Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  But those revelations came much later. At first, I misunderstood Felix utterly. At first, he was just another purveyor and consumer of the usual homophobic jokes that abound in almost all exclusively male environments, the monastery being no exception.

  We met formally over a game of mah-jongg in the rec room. I’d never played the game before, but on his invitation, I’d joined a foursome that included him, Vergil and Jerome. I had a bit of trouble getting my pungs and chows straight, and I made a number of mistakes up front. Felix was in a cranky mood that night, and this wasn’t the best of circumstances under which to make his acquaintance. As I got to know him better, though, and earned his respect, I found that these moods were fairly rare, and usually directed at people he took for fools. I was, in my ignorance of the game, displaying the marks of a fool. I had to be corrected on a number of my moves, and his corrections were startlingly sharp.

  “No. You can’t pick up from the discard pile unless you have a pung or a chow to show.”

  “Okay. Okay. Sorry. Relax, Brother. Relax,” I said.

  “Please,” he added, between gritted teeth.

  As we played on I got distracted by the television, which was playing in the background. Usually, at this hour, a gaggle of the older monks gathered round the tube to watch the news. One particular segment on the American obesity epidemic had caught my attention. The camera was focused on a man’s enormous wobbling midsection as he waddled down the street. I couldn’t look away. I was still staring when my turn came up.

  “Hello?” said Felix in a crescendo of irritation. “Your turn.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was just mesmerized by that man’s belly.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  Jerome looked down at his pieces. Vergil burst out laughing.

  I squirmed immediately, regressing in an instant, trying to cover myself like a teenager caught in a flub.

  “What?” I clamored. “The guy was enormously fat. That’s all.”

  But it didn’t matter what I said. I wasn’t being entirely honest with them anyway, so I could hardly complain that they were having a little joke at my expense. Besides, these jokes were part of their badinage and I couldn’t blow my cover by deflecting it with a dirtier innuendo, as I might have done in the outside world.

  Essentially, this was harmless boys’ stuff, being the first to make the fag joke and laugh the loudest—the trope of every male-bonding ritual. In this, they were hardly different from my bowling buddies, though naively I had expected them to be. Still, their remarks had a testing edge to them that I had never felt with Jim, Bob and Allen. I sensed, the way you do when you hear an old married couple sniping at each other, that there was a lot being said without being said.

  Mingling behavior in the rec room taught me a lot about the monks’ ways with each other, their interpersonal skills or lack thereof. Watching and listening for only a short time, I could see how rigid and inept most of them were at relating to each other, and why by contrast I stuck out so sorely. By the way they tripped over each other and backed away, you’d almost have thought they were virtual strangers, not people who’d been living together, some of them for as many as thirty or more years.

  Tuesday nights were supposed to be social nights. The abbot had ruled that on that one night out of the week the monks would sit in a circle and try to talk to each other. It had to be mandated or it wouldn’t happen. It was supposed to foster greater closeness or openness among the monks, something they’d been trying to work on for some time at the abbey in various ways.

  Apparently they’d once tried instituting a hugging program. This, too, they’d had to enforce in a formal way to make it happen at all. Some of the monks, especially the older ones, who’d had ingrained in them an aversion to any physical contact with other men, just couldn’t do it spontaneously. Vergil and Felix had each told me about this incident. It was obviously a big event in the history of the abbey, one that Vergil had scoffed at, but Felix had better understood. Felix had told me about the semiabsurdity of it, how some of the hugs felt natural, or almost natural, but hugging some of his fellow monks, he said, was like hugging a board. The exercise hadn’t lasted. The discomfort with enforcing affection had been too great, or perhaps, as Vergil seemed to suggest, some monks’ repugnance for new age role-play techniques had swamped the spirit of the thing and sunk it before it took hold. Clearly each man had his own struggles with intimacy—all of the monks did—and these attempts to address those struggles were always prickly, though necessary in a community where men were trying to live in a spirit of love with each other.

  From what I could tell, it wasn’t just that, as Christians, they felt they had to express greater affection for each other, or even that, as housemates, they had to learn to mingle rather than simply coexist. It was that their needs, whether they could admit it or not, were poking through the formal web of this living arrangement. Their needs for affection and touch and companionship and compassion were making themselves felt. For some of them it was only in the harrowing run-up to death, for others, it was in the trough of late middle age, and for some it was happening out of sheer constitutional sensitivity refusing at long last to be put down.

  But they were socialized men and they didn’t know how to talk to each other about much of anything at all let alone their feelings. And who could blame them? That, in our culture, has traditionally been the feminine role and it has not yet been entirely bred out of us. Women are still often the communicators, the inter-locutors between men and themselves, men and their children and even men and each other. Observing the monks I couldn’t help thinking that without the connective tissue, without the feminizing influence, these guys were like bumper cars trying to merge.

  Those Tuesday night gatherings were painful to watch. We’d all sit around in our chairs in a circle. There would be long silences, and then little pathetic attempts to fill the silences with talk that sputtered and rarely flew.

