Gospel, page 53
It was this life, this bad minor work by Eugene O’Neill too unbelievable ever to be staged, that loomed ahead as my destiny. To be lost in this sea of unreasoned Irish emotionalism, dockyard brawling, union politics, grabbing a bat after five shots of Jamesons to go down to the yards with Grady O’Connell and Tom Kelly and Jacky Doyle to bust the heads of the goons whom management had hired; my mother pleading, sobbing for him not to go and get the hell beaten out of him, which he went, and did … Not even my mother saw it as clearly as I did. Her solution was that I should be a priest, and turn my eyes to a higher calling, a better life.
(Because you loved God once.)
Don’t take so much credit—it wasn’t so much You as it was escape from the South Side. I saw a world where men read and thought and there was quiet and they lived in clean places and ate good food. It was the only thing for someone like me to do.
(But you have forgotten that you wanted to do good, that you prayed for a mission whereby others would be helped, raised up. Have you truly erased what We once meant to you?)
I groan to see myself: how pious, how pale and weak and quiet. My mother thought it was religiosity and was comforted, my father thought it was unmanly but if one of his sons had to be a priest, it might as well be me … And I thought that being a priest was the answer, until I realized that that too was a trap, the same Irish conspiracy dolled up with a little incense.
My sister Catherine and I would walk to school together. Let’s see, I was twelve or so, she was a bossy fourteen. And she’d lead us out of our way in order to go by the public school and look in at the other kids, the Protestants. My sister would lean up against the open-link fence and yell insults. I told her our mother said not to have anything to do with them, and especially not to make fun of them. Do you know why Mother said that? asked Catherine. Because they’re Protestant and going to hell. And I looked in at the guys playing stickball on the asphalt playground and I dwelled fearfully on a God Who would send these laughing boys to hell.
(You prayed about it that night for an hour.)
And then came the time when the parish closed our ill-educated, understaffed parochial school and we were told we would have to go several miles from our neighborhood if we wanted to stay in a Catholic institution. So my father, in a horrific fight with my mother, ordered that we go to public school, which he had, after all, paid for with his taxes. And we took tests to see what grade we should be put in. And I found my eyes smarting with tears and I felt rage inside me. Because where were the questions about who was the Queen of Heaven and who attended her Coronation? Where were the great saints, Christopher and George, what of the Joyful Mysteries, the four Archangels, the Pater Noster in Latin? They wanted none of this, they wanted the first eight U.S. presidents and for me to match animals with their phylae and pair Longfellow and Poe to their famous poems’ titles. And I remember etched in my heart the woman receiving my test paper and shaking her head, saying lightly to her colleague, “Another genius from Our Lady,” and I was put back a grade.
(And you are still bothered by it fifty years later.)
Patrick Virgil O’Hanrahan, head of his class as long as he had ever been in school, put back a grade! Yes, I can still taste the bile. And so I had to play catch-up, which made me mad and bitter, and competitive … before it slowly seeped in, very slowly, ever so slowly occurring to me that to be Catholic at Kelly High in 1935 was to be one of the stupid back-of-the-yards mick kids.
And that’s why there’d be no parish for me, no lousy rundown moaning diocese to see to, no old crones venting their family squabbles, no endless confessions from young women like my sister Catherine dredged up from a stunted, juiceless life …
No, Plan C: I would go to Loyola. I would be in the Jesuit elite. I would travel to other continents, anywhere in the world to do the pope’s bidding if I must—anywhere but the South Side!
(Since when did you have the pope in mind?)
I was being facetious. I didn’t care about furthering Rome’s cause—far from it, I almost abandoned Catholicism after Pius XII sucked up to the Nazis through World War II. Nor did I wish to defeat Protestant error, because from my high school days, there were more Protestants than Catholics among my circle of friends—they at least had some sense of progress, of forward movement! Religion had little to do with my wanting to be a Jesuit. I was looking for that stamp of approval that Jesuit meant: I wanted to scream to the world I am a thinking, brain-alive Catholic man!
