by Caryl Rivers
Then Father Feeley turned to Seamus O’Flaherty and said, “Do you accept the One, Holy, Universal, Apos—”
“Take your mumbo jumbo somewhere else,” Seamus roared. “Opium of the masses!”
Poems are made by fools like me—
“Depart now, or know the wrath of God!” Count Orlov decreed, taking a step toward Seamus O’Flaherty.
“Take your prayers and your phony Virgin and stuff them up your—” Seamus began, but all at once the count let out a mighty roar, one that could be heard clear over on the other side of the monument. With a flourish, he ripped his sword from the scabbard, and as people screamed around him, he raised it high over his head. The sunlight glinted off the silver of the blade, and he stood that way for an instant, then he waved it in a circle and advanced on Seamus, like a mad Cossack in full charge.
“No, Count, don’t do it!” Dr. McCaffrey screamed, but the rest of us just stood there, frozen, as the count advanced on Seamus O’Flaherty with decapitation clearly in mind. Fortunately, the treasurer of the Socialist Progressive People’s Worker’s Party had the presence of mind to do something. She clobbered the count, right on the back of the head, with a FREE ALGER HISS sign. The count went down in a crumpled heap on the ground.
And then pandemonium broke loose. It swirled all around me. Father Frank Feeley, apparently getting even for all those times he’d been rapped in the mouth, decked Commander Blanton with one good right to the jaw.
Communists started hitting slaves of the Immaculate Heart; slaves started hitting Thunder Troopers; Thunder Troopers started hitting communists; then communists hit slaves, and slaves hit troopers, and troopers hit slaves, and slaves hit communists People in the crowd started hitting all of the above, just for the sport of it. It was a mess.
“What a story!” I yelled to Sean, just as an IMPEACH MCCARTHY sign, wielded like a poleax by a commie, caught me on the side of the head. I literally saw stars, and I felt myself starting to fall, but Sean caught me, and carried me away from the fray, and laid me down on the grass.
“Peggy! Oh Peggy, are you all right?”
I put my band to my head. “I’m O.K. Oh Sean. I bet Maggie Higgins hasn’t ever seen this much fighting! I’ve got to take notes.”
But Sean wouldn’t let me get up. “You can take notes from right here. You could get killed in there!”
“Sean,” I said remembering something. “Your father! He’s in there! Somebody might really hurt him!”
“Oh Jeez!” he said and he got up and ran toward the boiling mass of humanity. At that very moment, Dr. McCaffrey, who had been trying to revive the count, was engaged in a tug of war with one of the slaves, who had pried the sword out of the count’s hand. Sean’s father, who realized that the slaves were not the most stable people in the best of times, could imagine what one of them could do armed with a broadsword: decapitate a dozen people, at least. That would really put a damper on the rally.
Just then, the metropolitan police descended on the melee, in force. Now slaves were slugging troopers who were slugging commies who were slugging cops.
A burly D.C. policeman lifted Seamus O’Flaherty right off his feet.
“Fascist! Nazi!” screeched Seamus.
Commander Blanton, still stunned, got carted off next. Father Frank Feeley was thrown against a paddy wagon and handcuffed. He asked the cop who was fastening the cuffs, “Do you believe in the One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic, Roman Catholic Church?”
“Anything you say, pal,” said the cop.
Sean was still trying to struggle through the brawlers to reach his father. A Thunder Trooper tried to knee him in the groin so Sean smacked him one and the trooper went down like a rock. Just as Sean had almost reached his father—who was still hanging onto the jeweled hilt of the sword for dear life—Dr. McCaffrey was lifted by his feet and his shoulders by four cops. He was carted off that way, still clutching the sword, looking like a medieval warrior who was being carried from the field of battle by his compatriots. Well, he almost looked like one, since most medieval warriors didn’t wear a three-piece suit and Hush Puppies.
“Pop!” Sean called out, in dismay.
The Visitation Glee Club had gone back to “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.”
