THOMAS LARSON

(First Published Miranda Literary Magazine Summer 2006)

As early as I can remember, my father hated Catholics. Actually, he despised religious people. He labeled believers, hypocrites, priests and ministers, lushes. Whenever he spoke of this, which, like most personal things was seldom, the sibilant sounds of those scandalous words entranced me. His disdain for God’s reps on earth began and ended with two betrayals, one of his body, the other, his soul. Born September 3, 1914, in Evanston, Illinois, he was given up immediately by his Bohemian mother, who was probably (though no one knows) the dalliance of his Swedish father. The next day, he was adopted by the childless Larsons, a father who was distant and irascible and a mother who took him with her to daily mass. Of course, he didn’t know of his illegitimacy growing up, but the mark was there. At Catholic grammar school he was a student, and at church, an altar boy. A photo of him survives. A full head of combed-back black hair. A white surplice with the starched linen collar and large red satin bow. A look of mystical subjection. A boy, maybe any boy, who loved God.

Later, he attended St. George High School, a new school for the poor staffed and run by the Christian Brothers. He was enchanted by their curriculum: four years of athletics (baseball, swimming, boxing) and scholastics (the physical sciences, history, literature, and art: he loved the medieval painters and was good at drawing). He especially liked the dramatic society and the debating club, where he learned how to persuade the class and the teacher that it was morally right for the government to help families pay for education. Following his death, my mother and I found, in his closet, my father’s high-school serge blazer the fire-breathing dragon St. George had slain sewn onto the pocket. The legend goes that in Libya in 303, George slew a dragon, whose breath was poisoning the air. He saved a princess just as she was to be sacrificed to the dragon, and his exploit converted 15,000 to Christianity on the spot. He later became the patron saint of boy scouts and soldiers. So great was my father’s affection for St. George that it was among a handful of things he had saved in his 61 years.

When he graduated from high school, he told his mother he believed his education had prepared him for the priesthood. She was ecstatic. Late summer of his seventeenth year, he entered the seminary. There, no more than two weeks into the term and in a small class of young men, whose first course was the history of church doctrine, my father ventured a question. I imagine him. Still in his serge jacket, his wet-combed hair is less luxuriant. His hand is in the air. The cassocked priest is erasing a blackboard full of fast-chalked phrases. One is "extreme unction." There are many phrases the assembled very young men have been intoning aloud to themselves as they copy line and meaning into their notebooks.

The priest sees my father and nods.

I have a question, father, about God.

What about God.

Well, I’ve been reading about the Great War, and I don’t understand why God didn’t end it. Why was the Pope neutral? Shouldn’t he have been opposed to the violence and the killing? Jesus would. The questions cascade from him; he is fearless like St. George.

The priest says, Who are you?

My father states his name.

No, I mean, who are you to be asking such things?

Yes, but I wanted to know—

Yes but nothing, the priest replies. This is not a university. We don’t question authority here. Go to college and study philosophy, if you want to box with God. You’ll also do well not to secondguess the Holy Father.

Do you mean we can’t discuss the nature of God—

That’s enough.

And the workings of the church—

I said, That’s enough.

And still believe?

Stop it! the priest shouts.

The novices are staring at him—my father, the fish who’s leapt out of the water. The priest leers. He is old and sour-faced, with elephantine ears. Since his burden is light, his club is swift.

Boys, he says, there’s always one who wants to defile the sanctity of our passion. He snickers. A boy in the front row snickers, so does another behind him, and another behind him.

For the rest of the class, my father sits and thinks at his desk. He doesn’t take notes. He thinks. Neither he nor the priest regard each other. My father gazes out the tall seminary windows. The leaves of an elm spangle in the wind, turn this way that way. The whim of a September breeze. Close and free. Each leaf yoked to the branch by its stem. Close. Free.

