Closing Time (15 page)

His nominal protégé, the dashing, good-looking Father Griffin, was one of those flashy young priests who became hideously fashionable in the sixties—flippant and irreverent, just one of the guys, forever astounding the congregation with his wisecrack-laced sermons. Father Griffin, who seemed to have derived his Hotshot of the Hieratic persona from a controversial early-sixties film called
The Hoodlum Priest,
which lionized an inner-city padre who actively sought out, and indeed seemed to prefer, the company of society’s offal. Father Griffin also scandalized the devout by conducting Holy Mass in twelve minutes flat. Seemingly working from the premise that mass was an empty, mind-numbing ritual, he rocketed through the Introit, the Kyrie, and the Agnus Dei as if he had an urgent noon meeting at the UN Security Council. His philosophy was unequivocal: The faithful were obligated to attend Sunday Mass, yes, but there was no reason they had to suffer through it. With his snap services, Father Griffin, in the view of older parishioners, made a mockery of the most important ritual in Catholicism.

A child reactionary, I was perhaps the only young person in the congregation who shared Father Cartin’s opinion about his heir apparent, and I ceaselessly implored God—during our twice-daily private colloquies—to delay the old priest’s demise until a more suitable replacement could be found. To my mind, rituals were important, even empty ones: twenty-one-gun salutes, thirty seconds of silence, heartfelt renditions of “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters”—all these ceremonies had to be taken seriously. Father Griffin must have known that his Chinese-fire-drill masses were offensive to older parishioners, but he did not care. He was a likable chap, the hipster in the Roman collar, a bit of a cutup with the altar boys. But I think he was in the wrong line of work.

Monsignor Collis, who presided over the parish my family moved to when I was thirteen, was a fat, blustery racist. He had a lilting brogue, a touch of the poet, and the gift of gab, but like many Irish-American clergymen, he was narrow-minded and pompous, and his heart was dead. We did not know this at the time we started renting the house directly across the street from Saint Benedict’s church. When my mother announced that we were moving out of the housing project and shinnying up the economic ladder to West Oak Lane, a congenial district where my uncle Jerry and aunt Cassie lived, we were ecstatic. We would now be renting a two-story, three-bedroom house with an enclosed porch, from which we could gaze out on bustling Chelten Avenue. There was a small garden in the back and a storage shed attached to the rear of the house. There was also a bar in the otherwise dank and gloomy basement, with silhouettes of naughty dancing girls wriggling across the front panel. My father vowed to have the racy silhouettes removed, but he never did, rarely venturing into the basement except on those occasions when he took issue with municipal parking ordinances, ripped a traffic sign out of the sidewalk, and stored it downstairs. We could not imagine who our predecessors were or why they would have abandoned this august abode, assuming as we did that tenants wealthy enough to afford their very own subterranean lounge must be descendants of the Medicis.

We were even more ecstatic when we found out that Saint Benedict’s was a space-age facility with pink walls and modernist stained-glass windows and plenty of direct sunlight, and not a caliginous tomb like Saint Bridget’s, where even weddings took on the aura of funerals. The best news of all was that Saint Benedict’s had a monsignor as its pastor. Monsignors ranked just below bishops in Church hierarchy but far above ordinary parish priests. This meant that Saint Benedict’s was a parish the archdiocese took seriously. To have a monsignor running the show was a clear sign of class, sophistication, money. The Queenans were finally getting somewhere.

Where we were getting, in fact, was into a once-prosperous neighborhood that was going downhill fast. Blacks were moving in; whites were moving out; for-sale signs were popping up everywhere. Spurred on by the federally subsidized highway system that made flight to the suburbs not only feasible but enticing, middle-class white people dumped their houses at fire-sale prices and hightailed it to racially segregated suburbs all over south Jersey. Overnight, huge tracts of North and West Philadelphia turned into slums as white people made a mad dash for the exits, fleeing the African-American onslaught the way the Romans had once fled the Huns. There was never any chance for integration to work in Philadelphia, the city that wouldn’t let Jackie Robinson rent a hotel room when he made his major-league debut. Inflamed by the populist thug Frank Rizzo, a feared, inept police commissioner who then became a feared, incompetent mayor, white people acted as if their black neighbors were savages. Once in control, Rizzo gleefully harvested the seeds of discord he had planted years earlier when he begged the federal government to send him Sherman tanks to help quell urban discord fueled by “outside agitators,” meddlers, commies. This approach set the overall civic tone for the next two decades. The city imploded in the twinkling of an eye; it never recovered from the urban holocaust of the sixties. Tellingly, the no-nonsense “savior” idolized by so many whites, including my father, was the man who was ultimately responsible for the Caucasian stampede out of town. No one seemed to notice the irony.

