The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, crime does not
pay….
It is not the thief who is hanged, but only he who is
caught stealing.
-- Czech Proverb
Any fool can tell the truth,
but it takes a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
-- Samuel Butler
In my youth, the Archdiocese of New York was in the iron grip of one Francis Cardinal Spellman. He was an archconservative, a friend to J Edgar Hoover, a big fan of the Vietnam War, and a nasty grudge-holder who took delight in squaring accounts with unhappy clerics who had, for one reason or another, displeased him. The aged monsignor (a sort of junior-grade officer in the Catholic hierarchy) of my parent’s parish had been sent there as punishment for having crossed Spellman for some slight. Monsignor Jacob Batowski had spent his entire ministry teaching in a seminary and had had no contact with real people his entire adult life. Now, in his old age he was unceremoniously introduced to reality as the pastor of a parish made up of people who, in his mind, were not, and would never be, so holy as himself. Batowski was so upset over this turn of events that he lost his voice entirely for several months. I can still picture the first time I saw him -- a shriveled old figure who shuffled up the nave of the church one afternoon while I was attending religious instruction. He tried to talk to us kiddies, but his voice scraped and squeaked, making it impossible to understand what he was saying.
I was never able to find out what offense he had committed that caused Spellman to cast the monsignor into the Evil Darkness Which Lurketh Without the Seminary Walls, but I like to think it related to the Monsignor’s thoroughgoing unpleasant demeanor and holier-than-thou attitude, though it was probably something quite unconnected to all that. In Batowski’s mind, every man should have become a Catholic priest, every woman a nun. To fail to do so indicated a lack of piety brought on by avarice, vanity, indecency in sexual matters, and a host of other character flaws. This low opinion of the laity is not uncommon among clerics, but it was dramatically pronounced in Batowski.
Batowski was
at least in his mid to late sixties when banished to our parish. He was bald,
hawk nosed, walked somewhat stooped forward, always carried a cane in his hand,
and always carried a scowl on his face as though he had just made some new
discovery of mankind’s sinfulness that lowered his opinion of the rest of us
all the more. Sinfulness was not difficult to find in his world. Once, at some
function at the grammar school which was attended by one of the diocese
bishops, a group of eight-year-old girls entertained the parishioners by
performing a little song and dance routine in the costume of wood-sprites.
After the applause died down, the highly moral monsignor rose from off his seat
and denounced from off his tongue these same little girls for their
“scandalous” attire which, ideed, displayed several inches of subteen female
leg above their subteen knees. Perhaps the sight of this inflamed the
monsignor, but it didn't seem to similarly affect the bishop. His Grace felt
compelled to rise and apologize to the girl’s parents and to all others attending
for what he called the monsignor’s “thoughtless and cruel” remarks. Batowski
sat there with an improved opinion of himself, no doubt inwardly beaming behind
the righteous scowl he wore on his face.
Batowski’s interminable Sunday sermons were a stupefying display of bewildering digressions, sudden bursts of anger, teary tales of sickness and death, and denunciations of his sinful parishioners. [ I should point out to non-Catholic readers that in the Catholic Church, the diocese appoints priests and pastors to the various churches, there are no lay councils who can hire or fire the ministering clerics for their individual church ]. I recall one Sunday sermon in which Batowski was using a rather prissy line from some poem, “…and all the flowers looked up, and the all the stars looked down”. He repeated this line in a sweet, singsong fashion many times during the sermon and indeed, at long last, finished his soliloquy with it. I forget the central point of the sermon, if it had one, and I forget precisely what occasioned all the flowers to look up and all the stars to look down, but the line clashed jarringly with several digressions dealing with smoking and emphysema, overeating and cancer, and (a favorite topic of his) how today’s women paint themselves with cosmetics like modern-day Jezebels. I remember another Sunday in which he picked up on this last topic and ran with it for forty straight minutes. Notwithstanding the foregoing, all the flowers continued to look up, and all the stars persisted in looking down.
Batowski was bad, but his age and mistreatment at the hands of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman count as mitigating factors for his shortcomings. Father John J. Foley of the same parish deserved no such dispensation. Foley was an unhappy, not very bright man, with a gigantic chip on his shoulder. Unlike the haughty monsignor, he felt inferior to the parishioners, who came from the middle and upper middle classes, while Foley was a product of the Irish ghetto. No one is tougher to deal with than a person with an inferiority complex who finds himself suddenly in a position of authority over precisely the people to whom he feels inferior. Think of the captain in the film Mr. Roberts. Foley's sermons also dealt with the parishioner's sinfulness, but unlike the monsignor's scoldings from the chair of moral righteousness, Foley's denunciations of his flock had the quality of a New York street punk trumping you with "Yo' Mama!".
