Gospel (73 page)

“I don't see any reason why a Jesuit shouldn't take a lover,” he remembered saying in the canteen, in a low whisper. “Popes and cardinals do. Cardinal Spellman's got a boy on the side—yes, it's true!”

She was torn with indecision. Her fellow, secular nurses—the way they talked about men! The torn-out pictures of leading men from
Life
magazine taped to the interior lid of footlockers, the pictures of a boyfriend on the beach at Coney Island displayed on another nurse's nightstand, the tales from some of the coarser women about romance on leave in Tokyo, and those moving tales of men about to die, virgin boys, begging the nurse for a late-night tryst, a taste of earthly love before death. Yes, sometimes that pitch was a ruse, but sometimes it was true and sometimes nurses gave in. Beatrice was ashamed but that fantasy tempted her because the men would either die or be transferred home and that could be the end of it, no consequences, no scandal … Not that many of the men made passes at her, since she wasn't very pretty, although she was in a Sister of Charity uniform, so it could be that. Also very bothering: the older, married women who were separated from children and husband. Maybe they were the greatest objects of envy of all. And here she was just twenty, a prisoner of the Church! No, she would do the one reckless thing of her life. She would know love.

(Well, Beatrice certainly loved you, worshiped you, adored you. You replaced one vow with another, and in the place of the former authority of the Church you offered … what? You were going to order and uplift her life, but you lost interest.)

Because she was, once back in the States, quite apparently …

(Undereducated.)

Irredeemably stupid. She didn't care about anything I cared about. She didn't want to read. She didn't have an inkling of interest in ancient cultures, foreign languages, lost scrolls, treasures of the past. This was my life! She devoted herself to home and hearth and it was all right for a while, but even she knew we were badly matched. “I'm too stupid for you,” she protested.

(You should have soothed her. You married her after all.)

But what she said was merely the truth. Two bumbling, Church-wrecked, hard-up, overaged virgins stumbled together in time of war. What possible future could that have once life returned to normal? All right, all right, she did love me and I never really loved her the way a man should love his wife. She was a concept, a ritual of passage, a way to dump the Church and change directions yet again in my life, one more lousy idea that led nowhere.

Oh and I was responsible at first now—You gotta give me that! How I wept about it. How I stared for hours at the backyard, all those rainy Sunday afternoons in Pennsylvania, thinking how can I salvage this, this disaster? A divorce would have been merciful. I got up the nerve to ask her about it.

(That was the turning point.)

I'll say. She began backfilling with religion. Back to church, back to daily mass, back to afternoons ensconced at the local St. Bridget's Church and its prayer circle and its food drives and a young Catholic faculty wives' group … and then a month later, she discovered she was pregnant. Carrying the child of the man who made her break her vow to God and then asked her for a divorce so she could fall into damnation twice.

“This marriage is my penance,” she said stoically. “I bring a child into this world with an apostate and a drinker for a father.”

Hell, lady, my drinking wasn't
anything
back in those days.

Just wait till I got to Hyde Park in 1961 when I was made an associate professor at Chicago. Everyone was happy for this promotion but Beatrice. She didn't want for us to leave Duquesne University because it was close to her sisters in Pittsburgh. Chicago was a million miles away, she didn't know anybody. Do you realize years passed without a warm word or any healing in this breach? Is it any wonder that I traveled as soon as any project was offered—when any grant was tendered, I was gone!

(So you escaped your wife, all right. And your son, Rudy. And in those few months and weeks you were home, you acted worse.)

Don't You see? She never once felt forgiven. She had taken a vow and then she'd broken her vow—to God. No amount of divine forgiveness was enough: she was purgatory-bound if not hell-bound and this she accepted coldly, with a quiet bitterness. I was the first cause of this sin. I was the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and Satan all in one—the living reminder of her Fall. And there was no way that her little angel, her Abel, her Benjamin, her baby was going to be tainted and corrupted by his father, the philanderer, the drunk!

(Not entirely inappropriate descriptions of this period, however.)

