A Song for Mary (17 page)
“Shit,” he says, “how are we gonna go over the Latin?”
“Don’t you know it by heart?” I ask. I know that Carney is good at the Latin. We have been altar boys at St. John’s for a few years now, and ordinarily I would know the Latin pretty good, too, but this was for the Cathedral. Your Latin has to be exact at the Cathedral or they’ll give you the bum’s rush, twenty-three skidoo, get lost, kid.
“Yeah,” he answers, “I know most of it. You can start after
Ad Deum qui laetificat.”
“Quia tu es, Deus,”
I say,
“fortitudo mea, quare me repulisti, et quare tristis …”
“Okay,” Carney says, “okay.”
He goes on through the Latin, and I am amazed that he knows it as good as any priest. I am trying to answer as quickly as he says it.
I am doing fine as Carney gets to
“Domine, exaudi orationem meam.”
“Et clamor meus,”
I answer,
“ad te veniat.”
“Dominus vobiscum,”
he says.
“Et cum spiritu tuo
, “I say, being careful to form my words exactly.
Carney shakes his head.
“Et cum spiri tutu oh,”
he says.
“That’s not how you say it,” I say. I know that he said it wrong, and a little mess-up like this could keep me out of the Cathedral altar boys.
“Bullshit,” he says. “It is so.”
“It’s not,” I say. “It’s
et cum spiritu tuo,
and not
spiri tutu oh
.”
“Bullshit,” he says again, this time very sarcastically. “I’m telling you, I’ve been saying this for years. It’s
spiri TU-TU oh
.”
“Look, Carney,” I say, getting a little hot under the collar, “I don’t want to say you’re wrong, but you’re wrong. I mean, I can see the words the way they are written on the page in my Latin book.”
“Do you know what the Latin means?” he asks, and I can see he wants to lord it over me.
“No,” I say, “I don’t know what any of it means, but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause they don’t ask you what any of it means.”
“Well,” he says, “it tells you in the book what it means, and it was you who forgot the book. I didn’t.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I know what it says. It says
et cum spiritu tuo
.” And, for emphasis, I yell,
“Tu-oh,
you see, not
tu-tu-oh
.”
“Well,” Carney says as he gets up from the couch, “if that’s the way you feel about it, you can just go over there for the test by yourself, and see if I care.”
“All right,” I say, getting up also, “who needs you, anyway?”
“Don’t get smart with me,” he says, “or I’ll punch you in the mouth. You wouldn’t be having this test if it wasn’t for me.”
“You punch me in the mouth,” I say, “and you’ll be picking up your eyes off the floor.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I am feeling a little angry that Carney and I are arguing about this, but I know I can’t let him push me around. And, anyway, I think I know the Latin enough to pass the test. So I begin to head for the door when I am suddenly shocked as Carney punches me square in the back.
I am falling forward now and thinking, Holy God, do I have to fight Carney over the Latin right here in his living room on East 51st Street?
I know I can take him, for I have wrestled with him a hundred times at Kips Bay, and I think of the pain in my back where he punched me. I could give him a black eye right here in his living room, but this isn’t the same as when Shalleski pushed me around. Carney is a good kid, and he’s just being stupid and selfish, and I guess he wants to show me that he’s not afraid of me. I don’t know why guys get like this. Why does he so need to be right even though he’s wrong as Wrong Way Corrigan?
I just look at Bobby, hard and angry, and he puts his fists up. He wants to duke it out in his living room where we’ll break all the lamps and ashtrays. It’s crazy, especially since I know I can take him in a minute.
But I don’t want to beat Bobby Carney up. He did get me the test at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, even though I didn’t ask him to. He just came and asked me if I wanted to get in the Cathedral altar boys. It was a nice thing for him to do.
I am always remembering the story about turning the other cheek. Carney is wrong to hit me like this, as wrong as he is about the Latin, but I don’t have to do anything about it. I know it is
spiritu tuo.
It is enough to know I am right, without getting into a fight about it.
