Out of the Bag:
A Search for Missing Pieces
By Greg McAllister
Copyright 2012 Greg McAllister
Smashwords Edition
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Acknowledgments
I am especially grateful to four people: my friend Arthur Westing for his encouragement, proofreading, and cover photography; my editor, Suzanne Kingsbury, who taught me how to see through my pen; Jeremy Taylor who designed the cover; and my partner, Linda Evans, who daily inspires me with her love and positive energy.
Thanks also to the many seminary friends and classmates who shared my youthful idealism, as well as my ex-wives who had to put up with my arrested development. The names of the latter have been changed to protect the intimate.
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Prologue: The Manichaean Candidate
Part One: The Joyful Mysteries
Chapter 9: Near Death Experience
Chapter 10: Apologetics, Rhetoric, and Football
Chapter 14: Loss of Faith . . and Hair
Chapter 15: White Sock Rebellion
Chapter 16: Seminary Filmmaking
Chapter 17: Mississippi Death Wish
Chapter 18: Christian Prejudice
Chapter 23: Politics & Guerilla Theater
Chapter 25: The Oath of Celibacy
Chapter 27: Life in the Rectory
Chapter 28: The Roman Collar as Weapon
Part Two: The Sorrowful Mysteries
Chapter 30: The Haight & S.F. State
Chapter 31: Panthers, Pickets & Priests
Chapter 44: Achieving The Bottom
Part Three: The Glorious Mysteries
Chapter 46: Courtroom Rashomon
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Prologue: The Manichaean Candidate
In the backyard, a basketball hoop stands between the fig trees along the wire fence. My dad has strung chicken wire between the fence and the slatted backboard to keep the ball from going into the Peck’s yard. Jim Boy and Tony stand beneath it, beckoning me down for a game. I leave my Grandma Mayme with her sensible black shoes and tortoise shell combs and run out for a pick-up game, dribbling around rotting figs and fermenting apples, sweat rolling down my back until my hair is matted and my shirt cast off.
After Jim Boy and Tony are called home, I head for the kitchen to get a drink, and poke my head in to my grandma’s room on the way. It’s a hot muggy June day. The air is heavy with the smell of the Ben Gay I have tirelessly massaged into her shoulders. She sits stone-like in her rocking chair, rosary beads wrapped around her pudgy fingers, her eyes shut. She is whispering prayers. A partly-crocheted rug lies at her feet. On the wall beside her, Jesus kneels against a jagged rock, blood and sweat oozing from his temples, an angel hovering behind him. “Hi, Gramma,” I say quietly.
She opens her eyes briefly, then creases her forehead and turns toward the wall, showing me her tight perfect bun.
My stomach grabs. “What’s the matter, Gramma?”
She keeps her face to the wall, her hands moving on the rosary. “I’m surprised, that’s all,” she says.
I try to still my breath. The sweat runs in rivulets down my back. My eyes sting.
“I’m disappointed,” she says. Her tone is the one she uses to talk about sinners, lax Catholics. “I didn’t think you were that weak.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper. Hot tears run down my cheeks.
My grandmother turns her fierce face to me. “You couldn’t keep that shirt on?” she narrows her eyes “and offer your suffering up for the poor souls in Purgatory?”
Like a heroic Gawain donning armor, I pull my shirt back on. My grandmother continues looking on in disapproval, cinching me into her delicately stitched, but inflexible, religious corset, judging me along with the other laggards, putting moral stricture over love, dividing good and evil along the dotted line first drawn by Zoroaster in 600 B.C. when God had two sons and the first chose Good and Truth, the other, Evil and Falsehood.
Eight centuries later, a Persian named Mani would introduce this dualism into Christianity by teaching that the human body was a dark prison confining the light of man’s soul, that only a strict, almost violent, asceticism could free the soul from its fleshy prison. The doctrine would morph its way down through Augustine and the medieval Jansenists, and by the time my Grandmother learned it from the Benedictine nuns and then passed it down to me, her eight year-old grandson, it would be the basic operating system in the Catholic computer.
I am seven the summer the Second World War ends and Mayme comes from Montana to live with us. My father adds a room to our little house in Kentfield he and my mother bought for $3000 when they were first married. That was just after the Golden Gate Bridge was built, and rather than taking the ferry, my father drives across it to work at the base of Market Street in a dusty three-man trucking office wedged between noisy loading docks. I ride the bus every day to St. Anslem’s grammar school, a three sided mission-style building with stucco walls and a long arcade lined with low green benches where we salute the cross and the flag and then wait for the sound of the wooden clacker so we can run out to the cement playground. Nuns watch from the sidelines in their black crepe robes, their faces framed with starched white linen.
German, Irish and Italian, the kids of St. Anslem’s are all Catholic, and the Catholics are under siege. We know this because the nuns make us pray for Cardinal Mindszenty, who is being tortured in a Hungarian prison. They make us pray for the overthrow of the Communists, including Jews, Protestants, Masons, and the owner of Jack’s Drug Store, who sells girlie magazines.
Every day I wear a uniform with salt and pepper cord pants to a school that smells of crayons, floor wax, baloney and ripe bananas from the lunchboxes in the cloakroom. One afternoon, I grab my lunch pail from the cloakroom and run out the door, banging into something on the arcade, something dark and scratchy, and I can’t get loose. Things are bouncing off my head, hands grab me, spinning me around, pushing me out into the light. Finally, I look up and see a giant, red-faced nun, shaking her finger, telling me not to run in the corridor. I realize I was lost in the black crepe folds of her habit, tangled in her rosary beads, dangling scissors, and wooden clacker, trapped there like a flightless bird.
I end up not liking nuns much. In third grade I call Sister Mary Coleman an old goat under my breath, and she grabs my arm, shakes it, yanks me toward the door and down the empty arcade toward the boys’ bathroom, where she stiff-arms the old green door, and drags me to the wash trough with its spring-loaded faucets and the soap dispensers you have to jiggle on the bottom to get the Boraxo out. She jiggles out a handful of powder. “Open, boy!”
