Doctorow

  I was on the case now, asking questions, my nostrils flaring. I was enjoying myself. Good Lord, Lord, should I have been a detective? Was that my true calling?

  Angelina, whom I think you met with the children: she heard noises from the roof one morning. We were already gone. That was the day I went to see my father, Sarah says, looking to Joshua for confirmation.

  And I’d gone running, Joshua says.

  But the noise didn’t last long and Angelina thought no more of it—thought that it was a repairman of some sort. I assume they came up through one of the houses on the block. The roofs abut.

  Did you go down the block? Did you ring bells?

  Joshua shook his head.

  What about the cops?

  They exchange glances. Please, says Joshua. The congregation is new, just getting its legs. We’re trying to make something viable for today—theologically, communally. A dozen or so families, just a beginning. A green shoot. The last thing we want is for this to get out. We don’t need that kind of publicity. Besides, he says, that’s what they want, whoever did this.

  We don’t accept the I.D. of victim, says Sarah Blumenthal, looking me in the eye.

  And now I tell You, Lord, as I sit here back in my own study, in this bare ruined choir, I am exceptionally sorry for myself this evening, lacking as I do a companion like Sarah Blumenthal. This is not lust, and You know I would admit it if it were. No, but I think how quickly I took to her, how comfortable I was made, how naturally welcomed I felt under these difficult circumstances, there is a freshness and honesty about these people, both of them, I mean, they were so present in the moment, so self-possessed, a wonderful young couple with a quietly dedicated life, such a powerful family stronghold they make, and, oh Lord, he is one lucky rabbi, Joshua Gruen, to have such a beautiful devout by his side.

  It was Sarah, apparently, who made the connection. He was sitting there trying to figure out how to handle it and she had come in from a conference somewhere and when he told her what was on the roof she wondered if that was the missing crucifix she had read about in the newspaper.

  I hadn’t read the piece and I was skeptical.

  You thought it was just too strange, a news story right in your lap, Sarah says.

  That’s true. News is somewhere else. And to realize that you know more than the reporter knew? But we found the article.

  He won’t let me throw out anything, Sarah says.

  Fortunately, in this case, says the husband to the wife.

  It’s like living in the Library of Congress.

  So, thanks to Sarah, we now have the rightful owner.

  She glances at me, colors a bit. Removes her glasses, the scholar, and pinches the bridge of her nose. I see her eyes in the instant before the specs go back on. Nearsighted, like a little girl I loved in grade school.

  I am extremely grateful, I say to my new friends. This is, in addition to everything else, a mitzvah you’ve performed. Can I use your phone? I’m going to get a van up here. We can take it apart, wrap it up, and carry it right out the front door and no one will be the wiser.

  I’m prepared to share the cost.

  Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I don’t need to tell you, but my life has been hell lately. This is good coffee, but you don’t happen to have something to drink, do you?

  Sarah going to a wall cabinet. Will Scotch do?

  Joshua, sighing, leans back in his chair. I could use something myself.

  —

  THE SITUATION NOW: my cross dismantled and stacked like building materials behind the altar. It won’t be put back together and hung in time for Sunday worship. That’s fine, I can make a sermon out of that. The shadow is there, the shadow of the cross on the apse. We will offer our prayers to God in the name of His Indelible Son, Jesus Christ. Not bad, Pem, you can still pull these things out of a hat when you want to.

  What am I to make of this strange night culture of stealth sickos, these mindless thieves of the valueless giggling through the streets, carrying what? whatever it was! through the watery precincts of urban nihilism…their wit, their glimmering dying recognition of something that once had a significance they laughingly cannot remember. Jesus, there’s not even sacrilege there. A dog stealing a bone knows more what he’s up to.

  A phone call just now from Joshua.

  If we’re going to be detectives about this, we start with what we know, isn’t that what you did? What I know, what I start with, is that no Jewish person would have stolen your crucifix. It would not occur to him. Even in the depths of some drug-induced confusion.

  I shouldn’t think so, I say, thinking, Why does Joshua feel he has to rule this out?

  But as you also said something like this has no street value unless someone wants it. Then it has value.

  To an already-in-place, raging anti-Semite, for example.

  Yes, that’s the likelihood. This is a mixed neighborhood. There may be people who don’t like a synagogue on their block. I’ve not been made aware of this, but it’s always possible.

  Right.

  But it’s also possible…placing that cross on my roof, well, that is something that could have been arranged by an ultra-orthodox fanatic. That’s possible, too.

