Closing Time (34 page)

The students assigned to the Business section were a mystery, like the ancient Phoenicians or the lost masters of the oud. They inhabited a netherworld, marooned between those who were indisputably bright and those who were not. Their predicament evoked the specter of Limbo, that murky, poorly signposted halfway house between Heaven and Hell populated by those unfortunate enough to die unbaptized. Unlike Purgatory—which Catholics saw as a minimum-security detention facility of the mind, a rehab center where sinners underwent a middling level of chastisement for an indeterminate period before finally being allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven—Limbo was an extraterrestrial waiting room where infants, well-meaning heathens, and freelance holy men like Mahatma Gandhi sat around until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse finally cantered in. Only at the End of Days would the Good Book be opened and everyone who had ever drawn breath would learn what his eternal reward was to be. But it was clearly understood that Gandhi and Aristotle and Plato and all those unchristened infants could be kicking around Limbo for a long, long time, as their cases fell between stools, and the Last Judgment was hardly nigh.

A nun once told me that the actress Jennifer Jones, despite a generally immoral life pockmarked by numerous affairs and brazen appearances in a handful of steamy movies, would probably be dispatched to Limbo when she died, in recognition of her fine work in the 1943 film
The Song of Bernadette.
Implicit was the belief that God would turn a blind eye to Jones’s torrid onscreen affair with William Holden in
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,
ignoring that provocative, canary-hued swimsuit she pranced around in, fetching lass that she was, because
The Song of Bernadette
was one of the very few films ever made about south-western French Catholic teenaged schizophrenics that was not teeming with factual inaccuracies and glaring doctrinal errors. Limbo was a place for people who hadn’t really done anything wrong, blameless folk who were not so much in the wrong place at the wrong time as not in the right place at the right time. It was the same with the Business section: These students were neither inside nor outside life’s rich feast. They were marking time in the vestibule, cooling their heels.

Escaping from the Business section once you were in it was tantamount to escaping from Alcatraz. Many tried; few succeeded. The same was true of the lower Academic section. My junior year, I met a young man who, having fared poorly in grade school, was remanded to the bowels of the Academic section B-6. Belatedly, it became clear that Leo was much too bright to be cast out into the pedagogical darkness; he even tried to get himself promoted to a higher grade, where he belonged. But the éminences grises who ran Dougherty feared that this would set a bad precedent, as, in their view (the ultimate statement of Catholic orthodoxy), all precedents were bad. And so, they refused.

One day, an insurgency of the type one rarely encounters outside motion pictures erupted when a grassroots campaign was mounted to get Leo elected president of the senior class. This terrified the administration, as Leo was considered a free spirit, and free spirits were dangerous. Leo won the contest in a walk, amassing votes from all three sections, effortlessly defeating the assorted goody-two-shoes and hale-fellows-well-met slated for greatness by the administration, all of them from the top Academic section. Their numbers included the usual assortment of brownnosing stalwarts and yes-men, as well as a sensitive type who wrote the kinds of precociously wise short stories about soldiers dying young that made one wish a pipe bomb would explode in his locker.

Leo subsequently fared poorly in one of his classes, an event almost certainly orchestrated by the administration, and because of this he was stripped of his post. On the yearbook page devoted to the officers of the class of ’68, there are photographs of the vice president, the secretary, and the treasurer. Leo is nowhere to be found. It was as if Joe Stalin himself had popped by and assisted the yearbook editors in airbrushing him out of history. After graduation, Leo made his way to Georgetown University, where, I believe, he was preparing for a career as a lawyer. But one afternoon, having misplaced the key to his mother’s home on a return trip to Philadelphia, he tried to climb in through the second-story window, fell to the ground, and died. His life, however brief, would have made a great movie, but had it been less brief, it would have made a great life. His strange, unnecessary death haunted me. Nobody ever said that life was fair, one is constantly reminded, usually by people least in a position to know. Fortunate sons are particularly fond of mouthing such clattertrap. Leo was not a fortunate son.

