After This (11 page)

 

Now the pledges had been counted (not, it turned out, exclusively
by Father McShane but by Father Melrose and Father Hecht, his
assistants, as well, and by Mr. Marrs, an accountant, whose respect for
privacy—Father McShane had assured them all—was as inviolate as
any confessor’s), and through the power of prayer and (Father
McShane said) good old-fashioned shoe leather, the initial goal had
been more than met. But, he added (nerves or indigestion or simple
displeasure caused him to precede all difficult announcements with a
swallowed burp), there was an obstacle. Mr. Krause would not sell.

 

The architect’s design for the new gym and eighth-grade
classrooms was a marvel of symmetry. There was the simple brick
square of the old school building’s left side, updated by a wide glass
door, then the new entrance to the new gym, a single-story swoop of
steel and glass, then another, new brick square to balance the old.
A series of low white marble steps led from the gym’s modern
entrance to a green lawn (Saint Gabriel himself, in white stone, at the
center of it) that was bracketed by two curving white paths that led
directly to the sidewalk and the street. Mr. Krause’s property, which
consisted of a backyard, a small detached garage, and an eighty-yearold clapboard house out of which he had run a delicatessen for thirtyfive years, began at the gym’s modern entrance and ran to the edge of
the sidewalk. A year ago, when Father McShane first approached him,
Mr. Krause had agreed that he was more than ready to sell. His was
one of the last houses left along what had become a mostly
commercial boulevard, and the last bit of frontage on a block that was
equally divided between St. Gabriel’s Church and School on the one
end and a small strip of stores on the other. A descendant of the
Germans who had first farmed this land and established this village in
the wilds of Long Island just east of Queens, Mr. Krause knew that the
postwar sweep of homes and families had already obliterated most of
the old traces of the last century, and that his little farmhouse was one
of these. It was only a matter of time, he said.

 

He had been looking, as it happened, into moving the deli to a
storefront in a new mall in the next town.

 

But buried in Father McShane’s pitch to pay Mr. Krause a
handsome price for his house and his land was the bad seed of his
own destruction—or so the priest told them. (John Keane sought to
remember the parable.) “The parish is burgeoning,” Father McShane
had said. The school was bursting at its seams. Mr. Krause was a
Lutheran so he might not be fully aware, but Father McShane, in his
pride and boastfulness (through my fault, he told the men) had
assured him that eight Masses were offered every Sunday morning—
seven, eight thirty, ten, and one—in the church and simultaneously in
the auditorium, and still there were folks standing in the aisles. There
were double shifts of kindergarten in the school, morning
and afternoon, to accommodate all the children. Building the gym was
only the first step. Once it was up and Masses could be held there on
Sunday mornings, then the old church was coming down and a new,
larger one would take its place. Father McShane was thinking of
something “in the round” to suit the new liturgy.

 

But of course Mr. Krause knew the Mass schedule and the school
schedule at St. Gabriel’s. Also the hours of the Mothers Club meetings
and the Holy Name Society meetings, the basketball games, the first
communions and confirmations. Father McShane said three,
sometimes four Masses on Sunday mornings, but he had never once
edged his way into Mr. Krause’s little store after any of them, never
found himself pressed cheek to jowl with thirty other parishioners
vying to order cold cuts or potato salad or those marvelous doughnuts
from Mr. and Mrs. Krause, their two sons, and the daughter who
worked the counter. He’d never reached an arm through the crowd
outside to throw some coins into an open cigar box and grab a Sunday
Daily News
before they were all gone. Father McShane had forked
boiled ham and rolled pieces of Swiss cheese onto paper plates, added
a dab of good mustard and some coleslaw, snitched a green olive from
the tray, in living rooms after funeral Masses or at backyard graduation
parties, but he had never thought to note how these always came from
Krause’s store.

 

The parish is burgeoning, he’d said, and no doubt Mr. Krause saw
housewives holding wrapped trays of cold cuts high over their heads,
like Copacabana chorus girls, as they maneuvered through the Sundaymorning crush. Husbands sent back to get a good-size container of
rice pudding. He saw St. Gabriel’s kids in their uniforms coming in for
sodas, for chips, for a quick perusal of the candy displayed beneath the
counter, saw them handing their mother’s scribbled shopping list to
him over the deli case, or ordering a bologna hero because there had
been no time this morning for making lunches. And now added to that
vision, thanks to Father

 

McShane and his (he was the first to admit it) big mouth, bricklayers
and electricians and plumbers and painters filling the place every
lunchtime for however many years or months it took to build the gym
and the eighth-grade classrooms, and then to tear down one church
and put up another.

