Prince of Peace by James Carroll

extroverted and humorous. I hit it off with the brightest of my classmates, and by my last year I found myself at the center of a lively intellectual crowd, mostly Jews, on whom the exotic airs of Bohemia seemed utterly natural. We gathered at night at the Cedar Tavern on University Place where we imagined ourselves hobnobbing with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and their disciples. As would-be writers we fairly basked in the sporadic presence of Dwight MacDonald, Norman Mailer, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz and the old
Partisan Review
crowd. I had friends who insisted my poems were as good as anything that magazine was publishing and they were always threatening to go over to Rahv's table on my behalf. What a mortification it would have been. I could never bring myself to tell them how many times that magazine and a dozen others had already rejected my work. My fellow undergraduates thought of me as one of the two or three among them with
real
promise. I let them. I suspected the truth, however, that my flare for poesy would not outlast my adolescence. I would be a teacher like the rest of them.
    My oh so worldly fellow students would not have recognized me by the feelings I was having on my way to Good Shepherd. The closer I came to the Irish neighborhood in which I'd been raised, the more inhibited I felt. By the time I got off at 207th Street and climbed out of the subway I had my overcoat tightly belted, my shoulders hunched against the cold and my head lowered, eyes on the sidewalk, like some bookish introvert come back to attend Mass with his mother.
    The sun was up and Broadway, so domesticated there on the far tip of Manhattan, was yawning and stretching like the family collie. Terry Behan the baker who claimed then to be a cousin of Brendan's, but later when the writer was dissolute would deny ever having heard of him, was winding down the awning on his shop window. It was of pink canvas and carried the legend "Baking on Premises." He didn't look at me as I passed him and I did not greet him. I saw the church at the end of the block. But for its size it was an unremarkable structure of gray stone set back from the street by a stunted plaza and above the street by eighteen stairs. Many people were going in for Mass, and most of them were familiar to me. Automatically I took the stairs two at a time as I had done since high school, which was when I discovered that the steps were too shallow for a grown man to take in stride. The steps, I had decided one bold day in my sixteenth year, were made for children and old ladies, like the religion was.
    I noticed in fact that the people approaching the church with me seemed mostly to be women, which one would expect at the early Mass. But this was Father-and-Son Sunday. Where were the men and boys? I'd expected to see a dozen of my schoolmates. Did I have the wrong weekend?
    Even in my agnostic phase—never atheist; it was a distinction we made much of—I was a sucker for the silence of churches. When I traveled in Europe during graduate school I could never enter a cathedral without matching its hush with a piquant inner one which was like a voice rebutting my sophistication; God whispering, "Oh really?" The compelling atmosphere of the sacred depended in my case at least on certain visceral feelings of guilt, and no place ever evoked those more satisfactorily than Good Shepherd. The guilt I felt that day was so pleasantly familiar it was easy to think of it as an element of the holy. Even the obnoxious bustle of the old women with their satchel-sized purses staking out their favorite pews could not dispel the old
mysterium,
and I welcomed the sensation even as it welcomed me. The silence, the unctuous odor of votive candles, the warped sheen of the linoleum aisles and the hissing of the car-sized radiators touched off such warm feelings of belonging that I could have exclaimed, "Of course you can't go home again, but you can always go back to church!" I