In Maytime of a certain year, in the auditorium of your Catholic grammar school, you attended a vocational fair hosted by the Maryknoll Fathers, who are missionaries. You saw a glossy illustration of a Maryknoll Father who’d been tortured by savages, and you got an erotic charge. In the same week you read Dracula, which was your favorite novel until The Scarlet Letter came along a few years later. In Maytime of a certain year you began to see the connection between sex and death. Sex is sin is death. Then, as you continued to look, it really got confusing. Sex is sin is death is the resurrection and the life. The old priest:
“Once, in that Jesuit house in Vienna, I found a room that was like a medieval torture chamber. There were whips and straps, iron benches and wooden racks. Good heavens!”
“But why would anybody want to do such things?”
“To abase the flesh, of course.”
“But why would you want to do that?”
“Idiot.”
“Did you tiy it?”
“I went in there one afternoon, the room completely empty and still, sunlight coming in through the barred windows and the little chinks in the wall, and I thought of Itchy, and I flogged my bare back mercilessly for one hour. There are some things lost to us in modem times that ought not to be lost. Many things, actually, that most people would call barbaric, or medieval, but ideas and practices we might need all the same. Things lost to us which we can’t do without, even if we don’t know we can’t do without them.”
In the end you are alone, a bachelor-teacher at a posh New England boarding school. Not the worst life you could have imagined for yourself, though a suite of rooms at the boarding school would be better
than taking the train each morning from North Station. Your colleagues are entertained no end with the stories of your colorful past, the casino days of your profligate youth. Oh, how they wish they had lived such a varied and adventurous life!
In the end you are alone in your room, still thinking of the old priest, what to say about your friendship, your “relationship, what not to say, how to write an end to this, if the ending is yours to write. As a young man you were awkward and depressed, youthfully morbid but far from ICeatsian. Women found you dull, ponderous—“bloodless,” one of the cleverer ones called you from the other side of an open doorway—intelligent but without much style or imagination. The old priest alone took an interest in you. Years later you read a few newspaper articles that caused you to see this overweening interest in a somewhat different light.
In the rooming house in Atlantic City where you settled down after college the old priest came for a visit that veiy first summer, jaunty in his white polo shirt and Madras shorts. You sat up all night smoking cigarettes and drinking gin and tonics, the two of you talking with the drunken high-mindedness of fraternity boys. Later you found out from former student X that it was the real and true modus operandi of the old priest to stay up all night smoking and drinking with a former student, talking all that drunken, high-minded talk until daybreak, but then, at that moment in time when it was taking place, you thought it was the first time it had happened to either one of you. In the morning you walked the block to the beach and swam before breakfast in the gently breaking waves. He sang “O Mio Bambino Caro,” plunging up and down in the easy current, and you can still see his face as it was in the early sunlight, spouting water from both nostrils and singing in Italian. Later you cooked cheese omelets then lay together side by side on the pullout sofa which was his bed, holding hands. As he drifted off to sleep his final words were not his own. They were Shakespeare’s: “I will grapple you to my bosom with hoops of steel.”
After he left you decided the whole thing had been a terrible mistake. A few months later you went to see him, in Philadelphia, to explain it to him. You walked along the cobblestone streets of Old City, sullen and intractable, refusing to hold his hand. “Bare mined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” was his reply, gazing up into the leafless branches of the maple trees.
Two lines of Shakespeare (plus a little Puccini) to fix in place the simple but overwhelming fact: you loved another person, even though
you did your best to cancel it out or turn it into something else, even if it was your right to cancel it out and even if it really was something else, something other than what you took it for at the time, whatever that was.
The ending, then: you loved him, something you were in a big hurry to forget but which he was in a bigger hurry to remember. For he loved you also. That is the one thing you seem most of all to avoid considering. Others he loved as well, perhaps—at least that has been your suspicion all these years, supported mainly by the leering presence of former student X—but he loved you, or at least the person you were in your youth. The handsome boy with the David Bowie pants and the nicotine-stained fingers, the frenetic teenager bursting with promise and the will to please.
All right, love is love but resentment is also resentment, and little by little you came to resent the way the old priest continued to look at you, as if he could fix you in a certain moment of your life and experience and keep you there. As if you yourself were a story to be told, and told the way he’d decided to tell it!
As if you alone could save him.
And so one day you went away, intending to return, as many another times you’d come and gone, but things happened, one thing and then the next, time and distance, and you never got the chance to go back.
You abandoned him, is what really happened.
Just face up to the ending, the real ending, even if that’s not how your book ends.
The book ends with you and the old priest having martinis and Chinese takeout the evening before he is to be placed in Assisted Living. The book ends with the old priest, having gone a bit senile, drinking martinis and casting out imaginary demons between bites of tea smoked duck.
But this story does not end with imaginaiy demons and cold dim sum.
He betrayed you, is what really happened, following which you betrayed him. You abandoned him also, following which he abandoned you.
Just face up to it. Be honest. Admit what happened and move on
Nominated by Salvatore Scibona.