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Discontinuity

There is a crucifix over my bed. I am in bed, my eyes are open. I am waiting for the sound of midnight--a burst of horns, a fire whistle, a woman's scream.

A car passes on the wet pavement outside. My room revolves on a rail of light. And then it is dark. January 1, 1960. The new decade has come to Sacramento, California. It is no longer Christmas. In the morning there will be a cold mass at church, then the Rose Parade on TV. And the long gray afternoon will pass away through a series of black-and-white football games; in a few days I will be back at school.

I am fifteen years old, old enough to be dating. I am not dating. I am brown. I envy my older brother's cool, his way with girls. My brother's bed is empty. My brother is out at a party. I am bookish and witty; though I don't have such maypole words for myself. I write the gossip column ("The Watchful Eye") in the Gael, the school paper. I am much more than the class clown; I am the leveler, caustic enough to force my male classmates to a truce. I am bright, a straight line. I am ambitious for college--some school that is hard to get into--a brick castle filled with rich kids where I will clean up, because I want more than they do. I want to be a college professor. I will have run out of things to read. I want to be a journalist on a train far, far away, hurtling toward the present age of my parents. Thirty-six. Thirty-six.

My family has moved three times in Sacramento, each time to a larger house than before. We live in a two-story house. We have two televisions. Two cars. I am not unconscious: I cherish our fabulous mythology: My father makes false teeth. My father received three years of a Mexican grammar school education. My mother has a high school diploma. My mother types eighty words per minute. My mother works in the governor's office where the walls are green. Edmund G. Brown is the governor. Famous people walk by my mother's desk. The other day Chief Justice Earl Warren said hi to my mother.

Every New Year's Eve my mother cries in front of the TV when Guy Lombardo marks auld lang syne. "It's so sad," my mother says. The crowd in Times Square cheers. This year, however, we have gone to bed early. The back-porch light is on for my brother. I have stayed awake in the dark to feel the difference of a new decade.

There is no difference. It is the unexpected that my life is protected against. Inevitability is what my parents have bought me with their ascent into the American middle class. My ambition will match their desire. I will go to college in the sixties. I will not be the first in my family to attend college, but I will be the first to leave home for college. I will go to Stanford in the sixties. Four years later I will take my first plane trip--TWA's Royal Ambassador Service--to New York. I will go to graduate school at Columbia, then Berkeley.

Ten years from tonight, I will be a graduate student at Berkeley. I will expect to be a college teacher. I will be spending the Christmas break in my apartment on College Way, writing a paper on Henry James's The American. I will be composing elaborate opinions about the naive and the worldly, about the Protestant American and the cynical Catholic orders. Over my bed will be a blowup of Marlene Dietrich.

Sacramento, the first minutes of 1960: the ectoplasmic corpus of the crucifix glows with confidence. Awake on my bed, I am inclined forward: I want the years coming to improve me, to make my hand a man's hand and my soul a man's soul.

The sixties will be my sacramental confirmation. The fifties already have defined my life. As 1949 became 1950, we lived in a one-story house on 39th Street, a few blocks closer to Mexico. There were no faces like ours on the block. Nor were there voices like ours on the block. When I began school, my classmates seemed of one blank face and of one emotion, which was cheerful. The majority of the class carried lunchboxes full of snowballs of frosted pastry. It was an American classroom. And yet we were a dominion of Ireland, the Emerald Isle, the darling land. "Our lovely Ireland," the nuns always called her.

The conclusion of my education will be at secular universities where the majority of my teachers will be Jews--many of them only a generation from working-class memories. But the Sisters of Mercy will remain the most influential. They will claim me for Ireland.

What was my initial resistance? When I came to the classroom unable, unwilling to speak English, the nuns methodically elected me. They picked on me. They would not let me be but I must speak louder, Richard, and louder, Richard. I think of those women now, towers, linen-draped silos, inclining this way and that, and only their faces showing, themselves country lasses, the daughters of immigrants. They served as my link between Mexico and America, between my father's dark Latin skepticism and the Edenic cherry tree of Protestant imagining. Pulling ears, straightening collars, blushing, strong-arming, my nuns ushered their students in straight lines toward an American future none of us could conceive. Years after, the nuns would leave me a skeptical figure within tall library windows, regarding the swirling chaos on the quad below.

From its influence on my life I should have imagined Ireland to be much larger than its picayune place on the map. During the hot Sacramento summers, I'd pass afternoons in the long reading gallery of nineteenth- century English fiction. I gathered a not-accurate picture of London and of the English landscape. Ireland had no comparable place in my literary imagination. As a Catholic schoolboy I had to learnt to put on the brogue in order to tell Catholic jokes, of gravediggers and drunkards and priests. Ireland sprang from the tongue. Ireland set the towering stalks of the litanies of the church to clanging by its inflection. Ireland was the omniscient whisper from a confessional box.

Did your mother come from Ireland? Around March 17th, a Catholic holiday, my mother--that free-floating patriot--my mother would begin to bristle. "If it's so wonderful, why did they all leave?" But it was her joke sometimes too, that we were Irish. My mother's surname is Moran, her father a black Irishman? She laughed. Her father was dark and tall with eyes as green as leaves. There were Irish in nineteenth-century Mexico, my mother said. But there was no family tree to blow one way or the other. The other way would lead to Spain. For Moran is a common enough name in Spain as through Latin America. Could it have been taken, not from Ireland, but to Ireland by the Spanish--Spanish sailors shipwrecked by Elizabeth's navy?

