Gospel (75 page)

(How about this one?
If the Son makes you free, then you will be free indeed.
)

Oh, I get it. We've endured torments of Fathers and memories of my wife, the Virgin Martyr, and now it's time for the Son. Well, I'm stubborn on this. Rudolph and I never got on, never had a relationship. It is a dark thought: but it is a strange solace, since he is dead, that he despised me. Imagine the loss of an only son who adored you!

(But he didn't despise you.)

Could have fooled me. Yeah, even now I wonder how did Rudy get so fragile? In the house with all my noise and racket? Always so sickly and wounded as a child. He was smothered by his mother. Beatrice raised him to agree with her on all my faults. If I corrected Rudy, she defended him. If I suggested he get out and play with the other children in the neighborhood, she argued how unfit the other boys were for her son. I was always cast as the malcontent who picked on Rudy, who set standards he could not live up to. God knows I had no standards for him—

(That's not what you spent his adolescence saying, is it? You compared his own report cards to your own. He was going to be twice as smart as you or he was a failure.)

I never put it like that! A little fatherly pressure here and there—

(You took quite a patriotic line with him concerning Vietnam.)

No, I merely said he would have trouble getting a job one day if he didn't go if he got drafted. That no one wanted to hire a draft dodger. I'd been to Korea after all—

(And hated every minute of it, according to you the other day.)

Well, if I didn't actively say he shouldn't go it wasn't because I didn't care for him, it was because he was going to Princeton and that ended the speculation. He was a freshman in 1972 and the draft was winding down. Surely he knew I didn't want him to go to war—

(You quoted Caesar, Martial, Xenophon, Gibbon, and spiced it up with Herodotus and Aristotle, in a series of arguments persuading him of what a country could ask of its young men.)

Okay, I was an ass! But I would have said none of it if I thought he might actually have to go over there … Oh, God, how I must have looked to him though, what an old man I must have seemed, how loveless and arcane and goddam pretentious on top of all that. But look, he never tried to accommodate me either, did he? He never cared a damn for any of my pursuits. I sent him to college, put bread on his table, paid for his hippie phase—never once did he feign interest in my life!

(Yes, just like you didn't show interest in your father's unloading crates at the stockyards.)

It's hot and airless in this shack … I need some more water, I need cool air, I need food, I need a drink—I'll trade everything else for a drink. I am being tormented by devils again!

(O'Hanrahan in the Wilderness. Not forty years, but forty hours will do.)

A merciful God would let me have a drink about now, manna from the skies!

(You argued with Rudy about alcohol as well, didn't you?)

With Mrs. Temperance Union at the dinner table each night, what could you expect? I couldn't have a glass of champagne at a wedding without a lecture.

(Because in your whole life you never stopped at merely a glass of champagne. Taking after those family weddings you hated.)

Honor thy father and thy mother—remember that one? He had no right to speak of my drinking to my face. What kind of son calls his father an alcoholic?

(One with an alcoholic for a father.)

I did not destroy my family! We had plenty of money. Except for the Christmas debacle, I never missed birthdays, never pulled all the hard-core alcoholic antics. But in those days when they were trying to force me out of the department, I needed the drink to get me through it and maybe if I'd had some sympathy, some support, from my family I wouldn't have needed it! Besides, Rudy and I fought over marijuana. I caught him smoking marijuana in the garage, with that other longhaired creep friend of his … forget his name.

(Hypocrite! And you haven't smoked hashish in your Middle Eastern travels? Didn't turn up some narcotic-strength absinthe with the fathers at Montserrat in Spain? Your relations would have changed had you sat down and joined him! It was another excuse for you to play the authoritarian, ever-critical father, the one role you were least suited to. Speaking of drugs, what about the bottle of Percodan you're making your way through? And you forgot to get the prescription refilled in Athens, didn't you?)

O'Hanrahan panicked now that this shortage occurred to him: my precious Percodan! I've got only a pill or two left. Enough if my side acts up again. No sense worrying about it, or I will bring on the pain and I'll be even more miserable than I am now …

(And you had the nerve to lecture Rudy about drugs.)

