The talk covered school, sports and girls. Tom found himself discussing a girl he knew. Harold joined in appreciatively and concluded, “She’s not bad for white girl. He said it with a grin and looked for a reaction from Tom.

“That’s mighty white of you to talk that way,” said Tom, resurrecting an expression of his father’s.

“Actually, I was engaging in some black humor,” retorted Harold. “Sort of an end-man routine. You dig?”

“I dig, Harold. I’m very hip, full of be-bop and all that,” said Tom as they waited to cross a through street.

Harold laughed. “Full of be-bop?” he asked, his face screwed up.

Tom didn’t smile, He was tired of the byplay. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

The rest of their talk was about the school’s football chances next year. Tom peeled off at his street and they said goodbye until next day.

Tom arrived home nettled by the exchange. He greeted his mother, made a sandwich for himself in the kitchen and went up to his room to do homework, Tonight was teen night at St. Denis; so he had to be ahead of the game.

He had to finish Quo Vadis, Sienkiewicz’ novel about ancient Rome. The book had an orgy scene that was nothing compared to a copy of Playboy but which had its effect on Tom as he read with his accustomed thoroughness. He had a physical reaction to graphic descriptions of half-dressed Roman women and handled it in his usual way, by sitting there and neither relieving himself nor switching tasks. He was too fascinated to walk away from it, too conscientious to plunge into it. Sex had tremendous appeal to him. He just put up with the urge.

His uncle Jerry, a priest, had suggested he get up and walk around, distracting himself. Tom had asked him, in a burst of adolescent idealism after a discussion of the matter in his eighth-grade class at St. Denis. And Uncle Jerry had said to walk away from it He had decided he wouldn’t feel right whacking off. But neither could he walk away. It was too interesting. He read through the passage, missing not a comma, then read the following sections while the imagery kept bouncing back.

There was a knock on his door. He jumped. “Come in.”

It was Donna, his sister. “Hi.” She stood in the doorway.

“What’s up?” he asked, looking up from his desk, his eyes glazed with the daydreaming.

“What’s the matter? You look funny,” she said.

“I’ve been reading.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Going to Denis tonight?”

“Mmm—huh. You?”

“Yep.” She grinned, radiant. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“I’ll walk you there,” he said.

“Good. See you later.” She closed the door and went her way. He returned to his book.

Donna was thirteen going on seventeen, very happy about herself and lookin’ good most of the time. She had the usual bouts of self-doubt, when she was sure she was no good, but fewer than her friends did. In general she was ready to meat and greet and looked forward heartily to something like St. Denis teen night, when the boys and girls met under auspices of parish priests and their helpers.

She liked Tom’s friend Alex McGee, Tom knew. Tom accepted that as he would accept rain or snow or a bright sunny day: one of the things that might happen. Donna was his younger sister, but not his kid sister in the sense that he had to protect here She wouldn’t put up with protection, unless in case of physical attack. Then he would do the same as for anyone else, jump in and flail away.

Meanwhile, Donna could take care of herself. She went to the public junior high. When Tom finished at St. Denis, the family moved at the same time out from under the shadow of its tall Gothic steeple into a bigger house a mile away. The convenience of St. Denis was no longer a motive for continuing to send the Skelton kids to a Catholic school. Also at the same time, the Catholic school went majority black as kids from the city, just across the street, flocked to it as something better than city public schools.

The ghetto moved to St. Denis that year; and the Skeltons, for all their liberalism, shrugged and sent their kids to the public school which was practically next door to their new house and where blacks were a sizable minority. Donna went off to junior high, a short bus ride away, Tom went to the big two-village high school, and the other five Skeltons were greeted warmly if with some amazement at their numbers, at the nearby elementary school.

At that point, with her youngest in a half-day kindergarten at that school, Mimi the 38-year-old supermom, began to test her wings. Exhilarated by her new freedom and looking forward to more of it, she began to feed her mind more than a subsistence diet and try out ideas on her friend Carol.

“We are women whose time has come,” she announced to Carol one day.

Carol agreed. “Nothing to lose but our chains,” she said, sipping coffee

“It’s been wonderful with all these kids. I don’t regret any of i”

“None of it?”

“No. I loved diapers and breast-feeding and noise and lack of privacy and all of it.” She paused. “How’m I doing? Good liar?”

“Very good,” said Carol.

“You get my point, though, right?”

“I get it. You regret none of it all the time and all of it none of the time, and in sum it was a good idea.”

“That’s it,” said Mimi. “It goes with my philosophy that the same can be said for anything. All of it none of the time, none of it all the time. The in-sum part, that’s where the crunch comes. Many the chosen path that has come to grief on the in-sum part. Luckily, mine didn’t.”

“Hasn’t yet?” asked Carol, smiling.

“Right. Hasn’t yet.” Odds are good at this good at this point, but even a hundred to one allows the possibility of trouble. Nothing is certain. We live with uncertainty. Some of us with more than others.”

“Some with a lot more than others,” said Carol.

“Absolutely. But comparisons are odious. I keep looking over my shoulder, I’ll never solve my own problems.”

“Selfish creature.”

“Should I wish myself on the state as a basket case of one kind or other because I was busy minding other people’s business?” Mimi asked.

