Chapter Six

Matty

Among the gala protestors was, as it happened, Matty Fitzgerald, a high-profile faculty member at Holy Family High School. He was the kind of teacher HFH graduates nostalgically looked forward to visiting while home on college breaks. That’s when they thanked him for all he had done on their behalf, testified he was better than any of their professors, and asked him out to lunch, behaving like the adults they aspired to become one day. Matty’s older brother—Father Philip Fitzgerald—had been counseling him to adopt a more measured approach to resistance, or what he called a more mature approach. “Mature approach?” echoed Matty, smacking his own forehead with the heel of his hand. “You’ve always been a condescending son of a bitch.” That remark was as foreseeable as it was hurtful, but Philip did his best to reason with him. The bishop was dug in, and not inclined to listen to strident voices or to be intimidated by confrontation. Compromise should be Matty’s watchword—well, it was Philip’s anyway. To that end, he had pleaded with the bishop to meet with his brother one-on-one in private, to talk some sense into him, or at least seek some middle ground, where they could both agree to respectfully disagree. Bishop Mackey might have claimed to be indifferent as to his plunging unpopularity, but Philip was more pragmatic: the protest movement was building a head of steam, and that was not good news for anybody, especially those who wanted to raise capital for a new high school and for the teen runaway center. Philip should have known better. The report he received from both participants was that the meeting was an unmitigated disaster that concluded in short order when the bishop banished whom he considered the self-righteous teacher from his sight. “Sorry, Philip,” his brother said. “That’s all I got, anger, alternating with rage. How can you tolerate that drunken son of a bitch? How can anybody?” Philip couldn’t explain how to his brother because he couldn’t explain it to himself. “Give me a little time, would you, please? I am doing all I can to undo this mess.” “So you do agree with me? Thanks, Philip.” “Hold your horses, this is convoluted.” “It is not that complicated, not really, it is pretty simple. Morality clause is bullshit, and you know it.” Philip did know it, but he temporized: “Try to see it from his point of view.” “No, thanks. But what a mature approach on your part, congratulations. As always, you’re a huge help, big brother.” This exchange took place when the last two standing brothers found themselves at the Family Fitzgerald home on a Sunday afternoon a week before the gala. Interested observers of the exchange would be struck by their dissimilarity. Philip in his sharply pressed black clerical suit, lean and athletic and elegant, and the shorter Matty in distressed jeans and red HFH hoodie that rendered him faintly cartoonish, soft around the middle and wild of hair complete with unkempt beard. Engaged in the moment, Matty’s head was as usual cocked to the side, as if he were trying to overhear something occurring in another room, and his birdlike features signaled skittishness, and an earnest wish to be anywhere other than wherever he was. Since adulthood, the brothers had been polite to each other, and careful, and they rarely talked at length, unlike that Sunday afternoon. “Well, contracts are due soon, Philip, so the clock is ticking.” “What are you going to do?” “Not signing. The blood’ll be in the water.” Matty and Philip were not particularly close growing up, despite their bedrooms being next door to each other, and certainly enjoyed nothing like the competitive intimacy shared by Philip and Anthony. Matty and Colleen, his sister and the youngest of the four children, both looked on their much older brothers as if they were from another generation or tribe, if not another species, and as rivals for the scattered attention of their aging parents. Sister and brother banded together, unified against their mutual enemy, the rest of the family. They secretly called themselves with sarcastic glee the Afterthoughts, two children born because, well, what else were Fitzgeralds put on earth to do? They made babies. As a result, brother and sister believed they didn’t ultimately matter much to their father and mother, who pinned all their hopes on Anthony and Philip, such that the Afterthoughts amounted to walk-on extras in case they were required to play the role of spare, compliant, remotely acceptable child in a pinch. Maybe they were right and maybe the parents were worn out after the two high-drama, high-achieving boys, Anthony and Philip. The older brothers would take the liberty of barging in on Matty and Colleen as they huddled together and talked late into the night under a blanket armed with a flashlight. They resorted to labeling them with a single name—sometimes Catty, sometimes Molleen—which was useful shorthand since the two were rarely seen apart during their formative years. “What are you two brat Molleens always talking about?” Philip would challenge them. “We’re conspiring,” she said—she was nine, with a good vocabulary. “Yeah, a palace coup,” said Matty, ten, a serious reader who was up on imperial takedowns in classical Rome, and he pronounced the word coop. “Two idiots,” Philip decreed. “Word’s pronounced coo-pay.” Matty followed up, searched for the word, and couldn’t determine whether Philip himself didn’t know how to pronounce it or if he was teasing him. It might be therefore unsurprising that the first person Colleen came out to was Matty, when she was fifteen, and she felt exhilarated