SISTINE

It’s early winter, and Dennis Wertz is on a train heading south to Boston. Outside the window, beyond the pine trees and oak trees and elm trees and the overgrown brush slapping the train, all of it going by so fast it’s hard to distinguish one thing from another, he looks to a point in the distance where there’s a ship in the harbor. It’s one of those barges that carries things and has a bridge that looks like the silhouette of a small city skyline.

Dennis wonders why the trees and things up close move by so fast, and the barge seems stationary, unmoving and still. He takes out a pad and pen and sketches the elements of a physics problem. He sticks with the high school Newtonian stuff. Straight lines, vectors, rules of motion, none of that quarks and dorks bullshit, and none of that fancy PBS string theory. No, it’s straight goods from Isaac Newton, 17th Century virgin, who wrote tracts on God after he’d left behind the kind of physics that powers empires and wins wars.

Dennis notes the speed of the train, the distance from the train to the trees, the distance from the train across salt grass and tidal pools to the breakwater and the ocean. He can’t remember the formula pertinent to optics, so he thinks how it’s like a person running along the circumference of a circle who looks inward as things speed by, and then looks to the center of the circle where his eyes rest on some unmoving, still point. Perhaps that’s what it is: The farther we are from something, the more it approaches the center of our world. Proximity breeds speed. Distance codifies stillness. And of course that would explain God, the infinitely still center of a moving world, whom we see, if at all, from an infinite distance.

It’s also why Maureen Talbot of South Winchester, Connecticut, after eleven years of resolute rejection (and a few restraining orders) remains the love of his life, untouched, barely corporeal, frozen in the velveteen mists of romance, the still point of his moving world, situated at infinite remove in the shadows of memory enhanced by time, married with children in a suburb so wealthy it looks like farmland south of Hartford.

The conductor comes through the car. He’s younger than Dennis. Mangy hair peeks out from under his conductor’s cap. His fingers are thick and dirty, his nails bitten to the quick.

“What did you think about Ringo Starr doing that conductor-thing on Shining Time Station?” Dennis asks.

“Ringo who?” the conductor asks, and Dennis thinks how The Beatles have ceased to be the center of so many people’s worlds.

Since November Dennis has lived in a room on the third floor of Ms. Quinn’s Victorian house at the end of in . The house is a whale, huge, cavernous, under-furnished, difficult to heat. Dennis moved there from no place, meaning he didn’t have an address, which is one of the better definitions for “homeless.” He moved there through the intercession of Mrs. Gawrych, a woman he’d met in AA who’s a friend of Ms. Quinn. Ms. Quinn’s white whale of a house has been a good place for Dennis; it’s out of the way and safe. He’d live there longer if he could, but Ms. Quinn says it’s time for him to move on now.

Before Dennis was homeless he was a Jesuit novice and lived in a Novitiate on Newbury Street in Back Bay. “Jesuit” is the name for an order of Roman Catholic priests and brothers founded by Ignatius Loyola about twenty years after Michelangelo painted the Sistine Ceiling. “Novitiate” is the name for the period of time designated for being a novice, as well as the place a young man lives when he is a novice. It comes from the Latin word, “novus,” meaning new, which is what Dennis and the others were: novices, new guys, newbies, neophytes, rookies, primis (pronounced “pree-mees”), whatever. They were the guys who’d cut their nuts off so that after twelve years of study, flannel shirts, khaki pants, sensible shoes, homoerotic flirtation, autoerotic activity, three hots and a cot, they too would be ordained to forgive sins and turn little bits of bread into God. They’d be Roman Catholic priests – Jesuit priests – and a lot of people would think: Isn’t that nice.

Things didn’t go well for Dennis in there. They booted him after a year. They’d had enough of him. Probably because Dennis did not want to become some-kind-of-Bing-Crosby or Grand Inquisitor for the Illuminati. Deep down Dennis didn’t even want to become a good Jesuit. Truth be told, Dennis was a drunk who wanted to move to and fuck every woman in sight. Truth be told Dennis wanted to drink himself insensible, get fucked up on stage, wake up naked on his kitchen floor and cry like a baby for the mess he was making of his life. That’s what he wanted to do. And why not? It’s what prophets do. That he knew. After all, he’d read the book.

