3. STATE AND CHURCH

WHEN I WAS two years old, my mother held me in one arm at FDR's last inauguration. With the other she clutched my brother Joe's hand. He was four. She was determined that her two sons would glimpse the president once, and the odd arrangement of that inauguration gave her the chance. FDR had ruled that, because of the war, a large celebration would be inappropriate, although it was also likely that his unpublicized declining health—he died of a stroke a few months later—would not permit it. Roosevelt's health would, in fact, emerge as a contrasting thread in this story, but at that point my mother was like most Americans in feeling only admiration for the stoic reserve with which the president kept his affliction not hidden precisely, but in the shadows of public awareness. In 1921 he had been stricken with poliomyelitis. He'd been paralyzed from the waist down ever since. Very few knew of the severity of his condition. Of the 125,000 photographs of FDR on file at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, only one shows him sitting in a wheelchair. We are expected to look back on the reticence of that era's press corps—those photographs not taken—as a better way, but would the disease of polio have been so consistently and universally taken as shameful if the president had stood openly in his braces, with his crutches, and declared, "I do not govern with my legs"?

In 1945 there was no inaugural ball and no parade. Roosevelt took the oath on the south portico of the White House. He spoke for five minutes to members of the public gathered on the lawn, the smallest audience ever to hear an inaugural address—a few hundred people, three of whom were Mary Carroll and her sons Joe and Jimmy. It is as if I can remember being there, so much have such events featured in my life. In 1949 our mother took us to the swearing-in of Harry Truman, a person, like her, of no schooling—the only president of this century not to have gone to college. Like her, he was of the unvarnished and unpuritanical Midwest—his Edward J. Kelly was named T. J. Pendergast Jr. Famously a man of plain talk, Truman was proof to a woman who needed it that, even in Washington, virtues of directness and common sense could triumph. For Truman, we stood in the throng at the Capitol, and images of my mother's beaming face and of the gleaming white dome play off each other in one of my first true memories.

Brian, Dennis, and toddler Kevin kept her home in 1953, so that year Joe and I, aged twelve and nine, went to Ike's inaugural on our own. That is the one from which I cherish images of the marching bands and soldiers, baton-swinging girls and cowboys on horseback—and Eisenhower's Homburg. I remember someone saying Ike was the first not to wear a top hat. Like good Democrats—Back of the Yards Democrats, Mayor Daley Democrats—Joe and I wore buttons that said, "I Like Everybody."

By 1961 I was a freshman at Georgetown. I had desperately hoped that my ROTC unit would be tapped to march in Kennedy's parade, but we were not chosen. It was deflating to be on the curbside again, but disappointment gave way to rampant joy when JFK drove by, no hat at all. More, almost, than anything else, his bareheadedness made him ours. It was so cold that button vendors had built fires in oil drums up the side streets from Pennsylvania Avenue. I recall that someone near me in the crowd was carrying a transistor radio, which seemed more a marvel even than Kennedy's speech.

I was present for Lyndon Johnson's parade, but my memory is blurred because a melancholy impulse had taken me back to the spot on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the National Gallery, where I'd stood for the funeral procession the year before. When I try now to picture a triumphant LBJ going by, I see instead the riderless black horse. Same bands, different music.

No longer living in Washington in 1973, I realized I had an unbroken string of inaugurations going, yet when I traveled there that year, it was to join what organizers dubbed "the counter-inauguration." The protest was an enraged reaction to the just past Christmas bombing of Hanoi, which, with a hundred thousand bombs dropped in eleven days, was the highest concentration of firepower in the war. When Richard Nixon's car approached—that year my spot was at Fourteenth Street, near the District Building—the crowd jeered the man who'd kept the war going despite his four-year-old promise to end it. My own readiness to join in was a measure of the distance I had come from my youthful worship of these men. I shook my fist and cursed the president of the United States.

All my life, inaugurations had been like a sacrament of the streets to me, rituals of rebirth, the one true American gala, a quadrennial instance of Jefferson's "peaceful revolution." At inaugurations, even including the glaring exception of 1973, because it was an exception, I had learned the basic lesson of this nation: how to put aside what divides us— e pluribus —in favor of a felt experience of what unites us— unum. At inaugurations, we could all wear buttons that said, "I Like Everybody."