Soon after we moved to West Oak Lane in 1963, I met a boy named Mike Craig. He was the first black person I ever knew personally; before we moved to West Oak Lane, I had never been inside a black person’s house. Mike and I became fast friends; we played football together, we played pinochle together, we started a rock band together, we attended the same high school and college; we would not lose contact until we were twenty-six, when I moved to New York City.

One day during our junior year in college, a few of us were sitting around discussing pertinent issues of state in the way upperclassmen so often will. At some point, the conversation turned to the subject of the white man’s burden, specifically the young white man’s burden: whether earnest, unbiased young white people should be held accountable for centuries of racial abuse for which they in no way felt responsible. Mike then told an amazing story. A few days before my family moved into Saint Benedict’s parish, Monsignor Collis, who bore a strong resemblance to a vindictive leprechaun, visited the fourth, seventh, and eighth grades and implored the students to be extra hospitable to the Queenans, because we were the first white people to move into the neighborhood in three years. Each of the classes contained a handful of black students, who were obliged to sit through this spiel. The monsignor did not seem to notice them, much less care. Nearly a half-century after that little pep talk, Monsignor Collis is long dead and forgotten, while the congregation that worships at Saint Benedict’s consists almost entirely of African Americans, devout servants of the Lord who inhabit a neighborhood where a white face has been a rarity for decades. The monsignor’s dream that my family’s arrival might portend a sea change in the parish’s fortunes did not come to pass; the ethnic renaissance our advent seemed to announce was a mirage.

The students and nuns at Saint Benedict’s were extraordinarily nice to us, but not even the most glowing accounts of their hospitality could attract the fresh Caucasian blood needed to stem the onrushing ebony tide, and within four years the neighborhood was down for the count. To paraphrase Debussy’s comment about Wagner’s music, the arrival of the Queenans may have seemed like a glorious sunrise, but in fact it was a bittersweet sunset. If a rapidly deteriorating white neighborhood couldn’t attract anyone more upmarket than the Queenans, it was probably time to throw in the towel.

 

Throughout my childhood, I believed that having a vocation in and of itself set me head and shoulders above my fellow students, who rarely spoke of their career plans. The nuns encouraged this swelled-head attitude, taking pains to inquire about my latest visit to Maryknoll headquarters and doing so within earshot of my classmates. It was as if they were looking forward to my being martyred, or at least tortured; and if they continued to laud my virtues in public the way they did, in front of classmates who had no dreams of one day joining the Curia, they might succeed in getting me dispatched into the arms of the creator before I even started high school. No one, myself included, seemed to realize that there was an unhealthy side to my aspirations, that unlike my peers, who derived their vocational inspiration from real-life firemen and nurses, I drew most of my inspiration from people who had been dead for two thousand years and had not breathed their last under agreeable circumstances.

It is remarkable that I even considered pursuing a career in the liturgical sector, given my father’s efforts to undermine my faith. But it is pointless to hate Christ merely because of Christians, and, in any case, my dealings with God usually went directly through His son, the saints, and my guardian angel, not through the Church itself. Bypassing intermediaries and making direct contact with Almighty God was a tactic I learned from my father. More a stay-at-home mystic than a devout churchgoer, he gave the impression that his relationship with God was a personal one and, indeed, that the two were rather chummy. He did not require the mediating force of the Church to commune with the Almighty; he went straight to the source.

For a long time he had been an ardent communicant, attending Sunday Mass and trooping in for weekly confession just like everyone else, but this did not prevent him from criticizing our parish priests for doctrinal lapses or for delivering intellectually threadbare sermons. He often told us that if his life had turned out differently, he would have happily become a Trappist monk, an unusual career choice for one who was so gabby by nature and so disinclined to stay in one place for any length of time. His churchgoing habits tailed off considerably after a grizzled missionary, on sabbatical from the fields of the Lord, heard his confession and told him he was a worthless drunk and a bully who ought to be ashamed of the way he treated his family. At least this is what my mother reported, though she may have tidied up the language here and there; my father later disclosed that his confessor had specifically referred to him as a son of a bitch. Because the priest who had rebuked him was a missionary, my father henceforth took a dislike to all those who toiled in foreign climes and then, upon their return to their native shores, acted as if their privations gave them carte blanche to pull rank on the hapless laity.

