Wolfgang referred to the years after his recovery from polio as the “walking years.” He had insisted that his mother allow him freedom from the bed. “I feel like a prisoner in this bed,” he told her.
To which she responded, “What do you know of prison, Wolfgang?”
“I’ll prove to you that I’ll walk again.”
She stared at him for a moment before putting on a smile. “I’ll get you a cane at the store today.”
Doris returned an hour later, opened his bedroom door, and propped the cane against the wall of the hallway outside so he could see it. “Well, there it is. Go ahead and grab it. I won’t baby you anymore.”
After he’d heard her descend the stairs, he crawled out of bed and then out into the hallway to retrieve the cane. He started off with the upper floor, walking up and down the hallway ten times that first day before tiring. On his first attempt he fell after only two steps. Doris hurried up the steps to help, but he insisted that he do it on his own. “I don’t need your help, Mother.”
She returned to the kitchen and moments later he heard her crying. Thoughts of the pillow closing in on his father’s face fueled his drive to walk. He wanted more than freedom from the bed, even at eight. He wanted out of the house and away from her. He’d used the cane so often that the grooved feel of it would always be ingrained in the palm of his right hand.
Next he’d used the stairs to strengthen the muscles of his legs. Up and down he’d travel them, twenty times a day, before and after school, from the living room to his bedroom until he’d begun to wear the shine from the wood on the middle of each uneven step. He’d step up with the left foot, drive the cane down on the same step, and then lift the right foot up next, the sound of each movement distinct, like a ritual, like a song. He pounded every inch of the sidewalk up and down their street, his daily presence as common to the neighbors as the milkman and mail carriers. Neighbors waved, and sometimes, depending on his focus, Wolfgang waved back. Mostly he’d nod and keep to his business, venturing outside more than he ever had in his life, loving the freedom of it, away from his mother’s increasingly extremist remarks and teachings of her religious thinking.
In the eighth grade Wolfgang pushed the limits and ventured down the road to Central Park. He walked the seventeen acres of the park throughout each week, he and his cane clip-clopping around the winding walking trails, careful not to place the end of his cane in any patches of sunlight that bled through the overhanging tree limbs. It was a game. His cane couldn’t touch the sunlight, and his feet couldn’t step on any crack. On some sunny days he’d appear to be dancing as he sidestepped and maneuvered his way around the patchwork of light and shadow, watching the squirrels and dogs chase each other, watching the women push babies in strollers, and waving to the horse carriages. Some days he’d stop to skip rocks across the wading pool or stare at his reflection in the shimmering water, sighting the first curls of black hair on his chin that would later become the beard he would never shave from his face.
One morning at breakfast, Doris said to her increasingly unresponsive son, “Mrs. Hammerston down the street. She saw you walking the park the other day.”
“I walk the park every day,” said Wolfgang.
“Well, I’d like you to keep it at that,” she said. “You’ve no business on the streets by yourself.”
That afternoon, Wolfgang figured it was time to expand his horizons. He’d finally gotten rid of the cane and decided it was time to venture farther downtown. He stretched it a block or two every day until his daily jaunt had reached nearly ten miles. He’d pack a canteen full of water on his trips, sipping and rationing it out so as not to run dry too early. Hurrying across streets, he’d slow his steps on the sidewalks. He would slow even more when he’d curiously pass a bar or whorehouse on Green Street where the men liked to drink to crudeness and dirty crib girls were known to give themselves for money. He’d imagine them in the throes of passion and then hurry on, snickering inside his head at the dirtiness of it all. And then he would silently apologize to a God he befriended on a daily basis.
On several occasions he stopped outside the Baroque and peered through the window, imagining his father alive and slurping from a beer mug. Men played cards and dice games and drank bourbon. In the back, half concealed by smoke, a man played ragtime on the piano. A thin young man painted with oil paints at a table just inside the front window. The walls of the Baroque glowed with dozens of framed oil paintings. Along the wall next to the fireplace stood a marble statue with nude figures, a replica of Giambologna’s
Rape
of
the
Sabine
Women
—a man and a woman upright and intertwined, coiled, their arms reaching up toward a ceiling covered by smoke. Wolfgang never hesitated to stare at the statue, at least for a few seconds before moving on, past the Rue de Lafayette next door, where the sound of drunken laughter always permeated the walls.
