With her purse in the crook of her arm, Mary Keane reached out to run her fingers through her daughter’s thin hair, gathering it bit by bit to the top of her head. She twisted the hair into a topknot and pulled three bobby pins from the purse to hold it. Annie reached back tentatively to feel her bare neck. “Better?” Mary Keane said and Annie said, “Yes,” although one of the bobby pins bit like a tooth.
The line moved again. Mary Keane leaned down and blew a soft stream of air onto her daughter’s neck, miraculously cool. Annie closed her eyes briefly. “How much longer?” she said at the same time the woman behind them said, “Not much longer.” They turned, mother and daughter, to meet her eye, but it was the man she was addressing, leaning against him, holding on to his arm. There was a diamond engagement ring on her hand. You had to pity the length and thickness of her brown hair, the weight of her chin on his shoulder.
They shuffled forward again. Now they could hear faint music coming from the building, and with the next step forward they could smell, if certainly not yet feel, the air-conditioning inside.
Someone up ahead, an official, cried, “No pushing, please,” in what might have been an Italian accent. They felt the line grow slack at the reprimand. And then it moved forward again.
The fat woman was now talking to the woman ahead of her. “What if you’d just stepped out of the shower?” she shouted.
“Pee-aye-tuh,” the man behind them said and the woman, laughing deep in her throat said, “Pee-aye-ta.”
Here now was the official who belonged to the voice, perspiring in a red jacket and gray pants. He waved his arms like a traffic cop although, at the moment, they were standing still in front of him.
“Almost there,” he was saying, smiling at them all. His accent not Italian but Long Island. “That’s it”—as they moved forward—“won’t be long now.”
As if responding obediently to a command, the line pressed itself together, tighter still, heads, hands, shuffling feet. (Annie briefly placed the heels of her palms to the damp yellow shirt of the man in front of her and then drew them away.) Chests to backs and the woman behind them leaning, it seemed, over Mary Keane’s shoulder. “No pushing, please,” the man said again.
The sun had nearly dropped out of sight although the sky glowed so vividly with its afterimage that it hardly mattered. The heat still gave the thick air a slow pulse. The crowd pressed together and her mother took her hand, moving. For a moment Annie forgot just what it was they had been waiting to see. And then they were inside.
Cold air and a low Gregorian chant, eyes struggling to adjust to the change. There was the smell of incense and of new paint. Glass cases along the walls and the impression of red and gold. Golden arcs of light. Red carpet at their feet. The line held, still shuffling, past cases of jewels, now, or books, or vestments, or small ivory models of churches, paintings of saints and priests. The volume of the choir’s voices seemed to rise slightly as they moved forward, wavering the way the heat outside had wavered. But the heat was already forgotten. “Keep moving, please,” someone said.
And then the line broke. Wheat from chaff, Mary thought as red-jacketed guards counted them off, said, there—four rows in descending order—back there, please, here, down there. A brusque tap on her shoulder and she and her daughter were hurried forward. Down here, please, keep moving.
No choice in the matter, it soon became clear, because what they were being directed to was a moving walkway, four ascending rows in a kind of amphitheater of moving walkways. There was the uncertain first step, the tug of the rubber tread against the soles of their feet, and then, through no effort of their own, the slow movement forward into the dark. Mary Keane and her daughter were in the first row. The air grew colder and the holy chants nearer, even as the faces and the bodies and the clothes of all who had waited—though they were still beside them or above them in the darkness—disappeared. There were only whispers and stirrings, a child’s voice, and then not even that.
Mary Keane put her arm across her daughter’s chest, pressed her close so that the little topknot was just under her chin. Annie took her mother’s arm in both hands.
In the absence of all color and all other light, the white marble held every nuance and hue a human eye could manage. Here was the lifeless flesh of the beloved child, the young man’s muscle and sinew impossibly—impossible for the mother who cradled him—still. Here were her knees against the folds of her draped robes, her lap, as wide as it might have been in childbirth, accommodating his weight once more. Here were her fingers pressed into his side, her shoulder raised to bear him on her arm once more. Here was her left hand, open, empty. Here were the mother’s eyes cast down upon the body of her child once more, only once more, and in another moment (they were moving back into the darkness) no more.
