In Due Season E-Book

Paul Wilkes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 599

Beschreibung

Paul Wilkes has been a writer/journalist, a TV producer, a monastic, a hedonist, a friend of the famous, a family man, and ultimately a true prodigal son. With In Due Season, Wilkes, one of America's most respected writers on religious belief and spirituality, details his search for God--from his working class upbringing in Cleveland to giving up everything he owned and living with the poor to his hedonistic life among the rich and famous. Wilkes's inspiring life story is one of abysmal failure and ultimate triumph, of a faith in God, battered and tried in the crucible of his experience.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Books by Paul Wilkes

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Introduction

PART ONE - FORMATION

Chapter 1 - THE SEVENTH CHILD

Chapter 2 - A VISION

Chapter 3 - HIGH SCHOOLThe Man in the Ten-Way Suit

Chapter 4 - COMING HOME, LEAVING HOME

Chapter 5 - COLLEGE Red Arrow Park

Chapter 6 - AT SEA

Chapter 7 - ONE HOT DAY . . . AND NIGHT

PART TWO - MAKING IT

Chapter 8 - A YOUNG REPORTER

Chapter 9 - THE BIG TIME, MORE OR LESS

Chapter 10 - HOME, AGAIN

Chapter 11 - ON THE STREETS

PART THREE - UNMAKING IT

Chapter 12 - CHIPS DAYS

Chapter 13 - PRESENT

Chapter 14 - THE PILGRIMAGE

Chapter 15 - NOT PRESENT

Chapter 16 - THE SOFA

Chapter 17 - 80 WINTHROP

Chapter 18 - THE SCENT OF A WOMAN

PART FOUR - AS GOOD ASIT GETS?

Chapter 19 - ON THE PLAYING FIELDS OF THE HAMPTONS

Chapter 20 - THE PERFECT GIRL FOR YOU

Chapter 21 - TRACY

PART FIVE - GETTING BEARINGS

Chapter 22 - THE HERMIT

Chapter 23 - ALMOST

Chapter 24 - A PLACE TO PARK

Chapter 25 - FATHER GREER

PART SIX - LIFE, LIVED

Chapter 26 - THE WRITING LIFE

Chapter 27 - A MONK, AT LAST

Chapter 28 - WHY? WHY NOT?

PART SEVEN - RETURNING

Chapter 29 - KOLINOVCE

Chapter 30 - WORTHY OR NOT

Chapter 31 - RETURN TO ST. PETER’S

Chapter 32 - A LIGHT IN THE WINDOW

Photo Insert

Acknowledgements

THE AUTHOR

Join Paul Wilkes in Helping Orphan Girls of India

More Praise forIn Due Season

“Paul Wilkes’s In Due Season takes the reader on a moving journey through an extraordinary era’s thickets of American Catholic life and belief—opening at last into wisdom, affirmation, and hope.”

—James Carroll, author, Practicing Catholic and An American Requiem, winner of the National Book Award.

“Paul Wilkes is a rare creature: someone who writes about religion in a way that’s both insightful and riveting. He combines personal experience with reportage and canny analysis like few others.”

—Steven Waldman, editor-in-chief, Beliefnet.com

“In Due Season is Paul Wilkes’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Profoundly influenced by Thomas Merton, Wilkes is uniquely himself in these pages, honest and brave in his search for God.”

—Brother Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O., was Thomas Merton’s last secretary and continues to edit Merton’s writings and serve as General Editor of the Monastic Wisdom Series of Cistercian Publications

“In Due Season is ripe and ready for picking. St. Augustine is all smiles with this confessional autobiography of decadence and redemption set in the parched haunts of East Coast literati.”

—Donald Cozzens, author, Faith That Dares to Speak

Books by Paul Wilkes

Nonfiction

Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life

The Seven Secrets of Successful Catholics

The Good Enough Catholic: A Guide for the Perplexed

And They Shall Be My People: An American Rabbi and His Congregation

The Education of an Archbishop

In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest Merton: By Those Who Knew Him Best

Companions Along the Way

Six American Families

These Priests Stay

Trying Out the Dream: A Year in the Life of an American Family

Fiction

Temptations

For Children

Fitzgo, the Wild Dog of Central Park My Book of Bedtime Prayers

Lilly Endowment Grant

Best Practices from America’s Best Churches

Excellent Catholic Parishes: The Guide to Best Places and Practices

Excellent Protestant Congregations: The Guide to Best Places and Practices

Copyright © 2009 by Paul Wilkes. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

Love The One You’re With. Words and Music by Stephen Stills. Copyright © 1970 Gold Hill Music, Inc. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax [phone].

Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Wilkes, Paul, date.

In due season : a Catholic life / Paul Wilkes. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-470-44378-1

1. Wilkes, Paul, date 2. Catholics—United States—Biography. I. Title. BX4705.W55748A.092—dc22

[B]

[B] 2008050162

HB Printing

For Tracy

In All Seasons

. . . so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.

—Acts 17:27

And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season.

—Psalm 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is one man’s story, of a life that has seen its share of dark days and those filled with light. It is a life shared with many people, through the good times and the not so good, and as I write about those people, these are but snapshots, taken from my angle, at that time, in that place. To retell the story of my life, I used letters, photos, journal entries, interviews, and other research, in addition to calling on my own memory. I have attempted to reconstruct events and conversations as accurately as possible and to the best of my memory. If I have made any mistakes, in fact, tone, or context, they are unintentional. In a very few cases, where it was appropriate, names and identities have been changed. All else in the book is fact—at least as best I could recall and relate it.

INTRODUCTION

I have spent much of my adult life watching people, asking them questions, and eventually writing about what I observed and heard. Some were famous people, others unknown. Each had a story to tell, as everyone does, given the opportunity.