  Good God!

  We have our extremists, our fundamentalists, just as you have. There are some for whom what Sarah and I are doing, struggling to redesign, revalidate our faith—well, in their eyes it is tantamount to apostasy. What do you think of that for a theory?

  Very generous of you, Joshua. But I don’t buy it, I say. I mean, I can’t think that it’s likely. Why would it be?

  The voice that told me my roof was burning? That was a Jewish thing to say. Of course, I don’t know for sure, I may be all wrong. But it’s something to think about. Tell me, Father—

  Tom—

  Tom. You’re a bit older, you’ve seen more, given more thought to these things. Wherever you look in the world now, God belongs to the atavists. And they’re so fierce, these people, so sure of themselves—as if all human knowledge since Scripture were not also God’s revelation! I mean, is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backward? That civilization is in reverse?

  Oh, my dear Rabbi…where does that leave us? Because maybe that’s what faith is. That’s what faith does. Whereas I am beginning to think that to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm conviction of God, or of an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His Spirit, somehow.

  —

  MONDAY. THE FRONT DOORS are padlocked. In the rectory kitchen, leaning back on the two hind legs of his chair and reading People, is St. Timothy’s newly hired, classically indolent private security guard.

  I am comforted, too, by the woman at Ecstatic Reps. She is there, as usual, walking in place, earphones clamped on her head, her large hocks in their black tights shifting up and dropping back down like Sisyphean boulders. As the afternoon darkens, she’ll be broken up and splashed in the greens and pale lavenders of the light refractions on the window.

  So everything is as it should be, the world’s in its place. The wall clock ticks. I have nothing to worry about except what I’m going to say to the bishop’s examiners who will determine the course of the rest of my life.

  This is what I will say for starters:

  “My dear colleagues, what you are here to examine today is not in the nature of a spiritual crisis. Let’s get that clear. I have not broken down, cracked up, burned out, or caved in. True, my personal life is a shambles, my church is like a war ruin, and, since I am not one to seek counsel or join support groups, and God, as usual, has ignored my communications (let’s be honest, Lord, not a letter, not a card), I do feel somewhat isolated. I will even admit that for the past few years, no, the past several years, I have not known what to do when in despair except walk the streets. Nevertheless, my ideas have substance, and, while you may find some of them alarming, I would entreat—would suggest, would recommend, would advise—I would
advise you to confront them on their merits, and not as evidence of the psychological decline of a mind you once had some respect for. I mean, for which you once had some respect.”

  That’s okay so far, isn’t it, Lord? Sort of taking it to them? Maybe a bit touchy. After all, what could they have in mind? In order of probability: one, a warning; two, a formal reprimand; three, censure; four, a month or so in therapeutic retreat followed by a brilliantly remote reassignment wherein I’m never to be heard from again; five, early retirement with or without full benefits; six, defrocking; seven, the Big Ex. Whatthahell! By the way, Lord, what are these “ideas of substance” I’ve promised them in the above? The phrase came trippingly off the tongue. I trust You will enlighten me. What with today’s shortened attention span I don’t need ninety-five, I can get by with just one or two. The point is, whatever I say will alarm them. Nothing of a church is shakier than its doctrine. That’s why they guard it with their lives. I mean, just to lay the “H” word on the table, it, heresy, is a legal concept, that’s all. The shock is supposed to be Yours but the affront is to sectarian legality. A heretic can be of no more concern to You than someone kicked out of a building cooperative for playing the piano after ten…So I pray, Lord, don’t let me come up with something worth only a reprimand. Let me have the good stuff. Speak to me. Send me an e-mail. You were once heard to speak:

  You Yourself are a word, though deemed by some to be unutterable,

  You are said to be The Word, and I don’t doubt You are the Last Word.

  You’re the Lord our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, at least that is our story of You.

  So here is Your servant, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Pemberton, the almost no longer rector of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, addressing You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonational systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills.

  Will You show him no mercy, this poor soul tormented in his nostalgia for Your Only Begotten Son? He has failed his training as a detective, having solved nothing.

  May he nevertheless pursue You? God? The Mystery?

  I had followed my man here. Everything he did was mysterious to me, and his predilection for the Water Works this November day was no less so. A square, granite building, with crenelated turrets at the corners, it stood hard by the reservoir on a high plain overlooking the city from the north. There was an abundance of windows through which, however, no light seemed to pass. I saw reflected the sky behind me, a tumultuous thing of billowing shapes of gray tumbling through vaults of pink sunset and with black rain clouds sailing overhead like an armada.

