In retribution for perceived callousness, he would make us retrace our steps and repeat the last decade, this time more obsequiously. Sometimes he would burst into tears, not unlike the child who sees the same movie a hundred times but always acts surprised when Bambi’s mother takes one for the team. Every time he knelt down to say the rosary, he seemed to do so in the expectation that this time around Pilate might let Christ off with a warning. It suggested, in our minds, that the dirt-cheap horse piss my father guzzled by the case might not be the mild stimulant we took it to be but an out-and-out hallucinogen.
On nights when he got totally pulverized, he would forget where we were and accuse me of skipping a mystery, of trying to take a shortcut. This was sometimes true; on the few occasions when I did manage to condense the total number of Hail Marys, my sisters would smile with wry complicity at these blows against the empire. But in the end, these were feeble acts of sedition, similar to the exploits of the French Resistance, whose operatives would occasionally blow up a train or assassinate a Gestapo officer to annoy the Nazis, realizing that it was unlikely to have much effect on the outcome of the war.
In the fall and winter, it made no difference to us when we engaged in this despised ritual; the sun had already gone down by suppertime, and it was not as if we were going out to play again that day, so we might as well grin and bear it. But once daylight saving time arrived, when the sun dallied, there was still a sliver of time left to squeeze in a few innings of baseball after dinner, provided we said the rosary early enough. Here, with the choreographed malice that is the hallmark of the Irish American, my father would fuss around in the kitchen, delaying the postprandial ceremony while he quaffed a few more beers. The rest of us would sit in the living room, watching the day slip away, as he careened around the kitchen in a stupor. By the time we got around to saying the rosary, there would be barely enough time for two innings of baseball and only then if we did not linger over Christ’s long-running feud with the Pharisees or the complicity of the Jews in His execution. But on all too many occasions, my father did have a few extra comments to slip in regarding Jesus or Mary Magdalene or the Holy Ghost’s unpredictable comings and goings, as the booze rendered him even more garrulous and even more sententious, and by the time he was done, the sun would have gone to bed for the day and any chance of playtime was over.
This family obligation did not end until I was fifteen, when one night he keeled over, landed flat on his face, broke his eyeglasses, and passed out. We all found this quite hilarious. For years, my youngest sister, Mary Ann, would reenact the scene, always making sure to remove her own eyeglasses first. We left him there, facedown, all night, hoping that he might suffocate on his own vomit. Alas, luck was not with us. After that incident, he was too embarrassed to ask us to say the rosary ever again. He had disgraced himself in the eyes of the Lord, and the Lord was unlikely to forget it.
Miraculously, these twilight burlesques did not rattle my faith in the Church, nor did they undercut my desire to be a priest. This is because I had no trouble distinguishing between the One True Faith and the parody sect my father had devised for his personal use. It was famously said, by a Jesuit, of course, that if the Church could have a child for seven years, it would have the child forever. This was certainly true in my case: Repudiating the Church would be tantamount to deserting my ethnic group, acting as if everything that happened in my childhood was false and irrelevant and stupid. There was never any chance of my falling prey to that kind of revisionism, no possibility of abjuring my faith or forgetting where I came from. Moreover, I didn’t want to grow up to be like everybody else, as I truly believed that Catholicism—particularly taking into account the pageantry, the spectacle, the iconography, the props, and even the aromas—had all the other religions beat hands down. To me, as to most Catholics of that era, other religions were polenta.
My first direct involvement in official Church ritual occurred when I was ten years old. A hoot and a holler up the road from the housing project stood Ravenhill Academy, the ritzy private school where Grace Kelly received her top-of-the-line education and, presumably, replaced her Philadelphia accent with something more plummy. Ravenhill was run by a mysterious order of nuns based, so the story went, in the Philippines. The Religious of the Assumption had actually started out in France, but their numbers included quite a few Filipinos, which is how the rumor of a Manila connection reached my ears. They wore phantasmagoric maroon and yellow habits, but instead of concealing their heads inside starched lampshades the way most nuns did, they topped off the ensemble with headdresses that looked like top-quality dishcloths. The Filipino nuns were giggly and bouncy and spoke preposterous English. At that point in my life, they were the most exotic people I had ever met, challenged for visual glitz only by the Mummers. Until our paths crossed, I had no idea that people with dark skins were even allowed to be Brides of Christ.
