And then, Lord, I confess, I dozed. Father Brown would never have done that. But there was this crash, as if a waiter had dropped a whole load of dishes. That brought me up smartly. Wait a minute, I thought, churches don’t have waiters—they’re hitting the pantry again! I had figured them for the altar. I raced my bulk down the stairs, my Superbeam held aloft like a club. “Cry God for Tommy, England, and St. Tim!” How long had I been asleep? I stood in the doorway, found the light switch, and, when you do that, for an instant the only working sense is the sense of smell: hashish in that empty pantry. Male body odor. But also the pungent sanguinary scent of female hormone. And something else, something else. Like lipstick, or lollipop.
The dish cabinets—some of the panes shattered, broken cups and saucers on the floor, a cup still rocking.
A whiff of cool air. They’d gone out the alley door. An ungainly something moving out there. A deep metallic bong sounds up through my heels. Someone curses. It is me, fumbling with the damn searchlight. I swing the beam out and see a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner.
I ran back into the church and let my little light shine. Behind the altar where the big brass cross should have been was a shadow of Your crucifix, Lord, in the unfaded paint of my predecessor’s poor taste.
WHAT THE REAL DETECTIVE said: Take my word for it, Padre. I been in this precinct ten years. They’ll hit a synagogue for the whatchamacallit, the Torah. Because it’s handwritten, not a mass-produced item. It’ll bring, a minimum, five K. Whereas the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada. No disrespect, we’re practically related, I’m Catholic, go to Mass, but on the street there is no way it is anything but scrap metal. Jesus! Whata buncha sickos.
Mistake talking to the Times. Such a sympathetic young man. I didn’t understand anything till they took the cross, I told him. I thought they were just crackheads looking for a few dollars. Maybe they didn’t understand it themselves. Am I angry? No. I’m used to this, I am used to being robbed. When the diocese took away my food-for-the-homeless program and merged it with one across town, I lost most of my parishioners. That was a big-time heist. So even before this happened I was tapped out. These people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But on further reflection maybe Christ goes where He is needed.
Phone ringing off the hook. I’m getting my very own Presentment. But also pledges of support, checks rolling in. Including some of the old crowd, pals now of my dear wife, who had thought my vocabulary quaint, like a performance of Mozart on period instruments. Tommy Pemberton will scrape a few pieties for us on his viola da gamba. I count nine hundred and change here. Have I stumbled on a new scam? I tell you, Lord, these people just don’t get it. What am I supposed to do, put up a fence? Electrify it?
The TV newspeople swarming all over. Banging on my door. Mayday, Mayday! I will raise the sash behind this desk, drop nimbly to the rubbled lot, pass under the window of Ecstatic Reps, where the lady with the big hocks is doing the treadmill, and I’m gone. Thanks heaps, Metro section.
TRISH GIVING A DINNER when I got here. The caterer’s man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now that I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She’s doing the veal-paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh, what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual-fund manager. Odds on the Frenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And, in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish’s glance over the rim of the wineglass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the blue amused eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I’d slunk home. But isn’t it terrible that after it’s over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do You have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven’t even gotten around to your small-time perversities. I mean when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence. And it’s the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn’t Trish.
But the dining room was the least of it. It’s a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.
We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.
DEAR FATHER if u want to now where yor cross luk in 7531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an scarifises chickns.
Sure.
Dear Mr. Pemberton, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York … Nuffuvthat.
Dear Father, We have read of your troubles with those aliens who presume to desecrate the Christian church and smirch the Living God. Lest you despair, I am one of a group in nearby New Jersey who have dedicated ourselves to defending the Republic and the Sacred name of Jesus from interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thing these people understand, The Gun that is our prerogative to hold as free white Americans …
Right on.
OKAY, ACTION TO REPORT.
Yesterday, Monday, I get a message on the machine from a Rabbi Joshua Gruen, of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, on West Ninety-eighth: it is in my interest that we meet as soon as possible. Hmm. Clearly not one of the kooks. I call back. Cordial, but will answer no questions over the phone. So okay, this is what detectives do, Lord, they investigate. Sounded a serious young man, one religioso to another—mufti or collar? I go for the collar.
The synagogue a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive. A steep flight of granite steps to the front door. I deduce that Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. Confirmed when I am admitted. Joshua (my new friend) a trim five-nine in sweatshirt, jeans, running shoes. Gives me a firm handshake. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-four, good chin, well-curved forehead. A knitted yarmulke riding the top of his wavy black hair.
Shows me his synagogue: a converted parlor–cum–living room with an ark at one end, a platform table to read the Torah on, shelves with prayer books, and a few rows of bridge chairs, and that’s it.
