Darling (11 page)

Malcolm had a car and an after-school grocery-delivery route and a criminal penchant. I knew, because he told me, he'd been caught breaking into empty houses.

He walked like an illustration from
Huckleberry Finn
—arms akimbo, fingers spread, picking up his knees as though he were stepping over creaking floorboards. He had dark eyes, very white skin, and an expression of condescending pity like that of a raptor bird, if raptor birds had eyes that dark. He said he was part Chickasaw.

What is a season in the life of a high school boy? Four months or so. Malcolm's next season was girls. Basketball and girls.

On summer nights, my mother and Helen and I stayed up late watching old movies. At some point in the movie the women would retire from the table and leave the men to their brandy and cigars. I preferred movies that followed the women upstairs to a region of knowing. . . .

The doorbell rang at eleven thirty.

My mother went to the upstairs front window. I went down to answer the bell. It was Malcolm.

“Come out for a minute,” Malcolm whispered.

I closed the door behind me.

“Smell this,” he said, thrusting his index finger under my nose.

I did not understand.

He named a girl I did not know. He was ecstatic. He leaned backward on his legs and silently crowed. He jumped from the top porch step down to the sidewalk. He ran away, down the street. I never heard that audacious male voice again. Unfleshed echoes in
Les Liaisons dangereuses,
perhaps, or the memoirs of Casanova, but never again the naked envy of the seducer.

4. Picasso

Because I had arrived early for my nephew's wedding in Golden Gate Park, I decided to walk over to the de Young Museum to look at an exhibition from the Musée Picasso in Paris. Many of the paintings displayed Picasso's naked infatuation with female-ism, with convexity, concavity, bifurcation. The female face, too, was divided into competing arrondissements—one tearful, one tyrannical—like the faces of playing-card Queens.

Concurrent with the Picasso there was an exhibit at the museum of the fashion of Cristóbal Balenciaga, another Spaniard,
Picasso's contemporary. But whereas the sexed, sublime painter undressed women as unashamedly as if he had created them, the modernist couturier made formidable casings for women, unassailable pods, chitins, scapulars, shields—made saints of women, made queens, bullfighters, pagodas, nurses, priests, Jeannes d'Arc—conventuals of the Order of Fashion who, thus armed, might one day slay the grizzled minotaur of the maze-like gallery upstairs.

•   •   •

I was the one who insisted it was time for you to lose the jeans and the sweatshirts, Darling. I sat through a rainy Saturday afternoon on a fake Louis Quinze chair in a salon at the Beverly Hills I. Magnin as the Delphic vendeuse consulted her clattering racks to bring forward a succession of looks for you to try. Patience, Darling, I cautioned—I could tell you were about to bolt. The stockroom door opened one more time, and the priestess stepped forward, bearing in her arms a red Chanel cocktail dress that betokened revenge on a shallow, faithless husband.

•   •   •

A middle-aged woman in a brown wool suit tapped my shoulder after Mass. She knew my name. She said she had read an interview I gave to an online magazine on the gay marriage controversy in California. At that time, a Catholic archbishop colluded with officials from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a campaign to protect the sacred institution of marriage from any enlarging definition (including civil marriage, which the Catholic Church does not recognize as sacramentally valid). Campaign checks to be made payable to the Knights of Columbus.

The Knights of Columbus is a lay fraternal organization sanctioned by the Catholic Church. The Knights are an admirable bunch of guys—I believe “guys” is the right word—who spend
many hours performing works of charity. On festival days, the Knights get themselves up with capes and swords and plumed hats like a comic-opera militia.

The woman in the brown suit did not say she agreed with my comments in the article; she did not say she disagreed. She said: “I am a Dominican nun; some days I cannot remember why.”

I will stay in the Church as long as you do, I said.

Chummy though my reply was, it represented my abrogation of responsibility to both the Church and the nun.

