My Life as a Wannabe Dervish or, My Vocation, My Crack-up

I found my vocation to be a whirling dervish in the country club swimming pool. Frank, my jock older brother, played baseball every summer, all the other sports every other season.  Father golfed.  I never took to it.  I resented the few lame efforts he made to get me interested when I was about fourteen. Mother dropped us off at the country club and went off on her endless string of errands or back home to her cooking.  My little sister Gladys liked tennis lessons. I never liked those either.  I liked crafts at camp but the country club didn't have those.  I was left to float for myself in the pool most of the summer.  There I learned to wile away the time by spinning in circles with my legs straight down, ankles twisted together, back slightly arched back.  I made myself into a sort of top that I could spin in either direction, head slightly back so I could watch the sky and clouds spin.  I got good at it, getting the right slowness or speed so I would not end up dizzy.  It took thirty or so years to even hear that there was such a thing as a dervish even though the phrase was something one heard now and then without ever knowing what it was or was about.   In Cambridge one fall I went to Harvard's Sanders theater to see whirling dervishes from Istanbul perform.  By then I had read enough about Sufi thought and poetry to know that the event was not to be thought of as a performance but that was the only way we westerners could engage with it.  The essential search at the heart of the whirling itself I recognized in an instant.  Release, escape, ecstasy, union, loss of individual consciousness, merging with something else, some other reality, longing, desire, prayer.  But in the pool those summers I never learned to link the swimming and turning with what we did in church or at home with rosaries and holy cards.  Mother had converted I learned years and years later when she was maybe twelve or fourteen and her mother went from being Methodist to Catholic and learned to teach her eldest children what to do and how to behave in the new surroundings and services on Sundays.  Her first-born, Richard, Dick, killed himself in a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen.  Mother must have been twelve and she took it hard without knowing quite how long and hard it would shape her life.  She became as Catholic as possible, more devout and religious than anyone else of her seven remaining brothers and sisters and even more so than her best friend who had been born into the faith and who after high school joined the convent and became a nun.  Mother always wondered if she should have done that too but she felt she wasn't really worthy of that high calling.  She decided I was, thoughl.  She never said she wanted me to become a priest but she was so in love with the priests and the brothers and the nuns that I could tell it because I was her favorite and Father's were Frank and Gladys.  Our family was pretty much us against them, Mother and me against the other three.  They were all about fun and pleasure, sport and drink and wasting time with friends.  Mother was intent that I would have cultural things, galleries, musical events, lessons on the piano, church events, serving at mass as much as possible, selling raffle tickets for spaghetti dinners so the nuns could raise extra money for school things.  But Father read lots of books and Mother never read anything but magazines and papers.  She never sat still.  I liked to read and read all the time in my room.  Father read in the study, in his favorite red leather chair where he would fall asleep while reading.

         After we left the nuns to go to the high school where the brothers taught I could tell Mother wanted me for something much more precise than the priesthood and she could tell that I didn't really like the priests of the parish even though I served lots of masses and even went early enough to knock on the rectory door to get them up for the seven o'clock mass before their housekeeper even got there to fix breakfast.  Mother said to me one day "you're going to go to college and you're going to go on then and get your doctorate."  She and Father had not been able to go to college because of the Depression and then the war.  That much I knew.  Father's youngest brother was the only person they knew who had gone to university after the war and then he wasted it, they secretly thought, by coming to work in the family grocery store.  He should have gotten better work somewhere else. 

We all started kissing around eighth grade.  Somehow we knew in high school the boys and girls would be separated.  Nancy Barrett had the kissing parties in her house on Arch Street.  We crowded into the small living room, the lights dimmed, and played spin-the-bottle.  Sandy Fresh liked me after one of the parties and I liked her for a while.  Then Jane Coyle, who was tall and started to show before the other girls.  Her breasts weren't that big but the catholic school uniform, a blue jumper over white blouse, strained to cover her.  Sophomore year I met Cindy Sue Flickinger at a sock hop and started going to her house very chance I could.  She lived on the other side of town and I got very good at walking over very fast and using work on the school paper as my cover.  One of those summers Eileen Black taught be to French kiss.  Her father was an intellectual.  He wrote for the newspaper.  Their living room was piled with books.  Eileen and Ellen Solomon, and Cindy Sue were all non-Catholic.  We had all been in kindergarten together at Mrs. Waddell's house near the Dingle, which was on the better part of town.  Even so, Mother wanted me to date only Catholic girls.  But Cindy's father had a cabin at the lake up in the mountains and I wanted to go, so I persisted in seeing her and mother relented.  Junior year I sort of dated Dede Rougier, a year older and her parents lived right on Washington Street, the ritziest street in town with big old houses.  Mother approved too, reluctantly, because she liked that street and secretly wanted to live there.  Senior year I was back with Cindy Sue and we went to the prom together. 

Mother wanted me to study and it came easy to me and I liked it.  She wanted me to be as devout a Catholic as possible and when I finally announced that after having prayed and talked to my teachers and sought counsel I had decided that I might have a vocation and I would join the teaching brothers right after high school she approved a bit readily more than Father did.  Getting a college degree would be part of it.  He had gone to the same high school with the same brothers and he thought they were ok but he was not as crazy about them or about the priests as Mother was.  He mainly wanted me to not be queer.  Right before high school started he took me to see his own doctor and asked him to check me over and make sure there was no chance I would turn out queer.  I didn't know what that meant.  It was something paperboys did while they were waiting for the bags of fresh papers to be delivered down at the printing building behind the main post office in the center of town.  Something about the men along the railroads and in the rail yards too.  The doctor looked me over in the usual ways and told my father outside in the other waiting room that I was fine and there was nothing to be worried about.  I wasn't interested in sports like Father and Frank, I was quiet and alone a lot.  My parents didn't know what to do with me.  I liked being dreamy and wandering around the town and riding my bike.  When high school started Father told me I would have to work in the store after school to help out with the money.  I didn't want to do that but I couldn't say I had to go to practices for any teams.  I knew he wanted to keep me where he could keep an eye on me, keep me out of trouble, learn to work and be more practical.  I didn't like it much.  If there was not much to do there would be extra busy work. I learned about how Father would say things at the meat counter while he was cutting meat for customers to please them and make them happy.  I learned something more about prayer without really knowing what that was in the cold silence of the meat locker where I could go to get away from the customers and things that need to be done.  I would stand still among the hanging sides of beef, super cold, sawed rib bones, red muscle, shiny tendons, marbled layers of white cattle fat, hollowed out innards. 

