Fear of Faggotry: Growing Up in the Seminary

I went in after eighth grade and came out seven years later. When I left, I was 21 years old, a virgin, scared stiff. I had never met a Jew; I had never been on a date; most of my cultural heroes had Saint affixed to their names.

Sometimes, the seminary seems almost like a dream, something I must have made up from mostly whole cloth. We never went home for Christmas. Our mail, both coming in and going out, was opened and read by a prefect of discipline. (Letters from girls were confiscated.) We slept in creaky dorms, in metal bunks, on rude wooden floors. Our showers were a couple of cement-block rooms slick with algae, and our toilets were three long rows of hoppers bolted to wooden runners on cracked concrete flooring. We called them jakes. The toilets had flimsy green-plywood dividers, no doors. The seminarians who had jake duty that week would come along after breakfast with buckets of industrial-strength ammonia and swab the room while you sat there. You could raise your feet or get your socks disinfected. We'd lean forward, past the plywood dividers, to talk to one another up and down the stalls. Even in my own house, it is hard for me to sit on a toilet now without wanting to bolt the door.

In my third year, the school would move to Virginia and we with it; by then, the Sixties--and all that word entails--had begun creeping in. But in the good years, 100 of us lived and prayed and studied for the Catholic priesthood at Holy Trinity, Alabama. Most of us had come from up North, from towns named Bayonne and Florham Park and Davenport. We were parish altar boys, daily communicants. We belonged to the only "the" Church, as comedian Lenny Bruce used to say with scorn. We were R.C.s. We wanted, all of us, to be priests. A few of us made it.

The seminary was sacred, and it was cruel. I remember warm May nights in the pergola, ten or 15 of us sitting in a U on green benches around the water cooler. We had a certain gleeful genius for spotting a ripe vulnerability, a hidden defect, then exposing it to group light. Maybe someone had a harelip, as someone did. Usually, our knife sessions were more good-natured than vicious, though every once in a while, something went wrong. Then it was as if a man sitting in a tower in a rail yard had switched us onto another track. Then our little cruelties were like child savageries: They had to run their course, as if in proof of Newton's law that when a thing is in motion, it stays in motion. At times like those, I remember thinking, Nobody gets out of here alive.

But there were other moments, too, of an almost iridescent softness. Several times each day, we went to chapel to murmur, in half-dreamy unison, "O most precious blood of Jesus / Oozing from every pore / Grant us the grace to love thee / Ever more and more." There was music, a loving, willing witchery, in that cadence.

•

Yet it is the riddle of celibacy, I suspect, that makes people want to peer into monastery and seminary lives--and that motivates writers who had once known a little of that life to try to tread a wire and perhaps make some dough out of the venture. Is sexual continence a form of heroism, a small voice wonders, or merely nonsense and musty Church rational? Do people put too much emphasis on getting laid? Probably. How do priests and nuns go without it? Aren't they really getting something on the side? When I was in the seminary, I thought those were foolish questions. And now that I've left and have tasted sex for myself, I find myself with the same voyeuristic impulse to know. How dare priests and nuns think they can go without it?

Nearly the whole time I was in, and for a long time after I left, I went through bouts of worry that the seminary had turned me into a latent homosexual and that it was only a matter of weeks or months or years before "it" came roaring out. Amid a navy of worries, that was easily my bulkiest boat. Usually, my worries were seasonal, coming in the fall and lasting into winter: and for years after I had left, when they still came at those times, I could never see the logic. I remember a woman named Becky, whom I was dating when I worked at a paper in Michigan. One night, she confronted me about homosexuality in the dark of her Grosse Pointe driveway. "Paul, are you worried for some reason that you might be gay?" she said. I had been out of the seminary eight years by then, had been married and separated, was in the final stages of a prolonged and guilt-ridden divorce. I thought of myself, nonetheless, as something of a Detroit rake, making up for lost time. Becky and I had been going out for several months, and her question, seemingly from nowhere, knocked me flat.

