The Cloister Walk (13 page)

One year, on December 30, the Feast of the Holy Family, the piano player, already weakened by cancer, played one last boogiewoogie. His Our Lady of Perpetual Help medal swayed to the beat, a gold pendant shaped like a scallop shell, an ancient symbol of pilgrimage. My mother reminisced that day about her very first dance, the Fireman's Ball in Lemmon, South Dakota, in an auditorium long gone. The vanished music, the happy dancers, herself the happiest in her first grown-up dress. The bass player, Jerry, a comedian to break your heart, got serious for a moment and did a searing rendition of “St. James' Infirmary.” Cold, stark death, death and devotion. My dad's gritty cornet solo brought it home.

Both the piano player and Jerry died before the year was out, Jerry from complications of diabetes, at only thirty-seven years of age. The room—the Esprit Lounge, of all things—remains fixed in my memory, a cabaret with a view of the ocean. And music that lingers in the afterglow of sunset, as the first star of evening appears over the Pacific. Living in a monastic environment all that fall had made me see many things in a new light. Dixieland jazz, for example, now seemed the most Benedictine, the most communal of ventures. Each individual in the band is recognized as such, in fact is required to play a solo, but not to improvise to the extent that the others are left out. The band begins and ends each song together.

Not long ago, on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, when the band played for a senior citizens' dance on the waterfront, at Aloha Tower, it turned into a reunion for former fans who don't get out much any more. An elderly black man that my mother and I remembered as a regular at the old Garden Bar at the Hilton, where the band played on Sundays for more than twenty years, embraced a former dancing partner. Then he set down his cane and danced with her. “Dad better watch it, Mom,” I said. “When that sort of thing happened around Jesus, all hell broke loose.” But I don't know that she heard me; she was eyeing the crowd for a dancing partner of her own. A few years before, when she turned seventy, she got new ballroom dancing shoes, to replace the pair she'd worn out.

My favorite photograph of my parents, taken not long after they eloped, shows two pretty young people dressed in style, who most likely had no idea of the moral courage their marriage would require of them. They were still vain children—Mom's showing off her great legs, Dad his rascal grin—but they soon found that matrimony would plunge them headlong into the strenuous process of redemption, in which even the worst things may eventually work to the good. It took my father a long time to settle into marriage, and my mother learned the hard way, as she once told me, that the only way to hold on to those you love is to let them go. As of this writing, they've been at it for going on fifty-eight years.

I inherited my father's promiscuous nature. He falls in love easily, he's the sort of man who easily turns strangers into friends. And he doesn't like to lose people. His fidelity to friendship is such that in his late seventies, he still corresponds with high school and college friends, including his first girlfriend. I also inherited my mother's stability, her commitment to the sacred vows of matrimony. All of it has helped. That year, my sister-in-law said about of them, “They have large human hearts, getting larger. As they age, they're becoming more intensely themselves, and it's so good. Good for them, good for us, good for the children to see.”

Gregory and his friend Basil met as students in Athens in the mid-fourth century, and later lived together as monks in Cappadocia. Basil wrote a Rule for monasteries that is still followed in the Orthodox world today. Grounding monastics firmly in private and communal prayer, as well as manual work, he also gave a high priority to their care of the needy; he legislated flexibly enough to provide for a mix of contemplation and action in monastic life. Basil himself founded a number of hospitals, orphanages, and residences for the poor, and was termed “the Great” by the populace of Caesarea, when, shortly before becoming the bishop of the city, he gave away much of his inheritance in famine relief, and served food to the destitute.

In one of Gregory's orations, “De pauperum amore” (On the love of the poor), he supports his friend Basil's soup kitchens by asking the rich to express their gratitude to God in gracious giving, without prejudging the needy. It is not unlike some of the last sermons of the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero. At any rate, Gregory's view of the common good is still relevant, and increasingly endangered in a world that idolizes private wealth. “Let us put into practice,” Gregory says, “the supreme and primary law of God. He sends down rain on just and sinful alike and to earth's creatures he has given the broad earth, the springs, the rivers, and the forests. . . . He has given abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, not divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure.”

I spent some time, over Christmas, sorting through a box of mementoes, some of my own from college, and many more that my mother has saved for me since I was a child, among them several bills from Providence Hospital, in Washington, D.C., dating from the late 1940s. This is where, at the age of six months, I came close to dying. I had shrunk to twelve pounds.

