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Rome might have been Neptune. Art listened in fascination. His Latin vocabulary doubled, then tripled, so desperate was he to please Father Fleury. It was a task that demanded considerable effort, the priest’s attention was so clearly elsewhere.
    Adult indifference, its power to motivate children, is old news in Catholic circles. My own mother practiced a version of this approach—by natural inclination, I suspect, more than by design. Father Fleury’s disregard was, to Art, oddly reassuring. He was unused to flatterers like Father Dowd, confused by male attention of any kind. With his stepfather, indifference was the best you could hope for. If you did anything to attract his notice, there would be hell to pay. But unlike Ted McGann, Father Fleury wasn’t volatile or angry, just preoccupied with other matters. Art lived to impress him. Years later he would recall the time he scored a 99 on a quarterly exam and was rewarded with a rare smile.
    He had made no errors, but Father Fleury did not award 100s. He subtracted one point, always, for original sin.
    Art had never had a father. When Ma’s first marriage was annulled—literally made into nothing— Harry Breen was expunged from the record. Art was the awkward reminder of a union that had, officially, never been. Now, suddenly, he had more fathers than he knew what to do with: Father Fleury, Father Koval, Father Frontino, Father Dowd. They taught him more than Latin and history, algebra and music. By word and example they taught priestliness: ways of speaking and acting; of not speaking and not acting. Restraint and discipline, obedience and silence.
    For a shy boy, these formulas were a help and a comfort. Art didn’t miss his old school, the rough-and-tumble Grantham Junior High. St. John’s was a haven from all that frightened him, the alarming interplay of male and female, that intricate and wild dance. Like many boys he feared the opposite sex. But even more intensely, he feared his own.
    A certain kind of boy unnerved him, hale athletes, confident and aggressive. At seminary such specimens were blessedly few. From the first it was clear that a range existed: alpha males at the one end; at the other, the distinctly effete. Both extremes were, to Art, alarming. Like Latin nouns, the boys came in three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. He placed himself in the third category, undifferentiated. In the seminary at least, it seemed the safest place to be.
    Matters of sex, of maleness and femaleness, were in this world peripheral. He felt protected by silence, grateful at all that was left unsaid. Once, at a Lenten retreat, Father Koval had delivered a steely sermon, exhorting the boys to keep their vessels clean . To Art, at fifteen, the words remained mysteriously figurative, vaguely connected to all that had distressed him in his old life: at home, the nighttime noises from Ma and Ted’s bedroom; at school, the fragrant and fleshy presence of girls.
    The life of a celibate priest. Father Koval had compared it to climbing Mount Everest: the outer limits of man’s capacity, a daring test that few were brave enough to attempt. The rhetoric was aimed at the boys’ nascent machismo; to Art, who had none, it rang false. A better comparison, he felt, was a journey on a spaceship. A priest was isolated and weightless. He existed outside gravity—the force that attracted bodies to other bodies, that tethered them to God’s earth.
    A RT GREW up in this atmosphere, outside gravity. Troubling questions were answered for him, and he accepted these answers in gratitude and relief. So when he graduated from high school and entered the seminary proper, he was unprepared for the sudden change in the weather. That September a new rector was brought over from Rome, a strapping, ursine priest named James Duke.
    The previous rector had been mild and scholarly, a soft-spoken man with a distracted air. But Il Duce was another sort