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Excerpt

13

The ridge by the bay in fact formed the northern tip of the Appalachian chain. All the CFs knew in the 1870’s was that it was high ground, and beneath it a spread a great harbor that drew them, held them, like some hungry, primitive image they had of themselves as men of the sea. A more sober look would have told them that, except for the Irish living in shanties around Fort Hamilton and scattered pockets of dirt poor Italians and Jews, the population consisted largely of Swedes, Finns, Danes, Norwegians — all Lutherans — who brought their skills as shipwrights to the great harbor. Who would come to their Catholic college?

Sometimes ignorance lands on its feet. The college grew with Brooklyn. Except for the first World War, when it had to close its doors for seven years, it built a reputation as a feisty, no-nonsense place to send the first of your children you could afford to send to college at all. The learning was lean and reliable — and ever so Catholic — so they came. The seismic disruptions brought on by the arrival of new subways, by the Gowanus Expressway and, later, the Verrazano Bridge actually carved a path to the college door and St. Alvaro’s thrived.

Eddie hadn’t expected to be sent to teach there, though it did solve one problem. He couldn’t imagine going back to St. Wow’s or one of their other high schools. His head had been pummeled by so many thoughts these past years he needed to sort them out. In high school you were a god; knowledge traveled one way — to students as from the head of Zeus. Eddie was looking for something less privileged, something like a community of minds he could bounce ideas off, a devil’s advocate he could get a good argument from. Paris, Berlin, Louvain, Frankfurt, Rome, Vienna, London — all had whispered to him their favorite mantras for wisdom and intellectual sophistication. He felt tugged in a hundred directions. Maybe the college could be a place where things would hold together.

Yes and no.

It was a sticky September morning. Across the way, Staten Island lay under shouldering clouds. The academic assembly proved more ferverino than hard-nosed forecast of the year’s issues. Students and faculty seemed listless, except for the part where new faculty were introduced. Eddie’s credentials drew a few oohs and aahs. At the lunch that followed in the seedy faculty dining room, Eddie joined a table of unfamiliar faces.

“Going slumming are we, Fah-ther?” The face was hatchet-like, topped incongruously by a thick, unruly mat of hair. “I’m Weaver, English department. And you, no doubt, are the big catch.”

“Depends,” said a broad, jowly face. “Where do you stand on the union?”

“I’m for the North,” Eddie replied, squeezing his plate onto a narrow strip of table. “I’m Eddie Danaher.”

“That’s Hickum, Fah-ther. Poly-Sci. He means our union — the one that will break the repressive power of the CFs. And that’s Jeff Twomey, Sociology ... Harriet Mastrangelo, into something about Education ... Joe Stubb, Biology ... and into Harriet we suspect ... Dr. Meeker, Classics ... he’s so old he’s forgotten his given name ... Leon Szerny, Economics ... Fred Ellis, Modern Languages. Have I left anyone out?”

Twomey’s face was mostly a wide, scraggly beard concealing a puny chin. He kept up the drum roll, “No union, no rest. That’s our motto, Fah-ther.”

“Hey, guys,” Eddie smiled, “I’m just off the boat.”

“Ah, the boat!” Weaver exaggerated. “Harriet, has Joe promised you the Caribbean yet — by boat? Fah-ther, you see most of them are unfamiliar with boats. Joe couldn’t get his car started this morning, which makes it harder for him to run and hide when they come to repossess it. Behind in our payments again are we, Joe? I myself confess to a wee familiarity with boats. I bought one for fifty cents to place in my children’s inflated pool in our alley. Did I get a bargain Leon?“

Leon’s face looked like it needed a dueling scar. “Vor an English, vass nod bat,” he nodded. “Mikro, nod makro.”

Twomey pushed his beard at Eddie; the chin did its best to follow. “Leon could fill you in on the higher economics of a union, but we tend to measure things in more practical terms: whether we’ll have money for clothes this year, for food, for our kids’ text books, and maybe” — the beard seemed to rustle — “for a vacation”

“Otherwise we must make do with barter,” Weaver smiled wickedly. “Leon does our insurance forms and taxes and medical bills and we teach him English. Oh, but perhaps you are unfamiliar with such things.”

“Don’t let them snow you, Father,” Dr. Meeker’s parchment-like face advised.

“Yes,” Weaver conceded, “we are being wicked. But, you see, Harriet’s problems are not all menstrual. She is going to school full time as well as teaching full time, which leaves her little time for boats.”

Harriet’s face was a continuous venting of sighs and grunts, as though she was bored with the whole conversation. Eddie could see why.

The hard slit of Fred Ellis’s mouth produced an oracle: “Come to our happy hour Fridays, Eddie, and you’ll hear what we really think.”

Eddie did just that. Every week there’d be a mob afterwards who stormed the Brooklyn Bridge, ending up in the Village where, into the wee hours, they would share histories, projects, gripes, laughs, struggles. People gradually emerged from behind the faces. (The union business died with a well-timed, some would say insidious, wage hike.) Eddie discovered how smart, how disciplined and above all how dedicated to teaching his colleagues were. When he heard what they had to cope with in personal and professional terms, he could sympathize with the way they sometimes ground their teeth toward San Simeon, their derisive name for the CF residence. For the first time in his life, he was feeling uncomfortably privileged. What made it even crazier was that, in candid moments of spiritual sharing, these same colleagues expressed an almost squishy hunger to be joined in spirit with the Christian Fathers’ Olá, the Shout.

After a few months, Eddie had what he called his ‘shakedown’ dream. There was this high wall. It was transparent and seemed to breathe. He was on one side of it, talking ideas — not ‘about’ ideas, but each idea coming out like the lassoed words in a cartoon. Plato was there applauding them. Socrates, rolling his marble eyes, seemed noncommittal. Hegel offered minor changes but basically approved. Descartes, looking oddly like Charlie Chaplin, did a soundless dance. On the other side of the wall, squalid people struggled with ordinary chores — changing a tire or lined up at a counter or tiling the bathroom floor or slapping an unruly child. Harriet, her breasts heaving, was making grotesque mating calls to Joe Grubb. Eddie’s mother was washing clothes in a bathtub. Hickum was contemplating suicide. Eddie kept pointing at the wall but the Big Brains wouldn’t listen. He wanted somehow to disown his ideas, but they kept bouncing back from the wall like it was a trampoline. All the music was on the other side of the wall.

“OK,” he concluded later that day, “I have a lot to relearn.”