Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

wore over her head, her chin and spine lifted to help her draw strength from pride, both of her delicate hands clutching her purse in front of her waist, that’s how I see my mother waiting, in the post-Mass silence and shadows, rehearsing to herself what she was going to say. The anti-Semitic priest reappeared, still in his long, white vestments. My mother knew she had a chirpy, accented voice that made some people not take her seriously, but her English was nearly flawless. She launched right in and said, Father Doyle, I come every Sunday to Mass in this church. Sometimes I bring my children, but I am glad that today I didn’t. My husband is Jewish, as I think you know, and he is a good man. I prefer for the father of my children to be a good man, not a bad man. Whatever is his religion is not more important. Speaking as a mother I can tell you, Father Doyle, you are wrong about that. I’m sorry to say this, Father, but it is wrong to teach prejudice in church, to try to make people not like the Jews. Father Doyle, I think you should apologize for what you said.

More than once I’ve asked my mother to repeat what she told the priest, and her words always come out the same. This was one of the bravest moments of her life, probably replayed in her memory countless times. It happened during the years of Boston’s Archbishop Cushing’s Jew-friendly, interfaith brotherhood initiative, but Father Doyle was old-school, a former follower of the radio priest Father Coughlin and a staunch ally of the Harvard-educated anti-Semitic madman Father Feeney who until just a few years before had preached on Boston Common, drawing thousands.

The priest was totally unmoved by the tremolo-voiced, clearly tropical young parishioner Yolanda Montejo de Goldberg and the beseeching sincerity of her speech. He gazed down on her and enunciating forcefully and slowly, as if to somebody who barely understood English, though she knew that the priest knew perfectly well that she did—that old trick—he defended his sermon as “not prejudiced at all, Mrs. Goldberg.” On the contrary, what he’d said was established Catholic Church doctrine, upheld by Vatican scholars, and so no, Mrs. Goldberg, I’m afraid that I am unable to apologize for a word of it. In fact, Father Doyle went on, his voice becoming choleric, it is you who should seek forgiveness, and not from me, for scorning church teachings, and it is you who need to look after your own soul and after the souls of your family. Don’t you consider it a duty, Mrs. Goldberg, to enroll your children in our Sunday Bible classes, as all the other parents of this parish do? And don’t you ever try to convince your husband to seek salvation, Mrs. Goldberg? I’m sure Father Doyle felt he’d crushed Mamita. But now she raised her chin and vowed with shaking voice: Father Doyle, I will never come to this church again. She turned and left, high heels clicking down the long stone aisle. From then on, my mother drove alone on Sundays into the much wealthier town next to ours to go to Mass at St. John the Evangelist. She didn’t set foot in St. Joe’s again for about another fifteen years, until Feli’s oldest daughter had her First Communion there. By then Father Doyle was long gone, and the old blackened stone Gothic edifice of the first St. Joe’s had been razed and replaced by a pristine, modern church that looked bought from IKEA, with brilliant new stained glass windows radiating restored brotherhood and love.

He is a good man, she says she said. Whatever is his religion is not more important than that. Well, this was still when we were small children. The thing is, no matter what, Mamita never really stopped believing that a part of Bert really was that good man. At least regarding any situation not directly involving me or my sister or their marriage, she trusted Bert’s judgment, saw him as a kind of expert on moral principles she could count on to know right from wrong in any situation where she wasn’t so sure herself. Bert, Bert, she’d chirp at him at the dinner table, trying to get his attention while he chewed like some ravenous Ukrainian peasant, as if the sound of his mucky gnashing in his own ears made it easier to ignore us and suppress the irritation we caused him. Bert, how should she vote at the faculty meeting? It’s never wrong to stand up for yourself, Yoli, but what’s just is not always fair. That’s the kind of answer he gave. So she didn’t want to vote in a way that was going to irritate the school president, he’d elaborate, no matter what tenured faculty wanted her to do, when she was only a Spanish instructor on a renewable contract. You mean, my mother said, if I lost my job, it would be unfair to me, whatever happens to the campus workers. She looked relieved to have understood. What? my father sneered incredulously. Oh no, no, Yoli, that isn’t what I meant. My sister and I would look at each other with expressions of: Huh? Later it would turn out that that was what he’d meant, but he’d been feeling too ungenerous to acknowledge my mother getting it right the first time, while also flinching against how baldly she’d exposed, without any nuance or irony, the perhaps amoral or pragmatic harshness of his reasoning, so he had to complicate it a little more.

I could always persuade my mother to repeat that story about how she’d stood up to the anti-Semitic priest. But I’d never heard Mamita complain about racism or prejudice against herself when I was growing up. She’d never given racism as the explanation for any unpleasant experience she’d had or blamed it for any other problem, though that doesn’t mean she didn’t regularly