I owe my life to the doctors and nurses there, and to Sir Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. After using the drug successfully on soldiers during World War II, doctors thought it might work as well on infants. They felt that I would die without massive doses of it, and my grandfather Totten, who was a doctor, signed papers approving the experimental treatment that saved my life. Before we moved from Washington, when I was nearly seven years old, my mother took me to see the surgeon who had operated on me. Pulling a heavy book off a shelf, he showed me the pages where Baby X's treatment was recorded. He told me that I'd become so accustomed to the shots that the nurses would come in, turn me over and give me the dose, and I wouldn't even wake up.

He also said something I'd long heard from my parents and grandparents, that the reason I lived was because I had the will to live—“You were a fighter,” the doctor said. Not until I was in my thirties did I realize that this was not the whole truth. Babies are drawn to pretty things, and if dying is as full of light as those who've come closest to it say, I may have wanted to die, to follow the blue light, which is my image for it, and maybe a memory, although I was only six months old.

Before I had language, I'd had the most intense engagement of my life, a frustration I contend with by writing. Had I been rejected from heaven? Surely I was poor enough to make it, then, all the way through the needle's eye. It was a Catholic hospital, and my mother tells me that the nurses—mostly nuns in those days, Sisters of Charity—loved to hold me. Surely they were praying; one of them may have baptized me in secret. My mother came every day as well, to hold me and to sing. It was my mother, and the nuns, the surgeon, and the nurse who fed me a bottle all through the operation—these people working helplessly, with all their hope and skill—who called me back. It was their world I learned to want, like a Dorothy who, having seen Oz, can call Kansas home.

For me, for years afterward, there were nightmares, and screaming fits induced by motor noises and lights that triggered memories of my hospital stay. Once, when my favorite baby-sitter, a maternal teenager named Lillian, came to the house dressed all in white I had such a tantrum that she went home and changed. My mother says that my eyes seemed sad to her when I was a baby, sadder and older than those of other children. And when I first encountered the words “eschatology” and “teleology,” reading Kierkegaard at the age of sixteen, I looked them up in the dictionary and knew they were mine in a way most words were not.

Today, we are baptizing our little nephew. He's seven months old, chubby, thoroughly healthy. Ever since we came here for Christmas, I've listened for him in the morning. Like the birds, he begins to sing at first light, and together, they make the most joyous music—the baby, the birds—cooing and calling, as if life depended on it. We've planned the ceremony for late in the afternoon of Epiphany, at home, after our two ministers—my brother (Disciples of Christ) and his wife (Episcopalian) have returned from their church duties.

The baby's tired and cranky, he has no way of knowing that we are passing through hell. We renounce the forces of evil, and he cries out. As the godmother, I am holding him, and he's fussy, squirming; I have to hold on tight:

Our words wash over you, and you brush them away. The candle catches your eye, your mother's hair and fingers transparent in its light. You want the candle, you want the food your mother has become for you, you want to go down into this night at her breast. Poor little baby, water on your hair, chrism on your forehead, dried milk on your chin. Poor, dear little baby; hold on.

—Emily Dickinson

Church meant two things to me when I was little: dressing up and singing. I sang in choirs from the time I was four years old and for a long time believed that singing was the purpose of religion, an illusion that was rudely swept away by the rigors of catechesis. Church was also a formal affair, a matter of wearing “Sunday best” and sitting up straight. Like the girl in Anne Sexton's “Protestant Easter,
8 years old
” I knew that “when he was a little boy / Jesus was good all the time,” and I made a confused attempt to connect his story with what I saw around me on Sunday morning: “They pounded nails into his hands. / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats . . . / The important thing for me / is that I'm wearing white gloves.”

I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God, the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in “His” church. Such a God was of little use to me in adolescence, and like many women of my generation I simply stopped going to church when I could no longer be “good,” which for girls especially meant not breaking rules, not giving voice to anger or resentment, and not complaining.

Not surprisingly, given their disruptive tone, their bold and incessant questioning of God (“How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?” [Ps. 89:46]), the psalms were largely excluded from Sunday worship when I was a girl, except for a handful of the more joyful ones selected as suitable for responsorial reading. The wild and often contradictory poetry of the psalms is still mostly censored out of Christian worship in America, though Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and other mainstream Protestants hear snippets every Sunday. In worship services that lack a liturgical structure one hears less of the exacting music of poetry than lax, discursive prose that provides the illusion of control over what happens in church, and in the human heart. And the Pentecostal churches that allow for more emotional response in their worship try to exercise control by sentimentalizing emotions. Their “psalms” are likely to be pop tunes about Jesus.