Читать книгу Amen's Boy - William Maltese - Страница 8

CHAPTER FOUR

PERSONAL SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

My grooming as a special “priest boy” began about three years before I left for Mettray from Assisi. I was picked by Father Terry from out of the ranks of the seventh grade. Angry Sister Ida, who disliked me very much, remembering my unmanageable older brother, expected trouble from me. Suddenly one day without provocation she slapped me across my face as I stood in line silently. I was so humiliated and shocked that I just walked straight out of the classroom and out of the school’s front door. Sister Ida yelled my name, “Thaddeus, you come back here right now!” I walked directly home, ignoring her.

As a result of this, she was admonished by the Right Reverend Monsignor Pastor Morreau, who happened to be a classmate friend of my dad’s. However, Sister Ida didn’t let go of the grudge she formed against me and soon she lied to the priest about me. She told him I was playing with myself inappropriately.

I was called to Father Terry’s office. I’ll never forget the day, at 2:30 p.m. on a Thursday, October 2nd, while the other students had final period religion class, I was to speak to the priest about “self-abuse.”

I confessed, and Father Terry was kind to me, forgiving me in the name of Jesus, and telling me that we’d be meeting every Thursday from then on at 2:15 p.m. This seemed good to me. What had been dreaded turned out to be pleasurable.

His office was like a den, and it was air-conditioned in the sweltering summer heat, and he played music, and we drank cold milk or Cokes.

I have to mitigate the desire to fill in all the details about this time in my life. Everything seems important and meaningful. I wasn’t only running from a torturous home life, but I was enthusiastically moving forward to Mettray and to the priesthood. It is difficult to say anything bad about my father, especially since he is gone, and I miss him. He was a critical and angry force in my life. I didn’t know he was in pain; perhaps when I recognized that, I viewed him more compassionately and changed my expectations, how I dealt with him, but that didn’t happen until years after I left home for Mettray and got professional help relating to him.

He had to deal with my older brother. Bubba defeated him often in their war of wills. It was a psychologically unsophisticated time in the United States, and Bubba’s behavior was not, in that time in the 1950s, seen or heard as a plea or cry for help with his inner demons.

The positive acceptance and comfortable and safe atmosphere of the rectory appealed to me instantly. I had no adjustment problems in becoming a regular visitor to Father Terry. I cannot say I had a hard choice to make to lean in the direction of my priest; I treasured his affectionate hugs and frequent intimate sessions counseling me. There was no comparison to what I endured daily as a child in my family home. I beg God to forgive me telling these true stories of my life, putting my own family in such a sorry light, but there is a greater reason than my reputation or my family’s reputation. This story must be told truthfully. The truth must out! The truth must be and will be told in detail, if reluctantly.

Before I set this story down on paper, for moral reasons, I wrote letters to many of the people in this story, forgiving them any wrong they might have done to me. I wish to tell this story with a clear conscience; it is not told in a spirit of retaliation, revenge, or hatred. No, it is told because the meaning of my search for a true vocation, and my search for physical and emotional safety are themes much larger than me as an individual. My story, unfolding before you, has in it a meaning and substance that could ease some human suffering. If I had lived a life free of pain, and had I lived a life free of isolation and solitude, illness and despair, I would have no motivation to write this. I suffered because of ignorance. A book such as this could have forestalled my incapacity. Ignorance was my middle name, however.

The ignorance was not only my own, but also my parents’ ignorance, the church’s ignorance, the ignorance of my peers. The Dark Ages existed around me and surrounded the themes of my life in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I was being groomed for the seminary, and for other things. It is the “other things” which I believe might surprise you. A boy can have secret experiences with an adult in a position of high trust.

There are many persons who have walked along the sidewalk, smelling the odor of red bricks on the rectory front porch in the summer heat, and then into the buzzing cool atmosphere of the cold refreshing priest’s office. However, at the time of my first beginning this process I didn’t know any other boy in the world who had a similar problem or a life like my own. Walking up to the rectory was like approaching a King’s castle, a foreign fortress.

