Being in St. Simon Stock church, built underground beneath stone staircases, dark, mysterious, lit mostly by candles, incense mixed equally with oxygen, brought Megan back to her earliest childhood. She felt the tightening of her stomach, the catch in her throat that alerted her to the presence of the Holy Mother and God’s only begotten Son.
She glanced at the confessionals at the back of the church, remembering the voices of children: … and I used God’s name in vain seven times and I dishonored my mother and smacked my sister and cursed and oh God my very existence an abomination, my continuing existence by the grace of a living God. Her youth was encapsulated in this place. In her lifetime she had committed two serious sins; she had never, truly, fully confessed her part in a man’s death, nor her abortion. She had used words to get around both events, had manipulated each situation; and now, in this primary church of her life, all her intellectualizations deserted her. The sad statue of the Holy Mother rebuked her. The all-forgiving, tortured figure on the Cross suffered for her sins.
But she wasn’t a kid anymore, and the Church was just one compartment in her life. Even this elaborate legalization of a union to which she and Mike were already committed was only a gesture to please her family.
The church was filled with people who had known her from her earliest years, and with the important people in her father’s life, and with Mike’s family and with their mutual friends. In the dimness, with memories and long-denied knowledge filling her, Megan, on her father’s arm, felt her leg suddenly lock. She had misstepped, or caught her foot in her train, which one of the children had dropped. However it happened, Megan Magee went sprawling facedown on the aisle between the dark, well-filled pews.
A hushed gasp of shock was followed by the stark silence of tension, as Frankie rushed to help her. Mike Kelly left his assigned place at the altar, came to her side, and lifted her in his strong, capable arms. Holding her, he turned, surveyed the stunned guests, and in words that forever endeared him to Megan’s father, he said, “Megan and I are going to carry each other through the rest of our lives. It’s my turn now, so I’m gonna carry my bride to the altar.”
It was a good start to a good marriage.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHARLEY O’BRIEN DID A FEW THINGS THAT surprised his family and friends. Aside from seeking out his Jewish relatives. Aside from converting to Judaism.
He took the newly announced civil service exam for the New York City Fire Department. His father and his two brothers “on the job” figured this was all part of whatever had affected Charley’s mind over there in Europe. He sure wasn’t the same good-natured, easygoing Charley they had all known and loved.
His father’s only request to him was that he go on one good retreat with the Vincentians, and try to get his head straight, try to catch up with himself. He was, after all, a Catholic, born and baptized and confirmed. What he was planning was a foolish thing. Even his Jewish cousins thought so, didn’t they?
Charley’s Jewish relatives had viewed him with suspicion and alarm—especially the older ones, the brothers and sisters of his mother. Yes, he could have names and addresses, but what, exactly, was he after?
His mother’s sister Rhea—her one remaining contact with her family—had died years ago. Cancer. That and heart problems ran in the family. His mother’s younger sister, Harriet, actually looked much older than his mother, and did not resemble anyone Charley knew. She was a short, heavy woman, her body encircled by a dirty white apron over a thick sweater, her head covered by a woolen scarf. Between dealing with customers in her fish store, she glanced at Charley suspiciously.
“I hardly remember her. Miriam. Miri. I was so young. So she went her own way, why should I remember her? I was a child, ten years younger, maybe. And you, why do you come here anyway, what are you looking for?”
Cousins. People his own age. Faces he could recognize, bloodlines he could feel. Who the hell knew?
His cousin, Artie Kramer, a Navy veteran, had just bought a small tract house in New Jersey. He had heard about his cousin Charley O’Brien, and was delighted to meet him.
“My God,” he said, “I have a first cousin who looks like you? A Charley O’Brien, for God’s sake. You look like every Irish kid who ever beat me up when we lived in Queens.”
Artie was a rabbi who had been a Navy chaplain. After a kosher meal provided by a curious Ruth and shared by their three children, the two men in the small backyard sat watching each other. Searching each other.
