An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  I found his house, a surprisingly modern split-level with redwood siding set off by large panels of glass. It was in a tony section of the remote academic town, a hip faculty enclave. In Minneapolis, I'd been entirely focused on Tate's meaning for me, but now I knew that the summer of 1966 had been a momentous one in his life too. Only months before, he'd divorced the poet Isabella Gardner, and in July, while patiently tutoring me, he had married a young woman who had been a student of his. Her name was Helen Heinz, and she was a nurse. Tate's first wife had been the writer Caroline Gordon; that his third was a young nurse made their marriage a choice tidbit on the literary gossip circuit. That she had been chief nurse in a large Catholic hospital in Minneapolis made it gossip among Catholics.

  Her youth was reflected, I sensed, in this bright, appealing house. So was the fact—he'd told me this in his letter—that they had recently had twin sons. When I'd read that, I'd pictured the young poets in Dinky Town taverns back at U of M, elbowing each other about the old man's virility. Tate was sixty-eight. For a change, as I approached the front door I was not carrying a sheaf of poems, but I did have a pair of small wrapped boxes, crib toys for the twins. I rang the doorbell, aware of myself as the latest in a long line of would-be poets who had come to him like this, seeking a literary laying on of hands. Even Robert Lowell and John Berryman had done so, and years later my friend Robie Macauley would tell me that so had he. In an instant, had the image occurred to me, I knew that I would have put my hands inside Tate's, promising to respect and obey him. But now I realize that the reason I felt inclined to do so was that he'd have never let me.

  The door opened and a shockingly small, frail old man in a short-sleeved white shirt stood there, red-eyed and slack-jawed. His huge forehead—it was Tate's most distinctive feature—was crimson, as if he'd just been running. I hardly recognized him. He stared blankly back at me. He seemed the opposite of virile. To my horror, I realized he had no idea who I was. In his letter, he'd appointed this hour for my visit, but clearly he'd forgotten.

  "Paul?" he said.

  "It's Jim Carroll, Professor."

  He leaned toward me. I was wearing a blazer and a dark cotton turtleneck, despite the summer heat. I had abandoned the necktied Hans Kung as my clerical sartorial ideal in favor of Daniel Berrigan. I would hardly ever wear a Roman collar, but at that moment, to help Tate recognize me, I wished I had. I saw that his eyes were wet, as if he'd been crying, or as if he were drunk. I assumed drunk.

  "Oh," he said suddenly, "James!"

  When, in Minneapolis, I had asked him to sign his book to "Jim," he'd written 'James," and I've used the name as a writer ever since.

  "Forgive me," he said now, opening the door wide and stepping aside for me. "Forgive me," he said again, bowing slightly, the Southern cavalier. Tate ushered me into the spare, modern living room with its high flagstone fireplace, its Scandinavian furniture, its slate floor. I sat on the couch and, to my surprise, Mr. Tate sat next to me, close. I looked around for his bourbon glass and did not see it. I heard the faint sounds of someone else stirring in a distant part of the house.

  "Oh, James," he said then, leaning toward me. "I could have used you yesterday."

  "Why?"

  A startled expression crossed his face. "You don't know?" The sharp edge of inquiry in his eyes told me he was not drunk at all. But his eyes...

  I forced a big smile. "You mean about your twins? Yes, sir. You wrote me about it." I held my boxes out.

  He shrank back. "Oh. Oh." Then he simply shook his head. Tears fell from his eyes. Finally he said, "My baby died. One of my babies died. Michael..."

  He explained that one of the boys, Michael Paul, in the care of a nanny, had vomited while sleeping and choked to death. His wife, he said, was devastated. So was he. He looked off toward the part of the house from which I'd heard noises.

  "I could have used you yesterday," Tate said again. "I needed a priest like you."

  "What?" I asked, fearing that I'd misled him, since I wasn't a priest yet.

  "The Catholic priest here in the local parish—he would not let us have a Catholic funeral. Helen—" Tate began to sob. I touched his arm. "Because of me," he said. "The priest refused to bury Michael because, he said, my marriage was notorious."

