The highlight of the trip (even if he didn’t remember my dad, either) was meeting my dad’s old commander, Captain Melusky. Captain Melusky looked pretty good—handsome and fit. Part of the reason he’s still around to attend the reunions is that he was so young when he assumed command. The captain told me he took over the Schmitt right out of a Navy ROTC program. I felt like my dad’s earthly emissary when I told the captain what an honor it was to meet him and how my father always talked about him with such respect, even reverence. After, again, fruitlessly showing him the photographs she’d brought, my mother asked Captain Melusky whether he remembered the ship’s dance held at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn in 1944. That dance had been my parents’ first or second date. They’d met when the ship was docked for a couple of months at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it was being outfitted for service in the Pacific. “Sure, I do,” said the captain. “We even printed a group picture taken of that dance in one of our earlier reunion booklets. I’ll show it to you.” He went up to his room and came back with the booklet. He opened it to the photograph, and there, in the very front row of a huge ballroom crowd of sailors, officers, and their dates, were my parents, smiling. My dad is in his dark winter sailor suit; my mom is wearing a light-colored dress, and her hair is waved and long. They’re both so young and slim and beautiful. They look—as they had—like they’ve just fallen in love. A few weeks after that picture was taken, my dad proposed, then sent my mother an engagement ring bought at some Navy PX in the South Pacific. (“That’s a blue-white diamond,” he would remind her whenever she expressed dissatisfaction at the size of the stone.) Another of those whirlwind World War II romances that lasted a lifetime.
On Sunday morning the captain spoke at the memorial service that traditionally concludes each reunion. Like so many of us, he turned to books to make his meaning clear. He cited Tom Brokaw’s bestseller The Greatest Generation, which he’d generally liked. He said, however, that the problem with the book was that it talked about those who had served in World War II as “heroes.” “We weren’t heroes,” Captain Melusky said without a trace of false humility. “We just did the job we had to do.” And his modesty evoked a more generous and democratic thought from me: perhaps my students, or any of us, would, if called upon, “do the job” the way these ordinary men had so long ago. The quiet, unsentimental, no-big-fuss way the captain and other crewmen there regarded themselves reminded me of my dad. He always joked, for instance, that the motto of refrigeration mechanics like himself, who installed huge air-conditioning systems on top of buildings, was “Never stand back to admire your work.” Also, the way Captain Melusky and the others talked about making the next reunion an especially good one, “because we all know it might be the last,” seemed to echo the courage they had shown more than fifty years ago when they had faced death the first time, then, as young men.
Sometimes I see my dad as being out on the ocean, on the Schmitt, just beyond the horizon. I have a brown-tinted snapshot of a bunch of crew members—I can’t tell whether my father is among them, the faces are so faded—but they’re all on the ship’s deck, facing the camera. I think of these guys as the shipmates who’ve passed over, and now my dad is in their company, in safe harbor, reunited with the family he loved second only to the one he left behind when he died.
Sometimes, though, I think of death as more horrific, capricious, meaningless. Once or twice my dad told me this story to illustrate what a good leader Captain Melusky was. One night a sailor was crossing the Schmitt’s deck to go to the galley to get some cherry pie and coffee. That’s what he told the guys he was on duty with as he left them. A freak wave smashed into the ship and washed the sailor overboard. Captain Melusky ordered the ship’s lights to be turned on to search for the man in the black waters. The captain’s decision was absolutely against wartime regulations because turning the lights on made the Schmitt a sitting duck for any enemy ships or submarines in the area. You could argue that it was a stupid, even irresponsible, thing to do. Nonetheless, Captain Melusky gave the order: the lights were turned on and the ocean searched. That poor guy was never found. I think about him sometimes, out there in the black ocean, maybe just out of reach of the lights, terrified and screaming for help. His fate was a lot like Pip’s in Moby-Dick. (Books, books, always books.) A guy who just felt in the mood for cherry pie, swallowed up by the Infinite.
