Self-Made Man (19 page)

And, of course, it was entirely different than anything you'd find in the military. It wasn't as if the monks burst into my room in the middle of the night, tied me to my bunk and beat me with bars of soap twisted in pillowcases, or made me do push-ups in mud pits in the pouring rain until I promised not to talk about my feelings.

But I got a fairly clear sense by the end of the first week that I was a threat to their fragile ecosystem of terse masculine rapport.

I wasn't surprised when I got sour looks and disapproving shakes of the head from Father Jerome or from people like Father Cyril. Cyril was the prior of the monastery, which meant, as he lost no time in informing me the first time we met, that he was the second in command after the abbot. At sixty-eight, he exuded the jaundiced outlook of an unhappy man who knew there was no remedy for his unmet aspirations. He was too old to change or grow or do the things he'd left undone, and he took out his insecurities on anybody he thought inferior in intellect or station to himself.

If I'd been a serious contender for a spot in the novitiate, Father Cyril would surely have done his best to snuff my candle. I expected that of him. He didn't want anyone in his chosen small arena coloring outside the lines or challenging his authority. Besides, it was his job to enforce the hierarchy of the abbey, which was its organizing principle.

As a newcomer, you either fit or you foundered. You either learned your place or you left. There could be no place for an up-start in a world where obedience was a vow, and learning to be like the others was a mark of fidelity. Jerome had obviously internalized that message long ago and was a knot of denial and mishap as a result.

In that place I could see how a person could be broken down. It began happening to me. And once that was accomplished, once you had accepted the terms of the monastic rule and sufficiently humbled yourself before God and the order, Cyril's ounce of authority, which in the outside world was on par with a manager's power at a McDonald's, would suddenly mean a hell of a lot more. In this way it was no different than the military. Submit. Become like the others, a pure predictable machine, ordered and in hand, and never, ever show weakness or need.

But I was used to showing those things—a free woman's privilege.

I was clueless young Ned, at the bottom of the heap, seeking instruction, guidance, open arms. I got lost in the politics, and the pack mentality of the abbey, and I was amazed at how quickly it happened. Ned fell right into character. Ned did fall in love a little bit with Brother Vergil right away, just the way novices and postulants do and aren't supposed to, and his crush had to be corrected, because that was the obligation of his superiors, cut it off at first sign. In intimate groups of men, Freudian impulses are expected to arise and with help and guidance resolve themselves. It's part of the process in monasteries, too, part of what the novitiate is for, getting up all the buried stuff, all the daddy issues, the brother issues, the fag issues, and dispensing with them early, before they become entrenched and before the community has wasted too much time and too many resources on a maladaptive cub.

Still, I was pretty sure that what I felt for Vergil wasn't sexual, or even romantic, though the twisted mentality of that place, always on the lookout for forbidden desires, had made me wonder. The feelings were very real whatever their motive, and utterly unexpected. They were what drew me into the emotional vortex of the abbey and the fullest possible experience of being a young man at expressive loose ends in an all-male environment designed to rid young men of their messes.

Experiencing this strange and foreign treatment firsthand, I developed new sympathy for boys and young men, and I felt sadness for the damage done to them in those rites of passage we all condone and inflict to make them into men. I remembered my brothers' plights with this same process, seeing them as young boys weeping at home with my mother, telling her of the petty cruelties perpetrated against them by other boys and men at school and summer camp. In those days they were every bit as vulnerable as I was, and still able to show it. What's more, they could still ask for and find comfort and sympathy for their pain. But now, like so many other men, if my brothers show emotion at all, they show only anger, because that's all they've been allowed. I have not seen them cry for a very long time. Perhaps they can't anymore.

I know as much was true of at least one of the more candid monks, who, when I asked him how many times in his life he'd shed tears, said that he could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand.

“I'm a very rational person,” he said ruefully. “I'm not given to outbursts. It's part of my Germanic male upbringing.” He said he was just beginning the process of unlearning this with his own spiritual adviser, who, significantly enough, was a woman. But it was going slowly, and he had much to overcome. Almost all of the other monks had similar issues, he implied, but most of them weren't even close to addressing them.

In such an environment it should have come as no surprise when my first amicable week with Vergil turned inexplicably sour on a dime.

He stopped inviting me to the shop. He began ignoring me at services, and emanated an unmistakable hostility when forced into close proximity with me. At lunch he sat as far away from me as possible and if we spoke at all in passing, he was curt and superior. It was an unmistakable snubbing that caught me completely off guard, and threw Ned into juvenile pangs of self-doubt.

Father Jerome had noticed Vergil's defection, too.

But then he was looking for it. Kicks and wounds fit right into his schema. He claimed to know the ways of monasteries. He knew, he said, all about crushes and unnatural attachments, and the hierarchies of weakness and hurt, betrayal and emotional control, that festered under the ritual surface of cloistered life.

“He's doing you a favor by cutting you off now,” he said. But this was said in the context of so many other paranoid ideas and nasty undercurrents that I didn't know whether or not to take him seriously. He sounded deeply stung most of the time, as I'm sure I did.

He'd say things like, “Don't ever trust anyone here. They'll betray you. Believe me.”

He was already paranoid about the ramifications of our “gay” conversation. Every time we saw each other he'd say, “You haven't told anyone anything we said the other day, have you?”

I assured him that I hadn't, which was true, but this didn't seem to assuage his doubts or deflect his constant circumspection. He was afraid of being exposed to the group and his fear turned him vindictive.

He assumed an I-told-you-so tone when he raised the subject of Vergil's new and sudden coldness toward me.

“Boy, he just can't stand to be near you, can he?” he said with relish.

“So I'm not just imagining it?” I asked.

