IT’S POSSIBLE THOSE TIMES on the side of the road were not as peaceful as I recall. Hair might have stuck in clumps to sweaty necks, gnats may have swarmed, tensions might have run high. But I remember grass tall enough to tickle the backs of knees, a breeze making flutter of maple leaves, the clop of an Amish buggy as it passed. The guards on the other side of the fence—boys really—stood in uniformed lines, quiet except for the fact of their weapons and what they might need to do should one of our group disobey the law and scale the fence between us and them. Climbing the fence was a real possibility, one of the reasons for our drive to the region. Carved by the glacial scrape of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the Finger Lakes became a land of water and sky, where the Iroquois lived before the encroachment of the British and French—and us, in our cars and vans traveling to the Seneca Army Depot, which was said to house the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the country.
Nineteen eighty-three. The Cold War wasn’t over, and talk of nuclear weapons and Soviets was part of daily life. Thousands of activists descended on the depot in the summer, setting up a Women’s Peace Encampment in an old farmhouse nearby. They came in buses and airplanes and sometimes on foot from all over the States to protest. The women nailed peace signs to trees, painted flowers and doves onto the sides of barns, scrawled slogans against nukes and the men who made them. Hundreds were arrested; women from the encampment and others who’d flocked to the area, including groups from Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, progressives who packed into vans, staring into cornfields and vineyards and the blue of lakes as we passed, eventually unloading outside the gates of the depot, where we stood holding hands and singing peace songs.
I’m not sure I fully understood the threat of nuclear weapons. I knew what weapons were, of course, and must have understood at least some of why we were there, but nothing made as much sense as the strip of land between road and depot, the way it was dotted with goldenrod and chicory. Someone set an embroidered runner and vase of wildflowers onto a small table in a mowed section of grass, transforming it into an altar, the patch of weeds into a church. With the folk choir and the gleam of golden guitars, those masses for peace were like field trips to me. I should feel shame at admitting such a thing, given how old I was (ninth grade), what was at stake (nuclear armament), and the fact that the masses usually ended with someone climbing the fence and falling over. But even then, the bodies hoisted over the coil of barbed wire were received so gently by the open hands of the military boys, their landings cushioned by the grass nuzzling the fence’s interior, so that, in memory, the protests became a sort of ballet, the call of crows joined by the folk group singing Cat Stevens’s songs, everything on both sides of the fence framed by the sway of maple trees.
How can I say I was a soldier for peace when I worried so much about how my hair would come out in my mug shot? I wore it long and curly then and wondered if the waves had held during so many hours of sitting-in. I’d allowed a smile to ruin the perfect scowl of my face when one of the arresting officers flirted while fastening my arms, setting me in the paddy wagon with such care, we might have been on a date.
Nineteen ninety-one. Invasion in the Gulf. U.S. Forces sent to fight in Iraq, thousands dead. Eight years after the depot masses, I was old enough to understand, old enough to care, and decided it was time to scale my own fences instead of staring into drifts of pretty weeds. The protest itself came after weeks of planning and discussing tactics—peaceful resistance and how to make your body go limp while resisting arrest. Finally, we made our way as a group to the federal building in downtown Rochester, the twelve of us calling ourselves the D’Amato Dozen after the conservative state senator we’d targeted. Our coup was convincing his secretary to buzz us into the tiny office. She’d had her suspicions, D’Amato’s secretary, but eleven of us slipped behind a partition while the most confident sweet-talked: “We have a package to deliver,” he said. “Please open the door.”
She saw what it might mean and wrung her hands and said she wasn’t sure; but he was persuasive—“Just a crack,” he said—his voice so velvet that our lady of the hidden buzzer could not hold out. One crack was all it took for a foot, an arm—and before you knew it, all twelve of us had stormed inside. And yes, it was lying, but somehow okay because we were for peace after all.
Our sit-in was followed by arrest—a successful action, all things considered. But how to square it with the memory of the secretary who did not relax the entire time we occupied the office, never once settling into her seat, and even when we sang never once looking at us with anything but fear? No matter how sweet our “Kumbaya”s, how heartfelt our “If I Had a Hammer”s, no matter how gilded our hunger or how exquisite our patience, she never stopped twisting those hands.