“Yes,” his cousin told him, “we lost family in the Holocaust. Uncles, aunts, cousins. Of course. Everyone lost someone. All the Jews who came here left family behind. So, Charley, tell me—what is this all about?”
It took Charley a while to talk about what he had seen and felt at the camps. He shrugged heavily.
“An overwhelming experience, I’m sure. One you will remember all of your life. But to decide to become a Jew …”
“My mother never converted. So I was born a Jew.”
“But baptized and raised a Catholic. Charley, don’t hurry into anything. Seek answers in your own religion. I’d bet you practiced your religion by rote, without any real thought or feeling. I agree with your father. Go on a retreat. Search your own religion. First decide what it is you are seeking. To find God? He exists everywhere. To try to relieve some of the horror, the guilt? All of us feel guilt—we were safe from all of that. Imagine how the survivors will feel, for the rest of their lives. So what is it you really want to do?”
“I want to become a Jew. To marry a Jewish girl and to raise my children as Jews.”
Artie smiled. “First, find out a little bit what being a Jew entails. With a name like O’Brien, a policeman’s face—a brother who is a shining light in the Catholic Church, Charley. You can still be a good man, remaining a Catholic. To become Jewish is not a magical thing, it—”
“In the Catholic religion, there have always been saints. People who claim to have spoken with God, to have gotten messages from God. Maybe it was all psychological, all in their heads, I don’t know. I never heard God’s voice, but I have had this feeling that this is what I was meant to be. Jeez, I never knew I’d get so much resistance from the Jews.”
“We don’t proselytize, Charley. From what you’ve told me, you’ve already studied Judaism, technically, a great deal. Take some time. If after you’ve been home, say, a year, and reflected, and you definitely feel committed to do this, well, it would be my pleasure to prepare you, to preside at your bar mitzvah. But not now. There is no hurry. Agreed?”
On a bright April day, Charles O’Brien, age twenty-six—was bar mitzvahed at Temple Hillel in a small new suburban town outside of Tenafly, New Jersey.
He had done everything everyone had asked of him. He had gone on a two-week Vincentian retreat; he had discussed his religious feelings with his confessor. He prayed. He agonized. And he made his well-thought-out and irrevocable decision.
It was his cousin, Rabbi Arthur Kramer, who finally accomplished the entrance of Charley O’Brien into the world of the Reformed Jews.
His brother, Gene, wrote to him from the leper colony. He didn’t try to dissuade Charley, just asked him to be very careful and very sure, of his motives. If, after contemplation and soul-searching, he felt truly at peace with his decision, then Gene would pray for him and ask God’s blessing on Charley for his intentions. Even though he didn’t agree with him.
It was the most Gene had to give him, and Charley was grateful. He didn’t expect his father to attend. They hadn’t spoken much about the conversion, but Charley accepted the fact that, for the first time in maybe ten years, his police captain father had to work a Saturday morning. If that was how his dad handled it, well, okay. He knew his father was hurt and bewildered, but he hadn’t tried to dissuade Charley. Just asked him, as Gene had, to be sure of what he was doing.
None of his brothers or sisters attended, or any aunts or uncles on his father’s side; they considered what he was doing a
mortal sin, and could not be any part of it. His cousin Megan switched her shift at Bellevue to be there. She hugged him and told him she knew he must have thought about it carefully. She told him she loved him and was proud of him.
Many of his aunts and uncles and cousins from his mother’s side of the family attended, though not all; the older ones were skeptical. Not so much of Charley, but what was this “Reformed Judaism,” anyway? Men and women, sitting together. English spoken during the service. It was all too American to be truly Jewish.
Dressed in a new pale blue dress with a matching felt hat, Charley’s mother sat down front with the Herskels. He and his mother had left much unsaid. There never had been a great need for words in his family. His mother had always been too busy for much serious discussion: raising kids, keeping house, working split shifts as a nurse. Her life was orchestrated in set patterns, around designated responsibilities: getting the kids to school, through illness, accidents, religious rites, graduations, marriages, grandchildren. The war, the fear, the chin-up letters, packages with photographs inserted among the Rice-Krispies-squares. Even the happy, tumultuous family events, holidays that were never really hers, she made into celebrations for her family and kids: Christmas and Easter and the various saints’ days.
