Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  “I have to go into the hospital again,” she said with a certain breeziness. “They think there’s a spot on my lung.” She was puffing a cigarette even as she said it.

  Then I was the one who got gloomy. Could it be cancer? Yes, of course. But they could treat it, right? They were catching it early, right? She shrugged, somehow not all that concerned. She’d always hoped to reach eighty, she said, but after that she knew it was a free-fall. And then she started to reminisce about the ones she’d lost to cancer, and here the passion surfaced. First her beloved younger sister, then Kit—both had died in the age of discretion, when genteel people thought it best not to tell the truth to the dying. “Oh, it was terrible. They got sicker and sicker, and we’d all put on our brave faces and tell them they were going to be fine.” She fired that last word with fierce regret.

  And what did she think death was? I asked her. Nothing, she replied, matter-of-fact. But what about the white light and the tunnel? I persisted. Lately there had been much to-do among those who studied near-death experiences, people who’d gone to the brink and back, the welcoming committee of loved ones beckoning them into the light. No, said Gert, she gave that no credence at all: “That’s just the brain shutting down.” There was something heroic about her lack of sentimentality, consistent with her belief that when it was time to go you made your own choice and pressed your own button. No extraordinary measures to keep the body pumping. I remember hoping I’d be that way myself when it got to be closer to my time—but that was forty years away, long enough to get used to death.

  Merloyd writes to me that Gert’s stoicism in the face of illness and death didn’t mean she wasn’t a believer in her own way:

  She would tell me in the last years of her life that at certain moments she would feel a kind of euphoria. She felt that perhaps it was what came to people who meditate. She somehow knew intuitively how to step outside of time. The very way she chose to live, facing the river, facing the sea, rescuing stray dogs and sticking by old friends and wayward family when anyone else’s last shred of tolerance would have snapped, was a kind of celebration, even worship of life.

  I didn’t hear from Gert all that summer, but didn’t worry, assuming I would have heard if anything was wrong—forgetting that proud instinct of hers, discretion at all costs and never a bother to anyone. When I thought of Gert I pictured her at the Vineyard, still clocking noon by mixing herself a bullshot, stuffed avocados as usual on the deck. Indeed she was, says Merloyd, in a turban to mask the effects of the chemo. I don’t even remember what my deadline was that summer, or whether Donald Sutherland had pulled out by then, or if the producer had already washed his hands of the whole thing. In any case my poor play was moribund and orphaned, and I hated to think of telling Gert, who had been so much its champion.

  October came, and our birthdays. Because I couldn’t rouse her on the phone, I sent flowers to Sneden’s Landing. The card read: “Happy 79 from Happy 38.” Roger and I were busily getting ready for an autumn trip to Tuscany, so I didn’t think to follow up on the roses. But a couple of days later the florist called to say they couldn’t deliver the order. Why not? “The lady’s in the hospital, sir.” Well then, I answered briskly, have them delivered there. A day later the stakes escalated. The florist again, apologizing because they couldn’t deliver them to the hospital either. I knew and I didn’t know. I placed a call to the hospital and was told I should “talk to the family,” the first time I’d ever heard that particular sidestep. The euphemisms of dying hadn’t flooded my vocabulary yet.

  I spoke with Merloyd, fumbling a condolence, hardly conscious yet of what I’d just lost. The family was planning a memorial lunch at Sneden’s, but Roger and I had to decline because we’d be in Italy on that day. I lit a candle for Gert in Florence, in Brunelleschi’s soaring gray-stone church of Santo Spirito, a believer in beauty if nothing else. Returning from that trip, Roger and I were seized by the emergency of Cesar’s diagnosis, and on and on till all of our friends were consumed one way or another, dying themselves or taking care of the stricken.

  I hadn’t much time for reflection once the plague had taken root. When I’d think of Gert it was always bittersweet—a word Coward practically invented—recalling a vanished world before the war. Our war. I understand now that it wasn’t just a friend who’d been taken from me, but an elder and a mentor. Gert was my pioneer, a link to the dreams that made me different, the push I needed to go my own way. I don’t think I ever thanked her in so many words, but following her lead I refuse to regret that. No regrets.

