An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  The Paulist Fathers were a small, relatively new American order numbering fewer than three hundred priests. Yet they were widely known for efforts to bridge the gulf between a huddled, defensive Church and an often hostile American culture. The order was founded a hundred years before by the convert Isaac Hecker, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. Hecker's own life gave the Paulists their mission, a dual task of opening the eyes of immigrant Catholics to the virtues of their new country and mitigating nativist suspicions of a foreign religion.

  An undivided love both of the Catholic Church and of America fueled the Paulist project from the start, and this love served to undercut the rigid triumphalism casting the Church as a divinely established perfect society that had nothing to learn from the broader culture. The Paulists promoted an interplay between Church and society by publishing books and magazines, sponsoring radio and television programs, roving from parish to parish preaching "missions," and serving as chaplains at what were referred to as non-Catholic colleges and universities. The Paulists began the Newman Club movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the first decade of this century, and after seminary I would serve as Newman chaplain at Boston University. Outpost Newman Clubs were a potent symbol of the difference between the small order and, for example, the massive Society of Jesus, which in the same period reinforced the spirit of immigrant rejection by creating an alternative system of higher education just for Catholics.

  At Georgetown, where in all things save ROTC I was an underachieve^ I chose the Paulists over my Jesuit professors for none of these reasons. I'd never heard of Hecker, and except for the Air Force Academy, it had not occurred to me to go to a non-Catholic college. Though my parents, like their hero John Kennedy, were participating fully in the new American consensus, no one openly questioned yet the Church's rigid self-definition as an ideal structure set apart. Certainly not me. I cast my fate with an unknown and implicitly dissenting religious community for the goofy reason that the one Paulist priest I met wore penny loafers.

  He was a "vocation director" interviewing candidates at Healy Hall, below an austere portrait of Georgetown founder John Carroll, a Maryland aristocrat to whom I was decidedly not related. John Carroll was famous to Catholics as the nation's first bishop. His cousin Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence, the only Catholic to do so. I know now that John Carroll was a remarkable figure who challenged Roman Catholic triumphalism as much as nativist prejudice, but at the time he was just another prelate to me, an ancestral Spellman. His glum visage above us seemed an emblem of all I feared about entering the Church.

  My fears were contradicted by the young and informal Paulist priest who shook my hand warmly and pulled a chair out for me. He was handsome and jocular, like the Air Force chaplains I had known. Something in his breezy, hip manner made it seem that I could be a priest after all without torching the fragile structure of an independent self I had worked so hard to erect. Years later, I would recognize that instinctive, wholly uninformed choice of the Paulists as a life-shaping treasure, and I still feel a debt to that priest, a man I never got to know and whom I remember now only as Father Kelly. It does not dampen my gratitude to realize, as I did not long after entering the seminary, that the open-hearted camaraderie I found so irresistible was part of his pitch, and that, even with those loafers, I'd been had.

  Instead of requiring a sacrifice of the self, the Paulists would help me—as a Christian if not as a "good Catholic," as a true American if not as a military chaplain, as a man if not as an obedient son—to lay full claim on my self for the first time. I entered the seminary in largest part to please my parents, but I left it—that first sermon in the pulpit at Boiling Air Force Base—the kind of priest Catholics like my parents held in contempt.

  Before I took up residence at St. Paul's College, three months after the death of Pope John XXIII and three months before the death of John Kennedy, I lived like a monk in rural isolation for a year and a day, the canonically prescribed period of novitiate, a kind of spiritual basic training for life in a religious order. The Paulist novitiate, Mount Paul, was a former hunting lodge—a rugged retreat with its own manmade lake, the bull's-eye of ten thousand surrounding acres of deer-studded woods in the Picatinny Mountains of New Jersey, two hours west of New York City. Like many Catholic institutions of the kind—seminaries, colleges, and retreat houses from the North Shore of Chicago to the Hudson Valley to the Cliff Walk of Newport—it had once been the playland of robber barons, who sold off such places when income taxes, property taxes, and the wages of servants made them too costly.

