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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 Giova
(“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 di
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 fa
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 A