  Then someone would pick up a magazine and start leafing through it. Someone else would pick up the abbey’s copy of The Best of Calvin and Hobbes and do the same. I, and one or two of the monks would gravitate to the New York Times Sunday Crossword Omnibus that was usually lying open on one of the tables. Eventually people would peel off and leave the room or stand by the door to the patio and pretend to be fascinated by the impending weather pattern shaping up outside the window. Finally the abbot would give up, or the bell would ring for vespers.

  Father Richard the Fat was the monk with whom I most often did the crossword. He was the novice master, which meant that, like Vergil and me, he resided on the mostly empty fourth floor. True to his nickname, he was indeed round, Santa-like, with a white beard and mustache and a jolly, breathy laugh that would crinkle his nose and show his gums and baby corn teeth. He always had a generous spray of dandruff on the front of his habit. It made me think affectionately of a crack Jim had once made about a fellow bowler: “He doesn’t need Head and Shoulders. He needs Neck and Chest.”

  With Father Fat, doing the crossword was a form of intimacy, and a lesson in intellectual humility. It was a way into his mind, which was where he lived. I found it very fulfilling, sitting next to him, both of us leaning over the puzzle, laughing about the things we’d gotten right or wrong or the too, too coy clues and their esoteric answers. With him that was a brave start for anyone, and I considered it a victory. After all, it wasn’t as if you were going to walk up to him, put your arm around him and say, so Father, tell me about your childhood. His interpersonal style was very subtle and hands off.

  Vergil had a lot of affection and respect for Father Fat. He told me once, in his usual tone of sardonic remove, that Father Fat dealt with the novices the way he dealt with his plants, of which he had dozens all over the fourth floor. The plants were tangled, untamed, prehensile-looking creatures that you felt sure were going to reach out and grab you as you passed. There wasn’t a single flower among them. They were manly plants, all sturdy,
rubbery greens that even a black thumb would have been hard pressed to kill.

  Novices had, it seemed, to be as sturdy as that foliage to make it on Father Fat’s watch. The way Vergil told it, if you were a novice and Father Fat saw that you weren’t doing well where you were, he’d move you to a spot where you’d get more light or shade. If he saw that you needed watering or pruning, he’d do that. But he wasn’t going to stand over you or check on you every day. He’d let you take your course, and make a slight adjustment periodically, if necessary, but that was about it.

  That was his intellectual style, too. He was brilliant, a mathematician by training, but an obvious polymath, well versed enough in pretty much anything to do a crossword like he was just filling out a form. But he didn’t feel the need to beat you over the head with his brainpower. What he knew, he’d converted into a quiet wisdom. He never interrupted or overwhelmed. He never tried to convince. He offered. He suggested, and his suggestions were so profoundly right, so purely expressed, that they made you feel by comparison like a donkey who’d been temporarily granted the power of speech.

  He was a benign, almost avuncular presence when you got to know him, but a formidable one, never to be trifled with by the likes of Cyril or Jerome. I had the impulse to hug him, but out of sheer respect, I didn’t dare.

  Still, as much as the monks disdained it, and as flat as it fell, the hugging idea wasn’t altogether without merit. Actually, it was just what the doctor might have ordered. This revelation came to me while talking the first time with Father Henry.

  Father Henry was dying of prostate cancer. He’d had all the chemo and radiation his body could tolerate, and the doctors had told him that there was nothing else they could do for him. He was very sick, but he could still get around. He still went every Friday to one of the local maternity wards to participate in a cuddling program for premature infants. He and the other volunteers would each hold one of the infants for several hours, stroking, and snuggling, and talking to them in an effort to increase their chances of survival.

  When Father Henry was explaining all of this to me in the rec room one night, I said: “Wow. That’s amazing. Maybe I could join you sometime. I could really use some cuddling right about now.”

  Vergil shot Felix a look. I felt suddenly exposed, embarrassed once again in a way that I would never have allowed anyone to make me feel in another context. I might have protested, had I not been a young man surrounded by other men who, I could tell by their shared looks, were now deeply suspicious that I was gay and needy and undisciplined in suppressing those tendencies.

  I, in turn, was duly becoming the young guy who would be shamed into eschewing emotional admissions. The weight of my brothers’ disapproval would assure it, or mangle me in the process.

  This I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t thought that I could really become Ned so fully as to feel embarrassed by the conjectures of monks, or to smart under the sting of their disapproval. Yet it was precisely that experience, the immediacy of it, that led me to see and understand the dynamic of fraternal acceptance and rejection that underlay the community and defined the emotional well-being of its members.

  Feeling it at work in myself, I began to see it at work in the others, too, though in them it was much more skillfully disguised than it would ever be in me.

  Even with years of practiced stoicism behind him, hardened Vergil hadn’t quite been able to hide from inferior Ned how much he needed the approval of his peers. One day toward the end of my stay, he received the news that he was to be allowed to take solemn vows. He came to my room electrified with pride. He’d been distant for days, but now he wanted me to share in his joy. Not the joy of his impending profession, but, as he emphasized, the joy of his inclusion. He had been voted in by his brothers. They had accepted him as one of their own. These men, with whom he had lived for three years, had deemed him worthy enough to spend the rest of his life with them. The vows he was taking were in a certain symbolic sense collective nuptial vows, not so much to God, but to this band of brothers who lived together in sickness and in health and buried each other south of the church.