A gay man easily sees himself as expendable in the eyes of the Church hierarchy because that is how he imagines the Church hierarchy sees him. The Church cannot afford to expel women. Women are obviously central to the large procreative scheme of the Church. Women have sustained the Church for centuries by their faith and their birthrates. Following the sexual scandals involving priests and children, women may or may not consent to present a new generation of babies for baptism. Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.

It is because the Church needs women that I depend upon women to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.

I shook hands with the Dominican nun and we parted.

But even as I type these words, the Vatican has initiated a campaign against American nuns who (according to the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith) promote “radical feminist themes” and who remain silent regarding their Excellencies' positions on women's reproductive rights and homosexuality. A nun's silence is interpreted as dissent in this instance.

The Church—I say the Church but I mean the male church—is
rather shy in the presence of women, even as the God of scripture is rather shy of women. God will make a bond of friendship with a hairy patriarch. God interferes with Sarah through her husband. God courts Mary by an angel.

And yet the God of intention entered history through a woman's body (reversing the eye of the needle). The Church, as she exists, is a feminine act, intuition, and pronoun: The Christian Church is the sentimental branch of human theology. (I mean that as praise.) The Church watches the progress of Jesus with the same sense of his heartbreaking failure as did the mother who bore him. In John's account of the wedding at Cana, Mary might be played with maximum flibberty-jibbertry by Maggie Smith. Jesus struggles to extricate his legs from the banquet table in the courtyard; his companions can't help sniggering a bit. The first showing of Jesus's power over Nature, the changing of water into wine, makes no clear theological sense. But as the first Comic Mystery, the scene makes perfect domestic sense. Jesus is instructed by his mother.

5. The Sisters of Mercy

I would never in a million years have thought of lobbing a “darling” Franz Schurmann's way, though Franz and I had lunch almost every week for twenty years. Now I wish I had, for Franz would have sluiced the noun through the brines of several tongues, finally cracking its nacreous shell. He would have told me something interesting. Or he would have spit the noun onto his bone plate as something the Chinese have no word for, no use for. (The Chinese tongue had become Franz's point of view.)

Not that Franz was unsophisticated or unacquainted with theatricality. As a young man at Harvard, Franz was the best friend
of Bertolt Brecht's son. Franz spent several summers living among the colony of European expatriots in Santa Monica, with Brecht and Weigel and Mann and Isherwood.

After Harvard, Franz embarked on a Pashto-idyll, playing the scholar-gypsy to the hilt: two years on horseback through the Khyber Pass on an anthropological search for some remnant of a lost tribe of blue eyes.

When Franz passed through the molars and incisors of remote mountain villages, he was often invited to share a meal with the bearded men who squatted near a fire. The women who had prepared the meal stood several yards away, watching and waiting for the men to finish, for the men to pluck the remnants of food from their beards.

Franz caught a young woman's eye. She held his glance for only a moment before she spat on the ground and looked away, over her shoulder.

•   •   •

The women who educated me—Catholic nuns belonging to the Irish order of the Sisters of Mercy—looked very much like Franz's Afghan village women. They wore veils, long skirts, long sleeves, laced black shoes—Balenciagas all.

Of the many orders of Catholic nuns founded in nineteenth-century Europe, the majority were not cloistered orders but missionary orders—nursing and teaching orders. Often the founders of such congregations came from upper-middle-class families, but most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind. They became the least-sequestered women imaginable.

It was in the nineteenth century, too, that secular women in Europe and North America formed suffrage movements, following in the footsteps of missionary nuns and Protestant
missionary women. Curiously, it was the burqa-like habits nuns wore—proclaiming their vows of celibacy—that lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of a romantic air.

When seven Irish Sisters of Mercy (the oldest twenty-five) disembarked in San Francisco in December of 1854, they found a city filled with dispirited young men and women who had followed the legend of gold. The Sisters of Mercy spent their first night in California huddled together in St. Patrick's Church on Mission Street; they had no other accommodation. In the morning, and for months afterward, the sisters searched among the wharves and alleys of San Francisco, ministering to men, women, and children they found sleeping in doorways.

