Best Man Read online

  During this part of my childhood, approximately from ages five to eleven, I was not a critical analyst of the status or events of my family. Certainly, I had curiosity, and probably more than most children, at least according to my mother. But it was only that. I had questions, I asked them, and I received answers. Those answers were taken at face value, filed away, kept for another time. It was only years later that I would ever question the veracity or even the motives behind those answers and explanations.

  • • • • •

  Uncle Christopher told me that education was the most important thing. And my mother told me he wanted to help. I remember his words.

  “If a man is going to be a success in this world, he must clear his own path. His journey is never easy, and he must be prepared. It means a man must be armed with knowledge. And the know-how that comes from education must be accompanied by physical strength. A successful man must have both attributes.”

  The only thing he demanded was that I devote just as much effort to playing ball as I did to studying. This bargain hardly seemed unreasonable to me. I was being asked to work as hard at playing as on my schoolwork. I liked each of the two.

  Over the years, as my physical skills grew, playing with a team gave me yet another secret life. Not secret from my teammates and coaches, but secret from my mother. It was the same with school. I knew things and learned things that I kept to myself. I liked being able to switch from one life to another. I could keep my own secrets.

  The library was my refuge. At first it was just the branch library on MacArthur Boulevard. Later it was the school library. It wasn’t a place where other kids would hang out, so it was a very private place for me. Not quite secret, but almost.

  * * *

  07

  Father Brennan

  “The Church is my refuge,” my mother would frequently say. She attended Mass most mornings, and she always took me with her, at least until I was enrolled in school. The church was on MacArthur Boulevard, just a short walk from our house. During Mass, I had to sit with her.

  My experience in this early churchgoing was not religious, because it preceded the time when I understood anything about scripture, or the saints, or faith. Instead, I learned to go places in my mind, even though I physically remained in the pew next to my mother. I was required be silent, but she could enforce no restrictions on the adventures that were taking place in my imagination.

  When Mass was over, she frequently stopped to talk with other members of the congregation or with the priest. Those were opportunities for me to explore, and I discovered hiding places in various parts of the church where I could listen to others as they passed by. They were unsuspecting, often providing me with fascinating information or even divulging their innermost secrets in that holy place.

  When I started attending school, my mother would go to Mass by herself. Not just most days. Every day.

  “The church will always be my refuge, and it will be your refuge too, Timothy.”

  She really believed it, and I tried to believe it also.

  • • • • •

  By the time I was eight, in the third grade, I had become an altar boy. My mother had urged me to do it — insisted, really. That was when I met Father Brennan. And it was Father Brennan who soon convinced me of the path my life must follow. Not that it was obvious. Like many things in life, the final realization — really, the final acceptance of what I had known all along — came slowly.

  In some ways, Father Brennan coached me quite directly. “You cannot tell anyone, Timothy. Some things must remain between you and God. Otherwise they must remain private.”

  That was the start of it. What Father Brennan had shown me. Shared with me. Explained to me. Not the sexual stuff itself, but how to cope with the aftereffects. What Father Brennan taught me was how to live a secret life. He was the first teacher, but he would not be the last.

  I kept the secret. I told no one. Not even my mother, although she was always asking about things. “Why were you so late today? Mass was over more than an hour ago.”

  Sometimes she would unwittingly enlist Father Brennan as an ally for his own cause. “You’re so late again, Timothy. If you cannot do better about coming home directly after Mass, I may have to speak with Father Patrick about ways to provide better discipline.”

  By that time in their lives, Father Brennan had become a close friend of my mother’s, frequently offering both spiritual guidance and parenting advice. The increasing intimacy of their friendship was reflected outwardly by the familiarity they used in speaking to each other. She often called him Father Pat, which was even more informal than the Father Patrick that other members of the parish used when they interacted socially.

  It was possible that some members of the church, whether clergy or laymen, might have developed concerns that the closeness of their relationship hinted at certain improprieties. In fact, there were no such improprieties. If Father Brennen was ever a threat to decency or morality, it was not directed toward my mother. Of that, I could always be certain.

  Father Brennan became a frequent dinner guest, most typically on Tuesday evenings. It had something to do with his schedule, and whether he would celebrate Mass the next morning. I did not mind these dinners because I was only a bystander, not the primary object of anyone’s attention. It was very different from the times when I was alone with Father Brennan, and I learned to keep the two kinds of interaction entirely separate in my mind. I sometimes thought of these dinners as what other, more complete families might experience on a daily basis, but I also knew that we were nothing like a real family.

  In other words, I had learned to compartmentalize. Father Brennan was my mother’s friend, not mine. From that perspective he was merely a dinner guest, no different than when my mother invited neighbors like the Grahams or Mr. and Mrs. Kierney for an evening meal.

