Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (11 page)

W
HEN
I
WAS SEVEN
years old, my twin passions for the church and baseball collided. It was 1950, the year of my First Holy Communion. Every Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty, all Catholics who attended second grade in public school, as I did, were released early to attend the classes at St. Agnes that would prepare us for First Communion, admitting us into the congregation of the Catholic Church. Whereas the parochial-school students were allowed to receive their First Communion in the first grade, the rest of us had to wait an extra year, so that the nuns could compensate for all the rigorous hours of instruction that were lost. Our class was held in a dark room in the parochial school, the large map of the forty-eight states that adorned the back wall of our public-school room supplanted by a gallery of the saints. There was the infant St. Ambrose, on whose mouth a swarm of bees had settled, causing his elders to predict great oratorical gifts; St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, brandishing a staff as he expelled the serpent of sin and paganism from Ireland. My favorite saint was the Jesuit, Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron of youth, whose name my father had taken at his own confirmation, completing the full name I loved to say aloud—Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns.

Above left:
Though Elaine Lubar was Jewish, her mother bought her a white dress so that she might share in the celebration of our big day.

Above right and below:
I took great pride in the commanding beauty of my church, St. Agnes. Like something out of the Arthurian Legend, richly colored banners honoring the saints were mounted on lines of decorated poles projecting from the side walls.

Our teacher, Sister Marian, was a small Dominican nun who seemed ancient at the time but was probably in her fifties, with a gentle manner, a flowing white habit with a wimple pulled so tight her forehead was stretched smooth, and cheeks that bore such deep lines that the bottom and top of her face appeared the composite of two different people. Sister Marian introduced us to the text familiar to generations of Catholic schoolchildren: the bluecovered Baltimore Catechism with a silver Mary embossed on a constellation of silver stars. The catechism was organized around a series of questions and answers we had to memorize word for word to help us understand the meaning of what Christ had taught and, ultimately, to understand Christ Himself. “Who made us? God made us.” “Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things.” “Why did God make us? God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” Although it was learned by rote, there was something uniquely satisfying about reciting both the questions and the answers. No matter how many questions we had to memorize, each question had a proper answer. The Catholic world was a stable place with an unambiguous line of authority and an absolute knowledge of right and wrong.

We learned to distinguish venial sins, which displeased our Lord, from the far more serious mortal sins, which took away the life of the soul. We memorized the three things that made a sin mortal: the thought or deed had to be grievously wrong; the sinner had to know it was grievously wrong; and the sinner had to consent fully to it. Clearly, King Herod had committed a mortal sin when,
intending to kill the Messiah, he killed all the boys in Judea who were two years old or less. Lest we feel too far removed from such a horrendous deed, we were told that those who committed venial sins without remorse when they were young would grow up to commit much larger sins, losing their souls in the same way that Herod did.

Every Tuesday night, the day before my class in religious instruction, my mother would drill me on the weekly lesson. She never betrayed the slightest impatience, and she made it fun by playing games with me. She held up playing cards numbered one through seven for the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost—wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord—placing the appropriate card on the table as I recalled each one. In similar fashion, I learned the three theological virtues, the ten commandments, and the seven sacraments. And when I had to memorize various prayers—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles’ Creed—she put a glass of milk and a box of Oreo cookies on the table so I could savor my success at the completion of each prayer.

In class, Sister Marian explored each commandment with us in fuller detail. To understand the eighth commandment—“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”—we were told to imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of our house, then trying to pick up every feather. If it seemed impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, Sister explained, “so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it.”

My imagination was kindled by the concept of baptism. We learned that we were all born with souls that were dead in original sin under the power of the devil, but that baptism gave us new life and freed us from Satan’s grasp. Without baptism, one could not receive any of the other
sacraments or go to heaven. The part that particularly aroused me, however, was the thought that, if an unbaptized person was dying, and no priest was present, it was up to us—i.e., me—to perform the sacrament by pouring ordinary water on the forehead of the dying person and saying aloud: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” More than once, I used my unbaptized doll to practice the sacrament of baptism. I would make her comfortable on my pillow, run into the bathroom directly across the hall, fill a plastic cup with water, and very solemnly launch her toward salvation.

