The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (16 page)

I picked up a hymnbook and leafed through it to take my eyes off the skinny girl in front of me. I felt the priest was warning her about me—she was Maria, I was Serenelli. I wanted it to be a love story, with a happy ending, but I was nervous: in church I never heard love stories, and there were no happy endings.

“Serenelli followed Maria even into the church. He watched her praying. But instead of admiring Maria for her faith, Serenelli harbored impure thoughts. Imagine! In church, this devil was sinning in his heart!”

I tried to read a hymn, I put my fingers on it.

“Serenelli sat in the church and watched the poor girl praying. Wicked thoughts kept him watching. He couldn't take his eyes away from her.”

My eyes were so dazzled with fear for Maria and swallowed laughter I could not make out the words of the hymn.

“The devil was inside Serenelli.”

The name Serenelli made me think of a small fat man with a big nose and black mustache and flat feet, a clown in a brown suit with spaghetti stains on his necktie and a smelly cigar in one hand.

“He followed Maria to her home. She took a shortcut through some woods. The pure innocent soul did not know that this demon was watching her. And when he got a chance he grabbed her and demanded that she commit a sin of impurity.”

Until that point the whole story made sense to me—I could see each separate word as a vivid detail. But “sin of impurity” baffled me. I saw Maria, I saw Serenelli—Serenelli was me. But what did he want? Whatever it was, the sin was so enormous that she would be damned if she did what Serenelli wanted her to do—which was what?

“Maria said that she would never give in to him. She would not commit a sin.”

But in this description—Maria in the woods, talking back to Serenelli—I began to suspect that she was tempted. That the sin attracted her. That she needed to pray, because part of her wanted to give in to Serenelli. In my mind the sin was something to do with kissing her, hugging her, touching her—Serenelli slobbering over her, still holding his smelly stogie in one hand and squeezing Maria Goretti's cheek with the other. I smiled because I saw this clearly—the fat hairy man, the brown suit, the skinny little girl in her ragged skirt and muddy shoes; the woods; the shadows, the puddles, the lighted windows in the girl's distant house.

“When she refused, he stabbed her. Still she prayed to God for strength. Serenelli stabbed her again and again. Even after she fell to the ground this devil stabbed her.”

I was so horrified I let the hymnbook slip to the floor. I saw the knife plunging into Maria Goretti's body. I saw Serenelli transformed from a guinea wop like Chicky DePalma's father, with a mustache and cigar, into a devil with crazy eyes and a bloody dagger. Maria was like the girl sitting hunched and attentive in front of me, so small in my imagining that it seemed especially cruel to stab her more than once. And so thin that I imagined the knife going in one side and the blade point sticking out the other, each thrust of the knife making two wounds, blood spurting out.

“All told, Serenelli stabbed Maria Goretti fourteen times.”

I wanted Father Staley to stop using the name Serenelli, because it was still hard for me to picture a devil named Serenelli.

“As she was dying, her last words were merciful—forgiving her killer. ‘I want him to be with me in Paradise!' Christ on the cross turned aside and said the same thing to the good thief. That is why she is going to be canonized in a few months. She will be a saint! Christ provided the example for Maria Goretti. But who provided the example for Serenelli? It was Judas, the sinner, who betrayed Our Lord and Savior. Let us pray.”

I knelt and prayed but all I saw was the skinny girl in front of me, and wherever I saw bare skin I saw bleeding stab wounds.

More priests appeared in purple albs and frilly smocks at the altar, and the service continued with chanting and incense and foot-washing and the raising of a monstrance, a big spangled trophy with the host inside a round glass door, and the whole gold thing shaped like a blazing sun.

But I sat and stared at the girl's shoulders and head, and I tried to sniff at her hair when she sat back in the pew. When the service ended I watched her leave. She did so in a hurry, not looking at me, which I felt was her way of noticing me.

Good Friday was a holy day of obligation: it was a sin not to attend church. I knew I would run into my friends. The week had developed slowly for me, the progress at church had allowed me to be near the pretty girl I devoured with my eyes from behind, the girl who, to my confusion, to my guilty flustered pleasure, had confessed to “impure thoughts.”

