by S. J. Rozan
I dropped another quarter into a candle slot, saw that it lighted, picked up the parish bulletin from a wall holder, and found an empty pew. The bulletin was in Vietnamese. I didn’t try to read it, but turned it over, as I had always done in church, to examine the advertisements on the back, for funeral homes and auto repair shops, for abortion counseling and broker-free apartments, all in English. The list of priests was there on the second page. One Irish. Two Latino. One Vietnamese. The church hours. In English. Evening vigils. What was today? Yes. Tonight.
I looked up along the long, high-ceilinged nave from where I sat. I had remembered clerestory windows above the aisle roofs and the vaulting, but that must have been in a dream, or I’d imagined someplace grander than this. A conflation of conscience and hope, perhaps. The light softened toward the altar, where the apse lay in a wooden shadow.
The priest, russet-faced, bearded, sixtyish, Irish, walked out again. He wasn’t wearing a chasuble, a nod to the warmth that permeated even the usual coolness of a stone church. Just an alb, and his surplice, the barest vestments of office, the merest priestliness. He had an open, kind face. He began the service, hands apart in a limp crucifix, saying, “We open up to a God who loves us.” I bowed my head as if in prayer. But no. No. No love here. I wondered how much he believed himself, and how much was a scam. I’d wondered that aloud to the prison chaplain, and toyed with the idea of vicardom or something like it myself—it could beat the library. But that was then.
I looked back at the statue. A leaning parishioner with a boozy paunch and droopy neck met my eye from the row behind me. I tilted my head down a fraction. Just another believer biding time.
A church can breed its own defiance and devotion, personal and fierce. I looked up and considered what the window to my left might mean to me, in my own dim trepidation, had I considered a metaphor of suffering for myself. In Memory of the Schmitt Family, with its scene of the Sermon on the Mount, maybe? They died too long ago for me to care, for either the paltriness of their demise or the hubris of their son remembering them in glass. What about the Doyle Family, by their brother? The incorrigible Prodigal Son. No. He would never return, at least not repentant. Or, on the right side, the window depicting Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross? No remembrance from a guilty son or battered brother marked it. Just a generalized suffering. Mary’s face here cowed by grief, her followers propping her up, others holding Jesus’ body limp with temporary death. The words Mary Sodality were painted at the bottom. Mom’s group of rosary-wielding hysterics. She now, I thought, would be waiting sullen at the Oxford apartments just there in screaming distance on Webb Avenue. Not waiting for me. But maybe waiting for news of me. And perhaps, too, like Mary, for release. Mine, perhaps. Hers, maybe. And she too had her own ministry. Of shame. I’d be there later to serve under it. It was important. Not the service. The being there.
One of the parishioners announced a reading from the book of Hosea. I heard just a few sentences, as my thoughts wandered outside, into the glare oozing through the windows.“I will lead her into the desert, and speak to her heart…the days of her youth…The Lord is gracious and merciful…I will espouse you the right of justice.”
The gospel just after that went by quickly. It must have been a paragraph, a weekday snippet of good news. I’d missed it, turning around again, as if to look at the choir loft, as if to fool my friendly parishioner there behind me. The priest spoke. I turned to face him, settled myself, head slightly bent. His sermon. He said, “How do you see God?” He paused; not too oratorical. He meant it. “Do you remember your youth?” Do I. It’s all I ever had and squandered. “Can you awaken in yourself the love you had?” No. Because I didn’t. So many questions. Like the thoughtful believer he obviously was, the priest tried to connect the readings, to make quotidian sense of them for us in our tawdry lives, here amid the perspiration and second thoughts of Christ’s distant followers.
My mind meandered through the consecration. The key. The sanctuary. I’m sure the stash hadn’t been found. It must still be there. Had to be. We stood. The Lord’s Prayer. We all murmured it, even me, finding the words again easily enough. The people at the front were holding hands. When had this touching begun? I hadn’t been in a church since that night, ten years ago. I hadn’t attended mass for ten years before that. When had we all become so, I don’t know, Pentecostal? They’d be speaking in tongues next.
