Love and Fury (26 page)

I can hear D in the hall, crying because his mother has picked him up, restraining him a bit, maybe to keep him from toddling into the funeral across the hall, but in my present state of mind I hear him grieving, too, complaining of the weight on him, the burdens he never asked for tumbling down the generations, his early and wordless apprehension of the way things are. I hear confusion and defiance; I hear the demand for an explanation, the need for comfort.

Father Marty is giving it his best shot with what he's been given to work with: only moments earlier I saw the funeral director whispering in his ear. When he says, “Beloved of many, many others, besides those who are here today,” I halfway think he is commenting on the paucity of those present. He acknowledges “the deceased's sons and grandson,” bowing slightly in our direction, but neglects to mention Veronica, an omission that doesn't escape Kathi's notice. After a quarter-century of marriage, we have a rich lexicon of nuanced aspect and expression, and she gives me a look that tells me that she is thinking what I think she is thinking: that it is a not unforgiveable but nevertheless maddeningly predictable oversight from an officer of the world's oldest boys' club.

My marriage to Kathi was the site of my fiercest battles with myself, disguised for a time as a battle with the alcohol that kept the whole rickety structure of what I thought of as myself in soft, or at least intermittent, focus.

I loved her. She loved me. But not only did neither of us feel much joy in that fact, neither of us felt any confidence that we could keep the marriage. We tried couples counseling, and more than once. At a difficult moment in one session, the two of us in separate chairs, the therapist completing the triad, I cried out in frustration: “Jesus Christ, why don't we just get your mother and my father in here and let them duke it out?”

The therapist, an engaged and demonstrative psychologist, threw up her hands, pitched forward in her chair and flung her long hair in a veil over her face. We stopped. Silence. Then she sat up, parted the curtain of hair before her face, sighed, and said, “Richard, for God's sake, what do you think we've been doing all this time?”

Now I think it more that I wish we could have had
my
mother and father in that room, and that we could have brokered and judged
that
argument. In fact, back then I was still grieving my mother, dead less than two years, whose granddaughter, whom she would never meet, had just been born.

Kathi and my father weren't close. Neither disliked the other. Each was admiring—Kathi of my father's resilience and fortitude, my father of Kathi's accomplishments, intelligence, and practicality. Neither especially enjoyed the other's company, however. No one knew better than Kathi the injuries, fears, and incapacities my father had bequeathed me, but she also saw him as a man who always meant to do the right thing.

I could never talk with my father about my marriage. I did not rely on him to have any wisdom to offer. I'd seen my parents' marriage crumble under extraordinary pressure of circumstance, devolve into a kind of “toughing it out.” And yet, during the time when it seemed our marriage was coming apart, he surprised me when I told him we weren't doing well. “Just remember, you're not an easy guy to live with. You're not. Keep that in mind.”

“Let us recite the prayer that Jesus taught us,” Father Marty instructed. “Our Father . . .”

The murmur of the recitation seemed to calm D in Veronica's arms with his thumb in his mouth. The words were on my lips but they stayed there.

What are we called these days, those of us who have left the church? Are we
lapsed? Failed? Fallen?
I suppose we are officially apostates, but what does that really mean? I guess that depends on where you stand, or kneel, or if you have to keep your unbelief quiet: maybe you're a florist or an undertaker or a church architect or that other guy, the sexton, who keeps the gold all shiny and the floors buffed and the wood polished, along with who knows how many other people who have reasons good and not so good all mashed together to keep them, at least nominally, Catholic. Only they know if they should also be counted in the roll of the lapsed, the apostate. Or are we the fallen, like the angels Michael threw out of heaven.
Non serviam.

