An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  Those who did their double-clutching in the next decade, to the rhythm of the Rolling Stones, could hardly sustain such heights of tension—the point of "satisfaction," we believed, was to yearn for it—as the ones we approached to the strains of (what else?) "I want you, I need you, I love you." Of course today the truth of what drew that secretly lost young man to cute but as yet sexless Priscilla is obvious, though we swore then that the rock 'n' roll star was up to his olive underwear and their garters in fräuleins, mädchens and schatzies. Well beyond the eighth grade ourselves, we teenage boys knew, nevertheless, that we weren't ready for the German prostitutes whose Marlene Dietrich gams decked every corner for blocks around the night-time bahnhof. Still, those girls were barely older than we were. We tested them, testing the language and ourselves, with sly, pidgin exchanges. ("Was costen?" "Mit goumi? Fünf mark." "Zu muchen!") Then we'd hustle back to Hainerberg, great balls of fire, hoping for a slow drag at the sock hop. The music of Elvis, like our idea of sex, was all about dry humping.

  Even so, lewd Elvis embodied the opposite of all that I'd been raised to be. The showy sexlessness of my parents' relationship and the aggressive puritanism of my parish and monastery schools had established a standard of repression that we called morality. I was dying to fall short of it. I had been conditioned, like every parochial Catholic, to an exquisite vigilance against "impure thoughts" and "illicit pleasures." Vigilance means paying acute attention, which I did. The nuns and priests had told me that temptation was the great enemy. I recognized temptation as my steady companion, and eventually as a friend. Having been so breathlessly warned against upheavals of carnal desire, I found that when they came—whether through photos in a magazine, the sight of a classmate's bra strap, dancing on a dime with my girlfriend, or, marvelously, when the pearly gates of her teeth opened to my tongue—those upheavals were volcanic. Recalling them later always left me feeling alone, afraid, doomed.

  Until Elvis, "Hound Dog," "Love Me Tender." I was a boy with four brothers and no sisters. Elvis, like a fifth, did nothing to dispel the haze that mystified my every notion of what a girl was, but he taught me how to dance with one, how to touch her hip, and how to take the wild disapproval of parents and church, teachers and chaperons, as a signal that these feelings, as much erotic as rhythmic, were rightly ours. Because of Elvis, I found myself belonging to a new group—not Catholics, the parish, school, or even family, not the military either, but "youth."

  The American Youth Association, the AYA, was the teen club beside the high school, and every day we adjourned there for Cokes, which never tasted sweeter, and for the jukebox, the jitterbug, the stroll, and bop—for slow dancing with our knees inside each other's thighs, the unacknowledged teenagers' braille that told me girls were as much on board this express as boys. For the first time in my life I had something that belonged to no one else in my tight family, not my parents, of course, not Joe, who would never dance, and not my other brothers, who were—Priscilla notwithstanding—still too young. Elvis himself, sadly, was already a musical has-been, though who could have imagined that in 1959? Eventually he would be called The King, but he was already king to me, my truest lord, the one in whom, at the AYA, I found my first identity, not as my father's kind of Catholic or my mother's kind of son or my siblings' kind of brother, but simply as me.

  The AYA was for weekday afternoons. Saturday nights were for the Eagle Club and the permanent dream of seeing him, the one who'd made us who we were. The GIs and airmen who frequented the club were not much older than I was, and no more able to appreciate the glories of the physical setting. The mansion's ornate fence, curving driveway, and baroque entrance evoked the elegance of a bygone era, but the smoky interior and the dim lighting of a would-be nightclub blotted out the carved marble and crystal sconces to which the farm boys, rednecks, and buffalo soldiers would have been indifferent anyway. Jazz groups and rock 'n' roll bands performed on the stage at one end of a former ballroom. In the center of a circle of stein-cluttered tables was a dance floor, always crowded with servicemen clinging to or jumping with blank-eyed German girls, some of whom were secretaries or clerks at headquarters, some the daughters of sycophantic locals seeking contacts, and some the leggy schatzies from the shadows near the bahnhof. It was a regular shock to see the hookers here, how much less alluring they looked than the girls who might say no.

