Stanley Elkin - Boswell

I remembered a greeting card I had once gotten from a school friend when I was still wrestling. It was one of those cards which celebrates no particular occasion but pops out at you every once in a while in the mail as a sudden windfall of contact. It was cheery, bright, the kind of card a man could decently send to another man, with a cartoon drawing of “The Thinker.” Inside were big inky letters that said “JUST THINKING OF YOU,” and beneath the greeting my friend had written a small note. “Caught you on TV last night in a wrestling match and couldn’t help remembering those wonderful days as kids together. My best wishes to you in your new career. May good fortune and health be with you always.” There was something touching in the message, but I remember feeling crowded, bullied. It was as though I were being asked to value what I had never valued. A sales technique, another piece of junk mail — you could send it without sealing the envelope and it would cost you a penny less for the stamp.

I considered what it would be like to have brothers, parents, to nuzzle in the bounty of breasts, to sit on laps, be taught to suck sugar. There were only so many ways to die. You took your choice — that was what the will was for. For some people, for myself, the past made no difference; it was beside the point, like my friend’s declaration. There were some — some? we were legion — who neither made fortunes nor inherited them, congenital third sons of the woodchopper.

“Rabbi,” I said, “I don’t trust all this lace, that aunt’s nose repeated generation after generation. What is your cabalistic chant, ‘Auld Lang Syne’?”

“What do you want?” he asked, frightened. A loose nerve like some secretive, subterrestrial animal, slid under the surface of his skin. It was like watching the slow uncoiling of a whip. Like so many things recently, it was familiar.

“Well, I was in the neighborhood,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“Well, I’m a Baptist, don’t you get it? I’m making my ecumenical call.”

“Please,” he said.

“Oh, come on. I’m a Methodist, a Roman Catholic, a Christian Scientist. I’m Episcopalian, Lutheran, a Church of Christ man. Some of the Eastern things.”

He looked at me curiously.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m a converter. I join everything. Always willing to take a little instruction. Come on now, tell me, what’s the meaning of life?”

“What do you want?”

“What I said. I’ve been becoming everything. It may be hereditary. Perhaps I got the notion from my Uncle Myles’ charge accounts that he never used.” I started to tell him about the time, a year before, when I had gone into one of the confessional booths in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was outrageous.

I had gone into the confessional and pressed the buzzer for the priest. When I heard him enter through the other side and slide back the grill, something indescribable came over me. (It was this that I had forgotten, that even then the experience had been meaningful, not a prank.) When I realized that there was really a priest there, not an impostor like myself, there was nothing to do but what he expected of me. I began to tell him about my life. I had never been in a confessional before. I wasn’t a Roman Catholic at the time; I knew nothing about the forms, the language.

After a while the priest interrupted me. “But what sin have you to confess?” he demanded.

“I’m telling you, Father.”

“No. You must be direct. You must be honest,” he said. “When did you make your last confession?”

“Well, I’ve never made one. I’ve never made a confession before. I never have.”

“Are you Catholic?” he asked me angrily.

“Well, I have a soul, Father.”

I thought he would melt or something at the mention of the word, but all he did was ask again if I were Catholic. I was afraid that he would leave me there alone if I admitted I wasn’t, so I lied.

“Please get on with it,” he said.

“We’ll be here all afternoon, Father, it looks like,” I said, and I started to tell him again about my life. I told him about Herlitz and the wrestling and about Perlmutter and Lome and all the others, how I had extorted contact from them, and about the things that had happened to me. I told him about what I believed and how important it was for me not to die. At first he didn’t seem very interested, but as I went on I could sense an attention even in his silence. Every once in a while when I mentioned some famous person he would say, “You know him?” or “Really?” and I could see that he was impressed. It was odd. I knew that for him none of this, even his hearing my confession, had anything to do with religion or with his function as a priest, whereas for me the experience was more solemn than anything that had ever happened to me. We get different things from each other.

After I had finished I asked him my question. I asked him where the sin was.

He wasn’t very interested, I think, and he told me that it might be a good idea if I saw a psychiatrist.

“Come on, Father,” I said, “there’s a sin there someplace. Don’t push me off onto a psychiatrist.”

“God forgives your sins.”

“Yes, I know that. But what are they? What good is it if I don’t understand what God is forgiving? Shouldn’t I have some idea about that?”

He thought about this for a while. I don’t think he was trying to get rid of me. What he had heard must have sounded insane to him, but I think he also realized that there was something wrong somewhere, wrong in his sense. But he just couldn’t cope with me. He’d been trained to deal with masturbators and adulterers and the profane and the various larcenies — to transmit forgiveness, not to recognize sin. What did he know about sin? He dealt with those who had yielded to temptation, who had coddled their flesh, who had been temporarily delivered from the deceptive needs, had fought it out on their body’s battleground and lost. Finally he coughed and said something I couldn’t hear.

“What was that, Father?”

“Misrepresentation,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Of course I’ve told many lies, but I’ve been more honest with others, even about myself, than most people are.”

“Desire, then,” he said. He was really interested now.

“Well, maybe—”

“The failure to acknowledge God,” he said.

“No, Father.”

“Pride.”

“Father, I stink.”

It went on like that, neither of us able to put our finger on it.

“Father?” I said at last.

“Yes?”

“Father, I think — this may sound crazy—”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just an idea…”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I think you better go get the Cardinal.”

The rabbi stood barefoot on the uncarpeted floor glaring at me. He seemed wild and tough. I stared at his feet, pale and rough on the smooth brown wood, the toenails chipped and incredibly filthy. It was as if he had crossed deserts, knelt by streams, lived on nuts. (I thought of the old wrestling days. In his robe and skullcap, barefoot, the rabbi might have been in disguise for a match. It might have been another identity, like The Masked Playboy or The Grim Reaper. For me there had always been something more ferociously real about those identities than false. The Wild Men were wild, the bad guys bad, the good guys good.)

“There are prayers,” he said hoarsely.

“Come on,” I said, “it’s a joke. Pleased to have met you.”

“There are prayers,” he said again.

“Come on,” I said. “For what?”

“For your sin. That the priest couldn’t tell you about. There are prayers.” He put his hand on my face suddenly and began to chant.