by Martin Moran
Hi, this is Christ the King calling . . .
Usually there’d be a pause on the line and I’d experience, right inside my breast, a little burst of glee.
Most of the kids in my neighborhood went to public school. McMean or Fallis Elementary. I kid you not. Edwina Fallis Elementary. She was a beloved kindergarten instructor. Still, I just think it’s one thing when your school is named after a dead teacher and another when it’s named for the Risen Savior.
Every classroom at Christ the King had, hanging from the front wall, a clock and a crucifix. And every day, during math or spelling, I would stare up and watch the hands ticking past the numbers, while Jesus’s remained nailed at quarter to three. They were stuck there on the yellow brick like an odd couple that seemed, somehow, to be dueling. My eye would bounce back and forth: Time . . . Eternity, Earth versus Heaven. It was like watching Now spin toward the hour of death.
Sister Agatha was our third-grade teacher. She was a heavy woman, in every sense of the word. She wasn’t much taller than us nine-year-olds. She was shaped like a box. A black box. A moving cube of church. She was, among the many nuns in my life, the most intense. Often, before we’d go off to the restroom, Sister would turn, face the front wall, and raise her cloaked arms in the shape of a V, as if pleading to be beamed up. With one hand she indicated the hour and with the other our near naked Lord. “We line up by one but we live by the other,” she would proclaim in her crackly voice. Crackly because there was always something like grief or cheese caught in her throat. Sometimes in the midst of a lesson, especially if she was annoyed with you, she would gesture up to the cross then look at you and blurt out: “He died to set you free!” And I’d think, Free from what? From where?
There was a brief moment one afternoon (I was little, first grade) when I thought I’d cracked a piece of the Catholic code. It was when the bell rang, as usual, at 2:45 to release us for the day. Alleluia! I grabbed my satchel and as I did I glanced up to realize that the clock and Jesus told the exact same time and I thought, That’s it. But, right away, I knew whatever it was He’d done it was supposed to mean more than just getting to leave here, being set free to go home. Nothing could be that simple, could it?
Sister Agatha had a very particular method for teaching cursive. She’d put on 45 records of simple songs for each different letter of the alphabet—“Farmer in the Dell” for W, or “Three Blind Mice” for G.
“OK children, letter G. Remember the tail; every letter has a tail so they can connect, make meaning.” She’d plop on the record; we’d clutch our number 2 pencils as she sang, “Three blind mice . . . tail. See how they run . . . connect!” One afternoon late in the year, right in the middle of drawing letter G, she just froze, staring at her chalk. We sat there until, finally, Carol Buell went to the office to get someone. They came and took Sister out into the hall and we never saw her again.
Christ the King or CK, as we called it, was situated on a little hill at Eighth and Fairfax, sandwiched between Holy Ghost to the west and Most Precious Blood (a rougher neighborhood) to the east. Little Catholic fiefdoms all over town, fiefdoms of the soul, concerned, of course, with matters of the hereafter. That’s something you get from the time you’re tiny: After is what you’re shooting for. After is what counts. Here is basically a problem. We made a mistake, we fell, and we’re stuck here in this unreliable flesh, struggling to earn our way toward a bodiless eternity in a very nice place with all the saints.
And, lucky you, you learn this, that there’s a huge army of the Good and the Dead just waiting to be called upon, prayed to, because they’ve been through the earthly wringer and released. They’re part of the oxygen. Their stories are everywhere, stained into chapel windows, pressed into books and calendars, like Catholic celebrities, sacred movie stars. There’s a saint for every day and a patron for every profession. Cecilia for music, Luke for doctors, Genesius for prostitutes and actors. You’ve got Jude for desperate causes and there’s even Saint Claire of Assisi, who saw visions on the wall of her cell, of events unfolding far, far away. She’s the patron saint of television. It got so you recognized the saints’ hairdos or their particular wounds. Sad Saint Lucy with her eyeballs on a plate, or the virgin Agatha with her breasts on a platter, or Saint Denis, carrying his own head down from Mont Martre. Halloween is nothing to a kid from Catholic school. Everywhere you look, there’s blood and gore and metaphor.
