Our sit-in was followed by arrest—a successful action, all things considered. But how to square it with the memory of the secretary who did not relax the entire time we occupied the office, never once settling into her seat, and even when we sang never once looking at us with anything but fear? No matter how sweet our “Kumbaya”s, how heartfelt our “If I Had a Hammer”s, no matter how gilded our hunger or how exquisite our patience, she never stopped twisting those hands.
Our intentions were good—there was real invasion in the Gulf, after all, thousands of lives lost, governments gone wrong, families gunned down in the street. What is one person’s discomfort or a well-intentioned lie in the face of such realities?
I can only say that when I look back on those hours, the paddy wagon and the fingerprinting, the handsome officer with his smile and the subsequent court dates, I remember most of all the secretary shaking her head as she wept, looking at us and saying, “I’m sorry I ever trusted you.”
III
The rectories of Roman Catholic churches are ordinarily reserved for priests, but there was nothing ordinary about our parish. In the more robust days, several priests shared the rectory, but by the 1970s Corpus Christi had only one priest. By the late 1980s the progressive priest decided to leave the rectory for a home a few miles from the church and offered the rectory to college students who made peanut butter sandwiches for the homeless and filled out Mass cards in exchange for rent.
There were four of us: the oldest, a graduate student (who collected Victrolas and taught me to make ricotta pie), two Eastman School students (earnest blonds from the Midwest, the sounds of piano and cello leaking from their rooms), and me. We lived together, all of us posting flyers announcing visiting liberation theologians, taking turns ushering people in for nonviolence study groups, making nightly rounds to lock the huge old building, keeping the hub of the large urban church occupied so our priest could live in a grittier section of the city, closer to the neighborhood from which I’d only recently escaped and nearer those he hoped to serve—though I sometimes wondered if he simply required respite from the nonstop trinity of midnight callers (the mentally ill, inebriated, and confessional).
I’d been baptized at Corpus Christi as a baby, had slept inside a roll of carpet as a child, finding the opening after running way from my mother during Easter Vigil Mass, refusing to come out of hiding, frozen as the statues taken down from the altar on Good Friday, all of them crowding the side sacristy, all dark shadows and cracked plaster showing in moonlight. I’d come to Mass willingly and often on my own—looking forward to the homilies, the way they helped make sense of the world, the words washing over me, the names of faraway places, sounding like poems read at school. So while it may have surprised my friends when I applied for the opening to live in the rectory community, it made perfect sense to me. Corpus Christi had always been home.
And so I lived in the rectory with a handful of others, reading Thomas Merton and Desmond Tutu, sitting around a candle in the evenings, considering peace from all its flickering angles. So much feeling welling up, so much talk of social justice. Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott and fasting three days for El Salvador and breaking the fast with cheap wine, the highs and the lows. Talk of twelve steps and self-help and the reading of books with rainbows flanking their covers. Marches on Washington and white cotton sundresses and men drawn to such dresses like flies. A time of Advent and Lent and clear Octobers and cider—and our German visitor teaching me to say pumpkin in German (kürbis), how handsome he was and how new I felt and his chest the color of oak leaves, the Berlin Wall coming down while he visited, the sound of his voice breaking in the kitchen while talking with a sister he hadn’t heard in years. The volume of Yevtushenko found in an old bookcase.
But for all the poetry, for all the study groups and talk of hopes and fears deep into the night, the echo of piano and cello, for all the rallies and demonstrations for peace—the truth is that I lived in the rectory for other reasons. Despite the fact that formal prayer often felt like a pile of pebbles set onto my tongue, in truth, I loved the old building and its many rooms precisely because it was a church.
Some mornings I’d slip out into the church before anyone else woke and sit facing the sanctuary. To some, the oversized nave with its rows of old pews and high ceilings might have seemed hollow or cold. But the old wood warmed me, the ceiling beams felt like a backbone and the statues of the saints—the same sets of bony features that frightened me as I made the rounds to lock up the old building at night—softened as morning came, their faces taking on the sheen of familiarity, becoming old friends in the early light.
I’d sit for a while, experiencing a sort of quiet joy I’d never found at rallies and lectures and study groups. Everything fell away. Worries about past and future, thoughts of what to do next. There was only the sound of birds on Prince Street, the scent of balsam and cleaning wax, the great panel of stained glass breaking into a wash of blues and greens, and all the candles along the altar waiting to be lit.
Our Lady of the Carpeted Stairs
I’M NOT THE ONE who placed the Virgin outside the priest’s office.
But when he stood by my side and said I’m onto you with a wink, I went along with it. I’d long ago acquired the habit of hiding how little I knew and more than that, I feared losing that speck of connection, the small but meaningful space between the Father’s wink and his words: I’m onto you.
I had no father of my own, just the story of a man who’d traveled the New York State Thruway selling vacuum cleaners, stopping between Albany and Buffalo for a bite to eat, a soft reception. We’d only been an off-ramp to him, my mother and I, which may explain why I’d been trying to connect with the one called Father since I was a child. And because I had no arsenal of obvious charms at my disposal, I used what I knew to lure him, whipping up storms in the gulf of my mouth and sending them his way, twisted ribbons of longing.
I was twenty when the wink arose between us but remembered when, years before, he was new to the parish, a fresh-scrubbed priest walking our neighborhood, shining his light on streets others refused to enter. He most loved a girl whose last name was a stew of delicious syllables—LaMarata—a name that sounded to me like a prayer. She was sick and the Father kept a picture that LaMarata had colored hanging beside his rectory desk. He must have looked at it every day, taking in the crayoned lines on his way in and out of the office, staring into the mash of flowers, making a point of remembering the dying child, the brevity of life, the way nothing is guaranteed. And how low I was that I envied the girl the purity of her illness, when all those years before, a good priest appeared suddenly among us, back when I was nothing so much as a little hurricane, before the wink and the words I’m onto you.
When the wink came, I was living in the rectory and there were times—certain mornings, or the hour between Sunday Masses—when the door to his office flung wide and the priest tumbled forth as if propelled by a gust of wind, spilling toward the piano in the living room. I’d hear the start of the keys and slip down the stairs, sitting on a step just out of sight and listening to what came from his playing, something hard and loose and far from the precision of the piano student from Missouri. For all this talk, it might seem as if I loved the priest the way some girls take to older men, the way some parishioners fall for ministers. But no, he was simply a man whose goodness intrigued me. First, that such goodness could exist, and second, that it was directed so firmly at the world apart from me.
Is my delight so hard to imagine then—the warmth of the wink, the familiarity of the words? I’m onto you. The only real surprise was the speed with which I offered up my gummy smile, the ease with which I neither confirmed nor denied, and in my silence pretended I had indeed placed the statue of the Blessed Mother outside his office door.
And when, the next morning, the Virgin appeared on the landing of the stairs near my room, I stood open-mouthed like Bernadette in her cave at Massabielle or Lúcia dos Santos droppin
g the bundle of sticks she’d collected when the Lady showed herself at Fátima. I became faithful pilgrim and startled peasant girl as I stood there, the sight of Our Lady of the Carpeted Stairs nearly causing me to fall backward.
Then I remembered—I’m onto you—and though I had not started this game, I laughed and laid claim, hauling the waist-high statue into my room. She became a shared joke then, the Virgin, going back and forth between us: under a kitchen table, in the little-used office on the third floor, behind the drapery in the large meeting room. More smiles and winks, Our Lady becoming a sort of holy baton, an invisible string connecting the two of us—winks and more winks—until the night I placed her on the lid of the closed toilet in the priest’s private bathroom.
I’d walked into his office a few times before, enjoying the view through his window, the small patch of grass, the line of books, staring at the coloring made by the sick child all those years before. I wandered in again the night I placed the Virgin on the toilet lid, taking a seat and staring at the same water stain in the ceiling that had been there since I was a girl. All the times I’d been in that office as a child: dragged in by my mother for the humiliation of family counseling, for my firing as an altar girl ten years prior, stopping by to say hello before Thursday night folk Masses, shifting my feet while making up questions in an attempt to hold him. The same office I’d occupy a few years later, sitting beside the man I’d marry, his voice ratcheting with each word spoken, nervousness translating into volume because he was modest and a Lutheran and what had he ever done to deserve interrogation about heaven, the saints, and accepting children with open arms should they come?
But that was future and past, and as I sat in the priest’s office on that night, hands resting on the head of the Virgin, I only stared out the window trying to decide the next move in a game I’d lacked the boldness to invent.
How did it come to me then, the bathroom?
It wasn’t that I didn’t revere Our Lady. I’d always admired Mary, not praying to her so much as finding comfort in her presence. As a child, I’d listened to the stories of our religion—the water and the wine, Mary and Gabriel, Lazarus’s return from the dead—and seen them as a dream blossoming just under the surface of the everyday world, a beautiful dream, one shared and dipped into during Mass. But one day something tipped me off, a thing said at church, someone hinting at the reality of Mary made pregnant without sex, so that I had no choice but to quiz anyone who’d answer, asking about the matter over and over: Do you really believe? I persisted beyond politeness, thinking people too shy to speak, thinking they’d lumped Mary in with Santa Claus, magical stories they safeguarded for children. I asked until their faces turned, eyebrows rising, foreheads gathering into lines—until I finally understood. Others believed differently. Literally. I was perhaps alone in the dream. I continued coming to Mass but backed off from saying things I didn’t believe. But not from Mary, never from Mary—the lone figure of a woman among men, the one soft spot you could count on in any church—and because a woman becoming pregnant without a husband was what I knew best, I required no magic to adore her.
Even as I lifted the statue and placed the Virgin in the bathroom, I never thought to offend. I wanted only to succeed in this game and required a place that had not yet been tried, and there it was. A tiled grotto complete with raised platform. And when, the next morning, the priest did not smile or wink, when he did not even look in my direction and the air between us became as thick as it ever had been, and Our Lady failing to appear to me again, I knew I’d taken things too far—which, in reality, was less disappointment than confirmation, for I have always had a way of taking things too far.
I’m onto you.
I suppose that more than anything I feared that the priest had always been onto me in some meaningful way—as if with his goodness he was able to spot its opposite in the blustery child and ten years later, in the wide-eyed woman living in his former rooms. I was nothing like the girl with the illness, the one whose name would always be the sound of a prayer. I was nothing like the statue of Our Lady, sweet and pink and waiting to be moved—I asked too many questions, was a tad too fast with the wisecrack, and there was a hunger about me that fell in strange shapes from my eyes. How much more difficult, adoration, in the living breathing world.
Twenty years have come and gone, and still how little I know. Except that he was wrong about the Virgin. I was not the one who lifted her by the slender waist and set her blue and blooming before his door.
I was simply the one who stared into the faded colors of another girl’s picture, trying to unravel the mechanics of adoration from the way she crayoned her lines. The one crouched on the staircase on certain Sundays, listening to the mess of music rise from the piano, the sound as choppy and glorious as a springtime storm. The one whose heart pounded as the sound came, caught up in something I could not name as he played. The one who sat watching the Father as he rose from the bench, headed back to his office, letting the door close all the way behind him.
II
Do you remember
The night we were lost
In the shade of the blackthorn
And the touch of the frost?
ANONYMOUS, seventeenth-century Irish
A Party, in May
HOW DOES ONE NIGHT set itself apart from all the others?
So many nights, even in half a lifetime. Nights of twinkling lights and wedding tents and the moon hanging like a Chinese lantern. Nights of almond oil and the catalpa with its heart-shaped leaves, nights when the body has no choice but to unburden itself and the wreck of sheets at the end of the bed. Nights of the box fan churning heat in an August room, the movement of blades, a touch of hand shivering the skin. Nights without enough hours to pour the words into, and if it’s winter, nights of brandy and pine boughs thrown into the fire—needles becoming fireworks, how they crackle, what scent they give. But there are other nights too. Nights of tight words and forced music, nights of the candle dying out and the chill that won’t leave, nights of slammed doors and falling into bed alone, hands over your eyes. Nights of staring into the ceiling, looking for signs in the woodwork. Nights of tossing and turning and trying to remember that morning will come. In all those thousands of nights, why should this be the one?
The snow, I suppose—though snow itself is not rare in New York State. But this snow was different. Nothing like the snow of holiday greeting cards—this snow inserted itself into the wrong season and made demands, threatening the redbuds and the lilacs. And it was not just any night. We were well into the month of May, the evening before Mother’s Day—the night of a party, a party that would have been unlikely in December, and impossible in the month of April. Some nights must happen exactly as they do and this one was set for May.
We’d gathered to celebrate three birthdays—a good friend, a sister, and my husband. All turning thirty. We used the hall at the apartment complex where we lived, a fine complex; the wide room was newly carpeted and flanked by a dance floor and a granite-topped bar with a view to a pool not yet open for the season. A newly planted magnolia tree stood sentry near the door, a ring of fresh mulch circling its base, its fuzzy pods opening to flowers that showed pink. The magnolia’s blossoms sprouting from bare branches were what I first thought of when the snow came.
It was not the best of parties, nor was it a particularly beautiful May. It is simply a place to begin. As in any story, the roots extend beyond the beginning, going back to a time before the month was called May, before birthday cakes, before invitations stuffed into envelopes and sent. Like the olive trees of Lebanon are most stories, thousands of years’ worth of roots fingering the undersides of things. The Sisters Olive Trees of Noah, the Lebanese trees are called, because they’re said to have been the source of the branch the dove brought back to Noah, a branch signifying the waning of floodwaters, the end of God’s wrath. The trees still stand there in Lebanon, sixteen of them spreading their gnarled branches over the village of Beche
aleh, going on with the business of bearing fruit as they have done since the time the land was called Canaan. Which brings me to the Hebrew Scriptures, to Abraham, and to Sarah.
I’d devoured the illustrated Children’s Bible as a girl, often admiring those I was supposed to abhor—something about the strong lines of Jezebel’s back as she waited to be pushed from her tower to the waiting dogs below. Such pluck—the way she painted her face even as they came for her. Those biblical temptresses, what sway they held in a time of men who parted rivers and stared down lions, what rare and delicious power. Delilah and Eve and Bathsheba. Later Salome and Mary Magdalene. All of them, really. Except Sarah.
Wife to Abraham, Sarah could bear no children and, at her suggestion, Abraham made a child with their servant, Hagar. This was perhaps odd, but mostly fine, until Sarah, at the age of ninety, made a covenant with God and bore Abraham a second son. Then the real trouble began. The sight of Hagar with her child became a thorn to Sarah once her arms were filled with a child of her own. She began to nag and moan until, at her insistence, Abraham banished Hagar and his firstborn son. I can still see the Bible’s illustration: Hagar dark-skinned and huddled with her boy, Sarah’s pale arms crossed, her mouth sour as Abraham points a finger in a southerly direction.
It’s possible that the olive trees in Lebanon were not around at the time of Noah. Perhaps they came later. Perhaps Sarah herself gave root to the famous trees. They may have sprouted from pits tossed from a platter at her baby shower, a ninety-year-old oohing over the ancient equivalents of receiving blankets and baby oil, so delighted that, in a fit of happiness, she threw the olive pits behind the party tent. Lush as a new river, that Sarah, walking around her hut like a movie star, wearing her fertility like a gold sticker placed upon her wizened forehead by the hand of God.
Queen of the Fall Page 6