No carrot and stick approach for Sister Grace: she did it all on simple sex appeal. She smiled and dimpled and winked six of us Bronx prodigies into sitting in her classroom on sunny Saturday mornings and working out algebraic puzzles. She taught us to sp ell after a fashion, and introduced us to the subtle distinction between the subject and object of a sentence. The Jesuits loved subtle distinctions: they took all six of us.
When I went there as a student I could have sworn the school was on 85th Street; that, at least, was where I found it when I arrived every weekday morning at 8:45. Now somehow it has been relocated, like some Holy House of Loretto, a block south to 84th S treet. No, it hasn't moved; it's the geography in my head that has shifted. Regis High School has an elegant classical facade on 84th Street that sternly faces the equally elegant baroque of the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola across the street. And down below, on the street between the Doric severity of the school's front and the baroque cheekiness of the church, skipped and gamboled the blond girls of Saint Lawrence Academy next door. Or so it was said, since they were never seen to materialize anywher e but on 84th Street between Park and Madison Avenues. They were, the romantics maintained, a moral mirage, the purest spun seraphs of morose delectation.
There were no facades, and assuredly no girls, on the unlit 85th Street side of Regis High School, only a dark tunnel through which the cream of New York Catholic boyhood slouched in every morning to get themselves whipped into something remotely resembli ng a manly froth. No tunnels for the Jesuits. The faculty came in from Saint Ignatius' through the sunny 84th Street entry, joking a little on the way with the lovely blond wraiths from Saint Lawrence, then ambled amiably across the marble lobby and mount ed the marble stairs at the front of the building. Their charges meanwhile emerged from the tunnel, squinted up at the distant patch of sky above the atrium courtyard and pushed and jostled their way up the dark slate staircases at the rear, freshmen all the way to the top floor, sophomores and juniors on four, the happy and far less numerous seniors on three.
I cannot speak for the present, but the Jesuit educational system was once unabashedly based on privilege and its denial, and Regis was its most finely calculated and most successful example. We were all there on privilege, we were told, a privilege costi ng us nothing and won through a competive exam. That privilege, once bestowed, was then constantly threatened with withdrawal. A lapse below 75 in any one subject meant instant probation; in two, summary dismissal. Blown away. Gone. The brave among those discharged wretches picked up the shattered pieces of their lives and begged admittance to Xavier or Fordham Prep or some other Jesuit high school where you could shamefully buy yourself a place by paying tuition; the desperate disappeared into the flaili ng arms and ravening jaws of the Christian Brothers at All Hallows or Saint Anne's or, God help us, La Salle. Regis alumni still suffer a little frisson, I am sure, when they open the sports pages of the New York Times and their eye chances to light on an obscure high school boxscore and the name "La Salle Academy".
Or so it was supposed, since the losers in that all-win Regis universe were banned from human intercourse as totally as if they had been excommunicated or assassinated. No one ever dropped back and told us what All Hallows was like. The survivors, on the other hand, though annually dimished in number, waxed fat, as survivors will, in wisdom and age and grace, and by their senior year they were even permitted access to those gleaming marble stairs, though not to the facade entrance and never ever to the Sa int Lawrence girls across the street. When Socrates had his shackles removed in his Athenian prison, he rubbed his hairless leg and remarked how marvelously like pleasure was to pain. There was a lot of leg-rubbing at Regis high School between freshman an d senior year, and yes, the pain was much like pleasure.
The pain came first, as it inevitably must in that calculus. The Jesuits, embarrassed at being anticipated by the Dominicans in the invention of the Inquisition, riposted by devising the half-sheet, which, like its older and better known counterpart, was administered to those of the faithful suspected of temerarious theology or faulty syntax. Like all works of genius, it was a simple contrivance, a sheet of ordinary lined notepaper torn neatly --"neatly, Driscoll"-- in half, and on one half was indited ea ch day at the beginning of every class the principal parts of parco or the pluperfect subjunctive of faire or whatever other piece of obscure or troublesome information was demanded by the dangerously unpredictable Mr. Torquemada, S.J. or old Father Sache r-Masoch, S.J., fresh in from the Austrian province on the Society of Jesus. "Time's up. Pass to the front of the room." In that fashion the young scholars learned not only the principal parts of parco but the rapid and careful calculation of just how man y of those fatal half-sheets one could blow before descending below the ominous 75 and a future at Power Memorial High School.
The Jesuits made their students produce, daily, weekly, monthly, and on command. Each weekend the future cream of the FBI propped a copy of Father Donnelly's English Composition before them on dining room tables from Staten Island to Larchmont and wrote c harming paragraphs on the Council of Trent or the Second Punic War in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson or John Cardinal Newman. And at lunch hour we assembled on our own time in the school cafeteria and prolonged the exercise by composing charming if s currilous passages on the Jesuit faculty in the manner of James Joyce. Our mentors made us what we were, voluable, ironical, sarcastic wise-mouths; masters of the one-liner, the epic send-up, the sly put-down; clever sophists, charming cavilers. Much like the Jesuits themselves, in fact.
It was a long way from Pelham Bay and the Bronx to Park Avenue and 85th Street. At first I carried a large portion of the Bronx downtown on the IRT with me, like a moral lunch-box stuffed with what I had been assured were nutritious fears and values. But the Bronx, like a cheap wine or a cantankerous tot, did not travel very well, and so in the end I left it where it was and nourished myself exclusively, I thought, on a Regis diet. Rich stuff it was too, concocted by Jesuit master chefs for palates which had only yesterday been feeding on parochial pablum. It was exhilarating in a way no high school was ever intended to be and few probably are, a brief, warming season in the sun. I rushed brashly into that dark tunnel every morning and had to be dragged o ut through it every evening when the last Jesuit was turning out the lights. And when we were forced to leave, many of us retreated to a cafeteria on the corner of 86th Street and Lexington and played the whole thing over again. If the Jesuits had asked m e to leave Regis, I would not have gone to Fordham Prep; I would simply have killed myself.
