And then the line broke. Wheat from chaff, Mary thought as red-jacketed guards counted them off, said, there-four rows in descending order-back there, please, here, down there. A brusque tap on her shoulder and she and her daughter were hurried forward. Down here, please, keep moving.
No choice in the matter, it soon became clear, because what they were being directed to was a moving walkway, four ascending rows in a kind of amphitheater of moving walkways. There was the uncertain first step, the tug of the rubber tread against the soles of their feet, and then, through no effort of their own, the slow movement forward into the dark. Mary Keane and her daughter were in the first row. The air grew colder and the holy chants nearer, even as the faces and the bodies and the clothes of all who had waited-though they were still beside them or above them in the darkness-disappeared. There were only whispers and stirrings, a child’s voice, and then not even that.
Mary Keane put her arm across her daughter’s chest, pressed her close so that the little topknot was just under her chin. Annie took her mother’s arm in both hands.
In the absence of all color and all other light, the white marble held every nuance and hue a human eye could manage. Here was the lifeless flesh of the beloved child, the young man’s muscle and sinew impossibly-impossible for the mother who cradled him-still. Here were her knees against the folds of her draped robes, her lap, as wide as it might have been in childbirth, accommodating his weight once more. Here were her fingers pressed into his side, her shoulder raised to bear him on her arm once more. Here was her left hand, open, empty. Here were the mother’s eyes cast down upon the body of her child once more, only once more, and in another moment (they were moving back into the darkness) no more.
The white light reflected dimly off the faces still within its reach and then disappeared from them, lamps extinguished, one by one, as they were slowly drawn away. Somewhere among them a woman was weeping. Slowly, the moving sidewalk delivered them all through the darkness to the four ascending doors where they disembarked, step carefully please. Flesh, hair, clothes returned to them in the low light of the rest of the exhibit. A low, golden light that was nevertheless painful, accustomed as their eyes had become to the dark, and despite how briefly they had been in it.
Outside, the heat was a comfort, momentarily, on chilled shoulders and arms. The lights had come on in the park, in the trees, in the tall clock towers and the soaring pavilions and under the fountains that surrounded the Unisphere. It led their eyes up, for a moment. There were stars but also a stain of red on the western horizon, against the quickly descending night. There was the later bus to catch from the park to the terminal in Jamaica, and then the second bus to the intersection where they would call home and John Keane, unhappy about the late hour, would come in the car to fetch them.
At Pauline’s apartment, Clare was already asleep on the couch. Pauline listed all they had done together that day-an excursion to the fabric store and lunch at a diner, two cute gingham aprons run up on the sewing machine, cookies baked and nails painted and a walk around the corner for Chinese-making each occasion sound, to Mary Keane, like a compensation Pauline had rendered, since attached to each one was some surprise, on Pauline’s part, that Clare had done none of these things in exactly this way before. “And she said her mother only knew how to make Christmas cookies.”
Mary slipped her hands under Clare’s arms, lifted the sleeping child to her shoulder, felt the weight of her, and how, not quite asleep, she tightened her arms around her mother’s neck, brushed her fingers against her mother’s hair. Pauline was handing a shopping bag to Annie, the folded aprons, the cookies, a few odds and ends, “Little presents,” Pauline said, “nothing much,” proudly enough. The apartment was close, dimly lit, full of the scent of Pauline’s perfume. In her weariness after the long hot day, in her anger over her husband’s unreasonable impatience, in anticipation of the bedtime routine that was still waiting for her at home, Mary Keane looked at the peaceful rooms with some envy.
Which Pauline saw, of course. At the door, she asked, “Is he waiting downstairs?”-meaning John Keane. And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how he is,” and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband’s failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft’s transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage-which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn-simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.
A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself.
In the elevator, Clare heavy in her arms, she told Annie that Pauline was intolerable, sometimes. Really. “I don’t just bake cookies at Christmas,” she said resentfully, and Annie agreed although, at the moment, she could not recall any cookies her mother had ever made that were not shaped like Christmas trees or snowmen.
Her mother said, “You know,” and then paused. She recalled, briefly, the sacred music and the white stone and all the soaring aspirations of her faith: gold domes and ivory towers and in the darkness, light. She considered, too, how tired she was, Clare’s head heavy on her shoulder, the child’s heels digging into her hips. How annoying Pauline could be. “You know,” she said again, “Pauline doesn’t speak to Helen anymore, the girl she went to Europe with last year.” She looked down at Annie. “And she’s fallen out with Adele, too, from the office. Even though they shared a cabin on that cruise and were best pals for a while there.” She hitched Clare up on her shoulder. Annie transferred the heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left. “I wouldn’t mind sometimes,” her mother said, “if Pauline got mad and stopped speaking to us for a while. It would be a nice break.”
Watching the light move behind each number as they descended, Annie laughed and said, “I know.”
“It would be nice to untangle ourselves a bit,” her mother said. Clare stirred against her shoulder, moved the ringers she had placed in her mother’s hair, tugged.
Mary Keane and her daughters rode the rest of the way down in weary silence. It was an unkindness, she knew, what she had just said about Pauline. Words said in conscious defiance of all the gentle aspirations of her faith. But it was also true, what she had said. Just as it was true that there would be no untangling herself from Pauline. Not with Clare already so fond of her.
The church had gone to pot. It had gone to seed. It had been minimally repaired for the last five years and come Monday the dismantling would begin. Any parishioner wishing to purchase one of the old pews should have already called the rectory. There were shingles missing from the exterior; the bell, for safety’s sake, had long ago been removed from the belfry. The green canvas awning that had once shaded the entrance and the tall brick steps that led from the street had been torn in the ’60 hurricane and never repaired. In ’64 it was taken down altogether and now only the metal frame remained, a crisscross of bare ironwork against the sky. The choir loft, also for safety’s sake, had been off limits for as long as most of the children in the school could remember. A rumor spread among the younger ones, Clare Keane included, that the unused staircase at the back of the church, with its wide marble banister and its velvet rope (and its scent, when you got near it, of incense and attics) was an entrance to heaven. The painting across the high ceiling, of John the Baptist pouring water from his palm over the head of a beautiful Christ, was itself marred by water-there was a misshapen, ominously gray cloud in the blue sky above their heads, another stretched across the saint’s feet and over the savior’s knees. The stained-glass window high above the altar-Saint Gabriel with his halo and his wings-also leaked. On a bad day, the water ran down the wall and over the crucifix and behind the gold tabernacle. The filigree on the old altar had chipped away. No one remembered the last time the organ had actually played.