Damien had been a Jesuit for sixteen years now and an ordained priest for three of those years. He was a member of the long black line; he had faded into the woodwork; he was a minor cog in a vast machine. This is how he thought of himself, in images not his own but drawn from the rules of the Society of Jesus, from conversations in the rec room, from admonitions of superiors. Life was bland, uneventful, with few successes and no dangers to speak of. The habit does finally make the man, he told himself.
There were sources of anxiety, to be sure, but not really dangers, not terrible temptations. A drink too many, perhaps, or imprudence in speech (telling sophomores in a high school English class that “Cardinal Spellman, quite simply, is a fascist”), or undue intimacy with the mother of one of his students (Mrs. Butler and that funny business at the pool). But nothing serious, nothing to worry about. Still, habit or no habit, there was something very wrong. Something—he searched for the word—hopeless.
And then, in the spring of his fourth year as a priest, he was officially transferred from the prep school where he taught in Connecticut to the retreat house in downtown Boston, the transfer to be effective in summer. Suddenly it all seemed impossible to him: the vow of obedience, the awful loneliness, the waste of his talent as a poet. He had published two books, and they had been well received by reviewers, but what was he doing—as a priest—writing poems at all? And why? He went into a prolonged depression. He prayed. He drank too much. He flirted, deep in his subconscious, with the idea of suicide. Finally, while there was still a week to go before his transfer to Boston, it came to him that he did not have to die to get out, he just had to get out.
Damien went to his major superior, the provincial, and said he wanted some time to consider his vocation, he had come to a point where he had to do this one thing for himself. It was the 1960s and in the aftermath of Vatican II half his priest friends had already left, but Damien did not want to just leave, he said. He wanted to make a decision at least as rational and prayerful as the decision he had made when he entered. Damien paused in his declamation and appraised the provincial, who looked bored, and so he took a deep breath and said that while he was thinking through this problem, he did not want to work in, did not even want to live in, the retreat house.
“I see,” the provincial said. “How’s your drinking?”
Damien thought about that for a while, rejected the idea of a smart aleck response, and said, “Well, the drinking will always be a problem… for any of us, I suppose, but I think I’ve got it under control. What I’m talking about, Father, isn’t a crisis of booze, or even a crisis of faith. It’s a crisis of hope. I don’t hope anymore.”
“Hope, schmope,” the provincial said. “Look. You’re just one of over a thousand men we have to deal with, Damien. Things are changing. In the old days I’d have simply told you to go to the retreat house or get the hell out, but we can’t do that anymore. Superiors have to confer with a subject now, we have to consult his needs, we have to adapt. So look, I’m short on time; I’ve conferred and I’ve consulted and I’ve adapted. What do you want?”
“Well, I thought…”
“Where are you going to live, first of all?”
“Well, I thought I’d stay right where I am.”
“And do what?”
“Well, I thought I’d continue to write my poetry and reviews. And give readings. I thought I’d… pray.”
“And who’s supporting you, please, while you’re writing this poetry?”
“Well, I thought, the Jesuits. I’ve given almost seventeen years of my life, after all, and… well, I thought…”
“Well, you thought. Well, you thought. Think again, my friend, and when you do, be very clear on one thing.” The provincial leaned across the desk to make his point. “The Society of Jesus owes you… nothing. Got it? Nothing.”
Damien felt hot and dizzy. The provincial seemed to come in very close to him, their faces almost touching, and then he pulled away, far back, far, far back. Damien was isolated suddenly, lost, a small ridiculous figure in a world that in seconds had become distant from him. He saw himself as he was: self-absorbed, pretentious, deluded. As if, in this huge organization of brilliant and holy men, he could possibly matter: ridiculous. He had deceived himself with this self-important talk about hope. The room tipped away from him and he wanted to hide.
Then all at once, something inside him said no, and at that instant the room righted itself. Words came to him and Damien leaned forward to say, But I want my life. I have a right to my life. It’s my only hope.
But instead, he heard himself saying in a strange voice, a child’s voice, “Of course you’re right, Father. I’ll go to the retreat house. I’ll try harder.”
And in the long silence that followed, he said, “Hope isn’t that important anyway.”