He liked to pass storefront windows and watch his limping reflection, a boy without a care, a boy with no destination. Until he hit Fifth Street one fall day and noticed the tall spire extending from the pitched roof of a glorious building down the way. Clouds passed above it. Wolfgang’s heart began pumping. Something seemed to be calling him; a throbbing in his gut, a warm feeling he could only compare to the one he’d get after his father occasionally patted his back after he’d successfully played a complete piece on the piano. His pace quickened as he limped toward the building. He walked so fast his right foot began to drag, the toes of his black shoe like a broom sweeping across the dirt-covered concrete. A horse carriage rumbled down the street. He pretended to race it.
When he reached his destination, he stood for a moment with his hands on his knees, staring at the tall façade and large arched doors. Two women in pretty dresses and artfully arranged hairdos walked up the wide steps and opened the massive doors, and what emerged from the belly of the building was the angelic singing of a choir, singing in a language he’d never heard before yet felt drawn to. He took out his canteen and drank more water. He stared at the building for a good five minutes before inching closer to the steps. A man in a top hat brushed past him and apologized on his way into the building. Wolfgang knew it was a church of some sort. He surprised himself by speaking out at the man.
“What place is this, sir?”
The man stopped on the church steps and faced Wolfgang. “Why, this is the Cathedral of the Assumption.”
“Cathedral? Is it Protestant?”
The man chuckled. “No, it’s Catholic. Try coming in someday.” He tipped his hat. “Good day.”
Wolfgang watched the guy disappear into the church. Catholic? He didn’t know what a cult was, but it was the most common word he’d heard his parents associate with the word “Catholic.” If his parents were telling the truth about the Catholic Church, the man he’d just spoken to would have had devil horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. But instead he’d had straight white teeth and a handsome smile. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the appropriate words, but being there just felt right. And the music sounded as if it had come down from heaven itself. Wolfgang spent the next two hours sitting on the steps, contemplating entering. On that day he didn’t, and when he got home he spoke nothing of it to his mother. Over dinner she said to him, “You have a smile on your face, Wolfgang. I’d like to know the cause, but I’m sure you won’t tell me.”
***
Four weeks later he did enter the cathedral. He arrived at a time when there was a rush of people coming for daily Mass. He limped hurriedly to funnel inside with the herd, and once he entered he knew he’d found the part of his life he’d been missing. He was swept away by the vastness of the building, the grandeur of the architecture, the colors of the tall stained-glass windows that dominated the side walls, the height of the ceiling that hovered over what he would later learn was the nave. Upon entering he stopped without thinking to gawk and was nearly trampled by the incoming people. He stumbled back toward the baptismal pool and font that stood before the length of the center aisle. He righted himself and sidestepped out of the way, watching as the people poured in and the choir practiced singing in the choir loft above the entrance. Everything looked so different from the church he’d grown up attending with his parents, which was minuscule in comparison.
Wolfgang faced the body of the church. So many seats filled the expanse. Marble and granite everywhere. One large center aisle flanked by two side aisles. Giant pillars stood like endless tree trunks along the center aisle, stretching up to sweeping arches and a curved rooftop highlighted by a painted fresco of cherubs surrounding Mary at the time of her assumption into heaven. At the far end of the church behind the altar was the massive Coronation Window that took up much of the back wall and supported the fresco’s theme. Sunlight penetrated the stained glass, illuminating the purple, gold, and deep blue that dominated the window. The colors shone brilliantly, prism-like, across the altar and marble floor. Dust motes hovered in and out of the light. Mary was being crowned as queen. God took her body into heaven—the eternal goal. Wolfgang would dream of that window at night, and the vision would save him from the pillow that suffocated him in every nightmare.