  His carriage was in the front yard. His horse pawed the stony ground and swung its head about to look at me.

  The reservoir behind the building, five or six city blocks in area, was cratered in an embankment that went up from the ground at an angle suggesting the pyramidal platform of an ancient civilization, Mayan perhaps. On Sundays in warm weather, people came here from the city and climbed the embankment, calling out to one another as they rose to the sight of a squared expanse of water. This day it was his alone. I heard the violent chop, the insistent slap of the tides against the cobblestone.

  He stood a ways out in the darkening day; he was studying something upon the water, my black-bearded captain. He held his hat brim. The corner of his long coat took the wind and pressed against his leg.

  I was sure he knew of my presence. Indeed, for some days I had sensed from his actions a mad presumption of partnership, as if he engaged in his enterprises for our mutual benefit. I climbed the embankment a hundred or so yards to his east and faced into the wind to see the object of his attention.

  It was a toy boat under sail, rising and falling in heavy swells at alarming heel, disappearing and then reappearing all atumble, water pouring off her sides.

  We watched her for several minutes. She disappeared and rose and again disappeared. There was a rhythm in this to lull the perception, and some moments passed before I realized, waiting for her rising, that I waited in vain. I was as struck in the chest with the catastrophe as if I had stood on some cliff and watched the sea take a sailing vessel.

  When I thought to look for my man, he was running across the wide moat of hardened earth that led to the rear gates of the Water Works. I followed. Inside the building I felt the chill of entombed air and I heard the orchestra of water hissing and roaring in its fall. I ran down a stone corridor and found another that offered passage to the left or right. I listened. I heard his steps clearly, a metallic rap of heels echoing from my right. At the end of the dark conduit was a flight of iron stairs rising circularly about a black steel gear shaft. Around I went, rising, and reaching the top story, I found the view opening out from a catwalk over a vast inner pool of roiling water. This hellish churn pounded up a mineral mist, like a fifth element, in whose sustenance there grew on the blackened stone face of the far wall a profusion of moss and slime.

  Above me was a skylight of translucent glass. By its dim light I discovered him not five feet from where I stood. He was bent over the rail with a rapt expression of the most awful intensity. I thought he would topple, so unaware of himself did he seem in that moment. I found the sight of him in his passion almost unendurable. So again I looked at what he was seeing, and there below, in the yellowing rush of spumed currents and water plunging into its mechanical harness, a small human body was pressed against the machinery of one of the sluicegates, its clothing caught as in some hinge, and the child, for it was a miniature like the ship in the reservoir, went slamming about, first one way and then the next, as if in mute protest, trembling and shaking and animating by its revulsion the death that had already overtaken it. Someone shouted, and after a moment I saw, as if they had separated from the stone, three uniformed men poised on a lower ledge. They were well apprised of the situation. They were heaving on a line strung from a pulley fixed in the far wall, and by this means advancing a towline attached to the wall below my catwalk where I could not see. But now into view he came, another of the water workers, suspended from a sling by the ankles, his hands outstretched as he waited to be aligned so that he could free the flow of this obstruction.

  And then he had him, raised from the water by his shirt, an urchin, anywhere from four to eight I would have said, drowned blue, and then by the ankles and shoes; and so suspended, both, they swung back across the pouring currents rhythmically, like performing aerialists, till they were out of sight below me.

  I wondered, perhaps from the practiced quality of their maneuver, if the water workers were not accustomed to such impediments. A few minutes later, in the yard under the darkened sky, I watched my man load the wrapped corpse into his carriage, shut the door smartly, and leap then to the high seat, where he commanded his horse with a great rolling snap of the reins. And off it went, the bright black wheel spokes brought to a blur as the dead child was raced to the city.

  The rain had begun. I went back in and felt the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.

  The water workers were dividing some treasure among themselves. They wore the dark-blue uniform with the high collar of the city employee, but amended with rough sweaters under the tunics and with trousers tucked into their high boots. It was not an enviable employment here. I could imagine in human lungs the same flora that grew on stone. Their faces were bright and flushed, their blood urged to the skin by the chill and their skin brought to a high glaze by the mist.

  They saw me and made a great show of not caring. They broke out the whiskey for their tin cups. There is such a cherishing of ritual too among firemen and gravediggers.