This event was different from anything she had seen in all the years of her life, since she had married the handsome young patrolman, Tom O’Brien.
Charley had explained it to her quietly. His reasons went bone-deep. It hadn’t been just the horror of the camps. It was something that had been missing in his life without his ever realizing its absence. And he was reclaiming something now that by right of birth belonged to him. It would not tear the family apart; they were all adults now. They would have to accept him on his terms. As she had accepted them on theirs.
Charley listened to the prayers in the synagogue, felt the rhythm of the words inside his very soul.
“And you who cling to the Lord your God are all alive today.”
Then he was given his Hebrew name, Yechezkel, for his public entrance into the fellowship of Judaism:
His voice was a clear and bell-like tenor, his pronunciation careful and exact:
“Bor’chu es adonoy ha-m’voroch.”
The congregation responded with the prescribed words and then Charley continued in Hebrew, as every Jewish boy through the ages had done: “Boruch attoh, adonoy eloheynu, melech ho-olom, asher bochar bonu mikkol ho-ammeem, v’nosan lonu es toroso. Boruch attoh, adonoy, noseyn ha’toroh.”
And then, “I have chosen to read from the prophet Isaiah:
“Thy sun shall no more go down,
Neither shall thy moon withdraw itself;
For the Lord shall be thine everlasting light,
And the days of thy mourning shall be ended.
Thy people also shall be righteous
They shall inherit the land forever;
The branch of My planting, the work of My hands,
Wherein I glory.
The smallest shall become a thousand,
And the least a mighty nation;
I the Lord will hasten it in its time.”
Charley closed the section he had read, took a deep breath, and addressed the congregation, his eyes moving automatically to his mother.
“Today I join the community of Judaism as a man returning from a long journey. It is a true return home for me. As my mother followed Naomi’s admonition and followed her husband, as Ruth did, I now return to the congregation. She raised her children to be good and loving and to believe in the Lord. She always respected her husband and her children’s beliefs, and it is through my mother that I return here today, as a man and as a Jew.”
His cousin, Rabbi Arthur Kramer, pointed to the reading on the podium, and in a clear strong voice Charley finished the ancient ceremony.
“Boruch attoh, adonoy eloheynu, melech ho-olom, asher nosan lonu toras emes, v’chay-yey ohm nota b’socheynu. Boruch attoh, adonoy, noseyn ha’toroh.”
There was a small buffet luncheon at Artie’s home, and three of his cousins, men in their forties, cornered Charley and presented him with three fountain pens.
“Now,” said Herb, the oldest, “now you’re one of us.”
Deborah Herskel embraced him, and they walked through the celebration arm in arm. The next important event, everyone knew, would be the wedding of these two young people.
Finally his mother approached him. She embraced him and then pulled back.
“What, Mom, what is it?”
“Charley,” she said softly, her face radiant, “you are my redemption.”
His decision to accept appointment to the fire department rather than to become a policeman was puzzling to those of his family who were cops, but not to those who were firemen.
Throughout his growing-up years, within both his immediate and his extended family, among all his parents’ friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, most of the men were in one department or the other. The verbal rivalry and kidding between the two camps sometimes turned hard and edged on nastiness, but the men were careful to stop short, given the home setting of their conversations.
Firemen, according to the cops, were “checker-players and cooks,” thieves who waited for that one big fire in a mansion or jewelry store or furrier’s with maybe thirty minutes unaccounted for when they could load up whatever they could carry, and then get on with official business.
Policemen, on the other hand, were blue-suited gangsters with one hand out front, one behind, wishing they had a third to fill with graft. Fill it up, sucker, or answer for violations, real or not, that encircled every small business enterprise of any kind—any small corner grocery store, luncheonette, shoeshine parlor, not to mention the corner taverns and after-hours bars and dives; the gambling in backrooms; the faked robberies for insurance, and don’t think you’re fooling us, bub. Without even suggesting the take from department stores: Hey, know why Murphy the cop’s kids always dress in the latest Alexander’s fashions? Yeah, because he got transferred out of Manhattan, and Saks Fifth gotta take care of their local boys, don’t they?
