Silk Stockings - 9

Ornithology

It was ornithology or the rosary. When seated in this church I believe in God. It is the only place that I do.

But outside the was not a word nor a sound from the highest of angels waiting for our prayers though waiting he might be in that jam session in the sky above. He’s spontaneous and confessional. Perhaps in the moment he only hears Kerouac and Burrows and Ginsberg and others of the ilk. Who's to say? Whose to know? Who is listening on the drum roll that starts things off? Nothing happens for I walk the unwalked garden of rose-beds on bird-alightment sorrow. It was the pioneer of the Beat Generation calling to me one the half-shell plunk from the Bay east or west. The stars so fine in every gleaming inch of revelry. Glistening with a sheen so blank as to be a symbol for the utter night past night of night.

That is why I remembered the previous night I visited a white door whose whiteness I remember like the hanged man in the marketplace with his blue jolts that only the devil can burn the devil out. It is the bell jar that I see quite indistinctly though – a low bungalow thrown up on West Milton Street in Bostonway. A long strip of houses all different on the outside yet all the same on the inside. And glowering over this one on plinths is a portal on the bargeboard and bellyband on the gable. Low stretch with grey paint with grey asphalt roof and white wood treated with plaster to hold the cracks. The brick steps lead upwards under deciduous trees to grace my racket of echoes from the steely street.

And through the hanging of utterspace, I knocked with knocking breath and waited breathlessly for a nun who was my first teacher and first love in first grade because I did not know they were pledged to God alone in the sleepless summer nights. God who never has a problem conjuring up a dryad hearing a white saint rav.

Then the white door opened wider than a hammer and a lady not yet old and nor yet pale stared at me and by some listless calling she remembered a younger cherubic face that was mine in some younger year.

“This is an unexpected surprise because I haven’t seen you in many a year.” The voice was soft.

“If you knew I was coming, would you bake a cake?” I mimed the closing phrase.

She smiled broadly and motioned me it. “What is so urgent?” She knew me too well: Expression there is nothing but action in motion.

I moved to come in already seeing that there were only three chairs with wooden backings for spartan in the watchword of a spinster and a nun—even so gossamer a nun as this.

I began in media res: “It is about a situation.”

“Is it a girl?”

“Partly but the is a dead body thrown in.

Her face softened. “God will forgive you if you have a reason. But why come talk to me? There is the confessional for matters as weighty as this.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot trust a priest to be absolutely silent.”

“How is that? It is his most sacred word.”

“Because the dead body is tied up with a scandal in the holy orders.”

She did not make a sound, but her face lost all color.

I began: “There is something untoward in the holy orders.”

“Go on.”

“And I killed a priest.”

“Go on.”

“He was delivering a message I think from the archbishop.”

“Go on.”

“To cover over the tracks.”

“Can you tell me the details?”

“It has nothing to do with money or the retirees.”

Her face calmed down. Then she added: “Do what you feel is right.”

“You will not tell?”

She laughed a bit. “You who came into my first-grade class knowing how to read English and Italiano. Who could do addition and subtraction, multiplication and division in his head, and should be the algorithm to take the square roots? Who sang Ave Maria so well? Who tore open the Latin book I gave him? God forbid.”

There were very little pleasantries about my time at St. Mary’s Parish inside the trapped house.

After leaving her home I went straight to the Forest Hills Charlie stop. There was an old Filene’s Close-Up shop that was going to be dismantled. I wonder who would get the close-outs, betting that whoever it was would not pay a shekel for them. I settled down in the car and drifted in and out of sleep, watching the rooves come and go. Until North Station woke me. And there I fled down the dirty slats to the Causeway that called me.

I crossed the river and saw up ahead of me the spire of the monument to Bunker Hill. A vast mass of Brobdingnagian bulk. It was remembered on Bunker Hill, who got the glory, but it was fought on Breeds Hill, who got the blood. I threw up into the river. I looked up again into the twisted murky sky. There were lights on the obelisk that shot it into the twilight.

Then a car came up.

“Anything I can help you with?”

I turned and saw the blue and white equipped with an ugly misshapen Irish footman who chanted the mantra. He was undoubtedly hoping that something would force its way to my mouth, but he was going to be disappointed. He knew my tongue was shut as the shafts of counterpoint in Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge descending in leaping red subject in reverse. The clouds opened a cold and chilly sprinkle. He drove away. I hope mad but I doubted it. Cops were seldom mad to be alive but were most willing to be mad as they beat you to death.

He was right, of course, there was nothing I would tell him in this life or the one after. Ain’t nobody know my troubles but God. The guns the trials and tribulations. Ain’t nobody going to know what happened if no one says what happened to a policeman? That’s the way it is in Charlestown under the smooth erection to the night.

I closed my eyes and was back in the church. As I stared, I remembered the nun’s words as I looked up into the dome castling the pinnacle of the parish home. Do what is right. For who? For Ave Maria?

And I prayed under the dome, though nothing happened.