Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Chapter 79
“You Looked So Happy”
In Windsor, Ontario, where we’d moved in the summer of 1968, and lived in a white brick house on Riverside Drive East on the Detroit River, looking across to Belle Isle. In Windsor where we both had teaching positions at the university and where each day, each afternoon, we walked together—along the crest of a long steep hill above the river, or along tree-lined residential streets in the Riverside district several miles from the university. Sometimes, we drove south along the Detroit River to Lake Erie and Point Pelee Park.
(I am looking at photographs taken from our car, of autumn cornfields in the vicinity of Amherstburg. Brilliant blue sky, rows of broken cornstalks, how this so-ordinary sight tears at my heart . . . I am wondering
Did I take these pictures? Was Ray driving? What were we talking about?
Did we have lunch somewhere along the lake? And what was awaiting us
,
back in our Windsor house? What were the preoccupations of our lives
,
at this time?)
And there was a woman in Windsor of about my age, or just slightly younger—the wife of an English department colleague who’d been stricken with multiple sclerosis and who as he weakened, grew sicker and was finally forced to use a wheelchair, and was finally too ill to teach any longer, faded from our consciousness as from the memories of his students; and when this woman encountered me at university functions she would stare at me, so strangely—not obviously with hostility, though not in a friendly manner, either; and I felt uneasy, and tried to avoid her. And there came within a few years her husband’s death, at a quite young age—in his early thirties.
And at the memorial service at the university there was the wife, the widow, surrounded by her friends, but staring at me, with a fierce little smile—saying to me that she’d seen Ray and me walking along the river the other day and we were holding hands—“You looked so happy.”
It was an accusation, a reproach. That fierce hurt widow’s smile.
I could not understand then. But I do now.
On the desk in front of me is Ray’s unfinished novel-manuscript, in a soiled and tattered manila folder.
Years ago, he’d given me some of this to read. Several chapters, of which I remember just a little. Later, when we were living in Windsor, Ray worked again on the manuscript, but didn’t show me what he’d written; like other subjects, the subject of
Black Mass
was not one that Ray cared to discuss with me.
Once I’d overheard Ray say to a friend that being an editor was nothing like trying to be a writer—“No one ever killed himself over ‘editing.’ ”
Most of Ray’s adult life is not represented here, in this tattered and much-annotated manuscript.
Black Mass
was written by a young man in his twenties whom I had not met—a highly intelligent, intellectual, yet insecure young man troubled by family issues, disturbed by religion—a “lapsed” Catholic who hadn’t yet become comfortable with his new freedom
not to believe
.
For a Catholic, however, from a devout family, the issue isn’t simply belief but the emotional pressure of the family, that one seem to believe; that one behave as if one believed, in the public sense.
Each Sunday the Catholic mass, each Sunday communion with the family.
All religions involve such rituals. When it is a family ritual, the wish to deny, to repudiate, to flee is bound up with the wish not to upset, disrespect, antagonize.
Ray’s devout parents had sent all of their children to parochial schools—of course.
Give me a child before he’s seven and I will have him for life—
so the Jesuits believe, without irony.
Ray had been highly impressionable, he’d told me. He was likely to believe what he was told by adults in authority. The Church, in Ray’s lifetime, was characterized by the most intractable demands—the absolute obedience of all Catholics to the dictums of priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal, pope. As young children Catholics were taught to believe that the slightest, most trivial of infractions (i.e., before the Church law was changed, eating meat on Fridays; breaking your fast before communion by allowing even a snowflake to melt on your lips; any use of “artificial” birth control) could constitute a sin for which the sinner would be damned to Hell.
Venial sins
sent you to Purgatory, for an unspecified time.
Mortal sins
sent you to Hell, forever.
The Church teaches that you can work your way out of Purgatory, eventually. Like ascending steep steps up a mountain—it will take time, it might take years, but you can do it.
Also, if you are in Purgatory, your family can help you by praying to the Virgin Mary on your behalf, and by paying for masses to be said for the redemption of your soul.
Within its straitjacket of absurd canon law, by tradition the Church is curiously flexible, if not whimsical. To be prayed-over after your death is a kind of lobbying and, like lobbying, requires payment to individuals in authority. The Virgin Mary is the soft, feminine, maternal figure to whom you can pray for intercession with the stern, hyper-masculine paternal figure of God. In Ray’s time Catholics believed that if God wished to detain you for a long time in Purgatory, it was possible for Mary to ease you out, into Paradise, through the
back door.