The summer right after graduation I went off to the first session of joining the life of the teaching religious brothers.  It was called the Novitiate.  We were about forty novices, fresh high school graduates.  Boys from the middle Atlantic states as far away as Ohio who had all attended Catholic schools and who thought they had vocations to the religious life.  We played rugby, touch, not tackle, during recreation time, and loose games of pick-up basketball and maybe there was some tennis but no swimming pool.  We took lots of walks in small groups after meals.  Classes in bible study and religious books most of which were turgid old-style spirituality books about prayer and devotion, saints and church topics.  I really missed the kinds of books I loved to read.  I really didn't like what I had gotten myself into at all but I could not admit it to anyone or even to myself.  That first summer was miserable but I could not let myself realize it.  It was much more like what I imagined army life to be like than I had imagined.  I never knew every moment would be organized, duties, work detail, classes, prayers, masses, sleep.  No privacy, no time to yourself, no time to have a decent conversation with anyone. 

It was a big time in the Catholic Church, though.  The Pope had convened the Vatican Council, one of the first in centuries.  He wanted to bring the church more up-to-date.  By the end of the summer we were wearing the long black robes out teachers had worn and the stiff white collars.  But because the church was changing the brother director allowed us to hear read aloud at table reports from the Vatican council published in the New Yorker.  It felt like that was the only decent writing I heard all year long.  I had read Thomas Merton's book about his entrance into the life of the Trappists, The Seven Storey Mountain, and a similar book by a British monk, Bede Griffith's The Golden String.  The life we were leading in that year of Novitiate seemed as far from the elevated beauty of life described in those books as the shipyards of Baltimore were from the fiery mosaic murals in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. 

Mother always took me to the doctor when I was a child.  At the end of the seventh grade my father took me to see his doctor.  He told him he wanted him to check me over and make sure I wasn't going to be queer.  I didn't know what queer was but it was something newspaper boys did while they waited for the delivery trucks downtown behind the post office building. Mother didn't want me to have a newspaper route even though lots of kids had them and made good pocket money that way.  The doctor gave me a once over and told Father I was ok.  Nothing to worry about.  The next year I tried to join the basketball team at St Margaret's grade school because my older brother, Fred, had been a star for it four years earlier and was now a star in high school across town at the Christian Brothers' high school, the same one my father had attended.  Father loved to tell tales about their days and once or twice we would go to the old folks home and visit old Brother Zaccharias who had been his teacher and they both liked to joke and tease.  We had eight years with the nuns, the Ursulines, the kind Mother thought she maybe should have joined and the Order her best friend in high school had joined.  Sister David.  They wore black habits, heavy wool, pleated many times and big sleeves in which they could hide erasers, chalk and stuff.  Their faces were shelled in these big stiff white bibs and headthings, under the long, black veils, which they were always rearranging and pinning to make sure they hung the right way around their bodies.  That last year of grade school I got put into a basketball game finally even though I was chubby and couldn't play or run nearly as well as my brother.  He made fun of me, called me fat.  In the excitement of the game someone threw me the ball, my chance, and I dribbled fast as I could to the basket and made it.  I couldn't believe it.  Then I could tell all around me something was wrong.  Hot blood of shame poured down and up from the floor all over me when I realized I had made the basket at the wrong end of the court.  A basket for the other team.  I kept going to practice and the games because I had no other choice and people were pretty good about making fun of me without making too much fun of me.  My brother took to calling me "Honeysuckle" for some reason, mainly because it made me so mad.  I had a wicked temper sometimes.  Honeysuckle was the thick, sweet-smelling vine and flowers that covered the chain-link fence dividing our yard from the neighbors' yards.  Sometime during that year or the next, when no one was home, I got a skirt out of my parents' closet that was made of black cloth that seemed a lot like the nuns' habits.  Heavy black and on top of that a gauzier black, like the veils.  It was a dress-up skirt for my mother and full when you whirled in it.  I put it on and made it swirl out and went around and around.  I was wanting to be a whirling dervish, I think, years and years before I ever heard there were such things.  My teachers then were men, in the high school, and they wore ankle-length black robes, the cloth seemed like the nuns' cloth but maybe lighter.  They had funny white collars of stiff white things that looked like the back part of a small paper airplane stuck onto the collar.  Mother wanted me to become a priest, I had known that for a while, and for years she woke me up early at six so I could walk a few blocks down to the church to serve seven o'clock morning mass.  This was supposed to be special and we even read a novel in high school about a boy who did the same thing.  Many times I had to go to the rectory and knock and wake up Father Lonergan.  The housekeeper was not there yet or even if she was he could be late and very sleepy.  I served the mass and felt asleep half the time.  I would walk back home through the cold, eat breakfast and then go back to school in time for another mass a half an hour before the school bell, this one usually also a black mass for the soul of someone but this one also had more ceremony.  I had to light six big floor standing candles that stood on either side of a black fake-coffin, a wooden frame thing covered with a full black cloth with holy decorations on it.  It helped everyone remember that even though the real body of the dead person was not there the mass we were offering was for him, the dead person.  To help get him from purgatory into heaven.  At this time too we started to go to confession more often and with masturbation we had more to confess each week.  I didn't call it that and I never talked to anyone except the priest in confession about doing it even though one time after altar boy practice Jimmy Butler pulled out his thing and rubbed it and proudly showed us the white stuff that came out in a sudden bubbling action.  My cousin showed me that later that year too one day on the big porch in front of their house.  But after I started doing it I wondered if I should tell Father Lonergan but I didn't want to tell him so I would always go to confession when I knew Father Stegmaier was in the box.  I didn't know him and he didn't know me much. 

