Faith. Jennifer Haigh

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СКАЧАТЬ feet deep. Cardinal O’Connell had ordered it dug for the summertime refreshment of his dogs, two black poodles that, like the seminarians in their black cassocks, suffered from the heat.

      IN MINOR seminary, order was paramount. The boys lived according to an ancient template, a sixth-century invention. Benedict was not yet a saint when he fashioned it. Forever after, it was known as the Rule.

      The Rule governed the boys’ movements. The seminary day was punctuated by bells. There were bells for sleeping and waking and morning Mass, for meals and study and sports. Six classes a day, each an hour. Each opened and closed with a prayer.

      At first bell the boys rose and dressed. An upperclassman handpicked by the rector made his way down each corridor, singing out the morning greeting: Benedicamus Domino.

      The boys sang in answer: Deo Gratias.

      The day’s first class was Latin. The teacher, Father Fleury, had studied in Rome. He was young and fair-haired and wished himself elsewhere—among the ruins at Ostia Antica; kneeling before the Sacrament at Santa Maria Maggiore; walking along the Tiber, breviary in hand. In a few short years the Latin Mass would be abandoned, but at St. John’s at least, the fact would go unacknowledged. The curriculum would not change. Why learn Latin if the Mass was said in English? If the boys wondered, they gave no sign. They declined and conjugated and asked no questions. Father Fleury corrected them rigorously.

      In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.

      A bell rang.

      The boys processed to algebra, then history. The noon bell called them to chapel. In silence they walked to the refectory for lunch. A hot meal always, meat bathed in slick gravy—unappetizing fare, and yet they’d have killed for more of it; the invisible cooks, by ignorance or design, misjudged the hunger of growing boys. The priests sat up front at a long table, the rector at the center. At his elbow was a brass bell. If he rang the bell after the blessing, talking was forbidden. A seminarian would read aloud from scripture. A hundred boys chewed and swallowed.

      A bell rang.

      English came next; then biology. A bell rang for afternoon rec. The gymnasium had tall mullioned windows, as the dead Cardinal had ordered; they’d been covered in chicken wire to protect the fine glass. The boys suited up for basketball, a game Art had once avoided. (In Grantham it was a sport for tough boys. A Morrison or a Pawlowski might take out your eye.) But like everything at seminary, sport was mandatory; and Art was no longer the smallest or the shyest. Day after day the boys raced across the court, a crest painted at its center: Seminarium Sancti Joannis Bostoniense 1884.

      A bell rang.

      The boys showered and dressed, for dinner, Rosary, Spiritual Reading. At eight o’clock came the Grand Silence. Until breakfast the next morning, talking was forbidden. Not a word would be spoken in the corridors.

      The routine was fixed; it deviated for no one. Like those before him—more majorum—Art lived by the Rule.

      HE TOOK to this new life with great enthusiasm, a sunflower turning its face to the sky. He loved the orderly days, the mornings in chapel. The silence nourished him; his soul expanded to fill it. Every moment of the day became a prayer. The buildings themselves thrilled him, their high vaulted ceilings—to draw the eye upward, said Father Dowd; the mind closer to God.

      Father Dowd taught the boys music. He was the youngest of the faculty, a brand-new priest, only eight years older than the senior boys. The other priests treated pupils with a certain disregard, knowing that half would leave before graduation; that a scant 10 percent would eventually be ordained. But Father Dowd was not dismissive. He was known to have favorites. Those boys who sang out joyfully, who were not struck deaf when singing harmony: his work was made bearable by such pupils, the Arthur Breens and Gary Moriconis who could still hit the high notes. That first year, unspoiled by puberty, Art sang like an angel. In class, after his solo, Father Dowd had said as much. “What I would give for a dozen Breens,” he told the boys, his eyes misting with pleasure. Arthur Breen could sing anything. His voice was God’s gift.

      “Such a pity,” Father Dowd told the class, “that it has to change.”

      He launched, then, into a history lesson. Centuries ago, a voice like Arthur Breen’s would have been preserved by castration. The castrati were the superstars of their day, the primi uomi of early opera. They sang with otherworldly range and power, the darlings of popes, cardinals and kings.

      Listening, Art had blushed scarlet. From that day onward he avoided Father Dowd’s confessional, a choice easily justified: Father Dowd’s line was always the longest, his favorite boys—Ray Cousins, Gary Moriconi—at the head of the line.

      Of Art’s teachers, Father Fleury was the most inspiring. He spoke often of his travels to Rome. The splendors of Vatican City he called our patrimony. Every Catholic ought to visit as often as possible. To his pupils it was a stunning admonition; in their working-class neighborhoods, Rome might have been Neptune. Art listened in fascination. His Latin vocabulary doubled, then tripled, so desperate was he to please Father Fleury. It was a task that demanded considerable effort, the priest’s attention was so clearly elsewhere.

      Adult indifference, its power to motivate children, is old news in Catholic circles. My own mother practiced a version of this approach—by natural inclination, I suspect, more than by design. Father Fleury’s disregard was, to Art, oddly reassuring. He was unused to flatterers like Father Dowd, confused by male attention of any kind. With his stepfather, indifference was the best you could hope for. If you did anything to attract his notice, there would be hell to pay. But unlike Ted McGann, Father Fleury wasn’t volatile or angry, just preoccupied with other matters. Art lived to impress him. Years later he would recall the time he scored a 99 on a quarterly exam and was rewarded with a rare smile.

      He had made no errors, but Father Fleury did not award 100s. He subtracted one point, always, for original sin.

      Art had never had a father. When Ma’s first marriage was annulled—literally made into nothing—Harry Breen was expunged from the record. Art was the awkward reminder of a union that had, officially, never been. Now, suddenly, he had more fathers than he knew what to do with: Father Fleury, Father Koval, Father Frontino, Father Dowd. They taught him more than Latin and history, algebra and music. By word and example they taught priestliness: ways of speaking and acting; of not speaking and not acting. Restraint and discipline, obedience and silence.

      For a shy boy, these formulas were a help and a comfort. Art didn’t miss his old school, the rough-and-tumble Grantham Junior High. St. John’s was a haven from all that frightened him, the alarming interplay of male and female, that intricate and wild dance. Like many boys he feared the opposite sex. But even more intensely, he feared his own.

      A certain kind of boy unnerved him, hale athletes, confident and aggressive. At seminary such specimens were blessedly few. From the first it was clear that a range existed: alpha males at the one end; at the other, the distinctly effete. Both extremes were, to Art, alarming. Like Latin nouns, the boys came in three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. He placed himself in the third category, undifferentiated. In the seminary at least, it seemed the safest place to be.

      Matters of sex, of maleness and femaleness, were in this world peripheral. He felt protected by silence, grateful at all that was left unsaid. Once, at a Lenten retreat, Father Koval had delivered a steely sermon, exhorting the boys to keep their vessels clean. To Art, at fifteen, the words remained mysteriously figurative, vaguely connected to all that had distressed him in his old life: at home, the nighttime noises from Ma and Ted’s bedroom; at school, the fragrant and fleshy presence of girls.

      The СКАЧАТЬ