An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  When I think of Dennis and Jimmy, those two frightened young men standing in a crowd, staring at a window, a blank eye, in the largest building in the world—the largest tombstone, there, by Arlington—I want to reach back through time and hug them both, that John Lennon, that freckle-faced, big-eared Alfred E. Neuman. I want to comfort them, but, thinking of that man inside the Pentagon who was then only five years older than I am now, and of the deadly moral choices still ahead of him, I also want to shake those two, slap them, wake them up, make them see through the haze of their anguish. I want to yell, Don't be afraid of demanding of him that he explain himself to you! Don't let him down by assuming already that he is lost. Indeed—how I wish I could get this message back to Dennis and Jimmy—he needs your challenge! He needs your love!

  For the first time, here, in the writing, I see my own responsibility for what followed. It's a bit of a narcissist's fantasy, perhaps, but here it is: the son will shake the father, who will then do the right thing, and the world will be a better place. Still, it seems true. As my father failed to find a way to influence the generals, I failed to find a way to influence him. My failure compounded his. My failure, then, contributed to what Nixon did.

  A few weeks later, at Thanksgiving, I went to dinner at Boiling for the last time. Convinced that my father thought the war was good, I almost dared to tell him it was evil. But the most I could bring myself to say was that he had no right to call Phil Berrigan a kook. Hell, I thought pouring blood on draft files was a kooky thing to do, but I had come to despise that word. "He is not a kook!" I cried, which reads now like a comic anticipation of Nixon.

  My mother told me to lower my voice, and I said to her, "Tell him to stop saying that. Phil Berrigan is a priest!"

  My father leaned toward me and hissed, "Which makes it all the worse." He banged his fist on the table, pushed himself away, and left. A few minutes later, I told my mother at the door that I wouldn't be coming for Christmas. I'd be doing the holidays at St. Paul's, where I belonged. I remember heading out into the night, glancing back at sullen, stunned Dennis, and feeling the sting of guilt I'd felt previously only in relation to polio-stricken Joe. I was abandoning Dennis.

  A few days later, McNamara announced his resignation. The day after that, McCarthy announced his candidacy. And with what grave relief did I listen to his speech on television. McCarthy's forthright, brave denunciation of the war moved me to tears, which I desperately hid from the other seminarians. McCarthy was a serious Catholic who had himself once studied for the priesthood; who wrote poetry, read Teilhard, and could quote Jacques Maritain; who could make his points against Johnson by appealing to Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the Just War tradition that I had mastered; who, unlike the radicals, wanted to work within the system, to change it; and who conveyed through humor and self-deprecation an astounding lack of hubris. Watching him that day was like seeing a log drift by before going down for the third time. My gratitude would keep me loyal to McCarthy even after Bobby Kennedy declared for president.

  Having been raised with a hero in the house, I had slowly but surely lost him as such. I still needed heroes, and had made sure to have them. Hans Küng was one. Martin Luther King was another. Daniel Berrigan, perhaps. But Eugene McCarthy was something else. He seemed to offer me a way to stand against a hostile world, defining myself in opposition, and actually to change that world. Eugene McCarthy was running for president! He made me believe that Americans, as true Americans—lovers of our country!—could end the war. Patriots for Peace. For a time, I gave myself entirely to him.

  I went to work at once, putting the basic organizing experience I'd gained on civil rights vigils and demonstrations actively to work to oppose the war for the first time. I would settle in as a recruiter of college students, getting them "Clean for Gene." But the initial effort was to help organize, along with a dozen other Paulists, an early rally for McCarthy. It took place in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, a raucous celebration led off by a group of singing seminarians, the Roamin' Collars, led by my own Patrick Hughes. They performed the Simon and Garfunkel hit "Mrs. Robinson." As I watched the packed ballroom sway in rhythm with the song, I felt proud, relieved and like myself at last. I also felt strangely consoled by the line "Jesus loves you more than you will know."

  Later, in a corner of the crowded room, I met Senator McCarthy. When I told him I was a seminarian, he pressed my hand warmly, as years before Bobby Kennedy had, and for the same reason. It was a version of the small affirmation Catholics habitually gave their chosen ones, and to which, frankly, we felt entitled. Between me and the senator, a handclasp could be a brief signal of comembership, a seal, and a hint that because of my vocation I could be especially valuable to the cause. To la causa, as we, with Cesar Chavez, were calling it by then.