         In those early years of high school the family drama became more and more clear.  Mother wanted me to become a priest.  Father never said what he wanted but I know he liked the brothers and I never liked the priests as much as I liked my new teachers, the brothers.  I was in the middle in between them.  I was my mother's because Father had my older brother who was the sports star in all the sports and also liked to play golf like my father did too. And mother took me to the library to see paintings and to concerts that father never wanted to go to.  Father took me to the library too and later I started walkng all the way over there myself because I loved to read.  I got more and more prayerful in secret as high school went on.  Even while we had spin-the-bottle parties and then necking parties and then in junior year I started dating a little bit, first Eileen Keach and then Ellen Mary Waddell.  I liked her a lot and she lived over on the other side of town, her father was a dentist and I liked walking all the way over there to see her.  Mother hated the fact that we lived on the side of town where we lived, close to Father's store.  She knew the best people lived over near the Waddells and the Schweningers. 

I went to the novitiate the week after graduation from high school.  Brothers Stephen and Aloyius drove me the three hour trip down to Ammendale, a big old property between Baltimore and Washington.  The building was a huge red brick structure about a hundred years old, a French seminary style building, long, wide front porch, two end wings and in the back at the center the chapel, as big as a small town church.  Five stories.  At one wing lived the old, retired brothers, waiting for death.  There were maybe twenty or so we would see in the chapel.  Men in their seventies and eighties, gray, bald, stooped, a few a little feeble.  We novices took over the rest of the building and the staff in charge of our formations.  A year of prayer and silence and study.  We learned to sing Gregorian chant even while we were all aware that at that time in Rome historic changes were underway in the Church.  The Second Vatican Council had opened that spring and it was so important that at our meals the director had decided to have Letters from Rome read aloud each week.  These appeared in The New Yorker.   Normal practice stipulated that spiritual reading of some sort be read while we ate our meals in silence.  I missed the New Yorker dearly.  We could only read spiritul and biblical studies books that year.  All through high school I loved seeing old copies of The New Yorker show up in Brother Stephen's classroom and I devoured them as symbols of the wider more sophisticated life I long to find.  I would pretend to understand the stories, elusive, indirect works of fiction in modes of compression, repression and irony I could only imagine being able to fully grasp. 

We could have no letters from home.  One time in the summer we had a short visit from our families, a few hours.  Mother and Dad came and we had a stiff visit while they tried to get used to seeing me in my temporary black habit.  At the end of the summer we professed temporary vows and got our first real long habits, measured for each of us and sewn at home by women who worked for the Brothers. 

That first summer I hated almost everything but could not admit it to anyone or myself.  That whole first year, really.  I had never expected that signing up for initiation into the more deeply spiritual life of brotherhood ended up being much more like the military that I would have thought.  Everything was regimented and organized, sunup to sunset.  Classes in the bible, spiritual theology, philosophy, sessions of spiritual direction, quiet prayer, public prayer, ritual prayers, masses, benedictions, sung evening prayers.  Lots of work keeping the place looking ship-shape.  And every day a few hours of strenuous exercise in the form of games of touch rugby, touch football, basketball, and lots of walking around the grounds.  The property had been farmland once and was large but there were no very fully developed gardens.  I often cried myself to sleep that first summer.  We slept on army cots high up under the roof in the top floor.  It was hot and humid and many times hard to go to sleep in spite of the sort of exhaustion produced by endless group activity.  I missed having time to myself, time on my own.  I had been a dreamy kid, lonesome much of my childhood and gotten used to it and liked it.  I was the sort of loner life I could easily mistake for prayer and meditation once I got religious and tried to figure out if God really were calling me to a sacred vocation within a noble order of teaching brothers. 

For many of the winter months I was assigned to tailor shop duties for the work periods.  I enjoyed this because there were five or six older brothers who had been tailors for years and they had tales to tell and liked to laugh.  Brother Alphonse liked me, would pinch me on the cheek every so often just like a grandparent to a child and then would chide himself for doing so.  He prided himself on his suit, which he had had from his early years in the order.  He boasted that he had never had it cleaned but kept it in top shape by carefully brushing it.  He liked to show me his beautiful dark wooden clothes brush and show me the proper way to brush a heavy black woolen suit.  He might have been seventy.  He loved to laugh and you could see a mouth full of healthy big teeth.  He was lean and looked like he had had a hard life but was only slightly stooped. 

Somehow I got through the year without having one poem or novel or letter to read.  The younger brother on staff who taught us choir singing was interested in yoga and I had very vaguely heard of that and asked him to give me some lessons in yoga type movements and relaxation as a form of meditation. 

For one quarter I was given the duty and privilege of being the bell-ringer.  Instead of sleeping in the dormitory with the forty others, I had a room to myself.  All I had to do was wake earlier, before 6 and be ready to walk through the top two floors of the building from one end to the other, ringing a big brass schoolroom hand bell to wake everyone at 6 am.  I loved having the room and used it to practice more yoga on my own.  One morning, however, I got up and went out into the dark night of the halls and rang the bell.  There was not the usual rustle of waking noises.  Brother Director, a spare man in his fifties or sixties named Brother Didymus Edward, came out into the hall without his glasses on and looking cross.  It was 5 a.m. and not 6.   I don't recall whether I suffered anything further than the silent humiliation and embarrassment of imperfection in the eyes of the whole community. 

After fourteen months in the Novitiate at Ammendale, we went north to Philadelphia for four years of college.  We were in classes with other college young men but we lived in a large house about a twenty minute drive from the suburban campus.  A small fleet of vans ran all day ferrying us back and forth.  In comparison with the first year of "formation" I loved the second year when we were finally in college classes, had rooms full of books of every sort we could read and if not privacy at least we had more odd moments of free time on our own.  We also did more breaking of the rules such as going out into the evening after lights out to talk and socialize.  What I loved most about this first year of college, however, was the location.  The Order had purchased about ten years earlier a large estate to house the Scholasticate.  For the first two years we lived in the original mansion.  I relished every detail of the house for it was out of storybooks.  It sat on a hill within a large wooded park, beautifully landscaped with rolling lawns, footpaths through the woods, a hidden pond, clay tennis courts, a swimming pool with strange looking buildings at either end of the party area.  Behind the house were four huge spherical bushes, carefully trimmed boxwoods, they were called, and a trimmed boxwood hedge making the rectangle that linked them.  Behind the formal garden there was a ruined tower with vines growing over it.  Later I was told the tower was built to look ruined. 

