by Caryl Rivers
“Remember the time he got his picture in the Post for burning the Jane Russell poster at the Catholics for Decency rally at Griffith Stadium? That was pretty public.”
“But this one is really going to take the cake!” he moaned.
We climbed into the van, and we all rode in silence to the parking lot of the Hecht Company. My heart was beating rapidly; I felt like the commandos who bit the beach at Normandy ahead of the invasion force. Sean looked as if he were about to be led off to a hanging—his own.
We all trooped into the store together, drawing stares, and marched in a group onto the elevator. Father Clement pushed the button marked Three: Junior Miss, Promtime Departments.
Not surprisingly, the salesladies all gaped at us as we marched out of the elevator; it wasn’t every day that somebody who looks like St. Francis of Assisi strolls into Promtime.
One of the salesladies approached Brother Jonas, tentatively.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Brother Jonas just stared straight ahead.
“He’s taken a vow of silence,” I explained.
“Oh,” said the saleslady, backing away.
Father Clement lost no time; he walked directly up to a rack of formal dresses and began rifling through them.
“Filth!” he thundered about a little pink number with blue bows on it.
Next he came to a green taffeta. It had puffed sleeves, but the neckline was just a tad too low to get the approval of the B.V.M. “Temptation to the Morals of Youth!” cried Father Clement.
Finally, he came to one dress with a high collar and mother-of-pearl buttons. He smiled. He nodded to Mrs. Sullivan, who rushed over and pinned a Marylike tag on the dress. By now, a small crowd was beginning to gather.
Dr. McCaffrey was also looking through the dresses hanging in one of the alcoves, and he pulled out a dress with a mandarin collar and long sleeves.
“This is Marylike, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and added under my breath, “if the Blessed Mother is big on the Dragon Lady look.”
Dr. McCaffrey kept going through the dresses. “Here’s another!” he announced gleefully, holding it up. A saleslady walked over to him.
“Sir, what are you doing? And who is that person over there?”
“We are Catholic Crusaders for Modesty,” Dr. McCaffrey said. “We are examining your frocks to see which ones the Blessed Mother would approve. I’m Dr. Liam McCaffrey, assistant professor of communication and speech dynamics at St. Anselm’s Junior College.”
“Pop,” Sean said through clenched teeth, “you don’t have to give your name!”
In the alcove across the room, where Father Clement was advancing through the dress rack like Sherman through Georgia, a saleslady approached him and said firmly, “Sir, you can’t pin things onto our merchandise!”
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s!” Father Clement declaimed in his best reach-to-the-last pew voice. Mrs. Sullivan chimed in, “Amen!”
“We are acting in the name of the Virgin Mary!” called out Dr. McCaffrey, pinning on another Marylike label.
“Did he say something about a virgin?” one saleslady said to another.
“Estelle, I think they’re a bunch of sex perverts. Call Mr. Bernstein! Quick!”
Father Clement was still tugging and hauling at dresses, when suddenly he stopped dead still, as if he had been flash-frozen on the spot. His ice white face grew even colder with anger, and his eyes narrowed. Then suddenly he ripped a dress from a hanger and held it up. It was a black strapless sheath, with a deep V in front, cut tight around the hips. It was a dress I’d have given my eyeteeth to wear, but I figured you had to be at least twenty to carry off a look that sophisticated.
Father Clement elevated the dress above his head, almost as if he were raising the Host at Mass, then he waved it wildly above his head and threw it on the floor with a flourish. “Spawn of Satan!” he cried.
Sean edged up to his father. “Pop, can we go home now?”
But Dr. McCaffrey was looking at Father Clement Kliblicki with total fascination; he was watching a Catholic hero, a veritable St. George, in action.
Another saleslady, bolder than the others, walked right up to Father Clement and said, “Sir, we simply cannot allow you to throw merchandise on the floor.”
“Merchandise!” Father Clement sneered. “Merchandise! Satan’s evil handiwork!” and he leaned over and spat on the black dress.
“Oh God!” Sean said.
