Boys will be boys, men will also be boys, boys will be men, and men will be priests. I ought to be able to work in a reference to the seminal R&B group Boyz II Men here, but I find I’m not up to the task. Nothing could be further from their smooth, open-shirted, and mellifluous stylings than the celibate spectacle I am about to witness.
On the afternoon of the seminarian’s ordination, my mother and I rush, huddling together, through the doors of the cathedral. We have to walk through a row of knights in order to get to our seats. I can’t remember the name of their order, so I silently refer to them as the Knights of the Crucified Elks. Each knight is trying to have a bigger feather than all the rest. They’re also wearing swords, which seems like overkill for such a peaceful celebration, until I remember that I myself could be considered an enemy infiltrator. Still, my camouflage is perfect. I am even wearing a white dress embroidered with innocent flowers, to remind everyone that some people in the world are pure.
I have snuck in contraband, in the form of a notebook. I hide it in my lap, along with a mini golf pencil. At this point, I consider myself on an anthropological mission, much like Margaret Mead. I have discovered that this makes almost anything bearable—it would have been such a salvation in my childhood to think I had been sent on a mission to notice. That would have turned my insubstantiality into something useful, even advantageous. But I am not here to spy, not really. I am here because I promised the seminarian that I would come.
He isn’t the only one taking orders, of course. There is also Leonard, whom I have met only once; Dan, a reliable, badgerish man with a voice that sounds like it’s being carried away by the wind; and Rex, who is famous for once giving a sermon called “The Pharisees Were Right.” It prompted, my father acknowledged, “a number of complaints.” Some elderly women who had spent their lives walking the straight and narrow were furious to discover that they could have been Pharisees this whole time.
Dan is my favorite of all the candidates, because over winter vacation he came to the rectory and drank a Classic Martini with us and then pointed to the seminarian and pronounced, “You’re a . . . Temp-Taaaation to him!”
Happily, my efforts at seduction did no good. My villainy has been overcome, has been leaped like the lowest hurdle, because today these men become Christ’s husbands.
• • •
THE CATHEDRAL OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION is red brick with white wedding-cake trim and an ostentatious gold dome. The ceiling is painted a saturated celestial blue, with lights in it like stars. I think, as I always do in cathedrals, of what my history teacher told us about Gothic arches—that they imitated alleys of trees in the forest, and the way their branches crossed each other at the very top. Like most of the facts about history I have permanently retained, this one seems unlikely to be true.
Still, churches do resemble forests in one respect: the light in them is filtered through something else, some live leaf. The silence in them has been sifted through music. And the people standing in them do seem under a natural protection, to have come in out of the weather and taken shelter under a stone umbrella.
My mother finds us space to sit in the shadow of a marble column. A square of black cloth is pinned over her hair, its solemnity somewhat offset by a Band-Aid on her nose, where she recently had a patch of suspicious cells removed. Nothing serious, but to the Irish, as she has often warned me, the kiss of sun can all too easily become the kiss of eternal night.
She touches the Band-Aid with sudden decision. “No. I don’t want to remind people of injury . . . not today,” she says, and rips it off mercilessly. Then all falls quiet, and the congregation stands and turns toward the open front doors.
It’s starting. The bishop just walked by carrying some sort of magical gold shepherd’s crook. I wonder if he has license to hit the priests with it if they don’t behave
If the whole cathedral erupted into a fight scene, you just know he would start laying people out with it left and right
Then the fake knights would come in with their swords, and then my dad would probably whip out a hidden handgun, and then church would finally be exciting
Oh god, what is this triumphal music—it sounds like the farts of a man with a French horn for his intestines
“J’adore the French horn,” my mother murmurs, amid the holy blasts. I am less appreciative of its grandeur, possibly because I am a heathen. Jason’s father is a French horn player, and one Christmas he gave us a CD of songs he had recorded called Horn of Praise. Several years later, it was followed with Horn of Praise II. Perhaps the mad impulse to praise with horns is endemic to all Christianity.