My younger sister asked me to help her with an essay for school. The subject was Ireland. I dictated a mouthful of clover about Dublin's Jewish mayor and some American celebrities and politicians, Ed Sullivan, Dennis Day, Mayor Daley, Carmel Quinn. "Ireland, mother of us all. . . ." The essay won for my sister an award from the local Hibernian Society. I taunted her the night she had to dress up for the awards banquet. My mother, though, returned from the banquet full of humor. They had all trouped into the hall behind the Irish flag--my sister, my mother, my father, an assortment of old ladies, and some white-haired priests.

When Father O'Neil came back from his first trip home to Ireland, I was in third or fourth grade. There was a general assembly at school so we could see his slides, rectangles of an impossible green bisected by the plane's wing. Dublin gray, stone and sky. The relations lined up in front of white houses, waving to us or just standing there. There was something so sad about Father then, behind the cone of light from the projector, in Sacramento, at Sacred Heart School, so far from the faces of home and those faces so sad.

Ireland was where old priests returned to live with their widowed sisters and (one never said it) to die. So it was a big white cake and off you go. Ireland was our heart's home. I imagined the place from St. Patrick's Day cards, a cheerful Catholic place--a cottage, a bell on the breeze, and that breeze at your back, through quilted meadows and over the winding road. Sacramento, my Sacramento, then, must seem to Father O'Neil as flat, as far away as Africa in the Maryknoll missionary movies. Life was the journey far from home, or so I decided as I watched Father O'Neil popping squares of memory upside down into a projector.

Fading Ireland. . . . The American experience of Catholicism as an immigrant faith, a ghetto contest of them against us, was coming to an end in America. In the colored pages of Life magazine the old dead Pope with his purple face and his hooked nose was borne aloft through St. Peter's. My generation would be the last to be raised with so powerful a sense of the ghetto church. An American of Irish descent and athletic good looks would soon be elected President, our first Catholic President of the United States. As the old Pope passed through the doors of death, American Catholics were entering the gates of the city. A fat, expressive Italian Pope would soon call his church to "aggiornamento," a new rapprochement with the non-Catholic world. As the fifties passed, however, the nuns went on neatly dividing the world, as if they remained the Fates they had always been. We were the Catholics and all others, alas, were defined by the fact of their difference from us.

By the time many of us got to college, the temptation would be to turn back, embarrassed by the parochialism of our Catholic schooling. The gothic habits, the very names, Sister Mary Damien, Sister Mary Aquin, the prohibitions, the virtues would seem, from a distance of modernity, funny. There was no other word for it.

But then that was the general tone of the sixties, an irreverent laugh-in--for the theme of the sixties was the theme of discontinuity. As higher education became mass education, a generation of Americans, many the children of parents who did not make it to college, found themselves living a new future. We were not fated to become like our parents; we should not have to submit ourselves to compromise, to memory. We would therefore believe we were freed from history. History was evil because it hadn't, after all, worked. Look at the wars, look at the poverty. We were innocent. We were at the edge of an Aquarian Age, or so the lyrics of the sixties hustled us to believe.

"The sixties were about mommy and daddy, a family affair," says a friend of mine who ran off with a soldier. It has become the fashion appropriate to an age of individualism to date the start and the end of the era according to private calendars. Another friend, a woman who became a nationally known antiwar activist, says the sixties began with her divorce in 1962.

Shall I say the sixties began for me in 1963 when my parents drove me to Stanford University? My sixties began in the 1950s. In the fifties, billboards appeared on the horizons, which beckoned restless Americans toward California. If you asked, people in Sacramento in the fifties said they were from Alabama or from Portugal. Somewhere else. Sacramento of the 1950s was the end of the Middle Ages and Sacramento growing was the beginning of London. In those days people were leaving their villages and their mothers' maiden names to live among strangers in tract houses. Highways swelled into freeways. People didn't need anyone else to tell them how to behave on K Street. And God spoke to each ambition through the G.I. Bill.

I should say that my sixties began in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation. For the sixties were a Protestant flowering. The famous activists of the decade were secular Jews who heralded a messianic future. But the true fathers of Woodstock, of sit-ins, and of rock pastoral were the dark-robed Puritan fathers.

In the early 1950s, Sacramento, California, was a city of over 100,000 people, a river town, the "Camellia Capital of the World." Sacramento was the great city of the Central Valley, the state capital. As the fifties advanced, people arrived by the hundreds, then thousands, each month. Downtown Sacramento began to skid with the building of Country Club Shopping Center. The city was growing north and south.

A statewide university system was created on an economic paradigm of supply and demand to accommodate middle-class ambition. Dr. Clark Kerr named it a "multiversity." The problem was numbers. Mass education caused the market value of the diploma to decline, and so did the glamour of undergraduate living. lt was a dilemma peculiar to American ambition and one Henry James might have understood.

In the fall of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Life magazine printed a eulogy that said, "When you're Irish, what you know is that life will break your heart." The next year, on a spring afternoon, when windows were open and radios were up, my roommate at Stanford walked in to announce, with the smile he usually reserved for pictures of naked women, that they were busting heads at Berkeley. In the papers the next day students at Berkeley, using insect words, complained of the impersonality of the multiversity, of being reduced to IBM numbers.