  THE ORPHANS’ HOME (3:12)

  Now the Bronx is a borough of hills and valleys but you don’t see this if you live there. What you see is the picture of where you’re going and the dusty windows of the stores you pass and the miles of old apartment houses six stories high, and the buses you dodge and the stoops you read the chalk legends on and the parks with no leaves on the trees
. Occasionally you notice, where the tar is worn away, the gleam like a bare foot in a holey shoe of an old streetcar track. But you don’t notice what a place of rolling hills it is unless you are old and hanging between your shopping bag and your cane; or unless you are an orphan. And I am talking about an orphan of my mind who takes these trips regularly, feeling every hill its height and every valley its depth; and who hopes to find a certain street in the valley of the Third Avenue El. It is a noisy market street crowded with pushcarts and open-front stalls, and it flows like a river through the richest fields of the earth: fruit and vegetable stalls with oranges and apples, grapes, plums and pears, peaches, tomatoes, all banked up in pyramids; and stacks of celery in their crates, corn in its green husks, bushel baskets of potatoes, and huge, misshapen green peppers. Open dairy stores with cheese in nets slung from the ceiling. Clean and hallowed butcher stores with only smoked meat showing, but the good clean rich fresh meat is behind the heavy doors, the white clanking doors in the back, and the butcher wears a wool hat, and a sweater under his white smock. Appetizer stores with smoked fish and kegs of olives and barrels of pickles and trays of nuts and bins of dried fruit, and sawdust on the floor. And stores where live fish swim in tanks until the fishman lifts them out with a hand net, grabs them by the gills, slaps them down on the block, which stuns them, and cuts off their heads—fat steaks of fish wrapped in polished paper from the big roll. And along the curbs peddlers display from their pushcarts pairs of shoes tied by the laces, or billows of ladies’ silken underpants, or miniature amphitheaters of spools of sewing thread and packets of needles and pins and buttons and ribbons every color of the rainbow. And the cries of life echo from the stalls, from the street, from the fire escapes above, the cries of survival—merchants of free enterprise plucking their customers from the river that stomps by, slow, eddying, full of shoals, dangerous. A boy has to watch his step in these treacherous shallows—he can be squeezed against fat women with their bundles or stuck on the umbrella battens of spiteful old men. As he smells the life of the people from their homes, and the smells of oranges, cheese, chicken and fish and cheap new shoes, he must keep a practiced lookout for what is behind him and what is in front. Six, seven years on this earth, he is prey of big kids—Negro, Irish, Italian—who swoop, hover, sting, invisible as darning needles; of cops; of the Truant Officer; of Retribution, pulling him back by the ear to the home, to the Hebrew Home for Orphans some hills away, some deep deep valleys faraway, ascents and descents too tilting, too steep, for such small rubber sneakers, for such bunched-up drooping socks. And if he is lucky he has copped an orange or a celery stalk first. Or a plum whose pit remains in his mouth till it is as bare and juiceless as a stone. He may release it when the Scholar gets to him, and beats him on the shoulders, the head, the back, with the book of prayers, the book of wisdom; himself an orphan, a full-grown bearded black-coated orphan by choice, teeming with wrath and merciless pity. Afterwards the Welfare Lady will take the kid and dry his tears and mother him in her fat arms, and the smell of her will not be unpleasant as she cups his head and sits him on her lap and fails to tell him that though he runs away every week in the year, that rich fertile avenue he today discovered, that newfound land he came upon only by good fortune, is the street where they always look and always find him because he always goes there and nowhere else. Why? she may wonder sitting with him in the building of green tile walls and brown ceilings. Why there? Oh Momma Momma because I’m hungry. But some years will pass before, one day in his run over the hills of the Bronx, he goes in another direction and they never find him to bring him back. He is gone to make his way down every harvest street in the world. In the meantime the Scholar and the Welfare Lady bounce his life between them, tough to gentle, gentle to tough, like the old, half-dead volleyball bestowed for games in the school yard. Now three things make up my songs, the words, the music, and the attitude. And of these the least understood is the attitude. I mean in this song some critics think I am talking about Life or America or the Futility of Orgasm or some goddamn thing, but I am not, I am talking about the place where I grew up, The Orphans’ Home:  Agon danced a lively tune  Misero played the violin  Such performances are given  To benefit the orphans’ home  Children who lack a daddio  Whose mommas left you on the doorstep  Let’s have a big hand for Agon  And the violin of Misero  They’re here every night but Wednesday  To dance and play a tune or two  When you finally leave these portals  Others will sit in for you