The Jesuit priests there were much the same as those at Regis—a little more worldly, perhaps, a little wittier, a little more acerbic, a little more eccentric, but, in all that mattered, essentially the same. I admired them, admired the wit and the learning and the grace with which they moved through the world, the casual self-assurance, the flair. My father had died when I was a child and there were no other male relatives close by, so, lacking a model at home, and primed by four years at Regis, I naturally turned toward these men and sought to emulate them. It was not a bad choice.

  I spent most of my time in college—intellectually, at least, and psychologically, I suppose—as a young gentleman in a nineteenth-century novel might have spent his time at Oxford. 1 wrote some poetry, submitted some stories to The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and spent a great deal of time pursuing women. I read—in Greek—Plato and Aristotle and Euripides and, to lighten the mood, Sappho and the poets. (Xenophon and Homer had been amply translated at Regis.) Horace, Catullus, and Livy held sway in Latin class. Ronsard, Racine, Flaubert, Camus, Ionesco, were read in French; Dante in Italian; Chaucer in Middle English. I majored in French for three of the four years, studied linguistics and the gothic novel and early American literature and European history and “gentlemen’s biology” and did some Russian on the side, in addition to the equivalent of full majors in philosophy and theology that were required of all undergraduates at the time. Most of my teachers were Jesuit priests.

  One afternoon in the spring of my junior year, I was coming down the steps of Keating Hall when I met that same Jesuit who had offered me my golden opportunity to confess a vocation at Regis. I had heard through the Jesuit grapevine that he’d been unwell and was now at Fordham, taking courses and regaining his strength. It was a warm day—not warm by summer standards, but warm for April after winter’s chill—but the priest was buttoned up tight in a black raincoat that obviously still had its winter lining in place. I knew him to be in his early forties, but a casual observer might have guessed him ten years older than that. Looks can be deceiving.

  “Hello, Father Day.”

  He slowed his already slow progress up the shallow steps of Keating and mumbled the half-smiled greeting teachers offer former students whom they no longer recall. But I had stopped where I was and apparently something compelled him to raise his eyes to my face, and when he did so, he halted too. Eyes momentarily alive, he scrutinized my face.

  “Regis,” he said.

  I smiled and said yes.

  “Three years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” he said. His eyes narrowed, and before I could remind him myself, he told me my name, as casually as if I’d last been with him yesterday.

  These Jesuits, 1 thought.

  I was about to ask him how he was, but he spoke before I could.

  “Sex,” he said, and we laughed together, remembering. “Most succinct answer I ever had,” he said, “and a good one, a good one.”

  We stood on the steps, chatting easily and pleasantly. He seemed eager to know how I was doing at Fordham, what I was studying, who my teachers were, what plans I had for the future. In high school there had been much talk about “the Regis spirit,” one manifestation of which was the invisible but substantial tie that links alumni whenever they encounter each other in the world in later years. It can make confidants of strangers, this common baggage of shared learning, assumptions, attitudes. Father Day, I knew, was a Regis man himself, and I was warmed by this tangible evidence of the Regis spirit in action. After a few minutes, he suggested that we go to the Campus Center for coffee—his treat—and since I had been heading there myself when we met, I readily agreed.

  We sat for two hours, happily telling stories about mutual acquaintances at Regis, stories that often made us laugh as we compared quite different versions of the same events as seen from the sides of students and faculty. Then the conversation gradually drifted back to me and my life at Fordham and my future and I wasn’t even surprised when Father Day inquired casually if I had ever thought again about the possibility of a priestly vocation. I had, of course. In a setting like that— spiritual, intellectual, psychological—one does. It was—and here I measure my words with extra caution— a not unattractive possibility. But, still, it was not attractive enough to win me over. My interest in that direction was based primarily on practical and pragmatic considerations, and definitely not on any “call from God to His service” that I had felt. He smiled understandingly when I told him I had thought about it but my conclusion remained the same.

  “No harm in asking,” he said, and maintained his slight smile.

  I agreed.

  “And no harm in thinking about it further,” he said, the smile unchanged.

  I agreed again.

  “Will you?” he asked.

  “Think about it further?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” I said, my smile matching his. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “Right,” he said. “Couldn’t hurt. Which is the punch line of an old vaudeville joke.” He leaned back in his chair. “Ten minutes before he’s going on stage, see, this famous comedian dies in his dressing room and the stage manager has to …”

  We talked another twenty minutes or so before I had to leave for a late class. Even then, as 1 rose and gathered my books, it did not occur to me that Father Day, when we first met on the steps of Keating Hall, had been heading into the building and had changed his direction entirely to spend two and a half hours talking with me in the cafeteria.

  When we parted at the front doors of the Campus Center, we assured each other how good it had been to talk and sincerely wished each other well. We both felt it, I was certain: the Regis spirit, made flesh.

  It was three years later and 1 was twenty-four, a graduate student at UCLA, before I saw him again. Either because I had promised or because it was inevitable, I had indeed been thinking further about the priesthood.

