"A remarkable engineering feat," the Mayor said, "like the pyramids. And it needed slave labor to accomplish it."
"As in your Siberian camps."
(page 63)
In yesterday’s post I failed to keep in mind the good Father’s devotion to humility. It feels embarrassing to have exaggerated the level of my knowledge. No, I did not “sometimes” engage in a private joke with the luminary S. It happened once on a bright October day outside of the Social Sciences building on campus when S. pulled out a lunch that his wife packed for him and my friend crowed, “I wish I had a wife.” S. said, “Then your name would be Sappho.” And I laughed. And my high-achieving friend, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from a Jesuit school, did not know who Sappho was. So I told her.
I didn’t belong in that crowd, of course. They outclassed me. All four have Ph.D.s now and have had illustrious careers from which they may now all be retired. How did I come to enter their company? One wanted to sleep with me and invited me in. I liked them all so much that I stayed friends for as long as I could, which, for the three men, was the length of an academic year, until I moved away. When I told him, S. said, “I knew that you were thinking of leaving, but I never thought. . . .” “That I would really go? I am.” Those were our last words. I doubt he remembers me as clearly as I do him. His flat-topped gray wool cap, for example, one like my grandfather wore. And something about the tilt of his head, and his smile, as if he found our class light going.
One meets so many people in school. It was the 1970s, and Marxist politics were a common topic on campus, so the Mayor’s pointed comments seem perfectly natural (Monsignor Quixote was published in 1982). It’s the Father and his humble faith that surprise.