Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

The fact that she had chosen to come to church alone, to attend Holy Week services, made her seem virtuous. She was always on her own. She got down on her bony knees and prayed. But I hoped that she was also showing up partly to be near me, to let me see her, as part of a flirtation.

In church we could be near, we could stare at each other, examine each other's clothes, study each other’s face and body. At school this was impossible — someone would notice us and start teasing. And anyway, Evelyn Frisch did not go to my school. But in church, in the candlelight, in the mottled shadows of the stained-glass windows, it was possible for me to gaze at her for a long time and satisfy myself — and today, Good Friday, more than ever, for the slip that had been just peeping out last Monday at the Novena was now sagging lower, giving me a glimpse of satin and lace flopping against her leg as she mounted the stairs to St. Ray’s.

“How did you know her sister’s a tramp?” Chicky said.

Burkell said, “She’s a pig. Vinny Grasso saw her making out with a tenth-grader at the drive-in.”

A sharp voice startled us: “Why are you hanging around here? Get inside.”

With a frown on her bristly face, a nun loomed over us like a bat in her black cloak.

“It’s disrespectful to loiter here. This is the house of our Lord and Savior. Get a move on!”

As we started to go in, slightly hunched for fear she might hit us, she snatched at me, got a grip on my arm, and pulled me aside. Chicky and Burkell hurried ahead.

“I saw you yesterday,” the nun said. “You were smiling.”

That was true — I was sitting in the pew, smiling at the sound of the name Serenelli. But how had she seen me?

She pinched my chin and said, “Do you think there’s something humorous about immorality?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you think that mortal sin is something to smile about?”

“No, Sister.”

“Are you going into church to mock Jesus today?”

“No, Sister.”

“And betray our Lord, like Judas?”

“No, Sister.”

“Do you know what happened to Judas?”

“He went to Hell, Sister.”

“He took a halter and hanged himself by the neck,” the nun said. ‘And then he went to Hell, because he was a sinner. Do you know what Hell is?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Hell means you never see the face of Christ.”

That did not seem so bad to me — in fact, I was relieved when she said it. She still had a grip on my chin. “I’m going to be watching you. I know your parents. If I see any mockery I’m going to tell them.”

She pinched my chin one last time and pushed me so hard I stumbled on the granite step and almost fell. As I got my balance and looked back I saw her crooked lips and bristly cheeks.

Chicky and Burkell were waiting for me inside the door by the holy water font. We dunked our fingers and blessed ourselves and went up the aisle, sitting together, far behind Evelyn Frisch. When the praying Father Staley said the word “chrism” Burkell muttered it and had a laughing fit, covering his mouth.

Saint Theresa, Saint Patrick, Saint Michael, and Saint Rose of Lima looked down on us, and so did the nun. Chicky picked his nose and flicked a piece of snot into the aisle, and the nun hauled him out of the pew, gripping his head. A little later, Burkell folded the Easter Message into a paper plane and kept it on his lap, and he was next to go. Then I was alone, hungry from having fasted, no breakfast, no lunch, and straining to see Evelyn Frisch.

Good Friday was a terrible holy day. The service lasted three hours — each time I thought it was over there was a new prayer, more kneeling, another procession, an upraised ciborium, and a louder chant. The day commemorated the arrest of Jesus, his denunciation by Pilate, his robe stripped from him, the whipping, the jamming onto his head of the crown of thorns. He was given a heavy wooden cross to carry. He was spat upon by the same people who had welcomed him on Palm Sunday.

“And he was brought to Golgotha, which means the Place of the Skull,” Father Staley was reading. And he described the rusty nails, the hammering, the bleeding, the cross raised up with Christ slumping upon it.

“ Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani —Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Father Staley was still reading.

Christ asked for a drink of water. A Roman soldier dipped some bread in vinegar and hoisted it on his spear to torment him. Another soldier stabbed Christ in the side to make sure he was dead, and later Christ was taken down from the cross by Mary and some others, and he lay dead and bleeding on their laps.

The service continued, recalling blood and pain, death and darkness, “Free Barabbas,” the Jews saying “Crucify him! He is not our king. Our king is Caesar!” the rusty nails, the suffering of Jesus, “the passion and death,” the Good Thief, the Bad Thief, the storm, the earthquake, the suicide of Judas. Much worse for me was that I was sitting at the back of the church, too far from Evelyn Frisch for me to see her. But at least I knew her name.

Kneeling alone in church on Holy Saturday in a thinner crowd than yesterday — today was not a holy day of obligation — I was not watching the altar. My gaze was fixed on Evelyn Frisch, now in the pew just in front of me. She had entered the church after me, she had chosen to sit where I could see her. She knew what was in my head: that I had come there to worship her.

I stared at her neck, her tangled hair, her limp jacket, her droopy slip. She was kneeling, and so I knelt. I was praying to her; I hoped she was praying to me.

The priest appeared with two altar boys hurrying beside him. He busied himself at the altar, muttering in Latin, the boys replying. He opened and closed the tabernacle, he fussed with the chalice, he smoothed the linen napkins. At the consecration one boy shook the hand bells and Father Staley shuffled the host and snapped it apart with his scaly fingers and said, “Hoc est enim corpus meum, ” and I thought, This is my body, Evelyn.

The host was not bread anymore; it had been transformed into the body of Christ, as the wine sloshing in the chalice had been made into blood. Father Staley was leaning on the altar, his elbows on the marble, eating and drinking, chewing body, swallowing blood. I knew what was happening, I had half believed it because there was nothing else to believe. But now I believed in Evelyn Frisch, body and soul.

The way she knelt and prayed in a posture of struggle seemed to show that she was trying to believe, praying for strength. I was also kneeling, but I was not praying anymore, I was thinking: It is so hard to believe in God, and harder still to love him, or Christ the criticizer. It was so easy to love this skinny girl, who was full of life and yet frail, dressed poorly, probably in hand-me-downs, and yet her clothes attracted me. And half Jewish was alluring too; she was odd, exotic, didn't really belong here, and although she had never looked directly at me, she knew exactly where I was. We were together in church, worshiping together, worshiping each other, amid the watery flicker of lighted candles.

“On this Easter vigil, the burial of Jesus, we light a candle to signify Christ's passing from death to life,” Father Staley was saying in his sermon. “God is love, and if your soul is pure, you too can have eternal life.”

The candle flames were a nice part of the ritual that day, the warmth, the fire, the light, the dripping wax on the knob of the candle stump. And as I knelt she sat back in the pew and her head was against my face, her sweet soapy hair-smell in my nose and mouth.

I did not want eternal life. I had no idea what the words meant. What I wanted most of all was this, an hour in church with Evelyn Frisch, even if it meant I had to betray Jesus and be a sinner. She was love.