I suppose mother’d’ve wanted this. Or at least she wouldn’t’ve railed against it. But me, a part of me still wants to rescue her from it, to protect her against it.
She wasn’t one to protest things as they are, or at least as she knew them. If anybody knew what hypocrites, criminals and pure-and-simple liars the priests and nuns were—and are—it was she. That some of them could collect money and spend it on everybody and everything but the poor and broken—she knew—she told me herself before I left this block. It didn’t—at least, I didn’t think it did—surprise her, years after the fact, when I told her that a priest tipped my hand when I poured wine into his chalice during mass or that in the vestibule behind the altar he insisted that I—and he helped me—remove more than my surplice and cassock I, like the other altar boys, wore over my school uniform when I was on the altar. Well, I didn’t hear surprise in her voice anyway—I told her over the phone, months after I left. I’d stayed in so many places by then that I can’t remember now where I was when I made that call.
I’m sure she also knew that some took their vows of celibacy no more seriously than they took their vows of poverty. Madge, whom I’d gotten to know about the time I realized that I’d sleep with a man only for money or in self-defense, told me about the convent she left. “They’re all alike,” she said. As a noviate, she’d also taken the vow of silence, and the Mother Superior enforced it, she said, “for your own good.”
If mother hadn’t known about such things, surely she wouldn’t’ve been surprised to find out. After all, what woman doesn’t know that all bonds that hold any community—whether a family, convent, school, church or any other organization I know of—all consist of some unspoken, unwritten code of silence enforced by economics, blackmail and/or outright physical force? Just about every woman—I include mother; I include her mother and their friends, and now I will include myself—has, at some time in her life, acquiesced to those codes, out of habit or necessity, or because she was unaware of any other option.
The men—or the women who’ve joined forces with them—who coerce, blackmail, beat or starve their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers—either haven’t any idea of what they’re doing or see it as part of their entitlement, their very existence. Even the most consciously benevolent of them fall into their habits around women and girls, and with their students, employees, parishioners and other charges.
Mother had to’ve known this. Why else would she’ve raised me only with occasional help from her mother, with no men anywhere in sight? But then again, she made no attempt—perhaps she wasn’t capable of such a thing—to find a more worthy man, or to turn the man who impregnated her with me into my father. Nor did she stray very far from the church. True, she went only on special holidays or when she felt the need to light a candle and say a prayer for someone, for something she hoped for. And, as I’ve said before, she sent me to Catholic school for as long as she could afford it. The church wasn’t willing to help the “bastard child” of a single woman. But as long as he paid, or someone paid, I was allowed to stay in their school.
And for all that she complained about how meaningless such things are, she arranged for a wake and funeral as traditional as this one for her own mother. I don’t think she’d’ve wanted it any other way, hypocrites and all.
But once I left this block, she never talked to me about church, unless I mentioned the things I’ve been thinking about. She never used that stale argument I heard from others: “Well, church is like anything else. Some people are good and some people abuse it.” Others—someone else—said that. But not mother.
But even after I realized there are hypocrites everywhere—that one was in bed with me, lying with another—I still hated the church and its ceremonies. Even after I learned how employers use sex and other forms of extortion in much the same ways as priests and teachers do, I still despised them, it, all of them, all of it.
Mother may’ve thought this frivolous but I can’t stand to hear any living being say “thee,” “thy” or “thou,” even in prayer. In fact, I can’t stand the “th” sound: It sounds like the fanning of a flame that would otherwise die, and should, after it’s burned the house and killed all the innocents in it. I never could stand that kind of pompous artificiality that echoes voices that have authority only because they’re repeated. I mean, there’s just no reason—at least no reason that I can see—to say what doesn’t need to be said to make meanings out of things that aren’t there.
In one of the last classes I attended, the teacher was quizzing us on a book with this sentence in it: There be the woods of Lo’thlrien…Let us hasten. If those words had been spoken or written by someone in King Arthur’s court, I could understand. But the person who wrote them had been a professor of the teacher who assigned it. That teacher—I’m forgetting his name now—was probably mother’s age, so the professor who hastened him him to the woods was—what, mother’s age, maybe a few years older. But not ancient or—What did he call it?—medieval.
I wonder if that teacher advised the person who wanted use The Village People’s In The Navy as a recruitment song. Maybe he’s the one who told Reagan to use Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA for his Presidential campaign. While neither of those songs has much to do with me or mother, they—especially Bruce’s lament—are at least relatable to some people who have lived and died on, or fled or been pulled away from, this block.
And all the prayers, epitaphs, eulogies and such have no more to do with mother’s life than the opening line of Tale of Two Cities. Not the best of times, not the worst of times. Only this moment. No heaven, no hell; no appeals to get her into one or keep her out of the other mean anything now. Only now—this moment—does. It’s all she had; it’s all I have; it’s all either or all of us could ever have.
In this moment, in any moment, I breathe, I wake, I wash, I dress, I drink, I eat, I leave, I come back, I leave again, I breathe, I hurt, I cry, I sleep, I wake again, I sleep again, one more time, for the last time. Any virtue some priest some other mourner, could attribute to mother means about as much as anything they could attach to me or anyone else. She lives; she’s dead. She died; she’s here now, on this block, where she and I began.
At least neither Mrs. Littington nor the lady whose name I never knew are trying to make a hero of her now. I won’t, either. Nor, do I suspect, will anyone else here—except for the priest who pleads some cause that didn’t need to be made before God or any living being. No one has to justify her life, her death or the passage between them any more—and I’ve only just understood this—than I have any obligation to explain the transition I’ve been making: the one whose outcome mother won’t witness. But then again, she doesn’t have to. I am the life she bore into this world—onto this block—and I’m here now as she’s leaving. And so are the others. They can talk, if they choose, about drinking each other’s coffee or what their kids and hers have become or gone to. But it all matters now about as much as the priest’s appeals to that to which he’s pledged his belief and fealty, or about as much as any story I can tell about the boy who confined me inside my body back before it’d ever left this block.
After today, I will never be able to speak of that one as a boy, or myself as a man, again. Nor can I tell anyone about the woman I will become, and the laws of this state will recognize, if I survive the operation.
