EIGHT
NATIVITY
Anigel Reyes was annoyed whenever her brother-in-law said, “You can tell this isn’t a Polish church, not really, because Polish churches are…. Beautiful.” He always paused before saying the word beautiful to let everyone know how beautiful beautiful really could be. Anigel had never seen these Polish churches, and anyway, John Balusik had to be dumb as hell if he didn’t understand how beautiful Saint Celestine’s really was.
Saint Celestine, Anigel knew, was the pope who had sent Saint Patrick to Ireland, and when every Irish community this side of New York named their churches Saint Patrick or maybe sometimes Saint Brigit, the Irish of what would one day be part of Geschichte Falls, Michigan raised up Saint Celestine’s. Saint Celestine’s of the polished floors so bright they were like a sea of glass, Saint Celestine’s of the thick high, far apart pillars that reached tree high spreading out to make the branches that became the ribs of the great overarching nave. Saint Celestine’s with its swinging brass lanterns, and the smell of old wood wax and incense from Sunday masses that sank into everything and lasted all week, where the little grottoes to Saint Patrick, Saint Ita, Saint Bridget, Saint Celestine, Saint Joseph and the Mother of God herself, always winked with votives burning in red glasses, Saint Celestine’s was where she had first fell in awe with God.
And she had been in awe. She never understood how anyone could not be. Before they had moved up to Westhaven, life had been here, and in the end life continued to be here in what was now called Little Poland. Her mother was born here, for her mother was Black, yes, but her grandmother had been Irish and this had been an Irish neighborhood. There was, truthfully, very little difference between Little Poland on one side of the Brigham Street Bridge and Westhaven on the other except one had begun as Black, the other as Irish and one succeeded to Polish and then Mexican while the other had succeeded to Mexican and Puerto Rican. The inhabitants went between both, for they were more like each other, more like Chicago or Detroit from where so many of them had come, than like East Sequoya and Geschichte Falls.
And though Anigel had heard with wry amusement about the rivalry between Saint Adjeanet and Evervirgin, this church was the one that looked like a proper old church in a great city, and when she stepped out of it and looked down onto Calvert Street, she felt she was looking at a proper city.
The snow was softly falling in the glow of the headlights as Ross Allen’s van trudged softly through the snow behind Chayne Kandzierski’s hearse and they traveled from Curtain to Kirkland for Midnight Mass. Anigel was glad Ross was driving, because in her heart was a strange and not entirely sweet pain. She was not feeling nostalgia. She was remembering the Christmas Eves of her childhood when she had wanted something. She was remembering trying to get her mother or her father up to come to Saint Celestine’s, or asking her mom to put up a crèche beside the cheap Santa Clauses from the Dollar Store. One year, she and Ross had gone to Saint Celestine’s for Midnight Mass and she’d heard the beautiful music and seen all the families together, whispering to each other, singing unselfconsciously with their happy, innocent white faces and she’d felt something, some pain. She’d wanted to cry. Something in her hurt at Christmas.
Something in her had always hurt in church. And in the last days that something had gone away. She wished, almost, that they had stayed at that monastery where there was no space for the mother who sent her to Rosary High School and made sure she attended Mass everyday, who would have slapped her across the face if she’d said she was an atheist, but who would never go to church or put up a baby Jesus. Who sent her to Saint Celestine’s alone to wonder what healthy families were like, families who believed purely. When she had been at the monastery it had been just her and just everyone else, and they had all been wanting something real, and in the wanting…. They had found it.
“We’re all alone,” Anigel said as the van trundled over the fresh snow and she looked out and saw another car slowly moving north up Kirkland.
“What?”
“Ross, we’re all alone before God,” Anigel said, almost breathlessly.
“And that’s alright.”
She had once said she did not believe in any of this, but what was the this? There was something more than belief surely. She did not know Saint Adjeanet’s, did not know these people But she knew how she would have felt once upon a time. She would have felt too wild, too uncertain and unhappy, too dark, too Mexican, too Negro, too lonely for this place. But this darkened place with its few lit lanterns was for forlorn people. She saw it now. She saw, in the crowd, Cameron Dwyer’s family. She saw her mother and her uncle and Niall and Dave and Dave’s father… David? And the washed out white woman who must have been Dave’s mother, and there, on the other side of the church, looking like a tall and tired mouse, was Bill Dwyer beside Cameron. That was Chris Knapp with them. In another time she would never have waited for Cameron to catch her eye, but now she did. She waited for Cameron to come to her.
