The Devil's Daybook: On the Absolute Mystery of the Great High God

Carla defies description.

I mean that literally. She would not describe herself for my daybook. I told her, how am I going to document the origins of Fourth Street if you won’t be a source for the story? But beyond the bare minimum, I got nothing.

I even warned her: are you sure you want to leave your part of the saga in my hands? Nothing.

I even went mechanical with a reel to reel tape recorder from GBU. I told her to just talk into the microphone and of course she didn’t want to talk into the microphone but I said go ahead try it. This is as far as we got:

++++++++++++++++

“Is that thing on?” Carla asked.

“I think so,” I said. “But a master of these things, I am not. As you know.”

We were sitting in the tiny courtyard behind the House catching some of the precious mid-afternoon quiet and sun, though I wasn’t sure how long our backsides would last out there, sitting as we were on wrought iron patio furniture designed for, but not outfitted with, cushions. David and Jonathan, the cats from hell, uncharacteristically leave us alone and lie asleep in the sun at our feet, content and oblivious.

“There,” I said, satisfied that the equipment was ready. I started to feel as though I could get into the groove with this interviewing thing.

“This is my first interview,” I told her. “Let’s get started.”

“Go for it.”

“Well.” I moved the microphone closer to her face. “Tell me about yourself.”

She paused and stared at me. I thought she was going to get up and leave, but she surprised me.

“Give me that thing,” she said, pulling the microphone closer. “And don’t interrupt.”

++++++++++++++

“I arrived here,” she began, “actually you and I both arrived here, we all arrived here in this place because, when I first came out east to the university, I chanced to meet Gertrude in the library one afternoon.”

“That old bitch,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt. I’d started college in San Francisco, not far from the Mission District where I grew up. I was a commuter; my parents didn’t dare let me live in the dorms. I was pretty wild back then”.

“Back then,” I couldn’t help myself.

She paused at me. Carla had a way of looking a pause.

“Well, it was the sixties,” I said to prompt her. “And you were in the City That Knows How.”

She ignored that and continued. “I managed to get into some pretty sophisticated trouble even without the convenience of dorm life, and after two semesters my folks packed me off back East to live with my mother’s sister in Albany. (This, of course, backfired on them when my younger brother and only sibling, who presented them with no trouble in high school, insisted on joining me two years later, leaving them three thousand miles away from either of us).

“For the first time in my life, in the hills around the campus, I had the time to just be quiet, and I realized that I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. All the usual questions you’re supposed to ask in your late teens and early twenties. And of course I didn’t have to worry about the draft, like the guys did.

“At just this time of day, mid-afternoon, Gertrude walked by as I was paging through some magazine in the library. I remember I was staring at a patch of sun on the orange plastic seat next to me. I must have been fidgeting quite a bit because she stopped at my side and asked if there was something wrong.

“She was wearing a short veil and despite the fact that the college was a Catholic one, I had never shared more than two words with a nun in my life, and certainly not while sitting in shorts, with my legs hanging over the seat of the chair.”

“It’s amazing she didn’t throw you out,” I said.

“True,” Carla said. “Especially since Gertrude was one of the more traditional sisters at the College.”

“So, what happened? Did she give you the old heave-ho?”

“Nothing happened,” she said. “She just looked at me.”

“I know that stare,” he said. “She hated my guts back then.”

Carla smiled. “Her eyes give away nothing, but they weren’t judging me as she gave me the once over in the library that day. Which, I should add, was remarkable, considering how hard we would vex this woman who was by nature anything but non-judgmental.”

“So, what did she say?”

“I don’t recall her actual words, but she offered me a job,” Carla said. “And we became colleagues, you and I.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it for now,” she said, as she looked down at Luke’s bigboy wristwatch. “I have to go cook.”

“Now what?” I asked her.

“Hey, it’s your book,” she said as the legs of her wrought iron chair scraped against the flagstones of the garden.

+++++++++++++++

I was actually surprised that I got that much out of Carla before she split and left the rest of the tale for me to tell.

I met her within a week of her hiring at the library. I’d been hired around the same time (not by Gertrude, since that never would have happened. For the Ster, as I call her just to aggravate her, I was an acquired taste). I was a charity case, enrolled at GBU as part of the school’s outreach to worthy locals and I was a local they considered, for a time, to be worthy. I think that meant I had a pulse and had actually read a whole book before I applied for admission.

I was barely at work a week in the library myself when I was asked—told, really, the nuns didn’t ask—to orient this kid, Carla Dunbar, into the work of the library page. She presented well—short as me but the right height for a girl, with dirty blond hair that had a tendency to curl when she let it grow out. When I met her, her hair was short, though, and that went with her athletic, wiry body type. She was boyish in some ways but not manish, with pale skin (like her brother’s), the kind you don’t mind touching because it always looks smooth and clean and lightly dusted with blond hair. She wasn’t overly strong physically, but she had a strong, determined face with very pale blue/green eyes, much lighter than her brother’s startling cerulean blues.

