Her long friendship with Frances had seemed indestructible, until a girl named Moira Bangs moved to town in seventh grade with her fishnet stockings and her great idea to have a Little Prince club. Evvie had loved The Little Prince, but had not loved how Moira claimed Frances for her best friend, as if Evvie didn’t exist. Rather than fight for Frances, Evvie had retreated entirely, reading books about the astronauts. Now she felt a fresh humiliation remembering how badly she’d wanted Frances to drag her away from outer space and back to the world. Why did any of this matter now? Why did old wounds still seem present in the body, in the way that happiness did not? Why couldn’t happiness leave the same deep traces? And where was she going to sleep tonight? She sat down on what had been the front stoop of the Trudnack house.
After a while, an old man stood on his front porch next door.
“Hello, sir. Would you mind if I used your phone?” Evvie asked him, standing up.
He didn’t answer. He just looked at her.
“Just for a quick moment. I’d like to call my parents.”
“Where you come from?”
“I was raised two blocks from here.”
“Uh-huh. OK. Come on.”
Evvie followed him into the narrow house, which smelled of split pea soup and newspapers. A loud television was tuned into a rerun of I Love Lucy. Evvie stopped and watched for a second. “Love this show,” she said, turning to the man, but he was not in the mood to chat. He pointed her to an old rotary phone on a table by an armchair. “Sit on down and make your call,” he said. She sank into the old chair and picked up the heavy receiver. The old man hovered over her, watching closely as she dialed, as if making sure it wasn’t long distance.
The phone rang and rang. Just as she was ready to give up, her father answered.
“Hey, Dad!” Tears of relief filled her eyes.
After a short hesitation, her father said, “Pittsburgh!” He called all of his children by the names of their adopted hometowns, including Louise, who lived in Saint Paul. “What’s new with you, Pittsburgh?”
“Actually, I’m in town for business, and I thought I’d spend the night with you guys.”
“Business?”
“You know, animal stuff.”
“Right, right. Well, sure, come right on over!”
“Be there soon.” Evvie smiled and hung up the phone. “Thank you so much,” she told the old man, who followed close behind her as she made her way back to the night. She would be a pleasant guest for her parents, full of small talk. She would eat, sleep, and get back on the train.
Her father greeted her at the door with what might be called a hug. They hadn’t been a family of huggers until Evvie’s sister Mary brought a hugging, hippie fiancé into the mix years ago. The hippie hadn’t lasted the year; the hugging habit stayed. But it still wasn’t all that natural to the family.
Evvie wondered why her father was dangling car keys and why the house was so dark.
Her mother, as it turned out, was out doing karaoke. “She’s quite the karaoke junkie,” her father said, smiling at Evvie. “Two, three times a week now. You gotta come hear.”
“OK. Great.”
“How you doing?” he said now, walking her to the car. “Keepin’ it simple, are ya?”
“Oh yeah,” she agreed. She loved him and usually softened in his presence, but felt strangely absent now.
“Good, good. Ya keep it simple and you got it in the bag, kid.”
“Easy does it,” Evvie agreed.
“Your mom wishes you’d call home more often these days,” he said, as they got into the car.
“I will, I will. Just really busy.”
“We know all you kids have lives. That’s a good thing.”
He drove her to the Greek restaurant, where they sat in a high-backed wooden booth drinking Cokes while a guy who looked like Moe from the Three Stooges sang a fascinating version of “You Shook Me All Night Long,” followed by a young woman in eight-inch heels who belted out “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Evvie’s mother was up front with her karaoke friends at a long table. The plan was to wait and surprise her, give her a standing ovation after she sang.
Between the next two songs, both Rolling Stones numbers sung by what appeared to be a biker couple, Evvie’s father asked her about the Steelers. Did she think Troy Polamalo would be the backbone again next year?
“Troy and Hines Ward.” Evvie nodded, her eyes on her mother, who was rising from her seat now.
“She’s up next,” her father said. “The lady is up and rarin’ to go. Watch out, America.”
Evvie’s heart quickened. Her mother wore a red dress and had a strange kind of star appeal for a hefty woman in her seventies. Soon she was up there singing “Sweet Caroline” like a pro whose life had placed some salty, scratchy, beautiful resistance in her notes. Evvie, listening, felt both proud and protective. It was easy to love her mother from this distance, as part of a friendly audience in the dark. Evvie looked over at her father, whose face registered a complex mixture of love and fear. It was good to be here, Evvie told herself. Everything’s going to work out fine, eventually. Bad times come and bad times go, and people survive and go forward. And now she stood for the standing ovation, and her mother, seeing her there with her father, waved and smiled, her face lighting up, then settling into confusion.
Evvie smiled broadly to let her know that everything was all right, while the audience asked for an encore. “Come on, Gracie, one more! Knock it outta the park!”