"Why, noooo!" I said, sounding, I imagine, a little like Don Knotts in those man-on-the-street routines from the old Steve Allen TV show. (Allen to high-wire walker: "Are you nervous, sir?" High-pitched blurt: "Nooo!") How had she found out?

In the seminary, the worry about catching homosexuality was the size of a Buick. There were times when I was sure I was fated. But by my third year of studies, an odd, antithetical pattern had become apparent: In June, home for the summer for several weeks, I would discover that my fantasies and images about sex were reverting to the heterosexual. It was flooding relief, if also constant torment for the confession box. "Hey, I'm no queer," I'd tell myself, like some punked-up street-corner Eye-talian sharpie, practically ecstatic over my ability to get erections in the back of a dirty Chicago bookstore as I stood in creepy light beside men three times my age.

One vacation, after my folks had gone north to our cottage in Wisconsin, leaving me at home with the cocker spaniel, the second car and a refrigerator full of TV dinners, I drove into downtown Chicago and took a room, presumably for the night, at a cheap hotel on a side street near the old La Salle Street railway depot. I was 19 and between my fifth and sixth years of seminary study. That summer, I was working at the printing plant owned by Mr. Carmody, an outstanding Catholic layman from my home parish who had made room for a seminarian in his factory. He had even offered to take me to work every morning and drop me off every afternoon.

When he dropped me off on that particular Friday, my lustful odyssey in night town had already been formulated. I bathed, talcked, got into my mint-green shirt and skinny black tie and the checkered sports coat one of my brothers had left behind a year earlier when he had joined the Coast Guard. I couldn't do anything about my seminary lawn-mower haircut. I fed the dog, locked the house. I pulled out of the driveway certain that something important was going to happen.

As I pulsed down the Congress Street Expressway into the Loop, I don't believe I was consciously working through exactly why I wanted to rent a room and what I might do there. I had never rented a room in a hotel before. Just doing that on my own in a city the size of Chicago seemed its own tawdry thrill. Years later, I would write a short story--I called it Lust at the Hotel Atlantic--about that night:

"I said you look scared as hell." She was tugging at his arm on the fringe of the crowd.

After they had freed themselves from the crowd, they began to walk up the avenue. She just fell in alongside of him. He choked down his nervousness and began to tell her about his trip to the city and the excitement of being on his own, and she said she had picked him for an out-of-towner, all right. He was careful not to mention the seminary but said, instead, he had finished his fifth year at Staunton, a military school in Virginia (he had looked it up once), and that he was thinking of going on to West Point in another year. She cut him off.

"Listen, if you've got a room here, like you said, why don't we buy some beer and go up there and drink?"

He could scarcely believe his luck. She liked him. She was attracted to him. He remembered opening the door to the room a little while later with the feeling he had already done something terribly sinful. He raised the one small, curtainless window and turned on the small rotating fan above the dresser. There were exposed pipes running the length of the ceiling, and these made the room look even narrower and more confining than it was. The place smelled vaguely of old wine or maybe a combination of wine and urine. They opened the six-pack. The metallic taste of the beer combined with his nervousness to give him a heady feeling fast. He felt sick. He excused himself. He went down the hall and found the bathroom and tried to throw up. When he came back, she was lying on the bed in her slip, a beer can resting on her flat belly. The white-rubber clips that held up her stockings were just visible where her slip was hiked up. He felt excited and nauseous and resolute. He went over to the bed and kissed her on the mouth, while a dizzy throbbing began in his temples. She liked him. She was attracted to him. Her fingers were white and his toes were cold and then she began pulling at his shirt.

Nothing remotely like that ever happened to me while I was a seminarian. The story, awful as it was, was written as part of a novel for Professor Knoepfle's college creative-writing class. I didn't finish the novel and the world has not been poorer. I still have the story, as I still have my old seminary steamer trunk, which is now antique green and serves as a coffee table in the living room.

