by Kevin Deeny
Given Father MacDowell’s moody personality and his propensity to speak rather loudly, having your confession heard by him was somewhat risky. Occasionally while waiting in line, you could overhear him ask, “You did what?” from inside the confessional. Other unintelligible utterances emerged from his confessional that at times gave too many clues about the dark state of your soul to those waiting in line.
Holiday confession with Father MacDowell was to be particularly avoided. As the Easter and Christmas holidays approached, holiday Catholics came out in droves, and extra priests would often help out to hear confessions. St Andrews only had two permanent confessionals that served the everyday needs of the parish. These small enclosures were sufficiently darkened and screened to maintain anonymity and muffle the voices within. However, during holidays, four priests heard confession at the same time; two of whom sat on chairs in front of the church by the altar in plain view of everyone in the church. Father MacDowell seemed to prefer one of these.
Shortly before Easter, Marcus was kneeling at a pew in the middle of the church diligently working on his penance prayers when he noticed a kid, who must have been woefully uninformed, opt for the short line for Father MacDowell. Marcus watched when the boy’s turn came, and he seemed to have a little trouble getting started. A little prompting was offered by Father MacDowell. After what was a lengthy recitation for a boy who appeared to be no more than about twelve years old, Father MacDowell began mumbling. Suddenly, Marcus heard, “You’re a disgrace to the Catholic Church.” reverberate to the back pews followed by more mumbling.
The boy kneeling before the priest seemed to be frozen in terror, but most interesting to Marcus was the complete evaporation of the line of people who had cued up after the boy. Young boys and girls quietly scurried away and attached themselves to the backs of the lines for the other priests. Adults seemed to saunter towards other lines as they looked at their watches or seemed to suddenly remember that they wanted to look up a verse in a hymnal across the aisle. When the young boy finished and turned ashen face to walk up the aisle, every eye in the church followed his progress. He then did a courageous thing – he didn’t bolt for the door, but instead found a pew in the middle of the church, knelt down and said his penance. Father MacDowell, who found himself with idle time, pulled a small Bible from his cassock and read as the minutes passed.
During normal times when only confessionals were in use, it was imperative to find out which priest was in which confessional if you had any hope of avoiding Father MacDowell. Generally, the length of the line was a good clue – his line was the shortest -, but it also couldn’t hurt to discretely ask friends and family members as they emerged to be sure. On those occasions when Marcus unavoidably found himself in Father MacDowell’s confessional, he whittled down his list to the bare minimum and saved his really bad sins for Father Mike when he next came to confession, because as he figured it, absolution from a kind priest was just as good as absolution from a mean one. He prayed, given the dark accumulation on his soul, that he wouldn’t get hit by a truck in the interim. The absolution that followed confession left Marcus with a sense of relief. He was grateful to be able to lay down the burden of his sins and start fresh. It was a pretty good deal.
Over time, Marcus’s mother’s zeal for religious expression waned. Whether it was tempered by the daunting requirements of raising her children with an alcoholic husband or found to be insufficient in helping her solve the problems she faced, Marcus never knew. Her attendance at Mass diminished and eventually stopped altogether. Marcus and his brother and sisters were still required to go and had to bring back a copy of the church bulletin as evidence of attendance. With due care for proper timing, they discovered that they could hang out at the nearby Deli and show up to retrieve a copy of the bulletin just as Mass was letting out. Eventually, their attendance too became sporadic.
As Marcus looked back on his religious foundation, he found little to help explain the “Why?” of his father’s alcoholism or the “Why?” of his anger and frustration. Mostly he wanted to know the “Why?” of being placed in these circumstances by a God who made us. And as Marcus moved through his young life, he took with him a quiet anger and a fervent wish that things could be better. He sought answers for his “Why?” questions through the tools he had at hand; books.
Although his daily routine seemed to change little from baseball, hanging around with friends and tinkering with cars, he began his search with the realization that he could not be the only one who asked these questions. So, he read, and he started first with the Bible because that seemed to be the place people went to for answers. He found it difficult at times, but he was determined and read every line on every page. When he finally finished, he was impressed with three things; turmoil, personal or otherwise had been around for a long time, the God of the Old Testament had anger issues and was much too prone to smote people or nations and the New Testament painted a picture of God as a loving and tolerant father. These characterizations were at odds with each other. He did not find the answers he sought there and continued his search.
Marcus discovered that books about different religious or philosophical beliefs carried similar messages and he loved the stretch that he experienced whenever he delved into a new thing; particularly those that were never talked about in school. The world as he knew it grew more fascinating, but the questions that nagged at him remained unanswered.
Chapter 5
A New School
Integrity is the essence of everything successful – R. Buckminster Fuller
As Marcus grew older and attended middle school, he became tougher and angrier and more ready to fight. Although he didn’t have Mike’s stature and knew he never would, he took pride in his mental toughness. Eventually, by the time he entered 8th grade, he became a disciplinary problem at school which required a sit-down meeting with the Vice-Principle.
