Mitch was stunned. He didn’t know what to do or say, so he took a deep breath, then said what came naturally. He spoke very slowly and calmly, partially so as not to frighten the boy further and partially to keep control of his own emotions, but never taking eyes off the boy.
“I’m not angry at you, Simon. Please, you don’t have to be afraid of me, not ever,” he said doing his best to convey with his eyes and voice the sincerity of his words to the pitifully frightened boy. “That letter is the very best letter I have ever gotten in my life. That’s why I came to see you.”
Simon glanced back up to him questioningly. His eyes changed, still wide but no longer as fearful. His hands slowly stopped trembling. He didn’t seem so much afraid anymore as…perplexed.
“R…r…really?” Simon asked, astounded, his eyes taking on a quiet shine.
“Yes, really. That’s why I came to talk to you. I wanted to tell you that myself.” That was when Mitch first heard it, the murmur of his conscience sounding like his mother’s voice. Do something, it said, and Mitch spoke. “I’ve always loved castles and knights, art and culture, too. That’s why I became an art scholar. So tell me, Simon, what are you going to do when you graduate and leave here?”
Simon thought a moment, “Well, Father Perez says that I really only have two choices. I can either become a priest and the Church will pay for my college or I can leave and get a job and maybe get enough grant money to go to the community college,” Simon said shyly, thinking it an odd question; not understanding why this man was asking such a question.
“Well, let’s put it another way. If you had your choice, what would you want to do when you leave here? What would be your dream?”
“Dream?” Simon asked, like he didn’t understand the word.
“Yes. What do you dream of being?” Mitch said clarifying the question for him. Simon’s eyes got wide again. No one had ever asked him about what he dreamed or told him that he could even have a dream. He thought for a moment and came up with the only honest answer he could, then turned his eyes back down to look at his hands folded on the table.
“M…m…my d…dream would be…to be just like you,” the boy said, quietly, almost inaudibly. Mitch sat back, blown away, like he’d been struck in the heart with a pick axe. Like me? he asked himself, and it was as if Melanie Woodward was standing behind him, nudging him with her hand, whispering in his ear.
Suddenly he wasn’t at Holy Family anymore, and he wasn’t grown up anymore either. He was five years old and holding onto her skirt as she dished out stuffing and cranberry sauce to a woman with a little boy and girl about his age on Christmas Eve at the shelter in the Bowery. He was looking up at her. “Why are we doing this?” he’d asked her innocently.
She picked him up and whispered quietly in his ear so no one else could hear, “Because these people have no home, Mitchell, and this is how we can give them a little piece of ours. Home doesn’t always have to be a building,” she smiled and gave him the big spoon as she held him up so he could dish out the mashed potatoes to the next person in line to feel part of what they were doing. Then he was back at Holy Family, missing her terribly and looking into the wide, innocent blue eyes of that lonely boy, knowing how much he’d suffered; how much he’d done without— both materially and emotionally. He took a deep breath and spoke again, cautiously at first.
“Well…I…have an idea about that. Do you think you might like it if I could arrange for you to go to my old school, Columbia, to study history, or archaeology, or art? Anything that would make you happy.” The words began to flow. “I’ll make sure you get whatever grants and scholarships you can, and since Father Perez tells me that you’ll be graduating at the top of your class, that shouldn’t be too hard, and…I’ll pay for the rest myself,” he said, suddenly thinking it was about time to put some of that good old Bramson bribe money to use in a way that would make his mother proud.
He reached out and put his hand over Simon’s hands still folded on the table and looked intently into his eyes; his voice deepening with conviction. “And you have my word; I will never let anyone hurt you ever again.”
Simon’s pupils dilated, his eyelids fluttered and the color drained from his face. The next thing Mitch knew, the kid had passed out, fainted, and fell backwards.
“Sister! Sister! Please help me!” he shouted out to the nun across the room as he got up and ran over to the boy.
“What happened?” Sister Mary cried out shrilly as she ran to their side.
“Uh…I don’t know; one minute we were talking and the next he was on the floor. I’m sure he hit his head. Do you have an infirmary or something here?” he said, picking the boy up, ready to carry him in any direction.
“This way…” Sister Mary said, leading him through the door, back into the corridor and to another room down yet another identical corridor, into yet another sterile room, and laid the boy down on a stretcher.
Yet another nun came running over with a cool towel and a vial of smelling salts. As soon as Simon was under the care of the nurse nun, Sister Mary tugged at his sleeve pulling him back out into the corridor, he started pacing. Sister Mary could see that he was sweating bullets and tried to reassure him, reminding him that she did warn him that Simon was very high strung.
“So what exactly happened in there, Doctor?” she asked with kind concern, for both of them.
“We were just talking and he suddenly…keeled over,” Mitch said, rubbing his hand over his forehead with worry and guilt.
“What were you talking about, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Not at all. I just told him that I would get him into Columbia and pay for it myself if I had to,” he told her, shrugging and looking down to let his hair fall over his face. Silence. When he looked back up, Sister Mary’s eyes were wide and fluttering. Jesus Christ, not another fainter! he thought, positioning himself to catch her if he had to.
“Please tell me you’re not joking, Doctor,” she asked seriously.
“Not at all, Sister. I wouldn’t joke about something as impor-tant as that. I’ll mentor him through it and see that he gets the best of everything, personally.”
“Oh! Doctor Bramson!” she cried out, throwing her arms around him. “You’re an angel!”
“Oh no, Sister. Far from it, believe me…” he laughed nervously. “…now go back in there and see to it that that bump on the head hasn’t hurt our brainchild any. We have big plans for him now. Don’t we? I’ll go see Father Perez to tell him my idea. If he approves we can get the ball rolling. Applications for admission were due months ago, so I’m going to have to pull some strings to get this done,” he said as he headed back down the corridor towards the Main Office, leaving one stunned nun in his wake.
He found his way back to the priest’s office not long afterwards, notwithstanding the fact that all the corridors looked exactly alike. When he went in, Sister Helene was at a filing cabinet with her back to him. He cleared his throat politely to get her attention. She turned around. “Dr. Bramson, twice in one day. This is a surprise,” she said, the dimples in her cheeks showing as she smiled.
“Yes, Sister. I was wondering if Father Perez had finished with his appointment yet.”
“Why yes; he has. Would you like to see him again?”
“Yes, please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he said, feeling more humbled by their sacrifices every moment he spent in their collective presence.
Sister Helene went to the main office door, knocked lightly then went in. Father Perez was on the phone. She motioned with her hand and spoke softly, “Dr. Bramson is here to see you again.”
Father Perez just waved his hand to her indicating that she should bring him in. Sister Helene turned around and with the same hand motion waved at him to come in as Father Perez was hanging up the phone. “Well, Dr. Bramson. I take it you saw Simon?” the priest asked, clearly already knowing the answer.
Mitch didn’t bother to say ‘yes.’ He just cut to the ch
ase. “Why didn’t you and Sister Mary tell me about his leg?” he said, holding his hands out in bewilderment.
“Would it have made any difference, Doctor?” the priest asked, the intensity Mitch had seen earlier came back into his eyes.
Mitch let his head hang and shook his head. “No. Of course not. None at all.”
“The doctors’ reports when he was brought in said that it was broken severely before he was old enough to walk, and wasn’t attended. It healed badly and didn’t grow properly,” the priest said. “But please sit down, Doctor. I just got off the phone with Sister Akelo at the infirmary. He’s awake and he’s fine. Just a little egg on the back of his head.” Mitch breathed a sigh of relief as he flopped back down in the same chair he’d vacated earlier.
“So what is it you wanted to see me about, Doctor?” the priest asked calmly. Mitch took a deep breath and let it out slowly, taking a few seconds to choose his words carefully before speaking.
“Well Father…” he started, but Father Perez interrupted him before he could finish.
“Are you a Catholic, Dr. Bramson?”
Mitch thought the question odd, but not odd enough to make an issue of it. He simply answered, “No.”
“Then there’s no real need for you to call me Father. I’m a modern priest not all that caught up in formalities. We’re close in age and both educated men. Under the circumstances, I think you can call me Javier,” Father Perez said with an almost friendly shine in his eyes and tone in his voice. Mitch pointed to his own chest and simply said, “Mitch.”
“Okay, Mitch, now what did you want to talk about?” Javier asked patiently, putting his hands together, interlocking his fingers and holding them to his mouth giving him a pensive, thoughtful look
“Well…Javier, I wanted to ask about Simon’s future,” he said quietly.
“That’s a difficult question to answer…Mitch. He’ll age out of the system a few weeks after graduation and be on his own. I was thinking that I’d try to get him to come into the priesthood, but quite honestly I think it would be a waste for him. Not that the church doesn’t need priests, particularly down here; it’s just that with Simon’s academic capabilities…” and he trailed off. “The only other option is for him to get a job as soon as possible and maybe take some courses locally at night, but I think we’d both agree that would also be a waste and Holy Family has only so many resources and we need them for the other children in our care.” He paused, holding up his hands with a shrug. “But I don’t mind telling you that I worry terribly about Simon being put out on his own in the world. All of us here at the home do. Simon is not really…of the world, if you understand what I’m saying,” Javier said, the intensity in his eyes giving Mitch his opening, or maybe leading him to it. Either way he took it.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Mitch jumped in. “I’d like to ask your permission to…let me help him, get him through school and take care of him,” he said choking with emotion, struggling not to burst into tears before another grown man but knowing that somewhere along the line he was going to lose the battle. The priest’s eyes lit up but his facial expression remained calm, mask-like. A moment of silence passed before anyone spoke again, and it was Mitch. “You don’t seem surprised by that,” he said as a statement rather than a question.
“That’s because I’m not,” the priest said calmly, his eyes sparkling, “…not at all actually.” Mitch was stumped and his expression must have shown it. The priest spoke again, taking his hands down away from his mouth.
“I’m not a stupid man, Mitch, and in my business you get to know people, know things about them…in a very short time. I read your Time article before you came to give your lecture. I’ve also seen some of your…tabloid photos,” the priest said, smiling wryly to himself before going on. “A man like you, with your life, career and high profile just doesn’t drop whatever he’s doing to come down to skid row on Christmas Eve to see a poor kid who wrote him a letter unless he has a spark of God in his heart. And I don’t necessarily mean a Catholic God, either. Like I said, I’m a modern priest and I don’t believe for a minute that our Catholic God is the only version of God available. I saw it in you when you came the first time to give your lecture, then again today. I was sure of it when you still asked to see Simon after Sister Mary told you of his troubles, when, quite honestly, almost anyone else would have bolted through the door.” Mitch shook his head and let it hang low, his hair hiding his face.
“I’m not sure I can still believe in God, Javier, in any version available. And even if I did, I’ve been a terrible sinner of excess in my life, drugs, alcohol, sex…so I’m not all that convinced that any version would have me.”
“Nonsense, my son. If you were the kind of sinner you believe yourself to be, you would have thrown that letter in the trash without a thought, but you didn’t. I believe God brought you here today to save Simon, whether you believe that or not, and you did what he wanted. The God I believe in treats sins of the flesh like criminal courts treat traffic tickets. The true measure of God in man is doing exactly what you did today, coming here to meet a hopelessly lost, crippled boy, abused and discarded by a world that never wanted him, who naïvely reached out to a giant, expecting nothing…but you reached back. That makes all the difference in the world. Now you’re offering him a life in the light instead of leaving him the darkness. That is God on earth, Mitch,” the priest said as he got up, taking a handful of tissues from the box on his desk and handing them to Mitch. The battle was lost.
“What kind of…monster could hurt such a sweet kid that way?…I don’t understand.”
“Without monsters, Mitch, there can be no heroes. Without demons, there can be no angels. Your coming here proves that,” the priest said, putting his arm around him.
After Mitch had a few minutes to pull himself together, he got down to business, first by writing a check for a thousand dollars and giving it to the priest. “If you would, Javier, please open an account for him to make sure he has everything he needs until graduation, clothes, books anything he needs, especially vitamins. I’ll make arrangements for the same amount to be deposited in the account every month until then.” That did surprise the priest. “I’ll have an application for Columbia sent over as soon as possible. We need to get it filed…like yesterday. I’ll pull whatever strings I have to so we can get it done. It’s my school and I have some friends who have some friends, so consider it a done deal. In the meantime we need to get on the ball with filing for scholarships and whatever grants we can still get. I’ll take care of whatever shortfall there may be and all his personal expenses myself to make sure he’s well taken care of. Then when he graduates I’ll get him job at the Museum,” he said, getting up to leave, winded and drained. “But I’d better go now, Father—Javier.”
Father Perez walked around his desk and stopped him. Putting the palm of his hand over Mitch’s heart, the priest looked deep inside him. “You’ll always have a home here with us, Mitchell, Catholic or not,” he said and smiled. “God bless you, my son, and thank you.” Before Mitch closed the door, he turned back long enough to see Father Perez reach for the tissue box once again and heard him whisper into the air, “Thy will be done…”
When he got out to the sidewalk, it was snowing again, a curtain of big, fluffy white flakes. He held his face up to let the cold crystals land on it, cooling him from the heat of the emotional upheaval he’d just gone through, letting it all sink in, the boy, his past and…his future. Other than for his work, he’d never taken responsibility for anything in his life. But he guessed it was time he learned now. He’d follow Jack’s example; that would be the key. He would do for Simon what Jack had done for him all these years.
He looked down again and, through the blanket of falling snow saw a singular blinking red neon light across the street, “Pizza, Pizza, Pizza.” He followed it and went in. “I’d like to order twenty pizzas for delivery,” he said to the dark-haired Italian looking guy dr
essed in restaurant whites. “Mix ‘em up with all the toppings, and plenty of them.” The pizza man took out a pad and began nodding and writing. “And twenty bottles of soda too, mix ‘em up…What do you have for desserts?” Mitch asked, just letting the words roll out of him.
“Ice cream, gelato, some cinnamon knots and special Christmas cannolis. I have about twenty of those left,” the man in whites answered. “Okay, I’ll take one carton of chocolate ice cream and one vanilla. . .and whatever cinnamon knots and cannolis you have left, and send it all over to the kids’ home at the church across the street.” The man in white kept writing, nodding and smiling, probably thinking this guy must be out of his tree. “I want you to feed those kids over there, okay? And I do get a good price for bulk on Christmas Eve, eh, paisan?” Mitch asked with more than a hint of force. “Call your mother and ask her what she thinks about it,” Mitch said to him, knowing in advance what Mama would have him do when he saw the big, gaudy gold crucifix mixing with the thick black hair on his chest.
“I don’t have to…” the man in white said, giving Mitch a huge smile and shaking his head. “I grew up going to Holy Family Church. I know all about those kids and exactly what to do.”
“Good man!” Mitch said, handing his credit card over to him, “…and please call Father Perez and tell him it’s on its way, courtesy of Mitchell Bramson.”
The man in whites took the card and went over to the register and started ringing. A few minutes later he came back and handed Mitch the receipt to sign. Mitch looked at the receipt and smiled, the man had indeed done him right and he signed. He looked up to the man in white again. “…and I’ll come back every year from now on to do the same thing. I want those kids to have a Christmas party on me…every year.” The man in white put out his hand for Mitch to shake. Mitch took it and shook it hard.
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