With that, the board sat through Dennis's reading of his long, painstakingly composed declaration of conscience. I had read it, and found it to be a clear and forthright definition of the war's immorality and of a citizen's obligation to oppose it. When Dennis finished, the chairman asked him again to wait outside. Dennis left the room.
It was perhaps the next Christmas when I visited my parents, and we went to midnight Mass at St. Paul's College. By then I could not worship at the Boiling chapel. After Mass, I was sitting in the Paulist common room when an elderly priest asked my father about his defense of my brother. Unaware that I was listening, he described it. The chairman of the appeals board acknowledged that he knew who Dad was, and asked for his view. Citing the law, Dad explained why his son's position—not just then, but in the first place—was proper and legal. "The right to conscientious objection," he said, "is basic to the American idea." The board's task, as he saw it, was only to determine if the application for exemption from military service was authentically based on conscience. "I am here today," he went on, "not because I agree with what my son just said—obviously, wearing this uniform, I don't—but because I know with absolute certitude that his position is sincerely held, prudently arrived at, and an act, if I might add, of heroic integrity."
The chairman eyed his fellow board members, whose simple nods said it all. He gaveled the hearing to a close. Dennis was granted his CO status. He did a year's alternative service, as an orderly in a mental hospital.
The priest to whom my father told all this was a World War II combat veteran whose wounds had left the right side of his face frozen. His right eye would often fill up and overflow. Tears would stream down his one cheek without his being aware of it. That happened now. He said to my father, "General, I think it was big of you to support your son, but frankly, I don't think your boy's attitude does him much credit."
"I suppose I should agree with you," my father replied. "I share your instincts. I've spent my whole life defending our point of view. But I don't think you understand my son's position well enough to see the point he has. All I know for sure is this: if human beings don't drastically change the way they resolve their conflicts, we won't survive this century." Then, after a pause, still unaware of me, my father added, "My son Dennis certainly represents a drastic change from the way we were brought up. And that may be just the change we need."
There was a thin glistening on the priest's cheek as he listened to my father. I had to remind myself that his tears signified no particular emotion. Unlike mine. It wasn't only that I envied Dennis, confronting as I had to, yet again, how little I knew of my father's true capacity. It was also that I saw Dad, for the first time, as a "child-changed father," in the phrase Cordelia used of Lear. Dennis had touched him in that dark corner of the self on the walls of which his worst fear was scrawled.
And what was that but the fear of nuclear war? When Dad had first encountered the real risk of Armageddon, perhaps in meetings with our Boiling neighbor Curtis LeMay, perhaps in Wiesbaden while Nikita Khrushchev pawed at Berlin, or perhaps during the Cuban missile crisis when the Chiefs wanted to attack, how could that misfit general have ever imagined that a glimpse of the way out of this dead end would come from his lost-soul son?
It was as if the BU chapel fire had melted the ice onto which I had launched myself. Yet even as I felt the ice opening under me, I refused to contemplate a decision to quit the priesthood. I had taken a solemn vow. If that commitment could not hold—here was the fear—nothing of mine ever would. Abandoning my vocation had come to equal losing the faith. Being a priest had become my way of affirming the existence of God. And if I quit, God, whether He existed or not, would never forgive me.
But in January of 1973—on the twenty-second, my thirtieth birthday, and the day Lyndon Johnson died—the last shots of the American war in Vietnam were fired. It would take another two years for the Communists to seal the victory, but the Nixon-Laird pullout of GIs was complete. Opposition to the war had formed the spine of my priesthood. What would define it once peace came? The question sparked panic and dread. With a certain desperation, I went that next June to Israel, for a summer-long retreat in the Holy Land. I firmly resolved to lay a new claim on my priestly vocation.
