When the time came for Holy Communion, Father McKean approached the altar and received the host directly from the hands of Father Paul Smith, who did not hesitate to give him a look of gratitude for his sermon. As the music swelled, and the worshippers turned to each other to exchange the sign of peace, and the smell of incense spread through the air, the voice of Father Smith led the mass to its conclusion.
Later, as was their custom, the priests stood at the entrance of the church to bid farewell to the faithful, exchanging impressions, listening to their stories, discussing the latest parish initiatives. During the winter months this farewell took place in the lobby, but on that fine late April day the doors had been flung wide open, and they stood spread out on the steps.
Father McKean was complimented on his sermon. Ellen Carraro, their cook’s elder sister, came to him with watery eyes to express her emotion and remind him of her arthritis. Roger Brodie, a retired carpenter who sometimes gave his services free to the parish, promised he’d swing by Joy the next day to repair the roof. Gradually, the groups broke up and they all went back to their cars and their houses. Many had come on foot, as they lived very close to the church.
Father Smith and Father McKean found themselves alone again.
‘You were very moving today, Michael. You’re a great man. For what you say and how you say it. For what you do and how you do it.’
‘Thank you, Paul.’
Father Smith turned his head and cast a glance at John Kortighan and the kids waiting at the bottom of the steps to return to Joy. When he turned his head back to him, McKean saw embarrassment in his eyes.
‘I must ask a sacrifice of you, if it’s not too much of a burden.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Angelo isn’t well. I know Sunday is an important day for you and your kids but do you think you could possibly replace him at the twelve-thirty mass?’
‘No problem.’
The kids would feel his absence, but with the day being so unusual he knew he wasn’t in the right mood to share their company at lunch. That sense of oppression had not left him, and he thought it best not to spoil the mood at table.
He descended the steps and joined the waiting kids.
‘I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to have lunch without me. I have something to do here in the parish. I’ll join you later. Tell Mrs Carraro to keep me something hot, if you don’t wolf it all down.’
He saw the disappointment on some of their faces. Jerry Romero, the oldest of the group, who had been at Joy the longest and was looked up to by many of his companions, made himself the spokesman for the general discontent.
‘Seems to me if you want to be forgiven, you have to let us have a Fastflyx session.’
Fastflyx was a mail order DVD rental service that the community received free, thanks to John’s diplomatic skills. In a place like Joy, where there was so much effort and so much abstinence, even watching a movie together was something of a small luxury.
McKean wagged a finger at the young man. ‘That’s blackmail, Jerry. And I say that to you and your accomplices. However, given the common will, I feel forced to give in. In addition I think a surprise arrived only yesterday. In fact, a double surprise.’
He made a gesture to stop the kids asking questions.
‘We’ll talk about it later. Now go, the others are waiting for you.’
Arguing among themselves, the kids moved towards the Batmobile, the nickname they had given the bus. Father McKean watched them as they walked away. They were a colourful mass of clothes and a tangle of problems too great for their ages. Some were difficult to relate to. But they were his family and for part of their lives Joy would be their family.
John lingered a moment before joining them. ‘Shall I come back to pick you up?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get a ride from someone.’
‘Okay. See you later, then.’
He stayed on the street while the vehicle disappeared around the corner. Then he climbed the steps and went back into the church, which was now deserted apart from a couple of women sitting in one of the rows near the altar, continuing on a personal level that contact with God that had been collective during the mass.
On the right, just past the entrance, was the confessional. It was made of clear shiny wood, with the two doors covered in burgundy velvet drapes. A red light indicated whether or not the priest was inside. The side reserved for the confessor was a narrow space containing a wicker chair beneath a screened wall lamp that cast a dim light from above on the blue wallpaper. The penitent’s side was much more Spartan, with a prie-dieu and a grille allowing a privacy that many needed at such an intimate moment.
Here Father McKean sometimes took refuge, without switching on the light or indicating in any way that he was inside. He would stay there for a while thinking about the financial necessities of his work, collecting his thoughts when they threatened to fly away from him like migrating birds, concentrating on the case of a particularly difficult young person. Usually arriving at the conclusion that they were all difficult and all deserved the same attention, that with the money he had at his disposal they were performing genuine miracles and would continue to perform them.
Today, like many other days, he moved aside the drapes, entered and sat down, without turning on the little light above his head. The chair was old but comfortable and the semi-darkness an ally. He stretched his legs and rested his head against the wall. Those distressing television images took their toll on everyone, even those who had not been touched directly by the tragedy. Simply because everyone was human. There were days like today when he weighed his life in the balance and found that the greatest difficulty was to understand. In spite of what he had said in his sermon. Not only to understand men but also the will of the God he served. From time to time, he wondered what his life would have been like if he had not answered the call of God. If he’d had a wife, children, a job, a normal life. He was thirty-eight years old and many years earlier, when he had come to make that choice, he had been told what he was renouncing. But it was a warning – it wasn’t based on experience. Now he sometimes felt an emptiness to which he could not give a name. At the same time, he was certain that a similar emptiness was part of the experience of every human being. He had his revenge on that emptiness every day by living in contact with his kids and helping them to escape it. Ultimately, he told himself, the most difficult thing was not to understand but, once you had understood, to keep going, in spite of the difficulty, to keep travelling along the road. Right now, that was the closest thing to faith he could offer himself and others.