Hence the football term, inexplicable to non-Catholics—
Hail Mary pass.
The “Hail Mary” is the prayer that is exclusively to Mary:
Hail Mary
,
full of grace
,
the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women
,
and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb
,
Jesus.
How many hundreds—thousands?—of times had Ray uttered this prayer. How many times had Ray “crossed” himself—tips of fingers to his forehead, to his breastbone, to his left shoulder, and to his right shoulder.
How deeply imprinted these ritual-gestures. Far more deeply than anything in a Catholic’s more “conscious” life.
Purgatory is not unlike life. Purgatory is life as a prison sentence, from which one might be redeemed. Hell is a different matter.
Once you are in Hell, you can’t work your way out of Hell. Your family can’t petition you out. No matter how many high masses your family purchases for you, you will never leave Hell.
You will suffer such torments in Hell!—physical, spiritual.
Much of parochial school religion in Ray’s time focused upon the punishments of Hell. Paradise was a vague bright place overseen by God and populated by angels—Hell was a vivid place overseen by the Devil and populated by devils.
Each sinner could expect to be punished by his/her own devil.
For brilliantly imagined sadistic punishments to expect in the Catholic Hell, see James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And recall that, for all his repudiation of the Church, and his disdain for such primitive superstition, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus concedes that he’s still afraid there is a “malevolent reality” to what he no longer believes.
As it was the hope of most Catholics that at least one of their children might enter the religious life—take “holy orders”—so Ray’s father expressed the hope that Ray would become a priest. After graduating from Marquette High School in Milwaukee—a Jesuit-run school with a reputation for academic excellence—Ray entered a Jesuit seminary in the area, at the age of eighteen.
In photographs, Ray Smith at age eighteen looks so very young—like fifteen, or fourteen.
Exactly what happened at the seminary, I don’t know—Ray didn’t speak of it except generally, obliquely—
Things didn’t work out. I dropped out after a few months.
Ray’s emotions about the Church, thus about his childhood/boyhood in Milwaukee, were very complicated. A more aggressive wife—a wife who was closer to her husband’s age—might have succeeded in getting him to speak more openly about it, and about his feelings for his parents; a more aggressive wife might have become better acquainted with Ray’s parents.
Though Ray became very fond of my parents, as if he were a blood relative of theirs, I scarcely knew Ray’s parents. He didn’t encourage me, and we visited Milwaukee rarely.
My memories of Ray’s parents are good ones. Seeing Ray with his family at the time—his father, his mother, his brother Bob—was to see the man I had fallen in love with in another context: son, brother. I did not feel that my claim upon my husband was greater than theirs and I feared—as many young wives do—that it was less.
After our first visit Ray said, “Did you see how my mother looked at you? Smiled at you? She couldn’t stop touching you . . .” This was pleasing to Ray, and very nice for me to hear.
For this reason, I always felt close to Ray’s mother whom I would see on only a few occasions in her lifetime. When she died at a very old age—it might have been ninety-nine—the way in which Ray grieved for her suggested that he’d never had any quarrel with
her.
What is eerie, unsettling—as Ray grew older, the more Ray began to resemble his father, Raymond Joseph Smith, for whom he was named.
The more Ray began to dislike his photographs. The more Ray insisted upon being the one who took photographs, whose photograph was not
taken.
In the first insomniac nights after Ray’s death, when I lay dazed and exhausted and sleepless wondering what had happened to us, as the victim of an earthquake or a wreck must lay astonished and wondering what had happened quite apart from any physical pain or even any fear of what might happen again at any time, for some reason I was thinking of Ray and of his father—I was seeing Ray and his father, as if their faces had almost merged—I was thinking
Ray was older than his father when his father died. Ray should have forgiven his father.
I had no clear idea what might have been “forgiven.”
I would never have ventured such a thought to Ray.
Then, I remembered: it wasn’t just that Ray had discovered his father crying, or even that his father had expressed a terror of being “damned” because of Ray; Ray was also upset by his father’s habit of praying aloud when others could overhear, murmuring the ejaculation
Jesus
,
Mary
,
and Joseph!
which is, or was, a Catholic plea for the overcoming of temptation, or for forgiveness.
Seeing an attractive woman on television, for instance, Ray’s father would quickly look away murmuring
Jesus
,
Mary
,
and Joseph!
—a way of blocking an unwanted/sinful sexual thought.
