The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (19 page)

I rinsed out a glass and drank some water.

Out the window I caught sight of my little brother in his wide-ribbed corduroys and plaid shirt. He was with my little sister, who was still in her CK uniform. They zoomed past the front yard on their bikes. My head felt as if it was shrinking. Shrinking like the room, the walls closing in. I picked up the cloth to dry my dish.

An orange sun was sinking toward the Rockies. It blazed through the shutters, throwing vertical shafts of shadow and light across the turquoise-colored walls. Dusk would descend soon but it was still broad daylight in California and Hawaii and on the other side of the globe. They’d be receiving
Time
in those places too. Reading all about it. People everywhere would be talking about the sergeant and the fags. What made Matlovich
do
such a thing? I caught a ghostly reflection of my face in the window. I could see the whites of my eyes, the pimples on my chin lit up by the sun.

I rinsed the last bit of soap down the drain, turned off the water, and draped the dishtowel over the faucet. I went to pick up my pack and get to my room. That’s when the scraping stopped.

“I can tell you one thing.” So, it was her voice she’d been sharpening all this time. I turned and watched as she unscrewed the lid of her pink polish. “I think I’d rather find out one of my children was dead than homosexual.”

The words—
dead
,
homosexual
—hung in the air like unpinned grenades. And it was the second one, coming all the way from the Greek to the front of
Time
and out my mother’s tired, red lips, that crashed across our kitchen floor—a five-syllable blast, a crisp, clinical strike.

I stood absolutely still in the silent aftermath. My brain could not produce a response as I watched Mom dip the tiny brush into the bottle. The acrid chemicals wafted through the air as if it was Revlon who’d manufactured the bomb, won the battle.

Sick to my stomach, I moved to the stairs, past Mom’s bowed head. She was busy with the delicate painting of her digits. I glanced from her jiggling, frosted hair to the sergeant’s obscured face and felt revulsion. Hatred. For him. I hated what he was and that he’d done this in my kitchen; he’d done it in front of the whole world. He’d told.

I went to the basement, down to my room, and shut the door.

I
T WAS A
particularly sunny day in March and Brother Tom was deep into the beatitudes. He loved them. He said they were, in fact, great “attitudes of being.” He held his well-worn Bible in his right hand and reached out over our heads with his left. “It’s always in Christ’s own words that we find the gems, the real guidance. The Prophet.” He pointed now to the page. “Listen:

We paused there for a good while for a lengthy discussion on the meek. “It’s our job, our calling, to be aware, to come to the aid of those less fortunate.” He paced in front of us, caressing the text—Gospel according to Matthew. “And it’s you, you young guys, who have to be the radicals now. Radical and brave enough to see through the lies of modern society and hang on to these Christian ideals. The real human ideals. The old farts get caught up and tired and forget sometimes what’s true and—”

He was stopped by a knock. A small white note in the hand of a student on office duty was carried into the classroom. The boy passed the piece of paper to Brother Tom. This caused a stir. It happened rarely and usually meant death (as when John O’Neill’s grandpa died and a note came asking for him to go home) or, more often, punishment. A summons from Father Fitz.

Brother Tom, I could see it, was trying to be casual as he looked up and over to me. He nodded and, oddly, used my Christian name. My heart did a flip-flop. I got up, my feet on automatic.
What did they have on me?
I’d been late to school twice but that was due to snow, a stuck bus. Fitz had caught me once with my shirttail out, reprimanded me, but I had no demerits so far as I knew. No points stacking up toward JUG.

“Marty, head to the dean’s office.” He held out the paper. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

The room was silent as I took the note. I didn’t meet his or anyone’s eyes. I walked toward the door.

“Mr. Moran, tell Father Fitzpatrick we want you back quick, cause we’re into the good stuff, Matthew: Chapter Five. Tell him: ‘Blest are they who show mercy, mercy shall be theirs.’ ”

“I can’t say that.”

“I know. Just trying to get a grin out of you. Haven’t seen your teeth for weeks.”

He rubbed his little mustache and smiled.