I lived at Tantur, a monastery halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. On most days I wandered alone in the West Bank towns and, especially, in Jerusalem. I haunted the places attached by the tradition to Jesus—the Holy Sepulcher, the Via Dolorosa, the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane. The shrines had a profound impact on me, although not in the way I expected. Most were tourist traps, insufferably commercial. The most sacred were presided over by smelly monks of various orders and denominations. Their open contempt for each other, and their slightly more implicit disdain for the Jews who policed the sites, repulsed me. The ancient corruptions of Jerusalem put the contemporary corruptions of my own church in a new and unsettling context. See how the Christians love one another? No. See how they vie for superiority and grub for cash. When I bent my head to enter the chamber in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that enshrines the burial place of Jesus, I was shocked to find not the Empty Tomb but a toothless bearded Greek monk waiting to sell me a candle. "One dollar," he barked, a phrase he kept repeating while I, without a thought for the Resurrection, fled.
On the outskirts of Jerusalem, away from the crumbling Crusaders' churches, the Western Wall, the Muslim Dome of the Rock, and the noisy souk is a pristine enclosure called the Garden Tomb. Quiet and tidy, bordered by shrubs and benches, it claims to be the authentic site of the tomb Joseph of Arimathea made available to Jesus. The scene is like an illustration from a picture Bible, complete with a rolled-back boulder. The Garden Tomb was "discovered" in the nineteenth century, presumably by pilgrims who'd reacted to the more ancient shrine as I had. In the tranquil beauty of the garden one is supposed to bathe in the warmth of the old Resurrection faith—but it chilled my soul.
My visceral rejection of the neatly ordered tomb gave me part of what I'd come to Israel for: the sudden, sure knowledge that if the Incarnation means anything, it is that God comes to us in the mess of our conflict, confusion, and chaos. My conflict I saw at last. I returned to the crumbling, contentious Holy Sepulcher. A stone's throw from equally disordered Jewish and Islamic holy places, the church evokes the world's conflict. Before the scene had seemed blasphemous, but now I saw it differently: God is not aloof from any of this. When I reentered the foul-smelling chamber of Christ's "real" tomb, I found it possible to greet the monk and buy his candle. The miracle? Perhaps it lay in my having let go of the need myself to feel superior.
Later in the summer I was shown the holy places by Father Pierre Benoit, the aged French Dominican scholar who'd been a moving force behind the groundbreaking new translation of the Jerusalem Bible. Father Benoit had even more disdain for the commercialized pieties than I'd had. His commentary was laced with dismissive phrases—"It is said that..." and "Some fools believe..."
After a day of visiting sites tied to the beginning and end of Jesus' life, Father Benoit without explanation led me to the door of a Russian Orthodox convent. Some moments after his forceful knocking, the grill opened. At the sight of his face, a nun admitted us into the cloister. With his white robes flying, Father Benoit barreled along a corridor and down several flights of stairs. We entered an underground area undergoing excavation. By the light of swaying work lamps, he pointed to a pit, then waved me over. Adjusting one of the lamps, he showed me a simple horizontal slab of stone still wedged in the dirt. It was about two feet wide and six or seven feet long. Without a trace of his earlier cynicism he said, "This is the threshold stone of one of the ancient city gates. It was buried in the rubble of the Roman destruction in the year 70 and only recently is uncovered." The changed expression in his eyes drew me in. "It is certain that Jesus of Nazareth stepped on this stone on his way to Golgotha." He paused, then said again, "Certain."
Embedded in the floor of the great church in Bethlehe
m is a marker that reads "Hie Incarnatus Est." In the Byzantine basilica it had not registered: Hie. Here the Word became flesh. But in this rough pit, the scandalous facticity of our faith hit me. Here. The infinite accepted limits. Why? So that a limited creature—me, for one—might accept limits too. With no awareness of doing such a thing, I knelt down in the dirt of that excavation, bent to the threshold stone and kissed it. The cold, clean surface against my lips—I feel it every time I think of the event. This was what I'd come for.
Touching the stone that had been touched by the feet of Jesus of Nazareth confirmed me in my faith—the faith I had been preaching to others but had failed to fully embrace myself. Jesus had crossed this stone for me, not because of my tidy life or my good behavior, not because I'd kept my vows, not because I was a general's son or even a priest. He had done so simply because I exist. God's love for me, manifest in this man, is a gift, not a reward. Grace, not salary.
