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  But there’s a flip side to all that breast-beating we Catholic kids of a certain vintage did in church and all the instruction in self-denial we underwent in school. We think we’re better than other people. Down deep, maybe we still do.

  As kids, we were taught to be the psychological equivalent of Navy SEALs—an elite parochial-school unit, drilled to take life’s blows on the chin without wincing. Or to stand in the bitter winds of winter, coat-less, without complaining. If we did feel pain, well, we were supposed to. After all, we Catholics—not the Jews and certainly not the baffling Protestants, who had broken away from the one true Church—really were God’s “chosen people.” Suffering was a test from God, a sign of His love. The Kennedy assassination, which took place when I was in third grade, made some kind of grim sense when seen through the lens of this theology of suffering popular among Catholics. On that terrible November day in 1963, America’s first Catholic president also became the country’s most visible secular martyr. Like everyone else old enough to remember, I retain sharp images of that day. Sister Mary William, my wonderful third-grade nun, was called outside our classroom and told the news. In shock, she broke into tears—which, in turn, upset the class. I remember her big white handkerchief and her rosary beads. After we were dismissed from school that day, my friends and I played listlessly on the street. My father came home from work that night and said something that shamed me. “He was a bum,” my father said of Kennedy. My father might have said other, gentler things about Kennedy before or after this blasphemy, but I remember only those words, which, for years, I never repeated to anyone. In conversations we had much later, I learned that my father had never forgiven JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, for being an enemy of Franklin Roosevelt and, to boot, against the U.S. entry into World War II.

  Whatever else you might say about them, the Kennedy family, over and over again through subsequent tragedies, would conduct themselves stoically in public. I remember reading an interview years ago with Senator Ted Kennedy in which he recalled that one of the key family lessons he learned growing up was that “to whom much is given, much is asked.” I’m sure that I, too, heard this phrase, or some variation of it, throughout grammar school—even though none of us at St. Raphael’s were remotely in the Kennedys’ league. But we were Catholics; we had been given the greatest gift of all—our faith. That made us and the Kennedys equals in the most crucial way.

  Submitting to suffering silently and accepting blame without excuses, deservedly or not, made our souls stronger. Our school motto might well have been “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” It wasn’t; we didn’t have a motto. Instead, on top of the first page of every homework assignment we students submitted at St. Raphael’s, we were required to draw a cross and, under it, the initials A.M.D.G. Translated from the Latin, those initials stood for the phrase “For the Greater Honor and Glory of God.” Imagine: every scrap of homework, no matter how inconsequential, dedicated to God. The great payoff of the Catholic popular theology of suffering in silence was the knowledge that Someone was always watching, keeping score. There was no need to complain or call attention to yourself or your trials or triumphs—God knew all about them already. To be a loudmouth was akin to being a Doubter. Squeaky wheels never got the grease at St. Raphael’s Parochial School; they got admonitions from the nuns to put up and shut up, as well as, no doubt, private prayers for salvation.

  I had no problem absorbing this lesson in popular theology. Indeed, it was a message preached to the public at large during the 1960s heyday of cinematic Catholicism when movies like The Sound of Music, The Trouble with Angels, and Yours, Mine and Ours affirmed a “zip your lip” program of self-abnegation. Popular films like these underscored the more potent gospel of self-denial I encountered in my parochial-school reading. I especially loved the autobiographies and novels about “Catholics under duress” and remembered their plots vividly, if not always accurately. And, though I’ve seen hardy traces of the unflinching “offer it up” attitude of these tales in contemporary Catholic fiction by Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, Mary Gordon, and even America’s Queen of Suspense, Mary Higgins Clark, the secular-martyr stories were a historically specific product of pre–Vatican II Catholicism. All but the most hard-line Catholic literature written after Vatican II displays a more humane attitude toward the souls being tested, a recognition that self-esteem (in small doses) can also be a virtue. For instance, in her 1978 masterpiece of updated martyrology, Final Payments, Mary Gordon charts the self-immolation of a beautiful young woman named Isabel Moore. Isabel has nursed her father through his long final illness. Now that he’s gone, this good daughter finds herself tortured by guilt over an incident that happened decades earlier: Isabel’s father, a longtime widower, showed interest in marrying his housekeeper, but the young Isabel contrived to break up that romance. In penance, Isabel now decides to care for the former housekeeper, becoming that bitter and infirm woman’s domestic slave. In the course of her servitude, Isabel gains a lot of weight and cuts her gorgeous black hair, perming it into a dull frizz. But in a post–Vatican II deus ex machina, she is redeemed from her self-lacerations by the interventions of an enlightened priest, who restores her sense of self by reminding her that personal happiness and beauty are gifts from God. Had Gordon written that same story in the 1940s or ’50s, Isabel probably would have gone on to run a Catholic rooming house for other friendless and unappreciative old ladies, waiting on them ceaselessly until her life of service (and all that extra weight) brought on an early death.