My father told me when I was a teenager that having been humiliated by that priest changed him for good. His faith along with his belief dissolved. The following day, he decided to do what this country encouraged young men to do—remake yourself. By sunset, he had cleaned out his seminary locker, taken a crosstown bus, and enrolled at Northwestern University, where he would study not philosophy but commerce. He told his parents that night he’d be the family’s first college graduate, which a brisk four years later he was. Cashiering at a soda fountain, he paid for it entirely himself. How did his mother take it? She was disappointed, he said, that he left so soon after he began. But she was also pleased to welcome college, itself a kind of cloistered life: there, Johnny would still commune with the elders; they’d show him how to make his way in the world, which, he said, his mother prayed for every glad day of her life. The only time my father set foot inside a church again was for the mass the Evanston parish held when his mother died. I was with him then, that long week when we buried her and put the old man in a home. My father was untroubled, even as the old man wilted between us during the service and we held him up. Grandpa hadn’t been in church for years, either. But he wanted to say goodbye. Have the service expel his grief. Repeat-after-me, stand and kneel and sit, and repeat-after-me. But, despite the old man’s sorrow, I could tell all of it had been settled for my father long ago. That’s what I remember—while the other parishioners made the sign of the cross, how comfortable he was doing nothing.

2.

So, while my two brothers and I grew up in southern Ohio, in a town famous for its steel mill and basketball players, there was no God, no church, certainly no Jesus in our family: Sundays were for sleeping in. For years, my mother, herself not particularly religious, tolerated (maybe even agreed with) my father’s refusal to attend service or invoke God’s name. Others offered the meal blessing, not him. After she’d told her mother, a devotee of the Billy Graham Hour, what we hadn’t been doing with our Sundays, my grandmother said her grandsons needed some religious exposure. One Saturday, Mother announced that the next morning at 9:00 we’d be attending the Methodist church. Her directive was female and democratic, like, John, I think the boys need to decide for themselves. My father drove with a speechless ill-will, in which I sensed anger lacing his annoyance. He dropped us off and went to buy our post-illumination donuts.

That morning we were four deep in the pew, awkwardly trying on the faith much as we tried on school clothes during pre-Labor Day trips to the department store. My brothers and I wiggled, but we settled down once the pastor came out and sat in a chair with a stiff high back. Next, a bevy of thirty, boys and girls, teenagers, young adults, shuffled onto risers against the back wall and beneath the open-lipped pipes of the organ. The choirmaster entered. He was a peacocky man, about thirty-five and already balding. He nodded to the organist and raised his hands, thumbs up, fingers drooping. The singers stood in a uniform bustle.

A stately hymn unfolded, and the choir slow-danced an emotion I knew innately. My feet moved in my shoes. The choir leaned into the song. My legs swayed against the pew to the faint beat. The choir urged its attentions on the conductor’s hands. A voice stretched inside me (was it mine? was it theirs?) until I was humming right along.

I want to try out for the choir! I begged my parents on the drive home. This is important. This is something I want to do!

My father stared at me momentarily. He had the look of a man who had just cut himself with a knife. For a week I needled my mother every day until she got the audition scheduled.

Finally, this nervous, determined nine-year-old ran into the sparkling grey limestone Methodist church in Middletown, Ohio, down to the basement and the choir room where I presented myself to the choirmaster.

So you’re the young man who wants to join us so badly, he said.

I smiled. His hands moved me by my shoulders.

Stand here and hold onto the piano top. I’ll play a scale to warm us up. Do re me fa—Sing! and up . . . we went and down . . . we went. Again! This time he stopped singing mid-scale and leaned an ear my way while I kept going—so, fa, mi, re. Ah, he said, you’ve got the makings of a strong baritone, as though it were secret knowledge only he and I would share.

He next vamped the intro to a secular tune, "My Country ’Tis of Thee," and signaled me to join. It was a tune every 1950s kid knew by heart. What an effortless song it was, with its scale-wise melody, its marching rhythm, its held and syncopated notes in each phrase, its lovely self-conscious line, "Of thee I sing." Indeed, the music is the country; the making of the music makes My Country exist. The sung lines, "Land where my fathers died" and "Land of the pilgrims’ pride," were the reasons why we "Let freedom ring." The tune tied the lyric to the point. Song could bullet its way to the patriotic heart faster than any politician’s speech. The tune spoke to that part of me, which, even then, sought to analyze the art. I must have sung well, for he announced that, though my voice would change, he’d have me singing with the altos, the girls—but I could stand next to the boys. I was in.