The white light reflected dimly off the faces still within its reach and then disappeared from them, lamps extinguished, one by one, as they were slowly drawn away. Somewhere among them a woman was weeping. Slowly, the moving sidewalk delivered them all through the darkness to the four ascending doors where they disembarked, step carefully please. Flesh, hair, clothes returned to them in the low light of the rest of the exhibit. A low, golden light that was nevertheless painful, accustomed as their eyes had become to the dark, and despite how briefly they had been in it.
Outside, the heat was a comfort, momentarily, on chilled shoulders and arms. The lights had come on in the park, in the trees, in the tall clock towers and the soaring pavilions and under the fountains that surrounded the Unisphere. It led their eyes up, for a moment. There were stars but also a stain of red on the western horizon, against the quickly descending night. There was the later bus to catch from the park to the terminal in Jamaica, and then the second bus to the intersection where they would call home and John Keane, unhappy about the late hour, would come in the car to fetch them.
AT PAULINE’S APARTMENT, Clare was already asleep on the couch. Pauline listed all they had done together that day—an excursion to the fabric store and lunch at a diner, two cute gingham aprons run up on the sewing machine, cookies baked and nails painted and a walk around the corner for Chinese—making each occasion sound, to Mary Keane, like a compensation Pauline had rendered, since attached to each one was some surprise, on Pauline’s part, that Clare had done none of these things in exactly this way before. “And she said her mother only knew how to make Christmas cookies.”
Mary slipped her hands under Clare’s arms, lifted the sleeping child to her shoulder, felt the weight of her, and how, not quite asleep, she tightened her arms around her mother’s neck, brushed her fingers against her mother’s hair. Pauline was handing a shopping bag to Annie, the folded aprons, the cookies, a few odds and ends, “Little presents,” Pauline said, “nothing much,” proudly enough. The apartment was close, dimly lit, full of the scent of Pauline’s perfume. In her weariness after the long hot day, in her anger over her husband’s unreasonable impatience, in anticipation of the bedtime routine that was still waiting for her at home, Mary Keane looked at the peaceful rooms with some envy.
Which Pauline saw, of course. At the door, she asked, “Is he waiting downstairs?”—meaning John Keane. And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how he is,” and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband’s failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft’s transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage—which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn—simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.
A repository, Pauline
and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself.
In the elevator, Clare heavy in her arms, she told Annie that Pauline was intolerable, sometimes. Really. “I don’t just bake cookies at Christmas,” she said resentfully, and Annie agreed although, at the moment, she could not recall any cookies her mother had ever made that were not shaped like Christmas trees or snowmen.
Her mother said, “You know,” and then paused. She recalled, briefly, the sacred music and the white stone and all the soaring aspirations of her faith: gold domes and ivory towers and in the darkness, light. She considered, too, how tired she was, Clare’s head heavy on her shoulder, the child’s heels digging into her hips. How annoying Pauline could be. “You know,” she said again, “Pauline doesn’t speak to Helen anymore, the girl she went to Europe with last year.” She looked down at Annie. “And she’s fallen out with Adele, too, from the office. Even though they shared a cabin on that cruise and were best pals for a while there.” She hitched Clare up on her shoulder. Annie transferred the heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left. “I wouldn’t mind sometimes,” her mother said, “if Pauline got mad and stopped speaking to us for a while. It would be a nice break.”
Watching the light move behind each number as they descended, Annie laughed and said, “I know.”
“It would be nice to untangle ourselves a bit,” her mother said. Clare stirred against her shoulder, moved the fingers she had placed in her mother’s hair, tugged.
