Bay of Souls

9

ON A SPRINGLIKE Sunday full of sparkling sunlight and warm confiding breezes, the Ahearn family went to Mass. A little before ten o'clock, the three of them trooped up the slate steps of St. Emmerich's. It was a white wooden church whose central structure stood flanked by twin pointed towers tipped with Prussian blue. St. Emmerich's was a German foundation, different in every subtle way from the Frenchified Irish church across town.

They went single file, Kristin tall in the lead. One step behind, Michael trudged eyes down, containing his sick hangover. Young Paul followed him, looking abstracted and melancholy, occasionally rousing himself to a few moves of the insolent swagger he was trying to practice unobserved. He had brought it home from school.

At the top of the steps, Michael turned to look at him.

"What's the matter with you? You have a sore back or something?"

Paul straightened up but declined to answer. Watching closely, Michael thought he saw a second's glint of unfocused defiance.

He followed his wife into the sensory explosion of stale incense, varnish, old wood and lilies. The church interior was a pattern of grays, no sculpted altar but a stark table, the simple mensa, on which two candles burned. Each opaque gray window held a single decorated pane showing a stylized icon. Behind the sacrificial table a sanctuary lamp glowed before a gray banner displaying the Chi-Rho.

Michael stepped aside to let his wife and son into the rear pew he had chosen. Paul genuflected and crossed himself. Michael and Kristin blundered into eye contact, exchanged a bleak unseeing glance and sat down.

From his place Michael could watch the church fill. There was always a small colorful contingent from the university. The aged Professor Doroshenko, a philologist and an immensely learned authority on Slavic myth, led his failing wife to a place near the front. The professor's many tomes on wood sprites and river elves were regularly released by an émigré press in Winnipeg. Behind the Doroshenkos Mr. Giorgio and Mr. Cushing, a pair of middle-aged gay librarians of signal piety, knelt in prayer. Beside them sat Dr. Almeida with his wife and four of his children. The prolific doctor was a Goan and a savant at the computer center. Then there were the few dozen students, whom the church did its best to make welcome. They were mostly young women, away from home for the first time.

The rest of the congregation consisted of the townies and farmers. Three, sometimes four generations, descendants of the nineteenth-century Rhenish and Bohemian settlers, still showed up each week, ancients and babes in arms. The rural churches were being closed and consolidated; circuit-riding priests equipped with folding communion sets and cassettes of Tennessee Ernie's Sacred Songs spent long weekends holding Mass in half a dozen ruinous sanctuaries among the rows of soybeans. Only a scant fraction of the family farms remained out there.

The Germans were lumpy-faced and broad-shouldered, clear-eyed and scrubbed. Their young folk were freckled and fair, possessed, it seemed, of a radiant innocence.

Across the church, he saw a man named Harold Lawlor, who with his wife, Frances, constituted the dynamic of the local anti-abortion struggle. Michael put his glasses on and assumed an easy stance from which he thought he might observe Mr. Lawlor at his Sabbath devotions, telling his beads, eyes raised in the Maiden's Prayer.

Lawlor's elderly cousin, a man named Brennan, had shot a priest in South Dakota — crippled him for life — for permitting a twelve-year-old girl to assist at Mass. Brennan had insisted on altar boys; it was said he had spent the day of the shooting stalking the twelve-year-old, whose young life was preserved from his nine-millimeter bullet by chance. The plea had been Alzheimer's. Brennan was eighty and had died the same year. A martyr.

Watching Mr. Lawlor's watery blue eyes fixed on the numinous, Michael gave way to a spasm of rage; his jaw trembled. His fists contracted to claws. He had to remind himself that this man was not the shooter. As Michael watched, he completed the last decade of his rosary. Oh, the sorrowful mysteries! thought Michael. Lawlor crossed himself with the chaplet's crucifix, kissed it and fixed his rheumy gaze once more on unending bliss.

The celebrant priest, short, square Father Schlesinger, read scripture.

"I will go to the altar of God," he declared. And the pale, buzz-cut server, kneeling with the soles of his Reeboks toward the congregation, replied, "To God who giveth joy to my youth."

Beside Michael, Paul was praying. Decently, head down, following the order in his missal. The storms of impending adolescence had for the moment subsided. From the look of him, Michael thought, he was making contact. Casting the line up there, bending the reverent eye on vacancy, discoursing with the idle air. He saw the boy clasp his hands to his chest the way he had as a small child, and indeed, as far as Michael could tell, took hold of something and hugged it to his heart. Acknowledged and confessed it, rejoiced and partook. Outside, spring birds that should not have been present at that latitude warbled and trilled.

On his left sat Kristin; Michael saw that she too was watching Paul as he prayed. They could not take their eyes away. Their son was alive, the guest, like everyone, of random singularity. Random singularity, a mere machine, required no sacrifice. Yet around them secrets ascended with the incense and song. The farmers and clerks and cops, the professors, the young women on their own, all of them fought to merge their desperate inner lives with the peace that, it was written, passed understanding.

Finally Michael stood at the point of trembling, burning with shame and self-despising rage. The church that taught humiliation as a blessing was providing him all the humiliation he could bear. He regretted ever having led his son into its fragrant candle lighted rooms. He thought of Kristin in the hospital, leaning on the God she had conceived, imploring the mercy of dreams. He wanted to be out of there. Once, his mind wandered from a fit of anger and he imagined that there was a tiny old lady beside him, a doll-like creature with a death's-head smile. Marinette. She smelled of sachet. One of those waking dreams in the empty space he had come to church to contemplate.

Driving back, the best he could do by way of Sunday meditation was the picture of Lara among coral arches, her long body gliding past luminous tendrils or against the silky surface.

They went home to the ancient hum of after church. Pancakes for the young communicant. Ice water and the Knicks-Heat game for himself. Kristin took off her church clothes and put on a pair of tight jeans that caught his attention. He stood at the front window ignoring the basketball game, watching her rake winterkills in the yard. Those warm curves at the hip and the choice ones at the seat. The center seam taut, deep in. It was strange, ever since Lara had come into his life he had been in a state of sexual tension that focused itself equally on the two women. He was in different ways besotted with both of them. The high-pitched ache of desire was always one sensation away.

When she came in he thought she must know the way he had been watching her. All she said was, "What was the date of that dive charter?"

"Twenty-fourth. Easter."

"I guess it'll be nice there."

"Want to come?" He wondered if he had not hesitated too long on the false question.

"Shall I?"

"Sure," he said, "if you want."

"Yeah?"

So he wondered: What are we playing here?

"I just know," she told him, "you'll have a better time without me."

It was not quite what he had wanted to hear.