Closing Time (25 page)

Throughout these years, as my respect for missionaries grew in inverse proportion to my contempt for diocesan priests, ruggedness continued to be one of the main selling points of the Maryknoll order. Missionaries were manly men. Missionaries were serious. Missionaries did not get locked inside safes, they did not talk like two-year-olds, and they most assuredly did not drink Chablis. They also did not have names like Aloysius. And soon I would be one of them.

This, at least, is what I hoped would happen, but then reality reared its ugly head. Much like Christopher Columbus wading ashore on San Salvador and immediately realizing that, whoever the natives of the island were, they were definitely not canny middlemen in the Indian spice trade, I experienced a similar sense of disillusionment when I arrived at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary, officially, the Venard Apostolic School, in Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1964. The Venard was a tidy cluster of stone buildings perched hopefully atop a hill looking down on the drowsy hamlet of Clark’s Green, which itself towered over a petite, somniferous way station called Chinchilla, which was located about eight miles outside Scranton. Scranton was known up and down the East Coast, and perhaps even farther, as a first-class dump, only slightly more enticing than its twin city, Wilkes-Barre, which lay coiled in wait sixteen miles down the road, like the uglier of the Siamese twins. Wilkes-Barre was famous for exactly one thing: Mr. Peanut had been born there in 1916. Scranton could not even lay claim to that. Thus was I introduced to the meaning of the word “Podunk.”

I am not sure how a boy of thirteen who, save for that one trip to upstate New York, had never been anywhere except Philadelphia and the Jersey shore could instantaneously discern how awful Scranton was, but I could. Clearly, nothing exciting had happened there in decades; it was like walking into an Edward Hopper painting, where you got the feeling that all the wild, fun-loving people had already blown town, leaving behind only the brooding buildings and desolate streets. The Mafia had been active in Scranton during the Prohibition Era, but even the Black Hand had long since pulled up stakes, taking their bootlegging brio with them. I was old enough to know that Philadelphia had a reputation for being parochial, conservative, working-class, short on hoopla, and I knew that this reputation was well deserved, as people in the Delaware Valley worked hard at being uninspiring. But Philadelphia was a real city, with subways and trolleys and crooked politicians and a downtown and buildings that rose higher than four stories and two rivers and a zoo and ghettoes and organized crime and millions of inhabitants and department stores with names like Strawbridge & Clothier and local lore and graft and a nickname. By comparison with sarcophagal Scranton, Philadelphia was Byzantium. And I wasn’t even in Scranton. I was eight miles outside it.

Neither of my parents could accompany me to the seminary that first day, as my mother was recuperating from having her gallbladder removed, and my father had to work. So I trekked north to Scranton with my aunt Cassie on a banged-up old Trailways bus, then caught a local bus to Clark’s Summit. My aunt was not especially devout, but she did like an outing. She was very impressed by the facility that greeted us in Clark’s Summit, particularly the quaint monastic touches. As we entered the grounds we spied, just off to the right, a little pond ringed by pine trees; in the back of the main building stood a well-maintained baseball field and a functional basketball court. Off to the left were a barn and a nondescript building where some of the priests and all of the brothers lived. The main unit, which housed the dormitories, the classrooms, the refectory, and the administrative offices, was a conventional ecclesiastical structure, vaguely Mediterranean in style, with a bell tower at its apex. It was a nice spread the Maryknolls had, a haven from the world of Mammon, but I was already beginning to realize that the world of Mammon was in my blood, that rustic charm made me queasy.

Aunt Cassie stayed most of the afternoon. I’d never been anywhere near as close to her as I was to her husband, Jerry, who, like most nattily dressed men, was much more likely to spread his money around. But I made sure to kiss her goodbye when she left, because a fixture of family mythology was the time my father—her brother—refused to kiss her at the 30th Street train station the day he shipped out for the South Pacific in 1943. He’d given her the high hat, or so he later claimed, because he hadn’t wanted to be embarrassed in front of his friends. Aunt Cassie never forgave him for that slight, and he himself never stopped ruing his caddishness that day, for if he had been killed in action, this icy adieu at 30th Street Station would have been her very last memory of him. It was odd that my father so often mentioned this incident, because he was not an especially affectionate person, nor was she.