I occasionally sit, feeling exposed and self-conscious, at Mass in the neighborhood Catholic church, waiting for a sign, trying to reach my dad. I talk to his picture. I imagine I feel his hand on my shoulder, or hear his voice. Sometimes I feel his presence almost superimposed on me, when I’m sitting in our La-Z-Boy recliner late at night, like him, reading, lost in a book.
CHAPTER FOUR
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: What Catholic Martyr Stories Taught Me About Getting to Heaven— and Getting Even
It first occurred to me that maybe other people found Catholics a little peculiar in the fall of 1965—October 4 to be exact—the day that Pope Paul VI came to New York to address the United Nations. I was in fifth grade, and I was lined up with my other classmates from St. Raphael’s School under the shadow of the El along Queens Boulevard, the main artery from what is now Kennedy airport into Manhattan. To catch a glimpse of the pope as he rode by, we had all walked (in line) about ten city blocks from our school, newly built and situated in a factory zone of Long Island City, adjacent to sprawling Calvary Cemetery. I remember it was an unseasonably raw day and my teeth were chattering because the nuns had insisted that we all leave our coats back at school. It was very important, they told us, that the pope see our green plaid uniforms. For the girls, those uniforms consisted of thin pleated wool jumpers worn over even thinner white nylon shirts, a snap-on green bow tie, “flesh”-colored leotards, green kneesocks, and durable green oxfords. The ensemble was topped off by a green-and-gold Robin Hood–style felt hat and complemented by the requisite white cotton gloves. Thus, most of our major body parts were encased in something green or white and/or scratchy. Still, we were ridiculously underdressed for the chill October weather—even though the boys had the advantage of green woolen pants.
Hours and hours went by and still no pontiff. But at some point during that windy vigil, a man came out of one of the neighborhood Jewish delis and cornered the nuns. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I just saw his hands moving up and down and all around like he was really angry. He disappeared back into the store but came out again quickly, and this time he was carrying containers of hot chocolate. We all got some, even the nuns.
I finally did see a white papal blur whiz by that day. (Pope Paul, we were later told, was late for his UN appearance, and so the Popemobile raced down Queens Boulevard.) And, what did the pope see, I wonder, as he sped past us? A smear of green? The subway El that might have reminded him, vaguely, of a Roman viaduct? The worshipful faces of some of the nuns—many of whom, I now realize, would have been, at most, in their early thirties? Though no one knew it at the time, Pope Paul was speeding toward an even more fateful destiny than that historic address to the UN. The modernizing changes in Church liturgy and doctrine that his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, set in motion through Vatican Council II would, within a few short years, make that scene on Queens Boulevard look as quaint and otherworldly as a painting of a New England ice-skating party by Grandma Moses. Nuns in long black habits, shivering children unquestioningly obeying the commands of those nuns even as the nuns and the children’s parents obeyed the commands of the local parish priests. All changed, changed utterly. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Beyond the pope or the cold or the hot barley soup my anxious mother made me for dinner that night (she always made barley soup and gave me a shot of blackberry brandy to combat colds), my most vivid memory of that day is the outrage of that righteous Jewish deli guy upon seeing us kids out there freezing to death in our green plaid uniforms. Years later, I realized his agitated hand gestures translated into one word: meshug
ene!
Not only did our uniforms set us Catholic schoolkids apart, but so did our mind-set—one of silently “offering up” all sufferings, great and small, to God. It was a mind-set that was drummed into us, through word and deed, by our parents and teachers. Granted, some of its sources were secular. Many of those parents, like mine, had grown up during the Great Depression, when the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism. In addition, much of St. Raphael’s parish was then composed of first- and second-generation Irish Americans, and as Pete Hamill recalled in A Drinking Life, his great memoir of growing up Irish Catholic in 1940s and ’50s Brooklyn, the standard retort of “Who do you think you are?” was one any Irish Catholic kid who whined to his or her parents could count on hearing. There was a strong class element to this attitude, the “Bronx cheer” of the working class directed against any of its offspring who tried “to put on airs” or otherwise demand attention. (In The Gatekeeper, his superb memoir of growing up Irish Catholic during the late 1940s and ’50s in Manchester, England, literary critic Terry Eagleton says that his family’s aim was to have the words “We Were No Trouble” engraved on their gravestones.1) Working-class self-deprecation and Catholicism went neatly hand in hand; despite dazzling exceptions like the Kennedy family, Catholicism is not popularly associated with the ruling class. It’s the religion of immigrants and first- and second-generation strivers: the whiff of steerage still mingles with all that incense and candle wax.
