Prince of Peace (13 page)

"Want to walk me to the subway?"

"Sure thing," he said with counterfeit enthusiasm.

"You got a coat?"

He smiled. "No. Remember? I'm one tough's.o.b."

We left the hall and took the stairs in stride together. Outside I put my overcoat and hat on, but it didn't seem that cold and I felt citified. Michael didn't even turn his collar up. We walked with a studied casualness down Isham Street toward Broadway and the front entrance of the church. The sidewalk was deserted though the ten o'clock Mass was going on inside. It was that brief period when it was too late to arrive and too soon to leave.

Michael paused, and I thought he was reading the names of the clergy on the sham-Gothic sign nestled among measly shrubs off to the side of the main stairs. But he was staring at the weathered bronze plaque below the sign: a Celtic cross above the inscription "That Those Who Perished Shall Not Have Died in Vain," and then, "Catholic War Veterans, Shamrock Post 120, 1940."

Nineteen forty was the year the subway was completed from midtown Manhattan up to Inwood. The neighborhood celebrated that event, but it shouldn't have. That subway was what enabled my generation to escape.

I wasn't interested in Maguire mordant preoccupation with the war or the dead. I turned and began to walk down Broadway toward the subway at 207th Street. Michael followed me, but I could sense his reluctance. I did not slow down for him. I passed the bakery, the shoe repair, the baby carriage store, the cavernous entrances to apartment buildings in which dozens of our schoolmates had lived. I passed the Green Acres Bar, the A&P, Connor's Funeral Home and two liquor stores. Not even the makeshift rack of Christmas trees in front of Manning's Fruit Stand stimulated my nostalgia. My earlier affection for the old neighborhood was gone without a trace, replaced by a much more familiar repugnance. I wanted out of Inwood, that cramped, small-minded enclave of dreary apartment houses and drearier people, thè women forever pregnant, the men cheered not by home life or by work but only by the morose company of tavern-hounds and by the booze, the children eternally poked, pinched and chastised by mothers and nuns, and the whole throng of them cowed by priests to whom the great enemy was the world south of Dyckman Street where, notoriously, men and women read books and discussed ideas that had never been referred to in the seminary.

By the time Maguire and I reached the corner I knew that if I went down into that subway, leaving him behind, our friendship was over. I was furious at him. What the fuck was he doing back here? This was worse even than Queens! And what was this shit about the CYO, coaching Catholic kids for the monsignor? I faced him. "You know something, Mike, you ought to check out college. You ought to get a load of the Village."

"You love it, I guess, huh?"

"I'm the loneliest bastard you ever saw. If I died in my room tonight, nobody'd find me until the stench got to the landlord. But I'll tell you something, nobody steps on my hand down there." I was certain that he'd remember the time we were both altar boys, serving Monsignor Riordan's Mass. At Communion, the monsignor dropped a Host and it fell onto the floor at my feet, missing completely the gold paten I held beneath the chins of communicants just to catch the invisible crumbs. But this was the whole Host! the Body of Christ!—"Species" we called it, having our own words for such things—and on the cold, unconsecrated linoleum tile, and it was through my fault! Through my fault! Through my most grievous fault! Automatically, instantly, I bent to pick it up. I was going to put it on that golden plate, to save it, to rescue it, like Christopher did the Christ Child from the raging river. Alas, also I was going to touch it, and thereby compound the sacrilege, turn it into blasphemy. And so at the last moment, whump! Monsignor Riordan stomped on my profane hand with his hard black clerical boot.

Michael was staring at his feet.

"Mike, I have the feeling that if we just say goodbye now, then, well..." I couldn't finish the sentence. Direct expression on such a thing as the loss of one's oldest friendship was utterly beyond me. I felt an ominous wave of depression riding in.

"Then we've said goodbye," he offered with brutal matter-of-factness.

"Yes."

"And you don't want to do that."

"You do?"

"'If such things as these are done when the wood is green what will it be like when it is dry?'"