  High school kids were forbidden admission to the Eagle Club, and except for some of the tougher girls who dated GIs, few bothered to try to get in. That was less a problem for me than a further condition of my joy in the place. I learned early in Wiesbaden that such rules did not apply to the general's son, especially since my father's driver, a forever ingratiating staff sergeant, moonlighted as a club maitre d'. Once I arrived with my girl on my arm, her twin sweater set a demure contrast to the hookers' cleavage. The sergeant greeted us with a mock salute and took us to a table with a placard that said "Reserved." More typically he would wink, admitting us, and we would lose ourselves in the crowd. We would drink the German beer, and dance, and lean into each other's bodies, but always with one eye peeled for Elvis. Often we would hear he'd arrived on a night the week before, just after we'd left, and that, responding to the hoots of his buddies, he'd climbed to the stage and sung a song. Calculating our arrival to be later, we would hear another time that he'd just left. We never doubted these reports, and the sexy frenzy of the Eagle Club always seemed to justify them.

  When I saw Elvis at last, not long before he rotated back to the States, the single most striking thing about him was his hair—how short it was, and how unglistening. He looked as much the straight arrow as I did. I savor the memory of Elvis leaping onto the stage in his khakis, his field hat through the epaulet on his left shoulder; Elvis swooping the microphone and diddling his leg, that pelvis thrust, and making the crystal chandeliers jitter to the mournful squeal of "Heartbreak Hotel." I savor the memory, but instead of being what happened, it's what I'd always imagined happening. In fact, Elvis walked into the smoky nightclub and, instead of his Army buddies hooting a welcome, the room fell silent, which cued everyone to look his way. I caught the briefest of glimpses before his head disappeared as he took a chair at a corner table. A buzz of amazed exchanges swept the room, but it was instantly clear to me that this crowd was no more able to think of Elvis as belonging to it than we would have been at the AYA. All the stories about his easy camaraderie were false, and judging from the stupefied air, I realized that so were the reports of his regular Eagle Club appearances. Elvis was Elvis, here and everywhere. By the time I had maneuvered my way around the room for another glimpse of the greatest man alive, he was gone.

  Elvis's quick disappearance was a potent revelation that the man who'd set me free was himself anything but. It was a lesson not only in the imprisonment of celebrity but in the untrustwor-thiness of even our most absolute assumptions. If Elvis was not free, how in the world had I begun to think that I was? Not long afterward, Francis Gary Powers, in a flight originating in Turkey and plotted to bring him to Wiesbaden air base, was shot down over the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower said the U-2 was an off-course weather plane. I recall how, at H. H. Arnold High School, the sons and daughters of the air base maintenance crews and traffic controllers raised eyebrows at each other: weather plane? After a week, Khrushchev ambushed Ike, exposing his dishonesty to the world with Powers's own testimony. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a liar like Charles Van Doren? And that was not all. "The CIA promised us that the Russians would never get a U-2 pilot alive," John Eisenhower said, expressing his father's sentiment. "And then they gave the SOB a parachute!"

  I had seen noble Ike inaugurated twice. If he was not virtuous—here was the next weighty question—how had I thought my father was?

  ***

  My life in Wiesbaden ran along a pair of tracks that seemed parallel but weren't. On one, I sought to recreate myself as the beau ideal of the American high school boy, a chipper, clean-cut version not of Elvis but of an Elvis fan.
Of all the many surprises in Germany, the biggest was the ease of my own self-transformation, which was more instinctive than calculated. The feeling was that I'd been given license at last to be who I really was. No longer the student who wasn't quite smart enough, or the phony who felt obliged to make a show of piety, I became instead a tintype football hero, a cheerleader's lover boy, a dance contestant, a class officer, a card—a phony of another kind entirely. Successes came in a cascade—Stage Manager in Our Town, yearbook editor, Lettermen's Club—yet even I knew it was less because of my many charms—this freckled face? these Alfred E. Neuman ears?—than because that particular track was well greased by my father's rank. No dope, instead of hating my privilege, I embraced a new ambition for myself. I would make that privilege permanent by cruising that glistening track right into adulthood. Off we go into the wild blue yonder, fucking-A. By senior year I was a self-declared candidate for the U.S. Air Force Academy. At H. H. Arnold a culture of academic mediocrity prevailed, and I was content to be a C student. The college counselor assured me, however, that the Air Academy's competitive admission process would hold no obstacle for a boy of my special qualification. General Junior. Mr. Shoo-in. This track was inside.