It was the '60s, for pete's sake. The mini-skirts, the topless sunbathers, the see-through bras, the young coeds who thought nothing of hopping into the sack with the learned professor. I could see them out there, pretending to take notes, thinking about it … There are few periods that wreaked more destruction on middle-aged men than that one; woe to men whose mid-life crises coincided with the Swingin' Sixties! The flowered open shirts, the sideburns, the rose-tinted glasses, the tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, the pipe—forty-four years old and a man of my … of my son's era! And I would stare at my class from the podium, amid the born-agains and Jesus freaks and Catholic human disasters that washed up in Theology 101, those few young women who came not for the course but rather for the dynamic, showstopping lecturer, for the polished erudition and memorized Aramaic, puns in Latin, beautifully pronounced Greek. The languages and histories of the past spun all the needed mystery and hocus-pocus of an aphrodisiac …

(News of your philanderings got back to Beatrice.)

Oh, but some of those undergraduates! I remember one in particular …

(How about this memory:)

Rudy was six years old and Beatrice was still settling in and griping about being in Hyde Park. She declared at the dinner table in a scene rehearsed all afternoon: “Fine. We won't have Christmas in this house this year. I'll take Rudy and go to my sister's, and you can fend for yourself!”

Rudy: “Mommy, don't cry…”

The child was hysterical every time Beatrice sought to make a scene.

So, Patrick recalled, I took her at her word. She said I could go to hell and drink with my cronies at O'Connor's Bar and that's what I did Christmas Eve, the next day, assuming she and Rudy had stormed off to Pittsburgh and would be back after the holidays. I arrived home to see the table set, the candles burned down, the turkey and all the food picked at, and Beatrice indignant at the table.

“You said you were going…” O'Hanrahan mumbled, propping himself against the wall, having really tied one on.

“Daddy?” It was Rudy in his little pajamas, peeping around the corner. “Can we open our presents now? Please?”

He was trying, of course, to prevent the scene he knew would come.

Oh, but Beatrice, Our Lady of the Recriminations, would not be denied! You see,
I
never wanted to fight in front of the child, it was always at her instigation, until it became doctrine that when Daddy was home there was always a fight. What chance did Rudy have to know a decent father-son relationship: I was the villain, the reason Christmas was a time of tears, the scourge of all clean-living Christian folk!

Beatrice informed the boy, “Rudy, your father doesn't even have a present for you.” Heartless! Savage!

(Why didn't you have a present for him?)

I thought he was coming back after New Year's! Plenty of time to get something! Hey, for every Christmas after that I showered him with toys and books—

(But you never made up the hurt from that Christmas.)

No. No, I didn't. Every time I made an off-color joke or delayed putting up the Christmas tree,
that
particular Christmas—more holy to Beatrice than the one at the Nativity—was invoked: Father will ruin Christmas, we are at the hand of Satan once again, my little angel … The poison she poured into poor Rudy's ears about me! I'd have fared better if she had left and taken the kid and let me visit now and then. Without me as source material to work with, Rudy would in time have come to see his mother for the manipulative shrew she was; I would have had his sympathy.

(She offered to leave you once.)

Facedown, one winter night, on the living-room rug, O'Hanrahan decided rather than crawl into Beatrice's unwelcoming bedroom, he would stay right there and pass out. Next thing he knew she was standing above him with a suitcase.

“You want me to go to a hotel?” he asked.

“No, I'm leaving. Rudy is already in the car.”

O'Hanrahan came to and heard the Pontiac idling in the driveway. The mantel clock said it was three
A.M.
Rudy must have padded out of his bedroom and seen his father there like this.

“Don't go,” he said automatically.

She said, buttoning her winter coat, “I won't divorce you. You know I don't believe in it. But I don't have to live with you.”

(There was your big chance. Why didn't you let her go?)

Because … well, not when I was on the floor like that—

(No, it was because you wanted to leave
her,
with the next available woman who'd have you.)

