by Paul Clemens
I said he could, and proceeded to lie about what I did and where I did it. He liked the give-and-take; we were two working men, having a chat. “Can I see the list?” I asked. He offered me the donor list. “No—the list of magazines.” “Sorry, sorry.” I flipped through it, to stall for time—Good Housekeeping, Field & Stream, a bunch of car magazines my father kept in business—before seeing a magazine my wife bought off the newsstand each month at impoverishing expense. A former hipster magazine for adolescent girls, it had matured along with its readership and undergone a name change. A subscription would save us some cash. “How much is that one?” I asked. He pulled out a pricing sheet, and I noticed that it said “KILLER,” in crayon, at the top of his clipboard. Was this his nickname, a little halfway house humor? Or did the other salesmen have “ARMED ROBBER” and “RAPIST” at the tops of theirs, by way of identification?
“It’s forty-four dollars for two years, sixty-six dollars for three years,” he said, folding back the sheet. “How much is it for one year, then? Twenty-two bucks?” “You can’t get it for one year.” “Why not?” “It doesn’t come in a one-year subscription. None of them do. They’re all at least two years.” “I guess it looks like a donation, then. Let me get my wallet and see what I’ve got on me.” I went into the dining room.
“Who is it?” my wife asked. “No one,” I said, and went back to the door. “Here’s all I got,” I said to the guy, handing him a five. “This doesn’t earn me any points,” he said, looking down at what I’d put in his palm. “It’s all I have.” “I take checks. You can write a check.” And you can take a flying fuck at the moon, I thought. “It’s what I’ve got. Take it or leave it.” “Okay,” he said, looking me in the eye. I returned his stare and started to smile. Were we about to come to blows? “I need you to sign here,” he said. I did. “And I need you to initial here.” “Why do I need to initial what I’ve just signed?” What did I care! Was I trying to antagonize this guy, an ex-con of whatever sort? And was I the only person in whom liberal guilt and racial hostility were connected by the world’s shortest bridge? “Any donation less than twenty dollars needs initials. It’s so that when I report it to my supervisor . . .” More shit about points, and how he wasn’t getting any out of me. “There you are,” I said, putting “PC” alongside my signature.
I wasn’t in the best mood, admittedly. A week before this we’d received a phone call informing us, nearly nine years after the fact, that the Michigan State Police had a DNA match from my wife’s attack. It was an astonishing call to get out of the blue—frightening, disorienting, and somehow inevitable: finally. There was no soul-searching, no consulting of sacred texts, no grand literary or historical theorizing. Just a day off work and a couple-hour drive to the courthouse on a cloudy morning for the pretrial hearing.
I’ve often wondered, watching courtroom scenes, how the families of those who’ve been raped or murdered can refrain from jumping the banister and beating the assailant to a bloody pulp. What I learned, as I sat in that honorable circuit court, two rows behind the man who, according to the state database, had raped my wife a year and a half before I met her (not his first assault: he appeared in court in his prison uniform), is that the whole legalistic setup acts as a deterrent. It’s so plodding, so procedural, so antiseptic—“Next witness,” “Your witness,” “The court calls”—that one is lulled into a stupor in which the only recurring thought, as at the secretary of state’s office or the Department of Motor Vehicles, is that of escape. I’d dreamt of this moment for years, and yet my emotions never rose above the level of frustrated resignation—oh well, may he rot in hell. The first thing the lead detective asked me, as we walked out after the hearing, was if I wanted to go with him to get my parking validated.
As we left the courthouse, my wife and I were approached by a black kid asking for directions. He had on a baseball hat cocked sideways and pants that needed to be pulled up, and he spoke with an intentionally slurred speech that was almost inaudible—shit for which I have no patience. Never was this truer than then. Enunciate, motherfucker. “You know where Westphalia Street is?” he asked, or so I deciphered. “I’ve no idea,” I said. It was two blocks over. My wife, solicitous as ever—she is, by several orders of magnitude, a better person than I am—began to formulate an answer. “If you go straight—” “You’re on your own, pal.” I took my wife by the elbow. “Let’s go.”