The sixties should have been my time. I was the son of Mexican immigrant parents. I was the non-white American who was to be given full access to American life. If it had all gone as planned for me--the radical politics become bureaucratic affirmative action policy--I should have ended up teaching Hamlet at some vast Arizona or Ohio state university, liberal, discontent, tenured. But the romanticism of the sixties never took. Blame it on Ireland. I never bought into the idea that I could be free of the past, except in obvious ways. Oh, I had become free of Mexico--no longer spoke Spanish, no longer cared to or could. People at Stanford thought l was Pakistani. Ireland still clung to my heart in the sixties. The nuns' lessons--of sin, of historical skepticism--were real lessons. They were not offered as metaphor and I never took them as such. And my best friends in high school and college, as today, carried names that came from the trusted Old Sod--Murray, O'Donnell, Keating, Faherty.

Larry Faherty is my best friend in high school. Larry Faherty wears a ducktail sealed with emerald green Stay-Set. He gets kicked out of Brother Michael's English class all the time for having long hair, which is an impertinence. Larry Faherty is rich. His parents have moved to a new house on a new street on the new south side of town. Larry Faherty loves Mexico, he has been there on vacation every summer since his freshman year, and he speaks Spanish to me. Though I answer in English. My mother worries about my association with Larry Faherty. He and I go to San Francisco on the Greyhound and eat French dinners. We'd go anywhere to see Black Orpheus.

Larry Faherty is in New Orleans with his family for Christmas, so we have not spent New Year's Eve together going to the movies. He will send me a postcard written in Spanish.

lt must be around two in the morning when my brother's blue Plymouth pulls into the driveway. The car door slams.

He comes in the back door, he opens the refrigerator and the bottles rattle. My mother calls out to him. "Did you turn off the light?" "Yeah." His voice is thick with American disrespect.

His foot is on the stairs. I close my eyes. He turns on the light for a moment, he turns it off. He fumbles around in the dark. He falls into bed. January 1960, at the edge of my adolescence, in the first hours of the new decade, amid the warmth and the smells of all that is now lost to me, I put away my ambitions and fall asleep.

Protestants

One weekday in summer I am riding my bicycle past the Fremont Presbyterian Church. The door is wide open. So I stop to look. Painters on scaffolds are painting the walls white. I walk in. The room glows with daylight drawn through yellow-pebbled glass windows. There are no side altars, no statues. There is a wooden pulpit and a table on which stands a gold-painted cross. There are no kneelers in the pews. Don't the Protestants pray on their knees? This is only a room--place of assembly-- now empty but for its heavy golden light and its painters. Whereas my church is never empty so long as the ruby burns in the sanctuary lamp; my church is filled with all times and all places. All the same, I like this plain room, this empty Protestant shell. I ponder it as I ride away.

It is 1956. It is summer, and already, though it is not yet noon, the dry heat of Sacramento promises to rise above the fat dusty leaves to a hundred degrees. I hate the summer of Sacramento. It is flat and it is dull. And yet something about summer is elemental to me and I move easily through it.

America happens in summer. At school, during the rest of the year, America is an abstraction--an anthem or a concept for the civics class. It is easier to see what is meant by the Soviet Union. At church, at the end of the mass, the priest prays for "the conversion of Russia," for it is Our Lady of Fatima's special request. Russia is not an abstraction, it is evil and has the fat red face of evil or the gummy-eyed stare of people who ladle watery soup from huge cauldrons. Russia bears the weight of history, of people on the move, people forced from their villages. America is unencumbered by history, and rises even as the grasses, even as the heat, even as planes rise. America opens like a sprinkler's fan, or like a book in summer. At the Clunie Library in McKinley Park, the books that please me most are books about boyhood and summer.

My Sacramento becomes America. America is the quiet of a summer morning, the cantaloupe-colored light, the puddles of shade on the street as I bicycle through. There is a scent of lawn. Think of America and you'll think of lawns, force-fed, prickling rectangles of green, our pastures, our playgrounds, our commons, our graves.

On Saturdays I cut the front lawn. On my knees I trim the edges. Afterwards, I take off my shoes to water down the sidewalk. Around noontime as I finish, the old ladies of America who have powdered under their arms and tied on their summer straw hats walk by and congratulate me for "keeping your house so pretty and clean. Whyn't you come over to my house now . . . ?"

I smile because I know it matters in America to keep your lawn trim and green. It matters to me that my lawn is as nice as the other lawns on the block. On those Saturday mornings, Sacramento is busy painting and hammering, washing the car. I feel happy to be part of the activity. I cannot explain it--I am 12 years old--I have no way of discerning a theological aspect to what I sense about Sacramento on Saturday mornings. I do not know that the busyness is Protestantism.

Behind the Protestant facade of our house, the problem is Mexico. The problem is Ireland, the problem is Rome. I love the Latin mass and trust the questions and the answers. I feel the assurance of belonging to an institution that stretches over all time. But at home there is always something to pray for. Somebody's sick or somebody's out of a job. At night the family prays the rosary, five sets of ten Hail Marys. Asking for favors.

Catholicism at home, our Mexican faith, centers on Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, her downcast girl's face, which hangs over my parents' intimate bed. The Virgin is "ours," my mother says. In the sixteenth century, shortly after the Spaniards had overtaken Mexico and left the Indians demoralized, the Virgin Mary came on a cloud of bird song to a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego. The new thing for the New World was that Christian Mary appeared in the God-joke guise of an Indian princess.

The problem is that Sister Mary Celestine decides to have our sixth-grade class reenact the story of Guadalupe, and she does not choose me to play the part of Juan Diego.