He sat in the back row of the cathedral, captivated by that window. He listened to the priest at the pulpit, how his voice reverberated off of everything it touched. Later, during a silent lull in the Mass, he asked a neighboring woman, “What language is he speaking?”
“Latin,” she said.
Latin. He’d heard his parents refer to the language during several of their rants on the Catholic Church and the pope and Rome’s influence in the States.
One
day,
he thought,
perhaps
one
day
I
will
speak
Latin
and
preach
from
a
pulpit
while
others
listen.
The cathedral felt like home. If he could have placed a physical form on his faith, that form had been floating aimlessly in the air ever since his father’s funeral. Minister Ford’s church no longer conformed to it. But Wolfgang’s faith fit that cathedral like a glove. As soon as he’d entered, he’d felt as if the wound had begun to heal. Cells were changing, the skin was transforming, and the scar would begin to fade.
It was just a fleeting notion at first, not something he could fully understand, but over time it began to make sense. Protestants and Catholics were both Christians. His parents’ church just seemed to have a much more literal interpretation of the Bible, and that, in Wolfgang’s mind, was the beginning of the many differences, along with how they viewed the pope, confession, purgatory, and how they prayed in general. But they both prayed to the same Christ, and because of that Wolfgang couldn’t understand the animosity that existed between the two branches. For Wolfgang, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Catholic faith was the role of the Virgin Mary. His parents had always criticized the Catholics for praying to Mary, referring to it as idol worship, claiming that nowhere in the Bible did it say that Mary was greater than any other Christian.
But on Wolfgang’s second visit inside the cathedral, the statue of Mary in the back of the church called to him. He approached it slowly. Mary with her head tilted, eyes closed, so at peace holding the newborn baby Jesus. Wolfgang imagined being held in Mary’s arms. In his mind, he spoke to her and immediately felt a motherly comfort he had not known in years.
He kept his daily walks a secret for months until one day Doris decided to follow him. Part of him had been hoping for weeks that she would follow him much like she had years earlier with Charles and the Pendennis Club. She followed him around Central Park and eventually to the cathedral, where he’d bounded up the steps with an enthusiasm that had nearly made her nauseous. When he’d exited the cathedral after Mass, she’d stood horrified on the sidewalk, so angry she couldn’t look him in the eyes.
“Hi, Mother,” he’d said, when he found her. They walked home together until Wolfgang finally broke the silence: “I’ve found my calling. I’m going to attend high school at the abbey at Saint Meinrad. I’m going to become a Catholic priest.”
Doris Pike dropped to the sidewalk and wept.
***
So six years later as a twenty-year-old seminary student returning back to those same wooded hills after that confusing summer with Rose, he knelt beside his bed for what seemed like hours, searching for answers and reminiscing. He questioned whether God was still calling him to a life of celibacy and prayer. Had Rose been a test?
He thought back to how nervous he’d been the first week at Saint Meinrad at fourteen and how new it had all been, entering the quiet church every morning to pray before the sun rose, the
Liber
Usualis
heavy like a brick in his hands—never going to prayer or the abbey church without it. But Wolfgang knew the instant he’d arrived at the abbey at Saint Meinrad that it was the place for him, just as the monks had decades before when they’d founded the priory in the hills that reminded them of Switzerland. God had called him to the secluded seminary to pray amid the wooded, rolling landscape with the friars and monks. It was so peaceful, so far removed from a city that was growing louder and more polluted every year. He loved the predictability of the schedule, the simplicity of the lifestyle, and the lack of conflict that he’d been so accustomed to with his mother.
He cherished the memories of his four years in minor seminary, from age fourteen to eighteen. Despite the rigidity of the atmosphere, boys were still boys. They told jokes, they played pranks, they tossed balls on the lawn, and they fished in the lake. He chuckled as he remembered how fast they’d run after Trevor Kane had thrown a rock at the cloister’s front door, and then Trevor, ever the clown, falling in the grass and rolling down the hill to be seen by Friar Bennett moments later.