UNITED STATES
Room with a Pew
Paul Fericano
“But the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be on your own front door.”
–Perry Como
In December of 1965, I left Saint Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara on Christmas break and took the long train ride home to San Francisco. Keeping to myself, I spent most of the trip staring out the window and watching the scenery speed past me like a silent movie. The whole time I kept wondering: how could I explain to my parents what had been happening to me at school? For the first three months of my freshman year I had been emotionally and sexually abused by a Franciscan priest who served as the school’s prefect of discipline and used medical treatment as a ruse. I had no name for what I was experiencing. But inside I knew something was wrong. As I lay in bed each night in the dormitory listening to the other boys sleep, I slowly felt myself slipping into despair and depression.
As I rode the train north I was oblivious to the family crisis that was waiting for me on the other end. My parents had separated two months before and would eventually divorce six months later. But the news of their separation was purposely kept from me at the insistence of my offender who told my mother it could discourage my vocation. He advised her that it was best to tell me when I returned home for Christmas vacation.
Stepping off the train at the Southern Pacific terminal in San Francisco, I expected to be met by both my parents but was greeted only by my mother. It’s not hard to recall the joy I felt when I saw her. For the first time in months I felt safe. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, and it seemed as though I towered over her now. My mind and my heart were compressed into one, enormous embrace that wrapped my arms around her small body, seven months pregnant. Her smile was big but her eyes were red and I could tell she had been crying long before I got there.
I hadn’t been away from home so long that I couldn’t recognize the unhappiness in my mother’s face.
When I asked where my father was she told me straight out that he had left. Then she led me to a coffee shop where we sat and talked for an hour and, without revealing too many details, made it clear who the guilty party was. My first reactions were shock and dismay. But as I listened to her story, which for many years would be the only version her children would hear, I realized that my mother had not only lost a husband of twenty-one years but also a childhood friend.
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