and terrified, but also comforted when Matty hugged her and told her he loved her and asked how she knew, which she said she simply did, and for as long as she could recall. “Now you,” she said, prompting him. “Now me, what?” “You ready to come out yet?” It took Matty a minute. “But I’m not really gay, Colly.” She smiled knowingly, by her reading intuiting otherwise, but feeling generous enough to allow him the space to discover for himself in time. Nobody, including Philip, had a clue as to the Catty’s private agenda or Molleen’s. Years later, at the family home on Haymarket Hill that Sunday, Philip was saying, “Jesus in the Jell-O, Matty, Jesus, did you say blood in the water?” This violent image struck Philip as incongruous in the extreme. His brother had previously struck him as being a harmless, world-weary, introverted high school teacher, not some rabble-rouser. As with many teachers, Matty’s career choice was made essentially by default, arrived at after undergoing a withering, galling, humiliating process of elimination. He had been a fairly good college student at Saint Monica’s, though hardly stellar, but he got accepted off the waitlist into a graduate program in English at the state university, where he planned to pick up his master’s or, with luck, a doctorate. He washed out halfway through the second semester, his coursework undistinguished, his papers turned back adorned with scarlet C’s. Thus he was not destined to don professorial robes. He loved books but couldn’t master the critical lingo or mannered subservience in the department needed to impress the academics running roughshod over the exploited underlings. After his grad student debacle, he stumbled around, disappointing his father and mostly himself. He and Colleen kept in touch, but now years after their nighttime blanket-tented colloquies, it wasn’t the same. She had moved on, taking on a conga line of dubious girlfriends, and she didn’t bother to share with her brother all the tempestuous dips and turns in her romantic life. Molleen and Catty, once the self-designated Afterthoughts, devolved into afterthoughts to each other, which made them both wistful, but resigned. He himself did not connect romantically with anybody, high school or college, but he was reconciled and usually at peace with that development. Honestly, he wouldn’t know what to do with a girlfriend, and besides, nobody was sacrificing herself on the altar of his indifference and volunteering her services, anyway. During this stage of life, he found himself in a state of perennial penury. He was oddly smitten by this quintessentially Dickensian word, penury, and by all of the Dickens boy books, where he learned poverty was not a character flaw, the opposite of what his own father ingrained in him. At the same time, he never asked a dime from Paddy, and wouldn’t have accepted a handout if he’d been offered—though he did move back for a while into the family home on Haymarket Hill. Uncomfortable as abiding there was, a roof over his head and a bed to sleep in were preferable to homelessness, if on some days by a skimpy margin. He drifted from one dead-end job to another. He sold used cars—but that isn’t accurate. He was such an incompetent liar he didn’t sell any. He ran a barbecue joint brazenly fronting for drug trade, till it burned down one night, in a case of unsolved arson—in which he was, groundlessly and bizarrely, briefly a suspect, set up as the patsy by the shady insurance-scamming dealers. He got work as a pest controller but could not resolve his moral reservations as to euthanizing hapless, trapped skunks and opossums. He did rudimentary landscape work, which he liked more than expected, working in the open air, but the Central Americans demanded he speak Spanish, and he had little capacity for foreign language. In general, he detested all his jobs, and at one point gave up and dropped out of his family’s sight for about a year. Using money borrowed from Anthony, which was different in kind from his father’s money, he bummed around the capitals of Europe, never calling or writing, except for infrequent communications to Colleen. He was by turns resentful or depressed or inebriated on cheap, delicious-to-him wine. Anthony was always the most generous, the kindest member of the family, and though the two of them never deeply connected, he told his younger brother to forget it, or to pay him back whenever he was able if that was important to Matty though it was immaterial to him. Matty regretted that Anthony did not live long enough for him to be squared up. He missed his brother more and more with each passing year, and the loss settled in his belly like a swallowed stone. Sometime during that subsidized European sojourn, in a bed-buggy hostel, he made the acquaintance of his eventual mate, another American searching for purpose far away from home. The funny thing was, the two of them had grown up within miles of each other, though their paths had never crossed as far as they could determine. “But then I find you halfway around the world, amazing, the love of my life,” she said, “and you were there all along while I was growing up. How can you predict anything in life?” “Guess it was destiny,” he said. “We were fated to be together,” she said. He couldn’t muster a counterargument. There was a familiarity about her he found reassuring. What a great story, she thought, their European whirlwind romance, which they would someday tell their kids, their grandkids, who would hang on every word. She was no natural beauty, but neither was he, and yet she bodied forth a kind of promise, and a