After Aunt Cassie left, I began my new life. Many of my classmates were already suffering from homesickness; some were actually in tears. The priests told us that the surest antidote for homesickness was sports. The most persuasive of them was Morgan J. Vittengl, a stocky, striking-looking fellow who resembled the actor who would betray Clint East-wood in
The Outlaw Josey Wales,
a film that had not yet been made. Vittengl, who taught European history with considerable style but little insight, promptly organized a game of five-on-five basketball on the courts that lay slumbering in the shadow of the bell tower. I had never met anyone named Morgan prior to this, and certainly not a man of the cloth; every priest I’d come across up until then was named Patrick or Michael or Vincent or Joseph (gaudy Hibernian names like Brendan and Sean came later, when the Irish had enough money to move to the suburbs and send their kids to private schools and could afford to be more blatantly ethnic). To this day Morgan J. Vittengl strikes me as a jaw-droppingly suave handle—more like a nom de guerre—a name that might easily have belonged to a swashbuckling adjutant gallivanting through the swamps of Ole Virginny with Jeb Stuart himself.

It was priests against babes in the woods that afternoon—again, Morgan’s suggestion. I did not know how to play basketball at the time, having spent my entire childhood working in retail, and had never gotten any pointers from my father, whose attitude toward the sport was one of unalloyed revulsion. Father Vittengl was an ursine, territorial type, and he and his fellow servants of the Lord pounded the stuffing out of us. They boxed us out with their massive buttocks, smacked and tripped us as we dashed downcourt, smashed our pansy jump shots back into our faces, and fouled us at will. I was not sure at the time if any of these missionaries had ever had their fingernails torn out by the godless Red Chinese, or had their eyes kept pried wide open with bamboo splints for ninety-six hours straight by bloodthirsty Mau Maus, or had their guts spilled onto the sands of Corregidor by bayonet-toting minions of the Empire of the Sun rehearsing for the Bataan Death March. But there was clearly something about fresh-faced young boys with full sets of appendages that stuck in their manly craws, because they were certainly in a cantankerous mood that day. They must have beaten us pale, slack-jawed neophytes about 87-13. That really improved things on the homesickness front.

The next day school began, and we all settled into a rigid daily routine: early-morning mass, classes, lunch, more classes, several hours of manual labor, a few hours of sport, dinner, study hall, evening chapel, bedtime. On Sunday afternoons, we were allowed to vacate the premises for four hours; most of us wandered into Clark’s Green or Chinchilla to purchase records or books. Books had to be submitted for review to the rector or one of his assistants, who examined them carefully, eyes peeled for Satan’s wily input. If nothing offensive was found within, the freshly purchased reading material was stamped APPROVED BY THE RECTOR. Books that were not approved were confiscated and destroyed. Anything pertaining to war or diplomacy or nuclear devastation was acceptable; anything mentioning lingerie was not. My collection included a few trashy westerns with names like
Barranca!
and
Forced March to Loon Creek,
popular classics like
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
and the madcap right-wing screed
None Dare Call It Treason,
which my uncle Jerry had given me. This legendary volume—the lunatic’s bedside companion in the early 1960s—pilloried gullible Americans for ignoring the threat posed by the heathen Russkies, the atheistic Red Chinese, the Christ-hating Cubans, and the Democratic Party. I read the book to be nice to my uncle, who may have been a member of the Reds-under-the-beds John Birch Society at the time, but
Forced March to Loon Creek
was a lot more fun.

By the time I entered the seminary, my family had escaped from the housing project. Because both my parents were now working—at least for a while—we felt that we were moving up in the world as a family unit. But occasionally I would be reminded that the trajectory of our ascent was not uniformly vertical; on two separate occasions I was taken aside after dinner and told by the bursar that the checks my parents had sent me had bounced. Apprising me of this in hush-hush, conspiratorial tones, he conveyed the impression that Mom and Dad had just purloined the emerald-encrusted scepter from the tomb of Sargon II. The checks were for $5 apiece. My parents would never send cash through the mail, because they viewed all postal workers as confederates of Ali Baba. By sending a check, they were perhaps also expressing a desperate hope that by the time I cashed it, there might be enough money in the bank to cover it. More often than not, there wasn’t. This left me out of pocket for the next ten days or so, until another check arrived. Obviously, we were not yet out of the woods.

