by John Crowley
I said If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you. That’s the Gospel of John. And Dad looked down at me sitting on the floor with the crayons and I knew he loved me even if he didn’t think you could pray for snow and have your prayer answered.
No snow fell that week; the weather was cold but clear, day after day. I wore leather gaiters under my wool plaid skirt and watched the breath come from my mouth as though to tell me I was alive and warm inside; and I kept up my prayers to the Ice Saints.
On the Third Sunday of Advent Father Paine gave a sermon about prayer, and about asking for things in prayer. As though he knew about me and my plan. Dad looked at me beside him and winked.
What Father Paine wanted to explain to us was a question that he said many had. If God knows all that has befallen the world, and has known since before the beginning all that would befall the world, why should we pray that things will come out well for us and for everyone? Hasn’t it all been decided already, the good and the bad?
And he said that time for God is different from the way it is for us, that to God everything that was or will be is happening in . . . well, you could say in one moment, but moments are parts of time, and there is no name for what God sees. And when God sees a thing that by chance the world in its progress is bringing about, and the thing doesn’t conform to His will, He can easily reset the conditions in the past, even at the beginning of the universe, so that the thing won’t happen after all: because there is no “after all” for God.
That is the power given by God to our Holy Church, and by delegation to each of us, Father Paine said, and his sad pained face was alight. If we petition Him correctly, and if what we ask doesn’t conflict with His larger purposes, He can’t refuse us. At each moment He can reform the whole history of the world again from its beginning so that it will come to be. We may ask what we will.
And we call those things miracles, and answered prayers, and sins.
I thought then, sitting with the others in the newly rebuilt church that still smelled sweetly of wood and tartly of plaster: It’s like a movie.
It’s like a movie, where you know that the good guys will win in the end, no matter how often they lose and lose, how much they suffer: you just know they’ll win. And even so, through the movie you are afraid for them every minute, and cry out to them to watch for the bad guys sneaking up on them, and your heart races and you get tears in your eyes just as though you didn’t know: but you do know.
And the reason is that those who wrote and made the movie know you want the good guys to win, and so do they; and whenever in the story they are writing it looks like they can’t win, the writers change the story of the movie so that in the nick of time it happens that they can, and they do. Just as we watching hoped and prayed they would.
When we went out of the church on that Third Sunday in Advent so long ago we found that it had begun softly to snow. By the end of the day it had worked up to a pretty good blizzard. That night with the wild flakes flying in the street lights and the sound of tire chains in the street I knelt beside my bed and said my prayers and gave thanks to St. Mamertus, St. Pancras, St. Servatus, St. Agnes, St. Boniface, and I seemed to see them high in the heavenly places, like great snowmen striding above Timber Town and Twin City and the high hills beyond, the snow falling like seed from their hands.
The boys and girls I knew in St. John Bosco School, and my brothers, and Sister Rose of Lima and Father Paine and Father Michaels and the mill workers and the men who helped to build the new church, all still live in Timber Town, and so do I. But in another way I left a long time ago. I lived in many places, and things happened to me that I could not even have known were possible in the world, and some of them were not good and were my fault and some of them were dreadful and the fault of many people or everyone; and yet even as I grew up I thought that whatever bad things happened, however we stumbled as Father Paine used to say, overall in the world things were getting better, and old bad things were going away. And it has grown harder and harder to think that way.
I knew, when I was a child and thought as a child, that in the world I lived in the good guys would win in the end even when it seemed impossible, because even if they went wrong and lost their way and made mistakes, God and His angels could always change the beginning of the world so that in some unexpected way it would come out right, even if it could only be made right after death; and because of what Father Paine said about time, I knew how God and His angels could change such things even though they couldn’t know beforehand what wrong way the world would take, because we are God’s creatures and we are endowed with free will. Because nothing is over in a book that’s being written or in God’s world being made, not until everything is over and the book is finished and closed.
I still know now in the deepest part of me that it’s so, and that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of thing will be well, no matter how long and sad and scary the story gets. I just wish that once again, just once more, I could believe that the ways of changing things are mine too, that I am a writer of the world: and that as we did in the Timber Town flood I could reach my hands into the world, into the story of our town and all our towns, and change things so that the good guys would not be defeated forever.
MOUNT AUBURN STREET
1. Little Yeses, Little Nos
Harry Watroba had gradually become unable to remember his dreams. It seemed to him the most painful thing about growing old, though he was only just past sixty and was in good health and could suppose that many distressing things, worse ones too, lay ahead. It wasn’t that he awoke with no sense of having dreamed, as he had often done all his life; he awoke knowing he had dreamed, the events and images still as it were floating within his waking; and then he felt them slide away from him and turn to nothing even as he grasped for them. That was the new and painful part. It was though the picaresque sagas he had once upon a time inhabited, and woke in delighted or horrified possession of, still occupied his sleeping mind, only they were now erased like computer files just as he awoke.
“Why anyway,” he asked Dr. Macilhenny, “do we dream? Any progress on that line of inquiry? Last I heard they didn’t know.”
“They still don’t know,” said Dr. Macilhenny. “They have some guesses. But nobody knows. In my opinion we’re getting closer, but answers, even good likely possibilities that can be tested, might be farther off than they seem.” He hadn’t lifted his eyes from the columns of figures, Harry’s own Pay Attention! scores for today, which he was adding. A good Divided Attention man. Harry had tested okay for Selective Attention, poor on Divided and Alternating. No surprise.
Harry had asked other men his age (when it seemed appropriate; it was an odd question) if it wasn’t a shame how advancing age took away dreams, and found that many of them didn’t suffer from what he supposed was a natural, maybe a universal, concomitant of the aging brain. One of his friends, a longtime alcoholic (after drinking nowadays Harry himself neither dreamed nor slept), told him that his dreams were if anything longer, more vivid and memorable, than ever; often, he said, he went off to sleep in pleasant anticipation of the weird adventures that lay ahead for him.
“Maybe the effect is irreversible,” Harry said.
“To tell you the truth, it’s not something I’ve heard about,” said Dr. Macilhenny. “It’s not my area.”
Harry watched Dr. Macilhenny total up the day’s results, and then asked how he’d done.
“Oh, better and better,” Dr. Macilhenny said mildly, as though it was a good thing but not necessarily all that significant. When they had first begun on the seemingly meaningless tasks that Harry did as part of his Cognitive Rehab Program, Dr. Macilhenny was unwilling to tell Harry how he’d done, but upon considering it he’d decided that there could be no reason not to tell, and maybe after all knowing you did well would spur you on to greater efforts
. “It works in every other area of life,” he’d said. The program was new, though, even groundbreaking, and Harry suspected that Dr. Macilhenny was sort of making it up as he went along.
Not, he told himself, that there was anything wrong with that.
Harry drove back from the city where Dr. Macilhenny’s office was to the town where his daughter Hope lived, in whose house he was staying, just temporarily; he had been there for a month now, in a little bedroom under the upstairs eaves. As he drove he tried to Pay Attention! and make his right and left turns with care. He’d visited Hope here often enough in the past, but his wife had always been the navigator then, and he had (of course) no mental map of the area to check his guesses against. (Which direction would a right turn here take him? Toward or away? West or east? Harry wouldn’t know, and might never know.) He put his car in the narrow driveway, and as he climbed out he looked at his watch and saw that he ought to go right on to pick up his granddaughter at her school a couple of blocks away. Harry locked the car, zipped his jacket, turned left to go down the street, and then at the next intersection he paused, pointed (mentally) one way, then the other, and chose his turn.
Hope had astonished her parents (her father, Harry, anyway) with her choice of a name for her first, so far her only child.
“Muriel?” Harry said. “You’re going to name your daughter Muriel?”
“Not Muriel,” said Hope. “Muriel.”
“Muriel is a cigar,” Harry said. “A well-known cheap cigar. My father smoked them. There was a famous ad on TV long ago. A cigar, a female cigar, animated you know, dressed like Mae West. And the cigar would say ‘Why dontcha pick me up and smoke me some time.’”
“Oh my God, Dad,” Hope said, not really much scandalized.
“Edie Adams did the voice,” Harry said. It was like probing an old wound, he knew, the way he went on piling up these references that could ring no bell with her or anybody younger than himself, Mae West, Edie Adams, cheap cigars. Probing old wounds was something he was prone to, not always metaphorically either.
It was a sunny day. Harry walked on the brighter side of the street, liking the warmth on his back from the heating of the dark fabric of his jacket. His shadow went out before him, its feet stepped on left and right by his actual feet. It seemed to Harry that it was the same shadow that had gone before him since he was no more than ten; maybe it was the boy’s shoes he wore, black and white Keds, but it was the outgrowing crewcut too and the skinny neck and the wide ear-wings, the slight build and long-wristed hands swinging beside, which were all just as they had been. He knew what age the shadowed boy had really reached, and he measured himself against time’s onrushing effects, counting against them the head of hair still pretty full and dark, weight though not shape unchanged for years, mouth of mostly his own teeth, normal-limits blood pressure, firm though not often pertinent erections. He had read a study (he liked to read—was compelled to read—studies) that men who as adolescents masturbated every day had a significantly lower incidence of prostate cancer. So he was good there.
Tied at halftime. That wouldn’t continue.
The school was a dark brick old Catholic one, where Hope paid a high fee for a kindergarten run by nuns, all now in mufti. Once when they were kids Harry and his sister had cut out a hairdo from a picture of a middle-aged lady in a magazine, and then set it over the pictures of the fully habited nuns in the high-school yearbook; it was hilarious to see them with hair, transformed into ordinary matrons. No need for that any more. Muriel sat on the low wall before the school, and she smiled to see her grandfather coming, but she didn’t jump up; she propped her elbows on the plastic backpack in her lap and cupped her smiling face in her hands, watching his approach with interest as though he were a movie. They got along well, Harry thought. Hope at her age had been a little dour and fearful, and Harry’s heart had sometimes been plunged in doubt for her; the sight of Muriel almost always filled him with, well, with hope.
“Hi, Grampa.”
“Hi. How was school?”
She lifted one shoulder, still smiling: a measured response. She jumped off the wall and slung her backpack on; he took her hand and they started for home.
“Grampa, did they give you tests?”
“Yes. Dr. Macilhenny.”
“Give me the test.”
“Okay. Say this backwards. 1-2-3-4.”
She leaned down as she walked as though were going to heave something weighty into the air. “4-3-2-1,” she groaned.
“How about this. Say this backwards: C-B-A-D.”
More titanic effort. “D.”
“Yes.”
“A.”
“Yes.”
“B.”
“Yes? Actually I forget.”
“Grampa!”
“I do. But I bet you’re right.”
“C!”
“Yes! You’re a genius.”
She took his hand again. “I hope you did all right,” she said.
“I think I did.” He pointed ahead, to Hope’s little brown house on a leafy street. “And here we are home.”
It was October when Harry had knocked on his daughter’s door, like Frost’s hired man, with nowhere else to go. Deciding to leave the motel where he had been living since the fire had been a major positive step, actually, and Hope was always trying to get him to take major positive steps, so he thought that his coming to stay with her might be seen as one. Most of the little he was left with was in the back of the huge old station wagon he’d driven for nearly twenty years.
“Dad.”
“Hi. Did you get my letter?”
“What letter?”
“Mind if I come in?”
“Of course I don’t mind. I have to go to work pretty soon.” She looked doubtfully at the wagon and the things inside it.
The letter was in there too, unmailed, though Harry didn’t know it; he’d been racking his much-racked brains to see if he couldn’t draw forth a memory of himself stopping at the post office, taking the letter (which his mind’s eye could see) from his inside jacket pocket, or from whatever pocket, and putting it into the right or the even the wrong slot, and hadn’t quite been able to, which didn’t (he thought) mean for sure it hadn’t happened. But after all it hadn’t, and Hope hadn’t expected him. She took him in, and sat him at the kitchen table, and poured him coffee from the vacuum pot she’d have had to empty later anyway. He really had no place to go.
“Have you heard from Mom?”
“I talk to her now and then,” Harry said, as though he spoke of a somewhat distant acquaintance. “There’s a lot to get straight. Legally. I mean you know that even though the house is gone, or mostly gone, the land is still ours. The ground around. Hers and mine.”
“Does she still mean it, about the divorce?”
“She means it.”
“You know she says things when she’s angry.”
“I know.” Atrocious things, hurtful things, conceivably true but not actually true things; and then later when he would try to respond, or charge her with what she’d said, she’d be Oh I was just angry when I said that. Amazing woman. “I believe she means it. I’ve got a lawyer’s letter.”
Hope slowly lowered her eyes and her heavy head; her shoulders sank toward the table on which her elbows rested as though resolution, possibility, good prospects, all leaked away from her. “Stupid,” she said, and Harry supposed she meant more than the lawyer, more than her mother, more than himself, an ultimate stupidness that blanketed and smothered the living and hoping world.
On August 30th the house that Harry and Mila Watroba lived in, the house Hope was born to and grew up in, had burned to the ground, as it’s said. Actually there was still quite a bit left above the ground, including one whole unit that seemed almost untouched, only its roof bitten off from behind like a cookie, though inside it there was not
hing but blackness and filth. Harry was supposed to see to the leveling or razing of the remainder, and was making some progress toward the appropriate decisions. He thought. Mila didn’t. The house had burned down when neither of them was in it; Mila far away on business, Harry not so far away but out late where no one was going to be able to find him and tell him, so that he learned it in the most unforgettable way, by driving up the hill and into the awful sour smell of wetted burnt wood and building components, wondering what on earth, then almost passing by the already incinerated house still surrounded by trucks and cars all alight, unable for a moment to recognize it as his own.
“That paint,” said Hope. “So stupid.”
Harry had to admit (to himself; his womenfolk had no reluctance in saying it) that it had been his job to dispose of the paint in the basement. It had been on his to-do list for a long time. For years, he had to admit. Decades. The job was daunting: Harry loved colors, and discriminated with assurance between closely similar shades; whenever there was some part of the house that needed repainting, he liked to try out a lot of possibilities, colors with the names of food or weather conditions or unlikely vegetation or foreign places, or combinations of these (Persian Violet or Arizona Chile or Cotton Candy Cloud). It was, of course, the decisions that were hard. The colors not finally chosen, many of them nearly full cans, mounted up in the basement like unforgiven sins, waiting to be dealt with, finally running to the dozens. Harry—and he believed there was at least a shadow of the exculpatory in this—was the one who said it was a fire hazard, who noted how often in newspaper or TV accounts of fires the neglected paint cans and “oily rags” were named as the cause, and though Harry couldn’t actually picture the physics of it (oily rags or cans of paint suddenly beginning to smolder, then bursting vividly into flame) he at least acknowledged the possibility. Now and then when down in the basement he had touched the dripped and spattered cans, to see if any were getting warm.