The real story of my hot white night in Chicago that summer, my ravenous prowl of the city, is that it was a bust. Guilt and shame got me once more, though not until I had gorged myself for several hours on dirty movies and dirty magazines and Wimpy burgers. By ten o'clock, I was speeding, with an erection so prolonged my testicles ached. I bought a ticket to another soft-porn movie. Outside the theater were gaudy cutouts of seminaked women. I don't remember the name of the movie, but I remember coming out afterward onto South State Street in vapored light and smelling hot pizza from an open stand. The light was like weak tea in a clear glass. Then I went to a bar and took a table near the door and watched a young woman fiercely (continued on page 140) Fear of Faggotry(continued from page 104) arguing with a man much older than she was. The woman got off her stool, crushing her cigarette, cursing the man. She turned and walked straight toward me and, for an instant, I knew she was going to sit down at my table. She was only going for the door, but even after I realized that, it took me several minutes to stop trembling.

It was too late to go over to Saint Peter's church on Madison and blurt out my sins in the darkness of a box to a voice I didn't know. The Franciscan fathers who heard confessions there wouldn't be back in their stalls until morning. I walked through pale shadows to the hotel, where I undressed and lay with the light on, my chest thumping like Poe's telltale heart, about to pound through the floor boards. I stared at the overhead pipes. I tried to fall asleep. Ruin and damnation would come to me; I was a sinner beyond saving. One day, the police would find my crumpled body in a smashed car along the barricade of an expressway, and in the wallet of poor, dead Paul Hendrickson would be an I.D. linking his squalid present to his Camelot past. Paul Hendrickson, the news accounts would say, had once studied for the Catholic priesthood.

Shortly after midnight, I got up, dressed, rode the elevator to the empty lobby and walked straight up to the clerk. "Sir," I said, "I've just gotten word that my mother is very ill. I'm going to have to leave. But please don't worry about refunding my money. Here's your key." I turned on my heel and walked out.

By one o'clock, I was back in my own dark, silent suburban bed. On my way home, I prayed I wouldn't get creamed by a drunk on the expressway. The next afternoon, in the Saturday box at my parish, came the real orgy--of remorse. The priest seemed somewhere between amused and shocked. He recognized my voice and knew that I was a seminarian. "Are you sure you're praying to the Blessed Mother to overcome your problems with purity?" he said.

"Yes, Father," I murmured, grateful once again for the dark.

•

By fall, back at school six weeks or so, I would be both distressed and stoked with secret joy to find myself physically stimulated, tingled, by certain of my fellow seminarians. Those tingles could come from the "accidental" brush of my arms and legs, going up for rebounds on the gym floor; from the seemingly special import invested in traded punches or shared jokes or passed desserts at table in the refectory. Not that I was feeling those tingles from just any seminarian and not that my brain was flooded purely with homophile images. We still talked an awful lot about girls. (Plus, we had books to find women in, and I was a ceaseless reader. For some reason, the prefect let me keep James Michener's Hawaii, and I can remember to this moment my profound excitement over a passage in that novel about a ship's captain who reclined on his back while a plenitude of island girls worked on him at once. My imagination had not conjured up such a thing.) Generally, my attention seemed directed toward a select three or four seminatians every year; my subconscious must have done the preselecting. Sometimes, they were seminatirans older that I, though more often, they were younger boys who tended to the fair-skinned and the slight-framed. At turns, I could feel jealousy, ardor, anger and protectiveness for them. The prefects knew about such hidden emotions in us, I believe, and watched us like cats from a perch. No one talked about it. And I could stop neither my feelings nor my shame.

In my first several years, I particularly idolized a seminarian named Butch Evans. Butch was four years ahead of me and was probably the best-liked student in the school. We used to say it was impossible for a parent or a guest to get onto the seminary property without having Butch come up and stick his hand out. I wanted to pass him my desserts; I wanted to fold his laundry during work periods; I wanted to get letters from him on vacation. (I did and saved them all; the two of us were laughing over some of them a while ago.) At the same time, I should say, I have encountered a sizable number of my old schoolmates who insist that they never once, the whole time they were in, felt a physical stimulation, much less an erection, of the kind I am writing about here--and they can say it without sounding like Don Knotts parked in a Michigan driveway. But enough others, I think, were secretly fretting as much as I was about what they seemed to be turning into. There were times when I could have asked somebody to dance-- had I known how, had there been waltzes.