  I returned to the seminary that night feeling energized and hopeful. Pat Hughes and I and a few others watched the late news. When the TV screen suddenly filled with Pat's round face, we hooted. He was grinning happily above his banjo, singing, "Jesus loves you..." Then the film cut to McCarthy, and as the camera panned across the crowd, my heart stopped. God, what if the camera shows me? I turned cold with fear—again. He'll see me. He'll know. Today my children hold their breath whenever we drive past a cemetery: otherwise they will die. That is what I did. I held my breath, a magic act that made the camera miss me.

  It was perhaps that very week, and as if because of what I'd begun to do—the spirit of the movement encouraged such grandiose self-reference—that Francis Cardinal Spellman died. My classmates who knew of his interest in ordaining me offered wry condolences, but I felt only relief that he was dead. Free at last, I thought. But of course I wasn't. When I called my mother, a storm front of complicated emotions rolled in, as much hers as mine. She reminded me that while so much else in her life as an uneducated, "unfinished" woman who'd been conscripted into the role of a general's wife had aimed to undercut her, Cardinal Spellman had only affirmed her. Recognizing a rare esprit, and freeing it, he gave her ways to feel proud of herself. Through Catholic councils of military women in Europe and in Washington, he gave her ways to exert leadership and express herself. As we spoke, I sensed that, on the other end of the line, she was close to weeping. She fell silent. I imagined her fingering the gold medal at her throat embossed with Spellman's seal. He had given it to her for service to the Church. Years later, dying, she would ask us to put that medal on her for the viewing at her wake.

  I told her that I would pray for Cardinal Spellman. She did not reply. I told her, out of a sudden and ancient feeling of desperation, that I loved her, knowing that what she really wanted to hear at that moment was that I'd loved him.

  "And now," she said, "he'll never ordain you."

  "I know."

  "He'd be as disappointed about that as I am," she said. Then she forced a laugh. "But he's in heaven, where disappointment is forbidden."

  "Forbidden disappointments." The phrase struck me. It would be the title of my volume of poems. I thought of a crack with which to reply: You'll be disappointed, Mom, even there. But I didn't say it. I don't remember what I said.

  A few weeks later came Tet, when even I began to grasp that our country's failure belonged in some special way to my father. And within weeks of that came My Lai, which, when we later learned of it, would seem to Americans both outrageous—Lieutenant Calley tossing an infant in the air, spearing it with a bayonet—and not all that different from what, less personally, our B-52S were doing from the air.

  When Cardinal Spellman's successor, an agreeable Irishman named Terence Cooke, was installed as archbishop of New York and vicar of the American military, his first words from the episcopal throne in St. Patrick's were spoken to Lyndon Johnson, sitting in the cathedral's front row. As I had in my letter to the White House that very week, Cooke thanked the president for his search for peace. In fact, the real search was being conducted by 549,000 GIs, many of whom would never find peace again. Reflecting Cooke's po
sition, the American Catholic bishops issued a statement, implicitly defying Pope Paul VI, in which they said, "It is reasonable to argue that our presence in Vietnam is justified." Not much was made in the press of Cooke's friendly words to the beleaguered president that day, because a few hours after the episcopal installation, Martin Luther King was shot.

  On May 17, 1968, Philip and Daniel Berrigan led a Catholic raid on a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland. They burned records with homemade napalm. Daniel Berrigan's statement began, "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children ... We could not, so help us God, do otherwise." I taped it to my mirror, where once Lacordaire's pious hymn to the priesthood had been. I would have Berrigan's words on my mirrors or bulletin boards in a sequence of rooms for years. The consequences of Catonsville would give shape to my priesthood.