A year later—after seventeen weekend retreats to laymen and laywomen, after thirty talks to high school students on sex and marriage, after five Cana conferences and many baptisms and innumerable confessions, after a brief love affair with a divorcée (Mrs. Butler, who left her husband and family and came to Boston to find herself; she found herself, eventually, in AA), and a long love affair with a former nun (Alicia, whom he intended to marry as soon as he got his walking papers from the Jesuits)—a year later, Damien made formal application to leave the Jesuits and be reduced to the lay state. He was assigned an interrogator, Father Casey, a man in his seventies with a perpetual cough and a bad cigarette habit.
“Interrogator?” Damien asked. “Reduced to the lay state?”
“Just technical terms, boy,” Father Casey said. “Don’t get jumpy now; they told me you’re the jumpy type. Poetry.”
Damien said nothing. He was doing this not for himself but for Alicia, who had her own code of morality. She would have sex with him, she would even live with him, but she would not marry him except in the Catholic Church. Love is fine, she said, and so is sex as long as there is love, but marriage outside the church was unthinkable; it did violence to her integrity. And so he was doing this for her, submitting himself to a final humiliation so that they could be married as Catholics.
For over an hour Damien sat with his right hand on the little blue book that enshrined the rules of the Society of Jesus, the blue book itself resting on a Douay version of the holy Bible, while he answered questions about whether his parents had married for love or obligation, whether he was a wanted or unwanted baby, whether they had urged the priesthood on him or he had come upon the idea himself. Damien answered and contradicted himself and then answered again. Father Casey dutifully wrote down everything he said.
Telling himself he had only to hang on and eventually this nightmare would be over, Damien concentrated on the priest’s handwriting: perfect little letters of the same height and slant, perfectly controlled, perfectly legible. Perfection in even the smallest things. Would this never end? Finally Damien’s patience gave out.
“Why are you writing down every word I say? This is going to take forever!”
Father Casey looked up, amused. He had all eternity ahead of him. “I have to,” he said. “This is a legal document. It will be sent to Rome. You’ve been in the Jesuits for seventeen years; it doesn’t seem to me unreasonable to ask you to spend a few hours getting out.”
“But who could answer these questions?” Damien said, exasperated. “This whole process is designed to prove that I never really had a vocation, that somehow I was forced into this. But you’re not going to make me say that. I was not forced into the priesthood. I did not enter the Jesuits under any misconceptions. I did understand fully what I was doing.”
There was a long silence in the room. Damien was about to apologize, but said instead: “I entered the priesthood of my own free will and now it’s because of my own free will that I want out. I want to be my own man. I want to make my own mistakes. I want to be free.”
“Free,” Father Casey said, the word loaded with meaning.
“To make my own mistakes,” Damien said.
Another long silence. “We’ll try again.” Father Casey lit a new cigarette and said, “This is going to take hours, son, so I’d suggest you cool down. Now, as to the question of your vocation: to what do you attribute it; to what exact person or event or moment? It’s very important, so I want you to think. Are you thinking?”
Damien thought and said nothing. It was as if the priest had not heard a word he’d said.
An hour later Father Casey had moved on to other topics. How often did Damien masturbate? Never. Very good, but when did you stop? I never began. Never? Never at all? No, never. Why? What was the matter? A long pause, and then another cigarette, and more irritation on Damien’s part, but no explosion this time.
“And has there been any sexual congress with others during the past years?”
“Yes,” Damien said; an unequivocal answer.
“Frequently?”
“Sometimes.”
“Women? More than one?”
“Two.”
“Men?”
“No men.”
“Ah.” Father Casey took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. Damien laughed, thinking the priest meant to be funny. “Yes?” Father Casey was puzzled. “No. I mean, we’re nervous. Or at least I am.” “Now, about these women.” Father Casey paused, significantly. “The first was an affair. It was just sex. I broke it off after two weeks. Confessed it, of course. The other is love; a love affair, if you want; but it’s permanent. We’re going to marry as soon as my papers come through.”
“If they come through.”
“When they come through.”
“Be careful.” Father Casey held his pen suspended for a moment in the air.
“Father, I’ve been careful and I’m all done. I’ve given seventeen years of honest service to God, and one year of very muddled service that was meant to be for God but that ended up being for me, I guess, because it’s getting me out. And I don’t particularly care what you think of me or what Rome thinks of me, because it’s myself I’ve got to live with. And all I want from you is out. I’m done. Like it or not, I’m free.”
“You go too far.” Father Casey’s voice was suddenly the voice of God. “You go too far.”
