Authors: True Believers
Over the next few years this Vatican Council, after long debates in Latin, decided to let priests say Mass in languages other than Latin. In that great earnest moment of the new and improved, my mother believed—sweetly, incorrectly, sadly—that the Vatican II reforms would keep all her children in the Church’s embrace as we became teenagers.
As a little girl, I liked being a Catholic. St. Joseph’s Church seemed both gigantic and cozy, and the costumes and incense and Latin made for a great show. I managed to impress everyone by memorizing the Nicene Creed at age six—”We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”—and I
loved
the phrase “all that is, seen and unseen.”
However, my relationship with the Church was traumatically put asunder at age seven when I made my first confession.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” I tried to be succinct and get quickly to my one big mortal sin. “I broke the First Commandment. At Christmastime, we were at Marshall Field’s watching them make Frango mints, and then my mom said it was too late to go talk to Santa because we had to leave to make it to Saturday Advent Mass. But I said Santa Claus is just as important as Jesus, like the Holy Ghost. My mom said I was putting strange gods before God, like it says not to do in the First Commandment. But I cried, and so we stayed in line and talked to Santa and missed Mass.”
“Aha.”
Then, before Father Linehan spoke, he
chuckled.
Confession was serious business, the most serious business to which I’d ever been party, and he was
laughing
? He assigned me only one Our Father and one Hail Mary.
In retrospect, I can see that Father Linehan’s reaction to this eager, confused, penance-craving little Catholic seems charming and correct. But I was shocked. From that afternoon on I harbored a skepticism—not yet about the existence of God or the body and blood of Jesus Christ or any of the other magical mysteries, but about the
Church.
If they didn’t take my troubled conscience seriously, if it was all a big joke,
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat ha ha ha,
then why should I trust them to guide me along my path toward redemption? I started thinking that when it came to behaving correctly, I was probably on my own. I started thinking that my unchurched dad—every Sunday while we were at Mass, he watched
Meet the Press
and prepared our weekly Danish lunch of sweet cured salmon on dark rye—must consider confession and Holy Communion a ridiculous charade but didn’t have the heart to come right out and say so. Sort of the way I spent the next several years pretending, for Peter’s and Sabrina’s sakes, that Santa Claus existed.
I continued making confession and attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion and enduring the daylong annual embarrassment of Ash Wednesday, and I kept my growing disbelief to myself. Because I saw how this was eventually going to end—several against one, serially wised-up kids and irreverent Dad versus eternally faithful, hopeful Mom—it seemed preferable to postpone the uncomfortable moment of truth as long as I could.
Which came when I was thirteen. Not long after my mother performed her (successful) novena for peace during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I decided that I had to take my stand. It was a Saturday afternoon. My friend Mary Ann’s mom had just driven me home from the ninth of my twenty-two weekly confirmation classes. My parents were in the living room, reading. I sat down on the floor next to Curiosity, our cairn terrier. (As a puppy called Jake, he had played to death with one of the neighbor’s kittens, and my father renamed him Curiosity.)
After rubbing the dog’s tummy for a minute, I announced that I wasn’t going through with my confirmation. My mother closed and put down the Christmas issue of
Vogue
very carefully and slowly. Her attempts to appear calm always had the opposite effect.
“Don’t be silly. Of course you are, Karen. You are a fine Catholic. A ‘spectacular young Catholic,’ the archbishop himself said.”
She was referring to the social studies paper I’d written about American poverty, in which I’d quoted from the Book of James—”Well now, you rich! Lament, weep for the miseries that are coming to you.” My mother sent a copy of my paper to Archbishop Meyer, who gave it an award.
“I’m not like Saint Gertrude,” I said. I had been planning to take Gertrude as my confirmation name because as a young woman, seven hundred years earlier, before she saw the light and returned to the Church, Saint Gertrude had been a young intellectual and writer who rejected Christianity.
“You don’t have to be a saint to be Catholic.”
“But you have to believe in Catholicism to be one. It would be fake. It’d be a lie.”
“Is this about your problem with the virgin birth and miraculous apparitions? Listen, sweetheart—”
“And the Holy Ghost. Whatever
that
is.”
