THE WIND KICKED UP, BLOWING THROUGH THE CONCRETE CANYONS near St. Peter’s in downtown Manhattan. Hair fled unmoored, resembling Medusa halos, framing faces marked with the moist cruxes from Ash Wednesday at afternoon Mass. They passed by, and I was entranced by the haunting abstractions of the Holy.
I thought about my Catholic upbringing. By the time I had finished church religious studies, Vatican II was a decade in the past. Still we had aged nuns teaching the Baltimore Catechism. Limbo was where Buddha and aborted and unbaptized babies resided. Heaven was a place like home, but better. The impact of the changes wrought by the church reforms had seeped in because they now downplayed Hell, but the nuns certainly clearly defined the difference between a venial and a mortal sin.
I didn’t kill anyone, so I’m good.
***
I crossed the street to wait below the steps of St. Peter’s for Helen to come out, growing restless to see her. St. Peter’s was the ancestral parish, the first in Manhattan. In my genealogical research, I discovered that my five times maternal grandfather was a layperson at the church in the 1840s. He was a shipwright and made his home on Greenwich Street. There is a certain irony to spending five days a week only a few blocks from where he lived nearly two-hundred years ago, standing where he likely walked. Perhaps his spirit passes me, musing on the crossing paths of time and space.
I didn’t kill anyone, so I’m good.
The neighborhood back then was full of sin—both venial and mortal. I assume that my ancestor Edward Le Vere avoided the charms of the local brothels, because Edward was mentioned for his piety and charity in several letters written by the Venerated Pierre Toussaint, who attended the church and was legendary for his charitable work. That work has set him on the path to Catholic sainthood.
Edward’s goodness, so noted, didn’t exactly follow smoothly down the line. We are all human. I tend to believe in the karmic wheel and often act to avoid being crushed by repeating bad choices and habits of generations before. I’m scuffed up by the vagaries of experiences, but, as I said before, I’m good.
***
Soon Helen appeared, and carefully navigated the steep granite steps in her new black patent ankle boots, grasping the railing with one hand, as her other clutched her bag tight against her waist. She wore a black cloak over her flowing skirt, her graying auburn hair billowing in the breeze, crossed forehead marked, accentuating her pale features.
A kiss, a love you, call and response.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go in?” she said. “The line isn’t long.”
I nodded. “You know me. I haven’t done Confession since sixteen.”
“This isn’t Communion.”
“Maybe later. Likely never.”
Helen didn’t go to Mass much, either, but more than I did. She believed. I wanted to. That’s the difference.
Helen was the remnants of lost love, striving to take its place since we met by chance on at a vintage jazz party last December on the Second Avenue subway station.
That day, she wore a gorgeous wide-brimmed green hat and squinted at me, thinking I looked like someone she knew. When she put on her glasses and saw I wasn’t, she asked me for a dance anyway. Helen said she loved the purple tie I wore. It had a design of mice running up a set of stairs. I bought it the day before at the Housing Works thrift shop on 23rd Street.
So by this happenstance, we danced and I offered to take her out to brunch.
***
I walked her to her job at Seven World Trade, where she was an analyst for an Australian-based financial services firm. I’m three blocks away in my house of toil at a legal publishing house. While we hadn’t moved in together, we ought to have. We had designated dresser drawers and closet space in each others’ apartments.
As we crossed the pocket park near the building entrance, Helen slowed down.
“I’m feeling a little weird,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her steps more hesitant. “I was just thinking that if I had worn my glasses at the dance that I would have not approached you.”
“What makes you say that?’
“I don’t know.” Her hand grasped mine tighter. “It’s kind of bizarre to think this.”
“Well, you met me,” I said. “And still asked me to dance.”
“Yes, I did.”
***
We have a thing when parting to not turn back to look at the other. This time we both broke it. Helen turned and smiled shyly. I smiled back and waved.
***
On the subway, leaving behind Edward Le Vere and Ash Wednesday. It was a long day at work, overseeing final changes to books on legal procedures to eyestrain.
My mind wandered to my favorite film, Citizen Kane. The scene that stuck with me was the exchange between the reporter and Kane’s aged business manager, Mr. Bernstein.
In the scene, Bernstein tells the reporter a story about taking a ferry to New Jersey in 1896. He says, “As we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in. On it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol. Now, I only saw her for one second. She did not see me at all.”
Bernstein concludes. “But I bet a month hasn’t gone by since I haven’t thought of that girl.”
My left hand clenched, grasping thin air.
I thought about the woman in the wide-brimmed green hat and the round steel-framed glasses. It was last December at the vintage jazz party in the subway station. She didn’t notice me at all, but I found her striking–perhaps unapproachable.
I wondered if diffidence is a venial or mortal sin. I guess it depends on the circumstances, and I think I’m good.
Mike Lee is an editor, photographer and reporter for a trade union newspaper in New York City. His fiction is published in Ghost Parachute, Reservoir, The Airgonaut and The Alexandria Quarterly and many others. He also blogs at the photography website Focus on the Story. Website: mleephotoart.com.
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