Too often, I think, we were given to understand our sexuality as the enemy of chastity--if we were given to understand it at all. The other day, as I thumbed through a folder labeled Purity/Sex that I have been keeping for some time now, I came across the following: it is not from my seminary but from a document privately published by the Province of St. Augustine of the Capuchin Order in Pittsburgh: "Of course the case may occur of a boy who commits a sin with a girl while home on vacation, and I should be inclined to think that psychologically this would be a greater deterrent to the advancement to the priesthood than the sin of sodomy, even though the latter is a graver transgression of God's laws from the theological standpoint." Odd sentiment, but then we were in an odd atmosphere.

And last year, in a talk with one of my old seminary prefects, I raised the subject of homosexuality. He told me it had officially been handed down to him from above that he was to boot out, on the first transgression, with no chance for excuse, any student caught in an overt homosexual act. But between unequivocal "perverty" behavior and, say, the light, fevered brush against somebody's arm on a divan lay a multitude of point shaving. For me, things could be more than they seemed and look less. It was seeking without knowing or, at least, acknowledging. It was whether and how and why. I have this image now of a fierce, humming sensuality among us, a blooded presence, while up above, where we wore our smiles, there were only our piety and camaraderie and bonhomie. Some will say that is too stark, and maybe it is.

And yet at least one seminarian from my time has told me that he used to be in bed in his parents' farmhouse in Arkansas those first five or six months after he had left and contemplate his suicide. He had decided to put a shotgun into his mouth and pull the trigger with a string looped to his toe, if it came to that. He was blackly depressed about everything, and some of that, he suspects now, lay in his sexual confusion. He remembers getting an erection nearly every time he got near a classmate with smooth features and a Florida tan. In time, the depression went away. On the night I saw him, he was finishing law school, was an editor of his law review and was being courted by the best firms in the country. He was married and a Vietnam veteran. He said he was an atheist and then corrected himself and said he was probably an agnostic: He can't prove God doesn't exist. Almost immediately after he had left, he had experienced a rejection of his faith--part repudiation, he suspects, part defense mechanism. "The whole Catholic thing (continued on page 200)Fear of Faggotry(continued from page 140) is so far away," he said, with a kind of dreaminess, when I tried to press for something more.

Someone else from the seminary--someone I trust implicitly--told me he once spied on one of our old teachers and a boy in the trunk room below the pool at the new seminary. My friend was in charge of the pool, and he had gone down to the trunk room to sneak a cigarette when he came on this scene: A priest got around behind the boy, then slid his hands down the front of the boy's pants. When I heard that story, I wasn't so much surprised as sad for what the three of them must have felt afterward.

I don't know many stories like that one. A priest who had served as prefect longer than anyone else at the seminary told me recently he can recall only four or five students in his entire tenure getting dismissed for homosexuality. I can believe that. One felt all kinds of odd things and didn't dare act on them. How in hell did you tell your confessor that you felt aroused from touching someone's arm and you wanted to do it again? I now suspect that most of the "fruity" things going on among us in the seminary were simply youthful rites of passage. Was it more than that? Was some of it what clinicians call transitory homosexuality? I don't know; I am not a clinician. So far as I know, no one ever staged what is rudely but accurately known by some young boys as a "circle jerk." We were too old for circle jerks, and besides, that would have been too much up front. Our sexuality was more hidden. It has been fully documented by now, of course, that many preadolescents and adolescents go through a phase during which they are strongly attracted to their own sex and engage in experimental homosexual activity. In most cases, the attraction is arrested, and the youths can go on later to heterosexual relationships. There are blurred special feelings that simply exist, I think, between males and other males, and I believe that if you have lived a significant portion of your boyhood in a school composed of uppers and lowers, heroes and goats, boys of beauty and boys of brawn, it is almost impossible not to have experienced at times something lingering and something far deeper and more quizzical than the word friendship suggests.