I thought "in" meant wearing that sinfully purple choir robe whose togaed pleats draped to the floor. That was only the start. In meant learning to sing, and to listen, simultaneously, to your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor sing. In meant the sound of a room resonating during rehearsal, our ears ringing like gongs. The tunes were not all dour Protestant hymns. There were rounds and carols, "Jingle Bell Rock," Bach’s "Air on a G String," and even a jig in 6/8 time. Such variety quieted the instruction of the lyric, which, from a hymn like "Holy, Holy, Holy," bellowed doctrine on "God, in three person, blesséd trinity." Instead, tone had captivated me—it was physically indelible, enveloping our bodies and breathing them like an air. That music entered and exited through the flesh and not the mind (which seemed always to react or fantasize) convinced me of the body’s intelligence. I remember, every December, for those years I choired with the Methodists, rapturous Saturdays preparing Christmas stalwarts like "Joy to the World," a tune that followed the C major scale from top to bottom, and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," which, in a minor mode, ran along sneakily with bum-Bum, bum-Bum, bum-Bum, bum-Bum, bum-Bum, bum-Bum, bum-Bummmmm. To which the choirmaster, buoyed by our "bum"s, would exclaim, "Sing like that at the concert and you’ll bring the house down."

And yet, after several Sunday performances, during the long seated pauses, during the sacraments and the pastor’s sermon, I began to fidget: Something was amiss. In rehearsal, we sang as if we were conversing with one another, the sound engulfing us and the choirmaster. In performance, it was different. Our rehearsal camaraderie was supposed to continue on stage; its energy would be projected onto—and shared with—the audience. They were to participate in our vibration. When they didn’t respond, I didn’t understand. They sat there with a stony gaze that said either they didn’t get it or we, the singers, needed to try harder, sing what? more holily? And we tried. But we were being held back. Perhaps it was the absence of applause, the off-putting look of piety and privacy that seemed to go with the Methodists.

Many a Sunday, to my disappointment, we slogged through the doxology, a half-of-a-half-of-a-beat off. We ground through the anthems, singing and staring at family members in the pews, my mother, never my father. Why were they asleep? Didn’t they want the good tidings we bore them? The harder we tried, the more unmoved they seemed, until our trying hard petered out. We sounded churchly. It felt awful to have the physical certainty of music be sapped by such impassivity. Throughout, the choirmaster propelled us forward, but even his beaming face was faked. In the stained-glass, the warm-colored pews, the jewelled vestments of the minister, the performance of a feeling, I recognized the fiction. We were being used to prop up a flaccid faith.

3.

A Saturday afternoon, and I am with my father in our Ford station wagon with dad’s wood trim and mom’s pink-and-white body, returning home from choir practice and a haircut. A gas station attendant is pumping the gas. The car’s tan upholstered insides my father keeps very clean. He rubs the just-buzzed hair on my head, stiff like a new-mown lawn. His hand swishes over, from nape to top. I like the feeling. I can smell the barber’s powder around my shoulders, feel the fading tightness of the paper collar, clipped around my neck. From his wallet, my father thumbs out two dollars for the man.

Sometime when my father is not looking at me I can see the gold tooth in his mouth.

He asks whether I’m ready to go.

I answer, yes.

He says, You like that choir, don’t you?

I do, I say.

It’s more than just fun for you, isn’t it?

It is more, but I don’t say that.

He says, Does that choir fellow get you to talk about God?

It’s a strange question, but no, I say, he tries to get us to listen to the person next to us. And watch him, the conductor.

Why?

Because he knows where we’re going.

I’m sure he knows where you’re going. What do you think he knows?

He knows the song.

And what is the song?

The song, I kind of laugh, is the song, what’s in his head. He knows how the song’s supposed to go, and he wants us to sing it that way.

And that’s why you like it? So you can learn how the song goes in his head?

There. He gets it out of me, something I don't know I know until he gets me to say it. A big patch of empty air lies between us. Our words hang there, hovering, without noise. I know there’s something about my answer my father doesn’t trust. I wonder, Does he know that the pastor is using us? That the congregation doesn’t feel much of anything, even when we sing? That this singing is pulling me away from him? Is that what this is about? To assure him, I say, I don’t want to go to church, Dad. I just want to sing. That’s all.