But it wasn’t the roughhouse kidding, the ridicule, the barely concealed anger that occasionally got out of hand, that stayed with Charley.
What he remembered were the calm, reflective, storytelling times when these men related what their jobs really entailed. Charley had listened and remembered and thought a great deal about what the differences were between the cops and the firemen.
The cops, the guys “on the job”—as though that were the only job in the world, as though those three words defined an entire life that anyone would understand—the words spoke of violence, of fights, of riots, of beatings downstairs at the “house,” where everyone had a go at the bastard, who wasn’t so tough by court time the next day. Of the many culprits who “fell down the stairs.” (“Jeez, sometime soon we gotta fix up them fuckin’ stairs.”)
Some of their stories were funny; actually, they were howlers, better than the silly stuff you heard on the radio each week. So many of them were great storytellers. They impersonated voices, stood up, moved around, played all the roles.
They talked about nooses hanging from beams that collapsed, taking part of the ceiling with them, and a poor bastard who thought he was gonna be finished ended up only half-choked and in line to be sued for damages by a furious landlord.
They told about arriving at the scene of a suicide where a young woman, whatever her problem, had jumped from the roof of a six-story building. Her divorced parents showed up and stood over the decapitated corpse—the girl hit some electric lines going down—and argued loudly. Whose fault was this? Who should have done what and now, who was going to take over? In effect, whose busted-up corpse was this, whose dead girl was this? The storyteller recalled that it was an oldtimer, Tommy Halloran, on the scene. (“Jesus, remember him? He was always a pisser.”) So Tommy took all the shit he was gonna take and finally he just goes over and gives the head a shove w
ith his foot, and then pokes the body with his foot. “Here,” says Tommy. “This part’s yours, Mom, that part’s yours, Dad.”
The men convulsed over Tommy Halloran. (“Jesus, dead these many years; won’t be one like him again.”)
The firemen told different kinds of stories. They weren’t as determined that each recitation have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sure, they had their share of hilarious firehouse high jinks. The taming of the newest kid, the endless attempted comeuppances of the best practical joker ever born, who always managed to top everyone anyway. But their stories lacked the meanness and small-spiritedness Charley heard in the stories of the policemen. And when they talked about the job, he heard a different sound.
They spoke of rescues, attempted rescues, failed rescues.
Someone told the story of old Uncle Matthew, who nearly killed a uniformed cop. It was at one of those damn fires started by neglected kids in the middle of Harlem. No father around, the mother off doing God knows what with God knows who, and four little kids playing in their top-floor tenement bedroom with kitchen matches. Standard toy for those little colored kids left on their own. Not a very tough fire—hell, pretty routine, until the mother showed up, counted three kids, and pointed toward the smoky, steaming building. The smallest kid had been missed in the thick black smoke. Again, not unheard of, one forgotten lost little colored kid left behind by the huge rubber-coated and booted men who hadn’t a clue about how many lived where.
Uncle Matthew and a couple of other guys went up the big ladder, back into the blackness, and he, leading, found the kid under what was left of the crib. A small child, unburned, a somewhat melted rubber duck clutched in tiny hands locked over the still chest. Matthew ripped the toy away, held the little arms aside, breathed for the child. Breathe, baby. That was what mattered, not a replaceable toy. Breathe. All the way down the ladder, Matthew breathed for the child, his mouth gulping air and delivering it to the nonfunctioning lungs of the dead child. He knew, they all knew, it was useless. The kid was dead of smoke inhalation, but you did it anyway. You tried. Goddamm it, baby, breathe. Sweat, and finally tears of utter frustration, ran down Matthew’s face as his breath became more and more labored. His lieutenant put a hand on Matthew’s shoulder.
The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel Page 33