Famous Builder (12 page)

“That kind of thing’s out of style. Why do you think the schmucks from my New Jersey project changed it back to Willingboro?”

“What do you suggest?”

“I don’t know. Green Park?”

The boy feels the corners of his mouth pull. “Whatever happened to your imagination?”

“Ahh,” he says, waving smoke away. “That was Alfred’s department. Give me eighty bucks at the craps table and I’ll turn it into two thousand.” Bill Levitt steals a glance to his left, waiting to berate the lender he’s convinced is still coming to meet him.

The boy steps backward. With a nod, he turns around and heads for the door.

“Paul?”

He stops midstep. “Yes?”

“Get yourself some decent pants, for Christ’s sake.”

The boy looks down at his dungarees from E. J. Korvette. A blush fires up from the soles of his feet, scorching his scalp until his hair feels damp.

“Don’t be hurt. Here’s some money,” he says, and offers a bill. “Here, take it.”

“I thought you were broke.”

“Try Brooks Brothers. Get yourself a decent suit.”

The boy takes the fifty that’s extended to him and inadvertently shakes Bill Levitt’s hand. His palm is dry and vaguely cold, as if he’s already thinking about the life to come, the grander developments he’ll build in the next world.

“And one other thing. Don’t judge me, all right? And don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve lived.”

The boy slides the bill in his back pocket. “Would you like my mom to give you a ride somewhere?”

But before Bill Levitt can respond, the boy has vanished, back to the tyranny of the linear, the parameters of time that have been dealt to him.

I sit before the choir, playing through a dense chromatic passage in Richard Proulx’s “Look for Me in Lowly Men,” when Marcia Mackert pushes her vibrato, shakier than ever these days, up and over the other sopranos. I try not to laugh. It’s far too sad: the desperation, the flamboyance, the need. I lock eyes with Kate Papagallo, who steels her expression, trying to sing and stay composed. My lip quivers. My mother, standing to Kate’s left, catches the mischief in our eyes. Then all three of us snuffle, turning redder in the face, while the congregation looks back at us with an appreciative interest.

Soon enough the whole choir is in tears, with the exception of poor Marcia Mackert, who’s oblivious anyway, caught in some private fantasy of herself. But no one’s ashamed; such casual behavior seems to be oddly in keeping with these surroundings. Even though we’re celebrating the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we, like most of our fellow parishioners, love to flout tradition and convention, to push out the parameters of acceptable behavior. It’s a decade after the Second Vatican Council, just before the deeply conservative Pope John Paul II puts a damper on the party, and we’re enlarging our sense of what being Catholic means. We receive Communion in the hand years before we’ve been given the Bishop’s green light. We hold our collective breath as dancers pirouette and bow in the sanctuary. We sing the latest works from the Composer’s Forum for Catholic Worship; we struggle through bootlegged hymns from the radical Dutch church. I’m particularly drawn to their translation of Psalm 13, which is entirely absent of direct references to God, the Lord, or any higher power: “Even then I’ll cling to you, cling to you, cling tight to you, whether you want me or not.” There’s even time for the occasional rock Mass. One languid May morning, beneath the willows on the rectory’s lush lawn, Blue Danner—barefoot, sixteen, longhaired, with frayed bell-bottoms—grasps the fingers of his girlfriend, Tina, as they receive Communion to the electric strains of “Peace, My Friends.” Perhaps our audacity is best embodied in the design of our church. (Correction: Parish Center.) A starkly modern, circular affair, it features a sunken sanctuary, not unlike the conversation pits of our township’s splashiest living rooms. Abstract banners in every conceivable size and color—fishes, wafers, lopsided chalices—hang from the industrial black ceiling. To our delight, there’s not even a kneeling bench or a crucifix in sight. In no time at all the brand-new building is the object of much speculation in our predominately Jewish community (“It’s a nightclub.” “It’s a spaceship”), and when I attend an ecumenical service at the boomerang-shaped Temple BethEl on Chapel Avenue, I can’t help but feel relieved we’ve outdone them.

We are the new Catholics: rebellious, ironic, sophisticated, sexy.

Mass ends. I play an instrumental as Kate clutches her sky blue choir folder to her chest. We look at each other for a second longer than we intend to. There’s something sly in her face, an expression that’s both a smile and a pout.
“What?”
I say. But she’s silent. She walks up the steps, her lustrous blond topknot swinging behind her.