It was not all that common for a student in B-2 like me to strike up a friendship with someone in B-6; in a system that thrived on social and intellectual segregation, this was like a Hottentot consorting with an Eskimo. I do not remember how or when we first crossed paths—Leo lived in a better neighborhood than I did—but it was probably on the bus. Befriending anyone outside one’s class or neighborhood was rare; the social system fostered loyalty to a tight enclave of the similarly gifted, the similarly inclined, and the similarly financed, and in any case lifelong friendships with denizens of one’s own neighborhood—to the exclusion of everybody else—was a Philadelphia tradition. I never felt part of Cardinal Dougherty, which was miles away, and catered to a better class of people than my family. To me, Cardinal Dougherty was neither iconic nor memorable; it was a building where I went to high school. As a result of its size and social structure, there were literally thousands of classmates I never met while enrolled there, including a man who grew up to be the Hanging Judge, a folk legend famous for presiding over on-the-spot trials of rowdy carousers at Eagles football games. Many alumni continued to treat Dougherty as the centerpiece of their emotional lives decades after matriculating; for some, those high school days were the happiest they would ever know. But I didn’t set foot again in the building for forty years. And that visit would have no sequel.

Cardinal Dougherty consisted of a single large building with flanking wings. It was a modern, antiseptic structure—by no means vast, by no means hideous—though its facilities were almost actionably meager. During gym class, hundreds of us would sit in the stands and watch other classes play basketball, as there were not enough courts to go around. We were supposed to be doing our homework, but mostly we liked to watch the boys smack each other around and take dozens of ill-advised jumpers, all the while hoping that someone would suffer a career-ending injury or get pummeled into a coma. The next day, these same boys would sit in the stands and watch us play, wishing us exactly the same.

Directly north of the school stood a gigantic field—wide as the steppes and equally devoid of landscapers—upon which someone in authority could easily have given the order to erect dozens of basketball courts to accommodate the ludicrously underserved student population. But no one ever did. We were told that the archdiocese had long-term plans for this property, though we never learned what these plans were. We never went outside during gym class, not once in four years; the running track and the football field were off-limits to anyone but the varsity athletes. Decades later, the field still lay empty. A popular theory bandied about at the time hypothesized that the Catholic Church was patiently waiting a full half-century to make a killing in a real estate boom, which, in the end, never quite materialized. Knowing the way the Church operated, there was a good chance it would hang on to that tract of land forever. Having survived the property-devaluing hijinks of the Vandals, the Jutes, the Visigoths, and the Huns, not to mention the depredations of the Vikings and the Moors, the Catholic Church definitely knew how to ride out an adverse economic cycle.

In the 1960s, no one was required to pay tuition to attend a diocesan high school; it was simply thought of as public school for Catholics. Students did not have to be Catholics to enroll at Cardinal Dougherty; they merely had to attend religion classes, like the rest of us, and pretend to be interested, like the rest of us. Receiving no funding from the state, the schools were maintained through the auspices of the Church itself, which viewed public schools as the spawning grounds of Satan: hotbeds of atheism, ignorance, and depravity. This was not far from the truth, as Philadelphia’s public schools had already plunged into a maelstrom of mayhem from which they would never resurface. Even though our classes were much larger than those in public school, the quality of education was demonstrably better, as was the overall atmosphere, if only because bringing meat cleavers and sawed-off shotguns to class was frowned upon by the archdiocese.

At Cardinal Dougherty, troublesome students were given a warning or two, perhaps suspended once or twice, and then shipped off
in aeternum
to one of the unappetizing public institutions, which served as unofficial landfill for parochial refuse. Because public high schools were so dangerous, with student bodies that were overwhelmingly black and poor, the mere threat of expelling a student from a Catholic institution, where the student bodies were overwhelmingly white, was usually sufficient to whip troublemakers into shape. Teachers only needed to say, “You’ll end up at Daniel Boone,” to strike terror into the most recalcitrant Irish-, Italian-, or Polish-American heart.