Did I hate this kid? And what did I consider him? I had that cautionary note in my wallet by this point, along with my validated parking pass. Swirling around my head was a confusing mess: It’s a not very nice word. Who paints a house purple? The powers that be. Solemn-faced and quoting the Bible. Have a beary merry Christmas. Suffered, died, and was buried. I wish I’d picked the damn cotton myself.
I didn’t know if I wanted to grab my baseball bat or break down and cry.
But there’s no disputing what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children. And my mother claimed to know with absolute certainty which course I’d have chosen, if only I could. Which brings me back to the aftermath of that attempted carjacking:
After my father had set the knife, once again, safely under the driver’s seat, we went back to the house. I walked into the kitchen, where my mother was still making dinner. “Can you believe that black eye?” she asked. “It’s something, all right.” “I’m so glad that your father was attacked and not you,” she said, without looking up from her preparations. At first, this sounded flatly insulting to my father. His wife was happy that he was attacked as opposed to his younger, more vigorous son? But my mother has a talent for beginning her prepared speeches with line three as opposed to line one. I knew there was a thought process behind this. “What do you mean, you’re glad it was him?” “I mean,” she said, annoyed that I was too dense to understand straightaway, “if it had been you, and you’d gotten the knife off the guy, you would’ve killed him.”
A Good, Moral Boy of at Least Average Talent
I WENT TO MIDNIGHT MASS alone last Christmas, driving west along 7 Mile to St. Jude, the steeple of which can be seen during clear daylight from a good distance. Decades before, my mother would wake my sister and me around eleven o’clock Christmas Eve night, after having put us down for a couple-hour nap, and bring us cinnamon toast and milk while we sat in pajamas in our sparkling living room, where all the lights were off except those on the Christmas tree. We’d stare with sleepy half smiles at the sight of the unopened presents, all of which were accounted for except those from Santa, which would be brought out later, and long after we’d ceased to believe. Sitting alongside the wrapped presents were the already opened gifts we’d brought back from the Saulino family gathering in the suburbs, presents my sister and I had stored under our respective sides of the tree when we got back to the city. After we’d finished our toast, our mother would hurriedly dress us—a little-man suit for me, party dress and party shoes for my sister—before walking the both of us, still half asleep, out to the car, which our father was scraping and warming up.
On the way to Mass, if the conditions were right and the way was clear, he’d expertly execute a 360 in an intersection, making us all laugh. A few minutes later, a little more awake now, we’d get out of the warm car and walk back through the cold night into church, where the organ music tumbled down from the balcony in back and the whole place, decorated in red and green and gold, smelled of incense and pine. Everyone within—the frustrated fathers, the frumpy mothers—looked lovely, utterly transformed. The moment felt like nothing but what it was: Midnight Mass, which came once a year, creating an atmosphere so dreamlike that its spell couldn’t be recalled until 365 days later, when the same sensations returned. Whenever they played “O Holy Night” my mother would lean over and say, “This is my favorite.” Her voice wavered with emotion as she sang. It was “Away in a Manger,” however, that did her in: “The thought of that little baby, without a crib,” she said.
I was an adult now, past thirty, with a pregnant wife and
a child—neither of them Catholic—sound asleep at home. My parents had attended Midnight Mass at St. Jude the year before, and because the priest had provided some statistics on the parish for the benefit of the “visitors” who attended services once a year, which my mother had passed on to me, I had some idea of what to expect. The parish now had two hundred families—“instead of two thousand,” my mother said, “when your father went there.” “They used to have eight masses every Sunday,” my father, a former altar boy, added, “and every one of them was standing room only. Now they can’t even fill the place for Midnight Mass.” The school population, too, was small, and predominantly non-Catholic, with only one white student. “Forty years ago,” my father said, “they used to have to bring in portable trailers to make space for all the kids.” The space inside the church was smaller now, too; my mother said that they’d taken out about half the pews. My father considered, making mental calculations. “Yeah,” he said. “About half.”
