What It Was My Father Came Here To Get Away From

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As early as I can remember, my father hated Catholics. Actually, he despised all religious people. He called believers hypocrites; priests and pastors, pimps. He rarely spoke of this enmity or, for that matter, much else personal, including his years aboard a Pacific Ocean supply ship during the Second World War. “Hurry up and wait,” he told my brothers and me. That was the only combat he faced. No story bayoneting Japs ever emerged. Maybe, contrary to my comic-book idea of war then, there wasn’t any. So, when he unloaded on religion, I was piqued by the sibilant sounds of those scandalous words, hypocrites and pimps, and the frosty certainty with which he iced his dismissal.

His disdain for God’s henchmen on earth began and ended with two betrayals—one, his body, the other, his soul, though he would have denied the latter had any substance left. Born in 1914, in Evanston, Illinois, he was given up at birth, probably by immigrants, a Bohemian mother and a Swedish father. That day, he was adopted by the childless Larsons, (another) Swedish father who was irascible and belt-prone and an English mother who cradled the baby to daily mass. They named him John Joseph Milton, the first two referencing Jesus, the third an artistic aspiration. My mother said Dad figured out long before he asked them about his adoption that he wasn’t theirs—what gave it away was his swarthy skin and his inborn suspiciousness.

At St. Mary’s, down the street, he was a student and an altar boy. Photos survive. In one, he wears a white surplice with a starched linen collar and large satin bow. A boy, maybe any boy, who loved God. In another, he’s all decked out: a woolen suit, knickers, black shoes and high socks, neck tie arched at the knot. A full head of combed-back black hair. It must be Confirmation, for nestled in his soft hands is a Catholic prayer book, a finger and a rosary marking a favorite page. He’s ten, the age of discretion; he’s chosen this religion for himself. Though unfazed or freighted (I can’t tell which) by years of catechism, he dresses the viewer (me) with an untroubled gaze. His fate feels staked. He may know what he doesn’t know.

As a teen, my father attended St. George High School. He told me once that he blossomed there, often the first through the double doors, with the Christian Brothers’ tutelage: four years of athletics (baseball, swimming, and boxing) and scholastics (the physical sciences, history, literature, and art: he loved the medieval painters and was a talented drawer). He thrived in the dramatic society (my dad, acting on stage!) and the debating club where he persuaded the class that the US government had a moral duty to help the poor with food and shelter.

The school uniform was black pants, white shirt, striped tie, and a serge blazer. Sewn onto the blazer’s pocket was a patch, the school emblem, a fire-breathing dragon. (His coat was one of the few things my dad saved, along with Navy memorabilia, in his sixty-one years.) The legend goes that in 302 CE, George, a Roman soldier and a Christian, travels from Palestine to Libya doing good deeds in Christ’s name. There, he finds the desert dwellers are trapped by a dragon; they’re hoping to appease the monster by tying a princess, a virginal sacrifice, to a tree. George unbinds the damsel and, with nimble twists and balletic leaps, he exhausts the dragon’s ire and, at last, thrusts his saber’s length into its belly. So bedazzled are the Libyan pagans—some fifteen thousand, the story says—that they shudder, drop to their knees, and convert to Christianity on the spot. The Church later canonized George as the protector of men like him who defend the faith with arms. He became the patron saint of boy scouts and soldiers.

In addition to the school’s namesake, my father...