"Why not?" my mother wants to know at dinner. Sister Mary Celestine has assigned the role of Juan Diego to Peter Veglia. "The Veglias aren't Mexican," my mother says, lining up her knife and her spoon, "they are Spanish." Sister Mary Celestine has missed the point. (Peter Veglia is cute. My mother has missed the point.) My mother says she is going to speak to the nuns.

"Don't," I say.

So I play an astounded Indian in a crowd scene. Offstage I listen as the Guadalupe, with spikes of tinfoil stapled onto her cape, speaks tenderness to the upturned face of Peter Veglia. She says that she wants the Indians to come to her in their suffering. She does not promise to end human pain. She promises that she will share the Indians' suffering, which is our cue to shuffle on stage and fall to our knees. The curtain closes as irresolutely as it has parted.

What had Mexico taught my parents? They had come to America; they had broken with the past. My parents were hardworking. My parents were doing well. We had just bought our secondhand but very beautiful DeSoto. "Nothing lasts a hundred years," my father says, regarding the blue DeSoto. He says it all the time: his counsel. I am sitting fat and comfortable in front of the TV, reading my Time magazine. My mother calls for me to take out the garbage. "Now!" My father looks over the edge of the newspaper and he says it: Nothing lasts a hundred years.

I think I might want to be an architect. I sketch the plans for vast amusement parks to make Sacramento beautiful. I am pleased by the new twelve-story El Mirador Hotel downtown. Sacramento meets my optimism. There is a new mall planned over by Sears.

Sacramento is annexing to itself miles of vacant land. United Airlines has announced direct service to New York City. All of it matters to me. I figure that I am at the very center of the world. The United States is the best country, California has just become the most populous state, and Sacramento is its state capital.

It becomes a sort of joke between my father and me. "Life is harder than you think, boy." You're thinking of Mexico, Papa (while I fold the newspapers for my route). "You'll see," he says.

One of my aunts goes back to Mexico to visit, and she returns and tells my mother that the wooden step--the bottom step--of their old house near Guadalajara is still needing a nail. Thirty years later! They laugh. My father is attentive to the way Sacramento repairs itself. The street lights burn out, a pothole opens on the asphalt, a tree limb cracks, and someone comes from "the city" within a day. My father shakes his head. It is as close as he comes to praising America.

Like the Irish nuns, my father is always remembering. He remembers the political turmoil of Mexico. He grumbles about the intrigues of Masonic lodges in Mexico. My father talks about how America stole the Southwest from Mexico. (And how Mexicans could never forget it.) Americans died at the Alamo to make Texas a slave state. And what does puta history do? She gives Texas to the gringo.

America has a different version, the ballad of Davy Crockett. On television, Walt Disney Mexicans at the battle of the Alamo are dressed in French-style uniforms--white suspenders crossed over their bellies. I watch with my family downstairs. And for the first time I want the Americans--those greasy, buckskin Texans--to lose and die.

At a time when most boys in Sacramento are sporting coonskin caps, my father teaches me the story of the St. Patrick's Brigade. In the nineteenth century, there were Irish immigrants to the United States, most of them teenagers, who enlisted to fight in the Mexican-American War. They ended up in Mexico, and when they saw how the gringos behaved in Catholic churches and when they saw how the gringos treated women, the Irishmen changed their flags, my father said. So the Americans hung them as traitors one afternoon in Mexico City.

Mexico was a place of memory. America was the beginning of the future.

Ireland became the mediating island. I grew up in Ireland. The priest and the nuns seemed to believe in America. Priests were optimists. They were builders and golfers. They bellowed their Latin. They drove fast in dark-colored cars. They wore Hawaiian shirts. They played hard at being regular guys, and they told jokes to cover any embarrassment when they collected money for new hospitals or new high schools.

The nuns made me learn the preamble to the Constitution. The nuns taught me confidence. There was no question about my belonging in America. I mean that literally. There was no question. There was no question about English being my language. The nuns were as unsentimental as the priests were sentimental. But they all assumed my American success.

The only exception to the rule of confidence at school came with religion class. At the start of each school day, after the "Morning Offering," after the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, our young hearts were plunged in the cold bath of Ireland. For fifty minutes life turned salt, a vale of tears. Our gallery--our history, our geography, our arithmetic--was lreland. The story of man was the story of sin that could not be overcome with any such thing as a Declaration of Independence. Earth was clocks and bottles and heavy weights. Earth was wheels and rattles and sighs and death. We all must die. Heaven was bliss eternal, heaven was a reign of grace bursting over the high city and over the mansions of that city. Earth was Ireland and heaven was Ireland. The dagger in Mary's heart was sorrow for man's sins. The bleeding heart of Jesus was sorrow for man's sins. Our consolation alone was Our Redeemer, our precious Lord. Man needed Christ's intervention--His death on the cross. God the Father had given His only begotten son. That cross you wear isn't a pretty bauble, Patsy, it's like wearing a little electric chair around your neck. Christ had instituted a church--a priesthood, sacraments, the mass--and man required all the constant intercession of the saints and the church and the special help of Mother Mary to keep the high road. All alone man would wander and err like pagan Caesar or like Henry VIII.

At nine-thirty the subject changed. The class turned to the exercises of worldly ambition--spelling, writing, reading--in preparation for adulthood in comic America. The nuns never reconciled the faces of comedy and tragedy, and they never saw the need.

