Page 123 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 93

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Ryan’s paradigmatic scene with his father in the woods captured the
essence of his male self in relation to all other men. To Ryan, writing
retrospectively in his Journal when his father had driven him to the woods
to instruct him in sex before he left for Misericordia Seminary, it was the
primordial ritual of the older man initiating the younger man into the
fraternity of men.
Ryan’s father, trying to reveal the secrets of sex had simply touched
his son’s knee, but he set off in Ryan the first realization, the first star-
tling realization, of what Ryan wanted: men, and the company of men.
Exclusively.
The last weekend in Peoria confirmed Ryan’s spiritual resolve to go
off to Misericordia to live with other males. Ryan knew that as a priest he
could not, would not be expected to, associate with women. The priest-
hood was the perfect closet, the idealized, spiritualized, socially acceptable
way of stating a preference for men’s company over women’s.
As a boy, Ryan had wandered equally between the porch where the
men talked and the kitchen where the women talked, until the women
dismissed him. The men never dismissed him. They acted as if he weren’t
around them enough. They included him. They teased him, poked at him,
picked him up and played with him, told him jokes—even dirty ones,
which they laughed at doubly hard when he did not understand. They
wrestled him about, tousled his curly hair. They picked him up in their
arms and tossed him sky high.
“When I was a child,” Ry said, “I rarely touched the ground. I thought
I could fly. I was always being thrown up in the air.”
Between flights, the women brushed the smudges off his clothes,
combed his hair, made him wash his face and hands. The women tried to
ground and tame him. The men circled about him with an air of wildness.
“Are you your mama’s boy,” his uncle Leslie asked him, “or are you
your daddy’s son?”
Leslie O’Hara was Ryan’s youngest uncle, himself hardly more than
a grown boy. He leaned on the porch rail waiting Ryan’s answer. Leslie
O’Hara, the uncle he adored most, was a Catholic seminarian, husky for
his age, smaller than his older brother, Charley-Pop, and almost ready for
ordination to the priesthood. He was twenty-four but he had not given up
liking to tease his oldest nephew.
Ryan was seven years old. He was puzzled. He thought he was the
child of both his parents, and yet his seminarian uncle broke down that

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