The Lost Landscape (13 page)

After Bible camp, my interest in the Methodist church quickly waned. I had come too close to Methodists, living with girls of my age who were very unlike myself, and did not seem at all “spiritual”—hardly. Jesus's admonition to love one's neighbor as oneself had not seemed to impress itself upon these girls and would prove too great a challenge for me, who was not sure that I could love myself.

2.

OF BLEEDING LUNGS MY
grandfather John Bush died six months later. Of emphysema related to his longtime work at the steel foundry in Lackawanna, that did not pay its employees well but paid better than work elsewhere including blacksmithing and farming.

To placate my devastated grandmother, in return for the privilege of being allowed to bury John Bush in the Good Shepherd Catholic Cemetery in Pendleton, my parents promised the Good Shepherd priest that they and their children (Joyce, Fred Jr.) would become members of the parish.

My father would recall decades later being humbled by the priest, or humiliated—“I had to make out a check right then and there to give the s.o.b.”

S.o.b., bastard
—such language, that grates the ear in middle-class and academic settings, was commonplace in my father's world where it registers as mild profanity and does not signal extreme hostility.

Soon, my brother and I were taking catechism lessons from the priest who was called, oddly to our ears, Father O'Malley.

How strange, this purse-lipped stranger was
Father!
—a word we
never uttered, for our father was
Daddy
and could not be addressed by any other name, by us.

Strange too, we were attending not “church services” but “mass” Sunday mornings at 10:00
A.M
. in the somber dark-red-brick church in Pendleton.

It was “low mass” we attended whenever possible. For “high mass” was a longer and more elaborate service. In those days, a recitation by the Catholic priest in Latin, translated in our prayer books into English plain and devoid of romance as a lashless eye.

What a curious episode this was in the life of my family! I have not ever attempted to explain it to anyone, for there was much that was shameful about it, as well as baffling. My father who disliked any sort of organized religion and who was by temperament skeptical and doubting, forced to bring his young family, and his Hungarian-born stepmother-in-law, to Catholic mass at the country church . . .

How could Fred Oates bear it! But soon, Daddy joined the church choir, with a hope of improving it; soon, Daddy was asked (by Father O'Malley) to be choir leader. Within a year or two Daddy became the church organist, and no longer sat with his family in our pew as he no longer had to wince at mangled notes on the organ.

Though I loved my parents, and would not have rebelled against their wishes, I could not help but resent them for bringing me to this new and unwanted church—this “religion.” To force me to take catechism lessons like a grade school child. (
Q. Who made the world? A. God made the world. Q. What is the purpose of the life of man? A. The purpose of the life of man is to know and love God in this world and to dwell with Him in the next
. How I yearned to rebel against these prescribed words, with very different words of my own!) Especially I resented being trapped in a crowded pew between my mother and my heavyset Hungarian-born grandmother who knew little English and certainly no Latin, and who seemed often at mass to have but a
very vague idea of what was going on; or, as my father would say bemusedly—
What the hell is going on.

Perversely, though I had ceased to “believe” in the Methodist church teachings, I missed the crude foot-pump organ and my participation in the service. I missed the Protestant hymns that surprised you with their sudden swell of emotion. I missed the much-smaller congregation and my feeling of independence—I'd been a girl of twelve attending church services without her family. I missed the more emotionally engaged worshippers at the Methodist church who could not know, as worshippers at Good Shepherd knew, exactly what their spiritual leader would say as he led each service through its clockwork routine.

At Good Shepherd, worshippers at the Latin mass were like zombies: glaze-eyed, uninvolved, stunned with boredom. No doubt, as my mother once hinted, Sunday morning's mass was a time for wives and mothers to
rest
. Like sleeping with one's eyes open, somehow managing to remain upright in the hard wooden pews. (And the kneelers were hard wood, too.)