Sister Agatha was passionate about the saints. I remember how annoyed she was on the feast of Saint Martin when I replied to her inquiry that I didn’t know much about him.
“If you’re lucky enough to share a name with a saint,” she said, “then you should know their feast day. Agatha’s, for example, is the fifth of February.” Sister picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board in beautiful, curvy letters: AGATHA. “It means ‘good girl’ in Greek. She was the first, the very first virgin martyr of the church.” Sister touched her chest, leaving a smudge of white over her heart.
She made me stand and read Saint Martin’s story aloud from Miniature Stories of the Saints. When I opened to the proper page there was a dreamy drawing of him: long brown hair, handsome face with dark eyes gazing up toward . . . up. I knew right away that if he lived here-now instead of Rome-then, he would have been captain of the team and picked me right away.
The book told how he was a soldier who met a freezing beggar in the street one day. Having nothing but the cloak on his back to offer the poor man, Martin took his sword and chopped his cape and gave half of it to the beggar, who, lucky for Martin, turned out to be God.
That day during recess, Ricky Flynn cornered me. “Give me half of your Mars bar.”
“No,” I responded.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m the beggar, you be the saint.”
I didn’t see how, with his mean eyes and snotty nose, Ricky’s could be the face of God, but that’s the tricky part. So I ripped my candy in half and Ricky just laughed with his mouth full. “Thanks, Saint Martin.” I felt stupid and mad and more unsaintly than ever. You see, we’re supposed be like them, the saints, but they’re all holy and dead and it’s hard to know where to begin.
One day we third graders were having a silent study period, waiting for the hands to reach 2:45. I should have been reading but I was dreaming about Wesley, the neighbor boy who occasionally babysat my older sister and me. I didn’t know why but I longed to sit next to Wesley as next to a fire on a winter’s night. But he always remained alone and silent at the end of our living room couch, studying his geometry while I sat on the floor doodling his name in my workbook. It seems that during my daydream I stuck my hands in my front pockets. Suddenly, Sister Agatha was in front of my desk.
“Stop that,” she whispered, or hissed, really, as if she’d transformed into the serpent of Eden she talked of incessantly. I sat up straight, my hands still caught in my corduroys. “Do you need to make a trip to the toilet?”
“No.”
“Then stop it.” She pointed to my pockets. Mortified, I pulled my hands out and folded them on top of Phonics for Fun. She was trembling. Or that’s how my mind’s eye, my body, remembers it: this hallowed nun quaking at my offense. “That’s nothing down there,” she said “to be toying with.” I didn’t know why, but I knew well, my body was fit to blame.
She walked to the front of the class and clapped three times—her signal that it was time for another lesson about how we’re bad.
“Children, if the devil has his way, we’ll never reach our greatest desire: Union with God in the life everlasting.” She straightened her little round glasses and looked right at me. “There’s a war inside of us, children, because the Kingdom of God dwells within but so does our sin. There’s not a lot of room in there”—she placed a hand on her stomach—“and they are both going at it, white knight and black, angel and devil, tangling us up. And if”—she raised a finger—“if you allow . . .” She stepped toward me and the bell rang. She never finished.
3
IT WAS
A hot afternoon in June, soon after I’d made it through third grade, and my new friend, Nathan, knocked at the back door.
“Mart. Get your swim trunks. Let’s walk to the JCC.”
“OK,” I said, glad to follow him anywhere.
Nathan and his family lived just across the chain-link fence, in the yellow-brick house kitty-corner behind us. I didn’t know much about them until one day I started seeing Nathan in his backyard taking care of his gerbil, Moxie. Nathan was tall for his age and had the longest, blackest hair I’d ever seen on a boy. I first learned his name when his mother yelled, “Nathan, get your butt in here!” Her voice shook the pussy willows surrounding our incinerator. He asked me over one afternoon to watch Creature Feature. I found out he was a year older than I and went to shul as well as a school. Everyone—his three big brothers and sister—talked at once and loudly. His father was a wrestling coach and was always grabbing Nathan’s brothers and pinning them to the floor. It was a war zone of affection. I didn’t see Nathan often but whenever I did, he always showed up out of the blue, with a definite plan.
