The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  It was difficult for Gene to get to the heart of what was bothering him. It had all come too easily; it seemed as though he had, step by step, in a calculated fashion, moved into the position in which he found himself.

  “And why does that bother you, that you were prepared?”

  “It seems somehow … arrogant.”

  “To be prepared to serve God’s Church in any manner is not arrogant, Gene. It is expedient.”

  “But I don’t think expediency is the same as true service. And, Father, the way things are in the world today, the war in Europe, with my own country getting closer to war, things are changing. I should be doing other things with my vocation.”

  Things were changing. The Vatican’s wealthy friends could not travel to Europe anymore. The Europeans themselves were, by and large, locked out. Italy was mobilized, at war. The Vatican was declared neutral territory through various agreements and accommodations with the government of Mussolini.

  In December of 1941, when Eugene was twenty-three years old, the United States entered the war. He appealed to Cardinal Rappolini to send him home; he wanted to join his country’s armed forces as a chaplain.

  Rappolini replied, “It has been decided, Eugene. You will continue to serve at the Vatican. There are plenty of priests in your country to serve in the armed forces. This is where your Church needs you.”

  He kept up a sporadic correspondence with his family. For the first time in years, he felt homesick, and uninterested in the detailed administrative work to which the cardinal assigned him.

  When the war ended, Cardinal Rappolini, eighty-six years old and out of favor, died. His staff was dispersed throughout the Vatican and the world.

  Eugene O’Brien was sent home for a month’s visit with his family and countrymen before taking on his new assignment as a pastor to a leper colony on an island off the eastern coast of Africa.

  All his old friends and relatives were veterans now. They spoke of places around the world and unimaginable events that were no part of his life. They had been airmen and marines and sailors and pilots. He felt isolated and confused. Glancing through the Daily News, the Mirror, the Journal-American—all filled with stories about returning GIs he could not relate to—he felt like a foreigner in his own country.

  For the first time he doubted his vocation. And he was out of uniform much as were the young returning servicemen. But he didn’t have a small, gold-colored “ruptured duck” to wear on his lapel to show what he had been doing during the war.

  He heard his mother in the kitchen, returning from shopping.

  “Can I help you, Mom?”

  At first she shook her head. She was quick and efficient and had her own way of doing things, but then she glanced at him and nodded and he handed her canned goods that she placed precisely in her well-regulated larder.

  “Are you hungry, Gene? You look so thin. Shall I make you some lunch? A boiled-ham sandwich. It’s so funny, shopping without ration stamps.”

  “Just coffee will be fine, Mom. I’m not hungry.”

  She stopped putting things away, turned and studied her son. He looked so much older. There was a weariness in him, an uncertainty she had never seen. He had always seemed so directed. Now, wearing an open-necked collar under a bright red sweater, as he had when he was a young boy, he seemed ill at ease.

  “Gene, where is this place they are sending you? This island? Have you had shots?”

  He told her he had been assigned to a leper colony. Not to worry, he would get all the necessary shots. He had been doing some reading about the disease; yes, it was terrible, without a cure. His job would be to offer spiritual comfort to the dying.

  “And how do you feel about that, Gene? It’s such a change from your years at the Vatican.”

  He shrugged. He didn’t know how he felt.

  “You know, Gene, maybe you should spend some time in your own country. Your uncle Frank has some influence; he could—”

  “No. It wouldn’t make any difference. I mean … I’m just a bit disoriented, I think.”

  “Maybe you need to be home.” She watched him closely, saw him draw back from her touch, self-contained, even in his uncertainty.

  “My home is wherever the Church sends me. I’m a priest, and that’s the way it is. You know, I think I am hungry, Mom. I’ll take you up on that offer of a ham sandwich.”

  He gave her that much; aware of her stricken look when he backed away from her, knowing she wanted to do things for him, to help him somehow, he allowed her to give him food. It always made a mother feel good to feed her child.

  A few days later, it seemed crazy, but here he was, talking with his kid cousin. Little Megan, interning at Bellevue, preparing to become a shrink, of all things. This little tomboy girl, all grown up, but still a kid in her gestures, shrugs, and grins.

