—
WEDNESDAY LUNCH.
Well, Father, I hear you delivered yourself of another doozy.
How do you get your information, Charley. My little deacon, maybe, or my Kapellmeister?
Be serious.
No, really, unless you’ve got the altar bugged. Because, God knows, there’s nobody but us chickens. Give me an uptown parish, why don’t you, where the subway doesn’t shake the rafters. Give me one of God’s midtown showplaces of the pious rich and famous, and I’ll show you what doozy means.
Now, listen, Pem, he says. This is unseemly. You are doing and saying things that are…ecclesiastically worrying.
He frowns at his grilled fish as if wondering what it’s doing there. His well-chosen Pinot Grigio shamelessly neglected as he sips ice water.
Tell me what I should be talking about, Charley. My five parishioners are serious people. I mean, is this only a problem for Jewish theology? Mormon? Swedenborgian?
There’s a place for doubt. And it’s not the altar of St. Timothy’s.
Funny you should say that. Doubt is my next week’s sermon: the idea is that in our time it is no more likely that a religious person will live a moral life than that an irreligious person will. What do you think?
A tone has crept in, a pride of intellect, something is not right—
And it may be that we guardians of the sacred texts are in spirit less God-fearing than the average secular individual in a modern industrial democracy who has quietly accepted the ethical teachings and installed them in himself and/or herself.
Lays the knife and fork down, composes his thoughts: You’ve always been your own man, Pem, and in the past I’ve had a sneaking admiration for the freedom you’ve found within church discipline. We all have. And in a sense you’ve paid for it, we both know that. In terms of talent and brains, the way you burned up Yale, you probably should have been my bishop. But in another sense it is harder to do what I do, be the authority that your kind is always testing.
My kind?
Please think about this. The file is getting awfully thick. You are headed for an examination, a Presentment. Is that what you want?
His blue eyes look disarmingly into mine. Boyish shock of hair, now gray, falling over the forehead. Then his famous smile flashes over his face and instantly fades, having been the grimace of distraction of an administrative mind.
What I know of such things, Pem, I know well. Self-destruction is not one act, or even one kind of act. It is the whole man coming apart in every direction, all three hundred and sixty degrees.
Amen to that, Charley. You don’t suppose there’s time for a double espresso?
—
ALL RIGHT, THAT WISE old dog Tillich—Paulus Tillichus—how does he construe the sermon? Picks a text and worries the hell out of it. Sniffs at the words, paws them: What, when you get right down to it, is a demon? You say you want to be saved? But what does that mean? When you pray for eternal life, what do you think you’re asking for? Paulus, God’s philologist, this Merriam-Webster of the DDs, this German…shepherd. I loved him. The suspense he held us in—teetering on the edge of secularism, arms waving wildly. Of course, he saved us every time, pulled back from the abyss, and we were okay after all, back with Jesus. Until the next sermon, the next lesson. Because if God is to live, the words of faith must be renewed. The words must be reborn.
Oh, did we flock to him. Enrollments soared.
But that was then and this is now.
We’re back in Christendom, Paulus. People are born again, not words. You can see it on television.
—
FRIDAY MORNING. FOLLOWING HIS INTUITION, Divinity Detective wandered over to the restaurant-supply district on the Bowery, below Houston, where the trade is brisk in used steam tables, walk-in freezers, grills, sinks, pots, woks, and bins of cutlery. Back behind the Taipei Trading Company was the antique gas-operated fridge too recently acquired to have a sales tag, with the mark of my shoe sole still on the door where I kicked it when it wouldn’t stay closed. And in one of the bins of the used-dish department the tea things from our pantry, white with a green trim, gift from the dear departed Ladies’ Auxiliary. Practically named my own price, Lord. With free delivery. A steal.
Evening. I walk over to Tompkins Square, find my friend on his bench.
This has got to stop, I say to him.
My, you riled up.
Wouldn’t you be?
Not like the Pops I know.
I thought we had an understanding. I thought there was mutual respect.
They is. Have a seat.
Sparrows working the benches in the dusk.
Told you wastin’ your time, but I ast aroun like I said I would. No one here hittin’ on Tim’s.
Not from here?
Thasit.
How can you be sure?
This regulated territory.
Regulated! That’s funny.
Now who’s not showin’ respeck. This my parish we talkin’ bout. Church of the Sweet Vision. They lean on me, see what I’m sayin’? I am known for my compassion. You dealin’ with foreigners or some such, thas my word to you.
Ah, hell. I suppose you’re right.
No problem. Unsnaps attaché case: Here, my very own personal blend. No charge. Relax yoursel.
Thanks.
Toke of my affection.
—
MONDAY NIGHT, A NEW TACK. I waited in the balcony with my BearScare six-volt Superbeam. If something stirred, I’d just press the button and my Superbeam would hit the altar at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second—same cruising speed as the finger of God.