  My classmates were mainly working-class Irish, the sons of cops and electricians, getting their first taste of life in really beautiful surroundings. My first had come courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, in that Prussian general's mansion atop a hill in Wiesbaden. And then Rome, in all its Renaissance glory, had taught me that Catholicism was far more than the pinched, kitsch-ridden immigrant atmosphere of parish life in America. Still, the stone gates and the mile-long private driveway and the meticulously landscaped grounds around the tidy buildings—one a timber lodge dating to the hunters' era, the other a modern brick residence with a soaring glass-walled chapel; the blue diamond of a lake with its white cuticle of a beach, Adirondack chairs arranged on a terrace, flowers everywhere—the sight stunned me and made me feel out of place.

  I was bound to feel that way, of course, embarking as I was on a journey I had so long hoped to avoid. Only the week before, winding up my glamorous FBI job, I had met President Kennedy at a White House reception for summer interns. I was still warm with the glow of a last date with Lynda Bird, a dreamy twilight trip with her parents down the Potomac River aboard the vice president's yacht, Sequoia. I remember the chief petty officer in whites piping us aboard, the gleaming brass and mahogany rails, the firing of the small foredeck cannon in salute to George Washington as we passed Mount Vernon. Then and always, I remember Lynda Bird as shy and kind, and her mother as generous and welcoming, and it was on that trip that heretofore aloof LBJ had brought me into what seemed the inner circle of his affection by saying, "You don't have to call me Mr. Vice President anymore, son. You can call me Mr. Johnson."

  But I wouldn't be calling him anything now. I was Thomas Merton giving up Columbia. I was Isaac Hecker giving up Brook Farm. I was Augustine giving up a life with Deodatus. I'd had the inside track, and I'd dropped out of the race. Inhibiting me most of all, upon my arrival at Mount Paul, was a clinging emotional hangover from a recent misadventure in New York City where, aching with loneliness and desire, I'd gone by Trailways bus determined to complete a transaction with a prostitute. This last-inning wish to get laid also amounted, no doubt, if far more subliminally, to a wish to avoid the doom of celibacy. What would prove my unworthiness for the life of poverty, chastity, and obedience more irrefutably than a flagrant mortal sin committed with money?

  Alas, all I succeeded in doing was replaying a reel of ineffectual flirtation—those teasing liebchen in the shadows of the bahnhof. Only here I drew the dead-eyed stares of pimps hovering in the alleys and alcoves, terrifying me. The girls on Forty-second Street and on Seventh Avenue in their skin-tight, liquescent pedal pushers and short-shorts lacked entirely the waiflike, wounded air that the postwar Germans knew how to flaunt. These girls were gum-snapping hip swayers, tongue flashers, redheads whose wigs were too obvious, or—this suspicion finished me—not even girls. I wandered New York, ending up on the Staten Island ferry in the middle of the night. From a windswept railing, I stared forlornly back at the glittering city, seeing it as the world I would never have. I felt grief-struck for the loss of girlfriends past and future, wallowing in guilt for wanting to have sex, in self-hatred for being unable to. I could not get out from under that primordial, binding, implicit but still potent challenge from my father: carnality, pleasure, personal ambition, those things are for "them," not for us. Afterward, I would dutifully regard my sad plunge into depressed, repressed puritanism as a sign
of temptation overcome. That my "virtue" would always secretly feel false would be a sign of my essential mental health. But what did I know then? I arrived at beautiful Mount Paul in the rolling hills of Rockaway Township, feeling that my life was over, and that it deserved to be.

  One day about a month and a half later, some of us were standing on the edge of the lake. We were all garbed in the black cassocks that were to be our uniforms from now on. In a few years, the requirement to wear such things would evaporate, as would Latin and the rules of fasting and abstinence, but as novices, we had already acclimated ourselves to a discipline that dated back to Saint Benedict, more than a thousand years before. "Keep the rule," we'd been taught, "and the rule will keep you." It was also making us a little odd.

