by Dave Reidy
“All right,” I say. “If I find any volunteers, can they store the meals in the rectory freezer for a few days if need be?”
Helen lets out a sigh that reverberates in the speaker of my mobile phone. “Before we go any further, Catherine,” she says, “let me apologize. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s fine, Helen,” I say, clipping the words.
“It hasn’t been a good morning around here.”
Suddenly, Helen does not sound like herself. She sounds as if she is the one who has received the cancer diagnosis.
“How so?”
“The Archdiocese called,” she says. “They’ve named nine parishes they’re closing in three months to cut costs. St. Asella’s is on the list.”
Speechless again. But it isn’t Helen who has silenced me this time. It is Nicola. The big, institutional Church—the same body I told Nicola had nothing to do with what we were doing at St. Asella’s—is shuttering the parish. In the judgment of the Archdiocese of Chicago, whatever community we may have created at St. Asella’s is not worth preserving. On this point, Nicola Hayes and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church are in complete agreement.
•••
JILL AGREES WITHOUT hesitation to make and drop off chicken soup for Jeanne. Doreen donates another lasagna. Though both Jill and Doreen know Jeanne and Rose Marie well enough to say hello, neither has heard the news of Rose Marie’s illness.
“Did Fr. Dunne read her name from the prayer list?” I asked Jill.
“He might have,” she said. “I guess I haven’t been listening that closely.”
As it turns out, no one I call knows Rose Marie has cancer. And this casts doubt, from an entirely different direction, on the legitimacy of community at St. Asella’s. It seems that, once she called Helen, Jeanne didn’t tell anyone else at St. Asella’s—her parish for decades—that her sister was dying. She just waited for me to return.
I make a pot of vegetarian chili and ladle it into ten, two-serving plastic containers. I pick up Doreen’s lasagna and deliver it, along with my chili, to Jeanne’s apartment. The donated food is more than enough to feed Jeanne through Sunday, when I should be able to find additional volunteers. But my doubts about the community at St. Asella’s erode the sense of purpose that attended my past efforts to help its troubled members. Now, in this, too, I’m just going through the motions.
I tell no one that St. Asella’s is closing—because Helen has asked me to, but also because there’s nothing to do about it. I know enough about Catholicism to know the Church, like Franco’s Spain, is no democracy. There will be no referendum or real debate. The rest of St. Asella’s may as well hear this news when they’re together. The most any of them can do is commiserate. But I will not need their commiseration. For me, the closing will be a relief. I’ll see out my obligations, maybe exchange phone numbers with a few more members and, if they call to request my help, I’ll do what I can. But I know already that without Sunday gatherings to span the chasm that separates my world from theirs, they won’t ask me for anything.
The sense of obligation that gets me out of bed on Sunday morning is not enough to make me hurry, so I arrive at St. Asella’s later than usual. When I walk through the main doors, Helen is standing in front of them. We exchange rueful smiles.
“Waiting to see who’ll be here when the news breaks?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “Recruiting a lector, if I can. Simon Davies called up and quit. Just the beginning of our dismantling, I guess.”
I tell myself that Simon’s quitting is nothing more than another display of immaturity, but I can’t quite fight off the idea that after just a few weeks here, Simon sees St. Asella’s more clearly than I did after more than a year.
At the start of his homily, Fr. Dunne makes the announcement that only Helen and I know is coming.
“My friends,” he says, “I received a call this week from the office of the Cardinal. I was told that the Archdiocese plans to close our parish in three months.”
In the pews, there are none of the courtroom-scene gasps and tittering I have been expecting. The parishioners are silent, except for one among them—an older woman I hear but cannot see—who cries out, “Oh, no!”
She seems to be asking, Now this, too?
After mass, the sidewalk crowd hums with the nervous energy of residents displaced by an apartment fire. The realists are asking one another where they’ll go to mass once St. Asella’s doors are closed. Predictably, many make arguments for the parish next closest to their own home. Urging others to travel further, they tout the preaching abilities of priests they’ve only heard about and the architectural beauty of churches they’ve never entered. When they ask me what parish I’ll choose, I say, “I really don’t know,” and I ask them to cook a meal for Jeanne. I don’t tell them the truth: that I have decided that my dalliance with Catholicism ends with my obligation here. The last mass at St. Asella’s will be my last mass. My father’s wisdom worked for him. It isn’t working for me.
A few parishioners cannot accept the closing.
“Can we fight this?” Doreen asks me. She appears as dulled and weakened by terror as she was the time I took her to the clinic.
“We can try.”
She nods, waiting for me to say something more. I shrug and shake my head. After a few moments of silence, she leaves.
I begin my walk home. When I reach the stretch of sidewalk from which I made my impassioned defense of the St. Asella’s community before Simon, my face reddens at the humiliating thought that he’d seen right through a lie I hadn’t even realized I was telling.
•••
I AM WAITING for a client in the small, unattended lobby of her building the following Tuesday, the thirteenth of July, when my phone rings.
When I answer it, a woman’s voice says, “Catherine Ferrán, please.”
Despite my women-in-small-business pride, I feel a little embarrassed to be answering my own phone.