To me at eleven, it was fun getting to hang out with Father Terry, sometimes twice a week in his office; the invitation was not for once but as many times as I needed to discuss my sexual urges and report to him when they were at their peak so I could receive support from him to abstain from “self-abuse.”

I told him every time I had “irregular emotions” or practiced sinful “self-abuse.” Immediately I felt relief. Many years later, my best friend shocked me one day in the last year of the twentieth century when he said, “You were sexually and physically and emotionally abused!” It can take a lifetime to recall traumatic injuries.

The dimension of all this was greater than one boy’s ego or needs. I had a role model now, Father Terry, and this gave my world a feeling of solidity that no fists or spitting could take away. I studied the Church’s teachings, my religion, liturgy, Latin, and totally identified with the Holy Roman Catholic Church in my love for Jesus Christ, my compassion for the poor, and my desire to grow up to be a priest to help the unfortunate, and those who suffered. I thought mostly in terms of the poor, but poverty was recognizable to me as a boy in things like loss of hope, or feelings of entrapment. I had both a concrete image of how I wanted to live my life, as a priest at the altar, but also as an activist, helping the poor. I went with the Sisters of Charity to the hill people around Assisi, and I went with Father Terry to many shanty-style shacks to visit the sick and bring them communion. I assisted in his administering of the last sacraments.

I believed I was willing this to happen, that I was causing my life to take this new path, but I was too young to understand. What was profoundly taking root in my life was coming from a system, a culture, a church. I had not really noticed that now I was being groomed, cut out from the pack, styled in special means and modes and manners, and refined into a very loyal servant of the priest and the Catholic Church. This process began early in my life and was well-established before I was a teenager.

The rectory was old looking when it was first built, I think; all the photographs of this building show a rather dusty-looking, old place. The red bricks seemed to be denser than regular bricks, and to call them red was to avoid use of terms like burnt umber, or brownish-red. The place was invisible in some ways, maybe because only a few people ever walked to the door and entered. It wasn’t like an office building where you felt welcomed into a vestibule of activity. There was no receptionist, no waiting room, like in a lawyer’s office or doctor’s office waiting room. There were no large rooms in the building, and the entrance room was almost full with just the one army surplus desk, and an antique Underwood manual typewriter. The telephone system was modern for the place and time: there were buttons and extensions, a buzzer system notified the individual priests to pick up on the lines.

The secretary was the mother of one of the boys in school in the regular program at Assisi, but I didn’t know who it was then. Later I found out this red-haired lady was the mother of a boy that I wanted to see naked so badly that I was jeopardizing my entire reputation. I habitually went into his bedroom and tried to get him to relax enough to get naked with me, but that came after my meetings with the priest about masturbation. I didn’t ever get explicit instructions not to get naked with other boys, and it was not in the catechism, so I just plowed that field when I came to it.

I opened the wooden screen door. The screen mesh was painted black in the middle of a white painted frame; the frame was chalky, so you had to be sure not to let the screen door touch your clothing or you would have chalk marks that wouldn’t come out. The housekeeper was an ancient, sweet woman in a white dress, and later I learned that she was also the cook. She looked kindly into my little boy’s eyes. Could she tell I was coming to this place to be crucified, worse—drawn and quartered?

Father Terry came almost immediately, and with his hand on my shoulder, guided me into his office, or the outer part of his office, which was divided into his sitting room and his desk and writing materials area. The sofa and matching chair were covered in what I later found out was Army Surplus Naugahyde. It was standard issue, heavy duty, long-lasting, durable, bulky. I was lost on the giant sofa, and relieved to have so much room to myself. I’ve not thought much about how big or small I seemed to people then, but I imagine I was average, and at the seventh grade I was about five feet plus an inch or two, and growing. I was considered lean to my older brother, who called me a “fucking beanpole.”

“Thaddeus, I want you to know that whatever we say here today or any day is in the secrecy of the confessional. In fact, this is a place now where you can come and make ‘special’ confessions.”

