Gospel, page 54
“Heh-heh,” O’Hanrahan announced out loud, “I’ve got you voices on the run now, don’t I? What have You to say for yourselves when the subject of war and bodily pain comes up? This paradise You’ve made for Man!”
There was a Turkish battalion mowed down by the Chinese—Allah help me! A Persian brigade of wounded came in, a Zoroastrian among them—what of the eternal fire? No need to talk to the Jewish guy from New York with T-minus-five minutes left on this earth, his people gave up on Heaven some time ago. And as for the Lithuanian guy from Cleveland with bad English, clutching his Bible, kissing my Cross feverishly, craving absolution for—what? nineteen years of uncommitted sin?—feeling his body fail inside him, more than once did I feel like saying: oh please, have some dignity!
(So you doubted. Doubt is healthy. Jesus doubted from the Cross. Mohammed got discouraged, Moses disobedient, the Kings of Israel forgot about Us entirely. Do you not think We doubt sometimes? The worth of keeping the whole thing going? Where there is consciousness, divine or human, there is doubt. It is by doubt We know that We believe, but also that We think at all, that We are not stones, inanimate, content. If Humankind only knew how The Creator shared its doubts and discouragements!)
Unforgettable images returned. The Hispanic boy blown to bits, one eye closed by a wound, a good Catholic from New Mexico, begging him for a cure—a miracle, anything is possible, isn’t it, chaplain? I believe in my heart if you lay your hands on me … And Patrick did as requested as the boy screamed and writhed his way out of this world in the course of the next hour, convinced his pain was his deliverance. Indelible, that. Almost as unforgettable as the Laughing Guy, as O’Hanrahan remembered him. This fellow was so relieved to be alive; he talked for a half-hour about what he would do upon getting back home to the United States, he showed photographs, he joked that his injury, a leg wound, had been his ticket out of the Punchbowl. And how when O’Hanrahan returned with coffee for them both, now laughing as well, the soldier looked up uneasily and said, “Something’s weird, Father.” And as O’Hanrahan sat down and adjusted himself and tore little packets of sugar into his coffee, the boy died. Just like that. And O’Hanrahan talked for a good minute or two before realizing it himself. He just tired from all the strain …
But it was Death, quietly efficient! How true to the old salve, it can be just like going to sleep: there one moment, gone the next, no tearing of the ether, no thunderclap from the heavens.
(Such death is a blessing, don’t you think?)
Easy for You to say! O’Hanrahan wiped the sweat from his brow, gritty with the dust, scratching his forehead. So this is what I was brought out here for: to have my life pass before my eyes? A little divertissement of the All-Powerful, like Job’s leprosy, like Jonah’s misadventure with the leviathan—let this be a lesson to all who hear. If you see the burning bush, run from it! Turn away, for your very life! Get behind me, Yahweh!
(You haven’t enjoyed Our little time in the wilderness?)
“You don’t know when to leave well enough alone, do You?” O’Hanrahan cried out, screamed for relief and exhaustion and because he didn’t have the energy to smash anything. He picked up a rock and hurled it hard as he could at the sky, hysterically laughing at himself while he was doing it.
I know what You Bastards want! You want me brought low, on my knees! You want me to pray my way out of this! You can taunt me with all the voices, all the memories You got in store, because this is one man who has known You and turned away, who finds Your Omnipotence braggadocio, Your Omniscience dubious, Your Holiness in bad taste.
(Very well. But why is it that you’ve never stopped believing in God? Most people who lose their faith, say We don’t exist. You, perversely, say We exist but that you don’t like Us. Reconcile yourself, My son: We are God and you are Human and you don’t have many options.)
Ha!
O’Hanrahan at the bottom of the valley chose the trail to the left and began plodding up it with renewed energy. He mumbled, I’ll take Hell with the libertines, drunkards, freethinkers. Lunch with the Renaissance popes, dinner at Mallatesta’s, beer later on with Nietzsche, then stop by the palace at Julian the Apostate’s for Roman orgies!