“Let us offer each other the sign of God’s peace,” the priest suggested, and the hand-holders held on and looked at each other with shy disbelief in actual forgiveness, while those of us until then blessedly free of contact turned and made nice to strangers. I reached back and grasped the fleshy hand of the man behind me, who gave me a weird little smile. No, you don’t, I thought, widening my gaze. You don’t know.
I shuffled out of the aisle, and slowly went up to take communion, along with the redeemed brethren beside me. It meant nothing to me, I convinced myself, this ritual, but still my heart began to thump with the inchoate tremor of the damned. I did not believe in this tasteless wafer, but I feared somehow the wrath. I had always believed I’d be found out further, even after being discovered back then, limp and bloody, curled fetal in the chancel where I’d collapsed after the beating, after hiding, hoping to remain hidden. Then, it was fear of my punishment. Now, it was dread of another crime. Now. But then. Not back then. Not when I had not killed my brother. It hadn’t been me. Despite what my mother believed. Now, I wanted to see the sanctuary door again. To remind myself of where I’d been, or broken in. I thought it looked the same, but couldn’t be sure. Even the church changes—witness the newfangled grasping. I took the host in my hands, muttered my false thanks, and gave a little glance to the right of the altar. Later.
I shuffled back in holy ignominy to my pew, and leaned forward against the row before me, aping prayer, as we all do no matter what we think we believe. I prayed to Our Lady of Providence. I prayed to the sad spirit of my brother, wherever he ended up. Wherever my mother’s useless prayers might have positioned him in the afterlife.
The priest sat after the communion rite, to read announcements and utter remembrances. “Let us pray for those who are isolated in institutions, prisons, nursing homes, hungering for the warmth of home.” How many of this sparse little congregation knew prisons? How many of them knew what the warmth of home was, or did they just pretend to carry with them a phony memory of affection to get themselves through their leaden days? I had cut off my family. I had turned back all letters. I knew they would be filled with the screeches of my mother’s despair, my sister’s keening anger. I kept aside only that one of Bella’s, thicker than most, the guard signaling it contained cash for when I got out. But I could barely read even that except to take her offering and deny her the satisfaction of forcing me to hear of her generosity and deluded, misguided, untoward hope. Her stultifying superiority in matters moral.
“Let us pray for Father Tran, who is visiting family in Vietnam,” the priest said. “For Father Guzman, in Argentina, working with the missions there. And Father Terranova, in Costa Rica this July.” No one was at home. These roaming Augustinian mendicants spent their summers proselytizing among the heathens of the world. And tonight—I looked over the pastoral staff list on the bulletin—only white-haired Father Farrell would likely be on hand. “Let us go in peace. The mass is ended,” he told us. I waited as the church emptied, to walk about. But a clutch of Latinas were nattering on with the reverend Farrell there by the altar rail, his own trio of “excellent women,” Excellents III, perhaps. I left, after having walked once more toward the apse, to glimpse the chancel door.
Before heading to what my ma considered home, I decided to stop at Patsy’s again. Temptation, no. Just, I don’t know—people, places, things, all of which I’d been warned against. As if it mattered, when there were fewer people I knew. The places I’d remembered were few too, and the thing I wanted, well, it was the only reason to be here. But it wouldn’t be at Patsy’s. Wh
ere I shouldn’t be either. I was supposedly clean. At least I was no longer using, had broken that habit fairly early on, managed to get through the years unimpeded, but for one lapse. I could handle the bar now, I thought. Just not yet my mother.