I remember one Sunday lecture from the pulpit where Foley took off on the lay audience's obession with money and material posessions. Judging from my parent's constant fiscal worrying, I would have to say that Foley at least had us there. He then went on to compare us unfavorably to the urban poor of his childhood acquaintance, a simple, pious folk who attended church regulary and worked hard for little return. He got himself wrapped up in his reminiscing, however, and somehow got into a story of a ruckus he once witnessed in his neighborhood that had started in the local gin mill and spilled out into the street. It carried forward in what could, from his discription of events, only be called a general broken-bottle melee in which most of the adults on his block participated. This neighborhood free-for-all culminated in blood, cops and paddy wagons, carting off many to the hoosegow on a summer's day sometime in the roaring twenties. For all that, we, in our tranquil tree-lined parks and suburban byways, were expected to feel shamed for the undeserved wealth and comfort of our lives. At the conclusion of his sermon, they passed the collection plate.
If the impression here is that I dislike Catholic clergyman as a rule, I can only say that I dealt with priests and nuns all my childhood and adolescence. If I could think of some delightful Catholic priests, monks or nuns whom I encountered, I would mention them. But I can say that some of the nuns we had as instructors in the Catholic grade school were all right in their own way. I entered Catholic grammar school in the sixth grade. I was repeating the sixth grade as extensive illness had caused me to miss many days of public school the previous year, and my mother wanted me to have a Catholic education. The parochial grade school was new and had started with four grades when I was in the fifth grade at the public school across the street. It added a grade each year until it reached eight grades. When illness presented the opportunity for me to repeat the sixth grade, my mother enrolled me in the Catholic school where I would spend three years and be a member of the first graduating class in that school’s history.
It is sometimes cited that Catholic schools get better overall results than the public schools while spending less money. This is true because the parents of Parochial school kids are highly motivated and pay out of their own pockets to send their kids to Catholic school. Therefore unwanted kids and the truly slow and academically lame are not present to drag down the averages. In my recollection, the teachers I had in public schools were very much better than the nuns who taught in the Catholic grade school. Most of the nuns were very young and had not yet taken their final vows. More than a few of them never took their final vows as a result of their traumatic experience in dealing with us little maniacs.
These nuns were young, naďve, inexperienced, and simply could not handle the disruptiveness and goofiness of us kids. One problem was that there were too many kids per class. On the bulletin board in my classroom each year we had a list of the class and seat assignments. Next to it, for some reason, were cut-out letters that said “number of boys 25, number of girls 18”. Today, class size is kept to below 30 students. I never saw anything like the lack discipline and classroom decorum in PS 16 that I encountered in the Catholic school. Looking back on it today, I am embarrassed to recall our poor behavior and truly feel sorry for the poor young nuns whom we treated so badly. Of course, we were just being kids and the nuns were clearly out of their element. Most of these poor young women at the age of ten or so had begun to isolate themselves from their classmates. It was part of the decision to become a nun in the first place, which is not the usual ambition of young girl. They therefor accumulated rather little knowledge of how normal, run-of-the-mill kids behaved – especially the boys. I think the nuns were completely unsuited to handle an over-large class of 43 zany schoolkids, fighting, as schoolkids always do, the sheer boredom of schoolwork. I can still picture Sister Mary Catherine, or whatever her name was, our eighth grade teacher -- a smallish, buck-toothed girl of early twenty-odd years, flailing away in futility with a yardstick at a bunch of yakking, squalling twelve-year olds (myself among them) like she was swatting at a swarm of angry bees.
The principal of the school was unlike the other nuns. Her name was Sister Marie Rosaire -- an idiotic name she no doubt chose for herself at the age of eleven and practiced writing over and over in her school notebooks. (For the uninitiated, I should mention that Catholic nuns of most orders choose their own names upon becoming nuns and do not simply carry forward their civilian designations). Marie Rosaire was a nasty old witch who rivaled Monsignor Batowski in self-righteous indignation. She hated -- there is no other word for it -- us kids and our parents as well. Old and crumpled, she would at times invade our classrooms and treat us to one of her sermons which invariably entailed warnings against evil people, under whose influence we would be "dragged down into the gutter". That was her favorite phrase. She always drew out the word "gutter" into a long, low, remarkably canine growl -- "gutterrr". She always said, "Years from now, you will remember Sister Marie Rosaire, sitting before you in your seventh grade class, telling you this." She would then go off with herself, finishing with the business about the gutter. She was partially right. I do remember her telling me that I would be dragged down into the gutter, but I cannot recall what people, precisely, would do this to me. Probably Protestants.
