ONE BOY'S STORY My meeting with Father M
Cooper, Rand Richards
ONE BOY'S STORY 'Father M would like to see you in his office' Rand Richards Cooper This is a story about a priest I knew, and what he did to me. I was not molested, exactly. But something...
...and I wonder-in my case-how much farther up the scale it would have to have gone for its primary meaning to me, these decades later, to be one of damage...
...the same sense of advantage given and taken...
...I got an A." "I don't doubt it at all...
...Academically, Saint C's was not exactly achievement-minded...
...I did a term paper on the Attica State Prison uprising, and Mr...
...I had a baby face...
...Yet short of physical intimidation or force, I suspect the same troubling and confusing dynamic would have been in play-the same gratification and thrill of intimacy...
...Children don't understand things in the conscious way adults do...
...The building had a recent addition, identified in engraved gilt letters as The Father Penders Wing...
...I appreciate your candor," he said when I left...
...Would I feel more damaged, more hurt, if Father M had crossed the line into touching...
...He was young-thirty at most, dark haired, bearded and handsome...
...The irony of it-the awful, impossible, sad irony.write...
...Deception...
...Father M had recognized something in me, something praiseworthy, and rewarded it by letting me skip class...
...More hot secret tears...
...He said I copied it," I said...
...He gestured to a chair...
...Parents in particular didn't always react the way you'd like them to...
...It was about the escape...
...Father M wanted me-and that meant there was a me there, one he had seen into, with some insight...
...We have to be celibate...
...involved in maintaining teachings from Rome that have lost all credibility...
...It felt good to be desired, to be admired and delighted in...
...There was a hole in the fence where, if the teacher on patrol wasn't watching, you could escape at lunch, then hustle up the block to the pizza place, cram down an Italian sub, and make it back by the bell...
...A mutual hypocrisy, he claims, served both sides...
...He gave a rueful toss of his hand...
...Married...
...they brought celebrity...
...I was not a Catholic, but my parents, displeased with the public schools, sent me anyway...
...The incorrigible priest as bogeyman...
...Of course, someone obviously did do something, something that resulted in his being shifted out of education and out of the diocese...
...I like to invite students in now and then to see how they're getting along...
...My father stood on the sidewalk, looking at it with the ironic grin he saves for certain facts of life he considers darkly amusing...
...Their houses were smaller, their attitudes tougher...
...The school grounds, a half-acre of fenced-in blacktop, resembled a prison yard...
...Uttering those words was my first conscious experience of dealing with adults from a position of strength...
...My father couldn't keep the sick grin off his face...
...I was secretly sensitive...
...As for Father M, not too many years later he was transferred, out of the area and out of education...
...Input," "curriculum," "innovative"-to have an adult use these words, assuming (correctly) that I knew them, a sensitive twelve-year-old with a secret life as a reader: it was immensely flattering...
...I understood, in that inchoate way, just how cleverly he had seduced me...
...I wasn't...
...This year I planned a course in Family Life and Human Sexuality...
...But something happened The setting is a Catholic grade school I'll call Saint Crispin's, in the early 1970s...
...Penders, he told me, had been notorious in the 1930s and 1940s, when my father was a choirboy...
...But I couldn't...
...The thought that there might be boys among us Father M had actually victimized-such eventualities lay beyond rumor, beyond the thinkable...
...Like the schoolyard game of crossers and catchers, the spaghetti dinner was a rite of passage at Saint C's...
...My ears burned...
...Running a Catholic school wasn't easy, he went on...
...But I didn't...
...But I was not of that culture...
...There was a boy's frank cruelty at Saint | C's that I would recognize a few years later in the stories of | James Joyce...
...Mystery is power, and to the victim, the priest spoke and acted with an authority "sanctioned by all the accumulated culture of Catholicism...
...A few days later, a messenger again showed up in English class, and again Sister Helen looked my way...
...the ultimate manly escape, with Father M playing a kind of mad tackier...
...A nocturnal emission, it's when you have a dream in the night...
