The Believer, page 30
“The eye is the first circle,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the horizon it forms the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”
Peter stands. Speaks to the guests, to his wife in her casket. I am looping on Katrina, the set of her gaze, her love for her family, her vast equity, how what rankles continues to rankle even when our time is running out because there is no off switch, there is only a great gathering up of all one’s pains as one insists on racing ahead anyway. I am looping on her anticipated joy at seeing her Lachie’s hands wrapped around a paper cup of French fries, five minutes with Pete in a hot tub, one sip of wine, music always on, the warmth of the sun, the taste of one speck of banana warmed in a pan of syrup. I am looping on the great success that is being loved, and the greater success that is being able to, truly, love.
I am looping on one warm night sitting in the yard with my husband under a salting of stars so thick it reminded me we are floating in space. Us, our child asleep, everything. The perfect joy of it. Then the sudden absurd thought that it will all end. But we’re someone’s parents now!
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn,” Emerson wrote, “that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”
I am looping on Katrina telling me her friend would be sewing her wedding dress into a christening gown so it could be worn some day by any future grandchildren, how this delighted her and shattered her in a way that showed, as clear as a diagram, that our thoughts do not need to blindly follow our longings but that they can be separate wisdoms.
This is what Emerson meant when he referred to the moral fact of the Unattainable, “the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet.” There are no fixtures in nature, he wrote, the universe is fluid and volatile.
I still haven’t figured out how we’ll go on, Peter is saying, but go on we must and we will.
Soon, he and his four sons will take Katrina’s ashes onto a boat, rising and falling. They will launch it from the beach at the end of Dalgetty Road where she played as a child, lay as a teenager with her chin towards the sun. On boards on waves, they will stand pouring her into that water, connected in their grief as by a thread.
But right now, they are feeling the physical fact of their wife and their mother for the last time, threading their fingers through the arched handles of her coffin. They are taking her into their arms into the rain. They are lifting her into the body of a hearse that will drive slowly away as they walk behind it, the road on one side, the deep water on the other.
Being in that room with Katrina was a great teacher. First, one second taught me more about Annie’s work—what it takes to be able to do it—than I learned in two years of intimate, ongoing conversation with her about how death is a part of life. Second, it taught me something about love.
“Love? What is love?” Annie had asked me to elaborate the first time I used the word casually in conversation. And although I knew it, each attempt to concretize it failed. One second in that room where Katrina was still at home, Peter tending to her between greeting loved ones with an apology about his stubble and giving a quick fix to the oven fan with his screwdriver, his damp hanky in his jeans pocket all the while, pointed at the answer. Love is not reactively pushing away the parts of the picture that don’t serve our idealized image; love is truly seeing and truly staying.
And I think that Annie knows this—more than that, I think she embodies it—but I also think that she might need, like any of us, to receive more of it. I used to think, “Ah, love . . .” I really wanted to have love in my life and I realized that it’s so conditional. So, yeah. That was a good teacher.
A year later I will miss a call from Peter because I have just given birth during a pandemic. When I speak to him I tell him I have been thinking of Katrina a lot lately, speaking with her in my mind.
“Katrina was extremely good at pushing you into places you weren’t comfortable with,” he replies proudly through his still-thick grief. “And you’d come out saying, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’”
When I left Katrina’s house for the last time, I sent Annie the photo I had taken for her. Katrina looks wonderful, she wrote back. It was clearly a good death because her face is relaxed and not distorted. Perhaps the discomfort you felt was due to the fact that Katrina’s eyes are still open.
52
Halfway Home
Lynn
Lynn is laughing with Sister Ann, an Episcopal nun a few years her senior who is wearing a wooden cross the size of an iPhone around her neck. They are joined by another parishioner who hands the sister a bundle of the New York Times sports sections because she is crazy about baseball, barracking beatifically for both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, traditional rivals. Lynn, now a member of Trinity, is a regular. Will be chalice bearer on Christmas Eve. Attended both the nine o’clock and eleven-fifteen services this morning.
The Christmas decorations are up. Nearly a year has passed since we sat in the lecture on Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It’s been a difficult one. Her boss is sick, cancer. Had to cut back his practice, is very reluctantly letting her go. She’s philosophical about it, though worried about her income, her lack of savings. She’s been sending out feelers to try to find something, isn’t limiting herself to legal work given her teaching degree and experience in domestic-violence counseling. Plus, she’s bilingual. “However,” she says, “I’m seventy-one and disabled and I have a felony conviction. All of which are negatives.”
Sitting in the uncertainty, she’s used her extra time to become more active at Trinity, volunteering at reentry workshops to help formerly incarcerated women, helping pack lunches for those in need, though she is living in a shelter. That’s what she’s about to do now as she makes her way across the chapel to the card tables set up in a side aisle and spends half an hour joking and chatting with other volunteers while placing boxes of juice and cans of tuna efficiently into brown paper bags for the homeless men and women who will soon stop by to pick them up.