Along with Assumption Grotto, at 6 Mile and Gratiot, St. Jude was the prettiest of the east side’s Catholic churches. One of the least attractive, certainly, was our actual parish on 8 Mile, where we rarely went for Mass. St. Peter was typical of the churches built after the Second Vatican Council—which, along with doing away with the Latin Mass, had called for churches to be more utilitarian in design. In Detroit, the post-Vatican II period coincided with the era of suburban church building: the last Catholic church within the city limits was built in the late 1950s. South of 8 Mile, then, were the churches that aspired to be the neighborhood cathedral at Chartres; north of 8 Mile—even those just on the north side of 8 Mile, like our parish—were churches resembling hospital wards and Mexican restaurants. But because it was our home parish we had to pay dues whether we went there or not, on top of putting money in the basket wherever we happened to go that weekend: to St. Brendan, St. Matthew, St. Raymond, St. Clare, St. Ambrose, or any of a number of other churches, all of which expected attendees to ante up. It was enough to make one give thanks for time and a half on the weekends. “We are the poor,” my mother would say, opening the cupboards, whenever my sister and I told her that we had to bring canned goods to school for a food drive. Every Catholic mother on the east side, opening her cupboards, said the same.
There was a new priest at St. Jude saying Midnight Mass, a young man fresh out of Sacred Heart Seminary, as Father Hector Saulino had been sixty-five years before. I have a photo of a newly ordained Father Hec, wearing his priest’s collar, posing with his brothers Herbie, Mario, and Antonio and their father, Umberto, all of them suave and handsome in their 1930s suits, looking like hired goons from a gangster flick. Sister Marcia, in her veil, is not to be seen in the photo. As someone said of Mary Magdalene’s role at the Last Supper, she was probably doing the dishes.
At the top of Father Hec’s application to Sacred Heart Seminary—from 1926, when he was fourteen and had just left the St. Francis Home for Boys—is the following: “An applicant for the Seminary must be a good, moral boy of at least average talent. He must be of legitimate birth, free from deafness, blindness, impediments of speech, and taint of insanity in his family or among blood relatives.” This good boy of legitimate birth was all of the above. His mother was dead. He had four surviving siblings—three brothers, all younger, and one older sister. His father’s first name he Americanizes to Humbert. Father’s Occupation or Business: painter and decorator. Racial Descent: Italian. To the question, “Besides furnishing your books and stationery will you be able to pay each year Fifty Dollars for Tuition and Two Hundred Dollars for Board and Laundry?” the teenage boy, provided a long dotted line on which to respond to the question, answers simply: “No.” There is a follow-up: “In case you are unable to pay and the Diocese defrays your expenses wholly or in part, will your parents or guardian agree to refund all moneys paid out for your education in the Preparatory Seminary in case you are dismissed, or leave of your own accord?” Answer: “Unable.” Next: “In the event they cannot do this will you yourself later on see that it is done?” “Yes.”
The young priest at St. Jude wore a headset microphone that, like a pop star, he fiddled with throughout Mass. The former altar, at the front of the church, was now closed off, and a smaller altar jutted forward, creating a theater-in-the-round effect, forcing the priest to move this way and that during his homily, playing to those seated to the left and right. During the homily, for reasons unclear to me, he occasionally made quotation marks in the air. As I’d been told, the pews at the front of the church had been removed since my last visit, to make room for the new altar, and many of the pews in the back had also been taken out. Whereas before you could enter the church’s back doors, cross yourself with holy water, genuflect, and sit down, you now had to walk a good twenty yards before coming to the last row of pews. It seemed to me that two-thirds of the seating had been taken out.