To have
impure thoughts
was believed to be a grave sin, in the Catholic cosmology. If a Catholic did not sufficiently confess his
impure thoughts
to a priest, and if he took the sacrament of communion, he would be committing a mortal sin and if he died in this state of mortal sin, he would be punished forever in Hell.
How ridiculous such notions seem to us! To some of us.
How crucial to life, to others. We must consider that most of the world’s population “believes” in some sort of personal, often punitive God-relationship. The soil of the earth is steeped in the blood of those who have died for their religious beliefs as by those who have been killed by those who believe.
Ray’s father had fought in World War I, as a young man. He’d been born Catholic and except for illness, he’d never missed a Sunday mass or a holy day of obligation in all of his life.
He was a car salesman in Milwaukee. Even through the Depression, he worked. Ray would say of him
He worked so hard. He never stopped working. He was always at the dealership
,
or he was on the phone. He never rested. He wore himself out. His only happiness was the Church—taking communion.
I have no memory of Ray calling his father anything other than
my father.
I don’t recall him addressing his father. Not once did I hear Ray utter the word
Dad
,
Daddy.
I am thinking now that it was a mistake that I made no effort to urge Ray to be reconciled with his father. I seemed not to have given the possibility any thought. Very likely I took a kind of pleasure in it, that Ray was emotionally estranged from his family and therefore more dependent upon
me.
While we saw my parents often, and were on the very best, friendliest terms with Carolina and Fred.
Seeing Ray with my parents, seeing how well we all got along, how happy we were together, I might have thought
He doesn’t need anyone except us
,
as a family. He has us.
This was a naive thought. It was a young-wife sort of thought, the jealousy of one who isn’t altogether certain of herself.
Now that it’s too late, in fact decades too late, I am sorry about this. I don’t even know whether Ray loved his father, as well as being uncomfortable with him, and angry—and embarrassed. I don’t even know whether Ray’s father was upset about his son living at such a distance from him, seeing his parents so rarely. And there came the day in the late 1960s when Ray’s brother called to say that Ray’s father had died. And we went to the funeral in Milwaukee, and Ray was utterly stunned, silent; and whatever Ray felt, he did not share with me.
I was young then, and naive. I may have imagined, since Ray said so little about his father, that Ray wasn’t grieving for him. That when I asked him how he was feeling, and he shrugged and said
All right
, that was a reasonable answer.
It’s a fact, a man will love his father—in some way.
Snarled and twisted like the roots of a gigantic tree—these are the contortions of familial love.
Yet even now, if Ray were to return—could I ask him about his father? His family? Would I dare? Or would the slightest frown on Ray’s part discourage me, and deflect the conversation onto another subject, as it always did?
As a wife, I had never wanted to upset my husband. I had never wanted to quarrel, to disagree or to be disagreeable. To be
not loved
seemed to me the risk, if a wife confronted her husband against his wishes.
And now, I am
not loved.
And what a strange lucidity this seems to bring, like disinfectant slapped on an open wound.
***
From Ray’s notes, handwritten:
BLACK MASS
. Title: double meaning—requiem mass and Satanic inversion of mass. V. working at a poem of this title at the time of her suicide, P. discovers it in her journal . . . The poem (incomplete) describes their sexual encounter in terms of a witch’s black mass; her ironic projection of the guilt she imagines he felt . . . P. is about eight years older than V., a professor and a priest . . .
The manuscript
Black Mass
contains about one hundred typed pages, irregularly numbered. Included in the folder are numerous pages of notes and detailed outlines. Some pages are typed in red ink, others in black. Considering the age of the manuscript, the ink hasn’t faded much, though there are paragraphs that have been x’ed out as if impatiently and the author’s marginal notes are near-unreadable.
A kind of trance has overcome me, reading these notes of Ray’s. The single-spaced typing gives Ray’s writing an air of intensity, urgency. I feel as if I am overhearing Ray talking to himself and the sensation reminds me of the sensation I felt as a girl wandering onto rural property posted N
O
T
RESPASSING
.
There are two principal characters in
Black Mass
—V. (Vanessa), a poet (who bears some resemblance to Sylvia Plath?) and P. (Paul), who bears some resemblance, except for the fact that he is an ordained priest, to the young novelist Ray.
V.’s poetry is sincere, with a distinct voice . . . Her writing gives her an identity; it is a psychological outlet. She sees with the poet’s eye, continually assembling words in her head—“ordering the world.” She meets Paul at Wisconsin. She meets him several times, once at a grad student Christmas party; he shows an interest in her writing, encourages her . . .