III
Man is immortal, John Keane thought, or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking.
You either pray to the dead or you don’t.
But the real question before them this winter evening, the six men on the building committee, the pastor, the two priests, the architect, the accountant, and the dead, beloved pope who still smiled at them in oil from the end of the rectory dining room, was far simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?
Like something out of a parable (The Good Servant? The Twelve Talents?) each of the six men had brought to the table this evening the stack of pledges they had garnered over the past six weeks from the people of the parish who had not responded voluntarily to the pastor’s initial appeal for funds. Two weeks into the New Year, when, they figured, the financial burden of Christmas might have just begun to ease, the six men had divided the more or less eight square miles of St. Gabriel’s parish into six sectors. After some rigorous debate, it had been decided that the men would not solicit from their own recalcitrant neighbors. (There was the matter of financial privacy, the threat of hard feelings among men whose children played together, whose wives might see each other every day.) John Keane had the names of thirty-three parishioners on his list, all of them more or less strangers-although he recognized many of the faces from church when they came to their doors to let him in. There was the phone call first: on behalf of Father McShane, I’d like to come by some evening to discuss the new church and gym. Then the appointment itself, usually scheduled between seven and eight so as not to interrupt anyone’s dinner. They were for the most part strangers, but kicking the snow off his heels or brushing the rain from his hat, he never once felt that he was stepping into their homes for the first time. They brought him to their dining-room tables, or to the kitchen. There were children in pajamas on the staircase or stretched across the living-room floor, or biting pencils over homework on whatever table their parents weren’t going to use. There were dogs, usually, pushed behind basement doors or banished to the garage. The smell of whatever had been made for dinner still in the air-garlic in the Italian homes and green pepper in the Polish, something fried among the Germans, broiled meat with the Irish. They offered him coffee or tea, sometimes sherry or a beer. The wives, for the most part, hung up his coat and put down the plate of cookies and then disappeared-or lingered only long enough to admire the architect’s drawing on the front of the pledge packet. (Only the more observant asked, “Where’s Krause’s store?” Only the more prescient shook their heads skeptically when he said Krause had agreed to sell his property to the church.) He’d hear them walking around upstairs as he made his pitch to the man of the house, heard the vague repetition of spelling words or dates or catechism lessons as the men’s conversations moved, inevitably, away from the financing of the new church and gym to the war, what service, what theater, what division, what years.
John Keane was older than most of the men by a decade. None of them asked him to call them by their first names, nor did he. The formality-he wore a suit and a topcoat to every call-seemed appropriate for the transaction he was there to discuss. The wives appeared again only when he rose to leave. They stood beside their husbands as the men shook hands. He would return in a week to pick up the sealed envelope, for Father McShane’s eyes only. They were aiming for one hundred percent participation. In the mimeographed letter inside the packet Father McShane had asked only for “prayerful discernment” regarding what each family could afford to contribute. The men were impossible to read, but the wives’ eyes told him everything-they were eager or wary or resigned, those of them who still loved their husbands, or their lives. Others showed him the battle already brewing, or, far worse, an amused conviction that Mr. Keane had not seen through them, through their guise of good parents, good Catholics, of domestic harmony or financial stability. In every case, he had the sense when he left the house that he had at least given the family by his presence alone the gift of a single, hushed hour of quiet civility, good behavior. It was, perhaps, as close as he would ever come to feeling like a priest.
Now the pledges had been counted (not, it turned out, exclusively by Father McShane but by Father Melrose and Father Hecht, his assistants, as well, and by Mr. Marrs, an accountant, whose respect for privacy-Father McShane had assured them all-was as inviolate as any confessor’s), and through the power of prayer and (Father McShane said) good old-fashioned shoe leather, the initial goal had been more than met. But, he added (nerves or indigestion or simple displeasure caused him to precede all difficult announcements with a swallowed burp), there was an obstacle. Mr. Krause would not sell.
The architect’s design for the new gym and eighth-grade classrooms was a marvel of symmetry. There was the simple brick square of the old school building’s left side, updated by a wide glass door, then the new entrance to the new gym, a single-story swoop of steel and glass, then another, new brick square to balance the old.
A series of low white marble steps led from the gym’s modern entrance to a green lawn (Saint Gabriel himself, in white stone, at the center of it) that was bracketed by two curving white paths that led directly to the sidewalk and the street. Mr. Krause’s property, which consisted of a backyard, a small detached garage, and an eighty-year-old clapboard house out of which he had run a delicatessen for thirty-five years, began at the gym’s modern entrance and ran to the edge of the sidewalk. A year ago, when Father McShane first approached him, Mr. Krause had agreed that he was more than ready to sell. His was one of the last houses left along what had become a mostly commercial boulevard, and the last bit of frontage on a block that was equally divided between St. Gabriel’s Church and School on the one end and a small strip of stores on the other. A descendant of the Germans who had first farmed this land and established this village in the wilds of Long Island just east of Queens, Mr. Krause knew that the postwar sweep of homes and families had already obliterated most of the old traces of the last century, and that his little farmhouse was one of these. It was only a matter of time, he said.
He had been looking, as it happened, into moving the deli to a storefront in a new mall in the next town.
But buried in Father McShane’s pitch to pay Mr. Krause a handsome price for his house and his land was the bad seed of his own destruction-or so the priest told them. (John Keane sought to remember the parable.) “The parish is burgeoning,” Father McShane had said. The school was bursting at its seams. Mr. Krause was a Lutheran so he might not be fully aware, but Father McShane, in his pride and boastfulness (through my fault, he told the men) had assured him that eight Masses were offered every Sunday morning-seven, eight thirty, ten, and one-in the church and simultaneously in the auditorium, and still there were folks standing in the aisles. There were double shifts of kindergarten in the school, morning and afternoon, to accommodate all the children. Building the gym was only the first step. Once it was up and Masses could be held there on Sunday mornings, then the old church was coming down and a new, larger one would take its place. Father McShane was thinking of something “in the round” to suit the new liturgy.
But of course Mr. Krause knew the Mass schedule and the school schedule at St. Gabriel’s. Also the hours of the Mothers Club meetings and the Holy Name Society meetings, the basketball games, the first communions and confirmations. Father McShane said three, sometimes four Masses on Sunday mornings, but he had never once edged his way into Mr. Krause’s little store after any of them, never found himself pressed cheek to jowl with thirty other parishioners vying to order cold cuts or potato salad or those marvelous doughnuts from Mr. and Mrs. Krause, their two sons, and the daughter who worked the counter. He’d never reached an arm through the crowd outside to throw some coins into an open cigar box and grab a Sunday
The parish is burgeoning, he’d said, and no doubt Mr. Krause saw housewives holding wrapped trays of cold cuts high over their heads, like Copacabana chorus girls, as they maneuvered through the Sunday-morning crush. Husbands sent back to get a good-size container of rice pudding. He saw St. Gabriel’s kids in their uniforms coming in for sodas, for chips, for a quick perusal of the candy displayed beneath the counter, saw them handing their mother’s scribbled shopping list to him over the deli case, or ordering a bologna hero because there had been no time this morning for making lunches. And now added to that vision, thanks to Father McShane and his (he was the first to admit it) big mouth, bricklayers and electricians and plumbers and painters filling the place every lunchtime for however many years or months it took to build the gym and the eighth-grade classrooms, and then to tear down one church and put up another.
Mr. Krause understood that the old places were fading, the dairy farms and the potato fields and the
