Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  Maybe it had something to do with Audrey’s increasingly mystical religiosity, but agnostic though I was, I found myself wanting to go to church. Columbia had an excellent Catholic ministry, I remember, with a cool, smart, scholarly chaplain. I hadn’t grown up with cool priests. The ones of my childhood were the worst sort, more interested in the roof fund than in compassion, bullies who would suck up to the more moneyed people in the parish and work my mother, who was forever volunteering for everything, like a slave. Meanwhile the Italian priests of my high school, transplanted long ago from Emilia Romagna or Lazio, were harsh and haunted, scarred by the fascist Second World War. My high school Italian teacher, Father Mario, had hair-raising stories about Rome after the Germans came in, things like pulling weeds out of the cracks in the pavement in order to have something to eat, and in his class we’d watch films like Roma città aperta, all of us screaming and crying when Anna Magnani gets shot down in the street. So yeah, there was not a lot of sweet tending of the soul going on until I got to college, by which time I was pretty well soured on the Catholic faith. But something was moving me toward church that sophomore year, and every once in a while I would find myself at Columbia’s church, St. Paul’s, for the Sunday five-o’clock.

  It might not need to be said that in my eyes the Columbia students who went to Catholic mass were among the most excruciatingly uncool of just about all the Columbia students. They were even more nerdy than the Orthodox Jewish students—who at least, to me, had the charm of exoticism on their side. The Catholic mass students wore Sears Toughskins, buttoned their top buttons, and appeared to be pre-ironic. They smiled and asked questions. They were mad friendly! But I had no use for this at the time, walking around as I was with my big fat hating-everything Louis-Ferdinand Céline head on. So instead of going to St. Paul’s on campus, I cast around for a church where things were dark and dour and Gothic, where I could sit in a corner and cry my brains out.

  One Sunday morning shortly before the end of the fall semester, I woke up too early, as if shaken out of sleep by a pair of rough hands. My whole suite was still sleeping. Indeed, the entire dormitory building seemed to be, but my feet were itching to walk, so I dressed quickly and got myself out the door.

  It was a cold December morning, brisk and clear. I walked down Broadway and went to Columbia Hot Bagels, where I got an everything bagel and held it warmly in my hands as I walked south, tearing off great sections of it and chewing all the while. Few people were out, and there was a magic descended over the neighborhood. Things seemed dear to me, and deeply, singularly New York. I gazed at the stacks of the Sunday Times on the metal racks in front of the bodegas, peered in the window of the Judaica store, stopped in front of an old barbershop seemingly preserved intact from the ’40s. I must have walked thirty blocks in this way, looking at everything around me. At some point, for no reason that I can remember, I turned and walked east, and toward the end of the block there was a church. It was large and broadly striped, Byzantine, almost like a synagogue. And yet it was Catholic.

  I bounded up the stairs and slipped inside the doors and through the vestibule. A mass was going on, though sparsely attended. I slinked up a side aisle and into a pew. I unzipped my coat, pulled off my scarf, briefly knelt, and then sat back, letting my eyes close.

  But I had an odd feeling. I can’t explain it, but I was almost expecting someone to touch me. As I sat, the feeling grew until I found myself with one hand curled around the nape of my neck. There were certain social niceties that my mother—a woman whose elaborate system of manners was kept bizarrely intact even while raising her puling children in what was basically a slum—had instilled in me, and one of them was that, other than during the kiss of peace, you should never turn around in church.

  Minutes seemed to blossom into hours as I sat there with a sickening dread, waiting for the inevitable. I heard nothing, saw nothing, though I must have been gazing up at the dome of the church, because I can picture it yet. And then the next thing I knew I was standing and the priest was saying, Let us offer each other the sign of Christ’s peace…And I turned to see, several rows behind me, Kendra.

  My heart began to thud in my chest.

  She was swaddled in layers of black garments, voluminous, shapeless things, with a shawl covering her head. Her hair poking out from the shawl was bleached white. With her ghostly foundation makeup she looked drained of all color, a tabula rasa. Matching this was a soulful, contrite look on her face—contrived, like the rest of her.

  Immediately I was done—down the aisle and out the door.

  On the steps outside the church she caught me by the hood. I whirled around.

  “Tell me everything you know about the Catholic religion!” she yelled at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “I need to become a Catholic!” she yelled again. She was all up in my face, her shawl fallen down. Her eyes were red and fierce, and she was on some manic new high. I twisted around and pulled out of her grasp and then I was pounding down the street. But she was right beside me.

  “Kendra, you know, fuck you and your fucking daily mania and pretend enthusiasms! What’s the new lie, huh?” Suddenly it was my turn to yell in her face. “What’s the new lie?” I yelled, bearing down on her.

  She backed away and yanked up her shawl, clasping it at her chin and angling herself away from me as if to fend off a blow. Instantly I was wretched. Though in the midst of this—so completely art-directed did my ridiculous and dramatic friend make herself—a certain Annunciation painting flashed in my mind, of a scowling Virgin Mary recoiling at the strange news.

  “Kendra,” I said quietly, “I need you to fuck the fuck off.”

  I turned and kept walking.

  “Chess,” she said, “I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

  “Do I care?” I said.

  “I thought Catholics were supposed to care,” she said.

  “I’m lapsed,” I said. “I’m not a fucking Catholic!”

  “You can change your spots so easily?” she said.

  “Bah,” I said. “You always do!”

  “I need you to sponsor me for my conversion,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me!”

  I stopped and turned to her.

  “Kendra, the help you need can’t come from me,” I said. And then I kept walking.

  She had stopped but in a moment caught up to me again.

  “Clarice kicked me out,” she said.

  “Why don’t I believe you? Why do I find it hard to believe you about anything anymore?”

  “Oh, man, you’ve gotta believe me,” she said, in an awful, almost babyish voice I hadn’t heard before. She stopped but I kept walking. I kept walking! What was she, expecting me to save her?

  “Chess!” she called down the street after me. But I did not turn around.

  *

  When I got back to my dorm, my head still fizzing with anger, I found Audrey sitting in my suite kitchen. It was barely ten in the morning. We’d said good night only about six hours before, when we’d finished drinking two six-packs together, and she wasn’t the light sleeper I was. She was still dressed for outdoors, in her long midnight-blue winter coat, a strange garment that seemed to swallow her up in its enormous pilgrim collar, and she sat hunched over, fiercely sucking on a cigarette and staring violently down at a fixed spot on the table as if it offended her.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I said, falling into a chair across from her and pulling off my watch cap. I looked at her special spot on the table.

  She looked up.

  “Duh,” she spat.

  “Aud, what is it?” I said. What was the matter with everyone? I was still reeling from Kendra and I just needed her to be regular right now.

  “Give me your shoes,” she said.

  “Why would you want my shoes?”

  “You know why,” she said, her voice dripping with contempt.

  I looked down at my feet. I was wearing my favori
te boots, Carolina engineer boots that were three sizes too big for her. There was no precedent for this request. I shrugged, pushed back from the table, gave a big show of yanking off my boots, and put them on the table in front of her.

  “Here you go,” I said.

  “You understand nothing,” she spat.

  I reached out to take her hand across the table, but she snatched it away. What with the Kendra morning and this new weirdness—Audrey had been growing strange, but not angry like this—I felt my eyes filling up.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Duh, Chess, you pretend to be so smart.” She pushed back from the table and raked a hand through her lusterless red hair. I could feel her mind racing as she snapped her head from side to side, trying to shake something away. She was a tiny person and sat shaking her head like this in her huge, dwarfing coat.

  “Audrey?” I begged her. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked at me intently.

  “WPA,” she finally answered.

  “WPA?” I repeated, lost.

  “Duh!” she barked. She shook her head at my stupidity and then pronounced each letter slowly, as if this would explain it: Double-you. Peeeee. Aaaaay. She glared at me, needing me to understand this piece of important information.

  “Works Progress Administration?” I finally said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said.

  “Jesus, Audrey,” I said as she got up from the table. She was banging out the door as I struggled into my boots and raced after her. I hit the hall just as the elevator door closed on her. I banged on the button and then started racing down the stairs. I got to the reception desk just as I saw her pass through the barely open front door, a floating nun in a skimming habit.

  “Audrey!” I yelled as I chased her down Amsterdam Avenue.

  I caught up with her at the corner, and she whirled around and looked at me as if she were just seeing me for the first time. She started pounding her fist on her heart and yelling: “I am here, I am here, I am here.”

  “Of course you are. Of course!” I said.

  “Something’s wrong, oh God, something’s wrong,” she said to me, and collapsed crying in my arms.

  *

  So okay, it was clear that some serious shit was going down and Audrey needed to be pretty closely watched until she could be safely deposited in Pennsy with her family for winter break, at which time—I really believed this was all it would take—she could get some much-needed rest and come back well again.

  Amazingly, she had muddled through most of her classes. In the week and a half left of the semester, she took two incompletes and, using a charcoal stick and a twenty-two-by-thirty-inch newsprint pad, wrote a paper on Max Weber. She brought it over for me to type—I had a Brother typewriter with a tiny read-out screen that allowed you to check fourteen characters’ worth of work before the text appeared on the page (a fascinating piece of “technology” about as sophisticated as one of those collapsible umbrella hats)—and when I saw the state of Audrey’s paper, I thought I would tear my fucking hair out. I was already buried in finishing my own work. The joke of all this was that when I sat down and read Audrey’s paper, I was astonished to see that it was much more lucid, filigree-free, and representative of a subtle, agile mind than anything I’d ever managed to write in my life.

  Well.

  Winter break was almost upon us. Audrey had taken to camping out in my dorm room, and broke as we were, we were living pretty much on cigarettes, $2.99 six-packs of Knickerbocker beer, doughnuts, twenty-five-cent bags of plantain chips, and ramen noodles. She seemed all right—I kept an eye on her—but just before she was to get on the bus to Pennsy, a kind of stupor came over her. She could barely bring herself to get out of her pajamas or sit upright, never mind leave the building. The thought of her taking herself alone to Port Authority, which still felt like a place to get stabbed in the eyeball at that point in time, seemed just plain wrong. Worse than this, she couldn’t bear to be alone. When I would come back to the dorm from any trip at all, I’d find her right by the door, shaking with panic.

  We mapped out a plan that I would take the bus with her out to her family in Pennsylvania Dutch country, deposit her there, spend Christmas with them, and then get on a train from Harrisburg to Barfonia to see my family. Actually I was secretly thrilled at the thought of spending the holiday with a family other than mine and being spared the pained and uncomprehending eyes of my mother, if only for a few days.

  It’s funny, I remember how Audrey’s mood seemed to improve in stages as the landscape changed. Small relief came once we were out of the city, grew larger as we passed the urban doom-clusters of New Jersey, and when we finally hit the open highways she was sitting up and smiling like a kid at a party. It had snowed and then frozen over, and the fields all around us were covered in a heavy, untouched frosting of whiteness that sparkled in the sun. It seemed to me that nothing could ever look so clean and brilliant in the city, which felt like a hooded, blackened, corralled place in contrast. But as we pulled into the bus station in her little town, Audrey’s mood changed again, and an extremely shaky nervousness overtook her.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered to me as we got off the bus, “there’s Edwina.”

  This would be her eldest sister.

  I looked up to see a tall woman some yards away from us, unsmilingly standing her ground. You couldn’t help but stare at her. She exuded a terrible seriousness—she was so straight-backed and inelastic—and a kind of gloomy elegance. She should have been dressed in a bonnet and habit like Mother Seton, but instead she was wearing an Ike jacket and leather motorcycle jeans. In fact, what she looked like was a taller, darker, and altogether more severe edition of Audrey. Both she and Audrey had narrow, aristocratic faces with pointed chins and tiny mouths: preoccupied Van Eyck faces, seemingly unknown to pleasure. They were like the frowning angels from the Ghent altarpiece.

  As we approached, Edwina looked at Audrey with cold eyes and then gave her a stiff hug. Then she smiled at me and greeted me as if I were the truly welcome figure.

  “Come on, Chess,” she said, ripping my bag out of my hands while Audrey, much smaller and daintier than me, stumbled along under a huge load like an ant with a Shredded Wheat biscuit.

  It’s a strange thing to be let into someone else’s family and see what passes for normal among them.

  The Devane family, a.k.a. The Walking Irish Tragedy, makes more sense to me now that I’ve come to understand something of life’s creeping disappointments than it did back then, when I was a hard-line little asshole clutching my Minor Threat records. The parents were originally from New England—father Harvard ’52, mother a hat-and-gloves girl who grew up on Beacon Hill—but their ship had run aground in one of the least intellectually fecund places in the country round about 1961, when Professor D had landed at a small college in central PA. It was supposed to be a stepping-stone to bigger things, but something wicked had intervened. Maybe the environment had overtaken him. I have to say, I found Professor D a prickly, intimidating figure, with his Central Casting tweeds and pipe, perpetual air of amused disdain, and casual schadenfreude (“Oh, Dr. Franzel fell into a vat of polymer. Tough luck for him”). Whenever I used a “big word” around him, Professor D would unplug his pipe from his mouth, raise his eyebrows, and say, “Oh, pardon my French!” His kids all revered him, particularly Audrey, Edwina, and their middle sister, Maud, who fell all over themselves to get his approval. Mrs. D was a much more interesting figure to me, with her raspy, cigarette-cured voice, finishing-school speech patterns, and hairdo that tipped up at the ends like that of a ’50s sitcom star. She had a kind of utter über-mom ease in the world and was what they used to call a “good conversationalist.”

  Though they’d been there for at least twenty-five years, the parents looked on their surroundings with a sad condescension. It was as if the arrangement were merely provisional and better things were on the way. Meanwhile their five kids had grown u
p in this landscape and seemed trapped between two worlds. There was the high-culture fairy-tale version that existed within the walls of the Devanes’ Craftsman bungalow—which, again, seemed to me like something out of a television show, with its sunken living room, slate flooring, and Midcentury Modern furniture—and the underfed reality of the town all around them, with its crumbling downtown, scrimpy auto-body shops, and Bible-thumping utility-shed churches. Driving down the main artery, you saw neon crosses everywhere. Audrey’s brother Ciaran, the eldest but one, was a haunted med student who wrote poetry in the style of Yeats and who would tell you all about cardiothoracic harvesting trips, his great brown eyes shining with an almost paralyzing compassion. Maud, the roiling middle sister, had a BA from Amherst but worked as a bartender at a dicey local. She chain-smoked Sweet Afton cigarettes and had excruciating funds of knowledge about Gaeilge orthography, Bloomsday, and the sport of camogie. The girl talked about the death of Bobby Sands as if it had just happened yesterday, and I was not surprised to learn that she’d once knocked a patron out cold when he ordered a drink called an Irish car bomb. There was the eldest brother, not present, a sort of blessed supertramp called Niall, whose name was always mentioned in a reverent tone, and who had disappeared into the cloud forests of Amazonas before finishing his dissertation on microtonal composer Harry Partch. Edwina, who was, by contrast, extremely present, spoke like a punishing librarian, constantly correcting everyone’s already near-impeccable grammar; but she also seemed the most troubled—a hyper-meticulous, lonely person in space, and probably a real barrel of monkeys to the trembling youth she tutored in French. Everyone drank too much. Taken unawares at any given moment, the family, with the exception of Mrs. D, could all be caught frowning with intense and probably tragic thought.