It was just after 1, and the westerly sun had begun to shaft along the bar just as it had back in the day, turning the sudsy beer golden, the shots of rye amber, swathing the nursing codger briefly in light before a sepulchral pallor reclaimed him. Danny—God, it was he, still here, lanky as a Joad—leaned against the till, a towel draped over his shoulder, his attention taken upward by a blaring documentary. A standard-issue sot leaned over the bar, his elbow nestling his grizzly chin, his face turned downward but biased in the direction of the television. In a booth among those that lined the back a couple cooed inebriated nothings at each other; on their table were a tallneck Miller and a highball, half finished, plus a few empties. The lovebirds’ heads turned briefly toward the door as I came in, and Danny glanced my way, but only to sigh slightly. This was his afternoon quiet, so to speak, and a trio of tipplers was enough for him. Reluctantly, he turned away from the television.
“Can I get ya something?”
He didn’t recognize me, haloed as I was by the sun.
“Coffee.”
“There’s a bakery round the corner.” Not unfriendly, not inviting. His voice carried a trace still of his mother’s Ireland. He had spent summers there, I recalled, his ma’s folks’ Donegal place. This bar was his now, I took it, had been his father’s, but he must be dead, ancient as he’d been back then. They all must be gone.
“I see a pot there.”
“That’s tar.”
“Ah. Club soda, then. With cranberry.”
He gave me a wary nod, assessing me for hipsterdom or worse, sobriety. But my clothes, though clean, were downmarket and decades-old, my demeanor humble. Please, warden. He scooped some ice into a glass, squirted soda onto it, and added a pink splash from a plastic jug. He tossed a cardboard coaster before me, nestled the glass on the word Patsy’s swashed across its center, plunked a swizzle stick between the cubes, and tapped the bar with his knuckles. On him.
“Thanks.” I gently lay a couple of surviving bucks down. I had nothing, really. My sister’s regretful wad, folded into that recrimination I didn’t read when I’d reclaimed my belongings, had disappeared quickly. Train fare, subway fare, fare. I was down to tips. And maybe that key.
He turned again to the TV. “The church?” He spoke over his shoulder, but shifted his position so his back wasn’t to me. I remembered. People did come to see it, St. Nick’s. The local landmark. Basilica of the Bronx, sans basilica, sans historical interest, really, but passing tragic for me.
“My mother.”
“The Oxford, then?” Where most of the remaining Irish lived, the well-tended, tired apartments in the shadow of the church, in the clutches of it, off Devoe Park.
“I’ve been away.”
“You do look sorta familiar.” My hair was thinner, my sallow face held penitential hollows. I had the bearing of forbearance, which is to say I looked beaten down. He eyed me, his brow furrowing. “What’s her name? Your ma?”
“Doyle. Agnes Doyle. My sister Bella lives with her.”
“And you’re Davey. You must be. I remember Bella. I still see her at church every now and again.” Danny had folded his arms across his chest, the bar rag draping over his left shoulder. I couldn’t read his expression. It was, if anything, neutral. “You must be out.”
“Must be. Yesterday.”
“So. A new life then.”
“I hope so.”
“At mass, were you?”
“Yeah. Don’t believe much, now, but it couldn’t hurt.”
“No. But.”
He meant the memories. Even in a changing neighborhood, some things are remembered. The scene of the crime. It had actually been part of a long scene, that had begun at the check-cashing place where my sister once worked.
The lump of a drunk down the bar turned from his drink and looked over at me, sensing something. I assumed my prison face, and he shifted his glassy eyes down again. I’d spent several unremembered years here, in various stages of blackout and fury, seething over something petty, something my brother said, something my mother did, something my sister wanted.
“So you’re off the sauce.”
“Yeah. Best thing for me. Ruined my life.”
“It can.”
“You must see a lot of that.”
“Sometimes. But it’s an old crowd here.”
“So…how’s business?”
“We manage.”
“And your ma?”
“Back over. For a while now, with her sister, near Ards. Rural ass of backwards. It’d drive me batty. We manage here.”
“We.”
“My wife’s a lawyer now. You remember Sheila. Sheila Corrigan, from seventh grade?”
