Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  Beany and Carlton get the kind of modest, homemade, Catholic wedding that befits their unpretentious station in life, complete with the underprivileged kids from the recreation center crowding the church and Beany’s kindly old priest friend, Father Hugh, and his seminarian assistant, Andy Kern, presiding at the altar.

  Say it ain’t so—Andy Kern! Beany’s dishy Marine turned into a Father What-a-Waste! All too true, I’m afraid. I can’t take leave of the Beany Malone books until I give a nod to the weirdest depiction of martyrly self-denial in the entire series. Here’s how extraordinary that scene is: five summers ago, I showed my fellow St. Raphael’s alumna, Mary Ellen, my newly assembled collection of Beany Malone books. I began to describe the climactic Andy Kern scene in Pick a New Dream (1961), the eleventh book in the series, when Mary Ellen grabbed the book out of my hand, opened to the relevant pages, murmured, “I remember this,” in a hollow voice, and lost herself in a reading reverie. Some three and a half decades after she had last read it, Mary Ellen had never forgotten that scene, and neither had I. No wonder. It dramatized a barely conscious fear that haunted us Catholic girls. It was the complement to the dread of being zapped with a religious vocation; it was the fear that one day we might be called upon to sacrifice our potential husbands to a hungry God.

  In Pick a New Dream, eighteen-year-old Beany and her Marine beau, Andy, seem to be getting serious. Andy keeps talking to Beany about being at “the crossroads of life. ”42 So, one evening when Andy telephones Beany from Father Hugh’s rectory in the nearby mountain town of Twin Pines and urges her to drive up there now because he has something to show her, the eavesdropping Mary Fred is certain she hears wedding bells for her sister.

  Beany drives up to Twin Pines in an emotional tumult, partly due to the fact that Weber has contrived to have her develop a belated crush on boy next door Carlton. As Beany pulls into the sloping driveway of the rectory, she spots a stranger in clerical black coming down the rectory steps. The horror, the horror of this scene—and the oddity of Andy’s silent self-display (shades of Dr. Tom Dooley!) must be quoted in full:

  [Beany] climbed out, lifting her eyes above the oncoming figure, expecting to see Andy come leaping down the steps and toward her. And then her eyes dropped and met the twinkling ones beneath the black biretta. She stumbled back a step, leaning against the car and breathed out an amazed, “Andy!” And that’s all she could say.

  “Don’t just stand there with your mouth gaping open like a capital O. How do I look in a Roman collar?”

  She couldn’t answer.

  He took her arm and gave her a little shake. “Why, Knuckle-head, I didn’t mean to bowl you over. I’m ashamed of being such a ham. But I thought you must have guessed what I was beating around the bush about a time or two.”

  “I never guessed.” She was ashamed of how wrong she and Mary Fred had been.

  He guided her toward the gate. “This is just a preview. I won’t be wearing them for real until September when I enter the seminary.”

  And still Beany could only repeat after him, “Until you enter the seminary.”

  “The coat’s new, and so is the biretta, but the rest of the outfit some priest outgrew and left with Father Hugh. He brought me up to try them on, and I wanted you to be the first to see me in them. Look. Black shoes, black socks.”

  Father Hugh was holding the door open for them. “Now, don’t be blaming me, Beany, for proselytizing. He was the one that came to me and said he wanted to be a priest. And I was the one who told him, ‘It’s nothing you can go rushing into. Wait, lad—wait, till you get to the point where the wanting is bigger than you are.’ ”

  A dazed Beany sat with them on Father Hugh’s screened porch. She drank the lemonade his housekeeper brought, and tried to absorb all they were telling her.43

  Is it my cynical imagination, or is there something unkind about this scene? The two men playing dress-up out there in the woods, the coy phone call to Beany, the way she’s ambushed by the sight of Andy, and his and Father Hugh’s relentless cheerfulness as the poor girl sits there, stunned and dumb. What else can she do but be a good loser?