“Nope, he definitely doesn't want anything to do with you.”

That was a dig. He wasn't just rubbing my face in his predictions, he was also having a go at me for being gay. Ever since the gay chat, he had been sliding jabs into our casual banter, the odd homophobic remark designed to needle me—like quoting a recent newspaper article in which a prominent member of the Catholic leadership had said that marrying a person of the same sex was like marrying your pet. He laughed heartily as he told me about it.

“I fell on the floor when I read that. It was so funny.”

“You're an idiot,” I said, visibly angry. “And so is the person who said that.”

As I turned away, I noticed that Brother Felix, whom I didn't yet know by anything but name, was suppressing a laugh as he got up from his chair two seats down from Father Jerome.

I had noticed Brother Felix before but hadn't spoken to him directly. He, like many of the other monks, had glasses, a belly and a bald spot in the middle of his thinning hair. At fifty years of age, he was one of what I would come to think of as the midgeneration, or bridge, monks. He was significantly older than Brother Vergil but quite a bit younger than the octogenarian monks like Richard the Tall. He was post–Vatican II, but not so post that he'd entirely escaped the pull of the old ways. Yet he was still young enough to understand and identify with the younger generation. For me, this unique position in the abbey hierarchy would make him the key to understanding Ned's emotional plight at the abbey and contextualizing it within the framework of the fraught masculinity at work there. He would prove a far more reliable source than Jerome, though not an entirely contradictory one.

But those revelations came much later. At first, I misunderstood Felix utterly. At first, he was just another purveyor and consumer of the usual homophobic jokes that abound in almost all exclusively male environments, the monastery being no exception.

We met formally over a game of mah-jongg in the rec room. I'd never played the game before, but on his invitation, I'd joined a foursome that included him, Vergil and Jerome. I had a bit of trouble getting my pungs and chows straight, and I made a number of mistakes up front. Felix was in a cranky mood that night, and this wasn't the best of circumstances under which to make his acquaintance. As I got to know him better, though, and earned his respect, I found that these moods were fairly rare, and usually directed at people he took for fools. I was, in my ignorance of the game, displaying the marks of a fool. I had to be corrected on a number of my moves, and his corrections were startlingly sharp.

“
No
. You can't pick up from the discard pile unless you have a pung or a chow to show.”

“Okay. Okay. Sorry. Relax, Brother. Relax,” I said.

“Please,” he added, between gritted teeth.

As we played on I got distracted by the television, which was playing in the background. Usually, at this hour, a gaggle of the older monks gathered round the tube to watch the news. One particular segment on the American obesity epidemic had caught my attention. The camera was focused on a man's enormous wobbling midsection as he waddled down the street. I couldn't look away. I was still staring when my turn came up.

“Hello?” said Felix in a crescendo of irritation. “Your turn.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was just mesmerized by that man's belly.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

Jerome looked down at his pieces. Vergil burst out laughing.

I squirmed immediately, regressing in an instant, trying to cover myself like a teenager caught in a flub.

“What?” I clamored. “The guy was enormously fat. That's all.”

But it didn't matter what I said. I wasn't being entirely honest with them anyway, so I could hardly complain that they were having a little joke at my expense. Besides, these jokes were part of their badinage and I couldn't blow my cover by deflecting it with a dirtier innuendo, as I might have done in the outside world.

Essentially, this was harmless boys' stuff, being the first to make the fag joke and laugh the loudest—the trope of every male-bonding ritual. In this, they were hardly different from my bowling buddies, though naively I had expected them to be. Still, their remarks had a testing edge to them that I had never felt with Jim, Bob and Allen. I sensed, the way you do when you hear an old married couple sniping at each other, that there was a lot being said without being said.

Mingling behavior in the rec room taught me a lot about the monks' ways with each other, their interpersonal skills or lack thereof. Watching and listening for only a short time, I could see how rigid and inept most of them were at relating to each other, and why by contrast I stuck out so sorely. By the way they tripped over each other and backed away, you'd almost have thought they were virtual strangers, not people who'd been living together, some of them for as many as thirty or more years.

Tuesday nights were supposed to be social nights. The abbot had ruled that on that one night out of the week the monks would sit in a circle and try to talk to each other. It had to be mandated or it wouldn't happen. It was supposed to foster greater closeness or openness among the monks, something they'd been trying to work on for some time at the abbey in various ways.

Apparently they'd once tried instituting a hugging program. This, too, they'd had to enforce in a formal way to make it happen at all. Some of the monks, especially the older ones, who'd had ingrained in them an aversion to any physical contact with other men, just couldn't do it spontaneously. Vergil and Felix had each told me about this incident. It was obviously a big event in the history of the abbey, one that Vergil had scoffed at, but Felix had better understood. Felix had told me about the semiabsurdity of it, how some of the hugs felt natural, or almost natural, but hugging some of his fellow monks, he said, was like hugging a board. The exercise hadn't lasted. The discomfort with enforcing affection had been too great, or perhaps, as Vergil seemed to suggest, some monks' repugnance for new age role-play techniques had swamped the spirit of the thing and sunk it before it took hold. Clearly each man had his own struggles with intimacy—all of the monks did—and these attempts to address those struggles were always prickly, though necessary in a community where men were trying to live in a spirit of love with each other.

From what I could tell, it wasn't just that, as Christians, they felt they had to express greater affection for each other, or even that, as housemates, they had to learn to mingle rather than simply coexist. It was that their needs, whether they could admit it or not, were poking through the formal web of this living arrangement. Their needs for affection and touch and companionship and compassion were making themselves felt. For some of them it was only in the harrowing run-up to death, for others, it was in the trough of late middle age, and for some it was happening out of sheer constitutional sensitivity refusing at long last to be put down.