  "Your marriage?"

  "My divorces. I am a bad Catholic."

  "Oh, Christ!" The words rushed from my mouth ahead of a bitter bolt of disgust.

  "We buried Michael in the Protestant church."

  I heard in Tate's voice not bitterness or anger but despair. Religious despair. I knew that Tate had become a Roman Catholic, with his wife Caroline Gordon, in 1950. While other poets had embraced the Church as an act of faddish aesthetic self-expression, Tate had grappled for decades with the figure of Jesus—his 1928 poem "The Cross" is a religious masterpiece. His conversion to Roman Catholicism was the result of a lifelong spiritual quest and was a deeply transforming event. Jacques Maritain would cite him as an influence. But to the Sewanee curate, Allen Tate would have been the wrong kind of Catholic from the start. Not long after his baptism, writing in the New York Times, Tate had denounced Cardinal Spellman's censorship of the 1951 film The Miracle.

  Bad Catholic—the phrase meant as little to me as "good Catholic." What had I spent six years learning except that Jesus Himself had been labeled bad. Who had killed Him? Not the Jews, I had learned by then, but the curates. The monsignors.

  In his urbane and knowing lectures, Professor Tate had seemed beyond the cruel pettiness of the Church. But he wasn't beyond it at all, and that was a revelation to me. The Church gives us our faith. Later I would read that all of Tate's poems were about the suffering that results from disbelief. It was Tate who'd made me love "Pied Beauty," by that other convert Gerard Manley Hopkins, but now I saw that the Holy Ghost hovering over us with "Ah Bright Wings" had razor talons, which were sunk deep into this man's soul. Later I would learn how deeply they penetrated mine.

  I pressed his hand and said inane things about God's love for Michael, about the real meaning of our communion, about the importance of Jesus' own experience of such a rejection. Even as I spoke, I could not imagine that what I was saying could relieve his obvious pain, but when I fell silent, he asked me to say more, and I did. In the end I told him that I would pray for his dead baby.

  And with the most direct gaze ever to pierce me, he said, "Thank you."

  "I think I should go."

  He nodded. Then we stood and he went with me to the door, where he put his hand on my shoulder. "Your visit helped, James. More than I can say."

  Embarrassed, I turned his remarkable statement aside with a laugh. "If you can't say it, Professor, no one can."

  He smiled thinly. We shook hands. And I departed. I would never see him again, although I would continue to send him poems and he would continue to be kind about them. As I left, the irony hit me. From one point of view, it seemed I'd gotten the opposite of what I'd come for. But it didn't feel that way. Allen Tate, who'd given me permission to be a writer, had just given me permission to be a priest. Yes, I would pray for his infant Michael, at my first Mass.

  And so, six months later, there I was on the floor of the sanctuary of St. Paul the Apostle Church, with all these images floating like motes through my willfully distracted mind. I thought at one point of the war protesters who threw themselves down to the ground like this, miming the roles of napalmed Vietnamese. Several of my classmates and I had discussed the possibility of refusing to exchange the kiss of peace with Cardinal Cooke as a protest against his support of the war. The idea was that, immediately after he had made us "priests forever according to the order of Melchizedek," one of us would go to the microphone and explain our act of conscience. I remember how, in our grave discussion, we all fell silent, staring at each other. Actively contemplating such an act of defiance was enough to make it impossible even for my peacenik friends. As for me, why not just ignite myself with candle wax?

  So no, I was not miming
the part of a napalmed villager, although one day, at the main gate of Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, I would do just that—conical hat and all. But neither was I dead to the secular world, as the sacramental theology intended with this symbolic prostration, nor was I about to be resurrected into the spiritual realm. The great irony of my time in training for the priesthood was that, forcing my participation in the revolutionary events of the day, it had made me more alive to "the world" than I'd ever have been as a gung-ho fighter jock. Holiness had ceased to be an ambition of mine, which may have been the problem. To me, Jesus was not holy. Why should I be?