•

And yet no amount of amateur hindsight will explain how and why 100 boys coped, dug in, got by. Got by? Most of us were nuts for the place. We dreamed of being fishers of men. We were going to be preservers of the faith. That was the motto of my old order: ad fidem servandam. For preserving the faith. The dream had many colors, but the primary color was ever thus: getting chrismed with oils so you could go out to win souls for Christ.

The seminary was strange in lots of ways, yes, but it was also spiritual and mystical--deeply so. There was awe there. I never knew the former so much as I intuitively understood the latter. I know dozens of priests and brothers from my old religious order and from other religious orders who seem neither unhappy nor maladjusted. The point. I believe, is not hindsight but the skein of sexual memory. And here is one:

Every seminarian was required to have a spiritual director, and toward the spring of my first year, feeling that I needed more personal attention than I had been getting from the man who had been appointed the school's over-all director, I went to a priest on the faculty and asked if he would direct me in my spiritual life. He inquired what my aims for direction were, asked me about some other things, including the problems I felt I had with the sixth commandment, then said he would be willing to start seeing me every week or so. Either of us could drop the sessions if we felt they weren't working out. About a month after I began going to that priest, something odd and ambiguous began taking place.

I would go in, sit in a chair beside his desk, talk for a short while, await his nod, unzip my trousers, take out my penis, rub it while I allowed impure thoughts to flow through my brain and, at the point at which I felt myself fully large and close to an emission, say, "Father, I'm ready now." He would then reach over and hand me a black wooden crucifix. That crucifix, narrow and heavy and with a gold skull at the base of Christ's feet, had been presented to my director some years before, as was the custom, by the head of the order. The cross was a part of the religious habit of the ordained men in the order, and when preaching at a retreat or a day of recollection, a priest customarily inserted it inside his cincture. At my full erection before him in his room, my director would reach over and hand me the Mission Cross (that was its formal name) and nod, and I would then begin reciting the various reasons I wished to conquer that temptation: because God had blessed me with a vocation, because He had chosen to give me good health, a fine family, a sound mind. I always held the cross beside my penis--one hand on the crucifix, the other on my erect organ. Having thus systematically provoked myself to the ledge of mortal sin and having let myself teeter there, I was now just as systematically talking the temptation down. Literally. The power of the crucified savior in my left hand was overpowering the evils of impurity and the world in my right.

I participated in that ritual, more or less willingly, from the time I was 15 until I was past 20 and getting ready to enter my year of novitiate. When he first brought up the idea, I had found it repelling, scary. After a time, I could take my exposures as a matter of course, of curriculum, almost; something I simply did, weekly or biweekly, like writing home or cleaning a locker--almost. If I never completely got used to it, I think I can say I never really despised it, either, at least not until the end. In the middle years, the act achieved a kind of weird normalcy for me, a sort of calendar to my schedule. I think I began to view it just as he had promised I would: as a legitimate tool to help me temper my impure thoughts and desires, which often seemed to be raging out of control. I badly wanted to acquire the habit of purity, the dominion over myself. I knew that grace built on nature and I had to do my part.

Before it was over, I was rising from my bed in the middle of the night, putting on my cassock and going down the darkened, tomblike stairs to tell him that I had just awakened from a dream involving myself and three women with fantastic breasts (residue from Michener's novel) and that I was now sorely tempted to self-abuse. I would knock softly, and in a moment he would appear--barefoot, puffy-eyed, paternal. I could see the bottom of his pajamas sticking out from under his habit. He would nod, stand aside for me to enter. He would snap on the small light by his desk and we would go through our brinkmanship. I would get his blessing and return to bed.

