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improbable?
All of this seemed improbable. As an experiment I decided to return to my past
and see just what I could come-up with. As best I was able I reviewed the
years for hints of this material.
I wondered, though, how I could ever tell if the seeking and the finding were
the same act.
Maybe nothing happened on that train. Probably nothing did, and there is no
way to tell. I
would need some sort of corroboration before I could even begin to entertain
it as a serious possibility.
It seemed like a trick of the mind. Then I remembered that hypnosis session.
and I
thought to myself that the real trick of the mind might be happening now. My
memories were so spontaneous. and seemed so vividly real. Not the faintest
suggestion was made that I
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regress to age twelve. And vet . . . I now remembered that row of' soldiers
sleeping on those tables just as well as I remembered the drawing room of the
train we were on.
To protect my sanity. I had to believe that this was a comprehensible thing.
If it was contact, then it must be proceeding somewhat along lines I could
understand. They've been here for a while. Fine. Lately, because I moved to an
isolated area, they found me. That I
could at least entertain. But I could not accept the notion that they were so
totally involved in my life.
I found a photograph of myself during the spring of my twelfth year, which
showed me to the uniform of St. Anthony's School in San Antonio. Here was a
child so clean he seemed to have been polished along with the brass crossed
rifles on the collars of his uniform. The picture is inscribed: "For my dear
father with love. Whitty."
The neatness was a total deception. It couldn't have lasted more than the
precise amount of time it took to snap the picture. At twelve I was usually
involved in mischief of' one sort or another. I was rarely clean. I was rarely
even still.
I looked into the child's eves. He did not look haunted to me, that boy just
flirting with puberty. In May of that year my younger brother had been born.
and the house was consequently in upheaval. only some of it pleasant. I spent
much time in my room reading.
That summer I read
Life on the Mississippi and it was also the summer of my discover, of'
Kafka. One afternoon I found my mother reading
The Metamorphosis
. After that I read The
Trial. I'd go down to the San Antonio Public Library on the bus and, sit in
the big reading room under the fan and read Kafka until the librarian started
getting uneasy, then I'd shift to
Robert Benchley for the balance of the afternoon.
My smiling face hid a person full of conflicts, trying to cope with the sudden
presence of an infant to an established home and discovering under the sheets
at night that the sins the older boys whispered about were real, and were they
ever sins!
I was deeply conflicted about my Catholicism, wondering whether the tenets of
my faith could be fitted to the picture I was forming of the world. I asked
why the pope hadn't saved the Jews from Hitler. I asked why the Church had
burned people at the stake, and what on earth did abstaining from meat on
Friday have to do with getting to heaven? And if the worst punishment in hell
was to get a glimpse of heaven and not get to go, then what about the nuns in
Limbo who were there caring for the unbaptized babies the angels didn't want
to bother with? They'd had more than a glimpse of heaven. They'd been there
for a while. So wasn't sending them to Limbo actually sending them to the
depths of a personal hell?
The pope closed Limbo before we worked that one out in catechism class,
unfortunately.
Still, my faith was a burning fire in me. I loved Christ and Mary especially,
and used to pray with great fervor whenever I was trapped into going to
church. Then the priest would invariably say, "Go, the mass is ended," when
there were still ten minutes left. But why?
At home I got hold of a book by George Gamow about relativity. Suddenly I
understood how the nuns could take Limbo. I understood why the mass did and
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