(You rewrite your own history. There was also an idealistic Patrick, who hoped to better the world, who loved a spiritual notion of God divorced from the ecclesiastical bunkum of the Church. You don’t remember what a kind-thinking soul you had as a child, back in the days when you were confirmed.)
Oh geez, my Confirmation. The women on one side, all piety, all Marys and saints preserve us, all unloved, self-righteous frumps untouched by their husbands in years; their men a loutish band of drunken, irreligious wrecks. Twenty minutes after the trumped-up fight at the reception at the church, there was a forced reunion, someone would make my father and whoever it was—my father and Uncle Kenny usually—shake hands, then there was an embrace.
“Aw, Kenny my friend,” my father would pine, and inevitably, “come take a look at me young man! Come see me pride’n joy! A smart one he is, gonna go far like his old man, ey! Paddy, Paddy my boy, come meet your Uncle Kenny, lad!”
And the introduction would be made for the third time that night, the hundredth time in my life, and I’d have my hair ruffled, whiskey breathed in my face all around, a prelude to some other relative trying to slip me my own shot of whiskey while the women howled in protest, and that was as good as I could expect: the only time my father owned me. Drunk out of his mind, his closest approximation to saying he loved me.
(What was your closest to him?)
Damn You, these accusing recitals of conscience, these voices of the night! What guilt should I feel? I honored him, didn’t I? I loved him inasmuch as I could, being who I was. I never fought with him openly, always surrendered and ignored him. Gave him his respect that was due.
Besides, you could no more break through to him than you could talk with a cartoon figure on the screen. If he had once looked up in the kitchen over coffee and said, “Son, I don’t know what life is all about,” or if he had turned off the fights on the radio and said “Son, do you ever think there might not be a God above us?” I would have comforted him, talked to him, given all my poor wisdom to solace the man. But he never had a higher, deliberative thought in his life!
It was always “Yer old man knows how to deal with these city-fellow types, these big shots, ye let me do the talkin’…” right before the insurance man denied one of his claims. It was always “Jacky Doyle is the best man of his time and I stake me life and fortune on it—why, I wish I could only have lent the man twice the amount!” before Mr. Doyle went totally bust. It was always the same unoriginal, impossible, unending conspiracies behind my mother’s back: she dumped the booze out, he’d sneak some back. He’d get solvent again, that night he’d lend the money out, being a big man at the bar, and lie about it when he got home. How can a man with a brain commit the same stupid mick mistakes a thousand goddam times in a row?
(Did he have to be perfect in order for you to love him?)
God, I see myself suddenly, prim and proper, soft-spoken like a funeral director, pious in my novice’s collar, coming home from Loyola to see my mother. Was I that superior? Oh please, tell me I didn’t go around like that, tell me I had more life in me than that, let’s pretend I was always like what I am now. How I must have looked to him … At least my mother was proud of me—
(And what was it that she wanted from you before you went overseas to American University in Beirut?)
She wanted me … she wanted me to spend time with my father who was getting old and forgetful, she wanted there to be peace between us. And then years later when I was in Korea, she died, my blessed, worn-out mother. And my sister Catherine, who had nursed her and lived at home running her life for years, probably driving my father nuts. She wanted to be in charge of the family and correct the laxities of my mother, mete out judgment and scorn to my father, my poor father …
(A twinge of sympathy at last?)
And in six months after my mother’s death, a woman he had misused and berated for 46 years, my father drank himself out of existence. I can see Catherine standing over his passed-out body lecturing him, rosary in hand. Although I didn’t see it. I didn’t go home to see any of it. I never asked for leave. I couldn’t bear to watch. What did I have to say to him? My home was the place my mother lived, and when she was gone there was no home in Chicago for me.
Tears filled O’Hanrahan’s eyes, in this deep darkness.