I’ll do it for Alicia, Damien told himself and bowed his head as if he were sorry for his outburst.
“You are dealing with Mother Church, and she is a very indulgent mother indeed. But even mothers can be pushed too far. Do you understand me?”
Later, hours later, when Damien was leaving Father Casey’s room, he turned and said with a kind of innocent surprise: “I suddenly remembered. Your question about my vocation, about when exactly I knew I had one? It’s just come back to me: I was a child, about five or six, and I had a terrible quarrel with my mother about something or other. It was shortly after that quarrel that I began thinking I’d be a priest; not because I wanted to, but because it just seemed inevitable.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Father Casey said. “I’ve finished taking notes.”
Months went by and Damien moved from the retreat house into a studio apartment. At last a letter arrived asking that he come to the provincial’s office to sign and receive his decree of laicization. He signed and, with that signature, he was reduced to the lay state.
But when he moved from his studio into Alicia’s apartment just before the wedding, Damien discovered that—for some reason he could not explain—he still had in his possession his Jesuit habit: the cassock, the cincture, the Roman collar.
What was he to do with them? Obviously he couldn’t keep them. Nor could he just throw them out.
The awful session with Father Casey came back to him, and then the scene in the provincial’s office where he had signed away his Jesuit allegiance, surrendered the practice of his priesthood. No, he did not want to see those men again. Anger, resentment, shame; none of these described what he felt, but he knew he could not face them again for a long, long time.
“Betrayal,” he said aloud, and though there was no connection in his mind between the word he said and the idea that came to him, he realized at once what he would do.
He folded the habit carefully and laid it on the bed. He folded the cincture in halves, and then in halves again, and then once more. He laid the white plastic collar on top of the habit and cincture.
He stared at the clothes for a moment and then, with purpose, he picked them up and draped them over his left arm.
He walked the five blocks to the retreat house and went in the door to the public chapel. Though it was early afternoon, the chapel was very dark, and it was a moment or two before Damien was certain that no one was there.
He knelt and said an Act of Contrition. Then he stood and placed the cassock carefully in the pew in front of him. He laid the cincture on the cassock, crossways, with the white plastic collar on top.
He turned to go, hesitated, and then quite deliberately turned back. He picked up the collar and, with no thought that it was sentimental or melodramatic to do so, he lifted it to his lips for the ritual kiss that custom and devotion had required of him for so many years.
He genuflected and walked out of the chapel, hopeful, free.
Damien sat in the rocking chair reading Swiss Family Robinson while his mother peeled carrots for the stew. They often spent Saturday mornings like this, Damien reading in the big rocker while his mother watered her plants or prepared meals or did the baking.
Damien was eight years old and there was nobody his age in this new neighborhood; his mother, trapped here by marriage and the Depression, missed her old chums in the city; and so they were friends, really, more like companions than mother and son.
But she was cross this morning, Damien could see, and she was not going to keep her promise.
“You should be outside, playing,” she said.
“But what about the shoes?” Damien said, not looking up from his book. “We’ve got to go buy the shoes.”
“I’m busy,” she said, and tossed the last of the carrots into the pot.
Damien had been invited to Marianne Clair’s birthday party that afternoon, and he had a present for her (one of his Thornton Burgess books; you couldn’t tell it wasn’t new), and so he was all set to go. Except for one thing. He had to have a new pair of shoes. He had only a single pair that he wore for school and for best, and somehow he must have scuffed the top of the toe on his right shoe because the leather had worn away and when he stood in front of the class to read, everybody could see his sock showing through.
Damien had not been able to tell his mother this, or tell her what had happened yesterday in school when Miss Moriarty made him stop reading and insisted that Marianne share with the whole class whatever it was that she found so funny. “You can see his sock through the hole in his shoe,” Marianne said, and everyone had laughed. Damien could never tell her this; he could never tell anyone. But last night he had prayed over and over that he would get the new shoes soon.
Two weeks ago his mother had said that maybe next Saturday they would take a bus downtown and buy him a new pair of shoes. A week later she had said the same thing again. But this morning she had already mentioned several times how busy she was, how many things she had to do. It would be only a while longer—he could tell—before she said he would just have to wait another week for the shoes.
She finished preparing the stew and in no time spread the kitchen table with newspaper, got out her bag of soil and her pots, and was busy transferring the first of the window plants from a small pot to a larger one.