  Of course, no one knows who The Barretts are anymore, or Kit or Coward or the Lunts. It won’t be long, I suppose, before we come to a place where even Garbo and Dietrich will draw a blank. All of them are just a sidelight, anyway, to the history of the gay and lesbian struggle. Glamorous though the closet was, the world Gert and her friends inhabited still had walls, so that they didn’t even think to reach out to the pained anonymous legions of queers with nobody to look up to. Maybe history wasn’t ready yet. In any case, I can’t bring myself to condemn them for their silence and their compromise. It needed a revolution to challenge us all, a moment after which there would be no going back: Stonewall.

  I don’t know if Gert reached out to me, or I to her. It was doubtless mutual. In my play there’s a character called Robin, a balmy old woman poet in a wheelchair who lived in Paris in the twenties and knew them all. She keeps calling the young man in the play Ernest, mistaking him for Hemingway. Robin isn’t quite Gert, who never suffered a moment’s lapse of clarity, but the same historical linkage was there. And at the end of the play, when the young man, Tom, has broken with Julian and is off on his own to Paris, he has one last question for his mentor. “Does it go too fast?” he asks.

  “You mean life?” retorts Julian. “Just the summers.”

  Gert proved wrong in the end. It has gone too fast, so swift and sudden I sometimes feel I’ve been left clutching the empty air as life rocketed by. Gert swore I wouldn’t feel at the end that I hadn’t had enough, but then she couldn’t know the seismic convulsion that AIDS would unleash. Frankly, I’m glad she didn’t live to see the decimation of the arts, by plague and then by Philistines. Better for her to sit on the bluff of her memories, cheerfully giving it all away to me, though never stuck in the past herself. My friend from the far country of the eighth decade, first among sisters. Providing me my most intense experience of age, a cider taste of a world I would never reach myself except through her. All that and the Broadway years besides, my Broadway years. Caviar extra, but who can quibble with such a banquet? Or two on the aisle in Row H, as a thousand curtains rise.

  MY PRIESTS

  I DIDN’T IN FACT RECALL his first letter, or the phone call that followed it up. My number was still listed then, so it must have been the summer of ’89, before the death threats and the bricks through my windows. Apparently he asked if we could meet, for he had just relocated here from back east, to become the associate pastor at Saint Anselm’s in West Hollywood. I wasn’t unintrigued, having heard rumors for years that the bilious Inquisitor who ran Saint Anselm’s was notorious for denying funeral Masses to gay Catholics who’d died of AIDS. The new priest, Father Gambone, would doubtless defend his superior and dismiss these ugly tales as just more Catholic-bashing. In any case I was too busy, too swamped by Stephen’s illness, to spare a cup of coffee. Call me back in a few months, I told Gambone, and perhaps we could snatch an hour together.

  But I warn you, I added playfully, I’ll want to know all the dirt on how many priests are gay.

  He never called back; I never gave it another thought. Well, once or twice. I’d turn off Sunset at Tower Records, craning to find a parking space, cursing the long swath of yellow curb in front of Saint Anselm’s, the empty parking lot beside the parish house. And I’d wonder about that young priest—from Philadelphia, wasn’t he?—and whether he’d made a dent in the bigotry and the Roman lies about our people. A year or so later, when that bloo
dsucker convent opened just outside the walls of Auschwitz, defiling every murdered Jew with its simpering Carmelite prayers—I remember thinking in the midst of the flap how very like Saint Anselm’s was this particular Polish insult. Saint Anselm’s, perched with its pretty shrubbery and its knelling tower on the very lip of the cauldron of AIDS. As if the very thing West Hollywood needed for its hobbled tribe, here in the first gay city in America, was a Catholic presence on the hill.

  But this is to give the one little church on Holloway Drive far more importance than it deserved. My fight was with the Axis powers in Rome, the Vatican Nazis. My various fulminations on the subject had engendered a fair amount of response, especially from recovering Catholics, whose white-hot rage and sense of violation by the Church made my own anger seem puny by comparison.