Mrs. Gawrych tells Dennis to smile more. She says: Bitterness is like costume jewelry in a velvet bag; it’s a lot of bag for crap. She says: Being bitter won’t get you food or shelter or work. People tend to get what they need when they appear civil.

“Smile, Dennis,” she’d say to him at the meetings. “And remember to smile,” she said to him that day in November when they went to to meet her friend, Ms. Quinn.

“He’s a very talented young man,” Mrs. Gawrych said the afternoon they sat in Ms. Quinn’s day room and sipped tea from a well-laid tray with a tea pot, jellies and scones.

“Is he?”

“I gave you his book.”

Ms. Quinn looked about the shelves packed with books.

“Was it a book of poems?”

“No. A novel. A short novel.”

“A paperback?”

“Yes, a paperback.”

“And it was a book of poems.”

“No, a novel.”

“Published already, then?” Ms. Quinn asked Dennis.

“Some years ago.”

“When he was in college, or right after.”

“Harvard?”

“,” Dennis said.

“That is Emily Dickinson territory,” Ms. Quinn said. “I did love that one woman show with Julie Christy.”

“Harris,” Mrs. Gawrych said.

“I’m sorry, dear?”

“Julie Harris starred in ‘The Belle of Amherst.’”

“Yes, dear, I know.”

Dennis drank the tea. It was warm and sweet. He looked about the room Ms. Quinn called the day room. It was more like a library with hundreds of books on shelves and lying in piles strewn across the floor. The bindings in the piles on the floor read like the geological strata of lands that have shifted and settled over time. Reading the titles on the bindings from the floor upwards, Dennis noted some logic in the vertical progressions. One pile under the window started with Kenneth Clark’s study of Leonardo, followed by the bio-novel of Caravaggio, followed by Frank Stella’s Working Space, followed by Eliot’s On Poetry, followed by Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, followed by a French pocket dictionary.

He attempted a similar analysis on a pile of books on the other side of the room, but his eyesight failed when children’s literature (Watership Down) took a hard right with James Ellroy’s Kennedy-Nam-CIA-Hoover trilogy.

Dennis said to himself: If this is the belly of the whale, it’s a well-endowed whale, and I can read books for a long time to come.

It was getting late. The light through the bay windows over an old desk with a computer and printer started to dim.

“And what was your book about, Mr. Wertz?” Ms. Quinn asked, finishing her tea.

“Please, call me Dennis,” and he started to phone-in his answer about the “usual coming-of-age-stuff” when she asked what he meant by the “coming-of-age-stuff.” Then Dennis told her the story of a jejune man who leaves college to find his way in the world after falling in love with Maureen Talbot of , a co-ed who’d failed somehow to fall in love with him.

Mrs. Gawrych interrupted to say that the book sort of prophesied his time in the Jesuits, and Dennis was about to remind Mrs. Gawrych that it wasn’t a novel, but a novella and a collection of short stories that had nothing to do with the Jesuits, when Ms. Quinn asked, “Did you say ‘Jesuits?’”

“Yes, the Jesuits,” Mrs. Gawrych said.

“O, dear.”

Mrs. Gawrych turned to Dennis: “Betty’s older brother was a Jesuit.”

“Fr. Tom Quinn,” Ms. Quinn said. “He passed.”

“I’m sorry,” Dennis said.

“So, how long were you with them, Dennis?”

“A year and a bit.”

“Not long then.”

“Long enough.”

“Well, you needn’t tell me, ” Ms. Quinn said. “They’re an odd lot as far as I’m concerned. As was Tom, though they could have done better by him.”

“What did they do?” Mrs. Gawrych asked.

“Broke his heart for one thing. He was happy as a clam in Belize, teaching school, and they brought him back to Weston.”

“The old folks home,” Dennis said.

