“Don’t fight, Davey,” Ma said. “Don’t. Don’t come home after all this time and start fighting. But stay for dinner. Bella, let him be. For me, now. It’s been too long.” She hauled herself up and headed to the kitchen.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Bella leaned toward me. “I don’t trust you, Davey. I don’t believe you’re here to make amends, as you call it. In twenty years, you’ve shown up exactly twice, and the second time was a total disaster. So forgive me if I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance of things not working out so great now that you’re back.”
“I can’t control what you think, Bella. I’m not here to hurt you, or Ma, or take anything from you or expect anything of you. I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, but it won’t be here. I’ve always hated here. I don’t want a home. I don’t want a home here.”
“And yet, you are here.”
“Not for long. Listen—I know I hurt Ma, but it was killing me here. It was better that I disappeared. It was better. Jimmy stayed, and look what happened to him. He went job to job, hating every single minute. Only he told me he had a way out.”
“He did. Thanks to you.”
“And so I was the sucker. I showed up for him. He asked me to. He said he needed me. He was my brother. He said he was breaking out of here. He wanted my help. He needed money. He knew where to get it. So I came.”
“And saw, and conquered. I got it. Davey, I’m not going to argue with you. I want you out of here, because you’ll drive Ma crazy like Jimmy did, with his drinking and drugs and thievery and scheming. You’re the same, with your lying and acting as if you know everything that’s going on, acting like because you read a few books you know more than anyone. What did you think would happen after you helped Jimmy? That he would reform? That you would become upstanding? You always spoke like someone who knew something about the world, but you never got beyond the sound of your own words, you never really made sense. I don’t think you believed yourself even, what you said. And like I said, I can’t argue anymore. I want to make sure Ma is all right—and let her have a memory of you where you’re not getting someone killed.”
“And what did you think you’d do, once they found out we’d used your key?”
“I knew nothing about that, and that was proved in court. The money was never found.”
“Sometimes the dice falls the right way.”
“And don’t start with your accusations. I was never in on your scheme, and I won’t have you saying that.” Her voice had been rising. She turned toward the kitchen and back to me. “And I don’t want you hanging around anymore. Giving Ma ideas that you’re going to change. It’s been hard enough, goddamnit, getting her stabilized all these years without you giving her false hope again about whatever. I don’t know what you’re planning, but you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t after something.”
“I promise. I’ll be out of here tonight.”
“And going to mass. As if you believe in anything. Stay away from church.”
That wasn’t going to happen. But the rest of the afternoon and early evening passed without too much palpable rancor on Bella’s part or too much uncertain regret on Ma’s. I told them in so many words about prison life, about tutoring cons, about escaping the drudgery by reading, about keeping my head low. I didn’t tell them about the money, or the plan, or why Jimmy and I had thought that we’d escape the police by running into the church after we’d tripped the alarm like the rank amateurs we really were. Churches don’t offer sanctuary to petty thieves. But we’d managed to stay ahead, and since both Jimmy and I had been altar boys, we knew the layout of St. Nick’s, the stashing places in the chancel, and one particular cabinet behind the vestment closet that had a trick bottom, which one of the older boys had told us about in secret years before. It had been a hiding place during Prohibition, where a generation of miscreant boozy clerics concealed their illicit hooch and extra altar wine. We’d stored comics there and, in our gormless Catholic way, porn of the lamest kind, succulent pouts and ballooning breasts, along with the odd pint of Night Train to glaze the eyes and heighten the erotic possibilities of marginally naked half-beauties. But the priests had long since cottoned on to our feeble depravities, and had nailed the compartment shut so that it could no longer be a repository of half-baked filth and vice. Yet both Jimmy and I had remembered the drawer down the years, and he’d told me to come back and retrieve our stuff when things had cooled down, in case he couldn’t get to it first. I’d opened that false bottom that night, and then replaced the nails carefully, so it would remain closed and not tempt a new breed of clerics, altar boys, or minor thieves. We’d planned to break through at a later date, weeks perhaps. That date had dawned ten years on.
I left my mother and Bella’s apartment with no promise of anything other than an effort to let them know where I might be, how I might be reached, what I might do. In the end, I almost regretted—almost—my leaving, as Bella had lost some of her hostility and Ma had become less alternately weepy and accusatory and more resigned and benign, like the flock of women in the window captioned
Dusk had crept in and settled over Devoe Park when I left the Oxford. The white El Rancho van had moved on for the evening, and the ball courts were quiet. The church shadowed the trees below it there, and I walked around the building in shadows myself. Someone was exiting the side door. Good. It was still open. I dashed up just as the door swung closed behind her.
“It’s over,” she said to me. “The service just ended. You missed it.”
“Just a quick candle,” I said. “My Ma’s sick.”
She nodded, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for a far-too-skinny middle-aged bald man wearing shabby clothes to pop into church and say a prayer for his mother. The baleful predator’s ex post facto atonement. But the door had shut behind her, and it locked with a thunk. I pulled on the handle, but it stayed. No way in here. But no mighty fortress was our Lord: I’d remembered that the windows of the vestibule were sometimes kept ajar on hot nights, like this one, and the priest might not yet have gotten around to locking them. I hurried around toward the front in the growing gloom and spied a window cracked open to let in the city air. This side of the church was quiet, abutting the rectory. The tined fence was designed to keep thieves from getting over, but nothing prevented me from leaning against it to get my balance. I managed to shimmy myself up a bit, gripping the granite ridges with my fingers as my feet perched on a small crossbar between the rails. Leaning over with one hand on the outside wall of the church, I pushed the window further open with the other, but it stuck just six inches above the sill. I took a breath and, more forceful—and desperate—I pushed again. This time it unstuck and shot up with a rumbling clack. I heard it echo inside, but I pulled myself over the sill, and squeezed in before I was noticed. I stood in the vestibule, calming myself, wiping a trace of sweat from my forehead, and pushed open the door to the main part of the church, as quietly as possible, its hushed creak sounding like a screech to my ears. But I was in.
The priest had his back to me. The services were indeed over. He was near the altar, actually toward that