Oh, Patrick O’Hanrahan, Sr., how did you see your last days? How did you face the coming of the end, the half-fulfilled promises to yourself, the abject failures, the extinction of all possibilities? Did you know which of the bottles was your last? You never told your son how to do this part, this death business. Like everything I’ve ever done I’ll have to do this, as you did it, alone. Why did you let it end so badly? A gutter in an alley beside the local bar that had cut you off … You just thought, Well here’s me a place, I think I’ll lay me down here and die tonight. I’d give anything to know what you were thinking.
(He was thinking of his son. His son he was proud of and so hoped to see again before he died. He was thinking: when I wake up tomorrow morning, my dear Paddy Jr. will be standin’ over his dear old dad, comin’ to give me his love and take his poor old father home.)
O’Hanrahan wept.
JULY 20TH
Lucy, imagining O’Hanrahan had lost track of the days, waited in the Poseidon Hotel lobby for the appointed phone call at twelve noon.
Nope. No word today either.
Lucy went to eat a Greek salad and do the newsstand, beachfront, and the three side-by-side cafés walking tour again. Then she read a little more from So Hot the Sun. Then she went back to the Poseidon and asked again if there were any calls or messages. And there were none.
“Where do you suppose he is?” Lucy asked Stavros.
“Maybe the phone no work?”
Perhaps. It is a bit old-fashioned over there. Lucy didn’t know what to do. If worse came to worst she could send Stavros over there to look around.
“No,” he said, when she suggested it. “No religion, no.” Then he nuzzled closer and put his hand on her behind indecently.
She pulled away laughing, having incurred a rude stare from an older townswoman. “No, not here,” she said modestly.
“You get you tan today?”
“I might work on my tan, yes.”
They walked back to the Poseidon Hotel again. Lucy had a sense that Stavros wasn’t totally willing but he had balanced a guaranteed snooty rejection from one of the Valkyries against a sure thing with Lucy.
Lucy thought: I’m getting just a trifle addicted to this guy’s company. I could make sex with this guy a habit, against my better judgment—well, who knows if he’s even willing again. Lucy reached out to take his hand as they strolled down the seafront but Stavros clasped it for a moment then let it go, putting his hands in his pockets. Doesn’t want to broadcast he’s taken, thought Lucy, lest anyone else in town wants him. She felt a tinge of jealousy, then of inferiority and then let it pass. I’ll deal with the consequences of all this later, she thought, closing her eyes, her face finding the sun.
“Time for you tan?” he asked.
She gave him an inviting look. God, he was beautiful. She wanted to devour him, for all the time he wouldn’t be around in her future, for all the missed opportunities of her past.
“I was going to be a nun one time,” she said, as they walked up the stairs to her room.
Stavros laughed. “Too late for you now.”
And once in the room, she grabbed him playfully and pushed him against the door, nuzzling against his chest, undoing the buttons of his shirt. Erase that silly little girl who once was, she thought. Let’s do away with her now and forever.
* * *
Lost! Thank you, Blessed Virgin! You appear to every teenage schizophrenic, sexually neurotic nutcase in the Mediterranean, and you can’t even point out to Patrick O’Hanrahan a simple little direction!
(Is that any way to talk to the Handmaiden of the Lord?)
I should be nearly dead. Nope, no birds circling overhead yet, but dinner’s almost served … O’Hanrahan laughed deliriously at himself. What a way to go. If I could just find water I would surrender to whomever, for whatever, however …
No.
No, that was a moment of weakness. I am being tempted by devils again. But God help me, look at this countryside. To go down and up the next mountain ahead will take the afternoon, in this heat, and what will be left of me? I could fall and twist my ankle, lie there and rot until the end of my life. The other direction is the same. I’m not even sure if this so-called trail I’m on is a trail or just the natural clearing across the top of this ridge. I’m too old for this kind of thing—maybe this comic death scene will be related in the Scholarly Register, that is, if I were still important enough to be listed in it. I’ll be lucky to make the Chicago Sun-Times obituary page in fine print.
He arbitrarily decided on the right fork and began his descent into the valley.
