Arriving at the door of our house, Spellman was greeted, as per rehearsal, by Kevin, the youngest at six years old. Kevin was a curly-haired redhead with a winning smile, the one at the center, then and always, of everybody's affection. But when he said, "Welcome to our house," he addressed His Eminence as "Your Enema," causing his stunned brothers to choke on laughter while red-faced Spellman blushed even redder. Mom endeared herself to the cardinal by hugging flummoxed Kevin and smiling broadly at the prelate. She said, "Now we have to become friends." And they did.
At one point, after an intimate and, by me, wholly unauthorized conversation with my parents, Cardinal Spellman put his hand on my shoulder and said, "When you're ordained, Jimmy, it will be, God willing, by me." Not since the move to Germany had my long-determined fate been so openly referred to. I recall the pride in my parents' faces. I also recall feeling, despite myself, a momentary thrill of selection: Many are called, but few are chosen. The moment passed: Many are cold, but few are frozen. As a love-smitten teenager who was working hard to re-imagine himself a junior air cadet, a married man, a fighter pilot, I was thrown off balance. My simple, half-formed, run-of-the-mill ambition for myself seemed shoddy, even shameful—a secret. "Yes, Your Eminence," I said, blushing furiously, a true coward who was thinking, as I always would then, Enema.
"He's no pope," Cardinal Spellman had said to his aides about the newly elected Roncalli. "He should be selling bananas." Upon Roncalli's election, Spellman commissioned a life-size wax dummy of Pius XII and displayed it in a glass case at the rear of St. Patrick's Cathedral—the image of the real pope. As John XXIII, Roncalli immediately, and mainly by his behavior, undercut what had been taken to be Catholic absolutes—that Protestants and Jews are doomed, that priests are ontologically superior beings, that error has no rights, that the pontiff himself, no mere "bridge," is a kind of God. In his great encyclical Pacem in Terris, John would call into question not only his predecessor's rejection of conscientious objection, but also the basic assumptions of American military strategy, and therefore of my father's life. The pope would do so by declaring, "It is hardly possible to imagine that in the atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice."
Pope John stunned the world by receiving and embracing Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law. After their meeting, His Holiness advocated a Catholic dialogue with Marxists. Dialogue? With atheistic Communists? To discuss what? Even more momentously, he announced in January 1959, only two months after his election—and a month after Cardinal Spellman's first visit to our house—that because the Roman Catholic Church was out of step with the times, he was convening an Ecumenical Council. It would be the first in nearly a century, and its purpose would be, he said, to usher in aggiornamento. He was going to open the Church's windows, he said, to let in fresh air.
John XXIII's arrival, in other words, was a disaster for the likes of Cardinal Spellman, curial officials and Church moguls whose power under the rigid Pacelli depended on the triumphalist ecclesiology of the Counter-Reformation. If the Church was a perfect society in no need of reform, then its princes held power unassailably, and of course unaccountably. But for Pope John himself, and for an entire generation of European Catholic thinkers, the myth of the sinless Church had been exploded by the near-total capitulation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy before Adolf Hitler. As for the Vatican itself, when Pope John was asked what to do about Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy, which savaged Pius XII's complicitous silence, His Holiness replied, "Do? What can one do about the truth?"
As wartime apostolic delegate in Istanbul, Roncalli had personally signed thousands of forged baptismal certificates to give Jews the one credential enabling escape, but he knew that his effort fell far short of redressing Catholic responsibility. Sinful? Papal silence early—say, when Mussolini decreed an end to the rights of Jews in 1939; and Papal silence late—say, when Nazis rounded up Jews in Rome in 1943 for transport to Auschwitz—silence is one thing, but what about active cooperation with the tyrants? What else was it when, in Italy in 1929, Pope Pius XI agreed to Mussolini's demand to suppress University Catholic Action, the last organized resistance to Fascism? Or when, in Germany in 1933, the Vatican acceded to Hitler's demand to suppress the Catholic Center Party, the last opposition to Nazism? In each case—the Lateran Pact and the German Concordat—the Vatican put its institutional rights ahead of resistance to the dictators. The record of the moral failure of the Church in relation to the Final Solution is well known; even a number of formal Church statements have acknowledged the culpabilities of national hierarchies and individual prelates. The Vatican as such, however, has never openly faced its own role in the Holocaust, much less repented of it. But the pervasive malaise of European Catholicism that prompted Pope John XXIII to call the Ecumenical Council was surely a consequence of the popes' and bishops' having failed the moral test of the century. Even though his successors would fall short of his vision and impede the implementation of what it implied, Pope John, if only by refusing to exempt himself from the confession of sin, was a prophet of the Church's historic corruption. Which is why, to Spellman's ilk, he was anathema.
