Blue Sky Dream (11 page)

The great advantage to moving into a freshly made emptiness is that all your favorite beliefs can be unpacked and arranged anew, everything else left behind or stowed away in a cardboard box rarely, if ever, to be opened again. As soon as we moved in, my mother chose to lay a patina of low-key mysticism onto the empty surfaces: a small plastic statue of Mother Mary over the kitchen sink, the Holy Family huddled atop the stereo console, Christ on His Cross on every bedroom wall. My mother chose to bring her children to Queen of Apostles on the Feast of St. Blaise so that we might kneel before the priest, crossed candles in his hands, our chins lifted and the waxy coolness of those candles pressed against our throats while the priest asked Blaise the Throat Healer to protect us from tonsillitis. She insisted we be at Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, that we have our foreheads smudged with charcoal on Ash Wednesday, that we give up candy for Lent. At my mother’s urging I became an altar boy, and she was the one to wake me before sunrise many mornings so that I could be the only soul riding his bicycle through the subdivision streets, hurrying to arrive at church in time to serve
the 6:30 Mass. Answering my knock on the door of the sacristy, a priest would let me in, nod to me, and return to the slipping on of his vestments while I, in the next room, buttoned my black cassock. Those were days when a Catholic mother could imagine her son alone with a priest in the sacristy before dawn and feel certain she had placed a young boy in the safest place in all the world.

O
n Fridays the practice air raid siren would sound and the nuns of Queen of Apostles school would send us under our desks, having given us scapular medals to wear around our necks that would—provided we remembered to say a Hail Mary just before the sky exploded—secure us immediate salvation in God’s heaven beyond my dad’s heavens.

That a prayer to the Virgin Mother would hold final sway with God the Father made intuitive sense to me. In our home, where religion was clearly my mother’s realm, godliness was, ultimately, feminine. The manner of the priests of Queen of Apostles did nothing to counter the impression. If they were not feminine, they were men wholly unlike my father. Godliness was soft like their hands and voices; the making of a miracle asked nothing more physical than the raising of the chalice above the head. They were quiet men with quiet eyes who were more often seen wearing gowns than trousers and none of them projected the muscular presence of my father, a man who was quick to shout and to perspire, who would come home from Mass and change into jeans and T-shirt and grab tools and crawl down into the dirty spaces underneath the house or the cars or the bathroom sink.

How neatly and seemingly naturally fell the divide between the domains of father and mother in our home. My mother, the repository of mystical information; my father, with a scientific explanation for everything this side of heaven. My mother, who spoke in elliptical, musing patterns; my father, who started at “a”
(often literally) and proceeded on to “b” and “c” and “d” until his point could not be mistaken. My kitchen-based mother, whose charge was the seamless maintenance of household operations, all vacuuming, scrubbing, laundering, grocery shopping, and preparation of meals; my garage-based father, who was the wielder of tools against sudden crises, the dead vacuum cleaner, dryer, car, TV. My mother, who on a bad day imagined herself a suffering martyr, her Catholic guilt preventing her from demanding help from her husband and children until guilt gave way to self-pity and her tears of frustration flowed; my father, who on a bad day was not a bit hesitant to let go his temper and demand at the top of his lungs. My mother, who on a good day made us a lemon meringue pie from a recipe in
Sunset
magazine; my father, who on a good day made us patio furniture from plans in
Sunset
magazine.

The naturalness of this divide appeared evident to me in the two great holidays of blue sky suburbia: the Fourth of July and Christmas. The Fourth was a celebration of my father’s realm. My mother played a respectfully supporting role, joining with the other mothers to prepare the picnic food that everyone would eat at tables set up in the middle of the cul-de-sac. We children ate with one eye on the fathers, watching for the moment when they would gather and place twenty-dollar bills in the hands of one of their members (my father, usually), who would set off for the fireworks stand. The culmination of the Fourth always arrived in our backyard under the direction of my father. While the gathered neighbors clapped and cheered, he would apply the flaming tip of his blowtorch to the Volcano Cones and Pinwheels and Piccolo Petes he had arranged on a board spanning two saw-horses. The Fourth, a civil holiday, a masculine holiday, was a day for a father to demonstrate his affinity for fire and smoke and noise, the elements that made jets and rockets go.