  Los Angeles, UCLA, Westwood Village, and Santa Monica (where I had a furnished apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard, about ten blocks from the beach), seem unlikely places to be thinking about withdrawing—to a degree, at least—from the world and devoting one’s life to the service of God. 1 did, however, and although I was aware of the contrast between my own thinking and that of those around me, I continued to consider, if only in a pragmatic way, the possibility of becoming a priest.

  The idea had much to recommend it. 1 was alone in the world now, my mother having died in an automobile accident in Switzerland during the summer following my graduation from Fordham. I went to California an orphan, lacking even brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, to form a family. There was, in that regard, no one to take into account but myself. On the other hand, a religious community could readily fill the need for a structure and a sense of purpose and continuity in my life.

  Furthermore, my mother’s death had left me financially independent as well, thanks to her firm belief in large amounts of travel insurance, and my independence and self-sufficiency made me, I think it fair to say, rather more mature in my judgments than others in their early twenties, and rather more than I might have been myself in different circumstances.

  As for the “sex” I had mentioned to Father Day half a dozen years earlier as an overriding factor in my negative decision, it had proved, as 1 grew older, less of a problem. To speak the truth, I was no virgin, and I think my needs and appetites at the time, during those years, were as normal as anyone else’s, which may prove a mystery to laymen who think that priests and future priests are sometimes spared the hunger. They are not; 1 can vouch for it. But I did find, through necessity of time and circumstance, that the urge can be controlled, not through any secret vice, which is most often only a form of self-torture, serving merely to remind us of what we lack, but through a careful discipline of the will.

  In a practical sense, my life was right for the priesthood. In a psychological sense—and a practical one—I was comfortable with the idea; 1 would teach in any case. In a spiritual sense, it meant nothing at all; I felt no infusion of God’s spirit, no call to His service, and began truly to wonder if that last were really needed.

  And then, once again, I ran into Father Day.

  It was early May, the end of the academic year, the oral exams for my master’s degree successfully completed, and nothing before me but a summer of travel. I had driven back to the campus to return some books and was sitting near the entrance to Royce Hall, enjoying the California sun, reading a newspaper, and listening to the noon carillon concert from the undergraduate library. I had nothing to do for the afternoon, nothing to do, in fact, for a week until my plane left for Europe. I heard a voice speak my name and say, “Well, hello.”

  I raised my head and there was Father Day.

  He looked much the same as he had three years before. In fact, we might almost have been back on the steps of Keating Hall at Fordham, amid the elms and the dogwood, rather than here beside the Spanish architecture of Royce Hall, amid the bird of paradise plants and the palms. He still looked older than his years—the same observation I had made at Fordham, the last time I’d seen him. And he was still somewhat overdressed. The sun was warm, with only a gentle breeze blowing across the campus, but Father Day wore black woolen slacks and a black turtleneck shirt under a battered gray tweed sport jacket. Even discarding the standard clerical garb, as Jesuits feel so free to do, he had not indulged in any great license. He looked, as he had before, like a man recovering from a long illness, which indeed he was. Thin blood, I thought, meant to thicken in the sun. I said it was good to see him and that he was looking well.

  We satisfied each other’s curiosity and quickly provided basic information. He told me he had been on campus the whole spring term. Nominally, he was here to take courses in comparative religion. Actually, he was in California for a rest to build up his strength. He spent part of his time helping out with light duties— mass and confession—in a parish church in North Hollywood, where he was living now. He was thinking of accepting a teaching position he’d been offered at Loyola University. I told him that, unless a decent teaching position came along for me, I planned to start work on my doctorate in the fall term and, in that case, would no doubt turn into the archetypal perennial student. He smiled a little ruefully and said that it wasn’t such a bad life, and then we were laughing together.

  And before I realized it, we were once again talking about me and I was, once again, admitting that thoughts of the priesthood were still in my mind. And, again before I realized it, we had strolled from the campus out to Westwood Village and had found a quiet booth in a bar near the Bruin Theatre.

  “You keep turning up in my life,” I said when we had beers in front of us.

  “Twice,” he said.

  “Twice is almost a pattern.”

  “Almost,” he agreed.

  “Maybe you’re haunting me.”

  “Maybe,” he said and took a long drink from his glass. “Or maybe God is haunting you through me.”

  I thought of all the practical reasons I had for taking Holy Orders, and of all the spiritual reasons I lacked. “Not bloody likely,” 1 said.

  “Oh?” It’s a Jesuit habit to say that; it offers nothing but elicits much.

  So 1 told him, told him all the wide range of my thoughts on the subject, told him how, although 1 had not reached a definitive conclusion, the inevitable answer, born of inertia, seemed certainly negative. He listened patiently, his face without expression, until 1 finished.

  “So, then, you feel no call to the priesthood, no compulsion. Is that right?”

  1 shook my head. “None.”

  “The call can come in any variety of ways,” he said. “The path to God is not a straight one.”

  “And there are many doors in the castle, yes, 1 know, Father.”

  “Don’t be impatient.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe I’m your call.”