The chaos of the classroom eventually generated in me a complete lack of respect for the school and for the parish officials in general. This lack of respect was not just theoretical, I acted upon it. At one point, in my final year there, an attempt was made to inflict discipline on us. The more rambunctious kids (myself again included) were made to write a letter to our parents which spelt out (truthfully, I must admit) our unacceptable classroom comportment. We were required to get a parent's signature on the letter and return it to the principal the next day. The letter also requested my parents’ presence at a group meeting with Foley and Marie Rosaire the next Wednesday night at seven-thirty o’clock. There, our parents would be enlightened as to precisely what horrible monsters they had spawned.
The Padre and Mother Superior made one great mistake in all this: they required us to write the letter ourselves on standard notebook paper. This gave me an opening, I felt, to avoid trouble. The Wednesday night they chose for the meeting was one on which my parents had an engagement. “Why spoil their night out?” I reasoned. I couldn’t forge my mother’s neat handwriting, but my father’s left-handed scribbling -- this, perhaps I could do. That night, I dug out a box of cancelled checks from my Dad’s writing desk and practiced his signature as it appeared on the checks. I wrote it repeatedly at the bottom of blank notebook paper until I had several really realistic results. I chose the best. I looked at it admiringly. I could not tell the difference between my forgery and an authentic AF Lockwood scrawl. Then, in my own blocky, eighth grade hand, I copied out the required text of the letter.
The next day, Sister Marie Rosaire stomped angrily into our classroom. Each of us (and it was almost every boy and three or four of the girls) in the class had to march up to the front of the room and hand our signed letters in to her. I was perhaps the fifth or sixth pupil to hand my letter in. I laid my forgery confidently in her hand. She looked scornfully at the illegible signature. “Whose signature is that?” she demanded. Egad! She had me! Oh, Geez, I was doomed! I should confess all and take my punishment. Why was I so crazy as to think I could get away with this? I had never got away with anything in my life. How long could they put me in jail for this? I felt I was looking at twenty, maybe thirty years. I looked down at the paper she was holding. A slim ray of hope intruded itself into my fevered thinking. “Damn”, I thought, “it looks good to me. It really does look good to me.” My father’s forged signature stood out in an adult hand in obvious contrast to the childish printing in which the body of the letter was composed. I had even thought to forge the Old Man’s signature using a pen with black ink, then write the letter with a different one in blue ink. The idea occurred to me that perhaps – just perhaps -- she was asking whose signature was at the bottom of the page simply because she couldn’t actually read it. This was a tiny straw I grasped at immediately. “Give it a go!”, I thought to myself. My only chance was to play it out to the end, evincing a calm, detached, what-is-the-problem-here attitude. I glanced down at the paper. Without looking up, I replied, “My father’s”, in a flat, uninterested tone, as though she had asked me about some utterly irrelevant detail.
“Sit down”, she said coldly. I returned to my seat. Had she bought it? I couldn’t tell for sure. I sat nervously awaiting events, but my confidence was rising. Knowing Marie Rosaire as I did, I thought that if she was going to drag me off to her office for immediate execution after collecting all the papers, she would have thrown me out of the class, making me wait in terror in the hall. She collected the remaining letters scowling at each miscreant. Then she asked another student whose signature was it on his paper. Then another. Yeah! She just couldn’t read some of the signatures! That was all. I was in the clear! The relief was considerable, but now I had to cover my tracks at the Wednesday night group-scold.
To close the deal, on the appointed night, I decided that I had best get off to the school and observe the meeting somehow. I thought perhaps that I would make some excuse about my parent's being unable to attend, or that I could sit in on the meeting without anyone noticing that my parents weren't there. I felt I needed to know what went on at the meeting. Knowledge is, after all, power.
I had to wait until my parents left for their eight o’clock engagement and then go off to the school. It was agonizing, the clock kept ticking toward seven-thirty when the meeting would get under way, while my parents torpidly prepared for their night out on the town. "Geez, are they ever gonna get out of here?" I worried to myself as my father paced around the house, all dressed for dinner, cutiing his nails. My mother fumbled with her fancy faux-pearl sequined purse, transferring articles from her day-to-day handbag -- a worn, black, leafbag-sized affair out which came an endless string of unexpected items such as one might have found in Harpo Marx's coat-of-many-pockets. At long last, they departed. It was seven thirty-three.
