper, and caboose too, was his. We'd been told he had his own airplane (a converted B-29 bomber), but a private train? Beginning with the exotic sights we saw from the windows of that railway car, beginning with the canapés served that day on silver trays by Air Force sergeants who from then on would be our family servants, my brothers and I were astounded by the worl
d we found ourselves in. Germany's sad mysteries alone would have kept us amazed, but the Air Force culture too was a kind of Oz. Once ensconced, we roamed Wiesbaden as if we were heirs of the man who owned it. In relation to the Germans in that occupation era, we were. "We come as conquerors" were the opening words of noble Eisenhower's first proclamation to the German people, and though he went on to add, "We stay as friends," it was the first assertion that was true. The Allied triumph still showed, not in ruins because Wiesbaden had not been bombed, but in a subservience of the populace. The ingratiating deference of Karl, our gardener, of a gemütlich putzfrau, of neighbors on Biebricher Allee, embarrassed us and put us on guard, which of course that sort of passive aggression was intended to do. The sprawling, lavish house we lived in had been built for a kaiser's marshal, and it dominated one of the city's two hills. On the other hill sat Hainerberg, the American enclave with its housing blocks for servicemen, its tidy subdivision for officers, its shopping center and theater—the AFEX— and its cluster of schools, including mine.

  I remember climbing out onto the roof of our house to look across the city and up at Hainerberg. I would sit there watching the light of day fade and the windows of houses in the valley turn bright, and then stars overhead would fill the sky. I remember hearing what I knew then only as "classical music" drift up from a neighbor's terrace, and realizing how full of beauty the world was, and that it was put there for me.

  We were like heirs of the owner in relation, also, to Americans—because of rank. Our mother, the eighth-grade dropout and former telephone operator, was thrust into the role of grande dame of the Officers' Wives' Club, presiding at teas in white gloves, arranging Christmas parties in the wards of the vast headquarters hospital, and hosting receptions for German, French, and British dignitaries. My brothers and I learned in the Air Force-sponsored schools that our father's rank was a fact that took precedence over every other.

  I attended H. H. Arnold, the high school named for the famous bomber-general of World War II. My brother Joe, a valiant survivor of a dozen operations, still had a pronounced limp, and the state of his health was always a question. But he was away at college now, and for the first time in my life—Hap Arnold High to myself!—I was out of his shadow. Sprung as I was from the all-male pinched milieu of Priory, the large all-American public school with its hilltop view of the magic city, its bright cafeteria, sports field, locker-lined hallways, girls in swirling skirts, and talentless football team, the Warriors, on which I could shine—it was heaven. Suddenly, instead of being known as the crippled kid's brother, I was the general's son. The feeling was, Wiesbaden gave my father back to me.

  I remember especially the early bierstube sessions with a first group of chums, sons of lower-ranking officers and NCOs, when it hit me that my father's primacy in this pecking order was my own primacy; that the essence of his status was power, mine as well as his; that it was more determinative than our being Catholic. It hit me that, in relation to my friends, this was all grossly unfair—like my not having polio was unfair to Joe—and that I loved it.

  To be on an American-sponsored school's sports team in postwar Europe was a special glory, because most weeks we traveled to the capital cities where the great Army, Navy, and Air Force posts and bases were. Our big rivals were the high schools in nearby Frankfurt and Ramstein, but the games we really looked forward to were against Munich and Paris. One trip took us to Berlin. In those pre-Wall days we careened down East Berlin's Stalin Allee in a rented Opel, a drunken classmate at the wheel while the other four or five of us waved red bandannas out the windows, singing in honor of the heroes of the airlift, "Off we go into the wild blue yonder." We sang our own praises for making it back into the American sector without being challenged by the Commie "Vopos," or Volkspolizei, but then we were pulled over by a pair of stalwart Negroes, American MPs who seemed to know what we'd been up to. They were not amused. Looking at my dependent's ID, noting my father's rank, one of them said to me, "You should know better."

  The high school travels gave me a feel for that peculiar American empire: we came as conquerors indeed! But my golden memory is of a home game late in the season. I remember it as the biggest game of my senior year. I was the starting right end, which perhaps explains why our team had yet to win a game. I had stopped hoping that my father would attend one, and also stopped minding, since we were so bad, that he never did. He was busy keeping Khrushchev at bay. Those were the years of "flashpoint Berlin," and why should such a father have had any idea that his son was becoming another kid entirely?

  It was enough for me that my girlfriend was a cheerleader, and that after the dance that night, win or lose, she would let me push the palm of my hand against the wired cushion of her breast.