Sister Marian told us stories about the early Christian martyrs who were willing, sometimes even eager, to die for their faith when put to the test by the evil Roman emperor, Nero. After a great fire destroyed much of Rome six decades after Christ, Nero’s people began to suspect that he had started the fire himself to clear a site for his proposed “Golden House” and had celebrated the conflagration on his fiddle. To deflect the people’s wrath, he made the Christians of Rome his scapegoats, sending them into the jaws of lions if they insisted on professing their Christian faith. Many a night I lay awake worrying whether I might lack courage to die for my faith, fearing that when the test came I would choose instead to live. Lions began populating my dreams, until visits to the Bronx Zoo found me standing in front of the lion’s cage, whispering frantically to the somnolent, tawny beast behind the bars in hopes that, if ever I were sent as a martyr to the lions’ den, my new friend would testify to his fellow lions that I was a good person. Evading the terrible choice, I could exhibit courage, affirm my faith, and still manage to survive.

·    ·

S
o RICH
were the traditions and the liturgy of my church that I could not imagine being anything other than Catholic. Though there were Jews and Protestants on our block—the Lubars and the Barthas were Jewish, the Friedles and the Greenes Protestant—I knew almost nothing about these other religions. I could not describe what distinguished an Orthodox Jew from a Reform Jew, or say what made someone a Methodist rather than a Presbyterian or Episcopalian. I understood that our neighbors were devoted to their religions, lighting Sabbath candles on Friday or attending services Saturday or Sunday. Their church or synagogue was central to their social lives. The Friedles were very active in the Mr. and Mrs. Club at the Congregational church, which sponsored dances, pot-luck dinners, and card-playing evenings, and their children attended Sunday school every week. I knew that the Lubars were active in their temple and that the Greenes, who had been the Greenbergs before converting to Protestantism, were equally involved in their church. Indeed, in my neighborhood, everyone seemed to be deeply involved in one religion or another. Although I observed the fellowship that other religions provided, I had no inkling of what beliefs they inculcated in their followers. We were taught only that these people were non-Catholics and that we should not read their literature or inquire about their beliefs. Furthermore, it was, we thought, a grievous sin for us to set foot in one of their churches or synagogues.

It was this last admonition that produced my first spiritual crisis. In early February 1950, our newspaper, the
Long Island News and Owl
, reported that Dodger catcher Roy Campanella was coming to Rockville Centre. He planned to speak at a benefit for the local black church, then under construction, the Shiloh Baptist Church. The program was
to be held in the Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal church one block from St. Agnes.

The son of an Italian American father and an African American mother, Campanella had joined the Baltimore Elite Giants, one of the great teams in the Negro League, when he was only fifteen. In short order, his skill in calling pitches, his ability to fathom the vulnerability of an opposing hitter, his strong arm, his prowess at the plate, and his endurance became legendary. He once caught four games in a single day: a twin bill in Cincinnati on a Sunday afternoon, followed by a bus ride to Middletown, Ohio, and another doubleheader that evening. Unlike Jackie Robinson, who considered his experience in the Negro League demeaning, Campanella claimed to have thoroughly enjoyed his years in black baseball. Less combative and more conciliatory than Robinson, Campanella repeatedly said that he thought of himself as a ballplayer, not a pioneer; that, when he was catching or hitting, he focused only on what the pitcher was throwing, not the color of his opponent. Since his rookie season with the Dodgers in 1948, he had established himself unequivocally as the best catcher in the National League. In 1949 he led all catchers with a .287 batting average, twenty-two doubles, and twenty-two home runs.

I couldn’t wait to tell my father that his favorite player would be coming to our town, so he would get tickets and take me with him. I begged my mother to take me to the train station so I could tell my father the dramatic news as soon as he stepped off the platform, As our car passed St. Agnes on the way to the station, however, it dawned on me that Campanella was scheduled to speak in the
Episcopal
church. “Oh, no!” I said. “It can’t be.” “What?” my mother asked. Close to tears, I announced that there was no hope of my going after all, since I was forbidden to set foot in
the Episcopal church. Campanella was coming to my town and I could not even go to see him. To my surprise, my mother simply said, “Well, let’s see, let’s wait and talk to Daddy.” When I explained the dilemma to my father, he said that he understood the church’s prohibition against participating in the service of another church, but he didn’t really believe it extended to attending a lecture by a baseball player in the parish hall. He was certain it would be proper for us to go and would get the tickets the following day.

Reassured, I put my qualms aside until the big night arrived and the moment came to cross the threshold of the white clapboard church. A sudden terror took possession of me, and my knees began to tremble. Fearing that we would be struck dead in retaliation for our act of defiance, I squeezed my body against my father and let his momentum carry me past the door, through the sanctuary, and into the parish hall. At first, I tried to keep my eyes on the ground, but I soon found myself surveying the simple altar, small windows, and plain wooden pews, so much less ornate and imposing than ours. A podium had been set up in the hall with about 150 folding chairs, and we were lucky enough to find seats in the second row.