As soon as the sound of our car motor receded with my parents into the night, I stirred myself to leave the house. I was not supposed to go anywhere at night in their absence, but felt I could manage it without much trouble. My older brother was in his room, doing homework for high school. My older sister retired to her own room and got on the phone. That would tie her up for the rest of the evening. My two younger brothers went up to the third floor of our old Victorian house to watch TV. I descended from my second story bedroom to the front parlor and secured my coat from the closet. I eased out the door into the night. The school was a ten minute walk away and I scuffled along quickly, cutting the time perhaps in half. I walked down Broadway, on which the school was located and could see that the hall lights were illuminated. The familiar brick building, with its metal bound windows, seemed foreboding and strange at night. The interior lights cast odd shadows on the walkway up to the front door. With much trepidation, I swung the door open and stepped quietly into the foyer next to the principal's office.
I quickly discovered that the meeting was being held in the gymnasium. The gymnasium entrance was immediately to the right of the front entranceway. The wood doors to the gym were closed, but they were not fire doors and I was able to peer anonymously through the crack where the twin doors met to view the scene within. I could see Foley standing there, effusing vitriol in front of a group of parents and my classmates. He was angry and gesticulating wildly. Sister Marie Rosaire was seated next to Foley, grim-faced as usual. Sister Mary Catherine, our teacher, sat next to Marie Rosaire, teary-eyed as usual. The parents sat on folding chairs next to their kids, red-faced and embarrassed. Most of the kids had both parents with them. The kids sat looking at the floor, trying to appear as remorseful as they could. “God”, I thought, “I have spared my parents from all this.” Not to mention myself.
I had developed no real plan. I now considered what to do. I clearly couldn’t walk in there. That would advertise the absence of my parents. I saw that there were about fifty parents in there with thirty kids or so. That is a lot of people, I reasoned. Perhaps I could wait until the meeting broke up and then mingle with the crowd. In that kind of mob, it would be easy to miss that I was alone, without either of my parents. I decided to wait in the boy’s bathroom, which was on the opposite side of the hall. I entered the boy’s room and sat myself down in one of the stalls, closing the door. I was not much concerned with time. My parents would not return home until about eleven o’clock, and my sister and brothers didn’t know I was out of the house and probably wouldn’t care if they did know.
After some minutes, I heard hubbub in the hall outside. A few kids entered the boy’s room, Mike McGuire and Ralph O’Connor among them. They were friends of mine. “Boy, I’m gonna catch it when we get home”, said Mike. “Geez”, said Ralph, “They made us sound worse than we really are”. That was an exageration, It would have been difficult to make us seem worse than we were. I flushed the toilet and exited the stall. I washed my hands listening to them talk. They were pretty upset and ignored me. I left the boy’s room and walked casually into the entranceway hall. It was packed with parents and kids. The atmosphere was surprisingly jovial, like a social occasion. The parents were jibber-jabbering with each other about topics unrelated to the awfulness of their children. Some parents were conversing with Foley or Marie Rosaire, again about things unrelated to the meeting. No one noticed me. I decided I should show myself as present to the relevant parties, and hit upon a plan. I walked unobtrusively outside. There were several parents and kids outside already, leaving. After a few moments, I went back inside. I walked forthrightly up to my teacher and wished her good night. “Good night, John”, she replied politely, unsurprised at my presence. I then wished Sister Marie Rosaire good night. “Good night”, she harrumphed. She never addressed me, nor any of the students, by name. On my way out the door I said good night to Foley. “Good night, Lockwood”, he always used my last name, “where’s your parents?” I had an answer ready. “They’re outside”, I lied, “They sent me back in to say good night”. “Excellent!”, he replied, impressed by my parent’s solicitude.
I walked out into the night air. The darkness caressed me, gifting me with its enfolding anonymity. I walked home through the darkened streets. I entered my house at eight thirty-nine o’clock. No one had missed me. My parents were none the wiser. Foley was none the wiser. Sister Marie Rosaire and Sister Mary Catherine were none the wiser. But I was. I was much the wiser. I had triumphed. I had defeated the plans of Marie Rosaire and Foley to lay me low. I understood for the first time the allure of crime. Doing evil without inevitable punishment was a new sensation for me. I knew now that it was possible to get away with stuff, and it felt great. Little kids don’t get away with anything. They can’t lie without shifting their eyes. They can’t forge signatures. But I? I had just reached the age where I could accomplish these things. This night was different from all other nights -- “Today I am a man”. Though I had walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Big Trouble, I feared no evil. For I was the shiftiest little sneak in the Valley. My cup was full of it. Surely, Mendacity and Evasion shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of Deception, forever.
I dwell there still.
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9 June 2002