In my writing life, it was not long before I came to the conclusion that there are but few truly extraordinary people. Most of us are ordinary. Yet we, the ordinary, are placed in the extraordinary circumstances of our lives; how we respond is unpredictable, and what we eventually become, endlessly fascinating. Our story is certainly our own, but universal in so many ways. “The human condition” is what this is often called, for lack of a neater category.

I am one of those ordinary people.

As I look back over the first part of my life, I realize that this ordinary man has lived in extraordinary times and has been shaped by extraordinary events and people. Recollecting and reassembling the various shards, scraps, and fragments of my life, I find that some of the most horrific moments were gateways to grace. Some of the potentially holiest were mere tin idols. I have changed dramatically, and I have remained the same person I was from childhood. It is so for all of us.

Woven through the events and years that I write about is a search for God. I hope that doesn’t sound presumptuous, but trying to understand who God is and what he might want has occupied me from a very young age. I had a rich religious upbringing, but beyond that, it just seemed to make sense. After all, why was I alive, but to aspire to come close to him, please him, understand him? If I am made in his image, I must be destined to be something like him--impossible as that might sound.

But, as most of us have found, God does not speak to us directly, giving us specific instructions on what to do with our lives. Rather he speaks to us through people we meet, places we are in, the decisions with which we are confronted. At least that has been my experience.

I think that most of you will nod and see a part of yourself at some point on the bumpy, twisting path that is my life. Not that my life is at all exemplary; it is not. But what I have tried to do here is to be as honest as I could in its telling. When people asked me what I was working on, I said, “the story of my days on this planet,” not wanting to call it an autobiography—that sounded much too grand for such an ordinary life—or a memoir, which sounded far too self-conscious. So let it be what it is: a story, a true story, about an ordinary man’s search for God and for life’s meaning.

PART ONE

FORMATION

1

THE SEVENTH CHILD

ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1938, while ADOLPH hitler, with a fiery speech to the Party Congress in a vast hall in Nuremberg, was giving birth to his dream of National Socialism, Margaret Wilkes, already the mother of six, was stoically gritting her teeth in a cramped hospital delivery room at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. She was laboring to bear her seventh child, hardly, for her, a dream. Of course, the two events had no linkage, nor were they in any sense of equal importance.

Only that I was the child born on that fateful day.

Margaret had passed between the tall, elegant pillars of St. Luke’s entrance and presented herself to the admissions desk at about 10:30 Pm the night before. This in itself was extraordinary; she had never been in a hospital before. All her other children had been delivered at home by good Dr. Brown, by the light of a kerosene lamp, in a humble house in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, where the family had lived until recently. When Margaret learned that she would be required to pay the customary daily rate of $1.29 for the remains of that day—such were the inflexible rules for mothers on welfare, which, embarrassingly enough, she was at the time—she took her small canvas bag and returned to the waiting room. Every penny counted, especially with this new baby coming. She sat quietly and alone, watching the clock, trying not to call attention to herself as the contractions increased in rapidity and strength. At midnight, she once again presented herself at the admissions desk and was immediately whisked into the brightly lit delivery room.

She had awoken with a start shortly after going to bed that night. The pains low in her belly were both familiar and rhythmic. She whispered to her husband, Paul, “It’s time.” He rose sleepily from the bed, but she told him that no, he did not have to go with her. Although Paul was still among the some 3.3 million men then formally unemployed, his work at forty cents an hour with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided at least some semblance of dignity and served as the gateway for collecting free food and clothing for his family at the local center up on Buckeye Road. His work as a WPA carpenter required him to be on the job promptly at seven the next morning. Margaret took her small bag, packed with clean underwear, her best flannel nightgown, toothbrush, and a small jar of salt and baking soda—her dentifrice of choice and necessity—and walked the two miles to the hospital.

My mother, Margaret, then thirty-eight years old, was a stocky, compact woman of about five foot two. She had the square, solid shoulders of the Slovak peasant stock from which she was descended, reddish, rough hands from washing the family’s clothes on a scrubbing board with homemade soap. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick. She was not a woman prone to smiling; her milky blue eyes seemed to hold only the assurance of the inevitable as the birth drew near.

This pregnancy, somehow negotiated in the windowless attic of her mother-in-law’s tiny house on East 111th Street in the company of the other six children, was hardly looked upon as a fortunate occurrence. Having to live in an attic, treated no better than dusty trunks and out-of-season clothes, crowded together with her children, who slept crossways, three to a sagging bed, was bad enough. But it was better than being homeless, which had been a distinct possibility when the family, penniless and in a borrowed Model T Ford, were forced to leave a house in Pennsylvania that had been built by her husband but reclaimed by the state for taxes owed.

In fact, this pregnancy could not have come at a worse time. Her husband had almost saved the $100 required to join Local 11 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. Soon, Margaret had already carefully planned, they would be off “the dole” and would no longer have to borrow the neighbor’s rusty wagon to bring home the bug-infested bags of wheat and the uniformly green dresses and brown shoes that placed the Wilkes girls, then 14, 12, 10, and 4, on the truly needy side of the thin line dividing simple Depression-era want from poverty.

Paul and Margaret’s relatives were scandalized by Paul’s seemingly gluttonous sexual insistence and her impractical fecundity. When Margaret told her sister Rose—who was then living in her own shame back in Pennsylvania with a young son born out of wedlock—Rose’s eyes widened. “Take something strong,” she advised, as if the child should be flushed away with some strong chemical, like those used to clear clogged drains. But Margaret would have none of the abortifacients then available from the hollow-eyed gypsy women who lived in shacks bordering the trolley car barns down on Woodhill Road. “God will provide,” she bravely said, even as she wondered how she and her husband could feed still another mouth.

The birth, some eight hours later, was uneventful. And when her husband arrived after work that day, he found a seven-pound boy sleeping peacefully in his wife’s arms.

