Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

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.