Church’s role in World War II. Had that brought her home? It was hard to imagine how. But you never knew about Val. She wasn’t the kind of nun we knew at St. Columbkille’s Grammar School. That thought always put a smile on my face and I was grinning like a fool when I got to my brownstone. There wasn’t going to be anything Val and I couldn’t handle. There never had been.
I crossed the Hudson by way of the George Washington Bridge, headed toward Princeton, and felt the cold and the damp and the tension of my foot on the gas pedal setting off the old ache in my leg, a souvenir of my Jesuit days. The Jesuits had left their mark, all right. The traffic finally thinned out and I was alone with the sweep of the windshield wipers and the Elgar cello concerto coming from the tape player. It had become a foul, slippery night, the rain turning to a slushy half-ice, the car always on the verge of aquaplaning me into the next world.
I was thinking of another night rather like it, twenty-odd years before, only then it was the utter dead of winter and white not dirty gray, but there had been the same feeling of things out of kilter. I’d been heading back to Princeton then, too, dreading the talk I was facing with my father. I didn’t want to tell him what hadhappened and he certainly didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t much for sob stories and failures, which in his view were always nothing but goddamn cowardice. The closer I got to Princeton the more I wanted no part of it. There I was, in the middle of what Bulwer-Lytton might have called a dark and stormy night, ice and snow sealing me off, running like a thief in the night from the gloomy, crenellated battlements where I’d tried to be a Jesuit. Tried to be the man my father had always wanted me to be.
Hugh Driskill liked the idea of my being among the Jesuits, liked knowing I was entwined in the rigorous discipline, the demanding intellectual life. He liked knowing I was taking my place in a world that he understood. It was also a world that my father felt he could control to some extent. He liked to believe in his own egocentric way that he, because of his wealth and devotion to the Church and the accomplishing of good works and the wielding of influence—he liked to believe that in the end he was one of those who defined the Establishment, the Church within the Church. I always felt that my father rated himself rather too highly but, hell, what did I know?
More recently it has occurred to me that he may have had a pretty accurate view of himself after all. Drew Summerhays had confided a few things to me over the years that tended to legitimize my father’s belief in his own importance. Summerhays had long been a mentor and friend to my father in much the same way my father was to the ubiquitous Curtis Lockhardt. And now Summerhays was telling me that my father and Lockhardt were laying plans for the choosing of the next pope.
Of course I remembered things from my own life that lent weight to my father’s view of himself. When I was a kid, Cardinal Spellman—he must have been bishop or archbishop then, who remembers?—was always coming over from New York to Princeton for dinner, which must have meant we were something special. He came to both the Princeton house and the very grand Park Avenue duplex which we gave up after Mother’s accident. Sometimes I heard my parents calling him “Frank,” and onceI marveled when he told me he was wearing alligator shoes. Perhaps I’d been inspecting him for feet of clay.
It must have been the call from Val that had gotten me worrying and thinking about the old days, and now I was remembering Spellman and my father and alligator shoes and the Jesuits and that long-ago night when the road was slippery and the snow was blowing and I was driving home alone with a load of bad news, wondering what my father would say, wondering how he’d confront the newest disappointment I’d devised for him.
Twenty years ago,
I crossed the Hudson by way of the George Washington Bridge, headed toward Princeton, and felt the cold and the damp and the tension of my foot on the gas pedal setting off the old ache in my leg, a souvenir of my Jesuit days. The Jesuits had left their mark, all right. The traffic finally thinned out and I was alone with the sweep of the windshield wipers and the Elgar cello concerto coming from the tape player. It had become a foul, slippery night, the rain turning to a slushy half-ice, the car always on the verge of aquaplaning me into the next world.
I was thinking of another night rather like it, twenty-odd years before, only then it was the utter dead of winter and white not dirty gray, but there had been the same feeling of things out of kilter. I’d been heading back to Princeton then, too, dreading the talk I was facing with my father. I didn’t want to tell him what hadhappened and he certainly didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t much for sob stories and failures, which in his view were always nothing but goddamn cowardice. The closer I got to Princeton the more I wanted no part of it. There I was, in the middle of what Bulwer-Lytton might have called a dark and stormy night, ice and snow sealing me off, running like a thief in the night from the gloomy, crenellated battlements where I’d tried to be a Jesuit. Tried to be the man my father had always wanted me to be.
Hugh Driskill liked the idea of my being among the Jesuits, liked knowing I was entwined in the rigorous discipline, the demanding intellectual life. He liked knowing I was taking my place in a world that he understood. It was also a world that my father felt he could control to some extent. He liked to believe in his own egocentric way that he, because of his wealth and devotion to the Church and the accomplishing of good works and the wielding of influence—he liked to believe that in the end he was one of those who defined the Establishment, the Church within the Church. I always felt that my father rated himself rather too highly but, hell, what did I know?
More recently it has occurred to me that he may have had a pretty accurate view of himself after all. Drew Summerhays had confided a few things to me over the years that tended to legitimize my father’s belief in his own importance. Summerhays had long been a mentor and friend to my father in much the same way my father was to the ubiquitous Curtis Lockhardt. And now Summerhays was telling me that my father and Lockhardt were laying plans for the choosing of the next pope.
Of course I remembered things from my own life that lent weight to my father’s view of himself. When I was a kid, Cardinal Spellman—he must have been bishop or archbishop then, who remembers?—was always coming over from New York to Princeton for dinner, which must have meant we were something special. He came to both the Princeton house and the very grand Park Avenue duplex which we gave up after Mother’s accident. Sometimes I heard my parents calling him “Frank,” and onceI marveled when he told me he was wearing alligator shoes. Perhaps I’d been inspecting him for feet of clay.
It must have been the call from Val that had gotten me worrying and thinking about the old days, and now I was remembering Spellman and my father and alligator shoes and the Jesuits and that long-ago night when the road was slippery and the snow was blowing and I was driving home alone with a load of bad news, wondering what my father would say, wondering how he’d confront the newest disappointment I’d devised for him.
Twenty years ago,
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