gat

Boarding school was a harsh and stark contrast with my former life. I had never made a bed in my
life. Now I was forced to make one every morning, and the made bed was inspected! Used to the
privacy of my own room, now I slept in a dormitory with fifteen other boys, some of whom would
cry far into the night, every night. Sometimes I cried with them. Shortly after arrival, I was
assigned a part in an assembly about roasting in Hell, complete with stage sets where we dressed
up like flames. As the sinner unrepentant was tormented by devils, I jumped up and down to make
it hot for the reprobate. I can hear my own reedy falsetto squeezing out these parentless verses:
Know ye not the burning anguish,
Of thee-eese souls, they-er heart’s dee-zire?
I don’t want to beat up on the sisters as if I were Fellini in Juliet of the Spirits. This was all kosher
according to their lights, and it made a certain amount of sense to me, too. By that point in time,
although nominally Roman Catholic, I probably hadn’t been to church more than ten times,
counting Baptism and First Communion. Just walking around, though, is enough to make a kid
conscious of good and evil, conscious, too, of the arbitrary nature of human justice. Even a little
boy sees rottenness rewarded and good people smacked down. Unctuous rationalizations of this
by otherwise sensible adults disgust little children. The sisters had a story that gave satisfying
human sense to these matters. For all the things I hated about Xavier, I actually liked being a
flame and many other aspects of the religious narrative. They felt right somehow in a way the
dead universe of Newton, Darwin, or Marx never did.
I carried the status of exile around morning, noon, and night, the question never out of
mind—what had I done to be sent here? Only a small part of me actually showed up in class or
playground or dining hall each day, the rest of my being taking up residence in the lost Oz of
Monongahela, even though Swissvale should have logically been the more proximate yearning,
since that was where we lived when I was sent away. I missed the green river, I think.
Joan was there, too, but we were in separate dormitories. In the year we spent at Xavier I can’t
remember holding a single conversation with my sister. Like soldiers broken apart in dangerous
terrain, we struggled alone looking for some private way out of homelessness. It couldn’t have
helped that Sister was two years older than I. By that time she had been carefully indoctrinated, I
think, as I had been, that every age hangs separately. Sticks to its own class. You see how the
trick is done?
At Xavier Academy, scarcely a week passed without a beating. I was publicly whipped for
wetting the bed, whipped for mispronouncing French verbs, whipped for hiding beets inside my
apple pie (I hated beets, but the house rule was that vegetables had to be eaten, dessert did not).
Some telltale beet corner where a brown apple should have been must have given me away to a
sharp-eyed stoolie—the kapo who bussed away dessert. I was nabbed at exactly the moment
dining hall loudspeakers blared the wartime hit, "Coming in on a wing and a prayer. With one
motor gone we can still carry on, coming in on a wing and a prayer." Most dramatic of all the
beatings I endured, however, was the one following my apprehension by the Latrobe police.
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