sort of confidence, to set him on a sounder life course. They may have appeared an odd match, those two, she practically a head taller with dark eyes that nobody described as laughing, and he who raised looking askance to a level of art. With her large hands, she possessed workmanlike determination to power both of them, which was attractive to a man who conceded he required a push. After a while, then, marriage seemed to him like a reasonable enough concept, because as he saw it and said to himself, if not marriage now with her, then when with whom? Hard to argue with love, if love it was. He did not bother to drop to one knee to propose because one fairly sober night she announced that of course they were getting married, and he was disinclined to disagree. Accordingly, they hopped on a plane back to the States and were wed before a justice of the peace, why bother to wait, with no troublesome family from either side or any acquaintances in attendance for the brief, stock ceremony. “I can’t wait,” she said, “to get to know the Fitzgeralds.” “Me, too,” he said, and she laughed, though he was not joking. Complications inevitably ensued. As for Matty’s mother, she swore she would never forgive him for eloping, but that wasn’t completely true. She would never forgive her. She welcomed him tearfully when he returned with a bride by his side, or really, towering over him. In her remaining years, she would never much care for Claire, who was, to her mind, her son’s thin-skinned, prone-to-panic, red-boned, rabbit-faced apparent wife—at least for the time being. Had he been apprised of his mother’s dismissal of Claire’s character, Matty might have defended her, but he was insensible as to his mom’s bill of particulars. At the same time, it was also true that Grace Fitzgerald was also relieved somebody, somebody, seemed to have cast her lot with her poor son. Against this background, and once again back on his native soil, possessed of a wife and devoid of realistic job prospects, Matty himself searched for, well, a purpose. It did not take long before he identified one: books. He reaffirmed his love of literature, and seldom did he not have a battered paperback or library-borrowed volume within reach. Unsurprisingly, newly married and awkwardly domiciled with this woman of destiny he barely knew, he began to fantasize about trying his hand at teaching those books in a school. This last-ditch attempt at a career was enthusiastically spurred on by his wife. As for her, she had a well-compensated, apartment-rent-paying position she deplored as an associate dental hygienist, someone for whom tartar and plaque amounted to mortal adversaries, and whose bleeding-gum patients felt post-procedure they had been bested in a wrestling match. She hated her job almost as much as her patients hated her handiwork. So when Philip mentioned in passing at a Fitzgerald family dinner there was an office manager opening at Caring Street, she eagerly applied. At that point, Hector was the executive director, and he and Claire instantly identified with each other as kindred spirits. She demonstrated mad organizational skills and professed an abiding interest in working with kids who were in dire straits. She wouldn’t bring home anywhere near the money she made in the dental office, but from the first she unreservedly loved her new job, and loved working with Hector, who was such a good-hearted, inspiring leader. Meanwhile, prospects for Matty’s permanent employment as an instructor seemed remote. He dutifully sent out his CV and application letter everywhere and no vice principal in a hundred-mile radius was spared the purpled prose that colored his overwrought application. Then the improbable occurred. He caught on at a tiny struggling private middle school in town when a disgruntled teacher abandoned ship mid-year, and Matty served as a last-minute replacement, a part-time English teacher, three classes a day. The school was treading water financially and could not afford to pay a respectable teacher’s wage, but he and Claire were young enough to believe they would make do. On some level, as long as they had a place to live and food on the table, he didn’t care about the money. That is because he felt instantly at home, accepted unreservedly by those young children and his new colleagues alike. For the first time, he began to feel that his work, he meant his life, mattered to somebody else—in this case, his young students. Had he stumbled upon his life-affirming calling after all? Colleen believed as much and was thrilled for him. Brother and sister started seeing each other and talking at length again, and he shared with her stories from the trenches and about how every single day he found himself honestly, truly laughing over something his resourceful, impish students said. So when he heard there was a full-time opening at the Catholic high school, Holy Family, which was the alma mater of all Fitzgerald offspring, he asked Philip if he would please put in a good word. Philip said he wasn’t in a position to grease the wheels, that outreach on that order was problematic diocesan protocol, and Matty claimed he understood, though he did not. Typical Philip, Claire groused to Matty about his never being there when his brother needed a little help, which wasn’t truly the case, and her eyes narrowed in anger as she seethed. Because, in fact, without telling him, Philip did deftly, lightly reach out to the principal and put in a supportive word on Matty’s behalf. “At least meet with him, a courtesy interview, I will be indebted to you.” He didn’t have to draw attention to the