Underworld

singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

'If you'd been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you'd have visions too.'

I went to see Father in his office later in the day. It was a three-hundred-yard walk through a billowing white storm. I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorms and open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experience.

Father started talking before I had my jacket off.

'It's when the hair in my nostrils begins going stiff. That's when I want to retire to the south of France.'

'The snow on the parade.'

'Yes, I know.'

'The benches are buried.'

'Yes,' he said.

'I realized, just out the window there, I was walking over a bench.'

'Yes. Sit down, Shay, and tell me how you're doing. A young man's progress. That's the title of this session.'

'I borrowed a pair of boots.'

He liked that response.

'Do they fit?'

'No.'

Even better. When he asked about the state of my mind and soul, which he did only rarely, and when I answered on a practical plane, as I always did, he seemed to think I was devising a down-to-earth reply out of some manly instinct when in fact I was only confused, forever trying to put together a suitable set of words.

'What are you reading?'

I recited a list.

'Itbu understand what's in those books?'

'No,' I said.

Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He'd done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who'd made trouble for themselves and others.

'Some of it maybe. What I don't understand, I memorize.'

His arm was propped on the desk and he leaned his head into the canted hand. No smile this time,

'That's not why we started this place, is it?'

'I study like a madman, Father.'

'But you can't memorize ideas the way you do the endings of Latin verbs.'

His hands were unspotted and small. Some of the other jebbies wore flannel shirts and heavy sweaters but Father Paulus was not influenced by climate or geography or the sense of special freedoms at Voyageur. He went black-suited and roman-collared and I respected this and found it reassuring.

'One of the things we want to do here is to produce serious men. What sort of phenomenon is this? Not so easy to say. Someone, in the end, who develops a certain depth, a spacious quality, say, that's a form of respect for other ways of thinking and believing. Let us unnar-row the basic human tubing. And let us help a young man toward an ethical strength that makes him decisive, that shows him precisely who he is, Shay, and how he is meant to address the world.'

You were always afraid of disappointing Father, being unequal to the level of discourse. Being bland when he wanted a more spirited sort of traffic, even a bullshit act, wiseass and slouchy. Bland and plodding when he wanted independence and open argument.

'My own life, I confess-yes, why not, you'll hear my confession, Shay. Who better than you? Took me all these years to understand that I'm not a serious man. Too much irony, too much vanity, too little what-I don't know, a lot of things. And no rage, you see. Or a small ingrown toenail rage, a puny frustration. Eventually you get to know these things. Do you act out of principle? Or do you devise self-justifying reasons for your bad behavior? This is my confession, not yours, so you're not required to come up with answers. Not yet anyway. Eventually, yes. You'll know in your heart how well you've met the calling to be a man.'

'No rage,' I said. 'What do you mean?'

'No rage. Rage and violence can be elements of productive tension in a soul. They can serve the fullness of one's identity. One way a man untrivializes himself is to punch another man in the mouth.'

I must have looked at him.

'You can't doubt this, can you? I don't like violence. It scares the hell out of me. But I think I see it as an expanding force in a personality. And I think a man's ability to act in opposition to his tendencies in this direction can be a source of virtue, a statement of his character and forbearance.'

'So what do you do? Punch the guy in the mouth or resist the urge?'

'Point well taken. I don't have the answer. You have the answer,' he said. 'But how serious can a man be if he doesn't experience a full measure of the appetites and passions of his race, even if only to contain them or direct them, somehow, usefully?'

Who better than you to hear me confess? He'd said that, hadn't he? Someone who's been in correction. Someone who has the answer. Of course I had nothing that resembled an answer and wondered why he thought I carried a stain of special knowledge for having done what I'd done.

'Have you come across the word velleity? A nice Thomistic ring to it. Volition at its lowest ebb. A small thing, a wish, a tendency. If you're low-willed, you see, you end up living in the shallowest turns and bends of your own preoccupations. Are we getting anywhere?'

'It's your confession, Father.'

His office was in an old barracks building and the force of the wind made the beams shift and crick.

'Aquinas said only intense actions will strengthen a habit. Not mere repetition. Intensity makes for moral accomplishment. An intense and persevering will. This is an element of seriousness. Constancy. This is an element. A sense of purpose. A self-chosen goal. Tell me I'm babbling. I'll respect you for it.'

We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order-except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain unclean-ness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits.

'Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from.'

This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.

'Those are ugly things, aren't they?'

'Yes they are.'

'Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face.'

'Name the parts,' I said. 'All right. Laces.'

'Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed.'

I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.

'Sole and heel.'

'Yes, go on.'

I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.

'Proceed, boy.'

'There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top.'

'A front and a top. You make me want to weep.'