Unlike his wife, Paul had no trouble smiling. His wool cap cocked at a jaunty angle, the faint whiff of bottom-shelf whiskey and draft beer on his breath, a faint brown dribble of Havana Blossom chewing tobacco at the corner of his mouth, Paul Wilkes Sr. seemed to view the world at once bemusedly and benignly. Everything would work out. It was this attitude that drove his wife mad. No, everything would not necessarily work out. Right now, nothing was right. And besides, if she couldn’t afford lipstick, he shouldn’t afford a double shot of Corby’s and a bottle of Erin Brew. For Margaret, disaster awaited the unwary. For Paul, life unfolded as it would, so what was there to worry about?

Deep in the Great Depression, Paul and Margaret Wilkes could hardly have known that even more catastrophic world events were afoot. The armies of the furious man in Nuremberg were poised to swallow up their first bites of Europe, eventually including the Slovak land from which their own parents had escaped over forty years before. It was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which would have been news to them. They did not even know the village their parents had come from, only that wherever it was, there was not enough of its poor soil to be divided once again among family members. Rather than starve, they had come to the place they called Amerike.

Survival had been the focus for the Vlk, as they were called before the name was Americanized, and the Salanskys, Margaret’s people. For that was all that they knew, serfs that they were, trying as best they could to live under feudal kings and princes, greedy landowners in their native land, and then under capricious mine owners in their new homeland. Now they owed allegiance to a more benevolent leader, far distant from their daily lives—Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At least he had kept them from starving.

But it would be wrong to sum up their lives—and their humble heritage up to this point—only in terms of possessions or status. For there was a side to their lives that transcended the vagaries of this earth. There may have been no widely known Slovak kings or books or inventors or artists—such as the French or British or German or Italian or Irish immigrants could claim. But Paul and Margaret Wilkes were members of the most important royal family the world had ever known, something that no depth of poverty could erase. They were Catholic—and their new son would be soon baptized into this one true faith. Others might succeed in this world, but they were sure they would prevail in the next. Their Catholic Church in America was itself a magnificent, sprawling, and unified empire. While non-Catholic America still regarded their growth warily, working-class Catholics built schools and churches in great number. Devotions to the Blessed Mother were sung and uttered by churches full of the faithful, nuns wore distinctive garb, priests were never seen in public without a Roman collar. On the altar, the Mass was intoned in an unchanging Latin. Little had changed since the Council of Trent, the sixteenth-century response to Luther’s heresies.

When asked what name should be written on the birth certificate of this, the latest member, Paul and Margaret looked at one another. They already had a Thomas and an Edward. The girls were Pauline, Marian, Francis, and Margaret. Without much further discussion, they simply named the child Paul, with no middle name, after his father.

And so my life began.

Before bedtime, my six sisters and brothers and I would kneel, in order, oldest to youngest, before my mother at the edge of our breakfast nook table to say our nightly prayers. It was here that my early relationship—as narrow and perhaps misguided as it then was—with God began. My father had covered the table’s worn, wooden, cracked surface with yellow Formica, the newest modern rage, and we secretly imagined that its use surely marked us as true Americans. But of course, in almost every way, our outward lives were, like that Formica, very much a veneer on a much thicker piece of American life, of which we knew very little.

There were benches on either side of the table, and my mother, droopyeyed from her work as a housekeeper up in Shaker Heights for the Chadwick family—they, the wealthy makers of the Chadwick automobile that had faded into history, but whose money remained quite plentiful and readily accessible—as well as from all the washing, cooking, baking, sewing, and mending that a large family required, would sit there to hear our various cries to heaven. My brothers and sisters knelt on the glistening linoleum floor, scrubbed bare and polished each Saturday afternoon. This was an accepted portion of self-inflicted pain, penance for sins; after all, prayer was magnified in direct proportion to the time spent and pain endured. God surely listened better if you were at least uncomfortable, preferably in agony. I, however, knelt on a grate that brought heat from our coal furnace into the kitchen. Such a penitential act in one so young might be misunderstood by those who were not members of an immigrant Catholic family in the 1940s. But ours was a Church that believed in the purifying effects of suffering. Our pope, Pius XII, already looked like a cadaver. Our churches were populated with statues that did not shy away from depicting glistening blood, gaping wounds, and pain-filled, mournful, heaven-cast eyes.

The grate’s checkered pattern of forged steel offered me the opportunity to come close to God in the surest way I then knew—through suffering. For this was a distant God, large and all-enveloping, whose Son I saw hanging from the cross at the front of our church. His followers readily suffered. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. . . . Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed . . .” As the prayers I had been learning from the Notre Dame sisters at St. Benedict’s grade school passed my lips, my mind was often elsewhere, with the martyrs of my faith. In a courtyard next to St. Sebastian, my hands behind my back, just like his; arrows piercing my chest, just like his. By a river’s edge with Jesuit missionaries, a wild-eyed Iroquois ripping out my fingernails with his teeth. In a Roman amphitheatre among my young, brave friends, with lions tearing at our flesh as we calmly said our Hail Marys together. In an Italian village like eleven-year-old Maria Goretti, protecting my virginity—whatever that was—from some brutish thug.

Catholicism of this time is so easy to parody, but to a child like me it made perfect mythic sense. Especially when so much of the world was out of reach. Here was a sure path to greatness, open to the modest of birth and sinew, open to those brave enough to trudge step-by-step in the footprints of the ages. This temporal world was passing; what else was there to do but pile up treasure in heaven? Each painful moment on that grate mattered and counted. It was a simple world, with ironclad, nonnegotiable rules and guarantees. What else to aspire to, except sainthood?