“I’ve told you what Saint Augustine said about not taking Bible completely literally—and ‘doubt is but another element of faith.’”
“And transubstantiation. I don’t believe that Jesus Christ was God’s son. I don’t believe he was resurrected.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I can’t be confirmed. I won’t defend the faith. I don’t want to be a soldier of Christ, Mommy.” I had long since phased out “Mommy” in favor of “Mom” and “Mother,” and she despised the phrase “soldier of Christ,” so now I was being shrewd.
She looked at my father, who smiled wanly and shrugged, which made her angry.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. At last my father spoke. “Karen,” he asked, undoubtedly knowing what my answer would be, “do you believe in God?”
“I’m not sure. Probably not. But I know for
sure
I don’t believe that Helen is burning and suffering in
hell.
”
My coup de grâce. Except there was no grace or mercy involved, just blood-tingling adolescent cruelty. Five years earlier, my sister Helen, the fourth Hollaender child, was stillborn. I’d assumed that her little soul flew from the Evanston Hospital delivery room directly up to heaven. But when I asked Father Linehan to explain how babies such as Helen, who die before they learn to speak, are able to communicate in heaven, he set me straight on Catholic doctrine. I never quite got over the shock. Babies suffering eternal damnation if they die unbaptized—or
maybe,
if such a place exists, Father Linehan wasn’t certain, spending eternity in limbo—seemed like the most ghastly injustice imaginable. Between Father Linehan’s laughter at my first confession and this information about God’s mercilessness, I felt that I’d glimpsed a deep satanic streak in the Church.
Anyhow, when I played the baby-Helen card that afternoon in 1963, my mother said nothing but instantly crossed herself, stood up, put on her coat, grabbed her gloves and purse, walked out of the house, and drove away. I assume she went to St. Joseph’s and prayed for me.
The next morning at Mass, as we stood up to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a little boy in the pew just behind me said in a loud whisper, “Mommy, that girl got
hurt.
” Somewhere around
lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,
I felt a rivulet dribble between my underpants and the top of one of my stockings. I’d gotten my first period, and blood had stained through the back of my dress. As the priest prepared the Eucharist and I knelt in the pew, imagining myself about to eat the body and sip the blood of Christ at the altar with my stained bloody backside exposed to the entire congregation, I decided I couldn’t endure the nightmare.
As mother and Peter and Sabrina filed out of the pew and turned right, without a word, I turned left and walked down the aisle and then down the stairs to the ladies’ room. I waited forever outside in the cold by our car in the lot. As my mother approached, glaring at me, the December wind whipping hair around her face, I thought she looked like the witch in
Sleeping Beauty.
Sabrina was trying not to smile. After I explained what had happened and lifted my coat and turned around to prove it, my mother hugged me, and we both started crying. That was the last time I attended Mass, apart from Sabrina’s confirmation, and funerals.
7
Whenever I drop off someone I really care about at an airport, I choke up the moment I drive away. (I sometimes think that if I’d driven Jack to JFK and La Guardia for his weeks-long composing residencies in New Mexico and Norway and India during the ‘80s, I’d have realized sooner how much my love for him had shriveled. But he always took a taxi.) And my new electric car is so eerily quiet as it accelerates that the extra sonic space gives my emotions more room to roil. So I’m crying, a tear or two running down each cheek, as I wave back at Waverly on the sidewalk and start to concentrate on escaping LAX.
The woman reading the news on
Morning Edition
is black, I learned not long ago from a friend who works at NPR. I’d had no idea, because there’s nothing identifiably African-American about her voice. NPR has a bunch of black on-air talent, but because they all sound white, my friend told me in an embarrassed whisper, and it’s radio, “nobody
realizes
it. We get no credit. What we’d
kill
for are some first-rate journalists with, you know, African-American
names.
Kadisha, Jameel.”
The NPR newsreader introduces a report from Denmark, where four Jews have been killed and twelve more sickened in a poisoning plot carried out by Islamic terrorists. The terrorists coated the mezuzahs affixed to the front door of at least fifty Jewish households in Copenhagen with botulinum toxin. The Danish prime minister promised that “the full resources of the nation are focused on apprehending the perpetrators of this fiendish plot.”