“Exactly. And to think he was in perfect health, too. A little arthritis from the war wound, but other than that - perfect health. And then, what with the dark winters and the company he had to keep, he didn’t last more than a year. Just gave out. I’ve always said if they’d left him in he would have died happy.”

“They’re not about ‘happy,’” Dennis said.

“Then what good are they?” Ms. Quinn asked, sitting straight like a prairie dog, sniffing a fight, proud of the spunk that allows an elderly woman to value happiness as life’s primary goal.

“That’s a good question,” Mrs. Gawrych said, “and I bet it’s one Dennis has asked himself since they let him go.”

“Just let you go, did they?”

“It was mutual.”

“Wasn’t for you, then.”

“No.”

“Though you had to try it.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that something. All the young men who go into that sort of thing always say

they have to try it. There’s always that sense of compulsion.”

“Maybe that’s why they call it a vocation,” Mrs. Gawrych said.

“It’s not that,” Dennis said, “though they’d like you to think so.”

“Meaning?” Ms. Quinn asked.

“Meaning a lot of guys love the notion of being ‘called,’ set apart, you

Know. Though most join up for the same reasons they’d do anything else.”

“Like what?” Mrs. Gawrych asked.

“Status, power, comfort, sex.”

“Sex!” Mrs. Gawrych said.

“Sex.”

“So, what made you go in?” Ms. Quinn asked.

“Maureen Talbot of South Winchester, Connecticut.”

“What?”

“The girl who ruined my life,” and Dennis could have told them more, about how he’d left Amherst after Maureen threw him over for Darren at Williams, and how he’d worked odd jobs in Boston and drank and went on a five day silent religious retreat to dry out and ended up seeing Jesus, watching the bottom of His feet as He ascended, body and spirit, into a starless sky through the roof of an upper room where the priest had made everybody sit on comfy pillows before a makeshift altar.

Dennis could have told them about all of that, but he didn’t because then he would have had to have told them about how he went a little crazy, having seen Jesus, thinking he was a prophet and that his mission in life was to tell Boston to get over itself.

Dennis finished his tea, ate one scone and complimented Ms. Quinn on her hospitality. She cleared the tea tray and gave Dennis and Mrs. Gawrych a tour of the house. Then Ms. Quinn offered Dennis room and board on condition that he go to meetings, take his meds, help around the house, shovel her walk and look for a paying job.

As the train crawls into North Station Dennis sees the buildings through the winter haze rising off the water. The train stalls. The last mile is always slow. Finally, with a push and a tug, the train hiccups one last lurch and stops.

Dennis gets off with the others who made the mid-morning trip. It’s a short distance to State Street, and Dennis walks because taking cabs in Boston is too much of the “can’t-get-there-from-here.” ’s downtown was laid out by 17th Century cows who weren’t in any hurry to get anywhere. Bostonians love it though. They’re stuck on it, the whole crooked-streets-to-Haymarket-thing, the whole sea-faring-colonial-thing, the whole rude-waitress-pay-for-the-privilege-thing. Bostonians and their Bullfinch. Bostonians and their Bruins, Brady and gaslights, their Garden, Sox, Pops, Sweet Baby James, B.C., M.I.T. and the skater who cried “Why me?” They love it, Anglophiles all, who’ve spent time and energy claiming exclusive rights to it, having endowed America with its proto-caste: the measurement of value based on who got here first.

Dennis walks through Quincy Market with the smells of fish, tacos, French bread, pizza, white chocolate cookies and Blue Mountain coffee. He walks outside over cobblestones, passes through Faneuil Hall where for two weeks one summer years ago Maureen Talbot of South Winchester, Connecticut, worked in a strange place that sold designer mustards. Dennis thinks how two people can occupy the same place at different times and the same time at different places and how Descartes offers little comfort when you want what you want when you want it. The mustard shop’s gone now. The interior by Congress and State houses a few tables and chairs.

Dennis doesn’t linger. Memory’s an undifferentiated mass that bends light and changes time, but he has to move through the past and up the hill to State Street where he’s about to interview for a job to tutor a woman who lives with her parents on the North Shore.