A litany of clergymen begins to march down the aisle, led by a boy swinging a censer that pumps blue smoke. Bobbing along in the slow procession are my father and the candidates, all of whom are wearing white robes and black shoes and that special scrubbed aura that suggests they put soap in their own mouths when they are naughty. Alongside them, dozens of other men flow up to the altar and mill around, performing various occult tasks. One of them is decorated with much more lace than the others, gouts and gouts of it, frothing all over him like pony sweat.
“Get a load of Father Doily over there,” I remark to my mother. “Now there’s a priest who really loves lace.”
“That’s because he’s Hispanic,” she whispers. I didn’t even know that was a stereotype.
It would be nice if they had a ceremony like this for accountants, or firefighters, or tree surgeons. Imagine if to become a plumber, you had to lie flat on your face in the toilet section of a hardware store while all the senior plumbers swung plungers around you
Or if a zookeeper had to get blasted by a trunkful of elephant water before he could begin his duties, or if clowns all had to cram themselves into a special car, or if old magicians had to shave intricate goatees on the young ones
I mean, even the president doesn’t swear on a Bible this hard
If a cathedral is a spiraling, infinite library of human prayers, it is also a palace of free association. I have not felt the pleasure of letting my mind wander within the walls of one for a long time. First things first, I think, and set myself to studying the stained-glass windows. I am seated next to a tall rectangular one that depicts the crucifixion, all done in ruby and sapphire, with a black sky like a lowered eyebrow. Underneath Jesus’ body are the words “IT IS CONSUMMATED.” A few pews down, there is another that depicts Jesus being heavily messed with by a crowd of his haters. That one reads, “HE WAS SUBJECT TO THEM.” Above the altar is a large rose window that looks like the universe’s final orifice, dilated beyond human imagining.
I know how they are put together, because my father used to make them, before the pain in his back became so bad that he had to give it up. Clad in a disintegrating T-shirt and a pair of his billowing bengal-striped Zubaz, he would bend over his worktable in the garage and drag an X-Acto knife against the sheets of glass, which were opaquely swirled like candy, but which let the light flood through when you held them up. The knife made a shrill sound as it scored, and then he would tap-tap-tap the puzzle pieces out, with a sound more satisfying than a bone breaking, and join them together with soft bits of lead. Gradually they added up to abstract pictures: flames and stone tablets and pale extended feet. I was fascinated. I sat for hours with him among the raw elements, breathing in that ancient, mythic smell of what, of Roman glass ground under the heel, and before that the sparkling sands, and waited for the moment when my father held his work up to the sun. I felt the windows stood very thinly between me and art—they were not art themselves, but I could see art through them if I squinted, somewhere far off in the distance.
Across town was another workshop, the opposite of my father’s in every way. It belonged to my heathen uncle, whose hair was as long as Jesus’ hair, and whose jeans fit better than other people’s because he was a Modern Artist. All day he painted slick staring eyeballs, and screaming mouths aroun
d rows of television-shaped teeth, and carbonated dots in flying formation. He never spoke to me of painting, or theory, or how to look at things—it was enough for me just to know that he was there, that he had a studio in his house that was full of “good light,” that it was possible. No one had to tell me what “good light” meant. It was a little bit prouder because it was being put to a purpose; it was pure and clear and watery and went gladly into harness, like water on the wheel being turned into power. It was his and his to use, the way the silence in my room was mine. I could not tell then whether the pictures of my heathen uncle were any good or not. I did know they were different from my father’s wine, scroll, and sky-colored windows. When I thought of being away from my own house, I thought of being in that other workshop, where the paint was still wet and everything smelled new. I could not decide whether I liked that smell better than the ancient one. I wondered if at some point I would have to choose.