It was not the doing that held us there each day until twilight --nobody really wanted to work on a yearbook or debate Lend-Lease-- but the company of all those other adolescents panting in wonder at our simultaneous discovery of a nimble wit, a rabid mou th and the admiring gaze of Irish maidens in the very flower of their virginal charm. And so we sat around and engaged not so much in extra-curricular activities as in the contemplation of our own quite admirable selves: Edward Peter Fitzsimmons, the firs t and conceivably the last student ever to carry a walking-stick into Regis High School, a small conceit he permitted himself for having read The Picture of Dorian Gray; the joyful and pious Joe Tedesco, whose piety magnified, not masked, a strong desire to enchant out of her chaste knickers someone with the unlikely name of Philomena Goetsche; Bill Marra, the only human, child or adult, who ever mastered the rules of should-would conditions in English and whose discourse was, in consequence, extremely hy pothetical; Ray O'Brien, who bathed daily in Yardley soap and so acted as a mild but unidentified aphrodisiac on two hundred of his fellows; and a feckless child named Buppie Lutz who possessed neither grace nor wit in his fifteen year old being but who w as permitted to sit in company because he unaccountably knew a number of young ladies who were thought to actually attend St. Lawrence Academy and lived on nearby Park Avenue; and Joe May, whose sister taught us all to dance, badly, and who never let Bupp ie Lutz out of his sight, even for a moment.
Regis High School was not an athletic powerhouse, to be as kind as possible on the subject, and so the Jesuits dispensed their in-house stroking not to the high and the mighty but to the lithe and the literary, virtuosos who could dive five storeys into a limp epigram or lift their own weight in sophistries. Their ideal was neither an adolescent William F. Buckley, who probably could not have taken the heavy body-punching, nor a young Jimmy Breslin --crude, All Hallows material, obviously-- but a vigorous Catholic Norman Mailer, a little slapdash perhaps, our Norman, and obviously too bright for his own good, but with a mischievous bravado that the Fathers would have savored after hours in the privacy of their own residence. And the Robert Louis Stevenson wouldn't have done him a lot of harm either.
No judgments ever issued from those smiling Jesuit faces, no moral clucking over the students' extremely mild carryings-on. They merely chuckled over our endless social safaris, more convinced than the students perhaps that no game would ever be bagged on them. And the Jesuit Scholastics knew far better than those adolescent rakes that if God were contemplating the destruction of some contemporary Sodom or Gomorrah, it would unlikely be the Senior Room at Regis High School. Talk is cheap, as even moral th eologians could recognize.
But talk there was, endless and ongoing. By the sound of it, all those young scholars, those pious Sodalists and members of the Hearn in good standing, were totally and continuously preoccupied with sex, not with the act, which was still well beyond our s ocial and emotional range, so much as the idea, or more accurately, with its carriers. All my old female familiars from Pelham Bay still showed up for Sunday Mass at Our Lady of the Assumption, and then on weekdays they vanished without regret or pursuit to their own places of learning. But their new and exciting social replacements, who had the advantage of not carrying around the stigma of eight years of contemptuous grade school familiarity, I could already glimpse standing distractedly on subway platf orms, or clinging closely together for comfort and safety in movie houses, or even, if you were reduced to desperate oggling, hurrying across 85th Street to the Metropolitan Museum. Some of the more adventuresome belles even ventured on occasion into Regi s itself, a place as exclusively male as the Century Club or the inner courts of the Temple at Jerusalem. They came for sodality symposia and other forms of edifying intercourse. No need to fear. The young Jesuit Scholastics protected their maidenly chast ity by simply charming them away from the loutishly baying predators among the student body. Somewhat like benevolent older brothers, the Scholastics, filled only with chaste regard. Really.
There was somebody called a Spiritual Father at Regis, a Jesuit priest who heard the students' confessions and, if they chose, not in the medieval whisper-it-into-my-ear-through-a-screen-darkly mode favored in church, but man-to-man, across a desk in his office. It was like a therapist's dream, a session of somewhat studied free association, ended each time by a healing absolution. It was also a student's dream: it could be done during class hours. And so whatever the difficulties of face-to-face encounte rs over the delicate terrain of sin, they had to be balanced against the more lethal penalties attached to not having prepared that day's Latin assignment. I recall having enjoyed those confessional sit-downs, and if there was anything really ghastly on my menu I could always go across the street and spill it in the dark vaults of St. Ignatius. Our little office head-to heads seemed very adult --and so very flattering to an adolescent-- and more, that mild judge sitting across the desk seemed to be suggesting, if I had it right, that the broad canvas of papal infallibility did not entirely cover the rulings of that astute moral theologian who was my mother. The trouble was, I never quite believed him. Regis was a large and liberating experience, but it was surrounded by a system which was set as deeply in concrete as our lunch-hour courtyard and which no amount of deskside palaver could dislodge or even crack. Nor was it likely intended to. The Jesuits were certainly not pr eaching libertinism, much less immorality; they were probably attempting nothing more dramatic than trying to bang some perspective into my fanatic head. But the times were as fanatic as I was, and Mother Church and her surrogates, who taught me all I knew, still managed to cry louder than the Jesuit guardians of their Athens on 84th Street --no, it really is on 85th Street-- in New York City.
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