“Come on,” he said, standing on our patio that bright June day, straightening his cool wire-framed glasses. “This is a day for swimming.”
“OK.”
I followed, picking up what I could of his overflowing confidence. Past Flamingo, a right on Forest, we hopped barefoot down the broiling pavement past the rectangle houses, big porch, little porch, big, all the way to the Jewish Community Center.
I remember how the light shimmered on the water. This was the biggest and best pool around, shallow to deep packed with horseplay and high-pitched laughter. This was no place for laps, just splashing under the mile-high sky, pink backs smeared with Coppertone.
Eyes red, fingers shriveled, Nathan yanked my foot from under water, leapt up and out of the pool, calling, “Follow me.”
Magic words. I trailed his lanky frame up a back stairwell, stepping into his wide, wet footprints. We dripped our way down a long hall, feet-flops echoing along the polished tiles. As we reached the end of the yellow-colored hall, I smelled smoke. Nathan pushed open a door and—my God—it was a foreign country. A sprawling room filled with dozens of dads. They were seated around card tables or perched in fat lounge chairs watching the ball game.
“That was a bullshit penalty!” one man roared, sticking a cigar back into his mouth.
Some concentrated on books and newspapers. They were all naked. Naked as could be. Except some had on white socks and brown sandals, the kind Jesus used to wear. I was astounded. I’d never really seen bare grown-ups. Somehow, in my world, people emerged from separate compartments, scrubbed and fully clothed. The men had towels around their necks and were moving slowly in and out of steamy doors, chatting. This must be what they meant, I thought, by Community Center. Or by Jewish.
I panicked, thinking I didn’t belong here. Not allowed. That we’d wandered into something definitely venial, possibly mortal. But Nathan, with his usual assuredness, plunged right through the bare bodies. I followed, head down.
There was Nathan’s dad, sitting on a small stool with a crossword folded over his lap. I clenched, preparing for him to yell like he did at home. Nathan’s dad looked up, his gray eyes flashing.
“Hi, sweethearts,” he said, quiet as could be. “What’s doing?”
Nathan borrowed his dad’s towel and sat down on his knee to help with the puzzle. I wandered through the smoky sweat, lost in a forest of men. Who knew the human physique had so many shapes and shades? Or that human hair grew in such places and patterns? I heard splashing on the other side of a swinging door. I went in.
It was a huge chamber filled with showers, the kind I’d seen once when I visited the local public high school. There was only one grown-up in the room. A guy around eighteen or nineteen, I figured. He stood at the last shower opposite the door, rinsing shampoo from his curly brown hair. White suds made their way down his neck and chest. I recognized him. He was the lifeguard who blew the whistle when we ran too fast to the deep end. He was wearing red trunks with the cross on them. Not the crucifix, but the little white cross that meant he’d save you if you were hurt or drowning. He glanced my way. He had the whitest teeth you ever saw.
I turned on the nearest shower, next to the door. The warm water soothed my neck, ran down my spine. I loved that feeling. It’s what lured me out of bed on school mornings before 8:30 Mass. I watched the water glide down my stomach and jump off the drawstrings of my baggy trunks, scattering and flowing away. It had been another funny day with Nathan. Whenever I was with him, such grown-up things seemed to happen.
I looked up and saw the lifeguard taking off his red trunks. He began wringing them in the shower, his wide back tilted, twisting with the effort. He was bright white where his suit had just been, the rest of him dark with summer. He turned then and, in an instant, I froze under the hot water. My insides tangled, tightened as the space between him and me filled up with something that made my heart race.
Would I look like that in ten years? I wondered. A perfect triangle of hair below my belly? Everything . . . larger? I turned away and tightened my strings. I stared at the yellow tile, imagining ways I might begin to drown under a shower.
I twisted back around, I couldn’t keep, I couldn’t stop, looking at his . . . him.