During the discussions between his parents and the Vice Principal, he said nothing and was distant from the process. He noted when the Vice Principal’s voice moved into angry tones that his face also reddened and a vein was clearly visible along the length of his neck. At these times, he glanced at Marcus and scowled. Marcus had seen this kind of anger many times at home with his father and wasn’t particularly moved by it. For the most part, he looked out the window and watched the cars go by on the adjacent highway. He was given a 3-day suspension which he didn’t serve because he never returned to that school. By the middle of the week, his parents had enrolled him in St. Andrew’s Catholic School.
In many ways, Catholic school was a step backward for Marcus. There was no junior high school equivalent to what he attended in public school, and he entered a school configured with grades from 1 to 8. It seemed as though he had gone back to elementary school; students stayed in the same room all day instead of shifting to different classrooms, and every subject was taught by the same nun. The school didn’t have resources for science classes or language classes and for sport they focused on football to the detriment of all others. On arrival, he found that his reputation or more accurately, his brother’s reputation preceded him. He knew some of the kids from the neighborhood who attended the school and his departure from public school seemed already to be general knowledge.
His new classroom was unusually situated in the basement of the rectory – the school building itself was full, and this area served as overflow classroom space. No bathrooms were available in the basement so twice each day, morning and afternoon, the entire class made a foray across the parking lot to the primary school building to use the bathrooms. The desks in the classroom seemed to have dated back to the previous century in style if not construction. Individual bench seats were attached to the back of the desk behind, and these bench and desk couplets were affixed in a row to wooden rails by scrolled wrought iron legs. They reminded Marcus of a very long sled. The desktops themselves opened up on a hinge to access the storage space within,
and a hole for an inkwell and a trough for a pencil were common features for each. The carvings and graffiti on the desktops provided the only distinguishing characteristics among them.
It was apparent that the elderly nun who taught all of the subjects in the class had low expectations for Marcus because everyone knew that public school kids were far behind the Catholic school kids academically. Although his handwriting wasn’t up to par and sentence diagramming wasn’t a strong suit, he was no slouch with math and science and had no difficulty keeping up. Like most in public school, he assumed that Catholic schools were where the good kids went. It seemed his parents held the same belief when they transferred him to St Andrew’s. However, he was immediately confronted with circumstances that challenged that belief.
Elderly Sister Margaret was rapidly approaching the end of her teaching career. It was likely that she had postponed an active retirement to take this class of eighth-grade boys during a peak enrollment year. Sister Margaret was not vigilant at all times during the school day and was prone to taking impromptu naps when the class was hard at work on an assignment. This was also true when students took their weekly tests. During the first test of his first week at St Andrew’s, Marcus noted that Sister Margaret stayed at her desk in front of the class and unsuccessfully fought off drowsiness that crept up whenever the classroom grew quiet. After furtive glances to the front, several small folded crib sheets appeared on some students’ desks from shirt pockets and various creative and secretive locations. Marcus was amazed at how open and matter-of-fact the cheating was. The notes that one particular boy used appeared to be comprehensive, well organized and highlighted extensively. The page that Marcus could glimpse from a distance was written in lettering so small and condensed that it had the look of Celtic runes.
To Marcus, Sister Margaret could have been someone’s grandmother only dressed up in a nun’s habit complete with those square heeled old lady shoes that every grandmother seemed to wear. Younger sisters wore them too, so he thought that there must have been some kind of shoe regulation for nuns. Her teaching instruction was committed to memory many years before and was permanently cast in a prior decade seemingly never to be nuanced by current events. In the short time Marcus had been in the school, he already had a difficult time staying awake.
Given the peripheral location of their basement classroom and the full capacity of the primary school building, this class ate their lunch at their desks. During lunchtime, one kid was designated to go over to the main school building and bring back cartons of milk for those who ordered it. Milk money was due weekly. This practice however sanctioned the importation of an untold number of weapons into the classroom; straws and paper wads constructed of their wrappers. Spitballing had been around for as long as anyone could remember. It probably had its origin in more primitive times when the skill was necessary to kill prey with a poison dart, but in more recent times adapted to educational use.
Marcus had never witnessed anything of this magnitude. One day after lunch during his second week in the new school, Sister Margaret woke from an impromptu nap at her desk, turned with chalk in hand and outstretched her arm to the board. On cue, a blizzard of spitballs coursed through the air and peppered the blackboard, despoiling the beautifully written chalk script for the next lesson. Errant spitballs from lesser skilled marksmen bounced off the back of her habit, some lodged into creases and folds of the fabric. She turned to face the class with a look of astonishment that quickly turned to hurt and humiliation when she witnessed the repressed smirks throughout the classroom. After a few angry and tearful words, she left the classroom never to return. A quiet pall descended over the class. Marcus felt sorry for her and didn’t care at all for the way that some of the kids took advantage of this tired old nun. Retribution would be a bitch. The inquisition was soon to begin.