  This I felt sure was closely connected to these men’s decisions not only to take the vow of chastity, but to enter the monastic way of life instead of becoming diocesan priests. It was an entirely legitimate way for men to marry other men—to cultivate the lifelong company of their own sex—and this held true for both hetero-and homosexuals. It was the one thing all the monks appeared to share in common, a deep desire for fraternal and paternal approval and support, an almost inconsolable need for a bonded male family.

  Homosexuals found it convenient presumably because they could thereby avoid committing the grave sin of sodomy—in theory, at least—while at the same time enjoying all-male domestic arrangements and avoiding the dreaded expectations of “normal” heterosexual existence—intimacy with a woman.

  Heterosexuals, too, saw the appeal of marrying other men. Several of the monks with whom I spoke about chastity gave me the impression that women weren’t creatures they could handle on any level. These guys weren’t gay. They just didn’t want the emotional demands and constant struggles of navigating the opposite sex. They were Henry Higgins types, confirmed old bachelors. They wanted to be among their own kind, to be understood and left mostly alone to go about their business without a hectoring wife bearing down on them. But, and this was crucial, they didn’t want to be lonely. One monk told me, “I tried that [living alone] and it didn’t work.” Life in the abbey was a little like life in a college dorm, and for a certain personality type it could offer the perfect solution to sexual alienation and loneliness. It was, in many ways, a much easier life than the alternatives. A lot less stressful. A lot less involved, especially if you were the kind of man who didn’t want to cook or clean up after himself, and who thought of women as a separate, intolerable species.

  But therein also lay the rub. Living among the guys at the abbey had its downside, too. The nurturing influence that women could provide, the communicative skills they could lend and foster were lost to these men, and much to their emotional detriment. Most of them were hurting inside, needing each other’s consolation, but utterly unable to communicate those pains and needs, much less to offer consolation in return.

  Father Claude was a perfect example of this sad dynamic at work. At eighty-two, he was the second oldest monk in the monastery. Emotionally speaking, he was old school. You weren’t going to get him to talk about his feelings. Or at least that’s what I thought at first, and I got the impression that that’s what the other monks had thought for a long time. Probably with good reason. Claude had been the novice master at one time, and Vergil had told me that he was tough in that role. Emotionally tough. That is to say, not a hugger. Vergil said that when he was a novice, back when he first came to the monastery, one time while they were walking together, Vergil put an affectionate hand on Claude’s shoulder, the way you do when you’re talking animatedly with someone you like. Vergil said, “You’ve never seen anybody pull away so fast and furiously.”

  I first met Father Claude in the woodworking shop on one of those days early on, when I was helping Vergil with the coffins. Claude tended the vegetable garden and the beehives, which were both located in a small clearing about fifty yards from the shop.

  He used to come into the shop now and then for a break and a chat. He’d stand there wiping away the sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief, his face and hands covered with liver spots, his baggy work clothes hanging off his slight frame, his blue eyes rheumy with old age. He and Vergil had an affectionate, bantering rapport that consisted on Vergil’s end mostly of references to Claude’s extreme old age and questionable compos mentis, and on Claude’s end mostly of snide remarks about Vergil’s youthful sass and ineptitude. The game endeared both of them to me.

  After one of Claude’s visits, Vergil said: “He can be a little silly sometimes. We have a joke about him. We say, when Father Claude goes senile, how will we kn
ow?”

  It was one of Vergil’s sweet jests, full of awkward, untranslatable love.

  I made a point of visiting Claude after that. With great pride, he showed me his garden and his hives. He said he had probably been stung hundreds of times in his life, either gathering honey or transferring hives, but he said it never bothered him. He just loved bees. He could talk about them for hours, tell you anything you wanted to know. The other monks called the bees his six-legged friends, and I suppose talking about them was Claude’s version of talking about the weather, a neutral banter that made him comfortable.

  But as I spent more and more time with Father Claude, asking him questions and walking with him in the garden, he began to open up. He did have things to say if you probed him. Maybe it was old age, the mellowing that happens to some people. Maybe it was my feminine approach, even if he didn’t recognize it as such. Whatever it was, he told me things about his childhood, gave me images that I’ll never forget. And in the end, he said the most intimate, heartbreaking thing that anyone there ever said to me.

  One night in the rec room I asked him if he’d ever regretted becoming a priest. I think this took him by surprise because almost as a reflex he said no, not in a defensive way, but in a puzzled way, as if he’d never really considered it. But then the next day he found me in the refectory at the end of lunch and he leaned over and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked me yesterday and I remembered something a fellow priest once said to me. He said, ‘You know, sometimes I wish we were novices again.’ And I asked him, ‘Why’s that? Because it was such a wonderful time?’ And he said, ‘No. Because then I could quit.’”

  Father Claude chuckled at the memory and squeezed my arm. I laughed and took him by the shoulders and said fondly, “Father Claude, I really like you so much. You give me hope.”

  “Oh, thank you,” he said, tilting his head down slightly toward the floor. “I wish my brothers felt that way.”