The amber crime-preventing lights on the block make a perfect indoor crime site of my church. Intimations of a kind of tarnished air in the vaulted spaces. The stained-glass figures yellowed into lurid obsolescence. How many years has this church been home to me? But all I had to do was sit up in the back for a few hours to understand the truth of its stolid indifference. How an oak pew creaks. How a passing police siren in its two Doppler pitches is like a crisis being filed away in the stone walls.
And then, Lord, I confess, I dozed. Father Brown would never have done that. But there was this crash, as if a waiter had dropped a whole load of dishes. That brought me up smartly. Wait a minute, I thought, churches don’t have waiters—they’re hitting the pantry again! I had figured them for the altar. I raced my bulk down the stairs, my Superbeam held aloft like a club. “Cry God for Tommy, England, and St. Tim!” How long had I been asleep? I stood in the doorway, found the light switch, and, when you do that, for an instant the only working sense is the sense of smell: hashish in that empty pantry. Male body odor. But also the pungent sanguinary scent of female hormone. And something else, something else. Like lipstick, or lollipop.
The dish cabinets—some of the panes shattered, broken cups and saucers on the floor, a cup still rocking.
A whiff of cool air. They’d gone out the alley door. An ungainly something moving out there. A deep metallic bong sounds up through my heels. Someone curses. It is me, fumbling with the damn searchlight. I swing the beam out and see a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner.
I ran back into the church and let my little light shine. Behind the altar where the big brass cross should have been was a shadow of Your crucifix, Lord, in the unfaded paint of my predecessor’s poor taste.
—
WHAT THE REAL DETECTIVE SAID: Take my word for it, Padre. I been in this precinct ten years. They’ll hit a synagogue for the whatchamacallit, the Torah. Because it’s handwritten, not a mass-produced item. It’ll bring, a minimum, five K. Whereas the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada. No disrespect, we’re practically related, I’m Catholic, go to Mass, but on the street there is no way it is anything but scrap metal. Jesus! Whata buncha sickos.
Mistake talking to the Times. Such a sympathetic young man. I didn’t understand anything till they too
k the cross, I told him. I thought they were just crackheads looking for a few dollars. Maybe they didn’t understand it themselves. Am I angry? No. I’m used to this, I am used to being robbed. When the diocese took away my food-for-the-homeless program and merged it with one across town, I lost most of my parishioners. That was a big-time heist. So even before this happened I was tapped out. These people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But on further reflection maybe Christ goes where He is needed.
Phone ringing off the hook. I’m getting my very own Presentment. But also pledges of support, checks rolling in. Including some of the old crowd, pals now of my dear wife, who had thought my vocabulary quaint, like a performance of Mozart on period instruments. Tommy Pemberton will scrape a few pieties for us on his viola da gamba. I count nine hundred and change here. Have I stumbled on a new scam? I tell you, Lord, these people just don’t get it. What am I supposed to do, put up a fence? Electrify it?
The TV newspeople swarming all over. Banging on my door. Mayday, Mayday! I will raise the sash behind this desk, drop nimbly to the rubbled lot, pass under the window of Ecstatic Reps, where the lady with the big hocks is doing the treadmill, and I’m gone. Thanks heaps, Metro section.
—
TRISH GIVING A DINNER when I got here. The caterer’s man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now that I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She’s doing the veal-paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh, what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual-fund manager. Odds on the Frenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And, in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish’s glance over the rim of the wineglass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the blue amused eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I’d slunk home. But isn’t it terrible that after it’s over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do You have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven’t even gotten around to Your small-time perversities. I mean when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence. And it’s the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn’t Trish.
But the dining room was the least of it. It’s a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.
We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.
—
DEAR FATHER IF U want to now where yor cross luk in 7531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an scarifises chickns.
Sure.
Dear Mr. Pemberton, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York…Nuffuvthat.
Dear Father, We have read of your troubles with those aliens who presume to desecrate the Christian church and smirch the Living God. Lest you despair, I am one of a group in nearby New Jersey who have dedicated ourselves to defending the Republic and the Sacred name of Jesus from interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thing these people understand, The Gun that is our prerogative to hold as free white Americans…
Right on.
—
OKAY, ACTION TO REPORT.
Yesterday, Monday, I get a message on the machine from a Rabbi Joshua Gruen, of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, on West Ninety-eighth: it is in my interest that we meet as soon as possible. Hmm. Clearly not one of the kooks. I call back. Cordial, but will answer no questions over the phone. So okay, this is what detectives do, Lord, they investigate. Sounded a serious young man, one religioso to another—mufti or collar? I go for the collar.
The synagogue a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive. A steep flight of granite steps to the front door. I deduce that Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. Confirmed when I am admitted. Joshua (my new friend) a trim five-nine in sweatshirt, jeans, running shoes. Gives me a firm handshake. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-four, good chin, well-curved forehead. A knitted yarmulke riding the top of his wavy black hair.