If the Fourth was loud action come and gone in a flash, Christmas was a gradually building season of mystical imagination. My father lent a man’s sweaty energy where needed—the cutting down of a tree at a mountain farm, the stringing of lights
along the eaves of the house—but my mother, she and her Catholicism, provided the spurs to the imagination. I knew that the plastic figurines of our manger scene, so old that the paint was wearing off, had been hers forever. She was the one who sewed our costumes for the school Nativity pageant. Under her direction we prayed over an Advent wreath of pine boughs and candles at dinner every night for four weeks leading up to the big day. When the day came, after the presents were torn open, Christmas would culminate with the feminine, the spiritual, everyone saying my mother’s prayers at Queen of Apostles mass.

Were these realms, my father’s and my mother’s, so separate as to be the enemy of each other? On the contrary, the marvel to me is how comfortably they seemed to co-exist in my child’s mind. There is a Christmas morning snapshot of me at the age of six or seven, my thrilled face looking up at the camera as I show off my favorite present that day, a big toy aircraft carrier complete with fighter jets that catapulted off the deck. My father the former Navy jet pilot no doubt wanted me to have this “Mighty Mathilda” as much as I did. In the picture a presence is visible behind me, a presence created by my mother using modern and practical materials, Styrofoam backing and purple plastic foil and a tinsel-wrapped pipe cleaner for a halo. The angel my mother has assembled and mounted over the family room fireplace is smiling down on my Christmas morning.

A
modern Catholic did not grasp for status. A modern Catholic welcomed the uniformity of Clarendon Manor’s houses, which allowed us to imagine ourselves free of the trappings of class. We Catholic schoolchildren flowed out of our modestly alike homes wearing modestly alike uniforms. We gathered in the school yard, formed rows of red sweaters, recited in unison the Pledge of Allegiance, sang in unison “The Star Spangled Banner” before filing inside for prayers.

Somewhere far away in the world there were Catholics
much poorer than us, Catholics with brown skin slow to join the future. I knew this because I had seen their faces on the charity envelopes at Queen of Apostles Mass. It did not occur to me (until long after they were gone with the orchards) that the men and women and children climbing ladders into the fruit trees around our subdivision were Catholics. Their brown faces never appeared in the pews at Queen of Apostles Mass, nor the desks at Queen of Apostles school, so how would I have known? Almost all the children at the new nearby public school were white as well, as was the face in every kitchen window, behind every lawn mower. Parishioners who lived close by Queen of Apostles liked to refer to their neighborhood as “the Catholic ghetto,” as if to chuckle at the propitious accident that placed people with so much in common in the same place.

But it was no accident, our happy homogeneity. An original sin lay at the root of it. My mother remembers what the salesman for Clarendon Manor told her and my father the day they signed the deed for Lot 242. “Your investment in this home is a safe one. We aren’t selling to colored people.” That the salesmen in other model homes throughout the area were making the same assurances was an open secret back then, my parents remember. The builder Joseph Eichler, brave in his ethics as well as his tract home architecture, was virtually alone among his local peers in denouncing the practice. As for the poor, they were forced beyond the boundaries of Queen of Apostles by more subtle techniques, zoning laws and red-lined lending, invisible barriers to the existence of any low-income housing amidst the blue sky settlements.