  But the other track was there as well, incrementally diverging. "All hail rock 'n' roll," yes. But also, always, "Hail Mary, full of grace." At home, in the kaiser's marshal's mansion on Biebricher Allee, just up from the Henkell champagne factory, the Church was more palpably present than ever, but in a confusing new way. Instead of the Jansenist gloom of the old monsignor at St. Mary's—once, when he dropped the sacred host on the sanctuary floor, and when I, his altar boy, instinctively reached to pick it up, he stomped my hand with his stout Irish boot—our house was full of the raucous laughter of manly Air Force chaplains. Monsignor—Colonel, and later General—Ed Chess was a cigar-chomping Chicagoan who'd nearly overlapped at seminary with Dad. Learning the game on the same clerical course at Mundelein College, each had become a scratch golfer. Now, in Germany, they became weekly partners, playing on the requisitioned course of an elegant old German hunt club near Frankfurt.

  Sometimes I caddied for them just for the rare thrill of sharing their fellowship. They bet on greenies and "pushed" each other, a gambling trick I never understood. Monsignor Chess offered Dad cigars, which to my surprise he took. I loved listening to their exchange of stories from seminary days and gossip about priests they knew. When they slapped each other's shoulders, laughing, I glimpsed more fully than ever the rare warmth that marked my father's relationships outside the family. No wonder his colleagues were dedicated to him. No wonder disparate groups, from the seminary to the Bureau and even to some quarters of the military, wanted him at their centers. With Monsignor Chess, my dad's irresistible affability was on full display, and so was his manliness. I was awed by the power of their booming drives, rifle shots down fairway after fairway. On the golf course, and only there, they called each other by their first names, and at times during those leisurely Saturday afternoons, I pretended that my father had become a priest after all. Sometimes I forgot about the Air Force Academy, even about my girlfriend, and pretended that I had become a priest too.

  Those golf games were a dream of intimacy that, it seemed to me, was made possible by the transforming presence of a priest—a priest my father and I both came, without ever saying so, to love. For the first conscious time, and because of that priest, I linked a bond of feeling for my father to a like bond of feeling for God. That it was happiness pure and simple I know every time, even now, that I taste lentil soup, because lentil soup was a feature of the hunt club's kitchen. The three of us finished every round of golf by eating that porridge, with rough black bread, in the grand room of a timber-framed lodge that reeked of the ghosts of barons and Prussian generals we had defeated. What chance had the Nazis had against men of such virtue and such prowess off the tee? Monsignor Chess would eventually become the chief chaplain of the Air Force, in part, I suspect, because of his friendship with Dad, formed here. General Chess's concelebration at my first Mass a decade later would redouble both its meaning for my father and, then, the shame of my betrayal.

  The younger captains and majors among the Wiesbaden chaplains, given to bright crew cuts and stainless-steel ID bracelets, spit-shined shoes and aviator sunglasses, forced a new idea of the priesthood on me. The same was true of my mother. With these men, she was extroverted and flirtatious, delighted by the power her status gave her. In Germany she was the baron's wife, the baroness. The chaplains were champions of her court. She seemed as amazed as I that our religion, given to us in sorrow, for the vale of tears, could suddenly seem so glamorous. One chaplain drove a Thunderbird convertible, another a Mercedes gullwing. Instead of clucking nuns, grimacing monks, old ladies of the sodality, and a stern Irish pastor, we had brush cuts, loafers, ID bracelets, fast cars, and the good-humored informality of a clerical masculinity calculated to appeal to American GIs. It appealed to me.

  At the high school I kept it as secret as I could, but all the time I was angling for position at the yearbook and in class elections, and all the time I was chipping away at my girlfriend's sexual inhibition and my own, I was showing up also for early morning Mass at the chapel across the street. It thrilled me to see as servers sergeants or lieutenants in uniform instead of robed altar boys. Sometimes I took their place. As I stood by with cruets and finger towels, feeling naked in my uncassocked chinos and sweater, I imagined the young chaplain spreading the sacred cloth over the hood of a jeep on a cratered hillside in Korea, say. I saw myself as his assistant, holding the golden plate under the chins of GIs who, shortly after this last Communion, would die like heroes.