 

Mr. Krause understood that the old places were fading, the dairy
farms and the potato fields and the clapboard houses of the last
century, and nostalgia over the loss of a past that had never been his
had made him momentarily lose sight of the present, and of the
indisputable fact that there wasn’t a storefront anywhere on Long
Island that could beat this location. When Father McShane returned
with his generous offer and a copy of the architect’s drawing that
graced the cover of each pledge form, Mr. Krause said simply that he’d
be a fool to sell.

 

How, then, would they break ground in the spring?

 

From the far end of the priests’ dining room, Pope John XXIII,
even in profile, looked benevolent and amused. The men on the
building committee had wondered, only half joking, if they had to wait
for his canonization before they could send the good old man their
petitions or if they couldn’t start praying to him even now. With Mr.
Krause’s store stubbornly in place there was only a sliver of street
access available to the school—a narrow driveway, an alleyway, really,
bordered by the cinder-block wall that divided the church parking lot
where the bulk of the new building was to sit and the Dumpsters that
served the small strip mall on the far corner. The design, the one
printed on every pledge form the men had delivered and returned,
displayed on a gold easel in the church vestibule and in Sister Rose’s
office at the school, sent to the bishop, approved by the diocese, would
have to be scrapped, utterly changed. Father McShane swallowed
another burp. “None of these people,” he said, indicating the stacks of
pledges, “will feel he’s gotten what he’s paid for.”

 

Is it too early, the men asked, only half joking, to pray to Pope
John? Or would they have to wait till he was a saint? Wasn’t anyone in
heaven more or less a saint?

 

If that’s the case, Mr. Marrs asked, does anyone here know any
recently deceased architects?

 

The six men and the three priests and the accountant all turned
their eyes to the living architect who stood above the plans that were
spread across the dining-room table with his cheeks puffed out and his
brow furrowed. Thus far he had donated his work, both time and
material, with the hope that he would then be selected to design the
new church, but he could not very well afford (he was considering the
best way to say this) to do it all over again, gratis. He could offer
them, he said, two options. He could turn the entrance around—he
pretended to pick up the building with thumb and forefinger—put the
back of the gym and the new classrooms to Mr. Krause’s backyard, but
then the spanking-new entrance of steel and glass that Father
McShane was so fond of would face only the cemetery.

 

“Unacceptable,” the pastor said.

 

Or—he moved the building again—he could turn it to the side,
facing the alleyway and the cinder-block wall. Goodbye green lawn,
but the white statue of Saint Gabriel might easily be moved into the
lobby. And the alleyway, at least, could accommodate a car or a truck
or a school bus that needed, for whatever reason, to pull up to the
front door. It was a compromise no doubt, the architect said. Not
nearly as grand as the original, but they could break ground in the
spring and have the gym going in a year’s time. Which meant the new
church could get started and it was the new church, after all, that
would be the showpiece.

 

“It seems a shame,” Father McShane said, “that one man’s
intransigence will leave generations of St. Gabriel’s students in an
alley.”

 

Collectively, the men bowed their heads and considered this.

 

The six men on the building committee had jobs that only vaguely
qualified them for the task—Mr. Keeley was an electrician, Bill Schultz
managed a bank, Mr. Kozlosky sold insurance, both Mr. Keane and Mr.
Battle were with the telephone company, Lou Pintaro owned a garden
center—but each of them was happy to concede the point when the
architect replied that a man had to make a living and provide for his
family, first and foremost, come what may. No one could blame Mr.
Krause for that.

 

It was late. No one could blame the men for wanting this business
to be concluded. They had work tomorrow. They were missing
Bonanza.
Mrs. Arnold was waiting in the kitchen to clear away the
coffee cups and get home herself. Father McShane folded his arms
across his chest. He called the men by their first names, Robert? Bill?
Jerry? John? Larry? Lou? And one by one they all agreed. It was not
ideal, but it was a solution. With Mr. Krause dug in like this, there
weren’t many alternatives. Mr. Marrs said, “Those Krauts do dig in,”
and the men laughed, pushing back their chairs. The matter was
settled. The new church, then, would be the showpiece.