...I knew I didn't have to answer his questions about sex, either...
...Girls, those merciless arbiters of manliness, stood watching on the sideline...
...I remember watching the big hand tremble, as if it might move backward, and feeling a surge of terror until it finally clicked ahead...
...The church's task is clear...
...We have terrific spaghetti dinners...
...Teachers at Saint C's, he explained, weren't used to high-quality student work...
...It seems farfetched to ascribe the decades of silence about priests like Father M-including the silence of children and parents-to something so elaborate...
...Father M gave me a look that in retrospect strikes me as utterly knowing...
...I left that part of the country, and of my life, behind...
...The school was staffed mostly by lay teachers, plus a handful of nuns-like the decrepit Sister Catherine Mary, who sat statue-still in the world's tiniest library, a converted janitor's closet, and was said to be long dead and mummified...
...Mid-century American Catholicism, Wills points out, cast the priest as "an especially holy figure," a person of "numinous supernatural power" whose domain was the altar and the confessional, "special places marked off from the 'profane' and explicable...
...About your paper...
...And who knew what to believe, anyway...
...a usable asset...
...He smiled, and nodded ever so slightly, as if to say, Touche...
...This is not at all to support the pedophile Father Paul Shanley's notorious and grotesque claim that the child is the seducer of the adult...
...His letter rambled reminiscently, describing his occasional return trips to town-driving by my parents' old house ("I never pass the place without thoughts of you"), visiting with Sister Helen to chat about favorite students...
...How did your test go...
...Saint C's was not the kind of school, the kind of education, in which your opinion mattered...
...It must be close to thirty years," he wrote, "since I interviewed the perky young man with the longjsh blond locks who was seeking admission to Saint C's...
...My parents hadn't brought me up revering the figure of the priest, and thus, perhaps, my freedom from the sway of symbolism...
...My memories from this time in my life are full of smothered, shamed bursts of crying...
...Now, tell me about Mr...
...Father M nodded...
...Somehow I don't think thaf s very likely...
...The insistence of need, and the deeply mixed nature of all personal transactions...
...Garry Wills has written recently about the church's obsession with "preserving the priestly aura...
...The irony of it-the awful, impossible, sad irony...
...The girl I had a crush on was also a good student, and when I walked her home from school, tough boys followed us, mur...
...If I had a few adults around here like you, my job would be a lot easier...
...The priests ignore the forbidding of homosexual acts...
...A priesf s transgression brought me through a door into a room where I saw things and understood...
...The idea was that Father M liked boys...
...I value your input...
...He gestured to the seat...
...my abiding unhappiness...
...Did you tell Eunice...
...the line raced to the other side, and the one in the middle tackled someone...
...But how can I say this...
...Some months before the current scandals besetting the Catholic Church, I heard from Father M- a letter, out of the blue...
...Father Penders Wing," he chortled...
...I left feeling a grateful thrill...
...So much was going on, at so many levels...
...You'll have to come out to the shore sometime this summer," he said...
...He got his jollies by talking dirty to us...
...We'd had a quiz in Mr...
...There was a Bacchanalian free-for-all to these narratives- a feast, then a mad romp...
...Ask Scarlatti about M, someone would say...
...And yet as things actually happened, my impressions were, and remain, somewhat less simple...
...It's a lot of fun...
...Power...
...Until recently, this wasn't a thing people talked about...
...He had a summer cottage on the shore, where boys were invited for spaghetti dinners said to end in naked group chases through the woods...
...Actually, I believe at one point I did...
...How he'd 'given it to her' right in the sacristy...
...muring obscenities...
...As for me, Father M had been attentive, taking pains to make me feel welcome in my new school...
...But why hadn't anyone gone public...
...You half wanted to be invited...
...Nice to see you again," he said...
...A blunt anti-intellectualism joined teachers and students alike...
...As for my body, I wasn't going to let him touch it...
...You become, for a moment, a player...
...I know...
...Pagano's class...
...I knew what he was doing was wrong...
