Timebends (15 page)

We arrived at the Cleveland railroad station during the hottest week of that scorching summer. Mrs. Julia Slattery was already close to tears as she leaned stiffly forward from the waist in her
flowered cotton dress to touch lips to her daughter's cheek. Flushing with anger when the rear door of his Dodge remained stuck, Mr. Matthew Slattery turned to me to say, “It's the unions, you know—they forbid their members to do a good job.” I now began to sense an atmosphere of civilized duplicity that was already edging toward farce if not outright hysteria. As we rode from Cleveland toward suburban Lakewood, I heard for the first time bridges, corporate headquarters, and public installations referred to with the possessive—“And here is our Standard Oil Building, and there is our Cuyahoga County Highway Department, and there is our Lake Erie. The last time we drove to New York we drove over your George Washington Bridge . . .”—leaving me with a feeling of foreignness that was entirely new. But here was the prewar Middle West in all its pristine innocence, that real America to which every political piety was addressed. Here were the Adamic people in the land of the unalienated, these were the folk who had to be appeased lest they rise from dim sleep and most indignantly evacuate the halls of Congress.

In the rooms of their ample house on the leafy street was no bright picture but only, in the living room, a brown statuette of Christ crucified hanging from the wall. Something parched touched everything, and even the fruit in the bowl on the dining room table seemed to have been counted. We had, it now appeared, to wait out the week until Friday and the wedding, and though there were plenty of beds in the house, I was not, in propriety, to sleep there under the same roof as my intended but in a rooming house some sterilizing blocks away. The farce of this separation when Mary and I had more or less lived together for two years, as her parents must certainly have been aware, was sustained in all seriousness. Infinite was everyone's capacity, including mine, to dissimulate. Nevertheless, here was the source of Mary's self-discipline, which I—or part of me—had such respect for.

As distant as all this was from the effulgent heat and color of Jewish life, the real surprise to me was a certain deeper similarity. At breakfast Mrs. Slattery, reading in the
Plain Dealer
that a man had been arrested for falsifying his company's books, said, “I hope he isn't Catholic,” just as my mother would have, only substituting “Jewish” as her worry. For the first time, Catholics, despite their Christianity, their cathedrals, and their political clout, appeared as a minority to me, and a defensive one at that. And I saw Mary and myself more deeply related than I had until now imagined. It was only dawning on me what courage she must have had to break
from this, and all alone, with no allies in some surrounding of dissent! From this vantage America seemed an unbroken tapestry of conforming obedience, of clenched teeth, of exhausted sleep from days and years of submission.

The “relationship” gathered in the evening on the front porch, aunts and uncles and cousins, to look me over, their first heathen. (The scheduled ceremony came under the official heading “For Moslems, Heathen, and Jews” who were marrying a Catholic.) Some stayed an hour or so, others just shook hands, nodded a welcome, and left. All in all there must have been more than twenty visitors, and the strain was telling on everyone. The women fanned themselves in the rockers and Mr. Slattery spat tobacco juice onto the lawn while his wife nearly groaned in despair and glanced over at me as I pretended not to have seen. Relief from it all came with the arrival of Mary's cousins, young men and women her own age who were simply glad to see her and talked with me as though we were all citizens of the same nation.

And now the young parish priest who would be marrying us arrived for his formal visit. He happened to appear at an interesting moment: Uncle Theodore Metz, recently retired as chief of police, a small, jocular, muscled man, was telling how he had put one over on his son, Barney, a new police lieutenant and Mary's favorite cousin. Through high school, she had been his frequent shipmate aboard the many small boats he loved to sail on nearby Lake Erie. Theodore had ordered Barney, as a neophyte cop, to don civilian clothes and investigate a report of systematic ripoffs of customers at the local whorehouse. Utterance of the word itself sent all eyes flitting my way to see whether I could bear up under the sound and roused a fluctuating burble of giggles and a nervous exhaling of pent-up air from the lungs of the ladies. Then all went silent as Theodore Metz unraveled his plot; he had sent a detail of cops to the whorehouse while Barney was inside, ordering them to rush the building suddenly, burst into the rooms, and collar everyone in sight—including his son, whose protests could not convince the cops that he was in the place on business. The uproar from the crowded porch clamored up and down the quiet block as Barney's indignant explanations were repeated by his laughing father. “I had the fellas put him in the paddy wagon with the girls!” Oh, it was all delicious, but anxious glances were still coming my way to see if my opinion of the family had collapsed.