John Burkell was sitting on the church steps chewing his tie. When he saw me he started complaining about the length of the service.

“This thing is going to last a year.”

He was snapping a stiff card the size of a playing card.

“What's that?”

He handed it over. One side showed Jesus rising to a multicolored Heaven, and under a prayer was a small cellophane window with a cloth dot, the size of a dot that a paper punch made.

“Part of the Holy Shroud,” Burkell said.

But I read,
Fragment of a piece of linen that has touched the Holy Shroud,
and pointed this out to Burkell.

“Same thing,” he said.

As we were talking, Chicky DePalma walked over, his footsteps making clicking sounds from the metal taps on his heels, clickety-click, like a tap dancer.

“That's
gatz
,” Chicky said. “Look at this.”

He took out a small card with a similar cellophane window, but this one showed a dark chip of wood.

“Piece of the True Cross.”

It looked like the sort of splinter that you tweezed out of your finger after you'd been fooling in woodworking class.

Burkell said, “My old man says they've found enough pieces of the True Cross to rebuild the Italian navy.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Chicky asked.

But I was laughing, imagining a whole harbor of bobbing ships, all of them made of tiny dark splinters.

“Your old man's a Protestant,” Chicky said. “What does he know?”

Burkell went silent and chewed his necktie.

“They got a mixed marriage,” Chicky said to me, and made an Italian gesture of emphasis, flipping the fingers of one hand.

“My folks aren't the only ones,” Burkell said in a small beaten voice—he was embarrassed at having to admit that one of his parents was a Protestant—that is, damned to Hell for all eternity. He was watching the steps, his face tight with shame, looking at the people going in to the Good Friday service. “Her parents got one, too.”

The pale skinny girl had just walked by.

“Her father's a Jew. Her mother's Catholic. That's worse. Jews are Christ killers.”

I controlled myself and said, “What's her name?”

“Evelyn Frisch. She goes to the Swan School. Her sister's a tramp. She lives down near you, off Hickey Park.”

I had never seen her. I said so.

Burkell said, “Because of her folks, the mixed marriage. She only started to come here a few months ago.”

The fact that she had chosen to come to church alone, to attend Holy Week services, made her seem virtuous. She was always on her own. She got down on her bony knees and prayed. But I hoped that she was also showing up partly to be near me, to let me see her, as part of a flirtation.

In church we could be near, we could stare at each other, examine each other's clothes, study each other's face and body. At school this was impossible—someone would notice us and start teasing. And anyway, Evelyn Frisch did not go to my school. But in church, in the candlelight, in the mottled shadows of the stained-glass windows, it was possible for me to gaze at her for a long time and satisfy myself—and today, Good Friday, more than ever, for the slip that had been just peeping out last Monday at the Novena was now sagging lower, giving me a glimpse of satin and lace flopping against her leg as she mounted the stairs to St. Ray's.

“How did you know her sister's a tramp?” Chicky said.

Burkell said, “She's a pig. Vinny Grasso saw her making out with a tenth-grader at the drive-in.”

A sharp voice startled us: “Why are you hanging around here? Get inside.”

With a frown on her bristly face, a nun loomed over us like a bat in her black cloak.

“It's disrespectful to loiter here. This is the house of our Lord and Savior. Get a move on!”

As we started to go in, slightly hunched for fear she might hit us, she snatched at me, got a grip on my arm, and pulled me aside. Chicky and Burkell hurried ahead.

“I saw you yesterday,” the nun said. “You were smiling.”

That was true—I was sitting in the pew, smiling at the sound of the name Serenelli. But how had she seen me?

She pinched my chin and said, “Do you think there's something humorous about immorality?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you think that mortal sin is something to smile about?”

“No, Sister.”

“Are you going into church to mock Jesus today?”

“No, Sister.”

“And betray our Lord, like Judas?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you know what happened to Judas?”

“He went to Hell, Sister.”

“He took a halter and hanged himself by the neck,” the nun said. ‘And then he went to Hell, because he was a sinner. Do you know what Hell is?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Hell means you never see the face of Christ.”