I open my mouth and she slaps the powder into it, then cups her hand under the faucet.
“Open!” Her hand splats over my mouth. Water softens the coarse powder. “Now chew, boy!”
I hate her. I want to spit it in her face, run out of there, but I remember grandma at home, and what she has taught me about suffering. I start chewing, offering the pain up for the “poor souls.” I know, at that moment, God loves me more than He loves Sister Mary Coleman.
I never tell anyone at home when I get into trouble because they’d side with the nuns. Instead I tell it in confession on Saturday. “Bless me father, it’s been one week since my last confession. I used swear words five times, disobeyed my mom twice, and called Sister Mary Coleman an old goat.” I always have little sins to confess, cussing, getting angry, fighting, never the big ones Grandma talks about – missing Mass on Sunday, eating meat on Friday. And definitely never sins of the flesh. I’m not even sure what those are. All I can imagine is blubber jiggling.
It’s hot in the confessional. I rattle off my sins and wait. Father Leonard doesn’t say anything. Then he clears his throat. I can see his mouth working close to the screen. “Uh, Greg, do you ever, when you’re in bed, ever rub your penis?”
Wow! How does he know about that? I only recently learned how to do that. I thought it was my own discovery. When I say yes, he asks me if it feels good.
“Yes, Father,” I say, “it feels really good.”
He lets out a sigh. “What you’re doing is very dangerous. It’s called masturbation, and it’s a mortal sin. If you don’t stop right now you could end up in Hell. For your penance say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. And, uh, Greg, do you suppose you could cover the 8:30 Mass tomorrow?”
I’m Father’s first-string altar boy. I started out as a torchbearer in the second grade. People told my mother that I looked like an angel on the altar. I wore a cassock and surplice and carried big candles and had to kneel for a long time without getting sick from the incense. Grandma said even the pope probably started out as a torchbearer.
We’re good Catholics. We say grace before meals, night prayers before bed, and after dinner we pray together with the radio. “It’s almost time,” my mother says, clearing the table. She puts the dishes in the sink and I twist the volume switch on the radio until I hear the sharp snap followed by the hum of tubes heating up. My father and grandfather kneel down. Grandma stays in her chair because of her arthritis, and I slump on the worn wicker chair, my forehead pressed into the wicker backing. “This is The Rosary Hour with Father Alvin Wagner,” the announcer says.
Weekends, we buy cokes and comics at Caesar’s Soda Fountain, get our hair buzzed at Eldon’s barber shop, hunt for nuts and bolts at Mueller’s Hardware. On the way home we stop at Berthenier’s station and use our gas ration stamps to fill up the brand new Chevy we’ve won at the St. Anselm’s festival.
Tony Giusti and Jim-Boy Pulskamp are my best friends. We play at the little sandbar near the bridge, catching polliwogs in Folgers Coffee cans and use those same cans to pick blackberries, selling them for 25 cents a can. We make arrows from sticker-ended swamp weeds and attack the Hinkley gang up the hill throwing acorns and using garbage can lids as shields. I try to escape the stigma of being an only child and the void of lonely hours when my friends are home with their siblings by cultivating companions, co-conspirators.
I don’t remember the exact moment I become Grandma Mayme’s confidante. I know only the familiarity of her full round face, her stocky frame, the warmth of those hours spent in her room at her knee, shuffling her playing cards, which smell like camphor ice. She reads me tea leaves, gives me pennies and candy, bakes me cookies and blackberry pie. We play whist and rummy and Parchesi. She shows me the holy cards she keeps in an old candy box, the ones the nuns gave her when she was a girl at St. Benedict’s Academy. The cards have doily edges and show Jesus crucified, his heart stabbed with thorns, blood oozing out. The cards have different numbers on them. The plenary indulgence card, with no number, forgives everything. “If you recited this prayer and fell over dead,” she says, “you’d go right to Heaven.” In her silky flowery dresses, her crocheted afghan over her shoulders, she teaches me the magic of indulgences, saints days, feast days, first Fridays, novenas. Rubbing Ben- Gay into her shoulders for her acute arthritis, I hear about the sins of the flesh, the redemptive power of the rosary, how self-denial strengthens the soul of a spiritual warrior. “Stick out your tongue,” she says. “If you’re fibbing, there will be a black mark down the middle.” Sure enough, I find an ugly black line running down the length of my tongue whenever I lie. She tells me about St. Francis, a rich kid who gave away all his fancy clothes and money and dedicated his life to God and the birds. “Greggie,” she says, “I don’t care if you never make a cent. Just be a saint.”
As new people move into the neighborhood, she ranks them on the scorecard of salvation, reserving her harshest judgments for those whose names indicate they should be Catholics, but aren’t practicing. Even my parents do not escape. They enjoy an evening highball and are therefore weak. Tony’s family goes to the 10:30 Mass. Mayme says that makes them not quite as good Catholics as us, because they’re lazy. I find it exhilarating, pigeonholing people into simplistic categories. My grandmother stands at her bedroom window, watching Liz Peck whistle happily in her tomato patch. Turning to me with the offended look of a medieval inquisitor, Mayme shakes her head slowly, pronouncing her anathema: A whistling woman/ and a crowning hen/ bring the old devil/ right out of his den. My stomach sinks. I like Liz, but she’s doomed to Hell.
When her arthritis gets really bad, Mayme offers it up, and I imagine streams of poor souls floating up to Heaven on contrails of Ben-Gay.
I watch my grandfather turn our back yard into an Eden of vegetables. His pleated pants are held up by worn suspenders, and he wears a stained, soft-brimmed hat cocked at an angle. His pipe is clamped between loose dentures, and his shirt is rolled to his elbows. Unlike my grandmother, Peter Kennedy is thin and wiry with high cheekbones that give him the appearance of the Native American Sioux he spent so much time with in North Dakota.