The house itself was in the Tudor style and looked and felt wholly authentic.  Twenty-eight different chimneys looked over the slated gables and dormers.  Each chimney made of a different set of hand-made bricks to form intricate, unique patterns.  Faint gold bricks formed large diamond patterning in the dark red brick walls.  Windows were framed in soft sand colored stone.  The glass looked wavy and old and hand-made.  Many windows had touches of stained-glass emblems and crests.  That whole first fall at Augustine Hall I was intoxicated by the beauty of the grounds and the house.  The building we had lived in back in Baltimore for the first year and a half was a huge late 19th century red brick institutional place, looking more like an orphanage or even a prison.  And, in fact, the Order did run an orphanage outside of Philadelphia, so I assumed the two buildings must have been similar. 

The Tudor mansion where we now lived was an unbelievable change.  It was the sort of place I had only read about and seen in movies.  That first semester I had to read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice  for one of my college classes and I felt amazed to be living in a place just like the parks and houses described in the book.  The main part of the house had perhaps ten or twelve bedrooms and our two classes, freshmen and sophomores, totaled about one hundred.  So we were six to ten to a room, on metal army style cots, and then others were spread out over the other wings of the house which had been for servants.  The original colors of paint on the walls were still there, as little damage or change had been done to the mansion as possible.  A number of showers, private cubicles lined with canvas, and wash basins and toilets had been added in the basement.  Juniors and seniors lived in a new building at the far end of the estate and each brother had his own room.  I really looked forward to that.  But in the meanwhile I delighted in the grandeur of the mansion and imagined what life might have been like when it was in its heyday.  Only one room was radically different.  The Chapel had been for the original owners a ballroom.  The widow who sold the house to the Brothers had had the whole room taken apart and rebuilt in her next house, a smaller mansion but one large enough to house the ballroom.  What we heard about her is her father had been a wealthy merchant who lost his son on the Titanic and as a memorial donated Widener Library to Harvard University.  The Widner family had built three mansions in this part of Philadelphia since making their fortune during the Civil War.  The Tudor house we lived in had been a wedding present to the patriarch's daughter.   She had married her tennis coach, hence the beautiful clay tennis court on the property.  Her father's house was just down the road and it looked like Versailles---neo-classical in style and huge.  It was a seminary for a Protestant church denomination.  We visited one time and saw the large, ornate breakfast room and former garden room.  Further down the road was another mansion, now housing a convent of Dominican nuns.  We visited there once too.  It was decorated in elaborate Italian Renaissance style. 

The first few weeks in Elkins Park we had lots of meetings to orient us to our new lives as college students and as students in a different sort of community from what we had been trained in during the Novitiate.   Many of the rules were the same, such as observing the Great Silence after evening prayers until the morning bell for chapel.  Now that we were going back and forth to the college campus we had rules about how to behave on campus with the regular students and how to fit back into the house schedule every day.  The Brother Director made a strong statement at one point that no particular friendships would be tolerated.  I was puzzled by this term because I thought why if we are even called brothers would we not want to have good friendships with each other.  It seemed strange but I just filed it away as another of the puzzling details that would possibly be either not important or open to further explanation later.  During the first year a few boys had left and the manner in which they did became the pattern that was always followed.  Someone would notice that someone was missing.  On our walks after meals or during work duties when we were allowed to talk quietly, the word would go around---"Tom's not here.  Oh, he left about two days ago."  No one would know why.  There was no public discussion or farewell and the sense was that we were not supposed to inquire or speculate on reasons.  This happened during the first year at Elkins Park a bit more often.  I just assumed that people decided the life was not for them or that some illness showed up, or some personal reasons back in their home lives.  It felt odd not to have real information and especially not to be able to say good-by to people we had gotten to know pretty well even within the confines of this regimented way of developing us into teachers who were to be rooted in the spiritual life of prayer rather than in the temptations and sins of the fleshly world. 

In November President Kennedy was shot.  I was out jogging on a beautiful, sunny afternoon and as I ran up one of the paths across the lawn toward the house,  from near the house Brother Charles B waved to me, looking stunned and yelled "the president's been shot."   It was one of those lines one could not make sense of, comprehend verbally.  His face and body language conveyed more directly the shock which neither of us understood.  Everyone went to the dining room where there was one tv set.  We were allowed to watch tv, something we had not seen for over a year.  The room was paneled in dark English oak, with an ornate, heavily carved decorative plaster ceiling, about twenty feet high.    Two large bay windows brought the late afternoon sunlight into the room.  The glass in the window panes, as it was in all the main rooms of the house, was a faint green with small bubbles of air.  Many small panes in leaded frames within larger sandstone mullions.  So the light in these dark wood panelled rooms was modulated, tinted, softened and changed into a very unusual interior light.  The whole house rarely felt filled with light.  Only in the large library room which had the highest ceilings, perhaps forty feet high, and the most and tallest windows which faced south and west did the light pour in.  In that dark dining room that late afternoon we watched the gray images on the television.   We watched in silence different from the silence in chapel as the news from Dallas unfolded and the president's death was announced.   The next afternoon we were permitted to watch more of the live news coverage and we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. 