Shows me his synagogue: a converted parlor–cum–living room with an ark at one end, a platform table to read the Torah on, shelves with prayer books, and a few rows of bridge chairs, and that’s it.
Second floor, introduces me to his wife, who puts her caller on hold, stands up from her desk to shake hands, she, too, a rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, in blouse and slacks, pretty smile, high cheekbones, no cosmetics, needs none, light hair short, au courant cut, granny specs, Lord my heart. She is one of the assistant rabbis at Temple Emanu-El. What if Trish went for her DD, wore the collar, celebrated the Eucharist with me? Okay, laugh, but it’s not funny when I think about it, not funny at all.
Third floor, I meet the children, boys two and four, in their native habitat of primary-color wall boxes filled with stuffed animals. They cling to the flanks of their dark Guatemalan nanny, who is also introduced like a member of the family…
On the back wall of the third-floor landing is an iron ladder. Joshua Gruen ascends, opens a trapdoor, climbs out.
A moment later his head appears against the blue sky. He beckons me upward, poor winded Pem so stress-tested and entranced…so determined to make it look effortless I can think of nothing else.
I stand finally on the flat roof, the old apartment houses of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive looming at either end of this block of chimneyed brownstone roofs, and try to catch my breath while smiling at the same time. The autumn sun behind the apartment houses, the late-afternoon river breeze on my face. I’m feeling the exhilaration and slight vertigo of roof-standing…and don’t begin to think—until snapped to attention by the rabbi’s puzzled, frankly inquiring gaze that asks why do I think he’s brought me here—why he’s brought me here. His hands in his pockets, he points with his chin to the Ninety-eighth Street frontage, where, lying flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, lies tarnished and shining in the autumn sun.
I suppose I knew I’d found it from the moment I heard the rabbi’s voice on the answering machine. I bend down for a closer look. There are the old nicks and dents. Some new ones, too. It’s not all of a piece, which I hadn’t known: the arms are bolted to the upright in a kind of mortise-and-tenon idea. I lift it at the foot. It is not that heavy but clearly too much cross to bear on the stations of the IRT.
—
I’D BEEN JUST ABOUT convinced it was, in fact, a new sect of some kind. You do let this happen, Lord, ideas of You bud with the profligacy of viruses. I thought, Well, I’ll keep a vigil from across the street, watch them take my church apart brick by brick. Maybe I’ll help them. They’ll reassemble it somewhere as a folk church of some kind. A bizarre expression of their simple faith. Maybe I’ll drop in, listen to the sermon now and then. Learn something…
Then my other idea, admittedly paranoid: it would end up as an installation in SoHo. Some crazy artist—let me wait a few months, a year, and I’d look in a gallery window and see it there, duly embellished, a statement. People standing there drinking white wine. So that was the secular version. I thought I had all bases covered. I am shaken.
—
HOW DID RABBI JOSHUA Gruen know it was there?
An anonymous phone call. A man’s voice. Hello, Rabbi Gruen? Your roof is burning.
The roof was burning?
If the children had been in the house I would have gotten them out and called the fire department. As it w
as, I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and up I came. Not the smartest thing. Of course, the roof was not burning. But, modest as it is, this is a synagogue. A place for prayer and study. And, as you see, a Jewish family occupies the upper floors. So was he wrong, the caller?
He bites his lip, dark brown eyes looking me in the eye. It is an execrable symbol to him. Burning its brand on his synagogue. Burning down, floor through floor, like the template of a Christian church. I want to tell him I’m on the Committee for Ecumenical Theology of the Trans-Religious Fellowship. A member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
This is deplorable. I am really sorry about this.
It’s hardly your fault.
I know, I say. But this city is getting weirder by the minute.
The rabbis offer me a cup of coffee. We sit in the kitchen. I feel quite close to them, both our houses of worship desecrated, the entire Judeo-Christian heritage trashed.
This gang’s been preying on me for months. And for what they’ve gotten for their effort, I mean one hit on a dry cleaner would have done as much. Listen, Rabbi—
Joshua.
Joshua. Do you read detective stories?
He clears his throat, blushes.
Only all the time, Sarah Blumenthal says, smiling at him.
Well, let’s put our minds together. We’ve got two mysteries going here.
Why two?
This gang. I can’t believe their intent was, ultimately, to commit an anti-Semitic act. They have no intent. They lack sense. They’re like overgrown children. They’re not of this world. And all the way from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side? No, that’s asking too much of them.
So this is someone else?
It must be. A good two weeks went by. Somebody took the cross off their hands—if they didn’t happen to find it in a dumpster. I mean, the police told me it had no value, but if someone wants it it has value, right? And then this second one or more persons had the intent. But how did they get it onto the roof? And nobody saw them, nobody heard them?