Still, I grasped at the straw of this new explanation too. In 1981 and 1982, I wrote what I intended to be a reconciling novel about a senior American intelligence official and his worshipful son. Called Family Trade, it is a romantic political thriller in which the son tracks through the labyrinth of Cold War deceit to discover that his long-disgraced father was in fact a patriot and hero. I dedicated the novel to my father, and sent him an early copy. He wrote back a respectful, almost affectionate letter in which he made it a point to say that I had handled espionage tradecraft convincingly. When I read his response, I gratefully began to believe that a recovery was possible. I wrote back, expressing such a hope. Then, out of the blue, came another letter from him, a savage critique of the "foul language" I'd used. This letter ended, "Never, repeat NEVER dedicate another novel to me! Never!" This second reaction made no sense. Was it the effect of Alzheimer's? Perhaps, but I later learned that what triggered this fresh rejection was the bad-taste headline of a Washington Post feature story about the novel and me: "Confessions of an Ex-Priest."
Indeed, in another context there was supposed to be such a confession, but I'd refused to make it. In leaving the priesthood I had been advised that my letter requesting dispensation, addressed to His Holiness, should acknowledge that the entire enterprise of my vocation had been a mistake— my mistake. It would help if I could confess to grievous violations—a secret promiscuity, say. Compulsive masturbation was good. Complaints about the negative personal impact of the rigors of the long years spent in training would help too. I should by all means describe my ministry as a failure. I should assert that my own mental health and moral state, as well as the good of the Church, would be served by my departure from the sacred fraternity of the priesthood.
I refused to do any such thing. Instead I wrote: "I enjoyed my life as a priest, and regard the training I received for it in the Paulist seminary as a privileged and rare experience. I love the Paulist community, and remember my years of service at Boston University as successful and happy."
By the time I wrote this letter, in 1975, I had landed a position as playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There, with the gracious support of a writing mentor, the playwright William Gibson, I had begun my career as a writer. I concluded my one and only letter to the pope, "In summary, my request for laicization rests chiefly on these two facts of my present life: that I am pursuing the work of writing and not pastoral ministry, and that I no longer choose to live as a celibate religious." Some confession. I would not meet the extraordinary Lexa Marshall for nearly another two years. "I solemnly swear that all of the statements I have made in these pages are true."
Attached to this letter in my files, I have found a letter written in support of my petition by David Killian, my Paulist friend and fellow jailbird. Reading Dave's letter now, I am deeply grateful at his refusal, too, to describe my priesthood as a failure. His letter, dated January 24, 1976, is addressed to the president of the Paulist Fathers. I quote it because its affirmation is so precious to me: "Jim, in my opinion, was a dedicated and faithful priest—charismatic and prophetic. His penchant for speaking the truth and his impatience with hypocrisy often might have disturbed others. Nevertheless, he also brought a love and gentleness to his ministry which was reconciling and healing ... His sense of prophetic responsibility led him to criticize those in authority, whether bishop, university president or those in national government. He was especially outspoken against the war in Vietnam."
I imagine those Vatican monsignors, adding up the score, slapping a label on me: classic authority problem.
Not problem, Eminenza—solution.
His Holiness Paul VI, whose 1965 speech at the United Nations was part of what set me on this trajectory, did not reply to my request. He had his reasons. Perhaps those who'd advised a mea maxima culpa had been right. In any case, more than two years passed since my resignation from BU, and I heard nothing from Rome. Having met Lexa and fallen passionately in love with her, I chose not to wait any longer for permission to get on with my life. That I had still not been dispensed from my vows by our wedding day was the reason my father gave for his boycott.