Ms. Quinn had found the ad in the Globe. The ad said: “Tutor wanted. English, math and some physics. Room and board provided.” She cut it out and laid it on the tea tray. She asked Dennis what he remembered about physics and then made the call on his behalf. When Mr. Garrity, the girl’s father and well-known lawyer, heard that Dennis had been published by a reputable house and had been a Jesuit (though he’d only been a novice), he agreed to see the young man. He told Ms. Quinn that he’d been “something of a writer,” himself, during his student days with the Jesuits in Worcester, and Ms. Quinn assured him he wouldn’t be disappointed.

Dennis stands in front of the salmon polygon at 60 State and eyeballs the poor bastards coming and going, as if everything were just fine. He sees a guy in a parked car, plastered with posters lettered in Jolly Green Giant font. The posters complain that some Mayflower-certified law firm had fucked him over and how he’s their worst nightmare. Then Dennis looks to the Old State House and the small plaza where the British massacred a few Colonialists after they’d complained about how some Mayflower-certified tax collector had fucked them over and how they were King George III’s worst nightmare. And then, behind him, from the top of Congress, he turns and sees the cricket on the weathervane atop Faneuil Hall, and he wonders why the French hate us.

He thinks:

“O, ,

city by the sea,

city of brick and Brahman,

city of c-list celebrities,

city of townies, socialists and students,

city of Celtics and pols,

city of sculls, squares, and blue laws,

city of reticence and warning,

city of pretensions and the T,

city of hard women and lacey men,

city of good grades and cool affect,

city of grudges and bile,

city of secrets, ignorance and treason,

city of loyalty and support,

too long have I sought to gather you to my bosom as a mother hen gathers her chicks. O, , too long have I wept over you …”

The sun breaks through the white haze. The streets fill with more workers on their way to lunch. Dennis watches them and his stomach falls.

He knows some things.

He could tell you stories. It’s the prophet-thing, after all. It lends itself to the declamatory stuff: poetic, repetitious, rhythmic. It’s the Ben-Hur of conversation, the Ted Kennedy of chiaroscuro. When he drank it was honey and locusts and a big fuck you. But now, with the anti-depressants and salt substitutes for the mania, he tries to keep it under control. It’s not easy, though. Look around. It’s not easy.

MEDALLIONS

Mrs. Gawrych says: I had had two myself. Brad’s a lawyer now with one of those tobacco giants in and then we lost Dan in Iraq, the second war when the idiot lied to pick the wrong country just because he had to show his old man he was man enough, sacrificing other people’s lives for his little drama, not to mention the other losers who should have been strung up, though they gave one of them a medal, hear him all the time now,

so arrogant and defensive, and I say: yes, you did your job damn poorly, all things considered. My drinking went over the top after we lost Dan. Phil and I had grown apart, but losing Dan put the period at the end of that sentence. We divorced, as amicably as possible, both glad to be out of it, both sad to be out of it, too. Of course this is all set-up to what my predisposition was when I met Dennis Wertz. He came every Wednesday night to this high-bottom meeting in Back Bay. He was one of those handsome young men who seem so lost after they’ve peered over the edge to the void beneath. He was very polite, though, very measured, not shy, no need to monopolize the meetings, though he was very perceptive and, without trying to be funny, he could make me laugh, and I needed that, someone who could make me laugh. I asked him if he’d want to speak at my home group in and that was when I first realized that he probably didn’t have a home, only to learn that he’d been homeless since the priests on Newbury Street had kicked him out of their Jesuit seminary.

Being homeless was bad enough, the struggle each day, but, truth be told, I don’t think he wanted to be a priest, it being just a feeling, like a mother’s feeling, and the fact he didn’t give off that priest smell of wax and piety and all the happy nonsense they’ve hidden behind for years. He’ll be happier as time goes on. Won’t happen overnight, because something happened to him in there, something he heard or saw or did, because I can see it in his eyes, like when Phil and I would greet the boys coming home for a break.

Sure they’d look happy at first, but then you’d see it in their eyes.