One day toward the end of fifth grade, Mother Superior waddled into our classroom at Saint Bridget’s seeking volunteers to serve mass for the nuns at Ravenhill during the summer. This was an unusual request, because altar boys were typically not allowed to serve mass until they were in seventh grade. For reasons that later became clear, no one in the upper grades had put in dibs for the assignment. So I nabbed it. Paradise, as Christ once put it, was a mansion filled with many rooms, and accepting this assignment was my chance to get in on the ground floor.
No sooner had I signed on the dotted line than the downside of the enterprise manifested itself. Masses were served at 7:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. every day of the week save Sunday, when the services were held somewhat later. This meant that I had to go to bed every night at eight o’clock in order to get up in time to serve mass the following morning. It meant that the summer was wrecked. It meant no late-evening baseball, no tag, no foraging for bumblebees, no masquerading as Zorro. I had been hoodwinked. I had been had.
Ravenhill Academy was about a mile from my home, but to get there, I had to walk all the way to the back of the project; tiptoe across a vast, deserted, overgrown plot known as the Jungle; then walk on the shoulder of an out-of-the-way road up to the private school. The road had no sidewalk on either side; it was mostly used as a truck bypass. The nuns would not have permitted me to take this assignment, nor would my parents have agreed to it, unless I was accompanied by another boy. By custom, if not by edict, two altar boys were needed to serve mass: one to hold the cruets, the other to pour ablutions over the priest’s fingers, but mostly to provide visual symmetry for the congregation. In a pinch, you could get away with a single altar boy, but only in an emergency, as the sight of one adolescent serving mass all by himself looked unprofessional. And so Jackie Godman was recruited for the assignment.
Jackie Godman lived directly across the path from my house. His mother was a smidgen plump, with a smushed-in face that gave her the appearance of a charwoman in a Dickens novel, hemmed in by a phalanx of wee nippers who refused to part with a precious morsel of information for less than a guinea. Jackie’s father was an intense American Indian. He had long black hair and piercing eyes, and did not say much, but every so often the screen door would burst open and Jackie would come rocketing out into the front yard with his father in hot pursuit, usually with a belt flailing. In our family, this sort of behavior was viewed as poor form, as the Irish-Catholic code of conduct stipulated that children should always be beaten in private, and beaten mercilessly, but preferably with the windows closed, if only to keep up appearances. It was an unassailable tenet of our family credo that no matter how bad our father’s behavior was, other children’s fathers were worse. Especially stupid goddamn Indians.
Whenever Mr. Godman would explode out of his house and chase Jackie down the street, my father would quip that our neighbor was “on the warpath.” We never knew what tribe Mr. Godman belonged to, nor what he did for a living, though it was bruited about that he, like most Indians of that era, worked as a steeplejack. This was because Indians, as everyone knew, had no fear of heights, since heights did not exist in pre-Columbian culture. None of us ever knew if the ethnic myths we were ceaselessly retailed were true, but as adults invariably coated them with a patina of plausibility, gullible children generally accepted them as gospel truth.
Jackie was the only one of my friends who I knew for a fact was beaten by his father. He, on the other hand, never found out what transpired inside my home, as I deemed the whole subject too shameful to discuss. Though we were friends for years, we never talked about our fathers, not even to compare how much we disliked them. I have no idea what we talked about back then. Nor do I recall what byzantine arguments I marshaled to hornswoggle him into a summer of diocesan penal servitude. Unlike me, Jackie had no clerical aspirations; why he became an altar boy in the first place was never made clear. He was not a cerebral sort, not a reader, nor terribly communicative. But he was sturdy and reliable, and somehow I managed to talk him into getting up every morning for three months straight an hour before sunrise to serve mass for the nuns who had taught Grace Kelly all the things that the daughter of a construction tycoon needed to know in order to pass herself off as a femme fatale Cary Grant simply could not live without—thereby punching her ticket out of Philadelphia. I also suspect that we were enticed by the very elegance of the institution, which made such a sharp contrast with the banality and obviousness of the housing project. Or at least I was.