Above all, we Catholic-school students were taught that the state of our souls would largely be determined by our fortitude. The more God tested you, the stronger you became spiritually—that is, if you didn’t falter and complain. This pedagogical tough-love message persisted into college. During my first days at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx, we entering freshmen were required to write a composition to assess our skills. The assigned topic, as I vividly remember it, was “There is no free lunch in America.” By then I was an expert on that theme. Our parents and teachers transmitted this message to us, but we also were exposed to it constantly through our reading. In my case, at least, the martyr stories—spiritual and secular, overt and covert—that we read in grammar school made an indelible impression.
Of course, we heard the Gospel stories in religion class, as well as at Mass on Sundays. In school we read about the lives of the saints. I remember my attention level soaring whenever we read and talked about a martyr story: not only were the tales of saints like Agnes, Dymphna, and Sebastian less familiar than the life of Christ, but their deaths were often gorier (multiple wounds to the body, beheadings, salivating lions) and, in the case of the female martyrs, much more sexually provocative. Many of the early-Christian female martyrs died protecting their virginity. Throughout grammar school, I didn’t have the murkiest idea of how, exactly, a woman “lost” her virginity, but I knew that there was something enticingly sinful and secretive about the process.
The martyr stories we learned in religion class most blatantly preached the spiritual rewards of “sucking it up”—in the sense of enduring whatever life threw at you. Even secular subjects such as English, art, and spelling provided occasions for reinforcing this most fundamental of pre–Vatican II Catholic-school life lessons. I remember working on some kind of construction-paper collage in my second-grade art class and having trouble because we weren’t allowed to use scissors. I must have asked the “art nun,” Sister Mary Matthew, for help and she must have told me to figure things out for myself, because when I finally hit upon the idea of folding and tearing the paper into shapes, she stood over my shoulder and tersely said, “Now you’re using the brains that God gave you.”
Spelling, that most ideologically neutral of disciplines, turns out to have been a veritable indoctrination course in the virtues of spiritual and secular martyrdom. Purely by chance, I still happen to have my fifthgrade spelling book, The Brooklyn Catholic Speller—copyright 1939(!). (The fact that in 1965 we were using such an ancient speller demonstrates just how slowly changes infiltrated my childhood corner of the world.) Read today, The Brooklyn Catholic Speller seems like a soft-sell version of Mao’s Little Red Book in its propagandizing techniques. Each unit introduces new words by means of an introductory essay or poem and then goes on to list opposites, spelling rules, rhyming words, homonyms, prefixes, suffixes, and usage tips. It’s actually a good no-nonsense primer—the kind that I sometimes wish my own spelling-challenged college students had been required to study.
About 75 percent of those essays and poems preach the rewards of having a stiff upper lip or, conversely, meditate on the dangers of enjoying one’s self too much and forgetting one’s duty to God or others. There are straightforwardly religious essays on the rosary, the North American martyrs, the “perfect obedience”2 of Saint Joseph, and Christ’s death on Calvary. More intriguing to me at this distance, however, are the secular essays and poems that slip in homilies on self-sacrifice. In an essay entitled “The New Club,” some boys, bored in the wintertime, decide to form a club whose aim is to encourage its members “to perform a helpful deed each day.”3 Any boy who misses a meeting will be fined a few pennies, which will go toward setting up a fund “to buy cigars for the old men in the hospital.” The poem “Useful Advice,” which kicks off the book, is a veritable finger wag in rhyme on the dangers of succumbing to self-absorption:
Useful Advice
Gloomy children never grow
Into handsome people. So
I advise you to be gay!
Laughter, troubles sweep away.
Laugh then, and you’ll loving be.