  After Andy leaves the room to change, Beany assures Father Hugh in an intimate tête-à-tête that there was no “heart involvement”44 with Andy, but we loyal readers know better—and, dammit, so does Andy! When Beany gives him a lift home that night, Andy teases her at his door by “tilt[ing] her head and press[ing] a feathery kiss on her forehead. He added with his roguish grin, ‘After September it’ll be only a fatherly—not a brotherly—pat on the back.’ ”45 There is a nasty compound word for women who behave in this smugly flirtatious way toward men; there’s probably a nasty word for their male counterparts, and if I knew it, that would be the word I’d apply to Andy Kern here.

  Acting like a priestly peacock, Andy ostentatiously displays his sacrifice of himself in this scene, while Beany must suffer in silence. In this particular round of the ongoing, centuries-long contest Catholic women have waged with God for available straight men, Beany has lost; and, since she’s no Meggie from The Thorn Birds, Beany relinquishes Andy to his Maker without a struggle. Indeed, even the U.S. government colludes with God in sending Andy into the seminary early. We’re told that his Marine CO decided that Andy could get out of his tour of duty ahead of time, or, as Father Hugh firmly puts it: “In this case the U.S. service could give way to God’s service.”46 Thus, Andy’s induction into the priesthood extends the particular connection the Beany Malone books make between being a good, martyrly Catholic and being a patriotic American. Against the combined forces of God and country, poor Beany doesn’t stand a chance. She meekly accepts her second-best fate: marriage to sturdy old Carlton and bearing Carlton’s kids. Playful Andy Kern gains gravitas as he transmogrifies into Father Kern, while the lively girl with an Irish temper we first met as a thirteen-year-old in pigtails dissolves into Mrs. Carlton Buell.

  “That’s so sick!” my Jewish husband said when I recounted for him one evening the martyrly plot pattern of the Catholic juvenilia I read in grammar school. Caught up short by his response, I nimbly rushed to these books’ collective defense. “No! You’re stupid!” Granted, the Karen books and Tom Dooley’s memoirs are too neurotically guilty about partaking of the pleasures of this world, but they’re not sick. In many ways, the suck-it-up sermon of these books is infinitely preferable to me than the victimhood that’s displayed in so many autobiographies today, or the widespread sense of entitlement our culture fosters. As I’ve said, I’m drawn to books and people that don’t put on airs. Of course, one probable reason is that they remind me of the fast-vanishing atmosphere of my childhood. I inhabited that atmosphere again, a few years ago, when I picked up Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy—her dead-on, poignant novel about Irish Catholics in Queens and on Long Island. In the opening scene, a scruffy bunch of Irish Catholics, family and friends, are sitting around a restaurant in Queens. Every time the waitress comes by to fill their water glasses or put down a plate, people at the table quickly say “Thank you.” I find myself doing that, too—scrupulously thanking anyone in a restaurant or store who’s serving me. It’s a holdover from the world of my childhood where we were taught to feel gratitude for any service done for us—and where almost all the parents we knew held down blue- or pink-collar jobs, so there was no sense of superiority to someone working as, say, a waitress.

  These days, I sit at too many restaurant tables with people oozing privilege who barely acknowledge the waitperson. I’m more comfortable, for whatever “sick” reasons, being seated with McDermott’s table of penitents, eating humble pie. And, sure, by the Jesuitical logic of Catholic martyrdom, this embracing of my own unworthiness does indeed signify that I’m a morally and spiritually superior person. Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes—and the haloes. More “semicolon” qualifications: it’s also true that a wobbly sense of entitlement can be a bad thing. I’ve seen my parents, old friends, and myself be super-deferential to people in authority (teac
hers, doctors, bosses) who don’t deserve such consideration. My mother tells a story about how my grandmother Helen took time off from her two cleaning jobs to visit my mother’s grammar school and bring a present to an ill-tempered teacher who was humiliating my mother in class. I wince when I imagine that scene of my grandmother bowing and scraping to “buy” decent treatment for her daughter. And, if I could, I wouldn’t think twice about telling that teacher where she could stick her haughty attitude. But I’ve had the empowering advantage of a higher education; as I’ve said, my grandmother Helen couldn’t read.

