From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
Day after ordination, we had our first solo masses. Mine was at Our Lady of the Springs, the pretty little parish church in French Lick a mile or so away. Family was there for that, proud and happy. A few days later I ascended the main altar at the church of my boyhood, St. Catherine of Siena, in Oak Park; and with the help of two other priests, deacon and subdeacon for the occasion, celebrated solemn high mass. My picture was in the parish bulletin and in the weekly Oak Leaves. I was famous. And unbeknownst to me, my name was engraved on a corridor wall of my alma mater, Fenwick, a mile or so down the street, I discovered years later, when it no longer described my situation.
In the rectory before mass, I was told by one of the four assistant pastors that a “colored lad” was at the door to see me. It was a grown man, a onetime boxer, retired mailman and fellow writer whom I had met at a writer’s workshop in the city a summer or two earlier, Harold Sampson. He was Catholic and had come for the mass and wanted to say hello beforehand.
The “colored lad” reference, made by the priest, a big handsome red-faced Irishman, without rancor, gives an idea of the insularity then plaguing the white community. Harold was an excellent man, nicely dressed, a South Sider whom it was my pleasure later to entertain at our house two blocks from this very rectory in the early 70s, when it was Winnie and me and babies made three, then four, then five (in that house). In a few years, therefore, my friendship with Harold spanned my transition yet to come from holy Jesuit priest to husband and father.
MY IOWA SUMMER In June of 1963, however, a writing summer awaited me, at the State University of Iowa, as it was known, now just University of Iowa. I’d been accepted at the much acclaimed Writers’ Workshop for the eight-week course in fiction, where novelist Vance Bourjaily was to be my teacher-supervisor. I couldn’t get a room on campus at the Newman Center, but a local pastor was looking for a priest to take his place that summer while he visited his native Ireland. We corresponded—by U.S. mail, this being long before email and cheap long distance calls—and I got booked for my coming weeks in Iowa.
The town was Marengo, 30 miles on Route 6 from Iowa City and the university. Looking back from a writing standpoint, my living in Marengo was not a good idea: I could have gotten a dormitory room and plunged into life as a writing student, undistracted from my work of the moment. But the Marengo experience was a rich one for me as a priest and a chance to exploit my newly bestowed priestly position. Besides, it was broadening for me a city boy to live in a small town.
The priestly business began right away. On the plane to Cedar Rapids, my first flight, I heard a woman’s confession. Young woman. Can’t remember what it was about, wouldn’t say so if I did. I do remember, however, her writing me at the Iowa parish where I had said I was going to live. She wanted to get together, which I took as overly keen interest in me rather than my pastoral style. There I was, bishop’s oils barely dried on my consecrated hands, and some woman was making a play for me, I thought. The perils of announced celibacy! In any case, I did not respond.
Vance Bourjaily gave me encouragement enough, though he was clearly skeptical about where I would fit into the fiction landscape of the ‘60s. I know I felt like a square peg in round hole in the workshop, emphasis on “square.” I wore clerics to class at first, taking it for granted that I would do so, but gave it up. A Catholic in the class of 10 or 15 students, a wheelchair-bound black guy whom I got to know, knew I took it for granted I’d wear them and knew also that most would object.
Bourjaily, a nice guy, encouraged me but also said I might consider a book of sermons. I heard him out with a straight face at his gentle enough putdown of my whole reason for being there, namely to get good enough to write fiction that would sell anywhere, not just in Catholic publications, which he also observed were “too easy” a sell. For me a priest, he meant, and for writers in general probably. Not so easy as all that, I found.
The Marengo parishioners, straight, honest people, provided the rich experience. Preaching to them on farmers organizing union-like at a time when National Farmers Organization was afoot in Iowa, I quoted the pope in support. This did not sit well with some. Here was my pattern: if the pope said it, I was supposed to say it too, even in matters too complicated for me to grasp, and for that matter maybe for the pope too. No matter where I went, I was one to use the pulpit to push a point of view, something I learned later as a pew-sitter to resent greatly.
In addition, ever ecumenical and interracial, I looked up the African Methodist Episcopal pastor in Iowa City, Rev. Fred Penny, calling then knocking on his door. He was five years into an illustrious career at his church, Bethel A.M.E., which had opened its doors in 1868. I got to know him and his family and invited them to Marengo, where parishioners put on a wonderful affair, full of food and fun.
There were six Penny kids in all, including two lovely daughters. Regarding them their father, an ebullient and friendly man, noted that he was leery of the attentions bestowed on them of a handsome black guy who had got acquainted with the family. “Guy like that can take a jump and leave a package,” he told me. Rev. Penny died as pastor in 1994.
Meanwhile, the Marengo parish’s housekeeper and I did not hit it off. She was a hausfrau in her 50s. I had no idea she expected to sit at table with me, as she did with the pastor. He and she were a comfortable pair, apparently; she and I were not. When my parents visited me there, she was most gracious with her meals, and I believe we put them up in the rectory, a white frame house on that small town street. Neither did I expect that. It was only after I was back at Baden and corresponded with the pastor that I realized how put out she was with me.
“Thank God she didn’t leave,” he wrote. It would have been an unmitigated disaster for him, whereas I would have welcomed the chance to fend for myself, after years of community life. As I said, I’d have been better off in a student dorm, with nothing but writing and student life to occupy me. Dealing with parishioners was broadening, but rectory life made for a doldrum experience. I was cordial to her as far as I recall, but she knew I found her no company, I’m sure.
— To be continued —
Blithe Spirit 