Churches

Hail Mary full of grace the lord is with thee.

After a while you’re praying to the words. The way they sound, chant-like, hollowed out. Ancient vowels climbing the stairwells of a decaying abbey.

Catholicism is a religion of things. You pray to a cross. You pray in the shape of a smooth black bead, in the colors of stained glass windows. You pray to the words, and they pray back.

You light candles for the dead and pay a dollar.

~

My grandmother’s house is a religion of things. Silver spoons from Hawaii and the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. Grapes sprayed gold. A television with tubes and ghosts on channel six. A General Electric refrigerator with the curves of a late fifties Chevy.

Her name is Marie. All of the children call her Mary. Grandmamarie is too hard for little tongues. All of the children grow up and still call her Mary. Mary first in the kitchen, last to the table.

Mary hard of hearing. Mary full of grace.

She has white hair with pink curlers in the morning. When she undoes them, it blooms into a wispy aura that follows her head around for the rest of the day. The curlers come out before breakfast, before 7:30 mass, before you wake with a fever that makes mom drive you here—to the religion of things. To thick white toast that scratches off in rust when you try to butter it, and melts like a marshmallow on your tongue. To bowls and spoons that clink and talk radio on the police scanner and the question of hunger that you can never answer correctly.

How about some soup?

There’s a whole new bottle in the fridge.

Try it. You’ll like it.

In the afternoon she lets you peel apples for a pie and beat the dough with your palms.

And then you can fall asleep on the worn-in couch under the mural of a Tuscan village where she has pasted pictures of all her grandchildren, hiding in bell towers, running down alleyways. They call to you at the edge of your first dream, your cousins laughing echoes against the walls of the old city. Laughter in Italian, which you’ve never heard before, but understand perfectly.

 *

Over where we eat, a painting of The Last Supper hangs like an open window and the dusty heat coming in from the Holy Land plays tricks on the thermostat. It’s a paint-by-number of the Michelangelo my grandfather did before I was born. There are the apostles, worried brokers at a staff meeting.

You can almost hear their whispers in the stirring of objects: a soup spoon coming to rest in a final bit of broth, an uncle trying to whistle through his teeth. What’s to be done about the Romans?

And there’s Jesus with his hands out and up, eyes lowered, supposedly offering his blood and body as soul nutrition for the next two thousand years. But the way my grandfather painted him, you know he’s just saying, “Can’t we eat already?”

 *

My grandfather died in the winter. A limousine came to pick us up: slippery cold leather seats and a paid driver who opened your door but didn’t look at you. He drove us around Schenectady with the snow on the wind, through the streets that made squares with each other, over the concrete squares that made the streets.

I sat nestled between my cousins and the fake fur of my grandmother’s coat.

The tears of the elderly don’t just fall away. They nestle in the rings and wrinkles and wait until the eye has seen through them. Once. Clearly. Then they climb down, descending the ladder of the face to the chin. And if they are my grandmother’s, they dampen the fake fur near the highest button of her fake fur coat and she squeezes closer to the children and follows the snowflakes, like us, with her eyes.

Pick one and follow it down. From where it comes into your eye to where it joins the rest of the world.

*

For three days after my grandfather died the religion of things shuddered in its siding. Lights went off of their own accord. Fruit left the basket.

The word supernatural is a misnomer. It’s all natural. Some of it is so natural we don’t believe it.

~ 

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

The meaning is in the meter. It’s all there, the whole Bible, in those lines. It’s the past, present and future mixing in a river. Three gods in one.

Marie’s sons were three in one. Men whose faces could slide behind a mask of a black mustache and receding hair who the old Italian women of Schenectady would mix up at the bakery, at the bank when they were all still here.

My Uncle Mark died on Super Bowl Sunday, 1983. Dolphins, Redskins. Where Central and South St. make a cross. The score was 27-17. The ice was black.

When the news reached my grandmother, she fainted in the shower and broke a bone in her ear. From then on she has been Mary hard of hearing. It is in this way that the big events sink in space like planets and pull the dust of our lives around them to make rings.

 *

Evil is not inherent in things. It is created by people. It lives in our eyes. In our hands when we make the sign of the goat.

Goodness is inherent in things. It lives in the brown scapular of Mt. Carmel tied around my gear shift. Whomever wears this scapular shall not perish by eternal fire.

It lives in the golden horn I wear around my neck that looks like a crooked tooth. In Italian, you say cornicello.

Goodness lives in Mark’s cross that my grandmother gave me when I turned sixteen. In Catholic, you say crucifix. Careful, the spirals dizzy the eye.