Years before coming to Israel, I had gone as a literary pilgrim to Sewanee, Tennessee, hoping that Allen Tate's laying on of hands would take me out of the priesthood. The opposite had happened. Now I had come to the Holy Land clinging to the wreckage of my priestly identity. My brush with the sources of biblical faith changed the question entirely. It was not my commitment to God that mattered, but God's to me. And that commitment simply cannot be broken. The Holy Land would be forever holy to me because there I learned that believing in myself is not by definition the opposite of believing in God. I went to the Holy Land to ask Him what He wanted of me, thinking I already knew. But I heard nothing in the breeze off the desert. The question was no longer What does God want? but What do I want? The two questions were the same.
When I left Israel at the end of that summer, I knew I would serve out my assignment as chaplain at Boston University for another year. And I knew that I would preach the good news of Jesus Christ more pointedly than ever in what time remained to me in the pulpit. But I also knew finally that my days as a Paulist were numbered. It would be my deepest secret for a time yet, but I had made my decision to leave the priesthood.
About a year later, in 1974, I went to Washington to tell my parents. Observing the form required by my superiors, I would quietly resign from the campus ministry at BU and begin a twelve-month leave of absence before applying to Rome for "laicization." Even though this process involved several time-consuming steps, my mind was clear. The decision I'd come to in Israel had only been confirmed. As I approached my father's house, I was acutely aware that undergirding every aspect of the religious and political transformation I had been through was the war that had come between us. Later I would realize that my time as a Paulist—from John Kennedy to Gerald Ford, from the autumn of 1962 until the very week in the spring of 1975 when I sent my final letter to the pope—had coincided almost exactly with the time of America's war in Vietnam. For better and for worse, the war destroyed the thing in me that had made the priesthood possible.
I faced my parents across the kitchen counter. "I'm taking a leave of absence from the priesthood," I said. "I'm going to re-sign."
My mother exhaled. Only then did I realize that she had not taken a breath since I'd told them I had something serious to say. My father was staring at the cigarette clutched in the fingers of both his hands. His decidedly unconsecrated fingers.
Finally, pushing her chair away and standing, my mother said, "I expected this." She left the room without looking at me, or asking her question: Where is the place in heaven for the mother of a priest who quit?
When Dad raised his eyes the smoke clouded them, but even so, the depth of their cold rejection made me see what a puerile fantasy it had been of mine, that having found a place in his heart for Dennis, he could find one for me. But Dennis had called into question only his life's work, while I was reimposing a curse upon his soul.
"Can I tell you why?" I asked.
He only stared at me. Where was the man who had wept beneath my hands? He was as far from weeping now as it was possible to be. So was I. And why, since I had never seen hatred aimed at me before, did I think that's what I saw? What a devil's bargain had bound the two of us all these years. Why shouldn't he hate me, for my having been a party to it?
On the way here I had rehearsed a statement, foolishly thinking it might soothe him, and since I had nothing else to say, I recited it. "I'm leaving the priesthood, Dad, because I want to have a life like yours, with a loving wife and children."
"Children?" Now his eyes flashed. I glimpsed the full force of his feeling. Yes. Hatred, sure enough. "Why would you want children?" he said. "They would only grow up and break your heart."
I found it possible to stand and say, "I'm sorry that's the way you feel, Dad." And I left, admitting for the first time that I could not fill the void in him with anything I did or anything I was. The void was bottomless. He was on his own. So was I. Sad. Free.
