The day of my First Communion was a perfect day. May 19, 1956: the single date I can call up with the assurance that it marks a time in which I was completely happy. On that day I had no doubt that I had mastered everything that was required of me. The rest was in the hands of people whose competence, or more properly, expertise, was beyond question. This would never happen in my life again.
*
The preparations for the great event extended from mid-winter to the height of spring. From the beginning of February to the 18th of May, when each one of us would make his or her First Confession, a large part of each school day was devoted to making us ready to receive the sacrament. And from that time, the first grade classroom, which had been for me a locus of plain dread, became transformed.
My dread had started with my first step over the threshold, when I entered the room, pulled from my father in a flood of tears (he may have wept as well). I was oppressed, as if my shoes were perpetually wet, by the classrooms’ smells: sour milk, bologna sandwiches steeping, simmering, in tin lunch boxes in the cloakroom whose doors did not provide sufficient barriers to keep the odors from me. And, except for catechism, whose precision I enjoyed, I was bored by the curriculum. I already knew how to read and write; pretending I was on a level with the others enervated me and gave me my first deep lessons in contempt; drawing and mathematics seemed to me ridiculous, beside what I knew to be the point of everything: words.
And there were requirements for a kind of orderliness I considered both unimportant and entirely beyond me. Folding your paper in four to make identical columns separated from each other by a nearly invisible crease. Covering books in brown paper. Keeping books in a particular order in the desk. Other protocols, which did not involve my controlling objects in the physical world, objects that had clearly vowed to fox and vex me, I quite liked. I was very good at sitting in silence with my hands folded perfectly in front of me on the top of the desk. But hanging my hat exactly right on the hook reserved for me in the back cloakroom: this I could not do.
Some time in the month of October, I vomited in class, ruining my penmanship book, whose cover, green with black palmer method letter spelling out “Penmanship” had to be ripped off by Sister Trinitas, who dealt with everything calmly, efficiently, and made me feel, remarkably, no shame. She was a lovely woman, a kind woman, a calm woman, beautifully contained, sheathed, but what the sheath enclosed was not a sword, rather a lily, odorless, white, formal; she seemed quite as much a symbol as a living thing. Her skin was very white, waxen almost, like the texture of a beeswax candle. Her paleness seemed almost sacramental because when you thought of her your mind immediately went to things that in themselves touched on the sacred: blessed candles, Easter lilies, and she was hidden, precious, like the host concealed in the darkness of the tabernacle, whose interior none of the likes of us would ever see.
After I vomited, she took me down to the nurse’s office, and while I looked at the posters of the five basic food groups and allowed my eye to fall on the machine to test our hearing, she and the nurse agreed that I should be sent home. The uncalled for holiday changed everything. After that, my dread diminished incrementally but irregularly, throughout the fall and early winter. I don’t know why: perhaps it was the surprise, almost a shock, that what I had imagined would be an occasion for shaming became a moment of gracious care. But it took the furnace of preparations of my first communion to transform the room into a place of purpose, where everything, in its clear importance, in its obvious essentialness, became delightful. The room turned from the center of dark banishment to a place of light: high windows opened by a pole with a hook at the end which only Sister Trinitas could reach; the rest of us being much too small. Everything I was listening to seemed wholly desirable. There was so much to be learned. It was the kind of learning that had the surplus value of teaching me, or allowing me to know, that I did not need my parents. I could get along without them. I did not need anyone: I belonged to God.
*
There were fifty of us packed into that room in those crowded postwar days. Triumphalist times: Catholic children not sent to Catholic schools risked their immortal souls through contamination, the mere potential of being put in danger by careless parents, sent to public school, into the mixed, non Catholic world, as if they’d been frivolously sent into the plague ward for convenience, because the quarantine was too much trouble, too expensive, too much work.
And so we sat, half a hundred of us, in the weak light of late winter, early spring, our hands folded on the maple desk tops where some wicked child may have carved his name, a desk top we would each polish with a half lemon given to each child on the last day of class, one of the last days of June: but that warmth, that release, was in the future. Now it was March, April, and the light was silvery, still, with a hint of ice menacing it, and we sat, expectant, even the most disobedient attentive.
There were catechism questions to be memorized, but we had done that sort of thing before: Who is God, God is the Supreme Being, Why did God make me, to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven. So the definitions of the Eucharist: The Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine — were simply an extension of something we had already learned before.
But in addition to the catechism questions, we had to memorize a special prayer, longer than any we had yet learned. Far longer than the Our Father. We were not yet judged ready for the Apostles Creed, although my family, ambitious for my spiritual distinction, had taught it to me. This new prayer we would say in the darkness made by the screen of our hands in front of our closed eyes. We would say it in silence, part of what was called “making a Thanksgiving.” But now, to learn it, we said it aloud, fifty of us crying out with one voice: Look down upon me good and gentle Jesus while before thy face I humbly kneel and with burning soul pray and beseech thee to fix deep within my heart lively sentiments of faith, hope and charity, true contrition for my sins and a firm purpose of amendment. The while I contemplate, with great love and tender pity, the words which David thy prophet said of thee my Jesus: “They have pierced my hands and my feet. They have numbered all my bones.”