“Sean,” Dr. McCaffrey hollered as the cops opened the door of the paddy wagon, “Sean, do you have your keys?”
“I got ‘em, Pop!” Sean yelled back.
“I’m at a two-hour meter. I don’t want to get tagged!” he called out, and then he disappeared, sword and all, behind the doors of the wagon. The driver turned the siren on, and the wagon pulled off, heading for the D.C. jail.
Sean walked back to me. I had struggled to my feet and was watching as the cops broke up the remnants of the crowd, and people started to drift away to other parts of the grounds. Sean sighed and leaned wearily against one of the portable toilets.
“I don’t believe it!” he moaned. “My father is in the slammer again!”
“At any rate he’s going, Sean, your father is going to spend more time in the big house than James Cagney.”
“What’ll we do about the rally? I think he’d want us to do something.”
The Visitation Glee Club kept singing, their high voices now clearly showing signs of strain:
First leaf is sunshine, second is rain—
“How can there be a rally when the two major speakers are in the can?”
I said. “Unless you want to make a speech about smashing communism.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think I want to do that. I guess they’ll just have to call it off,” he said glumly.
“Come on, Sean, I’ll buy you a B.V.M. frank, and then we’ll go down and bail out your father.”
“I guess the Kremlin can relax,” he sighed.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “The Nemesis of Smut still has lots of fight left in him.”
“I suppose.”
“Let’s look at it this way,” I said, trying to cheer him up: “He who fights and gets thrown in the slammer/Has another day to clobber the sickle and hammer.”
“Peggy,” he said, “would you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Sean. What?”
“Just shut up,” he said.
The Lenin Ball
“AND THEN he pulled his sword right out of the scabbard, and raised it over his head, and he charged. You should have seen him! It was magnificent. Magnificent!” Dr. McCaffrey’s eyes were glowing at the memory. “The man is a hero, a true hero of Catholicism.”
“Wow!” said Bill, Sean’s older brother, who was sitting at the right hand of his father at the dinner table. Bill was home from Holy Cross for spring break, and Sean had invited me over to dinner to hear Bill’s tales of campus life. But first, Dr. McCaffrey was reliving the saga of the rally.
As usual, the scenario had changed quite a bit in the retelling. Dr. McCaffrey’s part had grown quite heroic. In fact, it seemed he had singlehandedly saved dozens of lives by wresting the sword from the hands of the slave, crying out, “Unhand that sword, you miserable heretic!”
He didn’t mention that the Hero of Catholicism had been charged with two counts of attempted homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, and inciting a riot. Count Orlov had taken his Smash Communism crusade off to Milwaukee, where he didn’t have a police record. But the charges against Sean’s father had been dropped. True to form, he had come off clean as a whistle.
“But enough about me and my mundane life,” Dr. McCaffrey said. “Let’s hear about Holy Cross.” He turned to me. “Peggy, did you know that Bill was named to Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities?”
“Oh that’s great,” I said. Bill nodded, modestly.
“And he’s been playing varsity baseball all four years. Bill, you’re really tearing up the track at Holy Cross.”
“I’m doing O.K.” Bill said.
“O.K.! Bill, you’re being modest. Did you kn
ow, Peggy, that the school newspaper did a story on Bill and called him, ‘the Renaissance man of the senior class’?”
“Oh Dad,” said Bill, “you’re going to bore everybody to death.”
“Hey, Bill,” I said, “did you know that Sean practically saved my life at the rally? And you should have seen him when he slugged that trooper. The guy went down like a rock!”
Sean flashed me a grin, sheepish but proud.
“Sean slugged somebody?” Bill said. “No kidding.”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “This nerd tried to knee me in the groin, and I—”
Sean’s father cut him off with a gesture. “That’s hardly anything to be proud of, Sean, brawling in a public place!”
Sean’s face deflated. I nearly choked on my soup. This, from a guy who’d been thrown in the slammer twice in the past six months for behaving like the Manasses Mauler?