  At one of the Tuesday evening meals, I made the announcement that I would no longer be an altar boy. My mother started to object, but Father Brennan stopped her to say it was all right. That it was my decision. We exchange looks, but we never spoke of it again.

  During following year or so, I noticed that my mother began to receive packages on a regular basis from Uncle Christopher. I never saw her open one of the packages, but it seemed they always included something for me. Usually, there would be books, and I looked forward to reading them with great anticipation. He seemed to know exactly what would catch the fancy of a young boy. There were dog stories, horse stories, and other novels filled with adventure. To the best of my memory, my collection eventually included every single book in The Hardy Boys series.

  The local branch of the public library was only a few blocks from my house, and when I was in the fourth grade, a new location opened that was even closer. I walked right past it on the way home from school, and I had my own library card, so I could check out books.

  At first, the books I took home were titles that were in the children’s section, but later I began to explore, and I discovered a brand-new world. Some of the books were fiction, others nonfiction. They encompassed themes and subject matter that were part of my imagination, yet they exceeded it. They helped me to determine quite clearly where reality began and my imagination left off.

  Books opened the door to my own refuge. My mother had the Church. I had the library. And it was safe. Father Brennan didn’t go there.

  • • • • •

  One evening, when I was ten, my mother found me reading a book in my room. It was something I had found at the library, and I thought it seemed perfect for me. It was called The Catcher in the Rye, and I’d heard some of the older kids at school talking about it. The librarian gave me a somewhat dubious look, but she didn’t stop me from checking it out.

  I had found a kindred spirit in Holden Caulfield, even though he was older than I, and I realized that this fictional character could be my guide, showing me how to navigate a system where grownups often could not be trusted.

  Wh
en my mother came into the room to say good-night, I showed her the book proudly. She usually was quite happy to learn I was reading serious books. To my astonishment, she was horrified.

  “Father Patrick spoke about that book. It’s blasphemous!”

  She took the book from me, and the next day she returned it to the library herself. I remained a bit confused because I knew the book was considered to be very good by other grownups. But I wasn’t discouraged. Quite the opposite. The event merely served to initiate the next phase of my secret life at home.

  I waited only a day before borrowing it from the library once again. I learned how to read the book secretly, hiding it behind some other book that would have my mother’s approval, and being fully prepared to stash it under the bed or beneath the covers if I heard her approaching. This was also the time when I began using my hideaway on a more regular and more purposeful basis. I would never consider leaving a book such as this one in my room where it could be discovered in a careful search or even by accident.

  Before going to bed, or in some cases before school in the morning, a quick trip through the hatch at the back of my closet allowed me to put it away properly. It would be a place where I could hide many things in the coming years. Always safe, always secure. Always secret.

  * * *

  08

  Angela

  Fifth grade was an eventful time in my life. At the start of the school year, Jimmy and I found out that Tommy was gone. To the best of my recollection, his father worked for the government. He might have been a bureaucrat at one of the big federal agencies, or maybe he was a member of the armed forces. Whatever he did, he was transferred to a new location, and Tommy was gone with him. I remember that Tommy had acted strangely toward the end of summer, but we only found out he had moved when one of our teachers told us. Jimmy and I remained close friends for another year, but that phase of my childhood was drawing to an end.

  By the end of fifth grade, Jimmy announced that he would be going to public school the next year. Another friend lost. We continued to play and spend our days together during that summer, but there was a wistful aspect to the time we spent together. We insisted to each other that nothing would change, but we were too young to know better.

  Soon enough, school ties would dominate. By the sixth grade, the children we played with after school were not those we knew from prior years but those we sat with in a classroom for the entire day. The few times Jimmy and I did get to play together, we found ourselves searching for words because we no longer had the shared experiences that formed the basis of easy conversations. We had moved on.

  So, there were no harsh feelings, and there was no bad ending. Jimmy and I simply went our separate ways, just as Tommy had done a year earlier. The only difference was that we had a reason for Tommy’s disappearance. I know it wasn’t a disappearance in the usual sense of the word, but it was the same for me. There were two of us when he left, and now I was the only one remaining.

  The explanation for Tommy’s departure was his father’s job. For Jimmy, logic demanded a further stretch. It must have had something to do with the cost of tuition. Public schools were free. But, in fact, I knew that Jimmy’s family was better off than mine. They weren’t wealthy, but they had a new car every few years, and his Christmas presents were always a little more expensive than those I found beneath our tree.

  The three of us had been inseparable through four grades of school and the summers in between. We had all become altar boys in the third grade. That is one of the things that I thought strange for some years. Not that we were altar boys, but that we didn’t talk about it.