The saleslady screamed, “You can’t do that!” She reached down to retrieve the dress, but Father Clement advanced on her and barked, “Woman, do not soil your hands with the work of Lucifer! The spirit of Beelzebub, prince of devils, is in this dress. I shall cast him out!”
The saleslady backed off. “Mister, you are a nutcake!” she said.
Father Clement stood over the dress, which now lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. He drew himself to his full height, and raised his hands like Charlton Heston asking the Red Sea to part.
“I abjure thee, Satan,” he said. “Begone! Begone, prince of darkness. I renounce thee and all thy works! Begonel”
Father Clement pointed his finger in righteous wrath at the dress, his eyes flashed with anger, and his voice carried all the way to Small Appliances. He was a spellbinder, all right. I half expected the black dress to start twisting and snarling and sending up little puffs of brimstone. But the dress just lay there. If Beelzebub was inside, Father Clement was going to have to juice up the exorcism to get him out.
Just then a large, beefy man in a dark suit hurried into the Junior Miss department. He took one look at the bizarre scene and said, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Begone, Satan!” Father Clement cried.
The store manager—that’s who the large man turned out to be—turned to one of the salesladies and said, “Estelle, who is that lunatic?”
Dr. McCaffrey stepped forward. “Sir, that is Father Clement Kliblicki, Catholic Crusader for Modesty. Perhaps you read about him in Time magazine.”
The manager, Mr. Bernstein, stared at Sean’s father.
“That fruitcake was in Time? What the hell does he think he’s doing?”
“I am driving the spirit of Satan from our presence!” called out Father Clement. “His handiwork is all about us here in this temple of filth!”
“Are you calling the Hecht Company a temple of filth?” demanded Mr. Bernstein.
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free!” said Father Clement, his forefinger still waving at Beelzebub, who was lying low.
“Listen, buddy, this is class merchandise we got in Promtine. You want sleazy stuff you can throw on the floor, go over to Sears Roebuck.”
“Cesspool!” Father Clement yelled. “Palace of Putrefaction!” He spat on the black dress again.
“You goddamned screwball, give me that dress!” yelled Mr. Bernstein.
Mrs. Sullivan stepped in front of the store manager, handbag raised like a bludgeon. “Lay one hand on the holy hairs of his head and I’ll mash your face in!” she shrieked.
“Estelle, call the cops! Quick,” the manager said. Estelle ran to the phone.
Sean grabbed my hand. “Oh God,” he said; “we’re going to get arrested!”
“Not we, Sean. Them!”
There was a high noon standoff for a minute, with Mrs. Sullivan facing down the manager, as Father Clement proceeded with the exorcism. Then Mr. Bernstein darted around her and snatched the dress from the floor.
“Don’t touch that!” screamed Father Clement, grabbing the bottom half of the dress. Now the manager had one end of the black dress and Father Clement had the other. They both began tugging at it.
“Give me the goddamn dress, you lunatic!” the manager yelled.
“Spawn of Satan!” screamed Father Clement.
They kept
pulling and pulling and then there was a horrible ripping sound and the dress tore right down the middle, sending the Modesty Crusader sprawling into the dress rack and the store manager bouncing off a cash register. The priest got to his feet. He moved toward the manager, raising his hand to exhort Satan once again to begone—at least from the half of the dress he still held—but Mr. Bernstein thought the priest was preparing to strike a blow. Dr. McCaffrey, who now was standing next to Father Clement, saw what was happening and tried to step in between the two men. He did so, however, just as Mr. Bernstein, who had been a Golden Glover before he went into retailing, cranked up a roundhouse right. It caught Dr. McCaffrey square in the jaw, and he went down as if he’d been poleaxed.
“Oh no! Pop!” Sean yelled, and ran to bend over his father. He started slapping Dr. McCaffrey on the face, saying, “Talk to me, Pop! Say something!”
Just at that moment the police arrived, and the first one they grabbed was Mrs. Sullivan, who had climbed on the store manager’s back and was pummeling him with her fists.
“Arrest them! Arrest them! They’re all crazy!” hollered the store manager, and one of the officers tried to sort things out, which wasn’t easy, as you can imagine.