My grandmother’s arthritis keeps her from the basement steps, and when the sun goes down, my grandfather will come into the basement, where he keeps his gardening tools and his stash of outlawed smoking materials hidden in an old Folgers can. Under the steps, he keeps a record of the first rainfall of each year, the first frost, the date of each year’s spring planting. He grew up in the rolling green farmlands of Wabasha township on the Mississippi River, sixty miles south of St. Paul where Irish immigrants farmed land that resembled their native Ireland. As a boy, he delivered groceries in a horse-drawn wagon, and was instructed by his employer to hand his cargo over without resistance to the brash young Indians who frequently waylaid his wagon. He was the first person the Sioux saw with fillings in his teeth, earning him the nickname “Hiamuga” or Iron Tooth. Later, he owned a trading post in North Dakota, learned to speak Sioux, went to pow-wows, learned their dances, caught tarantulas found in banana bunches delivered to the post and put them on display for his Sioux customers who were mesmerized by these strange prehistoric insects.
I will spend my childhood under the spell of my grandmother’s Catholicism, lost in the black habit and rosary of that Manichean destiny. What I will discover when I finally emerge is that my grandfather’s resonance with the pagan roots of our native Irish Catholicism, and his sensuous bond to the Earthly mother is stronger than a beaded rosary, stronger than thorns and crosses, stronger than kneeling in a cassock for hours on end and praying to the radio, stronger even than that plenary indulgence card that is supposed to send me right to Heaven.
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When is our fate decided? When do the dominoes that eventually form the patterns of our lives begin to fall? Perhaps for me it began with St. Augustine, my grandmother’s Manichean tendencies, St. Anselm’s and the Catholic neighborhood that raised me. Or perhaps it started with the strange labyrinth of puberty.
1954: Eighth grade. The year of pegger pants, black wing tip shoes with horseshoe tap heels and white painted welts, the year of duck's ass hairstyle with fishhooks dangling over the forehead. The official colors are pink and charcoal. You have to wear your MacGregor windbreaker with the collar up. Belts are skinny, pink suede and black-edged. The ‘chuke look. At first only Bocabella and the class hoods dress this way, but then Scabby, our substitute eighth grade teacher, snatched prematurely from a skin cancer operation, outlaws it, and the rest of us taste the forbidden fruit. I start timidly with the suede belt, then convince my mother I need a charcoal windbreaker. Next thing I know, I’m crashing out of the Junior Bootery in my first pair of horseshoe taps. The sound of that rebellious metal in the St. Anselm’s arcade gives me the same unfamiliar sexual rush I got when I lit illicit fires down by the creek with matches filched from my grandfather’s smoking can.
It’s the year I beg God to make my grandmother better, the year I pray for her to come home from the hospital, but she breaks my heart by dying. The year I beg God to make her better and plead with the poor souls to help, but she dies in a hospital room without saying goodbye to me. It’s also the year my grandfather begins to bloom. He laughs more, shows us Sioux dance steps, drinks an occasional glass of wine with my mother. In school I surprise myself and everyone else by scoring the highest on the scholastic aptitude tests. Scabby sits me in the front of the class, telling my mother “he just hasn’t been working up to his potential,” calling on me all the time like I’m Einstein’s little brother. That winter, my father comes to my room, most likely goaded by my mother, and gives me “the talk.” It goes something like this: “Uh, Son, you may find that once in a while you’ll be having a dream and you’ll wake up and, um, feel some fluid coming out of your penis. That’s called a ‘nocturnal emission’ and, well, it’s not a sin, even though it feels good. So don’t worry about it.”
My dad has handed down to me the only loophole to pleasure he ever discovered as an Irish Catholic.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Though I dress the part, I remain loyal to my grandmother, ignore puberty, deny its urges. I resent my friends as they fall in love, ask girls out, and talk about make-out sessions and the smoothest way to unclasp a bra. When they ignore Scabby’s orders and sign up for Mrs. Preble’s mixed dance lessons, I am the only one, besides Wendell Joost, whose mother insists on puritanical lessons at Arthur Murray, practicing formal dances with matronly instructors twice my age.
1955: Marin Catholic High School. I switch to desert boots, button-down shirts, ivy-league khakis with a belt in the back. But I’m wary of Elvis’ pelvic thrusts. I don’t do the be-pop at mixed dances where the girls cover their hickies with makeup and press their lips against their boyfriends’ necks. I’m still doing the box step with Wendell and joining the ham radio club. I try out for freshman basketball, but the newly arrived Black kids from Marin City are too good, so I wind up sitting on the bench.
A pretty regular existence, except that I haven’t yet held a girl’s hand, asked her to the movies, felt her bra strap in a cool back row seat. Through the years I will wonder what my life would have been like if what happened next never occurred. Would I have forgotten my grandmother’s warnings about the sins of the flesh and cut loose on the dance floor? Learned to thrust my hips? Would I have been different if circumstance had allowed Desire to call my name and I had felt the intoxicating touch of a girl’s lips, the softness of her breasts? Would my fate have changed?
It starts with a cold. Then bright red dots appear on my chest. The next thing I know I’m lying under the bright lights of Marin General Hospital gritting my teeth as they crush my sternum with a needle and suck out the bone marrow to determine what’s causing my idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. My platelet count is 10% of what it should be. My blood isn’t coagulating. I feel fine, but they tell me I could get bruised and bleed to death.
I miss two months of school and the cortisone they give me blimps me up like a doughboy. Finally the doctor lets me go back. “No sports of any kind,” he says. “Absolutely no fighting and be careful about bumping into things. You could bleed to death.” A fat wimp, I waddle back to school and, because there’s nothing left, I plow into History, Algebra, Latin, English. To my surprise, I enjoy studying. In lieu of a social life, I sign up as the school’s assistant sound technician, set up microphones for rallies, run stage lights, play the 45s at school dances. I am a non-combatant on the battlefield of puberty, watching from the sidelines. I’m shocked when, in May, I get elected class president. Vaguely, I wonder if my classmates only voted for me to please the faculty, or worse, because they felt sorry for me.
Father Cornelius Burns takes me under his wing. He is a scholarly young priest whose childhood polio has left him with a limp, causing him to swivel as he carries his huge stack of books under one arm. As my mentor, he teaches me Latin and English, drilling proverbs into my brain. The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory. Repetitio est mater studiorum [Repetition is the mother of studies]. His is a world of immutable essences, absolute truths, apodictic judgments – my grandmother’s world.
I spend a lot of time talking to Jesus, asking him why I have this weird blood disease and why I’m so awkward around girls. I’m the only aspiring saint I know and, in the absence of my grandmother, my righteousness is a lonely place. I assume my infirmity is a test to see if I can accept The Father’s will in everything I have no control over – most of my life.
It’s a warm April afternoon during my sophomore year when Father Lacey’s voice crackles through the homeroom speakers: “The entrance exam for the seminary will be held this coming Saturday. Anyone interested should sign up in my office in the next two days.” I glance around, wondering if anyone in my class will go. Last year Frank Healy did, Bob Murnane the year before that. I saw Frank last month. He said he really liked the seminary’s intramural sports program.
That night, I leave my father reading The Saturday Evening Post and my mother reading a Flannery O’Connor novel and lie in bed, dozing into a dream. A barely audible but familiar voice draws me out of sleep. Take the test. I open my eyes and sit up in bed. Shadows take shape in the dark room. Jesus. Jesus wants me to take the test for the seminary. Is this what they mean by a vocation, a calling from God? In the living room, my parents are still reading. They look up, surprised, when I walk in. “I’ve decided to take the test for the seminary.” My mother’s eyes search my face. “Well, this is sudden,” she says in her schoolteacher’s cautioning voice, but I can tell she’s pleased. My dad lights up. “By Jove, Darlin’, that’s wonderful! I think you’ll make a damned good priest.”
“I might not get accepted, Dad. I’m just going to take the test.”
“That’s a very sensible approach,” my mother says, shooting a glance at my dad who is bubbling with excitement. For years my father has been a member of the Serra Club. Their purpose is to foster priestly vocations. I can tell he’s ready to start calling his buddies.
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“They were all good eggs,” my father says as we pull into Sacred Heart High School’s parking lot that Saturday morning. He is speaking of the others from Marin County who entered the seminary. “It is just that some of them had a vocation,” he shrugs and glances sidelong at me, “and some didn’t.” The San Francisco fog is clearing and in front of us stands the imposing brick building where the exam will be held. I know who my father is referring to, our neighbors Bill Pulskamp and Joey Krause, who dropped out of the seminary after only a couple of years. “Just do your best,” he says when I get out of the car. “God will take care of the rest.”
Twenty guys are nervously perched on worn desks, talking to one another, or simply looking around, figuring their odds. I search for a common denominator among them, some saintly demeanor perhaps, but they don’t look any different from the guys at Marin Catholic, same pimples and peach fuzz. A priest with a pile of booklets comes in and tells us no one is allowed to leave the room except during test section breaks. The longest part will be the Latin. A collective moan rises. The priest laughs. “Right, that’s the toughest, but you have to know your Latin in the seminary.”
Three hours later, my face flushed, I walk out to where my dad sits reading the paper in our ’53 Chevy. He watches me while he starts the car. “How was it?”
I study the other guys filing out. “Okay I guess. I’m not sure about the Latin.”
My dad pulls the car out of the lot. “You remember Father Mariani?” he asks. “His father was an old Italian, sold fertilizer. After Joe entered the seminary, his dad donated a pile of manure to the St. Anslem’s festival every year and they’d raffle it off. One of the best fundraisers ever. Seemed everybody in Marin wanted manure.”
My dad pushes in the lighter and re-lights his cigar. With a shot of panic I realize he’s assuming I will pass with great scores, go to the seminary and become a priest. He is counting on it, as one counts on outliving his parents, on summer fog in San Francisco; he’s counting on his only son making him proud, never making a wrong or foolish turn. I close my eyes. Unbidden, all those Latin words come swimming into my mind.
“You heard from the seminary yet?” Gerry O’Donnell, my cynical, snobbish English teacher, who up until now has never paid much attention to me, has beckoned me up after class. “Not yet,” I tell him. He looks at me up and down as though I’m wearing a particularly classy suit. “Well, let me know,” he says. He pushes his hand out to me to shake it. In the lunch line Mike Gallagher, one of the wildest, most popular, guys in our class, slaps me on the back and says, “I just want you to know, I think you’ll make a great priest. We really need good priests. I could never do it myself, so good luck.” Francine Rogers, a cheerleader I was sure didn’t know I existed, bounces up to me in the hall and says, “Hey Greg, I hear you’re going to the seminary. That’s great.” I’ve become some kind of hero, riding off into a seminary sunset. It feels good, this respect, this sudden intimacy.
I stand in the kitchen one Friday afternoon in June with the seminary letter in my hand. No one else is around. My heart is beating fast. The letter says I passed the test, they have already informed my pastor. I will receive more information soon. I look out into the backyard where my grandfather’s Eden blooms. I think about my grandmother in her rocker, her arthritic hands running through the rosary, condemning Liz Peck for whistling, then suddenly dying, without saying goodbye.
On our Saturday shopping trip, my father tells all the checkers at Guasco’s market, the lady at the dry cleaners, and Harry Mueller at the hardware. I stare at my shoes on the linoleum floor, feel the hot flush on my cheeks and wish my father would quit saying my name. On the way home, I watch the oak trees blurring past. “Lots of guys get in,” I say into the Chevy’s stale air. “That doesn’t mean they make it through all twelve years.” My father leans over and pats my knee. “Don’t worry about a thing, Darlin’’’. You’re going to do just fine.”