When I was a kid you couldn't eat for twelve hours before communion, a long, long time when you're a child. You're eight or nine years old, able to take communion now because after the age of seven, the “age of reason,” you are responsible for your own soul, no excuses. You went to bed the night before, hungry, without your usual bedtime snack of bread and butter or peanut butter crackers, starving as only a kid can be starving, with only a rosary and you can't eat that. After a while, your stomach seeming to join you in the Hail Marys, you wonder what all those little yellow circles are floating around your room, and you finally decide they are the eyes of the many angels, drawn to your praying, flying through your room like those transparent tropical fish swimming in their tank at the pet store, just about invisible except for their bulging eyes. You can see them, the angels, only on those nights before you are going to communion. You take this as proof that you are holy in your post-confessional state of grace, and you would explain, if anyone asked, that the reason that their eyes were the only part of the fishy angels you could see was that the seeing, the looking, the taking it all in from as many angles as possible, is what we have in common with the angels, not our stupid thoughts that can't even figure simple math, remember the times tables, the infield fly rule, or the differences between the ways the apostles were martyred.

Sometimes turning things over and over, looking from different angles, can even trick you into thinking you're just like Jesus: God's son, not your father's. But that is a terrible thought, a sinful thought, and you have to chase it away at once, this pride. Now you'll have to stay awake longer, praying for forgiveness so you can still be in a state of grace in case you die in your sleep. You're hungry, scared that you've sinned, ashamed and begging forgiveness, but the fishy angels are still swimming round you, so you must be still okay.

Next morning, at a Solemn High Mass, the incense gets to you. They even teach you, if you're an altar boy, how to loop the chains over your fingers and let the burner—the thurible!, and what a great word to learn—hang down so you can swing it back and forth with just a little finger action like a puppeteer and pump out clouds of sweet smoke that on an empty stomach can take you out—bam!—just like that. One of the older boys warns you that when that happens you could piss your pants or even shit yourself because when you faint you have no control over that. So you make sure you go before you leave for Mass. You are learning your religion with your body. In church, you're supposed to kneel up straight unless you're old or fat; then you can rest your wide behind on the bench behind you. Everybody's stomach is making sounds like squeaky hinges or wet feet in sneakers, and then finally it's time.

When you go up to the altar rail you get to the front of the aisle and stand there and wait until someone gets up so you can take their spot that the priest has already passed. You look to see if this is the priest who works his way back along the rail in the other direction or if this is the one who turns and marches back to the place he started from with the altar boy hurrying behind him. Soon he's there and you close your eyes—unless the altar boy is a friend of yours who might try to use the edge of the gold-plated paddle (the paten, pronounced like the general) to deal a quick blow to your Adam's apple. So you stick out your tongue, and this thinnest wafer of bread that wasn't hardly bread to begin with and now isn't bread at all but the body and blood of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ lands on your tongue and all the juices suddenly flow. Sometimes your mouth stings then, and for all you want to sink your teeth into this thin chip of God, you dare not. On your way back to your pew, the Lord melts in your mouth. He tells you, as you look as holy for your parents as you can manage, that He's going to save you, your blood sugar rising now, just enough to keep you conscious till you get home and eat a bowl of cornflakes. Along the side of a house I once lived in, every summer tall fleshy bamboolike weeds sprung up. They stank and they had a nacreous milky sap in their hollow stalks that was hard to scrub from your hands. Over and over I yanked each stalk up from the ground by what seemed to be the roots—they dangled, dribbling clods—but they were really a kind of camouflage or trick. In fact, underground there was a long rope of a root, a rhizome, that stretched the length of the house and beyond and mocked my every effort.

I may as well give in and acknowledge a certain hunger for symmetry that feels like the distilled essence of my freighted and shame-crooked childhood faith.

The expression is “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” I am forever running into certain loops and knots in my thinking that suggest my hard drive has been formatted a certain way, with a Catholic operating system installed. If honesty is the antidote to all that smoky mumbo jumbo, then it begins with an acknowledgment of how at odds with yourself it leaves you to have turned away from it—ah, there! Turned away. I'm a
turned away
Catholic. Perfect. It is impossible to tell if
I
turned away, in the sense of repudiating the past, or was turned away like a guy at a restaurant without a jacket and tie. And that's, honestly, the truth: I'm not sure myself.

