The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

“It makes no sense, Charley. I’ve never practiced my religion, not since the day I met your father. It was never important to me.”

  “It is important to me. And I need to know, Mom—why was this kept a secret from all of us?”

  His mother regarded him as a stranger. He had been a somewhat heavy boy, chunky, good-hearted, loving, with a quick smile, a hug, a kiss. He had been the child who brought home the stray dogs, the injured birds, who had fought off kids teasing cats or bullying smaller children. He had been her last born, with brothers and sisters already grown and out of the house. He was the only one close to Eugene.

  “Your father and I felt it was better for you not to know. You were all baptized and raised to be good Catholics. It’s what you are—all of you. It was what I agreed to when your dad and I married.”

  “But we have another whole side to our family, Mom. I had grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins I never knew about. You said you were an orphan, without anyone.”

  “I was without anyone.” His mother’s face tightened. It was the angry, tense look he had seen when the nuns used to come to try to persuade her. “You want to know about my family, the Greifingers? All right. My father declared me dead when I married your father. I don’t just mean ‘we won’t talk about her, we’ll all forget about her.’ I mean I was mourned; I had died and they grieved for me. They sat shiva for me. I wasn’t the wayward daughter, I was the dead daughter. My father killed me. And my mother and sisters and brothers went along with it. Is that the family you want to know, Charley? What can any of them give you? You are the son of their dead sister. You and your brothers and sisters are impossibilities. You haven’t the slightest idea …”

  “I think I have a right to find out for myself. I think we had a right to know about our background.”

  His mother’s voice was hard. “It wasn’t your background. It was mine. It was none of your business, Charley! What good would any of this have done you?”

  “But you still cared, Mom, didn’t you? Ben told me about the Friday-night candles and—”

  “Ben should have kept his mouth shut.” As she hugged herself in pain, Charley noticed for the first time how old she had grown. The laugh lines around her eyes seemed as deep and painful as old cuts. The skin had crinkled on her cheeks; she had gotten thin through the war years, with three sons in the service and one in Rome, waiting for a terrible telegram. She had knitted hundreds of mittens and socks, scores of khaki and navy sweaters. She had sent as many food packages as the ration stamps allowed; cheated a little with black-market sugar for cookies for sons and for grandchildren come for a visit. She had comforted her daughter and daughters-in-law; she had waited and prayed and suffered.

  She had resisted her priest son’s attempts to convert her. Convert her from what, to what? And now, this steadiest of her kids, her solid, predictable, simple, and pleasant Charley, was crossing into areas of danger. Whatever his terrible knowledge was, what he had seen and smelled and heard and learned, she wanted him just to get on with his life, without making waves, without damaging anything she and his father had spent a lifetime building.

  She closed her eyes tight and bit down hard at the inevitable question: Which of the kids knew the truth?

  “I never discussed it with anyone. Except Eugene.”

  “When did you tell Gene?”

  “When he asked me. After he became a priest, he asked why I never discussed religion, never participated in things at the church. He came right out and asked me, Charley. And I told him.”

  “And the others? You’ve never told any of them?”

  “There was never a reason to, I guess. Through the years, they more or less knew, but it was never a matter for discussion.”

  “My God, Mom, you sound like it was a terrible secret, like you were guilty of something awful, as though …” The tears spilled from his mother’s eyes, which had become a washed-out gray, growing paler through the years. “Charley, it was all a long time ago. It was between your father and me. Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

  What other secrets were there? Was this the big-deal mystery that had hung over their childhood? Once he had overheard two of his older brothers discussing their mother’s background. They made up wild stories: her father was a big-time gangster and she had run away from home with him; or her mother was an heiress forced to abandon her on the steps of an orphanage.

  There had always been a pall over his family. Charley remembered sudden silences when the relatives all got together at holiday time—when someone, an aunt or an uncle or a cousin, told a joke, did a Yiddish accent, made fun of the Jews. Or when they talked about Father Coughlin’s latest broadcast. On Good Friday, when the nuns told them in explicit detail about the Jews’ role in the Crucifixion, his mother sat silent, her face unreadable, as they rushed home from grade school to relate what they had learned.

  Once she had asked, “How does Sister Veronica know so much? Was she there?”

  And Gene had never told him. It must have been one of the goals of Gene’s life, to convert his Jewish mother.

  “Mom, please. I don’t want to upset you. I just wanted you to know I’ve started studying the Jewish religion and … I want to look up your—our—family. This is my life, Mother. You’ve had yours, now I’m gonna have mine.”

  His mother reached out, touched his cheek, felt the blond stubble. “You need a shave, Charley.”

  He caught his mother’s hand, turned it over, and kissed the palm. “It’s gonna be okay. I promise you.”

  His mother nodded and tried to smile.

  “Hey, Ma, I bet I know what Gene said when you told him.” Charley raised his head. His eyes glazed over and his voice became musical—a good imitation of his brother. He said, ‘Why, Mother, our Lord and Savior’s mother was a Jew, too!’”