Oh, poor Rudy. Look, no matter how bad I was to him, I am still more to be pitied for having to endure his death, everything all unresolved. I hope he knew …

(Knew what?)

Knew how much I loved him.

(You never told him.)

How often I thought of him when I was at work, when he had moved to Princeton to study, how I missed him—

(He never knew.)

If only … if only he'd had the slightest interest in my life. I'd regale all those who'd hear with salacious faculty gossip, with bizarre lives of the saints, with all the puerile things that amuse me to my taste, the stuff I bombard Lucy with … He just didn't care. He'd stare at me from his half-touched plate of food—and Beatrice never could cook worth a damn—moping, brooding, can I be excused now? I embarrassed him, it seemed. It was an ordeal to sit with me. If I said something funny he would swallow his laughter, not wanting to give me the satisfaction of amusing him. He was deeply ashamed of me in some way. That was his mother's doing. I was being judged by them, nightly. They'd go to all the high masses and I would stay home refusing to go. That's it, perhaps, he thought I was damned, irretrievably lost.

(Most sons find their fathers irretrievably lost.)

He was a fag too.

(So?)

O'Hanrahan batting a thousand there! O'Hanrahan the loser once again! Screwed up being a Jesuit, being a head of a department, being a published scholar—you name it, befouled by Patrick Virgil O'Hanrahan's magic touch. Figures if he had a kid he'd turn out homo.

(Your heart is so far from charity, Patrick.)

You see, his mother effeminized him. Look, the concept of being a queer doesn't bother me, not me the Hellenophile, the scholar of the ancient Mediterranean world. Hell, half the priests and monks and scholars I deal with are to some extent women-haters, some are out-and-out screaming. Maybe I even had an unverbalized hankering back a million years ago when I pledged to be a Jesuit novice, a life among men, mentors and students, a thinly veiled rehash of the lover and his beloved from ancient times. Christ never said a thing against homosexuality because there wasn't even a goddam
word
for homosexuality in Christ's time. And what a word: Greek prefix and Latin root—what moron thought that was proper? Look, I've given the lecture on tolerance to my classes a thousand times. It was natural in ancient times that men should love men, David and Jonathan, the
Song of Solomon
is flaming, the very idea of Christian male closeness, like Jesus and John whom Jesus loved, probably
helped
spread Christianity through the ancient world.

(Nice lecture. Rudy would have enjoyed it.)

But see? I'm no Bible-thumping, fag-bashing born-again. I'm educated, I'm rational, I'm … but I'm still sorry my son was queer. It was one more separation between us, something we couldn't have in common. I bet he did it to spite me!

(There's an intelligent thought.)

You know, Beatrice couldn't have survived if her little Rudy, her ally, her witness to her martyrdom—forgive the etymological redundancy—fell under the spell of another woman. So she made sure when he was growing up that no other woman ever could get a foot in the door.

(You can't
make
anyone gay, Patrick.)

And all his adolescent piety that went with it. Fifteen years old, other kids were getting laid and playing sports—my boy was weeping before tacky plastic crucifix chapels with Beatrice and the old ladies who doted on him, shaped him, molded him into the little fruitcake he became. He knew all the old ladies and their names and problems …

(With all the other human varieties, there's room for gay people in the Church too. Always has been, always will be.)

How wrong and misguided all my attempts to communicate to Rudy were, how I messed it up time and time again. Believe me, Rudy, I didn't really hate your gayness or your liberal politics or your hippie phase or your changing majors three times or taking your mother's side, I didn't hate anything about you … it's just my way! It's my manner to be argumentative and blustering. Why was I cursed with the very type of son who would take offense at it, who would hate me for it?

(Why didn't you look up Stephen?)

Stephen. That guy Rudy lived with his sophomore year, in that ratty hippie house I disapproved of. The pale guy with the black beard, Jewish maybe. Jewish named Stephen? Yeah, I guess it happens. Real intellectual type, could spew Marx at you at ten paces in his belligerent, self-satisfied way. I guess they
did it
together. I sicken to think of my son putting … ehh, why pursue these thoughts? Maybe they were happy.