But for my family, as for ordinary Catholics everywhere, Pope John was something else. Not only a big-eared bear hug of a man whose warmth kindled the world's affection and ours, he was also attuned to the morbidity of Church structures, theology, and governance, which stood in marked contrast to the instinctive moral vitality of the Catholic people. For example, in the United States my parents' generation, with little or no guidance—although at times with opposition—from pastors or bishops, had enthusiastically and unembarrassedly embraced the national consensus, its respect for freedom of conscience, its assumption of the virtue of pluralism, and its determination to leave behind the old religious intolerance of Europe. My father's arrival as an American general was a small version of the imminent arrival of John Kennedy. Both represented a change in America and a change in what immigrant Catholicism expected of itself. Such change urgently required some equivalent shift in the Church's understanding of itself and some revision of the face it showed the world. Even Catholics who, like my parents, thought of themselves as traditionalists could only welcome it when Pope John opened the windows of the Church by opening his Council. This pope's religious hope meshed with our American optimism. People like my parents were never more themselves than at that time.
"Holy Father, General and Mrs. Joseph Carroll and their sons Joseph Jr., James, Brian, Dennis and Kevin..."
These words are written in Gothic calligraphy in a gold-framed certificate below a photograph of the smiling, large-nosed pope. In the four corners of the certificate are sketched scenes of Vatican City: St. Peter's, the Apostolic Palace, Bernini's square, the walled gardens. The framed object sits on the edge of my desk before me, leaning against the wall. I found it in one of my mother's boxes when she died two years ago, one of a matched pair of gilded frames. The other holds a color photograph of our family flanking Pope John XXIII in front of the red damask wall of his throne room in which we had our audience. In the photo, my blue father with his gleaming buttons and stars is on one side of the pope, together with Joe and Dennis. My mother, in a Lady-of-Spain mantilla, is on the other, with Brian, little Kevin, and me. I am beside her. My hair, in front, is a cresting wave, a small hint of Elvis, but my sideburns are not so long that my ears do not protrude.
The Gothic calligraphy, evoking the ghosts of Tetzel and Luther, continues, "...do humbly beg your fatherly and Apostolic Blessing, and a Plenary Indulgence at the hour of death on condition that being sorry for their sins but unable to confess them, or to receive Holy Viaticum, they shall at least with their lips or heart devoutly invoke the Holy Name of Jesus."
The petition is presumably answered with the scrawled signature of some monsignor and the pressed seal of the Keys of the Kingdom. This event was the absolute highlight of my parents' life, and it was something for me too. It took place in my senior year, toward the end of our time in Europe, wit
hin weeks of the chill midnight when my girlfriend and I, on the edge of the Hainerberg football field overlooking the twinkling spa city of Wiesbaden, fumbled our clothes open. The Puritan verdict "Found in Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," someone told me, gives us "fuck." My girl and I were not "found," and we did not quite consummate our "knowledge," but fucked was what, arriving in Rome, I felt. Sex was going to be my secret way out of the religion.
