It was a long time before he spoke to me of his crisis in Korea as a religious conversion—who'd have thought a Catholic could be converted? I assumed at first the aura I sensed that day in the Cloisters was an effect of the piped-in Gregorian chant or the medieval art. But it wasn't. As I followed him into the Gothic Chapel I realized the aura I was aware of came from him. I sensed for the first time the presence in him to which he rarely referred but to which, to my knowledge save once, he habitually and absolutely deferred.
There was no sanctuary lamp in that chapel and instinctively I registered the absence of the Blessed Sacrament. So despite the magnificent windows and the marble high altar below the barrel-vaulted ceiling and the statues of the saints, the chamber seemed sterile to me. Despite my sophistication I'd have still preferred the BVM side altar at Good Shepherd, holy card art and all.
I drew close to Michael, who was standing between the laid-out tomb-effigies of a knight and a lady, the one encased in armor and the other reposed with hands folded on a great pair of breasts. But he was ignoring the breasts and the effigies. "Something eerie," he'd said.
At that moment, profiled against a small arched window with clear glass, he seemed eerie. A fucking saint? My old buddy? It was bad enough he was a hero.
My mind fled the thought. My eyes went to the window and out to the grassy slope of the promontory of Fort Tryon Park. Maybe Michael would see it as a mountain in Korea now, or as a hill in Galilee. But I didn't. From the south side of that peak one could look out on the most seductive city in the world. As teenagers Michael and I, like other rakes of Inwood, had brought girls up there. Furtively, without swagger, we'd coaxed them into bushes, and we considered ourselves wild as pagans when we pushed our tongues against the gates of their teeth and pressed the heels of our hands against their wire-mesh bras. The truth was that our inborn inhibitions were near infinite, yet made worse by the looming Cloisters. We knew it was a museum, but it looked like a tower from which nuns were watching, if not God.
It seemed to me that Michael was still in the grip of those inhibitions, as it seemed to me that I was free of them. That freedom was what I'd gone to Greenwich Village to obtain. Three and a half years of the life at NYU had confirmed what I'd gleaned from the fierce denials of the priests and nuns at Good Shepherd—that sex is all. Though it would have mortified me to admit it, my sexual experience in the Village was episodic and unsatisfactory, but the illusion of my liberation was in place. I had an image of myself as one who knew what was what between the sheets. It was an image I would lose, of course; having discovered that sex is all, one discovers later that all is chaos. But at the time I considered myself an initiate, and that was enough to make me feel like a man.
I was more a man in that regard, I thought suddenly, than the famous Michael Maguire. Hell, he wasn't a hero or even a saint. He was just a virgin. What Michael needed was to get laid.
He was staring at a gray tomb-slab attached to the wall of the chapel just there. I could discern on it the scratched outline of a monk—the cowl, the tonsure, the steeple of his hands; the smug posture.
"Look at that," he said. "It's eerie."
I read the Latin inscription. "Hie pacet venerand Pater Michel."
"Here lies the venerable Father Michael."
EIGHT
"SOMEBODY I've never forgotten or forgiven myself for," Michael said to me many years later, "is Mary Ellen Divine. Do you remember her?"
I did vaguely, but I didn't answer him. He was in a confessing mood and I wanted to hear his story. I didn't want to short-circuit it with one of my cynical cracks. We'd been discussing an article of mine called "Sex and the Single God" in which I'd suggested that priestly celibacy was not only an aberration but a practical heresy since it implicitly denied the essentially sexual dynamic at work between the Persons of the Trinity. What claptrap! And I knew it at the time. I insist now that I was being at least partially ironic, although also, I admit, I'd allowed myself to think for a while that it mattered both whether priests got laid with permission or not and whether the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were real folks or just names we put on Ipsum Esse. I was happily married then, or thought so, and in the first throes of paternal bliss, and was inclined to reify both my family as the ultimate symbol of the tri-une God and fucking—"intercourse," we called it—as the great symbol of the divine interaction. "In His own image created He them; male and female He made them." It was a ludicrous twisting of traditional notions. In my scheme the Son became the feminine principle in the Trinity. But Michael took it seriously—he could be so fucking earnest—and it led to his impulse to tell me about his experience with Mary Ellen. My impulse to pile high the theological bullshit fell at once before an intense, slightly prurient curiosity. I'd have made an unworthy confessor because I wanted to hear the good stuff in detail and at the top. What had he done to her? And when? I would not realize until much later that what he really wanted to confess to me that night but couldn't was his love for Carolyn.
