He had Luis to thank—and, alas, probably God too—for leaving the side door of the church unlocked. Luis had assumed this dereliction of duty not long after the coffee shop had opened for business, as though to say, “If we are going to lure the well-heeled from the avenue with cappuccino and biscotti, then ciertamente we could accommodate more shadowy passersby with a dry place to sleep.” At first only one or two men slipped in, vague forms vaguely familiar from the church steps, where they would hunch and rock before burrowing for the night into middens of flattened cardboard, newspaper, bubble pack, and Spurlock could not bear to think what else. Later, when the weather cooled, more faces appeared at the shelter, followed shortly by a citation from the city, mounting complaints from some parishioners, enthusiasm from others, and the long, tedious debates in vestry meetings, the endless declension of earnest phrases: “the least of these,” “the least we can do,” “doing mission,” “clarity of mission,” “mission creep”…Holding up the citation, Mrs. Nickerson said as though for the first time, “For this, chief, we have our Luis to thank.”
The visitors were men, most of them older, many of them trembling, all untalkative. God knew how long they had lived on the street or what they had experienced at Bellevue or Wards Island to drive them from the archipelago of licensed city shelters. The parish might have been more welcoming had they been battered women or gay teens expelled from suburban homes, but these shuffling mutterers shrank from all expression of sympathy or concern. To each one, sealed in his grease-caked garments and encasing stench, the merest acknowledgment seemed unbearable.
For Father Spurlock, the stench was the hardest part. At some point, in a gesture of what he’d described as solidarity, he’d begun sleeping four nights a week on a cot alongside them. He would doze briefly, overcome by the exhaustion of the day, only to wake when the smell reached him, an infiltrating mist, the sublimation of ash and tooth-rot, urine and scurf. In time (he thought at first) he might learn to give himself over to it, even to welcome it as a cleansing penance. Solidarity with the poor, the naked, the captive! O cinder-path of saintly effacements! The nobility of it! The absurdity of it! A bubble of his drowned divinity school idealism rose up in his throat, then dissipated like a sighing belch. How quickly it had happened, his transformation from freshly ordained provisional deacon—scrubbed and penny-bright, ablaze for avant-garde liturgies and boisterous youth programs—into a nail-biting, sheep-counting, budget-hobbled rector, yoked to a listless parish, or rather the remnant of one. His predecessor, Mother Janice, had departed to serve uptown as canon of the cathedral, along with her ringing laugh, her famous saxophone, and the younger half of the congregation. The senior warden still insisted on calling him Sonny the Kid in vestry meetings. He’d been in fact the youngest rector installed in the nearly two-hundred-year history of the church, but whatever remained of that youthfulness now seemed to hang from him like a dinner jacket surprised by a Sunday sunrise. The turmoil of five brief years had disgorged him onto a midlife plateau where somewhere in the distance his wife, Bethany, labored grimly to make partner at her law firm because, as she put it, someone had to earn an actual living in this marriage.
Singled out among the squadron of lawyers marshaled to defend a pharmaceutical corporation in a class-action case, Bethany had been rewarded by her superiors with ever-escalating responsibilities, and the hours she spent at work had multiplied accordingly. When she’d first been assigned to the case, he’d announced with some satisfaction that he would see to it that dinner was waiting for her when she got home—whenever she got home—but this resolution had collapsed in the boneyard of his other marital initiatives (learning bridge, couples yoga). It was more convenient for Bethany to eat with her “team” before it renewed its evening onslaught, and anyway, by the time Bethany’s heels finally clacked out of the elevator, Spurlock would have long since fallen asleep on the sofa, pinned beneath the puttering bulk of Perpetua, his cat. Without consulting his wife or even himself, Spurlock had doubled, then redoubled his initial one-night-a-week commitment to the impromptu shelter in the church.
Had he perversely come to prefer sleeping in the church, he asked himself, steeped in odors of sweat and destitution? Was this how the Holy Spirit bent the soul to virtue, not by persuasion but simply by revoking alternatives? But no: he knew he had come to spend more than half his nights in the shelter not because doing so was virtuous, but because it was plausible—plausible and easy—a path of minimal resistance, an easy slide from his upstairs office, past Mrs. Nickerson’s desk, down the stairwell, and into the church. If the church was a ship—and that’s what nave meant, he explained each year to his handful of bored confirmands—then an imperious gravity drew him down into steerage with this
