All for a Story

by Allison Pittman

  “Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. Is this our stop?”

  She strained to look out the window. “Yes. It’ll be a block or so walk from here. But I could use the air. How about you?”

  “Indeed.”

  When the bus came to its final, shuddering halt, they joined the others in the press to exit, and he filled his lungs with the cool, refreshing air once his feet hit the ground.

  As usual, Monica took the lead, making him long for a time when they could be somewhere she could follow him. Maybe California, though she’d already made her feelings clear about that. Best to go someplace they’d never been, where they’d be on equal ground. New York City, perhaps. Or Chicago. Or now that the war was over, even Europe, like all the other great writers.

  “. . . Italy,” she was saying. “And these women just pick up, pack up, and go. I could do that, you know. There’s nothing holding me here. No family, no job—well, not one that I can’t take with me, right? I could save my allowance, sell everything, and be in Paris by springtime. How long do you think I could last on four hundred bucks?”

  “You? Forever. Some penniless baron would fall madly in love with you and whisk you off to his castle.” He was only half joking. The fact that he’d seen her in two different fur coats proved that girls like Monica didn’t need a lot of their own money to live.

  “Forget that,” she said with a dismissive air. “Penniless isn’t my cup of tea.”

  “Are you calling yourself a gold digger?”

  “Not so much gold, but definitely green. Nothing makes a girl happy like a little extra lettuce, you know?”

  She took his arm in the now-ubiquitous way she had, and he slowed his steps to match her shorter stride. If he’d hoped for a little firsthand history about the cathedral’s construction or its impact on the city, he was in for a disappointment. Besides the occasional comment about a passing woman’s hat, Monica remained oddly subdued. By the time they stood in front of the massive structure, she’d fallen completely silent and her shoes had turned to anvils.

  “Are you sure we can go in?” Her grip on his arm was as tight as her voice. “I mean, is it open?”

  “It’s a church,” he said, hoping he sounded more reassuring than condescending. “Churches are always open.”

  “I dunno.” She let go of him, stepped back, and craned her neck to take in the sky-touching Gothic structure. “That’s a lot of ceiling to come crashing down.”

  He reached for the door. “I’ll take my chances.”

  She immediately contorted her body, dropping one shoulder and looking up at him with a twisted mouth and one droopy eye.

  “Sanctuary . . .” She drew the word out in a low, husky voice, pawing at the door with a limp, clawlike hand. When he didn’t respond, she stood upright and made a show of patting her face back into its original form. “Lon Chaney? The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

  “Ah. I’ve read the book; haven’t seen the movie.”

  “Nobody has, yet. I just saw the pictures in Movie Weekly. Gave me the shivers.”

  She demonstrated with an actual shiver, and he pictured her beside him in a darkened theater, the screen filled with the image of a terrifying monster and his arm holding her close.

  “Well, then,” he said, chasing the image away, “maybe you should skip that one. See a Buster Keaton instead.”

  “Not a chance.” She breezed past him, this time lifting her hands to tap an imaginary tambourine to accompany her gypsy twirl. “It’s my favorite love story.”

  “That’s impossible. It’s tragic.”

  “Fine,” she said with an air of concession. “It’s my favorite tragedy. But think of it. La Esmeralda is so beautiful, but she’s awful. I mean, really not a kind person at all. And yet, all these men—they love her.”

  “They want her,” Max corrected, drawing from memory. “There’s a difference.”

  “Not Quasi.” She smiled, as if she held a personal fondness for the misshapen hero. “And he knows he could never have her, he knows he would never be able to enjoy her beauty, but in the end he shouts his love to the city.” She resumed her caricature and pawed pitifully at his sleeve, saying, “‘There is everything I have ever loved.’”

  “But she was already dead.”

  She resumed her small, authoritative stature. “Then he shouldn’t have waited.”

  Inside the vestibule, a conservatively dressed woman took their coats and Max’s hat and, speaking in a half whisper, directed them toward the entrance to Bethlehem Chapel. They thanked her, with Monica adding a self-conscious move rather like a curtsy. Not sure whether or not she intended the gesture to be a joke, he stifled a good-natured laugh.

  She’s nervous, he thought, justifying his own spark of queasiness. He tried to brace himself, but the first step on the marble tile took his breath, and he didn’t catch it again until he felt Monica’s small, cold hand in his.

  “Golly,” she said, and he found it to be the perfect word for the moment, full of a childlike awe at the pure majesty surrounding them.

  The walls were made of massive stone—limestone, if he recalled correctly from Uncle Edward’s letters—fitted together in smooth, almost seamless perfection. Stained-glass windows set within their own arched alcoves lined the walls, and the ceiling stretched high above a series of Gothic arches stretching to the grandeur of the altar at the front.

  Monica stepped away and went to the first of the massive columns lining the center aisle.

  “It feels ancient,” she said, pressing her hand against the stone. “Like something medieval.”

  He closed the space between them. “You’ve really never been here before?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve only ever been to church a couple of times since my confirmation. Christmas, mostly. Midnight Mass.” She looked around. “Where do you suppose they keep the confessionals in this place?”