I have little or no memory of the papal apartments, the tapestries or great paintings. I am told that somewhere there hangs a fifteenth-century map that marks the American continent as "Terra Incognita," but I did not see it. Years later, in the statue-lined corridors of the Vatican Museums, I would notice that the male genitalia of all the Greek and Roman nudes had been chiseled off. I would learn of the artist Daniele da Volterra, ordered by Pius V—always Pius?—to cover the loins of Michelangelo's naked figures, earning for himself the sobriquet "Il Brachettone," the trouser maker. But at the time of this, my first visit to the Vatican, I was blind to such signals of the Church's genital obsessiveness, no doubt because I was so conflicted about my own. Sex evil? All I knew by then was that God was right to regard the sexual feelings of creatures as supreme competition. At times my longings obliterated the existence of everything else, including Him.
By now, the effort to recall this phase of my personal history has succeeded at least in evoking my sad pity for the affected, frightened lad in this photograph with the freckles, big ears, and mini-pompadour; his carefully constructed surface—that Windsor knot just so—layering over a seething insecurity; his dread of a future that seemed a trap or a dead end; the tumult of his hidden unbelief, sex, and filial subservience. This lad whose brothers knew nothing about him, and whose parents could see only in the unsteady light of choices they themselves had made twenty-five years before. This lad whose ability to be consoled by a sweet, pretty girl who claimed to love him, who'd trusted him with her near nakedness, was blown to smithereens by the certain knowledge that, despite himself, in every gesture of affection and word of promise he had lied to her about an open future. This lad—how, in seeing him in this photo now, I would love to embrace him, pressing in all that I have seen and learned of acceptance and forgiveness and affirmation. He is my younger self, of course, and there is nothing I can do for him.
Yet just such a thing, by a miracle of the same fresh grace that has swept the Church itself, is done then to the very same lad. It happens when Pope John turns from my brother Joe to me. He is most of a foot shorter than I, his face as red as his shoes, his cassock pure white, a gold cross, a jewel on his finger. I bend toward him, and he surprises me by reaching up and taking my shoulders firmly in his hands. His head is close to mine. I smell the scent of incense, also of soap. He holds me for a long time, pressing in all that he has seen and knows. His accent is thick, and so I do not understand what he is saying. The interpreter stays apart, as if this is private. Confession. He seems so much more affectionate with me than with my brothers that I can only assume, as with Spellman, that someone has told him of my ancient designation, my "vocation." But now instead of the claustrophobia of my hypocrisy, I feel elation. He is seeing through to the core of me, he knows my secret, and he shares it.
This is the moment of my conscription. After this encounter I will abandon the false dream of following my father into the Air Force. The romance with my girlfriend will not survive the separation following high school graduation. I will enroll at Georgetown University. In summer I will work as a clerk at the FBI, a job my father gets me. There will be other girls, and more of the panic of sex, but no more lies. I will cut short my time at college to enter the seminary—the one past which Mom drove so often when we went to lay our sorrow down at the feet of Mary. I will spend the next dozen years in a religious order, ultimately—pre-ordained?—to be ordained a priest.
Why? For a hundred reasons and for one. Here in Rome, the city itself inside a gold frame, for the first time in my life the Call feels entirely addressed to me, and not from Mom or Dad. In the person of a pope, a counter-Elvis, I glimpse the transcendence of the Church, which Michelangelo saw in flashes. The Church is a way that God has touched the earth. I know that its rituals and symbols satisfy the deepest urges of human beings because here, for a moment, this man, its chief symbol, satisfies the very thing in me. My turbulent self-consciousness is replaced for a moment—the first one—with peace. For a moment I do not think of any of this in relation to my parents.
What can we know? Why is there anything instead of nothing? What is the reason and meaning of reality? What ought we to do? Why are we here? Kant's questions, and every adolescent's. Pope John's face is close to mine, his sweet breath blows across mine. I stop asking these questions because, for a moment—the first one—I believe in God.
Now another question: how could anything ever seem more important than this faith? To ask it is to answer it. I genuflect, and His Holiness blesses me with something not his own, not my father's, and not mine. The Hound of Heaven has me. God. And how can I not make a life of Him?
5. JOY TO MY YOUTH
"Introibo ad altare Dei," the priest says at the beginning of Mass. "I will go unto the altar of God."
"Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam," the altar boy replies. "To God who gives joy to my youth."