  She sat with him in her family living room, describing her training, her patients—without revealing anything confidential.

  “We have our code, too, Gene, like priests. Only we don’t hear confessions to offer absolution. We try to offer explanations and understanding, to get the patient to understand himself.”

  “Is that enough? Understanding?”

  “Hey, it isn’t easy. It’s hard to dig into your deepest emotions. My job is to lead the way, be a guide, help people to see what’s really bothering them, and why, and what to do about it.”

  For her part, Megan studied her cousin. God, beautiful Eugene, with his pale hair and fine features. So tall and lean and graceful. And so troubled.

  “So, cousin, what’s going on? What’s bothering you?”

  “Me? Hey, nothing. I just wanted to visit with you. To find out what’s going on with you. Not to talk about me.”

  “I’m fine. I’m doing exactly what I want to do with my life. Not many people can say that. All these guys coming home, they’ve got lots of problems, lots of pressures. I’m doing some work at the Veterans Administration Hospital, counseling husbands and wives. It’s a whole new world for me.

  She shifted in her chair, leaned her chin on her hand, and studied him. “You having unreal expectations, Gene? You having doubts? It wouldn’t be unheard of, you know.”

  He didn’t protest immediately. He seemed to be thinking, to be making a decision. Finally he said, “Not really. It’s just that it was such an adjustment at first. Those years in Rome. And then I’d gotten used to a certain … lifestyle. Settled in, I guess.”

  “Hey, I heard you had it pretty good. ’Luxe all the way.” When he looked surprised, she shrugged and grinned. “Hey, you know. Tabs are kept. Frankie Magee has his sources. He knows.”

  She got serious, went right to what she saw as his problem. “And now, wow, what a change. Sending you to a medical mission in the middle of God knows where. A leper colony, for God’s sake. That’s got to be scary.” She hesitated. “You up to it, or what?”

  “It’s what I’ve been assigned to do. I’m just not sure what I’m going to bring to the people there. I’ve been … spoiled. Protected. I’ve been living a very privileged life, by any standards. All the fellas, the guys I grew up with, they’ve gone to war, they’ve had experiences I can’t even imagine, while I—”

  “You’ve done what the Church told you to do. You did your job, right? Like all the others. They had no more say in where they ended up than you did. Gene, is it your calling? Are you having doubts? Maybe you should take some time, a leave, try to get your bearings.”

  Little tag-along Megan, sitting on the couch, leaning forward, watching him so earnestly, her eyebrows drawn into a frown, looking directly into his eyes. Concerned. Trying to be helpful. Caring.

  “Hey, I’m your cousin, not your patient, right?”

  “Right. But you can talk to me as a cousin, as a friend. Talking helps. Hell, I do it all the time. Helps me when I get screwed up.”

  “I have some … stresses. Some things to resolve. I will go on a retreat before my assignment. I’ve arranged it already. I guess it�
�s a matter of getting my priorities in order. I think, in all these years, I haven’t yet even begun to serve my priesthood. Now I’ve been assigned to get right down to the very basics of my religious calling. Yes, I find it … intimidating. Threatening. I don’t know if, after all, I will be equal to it. It is … scary.”

  Megan leaned back, stretched her arms over her head, then relaxed. “I think, Gene, you will be equal to any job you decide to do. You always have been, you always will be. I think … whoa, let me skip the shrink talk. As your cousin—I hope as your friend—I think you’ll be absolutely equal, and more, to the job. Whatever it turns out to be. It’s up to you to decide for yourself.”

  When they stood up, he leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Little Megan. God, a doctor. I think you’re going to be absolutely terrific, kid.”

  Megan hugged him, then pulled back. “I think you will be, too, Gene.” And then, softly, gently, she added, “Be happy, Gene. You’re entitled. Just try to be happy, okay?”

  What had been intended as a banishment, a time for contemplation of the uses and abuses of power, turned out to be the most valuable time in Eugene O’Brien’s life as a priest.

