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"We preach what we practice," she told Peter, insisting that he should climb the five marble steps to the pulpit right now, just as he would do for real the following morning. "You don't have to say anything, but it's best to stand there for a couple of minutes 'getting a feel' for the situation, understand?"
Peter ascended the steps as indifferently as somebody using a step ladder to change a blown light bulb. He glanced quickly to his left where Father Félix was sitting with a white brace around his neck in front of Shannon and Sean who were seated next to each other, attentively absorbing every word he had to say. Two "ushers" who had already been instructed to ask whether the arriving guests were "on the side of the bride or the groom" and then told how they were to escort them "arm in arm to their predetermined places" were now indifferently sitting on both sides of the main aisle, talking to each other across the eight or nine foot expanse.
Nobody, so far as Peter could see, was even looking in his direction. But in churches of all denominations, with their constant suggestion of existing or immanent miracles, you never know.
How strange it is looking at everything from here, above it all! Peter thought. Nothing but empty pews before him! Six Stations of the Cross on one side of the church and another six on the other! Candles flickering in the semi-darkness of the surrounding chapels! In the deeper gloom at the back, an old woman dressed entirely in black, lighting still another votive candle! More than likely for her deceased husband or, perhaps, for a child.
Otherwise, complete impartiality, like somebody randomly paging through TV Guide.
It was afterwards during the rehearsal dinner at the Marriott on City Line Avenue when Fr. Félix and Peter first spoke with each other. With all the clanging of silverware on gold-rimmed dishes, it was hard if not impossible to maintain a conversation, but when the two of them met and automatically shook hands, it was as though they had stepped into a sound-proof booth where everything external was filtered out and all they could hear were their own words and . . . and it seemed to Peter, their very own simultaneously beating heartbeats.
"I'm Lope Félix," the priest began.
"Peter Stone," Shannon's uncle answered back, immediately happy that all semblance of potentially distancing titles was no longer a question to be reckoned with. The one was a liturgical "father" and the other an academic Ph.D.--a doctor, in short, but neither the one nor the other made an issue of his title.
"It's your mother I'm worried about," Fr. Félix began immediately as though he were an intimate in the family. "She's frail and failing, but she agreed to come to the wedding tomorrow." He paused a moment, possibly weighing the impact of his next words. "She's been a Catholic all her life and is comfortable only with whatever's traditional. Vatican II
is meaningless to her."
How do you know about my mother? Peter was on the verge of asking and, at the same time, just moments away from rising to her defense. But Shannon his niece, of course, was the answer. She and her husband-to-be Sean were "personalizing" most of the wedding ceremony and theirs was the choice of scripting individual parts.
"Ninety years of tradition are enough to make you feel that what you're doing day in and day out are the right Rules of the Road, don't you think?"
"Ma's ninety-five," Peter corrected.
"Not even a moment in eternity," Fr. Félix commented without a trace of emotion, like a conjoining of a sigh and a laugh in the same breath. "But it's only on this side of the abyss we have any control of what's what, don't you agree?" And with that, he turned on his heels. With a thunderous crash the audio of the reception room of the Marriott came back on with a vengeance. If at first it sounded like a medieval clashing of swords in the heat of battle, it almost immediately settled down to a cacophony of voices that, like birds with the sinking of the sun, fell to nothing as Sean's best man rose to offer his toast.
"They're not married yet, are they?" Peter asked of one of the ushers sitting right behind him at another table. Their eyes fastened momentarily on each other's, long enough to realize they had never even seen each other before, and then dropped like a parent's resolve when first trying to bring up the question of the birds and the bees with a blossoming teenager and being told they´re living in another time that no longer exists: "That's not the way things are anymore. Don'cha know anything?"
Even Fr. Félix seemed to be working with a calendar that reckoned the days differently as he stood up and offered his own toast. Glasses of champagne were still clinking against each other, drowning out his first short sentence or two, but by the time he said "Sean and Shannon, having promised their troth to each other, are already married in the eyes of God," the entire banquet room was completely silent again. "In their honor we are all gratefully congregated here and our prayers are with them."
"Ask and you shall receive," the unknown usher commented and quickly drained his drink.
###
Meals-on-Wheels or St. John's fore-runner to it had worked wonderfully for the close to forty years since Mrs. Stone's husband Matt was run over by a subway car speeding south under Broad Street between Spring Garden and City Hall.