(There is a Hell. Every holy personage from the most liberal to the most severe, Jesus or Mohammed, told Humankind there is a Hell and there is still this fond fantasy that it doesn’t exist. Well, it’s not Our beloved Dante’s vision, exactly, but not any more nice, We assure you. Certainly, We have mercy on most poor souls and the majority of mislived lives, but it is entirely possible nonetheless to end up in Hell and you really wouldn’t like it, Patrick.)
Hey, don’t wear me out with this. I’ve seen Hell. Right here on this earth. Right in my own house, looking across the dinnertable at me.
(Beatrice, your wife. She brought on most of her problems herself, but you committed many sins of the spirit—the only kind that matter, frankly—and soured her on living. No amount of charity you have ever had has balanced the zest and passion by which you determined to make her miserable, make her pay for not being your ideal.)
My ideal? Petty, bickering, shriveled up with ill-will, irritating, complaining, whining, malicious, hyperreligious old killjoy, uniting the worst of Irish prudery and self-righteousness with the worst of Womankind. It was she who made me unhappy every day we were married!
(I see We’re going to have to bring it back fresh to you:)
O’Hanrahan nearly stopped in his path. She was so pale, even after seven months in Korea. So soft-spoken and docile. Not exactly kind, not exactly possessed of the soothing motherly qualities you want in a Sister of Charity if you’re a wounded soldier, but her timidity passed as calmness to those who wanted to see it that way. Twenty years old, shy and hard to engage in conversation, she had been an orphan raised by the Josephine Sisters, and from there she worked part-time for her keep in a St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen for the needy, before embracing sisterhood as a vocation herself.
No, wait a minute, Beatrice Helena McDidon wasn’t really an orphan, that’s right … she had been the last of thirteen children and the father, an Irish sot, had abandoned the family, and social workers decided that the children should be split up, the youngest to be put in orphanages. The nuns had been quite clear about it with Beatrice: your mother gave you up. The compensation: it must have been God’s will that you become a sister like ourselves.
“Beatrice,” O’Hanrahan said aloud.
Father O’Hanrahan went behind her back to learn who she was when he first saw her. It was at a mass. She had just arrived from a posting in Japan. She had dark brown hair, straight and pulled back, pale skin with freckles, tiny hands—she was porcelain, she was breakable. And that attracted O’Hanrahan, the twenty-seven-year-old man who had never known a woman. There was a woman who might understand, who might forgive my fumblings, who would revere my learning, whom I would impress and dominate—no, not in some boorish macho way, but …
(In what way then?)
But as a mentor. I could teach her, Paula to my Jerome, if you will, I could liberate her from the Roman Catholic abyss. I could show her what to read, show her how to think, save her from old-maidhood, from becoming like my own sister Catherine O’Hanrahan, that slow steeping in gall and vinegar that embalmed the Irish female heart …
(That was not really love, though, was it?)
Yes, it was! For me! For a man who had lived out of a book, who was more current with Tertullian and Justin Martyr than how to ask a woman to have a cocktail, to dance at the canteen? I flirted with her, I taunted Beatrice with apostasies, I sat and drank endless cups of bad army coffee with her in 1952, that endless hot, muggy summer of dirt and insects and slow death for the wounded. She’d sit in the canteen and I played the reckless, dashing Jesuit, dangerously modern, ridiculing Pius XII, calling him a war criminal, challenging all established precedents.
(Beatrice quietly defended her sisterhood, but all the while she was undermined. No man, Patrick, had ever taken the time to talk to her, to choose her for anything warm and human. She would go to bed each night, restless in the heat, sighing loudly until told to shush by the other sisters.)
Indeed, the Mother Superior pulled her aside and sternly wanted to know if she and that rascal O’Hanrahan were involved in something vow-breaking and illicit. O’Hanrahan recalled that once the idea of love had presented itself and attained the dazzle of the forbidden, it was only a matter of time. And he was there proffering temptation:
“I don’t see any reason why a Jesuit shouldn’t take a lover,” he remembered saying in the canteen, in a low whisper. “Popes and cardinals do. Cardinal Spellman’s got a boy on the side—yes, it’s true!”