The life-size crucifix that had hung behind the old altar now hung in the church’s eastern alcove, replaced on the new altar by a small wooden cross in a stand. No Christ, no nails, no crown of thorns, no stab wound from a Roman spear: just stained wood, about eighteen inches high. In the western alcove, where our family once sat, was a life-size statue of Mary, arms still outspread, still looking down upon her children with tenderness—though too big, this one, to be dragged into the middle of 7 Mile. Because the pews on both sides of the church now faced in toward the altar, no one faced the Blessed Virgin any longer. Her centrality—the old joke: “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that Mary was His mother”—was clearly in decline.
I could have tolerated this (very Protestant) demotion of the Blessed Mother were it not for the fact that, in her and her son’s stead, there was now a prominent stained-glass partition that ran along the back of the altar. It contained the likenesses of a number of religious figures, two per panel, the panels lightly folded upon one another, creating a zigzag effect. Among those I could clearly identify were Pope John Paul II, who was in one half of the central panel, and Father Solanus Casey, a Capuchin friar. Many American Catholics were working for canonization on behalf of Casey—who, if the campaign on his behalf should succeed, would be the first American-born male sainted. In 1995, the pope pronounced Casey “venerable”—two steps east of sainthood. Before making my confirmation in eighth grade, I had had to volunteer at a Capuchin food kitchen in the Cass Corridor.
I should have been able to do better, but while I waited for Mass to begin, listening to the carols while down on my knees, that was about the best I could do, at least as far as Catholics went. Others whose likenesses I thought I could identify behind the altar, in stunned disbelief that I was identifying them at all, were Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—a Hindu, a Confucian, and a Baptist. Had Catholicism, in the time I’d been away, become “inclusive,” or were such gestures limited to the inner-city precincts? Had religious relativism crept into the thinking coming out of Rome? Did certain absolutes—the belief in Jesus Christ as Savior, say—no longer hold sway?
I was only a couple of miles from the old De La Salle, but this all felt light-years from those stories I’d heard from my father and Uncle Tony about the fierceness of the Christian Brothers. I was a couple of miles, too, from St. David, where my mother, aunts, and uncle had been instructed in the Baltimore Catechism. “Who is God?” “God is the Supreme Being.” (Or as a young boy had once recited it back to Father Hec, in a story he often repeated: “God is a string bean.”) Had this sort of rigor, easily mocked as it may be, been replaced by cultural sensitivity? I finished my preliminary prayers, crossed myself, and pushed up the kneeler in front of me as I sat back down. Another Baptist, I wanted to inform the parish staff—Martin Luther King Sr.—had initially called for the defeat of Kennedy in 1960 on account of the candidate’s Catholicism.
In part I understood. The school was black, and the desire for black representation in the church, even if the students themselves were non-Catholic, was a commonsense nod to cur
rent demographics. Anyway, I’d already worked for a Catholic university with a Baptist president. But Gandhi? Confucius? The Hindu and Confucian populations on Detroit’s east side remained small. Were they brought in, along with other non-Western religious figures whom I was having difficulty identifying, simply to balance the ticket, to make Dr. King’s presence seem less like tokenism than a part of the broad patchwork of humankind’s religious striving?
I didn’t much care. My primary focus was on the person in the central panel with Pope John Paul II, a figure who looked familiar but was difficult for me to place. Pope John XXIII? St. Peter? St. Jude? Around the time of the Gospel reading, another possibility presented itself. Could it be—no, it couldn’t—Martin Luther?
The Gospel, Luke 2:1–14, was one I had by heart. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled,” it begins in the New American Bible, which is what was being read at Midnight Mass. I didn’t much care for this version’s vagueness—enrolled? The New International Version was better: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” Census was a clear improvement on enrolled; but the King James Version, as ever, was best: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” That was more like it. You take a census—would Detroit stay above a million people? if not, would federal support dwindle?—and this helped determine how Coleman Augustus would tax his population.
I only half heard the reading, translating what I was hearing into the cadences of King James’s English. Joseph and Mary go to Bethlehem. Jesus is born. Swaddling clothes. Manger. No room at the inn. Frightened shepherds receive a visitation: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” I looked down the pew, to see if my mother was crying. She was at home, fast asleep.