  By the time the Litany of Saints was ending, I may not have been dead, but the feeling was, my life had flashed before my eyes. And in truth, for all my worry and obsessive self-doubt, it was a life I felt grateful for. Even more, I felt grateful that it was far from over. Finally I relaxed into the last of the music, accepting where I was, what I was doing, and who was with me.

  From all evil...

  Lord, save your people.

  From every death...

  Lord, save your people.

  By your death...

  Lord, save your people.

  Bless these chosen men and make them holy.

  Lord have mercy, yes. When they called my name, I stood and said in a firm voice, "Adsum," which a soldier would say means "Present," but which at that moment in my life meant, "Here I am, Lord. Send me." That too was Isaiah's statement, and what was he—trouble coming, for sure—but a prophet?

  Uncoerced and with a clear mind, I accepted the chasuble of charity upon my shoulders. Touching the chalice and golden paten with the sacred host upon it, I received the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. When the cardinal anointed my hands with the oil of kings, and then wrapped them in fine linen bands, I had the only gift my mother ever wanted, for as tradition required, I would give that oil-stained linen to her. She would treasure it, unlaundered, and when she died, her own hands would be wrapped in it so that at the gate of heaven angels would recognize her at once as the mother of a priest.

  At the kiss of peace, Cardinal Cooke greeted me with such genuine warmth—his own son! a son of the military!—that it appalled me that I had ever thought of insulting him. When he said, "I hear you are going to be an Air Force chaplain," I was too surprised to respond. Before I could deny it, he was hugging me again. And then, having donned his golden miter and his jeweled crazier—the shepherd's stick they use on their sheep—he was gone. There was nothing for me to do now but turn and go down the stairs to the altar rail, for the moment toward which my whole life had been building.

  The ritual is that, immediately following the ceremony, the newly ordained priest imposes his first priestly blessing upon his mother and father. An imposition of hands. An imposition.

  Thirty-five years before, Joe and Mary had risked everything to be together. In the last hour, he had refused his own ordination, defying his own cardinal, his mother, the Church, and, by all lights, God. Then Mary had stared that act of sacrilege in the eye and found a way to second it. They had married, leaving the parochial world behind. They were free, they thought, of the fishmonger's curse. But then their first-born son, like some biblical Egyptian, was touched by plague. It was impossible, despite an otherwise magical ascent, ever again to feel out from the shadow of the spoiled priest. Until now.

  "May the blessing of almighty God..." My kneeling mother's head was bent before me. She was wearing the black mantilla, what she'd worn each of her two times in the presence of a pope. Her hands on the altar rail clutched the rosary.

  "...the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit..." I am quartering the air above her. In a million years, she would not look up at me, and I do not want her to. This is not about her Jimmy, I tell myself. This is about God. Jimmy does not exist here. It is not Jimmy who brings his hands together, palms downward, and lowers them to her bent head. It is a priest. "...descend upon you, and remain with you forever."

  There, Mom. For you.

  When I reach to touch her chin, she startles me by grasping my hands and pulling them to her mouth. My mother kisses my hands, as if she is an Irish peasant, as if I am the pope.

  Before I can say, "I love you," she is turning away, then gone.

  I take one step along the rail. In those vestments I feel like a float in a parade. My father in his dark civilian suit is kneeling there with his head bent, his face in his hands. What I notice is his hair, and I am shocked to see how white it has become. He is fifty-eight years old, but I have never thought of him as anything but young and powerful.

  If I could have looked into the near future, I would have seen the two of us sitting alone on the terrace of the Officers' Club at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico, the SAC base where, years before, he'd confessed his dread of the Bomb. We are there again the week after my ordination, a priest's honeymoon, a vacation with the folks. Mom is back at the bungalow. Dad and I are having breakfast before heading out for golf. The sun is warm already, glinting off the green-flecked Caribbean. Things have been awkward between us since my first sermon at Boiling, my use of the forbidden word "napalm." We cannot talk about the war. I know that. Yet I am determined to break through the wall of silence the war has built between us. So, suddenly, because it is the only question I have ever really had, I ask him, "Dad, why didn't you get ordained?"

  He puts his fork down, thinks for a minute, and seems to decide it is time to answer truthfully. His eyes meet mine. "Because I wasn't worthy."