Catholicism is a religion of things. Things protect. People perish.

*   

Mark still lives in Marie’s house. In the den he looks out over the icy Mohawk at where the sunset should be. His beard is reckless and he could be a fisherman or maybe John the Baptist. Behind him a black bird sits on the wind and a rock trail leads out to the living room where his face sits upon the old RCA and watches you watch TV. Behind his pursed lips is a crisp AM voice which can be heard on radio waves from the eighties, shimmering like space dust as they approach the edge of the galaxy.      

Mark still lives in my turn of phrase.

That’s something Mark would say.

In my face, when I look up to the place where I can see my thoughts.

Sometimes you remind me so much of your Uncle Mark.

And I wonder, are my memories of him just photographs in my grandmother’s albums? Or are they magnetized bits of spirit that got caught in the spirals of his cross and come to life when electricity hops the dark ravines inside my skull.

*

Mount Carmel is a high hill in Israel, a book of a plateau laid open upon the desert. Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s church is a mountain of wood and brick on Pleasant St. in Schenectady. The cavern within is a den of eternal echo, of magnified whispers and Amens only thought of. Bowed heads, bald and red-spackled, and arthritic joints on the fold out prayer kneelers. The stations of the cross in a fragile glass cinema. Father Mancuso with the handshake that grinds your knuckles together to make sounds from a pagan instrument.

On the weekend of the Mt. Carmel Festa, for three days God sends plagues to test our piety. For three days there is heat like an impenetrable darkness. Under the blue tents in the church parking lot, vats of oil boil off and the trapped steam makes a fog of sweat and saliva and other holy lubricants.

For three days there is rain like locusts, collecting in pools where the tent sags until the janitor pushes them out with a broom. And everyone shrinks away from the tent edges, afraid of bugs in their hair.

Under the tents we pray in the shape of baked goods. Of calzones that my father and his mother turn over like dead fish in the boiling liquid. Of pizza fritta with snowy sugar from a jar of powdered angel wings. The prayers are sold and we hope that prayers work like the quarter game in the gambling tent. You give a quarter, but sometimes get two back that ring like little bells in the cash out dish. They say thank and you in the voices of St. Margaret and St. Catherine.

For one night of the three days, I stand before a table with six women and thirty pounds of dough. Amid old world dialects and new world accents we beat it with our palms, reading its creases to forecast the day. The oldest woman, named Rose or Louise, waddles along the table reminding us in a language of hands to dip our fingers in oil before taking up the dough. There is kneading and talking, rain and thunder, lightning and the heat from the vats. 

The women speak of birth with far away expressions as the wind rushes through their hair, blowing open a door between worlds. Some are young mothers, mysteriously beautiful, pressing a secret knowledge between their thumb and forefingers, looking off at nothing in particular, but directly into their children's eyes. I feel jealous and relieved to be a boy, a porter and not a door.  

When the sun comes out just before evening and the dead locusts evaporate into a fine mist, I wander away from the tent. My grandmother makes me a special pizza fritta that is a twist, a union under the powdered angel wings. It is the same twist she’s made me since my first days of the Festa when my father carried me here in his hands, that twists my stomach with the hidden holy oil that gathers in the dough when it is not pressed flat but sealed up in a union of itself.

I wander away from the creasing in my stomach to the men drinking red wine in plastic cups who tell you not to get married. They wear white shirts with top buttons undone, glimpses of gold and hair swirling underneath. They finish sentences with their hands, hands that make an echoless thud when they land on your back. Some of them are my dad, his Uncle Sal, the shoe salesman from Johnstown whose voice comes through the radio in Italian on Sundays; his uncle Joe, a used car man, a fifty-dollar-window-at-the-races man. They’re all telling me, don’t get married, in coarse laughter with big tongues and mouths that glisten red wine. Their only arguments are faces that shine and smiles that press a secret knowledge in the creases of their cheeks.

I wander. A girl stepping out of the evening changes my direction. Her glistening shoulder holds up a tank top strap like a tent post, telling me not to get married. I follow the shoulder for a while and listen to its silent arguments as the sun fades and the colored lights that cross the blockaded streets come on. Red and green and blue dipping from the trees. Colors dripping from a cord, wetting us with light.

A singer and his band have set up outside in front of the church. Their music has the bounce of threes, the spirit of the colored lights. Coming to rest against the wall of the Catholic school I pull my knees up to my chest and the street fills with dancers, with glistening shoulders old and young and spirited, looking up from time to time at the wooden crucifix where Jesus is bolted to the cross, to the church, wondering if one gets used to the nails.