Prince of Peace (10 page)

Michael Maguire was one of those celebrated in news stories and sermons as proof that Americans, even in that imbecile defeat, had conducted themselves with virtue and manliness. If we hadn't beaten Communism, we'd stood up to it. We'd contained it. Maguire and his kind enabled us to believe that we were still good guys with balls.

I was more awed by his status than anyone, more admiring, more moved to have him back. Yet weeks went by and I didn't see him. I rarely visited Cooper Street anymore since I'd moved to the Village and my parents had moved to Queens. But it wasn't just a question of not having run into him. How does one presume to kick the can with young Hector? How does one bridge the gulf between the infinitely mundane experience of a mere student—even one in the throes of Village liberation—and that of a returned warrior, a champion, a hero? We were both twenty-one years old, but he was an archetype of manhood. I was an Honors senior in Modern Literature and had the swagger for it. Literature, after all, more than the life of license in Greenwich Village, had rescued me from the cramped sullenness of Inwood. My world had come to seem huge, bright and full of language, language even the great Michael Maguire could not have appreciated in its subtleties. But suddenly I wasn't sure. Who had left whom behind? I ruthlessly compared myself to my old chum and became to myself more a kid than ever. I "had gone back and forth all night on the ferry" with my Millay, but what was that? Michael had confronted the Waste Land itself, and "had bred lilacs" out of it. I assumed really that I would never see him again, except from a distance. The war—my exemption from it as much as his achievement in it—had changed, or so I thought, the very ontology of our relationship, as if one of us had been ordained or canonized or had undergone, as Christine Jorgensen soon would, a sex-change operation. What would he say to me? What would he think? His years in prison, his terrible time in combat—what a rebuke each reference to his experience was to me. When I'd heard that he was captured, I'd known at once that he and I would never have the most important things in common again.

During the long hiatus of the Panmunjom negotiations—they lasted two years, even while operations named Wolfhound, Thunderbolt, Round-up, Ratkiller, Ripper, Rugged and Piledriver failed at places named Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak—I thought of him continually. But would he believe that? When the prisoners came home, college boys felt more guilt than joy. Wouldn't Michael think I did too? I'd been gloriously freed from Inwood, that
parochia
we'd ruled together as boys, and had made a place for myself in the downtown world toward which we'd looked with longing. Michael had dreamed of college and digs in the Village too, a life of ideas, literature, liquor and sex. I'd plunged far enough into each to say I'd been there, and also enough to know the dream of such things can never be surpassed. But would Michael look at me now and see if not a hedonist and a coward, a frivolous aesthete? Would he see a weakling of the sort who went berserk in foxholes or who signed confessions in Chinese prisons? Later when I confided these insecurities of mine to Michael he laughed, though not cruelly. We were chums, he said, and would be always. Differences between us? Don't be a dope, Durkin! He didn't deny the differences but he dismissed them and therefore so did I. Now I see that perhaps we were wrong to. Michael Maguire was an anointed man. I would never be. We knew it then, but ducked. What we regarded later as the true beginning of our friendship was, after all, the beginning of the end of it.

 

Even before the sun was up that Sunday morning I was on the uptown A-train, headed for Good Shepherd and the 7:15 Mass. I hadn't been to church in a year, but this was a way to see Michael and perhaps, finally, talk to him. He was to be the main speaker at the annual Father and Son Communion Breakfast. Looking back on it, even given the insecurities I've described, it seems a curious choice of circumstances for our reunion, even if I'd wanted to make it seem a reunion of chance. Was I moved by an impulse I've forgotten? Did I in fact want to pray? The likelier explanation is that I wanted, first, to see him at remove, to see him before he saw me, to see him on the turf we'd had in common. We'd been altar boys together in that church and we'd roamed the parish hall as if we were proprietors of the place during bazaars and bingo and bake sales and talent shows and a dozen previous communion breakfasts. The first time either of us was made giddy by drink had been inside the huge sacristy closet where the deadly sweet altar wine was stored. The cheap but blessed sauterne was like cough medicine and we loved it.

