The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates
At Good Shepherd, worshippers at the Latin mass were like zombies: glaze-eyed, uninvolved, stunned with boredom. No doubt, as my mother once hinted, Sunday morning’s mass was a time for wives and mothers to rest. Like sleeping with one’s eyes open, somehow managing to remain upright in the hard wooden pews. (And the kneelers were hard wood, too.)
Daddy hadn’t such boredom to contend with. Typically, Fred Oates had managed to ascend to a level of participation that allowed him to think and make decisions, and not merely to drift and daydream through the hour-long mass with the small herd of worshippers. Playing the organ in the choir loft above the congregation was a great pleasure to him; immersed in music, he didn’t have to listen to Father O’Malley’s curiously falsetto singsong voice at all.
The most inhumanly soporific of religious activities is the “saying” of the rosary, and this too we were compelled to do, or to go through the motions of doing. Shuffling to the communion railing, we “took” communion—“This is the Body and Blood of Christ; take ye and eat”—or such was the translation from Latin. No one seemed remotely aware or even interested in what it might mean—what it would mean—if the “body” and the “blood” of Jesus Christ were literally contained within a crisp white communion wafer designed to melt on the tongue.
Transubstantiation: quite a miracle!
In all the Catholic years no passion, no zeal, no authenticity.
No tears like those of Reverend Bender.
“BLESS ME, FATHER. FOR I have sinned.”
Or was it rather, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Or, an artful variant, “Bless me, Father—for I have sinned.”
From the age of thirteen to eighteen I would attend what seemed like many thousands of masses out of respect for my parents and their promise to Father O’Malley, that had been made out of respect for my grandmother’s grief. Though it seems bizarre to me now, and would cause anyone who knows me well to laugh aloud, I also went to confession during those years, dutifully, doggedly; like any seemingly observant Catholic I slipped into the shadowy confessional that resembles a small kiosk, knelt on the rock-hard kneeler, and shut the little door; through a sort of chicken-wire grating I would see a vague outline of my confessor’s face, and would imagine his shut eyes; for a long afternoon of droning confessions in the Good Shepherd Catholic Church of Pendleton, New York* could not have failed to stupefy any sentient individual, even Father O’Malley. In the confessional one was not supposed to “recognize” the priest, nor was the priest supposed to “recognize” the penitent. In an abashed voice I would murmur Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been ________ since my last confession.
No doubt, it had rarely been more than one week since my last confession, in those years when I was a captive at home, under the (benign) surveillance of my parents. Though there were rumors of penitents who returned to the confessional after years, even decades, of having been “lapsed.”
Mortal sins, venial sins. Very few penitents in the Pendleton parish, I would guess, were capable of mortal sins (except those involving church law like eating meat on Friday, inexplicably as serious a sin as homicide); rather, it must have been a flood of venial sins cascading about the priest’s head, trivial scrapings from ordinary life—I was inattentive during mass, I did not attend mass. I did not obey my parents, I had “impure” thoughts, I told lies.
Extreme embarrassment attended the admission—I had “impure” thoughts. Fortunately, Father O’Malley had no evident interest in these “impure” thoughts—(at least not mine)—and did not interrogate me further.
As for lies—the number of lies uttered by most people, certainly by me, partial-lies, trivial lies, inconsequential lies, rarely significant lies, had to be enormous. Some of us, particularly if we are born female, must cultivate an artful sort of dishonesty virtually from birth: we smile, we smile happily, we smile very happily, to assure others that we are fine, indeed we are happy; we smile to assure others that we have no criticism of them, no quarrel, in fact no contrary thoughts of our own. But perhaps such smiles are not precisely lies since they don’t involve words.
It may have been that, in other parishes, under the watchful eyes of other priests, the penitent was expected to report sins in detail; but Father O’Malley, who may have been hard of hearing in one or both ears, did not often make inquiries. Whatever Father O’Malley’s limitations he was not a voyeur, or a sadist—(at least not with me. But perhaps he had no interest in me). In the prayer book for young people there was a helpful appendix listing categories of sins, which appendix I would skim before each confession, that I might dredge up a reasonable amount of sins to offer to the priest. (One sin I never had to confess was profanity. This was, to me, the easiest sin of all to avoid. One sin I admitted repeatedly—I was inattentive during mass.)
After a suitable interim, when no more sins were forthcoming from the penitent, Father O’Malley would seem to rouse himself and grant absolution with a murmured Say one Our Father, five Hail Marys or an equivalent penance and the ordeal would be concluded until the next time.