*
Never had any words pleased me so much. I would not have put it this way then, but I know now: it was the mix of the physical, the metaphysical and the historical in this prayer that struck a chord of ultimate rightness, ultimate satisfactoriness, of many tones being hit straight on and with full resonance. I have never known who wrote these words, and from what historical period they arose. You will say it is ridiculous to assume that six and seven year olds could have any understanding of these words. But it is not ridiculous. I knew what a burning soul was: I was an ardent girl, any experience of ardor I have had since then is only a recapitulation, a diluted version of what I felt as a child. It was easy for me to believe that my soul was burning because I had a clear image of what my soul might be. It was an oval, the shape that Sister Trinitas had traced with a white chalk line on the board, then filled in with splotches made of red chalk, representing sin, which could be erased — poof, like that — by the sacrament of penance, represented by the eraser. But no, my soul was not a simple oval, it was flame shaped, the flame I could fix with my eye at the top of the candle, and I could feel it burning within me, my desire to love God, to be good, to be good not for the sake of other human beings, and not even for the fear of hell fire, but because not to be good, to sin, would be to betray the love of God, who had died for me. And so I did feel great love; I did feel tender pity: Jesus had suffered unto death on the cross for me, he would have done it if I had been the only person in the world, I knew that as well as I knew the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and that I was an American child, and that the communists would kill me for being both Catholic and American if they got a chance. Most thrilling to me were the parts of the prayer that began with “While I call to mind the word which David thy prophet said of thee my Jesus: ‘they have pierced my hands and my feet; they have numbered all my bones.’” My father’s name was David, and I knew I was half Jewish, so to hear the name David was to have my heritage invoked and to underscore what I suspected; my lineage was more ancient, more burnished, deeper-rooted than any of my classmates. And I could feel in my body the words pierce and number, they made my flesh thrum; I could imagine the nails going straight through the tender flesh in the top of my arch. In the shoe stores that sold Buster Brown shoes (the boy, the dog on the inner sole, stepped on every morning brutally by children all over America), you could put your foot in an X-ray machine and see each one of your small bones. I brought this image to mind when I thought of the Roman soldiers, crushing bone after bone, ripping my feet, then when they got to my hands, puncturing then drilling through the tender spot below my knuckles, still dimpled, still babyish, nevertheless able to mimic the pain of the crucified Lord.
With this knowledge, the words I had absorbed into my skin made my body no longer an encumbrance, an irrelevance, but part of the sacrament, a necessary vessel, sacred in itself: My body would contain the host, it would house the body of Christ. In the presence of the host, which we would take inside our mouth and swallow, as we might swallow ordinary food (but everything about this was extraordinary), He would become our guest. We sang this as an idea contained in the hymn we all learned, sitting still in our wooden desks with their empty inkwells (first graders were allowed pencils only) in our stiff serge navy blue uniforms (jumpers and white Dacron blouses for girls, long pants, Dacron shirts, blue clip-on ties for boys),the equality of the ugliness a false promise of future equality, spread out on a larger terrain.
Sister Trinitas would put the silver pitch pipe between her calm lips, and her beautiful white cheeks would swell like a Botticelli Zephyr’s as she blew the note and we prepared (each of our hearts in our mouths, and yet these hearts were high) to learn the hymn. It was called Little White Guest, and we would sing it one day only, only one in our whole lives: the day of our First Communion.
*
We practiced the words many, many times. Hundreds of times it must have been, so I will never forget them. In a way that I cannot with any lines of great English poetry, I can call them to mind in a second:
You have come to my heart dearest Jesus
I’m holding you close to my breast
I am whispering over and over
You are welcome O Little White Guest
And now that you’ve come dearest Jesus
To nestle so close to my breast
I whisper I love you my Jesus
You are welcome O little White Guest.
This is the first time in my life that these words are a part of written rather than sung language. And as I type them and then read them, I see that they are entirely unremarkable: not an outstanding image, not a luminous word. Except for the central conceit: the little white guest. What could be more sentimental? But even now it strikes me, not as sentimental, but as poignant. At the time, although I was one of the children singing the hymn, I was aware of the poignancy of the image of children singing: I was simultaneously singing my heart out and swimming through a reflexive, rushing ocean of self love.
*
One of the most important things to be drilled into our heads, and one of the greatest causes of anxiety, was the pre-Communion fast. In those pre-Vatican II days, one was required to fast from midnight of the night before taking the sacrament. I would, of course, be asleep for most of that time, but I had to be very careful, very very careful, vigilant to the point of death, not to pop something into my mouth on my way past the kitchen to the bathroom. I worried that even brushing my teeth might be a violation of the terms of the fast, but Sister Trinitas assured me it was not, when I raised my hand to ask the question. Did my classmates feel relief that I had voiced an anxiety they might have shared, or did they think I was a freak, ridiculous in my over-scrupulosity?
I knew that the emptiness I would feel that day would be a sacred emptiness, unlike any kind of ordinary hunger. I longed for it; but I feared — I had been warned so often — of the stupidity of my own flesh, its coarseness, its vulnerability to the temptations of the devil. To break the fast would not be sinful, but nonetheless would make the taking of the sacrament impossible. And, like little soldiers, we repeated the command, “Nothing must pass the lips after midnight.” The repetition was meant to fix the idea, not only in our brain, but as if we had inscribed it, like M. in Kafka’s penal colony, onto our flesh, the writing and rewriting, the inscription and re-inscription. Nothing after midnight. Nothing past the lips.