I walked around the grounds of the house every chance I got and eventually walked out into the neighborhood around it and on one such walk I made an astounding discovery.  Within a few blocks of the estate stood a famous Frank Lloyd Wright building, the Beth Shalom Synagogue.  I had discovered Wright in some of his books I found during high school in my hometown library.  It was in those books I had seen photos of his houses and buildings and had read his meditations on Unitarian philosophy, on architecture, on life in general.  I wanted to become an architect.  My grades in math were not good.  I had to struggle to get a B or above and we all knew our math teacher, Brother Machineas Thomas, was a terrible teacher.  He taught all the math classes each level of our small high school, all four years.  He spent almost every class talking about the recent baseball games, football games, basketball games, which he coached as well.  Junior year I sat in the back of class and read as many novels as I could. Jimmy Schmitz told me one day that he had told Brother Xavier, our favorite English teacher, that I wanted to become an architect.  Xav had said, Oh, too bad, he would make a good English teacher.  Oh, ok, that's what I'll do, I guess.  I had written a letter to Wright's school Taliesen in Wisconsin asking if one could be an architect in Wright's school and still be a Catholic.  In a few months I got a letter back.  It was on thick cream parchment like paper with the Taliesen emblem engraved on the upper left quadrant.  The reply was typed in a special font I had never seen before which looked somehow very architectural and very Wrightian.  The head of the school said yes there were a number of students who were Catholic who had successfully attended the school. 

The Beth Shalom Synagogue in Wright's explanation of it in his books echoed the shape in symbolic form of Mt Sinai.  I found on my walks over to it that I could just walk in at mid-day and I did so to look around.  The interior soars into a magnificent three-sided steeply sloped canopy about five stories high with no interior supports and covered with opaque translucent panels so the sanctuary is flooded with brilliant, softened light.   Outside the building looked a bit less stirring than the wonderful Wright drawings.  The metal beams were painted silver with aluminum paint.  The lantern roofing looked like pale yellow fiberglass.  I liked the building inside more than from the outside.  The scale of everything surprised me; it felt smaller when you were outside than I had thought it would be even while inside the upward sweep of space and light was thrilling and made the building feel vast.  The floor sloped gently downward toward the place where the holy books were kept.  Wright had written he wanted the congregation to feel it was being held in God's hand.  I visited a number of times and the two buildings became for me a private dialogue in architectural history---the historical Tudor mansion vs the contemporary interpretation of the ancient faith that pre-dated Christianity.  I never told anyone in the community about the location of the synagogue nor did I take anyone with me when I went for walks to it.  It felt like a private retreat from the life I found too constricting at times.  In the contemporary  building I found a more open place of air and light in which I could breathe more fully and deeply.

Sometime that winter I began to talk more often when the chance arose Brother Zach C.   I was an English major or was planning to be and he was an Philosophy major.  We both took an interest in Theology too, beyond what all of us were given to read in spiritual theology.  We started to have long talks on these subjects that were exciting and interesting.  They felt like natural expansions of the classes we were taking at the college and when we were all there on campus we had little time to talk except between classes because we were supposed to get back to Augustine House to stay up with our various duties and chores.  I was assigned that first year to be a barber, for instance.  Saturday mornings we cut hair, three or four of us, in temporary barber shops we set up.  I knew nothing of how to do it and learned quickly just by watching the others and by making mistakes that I was assured would grow out in three days, no matter how bad it might have looked at first.  Most of wore simple crew cuts so it was not difficult to get to be pretty good at the job.  As the weather got better when winter ended and spring was starting, Zach and I would go out after the start of Great Silence to sit on a far hillside and talk philosophy and literature.  Others were out doing the same.  We were breaking the rules and it felt like the spirit of adventure we were craving.  I didn't think it was bothering me and Zach assured me it was a minor matter that many of the upperclassmen said was pretty ordinary and no big deal.  Some of the juniors and seniors were starting to bring up social problems from the outside world in the open community discussions we had at the house once a month.  They felt we should not be living in the palatial house and grounds we were living in since the Order had been founded over two centuries ago by a French nobleman to teach children of the poor.  Troubles were starting in the deep South in our country regarding Negroes and their rights.  In Philadelphia too, college students were going in to poor neighborhoods to help people.  Regular students from our college were doing this, even moving into ghettos to live with the poor and help and teach children.  They wondered why our religious Order was not doing this too.  We went in small groups to visit poor neighborhoods in the inner city and volunteer at soup kitchens and clothing charities.  I had never seen such broken neighborhoods and such poor people.  Zach and I and others started talking on our own about how disturbing this all was and wondering how to figure out what positions were correct.  These questions challenged our sense of vocation to the religious life in ways we had never imagined.

The second year in Elkins Park started well enough.  I took French and we read L'Entranger by Camus.  We were sophomores now and a new group of freshmen arrived.  Friends from last year moved to the other house and we saw them less.  We would go up to the upper house for joint dinners together to encourage the sense of community and we would see movies up there because their dining hall had a big white concrete block wall perfect for project movies onto.  In late October we saw a movie called David and Lisa about two college students in a mental hospital.  It disturbed me a lot but I could not figure out exactly why and I did not even realize it.  I felt like I was both characters and I felt like the hospital was a portrayal of our life in the mansion.  The hospital building in the movie was a large brick mansion.  A day or so later I heard a rumor go around the house that Brother Daniel was ill, psychologically, and that he would be taken to a hospital.  Daniel was a year ahead of us, one of the juniors, very quiet, very withdrawn.  We talked about whether he was schizophrenic, whether he would get shock treatment if they took him to a hospital.  That Saturday afternoon while most everyone was away somewhere on sports or other duties, I went into the large kitchen and found a big pile of the day-old donuts we got every week from one of the bakeries.  I ate quickly about ten or fifteen, I didn't count, jelly-filled donuts.  Then I went off somewhere by myself and was sick.  I didn't go to my bedroom because five or six others going in and out would have seen me.  I wanted to be alone somewhere.  I got to dinner that evening late and the director noticed this.  He told me to come to his office the next morning to talk about this infringement.  I spent a sleepless night worrying about this and about everything I could find to worry about. I felt like I was in a novel.  At the time I was reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves and all of this felt like a part of that and vice versa. I snuck out of the house in the dark and walked around the hills for a while.  Maybe someone saw me, maybe they reported this to the director.  When I went to see him the next morning after morning work duties, I was shaky, had not slept, felt miserable with worry, outside myself.   He asked if I wanted to take a few days off and have a rest somewhere away from the house.  I nodded yes.  Soon we were in the rear of the large black car he used and the Brother who drove said little while we left the grounds and headed through the suburbs to another side of the city.  I remember the number of long white fences and big green paddocks and I thought well this must be the horse country area of wealthy Philadelphia I had heard about. 

