Those tigers in my brain are slowing down, showing their stripes now, like a carousel on its last revolution. I desperately want to call the number Aidan gave me to tell him what I’ve learned but I know it’s not enough yet. Something’s still missing. And the only place I can think of looking for it is in Brooklyn.
Chapter Twenty-seven
On my way to the subway I buy a five-boroughs map of New York City. Fortunately, it lists churches and I’m able to find St. Mary Star of the Sea on Court Street between Nelson and Luquer in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. I’m not all that familiar with Brooklyn, mostly because I hate taking subways. I usually tell people that I’m claustrophobic, but the truth is I hate going underground. I’ve even had trouble using some libraries—like the Beinecke at Yale—where the stacks are below ground.
Today, though, my phobia is happily placated by the whir of thoughts revolving inside my brain. Instead of tigers, now, I see Vera Nix in her siren’s green dress, John McGlynn in his St. Christopher’s band uniform, my mother and Peter Kron, and hovering outside this inner circle, Harry Kron. The one face that remains blurry is Rose McGlynn. I take out her plea to the court and reread the part in Rose McGlynn’s story when she visited her brothers at St. Christopher’s. They looked well enough—they were probably eating better than they had at home—but there was always something missing in their eyes. And then a little later, she’d said of John, He was so young, but he’d grown into an old man in that place. He’d even developed a curve in his back, which the nuns said came from poor nutrition as a baby.
Concentrating on the small faded print in the swaying train has made me nauseous. I close my eyes and find that a new figure has joined the carousel in my mind: a grotesque half man/half swan with cold black eyes. It’s a creature from my mother’s books, one of the men who turn into winged creatures. The transformation from man to beast, as my mother described it, is painful. Their emerging wings break their backs, and their eyes grow cold. I remember a single line from my mother’s second book. But when Naoise turned to me I saw in his eyes that the animal growing inside him had already taken over.
I shiver despite the suffocating heat in the train. If my mother had known John and Rose McGlynn when they were growing up she would have seen this transformation. She not only saw John turn into a hardened criminal, she also saw his sister kill herself, saw her step off the platform, her worn suitcase left behind like a used skin, to be crushed by the oncoming train. Decapitated, Harry had said. No wonder my mother got on the northbound train and continued on her journey upstate, to the hotel where she and Rose had planned to look for work. There was nothing left for her back in the city but bad memories. The Hotel Equinox, and my father, must have seemed like an oasis of peace after the horror she had witnessed. But then something had happened, twenty-four years later in the summer of 1973, to reawaken those horrors.
I’m so deep in thought that I almost don’t notice that the train has reached the Carroll Street station. I get out just before the door shuts and then take the stairs two at a time, breathless to get back up into the air. And back into the present. All morning I’ve felt the past tugging at my heels, a tide dragging me out to sea, and now I’ve washed up at the feet of St. Mary Star of the Sea, patron saint of seagoing sailors and shipwrecked castaways. The first thing I notice is that the church is nowhere near the sea. I check my five-boroughs map and see that the closest waterfront is the Red Hook docks. The second thing I notice is that the black iron gates in front of the church are chained and locked.
I look up and down a Court Street becalmed by the late-afternoon sun and then walk up to the corner. West on Luquer, deep shaded yards and plaster devotional statues guard the placid brownstones. The neighborhood feels quiet and private and, like the church, unwilling to give up its secrets. East on Luquer I find the church’s rectory and a bell to ring. A small plaque below the bell reads, RING ONCE AND THEN PLEASE WAIT PATIENTLY. I ring once and wait, patiently at first but decreasingly so, for ten minutes. I pace back up to Court Street and notice a coffee shop called Le Trianon directly opposite the church. There are benches outside, shaded by a linden tree, where a couple in neoprene cycling gear sip iced tea while their giant rottweiler laps up water from a bowl chained to the bench. I head there.