Damien looked over at her without raising his head; this way he could watch without her knowing it. She rapped the plant out of its pot and held it upside down in her left hand while she scooped soil into the new pot with her right. She was quick and certain, juggling the plant and the pot, pressing down the new soil with her knuckles, making it all come out right. Everything she touched grew.
She looked up at him suddenly. “You should be outside, in the nice sun,” she said. “It’s too nice a day not to be outside.”
“But when are we going to buy the shoes?” he asked.
She said nothing.
“Mother? What about the shoes?”
“They’ll have to wait,” she said, her hands busier than ever with her potting.
“But you promised. You said.”
She started on another plant, ignoring him.
“You promised. You never keep your promises.”
“That’s enough. Now stop, or you won’t go to the party at all.”
“What a cheater you are!”
“Damien!” she said, the last warning.
“You lied to me. You never intended to buy the shoes.”
“That’s it. That does it,” she said. “You’re spoiled and you’re fresh and you’re selfish, and you are not going to that party. Period.”
“You just don’t want to take me, that’s all. You just don’t want to buy me shoes.”
“Go to your room! Now!”
“I hate you,” Damien said, and headed—fast—for the door. “Besides, you’re as homely as Mrs. Dressel.”
It had popped into his head from nowhere. He had heard Mrs. Waters from next door say she thought Emily Dressel was the homeliest woman in town, and he had heard his mother repeat the comment to his father. He had heard them laugh and agree that it was probably true. His mother had said, “That poor woman; if I looked like that, I’d wear a hat with a veil.”
So now he sat in his bedroom wondering why his mother had said nothing back to him. He had wanted to make her angry, to hurt her, badly, because she had ruined everything. Even if he said he was sorry and they were friends again, it wouldn’t be the same. Even if she took him to get the shoes now, it wouldn’t be the same. It was too late.
He would ignore her. He would be nice to her from now on, but never again the way he used to be. That was what she deserved. She had earned her punishment.
He tried to go back to Swiss Family Robinson, which, despite the speed of his escape from the kitchen, he had had the sense to take with him, but he couldn’t concentrate on the words.
He wondered if she knew. Did she know that he was punishing her? And did she suspect that, in a way, he was relieved not to have to go to the party with all new kids?
She probably did. She probably knew, as he himself knew, that in a day or so, after he’d been punished for being fresh and after they’d gone without talking for a while, it would all be the same, and that next Saturday he would read some new book and she would bake cookies and all of this would count for nothing. He wanted to hurt her back, now, for good.
Instantly he realized how to do it.
He marched out to the kitchen and stood beside her at the sink. She was holding one of the repotted plants near the faucet, getting it wet but not too wet. She said nothing and so he waited. He would give her one more chance. But when she still remained silent, he said, “Do you want to know something? You really are as homely as Mrs. Dressel. And tomorrow or the next day when we’re not mad at each other anymore, I’ll tell you I didn’t really mean it. I’ll tell you I just said it to pay you back. But I do mean it, and you know what? I’ll mean it then, too, even when I say I don’t. Because it’s the truth.”
His mother said nothing, but her face got hard-looking, and she shook. Suddenly the plant fell from her hands. The fresh soil spilled into the sink and the water from the faucet drilled hard on the plant until even the old soil fell away and the roots were exposed, but still she did nothing to save it. She only stared straight ahead.
Damien turned smartly and walked down the hall to his room. He shut the door behind him.
His face was hot and he felt dizzy, but not sick dizzy. He was dizzy with a kind of power, a strange sense of who he was and what he could do. He looked around the room and everything seemed different. His bed was so small, and the chair too, and his bureau. Not exactly small, but distant; as if he had moved away from them, as if he had nothing to do with them anymore. Even his books looked different; they looked old, ancient; he knew everything that was in them. With one finger, with a single word from his mouth, he could dismiss them from existence. He was capable of anything now.
And at once he knew he must hide. But where? He went to his closet and climbed in among the slippers and boots and old toys, but that was not enough.
He took his bathrobe down from its hook and put it over his head. No. He was still not hidden.
He pulled down his shirts from the shelves, his pajamas, his underwear; in a frenzy he tore everything from the hangers, heaped the clothes in a mound on the closet floor. It was not enough.
He stripped himself then, adding his shirt and trousers to the pile on the floor, and, pulling the door tight behind him, crawled beneath the heavy pile of clothing and lay, for a time, hidden.
