It sounded almost too much like the magical, punishing Sicilian moral universe of my mother, and yet perhaps overcorrecting for this small inward bite of disbelief made me even more fierce. Faith was what I wanted, not skepticism, pure cleansing faith, mind and body, every shred of disbelief burned away, my soul fired in the kiln of purity to the most perfect ceramic.
To my mother’s wary but happy surprise, I began to accompany her to evening novenas. Janet joined me in a religious retreat for young women at St. Gabriel’s, where an itinerant monk lashed the certain impurity of our girlish hearts, flash-scorched them, crisped and pulverized them as if they had been nothing but used palm fronds burnt for Ash Wednesday’s ashes, warning us that Christ’s exquisite suffering was incalculably multiplied by each failure of ours to preserve a body undefiled.
I have no idea what Janet felt. I suspect she went home and soul-kissed her way to delirium the following week at the movies. I remained mortified. And yet I still did not know how to confess my own sin, this sin unnamed among the Ten Commandments. So I went to confession in a sweating agony one sultry Saturday afternoon in August, and told the priest behind the grille that I had committed adultery.
When I returned to school in the fall, Judy wondered about my odd solemnity, but there were subjects on which even we two were not yet ready to speak. I cosseted my new chastity. I prayed the rosary to myself on the train and stopped at St. Gabriel’s to light candles on the way home from the railway station. I kept Christmas with an intensity bordering on lunacy, and my sister (who had clung intransigently to Santa Claus, well past the age of reason) delighted to follow me. Throughout the next Lent my devotions to the Stations of the Cross were unremittingly hot-hearted—I dreamed of turning to devotional art and sculpting a series of them myself. On Good Friday, I attended a three-hour devotion to the Passion and choked back scalding tears as the priest spoke Jesus’s poignant “Why hast thou forsaken me?” from the cross.
And yet while fear drove me, fear and some diverted channel for the ecstasy of loving, I think I knew somehow that the fear was not so much fear of God as of my own defiant inner refusal.
•
Christians were the oddity at Music & Art, teachers and students. On Jewish holidays, about four of us out of thirty would show up in a homeroom staffed by a substitute. It did not seem especially outlaw to leave school quietly, once we had officially clocked in in the morning, make a dash from 135th to the subway at 125th Street, head down to West 42nd Street on our school passes, and spend the livelong day at a favorite, cheap, all-day moviehouse watching a triple bill of quirky cult things like The Maltese Falcon and King Kong and maybe a Magnani or an early Bergman, movies that took me way beyond the Cinema Paradiso of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s basement, and would never have made it to New Rochelle. No sex films, heaven forbid—the Times Square porn-flick industry was still a sinister gleam in somebody’s eye—though I didn’t bring conversation about them home. And we could still clock back in on Convent Avenue for the last roll call of the day.
Yet I made no long-lasting friendships with other Christians on these runs. They usually included Judy. They were fun. That was all. The rest of the year I seemed to need to cultivate attachments with my politically conscious and activist Jewish classmates. I can remember feeling oddly thrilled when a parent on the Upper West Side speculated about the Hebrew origin of my surname. Maybe it had something to do with being at an ethnic crossroads together. But I had no clue at the time to the social dynamics of “othering,” and in any case, though I didn’t discuss it, I was still caught up in my Catholic passion. I hadn’t yet begun to imagine a theory I came to develop later on, and to find quite credible: that my father’s roots, which some relative had historically traced to Spain four centuries ago, had originally been Jewish, and that his family had migrated to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the excesses of the Inquisition. This notion, whatever its modicum of truth, would at some time come to seem very important to me. It is now. I still let myself be teased by the mystery of how Sant’Elia—the prophet Elias of the Old Testament—had ever come to be patron saint of the Alaya village of Sperone.
These high school get-togethers on the Upper West Side (which I am sure I explained oddly to my father, so as to be able to attend them) were, as I say, often political, or had a political hidden agenda. We would discuss enlisting in demos at the UN, or circulating petitions against HUAC witch-hunts. Or we would strategize our opposition to the loyalty oaths then being foisted on our teachers. It seemed as if the pulse of the world were in our caring hands. Coming of age in extraordinary times, jolted out of all naïvete about a warless future or the benignity of the bomb by the sudden outbreak of the war in Korea, we were the generation fated to be present at the birthing of both the peace movement and the movement for civil rights. Perhaps it was not precisely bliss to be alive or to be young, but for me it was another near-religious universe, one that seemed to recruit pure energy, indifferent to sex, consciously striking out across the color line, embracing difference, including my own.
What we didn’t know we felt, and guessed, and feared. Yet I don’t remember feeling fear for my private political soul, nor even precisely for my private survival. Ever since our old days in Arizona in wartime I had nursed an intuition that there was nothing that could happen out there, no social circumstance in the big world that wasn’t capable of rupturing our so-called personal lives. In this sense, my father had transmitted a vivid political consciousness to me. But I could see, now, here, that we could struggle to rearrange the equation, not to be passive, merely, and let it happen.
My father had written to Roosevelt once, complaining of how the government had treated him. But that had been a personal act, to protest a wrong done to himself. Since then he had grown hostile to movements, movements that in any case he had always been too proud to join. Resettled now among New Rochelle’s posttenement Italian Americans, his politics had morphed into a rather supercilious, Republican worldview—a hatred of taxation, a fierce pride about self-help, unease about the business impact of the coddling ministrations of the New Deal, and a fear of what would happen to our Way of Life with the sudden in-migration of impoverished Puerto Ricans, who by now had transformed our old Italian East Harlem into El Barrio. It was as if all social help had turned sour now that he himself didn’t need it anymore.
Maybe it was mere peer pressure on my side, but I like to think that I had been in some sense inoculated against my father’s politics, that straight from the East Harlem tenements as I had come, my lungs still exhaled a bit of the radical live air of Vito Marcantonio, that a few brain cells still stored memory-prints of sainted anarchists. I like to think there was a certain intercultural, working-class camaraderie packed into the marrow of my bones at those tap-dance classes at Hull House on East 116th Street, where all the varicolored pigtails bounced together to the same thumping beat.
I became connected, at any rate—it was too soon, too hard to say I became “identified,” “committed.” My red diaper classmates were sunk into politics by the taproot, with an educated passionate intensity. Their interest in the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg was not just spectatorial, like mine. The sadism of blacklisting must have come literally home.
And yet even for them it was—it needed to be—a performance of belief. In this seedtime of Beat and the sixties they wore their politics on their bodies. The girls defined the look in peasant blouses and skirts, laced sandals, scarves, dangling earrings. Everybody played the guitar, and those who didn’t sang—folk songs, of course, songs with ironclad pedigrees from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger direct. I sang them too. I let my hair grow out again, and wore it again in a single braid down my back. I forgot about my rosary beads when I was with them. I kept my little silver Miraculous Medal and my Sacred Heart scapular in the bottom of my saddlebag. And I fell in love with Jewish boys, though their hearts were more disciplined, and they did not fall in love