On the Formica-like surface of my life, I was an overly talkative, distracted, and often disobedient child. Actually, there was nothing more I wanted than to be a saint. As I knelt on that grate, the numbing sensations radiating up my legs and into my hips were at once excruciating painful and wonderfully comforting. I was on the path to becoming that saint. No one knew that, but I was. What were a few piddling years of difficulty when compared to an eternity of divine pleasure? As I look back on those days, there is no anger, only affection. There was a simplicity and honesty about such an approach to God.

In parishes like mine, St. Benedict’s, priests provided one of the few comforts of this alien land by speaking the native Slovak tongue for the half million who had immigrated around the turn of the century. In crowded parish school classrooms we were kept apart from non-Catholic influences so that we might preserve our faith, under assault by a Protestant-dominated American culture. For we were a perfect society, the Church complete in itself, neither having nor needing nor seeking much of a relationship to the world. The Baltimore Catechism answered any question we might have, let us know exactly where we stood with God, when we were going astray, and how far. We were taught to “mortify” our senses, avoid temptation or even the “near occasion” of sin. It was incomprehensible that if we would marry—a state decidedly inferior to becoming a nun or priest, which only the holiest among us aspired to—we would not marry anyone other than another Catholic, preferably a Slovak one.

Although I was a member of this huge family, I always had the sense of being alone in the world. Perhaps I felt this way because my older siblings and parents seemed “the family” and then there was me, separated by four years and a chasm that only widened with time. It was not that I was unloved or uncared for. The one picture of me from my early years—taken by a professional at Woolworth’s Five and Dime up on Buckeye Road—shows luxuriant, chin-length curls, held neatly back by a barrette, framing a chubby, smiling face. An obviously indulged, slightly petulant . . . little girl. Was it that my mother knew that girls were more malleable and hoped to reprogram my maleness as much or for as long as she could? Or had she already sensed in me—as mothers can do just by the tone of a child’s cry or the way a breast is taken or the position while sleeping—that I would not be a cooperative crew member on this fragile family bark sailing stormy and uncharted American waters?

Because my siblings were older and my parents were working, I was something of a feral creature, raising myself, cautiously ranging out into the neighborhood that surrounded our one-and-a-half-story shingled house at 11412 Forest Avenue. I would follow the horse-drawn wagon with a man calling out “Paperricks, paperricks” (which only much later I would decode as a Yiddish plea for scrap “paper” and “rags”) as it rattled over Forest Avenue’s red bricks. I peered at women in babushkas as they hurried back from the crossroads of 116th and Buckeye Road, having stopped at fruit and vegetable markets, the butcher shop, the bakery, each its own province. Ours was more a medieval village than the result of modern city planning. The men were plumbers and lathe operators, electricians, tin smiths, masons; each of their homes could have just as easily had a guild crest out in front. They were hard-working men, blessed with the dignity of a job after the scourge of the Depression. Cleveland’s mills and factories were happy to have them, an intact, stable workforce, willing to toil in whatever conditions they found so that they could provide for their large families.

Any house that I went into had clean floors, an icebox with drip pan beneath, a garden in the rear, an older-model car in the driveway, and usually the familiar smell of cabbage, onion, or bread. Jews, blacks? At the time, I didn’t even know the Hungarians, who lived in St. Margaret’s, a neighboring parish and autonomous fiefdom not much further away than our own St. Benedict’s, but in the opposite direction, across 116th Street.

Our house, with its two downstairs bedrooms, a dining room used only on holidays, and a living room not used at all, had a largely unfinished attic into which my father crafted two more bedrooms to provide more room for the seven of us and my mother’s mother, Anna Salansky, who had come to live with us after her husband died. A full basement contained the furnace; a huge coal bin; and a small, two-burner stove on which my mother heated washing water, boiled the white clothes in huge copper tubs, and rendered homemade soap. There was a loom, where clothing and sheets past patching or mending commingled, to be reincarnated as colorful rag rugs. Clotheslines ran the length of the basement, for drying clothes throughout the long Cleveland winter. A cool fruit cellar held jars of tomatoes, plums, peppers, and pickles my mother had preserved. There was a single bathroom with the luxury of store-bought Ivory soap for our weekly bath. The payments were $41 a month, and with my father and mother working and my older brothers and sisters selling newspapers, clerking, or working at the parish house, the idea was to “double up” on the payment so that the house would soon be ours. No one wanted to relive the horror of those years in the in-laws’ dusty attic just a few blocks away. My father would have done anything never to have to repeat the humiliation of facing that perspiring, smooth-skinned man in the rumpled suit who, one hot day in 1936, told him that a bank and not Paul Wilkes now owned the house he and his children were illegally occupying. Each day as he mounted the steps to our tiny porch, my father hesitated before opening the back door. It was a sign of reverence. And thanksgiving.

My mother and father’s mentality was a post-Depression ode to scarcity interwoven with the reality of a country at war. The tissue-thin foil wrapping from the occasional stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum was carefully separated from its inner layer and annealed onto an ever-expanding ball in the pantry. No length of string was ever thrown away, no can not flattened, no glass jar ever discarded—for everything there was another season, another use. The war effort was really no effort at all for families like mine. Waste was unheard of, sinful in fact. Food was precious, a gift from the God who both provided and demanded careful accounting of its proper use. Even the cornmeal mush with browned butter that was our standard Friday night dinner was treasured down to the last congealed dollop. During the war, my mother always had extra ration stamps to give to other families. We would not consume more than our fair share. We would walk lightly on this earth, barely leaving a footprint. There was an ominous, unspoken sense that our life hung by a thread and that any false move could be disastrous.

And yet to walk as a visitor through the back door on Forest Avenue, onto the scrubbed, waxed linoleum, was to be treated royally. Whatever food that was already prepared was yours, and if a serving bowl was emptied, it was an embarrassment, for you may have wanted a bit more. Our humble icebox became a cornucopia of delights, our stove forever burning bright. Stuffed cabbage, chicken soup with my mother’s homemade noodles, perogi, garlic sausage, huge loaves of Martinovic’s Bakery rye bread with caraway seeds. If family members knew not to ask for another slice of bread or not to tarry during mealtime lest that errant piece of meatloaf or pork chop be snapped up by someone else, ours was a house in which the visitor never felt any want.