While I was in high school, the swarming magnetic dots of the television screen began to compose themselves into black faces during the nightly news; the Civil Rights movement was gaining national attention. Black Protestantism had until then seemed to me a puzzling exhibition of perspiring women and wet-voiced men chained to a rhythm that was foreign to me. Suddenly, on the nightly news there appeared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and everything I thought I knew about saints began to change as I contemplated that face, as I listened to that voice. I began to believe in heroes.

By the time I got to Stanford I believed in manmade history. I tutored ghetto children. I paraded through downtown Palo Alto toward my first antiwar rally. I was an English major at Stanford; increasingly, though, I began taking courses in religion, mainly Protestantism. I took on a new hero--a Protestant theologian named Robert McAfree Brown. These were the years of ecumenism, and I had outgrown any caution regarding contact with non-Catholics. I eagerly bit into the Protestant apple the nuns had warned me against, and I admitted its sweetness. When my mother learned that I was taking a course from a Protestant minister, she made me promise that I would ask the Catholic chaplain at Stanford for permission. I didn't, though I told her I did.

So began my Protestant years. I was attracted to the modesty of style, the unencumbered voices of Luther and Calvin, free of the trinketed cynicism of Mexico and the nagging poetry of Ireland. And there was a masculine call to action. One week Dr. McAfee Brown was flying to Rome to serve as an official Protestant delegate to the Vatican Council. All the while he was writing books; he knew more about Catholicism than the nuns could have told me. He would be off the next week to Selma.

I entered a master's program in religious studies at Columbia University; I took most of my courses across the street at Union Theological Seminary. When Columbia was closed by sit-ins and police riots, I sat in the library of Union Seminary reading eighteenth-century Puritan auto-biographies--books of people who had learned to read late in their lives. They spoke from their pine houses and from within the rings of their candles about personal confrontations with God.

Were these the renowned dour Puritans? But here were people who believed in the possibility of change, sudden conversion. One could be born again, sin could be overturned like a wooden table, like a bucket of water. With God's help one could stand on one's own feet. There was no necessary tragedy. Was there a need, then, for angels and priests?

It was thus in the late sixties, in a neogothic library in New York City, that I found a theology to escape my father's skepticism and my mother's famous intimacy with the Virgin Mary.

As I read, I remembered the close-cut lawns of Sacramento, I saw the face of the Puritan. It was an old lady's face I saw; she wore a yellow dress with sunflowers on the pockets, she wore a sun hat. She stopped to congratulate me for keeping my lawn so pretty. She was smiling.

Evil

On my part it is less a decision to get to know Larry Faherty than a fascination I decide not to deny myself.

"Faherty, take off those stupid sunglasses," Brother Michael interjects into the Iliad.

Skinny, pale, slouching, yesterday Larry Faherty won the essay contest I had expected and wanted desperately to win.

"Faherty, I'll give you three to take them off. ONE . . ."

Our courtship: Larry and I are sitting at the far end of the football field during the lunch hour, a blurry distance from the schoolyard monitor. Larry saves his milk cartons to use as ashtrays. Larry has been reading a book by James Baldwin about Negroes in Harlem. Larry Faherty has been to New York. Larry Faherty calls Sacramento "Sacramenty." Larry Faherty writes poetry. I have been to Mexico with my parents to visit relatives. Larry went to summer schools in Mexico to learn Spanish. Larry is not afraid of Mexico. Sometimes he makes it sound male. "We all went down to the whorehouse," he says, flicking an ash. Sometimes he tells Mexico as a woman. No one there asks if he is gringo. The Mexicans speak to him only in Spanish, with cortesia--it's in the language, he says.

Larry Faherty protests the smallness of our island.

Peter Raderman--of the duckling yellow crew cut and the school sweater--warns me in confidence (and for my own good) that Larry Faherty will ruin me . . . "socially." So Larry is jeopardizing my tenuous ties with circles of athletic glamour and social celebrity at school. My mother worries. My parents are in awe of his parents. Larry's mother is a teacher; his father works for the government. My sister Sylvia says "look at his hair" as Larry rides up on his bicycle.

Larry Faherty's hair: it is long and it is greasy. Every four weeks or so, Larry's hair descends to his collar. There is a ritual confrontation in Brother Michael's English class.

"TWO . . ."

Brother Michael is late in his twenties, passionate, athletic, sarcastic, the stuff of crushes. Not only does he understand the classics, he plays the lead role. All the boys think he is their favorite teacher. But he is mine. I have managed to become his pet. After school. Brother Michael encourages me, he spends time with me, he gets me to write for the school paper. In class I am careful not to act kissy. I told you, I am the class wit. Like Falstaff, I take hits and then I hit back. I am as ready to laugh at your humiliation as you are to laugh at mine.

Larry Faherty sits silent, he judges me when I make the class laugh, even at the expense of Brother Michael, which I figure Larry ought to enjoy.

Larry Faherty is the one kid in class I regard as brighter than me. His essays, done the night before, have big words stuck in like cherries. When Larry gets kicked out of class, he is not allowed to come back until he has gone to the barber. Because I am the obedient Catholic schoolboy, because I never get in trouble, I am fascinated by Larry Faherty's defiance.

"THREE." A rustle of black serge, the little wind of starch and sweat as Brother Michael rushes past; a furious slap knocks the sunglasses clattering across the floor.

I too laugh when the pneumatic hinge has finally jerked the door shut against Larry. My mother has no reason to fear. I will always be attracted for the same reason that I will never become. Because I am a Catholic.