The A-train clicked along like the Ellington tune, snaking under midtown, Central Park, Harlem, and Upper Broadway. There were few other passengers at that hour and so I found myself looking unselfconsciously into the black mirror of the windows. I worried that Michael would see what I saw. When the train periodically pulled into stations my eye was drawn to the bright posters and billboards on which were portrayed ruby-lipped women in calf-length skirts and pipe-smoking men in absurdly creased fedoras. It was a Sunday in December and there were scenes of couples under mistletoe and families at Christmas dinner which only heightened my sweet melancholy. A boy like me believed more firmly than he believed in God that he couldn't go home again.

At NYU I was regarded as something of a dazzler, I don't know why. I lived alone in a dark room below ground on Horatio Street, and in looking back it seems to me I spent an eternity at my table writing poems, whole afternoons walking the city alone or seeing Russian films in dingy movie houses. But I mustn't have been the recluse I fancied myself. In my junior year I was elected editor of the literary magazine and chairman of the Cellar Theater, a campus coffeehouse where we smoked and read our poems to one another. In public I was extroverted and humorous. I hit it off with the brightest of my classmates, and by my last year I found myself at the center of a lively intellectual crowd, mostly Jews, on whom the exotic airs of Bohemia seemed utterly natural. We gathered at night at the Cedar Tavern on University Place where we imagined ourselves hobnobbing with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and their disciples. As would-be writers we fairly basked in the sporadic presence of Dwight MacDonald, Norman Mailer, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz and the old
Partisan Review
crowd. I had friends who insisted my poems were as good as anything that magazine was publishing and they were always threatening to go over to Rahv's table on my behalf. What a mortification it would have been. I could never bring myself to tell them how many times that magazine and a dozen others had already rejected my work. My fellow undergraduates thought of me as one of the two or three among them with
real
promise. I let them. I suspected the truth, however, that my flare for poesy would not outlast my adolescence. I would be a teacher like the rest of them.

My oh so worldly fellow students would not have recognized me by the feelings I was having on my way to Good Shepherd. The closer I came to the Irish neighborhood in which I'd been raised, the more inhibited I felt. By the time I got off at 207th Street and climbed out of the subway I had my overcoat tightly belted, my shoulders hunched against the cold and my head lowered, eyes on the sidewalk, like some bookish introvert come back to attend Mass with his mother.

The sun was up and Broadway, so domesticated there on the far tip of Manhattan, was yawning and stretching like the family collie. Terry Behan the baker who claimed then to be a cousin of Brendan's, but later when the writer was dissolute would deny ever having heard of him, was winding down the awning on his shop window. It was of pink canvas and carried the legend "Baking on Premises." He didn't look at me as I passed him and I did not greet him. I saw the church at the end of the block. But for its size it was an unremarkable structure of gray stone set back from the street by a stunted plaza and above the street by eighteen stairs. Many people were going in for Mass, and most of them were familiar to me. Automatically I took the stairs two at a time as I had done since high school, which was when I discovered that the steps were too shallow for a grown man to take in stride. The steps, I had decided one bold day in my sixteenth year, were made for children and old ladies, like the religion was.

I noticed in fact that the people approaching the church with me seemed mostly to be women, which one would expect at the early Mass. But this was Father-and-Son Sunday. Where were the men and boys? I'd expected to see a dozen of my schoolmates. Did I have the wrong weekend?

Even in my agnostic phase—never atheist; it was a distinction we made much of—I was a sucker for the silence of churches. When I traveled in Europe during graduate school I could never enter a cathedral without matching its hush with a piquant inner one which was like a voice rebutting my sophistication; God whispering, "Oh really?" The compelling atmosphere of the sacred depended in my case at least on certain visceral feelings of guilt, and no place ever evoked those more satisfactorily than Good Shepherd. The guilt I felt that day was so pleasantly familiar it was easy to think of it as an element of the holy. Even the obnoxious bustle of the old women with their satchel-sized purses staking out their favorite pews could not dispel the old
mysterium,
and I welcomed the sensation even as it welcomed me. The silence, the unctuous odor of votive candles, the warped sheen of the linoleum aisles and the hissing of the car-sized radiators touched off such warm feelings of belonging that I could have exclaimed, "Of course you can't go home again, but you can always go back to church!" I thought it was an original insight of mine when I understood that the church's main function is to be there to go back to.

This feeling of poignancy at Good Shepherd was as unexpected as sharp, and it filled me with a sudden sense of loss, not for belief or religion or Catholicism but for the neighborhood, the parish. I regretted not so much my own move away from it, but my parents', because as long as this was theirs it would have been mine. How could they have abandoned Good Shepherd? And for what? Queen of Queens? I resented my parents' move for the first time. So what that at last they had a little bungalow now and their own patch of grass. So what that they finally had a car. Wasn't it their job to keep my past intact so that I could wander through it now and then, nostalgically? It came as a surprise that my parents' choices, their lives really, could still impinge on mine. In the Village we thought parents counted for nothing. The best people, the ones we emulated, had never had them.

But at least the church of Good Shepherd was not like our apartment on Cooper Street. Those five rooms were someone else's now, with new wallpaper in the bathroom and pictures of different snow scenes on the walls. It was a relief that Good Shepherd, with its silence, odor, sheeny floors and hissing pipes was still mine. And if it was still mine after NYU, it always would be. Good Shepherd with its nuns, priests, old ladies, pamphlet racks, banks of red and blue votive lights, holy water fonts, pointed windows and mammoth electric lanterns under which I'd made a point since fourth grade never to sit was indelibly stamped on my soul, like grace. I did not realize until that moment how at sea I'd felt downtown, and how lonely. If I was at my desk too much or at the movies it was because no one I knew down there was an Inwood kid.

Like Michael. No wonder I'd come to see him here. In a park, a tavern or an Automat downtown I'd have been reduced to imitating Edward R. Murrow interviewing him. But here ... I understood in a flash and for the first time that it was this place that had made us friends. That alone would have made it sacred.

I entered, dipping my hand, blessed myself, genuflected—right knee to left heel—and slid automatically into the corner by the confessionals.

"Msgr. Riordan," a lettered sign said over one, and I shuddered. He'd caught me smoking in the schoolyard and his mere stare had injected me with a terror I still felt five years later. I took up a place by Father Walsh's booth. He was a soft touch. The line of penitants waiting for him on Saturdays could run for an hour after the monsignor had returned to the rectory. You could confess to Father Walsh having been sinfully aroused and he wouldn't ask you if it was with yourself or with others.

I looked from worshipper to worshipper for Michael but didn't see him. He was taller than I was from the age of twelve and so all through high school had sat behind me, so I might not have recognized the back of his head, but there were almost no men or boys in the church anyway. Why weren't they standing in the right rear corner where I was? Even when the pews were threefourths empty, my father and his cronies always heard Mass from there because at sermon time, but before the priest turned around to face the congregation, they could slip out the side door for a smoke. When my generation stood there it was to arrive late and leave early. But that morning in the last moments before Mass I was alone in the men's corner and it took me a moment to remember why. Holy Name Sunday was the one Sunday on which the male hangers-back joined the congregation. They would be wearing their funeral suits today and, having gathered in the choir room behind the sacristy, they would any minute now be entering the sanctuary in procession ahead of the priest. They would file out onto the laity's side of the communion rail and into the first dozen pews on both sides of the aisle. Even from the back of the church I would know their bright faces. The fathers would be red from the flush of weather, age and drink, and the sons would be red from embarrassment, unnecessarily since no one whose opinion they valued would see them in their obeisance.

Except me, of course.

I was famous among my old friends for having lapsed. In my rare summer forays into Inwood taverns I had, in the drunken company of mates who now worked as apprentices to their fathers in the Irish trades and on the waterfront, sworn with Jefferson upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. "Including if needs be," I loudly added, "the tyranny of God Himself."