In Danish, I happen to know, “fiendish” is
djævelsk.
As children, when we did amusingly naughty things, snapping Polaroid pictures of my parents as they stepped from the shower or eating entire sticks of butter coated in brown sugar, my father, who rarely resorted to Danish, would call us
lille
djævel,
little devils, little fiends. Otherwise, “fiends” and “fiendish plots,” like “dastardly deeds,” existed only in comic books and Looney Tunes, as antiquated and self-parodying hyperbole.
These murders in Copenhagen are, of course, like something from James Bond, a scheme devised by a grinning Blofeld or Drax for his henchmen to carry out.
The one time I met George W. Bush, at a dinner in New York before he was governor, when we were both in our forties, I immediately thought of him as Felix Leiter, Bond’s Texan CIA helpmate. Life was surrealized for everybody on September 11, but a week after the attacks, as I sat alone in our new apartment on Desbrosses Street in lower Manhattan, burning dogwood-scented votive candles to cover the stench of smoldering rubble and flesh wafting up from Ground Zero, I was talking on the phone to my Washington friend in the intelligence community. He was angrier than I’d ever heard him, talking about all the squandered opportunities to kill bin Laden—”six months ago we had the prick literally in our sights, from a drone I was
watching
him on a
monitor.
” When I hung up and turned on my TV and saw live coverage of Tony Blair’s visit to Washington, I felt like I was tripping: Felix Leiter was president of the United States, talking about “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters, with a somewhat fey British prime minister James Bond committing himself to join in the free world’s war against crazed foreign evildoers.
In September 2001, real life abruptly and completely flipped into full Bond mode. A wealthy freelancing supervillain in a secret underground lair, four hijacked American jetliners, the Pentagon struck, iconic 110-story Manhattan skyscrapers vaporized—this was precisely the kind of absurd, baroque scheme that Commander Bond trotted the globe trying to prevent. Since then, half our politics and news have concerned fiendish, nihilistic masterminds in their hideouts, charismatic and stateless psychopaths who dream of committing spectacular mass murder for its own spectacular sake, with the battle against them fought by daring, steadfast agents of MI6 and CIA and special ops equipped with fantastic gadgets and licenses to kill. Afghan guerrillas in the heroin business and Colombian guerrillas in the cocaine business, a world-famous Pakistani physicist selling nuclear secrets to rogue states, an American-born Colorado State grad in a beard and turban brainwashing killers by remote control from Yemen, Mexico commandeered by psychopathically depraved drug lords, entranced suicide bombers, proud videos of beheadings? A global confederacy of disparate madmen and terrorists? In the Bond novels, it was called SPECTRE. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents Bush and Obama was a young former naval officer named—yes—Leiter. Truth is not stranger than fiction, it’s
exactly like
the pulpy fiction I loved in junior high.
As I turn off Wilshire onto Westwood toward campus, I’m thinking about the Danish mezuzot botulin murders. I remember the first mezuzah I noticed in L.A., right after I moved. Waverly, visiting me at age ten, spotted it. It was pewter, affixed to the doorjamb of Dr. Benjamin Silverstein, a make-believe Jewish physician with a make-believe old-timey office on Main Street in Disneyland.
“Morning, Professor,” the UCLA parking garage guy says as I pause to let the little latticework of red laser beams read my card. “Fantastic day, huh?” He means the weather. It’s the greeting he gives me almost every day.
“Beautiful,” I reply.
The life of a tenured university professor is rather grand in a way that barely exists elsewhere anymore. Every job exists along a spectrum according to how frequently one is required to lie and to act like a jerk, from many times a day at one end of the chart to maybe once a year at the other end, and my current job is way toward the pleasant side. Unlike at a law firm, at a university almost nobody seems perpetually on the verge of panic or keeps track of your hours, and unlike when you’re a litigator or a prosecutor or a judge, you don’t really have the opportunity to wreck people’s lives.