This is important: As many times as I performed in the scene over nearly six years--and I performed in it maybe 150 times--I never once saw or felt him studying me with what seemed like an erotic urge or lustful desire. I think I would have known. Could he have hidden his true intentions that long? It didn't make any sense for him to be a pervert, though in truth, I had only a shaky notion of what a pervert was. In the first few months, I was like a cat, on guard against him. Although I had placed him in charge of my spiritual life, and though he carried considerable weight on the faculty (which doubtless had something to do with why I had chosen him), I was still prepared to bolt out the door and maybe out of the school if the least overt movement, or even grin, had slid from him. But he was never anything but proper, and, perverse as it sounds, my scores of near-orgasms (miraculous to say, the worst never happened: Somehow, I could always rein in at the critical moment of my throbbing light show) appeared then and, indeed, appear now, in only a devout context.

He would seem almost uninterested, restless, as I went about rubbing myself, getting large. And this was the confusing part: What would have been un-arguably a sin 20 feet outside his room could take place here, under conditions of immediate amnesty. It was as if my getting an erection were the warm-up; he waited for the game. Sometimes, he watched me; more often, he turned to his desk and took up papers or his divine office. Always he sat in the chair behind his desk, and always I sat in the green easy chair adjacent to the desk. Only at the moment when I felt myself close to an emission and said so did he begin to grow alert, solicitous. Hunched forward, arms on his knees, face behind wisps of smoke, he would be poised within two or three feet of my blue-veined and throbbing adolescent self, nodding intently as I tried to row the boat back to shore. Each time, he would urge me to plumb for deeper spiritual meanings why we were doing this, metaphysical reasons why I wished to conquer evil, reject Satan, that father of sin and Prince of Darkness. It was a surreal pilgrimage we were on, a search for the weirdest grail, and I think I can see now that he may have been bringing himself to the same ledge to which he was bringing me. It was as if we were accompanying each other on a dark, relentless odyssey of Augustinian self-scrutiny. It was a kind of scientific rationalism, it almost seems now: pragmatic, American. It was as if I had delivered up myself, body and soul, to a spiritual caretaker. I can recall feeling numerous times a profound sense of communion, a conviction that I had stumbled on the right man in the right place at the right moment in my life. Although I have since thought about all of it hard and long, though I have discussed the scene in detail with a psychiatrist--who agrees that things do not always have to be what they seem and who adds that a sort of canny behavior-modification therapy seemed to be at work, but who also says that it is one of the oddest things he has ever heard--I can still reach no conclusions about what was going on.

By the middle of my sixth year, soon to graduate to the order's novitiate in another state, I simply knew that I didn't want to do it anymore. My exposures had begun all over again to seem repelling. Besides, I was becoming sure they were clinically and theologically improbable: rolling to the edge of delicious, exempted pleasure, pulling up short. But how to tell him? It would be like announcing an apostasy: After all, we had been in this thing together for half a decade, had grown in it together. To complicate things, my director had a short fuse on his temper. I wasn't sure how he'd react. At 15 and still relatively new to the seminary, my conflict had been over a man representing the person of Christ--in a Mission Cross I coveted for my own someday--telling me something was right that seemed inherently insane. At 20, with some stature in the school, I could no longer suspend disbelief. I just wanted out. I remember trying for several weeks to argue both sides of it with myself, deciding alternately that it was sound pastoral therapy and the worst theological perversion. The more I debated it, the more confused I felt: Typically, I was trying to overuse my intellectual defenses against my emotional conflicts. At length, I decided on a kind of truce with myself: Maybe the scene was OK, but I wasn't going to perform in it anymore.

When I finally found the nerve to tell him, his response was an immediate "That's fine, Paul." I remember exactly how he said it--with a small "of course" in his voice, as if he perfectly agreed and was wondering why it had taken me so long to say so. It was as if I had just guessed how many peas were in the Mason jar, when the number had been pasted on the bottom all along. And he never brought it up again. The ritual was canceled, erased. I saw him for direction for another several months, until school was out, and nothing remotely like that ever happened again. In a dream one night, I began to wonder whether or not I had dreamed it all up.

