CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’d say you had a busy week, Father,” the portly Dominican retreat master told him the next morning after a typical retreat breakfast of underdone eggs and soggy toast. There had been an introductory talk shortly after he arrived the night before. The retreat master had also made himself available for confessions. But Father Walther had just confessed that afternoon, and besides, he was not the only one there in need of spiritual comfort.
He was one of six. Two were elderly, an arthritic who had retired five years ago from a pastorship in Union City, and a gregarious Italian who never stopped smiling. The arthritic volunteered that he spent about half his time in retreat houses like this one. He seemed to know the cuisine in every such establishment in several dioceses. The other three priests were middle-aged. They were a good deal quieter than the older fellows, no doubt because they had more on their minds.
Father Walther had decided on making the retreat, a weekend affair in Staten Island for clerics like himself, right after his bizarre experience with the Jesuit. He had hoped to unburden himself to that man, but instead, the priest had merely offered him the option of leaving the priesthood. At least, that was all Father Walther was able to make of the Jesuit’s words after he stepped out into the blinding light of Fifteenth Street. Maybe here in this former seminary, as secluded on its own couple hundred acres as anything in upstate New York, he would find the guidance he needed.
He was seated in a room about a third the size of his own digs at Holy Name. There was a desk with several bookshelves ascending the wall behind it. Next to the desk and behind the swivel chair occupied by the retreat master was a large window that looked out onto a parking lot. A narrow cot—far too narrow to support the Dominican’s girth—lay flush against the opposite wall. As the visitor, Father Walther got to occupy a handsome, but uncomfortable, imitation-leather recliner.
“Do you think you’ve learned anything as a result of your adventures?” the Dominican asked, his hands joined across the midsection of his cassock, his huge torso tilted toward the window which framed a gray Saturday morning.
They had been talking for the better part of an hour. The retreat master had scheduled a conference with each of the six priests at half-hour intervals. If nothing else, the extra time he was devoting to him confirmed Father Walther’s suspicions about his spiritual state: He had done the right thing in coming here—a better alternative, certainly, than Father Lapcheck. Only, his retelling of the events of the past week was beginning to wear. His body was rested, but his mind had a limited tolerance for so much soul-searching. And the glare from the window behind the Dominican was giving him a headache.
“You seem like the sort of person who sets high standards for himself.”
“No higher than the next fellow’s.”
The Dominican rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, his lips pursed in a fat man’s kiss.
“If anything,” Father Walther continued, “I’d say they aren’t high enough. Otherwise I wouldn’t have tolerated the rut I’ve been in for the past year.”
The Dominican closed his eyes. His great chest heaved up and down like a sea wave. But just as he seemed about to doze off, his eyelids popped open. Father Walther couldn’t help wondering how he maintained such a great weight. He didn’t eat any more than the others at breakfast, and not even a stick of gum had crossed his lips since this session began.
“Even so, Father, you strike me as a man who judges himself harshly. I may be wrong, but that’s the impression I’m getting. Were your parents keen on your becoming a priest?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘keen.’ I made the decision at an early age—“
“How early? How old were you?”
“Seven or eight.”
“That’s early. What did you want to be before you decided to become a priest?”
“I never wanted to be anything else.”
“Never? Not even a policeman or fireman? Little boys do, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
The Dominican allowed his swivel chair to tilt further back, letting in more painful daylight.
“Did you like little girls?”
“I liked little girls.”
“How did you fancy devoting your life to a career that excluded them from your life?”
Father Walther shrugged. “I didn’t think much about it.”
“No?”
“Not until I was much older. But even then the prospect didn’t seem all that dreadful.”
“How old were you then?”
“Fifteen, sixteen.”
The Dominican guffawed. “At sixteen years of age the thought of giving up girls for the rest of your life didn’t bother you? Do you realize you were just then approaching your years of greatest sexual urgency?”
“My decision was made long before that.”
The Dominican leaned further back, his chair groaning like a horse that was used to being misused but hadn’t yet given up complaining about it.
“Did you ever have a problem with masturbation?”
“No.”
The Dominican shook his head in amazement.
“You’ve been very kind to spend this much time with me,” Father Walther said, “but I seem to be getting a bad headache.”
“Of course, Father. I’m sorry. Would you like something for the pain? There’s an infirmary on the second floor.”
Father Walther thanked him but said he had aspirin in his suitcase. They set no time for a second conference.
His head continued to throb even after he had swallowed two aspirins, pulled down the shade in the room assigned to him and laid a damp cloth on his forehead. He tried to clear his mind of thought, but the interview he had just had continued to play in his mind. At the beginning of the session he had described his adventures in South Jersey—at least those that seemed to bear on the purpose of his making this retreat. He mentioned Rosalie, but only as part of the bigger picture of spiritual malaise he was suffering from. The Dominican encouraged him to speak at length. Sometimes he interrupted to ask for a fuller account of the curate’s reactions to one event or another. But when Father Walther reached the end of his tale, the retreat master, like the Jesuit, chose to focus exclusively on the woman.