Father Conner appeared in the doorway of the classroom. His arrival was announced long before by twenty-five sets of eyes that followed his footsteps on the floor above and down the stairway behind the classroom door. His anger and disappointment were clearly visible, but he didn’t rant or rave. With a stern tone, he instructed the boys to remain in their seats in absolute silence and left the room. They began to sweat as time wore on and every now and then nervous laughter and mumbling could be heard around the room as the boys anticipated what was to come.
Sister Mary Louise entered the room in a rush, slammed the door and glanced at the blackboard, which was still bespeckled with evidence of the crime. She unleashed a verbal fury. She was, Marcus noticed, a younger nun perhaps in her early thirties; although he had a difficult time guessing the ages of sisters who were always dressed in habits. He noticed the reaction of the boys to her arrival; clearly, they feared her. They had heard much about her from their classmates across the parking lot. She wasn’t very tall, but she moved confidently, often on the balls of her feet and seemed to have avoided the nun shoe regulation. He didn’t feel comfortable about this at all. At the end of the verbal tirade, she got down to business. “Who did this?” she asked with a steel voice as she pointed to the blackboard.
Although there were many culprits, only one hand rose in the middle of the room. Timothy, a small kid with glasses, seemed an unlikely perpetrator. Marcus noticed earlier that he wasn’t part of the usual crowd and was often picked on by other kids. Sister motioned him towards the door and turned as they left the room to glare at the class before quietly shutting the door. Silence descended on the classroom again.
Sighs of relief rose up through the class; a sacrificial lamb had been received, and there was noticeably less tension. Marcus didn’t share that optimism. There were far too many spitballs still stuck to the blackboard to attribute to one person, and Sister Mary Louise gave the blackboard a good look when she entered the room. “No, this wasn’t over yet for sure,” he said to himself. Although Marcus had chosen not to participate in the spitball barrage, he was wary about getting caught up in the aftermath and waited quietly for the next shoe to drop. It was not a long wait.
Timothy came back into the room holding his glasses in his hand, sobbing as he made his way back to his desk. Sister followed closely behind, paused at the front of the classroom and called out a name; “Kevin Fowler.” From the back of the room, a hand was weakly raised. With a crook of her finger, she summoned him, turned and passed out of the classroom again to the anteroom beyond. Kevin got up slowly from his desk and shuffled after her. Every eye was on him as each boy in the class put himself in Kevin’s place and desperately considered options. Although they would later learn that when faced with a threat, the human animal like most others, considers fight or flight, neither was an option. Clearly, this woman had God on her side, and neither fight nor flight was a possibility. No, their individual and collective thoughts turned to consider how severe the beating would be. As Kevin closed the door behind him and muffled sounds of a raised and wrathful voice were heard, a few whimpers came from the back of the room, and all grew quiet again only occasionally broken by a sob from Timothy. Kevin returned to the room with a reddened and tear-streaked face and the process repeated one by one.
For those who had not yet had a session with Sister, all of their attention turned to the clock above the blackboard, and as young Catholic boys are trained to do, they prayed. They prayed time would fly, the hands of the clock would move faster and the end of the school day would come swiftly to end the terror they constructed in the quiet intervals between the sobbing return of their classmates. At long last, the sounds of school buses were heard as they arrived at the school and cued in the drive to await their passengers. Sister came back into the silent room, red-faced herself, partly from anger and partly from physical exertion. She berated the class until the bell was heard from the adjacent school building. Although there were many preparatory twitches, no one rose to leave. She held them with her gaze for a final moment and bade them go.
Without a word, boys left the classroom and w
alked up the basement steps to the sunlit courtyard above.
Chapter 6
A New Teacher
Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway. -John Wayne
There was a lot of chatter in the classroom the following morning as each boy relived the previous day and those who were saved from interrogation sought details about the experiences with Sister. There was a lot of guesswork about who their teacher would be. Some held the opinion that Sister Margaret would return, while others thought a new teacher would probably take over the class. Few were prepared for Sister Mary Louise when she walked into the classroom with a stack of books and folders under her arm. “Oh my God,” they thought to themselves, “She’s got our class!” Although she addressed the class sternly, it was without the fury of the previous day, and she took over the lessons at the point of interruption and moved on. As she taught, Marcus noticed that she probed a lot to get her own sense of each student and seemed to be less impressed with rote responses. The class and Marcus settled into a new rhythm.
Although Marcus knew a few kids in the class, he was a stranger to most and as with all newcomers; he was tested and prodded by his classmates. For the most part, Marcus felt distant from them, not merely because of the cultural differences that existed between public and parochial school kids, but mainly due to his need to deal with adult issues arising from family circumstances. He felt that most of the boys in the class were childish and did childish things. This “distance” became something he sought – it provided an opportunity to observe, learn, and explore his own private answers. The limited interaction with classmates and tendency to retreat into his own thoughts presented a quiet demeanor that some mistook for shyness. Eventually, attempts would be made to cross this cultivated distance, and they would not all be pleasant.