Et cum spiritu,
big space,
tuo,
and he’s got a lot to learn.
And, I think as I skip down his stairs two by two, he’s lucky I gave him the other cheek.
I
passed the Cathedral Latin test. It was like a breeze. It is now morning dark, two months later.
It doesn’t seem like there is anyone in the Cathedral, except me and this priest who doesn’t speak any English. He is looking at a framed diagram of the altars in the Cathedral, each one numbered. It is hanging on the sacristy wall next to the cabinet where they keep the wine and the incense. There must be about twenty altars upstairs, and he is trying to figure out what to do.
It is good I know the Latin, for this priest would go thirsty if he tried in his own language to get any wine from me. Maybe he is a guinea priest, or spick, or Portugee. Billy was right. All I seem to get here in the Cathedral are the six o’clock Masses, and most of the time with the priests who don’t know the English.
I don’t like it so much at the Cathedral, but I guess it’s fair. The new guy on the block always gets the dirty work in any job. That’s the way it is on the basketball team, too. The new guy never starts the game, never gets in the middle of the action at the beginning.
I was yawning and thinking about this when I was walking here this morning, getting up in the dark like I was a farmer going to milk the cows, and then meeting some foreign priest in the sacristy who tries to tell me what to do with hand signals, like in the deaf school. And I am so tired I can hardly speak, let alone read hand signals.
The priest doesn’t seem much older than Billy. He waves me over to him. The sacristy is made of stone, and has a high ceiling that goes up in the middle like a fancy tent. He gets a pencil and paper and draws an altar of a table and a cross and then puts a question mark next to it. It’s like charades with a pencil, and I know right away what he is asking.
But how should I know what altar we should go to? Pick a number, one to twenty.
Since I don’t want to appear that I don’t know what I am doing, I write
#1
next to his question mark. The priest smiles. It is the way the Italians and the Spanish in New York smile when they don’t know the language but want to believe that everything is all right. We begin to walk up the long, steep and narrow corridor of the sacristy stairs, and I know that this priest is going to take me right to where we shouldn’t be. We then continue right on to the main altar, me trailing behind him when I should be in front, smiling as well, holding the cruets in one hand and my cassock in the other, trying to keep from tripping over myself.
I have been on the main altar of the Cathedral only once before when they called me in to fill in for a sick acolyte at a High Mass. It was a fluke, for altar boys don’t get to serve at High Mass until they’ve been around for a couple of years. In the Cathedral they make the High Mass on Sunday mornings their biggest deal, like being in a movie. I never had so many layers of vestments on. They have a woman who dresses you. First, in a kind of an alb, a long white surplice, and then a cincture to tie around it like a belt, and then over this they make you wear a very fancy surplice with more lace than I have ever seen, and, finally, they put a red velvet cape around my shoulders, the material flowing like a waterfall down to my wrists. Then I was really surprised when the sacristy lady pulled a small gold ring out of a box and put it on my middle finger. I felt like I was a cardinal like Cardinal Spellman and asked one of the guys next to me if he would kiss the ring so I could tell Billy that it was all so great and they were kissing my ring and everything.
I was hoping I would see Cardinal Spellman, for I have never seen him except for his picture in the
Daily News.
But the cardinal was off with the Pope or something, and we had to settle for a bishop who said the Mass with about fifty priests around him. I thought I was an actor in a play, but then some guy started to sing the “Panis Angelicus,” a hymn that means the bread of the angels, and I felt that the hymn was so cool, the singer was so great, that I had to think about being in church and talking with God. Not in a cathedral, but just in a simple church where just you and God can get together. And I kept looking at the angels painted on the ceiling, up over the three red hats of the dead cardinals, because I thought that they might get off the ceiling and fly around.
I get a feeling of belonging when I am in church, that there are no problems in my life that don’t have answers. Not long ago a Capuchin monk came to St. John’s to give a retreat. Father Luke was such a cool guy, and dressed cool, too, in a long brown robe tied around the waist by a white cincture. There was a red heart over his breast, a symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And on his feet he wore thick leather sandals that the monks make for themselves.
