"Cream?"
"No, thanks. Nothing."
"No sugar?"
"No, thanks, Sister."
She served the coffee, then took a chair across the table from him. "You should call me Anne. I call you Michael."
"Okay." He smiled. "I never called a nun by her first name before."
"You still haven't."
"Anne."
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" She laughed and sipped her coffee. The sleeves of her habit fell back each time she raised the cup to her mouth, and he saw her forearms. She wore a man's watch. Her wrists were pale and he could see the faint blue lines of her veins. Other girls her age put perfume there.
"Like I said on the phone, it's bad news." Michael pushed his coffee aside and unrolled the Triborough plans. Anne Edward leaned forward. "Right there. See?" Michael planted his forefinger firmly. "The whole school is marked for demolition."
For a moment she said nothing. Then, exhaling dramatically, she leaned back in her chair. "And the monsignor says, 'Don't worry!'"
"Monsignor Ellis has his head in the trench, but that's because Moses is shooting live ammo. Obviously these plans are going through."
"No, they're not."
Michael shook his head. "Anne, if the cardinal has given the green light, and I'd say there's reason to think he has—"
"The cardinal doesn't understand the needs of this parish. If he did, he'd never permit the destruction of the school: The school is all there is at Holy Cross."
He said nothing.
"Don't you agree?"
Loyalty to his fellow clerics, whom she was criticizing—what did it require? He could say, No, there's also the hospital ministry, there are the daily Masses, there's the bingo. But those were rote exercises, and he already knew it. Only the school had life. He nodded, a small concession, but for him important. A break with clericalism. "Why else would I be here with you? I haven't shown these plans to the priests."
"They would say what you said, that it's all over. But do you know why they'd say that? Because the priests don't care about the school. They don't care about the children. Why should they fight for them? But if Robert Moses was coming through here taking away their liquor cabinet or their three days off a week or their free passes to fancy restaurants, then you'd hear a howl! Then they'd be on the cardinal's doorstep! And then Moses would think twice. But the priests are fatalistic now because all Moses wants to take away from the parish are its children."
When she sipped her coffee now her hands were trembling, and Michael saw that she herself wasn't nearly as bold as her speech was. When she looked at him across the rim of her cup, he saw that her eyes were full.
"I don't blame you for being angry," he said. She was right. It was an outrage. These nuns were right and the priests were not supporting them. Well, by God, he thought, I'll support them. Even if they're bound to lose. Now clerical loyalty required that Michael throw in with Anne Edward. Should he have let these nuns defend the parish alone? Should he have ignored what he saw in her eyes, what her speech revealed, what she was telling him? They needed the priests! They needed him! He said, "You love the children, that's obvious."
She put her cup down. "Of course we do. What sense does our life make if we don't love the children?"
Michael nodded. What a simple statement of the nun's vocation. Priests fall back on clerical privilege or on the transcendent function of administering sacraments or on the exercise of ecclesiastical power or on the superior social status they occupy in an immigrant community. Nuns fall back only on the people they serve, or on God. Michael was surprised by a wave of admiration he felt for her, and he wanted to express it. "Holy Cross is lucky it has you."
"Our order has been in this school for seventy years."
"And you?" Michael smiled.
"This is my second." She laughed and touched the corner of her eye. To purge a tear? "But I care about it as if I've always been here."
"Where were you before?"
"In the juniorate. In training. I came here right after I took vows. I felt so lucky to be assigned here. It's considered a privilege in our order because the people of this parish are so good."
"How'd you wind up in the convent, Anne?"
With a quick look she conveyed both that she did not take his right to ask such a question for granted, but also that she welcomed his interest. "The sisters in my high school; I thought, what fantastic women! They were so happy, their lives were full of meaning. I fell in love with them." She blushed but did not drop her eyes. "I fell in love with Christ." She laughed and added, self-mockingly, "Isn't that what girls in high school are supposed to do? Fall in love?" Despite her irony, however, Michael sensed the strength of her vocation. There was no equivalent for priests to the religious woman's fiercely romantic attraction to the mystical life. It was at root, of course, an attraction to the great dream figure of all time. Jesus was the ultimate Mister Goodbar.
"It's a great system, isn't it?" he said. "Now you're in a school impressing young girls with your happiness, with the meaning in your life."
"Yes," she said, but there was a hint of darkness in her that made him wonder, How happy?
She went on, "Maybe that's why the school is important to me. Schools are where we sisters do our work. Schools are where we sisters come from. We take care of our schools because they take care of us."
Michael nodded. He looked around at the corners of the room and suddenly realized that teaching nuns had been eating lunches in there for decades. Robert Moses was assaulting the ghosts of all those nuns too. A long line of fantastic women! Yes, Michael looked at her and thought that.
Perhaps she sensed these feelings in him because she continued to blush. When she didn't speak, the silence loomed between them. She picked her cup and saucer up and stood, but because her hand shook the cup rattled and she had to quiet it with her other hand. This was not like her, he sensed. She was ordinarily more selfpossessed. Was he the cause of this tension? he wondered. Or was it only Robert Moses? She came to his side of the table and took his cup. She smelled of soap.
