The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

Some lies are fine. Others eat at Morris.

  Having told Jetski he’s going to church, Morris now feel obligated.

  He takes four antihistamines, drinks a cup of coffee. Showered, he takes his one suit from the closet. Wool, it has the smell of trapped space and candle smoke. His fingers keep fouling his tie’s knot. It keeps coming out wrong.

  Morris goes to church. St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church. His church. The one he and his mother attended when he was a child.

  It’d been two years since he’d last attended a service, the twenty-year memorial of his mother’s death. He came and lit a candle for her, prayed a prayer he felt hypocritical for praying, then left. God had never revealed himself to Morris. It was foolish to call upon an entity that didn’t exist, or if existed, was malevolent. Yet the church, the Greek Orthodox religion, with its rituals and customs, held a mystical sway over Morris. He liked the idea of it, not the actuality.

  Built in 1921, the church originally was a synagogue, a temple for a small, divisive community of eastern European Jews. But immediately upon its opening, an innocuous debate over strength of faith grew into a heated argument, then a full-blown battle. The community split into three camps, each attacking the other on their interpretations of the Torah, family bloodlines, and who the true leader of the synagogue was. No one would give ground. Fisticuffs would erupt on the Sabbath, one group of men descending on another with slaps and kicks and yanks of the beard, screaming that the others were devils or gentiles or uncircumcised cretins who flouted rabbinical law. Boycotts of businesses were decreed by one group on another, and returned in kind. A newly married young woman was abandoned by her husband, his family angry at hers. Another woman had a miscarriage when she was knocked down a flight of stairs. Friendships of twenty years were dissolved, weddings suddenly called off because groom-to-bes' families weren’t “pure enough.” Each group fought for control of the community, the vitriol and attacks increasing with each passing week. Slowly, the temple was driven into debt and ruin.

  By 1926, the congregation disbanded, unable to resolve their issues. The building was shuttered and put up for sale. It remained abandoned for two years.

  Flush with cash from questionable stock deals, Manos Fousli, a young Greek immigrant, bought the building outright in 1928 and donated it to the Greek Orthodox Church. He did it to raise his standing, to appear magnanimous and good, and to be able to hold something over his neighbors. “Are you going to church?” he’d ask, with the real meaning understood. “Are you going to my church?”

  He enjoyed bragging rights for only a short period. Just one week after the church’s consecration, the stock market collapsed. He lost everything. Ruined, Manos Fousli found himself falling in front of an approaching subway train.

  The church grew in the thirties, forties, and fifties, reaching its peak in the mid-sixties, then started its slow decline as families aged and children moved from the city. Now it struggles to fill even a quarter of the pews.

  Standing in the street, Morris gazes up at the solid structure. He’s always found the building ugly. Lodged alongside the Williamsburg Bridge overpass, the Star of David is still large and visible in the stone above the front door, but now it serves as symbol of Christianity’s Old Testament. The heavy, oak doors are propped open, welcoming. Morris mounts the stairs, planning on having a quick visit, paying respects. Halfway to the door, the thick scent of incense envelops him. The odor sparks a mix of memories: his mother making him say the Lord’s Prayer in Greek; the grainy, bittersweet taste of koliva; the priest’s thick, callused hand he’d have to kiss after communion, a hand that always smelled of bacon.

  Entering, he stands toward the back of St. Barbara’s, near the candles and icons and Soula Nicolouspolis, the ancient, bone-and-gristle widow who tersely greets everyone as she stands guard over the worn wicker donation baskets. She’s stood watch since Morris’s childhood. The woman never takes a break, a Sunday off, never goes on vacation. No one else stands there. No one else is allowed.

  Guarding the near-empty basket, Soula welcomes him like a regular, with a curt nod of her head and a croak that sounds more like “God deal with you” than “God be with you.” Morris drops a few dollars in the donation basket, lights a lean candle and crosses himself.

  Nothing’s changed about the building, the church. It’s like he’s a child again.

  He’s not staying, plans on only a moment of silence then he was out the door, but the hard pull of obligation pulls him in. A need to show respect to his mother. Five minutes, he thinks.

  Quietly, he moves down the side aisle and sits heavily in the last pew on the right, the pew he and his mother used to always occupy. It was their pew. The congregation knew. This is where the Blisses sat. No one else.

  The pew’s hard, sharply angled, and while uncomfortable, Morris feels a reassurance in its familiarity. It’s stained with a sense of his mother, his life with her. Like home, he thinks. Nothing has changed, the place untouched by time. A place of peace, meditation, held safe from the weathering of the world outside. It’s an incorruptible touchstone.

  He takes it all in, the gold painted icons, the warm smell of smoky incenses. Nothing’s changed.

  But after a few minutes, he notices a large crack running the length of the wall, and a pane missing from the stained-glass window. The liturgy book is marred by coffee and the woman in front of him noisily chews gum. A cell phone rings, a man answers it. “Oriste?” he asks. “Oriste? Speak up.” The cantor’s chanting is sharp and off, like he’s being poked by his wife’s knitting needle. And the priest, Father Dennis, when he finally steps into view, with plumes of incense smoke wrapping him, looks defeated, old. He’s aged in the last two years, his beard turned from a dark brown to all gray, and his robes, once flowing, now tightly hug his huge body.

  It isn’t the same. It isn’t home, Morris admits to himself. The incorruptible has been corrupted.

  At least the bench is the same, he thinks, running his fingers over the smooth wood before he rises to leave. At least that’s still here. He and his mother’s pew.

  Stepping into the aisle, he notes there are multiple sets of bolt holes in the worn, hardwood floor behind his pew. Bolt holes where two other pews once stood. Where he and his mother’s pew once stood.

  He realizes his mistake. His pew no longer exists. Even that is gone.

  He crosses himself and quickly leaves.

  Pausing on the steps outside, he breathes the cool air and wipes a stray tear from his eye. Feeling light-headed, he loosens his tie and takes off the suit jacket. From just inside the doors, hidden in the dimness of the church, the antique voice of Soula Nicolouspolis calls to him, low and looming: “God deal with you.”

  Chapter 21