“You made those shoes?” I asked him.
“I made them,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling, “with a little help from the Big Guy.”
He kept twirling the ends of his cincture in different directions as he told us that a retreat was not like running away from anything, like an army retreats when their goose is being cooked. “This retreat,” he said, “is taking a time-out from the everyday stuff of your life, and taking in a deep breath, but while you’re doing this you’re remembering that God is in the deep breath.”
I sat on that hard wooden pew of our church, breathing hard, and thinking that being in church made me happier than in any other place. Breathing God like that made me feel that maybe I was born to care about people the way Father Luke cared about us. No one ever asks me what I want to be, because they are always spending their time telling me that I should learn about my abilities. But, maybe, I thought, I want to be like Father Luke.
I went every day for three hours to listen to Father Luke, and at the end of it he brought everyone into the school auditorium and gave us punch and cookies.
I asked him what I had to do to go to a seminary where I could make my own sandals, and he said that he would talk to my teacher about it, and he would write me a letter. And then he shook my hand, like we had made a deal.
I haven’t heard from him yet, but I remember that I skipped home that day, singing like Bing Crosby.
There are no lights on the main altar, and the priest seems very confused. But we are already there, across the black and white marble floor, walking up the final five marble stairs to the platform beneath the gold canopy, and it seems he isn’t going to give the spot up just because there aren’t any lights. So we grope along in the dark. I know there is a huge marble pulpit to my right, but I can’t see it. And the big wooden cardinal’s throne is to my left, but I can’t see that either. I am wondering how I’m going to pour the water and wine into his chalice if I can’t see a foot in front of me. Then, suddenly, the dawn begins to spread out through the Cathedral, and all the big stone columns begin to change color, and there are shafts of yellow light and blue shade all around. It is very beautiful here on the main altar, like in a picture at the Metropolitan Museum, with some of the saints on the walls and the angels on the ceiling being half in shadow and half in glittering gold.
But I wonder how long it will take before the smiling priest realizes something is wrong, because there are no lights on anywhere, except for two of the small side altars, which is where we are supposed to be.
The priest, though, is as happy as a prince sitting on his father’s chair, and the Mass goes along without a hitch. I remind myself, as I always do, that being in church is supposed to be a swell time and that I should be thinking good and wholesome thoughts.
But today, for some reason, I can only think of Sue Flanagan, and seeing her moving around her room, her skirt waving, her blouse open showing the soft cotton of her brassiere, and I know I shouldn’t be thinking of things like this in church.
But maybe this is exactly the place to think about it, to get all these thoughts straight and unconfused.
It’s getting lighter, but I can still hardly see what the priest is doing between the shafts of light pouring into the darkness.
When we get to the Consecration, I can see him leaning over, and beginning to change the Host into the body of Jesus, but he moves out of the light shaft, and I can hardly see him as he lifts the Host into the air. But at least I see some action, and so I ring the bell, and then ring it again when it seems he is lifting the chalice with the little bit of wine I poured into it. I guess I got it right, because he doesn’t turn around to give me a dirty look the way priests do when you make a mistake.
I love this part of the Mass because it is the part only for good Catholics. I guess no one else believes that the priest is changing the bread into the body of Jesus, that’s what Billy says.
But, I am thinking, maybe they can believe that it’s okay for other people to believe it. I am not sure which part of the body of Jesus it gets changed into, and sometimes I wonder if it isn’t a little like having chicken for dinner where you get a leg or a wing. But I know it happens, and Father Ford taught us that you can have faith in a lot of things, like if you have faith that it is really Arthur Godfrey playing the ukulele on the radio when you hear the ukulele, or that Joe DiMaggio will bring a base runner home if he gets at bat, but that you can never be a good Catholic unless you have faith to believe that the Host is turned into the body of Jesus when the priest lifts it up to God.
I like this, this having faith, because it makes us different from everybody who doesn’t have it.