“This is she,” I say.
“This is Claire Weber, calling on behalf of Daniel Shadid.”
I’m not sure if Claire realizes she’s speaking to the person she has asked for, or if she’s on auto-pilot and answering a question I haven’t asked: Can I tell her who’s calling?
“Hello, Claire.”
“Hello, Catherine.”
I move to the glass façade of the lobby. I am not letting this call drop. “How can I help you?”
“I’m calling because Mr. Shadid—”
I briefly indulge my fantasy that the great Claire Weber hates herself for selling her agency and taking a cushy, in-house job that requires her—publicly, at least—to refer to her boss as “Mr. Shadid.”
“—has acquired a new property, and he would like me to consider you for the project.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m flattered.”
In her long pause, Claire lets me know that I should be.
“Mr. Shadid has not yet closed on the property, but I have been granted access for a two-hour walkthrough this Sunday at noon. You will have the first hour to assess the space. In the second hour, you will share with me your initial impressions and recommendations. You’re available to meet this Sunday?”
The conflict in the timing is as evident to me as it was when Nicola invited me to the conference session. I understand that taking this meeting with Claire will mean missing mass at St. Asella’s. And this time, the decision is easy. Life is too short to keep going through the motions.
What I say to Claire Weber is, “I will be there.”
•••
SHADID'S LATEST ACQUISITION is a penthouse just east of the Magnificent Mile. At 4,200 square feet over two floors, it’s the largest of his guesthouses for the famous and famously philanthropic.
I meet Claire Weber in the marble-floored lobby, and she leads me past a small army of doormen to a private elevator. Standing with one foot inside the elevator car, she swipes a fob in front of a black pad and pres
ses the button next to the letter P on the control panel.
“You have an hour,” Claire says, stepping out of the car.
“Okay,” I say.
As the doors close and the elevator begins its forty-eight-floor ascent, I take a deep breath and try to forget how important the next hour is for my career. I tell myself that the same design principles that have served me so well in smaller units and in less impressive buildings will stand me in good stead in Daniel Shadid’s new penthouse. But I cannot make myself believe that’s true.
The elevator slows to a stop, and the doors open into the penthouse. I enter a long, narrow hallway with gently bending walls and walk toward the daylight reflected in the finish on the mahogany floor at the far end. When I reach the edge of the wall, I peer around it into the unit’s great room. That the room is lined on three sides with floor-to-ceiling windows makes it seem somehow infinite. I take in the westward view. Looking out over the sprawling Chicago suburbs, I’d swear that I see the curve of the earth.
Daniel Shadid has found a space that might impress George Clooney.
Before I allow myself to consider recommendations, I walk the entire floor plan. The penthouse is fully built out but unfurnished. The walls have been painted a matte eggshell white. I count three bedrooms, each with a master bath. I open every closet to assess its space’s potential as a humidor or a sauna or a sky-high, climate-controlled wine cellar. Off the largest bedroom is a vast, south-facing terrace. A glass door slides easily on its clean, lubricated track, and the air rushing out of the unit takes my breath with it. The terrace has a wrought-iron railing taller than my waist, but I approach it with caution. I’ve never been this high above the earth in open air before. Like a child, the first thing I do is look for my apartment building, but it’s obscured by the reflective-glass façade of a boutique hotel one block north and another block east of it. My eyes pan right, and I recognize, in a gap between two skyscrapers, the green copper patina of the St. Asella’s spire. My sense of obligation rises but doesn’t put up much of a fight. By the time I’m standing inside the silence of the penthouse again, re-taming strands of hair the wind has pulled from bobby pins, I’m thinking only of the task I have less than an hour to complete.
There is a phenomenon in which a person who reaches the highest echelon of her field experiences insights that eluded her at its lower levels. In the hour I spend alone in the space, my talent somehow expands to encompass the penthouse and envision it as a conceptual whole. The penthouse is Gibraltar—the narrow entrance to the deep blue of the Mediterranean seascape, the gateway to my father’s Spain, Shadid’s Lebanon, and the Morocco of my travels. I see a distressed North African tapestry cut into four strips and hung horizontally on a wide white wall, posing an organic contrast to the cool modernity of the aluminum frames of the floor-to-ceiling windows. In each bedroom, I’ll demand a subtle seascape—a color photograph or a rendering in oil—recasting the blue sky that surrounds the penthouse as the Mediterranean itself. For the great room, I’ll commission a long table of reclaimed cedar, rough-hewn but carefully constructed to allow for the easy addition and subtraction of leaves. And on the wall of the largest bedroom, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for Shadid’s most honored guests and a secret tribute to my father and the Spain he loved: a Picasso from Shadid’s private collection.
I recommend the Gibraltar concept and its manifold manifestations to Claire Weber with complete conviction. She listens, but doesn’t comment. Her silence doesn’t rattle me.
We finish in the largest bedroom. When I mention the Picasso, Claire says, “Mr. Shadid has only one Picasso canvas in his collection. It was recently installed in another unit.”
Her tone suggests that discussion of the Picasso is closed. I am not having this.
“Then I recommend that he have it uninstalled and put here,” I say. “Or that he buy another one.”