  In an era when having an “attitude” was akin to committing a mortal sin, we kids at St. Raphael’s, along with our doppelgängers in thousands of parochial schools across the land, were given these secular-martyr stories to read as a crucial part of our religious training. But maybe our nuns assigned these books to us for another reason. Maybe they sensed that reading itself is essentially an antisocial and even voluptuous indulgence. So, to combat the dangerous siren call of literature, they needed to toughen us up with books that preached a message of hard work and self-sacrifice, deference to others, and service to society.

  If the secondary aim of this early curriculum of secular-saint stories was to turn us away from the pleasures of the word out into the work of the world, it failed. Reading those books as a child, rereading them as an adult, I could hardly tear myself away.

  EPILOGUE

  My New York: September 8, 2001

  I’ve never identified with those up-from-the-working-class stories where the hero (almost always it’s a hero) packs his bag and leaves his humble place of origin never to return. Even in Pete Hamill’s New York memoir, A Drinking Life, which I love and always assign in the course I teach on the literature of twentieth-century New York City, Brooklyn all but disappears when the young Hamill leaves it—first, for a stint in the Army and trips to Mexico, then, most irrevocably, for Manhattan. Sunnyside, my old neighborhood in Queens, has never disappeared from the routine geography of my adult life. After I “left” for college in the faraway Bronx, and then for graduate school in Philadelphia, I always made frequent trips back there to visit my parents. During the year and a half when my dad was seriously ill, I’d spend at least one weekend a month in Sunnyside with my parents, shopping for groceries at the corner markets, sometimes renting a car and taking them for a ride to Bayville or Teddy Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill, on the North Shore of Long Island, the places we used to go to almost every summer weekend when I was a kid. That was in the days when people said, “Let’s go for a drive!” Reading took me away from Sunnyside, but it didn’t sever the connection.

  Now I go back to visit my mother, to help her in the slow chore of packing up thirty years of her life in that apartment—old home movies (keep), the long rayon slip from my prom dress (ditch), a bureau drawerful of my dad’s brown and black dress socks (Who would want them? But it’s so hard for her to just throw them out). She’s planning to move to Washington, to be close to us. She’s been planning it for six years now. Maybe it will actually happen, maybe not. As she tells me, “Everyone in Washington is a teacher,” meaning they’re educated. My mother doesn’t really fit in in Sunnyside anymore, either. She’s part of a dwindling band of elderly longtime residents in the neighborhood, which has become home to newer waves of immigrants—from India, Romania, China, and Ireland. Yet Sunnyside is still, in a loose sense, “home”— hers and mine. Another strike against Thomas Wolfe, whose florid novels a short-term boyfriend convinced me I had to read; his famous pronouncement, “You can’t go home again,” has achieved the status of woeful fact. Maybe it is, for a lot of other people—most of whom I suspect, based on a completely subjective survey, are male. I know a lot of women in my situation who are always going home again, and again, and again.

  This was not a “help-out Mom” trip back to Sunnyside. The reason Rich and I and Molly were driving up the interminable Jersey Turnpike that Saturday morning was a fiftieth-anniversary party in honor of Joe and Ellen Sullivan, the parents of two of my closest friends from childhood. I’ve mentioned Cathy and Pat Sullivan before, the “Irish twins” (born eighteen months apart), who, together with Mary Ellen Maher, were my constant companions during some of the happiest years of my life. My friendship with the Sullivans was sealed one afternoon when we were all playing in the alley behind their apartment building. Cathy Sullivan asked me which baseball team I rooted for, the Yankees or the Mets. I took a lucky guess and said, “The Mets.” For well over a decade afterward, the four of us constituted a quartet as solid as the Beatles. Indeed, we even played the Beatles in the living room “concerts” we staged in the mid-1960s. Years later, I felt a shock when I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s smart discussion in her 1986 book, Re-Making Love, of what she identified as a widespread phenomenon of preadolescent girls acting out fantasies of androgyny by assuming the identity of their favorite Beatle in playtime concerts. We thought we came up with the idea ourselves. I believed my love for George Harrison—naturally I would be George, “the Quiet Beatle”—was a mark of my superior discernment.