Entering the café I feel like I’ve actually found the church, mostly because Michelangelo’s God and Adam are lounging on a bed of clouds and blue sky painted on the ceiling. Everything else about Le Trianon is pretty—the hand-blown light fixtures, crafted to look like tightly furled lilies, the marble tables, and the selection of teas and pastries. Even the man behind the counter, short but muscular and bearing more than a passing resemblance to the painting of Adam on the ceiling, is handsome. I order an iced green tea and cinnamon scone and ask him if the church across the street is always locked up.
“Yeah, since some silver candlesticks were stolen from the altar a few years back. They’re open for Mass at the crack of dawn and once again in the evening at eight-thirty.”
“Damn,” I say, “I came a ways to see it.”
“Did you try ringing at the rectory door?”
“I rang once and waited patiently.”
He laughs. “Those old ladies who work in the office are probably there but they don’t like getting off their fannies. You could try again.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking my iced tea and scone. “By the way, why’s it called St. Mary Star of the Sea? We don’t seem to be anywhere near the sea.”
He points toward the rear of the café to indicate, I gather, the neighborhood to the south and west of us. “A lot of this land was built up over the years. When the church was built a hundred fifty years ago the water came closer and there weren’t so many buildings to block the view.”
“Really? I didn’t realize the church was that old. And has the neighborhood always been Italian?”
“My grandparents moved here just after the war,” he says, “but they said there were still a lot of Irish then. Now we’ve got lawyers and stockbrokers willing to pay a couple thou a month for a studio apartment. You looking to move into the neighborhood?”
“Sounds like I couldn’t afford it. Actually, I think my mother may have gone to school at St. Mary’s. I was baptized at the church.”
“No kidding. Well, look, considering you’re from the old neighborhood, forget trying to raise those old bats in the rectory. Go over to the school and ask for Gloria. Tell her that her nephew Danny sent you and she’ll get someone to show you the church. Plus, she’s got all the records for the school going back to Moses.”
“Thanks, that’s really helpful. Oh, and by the way, I love the ceiling.”
Danny rolls his eyes up to the painted heaven not eight feet above his head. “My brother Vincent, the artist. I’m just the baker. It’s okay if you don’t mind God hanging over your head all day.”
I sit on the bench outside (the cyclers and rottweiler have gone) and watch dismissal from the school while sipping my tea and eating my scone (which is so light and flaky that I wonder who is really the artist in the family—Danny or Vincent?). Children file out the front door in orderly rows that split to the right or the left to mini buses waiting on Nelson and Luquer Streets. I watch mothers in clogs and long Indian skirts and mothers in suits and high heels and some fathers too in paint-splattered overalls or rumpled Brooks Brothers shirts—ties stuffed in shirt pockets—emerging hand in hand with their children. I don’t know what I’d expected of my mother’s old neighborhood, but it wasn’t this pretty suburb, which seems too renovated and gentrified to still hold my mother’s secrets. This is a neighborhood Jack and I could have moved to, I think. He could have found some studio space in the new, burgeoning artists’ neighborhood, DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and we could have renovated a brownstone before the rents skyrocketed.
When the traffic out of the doors slows to a trickle I cross the street and go inside. The secretaries are still in the office, c
omforting a little boy whose mother is late for pickup while packing up their purses to go. I pick out the oldest-looking woman—who also bears more than a passing resemblance to Danny from Le Trianon Café—and ask if she’s Gloria.
“I was talking to your nephew Danny across the street and he said you might be able to help me look up my mother’s records. I think she went here in the late thirties, early forties. Also, I was kind of hoping to see the church . . .”
Gloria and one of the younger secretaries exchange a look. “Did you try the rectory?” the younger girl asks me.
“I rang once.”
“Is Anthony still here, Tonisha?” Gloria asks. Tonisha nods, already hitting an intercom button on her phone.
“We’ll get you into the church. If you want to look at the records you’ll have to come down to the basement with me and find what you’re looking for yourself. My back can’t take stooping over those files.” In fact when Gloria gets up I see she has a pronounced hump in her back and that she needs a cane to walk.
“If it’s a real inconvenience . . .”
