Self-Made Man (22 page)

“I think maybe I know what it is, and it's okay.”

“Oh, you do? That's interesting. What?”

“You're gay.”

This made me laugh. Hard. Even
he
thought Ned was gay. I knew he hadn't given the time of day to Father Jerome, and I knew he didn't really concern himself about the sinfulness of anyone's sexuality. That was clear. But I was curious about where he'd gotten the idea.

“Well, yes,” I said, “I'm gay, but not in the way you think, and that's not the thing I have to tell you. But, I'm curious, what made you think it?”

“Well, your mannerisms are pretty effeminate.”

This was rich. As a woman, no one had ever accused me of being effeminate. Here was another of Ned's tricks. Dress as a man, and thereby emphasize the woman. Reveal the truth under the rubric of a lie.

Father Fat went on, “Okay, if it's not that you're gay, what is it?”

“This is really bad,” I said, “and I'm afraid you're going to feel compelled to break the seal of the confessional when I tell you. How do you feel about the seal, by the way? I mean, if I told you I was a murderer—which is not what I'm going to tell you, but if I did—would you feel compelled to go to the law, or to tell your brothers?”

“No,” he said.

Still, I was going to put him in a sticky position. But I had to hope he'd keep the confidence, even though he would have been well within his rights to tell
me
not to keep it, to compel me morally to disclose my wrongdoing. I knew that myself.

“Okay,” I said, finally. “Here goes. I'm not a man. I'm a woman.”

He'd been smiling his tolerant, jolly smile, and it froze on his face. Dead silence.

“I'm not a transsexual or anything,” I went on. “I'm a full biological woman, and a lesbian, by the way. I came here in disguise to study and write about this community of cloistered men. It's part of a larger study I'm doing about men and women and how they are treated differently in the world.”

He began nodding slowly, the smile fading, but still there as a form of shock. Then very slowly he said, “Like Margaret Mead.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

There was another silence. Then I asked, “Are you angry?”

“Well, it does give one the feeling of being used.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know, and I'm sorry. Do you think you can forgive me?”

“Yes, I forgive you,” he said without hesitation.

“The thing is,” I said, “I've had real experiences here. I haven't just been an observer. And while some of them have been painful, I've undergone some spiritual change as well, and I've connected with people and myself in certain ways that I won't soon forget.”

He nodded. Then he started to laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I was just thinking that I wish you'd put me in your will or something so that I could tell this story—‘There was this one time…'”

“Well, maybe I can release you to talk about it,” I said. “We'll see how it goes.”

He gave me absolution and he said by way of penance that I should go and sit in the church and think.

As we were finishing, I said, “Knowing I'm a woman changes everything, doesn't it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“See, now I can hug you, right? I couldn't have really done that before, could I?”

“Yes,” he said, “and no, you couldn't have.”

For Father Fat, hugging a dying old friend like Father Henry was one thing. Hugging a young would-be novice was quite another. But hugging a woman friend, a foundling daughter who couldn't help thinking of you as a lost grandfather, that was something else altogether.

We both stood up and came together. I put my arms around his neck and my head on his shoulder. He squeezed me tightly with great affection.

“Thank you,” I said as he walked out of the room.

He smiled again. After he'd shut the door, I smiled, too, when I looked down and saw that I had dandruff all over the front of my black sweatshirt.

Later that morning I did my penance. I went to the church and thought. I thought about whether or not to tell Vergil and the others about my true identity. I wondered if they, too, could forgive me.

I had reached the end of my run, or one end. Had I stayed longer there would have been many more emotional disasters and reforms, because that was the designated course, a very old paradigm, and the essence of what our culture has come to think of as masculine tutelage applied roughly to the moral soul: break a man down to build him up stronger. Find the fault in yourself and heal it.

I was, after all, the one among them who had committed the greatest transgression, and in forgiving Ned so readily and completely, not only had Father Fat shown me the clarity of mind and heart that emotional self-discipline at its best could give to any man or woman able to stand up to it, he had shown me the rigors of insight that Ned had yet to find in himself.

After my confession with Father Fat I knew I needed to talk to Vergil, so on my second-to-last night I arranged to meet him for some private time together. We decided to take a walk around the grounds. It took a fair amount of preliminary chatter before we got down to the real subject. Vergil was uncomfortable with what he sensed was coming, but by this time I wasn't hiding anything anymore, and finally I just cut through.

“So,” I said, “what happened between us a while back? One day we were friends, and the next it was as if you hardly knew me. Did I do something to make you angry? Did I disappoint you in some way?”

He deflected calmly.

“No, not at all. I don't know what you mean.”

“Oh, come on, Vergil, you do, too. I didn't imagine this. Something changed radically after the first week, and I'd like to know why.”

We went back and forth on this for a few minutes, with Vergil claiming to have been busy and preoccupied with his coming profession and a whole host of other things unrelated to me. They were plausible explanations, but there was more to tell and Vergil was too honest at heart to hide this very well, even in his disclaimers.

Then in frustration I said, “Look, just tell me the truth, even if it hurts my feelings. I'd really like to know. I promise, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking about me, you're wrong.”

Vergil didn't reply, so I went further and said the obvious. “I know everybody here thinks I'm gay. But I need you to know something, and you're just going to have to take my word for it. I'm not sexually attracted to you.”

