The Voiceover Artist (17 page)

After the fourth Sunday mass I attended at St. Asella's, I climbed up the dark spiral stair case to the choir loft and asked the startled organist, a nerdy little man who squinted to keep the frames of his glasses from slipping off of his nose, if there had ever been a cantor at this church.

“Oh boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Not for some time. Not for years!”

“I see,” I said. “Well, I just thought I'd ask.”

“Are you a singer?”

“No,” I said. “But I can sing these songs. Church songs. It's possible I would be just slightly better than no singing at all.”

“Well,” he said, “you should talk to Helen.”

“Helen?”

“She's the—I want to say scheduler, but that's not it.” The organist looked away and lowered his head, searching his memory for Helen's title. He snapped his fingers. “Liturgical coordinator.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“She's probably on the altar, cleaning up. That's where she usually is after mass.”

Stepping gingerly down the worn cement stairs of the choir loft, I considered trying to satisfy my sense of obligation to long-dead immigrants by dropping a few more dollars into the collection basket. But I kept walking, down the stairs and up a side aisle to the sanctuary, where I found Helen. She'd clothed her pear-shaped figure in a bulky wool sweater, hopelessly unfashionable jeans and white sneakers. She stood awkwardly on her toes as she extinguished a beeswax taper with a brass bell.

I introduced myself and offered to volunteer as a cantor.

“Are you willing to sign a six-month commitment?”

Commitment.
Hadn't I been coming here to enjoy an hour with no commitments?

“I'm sorry,” I said, shaking my head with confusion. “A commitment to what?”

“To cantor at the noon mass and give me three days' notice if you can't make it.”

It was a moment before I was certain she wasn't kidding. I figured the commitment could be dissolved whenever I liked by my leaving St. Asella's and never coming back, so I agreed to sign it.

Helen led me into the sacristy and pulled a piece of paper from a drawer at the top of a freestanding maple cupboard. “What was your name again?”

“Catherine,” I said. “With a C.”

“Last name?”

“Ferrán.” I spelled the name without waiting to be asked.

She slid the paper across the top of the cupboard and handed me the pen she had used to write my name. I scanned the paragraph-long, boilerplate commitment statement and signed the blank line beneath it. Helen added the date next to my signature.

Then Helen pulled out another copy of the commitment from the drawer, turned it over to the blank side, and wrote “Cantor Schedule.”

“You'll be here next Sunday?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She wrote the following Sunday's date, reprinted my name next to it, and, with two pushpins, posted the sheet on a bulletin board above the cupboard.

“Try to be here fifteen minutes before noon,” she said. “I'll get the song list from Paul”—the organist's name, I would learn later—“and I'll put it on the lectern on the left side of the sanctuary. Take a book from any of the pews and bring it to the back. You'll process in just ahead of Fr. Dunne.”

Helen picked up a purse by its shoulder strap and held it at her side. “You're welcome to leave your purse back here during mass. I do. Nobody has ever taken anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then, having trained me well enough, Helen left.

I had expected that the people of St. Asella's would not take much notice of the woman singing up near the altar. But they did. After the first mass I served as cantor, ten people—probably a quarter of the people in attendance—stopped me on the sidewalk in front of the church to shake my hand and thank me. The next week, people who thanked me asked my name and gave me theirs.

This is how it all started. If I had not volunteered to sing, I might never have met anyone from St. Asella's. I might have gotten whatever fix I needed and left after just a few more Sundays. I will recall this moment and wish that I had kept my silence and my seat near the back.

 

•••

 

NOT EVERYONE
 
I
encountered at St. Asella's lived on the margins. I would meet an accountant, a legal-aid lawyer, a professor of anthropology, and a devoted young grandmother whose daughter and granddaughter lived in an apartment just down the hall from her own. But only the aged, the lonely and the grief-stricken deemed it appropriate—or necessary—to share their personal problems with me as we stood near a small crowd on a public sidewalk. An old man named Joseph told me I reminded him of his daughter, adding that he hadn't seen her in fourteen years. Jill, a single mother of three, confided in me that she had lost her job managing a diner on the North Side. And Doreen, a woman older than me but not as old as my mother would have been if she were still alive, leaned in to whisper about her heavy perimenopausal bleeding.

“It's happening now,” she said, breathing the words into my face. “As we speak.”

Carrying on even a simple hi-and-bye conversation in front of St. Asella's made me anxious, but I would listen to these confessions and try to respond with genuine sympathy. When I'd heard them all, I would hurry back to the sacristy, grab my purse, and head straight home to my apartment, congratulating myself for having given a few troubled people a chance to get their worries off their chests before I put those worries completely out of mind.

This went on for weeks before I realized that the people sharing their problems with me were actually asking for my help.

Before considering the burden I'd be taking on by making concrete efforts to help anyone at St. Asella's, I called Xabier, a friend who owned a Spanish restaurant in the South Loop. I had designed his interior for well below my usual rate—there aren't so many of us in Chicago with ties to Spain, so we stick together. I thought he might have something for Jill, the mother of three who'd lost her diner job.

“Are you looking for anyone right now?”

“Well,” he said, “I just lost my back-of-house manager.”

“I may have someone for you.”

“Who?”

“A woman I know. Her name is Jill.”