The Christian Brothers traditionally have been teachers of the poor. There is talk of the Jesuits coming to town to build a rich school in the suburbs. In Sacramento, Christian Brothers High School teaches the middle class. But the governing male ethos is tough. There will be order in the classroom because there is order in the cosmos--marches, genuflections, reverend addresses. I am indebted to my elders, the scholars, the theologians who preceded me. My teacher, by definition, assumes authority.

During a high school religious retreat, the traveling Redemptorist priest with a crucifix slung in his sash like a musket brays counsel to the assembly of five hundred boys. There is the one about the boy who went away to a non-Catholic college and lost his faith because he was encouraged to think he knew all the answers by himself, fool. The sin of pride. Pride is not submitting to authority. Pride is insisting on one's own way. Pride is lonely, men, lonely as hell.

The purpose of Catholic education was not "originality." At Christian Brothers, we read Aquinas and we read Shakespeare. At Christian Brothers, having a mind of one's own was a problem. Like Faherty. We were trained to keep order. From my class at Christian Brothers would come yet another Catholic generation of policemen and FBI agents and firemen, even a White House Secret Serviceman.

An Irish kid named Denny who sat in front of me in French class, and who this morning wears a checkered shirt, will become a cop. He will be driving after midnight down a rainy street, and he will be killed by a rifle shot through the passenger window. In 1961, in Brother Paul's French class, Larry Faherty drums his pencil eraser against his closed French grammar. Oh God, he is bored with Brother Paul, with French, with Sacramento. It is Mexico Larry loves, not France. Spanish.

Larry Faherty scolds me for not speaking Spanish. He calls me affectionately--the insulting word for the son who pretends to be a gringo --pocho. We are the odd couple: Larry is 6 feet tall, fair, Spanish-speaking. I answer in English. We spend a summer working for John F. Kennedy's election. We go to movies. He tells me what I should have known about sex, about girls, letting his line down tenderly, a little at a time, into the clear pool of my imagination. We talk about politics and about Mexico and about the young man Larry saw shot down to a pool of blood on a street in Mexico City. On Friday nights he honks for me in his father's Chrysler, the cigarette dangling from his lip. "Salutti Beulah Mumm," he calls out to the window of Beulah Mumm, the librarian who lives next door to us. "Salutti Cerrutti," he honks at the house of Mrs. Cerrutti. "There's something funny about that kid," my father says. We go to a jazz coffeehouse. We order espressos. I never finish mine. Black musicians with preoccupied red eyes play for dulling hours. It amuses Larry to overtip the waitress--sometimes two or three times the amount of the bill--"to see what she will do." She keeps the money, of course, and with a poker face.

Larry scorns me for not taking chances. I refuse to hitchhike. I refuse to smoke cigarettes. I refuse Spanish. And yet, I think, Larry senses Mexico in me, I am his way of escaping Sacramento. But if I am his Negro, he is mine too. His casual relationship to money, his house with a swimming pool, these I take as ethnic traits. What dooms our friendship is that we stare past one another. What he sees in me is innocence, an inferiority complex, Mexico. He is all casualness about the things I intend to have. I want what he claims to discard. I ingratiate myself to Larry Faherty's parents, and I get invited down to Southern California beach towns where they spend the summers.

And so for two or three years we know each other better than we know anyone else in the world. But then we graduate and I am to go to Stanford--"Stahnnn-ford" Larry says with a plummy cartoon voice, disapproving my choice. Larry goes off to college too. There is some kind of trouble. (Larry is vague on the phone.) He transfers to another college in the Midwest. We exchange letters. We see each other at Christmas. He is becoming sadder, handsome.

One summer Larry Faherty joins the Peace Corps, a fine young Kennedy cadet. There is a war in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson is President. Larry writes from Africa. Then there is trouble again. Larry has been kicked out of the Peace Corps--"for not wearing pajamas," Larry is quoted as saying in the Sacramento papers, which headline the story. The Peace Corps official is vague in response.

1968. We are, both of us, deep in the sixties now. But Larry Faherty has nowhere to go when the sixties become the sixties. From Africa he quotes Ayn Rand; he grumbles about the uniform answers of the newly fashionable left. His mood passes. His liberal heart cannot justify America's war in Vietnam, and his next letter says so.

The letters become less frequent. I am living in New York. I hear he is living in Paris. I have no address for him there. In New York, at Columbia, student demonstrations in April close down the university. Politically, I still think of myself as of the left. I write letters to congressmen. I march in antiwar demonstrations up Fifth Avenue. But I cannot follow the decade all the way down the line. Date my defection with the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After his death, the Pauline vision of a society united is undermined by hack radicals like Stokley Carmichael, proclaiming a Protestant separatist line. The virtue of the sixties moves from integration to defiance. The posture of the outsider is perceived as glamorous. Students at Columbia are reading The Student as Nigger in order to justify their privilege, a version of noblesse oblige which puts me in mind of the rah-rah twits in a Wodehouse comedy.

I do not believe in sudden Protestant changes, reformations, so much as I believe in fade-outs and soft loosenings. My friendship with Larry Faherty has no denouement.

There is a vacuity, an abeyance, an alignment to the spring afternoon as I walk defiantly toward the library between jeering students and silent policemen. The protest is all about me--about the need for more "minority students" and the "racist" university. Rocks and bottles are thrown and the horses charge in my wake.