In our time Mary Ellen Divine was considered the most sophisticated girl in Inwood. She was a flat-chested, spidery girl, and this was well before the type was fashionable. But her dark eyes and bony face gave her a look of such intensity that other, more conventionally attractive girls seemed uninteresting by comparison. After high school she got a job downtown in Macy's. Her looks were so striking that eventually they put her behind the makeup and perfume counter. With artfully arranged hair and applied eye shadow and rouge she was like something out of a magazine. During high school she and Michael had been friendly but they'd never dated. I assumed that they didn't see each other again after he went in the army. Not so. Michael didn't tell me at the time, but he went down to Macy's not long after our encounter in the Cloisters hoping to find her.
It was the week before Christmas, and he went into the store on the pretense of buying a gift for his mother. He approached the perfume counter obliquely, one of the throng, as if he didn't know she would be there.
"Michael? Is that you?"
He feigned surprise. In truth he was not prepared for the sight of the glamorous woman, not girl, she'd become. He noticed her lips first, how red they were, opened in surprise as she stared at him. She wore a formal black dress that emphasized her slimness, and jewelry at her wrists and throat that flashed like the seasonal lights against the department store glare. At first Michael thought he'd made a terrible mistake. He felt she'd left him far behind. He stood there, surrounded by women, staring back at her, unable to remember what he was going to say. His speechlessness reinforced the impression that he was completely startled.
"My God!" she said, moving toward him along her side of the counter. "It is you!"
"Mary Ellen Divine!" he said, and he grinned.
They shook hands across the counter.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
Suddenly it seemed juvenile to him to say he was shopping for his mother. It rankled that his mother expected him to go on living with her on Cooper Street after he got out of the army, which was one good reason for staying in. "I was just doing a little shopping."
She smiled at him. "For someone special?"
He nodded.
She gave him a look, as if she wanted to read his secrets, and then she asked casually, "Want suggestions?"
"Sure. Why not?"
She led him along the length of the counter. He had to weave between other shoppers to keep up with her. Finally she stopped. The display case featured small dark bottles of exotic fluids. Michael made a show of studying them.
"What's she like?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know what she's like?"
He looked up sharply, blushing. "Oh. No. I misunderstood. I don't know what she likes."
"If you tell me something about her perhaps I can make a suggestion."
"Well, she's ... hard to describe." Michael lowered his eyes. He knew that he seemed smitten and he regretted the deception he'd stumbled into, but he was si
mply overcome by inarticulateness. Once he'd charmed girls with his talk, but that was before. "Should I tell you what I like?"
"Sure."
"I like this." She reached down for a small bottle and brought it up to the counter top. She placed it carefully, as if it was fragile. "It's by Elizabeth Arden. It's called 'Garden of Delights.' It seems French, but it doesn't cost so much. It's cologne."
"That's nice."
"You haven't smelled it yet." She opened the bottle and briskly upended it on the inside of her wrist, then held her wrist for him to sniff.
He bent toward her. The sensuality of her pose, more even than the scent, was what struck him. He had never had the offer before of the inside of a woman's wrist. Her flesh there was whiter, and the veins were visible. It made him think of the inside of her thighs.
"It's what I'm wearing already, actually."
"'Garden of Delights'?"
"Yes. Silly name, isn't it? But it's rather nice for seven dollars, don't you think?"