•

Six years out of the seminary, between writing jobs on newspapers, married and separated and wanting to fall in love again, I flew to a town in the South for a visit with an old seminary friend. He, too, had once had the same man for spiritual direction, and maybe that was the subconscious reason I had gone to visit him. Sometimes, the two of us would pass each other in the hall in the seminary--he leaving spiritual direction, I going to it. I used to wonder, You, too? But I never asked him.

One afternoon during my visit, we played a hard game of one-on-one full-court basketball, then sprawled on the grass beside the court, shirts and tongues out. I was trying to spin the ball on my finger tip.

"Say, when you used to go see Father --, did anything different ever happen?"

There was only a millisecond of delay, then insane laughter and the two of us rolling back and forth on the grass, pounding each other. Later that day, still giddy with delight, we devised an elaborate and sacrilegious outline for a play in which a devout seminarian, in a Pavlovian response, gets an erection every time he enters a church and sees Christ hanging on a cross. (To cure the malady, his doctor decides he must go outside the bounds of medicine. He prescribes a cast-iron jock.) It was wicked. Sancta malitia. Holy malice. We were having ours.

I know of no other such scene that ever took place between a spiritual director and a seminarian while I was in the seminary. But it went on with that particular priest and some of the boys he saw. One of my old seminary friends, someone several years ahead of me, a police officer now, a gentle and skilled man and a deep believer in God, told me he had once spilled his seed willfully in front of that priest. We were sitting in a restaurant when he told me. I was forking down meat loaf and mashed potatoes. "How did you feel?" I asked, sputtering it a little, grateful for the sense of sanity I was suddenly feeling.

"Well," he said, "at first I said, 'But, Father, I can't do that. It's a mortal sin.' And he said, 'I will take full responsibility.' So I shrugged and went ahead. To tell the truth, it didn't feel much different from the rest of it." And just then, I knew what he meant: Sometimes, heresy is simply truth out of proportion. Maybe that explains why I could do it for so long. On the other hand, maybe I was enjoying it without really knowing. Maybe it provided a greater release than I knew. Most of the time now, when I think back on it and try to sort it out, it seems more like bawdy comedy than anything else.

Some boys who went to that priest declined to participate, and apparently, that was fine. But most of us who went bought the ranch and, uncannily, kept the secret. That is one of the more remarkable things about it, I think: Why didn't more people find out? Why didn't a whistle get blown? I think there was a profound level of trust, as well as fear, operating. Also, it was part of something called the Internal Form; the checks and balances of the system didn't apply there. I have since tried out the story on a few of my old schoolmates who, I had a hunch, had always been blissfully unaware that such a passion play was being acted out behind closed doors; at least one told me to my face that I was either crazy or lying. Perhaps what was running through the minds of all of us who went weekly or biweekly to the easy chair was an unthinkable thought: Could I be the only one? Some boys, I've since learned, talked of it among themselves. Not me. Thinking the unthinkable bought my silence.

I have traveled a fair piece these past few years to make peace with that story--and I haven't made it yet. Twice I have gone to visit that man. On each occasion, I found him warm and sincere and painstaking, someone who seemed genuinely interested to know the various paths my life had taken since I left the seminary. Each time, I found myself scared and vulnerable. I went with the express purpose of asking about our old recital together, and each time, I lost my nerve. Once, I brought the conversation right up to the lip of asking and at the last second, skittered away. I'm not exactly sure why, though I hope some of it was out of reluctance to hurt or embarrass him. But also, there seemed in his eyes not the least flicker of anxiety or self-doubt or embarrassment or hostility, any more than there had once seemed a flicker of lust, and I wondered whether he would look at me uncomprehendingly were I to bring it up. After all, 20-odd years had flowed between our lives since the first time I had performed the scene for him.