I'm left with tribal scars, axioms inscribed on the body, deep in the cortex from which ideas arise. I have long dismissed my yearning as mere nostalgia for the “smells, bells, and spells” of the Latin mass, and it is that, but also so much more. I am a captive of these first premises, the starting point for my consciousness, the cardinal directions making any map, and any journey at all, possible in the first place.

I once called myself an estranged Catholic. Asked why I'd left the Church, I replied that the Church had left me, that it had taken a hard right turn and kept on going where I couldn't, in conscience, follow. This is at least partly true.

There's a torn place, a jagged space between the faith that remains mine and the beliefs that made it all so seamless and comfortable. That space fills, now, with yearning. It is why my eyes well up whenever I listen to the chanting, the prayers, the several missae of Bach, Mozart, Lassus, Vivaldi, Palestrina, and others. Those tears may be the real fruit of my Catholic acculturation—now doctrineless or at least heterodox to the point of bewilderment—I'm left with sadness, wonder, compassion for myself and others, all of us doing what we can to understand how we came into being, where we're going, if we're going anywhere at all, whether life is what it seems, or more, or even denying, refusing, rejecting those questions.

Mainly, I am left with the unshakable conviction that life is a moral contest that will be judged at the hour of my death. I say unshakable because I know: I have tried to shake it off like a dog emerging from a lake. I have rolled on harsh ground, writhed against rough bark, all the while looking rabid and dangerous to those who find the idea of such a
Dies Irae
an embarrassing superstition in one they otherwise took to be an intelligent, rational person. But for myself, having tried to excise this expectation of a reckoning and finding it safely lodged out of reach deep in my own heart, I'm about as content as I believe a human being can ever be: I choose from among first principles what is already mine. As a man must eat and breathe, I accept what I require.

Is there such a thing as a post-Catholic Catholic?

“I keep a separate Sabbath,” as the poet said. Often I go into Catholic churches and sit in that quiet with the scent of incense, the shimmering tiered trays of votive lights. I sit. I do not kneel. I do not genuflect and cross myself as I was taught to do. The holy water in the fonts is not for me, has not been for me for more than four decades. I remind myself that I am not superior to those who light tapers and kneel (slipping a dollar in the slot.) But I have to remind myself, and I am humbled, shamed, by that knowledge of my own pharisaical pride.

I tell myself I am admiring the architecture, the art, the ways that the stained-glass panels form a narrative, the sculpted bas-reliefs of the Stations of the Cross on the walls, the craftsmanship; but for better and for worse the stamp of this belief system, its culture, its aesthetic and ethical precepts, is on this helpless soul forever.

Henry is circling Father Marty, his camera making a soft whirring sound as he shoots him over and over again.

At the end of the Lord's Prayer, when some of the assembled have veered down the Protestant road:
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory . . .
trailing off when they realize they are fewer voices than before, Father Marty segues to a hymn, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Two, maybe three of my cousins, Aunt Kitty's daughters, know it and join in, along with Mrs. McFadden and one or two others.

Love Divine, all loves excelling,

Joy of heaven, to earth come down

Father Marty, singing loudly, gestures with his arms, coaxing. He moves closer to the assembled and strides across the front of the area to appeal to others who are not singing. “Everybody!” he says.

Fix in us thy humble dwelling

I might sing, just to join in and because I love to sing, but I don't know the words. Father Marty is moving back across the front in a semicrouch, palms up, singing even louder, wheeling his arms as if exhorting everyone to scoop deeper, maybe for the lyrics.

All thy faithful mercies crown

I don't look at my brother. It might set us off. I do bump shoulders with him and clear my throat. “Oh, Lord,” he says.

“No pun intended.”

I can't keep myself from laughing, though. I have to hold my nose. Then I realize that if I put my handkerchief to my face and let it come no one will be able to tell the difference between laughter and tears. I feel brilliant.