“You look awful,” Anigel said simply.
Cameron threw her arms so tight around her, she wanted to sob.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Cameron said. “You don’t even know the things that have happened.”
“I know some of them,” Anigel said.
“Can we talk? Are you busy? Maybe in a few days?”
“I’m not busy at all? After Mass? Or tomorrow maybe?”
“No,” Cameron said, and Anigel could tell she was trying to keep it together, “After church if you can?”
“Yeah,” Anigel said. Then, “Yes.”
She said, “You want to see the crèche with me?”
Cameron took a breath and nodded, and they went up the aisle and knelt before the half life sized stable with its ox and ass, its Mary in a red gown and blue veil who apparently, even though she had just given birth, had no problem kneeling in worship of her porcelain son.
“That’s such bullshit,” Anigel whispered.
Cameron looked at her, wide eyed, and covered her mouth.
Anigel looked at the angel hooked at the cross point of the stable, bearing the scroll that read, “Gloria in excelsis Deo.”
“And yet it isn’t,” Anigel whispered.
The procession would have to walk around the nativity scene which was squarely before the altar. On small bales of hay, the plaster shepherds kept their watch over plaster sheep.
“It’s us, you know,” Cameron said.
Anigel looked at the girl.
“All of us,” she said, looking over the figures.
“Not quite real, all waiting. All waiting…. For something. For God. Desperate for him to send any sign. Come any way. Even if it’s a baby.”
The lights had been dimming. The lights had dimmed.
Anigel crossed herself and Cameron did too. They rose.
“Godhead here in hiding whom I do adore
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more.
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.”
With no organ, their voices touching the walls and echoing over the church, the choir sang into the darkness.
“So,” Ross said as Anigel took her seat beside him, “it’s not the monastery, but…”
“Oh, it’s still plenty wonderful,” Anigel said, leaning her head on Ross’s shoulder.
“And you know what?”
“Huh?” Ross said.
“I think my eyes were just shut. There’s really so much happening if you’re looking, so much miracle. Like Flipper and Jimmy and Macy here. We were able to bring them, and we all get Christmas together.”
“I wonder if they think it’s a miracle,” Ross wondered, “or if they’d rather be home.”
“They’d rather be here with some of their family, than stuck on campus in Walter, I’ll bet,” Anigel said. “And if it’s not their miracle, it’s my miracle. Everyone in this place has so much... Stuff. And here we are, for each other. In this moment. That’s a miracle.”
“Well, that was a beautiful Mass,” Mrs. Alexander told Chayne. She was with her husband, Bill Wynn Alexander, and Nehru was right behind them with Brad, the two men looking uncommonly formal in new suits.
“I’m surprised to see any of you in church,” Chayne said.
“Well, Chanakuh was early this year,” Nehru’s mother said. “So, no real competition.”
“I didn’t mean you,” Chayne said. “I meant the rest of these sinners.”
“Oh, Chayne,” Brad said, loftily, “it’s Jesus’s birthday. Everyone wants to come and say hello.”
Nehru, who divided his religious duties between Temple Beth Shan downtown, and occasionally Saint Adjeanet’s, said, “And we’ll be back in time for Good Friday.”
“Well, it looks like I came back just in time,” Anigel said when she was sitting in the back pew with Cameron, and Hannah was playing the organ as people lingered in the church, always threatening to go out into the night and return home, but finding one more person to wish a Merry Christmas before leaving.
“Or maybe I left mine just in time,” Cameron said.
“So you and your dad are staying together?”
“Yeah.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“At my aunt and uncle’s.”
“What about Niall?”
“I can’t blame Niall for not wanting to talk to Dad. He’s probably glad to be free of him.”
“I understand that. Look,” Anigel said, “I don’t know your father. You love him and you’re close and that’s great, but from Niall’s place he seems like a real asshole. Here’s the thing: don’t spend Christmas alone.”
“Oh, we’re going over to Russell’s tomorrow.”
“Well, there you go. I was going to say come over to the house with us. I’m not sure if I’m having you horn in on Chayne because he’s supposed to be gone after eleven. But, well, you know. You’re always welcome. Whatever I end up doing, you’re always welcome.”
Cameron hugged Anigel quickly.
“By the way,” she said, “is that your boyfriend?”