I spent about two weeks in Eugenia Memorial Hospital. The building had also been a private mansion.  This was a Federalist style mansion. When I first went in, after the entering interview was over, I noticed at once the beautiful rotunda we walked through to get to the bedrooms.  High white dome supported by a ring of white Ionian columns, polished black marble floor, winding staircase off to one edge of the circle up to the second floor.  I tried to joke to a woman sitting on a stone bench in the rotunda---how do they expect us to get better in here with all these crazy people here? 

The windows had metal mesh grates on them.  No windows were ever open.  Everything was painted a pale green.  A pale brown film coated every surface from cigarette smoke.  Everyone smoked.  A lot.  I could hardly breathe the first day or so.  I wondered from the start whether I would be taken to the other side of the building where they did the electric shock therapy.  I had heard back at the hall that Brother Thomas was going to have shock therapy because he was schizophrenic.  He had been checked-in a few days before me.  Shock therapy was used in the movie about David and Lisa.  The doctors talked to me every day and put me on two medications.  I looked forward to weaving potholders  every day because otherwise no much happened.  We could go out into the courtyard to walk around a half hour or so a day but it was late November and cold and gray.  The courtyard was covered with beautiful gray slate and there had once been a garden around it but it was mostly long gone.  The house had been an institution for a while now, maybe ten years. 

I went back to St Augustine Hall to finish out the classes for the fall semester after about ten or twelve days.  I lost count.  The doctors had me stay on the medications and once I was back into the community flow of life I could tell how much they affected me.  I could hardly feel anything, neither depression nor elation or excitement.  It all felt flat.  But one benefit was that I got to go see the psychiatrist once a week and this was great.  I used one of the house cars or vans and drove by myself through the suburbs to his office.  He was a middle-aged man, thin gray moustache, graying crew-cut.  He smoked before I arrived and to signal the time was up he would pick up the heavy green ceramic ashtray on his desk, pour the ashes into an opened tissue and throw the bundle into the waste can to the side of is chair. 

I recall nothing of what either he or I talked about, but this helped me get through the winter.  I thought things were ok but one day the Director called me in and asked if I would like to go back to the hospital for a week or so because he had to go away on a trip.  I didn't really care one way or another then.  I was glad for some sort of change or variety.  This visit to the hospital seems to have come when I was trying to read George Eliot's Middlemarch for a class.  I had a hard time keeping my thoughts straight about anything.  The hospital felt much the same.  By then I knew I was on medications and no longer worried about the possibility of shock therapy.  Brother Thomas had left the upper house and gone home by then too, so no one mentioned whether the shock had worked for him. 

Rumors had been floating for a year or so in the house that the Brother Director was going to be replaced.  He was nice enough but seemed easily flustered, maybe too old, a bit weary to be heading up a house of eighty college freshmen and sophomores.  After Easter recess from classes at the college, some other brother superiors from the district came and went at the house.  One of them called me in for a chat.  He said he thought I could take the rest of the semester off and go back home to see if I would get better faster and feel more rested.  I left a few days later.  They drove me to the train station and once they were gone and before the train left I bought a copy of The New Yorker.  It was the first magazine I had seen in three years.  I read it closely.  I had never heard of the country of Vietnam but our country was now doing something there.  A new singing quartet from England was about to arrive in New York and was causing a commotion wherever they showed up.  They were called The Beatles and had funny bowl-like hair cuts.  There was no photo.  This magazine never had photos so I made a mental note to find a copy of Life as soon as I got home.

That summer I read a lot, walked across town and back to the library.  I went to the club and floated away the hot, humid days in the pool.  That fall I went to College Park to start college classes again at the university.  My aunt and uncle lived there and I had spent many summers at their house and wandering around the city of Washington years before but my parents felt I should stay on campus.  I was in a dorm with three other boys.  They were sophomores and juniors.  I took philosophy courses and English courses.  One course on Plato I liked a lot and the professor wanted me to switch my major.  I stayed with English though.  I wanted to keep my draft deferment and starting looking into how to get into graduate school right after graduation.  Everyone was trying to do that.  On campus my first semester there I saw my first war protest.  Every day at noon people would protest the war by standing in a long row in front of the huge university library building. They stood in silence with some signs explaining what they were doing and why. 

I didn't know what colleges to apply to and I pored over catalogs and looked up programs.  I applied to the University of Chicago because Father and Mother had taken us to the city one summer for a short trip.  It was a great long train ride out and back.  Chicago accepted me and professors told me that was the best school I had applied to and I should go.  I looked up in the Maryland lists to find teachers who had degrees from Chicago and I walked around trying to meet them and ask them what it was like.  I was afraid it would be too hard and I thought I wanted to go to Pittsburgh to Duquesne because it was a Catholic college and closer to home.  Very few professors at Maryland had degrees from Chicago and most hadn't too much to say about it.  None knew anything about the English program.  One woman in the Psychology department, however, smiled at my question and murmured, "well, everyone has a nervous breakdown while they are there, but it's a great school and a great experience too."  "Oh, I said, well, good, then I'm ok, because I've already had my nervous breakdown so I'll fit in just fine."  She laughed and said, good, you should go. 

I went right after graduation and started classes that summer.  Everything about Vietnam heated up in the world.  The next summer was the 1968 Democratic National Convention with the hippies and the police rioting in Grant Park.  I was there for a few hours in the middle of the day and you could feel the violence coming, the thirst for it, for bloodshed.  Times were intense and study at the university was intense as well. 

One of the main events of my living near the university in Hyde Park neighborhood was my chance to walk past one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous houses two or three times a day.  The Robie House stood on the street between my room and the campus.  It is a dark brick and wood house built in the twenties and one of his most famous early houses establishing what he then called the Prairie Style.  Horizontal rooflines and shapes, long-low, nothing to echo Europe.  American as essential as the prairie beyond Chicago's skyscrapers. 