 

In the cold black sky over the rectory parking lot, there was
Orion, as he’d always been. And always would be. Jacob had drawn the
constellation once and labeled it “O’Ryan.” At dinner tonight, Michael
had announced that a kid in school asked if Jacob was a Jew. Michael
thought this was very funny. Jacob had brushed it aside. So what, he’d
said. Jesus was a Jew. There was something rehearsed in the boy’s
reply. John Keane wondered if one of the nuns hadn’t provided it to
him, against another kid’s teasing. Across the dinner table, his wife
had bowed her head, more effective than catching his eye. Fourteen
years was no time at all in the life of an I told you so.

 

Mr. Keane got into his cold car. Let the engine run a bit. The
other men were pulling out of the drive and he saluted them as they
drove past. They had done the work of their church. Solved the
question of Mr. Krause. At home, there would be a light left on in the
kitchen for them, or a lamp lit in the living room. A wife under a
caftan, watching TV, or in bed, asleep already, or pretending to be. The
scent of dinner still in the air. A child (probably Michael, but maybe
even Clare) still awake. Some of them might open a beer or pour two
fingers of scotch. Or walk the dog. Read the paper.

 

They were either immortal, or they were not. It was prayer, all of
it, this talking to the dead, or it was howling at the moon. At the
winter sky. At Orion. O’Ryan. It was another bit of misapprehension,
another mistaken imagining—the dead pope hearing their prayers, his
parents, his brother Frank, all the angels and all the saints, the other
Jacob. Or it was true.

 

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

 

Positively, Mr. Shean.

 

At home, his wife was at the dining-room table with Jacob. What
distinguished this room from the priests’ was the clutter of bills and
magazines on the server, the simplicity of the small chandelier (the
priests’ was Waterford), the dust. A portrait of a pretty little girl in a
wide-brimmed hat rather than the old pope. She had his history book
before her and her forehead in her hands. Jacob was sitting quietly to
her left, looking ready for sleep. “It’s late,” John Keane said, coming
in, but she ignored him.

 

“Battle of Hastings,” she said and he answered, dejectedly, in his
new voice, “1066.” His face was changing, too, growing thinner and
longer, balanced somewhere between homely and beautiful.

 

“Magna Carta?” There was silence. The boy frowned. Swallowed
hard, perhaps resisting tears. His Adam’s apple, also new, looked
swollen. His father had an impulse to turn away.

 

From the couch in the living room, Michael called out, “1215,”
and Jacob slammed his fist on the table and, standing, threw back
his chair. “I’m going to bed,” he said, and his father might have
reprimanded him if the boy had not also said, turning slightly toward
them, “Good night.”

 

Mary Keane looked up at her husband. Her face was colorless and
worn, as dimpled and lined as a potato. She ran her finger down a
double page of dates and names and places. The end-of-chapter review.
“He doesn’t know half of this,” she said.

 

He shrugged, walked through the living room where Michael,
lounging on the couch in his pajamas, said, “It’s easy.”

 

His father said, “Don’t be a smart aleck,” and then, when he had
hung up his coat, “Get to bed.”

 

Upstairs, in their room, Michael said, matter-of-factly, as if it were
the middle of the day. “Battle of Hastings, 1066, Magna Carta, 1215 . .
.”

 

“I’m asleep.” Jacob had his back to him. His voice was muffled.

 

“I thought Jews were supposed to be smart,” Michael said. In the
dim light from the hallway, he couldn’t tell at first what his brother
had thrown at him—it missed anyway and hit the floor. But then he
saw it was the flashlight Jacob kept at his bedside and the potential
pain it might have caused filled him with indignation. They were on
each other in seconds, legs and arms and blows struck into ears, into
shoulders. The overhead light came on—if they hadn’t expected that it
would they would not have begun the battle—and their father barked
a single word. He dragged them apart, both of them splotched red in
the cheeks and across their shoulders and throats, but whether from
blows or their own fury, their father couldn’t have said.