By the time I grew up, few parents would have allowed their children to make a daybreak pilgrimage on a deserted road, no matter how majestic the enterprise. But people didn’t think that way back then. School House Lane was not entirely untraveled in the morning; there were always a few delivery trucks whizzing by. My father made me swear that I would walk up the side of the road facing traffic, because to do otherwise was to invite death. But Jackie and I decided that if we walked up that side of the road, it would be impossible to get rides from passing truckers. Though we had been warned not to accept lifts from strangers, we ignored this counsel, because the road was steep, because the truckers we met seemed to be salt-of-the-earth types, and because little boys only fear danger they can see.
The principal structure at Ravenhill Academy was an imperious gray brick building that sat a hundred yards or so back from the road. In my memories, it resembles Salisbury Cathedral, sulking there in indolent repose, reticent, confident, fully cognizant of its all-encompassing, quasi-arcadian magnificence. It was ringed by lovely, manicured grounds, speckled with trees and flowers; but we never roamed around the property, because we had no interest in scenery and felt uncomfortable in places where we did not fit in. Inside the main structure was a beautiful chapel where we served two masses every morning. The chapel may have been neo-Gothic or postmedieval or Romanesque; it looked like something you would see in Europe.
The chapel bells I recall in much greater detail. Up until then, I had attended services where the altar boys were equipped with tiny silver bells that had a single clapper inside. These bells emitted a tinny, noncommittal sound, as if a telephone were ringing three rooms down the hall. But the ponderous objects we found waiting for us on the altar steps at Ravenhill Academy were chunky, eye-catching chimes the size of tea-kettles. They were massive and blaring and imbued with a just-add-water orientalism I found intoxicating. The elaborate devices had four separate compartments, each filled with a cluster of ringers that, when rattled, suggested that the czar was arriving with a retinue of 350 sleighs. Years after the fact, I cannot remember one single thing about the priests who served mass each morning, nor what beatitudes the chapel’s stained-glass windows may have depicted, but I have never forgotten those amazing bells. They were wonderful playthings, and I loved to make them sing out, having always been a sucker for affordable exoticism, particularly at the municipal level. Whenever I rattled those chimes, I felt transported to Samarkand or Constantinople or Oz.
The best thing about that summer at Ravenhill Academy was breakfast. Every morning after the first service, one of the diminutive Filipino nuns would scurry into the sacristy to bring us a tray containing orange juice, raisin toast, and coffee. Children did not drink coffee in those days—I am not sure they do now—but once I overcame my initial disgust at the acrid taste, I drained those urns to the dregs. After the second mass, another pint-sized nun would appear with a second tray, overflowing with pancakes, sausage, and bacon, or eggs, scrapple, and home fries, or some kind of delicious pastry, always accompanied by more coffee and more orange juice. Breakfasts at home mostly consisted of off-brand cornflakes. These were the best breakfasts I have ever tasted, rivaled only by a few crack-of-dawn, belt-loosening repasts in Limerick and Kilkenny. It is impossible to put into words how much those meals meant to us. They made it easier to go to bed in the early evening, easier to drag ourselves out of bed in the dead of night. They gave us something to look forward to every day. They made us feel like princes.
One morning halfway through August, one of the little nuns told us that we did not need to come serve mass the following morning. We could sleep late, kick back, relax. It was our only day off that summer, and I am sure we enjoyed the respite. That night my aunt Rita, who had a reputation as a gossip, phoned my mother, two years her junior. Aunt Rita was occasionally sent to reasonably priced, well-maintained institutions to recuperate from seasonal nervous breakdowns that were, apparently, the high point of her marriage. My mother always referred to her as “high-strung,” but the smart money said she was crazy. She was married to the dullest man in the history of
Homo erectus,
a post-man said to have achieved the only perfect entry-exam score in the history of the United States Post Office, even though everyone knew that he was the sole author of this rumor.