And God.
‘Here I am, Father McKean.’
The voice entered suddenly and without warning. It arrived from the semi-darkness and from a world without peace that he had forgotten for a few moments. Supporting himself on the armrest, he leaned towards the grille. On the other side, in the dim light, a barely glimpsed figure, a shoulder covered in a green fabric.
‘Good day to you. What can I do for you?’
‘Nothing. I think you’re waiting for me.’
These words made him feel uneasy. The voice was hollow but calm, the voice of someone who wasn’t afraid of the abyss he was staring into.
‘Do we know each other?’
‘Very well. Or not at all, if you prefer.’
The unease became a slight sense of dread. The priest found refuge in the only words he could offer him.
‘You’ve entered a confessional. I assume you wish to make confession?’
‘Yes.’
The monosyllable was resolute but nonchalant.
‘Then tell me your sins.’
‘I don’t have any. I’m not looking for absolution because I don’t need it. And anyway I know you wouldn’t give it to me.’
On his side, the priest was stunned by this declaration of futility. From the tone of voice he sensed that it wasn’t mere presumption but came from something much bigger and more devastating. A
t any other time, Father Michael McKean might have reacted differently. Now he still had his eyes and ears full of images and sounds of death and the sense of defeat that takes hold after an almost sleepless night.
‘If that’s what you think, then what can I do for you?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to leave you a message.’
‘What kind of message?’
A moment’s silence. But it wasn’t hesitation. He was simply giving him time to clear his mind of any other thoughts.
‘It was me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I blew up the building on the Lower East Side.’
That took Father McKean’s breath away.
The images piled up in his mind. Dust, ambulances, the screams of the wounded, the blood, corpses taken away in sheets, the moans of the survivors, the anguish of those who had lost everything. The statements on television. A whole city, a whole country again transfixed with the fear that was, as someone had said, the only true horseman of the apocalypse. And the indistinct shadow on the other side of that thin barrier claimed to be responsible for all that.
Reason dictated that he take his time and think clearly. There were sick people in the world who liked to assume the guilt for murders and disasters they couldn’t possibly be responsible for.
‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘What?’
‘That I’m a fantasist, that there’s nothing to prove what I’m saying is true.’
Michael McKean, a man of reason and a priest by belief, was nothing at that moment but an animal with all its senses on the alert. And every shred of his ancestral instinct screamed at him that the man on the other side of the confessional was telling the truth.
He needed to breathe for a few moments, before continuing. The other man understood that and respected his silence. When he found his voice again, he appealed to a piety he already knew he wouldn’t find.
‘What do all those deaths, all that pain, mean to you?’
‘Justice. And justice should never create pain. So much of it has been dispensed in the past that it has become an object of worship. Why should this time be different?’
‘What do you mean by justice?’
‘The Red Sea opening and closing. Sodom. Gomorrah. I have many other examples, if you want them.’
The voice was silent for a moment. On his side of the confessional, which at that moment felt like the coldest place in the world, Father McKean would have liked to shout out that these were just stories, that they shouldn’t be taken literally, that …
He held back and missed the opportunity to retaliate. The other man took this as an invitation to continue.
‘Men have had two gospels, one for their souls and one for their lives. One religious and one secular. Both have taught men more or less the same things. Brotherhood, justice, equality. There have been people who have spread them through the world and through time.’
The voice appeared to come from a place much further than the tiny distance separating them. Now it had become a mere breath, sour with disappointment. The kind of disappointment that gives rise not to tears but to anger.
‘But almost nobody has had the strength to live according to these teachings.’
‘All men are imperfect,’ Father McKean replied. ‘That’s part of nature. How can you not feel compassion? Haven’t you repented what you did?’
‘No. Because I will do it again. And you will be the first to know.’
Father McKean hid his face in his hands. What was happening to him was too much for one man. If this person’s words corresponded to the truth, then this was a test beyond his strength. Or the strength of anyone who wore a priest’s cassock. The voice pressed on. Not fierce now, but soft and persuasive. Full of understanding.
‘In your words during the mass, there was pain. There was compassion. But there was no faith.’
He tried in vain to rebel, not against those words, but against his fear. ‘How can you say that?’
‘I’ll help you regain it, Michael McKean,’ the man continued, as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘I can do that.’
There was another pause. Then the three words that set eternity in motion.
‘I am God.’
CHAPTER 15
In many ways, Joy was the kingdom of almost.