One day, I sat down and wrote him a long letter. I wrote it in a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after I had plied myself with wine. I wrote it straight through, without pausing to look back at sentences. I said that I had been fretting over the matter for some time and that I regretted very much not being able to ask him about it face to face. I told him I would never use his name in anything I wrote about the matter for publication and that, in fact, I would try to do some minor disguising but that I would be grateful if he could try to express his reasoning then and his feelings now. He wrote back two weeks later. I didn't open the letter for several days, just let it stare at me from the shelf above my typewriter. "Who's the letter from?" my wife asked casually.

"Oh, someone in connection with the book," I said.

When I did open it, bracing for his temper, I was caught off guard by the letter's tone: Not only was it not angry or defensive, it sounded contrite, though not pleading. My old director said he had been motivated by the idea of impurity as the worst sin of all and the chief obstacle to a vocation; by a desire to help ease the guilt feelings of young boys who in most cases had never received adequate sex orientation at home. He said the act had taken place in an era following the Kinsey report, when some new approaches to guidance were being tried in pastoral circles. "My desire to assist and preserve the vocation contributed to the confusion under which I was working and searching," he wrote. He said that self-gratification had never occurred to him. He said that later, away from the environment, he had realized the dangerous and unhealthy means he had employed.

He died last year. I might say that I forgive him for his part in this node of seminary history, except I feel there is nothing to forgive, at least if a man is to be judged more by his intentions than by his actions. Actions have consequences, but finally, I side with intentions. Why, I have lately been wondering, should we want men in the celibate life to be more than they humanly are? If temptation didn't exempt Christ himself. . . .

•

I guess I have been wondering something else as well: Why didn't my seminary become one big, floating fairy boat? I suppose the resiliency of kids is part of the answer; you can subject them to almost anything and they'll survive. That my seminary was a far cry from a boat of fairies is not difficult to recall. That the friendships formed in those first couple of years at Holy Trinity, Alabama, were true and lasting and deep is not hard to remember. One felt all sorts of odd things, yes, but despite them, there was a manliness, a ruggedness to the place that I haven't seen again in precisely the same way. I have heard that quality spoken of as "missionary impact," but the ruggedness was more internal than external. It wasn't macho that one was tapping into; it was a sinewy spiritual toughness, perhaps of the kind that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that fierce Christian, had referred to when he said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." Bonhoeffer ended by dying for his spiritual freedom.

But though this character of spiritual strength was more inside than out, the real secret of my seminary may have lain in its primitivism--the very thing the order was trying to rid itself of when it moved, in a new decade, to civilization and new facilities in Virginia. I can recall how, at our squeaky-clean and glass-enclosed $2,500,000 seminary, students seemed to be scattering for the outdoors every chance they got: The steel-and-brick terrarium couldn't hold them. Down in Alabama, nature had rolled at us like a boulder. That hicky, leaky school that nobody had ever heard of was never a place for soft people, though much softness was there. When we were there, we thought of ourselves as wise and tough, when actually, we were just sophomoric and scared. We didn't know who we were. We were just on a road to somewhere. But the place was a huge ripe adventure, and there was the sense that all of us were in it together. Ideally, at least, we had gone down there with the dream of someday helping people, serving them. We threw ourselves toward that dream and that adventure. The Holy Ghost was down there, too, at Holy Trinity, Alabama, but his presence and exactly what he did are harder to describe.

Holy Trinity is dead now, at least as a seminary. All that remains of it from my time are the old wooden gym and the chapel that was milled from lumber cut right on the property. But nothing that is good is ever completely lost, I believe. In other ways, Holy Trinity is alive. Perhaps I am thinking just now of evening benediction, when one of the priests would lift a glittering spiked monstrance from the altar, wrap it in the satin cape that was draped around his shoulders and bunched in his hands, turn and pass our Lord before our eyes, while tallow dripped and floor fans whirred and the subtropical stillness seemed deafening. The monstrance, encasing the pale Host, spangled like sun-white gold, and it was at such moments I was sure, and no longer suspected, that I was at the epicenter of Something. For now, though, I keep searching.

"The prefects knew about such hidden emotions in us, I believe, and watched us like cats from a perch."

"About a month after I began going to that priest, something odd and ambiguous began taking place."