Because with just the right dress, I might ignore the scene outside my window. With glitter-tipped shoes, I might walk around like Nancy, cool and bright, well-appointed, and just right.
So given the choice between a father and fringe, I would have had to admit that Victorian gowns folded out from steamship trunks would win every time.
Hands down.
67
Our house was number ten, between the Spades and the Smiths. The Smiths were next door to us, at eight. Unlike other families on Lamont, the Smith family did not attend Corpus Christi, and drove instead to St. Bridget’s on the other side of town. Only their youngest daughter attended the neighborhood church. She was called Happy, and the name was something like cruelty, considering that her family was the craziest on the street. They could have been hillbillies, for all the banged-up appliances piled into their front yard, all the babies running around without shoes. All of them were speech-disordered, to a greater or lesser degree, so that their talk was neither pretty nor a resource they relied upon much.
Fighting was what the Smiths did best.
Not that fighting was foreign to the street. People fought all the time. Mothers smacked kids upside the head for spending bread money on candy or soda. Women let loose on the men in their lives, accused them of drunkenness and cheating. Men raised their voices at women, told them to stay put, pulling them back into houses by their hair when they tried to leave.
Still, the fights between the Smiths and whatever target they chose were different somehow. More hateful and regular. They resulted in bloodied faces and ambulances. Their fighting was ugly. But compelling. It glued us to windows, hands clenched—hating what we saw, but unable to pull ourselves away.
The Spades were on the other side of our house. Unlike the Smiths, they spoke well and often. Their car was parked just below our bedroom window and Steph and I pushed our noses into the wire mesh of the screen and looked onto their driveway. We were riveted by Mr. Spade, in particular. We loved the way he stripped off his shirt to wash the family car, the way suds and water pushed the hairs on his legs into dark swirls against his skin. That his name was Dick only made things juicier.
His wife wore stylish clothes and their children had the best toys around, including two fully functional swing sets and an entire collection of Star Wars action figures. Still, things were deteriorating on the street, and they were a young couple with options, so they decided to leave. Other families followed suit. The O’Connells. The Aubreys. The Dinardos. Anyone with a car that started.
68
When we’d returned to Rochester, we found that Annmarie VanEpps and her nervous little mother lived at 20 Lamont, and we were reunited with them when we moved onto the street. The Sullis were at five, the Rosarios at four, the Matizzis at three. All of them attended Corpus Christi church and, as a result, knew each other not only as neighbors, but as parishioners and fellow Catholics.
The church became as much a backdrop in my life as the street. Though I was anchored in the realities of life and death and couldn’t bring myself to fully believe in resurrection, or water turning into wine, I loved reading stories from the Bible, and listened to the priest interpret them as often as I could. The softness of the church and her community combined and contrasted with the starkness of Lamont Place and provided a steady heartbeat and rhythm to my life.
Together they were home.
69
She didn’t come at first.
My mother.
She stayed home while I made my way to church. Once we moved onto Lamont Place, I rekindled my friendship with Annmarie, and it was by following her that I discovered the huge old building filled with light and warmth.
Annmarie loved the place and the people. She introduced me to them, and gave me a recap of her First Communion: the white dress, the veil, the cake.
“It’s sorta like a wedding,” she said, “only instead of getting married, you get to take communion after.”
I thought back to Lisa’s old lace communion dress, which had been left on the reservation, and remembered the photos taken of the oldest kids with rosaries and Bibles tucked under their hands. Lisa had been smiling in her communion picture. The veil she wore made her into a tiny bride.
It all sounded good to me. So I scheduled a meeting with the priest and arranged a First Communion of my own. I had already started to attend catechism, and planning a sacrament gave me more motivation to learn the Apostles’ Creed.
“That sounds like a pretty good idea,” the young priest said, and had me sit in his office while he found me a book to study from.
I made big plans. I’d borrow Annmarie’s white dress, clip two grass-green barrettes into my hair, and talk my mother into buying a pair of white tights.
It was only after I’d done these things, had the dress in my closet and the prayers on my tongue, that Father Shea walked from the rectory to my house one spring afternoon.
I hadn’t wanted him to come, didn’t want him to see where I lived, the mismatched furniture and scratched-up floors. I said it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted, said he’d feel better about my communion with my mother’s blessing and so sat in our kitchen and ate the boxed donuts my mother put before him while I perched on an old stepping stool and leaned into their conversation.
Most girls receive First Communion on a Sunday in May, but I chose the Thursday Night Folk Mass. I preferred guitars and jeans to organ music and starched cotton. My white-stockinged knees knocked into each other as I stood and read from the Old Testament. I destroyed the names of Hebrew tribes and desert places and, after Mass, went downstairs, relieved and laughing, only to discover that the communion party my mother planned had been stolen. Someone had crept downstairs during Mass and taken all the cards and gifts—gifts that the givers later described in painstaking detail:
“Oh, it was a lovely set! A cream-colored scarf, I know you would have loved it,” and, “The necklace was just perfect, with crystal beads that shone in the sun.”
