A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  One day I received an invitation to go the following Sunday to Christ Church, a small church in Somerville, just across the river from Boston. The senior warden told me clearly that this was a one-shot arrangement, because the vestry was about to hire someone permanent. Fine, I said. She gave me the directions. When I arrived I was surprised to see that the sanctuary was only a few hundred feet from the elevated interstate highway. I was met by an ebullient, elegantly dressed woman in her sixties named Kay Emerson. Kay bubbled with hospitality; she showed me where to hang my robe, she introduced me to the organist, and she told me at least five times how pleased everyone was that I was there. How many people did she expect that morning? I asked.

  “About ten,” she said with a big smile.

  “Ten?” I asked. That was unusually small, even for a tiny parish.

  “Well, almost everyone else is on the vestry, and they are all at another church listening to the man we hope to hire as our permanent rector.”

  “Ah, well,” I replied, “I understand.”

  When the service was over, I had a cup of coffee and greeted the few people who were there. Kay continued to express genuine delight.

  “This is the most lovely place,” she said.

  Though the building was unassuming and the neighborhood run-down, I agreed with her. I can still remember standing at the entrance of the church, looking up and down the street at the long row of three-story apartment buildings known in New England as “triple-deckers.” I took in the dirt ballparks across the field and the cars roaring by on the highway. For a fraction of a second I imagined myself returning to this place, getting to know the neighborhood, becoming part of the community, reminding myself of what was important in life.

  “Well, thanks again, Pastor,” said Kay. “We all loved your sermon! Goodbye!” She waved with winning sincerity, and I drove home.

  That night I called the senior warden again. I enjoyed the visit, I said, and though I knew they didn’t have any need for me, I was wondering if they knew of any other congregations that might benefit from a part-time person. No, she said, politely but firmly, she was not aware of any place like that.

  “Let me know if you hear of anything,” I said.

  The business school gave tremendous weight (often 50 percent of one’s grade) to classroom participation, and I realized early on that I would have to overcome my paralyzed silence. This was difficult, because my classmates were hurling new words and concepts around the room with ferocious speed.

  Even more difficult than mastering the language was the challenge that I was an anomaly wherever I went. At business school, I was peculiar because I was a minister; with church friends and other ministers, I was equally peculiar because I was in business school. This tension between the life of faith and the life of business was exactly what I had gone to the business school to learn about, but I found it tricky to know how to act in class.

  Once in a while I spoke up about what I thought were broader political or ethical issues raised by the cases. Was it really necessary to close this plant and throw hundreds of people out of work? Did any sane human being really want overpriced deodorant socks to be conveniently available in supermarkets? What effect might our extensive shampoo-marketing efforts have on the families we had targeted? Wasn’t it possible that a highly profitable hospital chain might be earning money by excluding the poor? The class seemed to tolerate my outbursts but rarely supported them.

  Four months after I visited Christ Church, I received another phone call from the senior warden. She sounded embarrassed but said that the other minister “hadn’t worked out.” “Would you be willing to come back for a few Sundays?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I replied. “How many do you need?”

  She paused. “Sixteen,” she finally said.

  I gulped. That was a major commitment. I checked my calendar.

  “I can do thirteen of the next sixteen,” I said.

  “Great,” she said. “See you Sunday.”

  After the three months, the bishop appointed me to a longer tenure, thus launching my three years of service at Christ Episcopal Church and the adoption of my new home of Somerville, Massachusetts, where I have now lived and worked for almost three decades. Built at the turn of the twentieth century by farmers and fishermen who immigrated from Newfoundland, the church was solidly Protestant in its theology and practices. The members, many descended from those founders, worked as carpenters, insurance salesmen, boilermakers, steelworkers, teachers, house painters, and at every other trade at which one could make a living in a working-class city like Somerville. Some of the parishioners had come from very big families—ten children, thirteen children, seventeen children—and those children had grown up and married into other parish families. Many of them were thus related, mostly through the sisters and wives and mothers and aunts, who all had different last names but bore a family resemblance if you saw them sitting next to each other in the pews. It took me a long time to sort those connections out.

  At the time I started at Christ Church, the community had shrunk. The entire budget for the year, including the small salaries that the organist and I received, plus the heat, hot water, electricity, insurance, Sunday school supplies, and the biggest category, repairs, came to a total of $39,000. If one looked at it through financial eyes, as I was being trained to do, it was hardly a going concern.

  Still, we were rich in remarkable people. The church had a formal legal structure, with wardens, vestry, and others charged with making decisions, but as in many places the informal leaders had much more sway. One of the movers and shakers was the charming Kay Emerson and her quiet husband, Al, who walked faithfully behind her at every church event in his brown tie and tan jacket, watching her admiringly. Another formidable lady was May. May was in her late seventies and had come over from Ireland as a young woman; you could still hear her accent when she spoke, which was not often. She had raised a flock of children and was still cleaning houses from time to time when I met her. I had been there for several months when I stopped by the church one day and found May down on her hands and knees, polishing the hardwood floor and the gleaming pews. “What are you doing here, May?” I asked. “The same thing I do every Saturday,” she said, pulling another rag out of her bucket.