  The leaves had already turned and begun to fall into the lake. The changing season prompted an argument about when the lake would freeze over. It was the size, say, of a suburban shopping center's parking lot, perhaps three hundred yards across. None of us had been there the previous winter, but ignorance did not prevent us from taking firm positions on the subject: January at the soonest! Late November! Christmas! Lent! We argued about such things at Mount Paul.

  Finally one of my classmates, a short, stocky Boston kid named Patrick Hughes who had said nothing until then, declared, "On December eighth, I'll skate across this lake. Who wants to bet on it?" Just like that, the discussion turned from a bunch of experts pronouncing to a handful of guys who had to put up their bets or shut up.

  The novitiate was like ravaged Europe after the war in that we didn't use money for currency. In Europe they used cigarettes and silk stockings. At Mount Paul we used desserts, our rice puddings and Jell-Os, our kadota figs and Sunday apple pies. If I lost a dessert in a bet, the winner could wait until something he liked was served, and then send the waiter, another novice, over to collect. Desserts were not only our currency but our one source of power, totems of our subliminal defiance of two of the three vows. That Patrick Hughes had offered to bet all takers made his gamble a monument of daring and foolhardiness. We all took him up on it, and soon Patrick had desserts for the next four months riding on his ability to skate across that lake on December 8.

  By Thanksgiving the lake showed no sign of freezing. Patrick would get up early every morning, don his cassock, slip down to the water to check, and then walk up to the chapel for morning prayer. We all knew what he was praying for. On December 3, when we woke up, there it was, the first thin glaze in the corner of the lake. That afternoon there was a delicate necklace of ice around the shore. Having bet against him, we gathered on the shore and groaned. By December 5, a thin sheet had spread all across the lake, but it would hardly hold a leaf. On the nights of the sixth and seventh, the temperature dropped, and in the daytime the sun hid, because on the morning of December 8, the ice looked good—or bad, depending on your bet. Desserts as the sublimation of poverty and obedience, if not chastity; all those coins, all that power. We knew nothing of these meanings, but neither could we have explained why the condition of the lake that morning had come to matter so much.

  Right after chapel, hiking our cassocks, we clambered down to the water's edge. Not water. Ice. Someone picked up a rock the size of a softball and dropped it on the surface, and the ice held. We all groaned except for Patrick, who sat down to put on his ice skates. Then someone else picked up a bigger rock, the size of a football, and threw it out. The rock broke the ice easily and disappeared. We all cheered. But Patrick kept lacing up his skates. An undeclared expertise was on display. Later we would learn he'd been captain of the Boston College hockey team. I, for one, had never seen shoelaces handled so deftly.

  I stepped out onto the ice with one foot. I bounced it a couple of times, then my foot went through. "Pat," I said, "you can't do this. It's impossible."

  My words registered not at all with him. He stood and went up the hill a little, to get a running start. I felt a real fear for him. To the sound of a gun inside his head, he took off, launching himself out onto that shimmering surface. He hit it in stride, his legs pumping away. But he hit it with a great crack, and sure enough the ice broke. It was too thin. It was too soon. Oh, Patrick!

  Then we saw that the ice was breaking and opening not under him but behind him. He was ahead of the break, skating so fast and so lightly that even the thin ice was support enough for the instant he needed it. All of us on that shore, watching him barreling across that lake, were transformed. We forgot our desserts and all they meant to us. We began to cry after him, "Go Patrick! Go Patrick!" As he shot across that ice, leaving behind a great crack, a wedge of black water, we knew we had never seen such courage before, not to mention such savvy knowledge of the ice, a Quincy kid's knowledge. We had never seen such a capacity for trust—a man's trust in himself. Even before he made it all the way across, and of course he did make it, I thought, This is a man I want to be with.