"Yes, indeed." In fact the last thing he felt prepared to comment on were the olfactory mysteries of women. His mother smelled of talcum powder, that was all he knew about it. He would never buy her cologne.
"Do you think she'd like it?"
"Is it...? Gee, Mary Ellen, you've got me." He took the cologne from her. Its shape and feel resembled a Vitalis bottle, but the liquid was green. "I was thinking of something a little more ... But if you like it..."
"I do like it, but there are other more special things." She smiled. "Things I can't afford."
"Like what?"
"Imported perfumes. From France."
"Could you show me some?"
"She is special."
He could only bring himself to nod. This deceit seemed ludicrous to him, and it was mortifying. He'd only wanted to conceal how foolish he felt, and how at sea. He was sick of the worship of his mother's circle of Good Shepherd biddies. He was sick of the goggle-eyed deference of the nuns and the chipper camaraderie of the priests who hailed him as if he was one of them. Upon his release from the Chinese prison he'd felt a great exhilaration, but that had faded and the confines of Inwood had been pressing in on him. Was the army his only way out? No wonder he was depressed. If anything, his rediscovery of our friendship only heightened this feeling because, after all, I was gone. Other people our age, even including the few old friends who were still around the parish, were uniformly stiff and uneasy in his presence. When he dared go into the neighborhood tavern, men bought him drinks and waited for his war stories. He'd bought his mother a television set when he'd first come home so that she could watch him on Edward R. Murrow, but in the weeks since his leave began, he'd watched it continually from the time it went on the air in the afternoon. He'd gone to Macy's looking for Mary Ellen partly out of his desperate but unadmitted loneliness, but more because he couldn't stay at home another day watching the antics of Kukla, Fran and Ollie.
"Here's one." Mary Ellen placed a tiny green vial in front of him. "It's called Je Reviens. That means 'I remember.'"
"It's French?"
"Parisian."
"Not a whole lot of it, is there?"
"She would just use a wee bit. It's the most wonderful perfume we sell. You'd know what I mean if you could smell it, but we don't open these. The assumption is, anyone who can afford it knows what it smells like."
"How much?"
"Forty dollars."
"For that little bottle?"
She nodded and laughed, and then started to put it away.
"I'll take it."
Mary Ellen looked up at him. "You're kidding."
"No, I'll take it. You convinced me."
"I wasn't trying to."
"You're a good salesgirl.',' Michael reached for his wallet. "Very good."
"You'll take her breath away, I promise you. My goodness." He saw that he'd taken hers away. He handed her a fifty-dollar bill. "Can I get it gift-wrapped someplace?"
"Downstairs, beside the credit desk, just bring your receipt."
Mary Ellen turned away to write up the sale. She put the boxed perfume in a bag and brought it back to Michael. By then he'd had a chance to think of what to say. "Listen, Mary Ellen, I see how busy you are and everything, but I think it would be nice to shoot the breeze a bit, don't you? I mean, what a coincidence, running into each other like this."
"You look good, Michael. I'm glad. I'm glad things worked out for you." She handed him his bag, then lowered her eyes. "I prayed for you." She looked up quickly. "We all did."
"I know. I think that's why I made it."
They stared at each other and for a moment the bustle around them faded and they were aware only of each other. Michael felt both that they'd been very close friends once, which was not the case, and that he'd never seen her before. Her beauty seemed unreal to him, as if she were one of the store's perfect manikins. But for that instant her feeling, that worry, tinged perhaps with grief and also with the awe he'd grown accustomed to by then, communicated powerfully. She too saw him as a hero, and he sensed that she was drawn to him.
"Anyway, I was wondering how I could see you? Or when?"
Her eyes fell to the bag she'd just given him; what about his girlfriend?
He lowered the bag and deflected the problem it implied. "Or do you work around the clock?"
She laughed. "Not today. I work till six."
"Do you live in Inwood still?"