Everything almost worked, was almost shiny, almost new. The roof was almost fine and the paint on the outside walls almost didn’t need retouching. The few permanent employees received their salary almost regularly, the outside helpers almost always forewent theirs. Everything was second-hand, and in that display of the old and worn anything new stood out like the light of a beacon in the distance. But it was also a place where every day, with great difficulty, a new piece of the life raft was built.
As he drove the Batmobile along the unpaved drive towards the house, John Kortighan knew that in the bus with him he had a group of kids to whom life had been a terrible counsellor. Little by little it had devoured their trust, and they had been alone for so long they took solitude for the norm. Each one, with that originality typical of adverse fate, had found his or her own destructive way to go astray, and the indifference of the world had covered their traces.
Now in this place, together, they could try to find themselves, realizing that, logically and not by chance, they had a right to an alternative. And he felt fortunate and grateful to have been chosen to be part of that enterprise.
However hard and desperate it was.
John drove in through the gate and a minute or so later the van crossed the forecourt and pulled up under a canopy. The kids got out and headed for the back door of the kitchen, arguing and joking among themselves. For all of them Sunday was a special day, a day without ghosts.
Jerry Romero expressed everyone’s opinion. ‘Boy, we’re hungry.’
Hendymion Lee, a young man of oriental descent, shrugged his shoulders in reply. ‘So what’s new? You’re always hungry. I’m sure if you were the Pope, they’d have to give communion with slices of salami instead of the host.’
Jerry went up to Hendymion and grabbed his head in an arm lock. ‘If it was up to you, gook, they’d do it with chopsticks.’
They both laughed.
Shalimar Bennett, a black girl with funny spiked hair and the body of a gazelle, joined in the joke. ‘Jerry become Pope? He couldn’t even become a priest. He can’t stand wine. At his first mass he’d get so smashed they’d throw him out.’
John smiled. He lingered in the middle of the forecourt, watching them disappear inside the house. He was not fooled by that relaxed atmosphere. He knew how delicate the balance was, how in each of them memory and temptation were one and the same, until they could be transformed into just a memory. But what he witnessed every day was beautiful – the attempt at rebirth, the construction of a possible future.
Alone, standing in the middle of the forecourt, the sun directly overhead, John Kortighan lifted his eyes to the blue sky and looked at the house.
Joy had been built on the edge of that part of Pelham Bay Park that adjoined the Bronx, on a six-acre property facing the stretch of sea that wove its way northward like a finger poking into the land. The main building was a two-storey construction in the shape of a square C, built according to the architectural dictates that characterized houses in New England, using mainly wood and dark brick. The free side was open towards the channel and the green coast beyond it, which, by contrast, descended southward like a hand holding back the sea.
There was the entrance, facing the garden, which you reached via a porch in the shape of a half-octagon, lit by large glass doors. On the ground floor were the kitchen and pantry, the dining room, a small infirmary, a library, and the games and TV room. On one of the short sides, two bedrooms with a shared bathroom for those members of staff who, like him, lived permanently at Joy. On the upper floor, the kids’ bedrooms, and in the attic Father McKean’s room.
The long side faced the forecourt, where
a second building had been built to house a laboratory for those who opted for more manual activities instead of studying. In back of the laboratory was the vegetable garden, which stretched as far as the western edge of the property, where there was an orchard. Originally the vegetable garden and orchard had been developed as an experiment, with the idea of supplying a distraction for the kids at Joy, allowing them to experience something physical, and at the same time rewarding. In a short time, to everyone’s surprise, the production of fruit and vegetables had grown until the community was almost self-sufficient. In fact, when the harvest was particularly good, a group of the kids went down to the market in Union Square to sell their products.
Mrs Carraro appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘What’s this about eating without Father Michael?’
‘He’s been delayed. He has to say the 12.30 mass.’
‘Well, no one will die if we wait a bit. We can’t have Sunday lunch without that man.’
‘All right, colonel.’ John pointed to the inside of the kitchen, from which came the high-pitched echo of the kids’ conversation. ‘But you tell the alligators.’
‘They won’t say a word. I’d like to see them try.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
John watched as she disappeared from the doorway, her face set for battle. Even though Mrs Carraro was greatly outnumbered by the kids, he had no doubt who would prevail. John left the kids to work it out with their cook. She was an apparently gentle and submissive woman but on several occasions had demonstrated how determined she could be. He knew that when she made a decision it was difficult to get her to change her mind, especially if the decision favoured Father McKean.
He turned left and walked slowly along the side of the house, breathing in the air, which had a slight salty taste.
Thinking.
The sun was already hot and the vegetation was starting to explode with that silent green clamour that always surprised the heart and the eyes and knocked down the cold gray walls of winter. He reached the front of the house and set off along the garden path. He walked until all he had in front of him was the shiny tabletop of the sea and the green of the park on the other side of the channel. He stopped with his hands in his pockets and his face lifted to the breeze.