• • •
THE PRIESTS ARE kissing books constantly, with wet, juicy, openmouthed kisses. This is the only part of the ceremony I understand. Hand signals fly back and forth, candles are lit and extinguished, bells are rung, cloth is touched with insane reverence, and the choir keeps bursting into a demented round that sounds like a mummy trying to unwrap itself while wearing mittens. Latin streams from every mouth, and I recall the long-ago morning when I showed the seminarian a poem of mine that had just appeared in The New Yorker—a poem that contained two instances of the word “vagina.”
“This brings us one step closer to an issue of The New Yorker that is ENTIRELY composed of the word ‘vagina,’ repeated ten thousand times,” I said, cackling, rubbing my hands together with maniacal greed.
He rolled his eyes. “Do you even know what vagina means,” he asked me.
I did, but it was better in these instances to play innocent. “It’s sort of like a pussy, isn’t it?”
“It means ‘scabbard’ in Latin.”
“Pussies aren’t in Latin,” I told him.
My father strode colossally into the room then, and looked over the poem and congratulated me, even as he declared that it was “part of The New Yorker’s mission to abolish age-of-consent laws.” I have no idea where he got this notion. There is something about hearing him trot out one of these new, astonishing conspiracies that must be like a mother hearing her toddler use a word she never suspected was in his vocabulary.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Mark my words,” he said, cryptic as God’s own sphinx, stopping just short of putting a finger over his lips, and then vanished up the stairs like a vapor.
I don’t mean to be rude, but these ceremonies were probably a lot more uplifting back in the Middle Ages, when everyone was always about to die from a disease they got from touching rats
They keep playing a song called “You Are a Priest Forever.” It is, and I do not exaggerate, as catchy as hell. Somebody should try to sell cars with this jingle
Is there a note of subtle menace in it, though? You are a priest FOREVER. If you try to be a priest for just a short while, we will have you killed
I’ve figured out that if I say “me too” after everything the bishop says, I will get to be a priest also. Major loophole, boys. Major loophole
The boys in their snowy robes wait, for a moment that may prove to pale in comparison to the one when they were first summoned: at night, in their beds; in chapel, at prayer; outdoors, under a sky that rang like a bell and then cracked. Eating pizza, with a girl who wore the same perfume as his mother. A catastrophe has brought them all here, the catastrophe of being called. I think of that Buster Keaton stunt where the wall collapses and he finds himself standing in the open window of the upper room, not merely unharmed but chosen. After that, you must live the rest of your life differently, carrying that open window around with you always, amid the whoosh of everything else in the world falling.
The boys stand, then kneel down, then lie on the floor, then stand again, all the while getting their heads touched. The bishop touches the candidates’ heads so thoroughly that I start to worry for their brains. Then the other priests walk by and touch their heads too, for good measure, and then they help them get dressed in new clothes and then kiss them on the necks to let them know that the new clothes look good. It’s essentially a makeover montage, with the added disturbing implication that they’re not allowed to take these outfits off for the rest of their lives. “And you felt this,” I say to each man as he passes, “and you felt this, and you.” Ending with my father, “And you felt this too.”
“YOU ARE A PRIEST FOREVER,” the choir shrieks again.
“Thanks,” I say under my breath.
Everyone always thinks that their religious rituals are the last word in dignity, but that if they slipped into another house of worship they would find a bunch of brainwashed idiots acting ridiculous. But I can tell something is happening now because my mother is crying, silvered streaks next to the injured nose, and so, when I find him among the crush of men at the front, is my father. The seminarian takes a handkerchief out of his sleeve and dabs his black buttonhole eyes, which are fastened at last. He and the other candidates present themselves, a row of fresh haircuts. All at once, a hundred cameras flash.
Is it possible to pin the moment when power descends, is bestowed, is transferred from one hand to another? It does not come down as a dove, but as a lick of fire, a language the powerful speak to each other. But careful, let it fall in the wrong place and the whole cathedral goes up with a roar.