Predictably, perhaps, I received the dispensation, embossed and in Latin, less than two months later, but by then I was, by the lights of the Roman Catholic Church, an excommunicant. That gave my father a sacred justification for continuing in what was by then a fundamental attitude. Once or twice, he asked me to understand: nothing personal to Lexa, mind you. Not personal, really, even to me. Just the law of God, a matter of right and wrong, the moral mandate of a lifetime. Such a tender fucking conscience, I thought. At last I found it possible to sympathize with Roger "Terrible" Touhy, who'd heard him as the "voice of doom." He'd become the voice of doom to me. But what my mother thought, and said behind his back, was that he was sick.
In truth, he was.
My family found itself reading about Alzheimer's effects just as they advanced in him. We read about irritability, and recognized the crux of the endless mixed signals and crossed wires that made even simple transactions dangerous. We read about "perseveration," the continuous repetition of a word or gesture, and thought of his odd new habit of saying "Oh boy" in every circumstance. We read about a patient's inability to handle distress in confusing situations—"catastrophic reaction"—and while my brothers thought of his outburst, say, checking into a hotel for Kevin's wedding, my mind went way back to my ordination in 1969. Were those once-in-a-lifetime wrenching sobs the start of this strange physical disease? Or were they symptoms of the old spiritual one with which I'd been so familiar?
Eventually there would be his versions of "hyperorality," the compulsion to put things into the mouth; of hoarding—he kept cartons of cigarettes under his bed even after he'd forgotten how to smoke; and of paranoid delusion. His last time at the wheel of an automobile, "Beautiful Dreamer" no more, was a mad midnight effort to drive from Ocean City, Maryland, to Washington, "because," as he told the trooper who tracked down his Cadillac on a back road of the Eastern Shore, "the president needs me."
Toward the end, he would seem to be consoled by a compulsive fondling of stuffed animals—"hypermetamorphosis." My children, who never knew my father as a figure of power and grace—how to convince them that once presidents did need him?—recognized him as a fellow lover of Kermit the Frog, which they chose as a special gift for him.
The most staggering consequence of the disease—to us, and I am sure to him—was the progressive difficulty in communication, the gradual loss of the ability to speak—"aphasia"—and of the ability to write—"agraphia." I believe now that my father's angry letters to me, increasingly halting and jerky, were what my mother insisted they were: symptoms of illness and markers on the road to the most terrible solitude. He was losing his mind, and the rest of my family was following me in losing him.
My mother was shattered. She remained a sharp and lively woman, yet unhesitatingly devoted herself to the restrictive regimen of taking care of him, first at home, then in a nearby nursing home where she visited twice a day. She was a guardian of his dignity, making sure he was properly cleaned and dressed. She insisted that aides call him "General," not "Joe," although behind her back they had taken to calling him "Oh Boy," before he stopped saying even that. For a time, mocking her, nursing home orderlies called him "General Diet," referring to the designation card that appeared on his dinner tray. My mother ignored the gibe, and eventually the staffers grew accustomed to my father's title, and used it unfailingly. If my mother had wanted them to salute, she'd have found a way to get them to do it. Her attitude was catching. In time they also took pride in what my father had been. My mother was his omnipresent protector. She took her meals with him. Without a hint of condescension, she fed him herself, as she had fed her babies years before. "Open wide," she'd say.
When I visited, I would feed him too, although what I said to get him to open up for the swooping spoon was "Airplane." I alw
ays thought of those B-52S. He stopped recognizing us, which was a shocking letdown for everyone in my family except me. For the first time in fifteen years, I did not sense his tensing when I arrived. I could sit with him for hours with no fear of bad feelings. I could shave him, clean his dentures, bathe him even. He gave himself over into my hands. I could even tell him my stories as I was writing them. While working on a novel inspired by his life, Memorial Bridge, I would hold his hand and relate whole passages, including my own presumptuous interpretations of his experiences in the Pentagon. He would listen as if nothing I wrote offended him. All because he did not know what I was saying, because he did not know it was me. It was the next best thing to being reconciled.