The next week another letter arrives. You have been officially accepted into St. Joseph’s, the words read. There’s a pamphlet enclosed called The Little City of God by Father Lyman A. Fenn. "St Joseph's College is the little 'City of God,' complete in itself, standing isolated against the 'City of the World,' having within its limits and independent of 'that other city,' all the means and possibilities to equip young citizens for their future warfare against the 'City of Confusion.'" I like this. It conjures up my grandmother’s worldview, that clear and righteous warrior perspective. "Constant self-surrender which leads to abiding self-control, is the keynote of his character building; not the modern self-improvement or progress." Spiritual bootcamp, I think. Just what I need. I’ve been worried lately that if I don’t get more focused on my spiritual life I might end up in Hell.
That summer, I shed my wimp status and work at the high school for a dollar an hour, watering plants, re-coding locker combinations, varnishing desks. There’s a crew of us. I’m cleaning lockers with Mike Anderson and he’s telling me he wants to buy an old chevy, fix it up. A minute later he’s confiding in me he might go into the seminary after high school. Jack McGuinness, our 23 year-old crew leader, is driving me out to water the baseball field. Out of the blue he says, “Y’know? I really wish I could live a better life.” As if I’m his father or something. I walk home that afternoon along the dusty path next to Egger’s nursery. What if I don’t stay in the seminary? What if God really isn’t calling me to the priesthood? What will my dad think then? I stare at the shrubs lined up inside the fence, imagining my grandmother peering down from her Heavenly rocking chair, watching me like a hawk, making sure I don’t fall prey to the sin of pride.
When I get home a packet from the seminary is lying on the table. Inside are sew-on laundry numbers, #174. All my clothing has to have 174 on it. Except my socks, which will be washed in a nylon mesh bag woven shut with a diaper pin stamped 174. I read down the list of required items: shoe shine kit, dust mop, broom, waste basket, drinking glass, spoon, rug, chest of drawers. In the afternoons, Mrs. Pulskamp comes over and sits in my grandmother’s old rocker. She and my mother sew 174s on all my things. “Bill went in too early,” she tells my mother, “right out of the eighth grade. He only lasted a year. I told Jim he’s going to have to wait until after high school.” She rips thread with her teeth. I’ve never heard Jim say anything about wanting to enter the seminary.
After a couple of weeks, I begin to identify with 174. It’s a tall, thin number, more angular than round, long limbed. I begin collecting the items on the list as if they were hallowed ceremonial objects. A footnote says nothing can be hung on the walls, the chest can’t exceed four drawers, all our clothes must be conservative in color and design. My father and his Serra Club friends give me their drabbest coats, jackets and ties, and I assume this is part of becoming a man of the cloth.
Late in the summer Bob Murnane and I speed around the hills of Marin in the little Hillman his father has lent him for the summer. I ask anxious seminary questions between screeching turns and Bob assures me that I’ll like it there. “The classes are tough and The Rules are strict, but we still have a lot of fun.” Judging by his driving, the seminary has unleashed something wild in Bob and I wonder about that. We’re roaring down Wolfe Grade now. “You’ll get drafted on one of four teams and play baseball, soccer, basketball, track and swimming. Everybody’s on a team and everyone has to play.” My heart starts pounding with excitement as I think about playing sports again. My folks are still worried about me bleeding to death, but I’ve decided if God’s calling me to the seminary He must also be calling me back to sports as well. What my folks don’t know won’t hurt them.
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September arrives and the San Francisco Seals finally win the Pacific Coast League pennant, only to be exiled to Phoenix to make room for a major league team in San Francisco. I’m hoping for the Dodgers, but it turns out to be the Giants instead. My dad tells me that Senator Joe McCarthy, “a good Catholic boy,” has been killed by the Commies, driven to a heart attack by their smear tactics. Times are bad. I’m glad I’m going into the seminary.
Our green '53 Chevy is in the driveway, stuffed with my dresser, mop, rug, drab clothes, drinking glass, spoon, shoeshine kit – everything dutifully checked off the list we received at the beginning of the summer. I squeeze into the front between my mom and dad and my grandfather wedges himself between the mop and the chest of drawers in the back. It’s hot in Marin, but we run into a chilly fog on the Golden Gate Bridge and it lasts until we get to El Camino Real south of the city. The air warms up along the peninsula and gets uncomfortably hot and dusty by the time we reach the Grant Road turnoff in Mountain View. We meander through acres and acres of fruit trees and finally turn down a little road marked St. Joseph's Avenue that winds through a stand of eucalyptus before narrowing into a hedge-bordered lane. At the end of the lane a brick building looms, fronted by a large grassy circle with palm trees. We follow the arrow along the right side of the circle until we reach the front of the building, four stories high with an elegant bell tower extending another two stories. I remember Father Fenn’s description in The Little City of God: The building has a certain severity of outline, unavoidable in an architecture designedly stout. This is no frat house.
As we pull up in front of the stairs, an older student in a black suit approaches us with a clipboard. He finds my name on the list and reads off a room number, pointing up to the third floor. “You’re allowed to use the elevator in the front hall, but only for your dresser. Usually it’s off limits. And you can’t bring the dresser up the front stairs here. You have to drive around to the side. Everything else you’ll have to carry up the side stairs.”
We can handle stairs. My dad’s a young 71 and my grandfather’s definitely spry for 87. We have stairs at home. We drive around the building and wrestle the dresser up a short flight of stairs then down a long corridor to the elevator. We ride up to the third floor, then carry it down another long corridor around the corner to number 34. The door is open, revealing a compact 7’ x 10’ room with twin bed, hinged shoe-shine box, chair, wash basin and built-in medicine chest. The small closet is empty. Out the high window I can see our guide giving directions to another family. Luckily the staircase is closer to my room than the elevator was.
After about three trips my grandfather is huffing and puffing. “Dad, sit down on the bed and rest,” my mother tells him, and he does.