I was surprised, already feeling better. Secrets I could handle. I had feared public embarrassment, but it’s possible I remember this out of sequence. I was there to be counseled about some problem I was having, as I recall now, but I think the bombshell of masturbation counseling was coming up in this conference for the first time outside of the confessional. I felt a little panicky when I learned the walls, veils, screens and sliding doors of the confessional were dispensable, and that we could, as human beings, have to face our priest in the telling of our sins. I was so used to the secrecy or supposed secrecy of the confessional that I was beginning to feel naked without the confessionals muted seclusion and anonymity.

“Sister tells me,” Father Terry began, “that you’re playing with yourself in class.”

I was totally and devastatingly shocked at such a lie. “NO!” I remember that.

“NO!” I would later be proud that I stood up for the truth. I already mentioned how I had to arrange my penis to make it not break in two when it spontaneously sprung up in class. I was not looking at the girls and getting hard.

I was sure of that.

“It’s OK,” Father Terry said, “I know sometimes a young man has erections and they come at times unexpectedly and it is just, well, some would say....”

“Uh...what?” I interjected trying to derail this line of confrontation. I thought of the ways I might change the subject, like I could mention about the choir singing so poorly or the ugly lamps on the front of the church that the pastor ordered installed. Innerly, I was panicking.

“I know you may have some problems with urges you feel suddenly....” Father was continuing to speak about my erections and I didn’t know what to say or do.

Well, he talked me through my panic attack, and we made a deal, simple enough too, that I wouldn’t masturbate without telling him immediately, the next day, and obtain absolution at that moment, so as not to make any bad communions in a state of mortal sin. I assume the entire world knows now that in the 1950s, Catholics were not allowed to even think about sex without it subjecting you to Satan’s plan to get you to go to hell for all eternity.

I promised to keep this oath of purity, and at that moment there began a three month segment of my life when I was a changed man. No long baths, no time with the soap, lathering it into a foam all over my naked body, no finding nipples hardening, no expulsions of vital fluids; I stopped relating to my body totally. No more cleaning up the mess that was difficult to mop up or wipe off when the entire bathroom was a steam room from a sensual hour long bath—boys did get dirty. I stopped that day.

Thursdays were wonderful, filled with various cold drinks, and coke in icy bottles, the returnable ones. Often, there were cookies, or cake, and sometimes candy, even two or three pieces of candy, so I could put some in my jeans and some in my mouth. Father Terry kept us focused on the problem, and we did not allow ourselves to be sidetracked off of the most important topic, the topic which we were not allowed to think of in our own minds, but which now had “confessional” sanction: SEX!

I had a pretty good education about sex without knowing it. I was not like John Palermo, who, as an altar boy a year older than me, told me one day that he knew the “dictionary word” for when a man and a woman make babies. I said he did not, and he said he did too, and I said he did not and he said he did too, and he told me the word and told me to check it out in the dictionary. John said the word for men and women doing it was “RAPE!”

“No! It is not!” “It is too!”

“It is not!” I kept this up a while but couldn’t remember what the actual word for intercourse was, so I shut up and went home. I looked up the word.

“Rape—The unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman by a man.” Wow! John Palermo was right! RAPE it was! I knew it was not allowed by the church, and that if you got a girl pregnant, the sheriff put you in jail. Its unlawfulness was clear. John Palermo told me the definition of “fuck” as “rape” and I believed it, until—and this is what Father Terry gave me, that the other boys didn’t have—good information. He taught me what sex was, and what thinking about sex was, and what “sin” was, and what was allowed. I learned fast that in confession it is the word that is important, and so one can stop saying, “Fuck,” for example, and be free of the stigma of the term. Father taught me inoffensive terms that referred to sex, bodily functions, and many things which before then I only knew slang terms for, learned from Bubba or other kids.

Time was compressed fast when it came to me and sex. I began to learn lots of sex information very quickly in the private chamber of my priest’s study.