Afterwards, we share her umbrella on the way to a café where “Silent Night” plays while she scans the vegetarian options. We have the place to ourselves. I ask Lynn about her faith, her belief in a just God.
“How did I not say, ‘God, if you’re supposed to be all good, why are you doing this to me?’” she clarifies. Which is, of course, what I mean.
“I guess there’s an element of, ‘If not me, who?’” she says. “And I did what I did. And God wasn’t happy with that. I mean, clearly it wasn’t an action that sat well with God. I had other options—whether they looked viable at the time or not . . .” She pauses. “Some of them didn’t. I had no recourse. Like, I could call the cops and they’d do something? No. That wasn’t true.” She rests her fork next to her salad.
“What it distills into is the fact that pain is part of life. Do you choose to suffer or do you choose to say, ‘We all have pain, we all can get through this’? If we are together, it hurts less. It’s whether you turn away or turn to. I think everybody has to make that decision.
“I’m not going to tell anybody they have to do this way. Because nobody could tell me that when I was being beaten, so I don’t try to tell others that now. It’s something I do for me. And if they decide to condemn me for what I do, who am I to take that away from them?”
To get to the front door of the shelter, you leave the sidewalk and walk down three stairs to a small courtyard, rubbish bins and the occasional rat to your left, and then down three more steps into a small vestibule where someone recently took a shit. In the front door is a small glass window and I can see Lynn sitting at the reception desk, squinting into a computer screen through her glasses before she looks up and smiles and buzzes me in.
After losing her paralegal position, Lynn was hired as a resident aide by the halfway house where she arrived two years ago seeking shelter. It is July, and she has been in this new role for three months. At the start of the year she moved to a studio apartment at the Brooklyn YWCA, where she has her own door, her own fridge and a table at which to sit and write or make her quilted collages. The move meant a change in parole officers but the new one is more flexible around her work schedule, which changes when she takes on extra shifts. She has joined a writing group, a theater group; has made new friends, has been asked to display her collages in an exhibition. She works doubles and nights at the shelter most weeks, taking the subway there and back.
The director has changed, the resident aides have changed, the case managers have changed. Many of the residents have changed, though some still remain from when she was living here not so long ago. While she has a softer spot for some more than others, she says it and means it: I am them. There is no me and them. It’s us.
Lately she has been thinking about her upcoming performance with The Theater of the Oppressed, how magnificent it felt to march with the leadership of Trinity Church in New York City’s Pride March, one of the youngest residents’ recent heroin relapse following the death of her father, the bedbugs that are being exterminated in one of the rooms upstairs, which of her prison collages to include in an upcoming show, and remedying, once and for all, the issue of the shelter’s front door that doesn’t reliably close, which is now urgent given the open secret that Federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents plan to raid homeless shelters in the city and there are undocumented immigrants living here.
“No one’s getting in without a warrant,” she says, making a call to the maintenance man. He materializes a few minutes later and stands in the doorway, working swiftly with his screwdriver. When the door shuts with a clean click, they hug in shared triumph. Two hours later, ICE agents without warrants will attempt, and fail, to raid a homeless shelter in Brooklyn.
Arranging maintenance is one of her many duties, official and otherwise. She logs exits and entries, inspects bags for drugs, weapons, alcohol. She liaises with the Department of Housing each night to report the final count of beds full and empty. She signs for mail, hands out packages, answers the phone, restocks toilet paper, napkins, dry packets of oatmeal; she makes small talk, hears good news, offers consolation and advice. At night, she does the rounds on each of the shelter’s four floors making sure all is well. Mounts the stairs slowly, like when she too slept in those beds, so close their occupants could hold hands.
Weekend nights can be eventful if a resident returns drunk or high or late and after count, forfeiting their bed in a legal process that will then require them to return to central processing for reallocation. Other nights are quiet. Previous resident aides have told me that in those still hours, alone at the reception desk in the two-hundred-year-old building, they’ve seen the ghosts of previous occupants ascending and descending the stairs, seen faces from a different time in the square of glass in the front door. Tonight we keep looking up at that window with a different fear; but no ICE agents show up and the time moves slowly, Lynn clicking at the computer and chatting with each of the women as they come and go.
I spend six months in this building without realizing I am sitting a few houses away from where my great-grandfather first lived when he arrived in the city. His first New York, when he was young and his family in Poland had not yet been murdered at Belzec, a concentration camp so prodigiously efficient in mass murder that only two Jews, out of approximately six hundred thousand, survived. I wonder what he said about the letters that suddenly stopped arriving from the aunties and the cousins around the time of my grandfather’s bar mitzvah. Or whether he stayed silent about the people and the place that had been his home, now gone. And what my grandfather, entering adolescence, made of all that. I research for a living, but there is only so much information I can find using first names and surnames, only so much that can be inferred from patterns and silence.