“Nah, do me good to get off my fanny. But it is cold down there . . .” She eyes my thin T-shirt and cotton skirt. “Here, take one of my sweaters.” There are several sweaters hanging from a lopsided coatrack in the corner. The one she picks for me is a hideous shade of acid green trimmed in a muddy pink. When I pull it on the synthetic wool itches and smells vaguely of some kind of lotion. Calamine, I think as I follow Gloria down the basement stairs; the muddy pink trim is the exact color of calamine lotion and the green is the green of poison ivy. Still, I’m grateful for the sweater’s warmth as we descend into the basement. If I thought the neighborhood at street level seemed too antiseptic to hold any traces of the past I should be comforted by the church basement, which looks, and smells, as old as the catacombs. The walls are hewn out of bedrock. The floor appears to be dirt.
Gloria pulls a string suspended from the ceiling and a naked bulb dimly illuminates the cavernous space.
“Wow, it’s huge,” I say, straining my eyes to see into the shadowy corners. I’m startled by what look like ghostly shapes in one recessed apse.
“It goes all the way under the church,” Gloria tells me, and then, pointing to the ghostly throng in the shadows and crossing herself, says, “Those are the ousted saints. You know, the ones the Vatican decided weren’t saints anymore. The church put their statues down here.”
“How does a saint get ousted?” I ask, looking away from the hollow eyes of the marble and bronze figures, which seem to look out with all the piteous eloquence of dogs at the pound.
Gloria shrugs and pulls a wobbly office chair with torn upholstery and one missing caster over to a bank of file cabinets just opposite the niche of deposed saints. “The church decides they weren’t real, like St. Christopher”—she fingers a medal at her throat, which I guess honors the defrocked saint—“or that their miracles weren’t real, like Santa Catalina. What year did you say your mother went here?”
“Well, she was born in 1924 so she would have graduated around 1942.”
Gloria pulls out a drawer and waves me to it. She rolls her chair back, takes a skein of wool out of her cardigan pocket, and begins to knit. I notice it’s the same calamine pink as the trim of the one I’m wearing.
I crouch in front of the metal cabinet, wincing at the pain in my battered knees, and try to read the names that have been handwritten on white labels affixed to dark brown file folders. The folders are so tightly packed—without the benefit of hanging dividers—that every time I move one folder forward the sharp edge of the next folder slices into my cuticles. The spidery handwriting—I imagine a long-dead nun as ghostly and hollow-eyed as the statues whose gazes I feel boring into my bent and aching back—is almost impossible to read. Nor does this particular nun seem to have considered strict alphabetical order, like cleanliness, next to godliness.
“Do the Mc’s come before or after the rest of the M’s?” I ask, lifting my head up from the drawer.
Gloria looks up from her knitting needles which keep moving in her hands, “I have no idea, but if you want to see the church too you’ll have to hurry up. Anthony takes his dinner break at four-thirty.”
I go through all the M’s but don’t find Morrissey or McGlynn.
“What if she dropped out?” I ask. I realize that my mother never actually mentioned graduating, and I know that Rose McGlynn dropped out.
Gloria sighs and, letting the bundle of pink wool sag into her lap, touches her medal. I imagine she’s asking St. Christopher to carry her out of the presence of fools and I also bet that Danny will get an earful tonight. She points a knitting needle in the direction of the deposed saints. “There are some boxes over there for the dropouts,” she says. “I think they’re grouped by decades.”
It makes a sort of perverse sense that the dropouts would get to share eternity with the unpopular saints. I picture an afterlife with cliques like in high school, with women like my mother and Rose McGlynn floating in limbo—only I believe that the Catholic Church has also gotten rid of limbo—with the ex-saints. I kneel at the feet of a pasty-white saint and start thumbing through the 1940s for my mother and her friend.
