The Rector's Tale

Copyright © 1992 by Michael Finley. All rights reserved.

Michael Finley

For a nicer text, download the e-book version.

651-644-4540

PROLOG

"NO MAN WITH HIS OWN LAWN TO MOW can be a communist," said Bill Plitt. "He has too many other things to do."

Therefore a country had use for a Plittville, for many Plittvilles. Therefore Plittvilles came to be, everywhere. No one disagreed with the Plitts when they made their case, for in those days disagreement of any kind reflected upon one's patriotism. Communists might disagree, but that was expected of them, and anyway, Plittvilles weren't for the bad Americans, the nay-sayers, the no-can-do bunch. Plittvilles were for the rest of us, the good, brave Americans who fought the good fight against Germany and Japan, who loved our government for plunging us into hard times, keelhauling us through a war fierce beyond our imaginings, then bringing us up prosperous, omnipotent, and strangely dry on the nuclear shore.

To the rest of the world we had said: Behold our works, ye unfree masses, and tremble. And to our own: a newer and even better deal than before. And so in June of 1947 the first Plitt home -- 1 George Washington Drive -- went up on the Delaware flats north of Philadelphia. Joseph Kennedy was on hand for the groundbreaking, and the young Nelson Rockefeller, the two of them standing arm in arm for the pictures. And all three Plitts in their shiny suits, admiring their prefab handiwork.

The Plitt home was a kind of miracle. While one crew tacked up a frame, another got to work on chimney and fireplace; both finished at the same instant. Rockboard, a new invention, substituted for the heavier and more conventional insulations. The plitt home was cellarless because -- as Bill Plitt said -- the modern age had no need for cellars. Life, Colliers, Fortune, Look all made pilgrimages to the flats to witness the birth of a new kind of city, and their witnessings extolled a new American artform, housing -- $7,990 complete, $90 down and $58 per month -- and each home came with a brand-new Bendix washer. "The model-T equivalent," as Irwin Plitt, self-taught architect brother of Bill Plitt, put it, "of the rose-colored cottage of every man's dream."

Said Patriarch Isaac Plitt: "Everything in this world of ours changes, and no one appreciates the charm of an older home, with the gingerbread trimmings and inlays, more than me. But we are moving into a utilitarian age, and the new home will be designed strictly from the standpoint of usability."

At the rate of one completed dwelling every 24 hours, Plittville I swarmed across the flats, stopping only at its natural boundaries, the river and the ridge. Work commenced immediately on Plittvilles II and II, on Long Island and outside Baltimore. It was not a sentimental sop to Isaac Plitt that a Plittville Haifa was penciled into the new nation of Israel; it was a deal, and money changed hands.

The spectacle of a building America sped by at newsreel pace. Where Rome took millenia, the Plitts took a weekend, and the occupational forces set up camp. The sense of dispatch, of efficiency, and of strict practicality was entirely American: Come on, boys, let's get these folks under a roof before dark. It was veterans roundup time, and short-cuts were shortened, competition thwarted, and planners thrown into a dither: instant towns needed instant schools, sewers, libraries, churches. More, good, American, government, quick!

The Instant People of the Flats dwelt by a ridge. They had won a war, and their reward was playing the role of Munchkins to the Federal Housing Authority's Kindly Witch Glinda, and the imperial wizardry of television. Every night they sat, electrified, caught up in pagan struggles: McCarthy versus the Army, Nixon versus JFK, the Cartwrights versus the Untamed Land.

And high on the ridgetop burned the fires of the Lord; and the incense of his priests rose heavenward.

+++

THE WARHOLA MERCURY steamed down Immaculate Conception Drive, passing under arch after Gothic arch of spreading catalpas. The car came to a stop before a wrought-iron gate topped with an inscription in unreadable German Blackletter: St. BERNARD'S BLUFF. And below that, in smaller Blackletter: Preparatory Seminary.

Marty Frye stared at the Blackletter, at the wrought iron, at the endless wall of red brick winding up over the next hillock and on up the ridge. He rested his chin against the front seat; after a long day's travel from one corner of Pennsylvania to the other, he had arrived at the seminary gates. He had seen these letters before somewhere -- and it wasn't in Father Garrity's "literature." And he had seen the iron bars before, too, and most of all he had seen the line of brick wall looping up the ridge. He had seen it in his dreams. He dreamed it often, and every time, the same thing happened. Snorting like a bull, he would stamp his feet and charge at it, believing it would part for him like a matador's cape. In some dreams, the wall did melt away at his charge. In others, it clobbered him. Sometimes he would look up and see Saturns and sheriff's badges whirling around him in a counter-clockwise orbit. There would be his mother, just beyond, saying wake up, wake up, you're having bad dreams, bad dreams.

"It's like the wall is, I don't know, teasing me or something," he would try to explain to his mom, staring into a spoonful of soggy Kix.

"You're thirteen years old," his mother would tell him, pressing down against the ironing board as if she were drowning a rabbit. "Old enough to say no to a wall."

From the front seat, Mr. Warhola spoke over his shoulder. "From the looks of it," he said, "I'd say, 'What a place. '"

Marty was pleased. He had got himself in one day from one corner of Pennsylvania to another. He could feel his past life uncoiling from him like an old suit of snake. And this wall was a portent of great good things happening at St. Bernard's. All thatremained was to get rid of the Stroops. Ma and Pa Warhola would weep at leaving George, but it was worth a tearful scene to see them go.

Marty had seen tears before, but he did not deign to cry them himself -- not standing at casketside at his retarded brother's funeral, not returning from vacation to find his father gone, and all the dresser drawers emptied, not coming off a brick-wall carom. Tears, his mother taught him, had special uses, and should be reserved for same. At the funeral he had been tempted, but he was strong. If I have waited this long, I can wait another day, he told himself. And he did not cry. He did not give them that satisfaction. His dry eyes had been a rebuke to The World.

+++

The Warhola Mercury cruised alongside the brick wall, and Marty carried his rebuke even further. Was the wall to keep the seminarians in, he wondered, or The World out? He blessed the priests. Finally, somebody was putting The World in its place.

The Mercury came to two twin cemeteries, one on each side of the car, each grave marked with an enameled white cross. Priests and brothers on the driver's side, the Petite Sisters riding shotgun.

"Gosh," said George, "priest graves."

Marty looked at him as he would at a crushed tortoise. "Not afraid to die, are you?"

Mrs. Warhola shot him a look of half-reprimand, half-alarm. George swallowed air.

Big George had known Marty all his life but had no idea that Marty hated him. In grade school George had been designated a leader -- he was pleasant and unthreatening for his size. Other kids flocked to him for protection on the playground. It was George who had given Martin his nickname, Marty, and it was Marty who returned the favor by dubbing George Big George, after the cartoon character who was always dragging himself across the desert. George was a completely unobjectionable person -- kind, average intelligence, a joiner. Marty hated him for being normal.

The boys' vocations could not have been more different. For George, the priesthood was a given. His family was Catholic Catholic -- no agonizing over fine points in that household, such as George's stories about him and Father Czestokowa gobbling unconsecrated hosts between Masses. Big George was Father Chesty's favorite altar boy. The family piano sported portraits of about eleven Stroops already at seminary or convent; George was the last of a great brood of Catholics, famous throughout the parish for helping institute the Interfamily Rosary Plan, in which neighbors met weeknights and went over their Hail Marys together, in their own homes, on their knees. Without being special in any way, the Stroops were almost too Catholic.

Whereas the Fryes were nothing but special. As Elizabeth liked saying, Whomsoever God loves He first kicks the stuffings out of. The Fryes had divine bootprints up and down the lot of them. In Marty's eye, God was crying out to him for propitiation.

First He nailed Jude. Ask anybody -- Jude was a swell kid. But God decided to have him be born retarded, a Mongolian idiot, Down syndrome. So he was nice and everything, except he was all wrong besides. He couldn't think to save his life. His nose ran, his mouth drooled, sundown to sunup. His eyes were kind of Chinese-looking. The soft spot on his head never hardened, and you could spend hours watching it heave and sink like boiling stew. And he talked just like a fool, stupidly, like a cartoon of a person.

And after taking away just about everything from Jude -- good looks, good company, education, career, love life, the delights of an examined life -- God played his trump card. Acting through the neighborhood physician (there was a joke about God thinking he's a doctor), God takes the boy's life at age 15 with a penicillin shot.

So in the end Jude's death had nothing to do with being an idiot. That shot would have felled Isaac Newton, had Newton been allergic and had Newton's doctor blithely ignored the warnings on his charts and sent the poison deep into the heart of the famed 17th century physicist.

Jude Frye, dead idiot. That's the sort of thing that made being a Frye special.

Here's another. Marty's dad, John Abner Frye. Elizabeth met him one day in 1944 pinned under the wheel of his own car. Fixing a flat when the jack slipped and the car came to rest on the dumb hillbilly's chest.

Elizabeth knew just by looking at him that she and he were meant to be. And John Abner, who by and large was better off where he lay, up and married Elizabeth and thereby supplied the family with its Catholicism. It was he (who was incapable of insisting on much) who insisted that the idiot baby be baptized by a priest, and so too with the other son, a few years later.

Aside from taking John Abner into her bed in the first place, this was the only concession Elizabeth's pagan heart ever permitted. As bats hate sunshine, she hated Christmas, and so kept her distance during high holy days while John Abner played "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" on his banjo and polished off his Advent fast with a six-pack of Dukes.

And then one day he was gone too. "Upped and left," was how Elizabeth put it, mocking the way John Abner formed sentences.

+++

That was what made being a Frye special. Of course, Elizabeth made her contributions. On the weekend John Abner packed up and quit, she took Marty to Devil's Cave down in West Virginia, and while they walked amid the dripping stalactites John was already tooling down Highway 188 to Somewhere in the Southland.

So when they all got home and Marty stared into the emptied drawers his first thought was that a thief had been in the house, and his mother offered no better explanation.

He pictured a scene from the end of every Lone Ranger episode, with the mysterious horseman disappearing into the mesquite. Who was that masked man, his beneficiaries always asked, too late. Had Pop gone of his own free will? Or had he been swept from the chessboard, like Jude was, by the Grand Master Himself?

+++

MARTY SAT BACK in the back seat of the Mercury as it climbed the ridge road. He glanced at Big George's face, huge, droll and round, and remembered the day Jude lay in a coma back in French Creek, and all the kids on the playground knew that Jude was dying -- the doctor's adrenaline had almost, but not quite, brought him back to life, and now he hung suspended between living and dying. And all Marty could think to do was tell jokes to the kids on the basketball court, to deflect their sympathy, to hold what was happening at arm's length.

