Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
education,” which purportedly allowed children to do whatever they wanted, turning them into spoiled brats. Strict discipline, we were told, was an essential factor making our schools superior. The core component of our superiority was that we had the truth. Other school systems were full of laxity and error.
I did well in school, but my parents did not put much emphasis on academic success—motivated more, I think, by a desire to pump up my brothers than to put me down. The notion prevailed that you were either smart at school or good at sports and mechanical things. I accepted the caricature more than I should have, making myself less adept at sports or mechanics than I might have been, but I preferred to be smart. I valued learning and I became less tied to their values or dependent on their approval. Church and school and library became more important to me than home.
Religion permeated the whole curriculum. We didn’t always adequately digest what we were taught. We were told that the Trinity and transubstantiation were mysteries we couldn’t possibly understand. We memorized the Ten Commandments without grasping much of their meaning. I was particularly intrigued by the wording of the Sixth Commandment. I came home one day and shouted at my mother through the letter box, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” She was in the living room talking with the insurance man and was mortified. Eventually in school we were told that the word meant “impurity in thought, word or deed.” (I confessed to it once. When the priest inquired further, I had to explain that I had urinated in the woods, which was extremely embarrassing.) We prepared for first communion, first confession, confirmation, and liturgical rituals during school time. Every year a girl in eighth grade was chosen to be May Queen and to dress as a bride and crown the statue of the Virgin Mary in the May procession. We were asked to contribute our allowances to the “ransom of pagan babies.” Every $5 made it possible for one more child in Africa to be baptized, we were told—and we could even choose the child’s new name.
Everything was precisely codified: ten commandments, six precepts of the church, seven sacraments, eight beatitudes, seven capital sins, twelve apostles, fourteen stations of the cross, nine first Fridays, forty hours’ devotion to the blessed sacrament, five joyful mysteries, five sorrowful mysteries, five glorious mysteries. All over the world, mass was celebrated in the same way and in the same language, so that we could go anywhere and be at home wherever there was a Catholic church. It was all prescribed down to the smallest detail. We worried about inadvertently doing something wrong. We were required to attend children’s mass on Sundays and to sit with our class, boys on one side of the aisle and girls on the other. The nuns would click for us to stand, sit, kneel, genuflect, file in or out in unison. Every movement, every gesture was predetermined.
Growing up in this world got me into the habit of thinking cosmologically, for which I have always been grateful—even if the cosmology of a three-storied world, composed of heaven, earth, and hell, eventually came to seem utterly implausible. But at the time, this all-encompassing worldview seemed self-evidently true and beyond question. It was as if all historical change belonged in the past and history had come to a kind of final resting point. All important issues were presented as basically settled; the answers only had to be looked up somewhere. Eisenhower was president of the greatest country in the world and Pius XII was pope of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, together personifying the stability and complacency of the world over which they jointly presided. Our church and our country embodied truth and goodness. The other, the adversary, was communism. It was falsity and evil. At the end of every mass, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Likewise, during the presidential contests of 1952 and 1956, between Dwight Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson, I saw “I like Ike” buttons and bumper stickers everywhere. Our house was for Ike, because he was a soldier and the other guy was an “egghead.”
I was affected by death for the first time in the early 1950s. A boy in my class died, then another boy on our street, and then two of my grandparents. I found their sudden absence from the world shocking and haunting, but was comforted by the belief that they were in heaven looking down on me. My mother said she heard her father being released from purgatory. She believed that God, saints, angels, and devils intervened in her life daily. We lived in constant expectation of miracles. If it could happen to peasant children in Lourdes or Fatima, why not to us? Indeed, some children in Philadelphia in 1954 claimed that Mary appeared to them. We went to the roped-off spot where people left rosaries and money and cards with special intentions. We prayed to Our Lady of Fairmount Park. I wondered why no one from heaven appeared to me.
In 1952, we moved to Springfield, Pennsylvania, in Delaware County, where my extended family lived. I attended Saint Francis of Assisi School from third to eighth grade. There was no difference in curriculum or custom, as all was standardized in the Philadelphia archdiocesan schools. The family grew, and the house was extended. In addition to the babies arriving, my disabled uncle moved in with us. It was a noisy and busy household, but never chaotic. My parents were highly organized. My father was particularly meticulous and laid out domestic projects much as he drafted plans for manholes and substations at work. My mother started doing the Christmas shopping during the post-Christmas sales nearly a year in advance.
Holidays took a lot of logistical skill, as huge numbers of diapers, pajamas, bottles, peanut butter sandwiches, and much more were piled into the station wagon along with kids who started scrapping before the car even pulled out of the driveway with cries of “He touched me” and “He’s breathing my air!” We always went within driving distance, mostly to New Jersey or Virginia. We stayed at a Sheehan bungalow in Atlantic City or the Moore Farm in Virginia. Occasionally we stayed in motels and all piled into one room. Once my father took the three oldest of us on a train to New York and we stayed in a hotel. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, walked around the crown of the Statue of Liberty, took a boat trip around Manhattan. It was so exciting. I was keen to go to Greenwich Village to see beatniks. Although I didn’t have a very good grasp of what they were at the time, I could feel the lure of forbidden fruit. We never traveled anywhere by air, but we did make excursions to Philadelphia airport to watch the planes take off and land. Other trips were organized through the Brownies and then the Girl Scouts. We went camping in the woods, toured Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the United Nations in New York. We earned merit badges for sewing, cooking, and camping. My parents aspired to military precision in running our home. Our dining room was called the “mess hall.” My father was deeply marked by his time in the army and acutely proud of his military service. He showed us the insignia of the 7th Armored Division in which he served, the Purple Heart he had been awarded, the Luger he had taken from a German soldier. When we misbehaved, my mother took out a horsewhip that my father had reportedly taken off a Nazi officer he had killed. She told us how many strokes we would be getting, made us lie down on the bed and expose our bare flesh, and on she went. She sometimes said that it hurt her more than it hurt us, but we never believed it. One day, after many years of this, my brother, by then stronger than my mother was, broke the whip in her face. Corporal punishment was common in those days, both at home and in school. The military ethos was powerful. We marched around the house singing the anthems of each branch of the armed forces. It all seemed like good fun at the time. Little did we realize that, when the wars of our generation would come, we would find ourselves on opposite sides of the barricades.
The idea of masculinity was inextricably tied up with military combat. Any man who had not done military service was a dubious character, and even those who had been in the military but not engaged in combat seemed vaguely suspect. Each of my brothers would come to terms with this in his own way, but they were all shaped by it. Whatever his other children’s achievements, I believe that the military service of my two brothers meant most to my father, certainly more than my degrees and publications. He also felt a special bond with his cousin Jim Thomas, who had been a prisoner of war. Jim was one of the quietest men I ever met. I sensed that he was inarticulately damaged by the experience, and he later had what was mysteriously called a “nervous breakdown.” But men did not talk much about such matters. It was only decades later that a public discourse began about the devastating mental impact of military service and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The idea of femininity was similarly constricted. The only women in the world of my youth were housewife-mothers and teacher-nuns and shop assistant-maiden aunts. The one thing I knew for sure was that I was not going to be a housewife-mother, not least