I find them both, their files rubber banded together, a note folded and paper clipped to the top file. I unfasten the note, which retains a rusty impression of the paper clip, and read it first. “Dear Monsignor Ryan,” she-of-the-spidery-handwriting has written,
Enclosed you will find the files of the two girls accused of stealing from the collection plate during last Sunday’s Mass. As you will recall, we suspected Rose McGlynn immediately because of the recent disruption in her family and when questioned she did not deny her culpability. Later that afternoon, though, another student, Katherine Morrissey, came to my office and said that she was responsible for the theft. I noticed that both girls were wearing identical saints medals that I hadn’t seen before. When I asked them, separately of course, where they got the medals they both became flustered and couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation. (Both girls come from very poor families and the medals are gold and quite valuable.) I concluded that the girls stole the money and purchased the medals. I confess that I felt moved to pardon them when I realized that the money had been used to purchase a religious item, but then I noticed that the medals are of Santa Catalina, a local folk heroine whose beatification was recently revoked by the church. (I’m embarrassed to tell you that girls in this neighborhood pray to this so-called saint to find them husbands.) I was further disillusioned in the girls’ characters when I was shown a picture of the girls (herein enclosed) cavorting at a local amusement park with a young man. You’ll notice, if you look carefully and perhaps employ a magnifying glass, that the girls are wearing the medals in the picture. I assume they were purchased as part of their escapade. In light of their both confessing to the theft and this evidence of slatternly behavior, I must recommend expulsion from St. Mary Star of the Sea.
The letter is signed Sister Amelia Dolores, mother superior. It’s disconcerting to read, twice in one day, of my mother being accused of petty theft. I’d rather believe that it was Rose McGlynn who stole the money, but then I remember finding the gold medal in my mother’s jewelry box and my mother tearing it from my neck when she saw me wearing it. My father said she reacted like that because of how she felt about the Catholic Church, but now I wonder if the necklace had reminded her of this crime and its shameful aftermath.
When I fold the note and slide it back under its paper clip I notice that something is written on the back, on the half of the paper that had been facing the folder. This note is written in a different, larger and rounder, hand.
“Dear Monsignor, please note that the boy in the picture is only Rose McGlynn’s younger brother, John McGlynn. I suspect that he is the one responsible for the collection plate theft and that the girls are protecting him.” This addendum is signed Sister Agatha Dorothy.
I open the folder and the blac
k-and-white photograph, turned yellow and brown with age, falls into my lap. They’re leaning against a wooden railing in front of the ocean—John McGlynn, whom I recognize from his St. Christopher’s picture, flanked by two pretty girls. At first glance the girls look like they could be sisters. They’re both wearing tightly cinched skirts and lacy white blouses. Their hair is styled in the same swept-back pageboy, their lips painted an identical dark shade. I can just make out oval shapes at the girls’ throats but it would take some magnifying glass to identify their necklaces as saints’ medals. It doesn’t take a magnifying glass, though, to pick out the differences between the two girls. My mother’s hair curls buoyantly in the light breeze; her green eyes, fringed by dark lashes, are arresting even in a black-and-white picture. The other girl is a pale shadow; it’s clear she’s trying to imitate my mother, but her hair falls slackly to her shoulders, freckles mar her complexion, and she squints at the camera. It’s not that she’s not pretty, it’s just that Rose McGlynn can’t hold a candle to my mother.
I look over at Gloria but she’s muttering over her knitting, having apparently dropped a stitch. I let the picture slide from my lap into the open book bag next to my feet. Then I quickly skim through the rest of the file, but there’s nothing much to see here. Both girls got good grades. I notice that Sister Agatha Dorothy was their English teacher and that she’d given both girls A’s in her class. It was Rose McGlynn, though, and not my mother, who had won the composition award their junior year. Even though there’s not much of interest here, I find myself oddly reluctant to leave the two folders moldering at the feet of the reject saint, even when I notice that, fittingly, the plaque at the bottom of the statue identifies her as Santa Catalina, the “folk heroine” whose medals the girls had bought with the stolen collection plate money. Gloria is still ripping stitches out and unleashing a stream of Italian invectives at the unraveled mess of pink wool, so I slide the folders into my book bag along with the photograph, then straighten my aching back and tell Gloria I’m ready to see the church.