“I could of course come to church for mass on Sunday and the like, and it was okay for me to be there with my ma for a minute if she was just swinging by, but that put an end to my hours wandering around the grounds alone.” “My mother was told that I couldn’t come to work with her anymore,” he recounts. Fitzgerald had always felt welcome at the cathedral, he writes, “But something changed after that day in the attic.”

Here was a fun priest, Fitzgerald thought.Īnother priest, who seemed much less fun, discovered the priest and the boys in the attic. The priest gave Fitzgerald and his brother candy. One afternoon, he and his older half-brother were playing at the cathedral when a friendly priest whom the boys did not recognize joined in, cajoling them into an attic as part of a pretend mystery that needed solving. “It would feel massive to anyone at any age, but when you’re six and enveloped by the shadow of the enormous organ as you follow its countless pipes reaching up and up and up to a ceiling so far away it might as well be the sky, it was so deeply lonely and self-abnegating that it was almost transcendental,” he writes.īut that space would eventually represent something else to Fitzgerald. The soaring ceiling and stained-glass windows made an impression on the child. Fitzgerald regularly spent time exploring the church and the residence while his mother completed her work.

“It was called Mass Ave for short, and as a child, I used to think that our street was named after a church service, not the state we lived in,” Fitzgerald writes in his opening essay, “Family Stories.”įitzgerald’s mother secured work at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, tidying up and completing secretarial tasks while getting to know the clergy who frequented the complex, including the notorious protector of abusive priests, Cardinal Bernard Law. His parents, young and unable to get their footing financially, had moved during his youth into Catholic Worker houses in Boston, including one situated in the city’s South End, on Massachusetts Avenue.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgeraldīut Fitzgerald’s childhood had one constant: It was saturated with Catholicism.

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