Strangely enough, I never felt poor—there always was enough to go around, enough for anyone who would walk through our doors. Even a pathetic pots-and-pans salesman would get a sale if he looked as though he needed it.

Those who came to our house were neighbors and relatives mostly. Sit, have a “biffer,” as my father called it—the boilermaker, the Slovak’s cocktail, aphrodisiac, anesthetic. Corby’s was the whiskey, preferably a double shot. P.O.C. (Pride of Cleveland) or Erin Brew was the beer, and that was the order in which you drank, the whiskey warm and the beer at the temperature of our fruit cellar in the basement, the icebox considered far too aggressively chilly for something as savory as this.

The men’s talk—which I listened to as I took their empty glasses away with the drop or two remaining as my reward—was of hard work, unfair bosses, and low pay. The shots and beers made the men stronger and wiser on those Sundays, which began with Mass and ended, by early afternoon, in an alcoholic haze. But instead of planning the revolution that would free them from these bonds, taking on roles in their unions or otherwise plotting a way out of the indentured servitude their own grandfathers knew firsthand, they inevitably turned on themselves. After all, what were they but “dumb hunkies.” Somehow, they deserved it.

They were living in a land of supposed unbounded possibility, and although being an American was a point of enormous pride, it was far too large a concept to have much of an impact on their lives. Voting was an almost arrogant act. Accomplishment was a cursed word; to be a foreman or supervisor was to take a lesser—not greater—place in the world, one of privilege and not dignified by labor. It was unholy, a form of prostitution of a man’s most sacred parts—his back, his hands. To think of higher education as a road out was not even considered. Keep your head down; don’t ask for or, worse yet, expect too much.

My father never talked about religion or politics or world events, or made grand pronouncements, even deep into a Sunday’s drinking with family or friends. But every so often, sometimes spurred by my laziness—the windows I was supposed to paint, porch glider assemble, grass cut—he would say, obliquely, yet with great seriousness, as if he were imparting the very essence of his being, “When a man pays you for eight hours’ work, you give him nine.” For him it was a sacred oath. Only later in life would I realize it was little different from the scriptural admonishment to walk an extra mile if asked for only one. Work, even unrequited and unrewarded hard work, not only had dignity; it was the source of holiness. This way of facing the world was always within one’s control, even when little else was. And so it was that Catholicism, combined with the suffering of a long-oppressed people, contained the perfect construct for us. Suffering was true nobility, and certainly within our grasp.

Whereas my mother and father may have agonized over their country’s survival and their own, for a young boy like me, the war effort was more of a great adventure. I could pray fervently for the safety of our troops, and wish the agonizing death of Zero pilots and Panzer tank crews. As I memorized the Our Father and Hail Mary, I memorized the names and numbers of our airplanes and can recite them to this day: P-51 Mustang, P-48 Flying Tiger, B-24 Liberator. Jackie Kerner and I took turns with the one plastic .45 pistol and single helmet we had between us, climbing trees and jumping off low garages, killing and being killed, alternately Tojo and GI Joe. In our front window, next to the sign that told Johnny, the ice deliveryman, to leave 25, 50, 75, or 100 pounds of ice (depending on the season), was a single blue star representing my brother Tom, who was in the Navy. Other houses had two and three blue stars. A few had a gold star. When we passed, we knew to make the sign of the cross.

Although America was involved in this war, and such places as Europe and Japan actually must have existed, it was the squarish red brick building of St. Benedict’s four blocks away on the corner of Lamontier and East Boulevard that was truly the focal point of our lives. From an early age, I understood that God was the proper center of our lives, all life, in good times and bad. If you asked Cleveland ethnics where they lived, it was always their parish, not their street address, they gave. St. Benedict’s was administered by Benedictine monks, every one of them a Slovak and—so it was hoped—role models for us, this cowlicked horde of boys at the parish grade school. There, class by class, we lined up for daily Mass, with a Notre Dame sister in her distinctive horseshoe-shaped headpiece to synchronize our choreographed genuflections with a clicker folded into her smooth hand.

Some of those nuns were no more than children themselves, having ardently joined directly from grade school and, because of the burgeoning numbers of children in Catholic schools, quickly returned to the classroom after but a year or two of college. Nonetheless, they were superb teachers in their fifty-student classrooms, explaining how letters were formed; sentences diagrammed; numbers added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided. How little I knew of their secret, quiet life, shoehorned as they were, fifteen of them, into a tiny convent adjoining the school. They were so restrained, so regimented. They never perspired, even on the hottest day. Their skin was a uniform pale color. They would wipe a table, tuck their handkerchief into their billowing sleeve, enter a room, or sit down in precisely the same way. Their novitiate was a holy uniformity, instilling in them a mentality of seeking perfection, being part of something far bigger than themselves. The best girls from each eighth-grade class would be honored when they were asked to follow in these soft footsteps.

Our four priests presided as lords of the Slovak manor, still at the time when the parish priest was educated far better than anyone in the flock and his authority was unquestioned. Empty liquor cases (not cheap Corby’s, to be sure) on their back porch (built by my father, who was rewarded with two holy pictures for his work) told of a far different life than that of the sisters. On those rare occasions when I went to the priests’ spacious house with my mother to obtain oplatki, the Christmas wafer, and give our offering, it smelled of cigar smoke. Our pastor, Father Leo, was not a man to smile, and his priests took the cue that a stern face and stern penances in the confessional booth were needed to keep these uneducated masses in check.