I grew up, in other words, with a vivid and continuous sense of connection to what theorists called "the state," but which we thought of only as our country. From an early age, I understood that "we the people" gathered on the sidewalks of the avenue to cheer the president as a way of cheering ourselves. And our entire lives in Washington, with its child-pleasing monuments, museums, military displays, and becolumned white buildings, reinforced us in our attitude toward the political sphere—toward, we would learn to say later, the "secular"—as a realm of nothing less than (we didn't know yet to use this word either) the "sacred."

The Roman Catholic Church had set itself against the modern ideas of pluralism and democracy, and it was deeply suspicious of Protestant America. But Catholic Americans knew in their bones that democracy was good, and their influence, especially through figures like the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, was beginning to be felt in Rome. The American experience, filtered through theology, would end the era of Tridentine Catholicism. My mother and father would be constitutionally incapable of thinking of themselves as ecclesiastical liberals, but they unselfconsciously anticipated the coming breakthrough that would be so powerfully symbolized to American Catholics by the twin, nearly simultaneous arrivals of John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. With a wartime jump-start, my parents embraced the life of Washington—of their nation—with a verve that I still remember as the electric pulse that brought me into my first awareness of myself not only as a citizen, but as a believer.

Our father would give us the motto Pro Deo et Patria, yet he was less the one who initiated Joe and me into the holy mysteries of Washington than our mother. Later our brothers were initiated too. They were born as Joe and I had been, in two- to three-year intervals, according to norms set by Casti Connubii, the Pius XI encyclical that "once and for all" defined "artificial" birth control as intrinsically evil. That doctrine was promulgated in 1930. It fixed my parents and their generation of Catholics—the meaning of Pro Deo —in the rigid sexual roulette to which so many of us, their children, owe our very existence.

Throughout our infancies and childhoods, our father was making his way from the outer circles into the starred chambers of real government power, first at Justice, then at Defense. But because we knew to associate him with the high and, even to us, evident purpose of the era's great crusade—he was catching Communist spies—his absence itself had the weight of presence. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," he used to say to us, climbing into the car where we were waiting, half asleep. We often picked him up at night, and I still remember the odd thrill it was to have our mother at the wheel, him in the passenger seat, and her announcing that on the way home we would have a tour. As if she were his guide to Washington too, she would set off, hunched over the wheel of the Studebaker Champion. She loved the city's avenues and edifices, and displayed them as if they were hers to give us.

So much was hers to give. I know that she cherished me when I was little, and wanted to give me not just that city but the world. She is the first source of my pride and self-regard, the virtue of my worldliness. I knew from an early age what a rare woman she was, and I remember feeling the power of that knowledge when she would drive us through Washington at night: the stately flag-bedecked mansions of Embassy Row, the brooding Lincoln, Jefferson in solitary splendor at the Tidal Basin, the White House, the Willard, the ghostly white "tempos" along the Mall, the fairy-tale turrets of the Smithsonian, and the floodlit needle of the Washington Monument. The tours were especially vibrant if visitors from Chicago were along, and then our father would chime in with a rare recounting of tales of wartime Bureau work: the surveillance of diplomats at Dupont Circle, a stakeout at the old Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, a rendezvous near the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, and someone's suicide off a bridge into Rock Creek Park.

I cannot drive through the Doric canyons of Washington even now without seeing the flash of my parents' youth, my mother's enthusiasm for a world she would never have dared expect to claim as her own, my father's quiet assumption of an authority that would eventually be ripped away from him. The established classes of old Washington—Cave Dwellers, the Foxhall Road set, the high society of Ivy League men and women who set their clocks by Cissy Patterson's Times-Herald —would ruthlessly have kept in their place one-toilet Irish interlopers like my parents, but a social revolution had occurred during the war. The population of the city had doubled with the arrival of men and their women who'd come to save the nation, which they then did. The newcomers loved Truman, of course, because he seemed like one of them.

