gat

"And could you now face the back of the room and repeat what you just learned?"
"I could, sir." And I knew I could because I had a strong memory, but he never gave me that
chance.
"Why are you so gullible? Why do you believe my lies? Is it because I wear clothing you associate
with men of God? I despair you are so easy to fool. What will happen to you if you let others do
your thinking for you?"
You see, like a great magician he had shifted that commonplace school lesson we would have
forgotten by the next morning into a formidable challenge to the entire contents of our private
minds, raising the important question, Who can we believe? At the age of eight, while public
school children were reading stories about talking animals, we had been escorted to the
eggshell-thin foundation upon which authoritarian vanity rests and asked to inspect it.
There are many reasons to lie to children, the Jesuit said, and these seem to be good reasons to
older men. Some truth you will know by divine intuition, he told us, but for the rest you must
learn what tests to apply. Even then be cautious. It is not hard to fool human intelligence.
Later I told the nun in charge of my dorm what had happened because my head was swimming
and I needed a second opinion from someone older. "Jesuits!" she snapped, shaking her head, but
would say no more.
Now that Xavier is reduced to a historical marker on Route 30 near Latrobe, I go back to it in
imagination trying to determine how much of the panic I felt there was caused by the school itself,
how much by the chemical fallout from my parents’ troubled marriage, how much from the
aftershock of exile. In wrestling with this, one thing comes clear: those nuns were the only people
who ever tried to make me think seriously about questions of religion. Had it not been for Xavier,
I might have passed my years as a kind of freethinker by default, vaguely aware that an
overwhelming percentage of the entire human race did and said things about a God I couldn’t
fathom. How can I reconcile that the worst year of my life left behind a dimension I should
certainly have been poorer to have missed?
One day it was over. The night before it happened, Mother Superior told me to pack; that I would
be leaving the next morning. Strong, silent, unsentimental Pappy showed up the next day, threw
my bag into the car, and drove me back to Monongahela. It was over, just like that.
Back home I went as if I’d never left, though now it was to a home without a father. Mother was
waiting, friendly and smiling as I had last seen her. We were installed, the three of us, in a double
bed in a back room over the printing office. Our room was reached through the kitchen and had
another door opening onto an angled tarpaper roof from which on clear nights the stars could be
seen, the green river scented. It was the happiest day of my life.
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