The manager, the salesladies, Father Clement, and Mrs. Sullivan were all talking at once. Brother Jonas didn’t say a word. Deirdre still looked stoned and Mr. Hardy was chuckling.
Dr. McCaffrey finally came to and Sean helped him to his feet. One of the policeman said to Sean, “Son, who is this man?”
“He’s Dr. McCaffrey from St. Anselm’s,” Sean said. “He’s my father.”
“What was he doing on the floor?”
“Well, it’s sort of a long story.”
The policeman looked at Dr. McCaffrey, who was shaking his head, trying to clear it.
“The saleslady says you were putting tags on merchandise. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Sean’s father. “You see, Father Clement Kliblicki, Catholic Crusader for Modesty—”
“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come with me.”
The police led Sean’s father and the Modesty Crusaders away, and Mr. Hardy tossed the keys to the van to Sean.
“Call Tom Harrigan,” Dr. McCaffrey called out. “He’s the archbishop’s lawyer!”
Sean and I walked out to the van together. He was still very pale. “I can’t believe it; my father’s in the slammer,” he said.
“They’ll probably just make him pay a fine. I mean he didn’t try to kill anyone or anything.”
We climbed in the van and Sean switched on the ignition. “Peggy,” he said, “there’s lots of sane, rational people in the church. Smart people. Scholars. Scientists. Not crazy at all. How does my father get mixed up with Father Clement Kliblicki and his Modesty Crusaders?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
As it turned out, I was right about the Modesty Crusaders getting off’ with a fine. Father Clement and his merry band climbed back into their van and drove off to New Jersey. A month later we heard that Father Clement had been picked up by the police again, this time for trying to exorcise the spirit of Beelzebub out of a Port Authority bus going from Paramus to Teaneck. His bishop shipped him off for psychiatric observation.
Sean’s worst fears didn’t materialize. Dr. McCaffrey wasn’t a laughingstock after all. He was one of those people who could get dropped in a pile of cow shit and come up smelling like Chanel No. 5. When the story got out that he had been arrested trying to defend modesty, he became an instant martyr. He had a telegram from the Chicago archdiocese asking him to come out and make a speech, and he got promoted to associate professor. He even got invited to appear on a national Catholic T.V. program, Catholic View. Of course, the way Dr. McCaffrey told the story was a lot different from the way it really happened. He left out the parts about Father Clement trying to exorcise the devil, and about himself getting decked with a right to the jaw.
Sean and I sat watching Catholic View, marveling at the way a lunatic brawl could be transformed, with a few well-chosen words, into a dignified crusade for God. Dr. McCaffrey was in his glory. He actually did look distinguished as he told his story, showing off his big vocabulary and his Speech Dynamics.
Sean looked at the image of his father on the screen and shook his head.
“He’s really something, isn’t he? I mean, he’s coming off like a hero, a fucking hero!”
Sean shook his head again and laughed, and I suddenly realized how much he loved his father. He didn’t have any illusions about him; he knew The Nemesis of Smut was vain and pompous and a bloody fool most of the time, but he loved him anyhow. And I felt sad, because I knew, deep down, that Sean would never please his father, not really. The things that Dr. McCaffrey liked about being a Catholic were the things the Church gave him—the license plates from the archbishop, the pictures in the Catholic Herald, the little brass plaque that said LAYMAN OF THE YEAR. For him, the Church was God’s Rotary Club.
Dr. McCaffrey was a taker. But Sean was a giver. The part of the church that drew Sean like a magnet was the hard part, the dirty part—his heroes were men who worked in filth and disease, who cared for people no one else cared about, who went where the rest of us refused to go. Damien the Leper was Sean’s kind of Catholic, romanticized, of course—all heroes are. But somehow, I couldn’t imagine Damien the Leper on the platform with Dr. McCaffrey at the Legion of Decency rally.