Up until then, he had been all in favor of my becoming a Maryknoll, because he, like most people, viewed missionaries as heirs to the martyrs: rough-and-tumble types infused with a Cagneyesque swagger, as opposed to diocesan priests, who were scorned as fussy bureaucrats, lazy sticks-in-the-mud, and sometimes prima donnas. Now his attitude changed. A confederate-to-be of the man who had chastised him, I now morphed into a symbol of missionary haughtiness on whom he could vent his rage. The way he sized things up, the missionary had been guilty of the sin of pride, for charity vaunteth not itself and pride goeth before a fall. Thus, once again, through no fault of my own, I had been sucker-punched by the One True Church, finding out the hard way that being devout and selfless and even cultivating an aura of personal sanctity were no match for physical size. So out came the belt.

One day my father decided to take matters of faith into his own hands, jettisoning the weekly sabbath-honoring duties mandated for all Catholics and installing a direct, personal pipeline to the creator. Now, whenever he got juiced to the gills, he would command his family to assemble after dinner and participate in the excruciating ritual of “saying the rosary.” Alcohol and Catholicism are a deadly combination, so what should have been a simple act of devotion—a humble ritual that had enabled believers to survive centuries of persecution in nests of vipers as far-flung as Ireland, Mexico, and China—he transmuted into a punitive ceremony.

Every night after dinner, he would herd the family into the living room, where we were ordered to kneel down and haul out our rosary beads. My mother, because of her arthritic knees, was allowed to sit in an armchair, but the rest of us had to take our places on the floor. My father and my sisters would usually prop themselves up against the sofa or one of the armchairs, but I always tried to kneel up straight—perhaps a bit too theatrically—a few feet away from the chairs, thereby demonstrating the intensity of my devotion to the Church Militant. But I think my father assumed that I did it to upstage him and remind him that he was getting old, which gave him yet another reason to wish he had a different son, or no son at all.

A normal family could say the rosary in about fifteen minutes. But for us, once alcohol got added to the equation, the allotted time could double, and even triple, due to extended pauses for bathetic sermonizing on my father’s part. The main portion of the rosary consisted of five sets of ten Hail Marys, each preceded by a brief recapitulation of a famous “mystery” from scripture. These mysteries—more like anecdotes—were divided into three categories: the Sorrowful, the Joyful, and the Glorious. (The Church would later add an off-brand set of mysteries called the Luminous.) Technically speaking, we were not obliged to repeat the same mysteries every night, but since my father had a soft spot for the Sorrowful tales, which hewed more closely to his worldview than the Joyful or Glorious ones, there tended to be much more discussion of crucifixion and flagellation than of angels popping through the window to make surprise announcements of impending pregnancies to flummoxed virgins. Many nights, he would ask me to lead the family in prayer. In doing so, I would try to work my way through the rosary as quickly as possible without appearing irreverent, because my sisters, who had no professional religious aspirations, loathed this sundown charade. But I dared not go too fast, or he would accuse me of sacrilege or blasphemy, and there would be no living with him for days.

Reaching the end of each decade of Hail Marys, I would dutifully note that Christ had been turned over to Pontius Pilate, or that the angel Gabriel had engaged the Virgin Mary in conversation, or that the Paraclete had descended amid tongues of fire—to the consternation of the Sadducees, who, unlike the Pharisees and the Levites, never seemed prepared for these spur-of-the-moment conflagrations—and if my father was sufficiently marinated, he might allow me to continue unobstructed. But when he was still vaguely sentient, or when he was in a particularly belligerent mood, he would halt the recitation to deliver one of his own micro-homilies, cautioning us to reflect more carefully on the deeper meaning of this or that mystery. This was an opportunity to accuse us of simply going through the motions, or of being insufficiently contemptuous of the mealymouthed weasel Pontius Pilate, or of failing to express an appropriate level of horror at Christ’s torments, especially the part where the iron spikes got driven into His Most Precious hands. He always spoke as if Christ’s crucifixion was a recent event, perhaps even a local one.