I guessed his statement was biblical, or rather hoped it was, it seemed so weird. I didn't know what to make of it then, but now I see that epigram as the perfect comment on the situation. At twenty-one years of age were we going to behave like a pair of defeated old men whose choices had been worn down to nubs by a long streak of dead years? If we lacked boldness and vitality in our relationships then would we ever have had the qualities of youth? But in fact, then, Michael lacked both. He had been overwhelmed by the death of time itself, and now that he'd dropped the false front of his noble cheer it was obvious to both of us that time had yet to come to life again. The poor bastard had no capacity for the present tense. Later I would understand that, in that passivity and detachment from the here and now, he was like the survivors of many kinds of large trauma. He could have just returned from an icy peak in the Andes where he'd had to eat the flesh of his fellow plane-wreck victims. He could have just returned from a season on a raft at sea or from a year inside the embassy in Teheran. What he'd endured had ended, but it remained still more compelling than the "reality" he'd returned to. Not even familiar old Good Shepherd was real to Michael. Not even—I saw this suddenly—I was.

I punched his shoulder. "Hey, come on, keed. What say? Come downtown with me? We can ride the ferry. I'll read you Edna St. Vincent Millay."

He shook his head. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes. I'd never known him to cry. He said, "I'd like to do something with you, but not that."

"Okay, buddy. Anything you want."

He raised his eyes, as if to heaven. "I want to go up there."

I turned, facing down Broadway. Just beyond Dyckman Street, overshadowing Inwood, was the majestic wooded hill of Fort Tryon Park, and on top of it was the stone tower of the Cloisters, the museum that housed the Rockefeller collection of medieval art in stark monastic splendor.

"It's where I go," he said.

I
N
Europe Benedictines built their monasteries on mountaintops, and the hill in Fort Tryon Park overlooking the Hudson River was the perfect site for one. The Cloisters, of course, was not a true monastery or even an authentic imitation. It was a fantasy building, an ensemble of Gothic and Romanesque, constructed to display the pillars, doorways, arcades, stairways, frescoes, altars, holy water fonts, stained-glass windows, sculpted figures and tapestries that wealthy and cultivated American Protestants prized so highly in the early part of this century.

By and large the only Catholics who strolled the Cloisters' hallways in the forties and early fifties—the museum opened in 1938—tended to be the Irish who were employed to do so. Many Inwood men worked there as uniformed guards, including for a time, on Sundays, my father. Despite the fact that the museum was a stunning monument to the aesthetic achievement of Catholic culture, the Catholics of Inwood knew better than to consider it theirs. What were a bunch of moth-eaten old wall hangings or limestone statues with smashed faces anyway? Everyone knew that what counted in monasteries and convents were the monks and nuns and their spiritual works of mercy. And as for religious art, my people liked their statues painted and their crucifixes in good repair. The Cloisters seemed a peculiar, empty, haunted place to the parishioners of Good Shepherd, and they were content to ignore it.

Beginning in the mid-fifties the Cloisters would, however, enjoy a vogue among a new type of Catholic, that first sizable generation of intellectuals and aesthetes, mostly laymen, who considered themselves disciples of Thomas Merton.

Merton had haunted the Cloisters while a student at Columbia and credited it with prompting his conversion. He was the first of many young Catholics to embrace the spiritual aesthetic of French monks and the humanist theology of French intellectual laymen. The Cloisters' connection with Merton's conversion made it the object of pilgrimage—was all the consecration the museum needed—for Merton was the prophet of aesthetic Catholicism. Even I was aware of Merton, and if I held myself aloof in those days from the religious movement he represented, still I watched it, sensing perhaps that eventually it would claim me. I always understood what, at bottom, such Catholics were doing. I should count myself among them because finally, in the sixties, I did succumb. I played a small part in the New York version of aesthetic Catholicism as an editor with the liberal journal
Jubilee,
and as a
Commonweal
savant. I liked having a desk between me and my movements, but even that didn't keep me from coming dangerously close for a time to something like commitment. My knack for detached—some said smug—analysis rescued me, although not before I'd been dubbed the Bill Buckley of the left. I was devastated by that, of course, though Buckley, I heard, was flattered.