...You're smart, and as a non-Catholic you probably can see things around here that I can't...
...The game was knees-on-pavement brutal...
...And then I asked him: "Do you think you would ever get married someday...
...Presumably, yes...
...That's easy," I said...
...A few years ago my own father, raised Episcopalian, took me to visit the lower-middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia where he grew up...
...but I was gaining advantages, too...
...The letter startled me, so reckless in betraying an impulse one can only call pedophilic-unable to refrain from stroking the memory of a little boy's looks...
...He himself was working as a fill-in parish priest while waiting to retire...
...A silence followed...
...In the hall he might stop to offer a word and a pat on the shoulder...
...Father M gave a shrug of utter simplicity...
...Our principal was a priest, Father M (note: I have changed the names and disguised identities...
...Make amends, hand over the lists of names, set an institutional course for zero tolerance...
...My classmates lived in the welders/policemen/coaches part of town...
...I just wanted to let you know that I do think of you," he finished, "and that I am understandably happy that our school played some small part in your formation...
...I can still hear her...
...Possibly this certainty came from my not being Catholic...
...In any case, I knew that if I got up and walked out of his office, Father M would be powerless to stop me...
...One day a messenger came to class with a note and handed it to Sister Helen...
...Actually, he said when I'd sat down, he wanted to compliment me...
...1 don't want to hear that kind of filth!'" He took a last look at the church...
...Don't worry, you're not in trouble," he said as I came in...
...This routine wasn't about the sandwich...
...Sexual victimization exists on a spectrum...
...He stroked his beard and looked intently at me...
...I went to private school, later college and grad school...
...years later I heard he was doing hospice work in another part of the state...
...A lone boy would stand in the center of the yard, facing a line of thirty or fifty on one side...
...It was merciless, in a casual, normal kind of way...
...vendettas and grudges of every kind were enacted in the scrum...
...I felt the continuity of schoolyard mirth joining his boyhood to mine...
...At a shout of "Go...
...But there it was again, that intellectual flattery...
...he had flair, that rarest of priestly attributes, and was something of a star...
...My grades were too good...
...The schoolyard pastime at Saint C's was a rough game that combined tag and tackle...
...and I knew-from a certain tingly anticipation as I made my way back through the labyrinth-that Father M's calling me down again so soon was risky...
...In the seventh grade at Saint C's I was an outsider, and not only by religion...
...After two years at Saint C's, my parents decided not to send me on to the Catholic high school...
...The laity ignore the ban on contraception...
...He and Murray went out to his cottage...
...of wielding power...
...am understandably happy that our school played some small part in your formation, he had the audacity to write...
...My teachers reported I was an outstanding student...
...You see...
...I don't remember how long the session lasted...
...I'd be interested in how you would handle this in my position...
...Yes, Father M was taking advantage...
...When it comes to the curriculum, they oppose anything innovative...
...But I told him, and we talked for a while...
...He'd boast about how he was having his way with someone or other's wife in the congregation...
...Near his family's house was the church they'd attended...
...How would you teach that...
...His career bears all the hallmarks of one derailed by accusations of misfeasance...
...Everyone gets his free pass...
...Desire...
...What's harder, perhaps, is to grasp the complexity of a time we now so clearly see as benighted...
...I understood Father M was taking a risk, talking about things that could get him in trouble in the world outside...
...Father M would like to see you in his office," she said, looking my way...
...It was intensely pleasurable...
...As for what transpired in that tiny office hidden in the labyrinth, if s important to note that it could have been much more-could have extended from talking into showing, and from there into touching, and onward...
...What I do remember is how it ended, with Father M sitting back in his chair and smiling...
...He was waving his pecker like a wand...
...And what was my opinion about my classes generally...
...For the church right now, this is the billion-dollar (and climbing) question, a habit of covering up that is being paid for- literally, in legal settlements, and figuratively, too, in lost faith and allegiance...
...I don't know for certain, but it seems likely...
...he said...
...That game again...