“No.”

“That’s a very smart answer. You’re a good friend, Carol. You know when to agree and when not to,”

“I agree,” said Carol.

—————————————

Devlin was beginning to think he had a sex problem. Here he was, forty-nine years old and a priest half his life, full of high-blown thoughts about the existence of God, and he was leaning toward the opinion that sex was it.

‘What is the solution to priestly celibacy?” he asked Dolan one day on the golf course.

“Priestly marriage,” answered Dolan without looking up from his putter, which he held motionless next to his ball. He swung the putter back and let it fall forward like a pendulum. The ball rolled to the cup, circled its edge and came back at him while he watched, still bent over. “If I tried to do that, I couldn’t do it,” he sighed, tapping the ball in with one hand.

“But we tell people not to use marriage as a solution to their problems,” said Devlin, bending over his ball. “Marriage doesn’t solve anything, we say,” he said, his putter motionless next to the ball. “You got problems before marriage, you got problems in marriage.” He let his putter swing. The ball rolled past the cup. “Shit,” he sighed, bending over it again for another full scale effort.

He managed to put it in the cup. The two walked in silence to the next tea. They were playing the nine-hole Columbus Park course where Devlin had played as a kid, jubilantly breaking 50 his third time ever. It was a glorious Monday in early May. Golf at Columbus Park, away from the rush and clamor of the suburbs.

“We discuss such matters from our ignorance,” Devlin said, picking up the conversation as he settled his driver next to the ball. “What do we know about it?”

He shifted his weight and let the club swing backwards, making its point of no return as indiscernible as possible. He sliced the drive and watched impassively as it trickled up to the edge of some bushes.

“We read about it. We study the matter,” he continued. “We hear people out. We bring some sorely needed idealism to the discussion. We hear confessions. We partake vicariously of the matrimonial conundrum. We’re not completely innocent,” he added, standing motionless, club in place, then swung, slicing his shot to within yards of Dolan’s.

The two shouldered their bags and trudged down the fairway.

They had discussed the matter dozens of times, never concluding anything, with that keen interest that absorbs stockholders when the Dow averages come up or bankers hearing about the prime rate or stucco-repairmen when the subject is a new weatherproof bonding agent. As professional celebrates they had a professional interest in the matter. It was an essential part of their life work, one of the major building blocks of their legitimacy. Do pilots care about airplanes? Priests cared about celibacy.

“The solution is marriage, Dev,” said Dolan. “I’ve told you that a hundred times. There is no other, If there were some other solution, they wouldn’t have it.”

“Celibacy.”

“Sure, Celibacy is an insoluble problem. Wait. There’s another solution, besides marriage. Death.”

“Terry, you sure have a way with words,” said Devlin. “They should have you at Mundelein. Or Niles. Talk a little sense into the lambs being prepared for slaughter. It’s not sense, it’s nonsense. None of it makes sense. Which, if you ask me and as I have already hinted, is why we do it.”

They blasted their balls out of danger, landing them next to to the bushes on the other side. Neither commented on their shots or on the weather or condition of the fairway. They just shouldered their bags and headed across the fairway. They were not going to let golf spoil their good walk.

“You’re getting eschatological again,” said Devlin.

“I’m always eschatological, Dev, you know me,” said Dolan, smiling. “When is it coming, Terry?”

“The eschaton? Beats me.”

They talked theological language, an older jargon than lawyers’ or doctors’ talk.

“Will it end in a bang or a whimper, this old world of ours?” asked Devlin, half listening for a response, half concentrating on his lye.

“How? When?” said Dolan, picking his club while Devlin concentrated on his ball. “Idle questions, idle questions. Leave them to the anti-nuclear society. They seem to have it pretty well figured.”

“Don’t knock those people,” said Devlin as he laid his club head next to his ball. “They are into very serious stuff.”

He swung and managed a low liner that would have done nicely after a severe drought but was slowed down by the soft April-rain-wet ground. “Geez,” he muttered.

“And they’re very serious about it, too,” said Dolan, addressing his ball before hitting beneath it and sending a pop fly into the infield. “Neither do I fault them for their efforts,” he continued, shouldering his bag.

“But some perspective is in order,” said Devlin. “One way or other, the world’s going to end. We’re all going back where we came from, and that’s when celibacy will, I’m betting, make sense. Between now and then, it makes no sense, except as mysterious witness against the position so well expressed by the incomparable Peggy Lee.”

“That’s all there is. There ain’t no more,” said Dolan. “From the song?”

“Yep.”

Dolan swung again and sliced to the far edge of the fairway. He was now in chipping distance of the green.

“We are signs of the eschaton, then,” said Devlin.

“Yep”

“We are not experts on marriage.”

“We are not experts on anything. We are signs. That what you see is not what you get. Not everything anyhow.”

He stopped while Devlin shot and miraculously landed his ball on the green.

“And if this celibate sign of the second coming we are talking about had a problem with his celibacy which he would like to solve short of marriage or death?” Devlin asked as Dolan laid the head of a five-iron next to his ball and sighted green and pin.

“There is no solution,” said Dolan, swinging and landing his ball in one of the few sand traps on the Columbus Park course.

(end of chapter four)