As for my brother Joe and me, the FBI was everywhere in our first remembered world, and we loved it more for that. My first experience of professional entertainment, one could say even of story itself, was listening on the radio in the late forties to The FBI in Peace and War, and I can still hum its theme. Joe and I, and then Brian too, huddled together by the old Philco, riveted because those tales of gangbusters, spy catchers, and G-men gave us glimpses of Dad, who couldn't be there to put us to bed. That radio program, and another called This Is Your FBI, filled that primordial need to draw close to him at night before daring to close our eyes—Joe in the bottom bunk, me in the top, Brian on the cot. Those episodes portrayed FBI agents as men of such competence and integrity, of such selflessness, that one could think of them as modern-day Knights Templars. In my mind, the image of the agent would blur into that of the priest, for some obvious and some quite obscure reasons. In recalling the power of that first ideal in which virtue was not the opposite of masculinity but the essence of it, I recognize that the man I still long to be is the one I first thought my father was.

 

Joe and I had a wealth of uncles and aunts. Between them our parents had a dozen or more siblings—we never knew for sure how many. The totality of their break with Chicago is evident in the sad fact that even now I have no remote notion of how many first or second cousins I have. But in those early years in Washington, our Back of the Yards relatives arrived at our garden apartment in Arlington in a regular parade. Someone from Chicago was always sleeping on the couch, under the replica painting of Lady Davenport that Joe and I thought was of Mom. The visitors came as if to verify the regular, and to them incredible, reports of Joe and Mary's ascension. And every visitor, whether Morrissey or Carroll, or member of the old gang at the phone company or Loyola, got the nighttime tour on the way to pick up Dad.

Two buildings loomed in importance. Careening down from Capitol Hill, crowded into the Studebaker, we would fall silent at a certain point on Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the wedding-cake Archives Building where my mother would slow down. At Tenth Street she would point to the innocuous desk-sized marble block that was Franklin Roosevelt's self-appointed and only monument—hidden in death as he was in life—and then, craning at the windshield, she would point at a set of grand corner windows three stories above. "J. Edgar's office," she would say with a familiarity that always impressed the South Siders, and had me convinced for years that Hoover was more her personal friend than Dad's mentor.

After the Touhy case, Hoover had brought Dad into his inner circle and begun to depend on him as a Bureau troubleshooter. My father went from kidnapping and bank robbery investigations to the more urgent wartime tasks of counterespionage. The Germans and Japanese proved to have been ineffectual penetra-tors of Washington security, but, as the nation would learn soon enough, they weren't the only ones trying. Joe Carroll came into his own as the war ended and a renewed Red scare began, a true reversal of the short-lived American assumption of invincibility.

In a few months in the summer and fall of 1949, the postwar euphoria evaporated suddenly, as illustrated by the contrasting findings of two Alger Hiss juries. The first jurors, in July of 1949, were unable to reach a verdict in the perjury trial of the patrician State Department official. The second, in January of 1950, found him guilty in a matter of minutes, not because the evidence was any more conclusive, but because the atmosphere in which charges had been brought was entirely different. In the period between the two trials the meanings of America's past and future were both upended. In August the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, which Truman announced to the world in September. In October Mao Tse-tung took control of Peking, prefiguring his imminent takeover of all China. In December, after being cornered by an energized FBI, the eminent Los Alamos physicist Klaus Fuchs admitted to being a Soviet spy, source of the information that had enabled the Reds to build the Bomb a full decade ahead of expectations. The intermediaries between Fuchs and Moscow, it would be revealed, included low-level Los Alamos functionaries, one of whom had a sister named Ethel Rosenberg, wife of Julius. Although the authentic villain, Fuchs, would serve only nine years in prison before returning, upon release, to a hero's welcome in East Germany, the Rosenbergs would be sentenced to die a week after the North Koreans invaded the South. For more than a generation, Americans would argue over these events and claim their fundamental identities in terms of them. Notwithstanding all the controversy, the one undeniable fact, obvious from the start, was that the most closely held secret in the history of the United States had been penetrated by agents of the Soviet Union, which was how Joseph Stalin, the moral twin of Adolf Hitler, obtained the Bomb. Why shouldn't Americans have been anxious?