I had to attend a conference at Princeton and since Rudy didn't have a phone I couldn't warn him that I was dropping in. Perhaps I wouldn't have warned him anyway. He and Stephen shared this upper room of this near-condemned Edwardian house off campus, with twenty-some long-haired, bead-wearing, unshaven, Afroed, psychedelic would-be revolutionaries living in the house as well. But he took me up to his room and I remember the piles of books—that was good, he read, he read a lot. I should have told him, right then and there, how proud I was he was a reader, a studier. Even if it was some bullshit like political science. Anyway, in pranced Stephen and said rather argumentatively that it was his room too, and, what? I'm stupid? One double mattress covered in Indian printed sheets in the middle of the room. So surprise, surprise. Rudy nervously walked downstairs and …

(You remember what he said?)

He said, “I don't care if you hate me, Dad. There's nothing you can do about it, I'm homosexual and that's all there is to it. But don't tell Mom, okay?”

My son said he didn't care if I hated him! I was such a dead loss, such a write-off, it didn't matter!

(But what did you do?)

I indulgently, deliciously, luxuriantly, playing out every baroque detail with relish and delectation, told my wife the truth and rubbed her pious, pinched old-woman's face in it. Take that! Happy now? So much for grandchildren, Beatrice O'Hanrahan!

(And what happened?)

Oh, the usual. A talk with the father—that weak-chinned, sallow Polish priest who had the facial coloring of a pirogi. Much lamentation, many prayers to Mary. And there was blame. I blamed Beatrice, she blamed me. And Rudy called to curse at me on the phone, which I deserved, and I suppose I said something backward and philistine—

(As a faggot, he was no son of yours.)

How kind of the day to bring it all back so clearly. My heart is ashes. Yet I dwell on it, pick it like a wound: I can't see my boy … I can't quite visualize him kissing that kid with that unruly beard …

(Stephen was at the funeral.)

Yes, crying his eyes out. I should have …

(Should have what?)

I should have gone over and consoled him, but …

(You glared at him instead, like he had been indecent to show up.)

But I'm not like that, damn it! I'm not that bad a person! I can be fun, I can be charitable, I can be warm and use my vast collection of tales to comfort and bring wisdom to people's troubles!

(Except when you dealt with the people you loved.)

I wonder if …

(You wonder if you might one day yet talk to Stephen?)

Yes, it's almost twenty years since Rudy's accident and Stephen's bound to have gotten over it, done something else in life. He might … I might sit down with him and say, Look, what was Rudy like? What was my son like? Tell me about him laughing. Tell me what he would be doing now, had he lived. Tell me if he … no, best not to ask if he loved his foolish, prodigal father. I suspect those two held each other tight enough to shut me and my generation out, to exile us as far as possible. All right, go ahead and hate me too, I'd say to him—I'm an old man, I'll be dead soon—but tell me how he was. Tell me Rudy was happy for a while and knew love during his unforgivably short life.

But of course, no father alive would do such a thing.

It's never done. Easier the loneliness than that kind of investigation! Would Stephen even consent to see me?

(He died last year of AIDS, shunned by his parents and, naturally, his church. At the age of thirty-eight.)

This Stephen, this stranger, wherever he is, holds what is left of my son in his heart, in his memory. This, somehow, gives me hope. Rudy is not entirely gone from this world …

(Patrick, poor Patrick.)

*   *   *

The half-English, half-Greek argument was highlighted by:

“After what the Germans did in Greece, I'm surprised you want to suck up to them so much.”

“Eh! The Americans are worse, much worse! Greece is ruined by America today. I am a communist.”

“The last one in Europe!”

Stavros strutted out as Lucy pretended to return to a page of
So Hot the Sun.
The door closed and Lucy fell back on the bed and rubbed her eyes.

Dumb move, girl. You couldn't just mind your own business, go down to the disco, flirt with the Handsome Stranger, talk to Tracy. No. No, that had prescience and self-discretion. You, Lucy, had to drink two glasses of wine, barge over to his room, knock till Stavros answered in a cheap hotel towel, some girl on the bed, so you could have a scene.