That did not seem so bad to me—in fact, I was relieved when she said it. She still had a grip on my chin. “I'm going to be watching you. I know your parents. If I see any mockery I'm going to tell them.”

She pinched my chin one last time and pushed me so hard I stumbled on the granite step and almost fell. As I got my balance and looked back I saw her crooked lips and bristly cheeks.

Chicky and Burkell were waiting for me inside the door by the holy water font. We dunked our fingers and blessed ourselves and went up the aisle, sitting together, far behind Evelyn Frisch. When the praying Father Staley said the word “chrism” Burkell muttered it and had a laughing fit, covering his mouth.

Saint Theresa, Saint Patrick, Saint Michael, and Saint Rose of Lima looked down on us, and so did the nun. Chicky picked his nose and flicked a piece of snot into the aisle, and the nun hauled him out of the pew, gripping his head. A little later, Burkell folded the Easter Message into a paper plane and kept it on his lap, and he was next to go. Then I was alone, hungry from having fasted, no breakfast, no lunch, and straining to see Evelyn Frisch.

Good Friday was a terrible holy day. The service lasted three hours—each time I thought it was over there was a new prayer, more kneeling, another procession, an upraised ciborium, and a louder chant. The day commemorated the arrest of Jesus, his denunciation by Pilate, his robe stripped from him, the whipping, the jamming onto his head of the crown of thorns. He was given a heavy wooden cross to carry. He was spat upon by the same people who had welcomed him on Palm Sunday.

“And he was brought to Golgotha, which means the Place of the Skull,” Father Staley was reading. And he described the rusty nails, the hammering, the bleeding, the cross raised up with Christ slumping upon it.

“
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
—Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Father Staley was still reading.

Christ asked for a drink of water. A Roman soldier dipped some bread in vinegar and hoisted it on his spear to torment him. Another soldier stabbed Christ in the side to make sure he was dead, and later Christ was taken down from the cross by Mary and some others, and he lay dead and bleeding on their laps.

The service continued, recalling blood and pain, death and darkness, “Free Barabbas,” the Jews saying “Crucify him! He is not our king. Our king is Caesar!,” the rusty nails, the suffering of Jesus, “the passion and death,” the Good Thief, the Bad Thief, the storm, the earthquake, the suicide of Judas. Much worse for me was that I was sitting at the back of the church, too far from Evelyn Frisch for me to see her. But at least I knew her name.

Kneeling alone in church on Holy Saturday in a thinner crowd than yesterday—today was not a holy day of obligation—I was not watching the altar. My gaze was fixed on Evelyn Frisch, now in the pew just in front of me. She had entered the church after me, she had chosen to sit where I could see her. She knew what was in my head: that I had come there to worship her.

I stared at her neck, her tangled hair, her limp jacket, her droopy slip. She was kneeling, and so I knelt. I was praying to her; I hoped she was praying to me.

The priest appeared with two altar boys hurrying beside him. He busied himself at the altar, muttering in Latin, the boys replying. He opened and closed the tabernacle, he fussed with the chalice, he smoothed the linen napkins. At the consecration one boy shook the hand bells and Father Staley shuffled the host and snapped it apart with his scaly fingers and said,
“Hoc est enim corpus meum,
” and I thought, This is my body, Evelyn.

The host was not bread anymore; it had been transformed into the body of Christ, as the wine sloshing in the chalice had been made into blood. Father Staley was leaning on the altar, his elbows on the marble, eating and drinking, chewing body, swallowing blood. I knew what was happening, I had half believed it because there was nothing else to believe. But now I believed in Evelyn Frisch, body and soul.

The way she knelt and prayed in a posture of struggle seemed to show that she was trying to believe, praying for strength. I was also kneeling, but I was not praying anymore, I was thinking: It is so hard to believe in God, and harder still to love him, or Christ the criticizer. It was so easy to love this skinny girl, who was full of life and yet frail, dressed poorly, probably in hand-me-downs, and yet her clothes attracted me. And half Jewish was alluring too; she was odd, exotic, didn't really belong here, and although she had never looked directly at me, she knew exactly where I was. We were together in church, worshiping together, worshiping each other, amid the watery flicker of lighted candles.