The Unspeakable Read Free

wanted a way out. Just in case.”
    When I started seminary in the fall of 1971, Marbury, already a year ahead of me and years wiser, still had that car. It was an old Volvo with a shredded blue interior. Ten years old at least, the car rattled and clanked when it started, knocking off pieces of the dashboard while warming up. A cab light stayed on all the time as I recall, a weird kind of metaphor that illuminated a backseat that was always packed and ready to go, loaded up with duffels and half-opened boxes, in case the urge struck Marbury to flee. But it never did.
    Not that any one of us was firm on staying. We were a small seminary, a hundred students at best, floating in like human balloons from the Vietnam War. Some hiding, others just escaping for a short time. We lived in a series of poorly maintained buildings on a bluff overlooking the Iowa River, near Decorah, in a pastoral community with farms and woodlands. Our seminary was one of the few industries in town, and except for a rival bunch of Lutherans,the only seat of higher learning in these parts. I arrived, as did many of my peers, excited but somewhat nervous about my future and the challenges that lay ahead. Nervous too about my convictions, which I deemed shaky at best. Naturally I had grown up Catholic, or mostly so, my father embracing the faith of my mother as he got older, and if not for the pressures from both family and country, I might never have chosen such a life for myself. Tradition, they called it. My mother at least called it that—tradition—though I had another name for it.
    My mother’s side of the family, as I was constantly reminded, had always done their part through the years for God and Nation, supplying both with eager recruits. Recruits for war, recruits for the ministry. As fate would have it, I was born in the midst of change. Vatican II had taken its toll among the growing counterculture that made joining the priesthood, except for reasons to evade the draft or just wanting to be around other men, nearly unthinkable. But my mother, ever the optimist when it came to issues of the faith, especially faith in the holy machinery, summed things up quite differently.
    She said, “What an exciting time, Peter. It’s a new church, with new opportunities. Who knows where you could go. Bishop, maybe. Dare I even say it? Right to the Holy See.”
    I, of course, saw my chances in Rome as remote at best, but my mother had a point. The ministry was calling and it was my duty, indeed my ancestral destiny, to respond. My uncle was a priest, along with some other relatives, each one charting his way through the past like some familial apostolic succession. We Whitmores could trace part of our Catholic lineage back to popes long since dead, and our service was well documented. Monks, teachers, parish administrators, anywhere the calling led us. My mother reminded me of these servants as I boarded the Greyhound for Iowa, ironically the same bus from Minneapolis that Marbury had scoffed at. Shekissed me good-bye, her lips touching my cheeks in the softest manner, as I imagine mothers sending their children off to die. “Carry with you the pride of the family,” she said. I remember those words as the doors swished shut, heavy diesel in the air, a black cloud blocking out everything, my pride included.
    Marbury was there waiting for me as I left the bus. We didn’t speak except for a hello, but then we didn’t have to. His mere presence spoke volumes. In one moment, Marbury had cut down every image I had ever had of the priesthood. Maybe it was the jeans and sandals that he wore, though others had adopted that same way of dressing. Or maybe it was just the way that he carried himself, aloof yet with a watchful eye. He was always alert, on the lookout it seemed. Later I heard stories about him. Other students, apparently feeling sorry for me having Marbury living next door, filled me in on the gossip. Rumors