“Of course.” Bouncy and becurled and just a little shiftyeyed. I was surprised she’d made it through the LSATs, let alone passed the bar. “That’s great. Good for you.”
“We live over in Riverdale, near her mom now, but we own this building, so it’s an investment. I’m a landlord now too.”
“And it’s all starting to come back.”
“We were lucky.”
“Location.”
“It’s coming back. Near the church is good. And the church isn’t going anywhere. So then. So.”
His unasked question: my plans. Practice for me for Ma, perhaps, and for Danny something to tell later to wee Sheila, as we used to call her, the cute curly-haired little minx. Jimmy had a thing for her back then. Before we were old enough to fail, which wasn’t too old at all.
“Weighing options. Such as they are. Open to suggestions.”
Danny nodded.
“I taught a bit up there, English to some of the cons, reading too, and the library. I worked there. Maybe, I don’t know. Something. I don’t know.” They don’t hire cons in the school system. And I’d never seriously considered it anyway. “Social work, maybe.” A lot of us end up there, facing what we laughingly called our demons. “I see White Castle is hiring.”
“You’ll find something. You always were the smart one,” Danny said. “Good you’re on track again.” Such forgiveness. Well, we hadn’t hurt him. At least, not that time, not directly. God knows I’d been thrown out of Patsy’s enough before that night.
The tough little man from the back booth came up for a refill. He looked at me. I looked at him, the rough-hewn snake tattoo on his wiry forearm. We knew where we’d been. We were marked, tattooed or not. We nodded barely, and he turned back to his girlfriend, or moll. Nah. That would be me. Top o’ the world, Ma.
“Say hi to Sheila for me. Thanks.” I headed out, and over to the Oxford.
I ambled along University Avenue, and turned left at Webb. They didn’t know I was out, let alone in the neighborhood. I was taking a chance here—they could be away themselves. But Ma never went anywhere, or at least she hadn’t when I’d roamed the neighborhood spreading unhappiness, and Bella wouldn’t be far from her. Apart from a Catskills hiking trip or some such with one of her other chubby spinster girlfriends, she didn’t do much except judge harshly. I had no idea how she spent her time. I did know she was a nurse, and probably had become one so she could talk back to our mother with the impunity of the health care industry and treat her patients with the contempt she always showed me, seeing as I had been unavailable for quite some time.
The building looked the same, a little older, but cared for. Pachysandra thrived on the ground behind the iron fence, and window boxes flourished above. I pushed open the fingerprinted glass door to our old lobby and saw her name there on the buzzer in the vestibule. I hesitated a second, then put my finger on the button and buzzed. There was a crackle on the other end. I buzzed again.
“Who is it?” Creaky and old.
“Davey.”
Crackle again.
“I
t’s Davey, Ma. I’m home.” I hated using that term, but I had to. The door didn’t click. Was she considering? I pressed the buzzer. “It’s Davey, Ma!” I shouted into the crackling once more. The door clicked, reluctantly it seemed, and I scooted in before she changed her mind.
I pulled open the elevator door and stepped in. This old elevator, from the 1950s, struggling under the weight of years, musty with the aromas of pot roast and futility. I hadn’t been in an elevator since I could remember, since that night, perhaps. I got out on the fourth floor, made the right to our old apartment, and rang the bell there. I heard a fumbling with locks following a long pause, as she probably checked me out in the security peephole. She opened the door.
“Ma. It’s me,” I said, bending to embrace her.
“Oh, Davey, you’re killing me.” She pushed me away. “Why didn’t you let us know?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, you have. I never knew what to expect. You didn’t write.”
“I couldn’t, Ma. I was too ashamed.” I was lying immediately, back to myself of old. I’d be high as a kite next.
“Come in, come in, let me look at you then.” She took my hand in a Pentecostal grasp of her own and drew me toward our living room. She had withered a bit, and her hair, like mine, had thinned, though hers nestled in soft cirrus clouds above her head. What was left of mine was shaved close.