Other guys are moving in too. I watch as my dad hefts a suitcase up the stairs, my mother carries the broom, mop and crocheted rug, her permed curls beginning to droop with sweat, and suddenly I feel vulnerable, protective of my little band of elders.
My mother makes my bed, hangs my clothes in the closet, fills the medicine chest. I’m starting to wish they’d leave, but I also don’t want them to. My mom straightens the bedspread one more time then brushes her hands together. “I think it’s time for us to go so you can settle in.” She gives me a brusque hug. “I love you dear.” My dad gives me a wet kiss holding fast to my shoulders. When he stands back to look at me I see his pale blue eyes blinking back tears. “If you need anything, Darlin’, just let us know.” Grandad hangs back as usual, then grabs my hand as they’re walking out the door. His chiseled features are taut, as when Mayme died. “Do good, Greggie,” he tells me. I open the door and we head down the hall. At the car my mom grabs me one more time and hugs me so tightly I can’t move. My grandad wipes his glasses and looks away. “It’s only three weeks ‘til visiting Sunday,” my dad says, forcing a smile. “We’ll see you then.”
The Chevy moves away and I think about my mom getting up the next morning, passing my empty room, missing me at the breakfast table. This Saturday, dad will run the errands by himself and Grandad will smoke alone in the basement gazing up at my jerry-rigged ham radio lines. The tail lights are almost out of sight when I turn around and head back toward the brick building to my new world. While I’m climbing up to my room, I realize that three flights is a lot of stairs.
~~~~
As I pass the room next to mine, I see a guy with sandy hair and glasses hanging a suit in his closet. “Hi,” I say. “My name’s Greg. I live next door.” He turns around smiling and walks over to me, hand extended. “Hey, nice to meetcha. I’m Dick Ormsby.” His voice is resonant, reassuring. “You must be a non-orig.”
His handshake is soft but sure. “What’s a non-orig? I ask.
“It means you must have transferred in from outside. I’m what’s called an orig, an original, because I entered right out of eighth grade. All it means is you probably had more fun. Let me get this stuff put away and I’ll show you around.”
There’s more activity in the halls now, latecomers arriving, greeting each other. Then a rich tenor voice, floating above all the others, is singing in a cockney accent. “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air.” Dick laughs. “That’s Bob Carroll. He’s a theater buff, probably seen every play and movie ever made. Sounds as though he liked My Fair Lady.” I look out in the corridor and see a light complexioned redhead with a sharp nose and dancing blue eyes. Dick introduces us. Bob reminds me of a bird, timid but also aggressive.
Dick takes me downstairs, showing me the classrooms and the huge study hall that we share with the class ahead of us. “We don’t call them seniors like you do outside. It’s first high through fourth high. Then, once you’re in college, you’re Poets and Rhets. Another name for first high guys is sixth Latiners, because they have six years of Latin ahead of them.” A bulletin board outside the study hall displays the daily schedule and the dining room seating assignments. I’m glad to see Dick and I are at the same table.
Everyone is starting to gather in the central courtyard, anticipating the dinner bell. We walk through the crowd, Dick introducing me to his friends. Some seem excited to be back, others are grumbling about summer ending too fast. My brain is spinning wildly, trying to reconcile this wild array of characters with my former stereotype of seminarians. By now there are about 300 guys in the courtyard and the noise is getting intense. “Hey, Mannion, who’s going to win this year?”
“Not the Trojans.”
“The Ramblers!”
Dick steers us in and out of groups, favoring, I notice, the quieter, more serious guys rather than the loud jock types. We meet Conrad Gruber and Al Larkin, Steve Matosich and Pete Martinez, Ed Gaffney and Gerry Winkenbach, all of them very friendly and welcoming. Then we run into a guy, ambling along like a mob boss, decked out in white bucks and a sports jacket, surrounded by a bunch of rawboned jock types. Dick doesn’t seem as sure of himself now. “Uh, Greg, this is Mike McLaughlin, another classmate of ours.” McLaughlin gives me a half-hearted handshake, looking over my shoulder, playing the crowd. Out of the corner of his mouth, he mumbles, "What parish ya from?"
"St. Sebastian's. In Kentfield."
"Marin, eh? I used to play ball with a guy from Marin." He mentions a name, still looking over my shoulder.
"I've heard of him,” I say, “but I never really met him."
He and his sidekicks are already moving on. "Nice to meetcha, Mike," I call after him. Nothing.
“He’s the assistant captain of the Trojans,” Dick says. “He’s a jock.”
“Not very friendly,” I say.
“Not in a group, but he’s okay by himself.” Dick doesn’t sound very convinced.
At exactly 5:57 the Angelus bell sounds and the courtyard cacophony goes silent. I look around and see a few seminarians with their eyes closed moving their lips in silent prayer. Others are glancing around, shooting furtive smiles at friends. The bell tolls on, then everyone walks rapidly, silently, toward the dining room, which Dick told me is called the refectory.
I follow Dick into a large room with high ceilings, beige walls and dark paneling. Long tables are covered with shiny clear plastic over white cotton tablecloths. Dick gestures me to a chair across from him and we stand in silence with the others. Off to one side is a raised platform where the members of the faculty stand like deities on Mt. Olympus. When everyone is in place, Fr. Campbell, the rector, says something in Latin and the entire community barks something back in a single voice. I wonder what they’re saying and again experience old fears about my inadequacies in Latin.
The prayer finished, everyone sits down, still in silence, and an older student climbs stairs to a pulpit set high at one end of the refectory. Very methodically he opens the Bible and begins reading from the New Testament, pronouncing each word distinctly and carefully. This seems like serious business. He’s certainly not sacrificing enunciation for expression. The reading ends in the same pained precision it started, and, after a moment of silence, the rector says "Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis."
