After This (14 page)

 

“It would be nice to untangle ourselves a bit,” her mother said.
Clare stirred against her shoulder, moved the ringers 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.
T
HE 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 sixpiece set of Danish modern from Sears, which gave the new room a
sleek, sciencefiction 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.
T
HE 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 doorknobs, 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.

 

And yet, the smell of the incense from the censer was the smell of
the incense of old, and the stately movement of the priests in their
robes as they walked down the aisles swinging them, sending the pale
smoke into the air, their free hands placed gently over their hearts,
was as it had always been. At his shoulder, Jacob’s bowed head and
thin folded hands reassured him somewhat (and told him the three
hundred a year for four years that he’d spent on his Catholic high
school might actually have purchased the boy something). Beside
Jacob, Clare had lost her initial, openmouthed fascination with the
saucer-shaped ceiling and was now simply studying her sister’s hand
(which Annie, limply, had allowed her to take into her lap), studying
especially the latest boyfriend’s thick high-school ring, which Annie
had made smaller with a welt of yellow yarn. Beside her, Michael
sprawled in the pew (three hundred a year for three years with not
much to show for it), his eyes cast down not in prayer but in a kind of
wry embarrassment for how utterly mistaken everyone around him,
everyone who had ever had a hand in the construction of this place,
seemed to be.

 

As soon as the priest said, “The Mass is ended” (“Thanks be to
God,” was the only response Michael joined in on, saying it loudly and
sarcastically and always adding, just loudly enough for his siblings to
hear, “Let’s cruise”), Michael was in the aisle, out the door, the first to
grab a fresh Sunday
News
from the pile outside of Krause’s store.
He carried it and his ritual bottle of Sunday-morning root beer
back to his parents’ car. They were delayed, touring the new church
(his father testing the confessional’s sturdy doors, his mother with the
girls on either side of her clucking her tongue at each white and nearly
indiscernible depiction of Christ’s suffering). Sitting on the warm
hood of his father’s car, Michael watched the people leaving the
church, getting into their own cars, pulling out. He saw Lori Ballinger
walking behind her parents, her legs tan, her hair glossy in the sun,
and he raised the bottle of soda in a debonair salute. She waved back,
smiling.

 

When Jacob joined him (“They’re talking to people,” was his only
explanation for their parents’ further delay), Michael said that he had
seen her. “She’s cute,” Jacob said.

 

“A nice girl, I hear,” Michael added, emphasizing nice so that
Jacob would know he hadn’t said “good.”

 

Jacob knew, and showed that he knew with a slight smile. He put
out his hand and his brother passed him the soda, although he said as
he did, “Get your own.” Jacob took a drink and then passed it back. It
was a taste that made him feel ten years old.

 

“Where the hell are they?” Michael said. He leaned back on the
hood, his knees raised. “Why the hell didn’t you take your car?” The
sky was clear blue above them, hardly a wisp of cloud. He felt
sometimes that all he did anymore was wait. He put his hand in his
pants pocket and found a stubby pencil from the golf course where he
caddied. He sat up. “Let’s walk home,” he said. “I’ll leave a note.” He
wrote across the clean border at the top of the Sunday

 

comics. Propped the entire paper up on the windshield and secured it
with a wiper, left the empty soda bottle beside it. His father’s car, a ’65
Ford, was, he told Jacob, a piece of junk.