“Ross? No. Ross is my best friend,” Anigel said. “And I’m glad he’s here cause usually he doesn’t do Christmas either, but this time I’m determined we’re all going to have one hell of a celebration.”
One o’ clock in the morning on Christmas, Russell is always sure that this is what the first Christmas must have been like. He imagines the whole world humming with the strange magic of earth united to heaven and hope in the place of what was hopeless, because he certainly feels it. After church, after his solo, very little matters. Blessedly, he is not even self conscious. Things will sort themselves out. All things. Tonight Cody is all cleaned up in a black suit, looking alarmingly like Thom and yet, never really like Thom, too broad and wild for a suit. When Russell embraces him and smells his cologne, he is full of love for him, but all love seems pure now. Nothing seems doomed. Back on 1735 Breckinridge, Macy has stayed home with Grandma Sara and Aunt Denise, and the house smells like tomorrow morning’s breakfast, apple cheese Danish, raspberry cheese Danish, cinnamon raisin Danish. For the last two days Sara has been rolling and re rolling the dough and tonight she leads Patti and Denise—Macy has no interest in cooking—in the last rolls, and in cutting the strips in the dough that will make the braided patterns. The house is filled with the smell, and there is no need to be stingy or restrain oneself because one will be eaten right now, right here.
There will be coffee. No one feels much like going to sleep. And they will open one present a piece. Macy is philosophical about her lack of presents, but surprised when Jimmy slips her a small box.
“How?”
“I went out today,” is all he says.
And he is surprised when Macy slips him a small box and says. “I went out today, too.”
“I bet,” Macy says to Flipper, “you thought we forgot about you.”
“Oh,” Flipper waves it off in his reedy voice, “I wasn’t even thinking that way.”
But of course he was, Russell knows. He would too.
Macy runs to her room and then Jimmy says, “Hold on,” and followers her. A few minutes later, they both come back with white paper bags.
“No you guys, didn’t!” Flipper says, and Macy reaches in it and hands him a small box and Jimmy shrugs, waiting his turn, and says, “I guess great minds think a like.”
“And sometimes ours do too,” Macy says.
“Don’t open it now,” she tells Flipper as he keeps her present on his lap and accepts Jimmy’s. “And it’s nothing special, so don’t get excited.”
“With that word of warning,” Flipper says, grinning, “I won’t. And thank you, guys.”
“Oh, and we both got you this,” Macy tells Russell and hands him a box from her bag.
“Well!” Russell says, grinning and pretending like he isn’t ready to open it right there..
And Kristin says, “Well!” satisfied as she rocks her baby, strangely Madonna like, “this is what being a family is all about.”
She yawns, and along with Uncle Reese is the first to go to bed. Finn and Meg arrived in the night and are already asleep. When Flipper says he can’t stay up any longer, Russell says he’ll show him the spare room downstairs.
“Mom and Dad had the basement redone when they thought they would be basement people,” Russell explains.
“It’s huge.”
“Right?” says Russell. “And I guess they were right because now we’re sort of running a hotel. So,” he shrugs, “here is your room.”
Flipper puts down his bag which has been in the living room all afternoon, and Russell says, “Look, I got you something too.”
He hands him a bag that is not white and there is no fancy wrapping.
“T.S. Eliot,” Flipper says appreciatively.
“The collected works,” Russell says, feeling embarrassed. “It seemed like you. I thought you might like it.”
“No, no,” Flipper says, grinning. He shakes his head.
“Russell, you don’t know how glad I am to see you. I wondered if I would again. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like, to meet someone and be like…. This is the realest moment. And you wonder, was it real, was it a dream? But, you’re here, and giving me Eliot and…. Ross told me to call you.”
“What?”
“Ross told me I should call you. He knew I was thinking of you.”
“Why didn’t you.”
“Cause I’m dumb. But…” Flipper bends over and begins rummaging through his blue duffel bag. He pulls out an equally ill wrapped bag and hands it to Russell.
“Allen Ginsberg. Collected works. And… On the Road. You trumped me!”
“On the Road’s a shit book,” Flipper declares. “It’s kind of whiny, but I feel like you need to have it if you’re going to get Ginsberg.
“I’m so fucking tired my eyes can barely stay open, but please, promise me we’ll get some time together.”
“It seems like an easy promise to keep,” Russell says.
He thinks of saying so much, but instead, he says, “Goodnight, Flip.”
