by Dave Reidy
•••
NOT EVERYONE I encountered at St. Asella’s lived on the margins. I would meet an accountant, a legal-aid lawyer, a professor of anthropology, and a devoted young grandmother whose daughter and granddaughter lived in an apartment just down the hall from her own. But only the aged, the lonely and the grief-stricken deemed it appropriate—or necessary—to share their personal problems with me as we stood near a small crowd on a public sidewalk. An old man named Joseph told me I reminded him of his daughter, adding that he hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. Jill, a single mother of three, confided in me that she had lost her job managing a diner on the North Side. And Doreen, a woman older than me but not as old as my mother would have been if she were still alive, leaned in to whisper about her heavy perimenopausal bleeding.
“It’s happening now,” she said, breathing the words into my face. “As we speak.”
Carrying on even a simple hi-and-bye conversation in front of St. Asella’s made me anxious, but I would listen to these confessions and try to respond with genuine sympathy. When I’d heard them all, I would hurry back to the sacristy, grab my purse, and head straight home to my apartment, congratulating myself for having given a few troubled people a chance to get their worries off their chests before I put those worries completely out of mind.
This went on for weeks before I realized that the people sharing their problems with me were actually asking for my help.
Before considering the burden I’d be taking on by making concrete efforts to help anyone at St. Asella’s, I called Xabier, a friend who owned a Spanish restaurant in the South Loop. I had designed his interior for well below my usual rate—there aren’t so many of us in Chicago with ties to Spain, so we stick together. I thought he might have something for Jill, the mother of three who’d lost her diner job.
“Are you looking for anyone right now?”
“Well,” he said, “I just lost my back-of-house manager.”
“I may have someone for you.”
“Who?”
“A woman I know. Her name is Jill.”
“Does she have restaurant experience?”
I decided that diner experience counted as restaurant experience. “Yes.”
“Can you vouch for her?”
I don’t even know her. “Of course.”
“Send her over.”
“Can she bring her kids?”
“To the interview? Sure, why not.”
“Perfecto. Gracias, amor.”
“Ciao, Catalina.”
The following Sunday, I gave Jill a slip of paper with Xabi’s name, the address of his restaurant, and the date and time of her interview.
She stared down at the paper and said, “I’ll have to find a sitter.”
“He said you can bring the kids to the interview, if you want.”
She arched her eyebrows, surprised as much, I think, by Xabi’s flexibility as by my having given any thought to her kids.
A week later, I was standing by the church doors, waiting for the opening procession to begin, when Jill surprised me with a cheek-to-cheek hug.
“I got the job,” she said, pressing her head to mine.
“Congratulations,” I offered.
“Thank you,” Jill said, sniffling. “Thank you so much.”
I thought of my father then. Jill and the parishioners of St. Asella’s were my father’s people: los pobres en espíritu—the poor in spirit. Maybe they, more than God, were the discovery he had in mind for me when he dragged me to mass all those years. Maybe they were the reason I could feel now the warmth of my father’s presence as near to me as if he were still living.
•••
FINDING JILL A job made me think that helping these people was easy.
Why hadn’t my father given me any advice about arrogance and pride? It’s possible that he had. It’s possible I hadn’t listened.
Jill had been working for Xabi only a week when I pulled Doreen aside after mass and asked if she was still experiencing bleeding.
Doreen nodded and said, “A lot.”
“Do you have health insurance?”
She shook her head.
“Are you free any day this week?”
“Free for what?”
“I think we should visit a doctor.”
Doreen pulled her chin toward her chest and looked up at me. “I don’t like doctors.”
“Doreen,” I said, “you need to have this looked at. It’s probably nothing, but it could be something serious.”
She shook her head again.
“I’ll pick you up,” I said, “I’ll drive you to the appointment, I’ll read a magazine in the waiting room, and I’ll take you home when you’re done.”
I watched Doreen examine my offer in her mind, looking for any sign of the bad intentions she might have learned to expect.
Then she said, “All right.”
I rescheduled a Wednesday-morning client meeting and picked Doreen up in front of St. Asella’s locked doors. She wasn’t comfortable with my knowing where she lived, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to know any more about Doreen than I needed to. We drove to the Near West Side location of a free women’s health clinic recommended to me by a nurse in my gynecologist’s office. I watched Doreen answer some basic health questions, listed in Spanish and then English, on a blue piece of paper clipped to a transparent, fuchsia-tinted board. I returned the questionnaire to the receptionist, and Doreen sat with her purse in her lap, stealing glances at the Latino women and children waiting to be seen by a doctor.
When the nurse called her name, Doreen didn’t get up.
“Okay, Doreen,” I said. “They’re ready for you.”
Doreen just stared at the short nurse in pink scrubs, who held open the door to the examination rooms with her round, ample behind and glared impatiently at the only woman in the waiting room she deemed likely to be named Doreen.
I leaned forward in my chair and put my hand on the back of Doreen’s. “Would you like me to go in with you?”
“Take me back to the church.”
“Doreen—”
“I don’t want to be here,” she said, raising her voice. “Take me back to church!”