Father O’Malley was a bald fattish middle-aged man who seemed often to lose his way in his rambling sermons, that were geared, in vocabulary and syntax, to parishioners of the mental age of elementary schoolchildren. I did not yet know the word for his glowingly flushed cheeks and nose netted with capillaries—rubefacient. His hard round beer-belly strained against the black fabric of his priest’s clothing; with each week of Lent this belly would shrink until by Easter Sunday it was perceptibly reduced. But following Easter, and the end of Lenten fasting, the belly would make its inexorable return. (I am not sure that I would have noticed this eccentric detail except that others commented on it, with some mirth.) In Father O’Malley, who was probably a totally representative parish priest of his era, Christianity had been reduced to the particular strictures, rituals, pieties and dogma of the Holy Roman Catholic Church which was irrefutably the only true church; the political leanings of this parish priest, reflecting the general anti-Communist/anti-liberal bias of the era, were evident in sermons castigating a “modern” way of living, synonymous with “sin.” (This was the era of the Catholic League of Decency which sternly rated “objectionable” movies with X’s connotating condemned. These films, like Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue [1953], Catholics were forbidden to see under penalty of mortal sin.)
Decades later when it was revealed how pervasive sexual molestation and pedophilia have been in the Catholic Church, how many parish priests not unlike Father O’Malley were involved in sexual coercion and its cover-up, I was astonished—how could this be possible? The priests we’d known at Good Shepherd seemed rather more like automatons or sleepwalkers than men of passion, or even emotion; it was difficult to imagine them behaving licentiously except with alcohol and food. How likely was it, such utterly bored and boring persons could commit such cruel sins?
So it is, former Catholics often exclaim to one another But we had no idea—did you? Not one Catholic of my acquaintance, practicing or non- , has ever remarked that he or she had any direct, or even indirect, knowledge of pedophilia in the Church. Yet, if the media is to be believed, such terrible things were raging about us, in parishes other than our own.
The experience of a Roman Catholic who is born into the religion, and who attends parochial school taught by priests or nuns, is typically very different from the experience I am describing here. I was spared the extremes of the catechism-religion of which so many writers have written so compellingly—the paragon being James Joyce; I came to the religion late, too skeptical already at twelve to take its elaborate cosmology seriously, and filled with resentment and incredulity at having to pretend otherwise. I found it very difficult to believe in “sin”—I found it very difficult to believe that there was a God who cared in the slightest if I’d eaten meat on Friday, or inadvertently licked a raindrop from my lips, before taking communion—I found it very difficult to believe that there was a
If I had not cared so much for my parents, and had not wanted to upset them, I would have walked out of mass during one of Father O’Malley’s droning sermons, and never returned. But I knew what my father would say—We gave our word.
How much is religion the honoring of one’s parents?—the wish not to upset, not to offend, not to disappoint?
The good girl is one whose smile is assuring, though it is not to be trusted.
I could not disappoint my parents, who meant so well by their new, adopted religion. I could not upset them, still less humiliate them in the eyes of others. Our religion seemed to me a sort of family charade in which each individual tacitly agreed not to question the integrity of the others while divulging no crack in his or her own. Dutifully I went to mass with them, Sunday following Sunday, for years; even when I was a student at Syracuse University I continued to attend mass, perhaps not every Sunday but frequently, so that, even at a distance, I wasn’t violating the promise my parents had made in their hour of desperation.
One day, in my early twenties when I was independent of my parents, I would cease attending mass entirely. No more abashed, faltering confessions! No more pretense! Even when I was composing my most Catholic novel What I Lived For, in 1993, I could not bring myself to attend a mass, by this time a mass said in English—I’d tried, but I could not.
Yet, ironically, it was in my mid-twenties, when I was teaching English at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit-run university, that I discovered a sort of Catholicism—intellectual, philosophical and literary-minded—that bore virtually no resemblance to the parochial religion of my childhood; among my colleagues and friends at the University of Detroit were several Jesuits, men of surpassing intelligence, wit, warmth, and personal charisma, with whom I became friends. How astonishing these individuals seemed to me, dedicated Catholics who’d earned Ph.D.’s and had written excellent books! I would wonder—where had such priests been, when I’d been a Catholic? Would I have cherished the Roman Catholic Church, if just one of these priests had been assigned to the Good Shepherd Church in Pendleton? (But Jesuits are not parish priests, of course. The soldiers of the Society of Jesus aim higher than weekly sermons.)
By this time of this revelation, I had long ceased to believe.
What I most vividly recall was the stultifying nature of dogmatic belief, thrust upon a young and naturally inquisitive mind. A nightmare for a young person, trapped in the repetitive din of the Latin mass! Yet, in those years I had been a dutiful Catholic girl I could take refuge each Sunday for an hour in daydreaming; in the most intense, oneiric daydreaming, to be recorded in a notebook afterward, or typed on the (manual) Remington portable typewriter my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern gave me for my fourteenth birthday. Out of the boredom of the pew, how many stories and poems have sprung! In desperation the Catholic writer learns young how to harvest the imagination where she/he can, in very defiance of those who would trap us in their nets and hold us captive.
* The most famous, or infamous, parishioner of the Good Shepherd Church was to be Timothy McVeigh, whose boyhood attendance at mass with his father, William McVeigh, overlapped with my parents’ attendance in the 1970s.