Sean wouldn’t collect all the little bibelots and trinkets of the church that were so important to Dr. McCaffrey—and so, in his father’s eyes, he would always be a failure. Was that another of those unpleasant surprises you got from growing up? They seemed to be coming along pretty regularly these days. Was it true that the things you wanted most were the things you never could get? Was that something I’d have to learn, too?
I wondered.
All the King’s Men
I WAS STRUGGLING with the Punic Wars in Latin II when the P.A. system squawked on. “Will Miss Peggy Morrison please report to the principal’s office?”
I walked down the hall, wondering what I’d done now. Had Sister Robert Mary finally identified Con’s panties? But Con was in my class and they’d have called her too. Maybe I’d won the Catholic Herald writing contest. I did a great essay on “How Catholic Youth Can Help America.” A finky topic, but I’d really jazzed it up, quoted Thomas Jefferson. O.K., Tom was a Prot, but he had a way with words.
I walked into the office and Sister Robert Mary was standing there. She looked at me—strangely, I thought. She wasn’t mad. She looked sort of, I don’t know, serious.
“Peg, I’m afraid I have some very bad news.”
Bad news? Was I being expelled? Did I lose the contest? What could be bad news?
“Peggy, your father had a heart attack.”
I blinked and looked at her. My father had a heart attack? Sissy Ryan’s father had one. He was in the hospital for a month.
“Is he in the hospital, Sister?”
“No, Peggy, he isn’t. Peggy dear—” She put her arm around me, which was really weird. She’d never done that before.
“Peggy, your father died this morning. An hour ago.”
“Died?” I stood looking at her. The word didn’t make sense.
“I’m so very sorry, Peggy. Your mother’s on the way here from the hospital. She said I should tell you, not make you wait.”
I looked at her. Died. The word twisted out of meaning. I tried to make it mean something, but it didn’t.
“He had a heart attack at work, Peggy. He never regained consciousness. He didn’t suffer. God took him quickly.”
God took my father? Nonsense. I’d go home tonight and he’d be there, eating a ham sandwich and giving me lectures. I’d give him the hip and he’d fake a fall and I’d do my homework. That was life—how it was, how it always would be. It couldn’t be any different.
“Peggy, are you all right?”
“Yes, Si
ster.”
Right now, my father was at work. I saw him, at his desk, in his shirtsleeves, over his desk, the calendar I sold to him for the Mission drive, the one with the bright green and red and purple pictures of saints getting martyred. Why didn’t Sister Robert Mary just let me go back to class and finish the Punic Wars?
“Peggy, do you want to sit here?”
“Could I go back to Latin?”
“Peggy, didn’t you hear me say your mother’s coming?”
I sat down. Probably it was a mistake. Probably they’d called the wrong kid. Maybe it was Peggy Milano, and they just got the Peggys mixed up and Sister Robert Mary would say, “Sorry about that, Peg,” and it was Mr. Milano who was dead. I pictured him, lying on the floor, white as a sheet, everybody standing around and saying, “Too bad, but that’s the way it goes.” Mr. Milano was an old guy, bald. It was probably him.
I just sat there, feeling sorry for poor dead Mr. Milano, but then my mother came in the office and she had a stunned look on her face and she hugged me and said, “We’ve got each other, Peggy! Oh, Peggy!” and I wanted to explain to her about the mistake. But I didn’t.
We went home, and my aunt was there, and neighbors and friends started coming in and everybody hugged me and said how sorry they were.
People were coming and going all day. About seven o’clock Sean came in with his mother and father. People were sitting around the living room, talking about my father and my mother was laughing and crying as they talked, and I just sat and listened. I had a strange, detached feeling, like I was watching all of this on T.V. I knew I was acting really weird. I wanted my emotions to work but they didn’t; it was like trying to get your mouth to work after you’d had Novocaine.
I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water and Sean followed me.
“Peggy, are you O.K.?”
Why was everybody asking me that?
“I’m O.K.”
“You just seem kind of strange.”
“Strange?”
“Yeah. You act like nothing has happened.”
“Something has happened. My father died.” Died. Still no meaning. Gibberish. Like I said my father zlotched. Zlotched. A funny sound. I laughed.