Invitations were not long in coming. I was invited to camping trips with my priest and the altar boys group. At times, people who were not altar boys came to the camping trips, but they were usually kids whose parents provided a camp in the woods on the bayou for the priest and us to use, so they could come with altar boys. I didn’t know there was such a life as this outside of Huckleberry Finn. It seemed too good to be true. We were free of parents and mean older brothers, and we were nature’s children in the woods and bayous.

The camps were at a place called Blueberry Hill Bayou. It was a long, sand-bottomed stream that was about twelve feet wide, and meandered through the woods along the county back roads forty or so miles away from home. In other words, it was an alternate world, as different as night and day from my everyday home life. Soon, I learned it was also a world where the secrecy of the confessional could cover whatever happened.

The first two months went by, and there was no masturbation. I felt my penis becoming a stranger to me. I was happy to get candy and cake and cokes, and now we even played music. There was this new music I learned about that was called “classical music” which was made up of, as best I could tell at the time, big bands that had violins and kettle drums in them. I loved this music, especially the beautiful “1812 Overture.” That one had cannons in it, live cannons.

I stopped playing with myself, and the new interest that replaced it was the counseling scene that played out with me and my priest. Me and my counselor-priest! I should say the priest and “his me.” He was helping me define who I was. He was my new favorite man on earth. I never knew a man could be such a pal, so sweet and genial, and almost like a mother. I told him every dirty thought I had, even going back to the earliest memories I could remember. I talked about wanting to see penises in the shower room at the pool, and how I looked into my brothers underwear to see pubic hairs, and at some point, when the hour was nearing ending, just before school let out, the purple silk stole came out of the inner black coat pocket. Father Terry would lean over me and begin to whisper in Latin. Soon he would make the sign of the cross over me, and I was forgiven all my sins.

It felt great to be free of guilt in that moment of absolution! No guilt! I loved the process, and I sure liked the lifestyle of the priest, and their cook even gave me biscuits if I had to wait. I wanted to confess my sins twice. I considered our conversation about my sex thoughts as informal preparation for the formal act of contrition and absolution which happened when he put the stole on. Once in the protection of the purple stole; I repeated the previous telling of my sins very seriously as though my previous chatter was just “warming up.”

Father Terry taught me that once he shut the door to the room we were in, that immediately we were under the “seal” of the confessional. When he put on the purple stole, it was the beginning of the sacramental ritual of penance being properly administered.

There was an important lesson here: I could tell him anything behind closed doors and it stayed with us, and I could be free of guilt about it, because God had given him the power to forgive my sins

The sessions in Father Terry’s rooms were increasingly comfortable to me, and they seemed to take on the flavor of a private, secret club. I began to expect the treats from the kitchen or the candies, and the soft drinks, and even now and then, when all the priests and the cook were gone, we’d slip down the dark hall to the kitchen and make popcorn, or eat some ice cream in blue willow bowls, with beautiful silver spoons. I became so comfortable, that we’d now sit together on the sofa, next to one another with our legs touching. When the long playing albums of violin and orchestral music began, sometimes Father Terry put his arm around my shoulder like a pal, or like my uncle did when I visited him. I thought nothing of it, and it felt good to be free from the nagging isolation I’d always felt. I finally felt like a person. I began to feel special. My parents always told me I was smart, but my mother rarely spoke of me being special. She did try to discourage me from taking my father’s constant criticisms to heart, and he was always finding fault, but mother said to let it roll off my back like water off a duck’s back, but I couldn’t do that. No. I cried and I feared my father’s scorn, and my older brother continued to beat me with closed fists. He would sneak up on me in the alley and pummel me mercilessly. He devised methods of humiliation and torture that were so cruel, I hesitate to mention them, not wishing to leave some accusation against him that he cannot address or answer now that he is dead. I even have to deal with guilt because I am glad he died. Nonetheless, during this time in my childhood he beat me a lot. Father Terry didn’t ever exert any negativity or violence. He was a kind and gentle person.