  She had endearing habits. During the warmer months of the year she often came to church in a floppy hat and sunglasses, and I could see that under her formal dress she was wearing a beach outfit. On such days she carried a large tote bag with slippers, sunscreen, a thermos, and several towels. Her plan was to attend church and then walk to the bus and take the subway to Revere Beach, a two-mile expanse of sand half an hour away.

  There were other remarkable participants. Jim, a veteran who served as an usher, always brought his case of harmonicas so that he could accompany the hymns. A boilermaker named Roger, having heard that I didn’t have any space to lay my papers or meet with parishioners in private, suddenly showed up one day with lumber, tools, and a few union friends. Within six hours they had framed out a section of the basement with wall and door and then carted in a desk and chair for my new office. I tried to thank them, but they all shook my hand, blushed, and faded away.

  We began to attract a wide assortment of new parishioners. Since we were situated right on the largest athletic fields in Somerville, people sometimes walked in off the street. The residents and caregivers from a local community home for men with Down syndrome started to come every Sunday and within a short time indicated that they wanted to participate in the procession. From then on we had three or four mentally disabled people, wearing white robes and bearing great smiles, helping to carry the cross and the baskets of offerings at every service.

  Over time, as people realized that the leadership of the church had settled down, they started coming more regularly and bringing their family members, friends, and loved ones. Soon my schedule filled with a roster of weddings and baptisms. It was not easy handling the demand for these personal connec
tions and services while taking exams and writing papers as part of my responsibilities at Harvard, but I enjoyed it.

  I also realized quickly that my parishioners were not moved by platitudes. The members of my congregation struggled with all the hard things that happen to a community under severe economic stress. They were out of work and unable to find new jobs. They had unusually difficult relationships with their families in all directions. They had limited education and opportunities. They often could not afford medical or dental care. Some turned to alcohol and drugs, or had spouses or children who did. Some of the women were struggling to free themselves from domestic abuse. Many marriages held on with the barest of threads or broke up completely. Most parents were trying to figure out how to raise children in a tough neighborhood. For the boys, the choices were to finish high school (if possible), find a trade such as carpentry or auto repair, join the military, and steer clear of the drug dealers. For the girls, the tasks were similar but even more stark: try to finish high school, don’t get pregnant, look for a steady paying job (such as dental hygienist), and don’t get married too young.

  Occasionally my parishioners ended up in trouble with the law. Sometimes they didn’t respond to a summons or have the right paperwork, or spent a night sobering up in jail, or got behind in their car payments or mortgages. Sometimes a member of one of the families would disappear and I would hear that he had been “sent up” for six months for driving while intoxicated or without a license. Single mothers struggled daily to protect, clothe, and feed their children. Young men got jumped in bar fights and then left town for a few months to let things cool down or to look for seasonal construction work in Florida.

  As a small community, we did what we could, organizing food and clothing drives, referring people to leads on work, steering the most desperate toward social services or food stamps. The process of obtaining government assistance of any kind was itself interminable and disheartening, requiring a person to make six trips on the bus to the government offices (often in different locations) to pick up documents, fill out documents, get documents stamped, provide supporting documents, and get the final document of approval.

  Despite the hard nature of many families’ lives, they were often eager to build something beautiful at Christ Church. We had potluck suppers and holiday gatherings with lasagna and potato salad and Jell-O. Some of the children in my community looked too thin and tired, but they enjoyed running around the basement. A cluster of relatives chatted in the corners after services and tried to provide counsel, encouragement, and practical support.

  At the business school I once tried to break out of the mold of class ethicist, just to see what it was like. We were discussing the problems of a men’s cologne that was declining in popularity. I raised my hand and said, “It’s all image and air anyway, so let’s capture that air with a campaign built on the most expensive sort of snob appeal.” The professor looked startled. “This from a man of your background?” The class laughed. I still don’t know whether he meant it as a compliment or a reproof. In any case, I never again recommended something I didn’t believe in.

  As time went on I got to know the students better, and the more friends I made, the more I suffered from a dilemma. I found many of my section mates to be truly charming and thoughtful people. Despite the competitive pressures, mathematically gifted students willingly helped those who were struggling with numbers. When a student’s mother and a professor’s father died during the school year, the outpouring of emotion and donations was immediate and genuine. Some people even found time to participate in volunteer activities, such as becoming a Big Brother or organizing a blood drive.

  I benefited all through the year from many people’s friendship and assistance. One classmate picked me up and drove me to school for several days after I had hurt my knee. The night before the accounting final, another spent an hour with me on the phone and cleared up some of my questions, thereby enabling me to squeak through. And I was delighted when a dozen classmates from almost as many denominations formed a little Bible study and fellowship group. We met every Tuesday for lunch and talked about our backgrounds, our beliefs, and our doubts.

  Some of my classmates offered me the opportunity to minister to them in moments of personal distress. One woman described her painful separation from her husband and daughter; another man told me in moving detail about the death of his father. On a few occasions people burst into tears as we talked, pouring out fears about their futures and frustrations with the relentless pressure of school. Over time many proved to be warm human beings, genuinely concerned about my well-being, and true friends.