Her mother didn’t need to be coaxed. She began singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and her friends went wild. Evvie watched her father watching her mother, and for a few stark moments, he looked suddenly old, like a stranger. Then he was himself again. The love in his face, born of the pain and effort of a lifelong marriage, was exquisite. She steeled herself against the sadness rising in her chest, and kept her eyes on her singing mother. Then rose for another standing ovation.
Evvie
Just after Cedric moved out to live in a house of Russian professionals in Greenfield, Evvie walked down Forbes Avenue one Saturday afternoon, eating a bagel, and ran into a landlady whom she had rented from over fifteen years before. Tessie did not appear to have aged much since then. She was still a tanklike woman in a thin cotton dress and black tie shoes, still had the odd habit of talking out of the side of her mouth, still accepted animals—even a big dog like Ruth was OK—and still loved the great saint Padre Pio. In fact, when Evvie asked her, “Do you still have a devotion to Padre Pio?” Tessie’s bright eyes widened, as if it were severely sacrilege to suggest that such devotion could ever fade. “You bet I do!” And yes, she had a room available.
The room was right across from the old room she had lived in the summer she’d met Ben. That old room had been small and white, with a wooden floor, a single mattress, and a boom box. She’d owned almost nothing then and was happy that way, making minimum wage in a record store that had long since closed, waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant on the South Side, and sometimes singing in a band—mostly punk bands that formed and broke apart every few months. No matter where she worked, it had been good to come home to such an exquisitely empty room, knowing there were other people in the other rooms, most of them older and all of them friendly and strange. She bought a broom and liked the daily habit of sweeping the wooden floor. She remembered thinking that summer, this is who I was meant to be. Someone who lives in simplicity in a boardinghouse with old people. Someone who sweeps the wooden floor in the morning. She had not been aware then that her happiness was dependent on a sense of infinite possibility, that the view from that room was a wide-open future, a yellow-brick road with no end in sight.
Then she met Ben and her little empty room seemed suddenly irrelevant,
except that it was a container now, for all her longing, and for what soon became a transfiguring love. Ben brought his cassettes of Jimmy Cliff and Joan Armatrading and Leonard Cohen and the Smiths and the Stranglers and a hundred others. Then he brought two guinea pigs, Lou and Marlene, in a big cage.
And his guitar and the stories of his life. Summer of endless revelation, childhood grief still fresh under their skin, they talked through the nights and cried when they made love, and sometimes Rudy the magician, who lived downstairs, woke them in the middle of the night to tell them, “You think I’m just Rudy from Baltimore, when really I’m the Messiah!” And Rudy’s friend Mrs. May, a sixty-year-old woman on the third floor, kept chinchillas and made whiskey Popsicles, and agreed that Rudy was the Messiah. It was that kind of place, that kind of beginning for Ben and Evvie. Now it was strange to be back in the house, which in the new century had a new spirit, filled up with college students, except for Diligence Chung, who Tessie had said was “a little Chinese Jesus freak,” when really she was a pale, thin Korean missionary who wore a purple wool hat and long skirt, no matter the weather. She liked to sing God songs to Evvie.
“People who work near me at the Frame Shop, including the real estate people in the office next door, don’t understand why I can’t just get over it,” Evvie told Tessie one hot August night. They sat on the front porch. “And one of the lawyers across the street, this young woman in a suit, says to me, ‘You just need to get laid. Then maybe you’ll get your appetite back and cheer up. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get divorced,’ she said, ‘but if it happened, I’d seriously think about all the people I could suddenly sleep with. I mean, can’t you look at this as a little get-out-of-jail-free card?’ ”
Evvie was drinking Tessie’s brother’s homemade Italian wine and feeling pretty good tonight.
“People got no respect,” Tessie said. “They all lost the compass.” She’d bent over to take her black tie shoes off, and now her bare feet sat planted resolutely on the cement of the front porch. In her white metal chair, she leaned forward toward the street, mildly wary of whoever passed by, her eyes following them until they were out of sight.
“Divorce is so common people think it’s no big deal,” Evvie continued. “You know, all the stars are doing it, all the neighbors are doing it, all the politicians are doing it—it’s like some kind of dance where you just change partners, and life goes on. But really it’s death. It rends the soul.” Evvie took a swig of wine, then held it up to the sinking sun. “I feel like warning the whole world. Not that they’d listen.”
“It’s terrible, what you’re going through. All you young people. In my day, you got married, you stayed married, that was that. My husband and I didn’t expect life should be so fun. Now it’s everybody has to have their fun.” She sipped her own glass of wine, which was leaving a purple mustache on her face. “And all the rush, rush, rush. Where do the people think they’re going?”
Evvie took another sip and sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Six feet under.”
Tessie never rushed around. She made tomato sauce and ate dinner and collected rent and fed the dog and cats or rode around with her brother Robert and his wife, Carla, in an old Cadillac, slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. Around her neck Padre Pio’s handsome, bearded face was framed in a gold locket. Tessie had told Evvie that the saint had stopped the Americans from bombing San Giovanni Rotondo during the Second World War by appearing in his brown robes up in the sky before the enemy planes. This was a documented miracle, and besides, her late husband had seen it with his own eyes. Evvie dimly recalled learning about the saint in third grade, how he’d had the stigmata, and how the nun had instructed them all to pray that the wounds of Jesus showed up in their own bodies, and how one kid, Eddie McKeever, had shouted No! from the back row.