  By the fourth quarter, the game was still scoreless. The quarterback was John Blaha, a lean hero who, like me, was planning to go to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He would actually do so, eventually becoming an astronaut and space shuttle pilot. In the huddle he called yet another play that sent me downfield, a decoy. I shot from the line of scrimmage, fooling no one. Then, when I crossed into the end zone, I looked back expecting to see the play action far away. Instead I saw the soaring football in descent toward me. I was horrified. My girlfriend and the grandstand full of kids would see me drop it. My father's rank would do me no good now.

  The ball hit me in the throat, and by some miracle I managed to get my arms around it. Tacklers jolted me, and I remember picturing my fumble, but I held the ball. I hit the ground hard. A few yards away, at the sideline, the band struck up the fight song. I heard the word "Touchdown!" The crowd made a new sound, and I wanted to see their faces, but mine, in dirt, was pointing the other way, toward the opposite sideline where the pole-vault track was. I remember lying there for a long time, not moving, looking across the field, my eyes unable to focus, quite, on the odd blue shape that did not belong.

  Blades of grass in the foreground gave way slowly to a sleek, long limousine, the most familiar car there was. I knew without seeing them that two stars would be on its bumper plates. How long had that car been there? A man in uniform and peaked hat, stars on his shoulders, was leaning on the front fender, hands in his trousers, a cigarette at his mouth. Daddy. Or rather, Dad.

  My first touchdown. Our first victory. And he had seen it. Not only that: the whole school, including my girl, had seen him doing so.

  In the huddle, the others knew. I sensed the rush of their excitement, as if the general had pressed an instant's imprimatur—General Patton at the front—on them too. For the extra point, Blaha called the same play, slot two, down and out, Carroll fly. As we lined up, I did not dare look over again. I shut the layers of my concentration down to the numbers. Hut! Hut! The snap. The running. The head fake. The flight. The ball coming at me again. And once again—first Lourdes, then Fatima—I caught the thing. By that one point we would win the game.

  When I looked toward the limo now, ready to wave, it was gone. I thought I'd looked the wrong way, and so I turned. The car was not there. How had it disappeared? I took my helmet off and looked again. He was gone. For a second I wondered if I'd dreamed him, leaning against the fender, smoking that Camel, watching. But I knew I had not. He had been there. He saw the touchdown. And he left. And in a flash—flashpoint Wiesbaden—I understood.

  The others would think he'd had to leave because of Nikita Khrushchev, the tension in Berlin, the things a general has to do. The others would feel the affirming afterglow of the general's presence, however brief. But not me.

  I knew why my father had left abruptly. Because he saw me in my moment of success. Success here, in this culture, with these kids, with a girl watching, was the enemy of my father's ancient and implicit plan for me. Silly as it seems to say so, crossing into the end zone with that football was crossing out of the zone of my selection. Daddy had been right in the first place to stay away from me in this new world. He could not see me exhibit what he had repressed. His coming to my gam
e was his mistake. Doing well in front of him, basking in the applause of my new friends, putting my happiness on display—these were mine.

  The Eagle Club was a requisitioned mansion in downtown Wiesbaden, near the casino and the park. Even grander than the house we lived in, it had reputedly served as Queen Victoria's residence when she'd come here for the spa. On better authority, it was said to have served as General Eisenhower's headquarters for a time in 1945. But by 1958, its distinction to us teenagers was even more pronounced, for the Eagle Club, now a servicemen's bar and music joint, was rumored to be an occasional hangout of Elvis Presley.

  Elvis, famously a GI by now, was stationed at an Army post thirty miles away, near Frankfurt. Word was that he drove trucks, and at a certain point a hot rumor had it that he was dating an eighth grader in the junior high across the street from H. H. Arnold. No one believed it. When even hotter rumors identified her as the daughter of an Air Force colonel, a prim girl on whom my eighth-grade brother, Brian, had a crush of his own, I really did not believe it. But I would remember her chiseled prettiness years later—1967, Priscilla Beaulieu—when Elvis married her.

  The main reason I could not believe that Elvis would seek out a girl that young was that it did not square with the libidinous image we had of him, or with the license he gave us to imitate it, albeit with a decidedly fifties-era inhibition. Even we straight-arrow military dependents mimicked Elvis with our pomaded hair, curled lips, slouches, suede shoes, piping on our trouser seams, and cultivated air of obsession with sex. Pregenital, making-out, feeling-up, French-kissing, going-halfway sex, but sex all the same. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in the pants. That's entertainment.