The Long Loneliness

Day now prays every day. She cannot not yet bring herself to get down on her knees while praying, but instead prays while she walks around the island. At times, Day is ashamed because she still considers religion to be the opiate of the masses. However, praying does uplift her spirits and she begins to attend Mass. Though religion helps her, she still feels restless. She wants to go back to the city, but she also wants to stay on Staten Island. Day decides that she would only “overindulge” in the city: there would be too many friends and parties. What she wants is “a church near at hand where [she] could go and lift up [her] soul” (134). She has to content herself with staying on Staten Island and going out rowing in the bay with Forster.

Day and Forster get into many arguments about religion. Day thinks that the love of God is an additional layer in the love between a man and a woman. Forster wonders why their love for each other cannot be enough. Day also wants to have a baby. However, Forster feels like he should not be a father, and that a baby should not be brought into such an uncertain world. He also dislikes controlling others. Day gets pregnant.

The child, who Day names Tamar Teresa (after St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Tamar from the Bible), is born during a cold March. Day wants to become a Catholic but knows that that would mean leaving Forster and being alone, so she waits. However, she also wants to baptize Tamar Teresa because Day “knew that [she] was not going to have [Tamar] floundering through many years as [Day] had done, doubting and hesitation, undisciplined and amoral” (136). This will not make Forster happy, so Day contemplates when she will have to leave him.

Day writes an article about her daughter’s birth for the New Masses. The joy she expresses over the birth is very relatable and becomes internationally well known. When she meets Diego Rivera four years later, he praises the article. The season after Tamar is born is mostly happy, but Day frets over when she will have Tamar baptized, which causes her much agony.

Day struggles with how she should love God. In her case, she has to choose between God and her partner. Day remarks that if she felt that Communism had answered her desire for a cause, she would have stuck with it, but it was the church that answers that call. As a result, she continues to pursue her quest for religion.

Day’s first problem is that she does not know many Catholics. One day, on Staten Island, she runs into a nun coming from St. Joseph’s-by-the-Sea and asks her how Tamar can be baptized. The nun, Sister Aloysia, asks Day how her daughter could become Catholic when Day is not a Catholic. She does not punish Day for her wavering. In fact, she ends up bringing her much to read about Catholicism. Sister Aloysia comes to Day’s house three times a week to give her catechism: “I made up my mind to accept what I did not understand, trusting light to come, as it sometimes did, in a blinding flash of exultation and realization (143). Day gives herself to the task of learning about the religion.

After her lessons, Day does decide to have Tamar baptized. Forster is upset, and he leaves. Day struggles with whether she also wants to be baptized. It feels like a betrayal of the working class people she cares about. The summer of 1920 arrives; family comes and Day is relieved of her burden for a bit. At the end of the summer, her sister and many of her friends go to Boston to protest the impending execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The duo are Catholics who have renounced their religion for anarchism. They were arrested for a robbery outside of Boston, during which two guards were killed. Many in the IWW and the Communist Party protest, but the pair are executed in 1927. Day writes that after the execution, the whole country was stricken by grief:

All the nation, I mean, that is made up of the poor, the worker, the trade unionist—those who felt most keenly the sense of solidarity—that very sense of solidarity which made me gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ whereby we are the members of one another (147).

Ironically, an incident that shakes the anarchist and Communist communities give Day a better understanding of what it means to be one with a community and an ideological force.

Forster returns. At first, he is very upset by Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution. Many days, he goes out to fish alone. Day loves him, but she also desperately wants to be baptized. The next summer, when she becomes sick and is diagnosed with a nervous condition, Day knows she has to be baptized. During her first communion, she still feels like a hypocrite because in the back of her mind she keeps hearing the old, communist part of herself claiming religion as an opiate. The Catholic Church is also a corrupt institution that keeps its wealth to itself, when more could be given to the poor; “one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church” Day writes, because the Church is at its base a corporate entity, and therefore corrupt (150). Just as Day has to separate the ideas of the corrupt capitalist state from the idea of pure government, she also has to separate the idea of the church as institution from the ideas and tenets of the Catholic religion.

Day does not regret becoming a Catholic, but it does distance her from her family and friends. She goes back to living in New York City and starts to attend a church on 14th Street. Father Zachary, a priest there, gives her multitudes of advice. Freda and Sasha also move to the neighborhood to start a restaurant.

There are aspects of her new neighborhood that Day finds less than communal. While she is sick with influenza, her sister is also sick (and pregnant), and there is no one to help her. When she lived on the Lower East Side, there were always neighbors who came to check on her, but the Chelsea neighborhood is different. For a few days, she thinks that she might die and leave Tamar in danger.

After Day recovers, she has a friend come to live with her whose son has just committed suicide. This time in her life is not an uplifting one. To make it worse, she has not been making enough money to pay taxes on her Staten Island beach house, so she has to work at Prince’s Bay (a house for priests) on Staten Island for the summer while renting out the house to cover the debts. Day cooks for the priests. She finds that whenever her communist and anarchist friends come to visit her at the house, the priests and her friends are wary of each other. However, the priests love Tamar, taking her to the barn to watch the milking of the cows and the chicken feedings.

At the end of the summer, Day gets a three-month contract to write dialogue for the film company Pathé. She and her daughter move to LA. Day thinks that she will be able to save money while there for a trip to Mexico, at the end of the contract, but her friend Lallah, who has accompanied her, has to be hospitalized, and Day ends up being charged for a stay at a friend’s ranch. However, by scrimping over the last month, she is still able to save enough money to go to Mexico.

While in LA, Day is extremely lonely. She writes:

And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others (157-58).

Forster, a man who prefers to be alone in his boat, has shown her that many men prefer to be loners. In fact, Day wants to go to Mexico so badly after the contract ends because Forster is in New York, and she is afraid that she might get back together with him.

While in Mexico, Day and Tamar live with the poor. They only return to New York City because Tamar becomes ill. The Great Depression is in full swing. Day joins action groups, but action seems to be lost on the Catholic Church. The Church belongs to and supports the groups, but does nothing in the way of organizing for change.

Day’s brother, John, and his young wife, both not yet 20 years old, come to live with Day. She has an apartment on 15th Street and begins to go to Mass again. Five-year-old Tamar goes to live with Day’s sister, her husband and their two children at their country house, where she can have room to roam. Day visits as much as she can. She also starts to work on a novel.

Though she has family living with her, Day finds that “[a]fter [she] had become a Catholic [she] began little by little to lose track of [her] friends. Being a Catholic, [she] discovered, put a barrier between [her] and others; however slight, it was always felt” (161-62). This distance contributes to her ever-present loneliness.

Day reports on an unemployment march to Washington, DC for The Commonweal, a Catholic newspaper. She also writes an account of the picketing for a Jesuit magazine. The marchers are blocked from entering Washington, DC for three days. The demonstrators sleep in cars and by the side of the road in the heart of December. Day asserts that the newspapers built up the communist element of the march in order to scare the public. Day and her friend, Mary Vorse, stay in a cheap motel and eat lunch from food trucks. They do not want to live in luxury while their compatriots are suffering in the cold. Day feels guilty that she has become so self-absorbed with her Catholic education, and that she has not looked outward.

Day writes that “[t]he demands of the marchers were for social legislation, for unemployment insurance, for old-age pensions, for relief for mothers and children, for work” (166). Now much of that legislation has been passed. After the march is over, Day goes the shrine at Catholic University and prays. She realizes that she has not had much contact with Catholics since her conversion and wants to change that. When she returns to New York, she meets Peter Maurin, who will change the trajectory of her life.