  And in that same hard season that ended with the murder of Bobby Kennedy, two other things happened in my family. My brother Dennis decided that, in conscience, he could no longer cooperate with the Selective Service System. He renounced his student deferment, then told our father he had done so. Dad stormed away from him in fury. Mom served Dennis his dinner, a casserole that, though meatless, he could not eat. He would be leaving the house on Generals' Row, and then the country. Dennis would be a draft exile for more than a year, working in a leper colony in India, a kind of self-imposed alternative service. And our brother Brian, out of college and married now to Vicki French, would resolve a youthful restlessness about future and career, if not also about a place in the universe, by applying to become an FBI agent. Upon receiving his badge and gun, he would be assigned to track down draft fugitives. When they went underground, Brian would be given the job of finding the Berrigans, and then other Catholic resisters. It would be reported that he tried to penetrate the Catholic left through me.

  9. THE IMPOSITION

  ST. PAUL the Apostle Church is on the West Side of Manhattan, across Sixtieth Street from Lincoln Center. It was designed by one of the first Paulist fathers, a hundred years before my ordination, at a time when Midtown was the edge of wilderness. Father Deshon had been an Army engineer, and indeed, to me, the church resembled nothing so much as an armory. Its stunted twin spires seemed like the crenelated towers of a fortress. St. Paul's vast interior was mystically dark, except for a few pillar-mounted lights that shone on the ceiling vault, a midnight-blue canopy on which was painted the night sky showing the stars and planets exactly as aligned on the night of the conversion of Saint Paul. That never made sense to me, because Paul's experience—knocked from a horse in bright daylight on the road to Damascus—had made him blind.

  We saw nothing. My classmates and I, halfway through the ordination ceremony, were lying flat on the cold stone floor, prostrate. Our faces were buried in our arms. We were blind, knocked down, but converted? Meanwhile, the boys' choir in front of us, alternating with the congregation behind us, sang the transfiguring Litany of Saints. Its strains ricocheted between the high-pitched precociousness of the boys and the ragged happiness of the amateur throng.

  Lord, have mercy.

  Christ, have mercy.

  Lord, have mercy.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  Mom. I thought first of her, what a dream come true this was. The reward to the people of her father's village in Ireland for never having taken the soup; her guarantee of a special place in heaven; proof that she had done the right thing in marrying Joe.

  Pray for us.

  Saint Michael the Archangel.

  Pray for us.

  On the refrains rolled, like heaven's chariot rolling over us. The litany is an arcane Who's Who—Athanasius, Sebastian, Agatha, the arrow-pierced eunuchs, the virgins whose breasts were crushed with the paving stones of the Roman Forum.

  All ye holy men and women, saints of God.

  Pray for us.

  Lord, be merciful.

  A prayer for mercy was one I had no trouble making mine. Only moments earlier, I had knelt before Terence Cardinal Cooke with my folded hands inside his, like a blade inside a scabbard. He'd looked me in the eye and asked, "Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey me and my successors?"

  All around were witnesses, not only my Paulist brothers and my family and the families of my dozen classmates, but Air Force chaplains, five of them, or ten, or fifteen—I kept seeing more. They were present because I was the son of a general, the first son of an active-duty Air Force officer subject to the military ordinariate to be ordained. They came to show a pious solidarity—and to be seen doing so by Cardinal Cooke. They wore their blue uniforms, standing behind me like sponsors. Slim priestly stoles draped their necks, stoles of the kind meant to be worn on a battlefield, evoking Mass on the hood of a jeep. The stoles across their epaulets blanked out the silver bars, leaves, eagles, and stars of their rank.

  "Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey your ordinary?"

  Ordinarily.

  "It depends, Eminence," I wanted to say. This man and others like him had just sheepishly endorsed the war. And only months before, he and others like him—ordinary indeed—had bowed to the pope's demoralizing edict on birth control, Humanae Vitae, published in July 1968. I knew that if, in that season, B-52S had been dropping condoms on the hills and valleys of Vietnam, Cardinal Cooke and Washington's Cardinal O'Boyle and all the other "ordinaries" would by now have solemnly condemned the war as intrinsically immoral, forbidding Catholic participation. But instead, they called it justified because the B-52S were only dropping napalm.

  The cardinal had put my hands in his when, at that moment, despite myself, what I'd wished for was to put my hands inside Dad's. The image I had of myself was of that little boy in boots, chaps, and a cowboy vest, standing hand in hand with his Air Force father, equally awkward in his general's uniform. Cowboy? Didn't my lying here on the cold stone floor equal elevation to the status of the Lone Ranger himself?