And I thought of Rudy, You have to give me that! I didn't want him shanghaied in the night, dragged to a life of her bitchy old sisters! All he would remember was me at my worst. So I made Beatrice a promise if she'd stay, that I'd go to some damn alcoholic clinic she'd picked out.

O'Hanrahan at this point in his reminiscence reached a rock ledge, the truly steep part of the climb was before him. He began a slow, step-at-a-time, breathless ascent.

And thought: there is something Protestant about the notion of an alcoholic clinic. Everything is counseled and confronted, talked about and reasoned with; the patient is submitted to a process from which he is to emerge purged and justified and whole, confirmed in his new life. It didn't seem to leave much room for backsliding into the gutter forty-eight hours after being sprung from the clinic, like any good Catholic could tell you would happen. Catholicism is founded, after all, on the notion that the human condition is a given; hence, pro forma confession and light slaps on the wrist. Protestantism persuades itself people can change, and that once a sin is identified and prayed about and fretted over it will go away if we really want it to; hence the fanaticism, Prohibition, antiabortion and antihomosexuality, antipornography and antiprostitution. And of course, Protestantism, though randomly well intentioned, is totally, completely misguided.

(Where reforming you was concerned, yes.)

The clinic Beatrice had set her heart upon was the Doster Clinic near Urbana, Illinois. She had talked to that sweaty, fat-faced priest about my problem—hell, she had taken out magazine ads, billboards! Told strangers at the bus stop about her drunk of a husband, her beloved cherished Cross to bear! Beatrice collected recommendation after recommendation for where to consign me. O Holy Mother Church, support her in this Crusade! The Reform of Patrick O'Hanrahan. Her martyrdom could now take on the aspect of the supreme.

“Yes, I'm fighting for my marriage,” she'd tell the church biddies, ennobled. “God would want me to do no less. For Rudy…”

Yeah, that was the putative excuse—for Rudy. Why didn't she think about the boy when she launched into her self-aggrandizing scenes at the dinner table, hm? Why didn't she give five minutes' thought to the effect that castrating his father nightly would have on the boy?

(But you went to the clinic, after all.)

Beatrice sat primly and erect in the driver's seat while O'Hanrahan sat in the passenger's seat, neither of them saying anything, as they drove through the gray farmland to Urbana. There was snow in the fields and mud under the snow where it met the potholed, rumbling state highway they headed down, with Urbana 45 miles ahead.

“If I hate it,” he said, “I'm coming right home.”

“You have to do this for a week, Patrick,” she said cautiously, so near to her greatest victory. “I think these people will make you see what you're doing to your life. What you're doing to all of us.”

“I'm not doing anything to you. You're provided for, you've got a roof over your heads, Rudy wants for nothing—”

“Except a sober father.”

He wasn't going to argue, not here in the car. There'd be time for arguing after he got home unrepentant and started drinking again.

Because he had every intention of drinking again.

There was not a molecule in his body that wanted to stop drinking; there wasn't even a still small voice saying that it was a problem. Drinking was his
life
! It was what made him clever and funny, whence sprung the O'Hanrahan legend. When he gave a party, the entire Theology Department went through contortions to secure invitations because it would be the blowout they'd talk about all year long: O'Hanrahan in good form, O'Hanrahan the entertainer, the liberal mixer of delightful decoctions. Mind you, that was the 1960s when people really knew a good cocktail—the cocktail is gone with so many other once-hallowed American vices and improvements on the dreary run of daily life.
Puritans, you have conquered,
to paraphrase Julian the Apostate. And as for the passing out, the sloppy ending, every bit of that was done in the privacy of his own home—no one saw that stuff.

(Just your wife and child.)

“You're going to see,” Beatrice was saying, her small mouth spitting out the words, brittle and factual, “what becomes of someone who drinks like you do. You'll meet lots of others there.”

That was another thing. Whether it was the one A.A. meeting he attended or the week at the Doster Clinic, O'Hanrahan was always struck by how much
worse
a drunk everyone else was: