White Wind Blew

by James Markert

  “Prove to me that it can’t.”

  “Dr. Pike, I studied at Johns Hopkins—”

  “Did you see their faces?”

  Dr. Barker clenched his jaw. “They’re tired.”

  “Did you see their faces?” Wolfgang asked. “You can’t deny them—”

  “How dare you speak to me this way.” He glared at the cassock visible beneath Wolfgang’s lab coat.

  “We have a patient here. She asks me every day, ‘Where do the bodies go?’ I lie. I change the subject. I don’t tell her about Lincoln’s Death Tunnel.”

  “Lower your voice, Wolfgang.” Dr. Barker looked around at the patients, many of whom had been listening to their quarrel. “They need rest and fresh air.”

  “That’s what we tell them, but they’re still dying. At times it’s at the rate of one an hour.” Wolfgang stepped forward, daring Dr. Barker to shove him, both of them too irate to stop this public argument. “My only cure is to make them happy. Make them look forward to opening their eyes the next morning. That is my mission now.”

  Suddenly, McVain’s voice came from his bed. “Shut us down and you’ll regret it.”

  Dr. Barker spun to face him. “Are you threatening me?”

  McVain sat up in bed, resting his weight on his elbows. “I’ve done much worse things in my life than threaten someone. But if I have to, I will.”

  Wolfgang didn’t give Dr. Barker time to muster a retort. “Do you realize the talent we’ve stumbled across here? This is no coincidence. This is fate.” A notion hit Wolfgang, an ally whom Dr. Barker couldn’t touch. “God has put these people here. The music is from God. The choir has a calling from Him.”

  “Don’t hide behind your cloth.” Dr. Barker shook his head. “That’s sacrilege.”

  “You can tell me what to do as a doctor, but not with the Lord.”

  Dr. Barker started to turn and then stopped. “I’ll go above you. To the diocese.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Prohibition keeps you from buying your wine in stores.” Dr. Barker pointed to his chest. “I track every order that comes into this place, Father. And I know about the extra stuff you get from Lincoln. But it seems the consumption of sacramental wine has risen quite substantially since you’ve been here. Yet the church attendance is falling off.”

  He stormed off without another word.

  ***

  Wolfgang stayed on the fourth floor that night and played softly. He played for the patients. He played for Rose. Could she hear him? He played for McVain, who appeared restless, tossing and turning, the mattress springs groaning with every shift of his weight. Every ten minutes McVain would punch his right fist into the center of his pillow and then plop his head inside the dent. Nothing seemed to work.

  When Wolfgang’s fingers ached, he stood. He walked the requiem over to McVain’s bed and locked the manuscript in its black case.

  McVain’s eyes were open. “You really believe this is fate?”

  Wolfgang flinched. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “It’s twenty-five degrees out here and you expect me to sleep? I asked you a question.”

  Wolfgang dropped down on the cold folding chair beside the bed. “What do you think?”

  “Coincidence,” said McVain. “There’s no other explanation. You believe in God because it makes you feel better about where you’re going after you die.” He looked Wolfgang in the eyes. “We’re going nowhere except the ground we’re buried in.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  McVain laughed. “Do you? I mean really?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why the look in your eyes?”

  “What look?”

  McVain sighed and laughed a soft, cynical laugh. “Why are you convinced that joining the priesthood is the right answer to your wife’s death?”

  “It’s a calling from God.”

  “You say that as if you rehearsed it.” McVain’s breathing was labored, pushed out in shallow bursts followed by bouts of calm. “So why all the nonsense?”

  “What nonsense?”

  “If it were a calling from God, then you wouldn’t be here. You’d be there. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I’m here because…I’m needed here. Look around,” he nodded to all the other patients. “And this music is God’s work too.”

  McVain chuckled. “What about heaven and hell? Do they exist?”

  Wolfgang paused and stared down the solarium. “There is a heaven, McVain, and one day I’ll see Rose in it.”

  “With the angels, huh? Floating around above the clouds in pure bliss with wings and shit?”

  Wolfgang stood. “Good night, McVain.”

  McVain held his head upward, his voice strained. “Do you really think there’s a hell?” His head settled on his pillow again. “A place of fire where the sinners go? Like me. Or was it concocted to keep people straight? Be a more dangerous world without the fear of consequence, wouldn’t it?”

  “What have you done that’s so bad that you belong in hell?”

  “Maybe one day I’ll pour my confession out to you. But what would it matter?”

  “It would empty the bitterness in your heart.”

  “Don’t you have bitterness?”

  Wolfgang opened his mouth to speak as thoughts of his mother consumed him, but nothing came out.

  McVain smiled. “The bitterness keeps me going. I wouldn’t know what to do without it.” Wolfgang started to leave, but again McVain stopped him with another question. “Would God keep a moral man from heaven’s gates?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Even if he doesn’t believe in God anymore?”

  Where was this heading? thought Wolfgang.

  McVain said, “There was a time when I thought I’d been blessed by God.”

  “When did you lose this belief?”

  McVain held up his left hand and wiggled his pinkie and thumb. “Was it coincidence that sent me to European soil? Or was it fate?”

  “I don’t have all the answers, McVain.”

  McVain’s jaw tightened. “I made a decision while I was over there. I lost these fingers as a result of it. If it was a punishment from God, then I hate him for it.”

  “God doesn’t punish—”

  “It’s easier just not to believe,” he said. “What kind of God would give something like this and then take it away?”

  Wolfgang immediately thought of Rose. “Good night, McVain. I’ll pray for your answers tonight.”

  He turned away, unable to shake the vision of Rose from his mind—how she looked, how she talked, how she breathed when she slept, how she smelled, how she tasted, the feel of her skin…

  Chapter 22

  Wolfgang referred to the years after his recovery from polio as the “walking years.” He had insisted that his mother allow him freedom from the bed. “I feel like a prisoner in this bed,” he told her.

  To which she responded, “What do you know of prison, Wolfgang?”

  “I’ll prove to you that I’ll walk again.”

  She stared at him for a moment before putting on a smile. “I’ll get you a cane at the store today.”

  Doris returned an hour later, opened his bedroom door, and propped the cane against the wall of the hallway outside so he could see it. “Well, there it is. Go ahead and grab it. I won’t baby you anymore.”

  After he’d heard her descend the stairs, he crawled out of bed and then out into the hallway to retrieve the cane. He started off with the upper floor, walking up and down the hallway ten times that first day before tiring. On his first attempt he fell after only two steps. Doris hurried up the steps to help, but he insisted that he do it on his own. “I don’t need your help, Mother.”

  She returned to the kitchen and mome
nts later he heard her crying. Thoughts of the pillow closing in on his father’s face fueled his drive to walk. He wanted more than freedom from the bed, even at eight. He wanted out of the house and away from her. He’d used the cane so often that the grooved feel of it would always be ingrained in the palm of his right hand.

  Next he’d used the stairs to strengthen the muscles of his legs. Up and down he’d travel them, twenty times a day, before and after school, from the living room to his bedroom until he’d begun to wear the shine from the wood on the middle of each uneven step. He’d step up with the left foot, drive the cane down on the same step, and then lift the right foot up next, the sound of each movement distinct, like a ritual, like a song. He pounded every inch of the sidewalk up and down their street, his daily presence as common to the neighbors as the milkman and mail carriers. Neighbors waved, and sometimes, depending on his focus, Wolfgang waved back. Mostly he’d nod and keep to his business, venturing outside more than he ever had in his life, loving the freedom of it, away from his mother’s increasingly extremist remarks and teachings of her religious thinking.

  In the eighth grade Wolfgang pushed the limits and ventured down the road to Central Park. He walked the seventeen acres of the park throughout each week, he and his cane clip-clopping around the winding walking trails, careful not to place the end of his cane in any patches of sunlight that bled through the overhanging tree limbs. It was a game. His cane couldn’t touch the sunlight, and his feet couldn’t step on any crack. On some sunny days he’d appear to be dancing as he sidestepped and maneuvered his way around the patchwork of light and shadow, watching the squirrels and dogs chase each other, watching the women push babies in strollers, and waving to the horse carriages. Some days he’d stop to skip rocks across the wading pool or stare at his reflection in the shimmering water, sighting the first curls of black hair on his chin that would later become the beard he would never shave from his face.

  One morning at breakfast, Doris said to her increasingly unresponsive son, “Mrs. Hammerston down the street. She saw you walking the park the other day.”

  “I walk the park every day,” said Wolfgang.

  “Well, I’d like you to keep it at that,” she said. “You’ve no business on the streets by yourself.”

  That afternoon, Wolfgang figured it was time to expand his horizons. He’d finally gotten rid of the cane and decided it was time to venture farther downtown. He stretched it a block or two every day until his daily jaunt had reached nearly ten miles. He’d pack a canteen full of water on his trips, sipping and rationing it out so as not to run dry too early. Hurrying across streets, he’d slow his steps on the sidewalks. He would slow even more when he’d curiously pass a bar or whorehouse on Green Street where the men liked to drink to crudeness and dirty crib girls were known to give themselves for money. He’d imagine them in the throes of passion and then hurry on, snickering inside his head at the dirtiness of it all. And then he would silently apologize to a God he befriended on a daily basis.

  On several occasions he stopped outside the Baroque and peered through the window, imagining his father alive and slurping from a beer mug. Men played cards and dice games and drank bourbon. In the back, half concealed by smoke, a man played ragtime on the piano. A thin young man painted with oil paints at a table just inside the front window. The walls of the Baroque glowed with dozens of framed oil paintings. Along the wall next to the fireplace stood a marble statue with nude figures, a replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women—a man and a woman upright and intertwined, coiled, their arms reaching up toward a ceiling covered by smoke. Wolfgang never hesitated to stare at the statue, at least for a few seconds before moving on, past the Rue de Lafayette next door, where the sound of drunken laughter always permeated the walls.

  He liked to pass storefront windows and watch his limping reflection, a boy without a care, a boy with no destination. Until he hit Fifth Street one fall day and noticed the tall spire extending from the pitched roof of a glorious building down the way. Clouds passed above it. Wolfgang’s heart began pumping. Something seemed to be calling him; a throbbing in his gut, a warm feeling he could only compare to the one he’d get after his father occasionally patted his back after he’d successfully played a complete piece on the piano. His pace quickened as he limped toward the building. He walked so fast his right foot began to drag, the toes of his black shoe like a broom sweeping across the dirt-covered concrete. A horse carriage rumbled down the street. He pretended to race it.

  When he reached his destination, he stood for a moment with his hands on his knees, staring at the tall façade and large arched doors. Two women in pretty dresses and artfully arranged hairdos walked up the wide steps and opened the massive doors, and what emerged from the belly of the building was the angelic singing of a choir, singing in a language he’d never heard before yet felt drawn to. He took out his canteen and drank more water. He stared at the building for a good five minutes before inching closer to the steps. A man in a top hat brushed past him and apologized on his way into the building. Wolfgang knew it was a church of some sort. He surprised himself by speaking out at the man.

  “What place is this, sir?”

  The man stopped on the church steps and faced Wolfgang. “Why, this is the Cathedral of the Assumption.”

  “Cathedral? Is it Protestant?”

  The man chuckled. “No, it’s Catholic. Try coming in someday.” He tipped his hat. “Good day.”

  Wolfgang watched the guy disappear into the church. Catholic? He didn’t know what a cult was, but it was the most common word he’d heard his parents associate with the word “Catholic.” If his parents were telling the truth about the Catholic Church, the man he’d just spoken to would have had devil horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. But instead he’d had straight white teeth and a handsome smile. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the appropriate words, but being there just felt right. And the music sounded as if it had come down from heaven itself. Wolfgang spent the next two hours sitting on the steps, contemplating entering. On that day he didn’t, and when he got home he spoke nothing of it to his mother. Over dinner she said to him, “You have a smile on your face, Wolfgang. I’d like to know the cause, but I’m sure you won’t tell me.”

  ***

  Four weeks later he did enter the cathedral. He arrived at a time when there was a rush of people coming for daily Mass. He limped hurriedly to funnel inside with the herd, and once he entered he knew he’d found the part of his life he’d been missing. He was swept away by the vastness of the building, the grandeur of the architecture, the colors of the tall stained-glass windows that dominated the side walls, the height of the ceiling that hovered over what he would later learn was the nave. Upon entering he stopped without thinking to gawk and was nearly trampled by the incoming people. He stumbled back toward the baptismal pool and font that stood before the length of the center aisle. He righted himself and sidestepped out of the way, watching as the people poured in and the choir practiced singing in the choir loft above the entrance. Everything looked so different from the church he’d grown up attending with his parents, which was minuscule in comparison.

  Wolfgang faced the body of the church. So many seats filled the expanse. Marble and granite everywhere. One large center aisle flanked by two side aisles. Giant pillars stood like endless tree trunks along the center aisle, stretching up to sweeping arches and a curved rooftop highlighted by a painted fresco of cherubs surrounding Mary at the time of her assumption into heaven. At the far end of the church behind the altar was the massive Coronation Window that took up much of the back wall and supported the fresco’s theme. Sunlight penetrated the stained glass, illuminating the purple, gold, and deep blue that dominated the window. The colors shone brilliantly, prism-like, across the altar and marble floor. Dust motes hovered in and out of the light. Mary was being crowned as queen. God took her body into heaven—the eternal goal. Wolfgang would dream
of that window at night, and the vision would save him from the pillow that suffocated him in every nightmare.

  He sat in the back row of the cathedral, captivated by that window. He listened to the priest at the pulpit, how his voice reverberated off of everything it touched. Later, during a silent lull in the Mass, he asked a neighboring woman, “What language is he speaking?”

  “Latin,” she said.

  Latin. He’d heard his parents refer to the language during several of their rants on the Catholic Church and the pope and Rome’s influence in the States. One day, he thought, perhaps one day I will speak Latin and preach from a pulpit while others listen.

  The cathedral felt like home. If he could have placed a physical form on his faith, that form had been floating aimlessly in the air ever since his father’s funeral. Minister Ford’s church no longer conformed to it. But Wolfgang’s faith fit that cathedral like a glove. As soon as he’d entered, he’d felt as if the wound had begun to heal. Cells were changing, the skin was transforming, and the scar would begin to fade.

  It was just a fleeting notion at first, not something he could fully understand, but over time it began to make sense. Protestants and Catholics were both Christians. His parents’ church just seemed to have a much more literal interpretation of the Bible, and that, in Wolfgang’s mind, was the beginning of the many differences, along with how they viewed the pope, confession, purgatory, and how they prayed in general. But they both prayed to the same Christ, and because of that Wolfgang couldn’t understand the animosity that existed between the two branches. For Wolfgang, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Catholic faith was the role of the Virgin Mary. His parents had always criticized the Catholics for praying to Mary, referring to it as idol worship, claiming that nowhere in the Bible did it say that Mary was greater than any other Christian.

  But on Wolfgang’s second visit inside the cathedral, the statue of Mary in the back of the church called to him. He approached it slowly. Mary with her head tilted, eyes closed, so at peace holding the newborn baby Jesus. Wolfgang imagined being held in Mary’s arms. In his mind, he spoke to her and immediately felt a motherly comfort he had not known in years.