Gentle, helpful, that’s the key
Winning loyal friends for you.
Yes, glowing beauty will come, too.4
Perhaps I’m imputing too much meaning to a pair of little essays called “Saved” and “Brother and Sister,” but prolonged exposure to The Brooklyn Catholic Speller tends to turn one into a paranoid reader. In “Saved,”5 an anonymous child narrator describes his or her new home by the ocean. While the writer’s parents take pleasure in a round of golf, the narrator walks near the edge of a cliff to catch a glimpse of an ocean liner and, of course, falls in. The child is indeed “saved”—certainly from drowning and, maybe, too, from reveling in the dangerous worldly delights of that new house with its luxurious view of the ocean—by the heroic efforts of a stranger.
“Brother and Sister”6 describes how Martha and Fred are spending a companionable day at home: Martha is ironing towels and Fred is reading and studying “postals” he’s collected in a writing tablet. The phone rings: it’s a nurse from the hospital letting them know that “a close relation” has taken a turn for the worse. Martha quickly makes a soothing custard, and she and Fred dash off to the hospital. Well, after all, what were the two of them doing having a cozy time at home while that relative was lingering, alone, in the hospital?
I don’t mean to indulge in retrospective Catholic bashing here. I’m still on the fence about my childhood religion. One priest I talked to after my father’s death labeled me a “skeptical Catholic.” He’s right. I think skeptical Catholicism is my denomination. Like millions of others, I have serious problems with the Church as an authoritarian institution and with its official views, to name a few, on abortion, women, gays and lesbians, and the proper way to handle the crimes committed by some of its own priests. I don’t understand the existence of evil in the world, and I don’t know what to think about the Bible stories or life after death. Though he didn’t go to church often, my dad was more of a believer than my mother is: part of my literal-minded mother’s torment since my father died derives from her difficulty in believing that there’s anything beyond death. Also, there’s a legacy of resentment toward the Church on my mother’s side. When my grandmother Helen’s first husband died, she was left a young widow with a baby. Grandma Helen went to the local parish priest for help. As the story goes, the priest looked at her and pointedly said, “You have two hands, don’t you?” Thank
s to that humanitarian, an unswerving, respectful awe of priests and nuns never prevailed in my family the way it did in the families of my childhood friends.
All these doubts aside, however, I still think of myself as a believer, sort of. I erratically pray—mostly “petitioning” prayers but sometimes simple prayers of thanksgiving. Occasionally I go to Mass. I cherish the mostly loving memories I have of my Catholic childhood. The nuns at St. Raphael’s were the first teachers to encourage me as a reader and writer. I even made my first writing money there, cooking up a theme song for the school to the tune of “Downtown.” At bottom, I have a slim but persistent faith—and for that, as well as for the progressive social gospel they preached—I’m indebted to the nuns and priests and neighborhood parents, most of them kind and intelligent, who shaped my childhood.7
Self-denial, generosity, acceptance in the wake of tragedy, the beauty of a life of service to others, even a sense of cosmic unworthiness: these core values that The Brooklyn Catholic Speller and so many of the other books I read in St. Raphael’s pounded into me seem more and more attractive as this, our current Age of Entitlement, flourishes. The spiritual training, which is what my teachers at St. Raphael’s would have called it, that I received in grammar school and that was diffused in the atmosphere of my neighborhood and family has unquestionably shaped my character, for better and worse. In person, at least, I’m uncomfortable promoting myself. Historically, whenever I’ve launched into a litany of my extraordinary qualifications for the job in question, I’ve heard my father’s voice, rumbling one of his favorite axioms: “Self-praise is no recommendation.”
The books of my Catholic girlhood have also influenced my adult reading tastes. I like books that don’t call too much attention to their own cleverness, ones that aren’t too pleased with themselves. I know I should give them yet another chance, but Great Books Untouchables such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James have always struck me as purring a bit too loudly over the beauty of their own sentence structure. The tone of a lot of academic literary theory repels me, given that it exudes a musky scent of superiority to the writing it purports to interpret. Many of the books I like at least assume a pose of shaky self-esteem.
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