And Big George here, who'd known Jude and who was himself in tears at losing a friend, had grabbed Marty by his jacket and ask how he could joke at a time like this.

Marty would hate Big George forever for asking that one question. It was as if George knew how to climb that brick wall, while he had to keep bashing into it. There were times when, dreaming about it, Marty just wanted to take a chance, maybe get on tiptoe and peer over the wall to the other side. Perhaps there were green meadows with clean white lambs bounding through hedges. Or somethingalong those lines.

But he was a Frye, and he was afraid. Afraid he would take a look and it would be the hour Christ died, and the dead would be walking, bad-breathed from their graves.

+++

ELIZABETH FRYE SAT IN HER NURSE'S UNIFORM for a last smoke before heading back to critical care. From the pinched pocket of her purse she drew the crumpled pamphlet Marty had left with her, explaining why it was a mother's honor to surrender her sons to Christ. She held her cigarette in her affected movie-star way, as if she were blowing a kiss with it, and she frowned. This was typical of Marty's style of communicating -- communication by dropped crumb, and "ME -- A PRIEST?" was a dropped crumb if anything was. She stubbed out her Newport, projecting her distaste for the the pamphlet's prose into the ashtray.

People in French Creek imagined that Elizabeth was some sort of atheist or other. And while this was true for most people's purposes -- vicious gossip -- it was not true in the strictest sense. Elizabeth knew knew first-hand that there was a God, and that He resided in Heaven. The problem was that the two of them never saw eye to eye.

From birth the tall woman had suffered from a curvature of the spine, a scoliosis just severe enough to suggest to her father, August Hunter, filling station proprietor of Portage County, the kind of laziness or indifference which he had trouble enduring, so instead of enduring her he beat her up. Gus Hunter was religionless apart from a vague reverence for the principles of internal combustion, and so his wife Eugenia, an inventive woman with a kernel of devotion but no place to plant it, played peacemaker between father and daughter. She did this by smashing gin bottles against the cast-iron stove until Gus let the girl go. Gus did not dare lift a hand against Eugenia -- she was a tree of a woman, with fists like smooth coconuts.

And smart -- it was her idea, once crook-backed Elizabeth turned twelve and required only a beachball to balance on to look exactly like a question-mark, to have Gus take the girl in the Model A down Highway 44 past the crossroads and have The White Man have a look at her back. It was an idea which Gus, knowing the genial string of taverns along that trunk road, was not indisposed to entertain.

Twenty-seven miles later, The White Man's wife met them and ushered them onto the porch. A washed-out little woman with a limp cotton dress, she had a look of exhaustion about her, as if she had a lifelong hankering to be covered up with dirt and done with the world of physicality. She was regarded in the county as a saint of considerable magnitude. Elizabeth thought she looked like a dishrag, however; life with The White Man could not be an easy one.

"Go on up," the woman said, pointing through the swing-door. "He ain't gone nowhere."

What Elizabeth beheld in the little house took her breath away. Inside the screen door she saw the kitchen, one wall of which had been torn out, and a three-sided Airstream trailer parked up against the hole. The air pressure in the trailer tires provided the springiness for the great bed which lay inside, consisting of a foundation of cinderblocks, two immense planks of oak laid side by side over the blocks, and a half dozen mattresses sprawled one over another, and resting atop them all the great man himself.

It was common knowledge that The White Man never left his trailer or, as he called it, his chariotte. It was a convenience to him, inasmuch as he had to preach twice yearly at the county seat in Ravenna anyway, at Pentecost and the Fourth of July, not to have to get into and out of bed bed all the time. In addition to which, The White Man was not all that well. Everyone knew he had been dying for upward of nineteen years, and that it was all the great albino and his little woman could do to keep his working weight at 820 pounds, sunup.

His flesh swam everywhere across the giant bed, honoring only the dictates of gravity and a subtler tug, perhaps of the moon. His muscle tone may not have been the best, but his color -- what color an albino can muster in the first place -- was worse, a dreadful chalky white, except for the blue of his lips (which Elizabeth guessed might weigh in at a half-pound apiece), the pink of his right eye and the crimson red of his left. All in all, he looked like a beached whale in bleached bunting.

Unsophisticated people might have thought The White Man was the victim of an awful curse from God Himself, were it not for the remarkable healings The White Man wrought, healings for which modern medicine could offer no cogent explanation. The White Man was a kind of Giant Jesus -- "He saved others, himself he could not save. " [Mark 15. 31] -- troubled within by demons specializing in disorders of the pituitary and thyroid.

When he inhaled, Elizabeth saw, his cheeks shook like shuddering sails, and when he exhaled they filled again, and when he finally took notice of the stooped-over girl, and gestured to her with a finger that was too chubby to completely crook -- more a bulb than a cylinder -- she was not comforted.

"Daughter," The White Man asked in a feeble, high-pitched whine, "are you washed in the blood of the lamb?"

Elizabeth, perplexed, glanced at her father. Gus mouthed something she could not make out.

"How do you mean, exactly?" she finally answered. She knew she lacked training in such matters, and did not want to misspeak.

The crimson eye found her, and it jiggled with passion. "Are you saved?" he squeaked.

Gus had come forward by now, and put his hands on his daughters's shoulders, trying to force her into a kneeling position. This only succeeded in riling up the girl.

"Saved? Pa, what the hell is he talking about? Let me go! "

Gus propitiated The White Man. "Oh, we're believers, Gene, we just ain't goers, leastwise not recently anyhow."

Both the pink and the red eyes closed, like sunset on Saturn. "Why, then," the voice rose out of him like fluted smoke, "do you rage against your infirmities?"

Elizabeth pulled away from her father's kneading insistence, saying, "Listen here, Mr. White Man, this ain't my idea, you know."

"Elizabeth here's just a girl," her father put in. "Help her and I personally would be much obliged. And that'd be a help to you, too."

The suggest of subornation was more than the great teacher could endure. Violating a number of highly-regarded laws of physics, The White Man bolted upright on his bed, the trailer rocked like a boat in a storm, and the great white hand stretched out over the terrified girl.

"The mark! " the excited teacher squealed, "the mark be upon you and your generation, yea, unto seven times seventy times! "

Elizabeth gazed up at the frightful face, the white hair spilling over it like milkweed stuff. Her own jaw tightened irrascibly.

"Then! " the teacher pronounced, "and not until shall ye enter the Temple! In the name of Christ Jesus! "And he foundered back into his mattresses like a steamer into the icy waters off the coast of Newfoundland.

The little limp woman rushed to his side, not alarmed but with an air of practiced emergency, taking a two-by-four from under the bed and levering it under his head to prop the mass back up onto the grimy, unwashable pillow, and held it with all her might until she heard wind reenter his form.

Gus Hunter was so caught up in the rescue operation that he did not notice when his daughter, her eyes afire with indignation, thrust out her elbows and held out her fists, and in one swift motion stood straight and uncurled from head to toe. Gus turned only in time to see her stalking out the door and out to the car, upright and defiant.

"Well I'll be," her muttered, scratching his chin, "a goddamn miracle."

Gus stopped off halfway home, explaining to the stern-faced girl beside him that his pals at the Palomino Grill would be as anxious to hear the stunning news as her mother; and he left her in the front seat to go in and sing hymns with the boys, little suspecting that his daughter had changed in ways more fundamental than a simple straightening of the sacroiliac.

Little lights spun round and round in Elizabeth's head. Was the whole world crazy, she wanted to know, or was she alone in believing The White Man was a perfect monster, stupid and ugly and evil and cruel, and if God did the bidding of such as that, then He was not much better. Let God come and take away her sons, she said, stuffing her fists in her pockets. God would work His wonders, she would work hers. And may the better of the two prevail.

+++

AT THE TIME WHEN MARTY WAS EIGHT and his father had packed up and left and Marty was left staring into the rifled drawers, his first thought was that a thief had been in the house. Over the next few years he also began to feel the first twinges of religious devotion, the beginnings of his holy vocation.

Somehow Marty never managed to put the two together, that He who had implanted the latter had also supplanted the former, that the thief in the house had been God all along. Better to keep the two lives separate, and secret from one another, for God was God, and unassailable; and unindictable, no matter how many fingerprints remained behind.

Likewise when Marty was eleven and his brother Jude unexpectedly died, and Marty stood frozen-faced at bierside, panicked by all the odd attention of the mothers in the parish, and the fearful silence of his friends. He did not take the matter up then in his prayers. He did not ask why the thing had happened or how he was supposed to manage now or what additional heists The Thief had planned, for God was God, and He had His reasons, and did not need an eleven-year-old boy to prick his conscience. Better to table the thought for future study, when one was older and subtler.

Over the months, as Marty grew more stoical and more silent, and as his friends peeled away from him like sunburnt skin, he took to two solitary practices. Every morning he would rise early and walk the mile through the development to 6 o'clock Mass in the gymnasium St. Mary's used for a church. Always he sat in the back row, far from the half dozen older women up front, and never did he advance to communion, thinking it better to go without. And every afternoon he would head the other way, toward the wooded area by the creek, kicking his soccer ball down the path.

By the time Father Garrity began making his visits to St. Mary's, no one spoke to Marty unless absolutely necessary, and he preferred it that way, so it was no surprise when Garrity, charming and talkative as he was, found himself doing all the talking and Marty doing all the listening during vocation sessions. Sister Leocadia made a note to herself that Marty Frye (of all people) was among the boys being wooed by the Bernardine recruiter, but failed to take Marty's vocation seriously. Neither she nor Father Czestokowa imagiend he would try to overcome the considerable obstacles to a vocation-- divorced parents, non-Catholic mother, and some serious questions of maturity and upbringing. And Sister was right -- a good talking-to might indeed have nipped Marty's vocation in the bud. But she had 250 other souls to watch over as principal at St. Mary's and had no time to quash vocations. And Czestokowa was too busy tending the boiler.

The seminary-bound eighth graders appeared before the Altar and Rosary Society. "So you boys are all going to become priests," the ladies said. And Marty gently corrected them. He would not be returning to act as assistant pastor. He would be leaving forever, to become a contemplative and live a life of enforced silence. And the ladies blanched -- Marty Frye had out-Catholicked them.

"But won't your mother be proud when you have a church all your own?" they would say. And Marty would grin agreeably, thinking how different his mom was from these moms. They were like rowers on a slave ship, whereas she was a riverboat gambler, with a delicious trump card. "Read 'em and weep, sisters. My son's a monk and I'm not even Catholic." And she might put her hands on her hips and roar with laughter, eyes shut to savor the weird triumph.

Marty and his mom would have made a great team if they'd been on the same side.

+ + +

GARRITY GLITTERED. He was nothing like the usual missionary visiting St. Mary's, those nervous men with the snowy white robes and bamboo crucifixes who were on the road to stay out of their prelate's hair back in Las or the Congo. Those poor men fumbled with their exhortations and showed their filmstrips of priests and brothers stringing barbwire while the villagers looked on, perplexed, brown-eyed urchins grateful for American hand-me-down clamdiggers and Mickey Mouse ears. Then the cup passed, people guiltily contributed, and Brother Clement or Whoever dashed out to his station wagon and was gone.

Garrity was different. He was the real thing -- forceful, dynamic, vigorous, Kennedylike. In Sister Leocadia's class he paused, took a deep breath, and smiled seductively. It was a sportsman's smile, jaw set, ruddy facial muscles flexed. A manly smile, a leer almost. Warhola's eyes widened. Marty's narrowed. Sister Leocadia nearly slid off her metal chair.

Chalk flew across the blackboard. Aggiornamiento was the word Garrity wrote. The eighth grade gasped at the word. Beneath it he paraphrased: Everything is new.

"Boys," Garrity addressed a half dozen of them after school in the cafeteria, "it's great you're interested in the priesthood. I've been to bigger schools and found less interest. You should all be proud."

The boys examined the literature, especially a pamphlet with a tiny portrait of Garrity's head asking the title, "ME -- A PRIEST?"

"Last week I was in San Francisco, and before that I took some Medford boys to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Eleventh inning homer by Ted Williams. Golly, we just had a ball."

Marty watched from behind the gaggle, and decided Garrity's success stemmed from his use of the word boys. He didn't use it like Father Flanagan used it. He used it the way Ted Williams used it. "What do you say, boys"Father Flanagan wasn't one of his own boys; Father Garrity was.

Marty sat up at night, going over the literature. Garrity's order was called the Society of Bernard, formerly the Brothers of God's Holy Oceans, founded by a Frenchman, Francois Champignon, who foresaw a band of priests and brothers spreading the sacraments across the South Pacific. The order was renamed in 1901 after the murder of Champignon's protege, Bernard de Veaux, eleventh martyr of Oceania, whose canonization followed in 1933. It was after de Veaux that St. Bernard's Bluff, the prep seminary in Plittville, Pennsylvania was named.

Marty read on, his brain abuzz with calculation.

+ + +

GARRITY TOOK ALL THE St. Mary's recruits out o the ball game. Sandy Koufax won and the Pirates lost, but Garrity charmed his charges to the quick when he explained that it's no disgrace to lose to an opponent of quality. Marty saw Big George nod as if he were in the front row at the Sermon on the Mount, taking notes. Garrity seemed to take the loss with such style, neglecting to remind the boys he was from Philadelphia, another league entirely. But Garrity was pitching a no-hitter of his own, and one by one his boys went down, dazzled, swinging. He was the first clever man Marty had ever seen.

Marty's obstacle was family. Getting a pass from his mom -- who was making a habit of losing people lately-- to what would seem to her the basest sort of religious drivel required finesse. What would Garrity recommend? Alternating flattery and sincerity. Which Marty knew would fail with Elizabeth Frye.

It had to be something good. For days he brooded on the correct approach. The Casual Stab: "Oh mother, I neglected to mention. I've been thinking of wintering with those Catholic chaps on the coast."

There was a certain charm to that, but it wasn't him. Was the Deadly Serious Approach him: "Mother, I have decided to offer up my life to the glory of God"?

Powerful stuff, but thick, very thick. Above all, Marty could not seem like what he suspected he really was, a rat requesting leave from a ship going down.

Oh, to have been born a Warhola among Stroops! Then this declaration would not stumble in so violently from the void, like a trapper slamming the blizzard behind him. What caused Marty so much heartache in his own household would be, in the Warhola home, cause for celebration. It was so unfair.

He had two weeks to get a parents' permission form signed for Garrity, which he promptly took to his mother, with memorized apologia, on the thirteenth day.

Elizabeth knew something was coming. Even if Marty hadn't been leaving insipid pamphlets strategically around the house the past month, the thing had long ago passed out of the ignorable stage. The other LPNs knew about it, for Christ's sake, kidding her (none too wisely) about getting religion now that her son was going to be a a priest. She was ready for him.

Marty girded his loins all the way up to his ribs. When Elizabeth got home from work he greeted her at the door and handed her her nightly Manhattan highball, and chatted pleasantly but with effort about the day's events. When the highball was eclipsed he followed her up one stair after another -- she turning at the landing to frown down upon him -- and waited outside and listened for the bracelet-noise on her vanity top and the sinking sound of her long, straight, bone-tired body into the propped up pillows. Like a ship's purser he tapped lightly on the door.

"Who is it?"

"Martin, your son."

He entered and sat on a wicker hamper, addressing his mother via her reflection in the vanity mirror.

"I got an A in spelling," he said, looking away when her reflection bore down upon him.

"You spell well," Elizabeth said.

Marty shrugged as if spelling were breathing. "Sister says I can maybe represent the school in the district bee. I mean, with Carolyn Mauk getting rheumatic fever."

"A sign," his mother said, steering the talk in a helpful direction.

Marty looked up at her and glanced away again.

"Perhaps that's your vocation in life," Elizabeth said. "To spell."

Marty fumbled the opening. "Actually, I've been hanging around with that Father Garrity a lot lately."

"We spoke on the phone Thursday."

Marty frowned. More surprises. "So anyway, I've been thinking, and, uh -- "his words tumbled like smelt from a trashcan, " -- I thought I might become a member of the Society of Bernard."

He heard himself as if over transoceanic cable. The Society of Bernard? God, Catholics chose bad names for things. Mutual of Omaha sounded better than Society of Bernard.

Elizabeth upped the ante. "Why?" She looked him right in his reflected eye -- this was the acme of Frye confrontiveness.

Why? Marty asked himself. Good question. He looked at his hands for answers.

"Wait here," he said, and dashed downstairs and fetched the Garrity pamphlet.

"This says it far better than I ever could," he said, and read aloud:

WHEN A VOCATION MAKES ITSELF FELT IN A FAMILY IT IS CAUSE FOR A SPECIAL SORT OF JOY, FOR WHAT GREATER OBJECTIVE CAN CATHOLIC YOUTH ASPIRE TO THAN A LIFE OF DEVOTION TO THE CHURCH? THE CALL TO RELIGIOUS LIFE IS NOTHING SHORT OF A MIRACLE WITHIN THE FAMILY. THE CALL TO CHRIST'S PRIESTHOOD IS THE FINGER OF GOD, BECKONING TO US, AND WHAT IT SAYS IS, I WANT YOU.

As Marty read he felt he was chewing on a full box of Kleenex. He wished he had read from the Erie phone directory instead.

"Martin," his mother asked him, "doesn't that strike you as a bit trite?"

Marty shook his head sorrowfully. "They have to say it like that, Mom. They're all that way."

Elizabeth stared at her feet sticking up under the sheet. "Promise me," she said, wiggling her toes, "promise me you'll do better."

Referring to the prose.

Marty's jaw dropped. He nodded furiously. He promised he would. He wished her good night. He backed out of the room.

In his own room he considered his gains. He had come up with the necessary courage, and his wits had failed him only a half dozen times or so. Not only had he survived the encounter but he had actually prevailed, he had gotten the thing he wanted -- a free pass out. Soon he would be en route to Plittville, to St. Bernard's Bluff. For $550 a year he would be fed by French nuns and taught by priests of God. What a deal.

In her room Elizabeth stared emptily into the mirror. She hadn't wanted to let Marty go. She hated to be all alone. But at last he would be with priests in Plittville, and priests were men, sort of, and a boy needed that.

But God don't take him forever, she prayed. Or I'll hound you till your dying day.

+++

AT FIRST, MARTY LIKED EVERYTHINGat The Bluff, even work detail. Prefect Provolini liked saying that if you didn't work at St. Bernard's you didn't eat, but that wasn't exactly true. And Father Tichenor likened the work-crew system to "the military model," but that didn't explain its appeal, either. Marty liked crew work because it was so darned hearty.

Seminaries without heartiness must be terrible places. Without this essential element to community life, everything slipped into sissy-boy pieties. He was glad that being on housekeeping crew meant lugging gigantic bags full of dust up and down several flights of stairs, and swabbing out priests' toilets and mopping the endless hallways and sweeping the elegant staircases on one's knees -- it was manly work, and it didn't involve a bitsy apron or feather duster. Sometimes, he thought, the more difficult a thing was the easier it was. In this case it was also the heartier.

At the bottom of the last flight of stairs Marty opened the door out into The Tombs, the basement corridor of House Major. Whereas the rest of the old hotel had been reasonably kept up, The Tombs had been allowed to slide some, and were now in such poor condition as to be turned over to the boys in the name of recreation. The boys didn't care if a basement had come down in the world -- if, indeed, such a thing were possible -- and had swarmed in to occupy.

Dragging his leaking dustbag down the splintered floor, Marty hummed to a tune coming from the record room. In the reading room he saw Ralph Diener thumbing through his breviary, a birthday present from his mom. Diener looked up from a psalm and smiled. Marty shuddered slightly and returned it.

Marty could not quite deal with the fact that Diener liked him. He sometimes reflected on the frustrating irony that one never wound up with the friends one wanted. He wouldn't mind if Tito Francona, for instance, took him under his wing. Handsome, charming, pleasant sense of humor -- Francona was OK. Whereas Ralph was such a ladybird. with his ladybird face and ladybird smile, and always saying queer things like, "I'm no Milton Berle but I enjoy a good joke."

If Ralph Diener had only been Torquemada. Marty imagined unspeakable howls issuing from the dungeon where Ralph, as Inquisitor, tortured heretics with his squareness.

He fetched broom and dustpan from closet and became caught in the crossfire of two musics. From the record room came "If You Want to Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life Don't Make a Pretty Woman Your Wife," which could have been more or less a theme for St. Bernard's, and from the other end of The Tombs came something else, a foreign, pounding, primitive tune on piano.

Marty kept his eyes to the floor as he swept past the weight room. Usually, Hal Dodge was inside, wearing sweatpants and that usual worried expression. Sure enough, he saw from the corner of his eye that Dodge was in there, holding a ton or two of barbell overhead, his brow knit tight as a drum.

Marty's theory was that Dodge looked that way on purpose because he thought he looked more intelligent, even though he didn't really. Marty might not be built like a bank vault, he told himself, but at least his brow was nice and loose.

He dragged the dustbag past Victor Van Eyck's workroom, and saluted Vic inside, doing something to the back of a radio. Van Eyck wasn't a student or a priest. He was -- no one knew exactly, except that he ran errands in his jeep or the seminary Chevy and did handyman sorts of things. All this made Victor very popular at The Bluff, but what made him especially popular was that he was a Negro. Priests and boys alike always said cheerful things to Vic, hoping it would take his mind off being colored.

Marty hoisted the bag onto a wheelbarrow and toted it past a storage room where the priests kept all their old statues and crucifixes and things, and stopped at the doorway to the piano room. Inside was that skinny boy, with his back to Marty, that Marty thought he'd seen the first night at St. Bernard's, dancing among the hedgerows down by the walking pond.

His name was Eugene Dubois -- "That's Doo-bwah, the proper French," he told Father Cooke the first day in theology, "not Da-boy, the corrupted form" -- and he was banging out that curious tune in stiff-fingered triplets.

"What's that called?" Marty asked.

Dubois lifted his hands from the keyboard as if doing so took all his strength.

"A piano," he said.

"Actually," he said, "it's a song called 'Bringing in the Sheaves. 'Protestants sing it."

"Then why are you playing it?"

Dubois folded his squidlike hands in prayer. "All songs are God's," he said sweetly.

Feeling bested by a better, Marty backed out the door. As he turned to leave he heard an anguished sob, and rushed back in.

But it was only Dubois blowing is nose into a very large and very stiff hankie. His eyes drooped like a basset's as he looked up at Marty.

"You've never heard 'Bringing in the Sheaves,' have you?"

"No." Marty turned to leave.

"Wait," Dubois rose from the piano bench. "I'm coming with you."

+++

IT DID NOT TAKE ALL WEEK for the two boys to become best friends. Casting about at the alternatives, each sensed the advantages of the other. For Marty, Dubois was a sign of what was possible, a pathway through the desolation. Dubois seemed to know everything, to have read every book, studied every language, made every word in the dictionary his own. Free of the usual Catholic prejudices, he had fashioned a secure fortress for himself inside his skull, and had cultivated traits of intellectual pride, self-sufficiency and independence of thought which Marty came to regard as Virtue itself, and to imitate.

And to Dubois, Marty was the thing he never had, the childhood friend to whom all things are entrusted, the cherished colleague, the intimate. Marty saw Dubois as an example of how unhurtable a person could be, and Dubois saw Marty as an opportunity, finally, to shed some of his armor, for the boy of stone to be made flesh. Both chose the other to help break from the past, to come closer to the "truth" in his life. Each celebrated finding the other by telling lies.

"I see Mrs. Miswitz' MG is parked at House Major again," Dubois would say as they leaned on the dock rail.

"Discussing the building fund again," Marty would nod.

"She and Father Lewis discuss the fund a great deal," Dubois said.

"In his cramped and cozy apartment."

"What fund," Dubois concluded the series, and the two of them convulsed in a lofty sort of sniggering.

"Cheezit," Marty hissed, drawing himself up. "Here come the prefects." Quickly the two fabricated a scandal for the prefects' benefit.

"So you think there might be something to this Donatist Heresy after all," Dubois said loudly.

"You bet I do," said Marty. "Sometimes I think we condemn new ideas out of hand, like this one here about the doughnuts. There's got to be something to it, I figure."

Prefects Nicholson and Provolini glanced over at them with expressions of concern and then alarm. When they turned away, Marty and Dubois stared cruelly after them.

"Provo is wondering if he should put this in his report," said Dubois.

"And Nicholson just filled his pants," said Marty.

It was humor of a very grand order. Dubois hewed to the high road, lifting Frye up with him into the verdant treetops of thought. Marty brought up the rear, undercutting Dubois' sublimity with crude bits of nonsense. Dubois liked wordplay and erudite allusions; Marty liked inking Hitler mustaches onto magazine pictures of the Pope.

"Hold you nose," Marty said. "Here comes Sludge." The two sucked in air until Sludge -- their name for Nelson Ledges, who early on made a reputation for himself by passing gas on purpose in study hall -- shambled by, a hangdog look around his eyes.

"Coast clear?" Marty asked, reddening.

Dubois licked a finger and held it into the air. His finger shriveled to the second knuckle. "Keep going," he said.

"How do you like Father Lewis' play?"

Dubois scowled. "Shakespeare's Julivs Caesar translated into Latin. It's an abomination of the Bard's work. What an execrable notion."

"That's what I think, too," Marty nodded, thinking to himself that bard and execrable sounded like what Nelson Ledges did in study hall.

Ahead of them on the path, dropping breadcrusts to the carp, was the bent-double figure of Brother Ivo, the oldest living member of the Society of Bernard. Upperclassmen regarded the old brother with affection, but underclassmen saw him as an old fool. Ivo's job at The Bluff was teaching Greek and French to juniors and seniors, which was made difficult by the fact that, having lost all his teeth years ago, he had steadfastly refused to be fitted for dentures. As a consequence it mattered little whether at a given moment he were teaching Greek or French -- without teeth it all came out Greek, making Brother Ivo a kind of cipher to be nodded and smiled at a lot but never understood.

Some suspected that, at age 96, he might be experiencing senility, but without a common language it was hard to tell. The Rector liked saying Ivo was "full of life, always adding condescendingly that he "was getting on." For some odd reason the Rector always managed to get a dig in on the old man, which puzzled the other priests. Ivo was a sweet old fellow, after all, charming everyone when his shaky hand drew out the laminated membership card from his breviary, and pointing at his name, Ivo, Frater, SOB, and the red number stamped in the corner, 26, indicating he was the 26th brother to take vows in the order. Ever.

Brother Ivo had actually known Francois Champignon personally. Father Grassins of the red neck-tie had been his confessor. And he hailed from a village eighteen kilometers from the birthplace of Bernard de Veaux, in the province of Puy de Dome. Brother Ivo was living history, practically a scriptural figure. So what did the Rector have against him?

"Comment allez-vouz, mon pere?" Dubois asked him.

"Wuffa wuffa wuff," the old brother answered pleasantly.

The boys bowed and passed him by. Kind-heartedly, they walked twenty paces before they burst into sniggering.

They passed Hal Dodge, bathed in sweat and worried-looking as usual. And not far behind was Francona, the handsome boy everyone called Tito after the Cleveland Indian. Tito was sweating, too, but he took time to nod at the boys and grin. No one ever grinned at Frye and Dubois. They looked at one another nervously.

Some of the boys gave Marty a hard time about his new friend, especially table prefect Mieczniewicz and the sophomores Vole and Cleghorn. Vole and Cleghorn were at least direct about it, mocking Dubois' virility. Marty conceded nothing, turning the remarks back on them. What good was manhood if you had no plans to implement it anyway? And what orphanages were filling up with their offspring, anyway?

Vole and Cleghorn backed off. Mieczniewicz didn't. It was a hobby for him, like pulling live insects apart.

But Marty wasn't opaque, he knew what the kidding was about. Dubois was a sissy; Marty conceded the point. But he and Dubois were -- without having formalized a pact -- allies. And the first task for allies, eying the hostile forces encircling them, was amnesty.

+++

AS ROGER MIECZNIEWICZ PUT IT, Father Tichenor was titched, meaning tetched, meaning touched, meaning mad as a fig. You could see it in his eyes, which were twice too big for his head, too big for his tiny eyelids to cover, and gave him an overly excited, hydrophobic mien.

But it was even more obvious from his hands. When Father Francis Tichenor stepped before English class or in front of his choir, heatlines practically radiated from them. Always, he seemed to be rubbing them together, back and forth like a demented surgeon, like Lady MacBeth, like a man on the lookout to devour the first quadruped he saw.

A stranger might at first describe his hand-rubbing as brisk, or as purposeful. Those who knew him better, however, knew it was more than a whim or affectation with him, knew that his hands were more like an obsession for him. With them he directed the choir, and they flew like separate souls with wills of their own, hovering and swooping and gliding like happy otters among the punctums and clivises. With those hands he could take on as formidable an opponent as the Hairy Beast in raquetball or squash and hope to prevail. With those hands he blessed people in nomine patris, et filii et spiritu sancti. With those two hands he lifted the consecrated body of the Living God in communion. They weren't simply the best part of the tiny priest -- it was more as if the rest of him existed to serve the hands.

Upperclassmen called him the Runty Marine, but never to his face. At 5'5" he was not a big man, but his intensity made him fearsome to men twice his size. It was not true that he had been an officer in the Marine Corps, or that the Jesuits had turned him down on account of his height -- though he could have been either, to great effect, for he had the gleam in his eyes and he had the hands. He loved to rave about Thomas Dooley and Bannister Tabb, about Chesterton, Merton, Hopkins and Eliot, and rave he did and at length. On balance, it was good he was a man of God -- with other loyalties he would have been a menace.

Marty liked everything and everybody at St. Bernard's, but he liked Titch especially, despite the obvious fact that Tichenor could not abide the sight of him.

"Frye! " the reprimands came stiletto sharp and fast. "Frye! Wipe that egregious simper off your face! "

With mental fingers Marty would search his face for signs of egregious simpering and, not finding any, shrug; and Tichenor would come at him again, this time for shrugging. There was violence in his manner and a horrific amount of zeal, but Marty never sensed unkindness and was thus never hurt by all the upbraidings. It was as if Tichenor wanted to toughen Marty up for the true brutes out there in The World.

"Yes! " the Runt would clap hands and resume rubbing, keeping rhythm with his speech. "John Kennedy is an American and a Catholic and so are we all! Whether we like him or hate him, he carries our banner in The World."

Or he would close his eyes and recite with growing intensity his favorite passage from Eliot's "Choruses from the Rock," about mankind's legacy being a wilderness of lost golf balls.

"Yes! " he would insist, as if some benighted fool in the back rows held reservations, "yes! The Church stands outside history as our passage way to the Kingdom of Heaven, yet it swims within the stream of Time as well. Witness the Revolution begun in our own time by John XXIII, witness the courage of the bishops in Rome, standing up to the Inquisitors and Ultramontanists! Of the breath of God is hot upon us! "

And the boys nodded like toy rabbits, learning more theology, politics and history from Tichenor's digressions that they did from everyone else combined.

Choir never lost its sense of paramilitary urgency. "Libers at the ready," Titch would order, and every boy would lift his Usable Book at the ordained page, and listen and watch as Titch sang the piece the first time through. He had a mediocre voice, a wheezy tenor with more than a suggestion of Brooklyn still in it. But with training, discipline, and above all, diaphragmatic breathing, Titch managed to impart a kind of manly perfection to every piece.

Roger Mieczniewicz said at table that "Tichenor would be a good singer if he only sang well."

But that remark said more about Mieczniewicz than Titch. As Titch put it, "When we sing our joy in praising God, the very least we can do is sing it con brio. Or," he added drily, "as the Italians say, 'with vivacity. '"

+++

THE BOAT SLID THROUGH THE WATERS between the reef and the island whose name no bomber crew knew. The engines, which had been chuffing through the still channel waters, switched off. The only sound Ensign Frye, radar boy, could hear as he sat at his screen, hands tucked under his legs, was the lap of the waves against the steel prow.

The word from headquarters in Malaita was clear enough: there were Japs somewhere out there in that dark -- not many maybe, but enough to do a number on any reconnaissance boat dumb enough to wander between them in their sub and the crackling barrier reef. Just being where they were, under cloudless sky and beacon moon, was a mistake, and the young lieutenant on the bridge had had to go to each crewmember, making, in his best school manner -- the manner the men despised -- a formal apology.

Torpedo Technician O'Donnell had put it to the others this way: "An officer don't apologize to his men. It ain't seemly." And O'Donnell had grimaced and spat.

"Maybe so," the radar boy spoke up, "but you fellows know this is the skipper's first command. I mean, gol, give the guy a chance."

That was dinner, before the tension onboard began to sing. Now was now -- midnight -- and the lieutenant was up walking the tin bridge with clenched fists, and cursing himself for his inexperience.

"Blast," he cursed.

Ensign Frye, radar boy, saw all, and attempted to console his superior. "You oughtn't to take things so hard," he said. "It weren't your fault we got lost. The Straits of Solomon are easy to get lost in even in broad daylight. And these maps of ours are terrible old -- they date back to the days of the early missionaries. Any seaman worth his salt could of got us this lost. Easy."

The young officer smiled, Groton-tight.

"I appreciate your efforts, Ensign. I just wished to holy hell I knew a way out of these narrows. And I pray our men show a little patience tonight. Between the mortar fire from land and the submarine movement below us, and the reef, which is God knows where -- we'll need to show a bit of nerve, I'm afraid."

Marty Frye nodded. What a leader the skipper was! The men might criticize his short hitch at the helm, but this Boston-Irishman was the real McCoy, born to command.

"Tell me, Ensign, I have been meaning to ask you something. I realize the War Department has been upping its entry quotas, but you still seem quite young to me. What are you, fifteen?"

"Seventeen, sir," the 13-year-old lied. "But my Ma signed a letter, said it was OK." His lip trembled. "And once Pa died at Pearl, I couldn't stay away no more."

The air was shattered by a crash from the galley. Marty hissed at the cook to be quiet. "Ssst! " he told her. He wished sometimes his mother had not come along with him to war. There she knelt, surrounded by mess-kits and steel bowls down in the hold. She never was much good in a kitchen.

"Go home, Ma."

"There's a job to be done."

"Aw, Ma."

The lieutenant peered down the stairwell. "What's this?"

"Just a bit of squawking from the scullery," said Ensign Frye, mortified.

The lieutenant stared as the kneeling woman collected the dropped mess-kits. "You know, Frye, that's quite a woman we have down there."

"Yes, sir."

"What do you think, Ensign -- could she go for a guy like me?"

Marty looked at his superior in alarm. "Begging your pardon, sir, but isn't there a war on?"

Far away they heard the pocketa pocketa of airfire. "Of course," the skipper said. "Ensign, man the radar screen. I'm going to get us out of this mess."

"Aye, sir! " the boy said, tears welling in his eyes, as he watch his commanding officer bound up the steel steps, two at a time.

Hrrang! Hrang! Hrang!

Attack! Marty thought, and bolted upright in his bed. He grabbed for his slippers and fell backward off his bunk.

+++

ENSIGN FRYE AND LIEUTENANT KENNEDY rocked on their heels on the bridge of the PT-109. The night was dark, and the black waters of the Solomon Straits, save for the rhythmic lapping against the bow, were silent.

For several hours the boat had rested upon the waters, its engines dead, its crew alert to the perils nearby: on the one hand, the patrolling Japanese submarine Matthew Calbraith Perry waiting somewhere below the surface, and on the other, out there in the darkness, the cruel castles of the barrier reef.

In the ancient game of cat and mouse, the mice waited -- over the centuries only the instrumentation had changed.

Frye watched his skipper from the corner of an eye, looking to him for reassurance, but finding none in that troubled, intelligent composure.

Radio silence was in effect. What Kennedy might have communicated to headquarters at Malaita he instead dictated to his radar boy:

Situation: disadvantageous. Mission may conclude here, aborted as we make a run for it. Even then, failure is likely. Fuel tanks numbers 1 and 2 are damaged and presumed empty. A pressure leak has been detected in number 4. Laden down with depth charges we cannot drop due to jammed release mechanism. We can only be even partially safe until dawn.

"Ensign," the lieutenant said upon finishing the dispatch, "I welcome your thoughts."

The radar boy swallowed hard. "The men are with you, sir. Honest. I know in the past there were times when -- "

"Times when what? Ah yes, the silent treatment." Kennedy looked away with bitterness. "These men think they can do me in. If they only knew I was hazed at Harvard."

"But sir, it was never anything personal. It was, well, you know."

"My religion?" The young commander winced and made a fist. "I can suffer for my faith. Better men before me have."

"Well, actually, it's your inexperience and your old man's money."

"Oh, that," the skipper shrugged. "Well to hell with them then."

"Yes sir."

All through the tension of this long night the radar boy had waited for such an opening. Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out a dogeared pocket-size New Testament. "Sometimes, sir, the right kind of reading alleviates tension."

The skipper snatched the book from Frye's hand and in one motion flung it overboard.

"Mister Frye, I remind you of the gravity of our situation -- our lives are on the line and your solution is some puilp pornography? I'm disappointed in you."

The ensign stared at the waves into which the Bible had vanished. "But, sir -- "

"When the going gets rocky is not the time to let down one's hair. Are we understood?"

Frye nodded.

"So," said Kennedy. "The men resent the weak little rich boy, is that it? Before the night is up these narrows will determine who is strong."

A seabird flying overhead issued its lonely call. Kennedy squinted into the darkness. Frye sensed another opportunity. From the pocket of his pea-coat he extracted a small flask.

"Sir, I -- "

"Ensign, give me that," the skipper hissed, seizing the bottle. "I'm not getting through to you, am I? And at your age -- I had no idea. Consider yourself on report." And with a look of fierce disgust Kennedy hurled the vial of Lourdes water out into the dark of the Solomon Straits.

+++

WITH A NONNY NONNY HEY, thought Eugene Dubois as he half skipped, half shambled down the seminary walkway, down the myrtle slopes to the walking pond. As the autumn wind whipped at him he drew his raggedy cardigan tighter around his skinny frame. In his head he heard music he was composing for a song from Twelfth Night. When Dodge and Francona, well-oiled from their workouts, bumped past him on the path, he paid them no notice. Him being what he was and their being what they were, being ignored was a kindness.

He pushed his tortoise-shell frames back up his bony nose. Francona and Dodge could never understand the things he thought, the things he felt. But Marty could. Marty Frye wouldn't bump past him like a hit and run. Marty Frye would look into Eugene Dubois' eyes like they contained all that was seeable in the world, and listen to what he said as if it were an epistle from a friendly, wise planet.

Hey ho the wind and the rain.

Marty's expression, when Dubois showed him his wrists, the shiny white scratchmark from Eugene's brush with death -- admiration, envy, and the open-mouthed question. Why?

"I shouldn't say," Dubois had told him, feigning adherence to the suicide's code, but blushing from the pleasure of being asked. "All right, I'll tell you. It was because I lost my faith."

The answer would have killed any other boy at St. Bernard's. Marty's eyes only narrowed as Dubois told him the story.

**

FROM HIS EARLIEST DAYS his greatest love was dance, which threatened neither of his parents in Oak Park, not until he was taking five lessons a week at age ten, when both Carl's and Olive's support switched to a strategy of diversion.

"You don't really like dance," Olive explained to him without looking up from her precinct reports. "Dr. Steinberg has been through that. Dance is the way you've chosen to hurt me. That's why your father signed you up for tennis camp. "

The ten-year-old squinted. "Dr. Steinberg touched me," he said.

Olive folded her arms. "He's a respected professional."

"He stalks the playground," Eugene countered. But the decision had been made. The next day he watched his leotard melt on the hibachi grill as he stood in tennis whites, gripping his racket by the strings. And he somehow knew, as the nylon bubbled, that there was no God. It depressed him to be an atheist in a tennis suit, so he went upstairs, drew a tub, slit is forearms with a Gillette Blue Blade and watched the red striate his sodden shorts.

**

"SO THAT'S HOW YOU LOST YOUR FAITH AND KILLED YOURSELF," Marty said.

"That wasn't it," Dubois said, "that was just an eclipse. I lost it during my dream. I dreamed I went to heaven, and when I got to the top of the escalator and came out on the top of the clouds, all I could see for miles and miles was a patchwork of tennis courts.

"My dad found me and called an ambulance, and they put on a bandaid and put me to bed, but the damage was done."

"Jeepers," Marty said bitterly. "And all because a guy's gotta dance."

**

DUBOIS PULLED HIS CARDIGAN EVEN TIGHTER around himself and looked out over the pond. He had loved Marty for believing his story, for taking his side. There had been precious few omissions in the telling. What the psychiatrist really thought, for instance. Dr. Steinberg had told his mother that her little boy was a Fairy.

But hey nonny no, no way, that was impossible. I am not, he had told Steinberg, and he had told himself a million times in the months since then. What I am is a Sissy. A subtle distinction, but Eugene clung to it like arkwood.

And even if -- God wherever and if ever he was, forbid -- even if Dubois was like that, well, the hell with it. No one would ever know because the secret would die with him, Eugene Dubois, the king of the wood. He would never destroy himself, or hurt a friend, like Marty, by reaching in that direction.

**

"ONE THING I DON'T GET," Marty said. "If you lost your faith, then -- "

"Sshh," eugene said, glancing about. "The trees are Catholic."

Marty laughed. "I've got a secret, too."

Dubois nodded solemnly.

"OK. The last few weeks something really funny has been happening to me at Mass. At Consecration. Just as the priest lifts the host over his head, and they jangle the bells, I get a boner."

"A what?"

"A boner. You know, when your wiener gets hard."

Dubois smiled a thin, frozen smile. If he didn't believe in God before, he certainly didn't now. "A Pavlovian erection."

Marty brightened. "They've got a name?"

"Oh yes. And a very common thing, from what I've read." Dubois' lip quivered uncontrollably.

**

DUBOIS SAT BY THE WALKING POND, trembling from the chill wind. He was thinking about Marty. What had he called him one time? Ah, a lamb on the lam. He resolved he would protect his lamb, come high water or hell. He would protect Marty from the whole vicious tennis-playing world. He would protect Marty from everyone.

He shivered -- from the cold. When he thought of the bad side of things he laughed. How when Olive called next, how different he would sound to her. So how many friends have you made? she would ask him, and the asking would like a dagger of intent slipped between his ribs.

And for once in his life he wouldn't have to squall into the receiver that he didn't have any friends and didn't ever want any anyway.

Instead he would say, Mother, I do have a friend. And he would smile, and his smile would shoot 1500 miles across the country and bite his mother's breast. Bitterness. Hatred. Envy.

Oh well, he shivered, better Olive green than Olive drab.

**

"WELL?" Marty asked.

"Well what?"

"Your faith. You never said if you got it back or not."

And Eugene looked into Marty's eyes and gulped. The truth? The truth was, he treasured the talks the two of them had, the walks they took. One thing only could make them better -- to be walking, talking, hand in hand.

"Of course I have," he said.

+++

THE NIGHT WAS NEARLY EXHAUSTED, and the two stood on the bow of the boat, alone.

"If we can make it to dawn, at least we can navigate by the reef," Kennedy said. "We are still manueverable. We might just zigzag our way home."

He peered through the binoculars into the pre-dawn haze. Ensign Frye stood just behind him, shoulders trembling.

"Try and be brave, Marty. Remember that I need you to be strong. And that your country is counting on you."

"I can't help it," the boy began to sob. "I'm afraid."

"Everyone is afraid, but you must not run from the thing you fear. Can you say what it is you're afraid of?"

"I don't know sir -- I don't know."

"It's OK," the lieutenant told him, and laid a hand on his shoulder. The boy clung to the young officer, weeping into his kapok jacket. Kennedy comforted him with gentle pats until Frye could put himself together again. Snuffling, he daubed his eyes with his shirttail. Marty gazed at his commander with unmilitary intensity.

"We will follow you into the jaws of death," he swore dramatically.

"Do you think that's wise?" Kennedy asked, a twinkle in his eye.

Both looked up as a light hovered above them. Kennedy, believing it to be a Japanese flare, crouched instinctively. But it was a different sort of light -- it was softer and moved in curves and switchbacks, as if it were not a light at all, but a runaway window overlooking some different kind of luminousness entirely.

And a voice came to the light.

"I am come to deliver you," it said. And as it spoke it assumed a shape -- a face; no, less than a face, a skull. But not a scary skull. This one was somehow kindly in its expression, its teeth and hollowness suffused with a radiant sweetness. Marty's eyes widened in awe, Kennedy's in apprehension.

"I know these waters," the flayed head went on to say. And a finger of light passed from one eye-socket out over the darkness, out over the boat's bobbing prow, streaming across the weaters like stilled lightning. "The way of passage from this place," the voice said, "is there."

Kennedy scrambled to consult the ship's compass. "South by southeast," he muttered.

"Then go," said the head of lovingkindness. "God calls you from the narrows."

And the light dimmed and was gone.

"I think I know who that was," the radar boy explained. "It was a vision of Saint Bernard de Veaux, the martyred missionary of the Solomons, the eleventh saint of Oceania. Before this century he knew these waters. Now God has sent himn to help us escape."

Kennedy stepped to the wheel and switched on the engines. "I pray you are right," he said, as the telltale sputtering echoed loudly over the waters. He set course, SSE. and the patrol boat came to life again, sliding quietly through the strait.

In Marty's ears the sounds of the sputtering and slapping were drumbeats, the ones he used to hear in the evenings, from offshore. And as he listened now to their pulsations he became aware of his own, the pulse of the blood racing by his ears, the thump of his living heart.

Far ahead he imagined the saw the first limning of dawn, like a knife's edge along the horizon. He paused a moment to pray, and when he looked up he thought he saw the light begin to peel away from the outline of the reef just off the starboard side, revealing the rocks and, farther ahead, the open sea. His heart soared, and he turned to tell the lieutenant the good news.

But the lieutenant was not at the wheel. He was above the cabin, and he was lashed to the mast with a dozen coils of rigging, and he sagged there in the coils, his hat fallen away, and Marty could make out in the reflection from the open cabin door the beads of sweat on the skipper's face, and the red stripes encircling his shoulders.

Ensign Frye swirled to look again at the light on the horizon, as if to ask it a question, to interrogate it, to demand a full account. Sure enough, the darkness was lifting, and the boat, now under its own power, puttered out into the brightening sea.

+++

THE PRIESTS TOOK THE NEWS OF THE PRESIDENT'S ASSASSINATION WORST. The seminarians, aged 13 to 17, saw the blunt, prehistoric form of Father Harris pound his fists together on the plank veranda, and wondered at the depth of the old Lithuanian priest's feelings. They saw Father Lewis, the professor of Latin, weep openly during Vespers. They saw the way the fierce Father Tichenor set his jaw extra-firm throughout the two dark days between assassination and funeral. Classes were canceled, prayer vigils maintained, with many priestly duties relegated to boy prefects to perform.

And 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 respose 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.

Marty, 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 Marty himself had given him when Hal 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.

**

EARLIER THAT YEAR, IN THE SUMMER, the seminary's recruiter, Father Garrity, had taken Marty 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 Marty 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 Marty 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 Marty not only as unoriginal but as a great unthinking colossus of sinew and bone, unable to think, the embodiment of embodiment. What Marty would never know was that beneath the brooding muscularity, underneath the strata of dead adjectives, was a brooding and tormented mind as well.

**

ALL HAL 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 Warhola, 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 faitful 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 Ropers, 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 Hal, 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 withing a specific physical moment in time? And if so, during what specific moment during the Consecration did it occur? Hoc? Est? EnimCorpus? 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 gradew -- 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 Hal 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 permision 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, Hal would permanently suspend all 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, Hal Dodge, by touching himself when the Sisters had told him to never, never do that, except at the highest possible cost, had killed the President as sure as that man in the warehouse window.

+++

THOUGH NINE YEARS OUT OF TEN IT FELL within the sorrowful season of Lent, there was still no greater nor more joyfully celebrated feast for the Society of Bernard than that of its namesake, Bernard de Veaux, eleventh martyr of Oceania, the 16th of February. And in the entire history of the holy congregation, not one of the celebrations matched the pomp, splendor, or showmanship of today's.

Already the grand choir was gathering in the rear of the seminary chapel. Visitors from up and down the eastern seaboard milled about beyond the vestibule, where Fund Days were well underway, and children dressed for church dashed from booth to booth, shirttails flying, and adults sipped coffee from styrofoam cups.

Madame Coordinator Mrs. Mieczniewiecz, with her new assistant Victor Van Eyck standing alongside, was in her glory, and glanced across the atrium toward her uncomfortable predecessor, Len Lewis. The senior members of the fund-raising committee for the new St. Bernard's Bluff, which was to be raised up upon the site of the current St. Bernard's, might not be speaking any more, but one half of that committee, Mrs. Mieczniewicz thumped herself, had not sold itself short. She and Van Eyck had worked like dogs to get invitations printed and mailed, news releases issued up and down the coast, phone calls placed to the proper personages -- everything from the linen for the Archbishop's breakfast table to the pinning of name-cards (HELLO! My Name is Brother Gaspar) on the countless cassocks floating up and down the plank veranda of House Major. Of course she was proud -- of the big things and the little things, from the mimeographed novena cards to the fifth of Johnny Walker Red in the quarters of the Very Reverend Willard James Croatch, Archbishop of Philadelphia.

Already the big man was moving in the sacristy, gazing contentedly at himself in the full mirror, while acolytes Diener and Dodge assisted him in donning the rose-lilac chasuble of the occasion. It was the latest rage in chasubles, floor-length as opposed to the standard sandwichboard jobs most priests had issued to them. The Archbishop liked the medieval flavor of the vestment. The Fourteenth was his favorite century.

He pirouetted in the mirror, admiring his magnificence. What a fine figure he cut, so tall and so -- so big. He had about him the congratulatory air that came with the knowledge that, should the need arise, he could swallow his enemies whole. The Archbishop was the sort of man who could never love his fellows quite so well as he loved himself.

The first year seminarian Marty, who had never before served as acolyte before, followed the Archbishop's movements from his hiding place behind an opened cabinet door.

"You there," the Archbishop motioned to Marty, "hand me that mirror." And while Marty fetched the hand-mirror, Croatch peered out at the gathering congregation. He seemed especially to take notice of Mrs. Mieczniewicz, whose teeth seemed visible all the way around her head.

"Here you are, Father," Marty said. Then, catching himself, "I mean, your -- your Highness?"

Croatch eyed Mrs. Mieczniewicz and grunted. "You've got yourself a real corker with that one," he said.

The truth was that the Archbishop wasn't on hand due to Mrs. Mieczniewicz' persistence on the telephone, but in spite of it -- the deal had been worked out months earlier, just between Croatch and St. Bernard's Rector, Monsignor MacConacht. MacConacht and Croatch shared the same wavelength -- Croatch put in his appearance at the St. Bernard fund raiser and MacConacht put in a good word for Croatch with the Mother House in Rome.

The Archbishop smiled benignly and twirled again in the mirror. Rose-lilac was nice, he seemed to be thinking, but his favorite color was cherry-red.

For Marty's part, he was ready. The Archbishop's presence did not daunt him in the least; the great throng gathering outside did not give him pause; the candles, flowers, incense and music -- water off a duck's back. Today he was at the peak of his powers, at peace with himself, and he could feel the natural grace flooding his being and emanating outward again, but with a certain topspin. The World may have come to the door to St. Bernard's for a glimpse of an Archbishop, true; but what they would take back with them the memory of a certain young acolyte who stunned everyone with his perfect altar stylings and his incredibly Christ-like instincts at the Mass.

The choir launched into the Asperges and the procession began: first Mieczniewicz, with a silver-plated crucifix on a stick; then a half-dozen seminarians in black cassocks and albs, carrying candles; then the censer, Marty, in red and white, smoke spilling from his chained vessel; then Fathers Harris and Tichenor, the concelebrants; then Archbishop Croatch, in pale rose-lilac; then Dodge, Marty's counterpoint, also censing; then Provolini in black, holding aloft the crucified, gold-plated Christ.

It was a grand parade, and Marty enjoyed his part in it. When they arrived at the sanctuary, the two-by-twos parted and encircled the statue of St. Bernard de Veaux, with his over-rouged cheeks and over-red lips, and both Marty and Dodge stopped to cense the statue. The Archbishop bowed, and the half-dozen boys in black wheeled the statue, which was mounted shakily on a stainless steel refectory cart, back into its alcove on the altar's left-hand side.

By now the choir had concluded the Asperges and had struck up St. Bernard's own theme, "Thank You, Lord (For Sparing Me the Cup)," and Father Lewis, who was filling in for Tichenor, was waving his hands expansively as his charges scaled the mixolydian heights. The congregation in the pews could be seen to surreptitiously sniff in the sweet smoky air. The Archbishop as putting on a whale of a show.

The three celebrants advanced to the center of the sanctuary and formed a line symbolizing the Holy Trinity. Dodge and Marty stood below them on the bottom step. The six seminarians in black took seats with the choir, while the torch-carriers stood opposite one another guarding the altar. Deacon Diener backed down the red-carpeted steps and proceeded to the three chairs beside the little washstand, and waited for his big moment, when he would chant the day's Epistle. Marty kept a close eye on Dodge, mimicking his every motion.

The Mass was underway. Dominus vobiscum, the three celebrants said, whirling, and then whirled right around again. The congregation chimed right in with the common mispronunciation, Et cum spiri tutuo. The rhythm was better that way, Marty nodded. Only the priests and seminarians got it right. Marty stifled himself a yawn -- he could feel his jaw muscles tighten around the yawn. It was all too easy, he thought. He daydreamed, as he had done since he was a little boy, bored with the ritual in front of him. He imagined the priests were the kaleidoscoped dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show. The Willard Croatch Dancers, featuring The Acolettes, he named them. He pictured the Archbishop doing the basic Gleason schtick. And away we god!

At the Kyrie, Marty glanced over and realized he had lost Dodge. Somehow, the older boy had sidled over and backwards about three paces, to make more room for the celebrants to whirl around in. Marty swallowed air -- suddenly the grand symmetry was off. He hoped no one noticed as he inched backward down a step. Father Tichenor, catching the misstep from his periphery, shot Marty a meaningful look.

The choir was going full-blast on the Kyrie, which enabled Marty to get squared off again with Dodge across the room.

"What the hell are you doing?" Dodge hissed through his teeth.

"Lord, have mercy," Marty murmured. Then came time for the Readings, and the torch-boys came out of retirement to escort Diener over to the Lectern, where he opened his big book to the 6th chapter of Revelations, something about lambs and beasts and seals.

Deo gratias. And the choir sang the Amen devised from the theme of St. Bernard, and then there it was again. Dominus vobiscum.

Marty daydreamed again about all the funny Latin phrases in the Mass. Asperges became asparagus, of course. Ora pro nobis was oh wrap your nose up. Liberamus domine turned into liver on a stormy day.

The same was true for English. Who could forget "oh my God I am hardly sorry" or "Hail Mary, full of grapes"?

Marty and Dodge took their places adjoining the chairs of Father Harris and Archbishop Croatch, while Tichenor spieled off the Gospel about the Clever Steward. When he had finished, the big man rose and advanced to the Lectern to give the homily. With the usual amplified fumbling with his microphone, he launched in to his talk.

"The theme of my discussion today, my friends, is: "Bernard de Veaux, eleventh martyr of Oceania, and patron saint of the little things in life!"

It was the dullest thought which had ever occurred at the Bluff -- no mean feat. For the longest time it appeared that the Archbishop would succeed where the cannibals of the Solomons had failed. "... and so I suggest to you today that perhaps it would do each of us a bit of good to pause from time to time in our own lives, and to ask ourtselves this simple and yet, oh-so-relevant question: What does the life of St. Bernard de Veaux have to do with my life?"

Marty was fantasizing even has he nodded sagely at this thought. He was picturing a latecomer arriving at the chapel, opening the doors, and drowning in the deluge of vomit pouring out onto him. It was that kind of a homily. He scanned the faces in the congregation. There was his friend Dubois, gazing distractedly at a stained-glass window. There was Mrs. Mieczniewicz and her new helper, Victor Van Eyck. And there, in the back row, arms crossed almost defiantly (it seemed to Marty), and with an expression of great irritation on his face.

Odd, Marty thought -- hadn't the Monsignor MacConacht ever heard a bad sermon before? And even so, it was the feast of his own order's one hero, surely a day for all to celebrate. MacConacht almost looked -- and this was quite impossible, more likely he was suffering from indigestion -- as if he bore a grudge of some sort against the beloved martyr!

The Archbishop was brief if not concise, and his sermon managed to further diminish Marty's concentration, so that upon resumption of the Mass he made the mental error of intercepting the three priests and escorting them back up the altar steps, instead of following from a discreet distance, as Dodge was doing. Marty realized with a mortifying backward glance that he now headed the grand procession.

Very well, he vowed, if I am to lead then I will act the part of a leader, and accordingly he thrust his head high and advanced haughtily across the center line, where he bumped into the genuflecting Dodge and nearly tumbled right over him. It was a textbook shoulder-block, perhaps the best Dodge had ever given, including times he had done it on purpose.

Dodge looked up at Marty with a stricken expression. For there, just ahead of the two in the tabernacle, rested Dodge's God, behind the brocade drape; and there, behind him in the congregation, sat his parents and other relatives from Buffalo; and here, standing beside him and serving as his counterpoint in worship, was Jerry Lewis.

Somehow the two managed to maneuver around one another, and Marty and Dodge stood side by side once more. The Archbishop and his helpers were back to their old ways, bobbing and dipping up front. The choir began its Offertory hymn and the two boys, taking that as their cue, lifted their censers again, censed the priests, and set the censers down, Marty setting his down a bit clumsily, the chain not retracting on one side. He made a note to attend to that once he returned from the Lavabo, and rose to traipse after Dodge to the tiny wash-stand. The Archbishop washed his hands and handed Marty the towelette, which Marty took great ceremonial pains to fold, laying one holy corner carefully over the other. When he turned to return to his place beside Dodge, Dodge was gone.

Marty rocked back and forth on one leg, trying to spot Dodge amid the whirling chasubles. No luck -- the sacramental personnel were blocking his view of his partner -- who very simply had gone up front to close the gate to the sanctuary. Marty concluded that Dodge had felt sick or had to visit the lavatory.

Very well, he concluded, he would manage somehow alone. In fact, he thought, this might be his big break. Without Dodge around to force Marty to comply with his bilateral symmetry, Marty was suddenly free to substitute his own symmetries. No more of this mismatched Laurel-and-Hardy genuflection. His spirit soared. What should he essay first?

Since he could no longer flank the three concelebrants, he decided it would be most symmetrical to line up at the end of them, making four. And so he did, trailing his censer -- chain still off-kilter -- behind him, taking his place behind Father Tichenor, splashing frankincense enthusiastically up at the rose-lilac chasubles.

Never mind, now, that the line of three symbolized the three-natured aspect of God. And never mind that the Mass had intensified beyond the period of praise and proclamation, and was now deep into re-enacting the miracle of the Last Supper. Never find, finally, what in Marty's mind constituted excessive archery of the eyebrows darting his way from the aggrieved Father Tichenor, and from the even more disturbed Father Harris farther up the line. Never mind the disdain of the Archbishop himself, who turned at the conclusion of the Offertory finally to behold -- as a surprised man beholds his vaulting shadow late at night in a bad part of town -- the Fourth Wise Man. And never mind, ever, that the lid on Marty's censer was precariously tipped and threatened to fall apart at any second.

Never mind any of that.

The important thing was that Marty Frye was finally outside himself, blossoming as he never had blossomed -- deep in his spirit, with a joy that rose up out of him like magician's doves, like a glistening meadow of dew-sprinkled Jerusalem artichokes.

Later on he could explain, and everyone would understand.

ACTUALLY, NOT ALL of him was outside himself blossoming. There was still a non-dove, non-Jerusalem artichoke part of him already busy making apologies.

Gentlemen, he would say, you must all bear in mind that your job up there today was to celebrate the Mass. My job, as I saw it, was to cense things. It was my best judgment that you three fellows were the very sort of thing I ought at that time to have been censing.

He rested his case.

BUT THE REST OF MARTY FRYE was in all its glory. He disdained everything but the sight and scent of smoke rising above the tabernacle roof to the wooden feet of Christ.

He disdained the look on Ralph Diener's face, shaking his head in little compact twists and making No! kisses with his lips. He disdained the blood in Father Harris the Hairy Beast's eyes, and the fire in Father Tichenor the Runty Marine's. He disdained the tittering from the congregation and the choir, the stifled grins of the young torch-boys, the look on his pal Dubois' face, as on a man who has just swallowed a Monopoly board. Oblivious to matters of The World, Marty stumbled after the troika of celebrants, like Dopey after the rest of the dwarfs.

Now was at hand the moment of reckoning, and Marty was now jolted into it -- the Consecration. He was on his feet, he saw, if from a great distance. He was standing during the Consecration!Fathers Harris and Tichenor were already lifting the hem of the Archbishop's chasuble, and the Archbishop was hoisting the large white wafer.

Marty panicked. He looked around him, at Diener, at the torch-boys, he saw Dodge kneeling at the bottom of the steps -- so that's where he was hiding! -- and Marty panicked even worse. His blood turned to cold glue in his veins, he clung to the hope that Dodge would now save him somehow, that Dodge would take him and lead him gently, like the "big brother" he had once been to him, lead him gently down the sanctuary steps.

But Dodge looked at him with vengeance in his eyes, clasped the bell-cluster in his right hand, and as the Archbishop said the magic words HOC! EST! ENIM! CORPUS! MEUM! Dodge jangled the bells for all he was worth.