"Deo Gratias!" the assembly yells and everyone starts talking at once. There are nine guys sitting at our table. “I’m Rich Mangini,” says the neatly dressed, well-combed guy at the head of the table. “Your tablehead. You can call me Mange.” He picks up his fork and points it at Dick. “Dick’s my right-hand man, his job is to cut the meat into nine perfectly” – he raises his eyebrows at Dick as though already scolding him – “equal pieces and pass them down. What’s your name?” pointing the fork at me.
“Greg.”
“Well, Greg, you’re my left-hand man. You have to cut the mystery. That’s dessert. We usually don’t know what it is, so we call it mystery. You,” he points to the guy next to me and then to the one across from him, “you are the butter cutters; your job is to draw a nine-part grid on the butter. Which we call grease.” He points further down the line and I wonder how long this lesson will last, when we’ll get to eat. “You’re the milk pourers,” Mange says to the next set of diners. “You can get more milk by holding up the pitcher for one of the waiters. You should try to get seconds on everything, but you always have a better chance with milk or potatoes than with meat or mystery. You guys at the bottom of the table,” he calls. “You’re the pilers. Your job is to scrape all the leftovers into that bottom pan, pile up all the dirty dishes, and then sort the dirty silverware in the other pan.” Mange sits back, sets his fork on his plate. “We all started as pilers,” he says, “so I don’t want to hear any complaining.”
When it’s time for dessert, I slice through a gooey chocolate cake-like affair knowing one slip of the knife will set the whole table howling, though it will be the left-hand piler who really suffers, since he’ll get stuck with the last, presumably smallest, piece of this strange concoction.
“If any of you start screwing around,” Mange tells us as he watches me cut, “or if you challenge my authority, all I have to do is stand up, and the Prefect of Discipline will be down here just like that.”
Ormsby turns to the butter cutter on his right, laughing. “Remember when Tobin stood up on Maloney last year?” The butter cutter nods. “Yeah. Poor Phil.”
The bell rings at the end of the meal and everyone goes silent again. The reader climbs back up to the pulpit and reads a passage from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’Kempis. Father Campbell follows it with another prayer in Latin. “Amen” the student body calls in unison, and we all rise and head for the door. People seem to be shaking hands as they go out. When we get to the door, Dick reaches over, dips his right hand into a holy water font and extends it to me. I touch his moist fingers with the tips of my own and make the sign of the cross as the others are doing. “This used to be the chapel before they built the new wing two years ago,” Dick says. “That’s why the fonts are still here.”
Outside in the cool September air we join Conrad Gruber and Al Larkin and walk down the service road past the swimming pool toward the old barn that houses the indoor basketball courts. On the way we pass other groups of walkers, some of whom trade barbs with each other like rival armies. “Different teams,” Dick explains. He and Conrad and Al talk about the faculty, the courses and other classmates, but not much about sports.
After half an hour we return to the chapel for the rosary, then walk in silence to the study hall where Father Campbell sits, pink and globular, on a raised dais, holding a copy of The Seminary Rule. He looks down at us through his round, wire-rimmed glasses. “This,” he says, “is your path to holiness. The Rule spells out God’s will for you every moment of the day.” I begin to feel more comfortable. This is one challenge I can meet. I don’t know if I can make it as a scholar or an athlete, but I can definitely follow rules.
At 5:50 the next morning I’m ripped from sleep by the blaring electric bell Father Campbell has dubbed vox dei, the voice of God. Moments later someone bangs on my door yelling something in Latin. When I open it, he’s already down the hall, banging on other doors, repeating the same Latin phrase. I pull on my pants and t-shirt and hurry down to the bathroom. Silent classmates stumble in and out of the stalls like zombies. I’m still fumbling with my tie as I run down the stairs into the cold darkness of the courtyard. The cavernous chapel echoes with muffled sounds of kneelers being lifted, students squeezing into pews. McLaughlin kneels next to me, his butt resting on the pew.
At communion time, we all stand and the kid on the aisle raises the kneeler with his foot so we can file out of the pew. As we’re coming back, someone in the row ahead kicks our kneeler and it whacks Mike Hearney right on the shins. Everyone starts giggling.
The grand silence ends at breakfast with an explosion of voices. Mange is the only guy at our table whose hair is perfectly combed, tie flawless. He waves his knife like a baton. “Today is Thursday, our weekly holiday, so we don’t have any classes. You new guys are supposed to go down to the campus and play softball. That way the scouts can look you over and decide whether they want to pick you. We’re all on a team. I’m a Rambler.” He gestures at Dick. “He’s an Indian. Everyone has to play.” Mange stabs his fork into the scrambled eggs. “And you can’t hold out.”
“What do you mean hold out?” I say.
He looks at me, chewing his eggs carefully. “A couple of years ago two new guys pretended they didn’t know how to play softball. They kept dropping flies and throwing like girls, so nobody thought they were any good. Turns out the Trojan captain put them up to it because he was from their parish in Oakland and knew how good they were. He was able to wait until the third or fourth round to pick them. That’s why the Trojans ended up with all the best athletes in that class. They cheated.”
As he talks, my heart starts beating faster. Am I ready to play sports? These guys are out for blood and I’ve been on the bench for two years. With a blood disease.
~~~~
Classes start the next day. Father Olivier’s black hair is parted perfectly, his cassock is spotless “Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra,” he intones and panic grips me, but luckily, he calls on Tom Sheehan. “Show us how it’s done.” Tom skates smoothly through the next few lines of Cicero’s convoluted Latin. What am I doing in this class? Why didn’t they put me in the “B” group where I belong? Jack Olivier extends a finely manicured hand toward Al Potter. “Alex, continue please.” Potter crashes through the next passage, furiously thumbing through his dictionary as he goes. These guys are amazing, extracting meaning from what to me is still just a series of words. I’m okay at translating individual phrases and recognizing verb forms. But actually making sense of whole sentences and paragraphs? No way.
“Mr. McAllister. How do they do it at Marin Catholic?” I want to say, “Not very well,” but I’m so terrified I just stare at the sentence in front of me. Finally I begin translating, a word at a time.