  I would on occasion hear some of the other boys in school talking about their experiences. Sometimes they spoke in hushed tones as they described how they had not properly followed the priest’s instructions, and sometimes they laughed at the foolish things they had done. Like Raymond, when he described how he almost tripped and fell while carrying the cross. They joked about how he’d probably have been forced to run away from home if he’d done that. And Danny told the story of when he’d made a rude noise — he claimed it was an accident — during Mass. The priest had looked all around to see who had done it, but none of the altar boys had looked guilty. We all laughed until we almost collapsed.

  They talked about how these things had happened with Father Shanahan, and with Father Kelly, and Father McCormack, and they were mostly good stories. It took me a long time to understand the underlying reasons. To figure out what was so different from the experiences I shared with Tommy and Jimmy. And probably why Jimmy switched to public school. And maybe why Tommy’s father moved away for a new job. The kids who told all these stories — the good stories — had never been altar boys with Father Brennan.

  • • • • •

  Enter Angie.

  Angela Donatello was in my class at the Catholic school I attended from the time I started in first grade. For the first several years we were classmates, I don’t remember much about her. After all, she was a girl, and boys didn’t play with girls very much. That all changed.

  Until the sixth grade, she simply existed. She was there, just like about thirty other students. I didn’t dislike them, and I didn’t particularly like them. We got along. We coexisted. Jimmy and Tommy were different. They were my friends.

  My relationship with Angela sneaked up on us. I think I told you earlier that she lived near me and walked home the same way. So, if we left school at about the same time, we would each be aware of the other’s presence. When Jimmy and Tommy were there, she faded into the background. She was a girl, and we were boys. There wasn’t much common ground.

  But once Jimmy and Tommy were gone, it was more difficult to ignore the presence of the second person who walked the same path every day.

  So, sometimes we would walk together. Perhaps together is too constraining. We would walk in proximity to each other, perhaps even sharing an occasional remark about something that had taken place in school that day. As we neared our respective homes, our paths might diverge without further words. No “Goodbye,” no “See you tomorrow.” Just two children walking on the same path at the same time, until they reached the end of the path.

  As I said, it sneaked up on us. Looking back, I can see that gradually, we would talk to each other more frequently on the way home. It had not been unusual for one of us to stop at the library while the other kept going, but that changed too. I can almost remember the exact time, although it may only be my imagination.

  “I’m going to stop at the library,” she said. “Want to come?”

  “Sure.”

  The curious thing was that Angela and I discovered we liked each other. Just as friends. The friendship solidified during that year, partly because we enjoyed our time together, and partly because Jimmy and Tommy had disappeared from my life. “The guys” had become a thing of the past.

  Angela didn’t play baseball, but she had a bicycle, and she liked to go on bike trips or hiking adventures on the nearby trails. She also liked to go fishing or just hang out. So, on Saturdays during the school year, and on many of the days during the summers in those last years of elementary school, we became nearly inseparable.

  We went on daylong trips by bike or on foot on the towpath of the C&O Canal, where mules had pulled canal boats for almost two centuries. We delved farther into Glover Archbold Park than either of us had ever gone previously, searching for arrowheads that might have been left by the early Americans and for spent bullets that might have been remnants of either the Revolution or the Civil War.

  We never found any of those treasures, but we did discover secret hiding places in the woodlands of the several nearby parks. One might argue that these hiding places were not actually secret, because anyone could find them as easily as we did. But that would be a minor criticism. What was important to us, or at least to me, was that these were shared secrets. They created a special bond between me and Angie because they were in fact secrets, if for no other reason
than we did not tell anyone else about them.

  As far as I can remember, we never did anything with these hiding places that could have led to disapproval by our parents or other adults. It was just that it was ours and ours alone. No grownups, no parents, no teachers, and no other kids. Just the two of us. Sometimes we read books or magazines, other times we told stories, either real or imagined, and on a few occasions, we simply relaxed and watched the squirrels, the birds, and the sky. Secret places were ideal for such activities.

  One of our favorite pastimes was fishing. Fletcher’s Cove was a short bike ride down Reservoir Road to the shore of the Potomac. It was known, and still is, as the best fishing spot for many miles. It never mattered whether we caught a fish. Just sitting on the grassy bank of the river on a lazy summer day could be its own reward.

  During this part of my boyhood, I never went anywhere without my Army rucksack. It had been a Christmas present from my mother several years earlier, purchased from an Army surplus store. It was certainly nothing fancy by today’s standards, but it was completely functional. It dated to World War II, and it had “U.S.” stenciled on the front in letters about three inches high. So, on top of its utility, I thought it was also very patriotic. Depending on the day, its contents ranged from textbooks and notebooks during the school year to lunches and cans of soda for some adventure with Angela during the summer.

  Other times, the rucksack would hold books from the library. I would sign out as many as permitted by the lending limit, and carry them back again the next week. Reading had become a habit and a passion for me. Almost always, I would go to bed with a book, often reading under the covers with a flashlight after my mother had given the instruction for “lights out.” It was another of my secret activities.