It was when the laughter was billowing up that the priest appeared. I was surprised by his youthfulness; he seemed younger
than my twenty-five. But more surprising was the suddenness of the awed silence at their first sight of him, so pale and adolescently thin, coming up the stoop from the narrow path to the street. He said his good evenings, shook my hand and, immediately turning away, held Mary's hand a bit longer and sat down. A propriety approaching real anxiety seemed to grip them as they leaned forward to catch every one of his softly spoken remarks, and his least attempt at humor brought immensely relieved laughter. “I have had a very long day” was greeted by a long sympathetic “Aaahh,” and “It's been so hot I've been tempted to take a swim in the lake” created a thrilled flutter of amazed laughter, a vastly appreciative compliment to his simple humanity. After ten minutes or so he said his good nights and left, allowing the former chief of police to finish his whorehouse story.

Later that evening, after the relatives had gone, Mary and I escaped for a walk through the neighborhood. She seemed grim and daunted by the lengths to which her parents were carrying their inane notions of decorum and their subservience to what they thought the Church required of them. I now saw them, however, as victimized people with whom we could end up as friends. She apologized for putting me through all this, but her mother would probably collapse with guilt if some touch of the Church's sanction, however slight, was not set upon her daughter's marriage. In the unremitting heat of the night a kind of desiccation of the spirit oppressed both of us at the prospect of this pretense we had to continue to play out.

A new surprise each day. Now it appeared that we were to take instruction from the young priest in the Church's rules of family life. Growing grimmer by the minute, Mary led me to the priest's office next morning, where we sat listening to him asserting the ban on birth control and the Church's insistence that our children be baptized and raised as Catholics, none of which we had any intention of carrying out. Youthful as he was, after a few minutes he got the message of our silence, hurried through a few more rote sentences of admonition, and asked if we had any questions. I did, in fact—a genuine one. Several years earlier, Brooks Atkinson, the
New York Times
drama critic, had reported a front-porch conversation with a Kentucky farmer. Atkinson asked the farmer, a devout churchgoer, if he had any idea what the Holy Ghost was. The farmer thought a moment and replied, “I figure it's sort of an oblong blur.” For some reason the Atkinson story had set me off on a brief, fruitless search for a clear definition of this mysterious
entity. Now that I had this expert before me, I eagerly asked what was meant by the Holy Ghost.

He pursed his lips and glanced out the leaded windows, whose watery light emphasized the gauntness of his cheekbones and his tight skin. Turning, his blue eyes flickered away from mine in clear resentment. “I think we'd better conclude now and maybe take that up on some other occasion. But I have a duty to tell you”—and now he turned to Mary, seated beside me—“that our experience shows these marriages never last.”

Both of us were so stunned we could not answer or even move. The priest stood up and took Mary's hand and said goodbye, then nodded a distant farewell to me and left us to walk out of the office into the open air alone. Outside, Mary laughed as though a cord had at last been cut by something real, an authentic expression that had brought life back. She seemed to straighten up, shedding a furtiveness that was so uncharacteristic of her. “Aren't they something?” she said, grinning. She knew where she was again. Once more the line had been drawn for her, the old line that she had crossed at fifteen and would not cross again. The priest's challenge had clarified her loyalties and her present duty, which was simply to do a kindness to her mother's sensibilities. And so all that remained now was to go on avoiding conflict for two more days until Friday and the wedding