11. THE LAST WORD
MY MOST INTIMATE times with Dad had been the two of us riding in automobiles. The green Studebaker on the way to early Mass at St. Mary's in Alexandria, me to be the altar boy, him to make a tee time. The Crown Victoria cruising along Mount Vernon Parkway, him whistling "Beautiful Dreamer," me cradling the football we would throw when we reached the fields at Fort Hunt. The Studebaker again, driving me on my paper route, if it was raining. The Air Force blue staff car, him and me in back, his driver at the wheel, bombing down the autobahn toward Frankfurt, where I would caddie for him. And the dried flowers of golf clubs and lentil soup would open for me ever after. That staff car was the one he leaned against, smoking, when he saw me score my touchdown on the hilltop field above Wiesbaden. Then the Lincoln in Washington, in the era of crises over Berlin, me finally at the wheel, him anointing me with his fear of the Bomb. My replying with a first promise to be a priest.
The last time I was in an automobile with my father at the wheel was in 1980, in his fat black Cadillac. I know the year because our daughter Lizzy was in the car seat next to me, not yet two. It was Easter morning, the occasion for our rare visit. Tension was still the norm. Next to Lizzy was Lexa, whom I had married in 1977. She is a novelist whom I had met because we shared a literary agent. As soon as I'd seen her, I knew that if my career as a writer never did anything for me except make our meeting possible, it would be more than enough. Lexa is a self-possessed, strong woman, the deepest person I know. She was riding silently now, a hand firmly on our baby's leg.
My mother was in front, next to Dad. We were doing sixty on the crowded Beltway south of Washington, on the way to visit Brian and his family near Quantico, Virginia. An Easter egg hunt was the idea, a holiday dinner, a stab at family happiness. Quantico is the site of the FBI Academy, where Brian was head of SWAT training at the time. I was sitting directly behind my father, who was seventy years old. I was excruciatingly aware of the fact that two times, then three, his head had drifted forward and down, then snapped up as he came awake again.
"Hey, Dad," I said, "why don't you pull over? Let me drive."
"I'm fine."
"You're sleepy, Dad. I can see you nodding."
"I'm fine."
"No, really. I'd like to drive."
"I said I'm fine." In his anger, his foot went down on the accelerator. The car lurched up to seventy. I saw my mother slyly reach across for her seat belt and fasten it. I looked down at my snoozing baby girl. She was the new meaning of "Beautiful Dreamer" to me. I looked over at Lexa, who was glaring at me. My father had insulted her by refusing to come to our wedding, and since then he'd been barely civil to her. His reactions had been a mystery to her—she was not Catholic, had never known me as a priest. She could handle what to her could only seem my father's pettiness—she hadn't known him as a man of power either—but she could not handle his endangering our baby. Neither could I.
I reached forward and touched my father's shoulder. "Frankly, Dad, you're making me nervous."
"Well, you can stay nervous," he said.
And I did. It became physicall
y dangerous to push him further. Here we were, driving south toward Richmond after all. But instead of Moscow threatening us, it was he.
Fortunately the rush of his anger woke him up, and we made it safely to Quantico. When we were out of the car, away from my father, I told Brian that we would not be driving back with him. Brian said he'd handle it. Ever the sleuth, he later filched my father's car keys and gave them to me. When it was time to go, Dad seemed to have forgotten that anything had happened, and he meekly got in on the passenger's side. I drove.
It was around that time that his doctors first spoke of Alzheimer's as a possible explanation for his behavior. They could never say for sure. Small strokes were cited as another explanation for what was, in any case, an onset of dementia. I began to read about Alzheimer's. Although it was first described at the beginning of this century by the German physician for whom it is named, it was only in the 1980s that symptoms long attributed to "normal" aging were recognized as consequences of this disease.
My mother fixed on Alzheimer's as an explanation for the transformation of her once loving husband into a restless and irritable narcissist. Now she encouraged me and Lexa to reevaluate his crude behavior toward us, especially his rudeness toward her. Lexa had been married and widowed before I knew her, but her love for her late husband, Tim Buxton, lived on in her abiding love for his family, particularly his mother, Helen, and his Aunt Lyd. Lexa's own father, Bill Marshall, and her stepmother, Betty, had opened their hearts wide to me. By comparison, my parents were stingy and rude. How could I explain to Lexa that their ill feeling wasn't aimed at her, but at me?
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