He interrupted here. “See, the fact that you would even feel the need to say that—that that would even enter your mind…”

“I know, I know. You think, like everybody else, that I'm in denial. The more I protest, the truer it must be. But you're just wrong. Believe me.”

I could tell he wasn't really buying it, but he didn't press me, so I said, “Never mind that for now. Tell me what it was that bothered you about me.”

“Oh, all right,” he said, relenting at last. He sighed. “You were too clingy. You were like this thing I just couldn't get off me.” He pronounced the last four words slowly with emphasis, shaking his right hand in a flicking downward motion, as if it were covered in muck.

“I could see it happening,” he went on. “I recognized the signs.”

As Jerome had said, Vergil had felt me developing an affection for him, had assumed it to be homosexual in nature and had taken steps to squelch it.

“So I was right,” I said. “You did back away purposely.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “But look,” he added, “I think you've had a good influence on this community. You've brought emotional awareness and the possibility of change. You're not a follower. We need that.”

Coming from Vergil this was a great compliment indeed, and it confirmed for me what I hoped had been the case—that however much of an intrusion I had been in their lives, and however poorly I might have handled myself at times among them, I had touched these men in some way. After he said this, I felt momentarily overwhelmed by a sense of healing and possibility, a sense that for all their stoic showing, these men were warm at the center, and breathing—crippled, perhaps, but not nearly dead, and by no means without some hidden ability to affect me, and for the better.

I knew then that the time was right to tell Vergil the truth about me.

“Vergil,” I said trepidatiously. “I've got a confession to make.”

“Okay,” he said with complete composure. “What is it?”

“There's something about me that I haven't told you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Something important.”

We walked a little farther in silence, and then I turned to him. At this point, since I was on the verge of leaving anyway, I wasn't wearing my beard anymore. I hadn't been wearing it for several days. To me it should have seemed obvious that something wasn't quite right. But this was the test of perception that continually arose with Ned. People saw in him what I had conditioned them to see. When I removed the beard, they saw nothing but a shaved boy. But I wanted to press Vergil on the point. He was perceptive and I wanted him to see. Could wanting to reveal myself reveal me as surely as wanting to disguise myself had disguised me? Did the suggestion work both ways?

“Do you have any idea what it is?” I asked.

He thought for a minute, then ventured something he'd obviously been thinking for a while.

“You're not Catholic,” he said.

This was typical Vergil. He would see heresy in a microbe before he'd see the transvestite staring him in the face. He was hard-core about his doctrine, though being his sardonic self he couldn't refrain from making a crack or two on the subject now and then. I remembered how once while we were looking through the monastery bookshelves together for some appropriate reading for Ned, and had come across the work of So-and-So, S.J., he had reshelved it immediately, saying, “No, that won't do.”

“Why not?” I'd said.

“I have serious doubts about whether Jesuits are even Catholic,” he said.

I loved him for that. He was a crank and he knew it.

I'd given enough of my unbelief away in theological argument over the last three weeks that Vergil's question didn't surprise me in the least.

“No,” I said. “I'm Catholic, all right, or I was, though you're right that I'm not anymore, or at least I'm not insofar as you can ever cease to be Catholic.”

Vergil glared at me over this last remark, as if I'd poked him with a stick, which of course I had. This was part of our game, when it was on, part of what had bonded us to each other all along.

“Guess again,” I said.

“Hmm. Let's see. You're an escapee from a mental institution.”

“Nope. Not technically, though being a New Yorker surely counts.”

The monks had all been tickled by the fact that I made my home in a neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen. To them, the freak show of New York City was about as far from their home as you could get. To me it was and it wasn't.

At this point, I stopped Vergil on the path, stood facing him and said, “Look at me. It's right in front of you. Can't you see it?”

“What?” He looked into my face. “I see a guy with graying hair.”

“No, that's not it,” I said. “Look closer.” I took off my glasses.

“I don't know,” he said, perusing me again. “What is it?”

He was blank. Puzzled.

We both turned and kept walking. I tried one last thing.

“I'm not what I appear to be.”

This sank in as we rounded the corner of the footpath by the carpentry shop and began the last stretch back to the cloister. Suddenly he turned to me, the moment of revelation having come at last with full force.

“You're a woman.”

“Yes,” I said with relief.

By now we were in front of the abbey. A discovery of this magnitude was going to require at least one more loop around the grounds. We kept walking. Vergil was quietly registering this information. I was watching his face. He was stealing looks at my chest.

“I do have them,” I said, catching him midglance. “They're just under a tight sports bra. I'm not a transsexual. I'm a woman in disguise.”

This seemed to answer the first question in his mind. I went on with the rest of the explanation.

“I'm also a lesbian,” I said, “which, you will now understand, is why Ned couldn't possibly be gay and why I never wanted to sleep with you. You see?”

He nodded. He seemed both disappointed and relieved. I had expected the relief, but not the disappointment. There was something more to this.

I told him about the book. He wasn't pleased at first, for all the reasons you might expect, feeling betrayed and lied to and used. His orthodox strain kicked in, as expected, but not in the punitive way I had thought it might. I had broken the seal of the cloister, and that, he reminded me, was a fairly serious breach of canon law. He suggested I go to confession on the matter. I told him that I already had, with Father Fat, and that my decision to tell him was part of my penance.