  “Be prepared for starchy food and an open bar; this is going to be an old-fashioned Irish party,” I told Rich, whose Russian Polish Jewish roots dictate exactly the opposite approach to party throwing. (His family thinks that a cranberry-juice cocktail really is a cocktail.) I knew from whereof I spoke. All the years of my Sunnyside youth, the Sullivans threw parties. Usually their huge extended family would cram into whatever apartment the Sullivans were then living in, and the cold cuts, whiskey, and beer would flow. Someone would put on an Irish record, and the two girls, Cathy and Pat, both award-winning step dancers, would fly around the packed living room, kicking and leaping. This was in pre-Riverdance days, when step dancers were praised for being light on their feet and the form hadn’t devolved into mass-culture kitsch. Mary Ellen Maher and I, the two only children in this sea of ever fruitful and constantly multiplying Irish Catholic families, would look on with envy. We loved these parties, as well as going over to the Sullivans’ apartment almost every day, because with four kids in their family and all these relatives nearby, there was always something going on, in contrast to the stillness of our own apartments. All the time I was growing up, the Sullivans were like a second, idealized family to me, and Joe and Ellen had been steadfast friends to my mother since my dad died. That’s why I insisted that we go to this anniversary party, even though I nervously anticipated that Rich (the Jew) and I (the egghead apostate) and Molly (the Chinese daughter) would constitute the “diversity table” at what would still be an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic gathering.

  As I drove over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the skyline of Manhattan rose up on our left. “Look at that,” I said to Molly, as I always have as long as we’ve been making this trip together. “There’s New York. It’s the most beautiful sight in the world.” And how I meant those words. That skyline—the apotheosis of New York’s grace and swagger, creativity and hard labor— is lovelier to me than the most serene sunset or snowcapped mountain range. Molly has a picture book called My New York, by the folk artist Kathy Jakobsen, and ever since she could talk, she’s been pointing out the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building on these car trips.

  Sunnyside, as we approached it, is no one’s idea of the most beautiful sight in the world. In my childhood, its greatest attraction as a neighborhood was that you could see the skyline of New York (we outer-borough types always call Manhattan “New York”) in the distance over the low gray tenements and factories of Long Island City. Now Long Island City is sprouting its own undistinguished skyscrapers and the amazing view is being blocked out. As we drove over the Koskiusko Bridge, Calvary Cemetery spread out for miles and miles below us. Calvary Cemetery sometimes appears in movies and TV shows, particularly cop dramas set in New York. It’s got great cinematic appeal because it’s such a vast necropolis with the skyline of New York as its backdrop. When I was in grammar
school, my grieving mother used to speed-walk with me far into Calvary Cemetery at lunchtime, so that we could visit my grandmother Helen’s grave. We’d hurry past the tombstones of Irish and Italian immigrants who died in the late nineteenth century and past the clustered mausoleums of the rich. My mother always used to give me apple juice and a deviled-ham sandwich on these picnics. To this day, thinking of apple juice and deviled ham together makes me gag— something about eating in the company of all those piled-up dead. My dad is buried there now; in the immediate vicinity are the graves of guys who died on D Day and at the Battle of the Bulge.

  St. Raphael’s, a little redbrick church with a quaint spire, stands at the western edge of the cemetery. The center of my life for years and years, St. Raphael’s has become one of the most ethnically diverse parishes in Queens: all variety of Asian and Hispanic families go to Mass at the church and send their kids to the school. When I was a student there, the school population was about as diverse as our green plaid uniforms. Everyone was Irish or Italian or Polish, with a few immigrant exotics—one French kid, one Romanian, a couple of Dominicans, and two Scots—sprinkled in at intervals.

  We parked and went up to my mom’s apartment, which is small and dark, as it always was, even before it became just “my mom’s” apartment. It’s got the feel of a life in limbo: it needs a paint job, and the chairs and cushions that are falling apart haven’t been replaced because, after all, as my mother keeps saying, “I’m going to move soon.” My black-and-white baby picture and a publicity photo of me that Fresh Air commissioned about a decade ago hang side by side on one wall; photos of Molly now cover the end tables and rabbit-eared TV set. My mom has had her hair inflated at the local beauty parlor she’s been going to for half a lifetime, and she’s had a nip of brandy. This will be a hard party for her: she and my dad celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, and then they had another year, and then he was gone.