...If Father M was this blatant now, I wondered, how must his behavior have looked back then...
...He blames "an elaborate framework of interconnected pretenses...
...Learn transparency- not easy for the church, but doable...
...And keep up the good work...
...Father M chased them through the freaking woods...
...That much I was sure of...
...For instance," he said...
...But the parents are fighting me tooth and nail...
...But the truth is, I wanted to answer...
...Retroactive outrage simplifies, necessarily...
...Crossers and catchers...
...To a woman...
...the rough give-and-take of the schoolyard...
...For instance, he had invited me to one of the infamous spaghetti dinners, a fact I couldn't wait to retail to my peers in the schoolyard: a story to bolster my status...
...Do you think you'd ever get married some day...
...Go on with you!' she said...
...My own sense is that the silence reflects first and foremost a different era's deep, instinctive relation both to institutional authority and to sexuality: the instinct for deference in one case, and for avoidance in the other...
...Pagano had made a bad assumption, a mistake...
...the demand for redress squeezes the real, lived ambiguity out of events, leaving only the bare bones of the actionable, and in some cases the criminal...
...the next time the wave crossed, those two tackled two more, and so on, until at last a few fleet, desperate crossers faced a mob of gang-tacklers...
...I don't know," I said...
...Pagano...
...It was about the transgression...
...I never went back to Saint C's, and today my time there seems like some Dickensian fantasy: the antique clocks and hissing steam radiators...
...I nodded...
...I lived in the doctors/lawyers/accountants part of town...
...No," he said, still smiling...
...He had made a move and I had countered, blocked it...
...Check and checkmate...
...Sure, running a school like Saint C's might require certain strict policies, but there was another, hidden school behind it, one that would be more humane, more enlightened, smarter-if only it were filled with boys like me...
...You know- fall in love with a woman and stop being a priest...
...This wasn't just a Catholic Church thing...
...As-suming he was, should he and others like him be held to account...
...I wanted to thank you for coming in the other day, Rand...
...You can speak frankly," he said...
...of having leverage...
...Of course...
...Saint C's was their place-a dark and antediluvian building that squatted behind the church like a big brick toad...
...But do you think you ever would...
...The narrative of sexual victimization casts the child-appropriately-as helpless, terrorized recipient of the pedophile's advances...
...Easy," I said...
...Well, let's imagine you're the teacher, and today's topic is-nocturnal emissions...
...Was Father M an active pedophile at Saint C's...
...It's a real pain in my neck, to tell you the truth...
...His office sat in a labyrinthine passage beyond the auditorium...
...You dream about sex, and in your sleep you ejaculate...
...In fact, my encounter in Father M's office was anything but simple...
...His mother, my grandmother, a person of avid conventional piety and propriety, fond of saying that she lived for the church...
...You had to be tough, or at least act tough...
...In the schoolyard, however, lurid rumors swirled...
...As priests we can't do that...
...He had followed my career, he wrote...
...Why hadn't someone done something...
...To a twelve-year-old, breaking a taboo carries a thrilling anticipation of the hidden, brimming, all-but-unimaginable adulthood to come...
...I welcomed these attentions...
...Father M leaned forward, tiny crucifix dangling from a silver chain around his neck...
...What would you do...
...Pagano accused me, falsely, of plagiarizing...
...Stories were not acts of truth, but assertions of status...
...I knew this, and the knowing gave me weapons: I could parry and dodge, even hit back...
...He was victimizing me, but I felt powerful...
...Strategy...
...I know what you mean," I said, and nodded...
...There was some renovation going on, and scaffolding draped with sheets of plastic created a tunnel effect that made it feel more isolated...
...From there we went on to other "teachable" topics-masturbation, intercourse...
...I want your opinion...
...In the classrooms the wall clocks were the antiquated kind whose seconds ticked off the minutes discretely...
...People like Ronnie Scarlatti could say anything in the schoolyard...
...But they do understand things, sometimes less as ideas than as feelings, even physical sensations...
Vol. 129 • June 2002 • No. 11