  “They don’t have those here. It’s not a Catholic church.”

  “Good thing,” she said with the little laugh he recognized as something she did when attempting bravado. “We’d be here awhile. Maybe ’til after dark, and you might not catch the right bus home.”

  She was leaning back against the column, her pale skin awash in the lavender light of the stained-glass windows.

  He leaned forward, close enough to feel the cool emanating from the stone. “You shouldn’t talk that way about yourself.”

  “What way?”

  “I don’t believe for a minute that you’re half as scandalous as you say. I don’t know why you’re trying so hard to convince us all of your own mythology.”

  “Is that what you’d like to believe?”

  There was a shift in the light coming from outside—a cloud drifting, most likely—and a new prism of color graced the top of her cheek.

  “It’s what I know. You see, every now and then, this charming little girl makes her way straight to the surface. She’s who you are deep inside.”

  “You don’t know anything at all.” She brushed past him and stood in the aisle. “What’s that up there?”

  “That’s the altar.”

  She batted his sleeve. “I’m not a total dummy. I mean—” she leaned forward, squinting—“I can’t tell . . .”

  “Come on.” He touched his hand to her waist and they made a strolling ascent amid the sea of plain wooden chairs. An elderly woman pushing a dust mop appeared from a door at the front of the chapel and, upon seeing them, leaned on its handle to watch.

  “We’d better be careful,” Monica said, speaking out of the side of her mouth. “People might get the wrong idea.”

  “Technically, the groom doesn’t walk the bride up the aisle.”

  “Who said anything about bride and groom? It looks like you’re about ready to give me away.”

  “Two problems with that.” By now they were nearly to the altar. With the emptiness of the room capable of carrying his words to the far corners, he dropped both his head and his voice. “One, I’m
not old enough to give you to anybody. Two, you’re too much of a brat for anyone to take you.”

  She looked up at him with a playful pout. “Oh, Daddy, how you tease.”

  He guided her into a row and they sat, assuming an identical posture, with their elbows propped on the seats in front of them. For a full minute, Max’s eyes scanned the scene carved into the white stone behind the altar—Mary and the Christ child, a manger behind them, angels looking on.

  “It was carved from a single piece of stone,” he said as both an expression of awe and an attempt to inform.

  “How do you know so much?”

  “Uncle Edward. I was working with Sister Aimee and, in case you haven’t heard, she’s built an enormous . . . temple—” there was no other word for it—“in Los Angeles. We traded postcards and photographs.” He chuckled at the memory. “It was almost like a competition. Who could build a bigger, better church.”

  “Who won?”

  Her interest seemed genuine, and while he hadn’t given the Angelus Temple much of a second thought since leaving California, his mind suddenly filled with memories of the place from the laying of its cornerstone to the final service he’d attended.

  “Hard to say. It doesn’t have the grandeur of this place. The windows and the carvings. It’s huge—”

  “This place is huge.”

  “Not in comparison. Sister Aimee’s is like a theater. Five thousand seats. Modern in every way. I think you’d like it.”

  Monica narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why are you spending so much time trying to analyze me? Who I am ‘deep inside’ and what kind of church I would or wouldn’t like? Because there’s nothing wrong with me here.” She tapped a dark-tipped finger to her hat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hoping the calming tone of his voice would halt her increasing volume.

  “I don’t need psychoanalysis—”

  “I was just making conversation—”

  “Or religion.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” But her glare made it clear he would not be able to pass this off as merely an informal observation of architecture. Deep down, he wanted to know—needed to know—what Monica felt about faith and God and all those elements that would make her . . . what? Eligible? Worthy? And now it was clear that he’d hurt her. The facade she worked so hard to maintain was threatening to crumble before his very eyes, and her blustering did nothing to reinforce it. She perched on the very edge of her seat, looking close to panicked, and might have flown away if it weren’t for the fact that she’d have to scramble over his legs in order to escape.

  His first instinct was to soothe what feathers he’d ruffled, but something told him that doing so would only result in another snap. Instead, he leaned back in his seat, sending echoes of creaking wood bouncing throughout the sanctuary, and stared ahead, taking in every detail of the Nativity carving while effectively leaving Monica alone. After a minute or so, he heard her chair creak a little too.

  “Those four guys?” he said after a time, pointing to the figures flanking the centerpiece behind the altar. “They’re the writers of the four Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.” He pointed to each in turn.

  “They all look alike,” she said, but with no sense of malice.

  “When I think about what we do—what I’m trying to do with this paper—I think about them. Their job, as it were, was to just write the story. To be accurate and truthful. They don’t judge or editorialize or try to compel you to believe or not believe. They disappear behind the words and let Jesus speak for himself.”

  “So you want to create the Gospel of Max Moore?”

  He chose not to see her comment as blasphemy. “I don’t want to tell anybody how to live or what to do, if that’s what you mean. I just want our paper to tell good stories about good people. And then, maybe, our readers will want to be good people too.”