Mary Keane and her daughters rode the rest of the way down in weary silence. It was an unkindness, she knew, what she had just said about Pauline. Words said in conscious defiance of all the gentle aspirations of her faith. But it was also true, what she had said. Just as it was true that there would be no untangling herself from Pauline. Not with Clare already so fond of her.
THE CHURCH had gone to pot. It had gone to seed. It had been minimally repaired for the last five years and come Monday the dismantling would begin. Any parishioner wishing to purchase one of the old pews should have already called the rectory. There were shingles missing from the exterior; the bell, for safety’s sake, had long ago been removed from the belfry. The green canvas awning that had once shaded the entrance and the tall brick steps that led from the street had been torn in the ’60 hurricane and never repaired. In ’64 it was taken down altogether and now only the metal frame remained, a crisscross of bare ironwork against the sky. The choir loft, also for safety’s sake, had been off-limits for as long as most of the children in the school could remember. A rumor spread among the younger ones, Clare Keane included, that the unused staircase at the back of the church, with its wide marble banister and its velvet rope (and its scent, when you got near it, of incense and attics), was an entrance to heaven. The painting across the high ceiling, of John the Baptist pouring water from his palm over the head of a beautiful Christ, was itself marred by water—there was a misshapen, ominously gray cloud in the blue sky above their heads, another stretched across the saint’s feet and over the savior’s knees. The stained-glass window high above the altar—Saint Gabriel with his halo and his wings—also leaked. On a bad day, the water ran down the wall and over the crucifix and behind the gold tabernacle. The filigree on the old altar had chipped away. No one remembered the last time the organ had actually played.
On the Friday before the last Sunday, all the children in the school were led into the church for a farewell prayer, and just as Father Hecht said, “The old makes way for the new,” Marilyn Giovanni in the fifth grade slammed the back of her head into the back of the pew and with an echoing, inhuman cry, rolled onto the worn carpet of the center aisle. It was an epileptic seizure. Mrs. Ryan, who taught the third grade, had an afflicted child of her own and knew just what to do, and superstition in this day and age was well to be avoided. But the Bible itself was full of misdiagnoses and who could help but wonder what it was the devil would have objected to—the old or the new? Was it protest that made him seize the little girl at that moment, or celebration?
(“Nonsense,” Father McShane said to the younger priest. “I’m ashamed of you.” And then, with a wink and a crooked smile, “They talk about the Irish.”)
On the corner in front of the church, the boys waiting for the high-school bus watched the workmen carrying statues over their shoulders like huge dolls. They saw them carrying the large framed oil paintings in both hands, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, stained with the smoke of votive candles, of forty years of petitions, and Saint Pius, still clean, carried like suitcases to a waiting van. The old wooden pews, eased out through the front door and down the old steps like streamlined, oversize coffins, were either placed in the van or—as in some final reckoning—carried to the lawn in front of the rectory where they were labeled with the purchasing parishioner’s name. Then a high chain-link fence went up around the old church and the wrecking ball came and in no time it was all splinters and smoke.
Jacob Keane, waiting at the corner with the other boys from his high school, in a jacket he had not grown into and his school tie, swore that the smell of incense still came from the hole where the church had been. He made the other boys pause and sniff the air. Yes, they nodded, their chins raised, they could almost agree. The road in front of the church seemed to grow more congested every morning. There was the thick diesel smell of county buses and school buses, delivery trucks and flatbeds, so that even on a spring morning at seven there was hardly a trace of new leaf or daffodil or even the cool dawn in the suburban air. But Jacob told the other boys, “You can still smell it,” and with their fingers in the fence they paused, raised their noses. Those who had once shared the belief that the stairs to the old choir loft led to another world, to heaven itself, considered briefly the possibility that some sort of holiness lingered everywhere, perhaps just beneath the shell of earth and sky. Jacob wondered as well. Then Michael told a joke about a workman in a church who hammered his thumb and cursed. A nun who was praying nearby said his bad language had made Our Lady cry. She pointed to the statue. “See the tears?” the nun said. The man shook his head. “She’s only crying cause I hammered a nail into her backside to hang up my coat.”