“Mr. McKeever, you can step out into the hallway now,” the nun said, horrified.
“Prayer is the oxygen of the heart,” Tessie said now. “I would be dead without this man.” She held the medal up and closed her eyes. Then opened them. Behind where Tessie sat, Diligence Chung stepped out of the house in her long skirt and purple hat. She had a beautiful face, a quietly certain expression. Evvie liked Diligence, though wished she didn’t sing in such high octaves. “Do you mind if I sing to Jesus the Christ?” she’d asked when they first met. “Not at all.” And Diligence bent down to pet Ruth. “I love you, dog,” she’d said.
“Where you headed tonight?” Tessie asked her now.
“To services,” Diligence practically whispered, then took a little bow and floated out toward the sidewalk. They watched her go in silence.
Tessie invited Evvie to take a ride in the Cadillac with her brother and sister-in-law. Going out for a ride was still a form of entertainment for them. Tonight they were headed out to the airport to watch the planes take off. “Come on, it lifts the spirit to watch those big jets getting away like that,” Tessie said. Evvie declined, thanking Tessie for the wine, and then walked into the evening.
Maybe it was the silky warmth of the air, or more likely the wine, that made Evvie feel like something good was going to happen. Some nights in summer are this way. Like the sky itself is holding its secret breath in anticipation of something utterly surprising, and the moon looks wet as ripe fruit, unusually present, and glad to be a part of things. She took great big steps, willing herself to give the world a chance, because it was a great, great world.
She began to sing, and found herself walking up the steps of Saint Paul Cathedral. She slipped inside and sat in the very last dark oak pew. The smell transported her straight back to childhood. Her eyes stung with tears. She’d believed. In second grade she’d even been in the May procession, walking right beside the girl who’d been chosen to crown Mary—the girl tiny and stunned in a white gown, lifted up in the light as two hundred children sang, Hail, Holy Queen Enthroned Above! Oh, Ma-ria! Hail Queen of Mercy and of Love, Oh, Ma-ria! Always, every year, tears had come into Evvie’s eyes—Those are Mary’s tears, her grandmother had told her once. Tonight the stained glass was possessed of a radiance she felt throbbing in her chest like something about to shatter. She looked up at the altar, where Christ hung on the cross. She still loved him. Her first love, born of sorrow and pity in childhood, while saying the Stations of the Cross. No matter that she’d lost faith, the love could not be shaken. At least not here, not now. Nor the sense that she had greatly disappointed him. Failed with flying colors. And yes, there was probably a God. But this God had to be held accountable for this world, right? With its hideous suffering that could never be explained? Suffering she couldn’t even imagine? And so Evvie closed her eyes and crossed her arms and sat in rigid silence, and then got up and left.
An old priest stood on the stone steps just outside the heavy red doors. “Good evening, Father.” She liked his face. He was good-looking in a shipwrecked way. He was a man who wore the heart of his profound weariness on his sleeve, and yet his face was so kind she couldn’t stop looking at him. She asked him if he knew Saint Basil. She’d become enamored with Basil when someone from Mercy For Animals had quoted him in a talk in Cleveland.
“Never met him. He was a little before my time.”
She laughed. “Did you know Saint Basil was a vegetarian, loved and respected animals, and wrote a beautiful prayer?”
“Well, let’s hear it,” the priest said, looking off into the distance as if the ocean’s horizon were at the end of t
he wide street.
Evvie hoped she remembered. “God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers and sisters the animals to whom thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us.” She paused. The priest turned from the traffic to look at her. She said the next line of the prayer looking into his eyes, and those moments were more intimate than any she’d had in a long time. The priest looked away. She took a breath and finished. “We remember in shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.”
The priest nodded. “Very nice. Really. By the way, you don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. Then I can’t ask you for a cigarette. I’m quitting at the age of seventy-one.” He smiled. His eyes lit up.
“You can do it,” she said.
“Maybe. So when did Saint Basil come out with that prayer?”
“Third century.”
“That’s right. So you like your animals,” the priest said. “I bet you don’t know about Saint Guinefort. The dog saint. I mean, Saint Guinefort was a dog. Venerated in the Middle Ages for saving his master’s child from an attacking snake. A beautiful greyhound. All the people in France were praying to Guinefort the greyhound.”
Evvie smiled. A dog saint! She’d never heard of it. “Here’s a picture of my dog,” she said, opening her cell phone. “She’s pretty saintly herself.”
Maybe she would come to Mass here just for old times’ sake, and to be close to the old priest.
“Did you know a dog saved Saint Rocco’s life by bringing him food when he was starving in the woods? You should go to the procession they have over in Morningside this summer. They still carry Rocco through the streets.”
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