“Does she have restaurant experience?”

I decided that diner experience counted as restaurant experience. “Yes.”

“Can you vouch for her?”

I don't even know her.
“Of course.”

“Send her over.”

“Can she bring her kids?”

“To the interview? Sure, why not.”

“Perfecto. Gracias, amor.”

“Ciao, Catalina.”

The following Sunday, I gave Jill a slip of paper with Xabi's name, the address of his restaurant, and the date and time of her interview.

She stared down at the paper and said, “I'll have to find a sitter.”

“He said you can bring the kids to the interview, if you want.”

She arched her eyebrows, surprised as much, I think, by Xabi's flexibility as by my having given any thought to her kids.

A week later, I was standing by the church doors, waiting for the opening procession to begin, when Jill surprised me with a cheek-to-cheek hug.

“I got the job,” she said, pressing her head to mine.

“Congratulations,” I offered.

“Thank you,” Jill said, sniffling. “Thank you so much.”

I thought of my father then. Jill and the parishioners of St. Asella's were my father's people:
los pobres en espíritu—the poor in spirit.
Maybe they, more than God, were the discovery he had in mind for me when he dragged me to mass all those years. Maybe they were the reason I could feel now the warmth of my father's presence as near to me as if he were still living.

 

•••

 

FINDING JILL A
 job made me think that helping these people was easy.

Why hadn't my father given me any advice about arrogance and pride? It's possible that he had. It's possible I hadn't listened.

Jill had been working for Xabi only a week when I pulled Doreen aside after mass and asked if she was still experiencing bleeding.

Doreen nodded and said, “A lot.”

“Do you have health insurance?”

She shook her head.

“Are you free any day this week?”

“Free for what?”

“I think we should visit a doctor.”

Doreen pulled her chin toward her chest and looked up at me. “I don't like doctors.”

“Doreen,” I said, “you need to have this looked at. It's probably nothing, but it could be something serious.”

She shook her head again.

“I'll pick you up,” I said, “I'll drive you to the appointment, I'll read a magazine in the waiting room, and I'll take you home when you're done.”

I watched Doreen examine my offer in her mind, looking for any sign of the bad intentions she might have learned to expect.

Then she said, “All right.”

I rescheduled a Wednesday-morning client meeting and picked Doreen up in front of St. Asella's locked doors. She wasn't comfortable with my knowing where she lived, which was fine with me. I didn't want to know any more about Doreen than I needed to. We drove to the Near West Side location of a free women's health clinic recommended to me by a nurse in my gynecologist's office. I watched Doreen answer some basic health questions, listed in Spanish and then English, on a blue piece of paper clipped to a transparent, fuchsia-tinted board. I returned the questionnaire to the receptionist, and Doreen sat with her purse in her lap, stealing glances at the Latino women and children waiting to be seen by a doctor.

When the nurse called her name, Doreen didn't get up.

“Okay, Doreen,” I said. “They're ready for you.”

Doreen just stared at the short nurse in pink scrubs, who held open the door to the examination rooms with her round, ample behind and glared impatiently at the only woman in the waiting room she deemed likely to be named Doreen.

I leaned forward in my chair and put my hand on the back of Doreen's. “Would you like me to go in with you?”

“Take me back to the church.”

“Doreen—”

“I don't want to be here,” she said, raising her voice. “Take me back to church!”

I apologized to the nurse, who seemed totally unfazed by Doreen's display. In the time it took for me to drive back to St. Asella's and see Doreen out of the car, we did not speak.

If my father had still been living, I would have called him the moment Doreen got out of my car to give him a piece of advice:
Ten cuidado con los pobres. Derrocharán tus días miércoles.

Be careful around the poor. They'll waste your Wednesdays.

 

•••

 

ONCE I'D DECIDED
 to help the people of St. Asella's, it didn't take long for their needs to overwhelm me. For help, I turned first to the people I'd helped already.

I gave Joseph's phone number to Jill and asked her to call him once a week, just to chat.

“He and his daughter are out of touch,” I told her. “He mentions it every time he sees me.”

Jill stared dubiously at the piece of paper on which I'd written Joseph's number. “When should I call him?”

“Whenever you can.”

“Does he know I'll be calling?”

“I'll let him know.”

It was clear to me that Jill had little interest in taking even five minutes of her limited time with her kids to call a lonely old man she didn't know. But she shrugged and said, “Okay. I'll do it.”

When Mrs. Landry, an older woman with a cane and a quiet, bright-shining personality, informed me that a young woman who attended St. Asella's—the granddaughter of “a dear, departed friend,” Mrs. Landry said—was coming home from the hospital with a son born two months premature, I worked the sidewalk crowd after mass for commitments to deliver a freezable meal to the St. Asella's rectory, where Helen would keep it refrigerated until the new mother's boyfriend could pick it up. By the time I left St. Asella's that day, I had commitments for six meals. Jill said she would bring something from Xabi's restaurant. Doreen offered to bake a lasagna. Jeanne and Rose Marie, sisters in their seventies who had lived together since Rose Marie's husband died years ago, volunteered to make two meals a piece.

“Are you sure you can manage that?” I asked them.

“Of course!” Jeanne said. “We make dinner every night. We'll just make extra.”