She was torn with indecision. Her fellow, secular nurses—the way they talked about men! The torn-out pictures of leading men from Life magazine taped to the interior lid of footlockers, the pictures of a boyfriend on the beach at Coney Island displayed on another nurse’s nightstand, the tales from some of the coarser women about romance on leave in Tokyo, and those moving tales of men about to die, virgin boys, begging the nurse for a late-night tryst, a taste of earthly love before death. Yes, sometimes that pitch was a ruse, but sometimes it was true and sometimes nurses gave in. Beatrice was ashamed but that fantasy tempted her because the men would either die or be transferred home and that could be the end of it, no consequences, no scandal … Not that many of the men made passes at her, since she wasn’t very pretty, although she was in a Sister of Charity uniform, so it could be that. Also very bothering: the older, married women who were separated from children and husband. Maybe they were the greatest objects of envy of all. And here she was just twenty, a prisoner of the Church! No, she would do the one reckless thing of her life. She would know love.
(Well, Beatrice certainly loved you, worshiped you, adored you. You replaced one vow with another, and in the place of the former authority of the Church you offered … what? You were going to order and uplift her life, but you lost interest.)
Because she was, once back in the States, quite apparently …
(Undereducated.)
Irredeemably stupid. She didn’t care about anything I cared about. She didn’t want to read. She didn’t have an inkling of interest in ancient cultures, foreign languages, lost scrolls, treasures of the past. This was my life! She devoted herself to home and hearth and it was all right for a while, but even she knew we were badly matched. “I’m too stupid for you,” she protested.
(You should have soothed her. You married her after all.)
But what she said was merely the truth. Two bumbling, Church-wrecked, hard-up, overaged virgins stumbled together in time of war. What possible future could that have once life returned to normal? All right, all right, she did love me and I never really loved her the way a man should love his wife. She was a concept, a ritual of passage, a way to dump the Church and change directions yet again in my life, one more lousy idea that led nowhere.
Oh and I was responsible at first now—You gotta give me that! How I wept about it. How I stared for hours at the backyard, all those rainy Sunday afternoons in Pennsylvania, thinking how can I salvage this, this disaster? A divorce would have been merciful. I got up the nerve to ask her about it.
(That was the turning point.)
I’ll say. She began backfilling with religion. Back to church, back to daily mass, back to afternoons ensconced at the local St. Bridget’s Church and its prayer circle and its food drives and a young Catholic faculty wives’ group … and then a month later, she discovered she was pregnant. Carrying the child of the man who made her break her vow to God and then asked her for a divorce so she could fall into damnation twice.
“This marriage is my penance,” she said stoically. “I bring a child into this world with an apostate and a drinker for a father.”
Hell, lady, my drinking wasn’t anything back in those days.
Just wait till I got to Hyde Park in 1961 when I was made an associate professor at Chicago. Everyone was happy for this promotion but Beatrice. She didn’t want for us to leave Duquesne University because it was close to her sisters in Pittsburgh. Chicago was a million miles away, she didn’t know anybody. Do you realize years passed without a warm word or any healing in this breach? Is it any wonder that I traveled as soon as any project was offered—when any grant was tendered, I was gone!
(So you escaped your wife, all right. And your son, Rudy. And in those few months and weeks you were home, you acted worse.)
Don’t You see? She never once felt forgiven. She had taken a vow and then she’d broken her vow—to God. No amount of divine forgiveness was enough: she was purgatory-bound if not hell-bound and this she accepted coldly, with a quiet bitterness. I was the first cause of this sin. I was the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and Satan all in one—the living reminder of her Fall. And there was no way that her little angel, her Abel, her Benjamin, her baby was going to be tainted and corrupted by his father, the philanderer, the drunk!
(Not entirely inappropriate descriptions of this period, however.)
