Confession or Not?

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

MY father, at the age of twenty, was a fiery young Irishman with three great ambitions: to free Ireland, to abolish stupidity, and to be a great actor. He read omnivorously, studied poetry, literature, and languages passionately, and taught school while he studied law.

In his class, an eighth grade, a little blue-eyed, curly-headed girl, the daughter of a long line of New England Congregationalists and Methodists, took fire from his fire. Two years later, when she was sixteen and he twenty-two, they defied their respective families and were married.

As the children came — we were six — each branch of the family fearfully looked us over for horns and tails. My paternal grandmother bitterly regretted thinning the blood of ‘the one true faith.’ My maternal grandmother, whose ancestors burned witches and papists indiscriminately, loved us devotedly, but had a ready hereditary excuse for any childish deviltry we perpetrated. Aunts, uncles, and cousins were all honestly lined up on one side or the other and never found a common ground.

In the midst of this sectarian whirlpool my parents went their own way. They read, studied, recited poetry, and talked, talked, talked on every question that stirred city or country. At the age of four I listened to Free Silver until someone remembered to put me to bed. Personally I thought free silver would be very nice. From that age to this I have never failed to support some side of each question and some candidate in each election with enthusiasm.

We lived in the best part of the best ward and went to what was then known as the ‘silk petticoat’ school. With the advantage of trying to hold our own at the family table, we debated all the questions of the day in the schoolroom. It was n’t an easy existence. We were the only ‘nice’ people who ever went to the Catholic Church, voted for Democrats, and believed in Woman’s Eights.

I remember well how bitterly my older sister cried when she debated Free Trade and outpointed her stolid opponent on every phase of the question, and then the class voted twenty-seven to two against her.

I myself was only seven when a big ten-year-old boy at dancing-school knocked my bonbons all over the floor because I said saloons should go. His father was a mighty brewer and the brewery now makes candy, but there never was stronger feeling on the prohibition question than on that day. It took the dancing-master and two very embarrassed mothers to separate us. Contrary to all the rides of the feminine game, I did n’t cry over my candy, but proceeded to trip him up in the latest approved fashion.

My Irish grandmother marshaled us all to a children’s Mass each Sunday at eight-thirty. We loved the ceremony, the candles, the incense, and dear old Father McGill.

My Methodist grandmother picked us up at ten o’clock and took us to Sunday School. We loved to sing lustily, to recite Bible verses, to listen to Bible stories, which we acted out in the afternoon. We loved dear old Mr. Trueman, a saintly soul whom we called Father Time because of his venerable long white beard.

My Irish grandmother was little and quick. She wore her decent black silk and her bit of a bonnet with an air. ‘The life,’she would say, ‘of an old hat is the cock of it.’

‘Now don’t be crying,’ she would say to one of us. ‘Think shame to yourself. What will the wee good people be thinking?’

‘ The wee good people’ were a species of canny little fairy who sat about under the leaves and danced in fairy rings o’ nights, and who knew if you were afraid of the dark, or forgot, your prayers. They would point their fingers at you and laugh at you. They knew things about you that you would n’t even tell Grandmother Gordon, so it behooved you to steer a straight course.

‘Grandma Gordon,’ said my brother one day, ‘if ‘t is wicked not to go to church of a Sunday, how about my daddy?’

‘Now, glory be to God, will you listen to the likes of that!’ answered she. ‘Your father is a grown man and a good man. Say your prayers now that you may be as good.’

My Methodist grandmother was a big, capable woman. She was the one with the hospitable cookie-jar and the big platter of molasses candy. She took care of us when we skinned our knees or had measles. No fairies spied on us when she was about, but a long line of exceptionally upright ancestors did.

‘No Emerson ever tells a lie,’ was her forthright way of restraining us. Fibs were not in her vocabulary.

‘An Emerson washes behind her ears,’was a remark often needed.

‘Grandma Emerson,’ I said one time, ‘all the Emersons go to church except mother. Why does n’t she?’

‘My dear,’ she answered, ‘your mother is an unusually good woman.’ And for some reason I felt reassured.

The grandmothers grew to be great friends. With the six of us they had inexhaustible material for finding and appropriating family traits.

We were a fleet-footed crew, so we won races when Grandmother Emerson took us to the Methodist Sunday School picnic. With great impartiality we repeated our conquests when Grandmother Gordon took us to the Holy Rosary picnic. The year the two picnics fell on the same day the second, fourth, and sixth went with Grandmother Emerson — for she was the better hand at taking care of the baby — and the first, third, and fifth went with Grandmother Gordon. We came the nearest to having a religious argument in the family when we discussed the respective merits of the picnics that night. We signed a peace treaty when my father threatened not to take us to the Irish picnic the next Saturday if we did n’t go to sleep.

I think the polite rivalry of the grandmothers each Sunday was a source of great enjoyment to our parents. This competition gave them a chance to talk uninterruptedly for a whole morning.

My father, who was a lawyer, a district attorney, and a judge, and my mother, who raised and educated six children on the rather meagre salaries which go with these offices of honor and distinction, never did finish talking. They had been married thirty years when my father died. My mother was left with so many wide interests, so many vivid points of contact with the world, that after a year or so, during the war, she found herself again in service to the city. I think, though, that she is putting by topics in her mind to talk over when they meet.

During these years of growing up I never remember my parents going to church but once. A Baptist preacher, a close friend, had urged them to come to hear a particularly fine sermon he had prepared. During their absence my brother broke his arm and my sister ran a crochet hook in her finger. My parents arrived home from church just after the second doctor left, and they found a very wan little family. That night I urged mother never to go to church again, because we expected her home when we got there, and besides, she did n’t need it anyway. ‘ Grandmother Emerson said so.’

We went a controversial way through school and college. We were forced, because of our intimate acquaintance with both sides of what was then a most debatable question, to be on the other side always.

After a heated argument one group of friends would say: —

‘Well, of course you are sort of Catholic, but you are different,’ meaning to be complimentary.

‘The black Protestant in you has done you no harm,’ would be the final statement in another argument just as heated.

I think I was twelve when I explained at home that people did n’t really talk about religion — ‘they just got mad.’

‘’T would save a deal of bitterness if the world recognized that,’ said my father.

So now when I hear a good K. K. K., who was once an A. P. A., and who has never known Father McGill and never had an Irish grandmother, explain the mysterious menace of the Church, I think of Uncle John. Uncle John, the youngest and dearest son of my Grandmother Gordon. Uncle John, an Annapolis man, who gave up a loved career in tireless devotion to an invalid wife. Uncle John, who writes poetry with a mixture of brogue, sentiment, mystery, and religion, but with a lovely lilt to some of it. Uncle John, who says his long Latin prayers with a sort of slow, melodious chant.

And when the Protestant churches are berated as social centres, as places where argument replaces faith, ‘when, by accepting, one could be so content with God,’I think of Aunt Deborah. Aunt Deborah, who sacrificed her own life to be with her mother. Aunt Deborah, who works with little Poles, or Indians, or Mexicans, and wastes no time mourning over their sometimes temporary conversions. Aunt Deborah, who earnestly and devoutly each day addresses God in the somewhat chatty fashion of the Methodist revivalist.

My own religious convictions? Oh, yes. They are the fundamental things I learned from my Irish grandmother on the way to Mass, and which my Methodist grandmother emphasized on the way to Sunday School, and which my parents practised at home: Believe in God, believe in prayer, tell the truth, shame the Devil, and don’t whine.