For religious as well as for temperamental reasons, it is impossible for me to imagine a propriety that will justify the seizure of an office of authority. I will never be a hero of the sixties brand. I will go to the library to confront the Protestant Reformation.

A manufactured sign in somebody's dormitory window urges passersby to "Question Authority." Why (me with my Samsonite briefcase) should one simply, as a matter of reflex, question authority?

An august historian of Protestant history lectures on Galileo--the inevitable example--as I sit in the classroom, and I am silent, though I would protest to him that if the church was wrong, it was possibly wrong for a valid reason. For the church sought to protect the communal vision, the Catholic world--a rounded, weighted, lovely thing--against an anarchy implicit in the admission of novelty. Novelty should only come from within the church; a question not of facts but of authority.

America is the fruit of a Northern European idea of freedom. How should I protest? America has justified modernity. How much can America hear from the Catholic schoolboy who defends the medieval Catholic dream? Of what value to America are notions of authority, communality, continuity? Tolerance is the noble Protestant virtue to replace Catholic orthodoxy. But, lacking a Catholic longing for union, what could America's Protestant sixties lend to the Protestant enterprise beyond flea-bitten utopias--reversions to an arcadian world--nomadic trappings, natural religion, mushrooms, sitars, incense?

The sixties offered assurance that middle-class Americans, even Americans among the upper classes who yearned for purity, could disenfranchise themselves, see themselves, by virtue of their era, as orphans of authority and that way achieve ultimate identification with "the people." All you had to do was leave home.

His head bandaged after a student-police riot in the university president's office, a friend at Columbia tells me that only during the sit-in had he come to understand the meaning of "community."

Many of the hundreds of riot policemen on campus at Columbia eat in John Jay Hall. They eat, most of them, on one side of the cafeteria; most of the students eat on the other. I make it a practice, a theatrical point, of sitting on the blue side, among what Catholic intuition teaches me to recognize as the righteous angels.

It was not then nor is it now a matter of divorcing myself from the opinions of the left. In the contest of politics, I was of the left. But in the overarching debate, I took the Catholic side, even if I saw the Protestant necessity clearly. The era's individualism seemed to me to stray too far from the communal need, an exploration of limits I privately called by its Catholic name: error.

What happened to the boys I grew up with at Christian Brothers? What happened to my teachers? What happened to the church? We were educated in the sixteenth century and then set loose in the modern city.

A mile from where I live now, an ex-cop, an ex-boxer named Dan White was elected to the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco--the city of gays, of drugs, of violence, of rock. Dan White remembered the neighborhoods as villages. He had never really been to the city before. He went mad. He crawled through a window of city hall with a loaded gun in his pocket. He murdered the mayor and the homosexual member of the Board of Supervisors. Newspaper accounts described Dan White's house. There were maps of Ireland on the walls, and there were holy pictures, and there were phonograph records of Irish ballads, sentimental and stirring.

It is possible to recognize the stuff of ballads in the life of Dan White, to recognize in the story of a dishonored man the American Catholic dilemma carried to an impossible conclusion.

In the 1840s, the nativist argument against accepting the Irish in the U.S. was Mexico. The fear was that the Irish would conspire with their fellow papists to overturn Protestant America. The truth of my education was that Catholicism made Irish immigrants, as it made me, into the sort of Americans who upheld the collective idea of America, even more perhaps than did the Puritan fathers for whom this country was an escape.

Something is now clear about Larry, and that is my betrayal of him. The last time I saw Larry Faherty, he was ducking down in the backseat of his father's Chrysler in the parking lot of the Greyhound station. Larry had wanted to see me. Our meeting was rushed, nervous, but lacking the fervor demanded of it. Larry was on the lam, he was sure the cops were looking for him because he was in trouble with the draft board. He wasn't supposed to be in the country.

"Salutti Beulah Mumm . . .?" He hoisted a duffel bag onto his shoulder.

Just go, I thought.

Then the dusty Greyhound carried my blessed hero away. The last I heard he was in Mexico, where I imagine his rebellious soul lapped by corrupt, warm waters.

In 1973, I went to England to pursue a study of puritanism and the rise of the novel. I sat in the darkening library of the Warburg Institute reading Paradise Lost. Even as I became fascinated with the glamour of Milton's Satan, I saw the absolute necessity to avert my soul's eye from a logic that would make mere individualism a virtue. The logic of Milton's faith made Satan the hero of man's creation.

Envoi

"Personal essays," the editor writes--not theory, autobiography. He says he is compiling a book of them, points of view. "Describe the odyssey you took through the sixties, how your life was changed. . . ."

The sixties never happened to me. I didn't get a divorce. I never took drugs. I didn't schoon the desert in a VW van. I wasn't packed off to Saigon or chased up into Canada. "I don't even listen to rock music," I answered him.

The sixties were gringo time. White-middle-class crisis! The white middle class decided it no longer wanted the diploma, the seals, the ribbons, and the stole I had cherished from boyhood. The white middle class pretended to be poor. I took the prizes, as many as I could get, but I had no competition.

The man who lives across the hall tells me that he is interested in studying Hinduism. He grew up an Irish-Catholic.

The prescription of the sixties was for cutting loose. But I believe in continuous time, as I believe in God. I believe that the boy of ten relentlessly dogs the man of forty. Four blocks from where I live today, in St. Dominic's Church, my parents were married. I have, in forty years, traveled and lived in several cities and countries, have gone to universities and met people. And I have ended up four blocks from the apartment house where my mother lived when she first came to America.