He would look at my mother, she said, as if she were a stranger. But what seemed even sadder to her—she showed me this by holding up a mirror—was that he no longer recognized himself. One day a bright young college graduate joined the nursing home staff as the new occupational therapist. She came upon my father in the hallway, sitting in his wheelchair beside my mother. The young woman spoke cheerfully to my father and, pulling a table over, put a fresh new pad of paper and a crayon down in front of him.
"He doesn't do that anymore, dear," my mother said. Her voice was pleasant, but she was determined to protect him from yet another failure. By then it had been three years since my father had written, more than a year since he had spoken intelligibly or recognized anyone. But while my mother explained this to the therapist, my father began to move the crayon across the paper. Both women watched his hand. Even scribbling would be an achievement.
The marks he made were not scribbling. In a sweeping, unsteady cursive scrawl, he was forming letters. My mother and the therapist leaned forward. Unmistakable letters. "M," the young woman said. "That's an M." My mother said nothing. She watched his hand move across the paper, the letters becoming visible individually, until a word was uncovered.
"Mary," the young woman read, and watched while my father wrote it again. And then again. The script was jerky, but legible. "Mary. Mary. Mary." Down the page. He did not stop. And he did not look up. "Mary."
The young woman looked at my mother, who said, "That's me."
The next day, my mother arrived at the nursing home with an entire box of crayons and a large pad of construction paper. She sat beside my otherwise uncomprehending father as he filled page after page with the one word "Mary." This went on for some days until, having forgotten again and once more in the grip of hyperorality, he put the crayon in his mouth. But my mother had her pages, his last word, the absolute treasure of her life.
Brian is now a seasoned FBI agent, assistant special agent in charge of the field office in Chicago. When I call him there, and am put on hold, a recording tells the story of the FBI's Windy City legends. A featured segment relates the tale of the capture, in 1942, of Roger "Terrible" Touhy. I am surely the only caller who, hearing the canned narration, ever wants to weep. "The FBI kid looked at me blankly," Touhy wrote, referring to my father. "That was it. The big escape was all done. The date was December 29th." Three weeks later I was born. And the rest is history. My history.
Just as I was leaving the priesthood in the fall of 1975, only a few years after Hoover's death, I became a volunteer bus monitor in Boston during the busing crisis. My job, as a delegate of the federal court, was to be an adult presence, supportive of the children and ready to report abuses. On the first morning of school, when I boarded a bus that was half full of black girls and boys about to run the gauntlet into all-white South Boston, one of the boys said, "You're an FBI man, right?"
The question shocked me. I recognized the child's awe as a version of what I had felt at his age. I asked him why he thought so. He eyed the plastic ID tag that was pinned to my lapel and replied, "Because the FBI are the only white folks on our side." And I thought of Bobby Kennedy, that day in the Justice Department auditorium, when he changed my mind about America.
Not long after that day in Justice, I met Patrick Hughes, who accompanied—and led—me on so much of this journey. He so endeared himself to my parents that at times their wariness about my embrace of this or that ritual of the new Church, or even my participation in some demonstration or other, would seem mitigated if I said Pat was there. The cold judgmentalism of the Catholic left was softened by my submission to it in Pat's company. Alone of nearly everyone I knew, he understood the division of my heart and the cowardly feelings I tried to hide. I had no secrets from Pat. His decision to leave the priesthood was a harbinger of my own. He and Marianne would be godparents to our Lizzy, and he would be the namesake of our own Pat.
Like some other ex-priests, Pat Hughes continued to celebrate the Mass despite his renegade status. We differed on that. I knew as I stood at the altar in Sacred Heart Chapel at the University of Notre Dame, where I was a visiting lecturer the summer after leaving BU, that I would never consecrate the bread and wine again. Except for Larry Kessler and Monsignor Jack Egan, to whom I'd confessed, no one in that vast church—a throng of Catholic lefties assembled for a summer institute on peace and justice—knew of my decision. They had no reason to understand why, as I fed them Communion, tears streamed down my face, or why, after I gave the last blessing, Larry and Jack came into the sanctuary to embrace me.
