After his novitiate in Europe the old priest came back to run a Jesuit high school in Georgetown, beginning in the early sixties, the Kennedy years through “We Shall Overcome” and “Bum, Baby, Bum” right into the middle of Watergate, the old priest always one to stand with both feet planted squarely in the historical moment. He came to Philadelph ia in the fall of 73, he was your senior guidance counselor and also became your French teacher when the original Jesuit who was your French teacher left midyear to many 7 a woman he’d met in a pizza shop. Those were somewhat different times, the seventies, when a man might suddenly drop whatever he was doing and run off with a woman he’d met in a pizza shop. (Of course that is still possible, but it no longer seems quite so commonplace.) Love was in the air, also anxiety, depression, the mounting dread brought on by Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, Black Power and Women’s Rights, the death of the patriarchy that seemed likely to accompany the gradual breakdown in faith in government and religious institutions, a return to individuality and the plea
sure principle, the inevitable victory of subjectivity and moral relativism, blah blah blah —
You remember how he seduced you, the old priest, how he charmed the David Bowie pants off you. Maybe that was part of it: ’73, David Bowie and Rod Stewart, a little later Mott the Hoople and Queen: androgyny was just then having its fifteen minutes. The David Bowie pants? Oh, well, they came up really high at the waist and then billowed out in an exaggerated three-pleat, descending to two-inch cuffs designed to go with platform shoes. You had two pairs of each, an interesting style for a skinny seventeen-year-old prep school student, it lasted about fifteen minutes.
One day smoking cigarettes in his office after hours he told you all about William Peter Blatty and the young Jesuits of Georgetown, in a smoky pub one afternoon merrily gathered round a mongrel-brown Lester spinet. Stories were told. Some information was leaked. Classified information about the Devil got out. There really was an exorcism, though it was performed on a Lutheran boy by not one or two but an entire team of exorcists. The exorcism itself went on for months, the whole thing audio taped and the tapes themselves locked away in some vault in the Vatican.
The best parts of the book, according to the old priest—the best parts, of course, being the scariest parts—were taken directly from the secret transcripts. He knew people who knew people who knew the Devil! Talk about being on the inside track!
The old priest told his stories—he always told stories—which meant of course that he had stories to tell. You fell in love, whatever that means, can you just admit that much? People fall in love: kids and old ladies, middle aged bachelors and hot young kindergarten teachers. The heart has its own secret life, like the family cat, and what it might drag home is anybody’s guess.
Not love, perhaps, but a schoolboy crush. Something glandular but at the same time completely non-glandular.
Can you admit that much?
Of course you can. Sometimes. Once in a while.