• • •
A REAL OBSERVATION suddenly interrupts the flow of toy ones. I recognize an elderly priest in the moving mass on the altar as a man who used to come over to our house. He was for a while my father’s particular friend. I did not like the way he looked; his skin was too pale and soft, like underbelly, and he had a mocking walrus mustache, and once he made fun of Walt Whitman right to my face. My little brother was five, six, seven. He was towheaded and charming, and the priest used to sit him on his lap and stroke his hair intently and give him garnet sips of wine. He crooned my brother’s name in a velvety voice, reciting it like poetry, and flicked his eyes at my mother as if daring her to stop him. Already I had learned to recognize the ones who hated women, from the way they treated my mother.
“Young children need to be touched,” he said, in that voice that meant he hated her and also something else.
There are small pockets in civilization, between words of conversation and everyday gestures, where secrecy lives. The priest fell dreamily, happily, into the alternate universe of the wine, where it was warm. He held my brother on his lap. The fevered lamplight shone around him. A sky rose up behind my eyes when I looked at him, a wide sky of clear and ruthless seeing, with a short stunted tree of compassion twisting in the middle of it. A tree that seemed to belong to someplace else, to Jerusalem. He drank and drank, his walrus mustache growing more and more ironic, laughing off my mother’s protests in a way that made my stomach climb down a flight of stairs; until finally, pink-cheeked and furious, she succeeded in banning him from the house.
When I learned he and the seminarian are close acquaintances, I felt that ancient and instinctual alarm. Late one night after everyone else had gone to bed, I told him about those visits, and for a brief space he seemed to receive it. I showed him the family picture of us in that rectory, laughing and clowning in front of a Christmas tree, but I could not put into words the strangest part: how the priest grew younger and younger as he did it, until by the end he looked like a boy too, young and happy, who had sent away for something in the mail, and now, after a long wait, it had finally arrived.
“He was sent away for counseling years later,” I say, “to Arizona or Texas or someplace in the Southwest. One of those dry places where people start over. All I heard was that he was drinking too much and acting inappropriately, whatever that means. I don’t know.” That was the
frustration—there were your impressions, and there were the euphemisms and rumors and scraps of information that surrounded them, but never the sense that you knew anything concrete, and always the sense that it would be much more irresponsible for you to speak up about it than to be quiet; after all, you didn’t really know. The seminarian stared fixedly at the side of my face and took short shallow breaths, and began, “I have heard some things,” and then went and shut himself in his room.
But the next day he returned to me, determined. “No, I don’t think that could be right,” he said, “because . . .”
And you feel what you have seen set neatly aside, in that tall pile where no one looks, marked LAUNDRY. And you feel foolish, and perhaps even wicked, for having mentioned it at all.
Again on the altar, the mass of men moves as one body. And I chant to myself Who is protected, who is protected?
• • •
SOMEONE IS PRAYING NOW, calling in a loud voice for God to help the poor, the victims of prejudice, the unborn. He places a ringing emphasis on the word “unborn” that he does not place on “poor” or “victims of prejudice.” A sort of breathlessness enters my head, as if I just overheard my name, and with a concerted effort I stop listening. I go sideways; I let myself drift.
The old impressions return: that you are floating in the jelly of a clock, that you are inside a bird’s backbone, that your head has gone an octave up and your body an octave down. That you are physically compelled to stand and kneel with the rest of the people, that you are required to answer with everyone else. Religion trains you like roses—it installs automation in the arms and legs, even in the mouth. Or as Jason once asserted, with his trademark mix of authority and malapropism, “They’re priming you like Chekhov’s dogs. To hear the gunshot and drool.”
I do not take Communion, but the mere word brings the taste back to me. In childhood, we used to eat unblessed hosts by the fistful, not distinguishing much between them and my mother’s Health Crisps. They came in sturdy plastic buckets that you could wedge between your legs, and the white discs on white discs gave the look of riches. They tasted like the second dimension, and vaguely like the black leather of my father’s car seats. There was a cross on each that you could feel with your tongue. Ten seconds, and it would melt into nothing—no calories even, just a moment of texture.
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