The best boys from each eighth-grade class were encouraged to be priests, the highest calling. Not me. My report cards read a steady stream of A’s and B’s in academic subjects and consistent D’s in “cooperation,” “dependability,” “industriousness,” and that seminal virtue of virtues, “guidance of action by reason.” “I am very disappointed in Paul’s work and in his attitude. He makes no effort to improve” were the damning words on the bottom of one report card.

Each morning in our parish church, a place suffused with an otherworldly ochre light, the holy smell of incense and burning beeswax candles enveloping us, I peered up to a priest (certainly not the likes of us!) reverently facing the altar, his stiff fiddleback chasuble properly keeping us from the mysteries that he alone could negotiate. He whispered in Latin to a God that surely was not the same God to whom I directed my prayers each night. I wanted to know this other God, this bigger, grander God, but for now I had to settle for my own. My God was a smaller God, gimlet-eyed, scrutinizing my every move.

“Please help me to sit still.”

“Please don’t let Jeanette Smolko write my name on the board when sister leaves.”

“Please forgive me for kissing my cousin Nancy when we hid in that pile of coats on the bed last Thanksgiving.”

“Give me something great to die for. Please!”

Our hymns were sung in the divine Latin, the Slovak of our native villages, and the English of America.

Stabat mater dolorosa

iuxta Crucem lacrimosa,

dum pendebat Filius.

S’nami Boh, s’nami Boh!

Razumejte jazyci

I pokarjajtesja, i pokarjajtesja

Jako s’nami Boh,

Jako s’nami Boh

Holy God, we praise thy name;

Lord of all, we bow before Thee.

All on earth thy scepter claim,

All in heav’n above adore Thee.

Infinite, thy vast domain,

Everlasting is thy reign;

Infinite, thy vast domain,

Everlasting is thy reign.

There were novenas, stations of the cross, Christmas pageants as we moved through the mandala of the church year. There was but a narrow gate to heaven. Because of our many hours of prayer and ritual each week, we would be granted entrance, while the weak-willed so-called Christians—what a sadly anemic word, I thought—and especially those stiff-necked Jews, would be turned aside to burn forever.

“Let us pray for heretics and schismatics . . . to call them back to our holy Mother the Catholic and Apostolic Church. . . . Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord our God tear the veil from their hearts. . . . Let us pray also for the pagans . . . May they give up their idols and be converted.”

2

A VISION

It WAS A TORRID, HUMID, AGUST DAY IN 1945 when my mother told me to put on my best clothes, as we were going “downtown.” She dressed in her best cotton dress, glistening with starch that kept its smooth surface unfazed as we walked up Forest, across East 116th Street, and finally, just before the imposing St. Luke’s Hospital where I had been born some seven years before, down a set of wooden stairs. A bright yellow train with a red roof stopped before us, and soon we were off, at what seemed like breathtaking speed. This was Cleveland Rapid Transit, the “Rappy,” hurtling us toward this downtown I had never seen before.

I knelt on the empty seat across from my mother, peering out the window as buildings and overpasses whizzed by. I looked across at her and she smiled, a wonderful mother’s smile from a woman who rarely allowed herself such an outward display of emotion. And then, for some fateful reason, my eyes traced down over her dress, the ample chest, the thin belt struggling to define a midsection that had yielded seven of us, her thick cotton hose, her sturdy ankles, and finally her shoes, well-buffed black lace-up shoes with heavy, thick heels. My eyes moved slowly to the right, to the sight of an entirely different female form. Had they not, my life might easily have taken another course.

I started at midcalf, each so slender and encased in such sheer nylon that the pale flesh took on a new and radiant life, shimmering in the rays of the midmorning sun. The ankles were angular, sculpted; light danced about them, further accentuating their sensuous curves, proclaiming the audacity of an unfatted bone to come so close to the surface. And the shoes. Elegant patent-leather pumps with a low heel, so delicate and proportionally fashioned, shoes that seemed more like form-fitting gloves than utilitarian foot coverings. My eyes flashed back to my mother’s legs and shoes. Then, almost as if they had been shocked, back to those pumps, those ankles, and up, ever so slowly, to the two shafts of fleshly perfection. My eyes ventured no higher than the woman’s two exquisitely conformed knees that almost, but not quite, touched each other, a tantalizing fraction of an inch apart. There was no need to look further. I was breathless, my mouth dry. I had seen enough for one day.

We emerged from the bowels of the Terminal Tower into the blinding sunlight and the calamity of downtown. Cars were stopped, honking their horns; rolls of toilet paper streamed down from the buildings along Euclid Avenue. My mother held my hand tightly as I gawked at people kissing, toasting each other with paper cups they filled from tall green bottles of champagne. They formed little circles and danced around and around, stumbling, falling, always laughing. I was beginning to realize that this war of blue and gold stars had ended. To celebrate this special day, we went to the Forum Cafeteria on Ninth Street. As we slowly pushed our trays along the smooth chrome tubes, I was confronted with an array of amazing foods I had never seen before. Quivering bowls of Jell-O in a dizzying array of colors. French fried, not only mashed, potatoes. Chocolate meringue pie, its tufts perfectly bronzed. All just an arm’s length away.

I rested dreamily on my mother’s arm on the way home, but it was not the war’s end or those delicacies that floated through my mind as I traveled back to my secure, small world. I closed my eyes. Those legs, those shoes! I was too young for lust. But not for questioning. What kind of person could this be? Where did she live? Was her house like mine?

In second grade, I received my first Holy Communion in a wool blue suit so scratchy that I had to wear my pajama bottoms underneath to stave off the itching. In sixth grade, an unsmiling, somewhat distracted Bishop Edward Hoban placed a dripping cross of oil upon my forehead, confirming me as “Louis,” a name carefully chosen, my homage to Cleveland Indians’ player-manager Lou Boudreau. In later grades, Sister Leah and Sister Augustine found my knuckles with their rulers and Sister Florentine my heart with the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, which I could repeat from memory and tried diligently to practice in my daily life. Clothe the naked. Oh, if only I could have found such a person. Shelter the homeless. I would have given my own bed. Bury the dead. I just never saw any as I walked up and down Forest Avenue to and from St. Benedict’s school.