I heard voices—Sister Agatha’s, Sister Joan’s—tell me this was wrong, rude. Or worse, this was my will acting up. Involuntarily curious, like Eve. I knew I should turn away but, heavenly God, he was beautiful. I watched the water slide across his skin and I could swear I was recollecting something I already knew. I recognized something in his shape; I felt some infinite hope in his particular curves.
He turned off the water and reached to grab his towel from a nearby hook. He shot me a look. I lowered my eyes to the drain, then peeked again. He dried his hair in a way that said he had no idea how nude he was, and then he wrapped the towel around his hips and walked my way. I dropped my eyes again to the swirl of water. I felt him, long-limbed and easy, right next to me. He paused and I looked up. His eyes were brown. And kind. He nodded—a polite farewell—as he reached for the handle of the door, and when he’d gone all I felt at the pit of my stomach was the weight of it. All I could see, stretched from now to forever, was the terrible trouble I was in.
4
FOR AS LONG as I could remember, since kindergarten at least, mornings were trouble. I often woke sick to my stomach. As I got older, I used to sneak out to the side of the house to barf right before car pool came to pick us up for school. I’d plant my feet in the snow near the naked rosebush, press my forehead against the brick, and get it out. If I could time it right, if I got past these early moments of the day without anyone hearing, it’d be OK. None of the questions. What’s wrong with you? Sick again? I had no explanations. Only embarrassment. At first, everyone figured it was the flu or a bad bit of food. But then it happened too often. I couldn’t skip school. Not again. Mom and everyone else lost patience. But if I could keep it a secret, get it over with quietly, then I could go to school, get on with the day. Every day a test, a chance to please. A chance to bring home As—the marks that held power, it seemed, to brighten the gloom. To make Mom smile. I’d lean into the brick and what wanted out so badly squeezed its way up the back of my throat. It spilled and burned right through the snow, a yellow hole down to the dirt. I’d wipe my mouth, tuck in my shirt, hurry along to grab my books before car pool honked. Hurry along, wondering what in the world was wrong with my body.
There was a statue of the Virgin Mary outside school. She was blinding white up on her pedestal, her arms lovingly outstretched, her wrists cocked in this odd way that always made me think she was directing traffic. You could sit on the steps, not far from Mary, and look west to see the whole front range of the Rockies, from Pike’s Peak in the south to Long’s in the north and all the mountains in between, standing jagged and mighty over our Disturbed Region. That’s what Father Elser—our priest and someti
mes science teacher—told us Denver is called in geologic terms. A Disturbed Region. Because of all the tectonic accidents and violent collisions that create such beauty. He told us that a rock, a mountain, may look at rest, but they most certainly are not. Everything is filled with ceaseless subatomic motion. Often, in the mornings before Mass, I would stop and chat with Mary or with the godly view, the way you do with mountains and statues because you sense that somewhere behind the stillness, behind the scenes, they are alive somehow and keeping an eye on things.
One morning I was sitting out on the steps getting air, staring west, when Paula Plank appeared and gave me a kiss. She’d been running. She was out of breath and late, like me, but she stopped and stood still at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
Her cheeks were flushed, two splotches of red spreading over freckles. We locked eyes for a second, blue on blue, twinkle to twinkle. She said not another word, though I thought I heard her brand-new breasts whisper morning from beneath her plaid uniform. She reached out and gave me a kiss—a chocolate kiss—and ran.
I watched her go; the pleats of her skirt swirling, her plump calves scrambling up the steps. When she reached the side door of our church, the bells began clanging across the clear sky. She turned to wave and beckon me, then slipped inside. I stood there in my navy blue jacket and gray wool pants, and pondered Paula’s gift. It sat like a big silver teardrop in the palm of my hand. And out of the top of it, like a tiny plume of smoke, flowed a ribbon on which was printed in light blue letters: kisses kisses kisses.
I should have told Paula: No, thanks. It was Lent and I’d given up chocolate. “Virtue grows through deliberate acts,” Sister Christine had said on the day we wrote on a secret piece of paper what we’d chosen to sacrifice for the five and a half weeks leading up to Easter. “Pray for grace, you’ll get the help you need.”