I got a job teaching down in southern Illinois for the following year, met my wife there and we married the next June and traveled around in Europe for the summer of '69.  Then we both started doctoral programs at Chicago and stayed there for two years, living in married student housing in an old hotel on the edge of the ghetto and looking out onto Lake Michigan.  One memorable night we watched thunder and lightning storm over the lake for hours. 

Over the years after that I would dream about the Tudor house in Elkins Park over and over.  I began to look up information about it and found that it was indeed a fairly faithful copy of a famous house in England, Compton Wynyates.  I read up about it, did some research about the history.  I found out too that wealthy homeowners in the Eastern States had a craze for all things Tudor at the turn of the 20th century.  Birmingham, Alabama for instance has a whole section of Tudor homes.  One or two can be found in Newport, RI and a large one is in Akron, Ohio.  The mansion in Elkins Park stuck in my memory though and I would go over details of it in my mind over the years.  Dreams about it continued, some involved returning to it, some involved leaving, some imagined the original owner and her husband, Mrs Eleanor and Mr Fitz Eugene Dixon, the tennis star and coach.  The house was originally named Ronale Manor in her honor, the backward spelling of her name. 

One time in the summer of college, or before I met Claudia at least, my parents took me on a drive over toward Pittsburgh to see a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  It belonged to business friends, the Hagan family.  It is just down the road from Wright's most famous building, Fallingwater, but it was built very late in Wright's career, just at the time, as it turns out, that he was also engaged in building the Synagogue in Elkins Park, 1954 as well as the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Hagan house was built in 1954 on a mountain top near Fallingwater.  It is a small house, one of what Wright called his Usonian houses.  We visited it as private friends of the owners who built it and I was deeply impressed by this.  At the same time, once I saw it and linked it in my memory to the synagogue, some disappointment registered.  The living room felt spacious and impressive and a bit like the prow of a ship.  The remainder of the house felt cramped and small.  Years later when visiting Fallingwater I learned that Wright used his own stature as the measure of all interior spaces and he felt hallways should be moved through swiftly.  Wright's idiosyncrasies come to the fore in all of his buildings. 

Whatever was left of my "architectural mind" took on the opposition between the Tudor mansion and Wright's masterpieces.  With those poles the dialectic between ancient and modern, hand-crafted and industrially fabricated became a topic I mulled over and over and used as a framework to continue to understand what was going on in my life and the world.  The dreams continued and finally I said to Claudia, we must go to Philadelphia so I can show you everything there.  The wonderful art museum on the river and of course this great Tudor house I talk so much about.  Finally the chance came up and we drove down from New England into Pennsylvania.  We drove through the city on a very hot summer day.  A presidential election campaign was going on.  I drove to the art museum only to find from big signs blocking the streets around it that it was closed for extensive renovations to add air conditioning.  Then we drove out to Elkins Park.  I was beside myself with anticipation.  I so wanted Claudia to see the grounds.  The large wooden gates were open, the lions rampant on top of the stone and brick pillars on either side.  I drove slowly down into the park anxious to show her every turn and angle of the plantings and views.  Over one of the small stone bridges, over another to the wide curve upward toward the house.  In the spring I reminded her this hillside all the way up on either side was covered with thousands of daffodils.  Pink azaleas lined the curve at that time.  And right outside one of the towering library windows was a weeping cherry tree.  It would not be in bloom still, but I would show it to her. 

At the top of the hill the ground was unexpectedly flat.  The asphalt ended in the familiar rectangular parking area, but there was no house.  Nothing.  My eyes could not take it in, nor my mind.  We parked and got out.  I said nothing.  I suppose I could hardly hold back tears.  There were pieces of brick rubble all around the dirt, spots of scruffy grass, bare and ashy patches of a place that had been torn down.  I still regret not having picked up a few pieces of the hand-made bricks left from the chimneys.  Pieces of Elizabethan masonry design, copies but faithful copies, convincing reproductions made by Philadelphia brick makers.   What a shock to find nothing of the house.  We went back into the city.  I don't remember if I drove past the other mansions on the road.  The main house, the neoclassical revival Lynnewood Hall, we had seen from a distance, it could not be missed and still stands a ruin today. 

Four or five years later, maybe more, we were going to be in England.  As a surprise to Claudia and our young daughter Louise, I decided I would take them out of Oxford to see the original Compton Wynyates.  I had read a great deal more about it over the years and I knew it was one of the great country houses that could be visited.  I had suggested we rent a car so we could explore the countryside, go to Stratford-upon-Avon and other places in the area.  I had not explained how close Compton Wynyates was or that we would drive there.  But on a fine sunny day in late August we drove north and I found the correct roads and turns as I had memorized them.  We drove up the slow curve of hill toward the entrance to the grounds.  A huge white sign stood there:  in bold red letters, House Closed to the Public - No Longer Open to View.  I stopped the car and we got out.  Claudia could see how crushed I was.  We tried to peek around the sign, down the long straight entrance drive and there at the bottom of the grassy bowl I could see a pinkish set of buildings that could have been the house.  By this time I had seen many black and white photos of it and could see that yes it was there, of course. 