Once.

Twice.

Thrice. It was consummated. And time stood still for Marty Frye, standing paralyzed at the altar's top stair, back facing the Transubstantiation. He felt a willowy tingling in his thighs. He imagined the curtain in an temple rending inside him. And while the hard bread of men was being transformed behind him into the pliable body of Christ, Marty's pliable little penis rose up in front of him like a blood-streaming rood.

Marty set his censer down loosely and put his hands to his temples. He stared down at his middle. Was it visible, the thing that had grown under his cassock and surplice? Could the whole congregation behold his indignity?

It was. They could. It looked to him as if he were hiding a swiped bottle of muscatel taped against his stomach. It was as plain as the nose on his face, he told himself, his heart kicking its way out of his rib-cage, as obvious as a tarantula on an angelfood cake. Every eye was upon him, and upon his peculiar condition, every hands was heaping imaginary faggots at his bound feet, every prayer implored the Almighty to blast the hapless boy on the spot he had blasphemed.

Of course, this was all happening in a dream, he told himself. Every night he had dreams, and this was simply another. Why, there was Dubois in the third row, looking ill -- Dubois was so smart, he knew the word for this whole experience was deja vu, where a thing happens and you know it happened before but you can't put your finger on it. That was what this all was, Marty thought, one of those deja vus.

That thought comforted Marty as he stood on the altar stair, and he sank to his feet with a tired smile, rolling his eyes to the chapel dome. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, he murmured, beating his chest drunkenly.

And when he rose, every eye on the house upon him, his shoe caught at his surplice, the surplice tore off him at the shoulder, slid onto the floor, landed on the censer, tipping it over. The surplice quickly burst into flame, and the loose coals rolled down the three remaining altar steps, spilling unceremoniously all the way to the communion railing, setting several fires in half a dozen smoldering stripes.

MARTY FRYE SAT AFTER THE CONFLAGRATION in a folding chair back in the sacristy, his mind reeling as it tried to weigh the morning's events. All around him the commotion continued to swirl. He could not quite piece it all together -- the chain of events never quite connected. For now he decided to sit calmly and be the unblinking eye on the premises while the hurricane around him spent out its last energies.

The Archbishop was far from spent out. He leaned against the wardrobe, hands trembling, his breath coming in spastic, smoke-inhalated sputters. From moment to moment he would glance over at the sloe-eyed Frye boy, and then he would bring himself to his full adult height, shake his finger, and then not know what to say. Fathers Tichenor and Harris, ignoring Marty for the moment, danced frantically around the great man who had nearly fallen in the line of duty, and hoped he would not need nitroglycerine tablets.

Marty was effused with an eerie, inconsolable peace -- something like bliss but also a lot like despair. He saw the mad gestures of the Archbishop when the prelate pointed at him, and he tried to remember where he had seen that gesture before. Finally it came to him -- it was from Dubois' enactment of Dreyfus case. The moment when Emile Zola took the stand. J'accuse! J'accuse! It was an interesting time in French history, from Dubois' description. On the whole Marty wished he had been part of it and not this.

As for the Archbishop's true feelings, Marty had no need to worry. Suffering from smoke and third-degree burns along his neck and scalp, the Archbishop could not be held accountable for his feelings at this time. Of course, the entire episode might have been less discomfiting overall had his rose-lilac chasuble not exploded in sudden flame at the altar, singing his hair and burning his back. Why the big vestment conglomerates couldn't fireproof their chasubles was beyond him.

Marty could only remember the smell, and a curious smell it had been, of hair crackling. He wondered whether that was what St. Lawrence smelled like on the spit in the days of St. Sixtus. "You can turn me over, boys," the madcap saint is supposed to have said. "I'm done on this side." Catholic humor was not without its moments.

Just then Monsignor MacConacht ambled into the sacristy to offer the Archbishop his comfort and condolences. Marty was fascinated. Now the Rector seemed strangely relieved and pleasant, where up until Martin's mishap with the censer he had seemed agitated and unhappy.

"You just sit a moment, your excellency, while I rub some of this stuff onto that neck."

"Ow! Oh!" the Archbishop winced in complaint, but was then seized by another coughing fit.

"There, there," the Rector said gently. MacConacht seemed -- cleansed or something. There was compassion in his voice as he soothed the Archbishop's hacking, a lilt in the way he spoke, and a decided spring in his step. He even seemed to regard Marty with an attitude of -- gratitude?

"Who put him up to this? The Cardinal?" Croatch lapsed into another fit.

The Rector shrugged helplessly, sympathetically. "No one, excellency. We're certain he acted alone."

Marty brightened: the Unbalanced Loner Theory.

"No, the Cardinal was in on this, it has his mark all over it. I'll wager my soul it was the Cardinal."

"Unlikely, excellency. The boy knows nothing of all that."

"What is he, a retard?"

Marty frowned.

"No, excellency." Mutter, mutter... "a discipline problem."

The Archbishop, regaining his composure, pushed MacConacht out of his way and regarded Marty across the room with the utmost vilification. Without taking his eyes off the boy, he spoke to the Rector:

"The kid's a menace."

"Come on, Willard, I'll buy you a drink. "The Rector took him by the wrist.

"He's a Goddamn hazard."

MacConacht led the great man away. Fathers Harris and Tichenor were still busying themselves cordoning off the altar area, cleaning up after the disaster. Marty noticed Dubois trying to get through to the sacristy but being pushed away by the Hairy Beast. Marty lacked the energy to have shrugged, but if he could have he would have.

For now it was all over -- everything. Seeing Dubois in the doorway was like getting a postcard from his own life. Great to hear that The World was having a wonderful time out there; he wished he could be there too. But it was not to be.

He gazed dreamily out toward the sanctuary, smoke and steam issuing in equal amounts from the passageway with an incense-like languor. He wished he had daisies by the dozens, so he could tear all the petals off, like Ophelia did. No, not daisies -- Jerusalem artichokes.

That done, he would tangle himself in the wreath he had made and go jump in the duck pond in front of St. Bernard's Bluff. And they would find him like that, floating face-up, a weird, demented smile on his face. And they would bury him outside the seminary grounds, in unblessed soil. And the stone would bear this inscription:

HERE LIES BROTHER MARTY, WHO GOT

ALL HIS SHAKESPEARE FROM

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED

Too late to be sorry, he thought, and too late to make amends. Too late for anything save that single perfect act of contrition, and then -- the duck pond.

Even were he somehow to rehabilitate himself after this heinous crime, his fellows would never suffer his presence among them. Tichenor and Harris had let him know their feelings -- mainly, a sempiternal dragnet of revenge. The boys had likewise hardened against him -- he could tell from the looks on the torch-boys' faces; unconsciously, all had elected him to eternity in Limbo, with no time off for good behavior, no visitors and no between-meal snacks. A stern bunch, his pals.

He was already passing time in Limbo. Already he missed the excitement of The World. He missed even the excitement of his downfall, that sunny Sunday morning of the Feast of St. Bernard de Veaux. What, thinking back, had been the most exciting part?

Many people would say it was when the fire department showed up, with their over-the-shoulder sprayer cans and long rubber boots, tromping down the center aisle and up into the Holy of Holies like Atilla and the Huns. While the storm-troopers clambered in, hoses streaming, the rest of the congregation huddled bug-eyed by the double doors.

Marty, however, welcomed the firemen -- in the tumult surrounding him, they could be neutral witnesses, in case things got really out of hand. As long as they were near, he felt safe. There was even a moment or two when he gave serious thought to joining up with them -- a career consideration which, before this fateful convergence of sacrament, fire, and sex, had never occurred to him, but one which, come to think of it, was damned attractive. Caught up in the excitement, however, he was too slow to collar one of them and ask for literature.

That was a big moment, certainly. Another came earlier, when him, but one which, come to think of it, was damned attractive. Caught up in the excitement, however, he was too slow to collar one of them and ask for literature.

That was a big moment, certainly. Another came earlier, missing word moment you expected a cinder-block to issue from her gullet. The Archbishop, even with his mitre on and his crook flying at high-mast, could have tumbled all the way down her sideways; or Dante pitched his tent between her tonsils.

And what a yowl commenced to come out of her, so piercing and so tremulous, so that even the chapel bells atop the cupola hummed mildly from the vibration; yet so eloquent, so to-the-point:

"FIRE!"

And the entire congregation then rose, unclickered, in the most perfect mass genuflection ever executed. Even people lining up at the Communion rail had second thoughts, and joined the crush at the double rear doors.

A great, great moment. But the best was still to come. There stood the Archbishop, the host in his hand and the back of his garment beginning to smolder. He was a perfect portrait of mixed emotions, and it was to his eternal credit that he did not then drop the Blessed Sacrament. But when the sparks caught the hem of his alb, the white undergarment, and he instinctively whirled to extinguish the fire -- alas -- the host did fly up out of his hands and over the lectern.

Now two things happened at once, and the eye had to choose whither it was to go: whether to zero in on the remarkable leap Father Tichenor the Runty Marine made, vaulting the prie-dieu and diving down two smoking steps in the nick of time to catch the sailing host in the end-zone; or whether to behold the singular resolve of Harris the Hairy Beast as he advanced up the steps to the burning Archbishop, seized the great one by the nape of his neck, and with one brisk sweep of his hairy hand slit the garment down the middle and stripped it off the Archbishop's body.

+++

THE DIE WAS CAST. Now it was simply a matter of Monsignor MacConacht making two telephone calls.

"That's right, Mrs. Dubois. I'm sorry to disturb you, but -- oh, I'm terribly sorry, I thought it was pronounced Du-bwah. It's Da-boy -- excuse me, please. But never mind that, there's been a problem here. Yes, I'm afraid it does involve Eugene... . "

But the Frye phone in French Creek did not answer. All day long and several times that evening the Rector tried. Unable to make the connection, he put off the matter until the following day.

For Dubois there would be no next day. With his hand weighted down in a plaster cast, he was ushered down the steps of House Minor and into the seminary Chevy, Victor Van Eyck at the wheel. Taking his place in the front seat, the boy in the floppy black blazer gazed out the window at St. Bernard's for the last time. As the car pulled down Immaculate Conception Lane, Dubois was still looking backward -- not the buildings, which were doomed to the wrecking ball, and not at the gardens or the walking pond, which he'd traversed a thousand times, but for Martin, his friend, his companion of the year, who had betrayed him into his mother's