The Man in the
Warehouse Window
EXCERPTED FROM The Rector's Tale, by Michael Finley
The boys were in worse shape than the priests. They stood for hours around the Zenith and the Magnavox, all of them, underclassmen included, bent into the prototypical "freshman squinch." The looks in their eyes spoke of terror and sorrow and a meek animal frustration at a thing being done and gone and unrecallable. They gathered in small groups and circled the seminary's walking-pond, moaning their praise for the fallen leader; they gathered in chapel to pray for the repose of his eternal soul. They prayed for peace for the country, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, which was cut off now from its dreamed-of destiny. And some prayed for forgiveness in their own hearts for the assassin -- and later, for the assassin's assassin -- and for the gift of understanding to put the absurd and impossible events in a Christian light.
Thomas, the youngest of them all, noticed the expression on the face of Hal Dodge -- the boy who idolized Kennedy, whose locker and desktop were littered with pictures from magazines, newspapers, the portrait Thomas himself had given him when Roy had been his "big brother." Within minutes of hearing the news out on the playing fields of St. Bernard's Bluff, Dodge -- a distant, glamorous, yet always brooding figure at the Bluff -- found expression for his feelings by dashing up to the first floor, three steps at a bound, pulling the dusty fire-axe from the emergency box, leaping back downstairs and sending the face of the axe deep into the eye of the rec room Magnavox.
The same fate might have befallen the Zenith, shattered into smoke and glass, had Prefect Provolini and maintenance man Van Eyck not grabbed Dodge and hauled him away, sparks and electronic pops issuing from the slain machine.
All the boys who had been watching NBC on the one set switched to CBS on the surviving one, and Dodge, disarmed, hunkered down along the cinderwall and bawled, blubbering over and over again his vague apologies -- to whom he wasn't sure, or for what.
The boys felt doubly cheated, losing Kennedy and Dodge both in one day. All felt cheated, drained. They paced about the rec room, the refectory, the walking-pond like frightened amnesiacs.
It was as if, looking back, they knew that a tree which had seemed dead and bare for years were suddenly struck by lightning, and a thousand white doves rose up out of its hollow.
And now the doves had flown back into the tree, and the tree sealed up again forever.
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EARLIER THAT YEAR, IN THE SUMMER, the seminary's recruiter, Father Garrity, had taken Thomas aside and congratulated him on drawing Hal Dodge as his "big brother" for the coming year.
"Dodge's a fine young man," the priest had said, "he runs like a cheetah and he can pull the curve. When God made Hal Dodge he threw away the mold."
But the school year hadn't even begun before Thomas and Dodge went separate ways. Hal was stuck in a certain dull, enthusiastic mode, regarding everything at St. Bernard's as "swell," "neat," "super," or "great," yet never with the passion that cried out for an exclamation point; instead, his judgments seemed to tail off at the end, as if he himself suspected their hollowness but was helpless to alter their course.
So when Thomas finally arrived at St. Bernard's and the two actually met, what had in correspondence seemed unlikely proved absolutely impossible in practice. The two would never be friends. Dodge struck Thomas not only as unoriginal but as a great unthinking colossus of sinew and bone, unable to think, the embodiment of embodiment. What Thomas would never know was that beneath the brooding muscularity, underneath the strata of dead adjectives, was a brooding and tormented mind as well.
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ALL TED DODGE EVER REALLY DEMANDED TO know, he had told himself time and time again, was what was what.
He had always wanted to be a priest. That was never a question back home in Buffalo -- not because, as with other seminarians, like Stroop, his parents insisted he become a priest -- it was because he insisted on it. Even as a little kid the earliest game he played with his sisters was Mass, in which he would wear his mother's paisley housecoat and bless the sacrament -- shards of ice-cream cup -- and distribute it to his "nuns," and to the fitful dog and cats. His progress from boyhood to St. Bernard's followed the straightest and shortest line imaginable, from altar boy to CYO junior high quarterback, his heart always fused to the Eucharist, his fascination rooted in a curiously mechanical way to the miracle that someday he, too, Hal Dodge of the Buffalo Dodges, would work in Christ's name.
That God had endowed him with speed and strength and rugged good looks and an absence of subtlety seemed to Hal to be a kind of sign, one saying that although all other men and all other women might be doomed to doubt, he would be the one remaining that believed. For Roy, when he was younger, faith was not a muscle that might be exercised or left to atrophy, it was more than that; it was innate, unimprovable and undiminishable, a talent, a pure bequeathal, as absolute a part of him as his split-second reflexes.
One morning when Hal was twelve, at Mass, as he sat enraptured to be assisting at the Blessed Sacrament, it happened -- an unsettling thought swam into his ken.
Granted, he conceded, that the Transubstantiation occurring in the Eucharist was total and indivisible -- that the bread and wine became the body and blood of the Living God -- did it not therefore have to occur within a specific physical moment in time? And if so, during what specific moment during the Consecration did it occur? Hoc? Est? Enim? Corpus? Meum? During which syllable of which word? And during which morpheme of that syllable -- M?