I apologized to the nurse, who seemed totally unfazed by Doreen’s display. In the time it took for me to drive back to St. Asella’s and see Doreen out of the car, we did not speak.
If my father had still been living, I would have called him the moment Doreen got out of my car to give him a piece of advice: Ten cuidado con los pobres. Derrocharán tus días miércoles.
Be careful around the poor. They’ll waste your Wednesdays.
•••
ONCE I'D DECIDED to help the people of St. Asella’s, it didn’t take long for their needs to overwhelm me. For help, I turned first to the people I’d helped already.
I gave Joseph’s phone number to Jill and asked her to call him once a week, just to chat.
“He and his daughter are out of touch,” I told her. “He mentions it every time he sees me.”
Jill stared dubiously at the piece of paper on which I’d written Joseph’s number. “When should I call him?”
“Whenever you can.”
“Does he know I’ll be calling?”
“I’ll let him know.”
It was clear to me that Jill had little interest in taking even five minutes of her limited time with her kids to call a lonely old man she didn’t know. But she shrugged and said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”
When Mrs. Landry, an older woman with a cane and a quiet, bright-shining personality, informed me that a young woman who attended St. Asella’s—the granddaughter of “a dear, departed friend,” Mrs. Landry said—was coming home from the hospital with a son born two months premature, I worked the sidewalk crowd after mass for commitments to deliver a freezable meal to the St. Asella’s rectory, where Helen would keep it refrigerated until the new mother’s boyfriend could pick it up. By the time I left St. Asella’s that day, I h
ad commitments for six meals. Jill said she would bring something from Xabi’s restaurant. Doreen offered to bake a lasagna. Jeanne and Rose Marie, sisters in their seventies who had lived together since Rose Marie’s husband died years ago, volunteered to make two meals a piece.
“Are you sure you can manage that?” I asked them.
“Of course!” Jeanne said. “We make dinner every night. We’ll just make extra.”
“There are two of us, honey,” Rose Marie said to me. “I’ll do the slicing, she’ll do the dicing.”
And then each woman let out a laugh that sounded like a recording of her sister’s, trilling up the scale and back down again. I laughed with them.
The scheme depended on parishioners doing favors for people they barely knew, as repayment of a favor they had received or a down payment on one they believed they might need someday. But the investments that the people of St. Asella’s made in one another delivered a return I hadn’t expected. At some point—I did not notice until after it had passed—the help that they provided to one another ceased to be repayment or prepayment of any debt and became what we do at St. Asella’s. It became who we are. Many St. Asella’s parishioners believe in God in a way I never will. But by saying yes when we might otherwise say no, we give each other good reason to believe in community at St. Asella’s.
And when I do something—even something small—for a person in the little community we’ve made, the doing of it feels nothing at all like going through the motions.
•••
BECAUSE IT IS no one’s business and, frankly, because I worry what people in my life will think of me when they find out, I go five months without telling anyone that I’ve started going to church again. When finally I do tell the person I trust most in the world, I am reminded why I have been keeping word of my churchgoing to myself.
Nicola and I both started our careers as unpaid interns at Cote D’or Designs, a well-regarded, luxury interior-design firm in Chicago. Nicola took my place when I left Cote D’or for my first paying job in the business, but we didn’t meet until 2002, when a colleague introduced us at a gallery opening in River North. There, Nicola and I each discovered how badly we needed to share, with someone who understood it, the trying experience of interning at Cote D’or.
“Did you have to get lunch for Diane?” Nicola asked me.
“Every day,” I said. “The raw plate.”
“With a side of baked potato wedges.”
“Of course.”
“And do not forget the dipping sauce,” Nicola continued. “The girl at Vegan Life knew me and my order, which was Diane’s order. I had drilled the dipping-sauce thing into her mind. She always, always, always put dipping sauce in the bag. Then, one day, my usual Vegan Life girl was out sick or something, I was in a hurry, and I forgot to check the bag.”
“No dipping sauce,” I said.
“No dipping sauce.”
“And Diane sent you back.”
“She didn’t have to,” Nicola said. “The second she said, ‘I don’t see any dipping sauce,’ I started running back to Vegan Life. In heels.”
I laughed.
“Well, dipping sauce is ‘made with real veggies,’” I said, quoting the chalkboard menu we had both seen so many times.
“That dipping sauce is the only thing keeping Diane vegan.” Then, with her cocktail poised in front of her lips, Nicola added, “The day Vegan Life closes, look for Claudia at a pig roast.”
When the opening was over, Nicola and I found our way to the nearest wine bar, where we kept telling our stories. After that, we started meeting for drinks whenever client work took one of us into the other’s neighborhood. We became regulars at the various exhibitions and specialty-store openings around town and at monthly meetings of the Women in Small Business Council. I told Nicola about Richard’s cheating before telling anyone else.
Nicola Hayes is more than my favorite plus-one. She is my closest friend.
So, when Nicola calls on a Wednesday and asks if I will take her second ticket to a Fall 2009 Humanities Festival session featuring Petra Blaisse, a Dutch designer we both admire, I accept before I ask for details.
“Just tell me when and where,” I say.