  Finally his mother laughed. She slapped his face lightly, then hugged him. “That is exactly what he said!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  EUGENE HAD ALWAYS BEEN TERRIFIED BY his own physical beauty. As a child he had heard himself described as an angel, silvery, golden, radiant, special, chosen. He tried to avoid seeing himself. When he brushed his pale, soft hair, he watched only the mirrored reflection of the hairbrush. Occasionally he looked into his own eyes, their pupils the color of ice water circled by a thin line of black, and he felt himself become mesmerized. He lost time; he lost himself for seconds, minutes, maybe longer, and as he grew older he accepted that this brief loss of himself happened from time to time. There was no one he could explain it to. He couldn’t find the words to describe not only what happened, but his desperate guilt about it.

  When he was a child, he had had several grand-mal seizures, but they had ceased by the time he reached his seventh birthday. The doctors said his prognosis was excellent. He had outgrown this form of epilepsy.

  Through his early years, between the major seizures, there were a series of petit-mal episodes: the seconds-long removal of himself from reality, the wide-eyed motionless staring during which Eugene was no longer present in his immediate surroundings, but could not afterwards say where he had been.

  In a less gifted child, such lapses would have been proof to the teaching sisters of wicked, deliberate inattention, and the child would have been shamed and castigated. But allowances were always made for Eugene; he was different. He was blessed.

  He once spoke of it to his mother. Quietly, she reassured him. “It will pass. It’s nothing dangerous. It’s your brain’s way of resting for a moment. You will outgrow it.”

  She said it with authority. She was, after all, a nurse.

  His mother seemed relieved when he went to the seminary, but they never really discussed the decision. Whatever feelings she had about her son becoming a Jesuit priest, she kept to herself. To Eugene, his mother was a mystery. At home for a brief respite toward the end of his initial training, he asked his mother if, when he was ordained, she would allow him to baptize her and give her her first communion. She reacted oddly
, her face hard, her voice strong.

  “That will never happen, Eugene. Don’t ever speak about that again. Not ever.”

  She regarded him with the glare of a stranger, and at the same time with the deep intensity of one who held dark secrets about him. There were times when he wondered, as his mother looked deep into his eyes, who it was, besides him, that she was seeing, and why nothing of this could ever be spoken between the two of them.

  After the seminary, Gene was selected to study at the North American College in Rome. For three years he studied with bright young men from seventeen states and the provinces of Canada. He learned not only fluent Italian, but Spanish and German. He learned enough accounting to qualify as a CPA, enough Church history to teach at the high school level or beyond, enough chemistry and mathematics to gain entry into medical school. A near-perfect student, upon graduation he expected to be sent, along with ninety-nine percent of the other students, back to the United States.

  Instead, he was assigned to work in the General Administration Office at the Vatican. It was where all the business of the Church was centered: the running and coordination of expenses of those who labored within the one hundred acres of Vatican City. There were payrolls to prepare and supervise for the private police force and fire department; for carpenters and maintenance men; for the corps of Vatican lawyers, art appraisers, and specialists of all kinds. The Vatican ran its own pharmacy, post office, printing office; it supplied its own bricklayers and laborers, its own corps of workers to keep all the buildings and apartments and churches clean and shining and ready to receive visitors from all over the world. The most evident employees were the gorgeous Swiss Guards; unseen were the vast kitchens filled with chefs and workers, the garages filled with chauffeurs and mechanics, even priests on special assignment to the corps of international visitors, priests who spoke languages ranging from the common European ones to exotic African or Far Eastern tongues. The Vatican, aside from being the center of the Church International, was a nation unto itself, and had to be run as a business entity by the army of employees—all in the service, in their own assigned ways, of the greater glory of God.

  Eugene’s job, for the first year of his assignment to the General Administrative Office, was to oversee the budgets of the cardinals’ staffs. How much was being spent on general household expenses: food, linens, cleaning bills, clothing, health care, entertainment. He had to keep account of gifts given by a small army of wealthy Italian noblemen, American Catholic business tycoons, potentates from small, wealthy nations with agendas of their own.

  In his free time, Gene wandered the halls of the Vatican, studying the priceless paintings, the ornate treasure of furnishings. He attended private audiences with the Pope, gatherings of up to four hundred people admitted by special invitation. To be in the mere presence, to cherish for a lifetime the immediacy of the Pontiff, a small, hollow-cheeked man with deep black rings under his eyes, but splendid in his ceremonial garb—that was a privilege arranged for the wealthy and the powerful by a long series of favors for favors.

  Sometimes the private audiences were smaller, for the maimed and the crippled, the faithful on the trail of miraculous cures, experiencing the one truly miraculous moment of a tormented life, an audience with Pope Pius XII.

  Gene explored Rome, curious, disturbed, interested in the changing, dynamic political situation. The Fascists maintained law and order; the streets were clean, the country seemed to be running on new, successful schedules. The Duce didn’t appear to his people as a comic figure; his posturing and posing made them hopeful and happy. There were parades, and workers were cheered. The government policy of encouraging the people to be fruitful and multiply was in line with Church doctrine. And the Church had made its peace, its deals, with the Fascists. It was not for Gene to question. This was Italy; he was an American.