“Now, Bill. Let’s hear about this Who’s Who business. How did you get picked?”
Bill went on to explain that the whole student body had voted; he told the story in a way that was becomingly modest, but not overly so. It was as if he simply expected good things to happen to him, so they came as no surprise
I looked at him as he talked. Unlike Sean, Bill was starting to look like his father: his torso was getting fuller, his face more square than it had been in boyhood. I tried to figure what it was that bothered me about Bill, who seemed a nice enough young man. But there was a—a what? A blankness about him, a lack of perception. I thought of him as one of those comic book characters who walk blithely through disaster, unscathed and unaware. Safes crash into the pavement six inches behind them; airplanes fly into buildings right over their heads; the earth cracks under their feet, and they just go on about their business. Shades of gray were invisible to Bill. He simply didn’t see them, the way some men can’t tell the exact color of their socks. His landscape was a desert vista, where the sun always shone bright and the air was warm and clear.
Dr. McCaffrey was turned to Bill the way a plant turns to the sun; only in this case it was he who was sending out the ultraviolet rays of love and approval, so intense that I felt I could almost see them. Sean, on his father’s left, sat in shadow, like the dark side of the moon. I had a sudden, awful thought. Was Dr. McCaffrey giving Sean to God because he was expendable? Would he ever have given Bill, who was going to go through life picking up trinkets just as his father did, only bigger, shinier ones? Was Sean the throwaway?
I looked at Sean surreptitiously while I ate my dinner; he wasn’t aware I was watching him. When he knew someone was watching, he’d let those green eyes chill, so no one had any idea what was going on behind them. But now, unaware, he was looking at his father with such an ache of longing in his eyes that I couldn’t stand to see it and I looked away.
“My brother always does things so easy,” Sean once said to me. “And I’m always second string.” Sean was never the last kid picked for the baseball game—but he was never the first or the second, or the fourth. He always tripped on his own feet. Bill never practiced at anything, but he was always good at whatever he did. Sean worked and worked, but he was always second string.
But if Sean was clumsy physically, he had a grace of spirit that was obvious to me. He had a mind that skipped like a stone skimmed across the surface of the water from one idea to another and a heart that could reach out to embrace all of God’s creatures—and even if he did kill a few of the smaller ones off, it didn’t mean he didn’t care about them.
I looked at him. He was so different from the rest of his family members, more exquisitely wrought. He was like a piece of fine china in a closetful of dime store dishes. And I looked at his father, seemingly unaware of Sean beside him, and I wanted to shake the man until his ears rattled. Why haven’t you ever looked at him! Why can’t you see him? Why don’t you know what you have? How can you throw him away so easily—throw him away to God! It seemed to me that Sean’s father had been talking about the priesthood for him for a long time, but not for Bill—never for Bill. I wondered whose voice it really was that Sean heard that golden morning. Was it God’s? Or just the echo of a voice that to a child often sounds like God. A father’s voice.
Since Bill was home, he had the use of the Caddy all week, so Sean and I couldn’t go park. We sat on the couch in my living room, and after my mother had gone up to bed, Sean stretched out with his head in my lap and I curled the tendrils of his brown, wavy hair in my fingers, and then ran my fingers across his lips. He was so beautiful it was hard for me to keep my hands off of him. I just liked touching him.
“Sean,” I said, “maybe you ought to go to college first and then go into the seminary afterward.”
“The seminary is a college.”
“No, I mean a real college, where you can go to parties and go out on dates and stuff.”
He was quiet for a minute. “But I had a Call, Peggy, you know that.”
“Well, who says you have to answer it right away? The call will still be there after you graduate from college.”
“I don’t think I’d be strong enough,” he said. “I think I’d get to like the secular life too much. And I wouldn’t answer the call, and then where would I be?”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be so awful.”
