It’s a surprise on Sunday morning when Di Angelo asks me if I’d like to go to Mass with him, a surprise because you’d think that people who sing the praises of Chinese Communists would never step into church, chapel, or synagogue. On the way to the base chapel he explains the way he feels, that the Church belongs to him, he doesn’t belong to the Church, and he doesn’t agree with the way the Church acts like a big corporation declaring they own God and it’s their right to dole Him out in little bits and pieces as long as people do what they’re told by Rome. He sins every week himself by receiving Communion without first confessing his sins to a priest. He says his sins are nobody’s business but his and God’s and that’s who he confesses to every Saturday night before he falls asleep.
He talks about God as if He were in the next room having a pint and smoking a cigarette. I know if I went back to Limerick and talked like that I’d be hit on the head and thrown on the next train to Dublin.
We might be on an army base with barracks all around us but inside the chapel it’s pure America. There are officers with their wives and children and they have the clean scrubbed look that comes from shower and shampoo and a constant state of grace. They have the look of people from Maine or California, small towns, church on Sundays, leg of lamb afterward, peas, mashed potatoes, apple pie, iced tea, Dad snoozing with the big Sunday paper dropped to the floor, kids reading comics, Mom in the kitchen washing dishes and humming “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’.” They have the look of people who brush their teeth after every meal and fly the flag on the Fourth. They might be Catholics but I don’t think they’d feel comfortable in Irish or Italian churches where there might be old men and women mumbling and snuffling, a suspicion of whiskey or wine in the air, a whiff of bodies untouched for weeks by soap and water.
I’d like to be part of an American family, to sidle up to a blonde blue-eyed teenage daughter of an officer and whisper I’m not what I seem. I might have pimples and bad teeth and fire alarm eyes but, underneath, I’m just like them, a well-scrubbed soul dreaming of a house in a suburb with a tidy lawn where our child, little Frank, pushes his tricycle and all I want is a read of the Sunday paper like a real American dad and maybe I’d wash and clean our spanking new Buick before we drive over to visit Mom’s grandpa and grandma and rock on their porch with glasses of iced tea.
The priest is mumbling away on the altar and when I whisper the Latin responses Di Angelo nudges me and wants to know if I’m all right, if I’m hung over from my beer night with Dunphy. I wish I could be like Di Angelo, making up my own mind about everything, not giving a fiddler’s fart like my Uncle Pa Keating back in Limerick. I know Di Angelo would laugh if I told him I’m so steeped in sin I’m afraid to go to confession for fear of being told I’m so far gone that only a bishop or a cardinal could give me absolution. He’d laugh if I told him that some nights I’m afraid to fall asleep in case I die and go to hell. How could hell be invented by a God who’s in the next room with a beer and a cigarette?
This is when the dark clouds flutter like bats in my head and I wish I could open a window and release them.
Now the priest is asking for volunteers to pick up baskets from the back of the chapel and make the collection. Di Angelo gives me a little push and we’re out in the aisle genuflecting and sending the baskets along the pews. Officers and noncoms with families always hand their contributions to their children to drop in the basket and that makes everyone smile, the little one is so proud and the parents are so proud of the little one. Officers’ wives and noncoms’ wives smile at each other as if to say, We’re all one under the roof of the Catholic Church, though you know once they’re outside they know they’re different.
The basket goes from pew to pew till it’s taken by a sergeant who will count the money and pass it on to the chaplain. Di Angelo whispers he knows this sergeant and when the money is counted it’s two for you and one for me.
I tell Di Angelo I’m not going to Mass anymore. What’s the use when I’m in such a state of sin for impurity and everything else? I can’t be in the chapel with all those clean American families and their state of grace. I’ll wait till I get the courage to go to confession and Communion and if I keep committing mortal sins by not going to Mass it won’t matter since I’m doomed anyway. One mortal sin will get you into hell just as easily as ten mortal sins.
Di Angelo tells me I’m full of shit. He says I should go to Mass if I want to, that the priests don’t own the Church.
I can’t think like Di Angelo, not yet. I’m afraid of the priests and the nuns and the bishops and the cardinals and the Pope. I’m afraid of God.
Monday morning I’m told report to Master Sergeant Tole in his room at Company B. He’s sitting in an armchair and sweating so much his khaki uniform is dark. I want to ask him about the book on the table next to him, Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky, and I’d like to tell him about Raskolnikov but you have to be careful what you say to master sergeants and the army in general. Say the wrong thing and you’re back with the pots and pans.
He tells me stand easy and wants to know why I disobeyed a direct order and who the hell do I think I am defying a superior noncom even if he is training cadre, eh?
I don’t know what to say because he knows everything and I’m afraid if I open my mouth I might be shipped to Korea tomorrow. He says Corporal Sneed or whatever the hell his Polish name is had every right to discipline me but he went too far especially when it was a three-day pass for the colonel’s orderly. I’m entitled to that pass and if I still want it he’ll arrange it for the coming weekend.
Thanks, Sergeant.
Okay. Dismissed.
Sergeant?
Yeah?
I read Crime and Punishment.
Oh, yeah? Well, I could have guessed you’re not as dumb as you look. Dismissed.
In our fourteenth week of basic training there are rumors we’re being shipped to Europe. In the fifteenth week the rumors say we’re going to Korea. In the sixteenth week we’re told we’re definitely going to Europe.