Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

SUNDAY AFTERNOON. A PEDDLER IN A PURPLE CHORISTER’S ROBE selling watches in Battery Park. Fellow with dreadlocks, a sweet smile, sacral presence. Doing well.

Rock doves everywhere aswoop, the grit of the city in their wings. And the glare of the oil-slicked bay, and a warm-throated autumn breeze like a woman blowing in my ears.

At my back, the financial skyline of Lower Manhattan sunlit into an islanded cathedral, a religioplex.

And here’s the ferry from Ellis Island. Listing to starboard, her three decks jammed to the rails. Sideswipes bulkhead for contemptuous New York landing. Oof. Pilings groan, crack like gunfire. Man on the promenade breaks into a run. How can I be lonely in this city?

Tourists stampeding down the gangplank. Cameras, camcorders, and stupefied children slung from their shoulders. Sun hats and baseball caps insouciant this morning, now their serious, unfortunate fashion.

Lord, there is something so exhausted about the New York waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all Heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.

But I went back to the peddler in the choir robe and said I liked the look. Told him I’d give him a dollar if he’d let me see the label. The smile dissolves.

You crazy, mon?

I was in my mufti grunge — jeans, leather jacket over plaid shirt over T-shirt. Not even cruciform I.D. to flash at him.

Lifts his tray of watches out of reach: Get away, you got no business wit me. Looking left and right as he says it.

And then later on my walk, at Astor Place, where they lay their goods on plastic shower curtains on the sidewalk: three of the sacristy’s purple choir robes neatly folded and stacked between a Best of the Highwaymen LP and the autobiography of George Sanders. I picked one and turned back the neck, and there was the label, Churchpew Crafts, and the laundry mark from Mr. Chung. The peddler, a solemn young mestizo with that bowl of black hair they have, wanted ten dollars each. I thought that was reasonable.

They come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, and find a piece of sidewalk and go to work. The world’s poor lapping our shores, like the rising of the global-warmed sea. I remember how, on the way to Machu Picchu, I stopped in the town of Cuzco and watched the dances and listened to the street bands. I was told when I found my camera missing that I could buy it back the next morning in the market street behind the cathedral. Sure enough, next morning there were the women of Cuzco, in their woven ponchos of red and ocher, braids depending from their black derbies, broad Olmec heads smiling shyly. They were fencing the stuff. Merciful heavens, I was pissed. But, surrounded by Anglos ransacking the stalls as if searching for their lost dead, how, my Lord Jesus, could I not accept the justice of the situation?

As I did at Astor Place in the shadow of the great, mansarded, brownstone-voluminous Cooper Union people’s college with the birds flying up from the square.

A block east, on St. Mark’s, a thrift shop had the altar candlesticks that were heisted along with the robes. Twenty-five dollars the pair. While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade.

I’m lying, Lord, I just read the damn things when I’m depressed. The paperback detective never fails me. His rod and his gaff, they comfort me. Sure, a life is lost here and there, but the paperback’s world is ordered, circumscribed, dependable in its punishments. More than I can say for Yours.

I know You are on this screen with me. If Thos. Pemberton, DD, is losing his life, he’s losing it here, to his watchful God. Not just over my shoulder do I presumptively locate You, or in the Anglican starch of my collar, or in the rectory walls, or in the coolness of the chapel stone that frames the door, but in the blinking cursor …

TUESDAY EVE. UP TO Lenox Hill to see my terminal: ambulances backing into the emergency bay with their beepings and blinding strobe lights. They used to have QUIET signs around hospitals. Doctors’ cars double-parked, patients strapped on gurneys double-parked on the sidewalk, smart young Upper East Side workforce pouring out of the subway walking past not looking. Looking.

It gets dark earlier now. Lights coming on in the apartment buildings. If only I was rising to a smart one-bedroom. A lithe young woman home from her interesting job, listening for my ring. Uncorking the wine, humming, wearing no underwear.

In the lobby, a stoic crowd primed for visiting hours with bags and bundles and infants squirming in laps. And that profession of the plague of our time, the security guard, in various indolent versions.

My terminal’s room door slapped with a RESTRICTED AREA warning. I push in, all smiles.

You got medicine, Father? You gonna make me well? Then get the fuck outta here. The fuck out, I don’t need your bullshit.

Enormous eyes all that’s left of him. An arm bone aims the remote like a gun, and there in the hanging set the smiling girl spins the big wheel.

My comforting pastoral visit concluded, I pass down the hall, where several neatly dressed black people wait outside a private room. They hold gifts in their arms. I smell non-hospital things. A whiff of fruit pie still hot from the oven. Soups. Simmering roasts. I stand on tiptoe. Who is that? Through the flowers, like a Gauguin, a handsome, light-complected black woman sitting up in bed. Turbaned. Regal. I don’t hear the words, but her melodious, deep voice of prayer knows whereof it speaks. The men with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. The women with white kerchiefs. On the way out I inquire of the floor nurse.

SRO twice a day, she says. We get all of Zion up here. The only good thing, since Sister checked in I don’t have to shop for supper. Yesterday I brought home baked pork chops. You wouldn’t believe how good they were.

ANOTHER ONE HAVING trouble with my bullshit — the widow code-named Moira. In her new duplex that looks across the river to the Pepsi-Cola sign she’s been reading Pagels on early Christianity.

It was all politics, wasn’t it? she asks me.

Yes, I sez to her.

And so whoever won, that’s why we have what we have now?

Well, with a nod at the Reformation, I suppose, yes.

She lies back on the pillows. So it’s all made up, it’s an invention?

Yes, I sez, taking her in my arms. And you know for the longest time it actually worked.

Used to try to make her laugh at the dances at Spence. Couldn’t then, can’t now. A gifted melancholic, Moira. The lost husband an add-on.

But she was one of the few in the old crowd who didn’t think I was throwing my life away.

Wavy thick brown hair parted in the middle. Glimmering dark eyes, set a bit too wide. Figure not current, lacking tone, Glory to God in the highest.

From the corner of her full-lipped mouth her tongue emerges and licks away a teardrop.

And then, Jesus, the surprising condolence of her wet salted kiss.

FOR THE SERMON: open with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing … to share their innocence.

But then I asked myself: Why must faith rely on innocence? Must it be blind? Why must it come of people’s need to believe?

We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity’s rule or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. God’s authority is a powerful claim and reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly gratitude.