Or so we thought. After an agonizingly empty day of driving us aimlessly about in the killing heat, Mr. Slattery announced, as napkins were being folded following the sliced ham dinner, that there was apparently some foul-up with the dispensation. It was even possible, although not yet sure, that the wedding would have to be postponed over the weekend, from Friday to Monday. The prospect of three additional enforced days in what by now threatened to become a corrupting dishonesty snapped something in my head, and I heard myself telling Mr. Slattery across the table that I couldn't possibly stay past Friday since I had important business in New York first thing Monday morning, a happy invention that seemed to raise my standing at the table. Mrs. Slattery's eyes remained demurely lowered to her hands, which were smoothing a napkin. I was surprised and confused by Slattery's nodding encouragingly as I spoke.

The reason for his agreement soon appeared—he would lose his two-hundred-dollar deposit on the reception he had arranged in the local hotel, and two hundred dollars was not easily come by in those days for a retired city employee. This thin bald man, who had
been as nervously formal with me as if I were a large bird that had flown into his house, now rather mechanically strove for intimacy, stretching his lips away from his dentures and touching my elbow with his fingers as he asked me, in an almost conspiratorial hush, to have patience. But wasn't there anyone he could appeal to? I asked. Yes, he was thinking of trying to call on the monsignor—but this was clearly something he had just that minute dredged up out of his shame.

Next morning at breakfast we were all quickened by the prospect of action, and the mood lasted through the ride downtown and up to the top of a tall office building in the Cleveland business district where we sat for an hour in a dark oak waiting room. His name called, Slattery nearly leaped up and soundlessly hurried through a door. Twenty minutes later, after his interview, he apologetically explained that he was still not sure we would have the dispensation by Friday as the papal delegate in Washington, who alone could issue it, was on a golfing vacation and could not be reached. Only halfheartedly now, he swiped at making this excuse seem reasonable, and riding back to Lakewood, I realized in the silence between him and his daughter that he was experiencing a deep humiliation before me, a stranger. Getting out of the car in front of his house, I could not bear to meet his flushed, evasive gaze.

Alone with Mary, I felt that she too was humiliated but as powerless as her father. Her submission was intolerable. I went to the phone book and found the number and called the monsignor's office. Slattery, standing only a few feet away unabashedly eavesdropping, looked on wide-eyed as I asked to speak to the monsignor himself.

The unperturbed voice on the other end replied that the monsignor was occupied. I felt an uproar rising in me, an anger fed in part by the long hot train ride from New York, the tasteless unseasoned food in this house, the idiocy of sleeping in a hot furnished room, the appalling mood of unrelieved blame that emanated from my crucified kinsman hanging on the wall, the repression of every human instinct in these people, my insecurity about my unknown future as a writer, the fall of France to the Nazis just weeks before, and guilt about marrying without my family present—for they had made no mention of wanting to come, and the expense of it all was beyond my means anyway. Anger created a new reality here, the reality of Mary, whom I felt myself falling in love with in a way I had not when she had seemed so strong and resolute a girl rather
than the foundering and vulnerable young woman she was now. I was happy.

“I am calling,” I said as quietly as I was able, “to inform you that we will be married tomorrow whether there is a dispensation or not.”

“Just a moment,” said the voice, quite as routinely as a moment before, when it had announced the monsignor unapproachable.

During the wait it was probably inevitable that I thought of the constitutional prohibition against the establishment of religion. Suddenly, the obvious fact that one could, if one desired, marry outside the Church, that its writ was limited to those who professed belief in it, was a miracle and a blessing.

Another voice, announcing itself as the monsignor's: “What seems to be the problem?”

I explained that Slattery had this deposit and that we had come from New York and all the rest.

“But the papal delegate has gone for the weekend and can't be reached,” the monsignor explained with a certain blind reasonableness!

“Well then, we'll have to be married by a justice of the peace.”

“
She
can't do that.”

“But can't a telegram be sent to Washington? This is very important to the family.”

“My dear sir, the Catholic Church has been doing business this way for nearly two thousand years, and you are not going to change that before tomorrow.”