One night we are cruising along on the ridge of South Ca pitol Street, above the river-plain city of Washington, D.C. It is the summer of 1960. "Kennedy Nominated on First Ballot," the headline blared this morning. Below it, another read, "Moscow Bids U.N. Convene at Once on RB-47 Incidents."
Dad has worked late at the Pentagon and, earlier, has let his driver go. I have driven across the Potomac to pick him up. I am a hotshot college kid now, and for the summer a cryptanalyst's aide at the FBI, but I am not so worldly as to pass up the chance to take the Lincoln out at night—or to be alone with him.
The headlines have steadily charted the ratcheting up of tension between our country and the Soviet Union. "Khrushchev Warns of Rocket Attack on Bases Used by U.S. Spying Planes," one read earlier this week, and I knew enough to think of the; U-2 hangar at Wiesbaden. The U-2 crisis in May had turned the heat up on Berlin again: "Khrushchev Establishes New Deadline." This time, if the Allies fail to withdraw from the beleaguered city, the Soviet leader says, he will close its access route through East Germany. GIs will have to go in behind tanks. A war will start. We will quickly drop our atom bomb on Moscow, and they will drop theirs on this city, here—the one outside our window. What a view we have, the twinkling lights, of Ground Zero.
The road takes us along the edge of a plateau. To our left and above are the looming turrets of St. Elizabeths Hospital, where the traitor-poet Ezra Pound has been locked up, nuts, for more than a decade. To our right, across the blue runway lights of Anacostia Naval Air Station, is the Potomac River, and in the distance the similar lights of National Airport. I know that Khrushchev's threats are what has kept Dad so late at the Pentagon.
When he finally came out, he surprised me by letting me stay at the wheel, which he had never done before. Instead of taking my place he got in next to me, a passenger. I was glad to have a chance to show him how well I'd learned to drive—both hands on the wheel now, of course, no finger-steering, no arm across the backrest.
Up ahead are the gleaming runway lights of yet another airport, Boiling Air Force Base, where we have lived since returning from Germany, and where my mother and father and brothers will live for the next decade. Westmoreland Avenue, Generals' Row, a gracious house next door to Vice Chief Curtis LeMay. There is a buzzer under the dining room rug for summoning the orderly to clear the dishes. There is a Red Telephone, which will ring when the war begins. There is a pool table in the rec room. When we pull through the main gate, an air policeman will salute us because of the stars on the front bumper. He salutes even when it is just me, and I salute back as if I am the general.
Behind us the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome are still illuminated, so
I know that it is not yet midnight. Washington and I have become well acquainted. It is a recovered paradise to me. There are fabulous girls at work—the typing pool, the file clerks—although I have been too shy to approach them. A clique of the sons and daughters of the high and mighty hang out at the Officers' Club swimming pool, and seem ready to invite me to join. Soon I will be haunting mixers at Visitation, Cathedral, and Goucher. I will meet Lynda Bird Johnson, and take her dancing at the Shoreham Terrace. I will squire girls to hear Charlie Byrd at the Showboat Lounge and Count Basie at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre. At Georgetown I will join the Young Democrats, staking a claim on the New Frontier. Washington—impossible thought—shows promise of the very joys I thought I'd lost. "It's like Wiesbaden," I'd crack to my new chums, a stab at true worldliness, "but it's better because here the hookers speak English."
My Life as a Hooker was the title of a book I would give Dad one Father's Day—the story of Bob Hope's golf game. Otherwise the word would never be mentioned, the profession never referred to. Not just hookers, but girls in saddle shoes, nursing students at Georgetown, pickups at the library, flirts in the mailroom—I would mention none of them at home, as if sex did not exist, as if I were not aching with desire and loneliness.
Tonight Dad is in a somber mood. He is not whistling, as he often still does, "Beautiful Dreamer." He is smoking, flicking ashes out the window. He has said nothing. Finally he crushes the cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and turns to me. "Son, I want to say something to you. I'm only going to say it once, and I don't want you asking me any questions. Okay?
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