Second floor, introduces me to his wife, who puts her caller on hold, stands up from her desk to shake hands, she, too, a rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, in blouse and slacks, pretty smile, high cheekbones, no cosmetics, needs none, light hair short, au courant cut, granny specs, Lord my heart. She is one of the assistant rabbis at Temple Emanu-El. What if Trish went for her DD, wore the collar, celebrated the Eucharist with me? Okay, laugh, but it’s not funny when I think about it, not funny at all.
Third floor, I meet the children, boys two and four, in their native habitat of primary-color wall boxes filled with stuffed animals. They cling to the flanks of their dark Guatemalan nanny, who is also introduced like a member of the family …
On the back wall of the third-floor landing is an iron ladder. Joshua Gruen ascends, opens a trapdoor, climbs out.
A moment later his head appears against the blue sky. He beckons me upward, poor winded Pem so stress-tested and entranced … so determined to make it look effortless I can think of nothing else.
I stand finally on the flat roof, the old apartment houses of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive looming at either end of this block of chimneyed brownstone roofs, and try to catch my breath while smiling at the same time. The autumn sun behind the apartment houses, the late-afternoon river breeze on my face. I’m feeling the exhilaration and slight vertigo of roof-standing … and don’t begin to think—until snapped to attention by the rabbi’s puzzled, frankly inquiring gaze that asks why do I think he’s brought me here—why he’
s brought me here. His hands in his pockets, he points with his chin to the Ninety-eighth Street frontage, where, lying flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, lies tarnished and shining in the autumn sun.
I suppose I knew I’d found it from the moment I heard the rabbi’s voice on the answering machine. I bend down for a closer look. There are the old nicks and dents. Some new ones, too. It’s not all of a piece, which I hadn’t known: the arms are bolted to the upright in a kind of mortise-and-tenon idea. I lift it at the foot. It is not that heavy but clearly too much cross to bear on the stations of the IRT.
I’D BEEN JUST about convinced it was, in fact, a new sect of some kind. You do let this happen, Lord, ideas of You bud with the profligacy of viruses. I thought, Well, I’ll keep a vigil from across the street, watch them take my church apart brick by brick. Maybe I’ll help them. They’ll reassemble it somewhere as a folk church of some kind. A bizarre expression of their simple faith. Maybe I’ll drop in, listen to the sermon now and then. Learn something …
Then my other idea, admittedly paranoid: it would end up as an installation in SoHo. Some crazy artist—let me wait a few months, a year, and I’d look in a gallery window and see it there, duly embellished, a statement. People standing there drinking white wine. So that was the secular version. I thought I had all bases covered. I am shaken.
HOW DID RABBI Joshua Gruen know it was there?
An anonymous phone call. A man’s voice. Hello, Rabbi Gruen? Your roof is burning.
The roof was burning?
If the children had been in the house I would have gotten them out and called the fire department. As it was, I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and up I came. Not the smartest thing. Of course, the roof was not burning. But, modest as it is, this is a synagogue. A place for prayer and study. And, as you see, a Jewish family occupies the upper floors. So was he wrong, the caller?
He bites his lip, dark brown eyes looking me in the eye. It is an execrable symbol to him. Burning its brand on his synagogue. Burning down, floor through floor, like the template of a Christian church. I want to tell him I’m on the Committee for Ecumenical Theology of the Trans-Religious Fellowship. A member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
This is deplorable. I am really sorry about this.
It’s hardly your fault.
I know, I say. But this city is getting weirder by the minute.
The rabbis offer me a cup of coffee. We sit in the kitchen. I feel quite close to them, both our houses of worship desecrated, the entire Judeo-Christian heritage trashed.
This gang’s been preying on me for months. And for what they’ve gotten for their effort, I mean one hit on a dry cleaner would have done as much. Listen, Rabbi—
Joshua.
Joshua. Do you read detective stories?
He clears his throat, blushes.
Only all the time, Sarah Blumenthal says, smiling at him.
Well, let’s put our minds together. We’ve got two mysteries going here.
Why two?
This gang. I can’t believe their intent was, ultimately, to commit an anti-Semitic act. They have no intent. They lack sense. They’re like overgrown children. They’re not of this world. And all the way from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side? No, that’s asking too much of them.
So this is someone else?
It must be. A good two weeks went by. Somebody took the cross off their hands—if they didn’t happen to find it in a dumpster. I mean, the police told me it had no value, but if someone wants it it has value, right? And then this second one or more persons had the intent. But how did they get it onto the roof? And nobody saw them, nobody heard them?
I was on the case now, asking questions, my nostrils flaring. I was enjoying myself. Good Lord, Lord, should I have been a detective? Was that my true calling?
Angelina, whom I think you met with the children: she heard noises from the roof one morning. We were already gone. That was the day I went to see my father, Sarah says, looking to Joshua for confirmation.
And I’d gone running, Joshua says.