On the one hand, there was his hero, President Kennedy, a Catholic in charge of the conquest of space, a man who would prove to Khruschev that there were angels but that they were not to be pinpointed in the upper stratosphere, a man who feared and trusted science; and on the other hand, the peculiarities of Church life which no one had ever put to the test of scientific reason.
Granted, again, that at the Day of Judgment the dead rise up, and that in eternity we dwell in new bodies such as Christ walked the road to Emmaus in -- how would the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the ones who had been painted as shadows onto the sides of buildings, rise up, and from what? That man who lay buried in the steel and concrete of the Brooklyn Bridge -- how would he rise up?
The Ascension was especially a stickler. In order to leave his disciples, Christ rose up off the ground and kept going. At what point did he stop ascending, look at his watch and decide it was time to pass into the world of spirit? 10,000 feet? 100,000? Or did he just keep on rising, like a button on a thread, through a trillion light years? Was he Ascending still, way out there on the cusp of some distant nebula, with countless cold eons further to go? In short, was Khruschev right after all?
First there was the speed of light and then there was the Light of the World. What was the Speed of the Light of the World?
Hal had to continually assure himself that these questions of his were not questions of faith, for deep down he entertained not a subatomic particle of doubt. In addition he told himself that it was a new age, and that there was a lesson to the Space Race, headed as it was by a Catholic President, and it was that God expressly condoned this very type of inquiry. Even as it troubled him it retained its innocence, and he his faith.
But as seventh grade wound down and the eighth grade -- a grade strewn through time immemorial with the wreckage of young souls -- his innocence began to dim, and his faith to glimmer more faintly than before. Hal changed, his body grew, his glands went to work pumping new fluids, his mind went to work pumping strange ideas. This personal transubstantiation showed up in the all-time records for Buffalo's St. Athanasius Elementary School Track and Field Annual Meets, for running the hurdles, the long jump, the broad jump, javelin toss and 1500-meter run. Pastor Bailey in his recommendation to St. Bernard's wrote that there was nothing Roy Dodge couldn't do, that he was a complete athlete, that his body did whatever he told it to.
And there lay his problem, for in this frenzy of development, Dodge left no muscle unexercised -- none. Against the incantory admonition never to touch himself in certain places, Dodge had clung to his odd notion of a special privilege dispensed to athletes, a special permission that made him, in effect, an adolescent indult.
Inwardly he knew his sin as sin, but outwardly he was in a panic. No longer was he the disinterested physicist weighing the molecules and atoms of the universe; now he donned another costume, the black garb of the advocate, of the law, as his quest for truth deteriorated into a lust for loopholes.
Nowhere, for instance, could he find an outright injunction in the Scriptures against masturbation, not in the teachings of Jesus and not in the Epistles -- although it was difficult to picture either Christ or Paul taking up the hobby. There was no commandment among the Ten singling masturbation out, but that was nothing new -- the Decalogue was loaded with catch-alls.
If only it were a one-time offense, he told himself many, many times. He had only intended to do it the one time, as an experiment, but within hours he decided a second experiment would yield more reliable findings. By the time he was 13, and the euphoria of the Glenn orbit had given way to the gnawing anxiety of Soviet missiles stationed a few miles off the Florida coast, Hal's years of probable damnation outnumbered by a horrifying ratio his years of stored-up indulgences. It was a problem.
He knew from family experiences that justice in matters of this sort could be swift, from the time his uncle, known throughout the family as a tax cheater, was struck down while standing in line at the Niagara Savings Bank on Fulbricht Avenue just after two in the afternoon on Tax Day, April 15, 1960. Heart attack or terrible swift sword? The Lord deposits and the Lord withdraws.
Frantically, Hal began to make deals. Item: If God saw fit to get him accepted to St. Bernard's, mediocre grades and all, he would cease and desist from his despicable habit forthwith. Item: If God in His infinite mercy granted him a passing mark for his first semester in Latin, Roy would permanently suspend all self-gratulatory functions. Item: If God in His wisdom helped him pass his second semester Latin he would definitely refrain from the Devil's deed throughout the summer vacation -- especially while in his parents' house, and most particularly while they were still awake in the next room, not counting weekends.
If he could not be like Christ or Paul, perhaps he could at least try to be like his earthly ideal. John F. Kennedy, say what else you might about the man, did not masturbate all the time. He was a hero, a beacon to the Catholic world, a man who thought never of himself or his personal desires but only of the greater good. He even thought about Negroes -- that's the kind of man John Kennedy was.
And so it was that, invoking Kennedy as a standard, Hal Dodge made his final plea to God:
Make me into the kind of man your servant JFK is, Lord, and I will be your faithful priest till death.
In retrospect he might have worded his bargain more carefully. Or perhaps he had no business making it at all -- perhaps he had it in him to discipline himself without calling upon the terrible powers. Perhaps the horror might have been averted. But Hal no longer had any excuses. He had learned a lesson in the bitterest and most grievous fashion: that the Lord sometimes takes us at our word, and that he, Roy Dodge, by touching himself when the Sisters had told him to never, ever do that, except at the highest possible cost, had killed the President as sure as that man in the warehouse window.
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Copyright © 1992 by Michael Finley. All rights reserved.
"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune |
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