  Yet however thoughtful and kind the students were in private, in public they could sometimes be surprisingly unwilling to raise ethical objections to any business practice. During one case series, we studied a cold remedy that introduced no new medical features into the marketplace and whose advertising budget would represent 60 percent of its retail price. I decided to keep quiet and see what people would say. After the second day, nine people came up to me separately to inquire why I had not yet objected to this “piece of crap.” I encouraged them to speak up, but they looked embarrassed. Even one professor remarked, again privately, that the product was terrible. But in three days of class discussion, no one openly objected.

  And thus the dilemma: privately and personally the students were caring people, but publicly they became aggressive, even callous. In the fall we saw a movie on the coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and the sight of the overweight miners’ wives brought wave after wave of cackling derision. When, in a discussion of textile workers in England, it was revealed that a woman who had sewn for twelve years for $2.50 an hour might lose her job, most of the class felt that she deserved to be laid off, since she was being paid too much.

  Moreover, all day long the students talked about money. Discussions about money in such courses as managerial economics, control (the business school’s term for accounting), or finance always had a clinical quality, as though money were a force with its own properties and principles, like electricity, rather than an instrument we use to express what we value. People forgot that the whole idea of exchange on the basis of price depended on a prior definition of possession; one could not sell what one had no right to own. And, as it became clearer to me over the years that followed, one often placed no value on things that had no price.

  The most demanding and moving part of my job as a part-time pastor was visiting the seniors who could no longer come to the church. I had twelve such “shut-ins,” as they were known, and I tried to visit them all every four to six weeks. This was a challenge, because I was living in Brighton at the time and it was a forty-minute commute before I could reach any of their homes. Yet I set aside the time to do it, and it was a profound and moving experience. I would study the map, drive to a person’s residence, and carry in a little packet with a Bible, perhaps a small gift or a bit of food, and the necessary equipment for home communion. I would climb the back steps to the kitchen entrance, which was usually open. Once inside, I would call out the name of the person I was visiting and advance carefully through the house, not wanting to startle or wake anyone. Usually the person was in the same place, often a comfy chair in the kitchen, dining room, or living room. If the television was on, I would ask if I could turn it off, unless the person was completely enthralled with a soap opera. And then we would simply talk.

  At the beginning all I noticed were the superficial aspects of each home: the memorabilia on the walls and mantelpieces, the decaying furniture, the uneaten containers of food, which I would often clean up and move into the kitchen trash. Some homes also had a strong and unpleasant smell, since many residents could not control their bladders or make it to the bathroom in time. I remember one cheerful woman who sat all day in her kitchen in a huge comfy chair that was soaked with her urine. She could reach everything from her spot—her radio, her refrigerator, and her cigarettes. She was always delighted to see me
and received both news and communion eagerly. After such visits I often called the city’s social services to request a professional evaluation of her needs. I thought she could not remain in that situation for long. People occasionally came by and cleaned her up, but then she sank into the chair again.

  One couple in their eighties had not left their home for twenty-five years, and they had assembled a network, now dwindling, of people to pick up their groceries and other items. One day when I was visiting them, I saw an elderly woman vigorously vacuuming the dining room. When she finished, she took a mop to the floor in the kitchen.

  “Who is that?” I asked Mr. Green, the husband.

  “That’s my aunt Maude,” said Mr. Green, who was in his mid-eighties. “She comes to clean house every week.”

  “And how old is she?” I continued.

  “Ninety-five,” he said, without the slightest surprise. She had been cleaning up for him for decades, and he didn’t find it unusual that she was still doing it.

  My oldest parishioners told me amazing stories about growing up at the turn of the twentieth century. One of my favorites was Ruth, and though she had an occasionally sour view of the world and was as skittish as a cat, I could sometimes make her a cup of tea and get her talking about Somerville when she was a girl, around 1904. When she got going, she painted the picture of a bustling city, full of young men and women making their way in the world, shopkeepers and delivery boys chatting in their stores, politicians shaking hands, girls chasing hoops, and children sledding down snowy side streets. Her parents would send her at the age of five to the corner store, where she bought a quart of milk for seven cents and a loaf of bread for five.

  Once while returning from such an errand she came across an ice man flogging his horse. Ice men dragged huge blocks of ice on sleighs and deposited them door to door through a special hatch built into the side of each house (our home still has one, now sealed off). In the absence of electric refrigeration, this arrangement kept food cool for days. The horse pulling this particular load was failing from the weight, the cold, and age or illness. The vendor, not wanting to lose his shipment, flogged it harder. Eventually, right in front of Ruth’s eyes, the horse simply lowered itself to its side and died. Recounting the story more than eighty years later, Ruth relived it through a flurry of tears. “He was dead!” she cried in the tone of a horrified girl. “But still that man kept whipping him and whipping him! And there was nothing I or anyone could do!” She wept for five minutes. I sat there murmuring “I understand,” watching the soul of a wounded child come flowing through the fragile and failing body of a very old woman perched like a bird across from me on a chair.