 

After the euphoria of flight from my father’s necropolis wore off, I began to examine the situation in which I now found myself. It would be going too far to describe my emotional state as one of homesickness, as I certainly did not pine for my home per se. But I did miss my city and my neighborhood, as I was now stranded in the boonies. Previously, I had defined myself as Catholic, white, male, working class, Irish American. Nobody I knew back home harped on the fact that we were Irish Americans, because everyone in my social circle was Irish American, or acted like it. Self-conceptualization was never a problem: We told great stories, we had an odd, unsetting sense of humor, we were fiercely devoted to our mothers without actually enjoying their company, we wished our fathers were dead, we spent most of our lives being depressed, we drank ourselves to early graves, we were Irish. And there were a lot of us. We were not the fish; we were the water. But now, left to my own devices in the wilds of northeastern Pennsylvania, I realized that what I really was, was an urbanite.

Most of my classmates in the seminary were not. From the outset, it was possible to detect a deep cultural schism that bifurcated the school. There were ninety-three students in all, about equally divided between big-city kids and rubes, many of whom came from farcical places like Mingo Junction, Ohio, and Fair Haven, Michigan. The big-city kids liked to smoke, listen to rock ’n’ roll, smuggle in banned books, play sports, and manufacture any excuse to get off campus. The rubes liked to help Brother Eric slaughter cows. Few of my classmates seemed particularly interested in religion; they were never devout in the way Saint John Bosco, or the saint I had mistaken him for, was.

To this day, I have no idea what most of us were doing there. Some were innocent bystanders press-ganged into the priesthood by overly devout parents. This was definitely true of the handful of shanghaied Hispanics enrolled in the school. While many of the rubes were clearly lost souls looking for high adventure, country bumpkins duped into thinking they could find it a few miles outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, a substantial portion of the student body consisted of those sorts of tough, mean, ambitious Irish and Italian youngsters who have always swelled the clergy’s ranks without conveying any discernible aura of saintliness or compassion for one’s fellow man. A handful—the ones who immediately signed up for roles in the school production of
Twelve Angry Men
—were either gay or veering in that general direction. And a fair number of the students were exactly like me, scrawny adolescents with fathers who didn’t like them. We were the ones who viewed the Church primarily as an escape hatch from reality.

Years later, I would read a novel called
The Dark
by the very capable Irish writer John McGahern. The hero is a young boy who enters the seminary to get away from the depredations of his sadistic, dysfunctional father, only to find that the Church is not much of an upgrade. As McGahern makes clear, this standard-issue CV is a cliché among the Irish. You become a priest, or you become a cop, or you become a criminal. But you do it to escape from a drunk, not because you genuinely seek to lay smooth the path of the Lord. Willa Cather once said that there are only a handful of story lines in all of human existence, yet everyone acts as if his or hers is unique. Only later in life do we learn that many others have trod an identical path, that our lives are largely generic.

Shortly after I arrived in Clark’s Summit, the Phillies began the most startling collapse in the history of baseball. Considered no more than a so-so team coming out of spring training, the Phils enjoyed a Cinderella season, taking over first place on July 16 and remaining atop the standings until the final week in September. The Quaker City, whose largely working-class population was still reeling from John F. Kennedy’s assassination the previous November, literally quaked with joy. Most of the city, anyway: Down in North Philly, in the slums that ringed Connie Mack Stadium, people were not having a Cinderella season. One sweltering June evening, riots erupted.

Because of the riots, because of the city’s dismal self-image, because of JFK, the Phillies’ magical season assumed a symbolic heft far beyond the events that transpired on the playing field. But as was so often the case in this luckless metropolis, the fairy tale would not have a happy ending; the team’s miraculous performance from the beginning of April until late in September was merely a prelude to disaster. Two weeks before reaching their first World Series since 1950 and only the third Fall Classic in their macabre eighty-one-year history, the hometown heroes boasted a seemingly insurmountable six-and-a-half-game lead over their closest rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, with just twelve games to play. Then, unbelievably, they managed to lose ten straight games and the pennant. The horrific streak ended on the next-to-last day of the season, when they beat the Cincinnati Reds, as they did the following day. But it was all for naught: The Cardinals, after dropping the first two games in New York, set down the puny Mets 11-5 on Sunday and won the pennant by a single game. The Cardinals went on to win the World Series, besting the Yankees in a seven-game slugfest few remember, because to sports fans the words “Nineteen sixty-four” are synonymous not with the Cardinals’ unlikely come-from-behind triumph but with the Phillies’ epochal meltdown.