Only the cake my mother had ordered from the Sweetheart Bakery was spared. A gigantic translucent sugar Host hovered on white frosting, and yellow pudding ran through its marble center. As people came up and described the book or doll or rosary beads they’d gotten me, I stood still in my pretty white dress. I’d never had a party of my own, with guests and presents and a bakery cake. The loss was strange, but a party would have been even stranger, and I didn’t feel nearly as bad as I knew I should.
At least I could receive the bread and wine, I told myself. At least there was that.
And it was in the basement, after my First Communion Mass, that I looked around the table and noticed my family there. All of them. Will and Anthony talking with strangers. Lisa with a group of teenage girls. Rachel and Mallory standing near my mother. Steph by my side. Though I had come on my own, they were there, standing around the cake like replacement gifts. All of them, shuffling in, taking their places, learning to speak their own prayers.
70
Body of Christ.
That’s what Corpus Christi meant in Latin.
Younger kids called it Corpus Crispy, and it wasn’t as nice a name as the neighboring parishes: St. Philip Neri, St. Ambrose, and Mount Carmel.
But it was my church.
And when I wasn’t going back and forth between public schools, it was my school, too. Because I had returned to the church before my mother, I behaved as though I’d discovered the place or built it myself, stone by stone—but in truth, the church had always been a part of our family.
I was baptized there. Back in April 1968, two strangers dabbed my forehead with oil, stood beside the font, and said prayers over me. The woman was pretty and young. A nun, according to my mother, who’d abandoned the sisterhood soon after my baptism. She didn’t remember much of the man, just that he was a kind-hearted parishioner who felt sorry for the rust-haired baby with no one to stand up for her. My mother couldn’t remember either of their names, but they took me into their
arms, anointed me with oil, and became my godparents just the same.
My mother’s Catholicism ran hot and cold. In fairness to Rome, the religion she practiced should have had its own name. It glorified mystery, but resisted authority. She opposed birth control, for instance, but had a certain appreciation for sex outside of marriage, and sex in general. She’d stay away from the church for whole stretches of time, only to re-emerge wearing a scapular under her shirt, proud of the tiny badge that guaranteed straight passage to heaven in the event of an accident or sudden illness. Her behavior ranged from embarrassingly devout (she said rosaries to cure common ailments like warts and ringworm) to shamefully liberal (she advised us not to marry the first man we fell in love with; certainly not the first we slept with.) She learned her Catholicism from her mother, and who knows where my grandmother learned hers.
Missionaries maybe.
Her own mother had been wild, making up her own rules about everything, but adoring the Virgin all the while. Her father, on the other hand, was a practical man, a woodcutter and a Methodist, who was suspicious of Catholics and was said to have driven away the unfortunate priest who came to the house to call on his wife. My mother had both sides of her lineage battling inside of her, the sloppily devout along with the untrusting and practical. Except for St. Mary’s downtown, where she’d had her only wedding, Corpus Christi was the church she’d always attended. It was closest in proximity to the various places we’d lived in the city, the hub of the circle we’d traveled. My mother had had every one of us baptized there, which could not have been easy, considering that the babies kept coming—even after she’d separated from her husband—and each child offered up had an entirely different set of features.
71
So many kids attended Thursday Night Mass at Corpus Christi that they sent a van for us. Rusted lesions covered the side of the two-toned vehicle, whose windows had been replaced by clear plastic and duct tape. The van shuddered as it moved and sounded like it was at war with itself. But somehow it managed to hold itself together and rattle its way through the neighborhood, scooping us up for the weekly folk Mass.
The van stopped on Goodman Street first, for Francie and her grandma, then made its way down Webster Avenue, gathered up the Morales girls, before it turned onto Lamont Place, and parked in front of number four.
Kids came running from houses, shouting that the van was here. Flopping onto the van’s torn vinyl seats, we were whisked away to Mass, where everyone (except Francie’s grandma, who draped herself in a black lace veil, and convulsed like clockwork during the Our Father each week) wore jeans or corduroys and was so relaxed that they moved from wooden pews to the carpeted sanctuary, the bosom of the church. After we’d professed our faith and the bread became body, we’d leave the hard kneelers behind to gather in a circle around the candlelit altar and celebrate together.
72
Religious instruction was an intimate affair at Corpus. In earlier years, classes had met in cracked plaster rooms, grouped according to age, and students were given lessons on the Bible and morality by nuns or similarly inclined women. But when Father Shea was assigned to the declining inner-city church, he shook things up. He pulled children out of dusty classrooms and paired them with the new parishioners who flocked to the church from the suburbs upon his arrival. Birkenstocked vegetarians who said “God is love” replaced polyester-skirted nuns who said “God is watching.” Studying other religions, preparing Passover dinner complete with Manischewitz products, and writing poetry from the heart, replaced rote memorization of the beatitudes.
I was paired with Julie Augsbury. She was young and fresh, and though I followed her around like the tail of a kite, I was not inclined to follow directions. I refused to write self-esteem poetry, for instance, and was not quieted by matzo crackers and kosher grape juice. I insisted on choosing my own topics, firing off questions about premarital sex while she did her best to steer our lesson back to the prodigal son and the nature of forgiveness.
“Do you understand why the father welcomed his son back?” Julie asked, looking me in the eye, hoping the mystery of her question would snare me.