Daddy hadn't such boredom to contend with. Typically, Fred Oates had managed to ascend to a level of participation that allowed him to think and make decisions, and not merely to drift and daydream through the hour-long mass with the small herd of worshippers. Playing the organ in the choir loft above the congregation was a great pleasure to him; immersed in music, he didn't have to listen to Father O'Malley's curiously falsetto singsong voice at all.

The most inhumanly soporific of religious activities is the “saying” of the rosary, and this too we were compelled to do, or to go through the motions of doing. Shuffling to the communion railing, we “took” communion—“This is the Body and Blood of Christ; take ye and eat”—or such was the translation from Latin. No one seemed remotely aware or even interested in what it might mean—what it
would mean—if the “body” and the “blood” of Jesus Christ were literally contained within a crisp white communion wafer designed to melt on the tongue.

Transubstantiation:
quite a miracle!

In all the Catholic years no passion, no zeal, no authenticity.

No tears like those of Reverend Bender.

“BLESS ME, FATHER. FOR
I have sinned.”

Or was it rather, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Or, an artful variant, “Bless me, Father—for I have
sinned.
”

From the age of thirteen to eighteen I would attend what seemed like many thousands of masses out of respect for my parents and their promise to Father O'Malley, that had been made out of respect for my grandmother's grief. Though it seems bizarre to me now, and would cause anyone who knows me well to laugh aloud, I also went to confession during those years, dutifully, doggedly; like any seemingly observant Catholic I slipped into the shadowy confessional that resembles a small kiosk, knelt on the rock-hard kneeler, and shut the little door; through a sort of chicken-wire grating I would see a vague outline of my confessor's face, and would imagine his shut eyes; for a long afternoon of droning confessions in the Good Shepherd Catholic Church of Pendleton, New York
^*
could not have failed to stupefy any sentient individual, even Father O'Malley. In the confessional one was not supposed to “recognize” the priest, nor was the priest supposed to “recognize” the penitent. In an abashed voice I would murmur
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been ________ since my last confession.

No doubt, it had rarely been more than
one week
since my last
confession, in those years when I was a captive at home, under the (benign) surveillance of my parents. Though there were rumors of penitents who returned to the confessional after years, even decades, of having been “lapsed.”

Mortal sins, venial sins. Very few penitents in the Pendleton parish, I would guess, were capable of
mortal sins
(except those involving church law like eating meat on Friday, inexplicably as serious a sin as homicide); rather, it must have been a flood of
venial sins
cascading about the priest's head, trivial scrapings from ordinary life—
I was inattentive during mass, I did not attend mass. I did not obey my parents, I had “impure” thoughts, I told lies.

Extreme embarrassment attended the admission—
I had “impure” thoughts
. Fortunately, Father O'Malley had no evident interest in these “impure” thoughts—(at least not mine)—and did not interrogate me further.

As for
lies
—the number of
lies
uttered by most people, certainly by me, partial-lies, trivial lies, inconsequential lies, rarely significant lies, had to be enormous. Some of us, particularly if we are born female, must cultivate an artful sort of dishonesty virtually from birth: we smile, we smile happily, we smile very happily, to assure others that we are fine, indeed we are happy; we smile to assure others that we have no criticism of them, no quarrel, in fact no contrary thoughts of our own. But perhaps such smiles are not precisely
lies
since they don't involve words.

It may have been that, in other parishes, under the watchful eyes of other priests, the penitent was expected to report sins in detail; but Father O'Malley, who may have been hard of hearing in one or both ears, did not often make inquiries. Whatever Father O'Malley's limitations he was not a voyeur, or a sadist—(at least not with me. But perhaps he had no interest in me). In the prayer book for young people there was a helpful appendix listing categories of sins, which
appendix I would skim before each confession, that I might dredge up a reasonable amount of sins to offer to the priest. (One sin I never had to confess was
profanity
. This was, to me, the easiest sin of all to avoid. One sin I admitted repeatedly—
I was inattentive during mass.
)

After a suitable interim, when no more sins were forthcoming from the penitent, Father O'Malley would seem to rouse himself and grant absolution with a murmured
Say one Our Father, five Hail Marys
or an equivalent penance and the ordeal would be concluded until the next time.