And why shouldn't my mother's voice have been full with pride as she pointed up at J. Edgar Hoover's windows? But the FBI wing of the Justice Department Building would not remain the high point of our family tour. By a stroke of fate that must have seemed of a piece with other momentous changes, the Pentagon became the destination of all our tours, the place where Dad worked now, and from which he would emerge at the end of another Free World-saving day, cheerfully greeting us and whoever that night's visitor was.

The life-changing Touhy letter from Hoover was dated, as I said, four days before I was born: three days before that, on January 15, 1943, the new Department of War Building was completed. Not one building actually, it is five distinct pentagonal structures arranged concentrically around a five-acre open court. These "rings" are joined by ten spokelike corridors, and its five stories (seven, counting the two below ground) are connected by broad ramps. Why ramps? "Because," as my mother always said, heading across the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the pharaoh's temple on the west bank of the Potomac, below Arlington Cemetery, largest tombstone in the world, "the building was designed to be converted into a hospital after the war was over." Ramps, she insisted, were for the movable beds and vets in wheelchairs, proof that we were an unwarlike people. I believed it for years, but my mother's explanation was a sweet piece of Washington apocrypha: Pentagon planners assumed the building's ongoing function as headquarters and records center of a massive military. The ramps ensured the smooth movement of wheeled file cabinets in the world's largest bureaucracy. Beginning in 1947, my father was one of the multitude working there.

Approaching the river entrance along the tidy George Washington Parkway, my mother loved to enumerate the wonders of the place: the Pentagon covered thirty acres and had three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, more even—here was something to impress Chicagoans—than the Merchandise Mart. It was a mile in circumference, had eighteen dining rooms that served sixty thousand meals a day. But the wonder of wonders was that her Joe worked there. A mere eight years after finishing night school, quitting the stockyards, and marrying her—he who, in growing up, had never crossed paths with a soldier or sailor much less an officer, never served a day in uniform, never saw a moment's service overseas, and had hardly ever been in an airplane—he had become an instant brigadier general in the United States Air Force. At age thirty-seven, he was the youngest general in America.

My brother Joe and I, and our Uncle Tommy, say, would laugh and laugh as Mom described how on his first day in uniform Dad went to work wearing one brown sock and one black. We'd howl as she described him at the bathroom mirror, practicing his salute. We wouldn't dare laugh about such things in front of him, but there was no mockery in us. We took our cue from Mom, and her pride in his accomplishment was bottomless, like her delight.

We had no language with which to express this, of course, no way to know it even, but looking back on my mother's giddy satisfaction at his rocketlike success, I sense its meaning as an apparently final reversal of the shame they'd felt in Chicago, a vindication of the risk he'd taken in rejecting the priesthood, and she'd taken in marrying a man who'd once promised himself to God. Wasn't the miracle of his success in Washington a sign of heaven's favor? How could their embrace during that period not have been edged with a feeling of release? Compared to the brothers, sisters, and friends they'd left behind in their indifferent hometown, and certainly compared to what, in their heart of hearts, they'd expected, they were surely the luckiest two people in the world, free or not.

Here is how it happened. In 1947 the Air Force was established as an independent service. The first air secretary was Truman's Missouri protégé Stuart Symington. He approached J. Edgar Hoover for the loan of an FBI expert in investigations and counterintelligence to devise a structure for an Air Force security agency. Symington wanted an operation more like the efficiently organized FBI than the Byzantine OSS or the Army's fief-ridden CIC. Hoover was duly flattered, which always helped. He assigned to Symington a man he described quite simply—this is my mother speaking—as his very best. "Your dad," she'd say; or, to Chicago visitors from his side of the family, "Your Joe"; or, to her own, and here was the phrase into which she put her every curl of feeling, pride, and love, "My Joe."