  I’ve delighted in meeting up with vestiges of the popular pre–Vatican II Catholic theology of self-sacrifice in contemporary Catholic-inflected literature, but like many an avid adult reader, I wanted to make a pilgrimage back to the source—the source not only of this traditional Catholic sense of superiority through martyrdom but also the source of my own passion for reading. About ten years ago, I began to try to reread as many of the autobiographies and novels as I could from my early years at St. Raphael’s. At an early point in this quest, I walked into a mega-bookstore that had just opened in downtown Washington and began to search for some of the autobiographies whose titles I remembered. No luck. I approached a clerk for help. He told me there was no separate section for autobiography. The autobiographies of literary figures, he said, were shelved in the literature section; all other autobiographies were shelved according to what their authors did. That system didn’t help me much because, as I’ve noted, what the Catholics whose life stories I was searching for “did” was to suffer and sometimes die without complaining too much.

  Remarkably, the children’s section of my local public library still had a few of those decades-old out-of-print titles on its shelves. (The District of Columbia public library system is as underfunded as St. Raphael’s was during my time there, when we were studying the ancient Brooklyn Catholic Speller. The librarians at my local D.C. branch are always too grateful when I walk in laden with shopping bags full of cast-off review copies.) In recent years, via the Internet, I’ve located little reprint houses that had still more of these secular saint stories on their lists. That’s how I’ve enjoyed the great luxury of revisiting parts of the literary world of my Catholic girlhood. And what I found in those memoirs and novels was the presence of something grander than a simple spirit of submission. If, as the Gospels tell us, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” the authors of those uplifting Catholic sagas—and, in particular, the autobiographies—must have decided that they weren’t going to wait for the next life to be recognized. Their tales of forbearance provided them the excuse to elbow to the head of the line and shout out that most Luciferian of profanities: “Pay attention to me!”

  That same semi-sacrilegious homily—one that suggested that good Catholics could not only get to heaven but also get even in this life— wafted through the plots of the novels I unearthed and reread. Over and over again, key (Catholic) characters come out on top in their stories precisely through pio
us renunciation, while their more grabby comrades are consumed by thwarted ambitions, envy, and a sinking realization of their own second-rate destinies. Of course, most martyr stories—sacred and profane—contain an element of superiority. The self-denying hero or heroine is “rewarded,” at the very least, by capturing the admiring focus of the narrative, while everyone else recedes into the background. Think of Sydney Carton, the guillotined martyr who gets to deliver the stirring closing words of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. ”8 Unlike the Catholic martyrs of autobiography and fiction, however, most non-Catholic martyrs like Carton need to sacrifice themselves to prove that they’re as good as the other characters. Catholic martyrs already know that they’re better than their peers; their sacrifice is evidence of their spiritual supremacy, and their stories confirm their mystical sense of election.

  As I reread these Catholic autobiographies and novels, their odd pridefulness became clearer to me. Much of the Catholic juvenilia I so dearly remembered preached a cover story of self-denial along with a covert sermon about the spiritual and worldly superiority that would result from this self-denial. Writhe and shine.

  Was I aware of this devout double-talk as a child reader? I’d like to claim premature powers of critical perspicacity, but who knows? It’s impossible to figure out just how literature influences young people, what messages they pick up or retain. I know that the lessons of the Catholic juvenile fiction and nonfiction I read meshed nicely with my shy personality and reinforced the “don’t get a swelled head” gospel that prevailed at home and in the neighborhood. I also sense that their pious egotism has something in common with my own. As a book critic for Fresh Air, I enjoy a certain amount of celebrity. As a college professor, I get to stand up in front of my classes and show off what I know. But in both cases, I’m shining my light in service to Literature, much as those exhibitionist secular saints served God and Family. (Plus, there’s a curious and fitting self-effacement involved in being a “radio celebrity,” since listeners don’t see your face.) This early reading diet of mine fed the desire for distinction that, I guess, is nascent in most children; it also cautioned against making a spectacle of oneself, towering too tall amongst one’s peers, being different. Wanting to stand apart and wanting to fit in—the contradictory impulses that have pushed and pulled my life—have their literary source in the books I read in parochial school.

  Upon rereading these stories as an adult, I wasn’t at all surprised to find that the meek and pious prevailed; maybe I half remembered that the plots turned out that way. And, certainly, as I’ve acknowledged, the message that we Catholics were better than the non-Catholics around us was so fundamental to our culture that it barely needed to be articulated. Indeed, a nonverbal memory comes to mind when I try to recall whether I would have realized that, through these ostensibly humble martyr stories, I was learning how to become a top dog here on earth and, eventually, in the hereafter. The image I see is Sunday Mass at St. Raphael’s Church. We knelt longer at Mass way back when I was young, especially at the pre–Vatican II Latin Masses, and I can still see the arrogant set to certain parishioners’ backs as they knelt stiffly on Sundays. That oh-so-correct posture had to have been a strain, but worth the pain. It was a public display intended to be seen by God as well as by the rest of the congregation—especially by those weaker worshippers who rested their rears on the pews for support. Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us. That’s certainly the justification that, particularly, the writers of the autobiographies I read in parochial school offered for their own immodest literary self-display. So, as a child, did I see the contradictions inherent in the way these authors flaunted their martyrdom to magnanimously provide spiritual models for the rest of us? I’m guessing, but I think that kind of behavior, both in books and in life, used to be as familiar to me as, once upon a time, Horn & Hardart fish cakes and macaroni were for Friday-night supper.