Though the girls outnumbered the boys at Cardinal Dougherty, the school was not, technically speaking, coeducational; rather, it was co-institutional, with girls on one side of the building and boys on the other. The student cafeterias were separated by a ten-foot-high wall, though sometimes, for no good reason, a panel door connecting the two halves of the gigantic refectory was left open, allowing the boys to sneak a peek at the girls and vice versa. The sexes were not allowed to socialize during school hours; male students caught gazing at the girls through that aperture were sometimes arraigned on charges of “mental rape” by puckish though dysfunctional priests and sent to detention. The system bred not so much misogyny as mystification; if the girls were close enough to look at, why were we forbidden to look at them?

This policy of straitjacketed gender segregation was unbelievably daft, the brainchild of overqualified eunuchs and flagellants manqué. Everything imaginable was done to prevent us from meeting Catholic girls; as a result, many of us ended up consorting with Jewesses, a development that seemed to fly in the face of everything the Church had been trying to accomplish since Caiaphas pusillanimously remanded Christ to the custody of Pontius Pilate. Others found favor with culturally adventurous Methodists or Episcopalians; I got my first blow job from a fallen-away Lutheran and remember it to this day as markedly less than satisfactory.

Even dismissal was conducted in segregated shifts. The girls got out at 2:45, the boys at 3:00, the girls at 3:15, the boys at 3:30. Students were forbidden to loiter around the premises after dismissal, making it even more difficult to meet members of the opposite sex. The girls who did stick around, the ones who salivated at the thought of riding home on the boys’ buses, were generally viewed as cheap sluts. This was not always a criticism. Female students wore long green gabardine sheaths that made them look like bean stalks. Many looked like chubby bean stalks. The girls who liked to hang around until the boys got dismissed looked like bean stalks of easy virtue. Even when they wore their skirts thigh-high or the most provocative kneesocks since Salome was in pig-tails, they remained about as sexually alluring as turnips. There was nothing fetching about them. They simply looked desperate.

With one notable exception, nothing important ever happened to me at Cardinal Dougherty. I developed no lifelong friendships, fell in love with no girls, joined no clubs, succumbed to the influence of no mentors. The school was located several miles from my home in a snooty neighborhood, and most of the students looked down on anyone living in a racially mixed community. As a result, I never felt at home there. I had close friends, true, classmates I genuinely liked, but these friendships did not endure very far into adult life. Because of this, my memory of those years is hazy, with few vivid images standing out. Cardinal Dougherty was staffed by a team of dedicated, generally competent diocesan priests, supplemented by a small group of lay teachers, all of them male. The school, as one would expect of an institution operated by a sect that had once threatened to incinerate Galileo, was stronger in the arts than the sciences, with the physics department in particular standing out as a ratiocinative Death Valley.

Due to the demands of work, I did not try out for any sports teams, though the only one I would have had a shot at in a school that large was cross-country. For purely philosophical reasons, I did not work on the school newspaper. Like all high school newspapers, ours was staffed by preening twits who wrote in a style best described as Lycée Hemingway: “We were on the street. There were three of us. There were three of them. We were white. They were not.” I had already decided that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, but I did not want to write like Ernest Hemingway, if only because everyone else did. I did not want to write some of the time the way he wrote all of the time, and I did not want to write most of the time the way the windbags on the newspaper wrote all of the time. Moreover, I could not see the point in publishing anything until I had something to say. I did not have anything to say until I was thirty-five and even then, not much.

Nothing served up in my high school literature classes played any role in my becoming a writer. I never strolled into a classroom and fell under the spell of a charismatic teacher, the way I had when I studied Latin with Father Ratermann in the seminary. I would not encounter another inspirational teacher until college, but by that point my career path was clear, so inspiration was no longer required. Whatever encouragement I did receive as an adolescent came from my father, a high school dropout who had somehow intuited that literature was a balm and a beacon, not a dead amphibian to be carved up in a laboratory. Writing, he understood, had cathartic power; putting words on paper enabled the otherwise impotent to exert a measure of control over their environment, to transform reality in all its cheerlessness into something more to their liking. Being a self-loathing drunk did not automatically disqualify him as a mentor; as I would later learn, most writers were self-loathing drunks. It came with the territory.