Symington quickly replaced Hoover as a mentor. My father might have been loyal to the FBI director, but he was no masochist. The initial assumption was that he would remain a civilian and return to the Bureau after six months. But the organizational structure he recommended for the Air Force posed a problem. It violated military taboos, and the brass hated it. For one thing, the new agency would be accountable not to local superiors, or even to theater commanders, but to a director in Washington. In order to avoid being intimidated by senior officers who could be subjects of investigations, its agents would dress as civilians, not disclose their ranks, and stand outside the chain of command. The authority of OSI agents could supersede that even of generals.

The generals did not like the idea, and said so. They said it would not work, and implied they would not carry out such a proposal. But the operation my father outlined was exactly what Symington wanted. He went to Hoover, Congress, and President Truman. In short order, extraordinary legislation was passed, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was established, and the ex-seminarian and former stockyards worker was released from the FBI, commissioned to the rank of brigadier general, and appointed director, a job he would hold for a decade. Instead of six months, my father would be in the Air Force for a quarter of a century.

A few years ago, I encountered a retired colonel who had been an assistant to my father in the early days of OSI. The mystery to me had always been how my father won over the hostile Air Force brass. The hard-boiled Curtis LeMay, for example, became his strongest early booster. I asked the colonel if he knew how it happened. He told me this story. In the late 1940s the great Pentagon contest was over who would be given main custody of the nuclear arsenal—the Navy with its proposed fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines or the Air Force with its new generation of strategic bombers. Politicians on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees would decide, and they seemed to be favoring the flyboys, largely because of the popular appeal of the Air Force chief of staff, hero of the air war against Germany, General Hoyt Vandenberg.

At a crucial point, however, a congressman sympathetic to the Navy produced an anonymous letter that labeled Vandenberg an adulterer and a liar. Negative publicity undercut the Air Force case just as the vote was to be taken. Symington asked the newly appointed General Carroll to find out what he could about the letter. And what Carroll did that very night, operating on a gumshoe's hunch, was burglarize the Pentagon offices of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations. Acting alone, he took type samples from all the Navy typewriters and, still in the middle of the night, brought them over to the FBI laboratory on Pennsylvania Avenue. By morning Joe Carroll had established that the anonymous letter slandering Vandenberg was written on a typewriter in the office of an undersecretary of the Navy. Using FBI-prepared photographic blowups comparing the "fingerprints" of the typescript, he briefed first Symington and Vandenberg, then the congressional committee members. Apparently no one asked whether this warrantless intrusion of the Navy offices was a violation of the law. Hearing about it from that elderly colonel, I thought immediately of my father's denunciations—"The ends don't justify the means!"—of Catholic peaceniks who burglarized draft board offices during Vietnam.

Later, I would read an account of the same incident, although without explicit reference to my father's role, in Iron Eagle, the biography of General LeMay by Thomas M. Coffey. The anonymous letter levied charges of corruption among the highest officers in the Air Force, including LeMay. Coffey writes, "The author of the document was not so anonymous after all. He was identified as a man named Cedric K. Worth, one-time Hollywood script writer who was now a special assistant to Undersecretary of the Navy [Daniel] Kimball." The colonel to whom I spoke told me that after my father's congressional briefing exposing the Navy ploy, the pro-Navy congressman who'd produced the letter apologized, and the committees took their votes. The first nukes went to the Air Force, which led to its ascendancy and, not incidentally, to LeMay's, with the formal establishment of the Strategic Air Command. After that, the colonel said, young General Joe Carroll could do no wrong with the Air Force brass. He could wear any color socks he wanted.

I have a photograph in front of me that shows my father in his new uniform, shiny brass buttons, flap pockets and all. He is standing on the lawn outside our Arlington apartment. I am standing next to him. He is holding my hand. I am four years old. My father in his peaked cap is looking off to the left with a benign smile that has always made me hope he is looking at my mother. I am wearing a uniform too, a fringed cowboy vest, gun belt, and boots. My eyes are in shadow, but otherwise the expression on my face is slightly stunned, as if I appreciate all that has happened to us in a few short years. Perhaps I know something else already, the other large event, the countervailing catastrophe that instantly and permanently undid every feeling my mother and father had of being lucky. The precise timing has always been unclear to me, but one day in this same period, my brother Joe fell down, and he could not get up again. Our mother took him to the doctor, who knew at once what to look for. Our father was summoned from his office, and this time he came. Their first-born son, the seal of a love that wasn't to have been, the issue of flesh that was weak, a child conceived in the Irish Church's idea of sin, my older brother, my lively partner in the world of radio, in the cult of bunk beds, my teacher and first friend, the one with whom I secretly shared a name—Joe had infantile paralysis, poliomyelitis, Roosevelt's disease, polio.