Catholics like me had tried and failed to liberate ourselves from the stifling parochialism of Irish American Catholicism by rejecting it outright. When we found we couldn't shake that complex of guilt, nostalgia, conviction and belief, we rejected our early experience of Catholicism by embracing a truer, higher form of the Church, an older one, a more rigorous one, which was at once beautiful and intelligent. How did we know? Eminent converts as different as Clare Boothe Luce, Heywood Broun, Hugh Kenner, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate and Tennessee Williams told us so. And, most importantly, the American Protestant elite, the Berensons and Eliots and Cramms and Mrs. Gardners and even Rockefellers (whom to our shame we secretly admired and envied) had told us so. It was they, after all, who'd given us our Cloisters. Only bigots accused the Protestant collectors of plundering the Middle Ages; they had rescued it from the crass Enlightenment and the profaning Revolution.

We could go up to the Cloisters, listen to the recorded Gregorian, stroll the ambulatories, gaze out on the wild Palisades from ancient arcades, thumb our laymen's breviaries and claim our place not only in religion or culture, but in the very cosmos. We indulged our highly sensitive souls and never feared for a moment that we were like our cousins in the Bronx whom we referred to contemptuously as "BICs," Bronx Irish Catholics. Certainly we were not like our parents, hustling up to Good Shepherd in the shadow of this very place. Good Shepherd was the only Catholic church on all of Broadway, they boasted, as if it was a glitzy show palace for the soul. It was the center of their impoverished lives, and they were always going to novena or to Benediction or to bingo, or, if it was morning, to a crudely gabbled Mass in which no one sang and in which the priest, vested in the laughable fiddleback chasuble, spouted from the kitsch-filled sanctuary his gibberish about the Building Fund. We preferred, in sum, our curators to our curates. We loved everything about the Church except its people.

 

But the Cloisters was still new to me when I went up there that day with Michael. How was I to know it would become a haunt of mine and a central symbol of my life, of what was right about it and—though it would take two decades for me to understand this—what was wrong? I think it fitting now that Michael who never embraced the pretensions of intellectual Catholicism should have introduced me to the place and that it should have been the scene of the rescue of our friendship.

We were sitting on an oak bench in the garden with our backs to the Hudson River. Naked quince bushes clutched the air grotesquely with fingerlike branches, and in the spaces between the sham buttresses of the Gothic chapel I saw my first espaliered pear and apple trees. It was nearly midday by now, but the gray winter light was still diffuse, as in the early morning, and if anything the day was colder. The arches of the portico and the terra-cotta tiles of the sharply sloping roofs so suggested balmier weather that the unreality of the monastic setting was heightened. It was like being inside the wallpaper in someone's bathroom.

A choir of monks was singing a Gregorian melody, which I could identify now as
Gaudete in Domini Semper
but which at the time seemed too mysterious to be enchanting. It was, naturally, a record, but the loudspeakers were hidden and I kept picturing stalls full of robed figures in the chapels through which we had just walked. I was certain those rooms were deserted, but still...

The walls of the large pseudo-refectory had been covered with The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. For some moments Michael had stood in front of "The Unicorn in Captivity," that exquisite and poignant portrait of the mystic animal in its corral. Its white coat was stained with red liquid. Michael said, "I thought at first it was blood. But it's not. Look, it's juice dripping from the pomegranates in the tree." He smiled. "See? Captivity's not so bad."

In another room were the faded, patched-together but still stunning Heroes Tapestries, three of them; the pagan heroes, the Hebrew heroes and the Christian heroes, all portrayed alike on thrones with an abundance of crowns, shields, pikes and drums. The faces of the men were unyieldingly fierce, and it was possible to see them rallying throngs. Michael pointed out to me that King Arthur and Charlemagne were attended by cardinals and bishops; Joshua and David by courtiers and warriors; but Alexander and Caesar were attended by entertainers and women, "I'll take pagan," he cracked, surprising me.

He stopped in front of a small alabaster bas-relief that might once have adorned the front panel of an altar. The figures were worn and unlovely and the scene represented was too cluttered with horses, riders and anonymous attendants to make much sense of. But Michael pointed to the central figure, a helmeted man brandishing a sword, and he said jokingly, "That's me." When I looked again I saw that it was Saint Michael the Archangel. He was standing on a dragon whose face was smashed, whether by the sculptor or by time I could not tell.