Hours later his mother found him there, still shaking with power and terror.
Alicia was dying of metastatic liver cancer.
Hers was the typical case. While shaving beneath her arms one evening, she had noticed an odd little lump near the nipple of her left breast. The next morning she phoned her gynecologist, and almost before she had time to realize what was happening, she was recuperating from a radical mastectomy. At her third-month checkup she seemed fine, but three months later a tumor appeared in her right breast and she had to undergo another mastectomy.
Two years passed, filled for Alicia and Damien with a kind of desperate hope, and then the hoping was over. Alicia developed a nagging cough, she began to lose weight, her fine white skin began to turn sallow. Even before the doctor examined her, he pronounced it cancer of the liver—final and fatal. Alicia had been in the hospital for over a month now, with the promise of days to live, or hours. And still she had not complained.
Whenever he had a cold, Damien always said—by way of apology to her and acknowledgment to himself—that on his tombstone he wanted carved this simple inscription: He suffered no pain without complaint.
What he could never understand, therefore, was how Alicia could suffer so much and complain so little. Or rather, not at all.
He had sat by her bed each day, telling her about his classes (he taught English at Sacred Heart College), about her friends from school who had phoned to inquire how she was doing (she taught English at Sacred Heart Prep), about their German shepherd, Heidi. She had smiled, her hand resting lightly on his, and in her new voice—husky, strained, exhausted—she had done her best to cheer him up.
But now she slept all the time, or perhaps she was unconscious. Damien sat beside her bed, forcing himself to look at her emaciated hand or at the small mound her feet made beneath the covers, or at the reproduction of the Madonna della Strada on the wall opposite. Anywhere but at her face.
Because the last time he had looked at her sleeping face, he had thought, Go. Please go. I have never known you anyway. And he could not bear to think that again.
Damien had known her since that last terrible year in the priesthood, when he had prayed and drank and made love to her and then gone to confession, promising he would end this affair, and he had meant it. Then he would start all over again. How had she endured it? Endured him?
He shot a quick glance at her face. Her skin was smooth, taut to her skull, and with the advance of the disease, the color had darkened from its natural white to a pale yellow and then to a deep tan; now it was reddish brown, thin and hard to the touch. Her face was a death mask made of copper.
This was not Alicia.
He tried to summon some image of her, some proof that he had known her after all. He saw them walking on the beach with the dog; he saw them fighting, spitting out the angry words they would take back later; he saw them making love. But that was not it; that was not what he was looking for. He thought of her as she had been for the past two years, broken with cancer, and he remembered kissing the pink flesh where her breast used to be and looking up to see the single tear on her cheek. He thought of her in bed with him, her head twisting on the pillow, the sounds of her pleasure in his ear. But that was not the right image either. It was hopeless.
Then, just when he had given up, it came to him: the photo of Alicia on the swing. She was five years old and she was wearing a birthday dress. She sat on the swing with both feet planted on the ground; her hands gripped the ropes solidly; she looked straight into the camera. There was a smile on her face, a look of confidence, a sureness about everything in her world. Her eyes saw, and liked what they saw, and she was perfectly content. Hope was not even a question.
Damien fixed the picture firmly in his mind, smiled at the freshness, the inviolability of that child, and then he turned to look at Alicia.
“The relentless compassion of God,” he said aloud, and as if she had been waiting for him to say that, Alicia opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Never,” she said, and then something else that Damien could not make out.
He leaned over her to catch the words, and at once her eyes tipped upward in her head and she began to push away the sheets. “Help me,” she said. “Oh, help me with these.” She sat up somehow and managed to kick the sheets free of her body. She clawed at the johnny tied loosely at her back; the string broke and she flung the thing on the floor. She was sitting up in the bed now, naked, staring, her eyes empty in her copper face. “Help me,” she said once more. “I never loved.”
“No,” Damien said, taking her by the shoulders, turning her to look into his face. “No, that’s not true,” he said, desperate this time. “You loved me. You always loved me.”
She focused on Damien then and something came into her empty eyes, a kind of promise.
“And I loved you,” he said, but already her eyes had begun to close. He lay her back on the bed, slowly, gently, and she seemed finally to be without life altogether. “No,” Damien sobbed. “Oh, God, no. No.” And then he thought he heard her echo him, “No. No.”
He did not cover her dead body but left it as it was, naked, decent. He stood by her bed and prayed, hoping against hope.