  1 looked at him then and, for a long moment, and for the first time, seriously wondered if perhaps he was right, perhaps he was truly haunting me.

  “The path to God is not a straight one,” I said, and we both smiled and relaxed, the moment of tension gone.

  “If we run into each other like this again,” he said, “it will definitely be a pattern.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “Patterns like that must be considered.”

  “All right,” I said, “if we run into each other like this again, I’ll grant you it constitutes a pattern.”

  “And you’ll consider it?”

  “The pattern?”

  “The priesthood.”

  “Ah,” I said. And a moment later: “All right.”

  “Good,” he said. “I think this calls for another beer.”

  It was not three years this time, but six weeks, before I saw him again.

  I took a place in the queue for tickets to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and there he was just in front of me. Neither of us realized it until he’d bought his ticket and turned away from the counter. Suddenly there we were. I quickly purchased my own ticket and followed him outside into Floral Street. A minute later, we were established in the Nag’s Head a few doors away, two steins of cold lager before us.

  “You’re following me,” I said. “It’s beginning to look slightly sinister.”

  “Is it?” Jesuits love to ask questions.

  “A bit. What are you doing here? I thought you were in Los Angeles.”

  “I was. Actually, in a way, I still am. I took the faculty position at Loyola and then rather lucked into a university travel grant. It was none of my doing, actually.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said lightly.

  “Actually,” he replied.

  He looked, it hardly seems necessary to mention, quite the same as before. The weather in London was cool and damp even in summer, but he was still overdressed. It seemed a permanent feature of his appearance. Apparently the California sun had not succeeded in thickening his blood. I didn’t imagine the chilly air of London would accomplish much in that line, but the thought seemed not to have occurred to him.

  “Did you follow me here?”

  He shook his head, a gentle smile on his lips. “Impossible,” he said.

  That, of course, was the truth, and I knew it already. Apart from the obvious reasons, if he’d appeared just behind me in the queue, I might have doubted, but he had been there in front of me when I arrived, no question about it, and I did not.

  “Then you’re haunting me,” I said.

  “So it appears,” he replied. He lifted his glass and in one long drink finished off the beer. “1 have to be on my way,” he said. “Let’s meet for dinner.”

  We agreed on seven-thirty at Romano Santi in Soho, and a moment later he was gone. I stayed longer in the Nag’s Head, ordered another lager and drank it as slowly as the first. After that, I walked over to Charing Cross Road and spent the rest of the afternoon in the National Portrait Gallery. I barely saw the faces in the paintings. I could see only the face of Father Day, haunting me wherever I went.

  During the meal, we limited the conversation to general topics. Afterward, he invited me back to his house for drinks. As we rode in the taxi the length of Oxford Street from Soho to Notting Hill Gate, and then pulled up in front of a lovely home in Kensington Park Road which he was renting for the summer, I wondered what sort of travel grant provided that sort of living allowance. These Jesuits, 1 thought. They’re like some fine old family, ripe with old money.

  “Shall we sit in the sitting room?” he said as he gestured me inside. “It seems only proper.”

  By that point, 1 was half expecting servants, but the house was empty. We’d had chianti with the meal and he suggested a lighter burgundy now. He poured the wine himself. When we were settled in easy chairs, he wasted no time.

  “I think you have a vocation,” he said. “Perhaps you feel no call, nothing of the sort you’ve thought all along you ought to feel, but a vocation nonetheless.”

  “Why?” I asked. 1 tried to sip my drink calmly.

  “Why do you have a vocation or why do I say that?”

  “Both.” These Jesuits, I thought again. They never stop. It comes with long practice.

  “Both,” he repeated, in a tone that reminded me of the classroom. “As for the first, why you have a vocation, 1 couldn’t begin to tell you. I almost hate to say it because it sounds entirely too pat, but it’s not for us to question the ways of God.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.” I said it as much to provoke him as for anything else.

  “I guess,” he said, and studied me curiously, as if wondering at the oddness of God’s dealings among men. While he studied me, I had the opportunity to do the same with him, and realized that, at least for the moment, he no longer looked as sickly as he had before. He looked, rather, like a man with a definite job to do, a man with a clear purpose.

  “As for the second point,” he said, “why I’m telling you this, remember that Christ taught us to be fishers of men.”

  “The wise fisherman doesn’t cast his net at random,” I said.

  “Nicely put.”

  “Why me, Father?”

  “You’re the type.”

  “What type?”

  “Why, the priestly type, of course.”

  “That’s a tautology.”

  “You’ll make a splendid Jesuit,” he laughed. “Here, let me top up your glass.”

  We sat together in silence for a while, with only the wine and our thoughts.

  “Have you not noticed,” he said at last, “that I seem to keep recurring in your life? Oh, never mind, of course you have.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Answer a question. The Church will last forever, will it not? Until, would it be safe to say, the end of time, at least? Agreed?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?” he snapped. “How can that be?”

  I hesitated, answers that had once seemed so clear— or at least so thoroughly assumed—now failing me.

 

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