  My friendship with Patrick Hughes became one of the pillars of my life. We helped each other get through the seminary. He taught me how to sail a boat, and I taught him how to use the Library of Congress. He introduced me to the Red Sox, and I helped him write sermons. He was a great athlete, a skilled carpenter, a singer and banjo player, an entertainer, a rare man whom others instantly trusted, yet he used to act as if our friendship were his privilege, not mine. Patrick was the first person who did not respond to either my cultivated self-importance or my deep-seated, mostly hidden conviction of worthlessness. He made me feel that, as he used to say to me, I could do no wrong. In that uptight, homophobic era, I never used the word "love" for what Patrick and I felt for each other—later I would—but the simple, pure pleasure I took in his presence remains one meaning by which I measure love today. I learned to measure happiness by the knowledge, which eventually became rock certain, that he rejoiced in my company as much as I did in his.

  Friendship with Patrick opened me to friendship generally. It was the precondition of the first of three distinct but related revolutions—interpersonal, religious, political—that I underwent as a Paulist. I had grown up with four brothers, each of whom I now cherish, but for whatever reason—Joe's polio, our parents' emotional inhibition, my own narcissism, or, for that matter, the Irish Famine's melancholy legacy of bitterness and self-doubt—I knew little of the consolation of fraternal intimacy. Gradually I began to feel, first with Patrick, then with other Paulists, even including priests on the seminary faculty, a warm comradeship, intellectual and emotional both.

  The Paulists were bright and energetic men. They regarded the community life as, in Hecker's terms, one of the "two poles of the Paulist character." The common room was a raucous place, and its rituals of game playing, conversation, and libation were sacred. But at times it could seem like a minefield too, strewn with bursts of sarcasm, which were always styled as ironic wit. "Still cranking 'em out, Jim?" a Paulist priest asked me decades later, at the door of his church as I was leaving Mass one Sunday. He was referring to my sixth novel, which I'd come to his city to promote. The remark brought back the efficiency with which we had used barbed repartee to cut each other down to size, and a sick feeling that reminded me I'd never been much good at it.

  "You ought to try it, Joe," I answered lamely. "It beats cranking out apologies for this pope."

  "Still have your authority problem, eh, Jim?"

  "Not my problem, Joe. My solution."

  Indeed so. The dark underside of the repressed, authoritarian milieu could manifest itself, to take another example, in the veiled cruelty of endemic nicknaming, which ingeniously exploited points of vulnerability. "Fuzz," for one whose chronic facial acne inhibited shaving; "Spade," for another whose nose, from a certain angle, was said to resemble a shovel. I made the mistake in my first year of wearing my old high school letterman's sweater—that touchdown—and the gold W for Wiesbaden earned me the sobriquet (from the French for "chuck under the chin") "Mr. Wonderful." For a long time, whenever I entered a room, I braced myself, waiting to hear some bastard humm
ing the first few bars of the show tune. Patrick Hughes seemed to get off light, called "Hugger," but I hear now a sly implication of homosexuality in the moniker, a putdown after all.

  The rule anathematized "particular friendships," as if intimacy were ever general. In fact, friendships flourished. Despite a climate of forever unstated insecurity about the love of men for men—we had our own rooms, were forbidden to cross the threshold of another's, and never did—life among the Paulists was an antidote to the deep loneliness I had long before concluded was a constituent part of my personality. This was more than a matter of camaraderie, lively conversation, the common work, and the thrill—part New Frontier, part aggiornamento— of building the new American Church together. Patrick, Paul Lannan, Bob Baer, Al Moser, David Killian, Jack Kirvan, Floyd MacManus, Jim Young, Michael Hunt, Stan MacNevin, Jim Donovan, George Fitzgerald, John Collins, David Pilliod, Ed Guinan—these men were my companions, and more. After many years together, sharing every aspect of our lives, we knew each other well, very well. Eventually, it seemed they knew my secrets, without my ever having revealed them. That "Mr. Wonderful" punctured—and rescued me from—the phony, Erector Set, general's son persona I'd begun to construct in high school, not in favor of the obsequious and pious ideal I had already rejected for myself, but of something new. A multi-year counseling relationship—spiritual direction—with a benign and holy priest, Al Moser, was at the heart of an unsentimental directness that slowly but surely eroded even my self-isolating sense of being different.