"Thanks," he said.
While she rinsed the cups and left them to drain, he rolled up the blueprints and put them into the tube.
She dried her hands while crossing to him, then dropped the towel on the table and reached for the cardboard tube just as he did. They picked it up together, each with a hand. The tube joined them. Their eyes met.
"I was going to take it," she said. "I have to show Rita."
"I have to get it back to the commissioner's office." Surely she understood that. "We can't keep it."
"But we need these plans, Michael. They prove our point. If we're going to rally the parish, they have to know what we're up against. They think it's just a widened street."
Michael felt sick suddenly. What was she asking him to do? What would the commissioner say if he didn't return the plans? What would the monsignor say if he found out? Or, good God, the cardinal!
He felt the pressure from her hand on the tube. She was pulling it toward herself. It was as if she was pulling him. They were physically close and no doubt since they were young and ripe, there was an erotic aspect to the charged field between them—they held each other's gaze after all for a long time—but it was not only that or even primarily. They were making a compact with each other, an alliance. And Michael didn't realize that that was what they'd done until, despite his inhibition, he let go of the tube, to let her take it.
Monsignor Ellis had assumed it would be the usual May procession from the schoolyard to the church front where the pale statue of Mary in its small grotto would be garlanded with roses as it had been every year since he put it there in memory of his mother. He hadn't presided himself in some years, but that hadn't mattered. Now it made him seem like a fool that he wasn't there, as if he didn't know what was what in his own parish. The first phone call was from a New York Times reporter, and the second was from the chancery.
An hour and a ha
lf after the end of the regular school day and well after such devotions were usually held, all seven hundred and fifty Holy Cross children filed down Forty-third Street, nuns herding them like collies. That block was little traveled for Manhattan, and as they always did when the pastor or the principal requested it, the police had closed the street. The girls were wearing their Communion and Confirmation dresses, and certain of them were carrying bouquets. The boys were wearing white shirts and blue ties, and their shoes were polished. As they marched along they sang, "O Mary, we crown thee with flowers today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May."
Neighborhood women leaned from their windows up and down the street to watch. One wiped a tear from her eye with the corner of her apron: such innocence! And what the world would do to it! It was a lovely spring afternoon befitting the ceremony, and the sky itself was blue as Our Lady's cloak. Father Mahon, looking stately and benign in his alb and gold-encrusted cope and attended by acolytes, each with his candle struggling in the breeze, stood on the top stair of the church entrance like a potentate reviewing his parade. He seemed indifferent to the implication when the nuns steered the cross-bearing eighth-grade boy and the garland-bearing eighth-grade girl at the head of the procession past the church, around the police barricade that closed the street and out onto the Ninth Avenue sidewalk, going downtown.
It was the height of rush hour, the sidewalks were crowded with the usual peddlers, but also with secretaries, shopgirls and clerks on their way home from work. The avenue was already jammed with automobiles heading for Lincoln Tunnel and buses for the Port Authority. Before the May procession intruded, the commuters had achieved, despite their numbers, the efficient, steady progress of their daily exodus. The alteration in the rhythm of that progress caused by the Holy Cross children was slight at first, but it was enough. Dozens of pedestrians slowed, then made room for the procession by spilling out into the street. Drivers cursed them, but they too slowed. At the intersections where the streets cut into the avenue, nuns raised their arms at the auto traffic as if it was Red Sea water. The commuters were amused at first, and they waited even if they had the light while the sisters waved the children through. "...Queen of the Angels..."
Policemen who saw it knew damn well what the effect of the disruption would be, but they had all been in such processions themselves, though not in midtown at rush hour. They weren't going to tell the nuns to beat it. They stopped traffic altogether and nodded at the sisters as they passed. One truck driver leaned out of his rig and joined in the chorus: "...Queen of the May..."
The decorum of the children was perfect. Those boys and girls, ordinarily the after-school bane of the fruit merchants and of the cops and of the newsstand hawkers, now went by with their eyes cast down and their hands in steeples.
But it was apparent on second glance, third at most, that this May procession was different. In every tenth rank of children was a pair of seventh- or eighth-graders carrying between them a large sign blazoned with the letters S.O.S. And trailing the procession were the ten tallest children carrying a large blue banner with white letters that read, "Save Our School From Robert Moses."
Michael had been walking behind Sister Anne Edward. He caught up with her. "You were right, Anne! You were right!" His exuberance overflowed. "You are fantastic women! Fantastic!"
She laughed. She was delighted with how it was going too. "You're not so bad yourself, Deacon!"
He fell into step with her. Taking the procession out onto Ninth Avenue had been her idea, but Sister Rita wasn't convinced until Michael had joined Anne in arguing for it. Without permits, which the police would never have granted, it was illegal to disregard traffic signals as they were doing, and the tie-up was building. "I think we have their attention," he said.
She gestured over the heads of the children at the line of automobiles. "They drive through here every day without a thought for the neighborhood and what they do to it. Maybe now they'll get the idea that people live here."