She nodded. He knew that she still lived with her parents on Isham Street.
"Well, I could ride the train home with you. I'm staying with my mother for a few weeks."
"I'd heard that."
"I have some other shopping to do. I could wait until you got off."
"That would be lovely, Michael."
"Maybe I could buy you dinner."
She stared at him, trying to read his expression, and she said nothing.
He spent the rest of the afternoon sipping coffee in an Automat. He watched the food-windows as if they were television sets.
At a few minutes before six he was back, but Mary Ellen was no longer behind the counter. For a moment he panicked, thinking she'd changed her mind and had slipped away. But then someone touched his elbow.
When he turned he was surprised to find not the glamorous woman with ruby lips, rouged cheeks and shaded eyes, and high-fashion dress, but the Inwood girl, in sweater and skirt, he'd known since they were children. She wore no makeup and her hair was in a ponytail. This second transformation stunned him even more than the first, and now he saw for the first time how truly beautiful she was. And also how familiar. Anxiety drained out of him. "My goodness," he said.
"You didn't think I go around like that, did you?"
"You didn't dress down for me?" He asked this ingenuously. He thought that if she had any appetite for him at all, it would be due to his uniform. It was why he'd worn it.
She shook her head. "Do you mind?"
"Heavens no!" He took her coat out of her arms and helped her into it. "Now I don't have to take you to the Rainbow Room."
It was dark and cold outside, but the sidewalks of Herald Square were crowded with shoppers. Men and women were holding each other and children were craning to see the scenes of Santa's Village in Macy's windows. A Salvation Army lady was ringing her bell, and from loudspeakers hidden above the elf-ridden window displays Bing Crosby was singing, "I'll be home for Christmas."
Michael had an impulse to take Mary Ellen's arm, but he checked it. He was nearly overwhelmed with the feeling that this was a moment he'd have dreamed of if he'd dared. A deep need of which he'd been inchoately aware was for that instant filled, and he felt suddenly free of his morose listlessness. It was possible for him to be inside such a scene, however contingently, a man with a woman on the streets of New York at Christmas. And not a mere man, but a soldier. For our generation the epitome of romance was the GI with his girl, and in our fantasies they were always either at the docks saying farewell or on those streets with snows
falling and Christmas coming.
He bent toward her. "I meant what I said about dinner."
"I think that would be nice. I've already called my mother."
He laughed. What a pair they were! Sophisticated Manhattanites? Inwood Irish Catholics checking in with Ma. He was relieved, though, because she wasn't checking in with a man.
"Where would you like to go?" He asked.
"I'd like to walk first, wouldn't you? Have you walked up Fifth Avenue? Have you seen the decorations?"
"No."
"Michael, really! And you call yourself a New Yorker!"
"And I've never been to the Statue of Liberty either."
They kept their distance from each other as they cut across Broadway toward Fifth Avenue. They knew they were enacting a classic scene. The Christmas carols that wafted magically above them might have been the film score. They passed Santa Clauses and more bellringers. The laden shoppers were good-humored for a change and the mounted policemen at each intersection seemed a very emblem of the benign and joyous season. At Saks Mary Ellen pressed against the windows which displayed animated scenes of life in an Alpine village. "I think ours are better, don't you?"
Michael had barely noticed the Macy's windows, but it was his impression that they had nothing to compare with these lifelike mechanical figures that chopped wood and drove sleighs and toted baskets. Still he agreed with her vigorously.
At Fifty-second Street they crossed into Rockefeller Center to see the tree. They stood on the parapet above the skating rink, aware of the gliding couples and the smooth music, but their gazes were fixed upon the huge spruce decked so abundantly in gaudy lights that the tree itself, its limbs and needles and cones, had no substance. They had been raised to think of this scene, the tree and the rink, as enshrining Christmas every bit as much as the parish nativity, and it would fall short to say that they gave themselves over utterly to the prescribed sentimental enchantment.
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