I remember the living room of our apartment on South Sixteenth Street, the Lady Davenport on the wall, the red couch, the figurine-laden glass shelves in the window. Four or five years old, I am sitting on the couch when they bring Joe home from the hospital for the first time. My father is carrying him. Joe smiles at me, as if privileged. I refuse at first to get off the couch, where he must lie now. My mother screams at me, the first remembered time. I run from the room, fighting off the consoling pleasure of my knowledge that Joe cannot run after me.

Behind and above my father and me, in this photograph, stands a telephone pole. This same picture sat on my table when I was a seminarian, and I recall the day I first saw that telephone pole as a crucifix. "The end of learning," Samuel Johnson wrote, "is piety." And the end, also, of a hard-won self-acceptance. There was a time in my life when I saw crucifixes everywhere—in soaring airplanes, in the joints of windowpanes, in radiator grilles, in the fall of toothpicks on a table. Polio brought the cross back into our family, where it belonged. Our religion meant one thing only, that God came onto the earth to show us, so vividly, so unforgettably, that every human being has, as Mom would never tire of saying, "a cross to bear." The phrase deflects from its own meaning, that each of us—"Drink ye all of this"—is crucified. Joe's fate—he would have a severe case of the disease, undergoing a dozen operations over the next fifteen years, forfeiting his childhood and walking with a savage limp for life—seized my parents like claws reaching up from the stockyards bog to haul them back into the fetid world from which they came, a crone chorus—Irish hags, the nuns—screeching, "Who did you think you were? How dare you think you can escape!"

After Joe got polio, our roles reversed. I did not openly claim the name in which I too had been baptized, but I usurped his place in other ways, a pseudo-older brother, sibling born to lead, to try things first, to help with chores, to mind the baby, and, later, to be the outgoing one, the Carroll boys' little representative. I did everything asked of me, and more than was expected. Yet my every success, since it came at Joe's expense, would feel like failure—a sad pattern grooved into my psyche to this day.

Mom did mute penance, nailing herself to the cross of her first son's suffering. The rest of us would compete for the dregs of her attention. His having caught one of the three viruses that caused polio—Joe and I agreed that he'd gotten it drinking from the creek that ran near our apartment house—was her fault, wasn't it? What else had she to do in life than protect her children? Or was it somehow my fault? Had I been first to slurp the forbidden water, giving him the idea? It was as if I were already older, guilty for giving bad example. I remember Joe telling me that if one of us had to get polio, he was glad it was he, a sentiment that seemed in no way noble to me. I envied him his suffering.

Mom became our own Pieta. The spontaneous, wisecracking, affectionate young woman I first knew, as it were, simply packed up and moved out, to be replaced by the Mother of Sorrows herself, a woman privileged to be in pain. Our father, meanwhile, fleeing the sure Jansenist knowledge that his own hubris, not polluted water or "germs," was the true cause of his son's polio—a perfect punishment if ever there was one, just at the time of his great achievement—he fled from us too, Joe junior for sure, a rebuke embodied; and long-suffering Mary; and also me. One might have expected that with our mother entirely taken up with Joe, I would have had more of our father to myself, his attention, talk, play; but not so. I remember sitting in the car with him, outside one hospital or another, waiting for Mom to come out from visiting Joe. He would sit at the wheel ignoring me, compulsively whistling a tune I would much later recognize as "Beautiful Dreamer." I hear it now, and it makes me sad.