  Father Eugene O’Brien was considered a good worker—industrious, quick, careful, respectful, with something of a flair as a guide. He grew more and more knowledgeable about the Vatican, both its internal workings and its external trappings. He was asked to escort visiting groups of Americans or Britons, giving them a bright, informative lecture, pointing out the Sistine Chapel, head craning, marveling not just at the spectacle of creation, but at the stamina and moral strength of the men who did the painting.

  He told them about the period in which the work was done, the number of workers, the hours involved, even the kind of paint that was used. He spoke not just with authority, but with a sense of delight and wonder. He was dazzled by the accomplishment, and so he dazzled his listeners.

  Among the group one day was a middle-aged woman, an American widow more accustomed to private escorts than public tours. Special dinners and meetings were usually arranged for her, as they had been when her millionaire foodcanning husband from the Midwest was alive. Now, on her tenth or eleventh trip to the Vatican, having some time to spare before her luncheon appointment, she had wandered into this group and was taken by the beautiful young priest who spoke with such enthusiasm for his subject.

  Mrs. Lyman Kelleher was, in keeping with her husband’s established custom, a very generous donor to the Church’s many causes. She had a large, affluent group of friends in Rome, who visited her in her villa some fifteen miles to the south, when she summered in Italy. She had friends among the nobility of Europe—former Russian nobility, princes without thrones, Italian aristocrats patiently waiting out the Fascist nonsense, but contributing, as a matter of convenience, to the government when asked.

  Occasionally, she befriended a particular young priest. God knew, they needed so much, had so little of material value. God knew, they needed some time away from the tedium of their constricted lives at the Vatican. Especially someone like this young Irish-American priest, who she learned labored as a clerk in the General Administration Office, tucked away in some obscure basement. She also learned that he conducted many of the tours on his own free time, which showed a generous and giving nature. Surely he should be rewarded by some bit of luxury.

  At the first dinner to which Eugene was invited, he was seated between a Russian countess who spoke German, and an Italian automobile heiress who wanted to practice her English.

  Mrs. Kelleher watched carefully, discreetly, to see how her new find conducted himself. He turned politely, first to one side, then the other, speaking and listening to the German; then, speaking English, but breaking into Italian—“I need to practice my Italian far more than you need to practice your English, Signora.”

  The heiress smilingly protested, “But no, Father O’Brien, your Italian is wonderful. So very ‘Rome’—so sophisticated.”

  Eugene became a favorite of a very wealthy, influential set, and his role at the Vatican was changed. He was assigned to Cardinal Rappolini, who had never had an American on his staff. But this American was different from the general run. He was brilliant with languages, amazing in his knowledge of the history and topography of the Vatican, quick-minded, articulate, and charming. Not to mention his almost angelic, physical presence.

  Eugene was also loyal and tended to withdraw from the vicious infighting among the Vatican staff. Above all, he seemed to understand how things worked, the subtleties needed to handle touchy situations. Loyalty came naturally to him. He was soon known as “Rappolini’s man” and Eugene’s growing contacts among the wealthy, titled, and important laity became more and more evident.

  When Cardinal Rappolini confided to Gene his humiliation at not having his own personal automobile—at having to sign a request sheet, and accept whatever was supplied for him—Gene told Mrs. Kelleher, who replied, “A Cardinal like His Eminence Rappolini, not having his own automobile! Well, we can remedy that.”

  A week later, a Cadillac limousine was presented to the cardinal by a grateful Mrs. Kelleher, who cherished every opportunity to serve a prince of the Church.

  Some of the young American seminarians began to turn to Eugene. They were not being given any of the better assignmen
ts; too many were being sent back to dead-end parishes in parts of the country without large Catholic populations. They had been prepared for advancement, but denied opportunities.

  Gene put in a word here and there, among the elite who had befriended him, who felt honored to have the elegant Father Eugene at their table, at their side, at their villas. Other young priests, carefully selected, found themselves with mentors. Other cardinals found themselves with young American assistants.

  Of course, not everyone was happy with Father O’Brien. Not that they could point to any particular arrogance or pomposity. But he did wield power to a degree unusual both for an American and for one so young of any nationality.

  But Gene brought in more money in a month than many of his colleagues did in a year. Not just from the generous Americans, but from some of the others—among them a famous French auto racer who donated a generous share of his international winnings to the children’s world hunger fund. Donations were made, in the name of dead ancestors, to favorite Church charities. Gene O’Brien was a money-maker. And yet he kept nothing for himself. Any gifts given him, he turned back or converted into cash for donation to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The only gifts he kept—had to keep—were the beautiful, hand-tailored blacky suits Mrs. Kelleher insisted on giving him. If he was to sit at her table she said, he had to look as well tailored as the other guests; she was entitled to see him well turned out.

  Eugene was shameless about collecting money. It pleased the giver to please him as much as it pleased the Church to receive. But to his confessor, Father Adams—an elderly Bostonian available to the Americans who preferred a countryman as their confessor—he brought a surprising set of troubles.

  “This is not how I envisioned serving, Father,” he said. “It’s not what I studied for—to be a social butterfly.”

  “But you are serving as the Church wants you to serve, Eugene. You are doing what is asked and required of you.”