Images the Elkins Park house eventually did fade out of my nighttime dream chambers.   Many years later, however, I grew more curious about Compton Wynyates once more.  I had thought of trying to write something about the house but I didn't know what.  I had a thick hanging file folder full of photocopied articles written about it.  Claudia wanted us to spend a long time in Italy on a sabbatical project she wanted to undertake in the libraries.  She got her grant and we made our plans.  Louise would be in the schools and learn the language.  I found a conference to attend in England for that fall and decided that would be my main event for the year and a half.  A longish week in England.  As soon as that opened up, I thought, ah, I'll see if I can finally get back out to Compton Wynyates.  I could find no reliable information about whether it was open to the public at all any more.  Friends of friends had found us a beautiful old apartment to use in Rome.  Some uncle had just left it to sit and so we were permitted to have it opened up and readied.  The address was wonderful sounding and I thought that would be a ticket.  I wrote to the Marquess of Northampton from that address.  I  mentioned Claudia's research in Rome in passing and got on to discussing in general terms how important his house had been in American architectural history, how imitations of it were built and some still treasured.  I mentioned my experience of having lived in the Widener family version and I hinted that I was in the midst of a cultural and architectural inquiry that would benefit greatly from a visit to the original.  Would that be possible?  I had also mentioned the conference at Dartington Hall in October.  Within three or four days I received a small, heavy cream-colored envelope, handwritten address and within a handwritten note:  Come for lunch and a phone number.  Spencer Compton  I suppose it was his signature, illegible though it was.  This was September.  I waited a day to catch my breath I think and then I called around 11 our time and hoped it was also UK time.  The Marquess answered.  We discussed dates and he liked the one I had chosen, a Sunday at the end of the Dartington week.  Come around 1, he said.  I did.

As I walked through the first courtyard of the house to the door I thought how tawdry the Elkins Park house would look in contrast with this master work of vernacular building design.   Years later in Lima, Peru I was wandering around the Miraflores neighborhood and saw a large Tudor house.  Ha, I scoffed to myself, how strange to see this in Lima of all places.  Shortly another voice said, well, yes, this is the new world and really a Tudor mansion here is about the same as a Tudor mansion in North America, isn't it? 

We sat in the Great Hall.  I was facing the large window that brought light into the room.  A tall, golden Buddha sat in front of the window further softening and amplifying the October light.  Indonesian perhaps, the statue, about seven feet high.  I sat next to the huge open stone fireplace and Spencer and Pamela, his new fiancé sat opposite. They sat on an oversized pale green high backed sofa. I had read about his previous marriages and that Pamela was his Jungian analyst.  Or did he tell me that?  I don't remember exactly.  I was as nervous as I ever could have been.  I could barely talk.  It was good to have the Temenos Conference I had just been to at Dartington to talk about.  And the poet Kathleen Raine and her group who had organized the gather of artists and writers under the topic of arts and spirituality.  I could tell fairly soon that my hosts were very interested in all such things and as we moved into the dining room for lunch they told me a lot about the esoteric importance of the house.  All the rivers of England came together under the house and flowed from there down to London and the sea, Lord Compton explained.  He is actually three years younger than me, but at the time it felt like he was older and I felt very much younger.  Mark Twain came to mind and consoled me at some point:  yes, here was the great archetype again---another yankee visiting another King Arthur's palace.  We had a simple and delicious lunch which the butler had cooked and served.  Fresh peas, salmon.   At one end of the room a Holbein portrait of Mary Queen of Scots looked on.    Spencer took me around to some points he wanted me to note.  He clearly loved the house and I knew he had undertaken expensive and elaborate renovations to bring it fully into the modern age but nothing showed.  It felt as old as possible and so much more warm and comfortable than any such large house I had ever been in, for instance the colleges at Oxford, Shakespeare's famous house, pubs and inns of Tudor age and style in London or Canterbury.  The textures of the house felt overwhelming.  We would say at once it was dark inside and there was a sense of endless intricacies of rooms and corners and niches and angles.  Stone, wood, brick, plaster, old flooring, carpets,   Lord Compton said he and Pamela had some things to do and that I should feel free to explore the house on my own and could go everywhere except into the private rooms off the north gallery.  I looked at my watch and tried to guess how much time I had.  Maybe three hours.  It was impossible to take it all in, to savor it properly, I almost knew nothing of what I was looking at or, really, even doing there, but it was beyond satisfying to walk and look at this treasure.  Spencer had taken me up to the gallery that crossed the great hall at one end.  There he had taken out a large portfolio of Dürer engravings.   

---now I am resorting to direct plagiarism as is my speciality

Compton Wynyates is settled – or, more accurately, centred – in an artificially levelled and terraced bowl below wooded ridges. From the road, through large gates, the house is visible at the end of a long curving drive. It is a large Tudor country house of pink brick, with steep gables, towers, and a forest of extraordinary slender chimneys, each apparently different with their ornate twists and curves; around the house climbing roses creep up much of the brickwork. An ancient wooden door gives access to a large inner courtyard gazed upon by tall windows; a flagstone path crosses through a lawn and garden. From here the basic house design can be seen; it is built around the sides of a square. Very fitting, I thought, for the Pro Grand Master of Freemasonry. But, as I was to discover, there is much more about this house which reveals that the Compton who built it and his immediate descendants were deeply immersed in something very interesting; even, perhaps, an early form of Freemasonry. 
Lord Northampton took me around the outside of his house to show me something curious: a tower stands at the middle of the western face of the house, another stands at the north-east corner and yet another at the south-east corner. We began at the latter: embedded in its Tudor brickwork is a design picked out by much darker bricks. It depicts a key with two bits at the end of its shaft. 
We then looked at the west tower: it too had a key picked out in darker bricks, but this key had three bits at the end of its shaft. And at the north-eastern tower there was yet another key but, due to reconstruction in the past, only the shaft was visible. But it would seem logical that this key’s shaft would have held one bit. Were we seeing connections with masonic ritual? The First Degree being marked by the key in the north-east, where today a candidate is placed in the lodge after initiation; the Second Degree marked by the key with two bits in the south-east, exactly where the candidate is placed after having passed through his Second Degree ceremony; and the Third Degree marked by the key in the west with three bits. But why should this be placed in the west rather than in the east where the Master is placed in the lodge? Well, perhaps, as the opening of the Third Degree states, a mason goes to the west to seek the genuine secrets of a Master Mason. Does our ritual preserve some ancient residue, one which gave rise to this curious feature embedded in the walls of Compton Wynyates? 
Within the house, a first floor drawing room holds an elaborately carved chimney-piece. By the irregular nature of the curious symbolism it is clear that a message is being conveyed but without the key to the symbols and their meaning, its full extent cannot be established. But this panelling is known to have come from Canonbury House, Islington, the remaining tower of which now houses much symbolic carved panelling and is the site of the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre.