Part 4 (2/2)

And then my grandmother enters in her stern shoes, old lady shoes, black low-heeled oxfords, a version of which she wears in all seasons and for all occasions. Her legs are thick in their elastic stockings, the color of milky coffee; she wears them for her varicose veins. Her housedress has a pattern of faded primroses; an ap.r.o.n is pinned to the bodice. Her ring sinks into the fourth finger of her square, mannish hands.

My grandmother doesn't know where to place herself in this company. For them she has only contempt. She is calculating, with a professional's knowledgeable eye, the cost of the gowns, the wastage of good food implied in every half-emptied dish on the exhausted table. She knows that she is saved and they are lost, that she is right and they are wrong, that she is wise and they are foolish.

Or does she? Is she, perhaps, not judging but yearning? Is she adoring those light, slow-moving people, with their empty hands? Their lovely skins, their high, impractical limbs. Their shoes that could take them nowhere. Perhaps she is not my grandmother, that is to say not an old woman, but a young girl. Her bones are delicate and long. The skin of her hands is bluish white, transparent. She is hoping that one of them will say: ”What a pretty child. Perhaps she'd join us for an ice.”

And she will sit with them in a summer house, eating an ice, pistachio, lemon, perhaps in the shape of something, a flower or a bird. They will ask her about herself.

And she will say nothing, because she knows that would spoil everything. She will shake her head, refusing words, lifting the spoon from her dish to her lips, silent. Happy, very happy, thinking perhaps of the word ”glaucous,” with nothing asked of her and nothing that she needs to do.

The Deacon.

No romance had been attached to Joan Fitzgerald's entering the convent. She wasn't that sort of person, and she hadn't expected it. A sense of Tightness had filled her with well-being, allowed her lungs to work easily and her limbs to move quickly, removed her from the part of life that had no interest for her, and opened her to a way of being in the world that connected her to what she believed was essential. Her faith, too, was unromantic; the Jesus of the Gospels, who was with the poor and the sick, who dealt with their needs and urged people to leave father and mother to follow him- this was her inspiration. Yet when she thought of the word ”inspiration,” it seemed too airy, too silvery, for her experience. What she had felt was something more like a hand at her back, a light pressure between her shoulder blades. The images she had felt herself drawn toward had struck her in childhood and had not left the forefront of her mind: the black children integrating the school in Little Rock, the nuns in the Maryknoll magazine who inoculated Asian children against malaria.

The source of their power was a G.o.d whose love she believed in as she believed in the love of her parents; she felt it as she had felt her parents' love; she believed that she was watched over, cared about, cared for as her parents had cared for her. She had never in her memory felt alone.

Her decision to become a nun, her image of herself as one, wasn't fed by fantasies of Ingrid Bergman or Audrey Hepburn. By the time she entered the Sisters of the Visitation, the number of candidates was dwindling and almost no one was wearing the habit except the very oldest sisters in the order; she'd been advised to get her college education first, and by the time she entered the order, in 1973, only two others were in her cla.s.s. After twenty-five years she was a school princ.i.p.al in New York City and the only member of her cla.s.s still in the order.

They joked about it, she and the other sisters, about how they'd missed the glamour days, and now they were just the workhorses, the unglamorous moms, without power and without the aura of silent sanct.i.ty that fed the faithful's dreams. ”Thank G.o.d Philida's good-looking, or they'd think we were a hundred percent rejects,” Rocky said, referring to the one sister living with them who was slender and graceful, with large turquoise eyes and white hands that people seemed to focus on- which she must have known, because she wore a large turquoise-and-silver ring she had gotten when she worked on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Rocky and the fourth sister had grown roly-poly in middle age. They didn't color their hair, they had no interest in clothes, and they knew they looked like caricatures of nuns. ”Try, as a penance, not to buy navy blue,” Rocky had said. They seemed drawn to navy and neutral colors. They weren't very interested in how they looked. They had all pa.s.sed through that phase of young womanhood, and sometimes, watching her Hispanic students, and the energy they put into their beauty (misplaced, she believed: it would bring them harm), Joan nevertheless understood their joy and their absorption, because she had been joyous and absorbed herself- though she had wanted to make things happen, to change the way the world worked.

All the sisters she lived with had the same sense of absorption. Rocky, who had been called Sister Rosanna, ran a halfway house for schizophrenics and was now involved in fighting the neighborhood in Queens where the house was located. ”They want us out,” she said, always referring to herself and the psychotics as ”us”- believing, Joan understood, that they were virtually indistinguishable. Four days a week Rocky lived in the halfway house; the remaining three days she joined Joan and two other sisters- Marlene, who directed a homeless shelter, and Philida, who was the pastoral counselor at a nursing home. They shared a large apartment- owned by the order- on Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue. They had easy relations with the neighborhood prost.i.tutes and drug dealers, who were thrilled to find that these people, whom they called ”sister,” seemed to have no interest in making them change their ways.

They could have been almost any group of middle-aged, unmarried women who made their living at idealistic but low-paying jobs and had to share lodgings if they wanted to live in Manhattan, housing costs being what they were. But at the center of each of their days was a half hour of prayer and meditation, led in turn by one of the four of them. They read the Gospel of the day and the Old Testament Scriptures; they spoke of their responses, although they didn't speak of either the texts or their thoughts about them once they had left the room they reserved for meditation. This time was for Joan a source of refreshment and a way of making sense of the world. If anyone had asked her (which they wouldn't have; she wasn't the type people came to for spiritual guidance), she would have said that this was why she loved that time and those words: they were the most satisfying consolation she could imagine for a world that was random and violent and endlessly inventive in its cruelty toward the weak.

Unlike the other sisters, including Philida, Joan had always been too thin. When she thought about it, she thought she had probably become stringy, and her skin, which had tanned easily, was probably leathery now. Perhaps her thinness and the coa.r.s.e texture of her skin were traceable to her anomalous bad habit. Joan was a heavy smoker. She'd begun smoking in graduate school, the education program at the University of Rochester. Her study partners had all smoked, and she had drifted into the habit. She had wanted to persuade them- and herself, perhaps- that they didn't know everything about her just because she was a nun. Nuns didn't smoke; everyone knew that. But Joan did, though she had tried to quit. The women she lived with didn't allow her to smoke in the apartment; they had put a b.u.mper sticker up on the refrigerator that said SMOKE-FREE ZONE. And of course she didn't smoke in school. She went over to the rectory to smoke.

She was the princ.i.p.al of St. Timothy's School, at Forty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue. Once all Irish, it was now filled with black and Hispanic children. Joan was proud of what St. Timothy's provided. She knew that she suffered from what one of her spiritual advisers called ”the vanity of accomplishment.” She knew she had a tendency to believe that she could do anything if people would just go along with her programs, and she made jokes about it, jokes on herself, jokes she didn't really believe. When she made her last retreat, which was run by a Benedictine sister, the nun urged her to contemplate the areas of life that were unsusceptible to human action, the mysterious silences of G.o.d, the opportunities for holiness provided by failure. She tried, for a while, to center her meditations the way the Benedictine had suggested, but then concluded that this was a contemplative's self-indulgence; she was in the world, she was doing G.o.d's work in the world. There was work to be done, and (was this what she had grown up hearing described as ”the sin of pride”?) she could do it. She had long ago given up heroic plans and dreams, but she could make her school run well, and she could give to children- who often didn't have it elsewhere- a place where they were made to feel important, where things were demanded of them, but where they were valued and praised.

Though Joan was frustrated and vexed by the poor quality of many of her teachers, she believed that the children got from her and her staff a quality of schooling they could never have gotten in the public schools. She came to understand that many of the teachers were at St. Timothy's because they wouldn't have been tolerated anyplace else. She put up with most of them, because at least they created zones of energy and discipline. She drew the line, though, at Gerard Mahoney. Gerard had been teaching seventh grade at St. Timothy's since he left his seminary studies, in 1956. Joan was sure he'd been thrown out, not for bad behavior or any spiritual failure but simply because he couldn't make the grade- not then, not in the years when the seminaries were full to overflowing. G.o.d knows, she said to herself, nowadays he would probably be ordained. But they'd sent him home, to his mother, who had been the housekeeper at St. Timothy's since, Joan once speculated to Rocky, Barry Fitzgerald was a curate. Mrs. Mahoney had been there when Steve Costelloe arrived, fresh from the seminary, thirty years earlier. Steve had been the pastor at St. Timothy's for the past fifteen years. Gerard's mother had died twelve years ago, after a long illness, when Gerard was fifty-two.

Joan and Steve got along, which was more, she thought, than a lot of women in her position could have said. Essentially, Steve was lazy; his saving grace was that he understood it. He was a pale redhead, with freckles under the gold hair that grew on his hands; he was going bald; he had broad shoulders, but then his body dwindled radically- he was hipless, and his legs (she'd seen them when he wore shorts) were hairless and broomstick-thin. He had a little pot- whimsical, like something he carried tucked in his belt, a crystal ball he tapped his fingers on occasionally, as if he were waiting for messages. He was incapable of saying no to people, which was one reason he was universally beloved. St. Timothy's was a magnet for people who had nowhere else to go; Steve was constantly cooking up vats of chili (his recipe said: ”feeds 50-65”), and some unfortunate was always in the kitchen.

Often someone who had no real business being there was found to have moved into one of the spare bedrooms; the rectory, built for the priests, was nearly empty. It housed only Steve and Father Adrian, from the Philippines, who giggled all the time; when faced with the desperate situations of junkies and abused wives, he would say, ”Pray and have hope,” and giggle. Sometimes Joan and Steve said to each other- thinking of the hours they spent counseling people in trouble- that Adrian's approach might be approximately as successful as theirs, considering their rate of recidivism. In the Filipino parade he'd been on a float, playing a martyred Jesuit. His brother, who had contributed to the construction of the float, blamed Father Adrian for their failure to win the prize for best float. ”You were laughing when they hanged you,” he shouted at his brother. ”That's why we didn't win.” ”I couldn't help it,” Father Adrian said, giggling. ”The children made me laugh.” Steve was happy to have Father Adrian, because he was willing to take the seven o'clock Ma.s.s, and Steve liked to sleep late. Joan suspected that Steve was often hungover. He was in good form by noon, for the larger Ma.s.s that served the midtown workers, who came to him on their lunch hour and usually, she guessed, went back to work refreshed.

Problems arose when Steve felt that one of the people in the rectory rooms ought to be moving on; then he would come to Joan desperate for help. She would summon the person in question to the office (not in the rectory, of course, but in the school, next door) and speak firmly about getting a hold on life and going forward. Some of them just ignored her, and stayed on until some mysterious impulse sent them elsewhere. But a few of them listened, and that was bad: it encouraged Steve to ask for her help again, and she couldn't say no to his unhappiness; he was as hopeless as a hopeless child. She often said that the one temptation she could not resist was to try to fix something when it seemed broken and she believed she had the right tools. More often than not she felt she did.

Steve was dreadful with money, and a terrible administrator. He was saved by his connections; people he'd met when he played minor-league baseball, or when he sat in the Sky Box at the Meadowlands because someone had given him a Giants ticket, or people whose confessions he had heard on an ocean liner while he was a chaplain on a Caribbean cruise. Once a year St. Timothy's would have a fund-raiser, and somehow he'd be bailed out. He left the administration of the school to Joan, allowing that she was much better at it than he, and saying, ”Just don't get our name in the papers, unless it's for something good.” He had no stake in proving himself the boss, and she was grateful for that; when her friends ran into trouble with their pastors, it was because those pastors resented a loss of power. Steve wasn't interested in power; but Joan believed he was genuinely interested in the welfare of his flock. When she was angry at him, because he had foiled her or screwed something up, she thought he was interested only in being universally liked, and that he'd become a priest because it gave him a good excuse for not being deeply engaged with human beings.

In the end he'd backed her up about Gerard, whose shortcomings were impossible to ignore. When she walked down the hall past his cla.s.sroom, the sounds of chaos came over the frosted-gla.s.s pane above the door. She had taken to making random visits; the sight of her in the doorway quieted the kids. Pretending she was in full habit, pretending she was one of the nuns she'd been taught by, she could stand in a doorway and strike what her mother would have called the fear of G.o.d into any cla.s.s. Even the rowdy seventh-graders- the boys who could have felled her with a punch, the girls who were contemptuous of her failure to get the knack of feminine allure- even they could be silenced and frozen in place by the sight of ”Sister” staring down at them, as if from a great, sacral height. It couldn't go on.

She talked to Gerard first. Gerard smoked too, and she saw to it that their cigarette breaks in the rectory coincided. She asked him- gently, she hoped (though she'd been told that she wasn't tactful and lacked subtlety)- if things were going all right in his cla.s.s. He said, ”As well as can be expected.” She had to hold her temper. Expected by whom? she wanted to say. She said that keeping order among adolescents was difficult, and if he wanted to brainstorm with her and some of the other teachers, she'd be glad to set something up. Then she looked into his dull black eyes, eyes that seemed to have been emptied of color and life and movement, and thought that if there was a brain behind them, it, too, would be inert and dull. No storming was possible in or from that particular brain.

She wasn't someone who thought much about people's looks (whether people were good-looking wasn't a judgment she made about them), but Gerard's looks annoyed her. It was as if he had sat pa.s.sively by and allowed someone to push his face in; the area from his cheekbones to his lower teeth was a dent, a declivity, a ditch; his lower teeth jutted above his upper ones like a bulldog's. Something about the way his teeth fit made it difficult for him to breathe quietly; he often snorted, and he blew his nose with what Joan thought of as excessive, and therefore irritating, frequency. His ears were two-dimensional and flat, like the plastic ears that came with Mr. Potato Head kits. His clothes were so loose on him that she could not envision the shape of his body. He wore orthopedic shoes, and she imagined that he had a condition no one talked about anymore, something people didn't need to have, which he just held on to out of weakness or inertia. Gerard had flat feet.

He said he was doing just what he'd been doing for forty years, and it seemed to work out all right. He mentioned that one of his earliest pupils was already a grandfather.

She wanted to say to him, What the h.e.l.l does that have to do with anything? But she was trying to keep in mind what would be best for the children. She suggested breaking up the cla.s.s into focus groups; she suggested films and filmstrips; she offered him more time in the computer lab. They didn't actually have a computer lab; it was a room with one computer. But Joan thought that by calling it ”the computer lab” she would encourage everyone to take it seriously. Gerard, remarkably, was more skilled with computers than most. She imagined him honing his skills alone in his apartment, the one he'd lived in with his mother, playing game after game of computer solitaire, or computer chess, or some other equally solipsistic and wasteful pastime. To whatever she suggested, he responded, ”I guess I'll just go on doing what I've been doing. It seems to work out all right.”

She was slightly ashamed of her glee when Sonia Martinez, the mother of Tiffany, one of the smartest girls in the seventh grade, came in to complain about Gerard. Sonia Martinez said that the children were learning nothing; that she wanted Tiffany to do well on her exams and get a scholars.h.i.+p to one of the good high schools, Sacred Heart or Mary-mount; and that Tiffany was going to be behind if she stayed in Gerard's cla.s.s. She mentioned her tuition payments. You've got to be kidding, loan wanted to say. Parents paid St. Timothy's a tenth of what was charged at private schools- less if they were paris.h.i.+oners, which Tiffany's parents were. She didn't like Sonia Martinez, who was finis.h.i.+ng a business degree at Hunter College and worked for the telephone company, whose children were immaculately turned out, who was obviously overworked and naturally impatient. But she admired her tenacity, and she knew that Mrs. Martinez was right. Sonia Martinez threatened a pet.i.tion by the cla.s.s parents.

”l.u.s.t wait on that,” loan said. ”Give me a little time.” Sonia Martinez trusted her; she said all right, but the semester was ticking on, and the placement exams came early in the fall of the eighth-grade year.

As loan walked over to the rectory, she felt the liveliness in her bones. A salty, exciting taste was in her mouth, as if she'd eaten olives or a salad of arugula. She thought that if she tried to run now, she could run easily, and very, very fast. She felt no concern for Gerard; she told herself that his job was no good for him, either, the way things were, and anyway he was sixty-four; the time had come for him to retire. If Catholic schools were going to have credibility, they would have to have standards as high as those of other private schools. They had to get over the habit of thinking of themselves as refuges for people who couldn't make it elsewhere. Anyway, she told herself, I'm doing it for the students. They're my responsibility. My vocation is to serve them.

This is what she said to Steve, who, of course, said she was overreacting, that Sonia Martinez was overly ambitious, that they had, in charity, to think of their responsibility to Gerard, who had been with the parish all his life.

”So we have to forget our responsibility to the children we are pledged to serve?” she said.

”It's one year of their lives,” Steve said. ”This school is his whole life. It's all he has.”

When she talked it over with her friends, Rocky- who because she dealt with schizophrenics was in an excellent position, she said, to deal with the clergy- suggested that she tell Steve that Gerard probably wasn't happy: dealing with chaotic, aggressive adolescents couldn't be pleasant. loan should think of something else for him to do.

”What, what can he do?” asked loan, who was wis.h.i.+ng more than ever that their apartment wasn't a smoke-free zone. ”He's a complete loser.”

”He must be good at something.”

”He can't even read the Gospel properly,” loan said. ”Didn't you hear him last week- 'When lesus rode on his donkey into Brittany'? You were the one who had to dive under the seat and pretend you were looking for a Kleenex.”

”Everybody's good at something. What's he interested in?”

”Smoking.”

”Didn't you say he did computers?”

She understood at that moment why people believed so literally in the Holy Ghost, in the purges of fire. A heat came over her head; her own wisdom was visible to her. She would put him in charge of the computer lab. That they had no computer lab was a minor problem. She had been reading about how obsolete computers sat around in offices. She would get Steve to schmooze up his executive friends for donations: Steve would get free lunches, the gift would probably be a tax deduction for them, and they'd think they were buying a few years out of purgatory.

Steve, as she told her friends afterward, fell for the scheme like a ton of bricks. Within a month they had six computers, none of them new but all of them workable. Gerard was more adept at the technology than any other teacher in the school, but so were most of the students. After he'd given the teachers some minor instruction, he had little to do but sit in the corner, watch the teachers and the students work, make sure the switches were turned off at the end of the day, and occasionally dust the keyboards. Everyone was happy- especially Sonia Martinez, who was doing a paper on computer literacy and minority advancement. One of Joan's friends, who taught education at the college run by their order in Brooklyn, was able to pump up one of her students for a stint teaching seventh grade. Joan knew this wouldn't last: the good young teachers left because they could earn more elsewhere, or they got married and then pregnant. But for now things were much better. She hardly saw Gerard except when their cigarette breaks coincided. When she did, she congratulated him on his new job. He said, ”We are all in the hands of the Lord.”

She wanted to smack him.

Steve told her that the parish was going to celebrate Gerard's twenty-fifth anniversary as a deacon.

”What the h.e.l.l does he do as a deacon anyway?” she said. ”Besides mangle the Gospel?”

”He brings communion to the sick, though sometimes he gets lost and wanders around midtown with the Blessed Sacrament. To tell the truth, he doesn't do much. But it means a lot to him. His mother was heartbroken when he was sent down from the seminary. I think the old pastor really pushed for his deaconate. It's a good thing. Or, as my grandmother would have said, 'It does no harm.' And sometimes that's the best you can hope for.”

She wanted to say to Steve, It's the best you can hope for, but she held her tongue.

”We're going to have a little party. We'll have Ma.s.s, and then wine and beer and pretzels and chips in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Can you organize the children?”

”To do what?”

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