Instead of saintly actions, I stole pennies from the change I was supposed to bring home from Bill’s, the little grocery store up the street, and bought candy. I even stole some when he was behind the counter. I peed down the furnace grate in my bedroom one summer night after drinking plenty of soda at a cousin’s wedding, too lazy or too afraid to go back downstairs through the scary, dark attic. That winter, when the heat came up, my sin was revealed. I lied about doing my homework, shoveling snow, sweeping the front walk. I always had a full laundry list to report each Saturday at Confession. After all, I had only to look at the cross to see what real sacrifice meant. I was trying to please God, and I was failing most of the time. I secretly reveled in the stinging pain when my mother would slap my face for a smart remark. I deserved that, and more.

If those marvelous ankles and shoes offered a sliver-thin peek into another world, a world apart from the one my family knew here in America and my people had known for centuries, then a green plastic box twelve inches long, six inches wide, and no more than six inches high flung open the window. My Admiral clock radio, a Christmas present in my eighth-grade year, was a magic carpet on which I could soar out my second-floor bedroom window to exotic places of new and forbidden sounds. This was not Fibber Magee and Molly or the Grand Ole Opry or a Gabriel Heater newscast I had heard from the wooden-cased radio downstairs as I sat there with my father. Not The Shadow or Jack Armstrong, All American Boy. No, this was Moondog Allen Freed, the howl of werewolves at midnight heralding his throaty voice. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . the latest from the Penguins.” Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine, my darling dear, love you all the time. “Now, mister lovebird out there, is this your song tonight.” I Got a Woman, way cross town, she’s good to me. . . . “And you sweet thang out there, this one’s for you, a new one heading to the top of the charts called ‘You’re So Fine.’”

Baby you’re so fine

Oh I’m so glad you’re mine

Baby you’re so fine, oh

Baby you’re so fine

Oh how I love you baby

Baby you’re so fine

My St. Benedict’s classmates were humming Patti Page tunes, and here I was, listening to music that sounded as if it had been recorded in somebody’s garage—some of which had been—with a beat that didn’t so much set my polished oxfords to tapping as my groin to pulsing. The beat, the rhythm, was so primitive, so in sync with whatever was coming alive in my young body. Etta James, Chuck Willis, Clyde McPhatter, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, B. B. King. This was “black” music—therefore, in my world, bad music, sinful music. I kept the radio low, and when my brothers were asleep in the beds across the room, I would creep over and slip from beneath their beds one of the tattered magazines they had brought back from a trip to Chicago. In the dim light of the street lamp, I could see mountainous breasts, eyes outlined in mascara, black garter belts. No, I would not do what George Pezo demonstrated with a grin on his face as he massaged his huge penis and spattered my whitewashed basement wall with a wad of mucus. No, I had to be strong. My impure thoughts were already enough for Saturday Confession, and I knew Father Louis or Father Michael would howl through the screen loud enough for the entire church to know what I had done.

Eighth-grade graduation was nearing, and I was finally allowed to attend a Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) canteen on a Thursday night in May 1952. I tamed my cowlicky hair with my sister’s Jergen’s hand lotion, paid my fifteen cents, and slipped into our parish hall. The air was moist with teenage sweat and suffused with the dime-store perfume the girls had clandestinely splashed on themselves after they left home.

As I scanned the dimly lit dance floor, I saw her, one hand poised saucily on her hip. Her white sweater seemed etched on her body. Her legs were apart, stretching the already tight skirt even tighter. Her bobby socks were swollen white blobs just above her penny loafers. The rotating globe overhead sent quivery beams of colored light across the floor, revealing her, then concealing, revealing. I felt as if I could pass out at any minute. I finally got up the nerve. No, not to dance with her. I could never be that bold, although we had learned the box step in Miss Minch’s gym class. I finally got up the nerve to look directly at her.

And she looked right back at me. Was that a smile? The light, the light! I couldn’t tell. I felt a pain rising low in my groin, the same wonderful pain I could feel, listening to that music after midnight in the quiet of my bedroom. I turned away immediately. Was it showing?

Where had my innocence gone? Was this any way for a budding saint to be?

3

HIGH SCHOOLThe Man in the Ten-Way Suit

IN REALITY, IT WAS BUT AN UNREMARKABLE, STOLID, three-story neoclassical building, but as I approached Cathedral Latin School on a dreamy, sun-dappled September morning in 1952, I peered up at its limestone facade in sheer awe. I was struck both with its magnificence and with the audacity that had brought me here. All five foot two inches of me passed beneath the school motto etched boldly over what seemed like a soaring arched door for the world to see and for us to live out: “Opere et Veritate.” In deed and in truth. I was at once humbled to accept such a mandate and to join the long line of illustrious Latin men who had gone before me, yet not quite sure I was up to the challenge. Cathedral Latin was founded in 1916 out of the downtown diocesan cathedral to provide the initial schooling for future priests and to reinforce the Catholic faith in the sons of immigrants, many of whom, like my own father, had never even graduated from grade school. This, the premier Catholic high school on Cleveland’s East Side, was my choice rather than the more working-class Benedictine High School, just a few blocks from my home. I still don’t know what propelled me out of my own neighborhood, but it would be the first of many forays into uncharted waters.

Internally, I may have had my misgivings, but nattily attired in my checkered trousers and my reversible vest, I felt perfectly presentable. This, combination number three of my ten-way suit, that ingenious $40 investment in my future I had made at the May Company for my grade-school graduation, was my ticket and crafty disguise for the passage out of Forest Avenue and St. Benedict’s parish. Such astonishing possibilities! A pair of blue trousers and a checkered jacket stood in readiness at the rear of my attic closet. Blue trousers, blue vest. Blue trousers, checkered vest. Checkered jacket, checkered trousers. I was surely ready for anything in the days ahead.