  In relation to Mom, my question, like every high school boy's, had become, How to be a son and a man both? A developing relationship with a girl—by senior year my cheerleader and I were going steady, talking lifelong love—could have opened the way to one kind of answer, but in the frenzied push-pull of my sexual confusion, my girl herself had come to seem like, in another loaded phrase of the era, an occasion of sin. She was, in fact, an occasion of my own true selfhood, but that, given my long-set fate, was what could seem the sin itself. Thus the power of the alternative represented by these military priests, new objects of my mother's affection and unexpected images to me of a holiness that was not quite sexless. They began to seem, much as I did not want it anymore, the answer I was born to give.

  The most dramatic consequence of our ascension to the upper ranks, not so much of the military but of military Catholicism, was the friendship it made possible between my parents and, as he was called, the military vicar, a no less exalted figure than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

  Spellman was a short, round-faced eunuch—although his biographer many years later would report that "rumors abounded" about his homosexual activity. Many of his priests assumed it. His own first bishop, William Cardinal O'Connell of Boston, had called him many years before "the fat little liar." Some would describe Spellman as a pederast. The thought that at the very time I was trying to repress my own sexual urges, key Church figures at whose behest I was doing so may themselves have been promiscuous is enough, even today, to wrench my stomach with anger and disgust. The issue is not homosexuality, but dishonesty and abuse. By the 1990s the pathetic exploitation of the young and the weak by priests had become an old story, but in the 1950s this pathology was deeply hidden. As the secret became exposed, Church officials would work hard to make the misbehavior of priests seem marginal, yet it was central. The pathology was and is endemic to the repressive, deceit-ridden culture of celibate clericalism. Cardinal O'Connell's biographer would expose him, an active homosexual, as a liar too.

  I was at war with myself, habitually committing, then confessing, the mortal sin of illicit sexual pleasure, "alone and with another." But without knowing it, I was at war also with the sexual lie at the heart of Church practice. My father, years before, had said no to clerical celibacy and all that went with it, not imagining
that many of the vicious slanders American anti-Catholics had hurled at priests and bishops were literally true. Now celibacy was an issue for me too, but the renunciation of sexual intimacy implied the "virtuous" embrace of a spiritual power that was actually profoundly temporal, and no one embodied this more fully than Spellman. "The Powerhouse" was how his residence on Madison Avenue was referred to in rectories, in boardrooms, in government offices, and in foxholes. The key to Spellman's power was the well-known fact—he made sure it was well known—of his closeness with Pius XII. From his being the pope's valued friend and counselor flowed his wide-ranging influence over Church and State alike.

  To Catholics like us, he was the avatar of Irish-American ambition. The son of a storekeeper, a graduate of the North American College on Rome's Humility Street, the Vatican factoturn at home with the high and mighty, he was also as well proven a friend to GI Joe as Bob Hope would ever be. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had used Spellman as a back-channel diplomat. Eisenhower depended on him as a fellow Republican. Thomas Dewey, Joseph Kennedy, and Clare Boothe Luce regarded him as a confidant, if not as a confessor.

  It was J. Edgar Hoover whom Spellman had in common with Dad, but that would not have been enough to soothe my father's impatience with Spellman's vociferous support of Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthy's pit bull, Roy Cohn. My father hated them both for making a proper anxiety about Communist infiltration seem only paranoid. Still, the memory of Spellman in military fatigues, saying Mass on Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill, had made His Eminence a permanent hero on Army posts and Air Force bases, and therefore to the likes of us.

  When Cardinal Spellman visited the troops in Europe at Christmas in 1958, protocol put my father at his side. That was the first of several occasions when he was a guest in our home. As he stepped from his limousine on Biebricher Allee, he was even shorter than I'd imagined, and with his cherub face and frock coat, the word that popped unforgettably to mind was leprechaun. I glanced inside his car behind him and saw the seat strewn with cartons of cigarettes, a mystery until later when I saw that the packages of Luckies had been specially manufactured to include the cardinal's own picture inside the cellophane, along with a printed promise of a papal benediction. Holy Smokes.