"I guess you're right," the subway conductor had admitted to the investigating officers of the Philadelphia Police Department. "Since Challie was driving the next train five minutes behind and had to brake so as not to run over him again, when you check the timesheet for when I went by, I gotta be the one what hit him."
"An' he seen me coming, too. Waved the way he always did, but come to think of it . . . "
"Come to think of it, what?" the detective asked nonchalantly. A ploy he'd been taught at The Police Academy, one that seems to have been the model for Colombo on TV close to half a century later.
"You don't get to see very much when you work underground," the conductor exhaled as his mind's eye kept flashing back to the scene he was being questioned about. "But what you seen once or twice is what you expect to see all the rest of your life. When the tracks that never change tell yeh where you're goin' from beginnin' to end, you get used to it. . . . An' the least you think about it the better, huh?"
"And . . . ?"
"And . . . " the conductor who had been promised that his name would "never show up in no newspaper" continued: "And what struck me a little strange about the whole thing , knowing now what we all know, is that Mattie signaled he heard me coming with both hands over his head. Like during the War when somebody was giving up, heh?"
"You think that's important or what?"
"We'd get to do a little chit-chat in the canteen every now and then out to the end of the line either at Frankford or at 69th and Market, but no . . . Never had no idea he was havin' problems he couldn't put up with. That what you guys are thinkin'?"
"Thinking's got nothing to do with the way things are," one of the officer's commented.
He was wrong, of course, but that was the end of that.
Now that Peter was "home" for awhile and was willing and able to take care of his mother, there was another ingredient in the mix. Fr. Félix had never previously even heard of Manayunk, but he would be there, too.
###
"I'm calling to congratulate you on your performance in the pulpit at St. John's," Fr. Félix said on the phone three days after the wedding was history and while Sean and Shannon were still on their honeymoon in Jamaica. "I know you were thinking about ad-libbing and saying something personal instead of reading the psalm Shannon had asked you to read. But you did the right thing, didn't you?"
"Who am I talking to?" Peter asked after his initial surprise washed over him like a wave and left him feeling damp across his forehead. The caller's slight accent, though, was like an anaphoric poster at a political convention, like "I Like Ike"; once you've seen and heard it, it sticks with you forever.
"Lope Félix and I'm calling to ask you a favor."
"The priest from the wedding, right?"
"Lope Félix," the caller repeated. "I don't know if Sean and Shannon told you yet, but Mary Elizabeth and her daughter . . . " There was a pause during which you could hear a deep swallow and then: "Mary Elizabeth, Rachel and I . . . We're now a family . . . and we're living here in Manayunk."
Peter had sensed the sexual charge between Fr. Félix and Mary Elizabeth from the first time he laid eyes on them at the rehearsal in St. John's, but no . . . Nobody had even whispered a word about how the two of them had become an item, as they say, nor anything about how Jesuit Scranton University where Sean and Shannon had been students actually "recommended" the living arrangement "because, under the circumstances, it's best for everyone involved."
"And you want what?" Peter asked a second time.
"It's an Italian family: parents of some guys you went to high school with."
###
Mr. Taborelli had lung cancer: smoked Camels for seemingly the seventy some years of his life. And he was obviously dying. But since there was no insurance, he was doing it the old way: at home in bed surrounded by those he loved, by those who loved him. And Santa Lucia, his parish church, was equally in a bind. A single senile priest hermetically lost in Alzheimer's and babbling exclusively in his native Italian. Moreover, house calls for the old priest were completely out of the question for the simple reason that if you don't know where you're coming from, there's no way in God's creation you'll ever get back there safe and sound.
"The Church is hemorrhaging," Fr. Félix whispered in front of the Taborelli home on Cresson Street, his words almost inaudible as a train rumbled overhead on the El on its way to downtown Philadelphia. "Manayunk is full of churches," he confided, lowering his voice that was now making a clicking sound like a light switch being turning on and off. "And empty of traditional priests," he continued, with the index finger of his right hand pointing accusingly at his own chest.
Moments later, with a signaling for Peter and Angela, the daughter, to leave the bedroom, Fr. Félix heard the dying man's confession and administered the Church's last sacrament: Extreme Unction.
"Did you understand him?" Peter asked as the two of them emerged moments later into the cacophony of echoing car horns, doorway conversations, and multiple other unidentified sound effects that are always so much a part of Manayunk.
"I wasn't listening," Fr. Félix whispered. "My Spanish and his native Italian are similar but there are differences, you know."