When I walked into that school building, I found a Catholic environment so totally alien to me that I don’t think I so much as uttered a word to any of the other boys in the first weeks of school. Engulfed in such rarefied air, I found myself overwhelmed with a strange narcosis. I surely said nothing about it at home. What could I say? How could I explain to my mother and father, brothers and sisters that there was a world outside St. Benedict’s? There was a Catholicism that went beyond the rote answers to the Baltimore Catechism. A Catholicism that even in the 1950s invited at least a modicum of discussion and was not offended by questions, at least those properly phrased. This Catholicism transcended not only our ethnic group—embracing Irish, Italian, Polish, German—but economics as well. Some of the fathers of my classmates actually wore to work each day what my father reserved for Sunday use only. I saw them as they dropped their sons off at school at a time when my father had already been pounding nails for an hour. They laughed so easily; they seemed in no hurry; worries were for others, not them.

At Cathedral Latin, there was none of the coarseness of the overweight, dull-eyed parish priests of St. Benedict’s, the only representatives of the male religious life I’d then witnessed. These Marianist priests and brothers carried books and magazines in their arms, and had obviously read them. They talked about world affairs and Senator Joseph McCarthy, new treatments for cancer, and banished European theologians who would later emerge as the true lights of the Second Vatican Council. Thomas Aquinas, neo-scholasticism, apologetics. Latin phrases succinctly summarized their points and rolled easily off their tongues. I went from class to class, fascinated with the echo of my heels resounding from the polished marble hallways, as if magically, mystically, my steps, my very self were being magnified by the place. I sat attentively in my alphabetically assigned seat and did my homework as if it were a divine summons. I don’t remember ever being so happy in my life.

I and my ten-way suit had negotiated Cleveland Transit bus route 107 so adroitly, so successfully. I was on my way—to where and to do what I didn’t have the slightest idea.

Midway through my freshman year, a tall priest with sunken eyes came into my religion class. He was a Maryknoll missionary just back from China, a place of dysentery, hepatitis, dengue fever, malaria. He stood before us, his beautifully sculpted and anointed hands clasped in front of him, offering his ailments as negligible sacrifices for the love of Christ, yet—to me—they were valiant combat ribbons that normal mortals might never be worthy to wear. He had been beaten, tortured, and imprisoned, all because of his passion to convert the hordes of heathen Chinese who otherwise would never know that Catholicism provided the only true path to God.

On the first Sunday of each month, he would gather a group of us to play basketball and to hear more of his stories. He actually talked very little of his suffering, but more about such moments as seeing the amazed look on a ten-year-old boy’s face when the priest told him that there was a power far beyond his village that watched over him every day, loved him, and wanted him to be part of his family on earth. Or the baptism of a ninety-year-old man and his four-month-old great-great-granddaughter on the same day. And of both dying of cholera the next. He talked almost romantically of what power the Beatitudes possessed, of St. John’s admonition to love always and everyone, of the dignity of washing another’s feet, and of how a few loaves and fishes could indeed feed thousands. Those once disembodied words of scripture—served in dollops at Sunday Mass at St. Benedict’s and then, through the sadly suspicious minds of our priests, turned into scathing indictments of our miserable Slovak selves—took on new meaning. The Christ I had known on the cross, contorted in agony for my sins, came down to walk along the shores of the Galilee and sit with his friends and smile at the children who were brought to him.

The Maryknoll priest was a painfully shy man—I could tell that by the way he never could look directly at us—but there was a certain confidence, along with goodness, kindness, and a quiet intelligence, that radiated from that emaciated body. He had to admit—when we asked for the number of conversions he had made—that he had not actually been that successful. Some would sow, others would reap, he said. His objective was not success. His objective was simply to do his best, with God’s help, in every circumstance.

Sitting on the gym bleachers one Sunday, looking at the priest, backlit by the afternoon sun and almost radiant before us, I realized I had not experienced such a man before. And that I wanted to be just like him. These priests who had gone to China were heroic. I wanted to do something heroic in my life. I had been given a whole new economy of life, and it made perfect sense.

Even as I so admired this man and wanted to be just like him, I wouldn’t admit to myself that I had been attending a vocation group and was signaling my interest in becoming a Maryknoll priest. When asked what I did on those Sundays at Cathedral Latin, I told my mother and father that it was a school meeting, and because the very word “meeting” had such an alien and exotic sound to them, they questioned me no further. I had no close friends, so there was no one who was privy to the details of my small life. I prayed on my knees each night that I would hear God’s call, yet had I been asked directly, I would have vehemently denied any interest in becoming a priest. This thorough mental bifurcation prepared me well for a Thursday night at the CYO canteen and a life hardly compatible with that of a celibate soldier of Christ.

Steam rose from the hissing radiators that flanked the dance floor; the air was thick with the suppression of young lust; you could almost sense it just walking through the doors. It was a volatile combination, ignitable at the slightest stare, nod, or smile. Overhead, the ball of tiny mirrors lazily spun on its axis, sending shivering beams of colored lights into the damp darkness. At the weekly CYO canteen, the hope was that good Catholic boys and girls would chastely meet each other, dance without actually touching more than the palms of their hands, and eventually go on to present their virginal selves to each other in marriage. There were those boys—Joe Semancik, Joe Kolenic, Paul Forgach, Bob Estvander, and others—who seemed to have gotten that message. And girls like Marilyn Ungarsky, Mary Jo Sotak, Martha Balash, and Joanne Kovats, who were models of youthful Catholic purity. But, of course, those were not the girls who made the hair on the back of my neck bristle, who caused my mouth to turn dry just looking at them.