“Oh no, I’d be in the wrong place. ‘Our hearts are restless, Oh Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in thee.’ He was quoting St. Augustine; it was that damned mystical side of him again. He saw himself pursued by the Hound of Heaven down all the corridors of his life. But what if he had mistaken whose voice he had heard? Wouldn’t he be in the wrong place then, too?
“I think a Call isn’t very strong if it can be drowned out by a few frat parties,” I said.
“Oh, some guys, they could do it. But I’m not good. I’m not worthy. I mean, I really like driving the Caddy. I shouldn’t like material things so much. I like doing crazy things, I don’t follow rules very well. I’m just not good—”
“So you figure being a priest will make you good?”
“Well, the seminary will be like a fire, a purifying fire, you know? You put steel in a fire, and it tempers it, makes it strong.”
“Do you want to be a priest or the human torch?”
“Ho, ho ho. You know what I mean.”
“No, I really don’t. I mean, maybe it’s too easy.”
“Easy? The priesthood is the hardest life there is.”
“Yeah, but it’s like. . .” I struggled to find the words I wanted. “It’s like putting on a uniform. Like when you put on an Immaculate Heart uniform, you know a lot about what you’re supposed to be. You’re polite, and you’re a lady, and you polish your shoes, and you don’t sass grownups. It gives you something to be. You don’t have to go out looking.”
“You mean I’m running away from life, copping out, by wanting to be a priest?”
“Maybe. You’re just a kid, Sean.”
“No I’m not. I’m eighteen. I’m a man. People my age go into the Army.”
“Yeah, but in the Army they don’t take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.” I thought about that for a minute. “Well, maybe poverty and obedience, but certainly not chastity.”
Sean was quiet for a minute, staring at the ceiling. “Oh shit,” he said.
Then I felt real bad about what I’d been saying, even though I thought it was true. He’d been miserable enough all evening as it was. His brows were knotted, his gentle mouth pulled up in a scowl. I leaned over and kissed him and I said, “That’s just for being a great person. You are, you know.”
That seemed to cheer him up, and we just kept on kissing until my mother called down, “Peggy, it’s getting late. You have school tomorrow.”
Reluctantly, we pried our lips apart, and I walked Sean to the back door. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek, gently, and I saw something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something older. I wondered what it was.
; The next day in school, I plunged back into the business of being part of the greatest Messenger staff in the history of the world. I tried to get Con inspired, but her heart just wasn’t in it.
“Come on, Con, we’ve got to pick up the pace. We’ve got a reputation to live up to, you know.”
“I’ll think of something. Give me time.”
“Time is what we haven’t got. The year is really zipping by, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Why don’t you or Mollie think of something immortal? Why do I always have to do it?”
“O.K., I’ll work on it. Listen, on Saturday, we’ll do it together. Maybe a fake stigmata. That would be a gas. (Now and then you’d read about people who would miraculously get the stigmata—the wounds of Christ.) If we could pull off a fake stigmata, we’d really go down in history. “Who could we get to do it?”
Con thought for a minute. “Maybe Ruthellen Mirden. She’ll do anything you tell her to. But Ruthellen is so dippy she’d probably get a real stigmata. Hysterical suggestion.”
“You mean a person could get it just by thinking she would?”
“Sure.”
“How do they get better? Do they put them in the Frigid Ward?”
Of course not. You can’t mix Frigids with Hysterical Stigmatas. Peggy, you really should learn about psychology.”
“Well, what do they do?”
“Give them some Band-Aids and tell them to take these pills that make stigmatas go away.”
“And do they? Make it go away?”
“How do I know?” Con said, crossly. “I have enough trouble with my periods; I don’t need the stigmata too!”
“I guess we ought to scratch the stigmata bit, then. I’d hate to see Ruthellen with tubes up her nose and Band-Aids on her hands. She’d miss the prom.”
“Probably,” Con said.
“So come over to my house on Saturday, I’ve got a new album, and—”
“Peg, I won’t be here Saturday. I’m going to Annapolis.”