  The heat and humidity bothered him, and he began to discard his spotless, pressed and starched clerical garb, even though the services of the youngest nursing nun had been offered to keep his clothing immaculate. He wore the lightweight khaki slacks and shirts favored by the colony’s doctor, an elderly, bearded Frenchman with rough manners who rarely spoke to anyone about anything.

  The colony was run by a nursing order of French nuns who ranged in age from their early twenties to their late sixties. They were, without exception, cheerful women who went about the most repulsive of physical chores without a flicker of emotion. He noticed that they touched and stroked and bathed and groomed their patients almost as though they were young girls playing with favorite dolls.

  His days took on a boring sameness. He said mass at daybreak, attended by the nuns and a few of the ambulatory patients. He gave communion, never really looking at the decaying bodies who sought closeness to God.

  It was the youngest nun, Sister Veronica, a pale, slender girl with pink lips and greenish eyes, who taught him more than he had learned through all the years of his academic accomplishments and all his political years at the Vatican.

  He made rounds with the doctor one rainy morning, standing back slightly, avoiding any physical contact, as the young nun, kneeling at the bedside of a woman whose face was ravaged, talked to the doctor. This patient, she knew, would not last until the end of the day.

  As she spoke, she supported the dying patient with one arm and fed her with the other. When she glanced up at Gene, she smiled.

  “Father,” she said lightly, “this woman will be in Paradise tonight. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that incredible? Will you bless her, Father, and pray with her? It would give her such joy.”

  He nodded, bowed his head, made the sign of the Cross, and prayed as the doctor continued on his rounds. He kept his eyes closed and was surprised at the sudden light touch on his clenched hands.

  “Father,” the girl whispered in her soft French-English, “would you touch her? She is in a state of holiness, and it would be a gift.” And then she added, “Not to her. To you.”

  Of all the things ever said to him, of all the prayers and convoluted arguments and rationalizations and sophistry, nothing like this had ever been said to him. He reached out, his hand cold in the hot, humid tent, leaned forward, and, with the tips of his fingers, traced the sign of the Cross on the corrugated forehead of a woman with no lips or nose.

  The black eyes opened and shone into his with a purity that took his breath away. Her life was gathered in that still-functioning sense of sight, though what she saw, Eugene could not imagine. There was a joy in the depths of those dark eyes, not of gratitude for his touch, but of sharing the secret miracle she was confronting. He left the bedside shaken, and spent several hours alone, in his small wooden cabin, on his knees, praying without words, for words had deserted him.

  It was the first true religious experience of his life. The feeling he had lived with since childhood, that he had been predestined to serve the Church, had all been framed by words. There had never been one moment, not one flashing second of true religious insight or fervor. Not even at the moment of his ordination, not even at the serving of the body and blood of Christ for the first time. Never, until the moment when his fingertips touched the forehead of the dying leper.

  From then on he made rounds several times a day. He held the children, gently massaged their ruined feet and stubs of fingers and decaying noses. He whispered softly into their ears and they turned to him, glowing with a love he had never wanted before and received now as a benediction.

  For the first time in his life, Eugene was looked on as a priest, a messenger of God and a voice of consolation. These souls did not see the superficial beauty that had damned him all his life. They saw what he was beginning to feel: the beauty from within that came from loving and caring and giving without recompense.

  That wasn’t true, of course, because Gene received a gift of serenity and peace and understanding and acceptance he had never known before. His touch became automatic; his embraces were part of his being, and his love grew as he shared it.

  At night he studied the medical textbooks the doctor shared with him. He visited the lab, such as it was, that the medical nuns attempted to keep going.

  He petitioned Rome for money for medical supplies, for textbooks for the children. He thought about the glamour and excesses of his time in Rome, and about the funding of the Church and the distribution of its wealth, as he looked around at the poverty in which the colony struggled to survive. The rich spiritual lives of these people were shamed by their physical, material dearth.