Michael waved at a glaring motorist, and through his grin he said, "They get it, Anne. They get it."
Under her breath she said, "They look mad, don't they? God, I hope nothing happens."
"Relax. Nothing will happen. It's a May procession! The folks who use Lincoln Tunnel will just get home late for dinner, that's all!"
Anne touched his arm. "I hope so, Michael. I wouldn't admit this to anyone else, but the whole thing makes me nervous. I can't believe we're doing this. Do you think it will really make a difference?"
"Hey, the parents and children of Holy Cross School have to be reckoned with, right? Now Moses will know it."
"And so will the cardinal."
Michael grimaced. "Let's leave him out of this." He clutched her arm, and they laughed like adolescents who had just defied a parent, although the parent didn't know it yet.
Her eyes flashed with delight. "Thanks, Michael." In that setting, despite her habit, she was the opposite of the churchly women enshrined by piety. The meek Bride of Christ? The Mother of Sorrows? The Woman Bathed in Tears? Her heart pierced seven times? Passive? Forbearing? Long-suffering? O Mary, we crown thee with flowers today? Not this woman. She was neither tough nor hard-boiled. On the contrary, she was caring and vulnerable. But threaten what she cared about and she became strength itself. She seemed more alive and more full of energy than any woman Michael had ever known. (What? All three of them?) It pleased him to think that his support had helped her to muster the nerve for this. She had helped him to muster his.
A stymied driver honked his horn angrily, and Michael waved at him. "Bless you, brother!" he called.
"Michael!" she said, half-teasing, but only half. "We shouldn't take pleasure in their discomfort."
"Yes, we should! It's them or us, Anne. And my money is on our side!" (What? All three dollars?)
She grinned at him happily. "We're doing it, aren't we?"
"Damn right. I'm going to run ahead. Try to keep the line up to pace here, Anne. I'll slow them a bit in the lead. And I want to make sure nobody bothers the kids when they make the turn at Thirty-ninth Street. Hell, I want to walk in front with them! This is great, Anne!" He clapped his hands and threw his fist in the air. Michael Maguire was a man of action again at last. Spontaneously he blew her a kiss as he turned and then, with an athlete's stride, ran out into the street and along the line of the procession. There were singing children on one side of him and irate motorists on the other. One could almost hear that young, smitten nun saying to herself, "Go, Michael! Go!"
By four-fifteen traffic all over midtown had slowed to a virtual halt, and the first radio reports were going out about what the WINS reporter dubbed "The SOS Parade." What was this anyway? Parochial school kids taking on Commissioner Robert Moses? What did he want with their school anyway? His Mid-Manhattan Expressway had been shelved, hadn't it? But you never knew. It was one thing for Moses to be blasted by Sutton Place matrons over his destruction of a playground above the East River or by the left-wing crowd who wanted Joe Papp to put on Shakespeare in what Moses called "my park," but Catholics? Nuns? The archdiocese? Was the commissioner taking on the cardinal? That would be the battle of Titans! Find out what the hell is happening over there!
By the time the procession had wound its way past the new Port Authority building at Forty-second Street, down to Thirty-ninth, across to Tenth Avenue and back up to Forty-third Street, bollixing traffic for an hour, the news organizations represented at Holy Cross included the Herald-Tribune, the Post, the Daily News, WMCA, WINS, WOR and a camera crew from WPIX-TV. The New York Times reporter who'd called the monsignor told his editor nothing newsworthy was occurring, and he would, after the storm broke that evening and the next day, be roundly rebuked.
After the last hymn was sung, Mary's head fittingly crowned and the throng of children dismissed with a blessing by Father Mahon, Monsignor Ellis appeared from inside the church vestibule. He had obviously been waiting for Father Mahon to finish. The pastor looked at the rheumy priest
with contempt as the altar boys led him past, into the church. Then he faced the crowd. The children had begun to disperse, but many of their parents were there now, filling the street. They, together with the reporters, waited for Monsignor Ellis to speak. He fingered the row of red buttons on his cassock, but not nervously. These people didn't threaten him. Only phone calls from the chancery did that, and by God he was going to see that he got no more of those on this matter!
"I have a statement to make," he declared in his preaching voice. He waited, skillfully collecting their attention. Cameras ran. He said, or rather, proclaimed, "The May devotions of this parish have the sole purpose of honoring Our Blessed Lady. They have significance for the Church, but not for the world. Therefore some of you have wasted your time in coming here, unless of course you have been edified by the innocence of our children, which would be to the good. As for those of you who are parishioners: my dear people, I appreciate your concern. Rumors abound. Next we'll hear that our beloved church itself is marked for demolition! Nonsense!" He paused, then repeated that word, slamming his fist into his palm for emphasis. "I am authorized by the cardinal himself to say that nothing anyone does with Lincoln Tunnel is going to bother Holy Cross School one bit! You can rest assured, my dear people, that the cardinal would not permit it, and..." His finger shot up; this is the last word. "...neither would I!"
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