The corner of Claire Weber’s closed mouth lifts just slightly as she regards me. It’s as if she is seeing me for the first time.
She looks at her watch. Then she pulls her smartphone from a bag that certainly cost a few times my monthly rent and begins typing.
“Mr. Shadid will be expecting you for lunch in fifteen minutes,” she says. “There is a car waiting downstairs.”
This is the first mention of any meeting with Shadid.
“Is this part of the interview?” I say.
“He’ll ask questions about your concept, if that’s what you mean,” she says, still typing.
I begin to worry I am being played, that the opportunity to recommend a concept for this penthouse was Shadid’s way of getting me to lunch under circumstances I would readily accept. When we met in the Navy Pier ballroom—I gave him my business card, I recall—I left almost no other avenue open to him. It takes some nerve to believe it possible that Daniel Shadid, with so many women at his disposal, would go to all this trouble to have lunch with me, but once I get the idea that there is even a small possibility I’ve wasted the best concept of my career on a playboy’s ruse, I cannot shake it.
“How did I get this opportunity?”
“I called,” Claire says, walking out of the bedroom. “You answered.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I follow her into the hallway. “You could have had any designer for this job. And we’ve never met. How did you get my name?”
We are on the stairs leading up to the main floor of the penthouse when Claire turns to me. “Mr. Shadid doesn’t work with the latest hot designer. He makes the next hot designer. I scout for him. I read blogs. I visit spaces. I ask colleagues about talent. And I talk to my former clients, two of whom are now your clients. They recommended you.”
“Oh.”
“Satisfied?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
But I have one itch left to scratch, and when we reach the narrow front entryway—the straits of the Gibraltar I have imagined—I ask one final question.
“Are you considering anyone else for this work?”
Claire does not turn around when she says, “Not anymore.”
By the time the elevator doors open, I can see how my lunch with Daniel Shadid will go. I’ll outline the Gibraltar concept, answer any questions he has about it, and hear his suggestions. I’ll do these things with the confidence of a designer who already has the job. But at the first reasonable opportunity, I’ll steer the conversation to Shadid’s work in Africa, giving him every chance to impress me with his stories of traveling with movie stars, meeting with tribal leaders, and making measurable improvements in the lives of people half a world away. Then, without mentioning St. Asella’s by name, I’ll tell him that I’ve spent the past year volunteering and now want to work on a larger scale, to contribute to structural and systemic changes that will change people’s lives. I’ll ask him how I can best support his humanitarian efforts. I’ll work my way into Daniel Shadid’s exclusive world of auctions and galas and celebrities, a world in which frozen lasagna is no currency.
But even if I never rub elbows with the world’s richest do-gooders, this lunch will be the beginning of yet another new life. I’ll leave St. Asella’s behind and search for my father in my work instead of among his people. I’ll find some way, through Shadid, to shore up small communities that can make use of my time, talent and treasure without depending on me to hold them together. Starting today, the only problems I carry home with me are my own.
And the moment my meeting with Daniel Shadid is over—the first minute I am alone—I will call my friend Nicola Hayes to tell her all about it.
She will be so happy for me.
8
Simon
IT HAD BEEN two days since I’d picked up Mrs. Landry’s spilled groceries and ushered her back to her apartment. In that time, I’d started showering in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what time, exactly, only that it was dark outside. When I showered and slept didn’t seem to matter under the weight of my unshakeable anxiety that, spending all this time alone, with
no voiceover scripts to rehearse and no Sunday readings to prepare, my vocal folds were beginning to atrophy again.
How could I know, I asked myself, more than eighteen years later, how many days or weeks into my silence it had ceased to be a matter of choice? So I started talking, just to talk, saying whatever was on my mind. And some of what I heard myself saying—one-sided conversations with my departed mother, for example—scared the hell out of me.
I decided I needed to speak face to face—and soon—with someone I know. And the only person in Chicago I really knew was Connor.
Even if there had been no Larry Sellers and no Skyline Talent, I’d have moved to Chicago because Connor was there. I needed to be around him because his success was the stick by which I measured my own. I was pulling for him to succeed in comedy. At the same time, I hated the thought that he’d realize his dream more fully than I would mine. Success could only be a good thing if each of us enjoyed his own version, and in equal measure.
When we were kids, I’d fight Connor to a stalemate of my own making. Without warning, I’d tackle him to the ground, straddle him, and punch his upper arms while he bucked and scratched and clawed at me. I was two years older than him and bigger than he was. I could have stayed astride him for as long as I liked. But at some point in every fight, I allowed him to flip me onto my back, sit on my chest, and punch my shoulders. I resisted a little, to make him believe he was in a real fight. And when I’d taken the same pounding I had doled out—when we were even—I’d throw him off of me, get to my feet, and walk away. Fair and square, I’d think.
When I was fifteen and he was thirteen, Connor flipped me without my help, and when I tried to heave him off and end the fight, I couldn’t. He did what I’d taught him to do: punched me until we were even. Then he stood up and walked away, without apology, just as I’d always done. Even as I lay there, on my back, stung by the sudden loss of my dominance, I was proud of him.