  "Worthy?" I am mystified, and to my horror, I feel a jolt of anger. Worthy? What the hell does worthy have to do with it? Who the fuck is worthy? I am here at a SAC base with you, with B-52S swarming like gnats, pretending they are not in my fucking nose, pretending not to be a hypocrite and liar. "Worthy?" I say again. I hear the pitch of my voice rise. "I was just ordained, Dad. You think I'm worthy?"

  My father stares at me, thinking. At last he answers. "Yes, I do."

  How I wish I could note this moment as the magnificent affirmation he may well have intended it to be. But I see it as something else. I am worthy because I have immolated my will. He is unworthy—here is the very definition of his life—because he would not.

  "May the blessing of almighty God..."

  I raise my eyes toward heaven, but what I see are the stars as they were the night Saint Paul was knocked from his horse.

  "...the Father..."

  I bring the blade of my hand up in front of my own face. Behind my kneeling father are my brothers, a line of relatives from Chicago, and the blue-uniformed chaplains waiting to kneel to me. Not me—a priest.

  "...the Son..."

  I lower my hand toward my bent-over dad. My eyes follow and are caught by something, a motion in his shoulders.

  "...and the Holy Ghost descend upon you..."

  I put my hands on my father's head, pressing that gray hair, the first time I have ever touched him there. I am so grateful to have this way to press into him at last all my thwarted love. But as I do, it is as if an electric current flows through me, because instantly his body convulses. The movement in his shoulders explodes into quaking, and I fear at once, though I cannot imagine what it is, that some awful breach of nature has occurred.

  And so it has. I have never seen a hint of such a thing in him. My father is racked with sobbing. Crude guttural sounds come from inside the hands that remain closed upon his face. He is loudly weeping now, and—as if he is my own Allen Tate—I press my love onto his head. Oh, what gratitude for the raw physical sensation it is to touch this man to whom I can no longer speak. I want to fill the abyss inside him, and I do not care if what I fill it with is myself.

  Myself. At the time I thought his weeping was all about me, my fulfilled priesthood balancing the scale of his failed. At the time I thought he was weeping because he was finally released from the curse. I was the ransom paid to God. Now I see what a narrow self-reference all that was. My father had far more to weep about tha
n me, the Church, and even God. Fifteen thousand dead GIs, for one thing. Was he making contact through me with feelings for all those lost sons? The extremity of the sobs that broke and broke and broke again, long after I had said, "...remain with you forever," should have told me. I knew so little.

  Less than a month before, Richard Nixon had become president. Melvin Laird had become secretary of defense. Among Laird's first messages was one sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: the era of breakdown between civilian and military leadership would now end. The Nixon administration was intent upon winning the war. Henry Kissinger announced that we would "prevail." He wanted, in particular, to reinvigorate the JCS, and indeed its recommendations for escalation, long thwarted by McNamara and his successor, Clark Clifford, were already being implemented. By mid-March, less than a month after my ordination, Nixon ordered a major expansion of the air war and began a series of secret and illegal raids by B-52S against North Vietnamese Army sites in Cambodia. This expansion would lead to the ground "incursion" into Cambodia in the spring of 1970, which in turn prompted the shootings at Kent State, sealing the alienation of an entire generation. Nixon's escalation would be partial, giving the Chiefs their air war in exchange for gradual troop withdrawals beginning in mid-1969. But Nixon's escalation would work no better than Johnson's had.

  I have no idea if my father objected within Pentagon councils to Nixon's expanded air war, although I doubt that renewed reliance on bombing could have been justified by his DIA estimates. Controlling the flow of military intelligence, my father would have been acutely aware of the other unpublicized development of that season: the psychological and moral unraveling of the U.S. fighting force. The full horrors of the massacre at My Lai, which took place in 1968, were just being uncovered by the high command, although the story would not become public until November of 1969. More and more GIs were committing "refusals to fight." Hundreds of officers were being assaulted—"fragged"—by their own troops. Up to a third of the Army was using drugs. What the Vietnamese could not do to the American military, it was doing to itself.