Father Walther thought he had made it clear that his spiritual lethargy had come on long before he laid eyes on Rosalie Sykes. Why, then, the those two priests preoccupation with her? Surely as a counselor, if not as a priest himself, the Dominican realized that every person’s sexual development was different. His own may have been unusual, but it was surely not unique. The models held up to Richard Walther as a child were not of people who had merely attempted to achieve a state of perfect chastity, but of young men and women who had in fact succeeded at that ideal. They were canonized saints, and he was far from being a saint. Yet, for whatever the reason, he had been spared much of the torment the chosen of God frequently suffered in their struggle to remain pure in thought and action. He didn’t know why he had been granted this dispensation. He supposed a psychologist could make a few intelligent guesses. Those guesses might even be true, psychologically speaking. But that truth did not mean his chastity was not also a gift in the religious sense—a special grace from God. If one were to take the psychologists’ explanations as the last word on such matters, the visions of mystics like St. Teresa would be reduced to mere hallucinations, psychotic disorders.
But he did not want to fall into the sin of pride. He was here, after all, because he had not been able to manage his priestly life as well as he ought. But his head throbbed each time he recalled the Dominican’s sly grin and the Jesuit’s patronizing casuistry. What had happened to traditional morality, to old-fashioned counseling? Bill Lapchek never queried him about his sex life, or mused on the love of celibates for women. But then, Bill Lapchek never spoke much about anything else either.
He felt as if he were the only one of his kind. But he couldn’t tell if his sense of isolation was the result of the Churc
h deserting its age-old beliefs or if he had just lost touch with the direction the religion had been heading in all along. It would be presumptuous of him—arrogant, even—to believe he had held to the true course while Rome strayed. But it was not just the psychiatric approach of clerics like the retreat master that jarred. His pastor’s materialism was even more troubling. And that old man would be the first to anathematize Freud. Psychology was now taught in Catholic universities and seminaries (what few were left). But what about sin and grace? Was Freud, or someone even more up-to-date, to replace the Ten Commandments?
His head pulsed. He hadn’t had a headache like this—deep, oscillating pain—since childhood. Those headaches used to come on for no apparent reason. His mother had applied holy water in an attempt to relieve them. When did he stop having them? He could not recall ever having one in seminary. Apart from a bout of appendicitis, he had never been ill enough from any cause to miss a class or chapel service.
He got up and poured himself a glass of water. The room was the same size as the retreat master’s but less comfortably furnished. There was certainly no vinyl recliner. A single straight-back chair sufficed, primarily for use at a small metal desk at the foot of the bed—an ironstead affair as old as the building itself. The walls were a dirty blue. A high window was secreted behind dark brown curtains and a drawn yellow shade. Jail cells were more attractively appointed.
Eventually he was able to sleep. But he kept waking with a pounding heart, the pain in his head responding in kind. He dreamed bizarre, quickly forgotten dreams that seemed to have no other purpose than to start his heart and head pounding again.
When he awoke for good his headache was mercifully gone, but he had little appetite for the midday meal—potted beef, soggy potatoes and hard peas. There was apple juice to wash it down. The entire house—retreatants, masters and any other clergy attached or passing through—dined together in one room, a wood-paneled hall which looked like a boarding-school refectory. Thirty or forty people were assembled, all male, at about a dozen tables. They were waited on by young Latin Americans whose own status was not clear: seminarians or hired help?
He was seated across from the two retired pastors who, along with the other, younger priests, made up his retreat group. There was no rule of silence as there was at some retreat houses. Conversation abounded, priests being a garrulous lot. The Italian, who had apparently inured himself to the rigors of clerical food, kept up a steady stream of talk without missing a beat with his knife and fork. He was a small, sinewy man, slightly hunched over from some chronic affliction, but as animated as a monkey.
“You from-a dese parts, Fadda?”
Father Walther named his parish and pastor. The older priest nodded vigorously and shoveled in more stew. “You know him?”
“Never hadda da pleasure.”
Father Walther inquired where the man’s own parish had been.
“Jersey City.”
It turned out the priest, Father Barese, had taught at St. Francis but not during the years Father Walther attended.
“It’s a smalla world.”
“Where are you from originally? In Italy, I mean.”
The older man shifted a piece of grizzly meat to the good side of his mouth, grimacing like a gargoyle.
“Bari!” he replied triumphantally.
Father Walther laughed. But Barese’s dinner companion didn’t get the joke. He not only didn’t get it, he shot a disapproving look at the Italian that suggested something obscene was being discussed. He looked older than his tablemate, which would put him at least into his upper seventies. His own name was Deelan. Father Walther suspected that Deelan looked down on immigrants much as his own father used to, although the economic and social position of the Walthers hardly warranted their looking down on anyone.
“I knew Coglin,” Deelan said, referring to the pastor of Holy Name. “We were at Darlington together.”
“Is that so? I’ll tell him I ran into you.”
“The rest of us are dead.”