  "Monsignor, take this one aside," I imagined His Eminence saying in response to my mute paralysis. But mute paralysis, only rarely broken by the poems I'd tried to write, was my true condition. I had begun this process of handing myself over to God, if not the Church, years ago, wanting only to be like Dad. And then what happened?

  In the crushing months before, with the assassinations of Dr. Bang and Bobby, with the pope's reform-killing encyclical, with the debacle at the Democratic National Convention—the Chicago riots took place within blocks of my birthplace—I had tried one last time to hurl myself from the ecclesiastical express, to get out of becoming a priest. That summer I'd been a pastoral counseling intern at a clinic for alcoholics in Atlanta. For three months I lived and worked in a becolumned mansion, once the home of the Coca-Cola Candlers, a family of notorious liquor drinkers. Now their stately house was the refuge of a ragtag collection of drunks and therapists. The solarium had become an arts-and-crafts center. The ballroom was the cafeteria. In the former master bedroom were bunks for twelve. My bed was in the corner of a small room. I loved the work, my first independent taste of the pastoral ministry. But I was challenged, to say the least, by my collegial closeness with female nurses and social workers, as well as partnership with Baptist and Methodist ministers. As a Catholic, I was a mystery to the mostly redneck patients, who, with edgy good humor, called me "bull nun." I handled it all with apparent equanimity, but I ached with loneliness and uncertainty. Visions of myself as a defeated whiskey priest woke me in the night, and I would lie there in the dark trying to remember how any of this had happened. One minute I am a laughing boy with a girlfriend in a gala room, waiting for Elvis, the next I am an avowed eunuch in a narrow bed alone.

  I hitched a ride one weekend up to Sewanee, Tennessee, site of the University of the South, where Allen Tate now lived in retirement. I hadn't seen him in two years, but I had continued to send my poems to him, and he had faithfully sent them back, properly defaced. His support had seemed an ongoing miracle to me. Slowly I accumulated a collection o
f finished poems, some of which would appear, with his imprimatur, in Forbidden Disappointments. In Atlanta, thinking of my approaching ordination, I panicked, fearing among other things that Tate's interest in me depended on my status as a priest in training. But, I argued with myself, even as I drove into Sewanee, hadn't Mr. Tate been the one to warn me with his demurral about my "two vocations"? Priest and Poet—not you, kid. How about Priest and Poet and Prophet. Maybe Daniel Berrigan could do it, but I couldn't.

  My spiritual director had recently told me that, in the final evaluation of my candidacy for ordination, one priest faculty member had observed disapprovingly that I had a "soft middle." Like the earth? I wanted to ask. Like bread? But it was true. I was soft where all the heroes, from Cardinal Cooke to Daniel Berrigan to my father, wanted me to be hard. On this at least those three would agree. Priest and Poet, I can't be both? By now I am concluding I can't be either. When I quit, they will think it's the war, and I may even say as much. They'll think it's birth control, or that I want a woman. All of which will be true, but only partly so. I drive into Sewanee knowing that the unidentified faculty critic has seen right through me. Addressing a reflection in the windshield, I rehearse what I will say when I resign: "Three reasons: poverty, chastity, and obedience." But the truth will be something else, and "soft middle" is as good a term for it as any I know.

  Soft middle—the place, above all, in which the silence becomes words, giving me poetry. Wasn't I coming to Sewanee now to tell Mr. Tate that he'd been right? That summer marked the end of my hope of becoming a Catholic priest of the kind my father wanted. If there was another kind—Thomas Campion the resister, not Thomas a Kempis the pious fool—what would that be to Dad? Therefore, what would it be to me? The choice seemed clear. As I arrived in the small Tennessee hill town in which Allen Tate had first made his reputation, I realized that in coming here I had already made the choice. I was coming to declare myself to Allen Tate, to announce my determination to make a life as a writer. He would bless me, calling me out of the priesthood, and out of prophecy too. Yes, Allen Tate would be my new father in the Word, but lowercase.