Now he fixes on me. Almost all the thick black hair he had as a boy is either gray or gone. He says, It’s not all—not with those lushes. Be careful, my son. (He would say that phrase to me only one other time, when I left home for college.) They’ve got plans for you. I don’t know about the song in his head. But you can’t let him take anything that’s yours.

I see, then, in the sky blue of those suspicious eyes, an abandoned place in him, like a bombed-out building, where his passion had been. I also see his acknowledging the passion in me. Again he swishes his hand across my buzz cut, this time passing to me I’m not sure what. Though I will not conceive this for many years, it may be a shield behind which I will be safe from the betrayals that have stalked him.

At rehearsal the following week, the choirmaster was in top form: cajoling and inspiring us: accent the rhythm right here like so; listen now for the fifth above your tonic; sing this line especially loud because it really means what it says. I felt utterly whole. This was home, this feeling of getting on the train with map and compass and book, and then being taken who knew where. I realized that getting there was in the going: the enactment of the tune was its end.

That morning I met eyes and smiles with a girl named Molly. Molly’s was the face of exaltation. There was no dead-and-distant white-man-god that looked out glumly from her eyes. In the quivering of her throat, in the tune-trumpeting through her mouth, there was an implacable now, a voiced halo, pulsing its embryonic heart. It was human—the undivine—present, not displaced, not beyond. Suddenly I knew what Molly was sending me. The other half my father didn’t know or had purposely forgotten. Yes, the church brought us in to sing. "God’s house" has good acoustics because God no doubt likes to join in when the undivine create. But God is not the reason we have raised our voices. His presence is not responsible for how good we feel. Our bodies make the walls speak. Our vibration animates the stone. Whenever we sing, the union of music and words begins and ends with us. If any glory’s intended, it’s all our own.

That God could be irrelevant to passion was a distinction I don’t think my father realized. I can’t say for certain, but I think he could not have separated music from religion. Nor could anyone else—in his view. He would have thought that I, while young, could not have countered the church’s power, either; I would have first fused with, then, eventually, fought the doctrine as he had. Moreover, he never spoke about the church as a venue for song, the buildings as cathedrals or museums, the Bible as literature; he believed all passions were the same and would only lead to grief.

So, when he tossed out God and religion, out went art, music, and literature as well. Quitting the seminary was his way of brandishing St. George’s lance. And yet on those nights when he couldn’t sleep, when, sitting in his pajamas, he looked at the dark with a kind of labored indifference, undiscussed and profoundly private—before his mother died, I would see him in this state sometimes, when, as a teenager, I came in late from a dazzling evening at a foreign film or a jazz concert, and caught him in his ancient vulnerability, the thing in him I grew to cherish—I wondered whether he ever thought that by demonizing the church he had disenthralled himself from all spells.

His demons were not mine. Some code, either mine or in the force of the music, kept me from confusing the church with what sounded inside it. I continued to be entranced by music, going on to sing in other choirs, especially during high school where every morning for three years I sang with one hundred other voices in A Capella, "Away in a Manger" and George Gershwin show tunes, medieval part songs and Randall Thompson’s majestic "Choose Something Like a Star." I played the clarinet and the guitar, I wrote and performed music, solo and in groups. Along the way I was also seduced by writing, a loft only a tad less elevated than music. As well as I know anything, I know that once we—not all but most—have been pierced by the arrow of enchantment, whether by music or religion, by writing or literature, once the spell has been cast, many of us are so deeply pierced that we can never be broken. Yes, my father warned me, Don’t let them take anything that’s yours. But what was mine was a penchant not to argue with, but to live for, the sublime, the very thing the arrow awakened me to do.

It’s a paradox to be awakened to our enchantment. And yet the true quandary for me is that something as powerful as the church and its authority could kill the beautiful and its arousal in us. That the pain of such violence would be so great as to make the absence of enchantment more important than the risk of having it and losing it again. The wish to have never loved at all.

Though he may not have known it, my father made sure I kept the beautiful things of the world. He strengthened my sensibility by trying to take it from me. He was the dragon he warned me against, the armored horseman who dueled an enemy I have never had to fight.