political reality that he had a major voice in diocesan budget-making, a far from trivial consideration for the money-pinching administrator. Strangely enough, the principal and Matty actually hit it off, and in due course he was hired. And then, more amazingly, it did not take long before he became nothing less than an authentic star at the high school. Adolescents seemed to constitute his natural audience. Teenagers are temperamentally idealistic and passionate and questing and full of self-doubt and simultaneously full of narcissistic illusion—which summed up Matty to a T—so no wonder he was embraced, being an older version of themselves. Philip watched from afar and never quite grasped how his brother achieved such sudden success. Meanwhile, Matty strictly maintained personal boundaries with students, but despite that, kids were convinced he was the sort of teacher they could confide in, about their own and their family travails. Tough kids fantasized he’d be cool to smoke weed with someday, which he never would, not on his life. In his classes they would consider Shakespeare or Dickens or the Bible or Homer or—really any good poem or play or novel—and students sensed that ultimately they were talking about their own lives, that the stakes were personal and sky-high. They yearned for his approval, they trusted him, they begged for college recommendations, which were worth their weight in gold, they invited him to their games and recitals and homes for dinner. He accepted these invitations whenever he could—increasingly, as it turned out, at the expense of his marriage. His wife began to feel more and more neglected, and her sense of abandonment disintegrated into full-blown jealousy and bitterness, sides of Claire he might have, but had not, foreseen. It wasn’t long before their marriage was in jeopardy. “You’re fucking those high school girls, aren’t you? I know you are, we never have sex anymore, you don’t touch me, you don’t kiss me, you stay late at school every day, half the time you don’t come to bed at night.” He had not quite detected the seismic instability in their marriage till then, but he supposed she had half a point. “You wanted babies,” she reminded him, gratuitously. Since she thought so, she was probably right. “Well, did you forget where children come from?” This did not qualify as a trick question, but he didn’t know what to say. She rued the day she had pushed him into teaching, feeling she had only her controlling self to blame, and consequently threw herself more passionately into her own job at Caring Street. It did not seem to matter that he denied having inappropriate relations with any of those girls, which was truly the farthest thing from his mind. “I must have let you down somehow,” she said to him. “No, Claire, the other way around.” It often occurred to him to note with dismay the meager compassion Claire expressed for teenagers—at least the ones not hanging on by their fingernails in Caring Street: those were the kinds of kids she championed. Maybe she thought that Holy Family High kids were sheltered and privileged, and therefore unworthy of empathy. Because all right, yes, it was indeed true that teenage girls innocently (and yes, innocently) flirted with him, and of course, they were gorgeous, but it was equally true he had standards and integrity, and he kept his disciplined, watchful distance as best he could, which wasn’t always easy to maintain. For instance, there were the neediest students, like Terry, the runaway he and Claire would on one occasion, and disastrously, take in for a night. Terry was exceptional in many respects. She was unmanageable, and she insidiously wormed her way into his life. He did his best to be professional with her, which effort was not without complication. But Terry was an extreme case. He wished his wife could appreciate the challenges he faced: to be there for desperate kids who needed him in ways they themselves didn’t understand—and desperate kids were everywhere, even in Catholic college prep schools. Finally, the fact was this: he was married, not the most happily married man in the world, nor the most successful of husbands, but he kept commitments. In the lonely hours, when he stayed up late grading papers, his wife sleeping by herself in their bed or watching television, the dull gray drone and hum would permeate the apartment and he began to dimly fear—no, more like wonder if or when—she would inevitably leave him, and there would be nothing he could do or say to stop her—and he could almost make his peace with that. He would never leave her, he was positive of that. While all this was going on, his father had no glimmering of the fabulous turn in Matty’s professional fortunes, nor the darker turn in his son’s domestic life, because he wasn’t curious enough to look that hard, simply thankful instead that his son had a steady paycheck and a community that for some baffling reason apparently took him into their bosom. The day his son produced a grandchild would be a high-water mark in both their lives, and he wished the day would come already. As for Philip, he had no prior inkling of Matty’s great, uncommon gift as a teacher. But adolescents crave, more than their idealized versions of sex, more than love itself, being heard and taken seriously—which may be a profound, alternate version of love, and which may be something their own families did not unconditionally offer. As a teacher, Matty had strong views pertaining to pedagogy. He never lectured in class. He conducted his idiosyncratic version of Socratic discussion using leading questions, and he never