Our intentions were good—there was real invasion in the Gulf, after all, thousands of lives lost, governments gone wrong, families gunned down in the street. What is one person’s discomfort or a well-intentioned lie in the face of such realities?
I can only say that when I look back on those hours, the paddy wagon and the fingerprinting, the handsome officer with his smile and the subsequent court dates, I remember most of all the secretary shaking her head as she wept, looking at us and saying, “I’m sorry I ever trusted you.”
The rectories of Roman Catholic churches are ordinarily reserved for priests, but there was nothing ordinary about our parish. In the more robust days, several priests shared the rectory, but by the 1970s Corpus Christi had only one priest. By the late 1980s the progressive priest decided to leave the rectory for a home a few miles from the church and offered the rectory to college students who made peanut butter sandwiches for the homeless and filled out Mass cards in exchange for rent.
There were four of us: the oldest, a graduate student (who collected Victrolas and taught me to make ricotta pie), two Eastman School students (earnest blonds from the Midwest, the sounds of piano and cello leaking from their rooms), and me. We lived together, all of us posting flyers announcing visiting liberation theologians, taking turns ushering people in for nonviolence study groups, making nightly rounds to lock the huge old building, keeping the hub of the large urban church occupied so our priest could live in a grittier section of the city, closer to the neighborhood from which I’d only recently escaped and nearer those he hoped to serve—though I sometimes wondered if he simply required respite from the nonstop trinity of midnight callers (the mentally ill, inebriated, and confessional).
I’d been baptized at Corpus Christi as a baby, had slept inside a roll of carpet as a child, finding the opening after running way from my mother during Easter Vigil Mass, refusing to come out of hiding, frozen as the statues taken down from the altar on Good Friday, all of them crowding the side sacristy, all dark shadows and cracked plaster showing in moonlight. I’d come to Mass willingly and often on my own—looking forward to the homilies, the way they helped make sense of the world, the words washing over me, the names of faraway places, sounding like poems read at school. So while it may have surprised my friends when I applied for the opening to live in the rectory community, it made perfect sense to me. Corpus Christi had always been home.
And so I lived in the rectory with a handful of others, reading Thomas Merton and Desmond Tutu, sitting around a candle in the evenings, considering peace from all its flickering angles. So much feeling welling up, so much talk of social justice. Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott and fasting three days for El Salvador and breaking the fast with cheap wine, the highs and the lows. Talk of twelve steps and self-help and the reading of books with rainbows flanking their covers. Marches on Washington and white cotton sundresses and men drawn to such dresses like flies. A time of Advent and Lent and clear Octobers and cider—and our German visitor teaching me to say pumpkin in German (kürbis), how handsome he was and how new I felt and his chest the color of oak leaves, the Berlin Wall coming down while he visited, the sound of his voice breaking in the kitchen while talking with a sister he hadn’t heard in years. The volume of Yevtushenko found in an old bookcase.
But for all the poetry, for all the study groups and talk of hopes and fears deep into the night, the echo of piano and cello, for all the rallies and demonstrations for peace—the truth is that I lived in the rectory for other reasons. Despite the fact that formal prayer often felt like a pile of pebbles set onto my tongue, in truth, I loved the old building and its many rooms precisely because it was a church.
Some mornings I’d slip out into the church before anyone else woke and sit facing the sanctuary. To some, the oversized nave with its rows of old pews and high ceilings might have seemed hollow or cold. But the old wood warmed me, the ceiling beams felt like a backbone and the statues of the saints—the same sets of bony features that frightened me as I made the rounds to lock up the old building at night—softened as morning came, their faces taking on the sheen of familiarity, becoming old friends in the early light.
I’d sit for a while, experiencing a sort of quiet joy I’d never found at rallies and lectures and study groups. Everything fell away. Worries about past and future, thoughts of what to do next. There was only the sound of birds on Prince Street, the scent of balsam and cleaning wax, the great panel of stained glass breaking into a wash of blues and greens, and all the candles along the altar waiting to be lit.