“I don’t think Cicero would put it quite that way.” The rest of the class laughs, relieved. I’m going to pose no threat to them.
English class next with Father Taylor. He hobbles in with a cane, eases himself gingerly into his chair, and glances at us as though he resents our presence. Pursing his lips, he speaks and then snorts, kick-starting his nose every few words. “All right, okay (snort). You will write several essays in this class (snort) and they will be thoroughly critiqued (snort).” He swivels his chair, grabs a piece of chalk, and writes on the blackboard: A nickname is a sign of affection. “This is your first (snort) assignment. Three hundred words please (snort), double spaced.”
Nicknames are common in the seminary, especially for the faculty, and nicknames aren’t always a sign of affection. His is Larry, but the guys who don’t like him call him The Gimp. Everyone calls Father Campbell Beansy behind his back. I wonder if Larry has given us this assignment to learn our secrets.
In Greek class, Father Perkowski comes in looking like a deer in the headlights. He’s young and freshly minted from a seminary back East. He leads us in sing-song recitations of noun and verb forms, keeping the beat with a thumbs-up fist. “Ho potamos, tou potamou!” He’s probably our easiest teacher. He’s also my confessor and I think of him as guileless and saintly, like me.
Father Conner teaches us speech. We call him Doc because that’s what he calls everyone else. “Put it in the bone, Doc,” he says over and over. The “bone” is the sphenoid cavity, Doc’s favorite part of the body. “The sphenoid is where you get the volume and pitch you’ll need to read in the refectory,” Doc tells us.
We have four study hall periods a day. “Evening study periods should be devoted to Latin and English classes,” Beansy tells us. “In the other study periods, you should prepare for the classes that immediately follow.” McLaughlin sits next to me in study hall and I watch him furtively reading numbers from last year’s Trojan record book when he should be studying. He’s in the B group, so I assume his classes aren’t as hard as mine. Every Wednesday night in the weeks to come, McLaughlin will ask me if he can borrow a stamp for a letter home. “I’ll pay you back,” he says, but he never does.
After dinner Beansy drones away from the elevated platform. Sitting at my desk, I wonder why they call this spiritual reading? All he’s doing is reading The Rule of the seminary at us. He’s short and round with a resemblance to the Campbell soup kid. As I listen to him spouting rules in his high-pitched voice, I picture Tubby Moffitt’s clubhouse in the Little Lulu comic books. “No girls allowed” is scribbled on the side.
“Rings and similar ornamentation, as well as faddish haircuts, are forbidden.” Beansy runs his pudgy fingers through his few strands of unkempt hair. “Card playing, gambling, hazing, and football are forbidden.” Football? What’s wrong with football? “Students are forbidden to have radios. All letters must be placed in the mail box unsealed. Incoming mail will be inspected by the Reverend Superior before delivery.” I imagine Beansy at his desk, buried under a huge pile of letters from mothers. I need to remind my folks to be careful what they write.
It’s nine-thirty at night and the lights-out bell has just rung. I kneel next to my bed and pray one more time before going to sleep. We’ve prayed at least thirty times already today, and that’s not even counting Mass, meditation, spiritual reading and the rosary. Those were all formal prayers, most of them in Latin. Now I’m just talking to Jesus, going over the day. I feel calm and peaceful, just he and I alone in the dark.
My door flies open with a bang and my head jerks up. My insides go cold. Father Canfield is standing in my threshold, silhouetted against the corridor lights. “What are you doing, son?”
“Uh, saying my night prayers, Father.”
“It’s lights-out, son. You should be in bed.”
The door closes. Soft padded footsteps recede down the hall. I’ve heard stories of Cat Canfield, how he prowls the corridors at night looking for students breaking The Rule. Thank goodness I wasn’t reading under the covers with a flashlight, or dangling a transistor radio antenna out my window, or, Jeez, standing there naked. I slip into bed, shaking. Jesus tells me he’s sorry for getting me in trouble, says we’ll talk tomorrow.
Next morning at breakfast I tell Mange and Dick about Cat’s visit. “Yeah,” Dick says, “you never know when he’s going to turn up. Even if you have your door locked, he can get his key in, turn it, and whip it open all in one motion.”
“And you never want to leave anything incriminating in your room,” Mange says. “Last year Cat found a paperback novel hung on a hanger under Phil DeAndrade’s suit pants. Two hours later they sent Phil to Beansy’s office and gave him a bus ticket home.”
“For reading a book?”
Mange shrugs. “It wasn’t approved.”
I nod. The truth is, I want my superiors to be strong, I want them to be wise. I have the idea that the more elderly they are, the more they know and the more respect they deserve. I’ve noticed the same classmates who flout The Rule also ridicule the faculty and I find this somehow upsetting. Did they never have elderly people living in their household? Coming out of the refectory after breakfast, I hear McLaughlin and Cunningham making fun of the old priest they call The Floater who inches his walker along the cloister, grey bearded, his wispy long hair disheveled, his eyes deep in sunken sockets. He stops and sits down on his walker seat, staring off like an Old Testament prophet. Surely some wisdom resides behind that weathered visage, I think. I try to catch his eye when we walk past, but he doesn’t respond.
Until one morning, a few days later, I’m lagging behind the rest, late for class and hoping to God my Latin’s done right, and he beckons me with a long crooked finger. I look around to see, is he talking to me?
I walk up to him. “Hi, Father,” I say.
He beckons me closer.
I lean down, see the dried soup and bread crumbs in his beard and put my ear near his cracked lips, hoping to catch his fragile revelation. The lips move and a guttural sound emerges, borne on the foulest breath: “Aaargh.”
I stagger back some. “What did you say, Father?” His grey rheumy eyes regard me with a fierce look.
“Aaargh,” he says again.
I stand there for a minute, waiting for Jesus to enlighten me, to decipher the aaargh into something sacred and meaningful. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I raise my hand in short farewell and jog back toward class.
Royal B. Webster, The Floater, remains a mystery.
~~~~