***

I’m surprised that I get along so well with Kate, given that I’m fourteen and she’s thirty-two. One wouldn’t think we’d have very much in common (she’s married, after all, the mother of two school-age children, Holly and Sean), but we took to each other immediately. It’s not that I don’t have friends my own age. I do, but, like me, they’re on the margins, too oddball to claim the attention of our teachers and peers. There’s Craig Cole, for instance, who appreciates my creative compulsions without judgment (lately I’ve been writing a play,
East of Canaan, North of Scranton—about
a glamorous terrorist who longs to be a movie star—which cracks him up). I’m entirely at ease with Craig, but there’s a little problem: he has the alarming habit of pretending his father’s still alive, even though I’m almost positive that he died the previous summer while I was away. I’ve gone so far as to look up the obituary in the records of the county library. Why has he kept this from me? A minor omission that’s gotten out of hand? I know for a fact that he wasn’t close to his father. Frankly, I’m too embarrassed to call him on his stories; we’re not on such intimate terms. But he’s been getting more extreme. When I ask what he’s doing one Saturday night, he replies, “I’m going with Dad to the Flyers game,” a declaration so ghastly that I refuse to fully process it. So it’s no surprise that I feel closer to Kate than I do to Craig. She recognizes my potential. Once, unprompted by any occasion or incident, she puts her arm around my shoulder, pulls me close to her, and tells me that I’m charming. Her perfume smells of lilacs. The blush burns hotly in my face. Later I’ll turn her observation over and over in my head, both honored and humbled, yet convinced that she’s confused me with another boy.

Could it be that she sees something of her younger self in me? At six foot one, unbearably nearsighted, with braces and prominent features, I’m certainly awkward beyond belief, and I can see no way out of this predicament. I wasn’t always this ugly. I blame it on a protracted fever I’d had in fourth grade after which my eyesight deteriorated dramatically. To help matters, I purchase wire-rim aviators and a expensive shirt from Bamberger’s (patterned blue rayon with a knitted black band around the waist), though no one remarks on my intended transformation. What I need is a vast overhaul, a new head, an entire new self. I stand before the bathroom mirror, twisting and pinching my face, and ponder plastic surgery: an ear tuck, a nose job. Maybe even a chin reduction. (Years later, after I’ve finally been fitted with contacts, grown into my features, and put on a little weight, my younger two brothers will love to show home movies in which I appear, pointing to my unruly hair and painfully skinny limbs, slapping their thighs until they fall out of their seats.) On more than one occasion Kate has talked about her junior year at Chevy Chase High when her life drastically changed, when all at once she had so many boyfriends she had to turn them away. She attributes her achievement to stripping her hair and dying it blond, but my mother suspects she’s holding something back. Kate’s father, Peter, whom we’ve met on several occasions, has a schnozz that virtually dominates his face, and there’s something unlikely about Kate’s pert and shapely nose. Every time she turns her head, I gaze and gaze at her nostrils, looking for the nicks and scars, the telltale signs of the knife.

But if it’s indeed true, it’s curious that she withholds such information from me. After all, this is Cherry Hill, and a goodly percentage of my Jewish and Italian classmates come to school decked out in bandages, practically flaunting their Sweet Sixteen birthday presents. “Brides of Frankenstein,” says Craig.

***

Quite by accident I end up being the accompanist for a church choir. One Sunday morning, when I’m distracted and ill at ease, my mother’s friend, Janet Margot, introduces me to the director. I’m not sure why I agree to play. Am I just afraid to hurt everyone’s feelings? Isn’t everybody already depending on me? It distresses me to think that I’ll be on display before some of my more savage classmates. The choir is positioned right beside the altar, illuminated beneath a set of black can lights, and I can already imagine John Pompo, who hasn’t let me forget the time I used my hands in a soccer game, smirking at me from the congregation, arms folded across his chest. I practice defending myself in my head.
So I’m a church-music geek. So sue me.

