ONE BOY'S STORY : 'Father M would like to see you in his office'

This is a story about a priest I knew, and what he did to me. I was not molested, exactly. But something happened.

The setting is a Catholic grade school I'll call Saint Crispin's, in the early 1970s. I was not a Catholic, but my parents, displeased with the public schools, sent me anyway. In the seventh grade at Saint C's I was an outsider, and not only by religion. I lived in the doctors/lawyers/accountants part of town. My classmates lived in the welders/policemen/coaches part of town. Their houses were smaller, their attitudes tougher. Saint C's was their place--a dark and antediluvian building that squatted behind the church like a big brick toad. The school grounds, a half-acre of fenced-in blacktop, resembled a prison yard. There was a hole in the fence where, if the teacher on patrol wasn't watching, you could escape at lunch, then hustle up the block to the pizza place, cram down an Italian sub, and make it back by the bell. This routine wasn't about the sandwich. It was about the transgression. It was about the escape.

The schoolyard pastime at Saint C's was a rough game that combined tag and tackle. A lone boy would stand in the center of the yard, facing a line of thirty or fifty on one side. At a shout of "Go!" the line raced to the other side, and the one in the middle tackled someone; the next time the wave crossed, those two tackled two more, and so on, until at last a few fleet, desperate crossers faced a mob of gang-tacklers. The game was knees-on-pavement brutal; vendettas and grudges of every kind were enacted in the scrum. Girls, those merciless arbiters of manliness, stood watching on the sideline. You had to be tough, or at least act tough.

But I couldn't; I wasn't. I was secretly sensitive. My memories from this time in my life are full of smothered, shamed bursts of crying. My grades were too good. I had a baby face. The girl I had a crush on was also a good student, and when I walked her home from school, tough boys followed us, murmuring obscenities. There was a boy's frank cruelty at Saint C's that I would recognize a few years later in the stories of James Joyce. It was merciless, in a casual, normal kind of way.

The school was staffed mostly by lay teachers, plus a handful of nuns--like the decrepit Sister Catherine Mary, who sat statue-still in the world's tiniest library, a converted janitor's closet, and was said to be long dead and mummified. Academically, Saint C's was not exactly achievement-minded. A blunt anti-intellectualism joined teachers and students alike; I did a term paper on the Attica State Prison uprising, and Mr. Pagano accused me, falsely, of plagiarizing. More hot secret tears. In the classrooms the wall clocks were the antiquated kind whose seconds ticked off the minutes discretely. I remember watching the big hand tremble, as if it might move backward, and feeling a surge of terror until it finally clicked ahead.

Our principal was a priest, Father M (note: I have changed the names and disguised identities). He was young--thirty at most, dark haired, bearded and handsome; he had flair, that rarest of priestly attributes, and was something of a star. In the schoolyard, however, lurid rumors swirled. The idea was that Father M liked boys. He had a summer cottage on the shore, where boys were invited for spaghetti dinners said to end in naked group chases through the woods. Ask Scarlatti about M, someone would say. He and Murray went out to his cottage. Father M chased them through the freaking woods. He was waving his pecker like a wand.

There was a Bacchanalian free-for-all to these narratives--a feast, then a mad romp. You half wanted to be invited. Like the schoolyard game of crossers and catchers, the spaghetti dinner was a rite of passage at Saint C's; the ultimate manly escape, with Father M playing a kind of mad tackler. The thought that there might be boys among us Father M had actually victimized--such eventualities lay beyond rumor, beyond the thinkable. And who knew what to believe, anyway? People like Ronnie Scarlatti could say anything in the schoolyard. Stories were not acts of truth, but assertions of status.

As for me, Father M had been attentive, taking pains to make me feel welcome in my new school. In the hall he might stop to offer a word and a pat on the shoulder. I welcomed these attentions; they brought celebrity.

One day a messenger came to class with a note and handed it to Sister Helen. "Father M would like to see you in his office," she said, looking my way.

His office sat in a labyrinthine passage beyond the auditorium. There was some renovation going on, and scaffolding draped with sheets of plastic created a tunnel effect that made it feel more isolated.

"Don't worry, you're not in trouble," he said as I came in. He gestured to a chair. "I like to invite students in now and then to see how they're getting along."

Actually, he said when I'd sat down, he wanted to compliment me. My teachers reported I was an outstanding student. "Now, tell me about Mr. Pagano. About your paper."