preached to his students, either, when they shared with him in private the details of risks they were taking in their personal lives, as with drugs or alcohol, or their revelations as to romantic or family dramas. He listened, and he listened some more. Silence never threatened him, which is rare as rainbows for a high school teacher. He was learning something new every day about kids, and about himself, and he had a natural advantage: he felt himself to be, in some sort of absolute sense, an adolescent himself. Someone else—someone like Claire—might say that his psychological and emotional development was arrested. All the same, he worked hard, assiduously preparing for classes, faithfully moderating the school newspaper and the literary magazine, and his colleagues, in a sign of respect in which they held him, elected him president of the faculty senate. He was naturally adept at chairing meetings, his leadership style being warm and receptive, undaunted by conflict, as long as differences were collegially expressed. Despite being largely uninformed as to the essence of Matty’s accomplishments and his school standing, Philip was pleased and proud of him. He took no credit for this development, but he was glad to have reached out to the school on his brother’s behalf in the first place. More than once the principal pulled Philip to the side at some function and thanked him for referring Matty, who had become his most reliable teacher, his bulwark, a disclosure that fairly stunned him every single time. Nonetheless, Philip could detect in his brother’s eyes a depth of self-confidence, at last. All this made Matty’s latest turn to political protest so maddening to behold. “Matty, now you’re going to throw away this lucky life you’ve made?” He didn’t see it that way. He was standing up for principle. What kind of example would he set for his students if he were intimidated by the exercise of unconscionable authority and rolled over for the sake of keeping a job? “Hottest places in hell are reserved for…” “Shut up, just shut up. You’re quoting Dante to me? I’m not in one of your classes.” “You need to remember what standing up for something means. You should try it some time.” Of course, Philip was worried for his brother. He was taking a stand and he would not survive the self-elected purge. Matty told him that there was a budding movement afoot to put pressure on the bishop, which his brother had of course heard about. “Not to worry about me. I’ll keep my dignity.” “But not your job.” “When I was little and you were my hero big brother, you used to have balls. Philip, what happened to you? But you know what? The bishop’ll be out of a job, too.” There was an intense, frantic grassroots effort underway all across the community to sign petitions and formally plead with Rome, asking for Mackey to be sacked and replaced by somebody more in keeping with the refreshed spirit of the new papacy. Teachers and families were not the only supporters. Well-established, bold-faced names of Catholic leaders were beginning to sign on—they had had their fill of the bullying bishop, too, and they had stories to tell. Philip laughed his sham melancholy laugh, because if there was one thing he was not, it was jaded. He was beyond cynical. He had too much desire, too many ambitions, too great a need to be admired, to qualify. “Ain’t gonna happen. You of all people know that’s not the way the Catholic Church works. Mackey’s here to stay and you’ll piss off the higher-ups and they won’t let you get your way.” “I don’t care, that’s their problem, and besides, I’m not Catholic anymore.” “Well, big deal, news flash, who is anymore?” Matty did not appreciate Philip’s derisiveness and disdain, which masked his brother’s undetectable, shielded love and authentic concern. “After you’re canned, what’s the plan, Matty Luther King, going back on skunk patrol? You’re so impractical, typical Fitzgerald. And you know what? All those colleagues supposedly lining up behind you, few if any of them will ultimately pull the trigger. They have mortgages to pay and children of their own to feed, and you’ll be standing there all alone with your dick in your hand.” “At least I won’t be dickless, like you.” Philip pulled out one more arrow from his quiver: “How can you in good conscience abandon your students? They love you, they need you, Matty.” “I’m not abandoning them, if anything I’m teaching them my best lesson, and another thing—how can you abandon my students?” “Don’t do this, Matty, sign the contract, we’ll work this out over time, trust me.” Saying that, Philip was being sincere. And he also knew, no matter what his brother claimed about no longer being Catholic, as a teacher Matty lived whatever was right and good about being Catholic—and of course he didn’t need to sign some ham-handed, ill-conceived loyalty oath to do so. “What makes you think life is black and white? It’s never that simple.” Matty smiled. “God, you sound like Colleen. She said sign the stupid contract, what the fuck, just do your job, kids need you and you need them.” “Colly said that? Listen to your sister. Somebody’s finally making sense around here.” “Not to me, Philip, not to me. If I have to, I’ll go down fighting,” he said. “And losing,” said Philip. Matty said it depended on how you defined losing. Philip shrugged, deflated, having no more weapons left in his rhetorical arsenal. “Guess you’re right, everybody has their own definition of losing.” Especially losers, he didn’t add. “We’ll see whose definition turns out to be right,” said Matty. And so they would. That was one thing they could both agree on.