On the Friday before the last Sunday, all the children in the school were led into the church for a farewell prayer, and just as Father Hecht said, “The old makes way for the new,” Marilyn Giovanni in the fifth grade slammed the back of her head into the back of the pew and with an echoing, inhuman cry, rolled onto the worn carpet of the center aisle. It was an epileptic seizure. Mrs. Ryan, who taught the third grade, had an afflicted child of her own and knew just what to do, and superstition in this day and age was well to be avoided. But the Bible itself was full of misdiagnoses and who could help but wonder what it was the devil would have objected to-the old or the new? Was it protest that made him seize the little girl at that moment, or celebration?
(“Nonsense,” Father McShane said to the younger priest. “I’m ashamed of you.” And then, with a wink and a crooked smile, “They talk about the Irish.”)
On the corner in front of the church, the boys waiting for the high-school bus watched the workmen carrying statues over their shoulders like huge dolls. They saw them carrying the large framed oil paintings in both hands, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, stained with the smoke of votive candles, of forty years of petitions, and Saint Pius, still clean, carried like suitcases to a waiting van. The old wooden pews, eased out through the front door and down the old steps like streamlined, oversize coffins, were either placed in the van or-as in some final reckoning-carried to the lawn in front of the rectory where they were labeled with the purchasing parishioner’s name. Then a high chain-link fence went up around the old church and the wrecking ball came and in no time it was all splinters and smoke.
Jacob Keane, waiting at the corner with the other boys from his high school, in a jacket he had not grown into and his school tie, swore that the smell of incense still came from the hole where the church had been. He made the other boys pause and sniff the air. Yes, they nodded, their chins raised, they could almost agree. The road in front of the church seemed to grow more congested every morning. There was the thick diesel smell of county buses and school buses, delivery trucks and flatbeds, so that even on a spring morning at seven there was hardly a trace of new leaf or daffodil or even the cool dawn in the suburban air. But Jacob told the other boys, “You can still smell it,” and with their fingers in the fence they paused, raised their noses. Those who had once shared the belief that the stairs to the old choir loft led to another world, to heaven itself, considered briefly the possibility that some sort of holiness lingered everywhere, perhaps just beneath the shell of earth and sky. Jacob wondered as well. Then Michael told a joke about a workman in a church who hammered his thumb and cursed. A nun who was praying nearby said his bad language had made Our Lady cry. She pointed to the statue. “See the tears?” the nun said. The man shook his head. “She’s only crying cause I hammered a nail into her backside to hang up my coat.”
The laughter outran the mystery. Michael was pleased to see his brother blush. The joke, he was pretty certain, had come from Uncle Frank.
But if there was inspiration in the lingering smell of incense, there was incentive in the church’s rising frame. The new church was to be in the round-a spaceship, some of the older parishioners complained, a circus tent-and every afternoon when the boys from the Catholic high school left the bus, they could mark the progress that had been made that day, at first in the dark stakes and poured concrete of the foundation but then, more clearly, in the skeletal web of steel and wood. By summer, a number of them had begun projects of their own-backyard tree houses and storage huts and potting sheds. Tony Persichetti and his father worked on their attic, transforming the space the developer had left as bare beams into a bedroom and a bath. Jacob and Michael Keane, making a case for privacy, for a place to gather with their friends that was not the kitchen, where their mother would have to break things up to make dinner, or their bedroom, where their sisters could listen at the door, convinced their parents to let them finish the basement-which meant to cover the cinder-block walls with knotty pine panels, to drop a white ceiling, enclose the furnace with its own room, and replace the shower curtain at the entrance of the tiny bathroom with a real door.
Their father took them to the lumberyard, bought them levels and tape measures and boxes of nails, cartons of two-foot-square linoleum with which to cover the concrete floor. Every evening that summer, when he returned from work, he changed into his old clothes, put on the army boots he wore for all household chores, and went down to assess the boys’ progress, to offer corrections and advice. With the help of a do-it-yourself manual, father and sons figured out the wiring for the fluorescent lights, got the door hung right, laid a checkerboard pattern across the floor. The old couch and the train table were donated to St. Vincent’s and their father agreed to splurge on a six-piece set of Danish modern from Sears, which gave the new room a sleek, science-fiction look that Mary Keane found cold, although it inspired in her sons a sense that their own modern futures, part Buck Rogers, part James Bond, were finally upon them.
In only a matter of months, Michael learned that the cheap foam cushions of the Danish modern sofa will buckle on you when you press a girl too ardently into its frame.
The parishioners on that first Sunday seemed both reluctant and awed, filing in not down a single central aisle but along any number of aisles that fanned out from the semicircle that was the altar. The faces in the new stained-glass windows were all angles (Mary Keane thought they looked vaguely Danish modern themselves), their robes all long bright shards of color. The crucifix suspended above them was a long swoop of gray steel intersected by a small crossbeam that seemed hardly the breadth of a man’s arms. There were no recognizable statues of any sort and the Stations of the Cross were merely white rectangles of carved stone, the Passion barely discernible within them. Because there were no corners, there were few shadows in the new church. The confessionals were small rooms, with actual doors (John Keane tested one on the way out, assessing how well it had been hung) and doorknobs, not curtains. Between them, behind a large plate-glass window, there was what Father McShane seemed delighted to call the “Bawl Room,” a soundproof room for mothers with small, noisy children. He pointed it out three times in his dedication sermon-it might have been the sole motive for the new construction-and Mary Keane, who throughout the service grew progressively dissatisfied with the too new St. Gabriel’s, added to her criticism of the place the fact that a baby’s cry or a toddler’s shouted phrase added life, and sometimes even laughter, to a Mass, which was, after all, supposed to be a celebration, not a dirge. She imagined the Blessed Mother with baby Jesus in her arms, standing behind the plate glass, the child’s mouth moving but not a sound getting through. Beside her, her husband noticed how the new pews lacked the small brass hat clips that had been secured to the back of every pew in the old church (spring-loaded, felt-tipped clips that Michael would stealthily snap at least once every Mass, a sound like a gunshot echoing through the place). He understood there was no longer a need for them-so few men wore hats anymore (he blamed JFK with his thick hair and his big Irish head for changing the fashion)-but the lack of them added to his dawning sense that the new church had turned the stuff of his own past, his own memories, into something quaint, at best. At worst, obsolete.
And yet, the smell of the incense from the censer was the smell of the incense of old, and the stately movement of the priests in their robes as they walked down the aisles swinging them, sending the pale smoke into the air, their free hands placed gently over their hearts, was as it had always been. At his shoulder, Jacob’s bowed head and thin folded hands reassured him somewhat (and told him the three hundred a year for four years that he’d spent on his Catholic high school might actually have purchased the boy something). Beside Jacob, Clare had lost her initial, openmouthed fascination with the saucer-shaped ceiling and was now simply studying her sister’s hand (which Annie, limply, had allowed her to take into her lap), studying especially the latest boyfriend’s thick high-school ring, which Annie had made smaller with a welt of yellow yarn. Beside her, Michael sprawled in the pew (three hundred a year for three years with not much to show for it), his eyes cast down not in prayer but in a kind of wry embarrassment for how utterly mistaken everyone around him, everyone who had ever had a hand in the construction of this place, seemed to be.