But as far back as I can remember, I’ve loved music. I study piano with Leon Roomberg, who with his wife, Jacqueline (pronounced Jak-wah-
leen
), run the Jacqueline Studio of Music and Dance in the paneled basement of their Imperial Estates rancher. I’m not sure what to make of Mr. Roomberg. He dresses in tattered black and wears a pair of thick chunky glasses that are forever sliding down his nose. He never pushes me to sight read, and is far more likely to assign Burt Bacharach’s “A House Is Not a Home” than Chopin’s Nocturne in D minor. All I need to do is play, and when I come upon a passage in which I can’t make out the notes, I simply make it up. “That sounded better than the original!” he cries, shaking his mop of graying hair. I can use the compliment, of course, but the compliments come a little too easily to him.

Still, the improvisatory techniques come in handy. My ear is getting sharper. It’s been happening for years actually, even before Mr. Roomberg was in the picture. I think back to Barbara Brewer, who sang and played guitar in the early days of our parish when we still attended Mass in the chapel of the Diocesan nursing home. She led the congregation with such authority that we often burst into spontaneous, hearty applause, forgetting that the place smelled of bouillon, that senior citizens kept wheeling themselves, senile and lost, through the overheated sanctuary. She wrote and performed her own songs, which she later recorded on her own record album—imagine a liturgical
Ladies of the Canyon.
The second I came home from church, I sat down before my grandmother’s old upright and played Barbara’s latest melody from the song sheet my mother had stuffed conveniently inside her purse for me.

***

I’m surprised by how much I get along with Nancy Fallon, the music director, especially after disliking her for such a long time. (Is it the way she introduces new songs to the assembly? That hint of condescension?
Louder, please. Now repeat after me … Priestly People. Kingly People. Holy People.
) But she’s kinder and sassier than I’d first expected. She’s friendly with the wildest priests in the diocese, having directed the music for their ordinations, and I love the way she calls them Vince or Joe, something which, no matter how open-minded I am, seems delightfully transgressive. She’s immersed herself in the world of liturgical music, attending the leading workshops of the day in places as far as Los Angeles and San Antonio. She’s a close friend of Joe Wise and the Dameans, all major figures in the movement, and once, driving me home from choir practice, she tells me about another composer, a former Scientologist and current lay Franciscan, who has a boyfriend on the side.

Like me, Kate seems to be a little in awe of Mrs. Fallon’s worldliness. She’s deeply committed to the choir and actually tapes our rehearsals on a high quality reel-to-reel that she lugs around in her station wagon. It’s no surprise that Mrs. Fallon takes a particular shine to her. I cannot help but wonder whether she’s also impressed with Kate’s fancy house and CPA husband, given that she lives in a sad little bungalow on the outskirts of Camden. No one’s surprised when Kate is offered all the descants and solos, even though her voice tends toward the shrill on the high notes. Marcia Mackert is clearly not impressed by this turn of events. She stops showing up for Mass, finds more and more excuses not to come to practice, until one day we learn that she’s directing her own choir at Mary Mother of the Church.

***

I’ve become a veritable archivist of contemporary liturgical music. I embark on my task with all the ardor I once gave to the design of suburban developments, which after almost five years has lost its allure to me. Occasionally, annual reports from Levitt and Sons, Kaufman and Broad, and the Rossmoor Corporation still arrive in the mail, but I cast such things aside and rarely bother to open the envelopes, and even if I bother, the houses on the pages inside look feeble, dull, lacking in vision. Instead, I give myself over to a project in which I can excel today, not ten, fifteen years from now. I write to all the major music publishers for catalogs; I spend Saturday afternoons alone in the dank music library of the Blackwood Catholic Center, sitting cross-legged on the orange-gold carpet, where I listen to scratchy, already outdated recordings like
The Mass for Young Americans
, while my classmates hang out at the Echelon Mall, looking for dates. I’m more driven and centered than I’ve been in a long time, and it relieves me that I’ve finally happened upon something into which I can channel all my jumpy adolescent energy.

It takes me about two weeks to realize that a lot of this music was written quickly, published impulsively. There’s a hunger for the new out there, primarily because there isn’t much available. Aside from some chants, psalm tones, and a few musty standards, the American Catholic Church doesn’t have an established musical tradition. We need the goods, and the three publishers currently in operation are determined to produce as much as they can until the fad runs its course. There’s money to be made, but there’s a strange upside to all this capitalism: some of the music is so tepid that I find it oddly encouraging. Listening to one album, I think: Maybe I could do that.