The laughter outran the mystery. Michael was pleased to see his brother blush. The joke, he was pretty certain, had come from Uncle Frank.
But if there was inspiration in the lingering smell of incense, there was incentive in the church’s rising frame. The new church was to be in the round—a spaceship, some of the older parishioners complained, a circus tent—and every afternoon when the boys from the Catholic high school left the bus, they could mark the progress that had been made that day, at first in the dark stakes and poured concrete of the foundation but then, more clearly, in the skeletal web of steel and wood. By summer, a number of them had begun projects of their own—backyard tree houses and storage huts and potting sheds. Tony Persichetti and his father worked on their attic, transforming the space the developer had left as bare beams into a bedroom and a bath. Jacob and Michael Keane, making a case for privacy, for a place to gather with their friends that was not the kitchen, where their mother would have to break things up to make dinner, or their bedroom, where their sisters could listen at the door, convinced their parents to let them finish the basement—which meant to cover the cinder-block walls with knotty pine panels, to drop a white ceiling, enclose the furnace with its own room, and replace the shower curtain at the entrance of the tiny bathroom with a real door.
Their father took them to the lumberyard, bought them levels and tape measures and boxes of nails, cartons of two-foot-square linoleum with which to cover the concrete floor. Every evening that summer, when he returned from work, he changed into his old clothes, put on the army boots he wore for all household chores, and went down to assess the boys’ progress, to offer corrections and advice. With the help of a do-it-yourself manual, father and sons figured out the wiring for the fluorescent lights, got the door hung right, laid a checkerboard pattern across the floor.
The old couch and the train table were donated to St. Vincent’s and their father agreed to splurge on a six-piece set of Danish modern from Sears, which gave the new room a sleek, science-fiction look that Mary Keane found cold, although it inspired in her sons a sense that their own modern futures, part Buck Rogers, part James Bond, were finally upon them.
In only a matter of months, Michael learned that the cheap foam cushions of the Danish modern sofa will buckle on you when you press a girl too ardently into its frame.
THE PARISHIONERS on that first Sunday seemed both reluctant and awed, filing in not down a single central aisle but along any number of aisles that fanned out from the semicircle that was the altar. The faces in the new stained-glass windows were all angles (Mary Keane thought they looked vaguely Danish modern themselves), their robes all long bright shards of color. The crucifix suspended above them was a long swoop of gray steel intersected by a small crossbeam that seemed hardly the breadth of a man’s arms. There were no recognizable statues of any sort and the Stations of the Cross were merely white rectangles of carved stone, the Passion barely discernible within them. Because there were no corners, there were few shadows in the new church. The confessionals were small rooms, with actual doors (John Keane tested one on the way out, assessing how well it had been hung) and door-knobs, not curtains. Between them, behind a large plate-glass window, there was what Father McShane seemed delighted to call the “Bawl Room,” a soundproof room for mothers with small, noisy children. He pointed it out three times in his dedication sermon—it might have been the sole motive for the new construction—and Mary Keane, who throughout the service grew progressively dissatisfied with the too-new St. Gabriel’s, added to her criticism of the place the fact that a baby’s cry or a toddler’s shouted phrase added life, and sometimes even laughter, to a Mass, which was, after all, supposed to be a celebration, not a dirge. She imagined the Blessed Mother with baby Jesus in her arms, standing behind the plate glass, the child’s mouth moving but not a sound getting through. Beside her, her husband noticed how the new pews lacked the small brass hat clips that had been secured to the back of every pew in the old church (spring-loaded, felt-tipped clips that Michael would stealthily snap at least once every Mass, a sound like a gunshot echoing through the place). He understood there was no longer a need for them—so few men wore hats anymore (he blamed JFK with his thick hair and his big Irish head for changing the fashion)—but the lack of them added to his dawning sense that the new church had turned the stuff of his own past, his own memories, into something quaint, at best. At worst, obsolete.
After This Page 10
