I was a Catholic in the 1950s, a student at an all-boys Catholic school, priests for teachers. I never heard of any of us boys being messed around with by a priest. I knew that I was afraid of them and probably would have done anything a priest asked me to.
But there was something else about them that impressed me and changed my life. In the ninth grade, we made weekly visits to the YMCA pool, where all the swimming was done in the nude. I was embarrassed, but I was the only one. We were all naked. And I recall how the priests would come into the changing room and find a locker. They wore long black cassocks, birettas, and black socks. They would undress with us, carefully folding their clothes and tucking them into the lockers.
Stark naked, they led us into the swimming pool, which stank of chlorine. They dived, they gave us swimming lessons. They taught us to pick up objects from the bottom of the pool—“surface dive.” They showed us lifesaving maneuvers. “Never let a drowning man grab you. He’ll take you with him.”
What I remember of the priests were their naked bodies, big and pale without robes or cassocks. They were men, just white skin and hairy legs. After a while I did not believe they had any power at all, and certainly not spiritual power. As time passed, I liked them less and less — for their bodies — and as an adult, reflecting on the YMCA visits, I began to hate them for pretending to be powerful. I easily lost my faith.
Like many boys of my generation, I was sent away to school. My father was an officer in the Indian Army, based in Bareilly, and he had the choice of sending me to a hill-station school — say, one in Simla — or to an English boarding school. He opted for England. There I went at the age of seven, accompanied by my mother, who left me at the underschool, returning every two years to check up on me. I know this seems extraordinary, but it was quite usual then. The period I am speaking of is the 1930s, for I was born in 1928, and my prep school days ended with the outbreak of war in Europe.
My mother died. This I was told by the headmaster, who took me aside and was very kind to me. His wife, Winnie — we called her Poodle — made me tea.
“Your father is coming to fetch you.”
I was ten, but a small ten, a white weedy boy with bony bitten fingers and spiky hair. I was too nervous to be dreamy or lazy. I was a whiz at maths, chess, and Religious Knowledge, humiliated in all sports.
The day came. “Your father is in the foyer of Ashburnham.” I ran. I was in a panic. I saw two men. I clutched one and began to cry.
“Neville, I am your father,” the other man said.
This man I hugged was laughing: my uncle.
Nothing was right after that with my father. I began to think, Who is he? And maybe my uncle is my real father.
My aunt Rosalind, whom we called Rosebud, had a fantastic collection of jewelry. She had two habits related to the collection. One, she was passionate about collecting, continually adding pieces, delving in markets, attending auctions and estate sales, and dealing privately. The other habit was her always announcing her finds and acquisitions. This meant that we were all keenly aware of what she had bought and what she owned. In so doing, she educated us. This is a topaz, this is a sapphire, this is a yellow diamond, and that’s a black pearl. We learned the difference between white gold and platinum as settings, the virtue of one stone over another, the variety of hallmarks, the price of gold and diamonds — specific numbers and scarcity value.
Auntie Rosebud’s collection continued to grow while we watched, from a few boxes to many chests of drawers, glass cabinets, and trays. We became knowledgeable ourselves. That close attention was a way of pleasing Auntie Rosebud. We felt that she needed us to take an interest, that she enjoyed educating us, and I suppose our knowledge linked us to this valuable collection and gave us self-esteem.
We were young adults, in the working world, when Auntie Rosebud sold her collection of jewelry. It was like a sickness and a death. An auction house swept down and valued the pieces, photographed them, and in a few months the whole collection was gone. She said, “You can bid for the ones you really like.” But we didn’t: we couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t the money she wanted. She had plenty. After the big auction she was more powerful than ever, and more of a mystery, and we felt so weak.
I was in Central America, visiting schools for an aid project. Leaving one small school in a village, my guide, Ramon, said to me, “Did you see that small boy at the front desk, who was so slow? Alone, writing after school in his notebook?”
The boy with the crooked smile — I had seen him, and he had seen me, too.
“His story is so sad. His mother was only fifteen when she got pregnant. She had no boyfriend, no fiancé. She was just a schoolgirl. She gave birth, and afterward she moved out of the house and went to San Pedro.
“A few years later, visiting her parents, she saw her father hugging and kissing her younger sister, who was fourteen. She screamed at him to stop.
“Her father said, ‘It’s nothing. We’re just being friendly.’
“She said, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to her. Leave her alone!’
“But the father didn’t. So the older daughter went to the police station and said, ‘My father is having sex with my sister. He had sex with me, and this boy is the result.’
“The little boy looked at the policemen and smiled. They could see in his smile that there was something wrong with his head.
“The father was arrested. He went to trial and was given fifteen years and is in prison now. It’s so strange. How do these things happen?”
A few days later we passed a small house in the forest near that village. Ramon pointed.
“That’s the house of Señor Martin. He had seventeen children. Imagine! And now that I think of it, his second son was the one who committed incest with his daughters. He lived there.”
“Seventeen children in that house?” I said.
“Two bedrooms,” Ramon said. “Fantastic, eh, how these people can manage?”
I plan to retire soon. I have high blood pressure, yet my life has been uneventful — two children, both married; my wife is a real estate agent. I have spent my life in accountancy and tax planning. I used to think, I should get outside more. And then when my health problems prevented me, I was somewhat relieved not to have to get any exercise.
All my life there has been a shadow over me, one I could not identify, weighing me down.
I was at the supermarket — this was just the other day — and saw a young mother with her three children, one in a baby carriage, one holding her hand, and the third, the eldest, trying to help her. This big boy was about ten. He wore a baseball hat that was slightly too large for his head and tipping sideways. His eyeglasses were the cheap kind that make a kid self-conscious. He was pale, bucktoothed, very skinny, with an ill-fitting shirt and blue pants — not stylish, none of it. It was a poor family but an earnest one, conscious of decency and order. The boy was carrying a heavy bag, because his mother was burdened with the other children and the shopping. She chose each item very carefully, weighing the thing, looking several times at the price.
The boy was ugly, foolish-looking, really pathetic, trying to look anonymous but obviously what his schoolmates would have called a geek. His glasses were all wrong, he was weak, he was worried, he was trying to be helpful, but anyone could see he was miserably self-conscious and perhaps terrified. He knew what it was like to be mocked: he anticipated it every moment, glancing aside. I knew that his father either was dead or had deserted the mother. The father would have shown this boy how to dress and would have given him a manly example. But his mother nagged him. “You’re the oldest!” He was in despair — I could see the shadow over him.