  I’d also been in contact with several priests and sisters, fearless ones who chose to fight within the system, as well as a lot of ex-religious. I couldn’t be said to have mellowed exactly, always ready to flash a moon, rhetorically speaking, at the Polish Pope and his diabolical sidekick, Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican’s Minister of Hate. But I had also come to see how passionate and self-denying were the good men and women still in uniform—feminist nuns who dared to be pro-choice; the radical left and its Liberation Theology, fighting the generals in Latin America; the Catholic Workers and the underclass, not a money-changer among them. I had begun to appreciate, in other words, the commitment the best of them had to service, especially to serving their gay and lesbian brethren. Thus did I cheer the defiance of Dignity, who refused to be ignored or tossed out or barred from the sacraments just because their love didn’t fit the psychopathology of church dogma.

  Then, midsummer this year, came the you-may-not-re-member-me letter. Father Gambone! He began by apologizing for his silence, but admitted I’d scared him off with my rant against Rome in various interviews. He felt “unjustly condemned,” he said, having given over his ministry for ten years to serving people with AIDS. The rest of him secretly agreed with the things I said, but he couldn’t face that and go on with his work. As it turned out, he didn’t need me anyway. Early on in Gambone’s tenure at Saint Anselm’s, a young professor named Joseph was serving ten o’clock Mass with the priest. They caught one another’s eye and fell in love, just like that. A moment of transubstantiation if there ever was one.

  He didn’t say how much time they had for sheer joy before the darkness fell. Only now did I understand that Gam-bone was fifty-five, and had been out for fifteen years to his family, his Jesuit order, indeed the Church. I don’t know why he didn’t get the boot for being so honest, probably because he kept his vow of chastity. Even with Joseph. And then like a sick joke, still on the honeymoon, the young teacher fell ill. The soul-crushing torture of AIDS took over. Gambone spared me the details, and tried after burying Joseph to pour his grief into deeper commitment. Hard to say if it worked, or how disconcerting it must’ve been for the flock, watching the priest break down sobbing in the middle of Mass.

  Now I want to share some things with you. I’m moving back to Philadelphia, leaving the Jesuits, the priesthood and the Church, as the final stage of my coming out. It was a half-truth that by staying in I could be more effective because wearing the collar opened the trust lines faster and deeper than without it. What finally made me see the essential dishonesty of my rationalizations was the latest assault from the Vatican supporting discrimination against us in several basic areas of civil rights (in effect wanting us dead) and suggesting that the American bishops extend this homophobic influence to America at large, “to promote the public morality of the entire civil society on the basis of fundamental moral values.”

  That did it. There was no ambiguity here—just raw prejudice, hyperhomophobia, ignorance, cloaked in sanctimonious pietism. I swallowed hard when past utterances came forth, from Ratzinger, kicking my friend John McNeil out of the Order, etc. etc. Shame on me! This latest pogrom finally put it all into focus, and now I don’t see how I could have stayed as long as I have.

  Still a long-winded Jesuit, collar or no. I tried to reach him, but he’d already left for Philly. A brave man, and clearly one after my own heart. Imagine, starting life over after forty years in the order and twenty-five as a priest. But what really tugged at me was how the Church had gotten off so easily—just another resignation, a failure of one man’s calling. How far up the hierarchy did anyone know about Joseph, or the love that finally made Gambone human? They only knew about one kind of gay priest anyway, the kind that diddled altar boys.

  The tortured secret life of the pedophile, and all the Church’s power mustered to keep things hushed, no treatment except a rest cure at a sylvan retreat. Then the transfer into a new parish, the slate wiped clean until the diddling starts again. The mess won’t go away, of course. Stories have surfaced suggesting that the Church has shelled out three hundred million dollars of late to settle the increasingly aggressive lawsuits around the issue of sexual abuse. Not a good year for “suffer the little children,” what with the banner headlines about the perv from Boston who got into the pants of dozens of kids over a period of thirty years. Bless me, Father, for you have sinned.