I would not preside at the Eucharist again, and for some years I refused even to think of preaching in a church. That was my way, I think, of making clear to myself, if to no one else, that I was not a priest. Being not a priest became more a note of my identity than its opposite had been. That changed when, on a shocking October day in 1980, Marianne asked me to preach the eulogy at Patrick's funeral. He had died of a heart attack. To preach for him meant standing at the pulpit of Boston's Paulist Center Chapel again, where I had lived and from where I had set out each morning as a priest. There was no question of refusing Marianne. When I'd taken my place in front of the grieving congregation and began to speak of Patrick, I knew exactly what to say. I told the story of his hurling himself out onto the thin ice at Mount Paul novitiate in 1962, and of my standing with my classmates on the shore, crying, "Go Patrick! Go Patrick!" I intended only to say that I'd recognized a man I wanted to be with, but—and this is what made it preaching—I now recognized in his story a reminder of that other One.
"Who is that, walking on the water?"
"Isn't that Jesus? The only one we loved?"
"Is that you, Lord?" Peter called.
And the Lord replied, "Come!"
And Peter went, right out onto the water, without a thought for consequence, or a nod to those who said it couldn't be done. And for a moment, he was walking on water too.
Once again I understood what Patrick had done, inviting me to stop worrying about being dry. To stop worrying about being worthy of his friendship, or of God's. It is an invitation creased, folded, carried near my heart which still puts me on my knees in gratitude. I concluded Patrick's eulogy by saying of him, "We were not worthy of his love until he gave it to us. And then weren't we worthy of all there is!"
Christian belief itself began with a eulogy, the one Peter preached of Jesus on Pentecost. That event revealed the structure of hope, which begins in despair. The followers of Jesus had disgraced themselves. In effect, they had all broken vows, they were all spoiled priests. "They all forsook Him," as Mark put it, "and fled." They went their separate ways. Only a miracle could have changed them from confused, inarticulate peasants into preachers who would ignite an empire. The miracle was that eulogy, delivered by a coward, of the only man he ever loved, the one whom he betrayed.
What I remembered in telling the story of Pat Hughes—this was his last gift to me—was that storytelling itself can be a priestly act. If there is something peculiarly "Catholic" stamped upon my soul, it is implied by this notion that the imagination itself is sacred. All of our greatest art, music, architecture, and poetry proclaim it as such, and so do the more modest efforts of ordinary writers. Patrick thought that what I wrote was sacred, long befor
e I dared to. For a novelist imbued with this idea, the very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative, is by definition holy. It is a version, however finite, of what the infinite God does. Telling our stories is what saves us; the story is enough.
And wasn't that just what my children taught? "Tell us a story, Dad"—their nightly refrain. And why shouldn't it have been? What the children have no way of knowing is how their stories bring resolution to ours. In addition to our daughter Lizzy and our son Patrick, Lexa and I are the parents of Jenny Marshall Carroll, who was born and died on the same day, April 24, 1986, a little more than a decade after I had left the priesthood. She was a perfect, beautiful little girl whom I believe God had sent as an unexpected miracle. She lived, as a miracle to me, nearly her entire life in our arms. She was born premature, but not so early that she wouldn't have done fine in any city hospital. But we were in the country. The small hospital to which we desperately went in the middle of a thunderstruck night had nothing our daughter needed. She was delivered by a terrified anesthesiologist. She lived for an hour and twenty minutes. Her eyes were open the whole time, and she looked at us. When I saw that she was going to die, I said to the nurse, "Bring me a glass of water."
The nurse said to her colleagues, with alarm, "He's going to faint!"
I said, "No. I'd just like some water, please."
Another nurse cried, "Get him a chair!"
I said, "I would just like to baptize our daughter, please."
"Oh," said the nurse. "You want baptism? We can have a real priest here in ten minutes."
No obstetrician, but a real priest.
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