It was the ’60s, for pete’s sake. The mini-skirts, the topless sunbathers, the see-through bras, the young coeds who thought nothing of hopping into the sack with the learned professor. I could see them out there, pretending to take notes, thinking about it … There are few periods that wreaked more destruction on middle-aged men than that one; woe to men whose mid-life crises coincided with the Swingin’ Sixties! The flowered open shirts, the sideburns, the rose-tinted glasses, the tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, the pipe—forty-four years old and a man of my … of my son’s era! And I would stare at my class from the podium, amid the born-agains and Jesus freaks and Catholic human disasters that washed up in Theology 101, those few young women who came not for the course but rather for the dynamic, showstopping lecturer, for the polished erudition and memorized Aramaic, puns in Latin, beautifully pronounced Greek. The languages and histories of the past spun all the needed mystery and hocus-pocus of an aphrodisiac …
(News of your philanderings got back to Beatrice.)
Oh, but some of those undergraduates! I remember one in particular …
(How about this memory:)
Rudy was six years old and Beatrice was still settling in and griping about being in Hyde Park. She declared at the dinner table in a scene rehearsed all afternoon: “Fine. We won’t have Christmas in this house this year. I’ll take Rudy and go to my sister’s, and you can fend for yourself!”
Rudy: “Mommy, don’t cry…”
The child was hysterical every time Beatrice sought to make a scene.
So, Patrick recalled, I took her at her word. She said I could go to hell and drink with my cronies at O’Connor’s Bar and that’s what I did Christmas Eve, the next day, assuming she and Rudy had stormed off to Pittsburgh and would be back after the holidays. I arrived home to see the table set, the candles burned down, the turkey and all the food picked at, and Beatrice indignant at the table.
“You said you were going…” O’Hanrahan mumbled, propping himself against the wall, having really tied one on.
“Daddy?” It was Rudy in his little pajamas, peeping around the corner. “Can we open our presents now? Please?”
He was trying, of course, to prevent the scene he knew would come.
Oh, but Beatrice, Our Lady of the Recriminations, would not be denied! You see, I never wanted to fight in front of the child, it was always at her instigation, until it became doctrine that when Daddy was home there was always a fight. What chance did Rudy have to know a decent father-son relationship: I was the villain, the reason Christmas was a time of tears, the scourge of all clean-living Christian folk!
Beatrice informed the boy, “Rudy, your father doesn’t even have a present for you.” Heartless! Savage!
(Why didn’t you have a present for him?)
I thought he was coming back after New Year’s! Plenty of time to get something! Hey, for every Christmas after that I showered him with toys and books—
(But you never made up the hurt from that Christmas.)
No. No, I didn’t. Every time I made an off-color joke or delayed putting up the Christmas tree, that particular Christmas—more holy to Beatrice than the one at the Nativity—was invoked: Father will ruin Christmas, we are at the hand of Satan once again, my little angel … The poison she poured into poor Rudy’s ears about me! I’d have fared better if she had left and taken the kid and let me visit now and then. Without me as source material to work with, Rudy would in time have come to see his mother for the manipulative shrew she was; I would have had his sympathy.
(She offered to leave you once.)
Facedown, one winter night, on the living-room rug, O’Hanrahan decided rather than crawl into Beatrice’s unwelcoming bedroom, he would stay right there and pass out. Next thing he knew she was standing above him with a suitcase.
“You want me to go to a hotel?” he asked.
“No, I’m leaving. Rudy is already in the car.”
O’Hanrahan came to and heard the Pontiac idling in the driveway. The mantel clock said it was three A.M. Rudy must have padded out of his bedroom and seen his father there like this.
“Don’t go,” he said automatically.
She said, buttoning her winter coat, “I won’t divorce you. You know I don’t believe in it. But I don’t have to live with you.”
(There was your big chance. Why didn’t you let her go?)
Because … well, not when I was on the floor like that—
(No, it was because you wanted to leave her, with the next available woman who’d have you.)
And I thought of Rudy, You have to give me that! I didn’t want him shanghaied in the night, dragged to a life of her bitchy old sisters! All he would remember was me at my worst. So I made Beatrice a promise if she’d stay, that I’d go to some damn alcoholic clinic she’d picked out.
O’Hanrahan at this point in his reminiscence reached a rock ledge, the truly steep part of the climb was before him. He began a slow, step-at-a-time, breathless ascent.