I couldn’t get her to talk much then, either, as I showed her around the library (a converted coach house for the original estate). But we found ourselves later that week in the same theology class with Father Jonah Lutes. It was an introduction to the New Testament, one of eight (eight!!) required theology classes to which every student at the university was sentenced, without hope of parole.

This meant we had to take a theology course every semester during our sojourn on the campus on Mount Reisendorf, and that meant that there was a strong incentive for people like us to get creative. Both Carla and I had strong reservations about the foundations of the theological enterprise, a/k/a “God, though neither of us had the courage and come on out and self-identify with the godless.

Our creativity consisted of relentlessly badgering Jonah (we saw him as the weak chink in the priestly wall of the theological and philosophical fortress [don’t get me going on all the philosophy we had to take!]). We convinced him to offer a course more suitable to our intellectual palate: he created his most popular course because of us, “War, Justice, and the Common Good.” The war, the draft, and the radical idea that Catholics were toying with—that being a conscientious objector might have been something Jesus would have approved of—all of this made the course one of the must-takes on campus, and Jonah got a name for himself as a radical. Hardly deserved, though he did know a lot of people in town who were working the justice and poverty line.

Which is how we wound up meeting the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day herself, when she came to Albany one semester to speak at a local union hall.

Well, I say we met her, but really, we sat in the third row and paid attention. She was talking, as she always does, about Jesus and the gospels, but for once this wasn’t a turn-off. I found Miss Day a rather indifferent speaker, untrained in public speaking and kind of monotoned. And she drifted a bit in what she was talking about. I wondered if she was prepared.

Of course, this was quick-tongued Jason the college student critic at work. Later, when Jonah forced us to read some of her work, I came to appreciate the woman for what she had done, practically reinventing service to the poor at a time—the 1930s—when just about everyone was poor, or so it seemed. Hell, my father, whose father was a carpenter with a job, used to hunt woodchucks with a shotgun to put meat in the gravy they sprinkled over the daily macaroni. I admit it: her words may have lacked a suitable rhetorical flourish, but it really was hard to be too critical of a woman who had inspired houses of hospitality all over the country that were serving thousands of meals every day. It didn’t hurt that she was a self-proclaimed anarchist and a pacifist against war in all its forms. That was attractive, for sure.

Anyway, that night, something shifted inside Carla. We all saw it soon enough. I’m sure Gertrude was thinking it was a religious conversion, but it wasn’t. But something did happen with Carla. I date it to that night, but it probably also involved the arrival of her younger brother Luke, and her having to be a role model for him and all.

Carla began to pester Jonah all over again, this time to introduce her to his connections, pro-union stiffs who were leafleting the mills in Troy and others who were demonstrating against the war on and off campus. The other priests gave lip service to Miss Day as a modern saint but didn’t much approve of the details of her program, like opposing the war, so there were some interesting confrontations on campus over the war, and Carla began to get it on with that scene.

She was the one who first spotted the “to let” sign on the house on Fourth Street and she continued to badger Jonah without mercy until he convinced his benefactors—people he met in the parish where he worked on weekends, as well as some of the better off lay faculty at GBU—to bankroll the deal and get a lease signed.

I’m not sure how Carla managed to graduate, but she did—we did—and when she headed downtown to begin her house of hospitality, I followed along. I’d been rejected by the draft board—I’m sure you will have guessed the reason—and was footloose and fancy free, as they say.

Well, hold on. I did say I was going to be honest here.

I did follow Carla to Fourth Street, true. But the reason was not really to work with the poor, not then it wasn’t. I mean, why would I return to the very city, the very part of the city that I had so wanted to escape? I was sure, when I got accepted at GBU and even got a room on campus, that I was Broadway bound! Once I got an education I would be able to make enough money to get my ass to New York City. Instead, here I was, donating a year or so of my precious young life to setting up a house of hospitality. Why? Was it Jesus after all, slipping into the back door of my heart?

Hell, no. It was Carla’s delightful, delectable brother Luke, who slipped into the back door of my . . . life. And yeah, my heart.

But that’s a story for another day.

In any case, it was good that I went along for the ride, since Carla had this problem that did not go away.

When Miss Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, the “Catholic” part was no last-minute add on, like a marketing tool or something. She was a Catholic first, she said, and a worker with and for the poor second. The work came from an identification with Jesus Christ, and a complete devotion to Christ and the Church, which she understood—as a Catholic does—to be the Body of Christ. She worked priests and the princes of the Church to get what she needed for her movement, but she insisted that if the Cardinal Archbishop of New York commanded her to close up shop, she would do it on the spot.

However, our beloved Carla, even as she swooned over the woman and her mission, and deepened her own devotion to the poor, Carla was still—is still—though perhaps somewhat reluctantly, an atheist.

Go figure.

I was the one that got faith.

[For more information about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, still flourishing today almost thirty years after Miss Day’s death in 1980, see the link below among my favorite sites. Jason’s description of Dorothy Day as a speaker is taken from an early account of her lecture style by Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker from October of 1952. Up next: “To Hell and Back.”]