I walked down the empty hall past the battered lockers, the portrait of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the solemn photos of matriculated men. His office was the last door on the left, next to the west entrance. I approached and waited just outside the door. I could hear his labored breathing. He was seated at his desk, his big nose bent toward an open manila folder. Sitting on each of his black shoulders was a sprinkling of dandruff. He always had it, as though daily he’d walked here through his own private snowstorm. I glanced at the small chalkboard stuck on the wall above his head. J. U. G. was written in chalk at the top with five or six names scribbled below. Mine was not among them. Not yet, anyway. Dangling from a nail in the upper-right corner of the board, like fat, swollen hands, was a pair of brown boxing gloves.

“Shut the door, take a seat,” he said without looking up.

The door creaked like everything in these haunted halls, then clicked to a close. I sank into the middle of three straight-backed wooden chairs. I’d not sat in here before. Not much to look at. His old desk and a file cabinet. A couple of reference books were propped near his phone. On the binding of the largest was inscribed
Libreria Editrice Vaticana
. He remained quiet; flipping through what I guessed must be my life. My heart hammered to think what he might know. That what was written in there could be the truth. He sucked in breath, blew it out. I smelled the alcohol. Even we freshmen had heard talk of his problem. He was the first person I’d ever known to whom the world referred, in a gentle and pitying way, as alcoholic.

“Mr. Moran?” His head was still buried in my folder.

“Yes, Father.” I studied the blood vessels, like delicate veins of a leaf, crisscrossing his Jimmy Durante nose and spilling out across his sagging cheeks. He lifted his head, folded his hands, and focused his bloodshot eyes on me.

“In the space of one term, you’ve gone from near the top of your class to very near the bottom. Did you know that?”

“No, Father.”

“Well, you have.” He pushed his glasses to the top of his nose. I tried to spy what was on the page in front of him, but all I could make out was a column of scribbles and the usual embossed
A.M.D.G
. (
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
—to the greater glory of God) at the bottom of the stationery. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing, Father.” I glanced up at the portrait of Paul VI.

“Look,” he said, taking off his glasses, “going from sixth in your class to one-fifty-sixth is not nothing. You are known as a disciplined student.” His eyes were rheumy. They blinked at me. “Do you see why I’ve called you here?”

“I think so, Father. You want me to do better.”

“Yes, that’s true.” He spread his elbows along the desk and leaned forward. “And I want to know what’s weighing on you.” I had thought this seat was for punishment only. I was totally thrown in the face of concern. “Are things all right at home?”

I shrugged.

“I know about your parents’ separation, Marty. I’m sorry.”

His use—first time ever—of my Christian name, his “sorry,” caused my throat to close. I saw that he meant to be kind, and I craved the kindness, but I was terrified to let anything leak out. A leak might lead to a flood and I could feel, looking right at him, how every door of me was slammed shut. He was reaching out, and I sat there, numb. A blank.

He took out a white handkerchief and blew his nose. Then he stood and, with great, wheezing effort, tucked my life away into the bottom drawer between McLaughlin and Moroni.

“Have you thought about joining a team?” he asked as he closed the drawer. “Soccer or swimming? Something physical, outdoors, something to do with other boys. What do you think?”

I stared at the floor, at the soiled cracks between the ancient tiles. I had not one clue how to speak from my hiding place, how to get out from under my own JUG. “Maybe soccer,” I whispered.

He sat back down.

“Good. You think about it. Good for you to get out and do something physical with the other boys. You’d better get back to class.”

“Yes, Father.” I stood and walked to the door.

“Marty?” His baggy face was all goodness. “If you’d like to talk . . . I’m here.”

“OK.”

“Get those grades up.”

“Yes, Father.”

I walked back into the empty hall full of male eyes, with the firm knowledge that I was falling, like my grades, to the bottom of the barrel. I couldn’t keep it up, the act, the will. I thought of heading out the door, walking west toward the hills, but, instead, stepped into the boys’ room, into one of the stalls. I locked the door and sat on the toilet.

I hung my head between my knees and wrapped my arms around my ribs as if to hold them all together. I felt like a little kid who’d fallen on the playground, banged my head, doing OK . . . until the adult reaches out and offers sympathy. It’s then that the tears come, that the sorrow and unfairness of harm washes through you. The want of pity. I hated, but couldn’t stop, the tears leaking. And hated that I didn’t understand my sorrow, couldn’t pull it apart, look at it. All I knew was that there was this immense ache at the center of me. I didn’t really know how much I was trying to bury. How much I was working to hide the attractions I felt, to hide the places I’d been and the hunger left in the wake of what happened. I don’t think I knew how much I missed him. I’d banished him. They’d banished him. He’d been my friend, for Christ’s sake. My fucked-up love. He knew my secret. He knew my body. This not divine body that would never hold a good Catholic man. A citizen, a husband, a father. Despicable.

I looked up at the rusty pipes and down at the filthy floor, whispering over and over:
You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to get out of here
.

On the bus ride home I held my list of irregular French verbs.
Valoir: je vaux, tu vaux, il vaut . . .
I couldn’t concentrate. I glanced up to see the streets thicken with people and construction as we approached downtown Denver. Suits and ties, secretaries and shoppers everywhere. I watched one man in a pinstripe suit with shiny cowboy boots rifle through his briefcase as, on the same corner, a group of Native Americans (Ute? Arapaho? Cheyenne?) huddled together on a pile of parkas in the shade of an old building. They passed around a paper bag. I’d see them there most every day as the bus stopped at the patch of red lights on the West End of town. They looked so lost, next to all the Plexiglas and steel. Visible but hidden beside the busy march of foot traffic, the honking horns. It was as if they were camped there in defiance while crazy, anxious white men built a city higher and higher around them.

The bus came to a halt at a congested corner not far from Sixteenth Street. I leaned my head against the window and watched a bricklayer at work. He stood alone at the corner, constructing, brick by red brick, a wall, which now stood about hip height to him. He was fast. He’d place a brick, swipe his trowel along the wet cement, line it up, smooth it out, pick up another one, and repeat. His arms were thick and sunburned. Globs of cement landed near his feet and on his yellow boots. His blue jeans were worn to white, covered with dust. He had a brown beard and, above it, ruddy cheeks and forehead wet with sweat.

As I watched him, a wave of anguish moved through me, a force that seemed to scoop away whatever will I had left. Why in the world was he making a wall? Doesn’t he know it will come to nothing? Why all this futile activity? Everywhere I looked was movement. Movement infused with some purpose, some essential ingredient gone missing in me.

Look at it, I thought, gazing up the busy street. This life is nothing but a lie. Couldn’t we all just agree to stop, for God’s sake? Lie down and stop?
Remember you are dust
, the priest says,
and to dust you shall return
. There’s the truth. I looked back toward the bricklayer. His lips were puckered. Actually puckered, and I could see that he was whistling. Whistling while he shoved another brick into place, while all the world, including me, moved past. He has a wife, I supposed. And kids. Is it for them that he’s whistling? Working? What possible reason? I couldn’t know and didn’t want to. All I knew was that would never be me. I’d never make it that far.

I
GOT OFF
the bus and walked toward home. I could hear the song from our corner.

Will I ever find the boy in my mind, the one who is my ideal?

The voice was spilling out onto the street. Mom was home early, had one of her favorite records going.

Will I recognize the light in his eyes, that no other eyes reveal?

She sat in the big chair in the living room, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in her lap, head thrown back, high heels kicked off. She’d made it through another day at the office. I dropped my knapsack and landed on the couch. She sat up and took me in. She was surprised, I knew, to see me stop so close. I’d been avoiding her. We hadn’t talked much since I’d kicked a hole in the wall at the end of the hallway two weeks before, just after I’d called her a bitch.

Or will I pass him by and never even know . . .

“How are you?” she asked, picking up her chocolates. I could hear it in her voice, the tone, like I was a box of explosives labeled:
Fragile, handle with care
. It wasn’t just the hole in the wall. I’d been behaving horribly. Really mean to my younger siblings and outright hostile to my older sister. Recently Mom had dragged all of us in for a few sessions of family counseling to discuss the divorce, the tension in the house. She was trying, God knows.