The man made a face as if his comrades had fallen dishonorably. Father Walther waited for him to say more, but the former pastor only stared at the wall opposite him, his mouth working angrily.
His own father had shown the same anger toward the end of his life, as if he had discovered some elaborate hoax had been played on him. It was shocking to see a similar bitterness in a priest, even in an old, not to say senile, one.
“I eata no eggs. No sirree. Too mucha cholesterol,” Barese offered with a wink. “Makes you arteries a-hard. Make you-a feeble-mind.” He touched his finger to his temple with his knife hand. Deelan glared at him suspiciously. The Italian waited until his companion’s attention was back on his plate, then winked again at the curate.
After lunch he took a walk. The former seminary’s property extended halfway up a long hill before turning into woodland. There were ball fields, a track where paunchy clerics were jogging, and a lawn that ran from the main building down to the highway. He was able to see it all from the vantage of the hillside. The sky was still clouded over but had grown much brighter as if the sun were on the verge of breaking through. Down below, Staten Island was doing its weekend shopping, eating fast food and watching televised baseball in hundreds of single-family homes barely visible through the mist. The western stanchion of the Verrazano Bridge was materializing through the haze as if some force were only just then creating it. Whatever lay beyond the bridge was obscured by fog. The bay and the towers of Manhattan to the north, plainly visible on a clearer day, were a wall of gray mist.
He wondered if humidity had caused his headache—some sort of sinus condition. Was it his imagination, or did a family doctor tell his mother he needed a dry climate? It was hard to conceive of his parents’ moving thousands of miles just to alleviate their son’s sinus condition. Apart from his father’s job in New York, there were relatives, their attachment to the parish and, however infrequently they visited it socially, the City itself—not to mention his schooling to consider.
He had not given much thought to his parents’ marriage. He assumed there was love, but he could not recall seeing many signs of affection beyond a kiss for Christmas or for one or the other’s birthday. Despite an unspectacular career in a Manhattan bank, his father had been as steady as a rock, hardly ever missing a day’s work, and even then rarely for any illness of his own. He never drank to the point of intoxication, though when he did drink he became sarcastic, especially toward his wife. But most of the time he was a steady, quiet man—until the last few months, when the sardonic streak that used to show only under the influence of alcohol surfaced, this time permanently. Nothing relieved it, not mood elevators or psychotherapy. It was as if something the man had kept bottled up all his life in the belief that one day his stoicism would be rewarded was allowed to bubble up for one parting invective. Father Walther had pitied his mother for what she went through those last few months of her husband’s life. Like everyone else, he had thought his father’s sour mood was caused by his illness, much as he once assumed the man’s sarcasm came literally out of a bottle. But today, here on the damp, recently mowed grass of a former seminary, he wondered if he had missed something.
Sunday morning he had another session with the Dominican.
“Have you ever considered psychotherapy, Father?”
They had switched chairs so that Father Walther would not be exposed to the glare of the window. The question took him by surprise. They had been discussing his spiritual malaise. At least that was what he had thought they were discussing.
“You think my problem might not be of a religious nature?”
The retreat master raised his interlocked fingers higher on the front of his cassock. A crumb of breakfast toast adhered to his right cheek.
“Not exactly,” the priest replied with a pained smile, the crumb of toast ascending almost to his right eye. “These categories tend to...overlap.”
To illustrate his meaning, he covered one hand
with the other. His fingers looked like lines of porpoises beached on a dune of black serge. “We’ve learned a thing or two—the church has, I mean—in the course of our lifetimes. Such a suggestion, psychotherapy, would have been unthinkable to, say, Father Deelan’s generation. They were too busy fighting the Red Menace and the evils of Secular Humanism.”
He smiled again. The sheer quantity of flesh in his cheeks made it seem an unnatural act.
But much as Father Walther had found Father Deelan a poor dinner companion, when he heard the retreat master speak disparagingly of him, he felt inclined to defend the old man.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the Dominican went on. “I’m not preaching relativism. I believe as firmly as you do in the tenets of the faith. All I’m saying is it’s possible to make the best of both worlds. Take this business of Creationism. It’s not a new issue, is it? When I was a kid the nuns never even mentioned Darwin or evolution.... Did you have nuns in grammar school?”
“Yes.”
“But we’ve learned to accept evolution as a scientific fact. We realize that science has its truths which in no way diminish the truth, or truths, of religion. We’re no longer troubled by a conflict between Genesis and The Evolution of Species. But I’m sure you get my point.”
Father Walther wasn’t sure he did, but he kept his peace.
“You’re an intelligent man, Father. I couldn’t speak this way to...well, you know what I mean.”
The Dominican leaned forward from the depths of the recliner, making it look like a piece of children’s furniture. “If we get an infection we go to a doctor. We don’t try to pray it away. So, why not do the same for a mental or emotional problem? It’s just good sense. In fact,”—his voice dropped to a confidential whisper, beads of perspiration glistening on his high brow; Father Walther suddenly realized what the man was like in a pulpit—“isn’t it actually our obligation to seek out such help?”
The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 10