Free Stories for Boys: A Memoir by Gregory Martin Page B

in the rotation to serve 6:30 a.m. mass. I was never even late. I would remember. When it was cold – it was often below zero – my father went out ten minutes before we needed to leave, unplugged the heater block, and started up his big, white Chrysler Newport, with its push button transmission down the left hand of the dash and its pale green interior illumination.
    My father sat in the pews, in the small side chapel, with the five or six other parishioners, the two or three nuns, while I rang the bells and washed the priest’s hands with holy water poured from the small, cut glass carafe, and the priest whispered from Psalm 51: “Lord, wash away my iniquity; cleanse me from my sin.”
    After we had all recited the Lord’s Prayer – the Our Father – the priest said:
    Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
     
    Before offering communion, the priest said:
    This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.
     
     
    And my father responded with the others in one voice:
     
    Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.
    Then I held the copper paten under my father’s chin as he kneeled at the communion rail and received the body of Christ on his tongue. After mass, I changed out of my black robe and went out to find my father, alone in the chapel and often still on his knees in the pew, his eyes closed in prayer. I’d wait, sitting beside him, until he opened his eyes, smiled and said, “Ready, son.” Then, we went out into the first light of morning and drove home.
    I think now that he could not wait to be there in that small side chapel. I could not wait to be there with him – I loved those mornings with him – the two of us driving there and back in the quiet of that big car. Or at least I cherish those memories now. Research shows that I have little authority to speak on behalf of the fleeting emotional states of my former self. That was thirty years ago. Even just writing this paragraph damages my ability to act as credible proxy for that brown-haired, black-robed boy. We remember best and most not what we experience, but what we say about what we experience.
    Did I admire that man who waited for me in the pew, whose eyes were closed in a seriousness I can only now understand? I don’t know. I doubt I gave it much thought.
    I could not have known then that my father understood himself to be a sinner – and not just the confess-your-three-sins variety, but the real thing. He believed, fully and sincerely, that he would go to hell for his sins. I could not have known that the church was his place to be quiet and honest with himself, to repent, to beseech God for a forgiveness he could not bring himself to ask of my mother, forgiveness for a sin of betrayal that he knew he would commit again.
    Monsignor Crowley knew that my father was gay. He knew that my father had been molested by his own father. Monsignor Crowley was the only person who knew. My father went to Monsignor Crowley once a month for confession. He told Monsignor Crowley everything, and Monsignor Crowley kept his secret. The secret was between my father, Monsignor Crowley, and God.
    Until now I’d never stopped to wonder why I wanted to be an altar boy so badly, why for years I served at mass, gladly, unresentfully. It was a duty I performed that did not feel like a duty. It felt like grace. I could not wait to become an altar boy in fifth grade. I had always thought that it was because I was so good at being an altar boy, so devoted and concentrated, that in eighth grade, Monsignor Crowley chose me to be the one altar boy to routinely get out of school and serve at the funeral masses that took place across the parking lot in the church, the one boy who got to drive with him out to the