Father O'Malley was a bald fattish middle-aged man who seemed often to lose his way in his rambling sermons, that were geared, in vocabulary and syntax, to parishioners of the mental age of elementary schoolchildren. I did not yet know the word for his glowingly flushed cheeks and nose netted with capillaries—
rubefacient
. His hard round beer-belly strained against the black fabric of his priest's clothing; with each week of Lent this belly would shrink until by Easter Sunday it was perceptibly reduced. But following Easter, and the end of Lenten fasting, the belly would make its inexorable return. (I am not sure that I would have noticed this eccentric detail except that others commented on it, with some mirth.) In Father O'Malley, who was probably a totally representative parish priest of his era, Christianity had been reduced to the particular strictures, rituals, pieties and dogma of the Holy Roman Catholic Church which was irrefutably
the only true church;
the political leanings of this parish priest, reflecting the general anti-Communist/anti-liberal bias of the era, were evident in sermons castigating a “modern” way of living, synonymous with “sin.” (This was the era of the Catholic League of Decency which sternly rated “objectionable” movies with
X's
connotating
condemned
. These films, like Otto Preminger's
The Moon Is Blue
[1953], Catholics were forbidden to see under penalty of mortal sin.)

Decades later when it was revealed how pervasive sexual molestation
and pedophilia have been in the Catholic Church, how many parish priests not unlike Father O'Malley were involved in sexual coercion and its cover-up, I was astonished—how could this be possible? The priests we'd known at Good Shepherd seemed rather more like automatons or sleepwalkers than men of passion, or even emotion; it was difficult to imagine them behaving licentiously except with alcohol and food. How likely was it, such utterly bored and boring persons could commit such cruel sins?

So it is, former Catholics often exclaim to one another
But we had no idea—did you?
Not one Catholic of my acquaintance, practicing or non- , has ever remarked that he or she had any direct, or even indirect, knowledge of pedophilia in the Church. Yet, if the media is to be believed, such terrible things were raging about us, in parishes other than our own.

The experience of a Roman Catholic who is born into the religion, and who attends parochial school taught by priests or nuns, is typically very different from the experience I am describing here. I was spared the extremes of the catechism-religion of which so many writers have written so compellingly—the paragon being James Joyce; I came to the religion late, too skeptical already at twelve to take its elaborate cosmology seriously, and filled with resentment and incredulity at having to pretend otherwise. I found it very difficult to believe in “sin”—I found it very difficult to believe that there was a God who cared in the slightest if I'd eaten meat on Friday, or inadvertently licked a raindrop from my lips, before taking communion—I found it very difficult to believe that there was a God involved in the world of humankind at all. (What was the evidence? Earthquakes, hurricanes? Polio? My grandfather's terrible racking cough, that seemed to be tearing out his lungs?) The figure of Jesus the Savior, so immediate in Methodism, seemed to have retreated in Catholicism and was represented by grisly statues in the church
with bloody heads and exposed, bloody hearts. This Jesus was not a
friend.

If I had not cared so much for my parents, and had not wanted to upset them, I would have walked out of mass during one of Father O'Malley's droning sermons, and never returned. But I knew what my father would say—
We gave our word.

How much is religion the honoring of one's parents?—the wish not to upset, not to offend, not to disappoint?

The
good girl
is one whose smile is assuring, though it is not to be trusted.

I could not disappoint my parents, who meant so well by their new, adopted religion. I could not upset them, still less humiliate them in the eyes of others. Our religion seemed to me a sort of family charade in which each individual tacitly agreed not to question the integrity of the others while divulging no crack in his or her own. Dutifully I went to mass with them, Sunday following Sunday, for years; even when I was a student at Syracuse University I continued to attend mass, perhaps not every Sunday but frequently, so that, even at a distance, I wasn't violating the promise my parents had made in their hour of desperation.