During recess at Queen of Apostles school, we freckled ten-year-olds would shout “nigger!” at each other with delight. Whether some of my friends were repeating a word they heard mothers and fathers say at home, I can’t say. I think I know why I joined in. I shouted “nigger” because there were no blacks to hear me. And because I lived in a place where there were no blacks to hear me, “nigger” was the most exotically evil word I knew. I sensed that the word was a supreme violation of what
modern Catholics in a classless subdivision were supposed to feel, the tolerance and even special (if abstract) warmth for people of other races. I knew that my parents were in full agreement with the priests and nuns of Queen of Apostles that black people and brown people, wherever they might be, were really just like us, and that they deserved to live like us and that probably, someday, they would. I don’t think my mother was aware at the time that Cesar Chavez had been, some years before our arrival, one of those who climbed ladders in the orchards very near where Queen of Apostles now stood. But she knew that he was a symbol of the modern direction the Church was taking in its relationship with the poor and the brown-skinned in the hinterlands where those people were to be found. She knew that Chavez and his marching farmworkers sang Catholic hymns and held aloft images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and that
The Monitor
approvingly reported on those faraway struggles, indicating to its readers that social justice was the business of all forward-thinking Catholics.

She knew this and made me know this, and so one day I was invited to step before my white schoolmates and receive a prize for the message of modern tolerance and good will I had crafted in art class with crayons and butcher paper. My poster carried a slogan I’d made up myself:
People Come in Different Colors.
I hoped for a special reward. When particularly moved, the nuns were known to bestow a bit of cloth or bone they assured was the relic of an ancient saint. This time the plastic case I received contained a relic with a different sacredness, a scrap of burnt foil from a
Gemini
capsule, skin that was singed, I was told, as it fell back to Earth.

T
he year in which we moved into our new tract home and Queen of Apostles rose into view from the window of our dining nook was the year in which Pope John XXIII convened his Second Vatican Council in the name of
aggiornamento
—the bringing
of the Church up-to-date, the modernization, no less, of the Catholic understanding of God’s will.

Now the American Mass would be said in English, the priest wearing humble vestments as he faced a congregation who spoke back loudly and confidently. Now church interiors would be democratized, the altar moved off the back wall and railings around it taken down. Now the gothic God’s trembling children would be treated as capable adults, the spiritual and practical workings of the parish placed more directly into their lay hands. Having been brought up-to-date, the Catholic God would encourage the popular taste for peppy, catchy folk hymns. The Pope of this God, meanwhile, would sound quite a bit like my grandmother, proclaiming the Divine preference for a “medicine of mercy rather than severity.” Pope John XXIII would say this as he called for a new day of Christian unity, an “ecumenism” that recognized that the Catholic and Protestant Gods were in fact the same One with different faces.

Every one of these modernizations my mother embraced fully and eagerly, as if the Pope and his Council had read her newly suburban, religious mind. As Catholic historian Jay P. Dolan writes, Pope John XXIII

Kennedy, yes. For my mother and thousands like her, the family in the White House was that other, irrefutable sign that heaven smiled on the forward-thinking. There was, for example, the photograph appearing everywhere at the time: Jackie Kennedy in her sleeveless linen dress, her lace kerchief tied lightly under her chin, and her white gloved hand guiding John John to
church on Easter Sunday. This very well could have been a picture of my mother (another slender brunette, smiling shyly) and me. This picture was, then, the nation’s latest image of grace: Catholic Jackie, modern Jackie, whose modern Catholic husband was vowing to send a man to the moon. The God of the Kennedys was my family’s God, an incarnation of the God worshipped, in a kind of ecumenism, by our entire tribe. He was a God who unreservedly endorsed progress, personal and national, and so the new suburban way of life that went with it.

What did this God ask of his chosen people once they had arrived in the promised land? Less than he asked in Depression-era Rock Island, perhaps. But also more. In the third grade, I listened to Sister Elizabeth tell of a boy in another land and time, poor and about my age, who was sweeping out the cobwebbed attic of an ancient church when he discovered a life-sized crucifix. The boy, Sister said, prayed with such belief that Jesus suddenly stepped down off that Cross, touched the boy, and gave him his blessing. I was excited to know that such things could happen, then sad in my gradual conviction it could never happen to me. Our church had no forgotten corners where anything old might lie undiscovered. There were no bells in its bell tower, just loudspeakers that played recorded chimes. Queen of Apostles was an environment of stackable steel chairs and checkerboard linoleum, and Jesus did not appear in places smelling of fresh spackle.