“Fantastic!” Nicola says. “It’s Sunday at one o’clock in the Art Institute ballroom.”
“Sunday afternoon?”
“At one o’clock. Weird, I know. Don’t worry—I’ll have a drink if you will.”
“That’s so disappointing,” I say.
“What is?”
“That it’s happening on Sunday at one,” I say. “I won’t be able to go.”
“Oh,” Nicola says. “Okay.”
And she isn’t prying, or feeling spurned and petty; she is looking for a way to help when she asks, “What do you have to do?”
Because Nicola is my best friend, I respond without my usual caution.
“I have to go to church,” I say.
“Oh.”
And I hear, in that one syllable, the tone I have heard Nicola use to mask—from everyone but me—her distaste for a small room packed with oversized furniture or carpeting installed over a vintage hardwood floor.
I feel the need to explain myself.
“I started going after I left Richard,” I say. “Just once a week. It isn’t even a religious thing. I’ve met some people there who need help, and I’m trying to help them.”
“What kind of help do they need?” Nicola asks.
“Finding jobs, getting to and from doctor’s appointments, meals after surgeries,” I said. “That kind of thing.”
“And you, like, take them to the doctor?”
“It’s not just me. Everyone who gets help pitches in to help someone else.”
I wince at my description of the St. Asella’s community, which makes me sound naïve and, by implying a quid pro quo, does no justice to the sweat equity the people of St. Asella’s are investing in one another.
Nicola says, “Can’t you skip it this week?”
I sigh. “I can’t. A woman in the parish is recovering from pneumonia, and she lives alone, and I need to find some volunteers to make meals for her.”
Relating this detail buoys me a little, as it shows my work at St. Asella’s to be, at least in part, a case of women helping women in need. This is something that my friend Nicola can appreciate. But Nicola is focused on another detail entirely.
“What kind of church is this?”
I want to say Unitarian, but I recall that I have just used the word “parish” and guess that Nicola may already know the answer to her question.
“It’s Catholic,” I say, as if this fact is incidental.
“Really?”
She is disappointed.
I tell myself that Nicola’s decision not to spare me her disappointment is a mark of our friendship, and that I should find her honesty encouraging. But I’m not encouraged.
“Like I said, Nic, it’s not a religious thing. It could have been any church. It’s just that I was raised Catholic, so that’s the kind of church I went back to.”
“But you’d left all that behind,” Nicola says, as if I’ve suffered a relapse.
“All of what?”
“All of that Catholic stuff,” she says. “The all-male oligarchy in the silly hats. The railing against the rights of women and gays and lesbians. And all those pedophile priests!”
“Nic,” I said, “you know me. I hate those things.”
“But you’re associating yourself with them,” she says.
“No, no,” I say. “People at this church are helping each other and making a community where there wasn’t one. The big Church—the men who make the rules—they have nothing to do with it.”
“I think you’re kidding yourself.”
I’ve heard Nicola condescend before, but not to me. I’m not sure how to respond.
Then, with a heavy breath, Nicola says, “I’m sorry.”
I brighten at the thought that Nicola is over thi
s and that my going to church will be added to the short list of topics that we will never discuss again.
“I wish I’d done more when you left Rich.”
“Oh,” I say, trying to reassure her. “But you did so much!”
“Not enough, apparently.”
This is when it registers that Nicola’s apology is not for anything she has said, but for whatever failure of hers may have led to my seeking sanctuary in a chauvinistic, homophobic institution.
I know that if I agree to skip church and join her at the conference session on Sunday, the rift opening between my friend and me will be healed immediately. But I believe what I have said—that the little community we have made at St. Asella’s is worth something, and that the Church at large does nothing more than give it occasion to come together once a week. And if there is concrete good for me to do at St. Asella’s, and people—many of them women—are counting on me to do it, I don’t see how I can walk away from them, even to please a friend.
“Thanks for the invitation,” I say. “Let me know how Petra does, okay?”
“Sure,” Nicola says.
Having thoroughly bewildered one another, we hang up.
The conversation stays with me for days, like a stomach virus. Over and over, I ask myself how well I understand my own involvement at St. Asella’s. Is it as I have come to see it—a worldly woman’s engagement with people living on the margins? Or might St. Asella’s still be, as Nicola suggested, little more than a jilted ex-wife’s hiding place?
A week later, when Petra Blaisse has come and gone, Nicola has not called me. I suppose that she has decided that, if I truly wanted to know how Petra’s session was, I should have attended it.
Ten cuidado con los ricos.
That night, staring at the shadows thrown onto my bedroom ceiling by the street light, I recall a story my father told me as I sat with my arms crossed in the front seat of his taxi, having been overruled in my wish to skip church that Sunday. When he was a young man living in Zaragoza, he said, my father’s friends were mostly like him: university-educated; believers in democracy, labor unions and free speech; young people reduced, in the oppression of Franco’s Spain, to making small, anonymous donations to Catalán fringe groups and grumbling to one another in cafés. But among his friends, only my father practiced Catholicism, and they scolded him for what they called his participation in Franco’s fascist regime by way of the Church that validated it.