  When supplies failed to arrive, or arrived in insufficient quantities or ruined condition, Gene prayed to be free of the anger and vindictiveness he felt toward his own Church. He remembered the luxury of his own life at the Vatican; the splendor with which he had been surrounded. He calculated how many lives could be made easier by the selling of one painting, one carpet, one set of brilliant crystal goblets.

  But in the evenings or in the early mornings, when he was alone, contemplative, Eugene felt an overwhelming exaltation. In this place of death and the dying, his religious message was brought to him by the very people he had been sent to comfort and counsel. They brought the true reality of pure belief in the message of Christ Arisen.

  Without sophisticated questioning, Eugene felt, accepted, and glowed with the purity of the faith all around him.

  He came to terms with a Church that had often puzzled, exasperated, angered, humiliated, and deserted him in his spiritual quest. It was as though the meaning of his Church, in its purest form, had finally entered into him.

  And then the powers shifted at the Vatican, and it was decided that the gifts of Father Eugene Sebastian O’Brien were being wasted in the small, unimportant leper colony. His time should be spent now, in the service of his Church, among the living, not the dying.

  After six years of an almost miraculous, holy existence, Eugene was recalled to Rome, where he was promoted to monsignor and assigned to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, operating out of Los Angeles, California.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WILLIE PAYCEK LOVED EVERYTHING ABOUT Hollywood. It was as though his four days and nights on a bus were only a prelude to his own dream. He was in a land where he had the freedom to be anyone he wanted to be. Farm-girl waitresses with platinum hair and long legs and spectacular breasts would be movie stars, once their “transition period” was over. Handsome boys with southern accents who pumped gas were just making stay-alive money “until they connected with a studio.” They were all stars-in-waiting, and they never had time to look at their counterparts, who had been around for five, six, ten, even fifteen years, and were still waiting. They were too concerned
with the ever-younger, ever-fresher, ever-more-beautiful, boys and girls getting off the buses to join their ranks.

  Willie loved watching them. Damn, there wasn’t an ugly waiter or busboy or usher in Hollywood, male or female, who wasn’t motion-picture-pretty. Any one of them could slide in front of the camera and replace any of those big stars. It was a matter of chance, and deep in every young heart, at least in the beginning, was the absolute conviction that the magic would happen. They would be singled out and they would talk one day to all the movie fan magazines and columns about what lousy countermen, short-order cooks, cocktail waitresses, bartenders, or cabdrivers they had been. None of them bothered to learn a marketable skill, beyond some girls who were passable typists and file clerks. God, no one wanted to get lost in a regular-hours, salaried job where you might be considered competent and be expected to stay with the company.

  There was only one real business, the fantasy business, and anyone with even marginal skills, besides singing or dancing or acting, tried to work his or her way into the mailroom or the commissary. It was an “in” to be a messenger.

  Every industry office employee under the age of forty talked about go-sees, call-backs, maybes, look-goods. And about friends who “knew someone.” And about unfairness, about talentless nothings—who did they know to get what they got?

  What Willie noticed, after he settled in as a studio driver, after he really began to look around him, was that everyone, top to bottom, was worried about the next assignment.

  He came to Los Angeles gifted with a job that paid well. Within a week of arriving, he and Maryanne settled into a small furnished bungalow in a colony of fifteen identical houses set around a long, narrow swimming pool surrounded by a rough concrete sidewalk. The water in the pool was dirty, the beach chairs were broken, and there was a vague sewery smell, but it was an honest-to-God swimming pool, and Maryanne grabbed her Brownie camera and used a whole roll of film taking shots of the pool, the bungalow, the tall, skinny palm trees.

  His first purchase, on the advice and with the help of his new boss, Gus Russo, was a shiny 1940 Plymouth. It was Willie’s first car ever, and it had, as advertised, been owned by a pair of elderly people who had bought it for their son in the Navy as a surprise for his twenty-first birthday. The kid used it for a month and then was shipped out. In 1941 he was killed at Pearl Harbor and the car had never been used, because neither of the elderly parents had the heart to touch it. Willie paid fifty dollars for the five-year-old, brand-new car.