I should have never left the Jesuits, O’Hanrahan thought. I should have parked myself in Jerusalem or Loyola at New Orleans and got tenure and kept out of the middle-class wife-and-family business. That would have been a hard decision to make in Eisenhower’s America but I could have spared myself a lot of problems.
(And spared the woman you married.)
My life, thought O’Hanrahan, has been a series of choices in which I outsmarted myself: when I was 23 and about to be one of the youngest Jesuit Ph.D.’s I told myself it was unimportant and went instead to American University in Beirut to see if I could work on ancient finds. Having been brought onto the Dead Sea Scroll team when I was 24, by the time I was 27 I had been offered positions, grants, opportunities to associate my name throughout history to these documents … and nawwww, I rejected that, just so much vanitas, academic vainglory, all garbage. No, Father O’Hanrahan wanted to see real life, do something visceral and meaningful. Plunge his hands into third-world soil! Rescue the untouchables from the Indian streets. What pretensions!
(You were never more noble, Patrick. Never was your heart so full of charity for your fellow man.)
And so it was off to Korea in 1952, attached to the chaplaincy. What I knew of war, O’Hanrahan recalled, I knew from newsreels during World War II and black-and-white Life magazine pictures. But Korea was in lurid, nauseating color. A parade of dead were brought before me for last rites and often a final comforting word, which I was quite good at. The first week of duty was gut-wrenching but rewarding. But then there was a second week, and a third, and the dying and dead and maimed-for-life kept coming and kept asking larger questions—
(But you gave them answers.)
Yes! Thoughtless, memorized anodynes to death and loss, second-rate platitudes fresh from the Hackmeisters of the Church. Do you think I couldn’t see it in their eyes? They came to me for justification … and I mouthed talk of Jesus and a Cross and something that happened a very very long time ago to people they didn’t know. The only Transfiguration one boy knew was five fingers miraculously now an unsightly stump, hastily sewn up and patched in ten minutes so we could get another rearranged collection of human parts to the operating table. The young Polish Catholic kid who wanted a last Communion. Out of wine, out of grape juice, we made do with red dye and sugared water, blessed it, consecrated it, and gave it to him to sip desperately. It is His blood, okay? But what need had we of anyone’s blood, summer 1952, the Iron Triangle, 38th parallel, day 36 of fighting. Blood, O Son of Man, we had in big supply there.
Then passed the sixth week, the seventh week.
Was it possible even carnage and human destruction could get tedious after a while? You want miracles? The perverse suspension of physical laws on the battlefield was more miraculous than all the legends of the saints combined: the guy who had been shot three times, one bullet after the other lined up end to end in the entry wound. The guy who had a .22 bullet crack his teeth but do no more damage than that … and then weeks later, he was back, having deflected a second bullet with his teeth. “Keep smiling, Johnny!” everyone joked. Who could believe these things?
(But some of those were Our miracles.)
And conversely there was the guy who got gangrene from a botched ingrown toenail do-it-yourself job and died. The corporal who drank so much Korean moonshine his last night of duty that he died from an alcoholic coma. The Turkish soldier who, upon hearing the full extent of his groin wound, calmly took out his combat knife and cut his own throat, as neatly as if it were a slice of melon.
I saw it all, God, I really did.
And, O’Hanrahan reasoned, if one reflected for a moment, one realized that one maybe gave some shard of comfort but mostly you were an impotence, a hindrance between a man and his death, a Soviet-style bureaucrat with papers and holy water and crosses and scriptures, cluttering up inevitable destiny.
Twelfth week, fifth month, almost a year.
The resentment began to build. After the first young man, his life spilling from innumerable shrapnel wounds, disintegrated before me I thought: well, of course all this religion-hooey is complete crap. Good on paper, but you can’t take Christianity on the road. You need a suburb for this delightful we’re-all-going-to-heaven parlor game, but “Excuse me, kid, I know the lower part of your body has been shot off and we’re out of morphine but, more important, are your impure thoughts washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb because Jesus sits on the right hand of His Father” doesn’t play so well.