“Because he was stupid,” I answered.
“Is that what you think?” she asked, her face pink.
I laughed.
She labored.
“What would you feel like if you were the other brother?”
Her attempt was noble, but I strayed.
Again and again.
She’d redirect.
I’d sneer.
Until her patience finally gave out and she requested a reassignment. She got a sweet-faced seven-year-old eager for poems about matzo and I got Sylvia Kostin, the fingernail-inspecting elementary teacher whose name meant serious business to anyone who’d sat through her third-grade class at Corpus Christi School.
Anyone but Mrs. Kostin, I thought, suddenly finding myself entirely capable of prayer. I ran to find the golden-haired Julie, eager to spout my understanding of the prodigal son and the nature of forgiveness into her ear.
“If I was the other brother, I’d resent my brother, be angry with my father, but in the end, I’d forgive them both,” I said, grabbing at her hand. “Forgiveness is so important.”
Julie shrugged. It was out of her hands now, she said, a bit of satisfaction squatting in the corner of her eye.
Older than my mother and rumored to wear a wig, Mrs. Kostin scared me. No way, I said of my new tutor, but by then, my mother was back at church and in charge enough to demand that I continue instruction with Mrs. Kostin. Sylvia Kostin. The teacher I feared and didn’t want to sit next to, but who, it turned out, was patient and calm and, as she set a story before me and asked me to consider the nature of love, brought out those same features in me. She sat me under the tulip tree in her backyard, serving lemonade while I read, and whether because of her reputation or expectations, I found that the words that came from my mouth in her presence, though perhaps strained, were thoughtful.
“Forgiveness is hard to believe in,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “keep going.”
Melting my mouthiness without making me feel small, Sylvia was serious enough to encourage reflection and gracious enough to forgive ignorance. She had converted from Judaism years ago, but not before she’d had enough Manischewitz to take the intrigue out of it, and so, as we sat in her yard, Sylvia returned me to the scriptures, revealed the poetry of the beatitudes, asked me what I thought.
73
The church had its own smell.
Sweet and musky.
The incense used at funerals was strong, and lingered always in the background, while the high sweet perfume worn by legions of old ladies seemed captured in the very grain of the pews. Candles glowed, and smelled like rain as they melted. The balsam of sacramental oils mixed with the sad scent of prayers trapped and beating against the rafters.
The windows leaked light, bled color onto whitewashed walls, thickened the air with their hues. I faced the great panel of stained glass behind the high altar, and when the sun hit just right, the window spilled its sapphire and scarlet into the church and everything was on fire. I stared at the window during Mass, imagining that if stained glass had a taste, it would be overripe plum, sweet and strong in my mouth.
The building’s exterior was tangled with ivy, its interior split into alcoves and domes ornamented with statues, thick pillars, and stations of the cross. The church was huge, high-ceilinged and heavy. An ark, really. Thick beams supported the plaster ceiling like the sturdy spine of a whale. I was Jonah, safe in the belly of a whale, I thought, as I leaned back and looked up at bats I pretended were doves flitting back and forth in the rafters.
I was comfortable there. Except for the joining of hands during the recitation of the Our Father, which made my hands so sticky that they adhered to whatever surface they touched. I tried my best to last out the prayer, and sometimes managed. But mostly, I fled. From the too-tight, too-loose holding of hands, the flar
ing of group prayer—the movement of everyday voices from apologetic mew to insistent boom. Hiding in the last pew, I waited for the chanting to end, then emerged for the payoff. I’d blow my hands dry, run out for the Kiss of Peace where, like a starved hummingbird, I’d flit from person to person, taking just a bit of sweet before moving on.
74
The communion rail lasted only months after Father Shea’s arrival. He was all for removing barriers, wanted the altar accessible to everyone. Though in truth, the communion rail had already begun to crumble before he came; whole sections were missing or broken, like the remains of an ancient Greek temple. Still, it was solid enough to lean against, its marble smooth and cool, and while it stood it was a favorite backdrop for teenage girls who gathered before Mass, leaning their summer flesh against it, comparing fingernail polish, sharing lip gloss, taking joy in being watched.
The broken marble rail was also the place where the gold-guitared folk group played during Mass, strummed songs we could bear until later, in the basement, we’d gather, child and teenager—even adult—and slip quarters into the old jukebox, then dance to Rick James and the Sugar Hill Gang.
The Corpus Christi community was strong. It organized picnics, held car washes, sponsored retreats. At Silver Lake, or the Jello Mansion in Leroy, the old house with a pond and canoes left to the diocese by the inventor of America’s favorite jiggly treat. We paddled in canoes, talked about our lives, made collages to represent our dreams, then confessed our sins to Father Shea.
Corpus managed to put a more positive spin on sin, and confessions were not performed in locked boxes, but in the open air—in the soft cover of a retreat house or in the flickering light of a candled altar. All but one of the church’s confessionals were reclaimed as storage and loaded up with stereo equipment. The one that remained was used by the few parishioners who still preferred the screen, and required that their Saturday sessions for forgiveness remain dark and enclosed.
Ghostbread Page 9