As a boy, Pete thought his faith had saved him, but if anyone had asked what it saved him from, he would not have known how to answer. Nobody ever asked. He grew up in a mansion on a hill overlooking the bay. His father was often away on business and his mother was cheerful and vague. She was never without a smile even though most things appeared to puzzle her. Whenever she caught sight of Pete, she looked surprised. “Oh, there you are!” she would cry, as if she thought he’d been lost, even when he had been there all along.
Pete’s father called his banker every morning to find out how much money he had to spend that day. Then he spent it all before nightfall. By the time he was ten, Pete understood that not everyone lived this way. He knew it meant his parents were not true believers. Nobody was. If they were, they would sell what they had and give the money to the poor. If they were, they would not be hunched at mass like tired workers, murmuring under their breath. They would stand and sing.
The world would be a different place.
But the world was what it was. Pete had nothing to sell. None of it was his, and he was glad. He learned to live among the trappings of prosperity while always looking beyond to the true splendors of divinity. His father noted a certain absence about him. “Damn it, boy, where’s your head?” he yelled.
When Pete became an altar boy, his father told him to beware of the priests. “Don’t you ever let them get the better of you,” he said. Pete had no idea what he was talking about. The priests were less godly than Pete had hoped. They dozed off when they should have been mindful. Many were unkind. One of them always had a head cold. They were all very human. Everyone was. That was all they had going for them, and Pete was supposed to love them for it.
“That boy is just like his mother,” Pete heard his father telling his friends. “Always with his head in the clouds.” They decided to send him to a boarding school where religion was kept in the proper perspective. Maybe that would break him, his father said. Pete begged his mother not to send him. She only smiled and shook her head and turned away.
The feelings were already there by the time he left. It seemed they always had been. At school he met a boy named Michael who wore big glasses that gave him the look of an owl. Michael read philosophy and poetry and said it proved there was no other life than this one, and this one wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. They talked and played chess, together all the time. One afternoon Michael grabbed Pete by the arm and they fell across the chessboard, rolling on the scattered pieces. One way to worship, and to cast off selfishness, was in overwhelming love for another human being. Pete knew that. What scared him, apart from everything else, was that he had never felt more like himself before.
His father must have got wind of this friendship, because when Pete went home for holidays all his father talked about were queers. The house was always filled with company, and they all sat and listened, nodding as he ranted. “It’s bad parenting,” he said. “Do you think anyone would turn out queer if they had the right discipline? You beat it out of them, that’s all. No kid of mine, I’ll tell you that. They’d know better. You can bet your bottom dollar. They’d know I wouldn’t stand for it. I’d run them off. I’d run off the whole damn brood!” What brood? thought Pete. He was the only one.
When his glasses came off, Michael was beautiful. His eyes were clear and steady. They seemed to see everything without having to judge it. His eyebrows were smooth and soft, a shade darker than his soft blond hair. If there was beauty, Pete thought, that was where it could be found, underneath. But some time later it struck him that Michael was beautiful with his glasses on, too.
Pete and Michael decided to run away together. They would hitchhike south to where it was warmer, because they thought they would have to live on the streets for a while. Before they could leave, Pete was called to the headmaster’s office and told he was being sent to a different school. He had an hour to pack. He couldn’t find Michael. He sent him letters from the new school, but he could not be sure they were ever delivered. No answers came.
He had only a year left of school. He spent it reading scripture. He had more questions than before, and he wanted them answered more than ever.
It had been a military school so it was natural that he go from there into the army. When he was home on leave, his father clapped him on the back and told him he was proud of him.
“You spend your life cheating people,” said Pete, “and you call it business.”
His father turned pale with rage. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the end.”
Pete was no more surprised than his father was when he was discharged after two years. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. He moved to the city where he and Michael had planned to live together, and he got a job in a shopping mall. He sat in a back room watching the video screens, looking for shoplifters. What he saw stunned him. All the lost souls, all the lonely and desperate, wandering by, across these screens. It was amazing what people would do when they thought no one was looking. But why should they ever think so?
There was a divinity school nearby. Some of the teachers allowed Pete to sit in on their classes. He heard there about a place in the hills where he could go for a retreat. He sent a letter to Father Gabriel. “I feel like I have been waiting for something all my life,” he wrote. “And now I think I know what it is.”
Father Gabriel read the letter late one night by the dim light of the lamp at his desk. He could not accept just anyone, but it had been years since he had turned anyone away. That was mostly because so few came. It was a different world, and from what he heard, Father Gabriel was glad to be out of it. Still, something about the letter wrenched his heart. He knew nothing about the writer, this Pete, but he knew the type. Only a boy, and with nowhere else to go.