HEADLIGHTS: THE FIRST DEATH
WHY WOULD YOU DO such a thing? That is not a good idea.
But no one knows, and so no one asks.
Why in the night I slip from the rear of the darkened house. Why making my way along the graveled drive to the highway where in the shadows of evergreens I stand watching for headlights on Transit Road.
Sometimes there is a light rain. Overhead, a mottled sky and a fierce glowering moon-face behind clouds.
Like a sleepwalker who has wakened. In the night, past midnight, in this place in which such behavior would be perceived (by adults) to be aberrant, in a way rebellious.
It is disturbing to the adults of a household, when we are not in bed at the proper time. Our sleep, they can’t control or monitor; how far we wander in our dreams, they have no idea. But it is an audacious gesture to leave the sleeping house and to venture outside, alone.
Insomnia begins in early adolescence. The swarming brain, the fast pulse. Excitement in realizing—Something is about to happen!
Out of nowhere has come this strange fascination that will endure for years, until I move out of the house on Transit Road forever.
A fascination with prowling in the night—standing at the end of the gravel driveway—watching for headlights of strangers’ vehicles as they first appear beyond the V-intersection of Transit Road and Millersport Highway (to the south) and beyond the bridge over the Tonawanda Creek in the direction of Lockport (to the north). Lights that are scarcely visible at first, like faint stars, gradually growing larger, and then more swiftly larger, as if the vehicles were accelerating, and the headlights near-blinding—until abruptly the vehicle has passed, and now it is red taillights that are visible, receding.
Of all vehicles, Greyhound buses at night seem most fraught with romance. For I am often a passenger on these buses, riding to Lockport and back to Millersport, but mostly by day; rarely by night. (The bus station in Lockport, on a back street that runs parallel with Main Street, is not a place of safety or comfort for a girl or indeed a woman traveling alone after dark.)
Why am I entranced by headlights on Transit Road? Is it the contemplation of sheer randomness, chance? The intersection of lives—by chance? The life of the mind is essentially a life of control; if you are a writer, it is control which you bring to your work, by way of the selection of language, the arrangement of “scenes,” the achievement of an “ending” . . . But life is likely to be that which lies beyond our control, and is unfathomable. And so I am entranced by the phenomenon of strangers’ vehicles speeding past our house, that would elicit scarcely a glance by day.
There is something melancholy about this memory. The girl is a figure in a Hopper painting that Hopper never painted. The girl is in disguise as a (young, mere) girl—that is the explanation.
It is at such times that I feel my aloneness most strongly—which is very different from loneliness.
Loneliness weakens. Aloneness empowers.
Aloneness makes of us something so much more than we are in the midst of others whose claim is that they know us.
If they have named us, it is reasonable for them to believe not only that they know us but that they own us.
It is a peculiar fact of my young life, that I am under the spell of the Other; mesmerized by the prospect of mysterious lives that may surround me, to which I have no (actual, literal) access. The phantasmagoria of what is called “personality”—why we are, but also why we are so very different from each other.
When I am alone I think of such things. Especially when I am alone at night. Restless in my room, which is now, after my grandfather’s death, a bedroom on the first floor of the farmhouse, with a single small window overlooking a small patch of outdoors. To see the night sky, I have to kneel at this window and crane my neck to look sharply up. Often there is nothing to see for the sky is opaque with clouds.
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT my wandering outside at night has begun in reaction to my grandfather’s death. For this is the first death.
It is possible that this early insomnia, a restlessness of the brain, a sudden and profound wish not to be in bed, with bedclothes weighing down my legs and feet, has something to do with the first death.
A death in the family is an abrupt and awful absence. A presence as familiar to you as your own face in the mirror is suddenly gone.
Like stepping through a doorway, and there is no floor, nothing awaiting—you will fall
The first death is a realization you cannot accept, as a child: that it is but the first, and there will be others.
The farmhouse, the farm buildings, the blacksmith’s forge in the barn—all are linked so closely with my grandfather John Bush, it is scarcely possible to imagine these without him.
Yet, these will remain. The smithy’s equipment, layered with soot; in a corner of the old barn, a pile of broken horseshoes.
Long after my grandfather is buried in the Good Shepherd Catholic Church cemetery, these will remain.
It was his time it was said.
John Bush died mysteriously—so it seemed to me. Suddenly my Hungarian grandfather was coughing more frequently, and more terribly, than before; his brash, bullying manner faded, and even his physical bulk seemed to diminish. My grandmother was no longer dominated by her forceful husband but rather terrified of what was happening to him, that took her, too, by surprise.
Emphysema, it was said. Ruined lungs, bleeding from tiny particles of iron, polluted and corrupted air breathed for years at Lackawanna Steel.
Nothing to be done, it was his time.
I am too young and too frightened of my grandfather’s absence to wonder at this death. Far too young, to wonder why John Bush who was so canny and obstinate yet had to work in such conditions. Why he felt he’d had to work in such circumstances. Decades later such a death would be designated work-related.