Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw Page B

as she could sometimes be, she was also smotheringly protective. She wouldn’t even allow me to join the altar boys—she was afraid to let me leave the house before daybreak to serve at six o’clock Mass—until Monsignor Dade declared that I might have “the call.” Ecstatic at the prospect of a priest in the family, she summarily shoved me out the door into the darkness.
    Little did she realize that her single loosening of the reins would free me for a different fate. Instead of sticking my neck into a clerical noose, I wriggled away from the future she and Monsignor Dade envisioned, and became the man I am. This narrow escape reminds me of the French playwright Jean Genet, who passed almost his entire childhood in prison. When later asked how juvenile detention might be improved, he replied that to the contrary it should be made crueler and universal. If everybody were savagely punished in youth, Genet said, there’d be far more beauty and poetry in the world.
    This theme of a beneficially stunted adolescence, set against the backstory of my stint with the altar boys, constitutes an early chapter in my memoir and is the first chunk that I feel comfortable sharing with the public. When invited to speak at the Burgh House about how I became an actor, I bring along a sheaf of typed pages. To prime the audience I joke that inside every Catholic boy there’s a spoiled priest and inside every Irishman a spoiled Proust. Then I don’t read my manuscript so much as perform it.
    Every summer, as a reward for our devotion, Monsignor Dade chartered a bus and drove a dozen altar boys to Glen Echo amusement park. The carnival rides didn’t start up until the afternoon, but the swimming pool opened early. While other kids spent the morning frisking in the cool water, I was stuck high and dry. Mom wouldn’t permit me to dip so much as a toe into what she called “that awful pee pod.” After polio had crippled Candy, she wasn’t about to lose another child to disease. I argued that no microbes could survive in Glen Echo’s astringently chlorinated pool. Still, Mom wouldn’t relent.
    So I clung to the fence, like those convicts I saw on Sunday at Maury’s slammer waiting in the yard at the hurricane wire, hoping for visitors. As if I didn’t feel excluded enough on my own, Monsignor Dade crowded in beside me in his black suit and starched collar.
    “Why aren’t you swimming?” he asked.
    “My mother won’t let me. She’s afraid I’ll catch something.”
    “And you obeyed her,” he marveled. “Even though you could have sneaked into the pool.”
    What was the point of explaining that I didn’t dare do anything behind her back? It was her punishment, not God’s, that I feared.
    “That’s wonderful, Quinn,” he said.
    Seeing nothing wonderful in my plight, I wandered off through the deserted park. Footsteps followed me. Monsignor Dade’s. Even after my run-in with the creep in the woods, I had no fear—the idea didn’t exist in those days—that a priest might groom a boy and crave his body. It was bad enough that he craved my soul. To me a religious vocation threatened to intensify the prison I was already trapped in. Holy orders, as I saw it, would sentence me to an eternity on the wrong side of the fence.
    As I ambled along, I heard workers tinkering on the innards of the Tunnel of Love, hosing down the Fun House and rattling utensils in closed food stalls. The smell of buttered popcorn made my stomach rumble. I debated whether to dig into the bag lunch Candy had packed for me. If I ate now, I’d starve later. But there was nothing else to do during this dead time.
    At a picnic table, I unwrapped a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wolfed it down under strands of unlit bulbs that swayed overhead like a galaxy of spent stars. Everything at Glen Echo—the coiled snake of the roller coaster, the stopped clock of the Ferris wheel, the scorpion stingers of the Dodge’em Cars curled against the