Americana

decide to work late and stay in the city overnight, we'll all understand.'

St. Dymphna's was located in southwestern New Hampshire and it was a nice place to be educated. It was quiet and picturesque. The leaves turned color in autumn and there was plenty of snow in winter. Everybody dressed neatly. Here and there a building was showing signs of falling apart but this didn't bother anybody; it was one of the traditions of the well-bred Northeast. The staff, wholly Episcopalian clergy at one time, now included many laymen, a few Unitarian ministers, a Duck River Baptist, and a lovable Irish janitor named Petey who was always challenging freshmen to identify the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The student body was composed almost wholly of cynical little anti-religious boys. My guidance counselor was a layman and on Reciprocity Day he introduced himself to my mother and father.

'My name is Thomas Fearing. My clubs are the Millbrook Golf and Tennis, the Rhinebeck Tennis and Saddle, the Players of New York, the Nassau of Princeton, the Princeton of New York, and the Church Street Social of Millbrook.'

'Most impressive,' my father said.

During my third year a controversy developed. There was a boy on the basketball team named Brad Dennis who used to make the sign of the cross before taking foul shots. Brad's mother was a very militant Roman Catholic and apparently she had not only ordered him to bless himself before taking foul shots but had also told him that St. Dymphna was an exclusively Catholic saint and that the Episcopalians, as nice and neat as they were, had no claim to her patronage and absolutely no right to use her name in connection with one of their prep schools, as fine and proper as that school might be. Brad spread the word and for his trouble got himself black-belted on the ass by the dean of discipline. This only aroused him to greater fervor and to an early-Christian lust for martyrdom. I began to get interested. Brad was like an anarchist running loose in the Pentagon. He distributed literature published by the Knights of Columbus and he offered to debate anyone his age on the relative merits of the world's great religions. Some of us would meet illegally in his room after lights-out to hear him discourse on the transubstantiation and papal infallibility. It was evident that some of his zeal was being transmitted to the small circle of disciples which had gathered about him. The student body began to take sides and the subjects of free speech and the right to proselytize soon became the main topics of conversation. Since the faculty knew little or nothing of Brad's post- flogging activities, there was an exciting underground feeling to those days. Many sided with Brad simply because of his run-in with the dean of discipline, who was known as the Son of Dracula and was universally feared and despised. Others seemed genuinely interested in the doctrines he promulgated. Those who were against him called him a papist, a crossback, an anti-intellectual and a pissyhole. I decided it was time for me to get to the root of the controversy and that was St. Dymphna herself. I asked Brad for one of his leaflets. It was put out by the Franciscan Missions and it had these words on the front page:

ST. DYMPHNA

(pronounced dimf-nah)

PATRONESS OF THOSE AFFLICTED

WITH NERVOUS DISORDERS

AND MENTAL ILLNESS

'The Nervous Breakdown Saint'

It turned out that St. Dymphna had been born in Ireland, the only child of the pagan king of Oriel. When her mother died, Dymphna's father decided to seek a second wife. Ultimately he concluded there was only one female worthy enough-his own daughter. Dymphna, who had been baptized by a priest of the church, was fourteen years old. With all the persuasiveness he could muster, the king outlined his scheme to his trembling daughter. Dymphna sought safety in flight, settling finally in Belgium along with her confessor. Spies, however, traced the exiles' route and it all ended when the king drew his sword and struck off the head of his only child. In time, many people with mental problems were cured due to the intercession of St. Dymphna, whose fame as the nervous breakdown saint gradually spread from Belgium to Ireland and thence to almost every corner of the globe.

The story fascinated me. I felt much the same way I would months later when Jane would read her YWCA notes on the primitive religions of the world. All those magnificently demented people made me feel small and well-dressed. I even liked St. Dymphna's father. I pictured him with a red beard, drinking mead from a ram's horn and secretly worrying about his masculinity. I went to Brad Dennis' room to return the leaflet and hopefully to engage in a fiery conversation about science, religion and eternity. Miles Warren was in there with Brad. Miles, fresh from two weeks of atheism, was the most brilliant student at St. Dymphna's. When I gave Brad the leaflet and told him how much I had liked the story of St. Dymphna, he said he had given me the wrong material. This is a childish piece of whimsy, he said. With that, he handed me a booklet titled Some Preliminary Concepts of Metaphysical Psychology.

'The Little Sisters of the Poor are the only people who believe that kid stuff about virgin saints,' he said. 'The modern Catholic is a hard-nosed kind of guy who asks piercing questions. The whole thing can be brought down to a question of metaphysics and first principles. Whatever is, is.'

'What about the Inquisition?' Miles said.

'The modern Catholic isn't afraid of that question anymore.'

'What about all those popes who had wives and mistresses?' Miles said.

'Speaking retroactively, we can say they weren't truly part of the mystical body of Christ in the doctrinal sense. It's like the lying and cheating General Motors does. You still need cars.'

'If a tree falls in the forest,' Miles said, 'and there's no one around to hear it fall, does that tree in fact make a sound when it hits earth or is the phenomenon of sound contingent on the presence of someone or something which possesses the faculty of hearing? Is the absolute dependent on an agent who can interpret it? Or is the absolute what the word itself implies? The question is as old as Plato.'

'Whatever is, is,' Brad said.

The best part of prep school was suiting up for a baseball or basketball game. I loved that phrase- suiting up. We would sit around the locker room mentally preparing ourselves for the game. We had all read about pro football players who become so tense prior to kickoff that they get sick to the stomach. There was a kid on our basketball team named Rich Higgins who would always go into the small toilet just off the locker room and try to throw up. He never got any further than the dry heaves but it made us feel good to know that one of our teammates was so affected by the impending contest that he was in the toilet with his finger down his throat. As soon as Rich Higgins returned, drained of emotion if nothing else, Coach Emery would say: 'This is it! Let's suit up!' And we would all suit up. It was more fun to suit up for baseball games because there was more to wear. Brad Dennis was the shortstop on the baseball team. He never blessed himself, as he did in basketball, but with his bat he used to make the sign of the cross in the dirt just outside the batter's box before he stepped in to hit. He batted eighth in the order, which brought about a mild complaint from his mother.

* * *

America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.

Numbers matter less now that the adding machines, the super-calculators, the numerical systems and sub- systems have been uninvented. However, thinking back, I recall how important it was for me, personally, to define a situation, or a period of time, with as many numbers as I could assemble. They seemed the very valets of clarity. If I were on my deathbed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn't possibly know how to die.