an unfortunate new set of clothes, claimed, I suspect, from Eaton’s Annex, a sinkhole at the downtown Eaton’s department store where merchandise returned by dissatisfied mail-order customers was disposed of at greatly reduced prices.
On this occasion the bargain in question was a matching pair of pants and shirt. The trousers were a vivid and thoroughly offensive green. They were several sizes too large for me (“You’ll grow into them” was a guiding principle for our wearables), and to make them fit I had to hitch the waistband up around my rib cage like Stan Laurel. The shirt—also far too large—hung down like a horse collar around my neck. It introduced a Western motif: it was a depressing gray from waist to armpits; then there was a clever bit of Gene Autry–style cowboy silver piping with Western curlicues, above which the shoulders and sleeves exploded with the same reptilian green as the trousers. Thus attired I looked, and felt, like Howdy Doody.
To complete my humiliation I was compelled by family obligation to wear this preposterous getup to Sunday Mass. Entering the church, removing my winter coat in the vestibule, walking up the center aisle past the families of my schoolmates, assuming our pew, I could feel a warm gush of prickly shame rising through my body and blushing crimson across my face. I was certain that my heartthrob of the moment was somewhere in the congregation, observing me, pathetic and ludicrous. How awful it seemed to me that morning, how awful it is to feel poor. Yes, poor little me. Oddly, an old photo of myself wearing that ridiculous outfit, and looking sufficiently pleased with both myself and it, now leads me to wonder whether I haven’t contrived a memory of emotional trauma about it for perverse revisionist reasons of my own.
MY FAITH NEVER wavered even as I entered the maelstrom of puberty, but now my prayers were frequently hijacked by the stirring of strange sensations in my body. Suddenly obsessed with the sweet mysteries of girls, but strictly forbidden to think “impure thoughts” about them, I took to praying for divine intervention toward arranging a successful love life. This attempt to cajole the divinities into giving me a hand represented a logical progression from all the times I’d fervently sought God’s assistance, or the Blessed Virgin’s intercession on my behalf, in getting top marks on a school exam or winning a race on field day. Ravished in my imagination by the charms of the Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, I prayed an entire novena—special prayers repeated in church on the afternoons of nine consecutive Fridays—to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would contrive, however improbably, to have Annette and me meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after.
The novena apparently fell upon deaf ears, and shortly thereafter I lowered my sights from Annette to another lovely Italian girl named Mary, whose attainability was enhanced by the advantage of proximity: she lived in a large house on Jane Street, the very route we’d walk on our way to and from school. A year younger than me, with tawny skin and eyes that gazed from darkly wonderful depths, this exquisite creature moved like a dancer, with the ease of the truly beautiful. Far too shy to dare speak to her, I spoke instead to God about her. I sought His assistance in arranging things between Mary and myself. As with my Annette novena, this too proved an unsatisfactory courtship strategy, and I was left to encounter the beguiling creature in imagination alone.
The penalty one paid for sexual obsession, however sanctified it may have been behind transparent prayer, was exacted on Saturday afternoon in the darkened confines of the confessional. Never one to lie or steal, cheat or blaspheme, I began creating a smokescreen of imaginary sins behind which I could tuck in a quick mention of the “impure thoughts” that had been my only genuine transgression. “I disobeyed my parents three times,” I’d exaggerate, “and I lost my temper twice and”—(quieter, almost a whisper)—“I had impure thoughts five times and”—(louder again)—“I was jealous of my brother once.” There’d be an ominous pause from the other side of the screen. I’d see the darkened outline of the priest’s head hover closer.
“What kind of thoughts?” he’d ask, and I knew I was sunk.
I mean, what did he expect me to say? That when I saw lovely Mary walking home from school ahead of me, her pert little bum swaying like lyric poetry, her gorgeous long brown legs, her dark hair cascading down her back in maddening ringlets, that I wanted to take her by the hand to some charmed and private place where we’d kiss and fondle one another until, until, until. . . Oh, God!
Of course not. Instead I fibbed and obfuscated as best I could and the priest pried and prodded as best he could. A confession of impure thoughts invariably aroused the priest’s attention in a way that theft, dishonesty, or blasphemy seldom did. Perhaps even murder wouldn’t. This didn’t strike me as the least bit strange because I knew that the ejaculations that impure thoughts produced were mortal sins that, if left unconfessed, would doom me to Hell forever. I would never have imagined at the time that the priest might have been indulging his own prurient interest. Priests were holy men, the holiest and most admirable men we knew. Only years later, after the outrages of widespread priestly sexual predation were exposed, did the penny drop. Imagine living a life of lonely abstinence while having all these innocent young children whispering to you in the dark the most intimate details of their first confused experiences of sexual desire.
Released from the tortures of the confessional at last, you knelt to say your penance, then burst thankfully out of the church washed clean of all stain of sin and fired with a firm purpose never to sin again. But you did sin again. And again. Erotic dreams, infernal “nocturnal emissions,” and that most catastrophic of all iniquities: to take upon your tongue the Body of Christ while the vile wickedness of impure thoughts and actions was still blackening your soul—oh, here was an abomination, a mortal sin of such magnitude that you would be condemned forever to Hell were you to die with it still on your conscience.
The God of Eucharist and confessional, of redemption and damnation, existed entirely within the fundamental virtue of faith. The spiritual apprehension of divine truths not available to intellect alone. Credo—I believe. Faith was a precious gift, vastly superior to any earthly wisdom. From the outset, we were pressed repeatedly by parents, priests, and nuns to guard our faith against transgression, to be constantly vigilant against its loss. This was why girls were to be avoided, lest a fascination with what was called “the flesh” erode and corrupt the fundament of faith. To lose your faith was to lose everything, a catastrophe worse than death.
THE UNRULY IMPULSES of “the flesh” were frequently described in incendiary terms, “the flames of lust.” For me the hearthside flames of childhood had been comforting rather than ravenous, but I’d largely lost touch with fire after our great immigration to Canada. Our house in Weston had no fireplace, being centrally heated by an oil furnace in the basement. The only fire to be found—other than the pungent piles of leaves smoking throughout the neighborhood each autumn—was the fire of disaster. An old wooden church alongside the Saint John’s schoolyard burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Even more spectacularly, a whole lumberyard in town shot massive flames into the sky one night. Arson was again suspected. The occasional wail of a fire engine’s siren promised the excitement of fire as spectacle.
Though in the process of becoming engulfed by booming postwar Toronto, the town of Weston back in those days was still a relatively easy bike ride away from open countryside of fields, farms, and woodlands. Often in the summertime several pals and I would plan an all-day bike hike out to the Credit River country or up to the Caledon Hills. I loved these long meanderings through the countryside, until the final one on which I received my baptism in the terrifying fury of fire.
After a hard morning’s cycling, my pals and I had stopped to have our picnic lunch in a field through which a little brook meandered. Four boys sprawled languidly in golden grass, an idyllic summer scene. John, who was older than the rest of us by virtue of having failed a couple of grades but wise in our eyes with the wisdom of age, took out a box of wooden matches. He began striking matches and flipping them at each of us in turn. The instant it hit the dry grass, each match would ignite a small fire that one of us had to jump up and stamp out. We told John to