  The Catholic literature of my childhood is fascinating to me not because it encourages obvious connections to contemporary literature or social attitudes but precisely because it doesn’t. Sometimes we read books to escape the confines of the familiar, the here and now. Rereading these autobiographies and novels, I’ve felt as though I were reentering a world I once lived in but whose beliefs and cultural assumptions are now radically “other.” I don’t think you have to be Catholic to enjoy delving into these books (any more than I’ve had to be Jewish to enjoy Philip Roth’s novels, or Protestant to “get” John Updike). The lost world these books both create and invoke is so vivid, any curious reader can enter and be swept away.

  I thought Karen Killilea had died. Somewhere toward the end of the second of the two memoirs that her mother, Marie Killilea, wrote about her, I had a memory of Karen, like Beth in Little Women, breathing out a final sigh, closing her eyes, and giving up the ghost. After all, Karen, like Beth, was depicted in her story as a Victorian angel in the house, a selfless spirit whose brief time on earth would be spent showing others, particularly those lesser beings who blatantly wanted material comforts and success (think Jo and Amy), the right way to live. Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring. Their creators have difficulty sustaining such static characters throughout the entire length of a book. But memory played a trick on me: Karen didn’t die. One of the bonuses of revisiting dearly remembered childhood literature is that we learn anew how faulty our recollections really are, and, in this particular case, how fictional plots can superimpose themselves on those memories. Karen Killilea, after all, was a real person. And like many other celebrated lives, hers refused to conform to neat societal or novelistic expectations.

  Karen’s exceptional life was the subject of two bestselling memoirs written in the 1950s: Karen and With Love from Karen. For decades these memoirs were required elementary and high school reading for both parochial- and public-school kids. Together they traced the life of the ever-expanding Irish Catholic Killilea family from the 1940S into the mid-’50s. The originating cause of the first book was the birth, in 1940, of Marie and Jimmy Killilea’s second daughter, Karen, three months premature, weighing under two pounds, and given little chance of survival by the attending doctors. When she was close to one year old, Karen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The Karen books are now out of print (although a special Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of With Love from Karen was published in 1983, attesting to its importance). The books, however, still grace the shelves of libraries and used-book stores, and they hold up as a devastating historical record of the widespread medical and popular attitude toward severely handicapped children in mid-twentieth-century America.9

  They also hold up as a record of the particular kind of spiritual extreme-adventure tale that we Catholic-school students were required to read. Along with swashbucklers by Robert Louis Stevenson and A.E.W. Mason (author of The Four Feathers), we were nourished on a steady diet of secular-martyr fiction, in which ordinary men and women, boys and girls, found their faith—and, often, their emotional and physical fortitude—tested. The intriguing and exhilarating thing about these spiritual extreme-adventure tales was that they routinely featured women in the primary role. Indeed, aside from the Nancy Drew series, the secular-martyr stories were among the few books, fiction or nonfiction, that I can remember reading from grammar school that featured women as heroines. After all, women were just as capable as men of suffering through dark nights of the soul—no muscles were required. As the Karen books illustrate, however, female martyrs often cloaked their remarkable acts of faith and courage in a mantle of ladylike humility—even as they gloried in doing ferocious battle with the sacred and profane forces of the patriarchy. Reading the Karen books as a young
girl, I think I internalized some lessons about being simultaneously devout and determined, pious and self-promoting.

  Karen Killilea’s life, as described by her mother, is the kind of story all readers love: a true story of ordinary people who are thrown into extraordinary circumstances and who persevere and triumph against all odds. When baby Karen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, many of the top doctors in New York City and around the country whom her panicked parents consulted predicted that she would never live beyond childhood. Other medical experts decreed that she was retarded, that she should be institutionalized and forgotten.

  But the Killileas desperately push on in their search to find hope for their baby daughter. Finally, when Karen is three and a half, Marie reads in the local evening paper that “Dr. B, cerebral palsy specialist,” 10 will be visiting their local hospital the next day. She boldly places a person-to-person call to the doctor’s home late that night and insists that he squeeze Karen into his already overcrowded clinic schedule. When the sleepy doctor demurs, Marie tells her readers,

  I wasn’t going to let this chance slip away. I forgot all Mother’s teaching and my convent training. I took a grip on the phone and boldly and frantically I said: “Doctor, doesn’t your train come into Pennsylvania Station?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Doctor, I believe you’re our last hope. I feel that if you say our case is hopeless, we must accept the verdict. But, I also feel that if you saw Karen you would not say so.”