The
Christian Advocate,
an anti-Catholic newspaper, published calumny about the nuns; the paper declared them to be women of low repute and opined they should move on—nobody wanted them in San Francisco.

In 1855 the Sisters of Mercy nursed San Franciscans through a cholera outbreak. In 1868 the nuns cared for the victims of a smallpox epidemic. In 1906, after the great earthquake and fire, the Sisters of Mercy set up a tent hospital in the Presidio; they evacuated hundreds of the sick and elderly to Oakland across the Bay. City officials in the nineteenth century invited all religious orders to ride San Francisco's trolleys and cable cars free of charge because of the city's gratitude to the Sisters of Mercy.

As they had done in Ireland, the Sisters of Mercy opened orphanages, schools, and hospitals in California and throughout the United States. By the time our American mothers caught up with the nuns in the 1960s—with the possibility of women living fulfilling lives, independent of family or marriage—the nuns had discarded their black robes in favor of sober pedestrian attire. Vocation has nothing to do with dress-up.

Veiled women were seldom thereafter seen on the streets of America or in European cities, not until the influx of immigrant Muslim women from North Africa and the Middle East in the 1980s.

A shadow of scandal now attaches in Ireland to the founding order of the Sisters of Mercy. An Irish government report released in 2009 documents decades of cruelty perpetrated particularly upon children of the working class in orphanages and homes for unwed mothers run by the Sisters of Mercy. One cannot doubt or excuse the record. The record stands.

The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas—the women I revere—are fewer and older. The great years of the order seem to have passed, but the Sisters continue their ministry to the elderly, to immigrants, to the poor. The Sisters are preparing for a future the rest of us have not yet fully comprehended—a world of increasing poverty and misery—even as they prepare for their absence from the close of the twenty-first century.

Nuns will not entirely disappear from San Francisco as long as we may occasionally glimpse a black mustache beneath a fluttering veil. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is an order of gay drag nuns whose vocation is dress-up.

Like the Sisters of Mercy in early California, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took up their mission in bad repute. Unlike the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of P.I. have done everything in their power to maintain a bad repute.

They have their detractors. I was one. I wrote against them because I saw them as mocking heroic lives. Thirty years ago I had lunch with Jack Fertig, aka Sister Boom Boom, in a taqueria on Mission Street. He arrived wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On the wall at the rear of the restaurant was a crucifix—not, I assumed, ironic. The nun in mufti approached the crucifix and fell to his
knees. He blessed himself; he bowed his head. Whether this was done for my benefit I don't know. There was no follow-up, no smirk, no sheepishness, no further demonstration of piety. I did not question him about it; I was astonished. But, as I say, I wasn't taken in.

Before he died, Jack Fertig converted to Islam.

A few years ago, I stood on a street corner in the Castro District; I watched as two or three Sisters of P.I. collected money in a coffee can for one of their charities. Their regalia looked haphazard on that day—jeans and tennis shoes beneath their skirts, like altar boys. I couldn't help but admire how the louche nuns encouraged and cajoled the young men and women who approached. The Sisters' catechism involved sexual precaution, drug safety, with plenty of trash repartee so as not to spook their lambs: “Do you have a boyfriend, honey? Are you getting enough to eat? Where do you sleep? Are you compliant with your meds?”

I experienced something like a conversion: Those men are ministering on a street corner to homeless teenagers, and they are pretty good at it. No sooner had I applied the word “good” than I knew it was the right word. Those men are good.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do what nuns have always done: They heal; they protect; they campaign for social justice; they perform works of charity. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have an additional mission: They scandalize.

For example, on Easter Sundays, the Sisters host the “Hunky Jesus Contest” in Dolores Park. The Sisters and their congregation seem only to be interested in satirizing the trappings of S&M already available in Roman Catholic iconography. (One cannot mock a crucifixion; crucifixion is itself mockery.)