My great-grandfather’s apartment is still around the corner. The kosher bakery I pass each day was open then, and is open now. I have his mother’s face, which is also my mother’s face. Though all of them are strangers to me, this is how close the remote past is: we live inside it. The light is the same; would have hit just like this, I think each time I exit into the early evening and choose my way home.
Lynn’s been crafting. She shows me photos on her phone of what she’s been working on lately. Jewelery and snow globes, sweaters and blankets of all sizes. My favorite, however, are her fabric collages. In them, ducks fly into the clear sky above Lake Champlain, cat’s tails bowing in the wind. Two hands reach for all that lies beyond a barred window. An owl perches on a branch before a full silver moon. A living room is silent at night, stars filling the navy blue square at the center of parted lace curtains, flowers in a vase, cat on a rug, a fire burning below a mantelpiece on which a real photo of her son sits in a frame. “This is the living room of my longing,” Lynn says.
“Can I get my metro card?” a young woman asks, dressed for work on the night shift somewhere. Due to an administrative error no cards are available, so Lynn leaves another resident aide in charge of the desk, grabs her handbag and her purple cane and walks out into the night to buy one from the closest subway station, using her own money.
I walk with her down to Astor Place, where we stand waiting for the lights to change at an intersection in the heat still radiating from the sleek surfaces of the tall buildings I think of as new. I tell her that this was my first New York. How at eighteen I would walk alone and unfindable in the geometry of that place which is both here and not here.
She chuckles, her own first New York, down on Christopher Street, not so far away. And suddenly, I—who was born the same year as Lynn’s son—wonder if she and I might appear to passersby as mother and daughter. For one warm and silent moment, I try it on: how the world might feel.
“You know,” she says in her teacher’s voice, scanning the older buildings around us, “used to be you could only build up five stories around here. They added those other stories later. If you look closely, you can see where that happened. All of them have a stop line before they kept going.”
In two months, Covid will hit New York City like a meteorite, cratering the shelters and lower-income neighborhoods where too many of the residents packed densely together will have no place to go but the refrigerated interiors of mobile morgues. Soon after, Black Lives Matter protests will fill the city, looters taking advantage of that necessary moment to smash the storefronts across from the halfway house, those around the subway station. The drugstores, the diner, the kosher bakery. Lynn will write to me that it looks like a war zone. That she is attending online church services but misses being with her Trinity family. She will continue to work long shifts, has no choice. Leaves late, and those are the times that she worries. “The protests remind me of the ones I participated in during the 1960s,” she will write. “I don’t remember them being as violent. Maybe that’s because I was a lot younger then.”
All that is in the future, though, and for now Lynn is invigorated by her work, doesn’t mind leaving late. She accepts all work she is offered at the shelter, unless it conflicts with her Sunday services, which means she has been keeping a large bottle of Diet Coke in the staff fridge to power her through her twenty-four-hour shifts and the late shifts that end at midnight, after which she zips up her coat, shoulders her bag, and walks up to the sidewalk and down towards the subway.
She rarely feels unsafe; it’s the East Village, full of life, eyes on the street. There are always taxis and cars, blinding white lights in bodegas and glowing yellow lights in apartments where she goes in and drops her key neatly in a bowl next to a vase of flowers, where she kicks off her shoes and puts on the kettle and resumes her knitting in a chair that has worn tonsures in the floor, so long has she returned to this spot beneath a mantelpiece populated with framed photos of her smiling with her son and daughter-in-law, their child in her hands.
She will get up to pour her tea and place it by her bed where it will cool while she washes her face in her bathroom and then pulls up her quilt, looking through her lace curtain out the window which is always open a little to let the world stream in. The homes of her longing, none of them hers as she grips the railing down into the station to catch the 1:00 AM train back to the YWCA.
53
The Kingdom of Heaven
The Choir
They are caroling down in a hole in the ground, the subway station where I first saw them, except now the weather has turned freezing and the floor is puddled with meltwater. Today they are many. Representatives of the mission families have been augmented by a large group of “the youth” from Pennsylvania as well as a few friends from the Susquehanna Conference with whom they fellowship. A very young man wearing formal pants and a black parka is conducting. Keeping tempo, really: arcing his flat palm from side to side as though petting an imaginary pony.
There is “Joy to the World,” “Away in a Manger,” “Gloria in Excelsis.” There is breath straining for the note which, once found, stays true—unlike words, which are feathers, hollow at their core and liable to shed with time or a change in the wind. As always their voices together are wondrous, and I’m struck by a memory that I wouldn’t have thought worth remembering, of being ten, eleven and watching TV alone in the living room. On the screen is a children’s program . . . Sesame Street, I believe. A time-lapse video of a flower opening set to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. I am weeping, something inside me that I do not understand and cannot name surging, expanding. And then my mother walks into the room and I hide the fact that I’ve been crying, somehow embarrassed.