I would have liked you to believe that I strode through the Protestant sixties purblind as Brideshead. As a Catholic schoolboy, I had been taught, if I had been taught nothing else, that we lived in a group. Ironically, this lesson implicates me in the sixties. Though I remain a Catholic, I did not evade the sixties, nor did my church evade the sixties.

I live alone. I have no children. I read at night. I jog at noon. I live in an apartment in a four-story Victorian that was designed to house an optimistic nineteenth-century family of many polite children. There are no children in my neighborhood. Most of the people I know best are living lives changed from the lives of our parents.

"Go on back to the safe world of your Irish nunnies who praised you for being so obedient," one friend of mine says. Jewish. He doesn't go to temple, though, he prowls the public toilets of city parks, looking for sex. My friend says he is careful. He says I am sentimental.

St. Dominic's, down the block, is dark and sparsely attended. Most of the people in church who are my age sit alone, hugging their shriveling souls, or else they sit staring through the bland recitation of vulgarized mysteries, and then they stand up and go home.

It is a liturgy meant to assure those of us who live in the city, alone in what we rather hesitate to call our faith. The Catholic Church insists that we are still a community, notwithstanding the evidence of the empty pews. The lector announces the Proclamation of Faith through her microphone: "Letter B. Page 36 in your missalettes. 'When we eat this bread and drink this cup. . . .'" Proclaiming the death of the heart.

Most Sundays I cross town to attend Mass in the Hispanic part of the city at St. Peter's, a nineteenth-century Irish church. It is dark and of an opulent vulgarity, with squeaky floors, a gallery of painted statues susceptible to candlelight and roses. A virile St. Patrick occupies a little gothic pavilion to the right of the main altar. The church is now filled with Spanish, with dark-eyed children and teenaged parents, and with waves of the sound of wailing babies that puts one in mind of the souls in purgatory, and with the off-key, full-throated singing of the women of Mexico.

During the sermon I study the stained glass windows to the blessed memories of Mary Anns and Patricks. The Irish have left the city for suburbs. I expect this Hispanic generation sitting around me to make a similar journey toward the middle class and away from this village church in the heart of the city.

There comes a moment in Hamlet that seems to me one of the saddest moments in the world. Hamlet stops, literally: Hamlet steps out of his play to address the audience. Hamlet stands alone and apart; Shakespeare no longer believes with Catholic assurance. The traditional faith of the playwright is that we are social creatures; all that is most essential to know about ourselves and about each other we know in communion, in conversation. The play tells all.

Hamlet becomes a modern man when he speaks his true heart to the void. He leaves the play behind him--a contraption, a booth--his father's Chrysler. Hamlet becomes a novel, which is the genre that Protestantism gave literature.

Four blocks from my house is a gym where men with pale thin legs sit harnessed to bucking Nautilus machines like victims of polio. I pay money to hang upside down on a bar listening to Vivaldi on earphones. My guru, my coach, is a twenty-four-year-old man from Dublin who is training to compete next year in the Mr. Ireland contest.

Another teacher, before she died, sent me a card, a confident florid verse. Sister Mary Regis (she also signs herself in the post&endash;Vatican Council style with her family name--Sister Mary Downey) tells me that she will not be able to come to the lecture I am going to give in Sacramento as she has a "chronic illness." (She is dying of cancer.) "Keep me in your prayers and I do you."

"When the nuns die, they die alone," Father O'Neil (he of the slides of Ireland) says to me a few months later. We are walking in the schoolyard of Sacred Heart; we are followed by a photographer who is shooting a going-home-again for People magazine, because my book has just been published. The photographer encourages Father O'Neil to "act normal."

I remember when Father O'Neil arrived from Ireland. His hair was black. He was handsome. He was shy. He apologized for his Irish, then. In this pause I am facing a man with gold teeth and gray hair. But the accent endures as a hint of youth clinging to him.

"None of their students ever come back. . . ." He is talking of Sister Mary Regis. I ask him how many nuns are left teaching at Sacred Heart School. There are two.

Sister Mary Regis writes: "Yes, I have fond memories of you and your days at Sacred Heart. Do you remember that you carried a notebook and asked millions of questions?"

I want to praise them. They deserve better than the ridicule the sixties heaped at their feet. I did not learn from any other of my teachers, as I learned from my nuns, that teaching is a vocation, a holy life, self- less, complete.

At Berkeley, in 1975, my sixties came to an end. The popular press discovered what it called the "me generation" on campus. No more warm-weather revolutions. I taught Freshman English while the Asian students at the back of my classroom studied biochemistry behind propped-up Shakespeare. I lectured on Hamlet.

One yellow day in April, revolution came to me. It was time for me to graduate to a full-time teaching position. I'd had offers. That day--the day I had to make a choice--I decided to turn down all offers by way of rejecting the romantic label the sixties had pinned on me: "Minority Student"--I just didn't want it. I moved across the Bay to San Francisco. I publicly scorned the sixties and became entangled in the memory of the era as a critic.

Which is how you find me now, on a Sunday morning in 1987. Over my desk is an etching by David Hockney from a suite of etchings suggested by the fairy tails of Grimm: a reading chair, empty, by a tall window. Outside, the leafed trees. Titled The Boy Who Left Home.

In a few minutes I will be leaving for the church across town, the Mexican church I told you about, where still I search for home.

"Keep me in your prayers," the nun would write to her third- grade student, remembering him as a boy on her deathbed. And I do you. Oh Ireland, Ireland.