Final Payments

My father's funeral was full of priests. Our house had always been full of priests, talking to my father, asking his advice, spending the night or the week, leaving their black shaving kits on the top of the toilet tank, expecting linen towels for their hands. A priest's care for his hands is his one allowable vanity. They prided themselves on being out of the ordinary, the priests who came to visit my father. One of their jokes was that non-Catholics thought that they argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, not knowing that that was a ridiculous question: angels were pure spirits; they did not dance. No, it was the important questions that absorbed them. They argued about baptism of desire, knocking dishes of pickles onto the carpet in their ardor. They determined the precise nature of the Transubstantiation, fumbling for my name as I freshened their drinks. All these priests wept at the cemetery, and I did not weep, for my father, whom I loved. I stood behind Father Mulcahy and concentrated on the way his pink skull showed through his white hair. I liked his shoes; they were edible-looking, winking out from under his perfect cuffs. Even as I observed these details, I knew I was wrong to do it; I knew the clarity of my mind was unseemly. They lowered the body of my father. I would never see him again. Do not think that because I did not weep, because I am capable of ironic statements about his behavior, I attach to my father's existence less than a murderous importance. I gave up my life for him; only if you understand my father will you understand that I make that statement not with self-pity but with extreme pride. He had a stroke when I was nineteen; I nursed him until he died eleven years later. This strikes everyone in our decade as unusual, barbarous, cruel. To me, it was not only inevitable but natural. The Church exists and has endured for this, not only to preserve itself but to keep certain scenes intact: My father and me living by ourselves in a one-family house in Queens. My decision at nineteen to care for my father in his illness. We were rare in our situation but not unique. It could happen again. My father's life was as clear as that of a child who dies before the age of reason. They should have had for his funeral a Mass of the Angels, by which children are buried in the Church. His mind had the brutality of a child's or an angel's: the finger of the angel points in the direction of hell, sure of the justice of the destination of the souls he transports. For my father, the refusal of anyone in the twentieth century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful. Culpable ignorance, he called it. He loved the sense of his own orthodoxy, of holding out for the purest and the finest and the most refined sense of truth against the slick hucksters who promised happiness on earth and the supremacy of human reason. In history, his sympathies were with the Royalists in the French Revolution, the South in the Civil War, the Russian czar, the Spanish Fascists. He believed that Voltaire and Rousseau could be held (and that Cod was at this very moment holding them) personally responsible for the mess of the twentieth century. He believed in hierarchies; he believed that truth and beauty could be achieved only by a process of chastening and exclusion. One did not look for happiness on earth; there was a glory in poverty. He would often talk about the happiness of people in the slums, although he had never visited one, and he ignored the struggle of his own family against poverty, a struggle that ended in his mother's madness. But if I had pressed him about his family, which I never dared to do, he would have said that the misery was worth it, for they were working to uphold a standard that was more important than their individual lives. The pyramids were more important than the deaths of the individual slaveGordon, Mary is the author of 'Final Payments', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307276780 and ISBN 0307276783.