Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

After my sister died in 1961, my parents split up. Our family had never been too cohesive, but now we were in tatters. My mother was devastated, my father was gone, my older brother Patrick was visibly anxious, and my younger brother was looking about as if he wanted an explanation for what was going on, but no one could give him one. Forty years later, not much has changed.

So I decided to cash it all in and leave home. In 1963 I was an 8th grader, and even though I had never been especially religious -- I had never been, for instance, an altar boy at St. Joseph's, our parish -- I met with a vocational recruiter for a Marist seminary in Philadelphia and began toying with the idea of getting myself to a monastery to cool out. Not to become a priest, like the other boys in our parish, but to become a monk -- I truly wanted to be alone.

The hardest part was asking my mother. She was drenched in bullshit at this moment in her life, and did not need me to be coming up with a fresh batch of the stuff. I very tentatively broached the subject with her one night when she came home from her restaurant job. She took the news quietly -- she never tried to talk me out of it. Perhaps the idea of losing another child made sense to her. I know she loved me -- when the car taking me to Philadelphia pulled out of the driveway at around dawn a couple months later, I saw the look on her face, and it was a look of horror. It was happening again. I hated doing that to her, but I needed to be free. I was 13 years old and leaving home. In a sense I never have gone back.

I loved seminary life. St. Mary's Manor was an old girls finishing school in Bucks County, a stone's throw from the infamous Levittown suburb. The priests got us up at 5:30 every morning for mass, and we would all queue up by a 20-foot trough to brush our teeth and spit. Then we would form a single file and walk to chapel, across a high boardwalk looking out over a pond, and immense oak trees, to prayer. We knelt on bony hard kneelers and chanted in plainsong. And when matins was over, we ran downstairs to the refectory, where a team of French nuns had made pancakes, or army eggs, or coffee cake. All the boys at St. Mary's put on weight from the hearty meals.

The Marists were a second-tier religious order that did conventional things like run parishes and teach at college, but also had a strong missionary tradition. Their one saint was Peter Chanel, who was killed by South Seas islanders on Futuna in 1841. The priests at our seminary were an odd assemblage of academics and eccentrics. I remember we studied Latin as a foreign language, conversationally. World history, taught by an intense Lithuanian priest named Wallace, who found a Lithuanian connection to everything from the Spanish Armada to the Civil War, was as good a course as I ever attended in college. The English teacher, Fr. Foth, was very strong on T.S. Eliot. I remember him reading "Choruses from the Rock," and being struck by the image of "golf balls on the moon."

It was 1963. We would watch Catholic newsreels about the bishops in Rome meeting to usher an aggiornamiento to the Church and to the faithful. I was playing soccer on the seminary field when Kennedy was shot. I was playing ping pong when I first heard the Beatles. So much happened, and my world grew so much, I think it was the most important year of my life, the year I became me.

What made the year special for me was my friendship with a boy named Robert Dubois. Dubois was a frail but very brilliant boy my age, much more worldly than I, but nevertheless very "good," too. Before I met him, for instance, I didn’t know what liberal and conservative meant. He put me straight on that and a whole lot more.

He and I spent months walking around the pond together, making fun of the place (though we both loved it) and generally eschewing other company. At our high point we became collaborators, writing a set of six plays about seminary life, only transplanting the characters and goings-on to catacombs-era Rome. We would take turns writing scenes in study hall, then pass our notebooks surreptitiously to one another. I remember what an exquisite pleasure it was to see Robert at his desk, shaking with silent laughter over some pun or over-the-top nonsense I had included in that night's draft.

We would cast the rector as an early pope, the lady who helped raise money as a Roman empress, and Praxis, a Roman citizen elevated to the prefecture. A newsboy in one scene was hawking the Capitoline Blade, with the headline "Praxis Makes Prefect." It was silly, but we adored it.

Our relationship was a very gentle friendship in which we poked nasty fun at the world of squares and pietists. I must say I mostly followed Dubois' lead. It was a nonsexual relationship -- I did not know anything about sex, and Dubois, though I now realize he must have been gay, was chaste, especially compared to many of the towel snapping masturbators of the dormitory.

But now comes the sad part. As the school year wore on, we were informed in separate meetings with the rector, the top man at the school, that our relationship was sick. The word "concupiscent" was used -- a Catholic catchall for libidinous sin. I did not understand much of it, but I understood that the school wanted Robert and me to stop seeing each other. In time, I figured out that they thought we were doing nasty things with one another, and I was mortified.

And I was just enough of a scared little shit that I let it stand. For the last two months of the spring semester, I spoke not a word to my dear friend.

And when the school year ended, I decided enough was enough. My older brother was due to go to college that fall. My mother and younger brother needed me. Thus concluded, I thought, my career in religion.

I registered for the public schools back in my Ohio hometown, and within a few months I was reassimilated back into lay society. Really reassimilated -- before the year was up I had lapsed into a juvenile delinquent, getting picked up twice by police, once for stealing an Iron Man comic book and another time for swiping a 45 of The Zombies' "She's Coming Home." I was like an angel fallen from heaven.

But do you know what -- for the rest of my life, not a week has passed that I did not dream of those days at the seminary, where the incense rose high to the Lord, and us boys dreamed of being really good men.

Years later, I wrote my first novel about my seminary adventure. It remains the single most powerful writing experience I have ever had. I even was able to rebuild some of our plays, and include them in the text. Once I made a pilgrimage back to St. Mary's, when Rachel and I were living in New Haven. The place had been sold to a group of Baptists, and all the beautiful things had been packed up and put away -- like the altar, with its beautiful mosaic of a pelican pecking blood from its breast.

Still later, around 1992, I used the Internet to find Dubois. He lived in Chicago. We had a nice conversation, in which he told me that yes, he was gay, but no, he never did anything about it until after high school. Even then, the seminary gave him a pass, all the way up to the novitiate, where he took an extended leave, just short of ordination.

He makes his living now as a kind of new age/Catholic healer, doing a Shiatsu-like massage and treatment with its basis in scripture.

I enjoyed speaking with him, and I perhaps made the mistake of telling him about my book. I sent it to him, and then the calls tapered off. My story, I imagine, did not square with his version. Who wants to read a novel portraying you as a suicidal homosexual weirdo? (I added a few character defects to make it more interesting.)

But I am grateful to him anyway, for being my friend that most wonderful year of my life.