Our parents would be sexually intimate again, but lovers? Properly unprotected prophylactically, they would be protected from each other in every other way from now on. I can claim only intuitive knowledge here, but my conviction is that the shock of my brother's illness broke the spell of the golden escape—the beautiful dream—they'd woven for themselves. They would be alienated from each other hereafter. She would be giving her all to her children. He would be saving the Free World from Communism. I would be the secretly beloved child of a quietly scorned woman, which would lead years later to a boundless embarrassment around sexual assertion. Now I understand my mother's forever unstated difficulty with male sexuality, mine in particular. The lesson of polio to all of us was that our bodies were plainly not to be trusted. Devastating as my brother's illness was in itself—year after year of his real agony—its resonance as a kind of Irish curse against a spoiled priest, his woman, and their children is what made it the radioactive mushroom cloud of our family. Certainly it hung over me.

Friends and relatives from Chicago stopped visiting. Mom stopped packing us into the Studebaker to go pick up Dad at night. Instead of wonder tours of Doric Washington, she did her driving now to doctors' offices and hospitals in Alexandria and Washington. Instead of past the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue, she now drove the Studebaker every chance she got to the far northeast of D.C., an area around Catholic University called Little Rome because of its concentration of seminaries, convents, monasteries, and oratories. When Joe was in the hospital, she took me and a succession of my infant brothers to the Franciscan Monastery, where visits to the papier-mache catacombs and concrete-over-mesh grottoes of Lourdes and Fatima earned something called "indulgences," which Mom flamboyantly "offered up," as she said, for Joe. I once asked a Friar Tuck monk why he had hair on his chin and not on his head, and the relieved pleasure I took in my mother's laughter makes me realize now that it had become unusual. Sometimes, in a wheelchair or on crutches, Joe would come with us. He could be imperious, ordering me to fetch, to wait, or to carry, but I had developed the habit of responding instantly. To do so solved the ache of my not being crippled myself.

If it wasn't the Franciscan Monastery or the Poor Clares Convent we visited, it was the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in those days a crypt church still under construction. Completed, it is the largest Catholic church in North America. Even incomplete, the Shrine had a well-stocked religious goods store, where my mother bought scapulas and miraculous medals for Joe to wear, sacred oil and relics to rub on his scarred and withered legs. I went along mutely, increasingly agnostic as I saw no improvement in Joe's condition. Mainly I was learning the great lesson that religious faith has everything to do with suffering and unhappiness. I was four years old, five, six ... eleven, twelve, going to and from these places with my mother and brothers. The Shrine especially was the North Star of my childhood. When Joe was in the hospital, it seemed we went there after every visit. I knelt below the crucifixes, all that writhing, legs as bruised as Joe's; I said my rosaries and learned carefully to deduct my time from purgatory. With the cultivated appearance of a fervor I never felt, I imitated my mother in lighting candles at the snake-ridden (virus-ridden?) feet of the Blessed Virgin Mary. After a while, and without ever believing any of it was helping Joe, I realized that these rituals had become for me what they were for my mother, a bond with her after all, and a rare—perhaps the only—source of consolation.

Latin Masses and communally recited rosaries were unintelligible rituals to me, but the act of kneeling next to her was emotionally comprehensible. I learned to bury my face in my hands, a dark focus that offered a release I had no way of understanding—and which is still available to me when, in certain circumstances and blank-minded, I assume that posture all these years later. Faith in a crucified God, son of a heartbroken mother, consoles without providing any particular hope of salvation, solution, fix, or escape—that was the first principle of my credo, and it remains the last.

Two blocks down Fourth Street from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, behind a pair of looming stone pillars past which we drove every time, was a pseudo-Gothic, crenelated mausoleum that had already branded itself on my unconscious. It was St. Paul's College, a seminary. Seminary: when I first heard the word, I took it to be "cemetery," another Arlington, like the one sprawling up the hill behind my father's office at the Pentagon. Seminary: at the word I always looked for grave markers. St. Paul's College on Fourth Street was the institution where, years later, in my pathetic effort to resuscitate the mortal happiness of that fugitive young couple and their first son, their first Joseph, I would, a willing mystic Houdini, entomb myself.