  “I don’t want to disappear behind my words. Everything I say is truth, too, you know.” He felt her clutch at his sleeve and turned. “You need to understand that, Max. What I write is who I am. I’m not some created character. I go to those places; I do those things. It’s who I am, and I don’t care.”

  “That isn’t really true, is it?”

  “Of course it is,” she said, neither convinced nor convincing.

  “So why isn’t your name at the top of your column?”

  She didn’t recoil—not completely, anyway. Her hand remained on his sleeve, though her grip receded, and her face relaxed from its wide-eyed intensity.

  “That was Edward’s idea.”

  “Oh,” Max said, holding back the wash of relief at his uncle’s foresight.

  “He told me it would be in my best interest, for now. In case, I suppose, in the future, I ever wanted to do something a little more substantial.”

  “He was a wise man.”

  “He was a good man, Max. Really, truly good. I don’t know why he didn’t show that side of him more.”

  “I don’t either.” He covered her hand with his, and the sound of a subtle clearing of a throat came from the cleaning woman who now pushed the dust mop up the center aisle. “I think it’s time for us to go.”

  “That’s it?” Monica didn’t budge. “Aren’t we supposed to pray or something? Light a candle? Or is that reserved for Catholics too?”

  “Sure. We could pray, if you like.” Suddenly, though, he felt uncomfortable. Should they hold hands? Go up to the altar? Kneel? The opulence of the sanctuary seemed to call for more than whatever simple, humble words he could say—if he should say any at all. Perhaps she wanted to pray alone, silently. Or for both of them? How was it that the mention of a prayer called up the same squeamish discomfort he’d felt locked in a bank vault with a bottle of whiskey?

  To his relief, she’d taken the Book of Common Prayer from the back of the seat in front of them and was running her hand over the dark-blue cover embossed in gold.

  “Do you use the prayers in here? I mean, if you can’t think of any of your own?”

  “You can,” he said, treading carefully. “Or during the formal service everybody might read them together. But even alone, sometimes, it helps to read someone else’s words and feel a little less . . . alone.” He took the book from her and thumbed through its pages. “The psalms of David are in here. Imagine, the prayers he wrote thousands of years ago, and they can be my own.”

  “Choose one.” She hunkered close to share the book. “I’ll read it with you.”

  He continued flipping pages. “I don’t know how to choose.”

  “The first one.” Like always, she sounded decisive, sure. He quickly found the Psalter, and together they read:

  “‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.’”

  By the time he finished the second sentence, Max realized he was reading alone. Monica had let go of her side of the book. Her hands sat listless in her lap, her face downcast with a gaze that threatened to burn a hole through the page. Still, he read on about the righteous man being like a tree planted near water while the ungodly blow away as chaff, clear to the final verse proclaiming that the way of the ungodly shall perish.

  “It’s us,” Monica said once he’d stopped. “You’re this big, righteous tree, and I’m just a bit of blossom that’ll blow away.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” he said, though he desperately wished he’d gone with the traditional twenty-third. “You’re no more a sinner than I am.”

  “Really.” She took the book from him, closed it, and ran her fingers along the gold-embossed title. “There’s not a person alive who would believe that.”

  “Monica—” He moved to take the book from her, to settle it back in its spot so he could take her away from this place, but she would not loosen her grip, so he chose to seal her hand to the book with his own.

  “My mother
, of course, thought I was a terrible person. Not so much when I was little, of course, but later. I’ll bet there were times she wished I would run away with gypsies, you know?”

  He hated her sadness, especially as it blossomed in this place designed for worship, but he knew he had nothing to add. Nothing of his power could heal the wounds that seemed to be opening just below the surface of her bravado.

  “But then,” she continued, “my mother was a horrible person too. Just a different kind. And I ended up surrounding myself with these boys and parties, and part of me wanted to think that I was better than them. Better than that. But I meet you now, and I wonder—”

  “Stop.” He slid the prayer book from her, replaced it, and touched her chin to bring her gaze fully to his. “I don’t like to hear you talk about yourself that way.”

  “Why?”

  The question was a challenge, one he was not quite ready to meet. Not here, anyway, where only one of them felt safe.

  “Because it isn’t true.”

  “Or lovely? Or of good report?”

  He smiled, somehow finding the strength to restrain his joy at her remembrance, frightened he’d startle her right back into hiding. “Exactly.”

  The late-afternoon light had nearly exhausted itself by the time Max arrived at his own familiar front door. He opened it to find the day’s mail scattered on the floor, including an official-looking envelope containing his final paycheck from his job with the Bridal Call along with a short, personal note from Sister Aimee herself.

  Max—

  While your talent and insight here are greatly missed, I am amazed at God’s provision in filling the void your absence created. I find myself rising to editorial challenges for which he alone can equip me, aided by those he has brought alongside to be my Aaron and Hur as I attempt to hold up the vision set forth in our publication.

  I pray that the God we strive to serve will bless your endeavors as well. Seek always to bring him glory, and he will make your path smooth.

  I shall be more than happy to provide a glowing letter of reference to any establishment with which you seek future employment.

  Your sister in Christ and co-inheritor of his Kingdom,