Bronx Noir

crack and all of that delightful nastiness.

About twenty-five people were here in church, dropped like random seeds along the hard furrows of the pews. Most of them were at the front, sprouting near the apse. A few knelt to the right side, under the white figure of St. Nicholas floating on a high shelf by the transverse door, a rare papal touch of statue in a church austere enough to have been Episcopalian. But no, here was more sign of a particular denominational kitsch, a chapel at the left transverse, a shrine to the Virgin, Nuestra Senora de Providencia, for the defiantly devout and luckless. I walked that way, barely genuflecting in front of the altar, just another worshiper. The church was empty on the far side but for one man wearing in this heat a camouflage jacket, perhaps from the Army-Navy store on Davis around the corner. Perhaps a veteran. Perhaps a murderer. Perhaps a brother in carnage. And still touched by his religion. Or his disgrace. Or his memories. He could have been Puerto Rican. He could have been Irish. His white hair glowed as if dappled by some interior star, and he held his head down, in sleepy prayer, a cane propped against the pew before him. I walked past him into that side chapel. The front of the church had begun to rustle with the movement of the priest; he checked the sound system, a few taps on a mike, followed by a rumple of fabric as his surplice sleeve scraped across it. Testing.

The chapel was dark too, with but a few candles glowing electric in their enclosed ruby glass biers. I put in a quarter, and another light sprang to feeble life. Before, in my distant youth, this place had been a vague chapel for the Virgin of the Whatever. She wasn’t particularly providential for me, whoever she’d been. I couldn’t recall her mission, or mine, for that matter—beyond offering her candles, real ones then with flickering flames unlike the repellant little flashlights now. The battered kneeler, imprinted with the depression of countless others, was still there, askew, pushed away from the array of fake votives; someone had risen awkwardly and shifted it. Perhaps the camouflaged veteran Garcia-Gerrigan out there finding way to his unsteady feet and lamentable cane. On the wall was a plaque in Spanish and several overemotional icons of the Virgin’s face. A painted statue of that fortunate Mary guarded one corner, and a small onyx one kept sentry at another. Here was a shrine of true belief, simpleminded, strong, primal.

I left and moved softly back to the rear, to another corner, where a statue of St. Nicholas, this one brown instead of white, more earthbound, rested at the wall. This was one I had hoped to find; I hadn’t seen it at first, its own beige camouflage hiding it from my greedy eyes. Its feet were polished from countless eager peasant fingers. I ran my hand along its pedestal myself, feeling as obvious as if I were a surplice brushing an open mike. I looked around me, a furtive supplicant. I felt around the back of St. Nicholas, searching for an indentation underneath. I stepped back, to bow in specious prayer, to scrape my mind for where it might have been placed. It had to be there. They never moved these plinths, they were bolted to the floor and their false idols to them, secured against the marauding horde, the petty us, the larcenous me. I felt again, pious and plaintive, my fingers touching the worn marble feet. There. Yes. A nib of something metal by the back right side, wedged tightly in. Just as Jimmy had said there’d be. I would return.

I dropped another quarter into a candle slot, saw that it lighted, picked up the parish bulletin from a wall holder, and found an empty pew. The bulletin was in Vietnamese. I didn’t try to read it, but turned it over, as I had always done in church, to examine the advertisements on the back, for funeral homes and auto repair shops, for abortion counseling and broker-free apartments, all in English. The list of priests was there on the second page. One Irish. Two Latino. One Vietnamese. The church hours. In English. Evening vigils. What was today? Yes. Tonight.

I looked up along the long, high-ceilinged nave from where I sat. I had remembered clerestory windows above the aisle roofs and the vaulting, but that must have been in a dream, or I’d imagined someplace grander than this. A conflation of conscience and hope, perhaps. The light softened toward the altar, where the apse lay in a wooden shadow.

The priest, russet-faced, bearded, sixtyish, Irish, walked out again. He wasn’t wearing a chasuble, a nod to the warmth that permeated even the usual coolness of a stone church. Just an alb, and his surplice, the barest vestments of office, the merest priestliness. He had an open, kind face. He began the service, hands apart in a limp crucifix, saying, “We open up to a God who loves us.” I bowed my head as if in prayer. But no. No. No love here. I wondered how much he believed himself, and how much was a scam. I’d wondered that aloud to the prison chaplain, and toyed with the idea of vicardom or something like it myself—it could beat the library. But that was then.

I looked back at the statue. A leaning parishioner with a boozy paunch and droopy neck met my eye from the row behind me. I tilted my head down a fraction. Just another believer biding time.

A church can breed its own defiance and devotion, personal and fierce. I looked up and considered what the window to my left might mean to me, in my own dim trepidation, had I considered a metaphor of suffering for myself. In Memory of the Schmitt Family, with its scene of the Sermon on the Mount, maybe? They died too long ago for me to care, for either the paltriness of their demise or the hubris of their son remembering them in glass. What about the Doyle Family, by their brother? The incorrigible Prodigal Son. No. He would never return, at least not repentant. Or, on the right side, the window depicting Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross? No remembrance from a guilty son or battered brother marked it. Just a generalized suffering. Mary’s face here cowed by grief, her followers propping her up, others holding Jesus’ body limp with temporary death. The words Mary Sodality were painted at the bottom. Mom’s group of rosary-wielding hysterics. She now, I thought, would be waiting sullen at the Oxford apartments just there in screaming distance on Webb Avenue. Not waiting for me. But maybe waiting for news of me. And perhaps, too, like Mary, for release. Mine, perhaps. Hers, maybe. And she too had her own ministry. Of shame. I’d be there later to serve under it. It was important. Not the service. The being there.

One of the parishioners announced a reading from the book of Hosea. I heard just a few sentences, as my thoughts wandered outside, into the glare oozing through the windows.“I will lead her into the desert, and speak to her heart…the days of her youth…The Lord is gracious and merciful…I will espouse you the right of justice.”

The gospel just after that went by quickly. It must have been a paragraph, a weekday snippet of good news. I’d missed it, turning around again, as if to look at the choir loft, as if to fool my friendly parishioner there behind me. The priest spoke. I turned to face him, settled myself, head slightly bent. His sermon. He said, “How do you see God?” He paused; not too oratorical. He meant it. “Do you remember your youth?” Do I. It’s all I ever had and squandered. “Can you awaken in yourself the love you had?” No. Because I didn’t. So many questions. Like the thoughtful believer he obviously was, the priest tried to connect the readings, to make quotidian sense of them for us in our tawdry lives, here amid the perspiration and second thoughts of Christ’s distant followers.

My mind meandered through the consecration. The key. The sanctuary. I’m sure the stash hadn’t been found. It must still be there. Had to be. We stood. The Lord’s Prayer. We all murmured it, even me, finding the words again easily enough. The people at the front were holding hands. When had this touching begun? I hadn’t been in a church since that night, ten years ago. I hadn’t attended mass for ten years before that. When had we all become so, I don’t know, Pentecostal? They’d be speaking in tongues next.

“Let us offer each other the sign of God’s peace,” the priest suggested, and the hand-holders held on and looked at each other with shy disbelief in actual forgiveness, while those of us until then blessedly free of contact turned and made nice to strangers. I reached back and grasped the fleshy hand of the man behind me, who gave me a weird little smile. No, you don’t, I thought, widening my gaze. You don’t know.