But the noise didn’t last long and Angelina thought no more of it—thought that it was a repairman of some sort. I assume they came up through one of the houses on the block. The roofs abut.
Did you go down the block? Did you ring bells?
Joshua shook his head.
What about the cops?
They exchange glances. Please, says Joshua. The congregation is new, just getting its legs. We’re trying to make something viable for today—theologically, communally. A dozen or so families, just a beginning. A green shoot. The last thing we want is for this to get out. We don’t need that kind of publicity. Besides, he says, that’s what they want, whoever did this.
We don’t accept the I.D. of victim, says Sarah Blumenthal, looking me in the eye.
And now I tell You, Lord, as I sit here back in my own study, in this bare ruined choir, I am exceptionally sorry for myself this evening, lacking as I do a companion like Sarah Blumenthal. This is not lust, and You know I would admit it if it were. No, but I think how quickly I took to her, how comfortable I was made, how naturally welcomed I felt under these difficult circumstances, there is a freshness and honesty about these people, both of them, I mean, they were so present in the moment, so self-possessed, a wonderful young couple with a quietly dedicated life, such a powerful family stronghold they make, and, oh Lord, he is one lucky rabbi, Joshua Gruen, to have such a beautiful devout by his side.
It was Sarah, apparently, who made the connection. He was sitting there trying to figure out how to handle it and she had come in from a conference somewhere and when he told her what was on the roof she wondered if that was the missing crucifix she had read about in the newspaper.
I hadn’t read the piece and I was skeptical.
You thought it was just too strange, a news story right in your lap, Sarah says.
That’s true. News is somewhere else. And to realize that you know more than the reporter knew? But we found the article.
He won’t let me throw out anything, Sarah says.
Fortunately, in this case, says the husband to the wife.
It’s like living in the Library of Congress.
So, thanks to Sarah, we now have the rightful owner.
She glances at me, colors a bit. Removes her glasses, the scholar, and pinches the bridge of her nose. I see her eyes in the instant before the specs go back on. Nearsighted, like a little girl I loved in grade school.
I am extremely grateful, I say to my new friends. This is, in addition to everything else, a mitzvah you’ve performed. Can I use your phone? I’m going to get a van up here. We can take it apart, wrap it up, and carry it right out the front door and no one will be the wiser.
I’m prepared to share the cost.
Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I don’t need to tell you, but my life has been hell lately. This is good coffee, but you don’t happen to have something to drink, do you?
Sarah going to a wall cabinet. Will Scotch do?
Joshua, sighing, leans back in his chair. I could use something myself.
THE SITUATION NOW: my cross dismantled and stacked like building materials behind the altar. It won’t be put back together and hung in time for Sunday worship. That’s fine, I can make a sermon out of that. The shadow is there, the shadow of the cross on the apse. We will offer our prayers to God in the name of His Indelible Son, Jesus Christ. Not bad, Pem, you can still pull these things out of a hat when you want to.
What am I to make of this strange night culture of stealth sickos, these mindless thieves of the valueless giggling through the streets, carrying what? whatever it was! through the watery precincts of urban nihilism … their wit, their glimmering dying recognition of something that once had a significance they laughingly cannot remember. Je
sus, there’s not even sacrilege there. A dog stealing a bone knows more what he’s up to.
A phone call just now from Joshua.
If we’re going to be detectives about this, we start with what we know, isn’t that what you did? What I know, what I start with, is that no Jewish person would have stolen your crucifix. It would not occur to him. Even in the depths of some drug-induced confusion.
I shouldn’t think so, I say, thinking, Why does Joshua feel he has to rule this out?
But as you also said something like this has no street value unless someone wants it. Then it has value.
To an already-in-place, raging anti-Semite, for example.
Yes, that’s the likelihood. This is a mixed neighborhood. There may be people who don’t like a synagogue on their block. I’ve not been made aware of this, but it’s always possible.
Right.
But it’s also possible … placing that cross on my roof, well, that is something that could have been arranged by an ultraorthodox fanatic. That’s possible, too.
Good God!
We have our extremists, our fundamentalists, just as you have. There are some for whom what Sarah and I are doing, struggling to redesign, revalidate our faith—well, in their eyes it is tantamount to apostasy. What do you think of that for a theory?
Very generous of you, Joshua. But I don’t buy it, I say. I mean, I can’t think that it’s likely. Why would it be?
The voice that told me my roof was burning? That was a Jewish thing to say. Of course, I don’t know for sure, I may be all wrong. But it’s something to think about. Tell me, Father—
Tom—
Tom. You’re a bit older, you’ve seen more, given more thought to these things. Wherever you look in the world now, God belongs to the atavists. And they’re so fierce, these people, so sure of themselves—as if all human knowledge since Scripture were not also God’s revelation! I mean, is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backward? That civilization is in reverse?