  No idea, not a clue about what a healthy gay and lesbian relationship looks like. My friend Father Bernard tells me that most of the abusers aren’t really pedophiles at heart. Rather, they’re closeted men who took the vow of purity at twenty, determined to keep their baser instincts under control. A couple of decades of that neurotic self-denial, and then they hit a midlife crisis, and suddenly their dicks are driving them out of their minds. The altar boys and the CCD girls just happen to be the nearest warm bodies, the perfect obedient victims, stunned into silence by their veneration of the criminal.

  Which brings us to the sick document perpetrated this summer, a Ratzinger special, the last straw for Father Gam-bone. It commands the bishops to fight against all legislation that mandates gay and lesbian rights of any sort, but especially the right to have children, natural or foster. And of course to keep such deviants away from schools or daycare centers, whatever might trigger the sin so common among the priesthood.

  What would Jerry have made of it all, I wonder. Jerry Silver was the first ex-monk I ever knew—a Trappist for years, on a farm in Ohio, keeping bees and boiling up the harvest fruit for jam. By the time I met him in ’78, he’d been out of the order for more than a decade, but still looked rather like a road-company Friar Tuck, portly and jolly and a little mad. He’d taken the name Jerry Silver upon reentering civilian life because he wanted to express solidarity with his Jewish friends. Not that he had such dark memories of the cloistered life. “I loved being a monk,” he’d say. “The hot lunch program was fabulous. And every Easter we’d all go over to Rome for the parties. I always stuck with the Kennedys, because they got invited everywhere.”

  So how many priests and monks are gay? I’d ask, to needle him. What did he think the percentages were? He’d flutter his pudgy hands, spotted with the scars of bee stings and covered with rings like a gypsy. “Oh my dear, who can say? A hundred and ten percent. No wonder it took me so long to decide—I really wanted to be a nun, not a priest.”

  And so he was on special occasions—Halloween without fail, but any good party would do. He had a closetful of habits, from billowing tents and wimples of the days before Vatican II to pert little modified numbers. He’d acquired them from an obscure specialty shop downtown, a sort of nuns’ department store, ingratiating himself with the staff by telling them he was buying for his sister, cloistered somewhere in the wilderness. “But do you know her size?” they fretted. “Oh, she’s a big girl,” Jerry retorted. “Just about my size.”

  I remember vividly the New Year’s brunch at Jerry’s place in Mount Washington. He was dressed in full Mother Superior drag, flouncing about in Seventh Heaven. The cross that swung from his neck was hauntingly beautiful, hammered bronze, ancient without a doubt. The heft of it in your hand was like a stone. “This old thing?” sa
id Jerry, showing it off. “I picked it up at the Vatican. Coptic, I think. Ninth century, somebody told me once.”

  Picked it up how, exactly? Suddenly Jerry’s face went rosy pink in his wimple, but he couldn’t resist the story either. It seems that every year when the Trappists made their Roman pilgrimage, they signed up for a private tour of the Vatican treasuries. A wizened keeper of the keys—an old, half-blind padre with skin the texture of tissue paper—would lead them through banks of embroidered vestments, altar linens so fine they would’ve melted in your mouth. On to the gem-encrusted chalices, the Mannerist candelabras as tall as a man, the icons, the reliquaries. It was an Aladdin’s cave of booty and plunder, the raw material of power, so much that even the Vatican didn’t have enough end tables to display it. Byzantium crushed and pagan Rome, a thousand infidels’ temples looted, all for the sake of a secret trove. One imagined the Pope taking a bath in his gold like Scrooge McDuck in his vault.

  “To us,” shrugged Jerry, “it was like a white sale at Bloomingdale’s. We’d grab up a handful of linen and stuff it into our cassocks. Maybe a nice gold salver or an incense-burner. The old queen never noticed. This cross was just hanging from a nail. I figured if I didn’t snatch it, then somebody else would. Some pious Dominican, probably.”

  For a moment I was open-mouthed with shock, imagining an imminent lightning bolt or a Vatican goon squad storming the door. How many years must you spend in Purgatory for burgling the Vatican? Of course I understood that most of the stuff was stolen in the first place, or at least bled from the faithful poor. Whatever you said about Jerry’s blasphemy, you couldn’t accuse him of being a hypocrite.