Peter's traveling around the world had found him voluntarily stranded in the Scandinavian countries for a couple of years and he knew immediately the difference between speaking Swedish and Danish, for example. Except for idiomatic expressions and a few individual words, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can communicate perfectly with each other. But as Fr. Félix had just said about Italian and Spanish, there are differences and they more often than not are important.
"If you weren't listening, what in hell's good was that man's last confession, Father?"
"Lope," the priest corrected. "Please call me Lope because that's who I am. One of this world's sinners."
Fr. Félix and Peter stopped walking and stood facing each other. And just as had been the situation in the reception room of the Marriott when even the wooden wall paneling seemed to be expectantly trying to decipher the silence, Cresson Street became an isolation booth holding its breath.
"If you don't speak Italian . . . " Peter began a second time.
Peter's green eyes met Fr. Félix's sagging brown ones and, wordlessly, they were communicating with each other.
"Mr. Taborelli was speaking with his God, Peter, and I'll bet that was the happiest moment of his life."
"Was God listening?" Peter asked when it finally became obvious that green and brown eyes don't have much of anything to say to each other except proximity in color.
"Does it matter? When it's all over and done, does anything matter if nobody's keeping score? . . . if nobody's there at the drawbridge tending The Castle Dear?"
"Is anybody there?" Peter asked almost silently once he got over the surprise that the priest and he had so much in common. "Is there anybody tending The Castle Dear, as you call it."
"All of us mortals" rolled an answer, and it was like a voice from the priest's toes that never made it out of his mouth without touching every intervening organ. "In our own ways and at our own places, we're all answering that question." A moment sped by and then: "That's why nobody can speak for anybody else."
When Peter looked up to question further, Fr. Félix's sad brown eyes had already fallen. And there was nothing further to see.
"More than anything,"-- Father Félix continued gasping and chocking on his own words-- "our job is to make dying as easy as possible. And making life more meaningful for everybody else--that's what we're all about."
###
JVs (Jesuit Volunteers), at first glance, are like apprenticeships in the Middle Ages: You work your ass off, seemingly day and night, and when it's over, somebody else gets the credit. And what you wind up doing is highly depressing: caring for the indigent and the under-represented in any number of ways; and now, with the advent of alcohol addiction and AIDS, making comfortable the last moments of the afflicted as their immune systems shut down completely and their wasted and almost weightless bodies are carried away completely, floating like un-embodied feathers toward nests unknown.
It was through the Jesuit connection at Scranton U that Shannon and Sean first met. After they graduated, both of them flew to Alaska "to take care of the Inuit," as had her parents a day after they "ritualized" their commitment to each other in the very same church: St. John's. This later time, though, the situation was even better because Shannon had lived the first twelve years of her life there, until her father and mother were killed in the crash of a Cessna in a snowstorm. Accordingly, she had the added advantage of speaking Inuktitut, the native language.
###
Two days later, without even making the pretense of associating Peter with somebody from his past that was more than thirty years distant, Fr. Félix called again, claiming he was having trouble walking . . . that he couldn't get from one place to the other without somebody else's help.
This time Confession and Extreme Unction were for a Polish woman on Gay Street in Manayunk.
But the two of them got there too late. Mrs. Bernadette Zabrinski was already dead. "Old age," according to the coroner who "conveniently" arrived after all the "religious" rites had been administered.
"Please tell me it isn't true," Monika, the daughter pleaded, and if she had been fifty before all of this happened, she now looked closer to the age of her now-dead mother. "Can't you do something? Something to make all of this go away?"
"Let's all stand up and join hands," Fr. Félix coughed after a moment's pause.
And that was what they did. The three of them held hands from across both sides of the narrow bed of the deceased, and their extended arms and clasped hands over the corpse were visual proof of their unity in purpose. "Let's pray the Apostle's Creed," he suggested further, and his raspy, chocking and sometimes over-the-rocks deep voice gave them a beginning.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
Peter's and Monika's voices were only a split moment behind in this recitation. She knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary by heart, of course, but The Apostle's Creed? No way! To the contrary, she was more accustomed to hearing the "Twenty-third Psalm" on such occasions upon the death somebody or another among her many friends from up the hill in Protestant Roxborough.
Peter's pause had an even simpler explanation: he hadn't prayed that prayer or any other since seemingly forever.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
In The Holy Catholic Church
In The communion of saints . . .
Still again, Fr. Félix's rumbling voice was seemingly raking itself over the rocks, as it were, and the words even seemed to echo back on themselves.
In the resurrection of the body,
And in life everlasting. Amen.
The prayer ended with Monika's voice being the only one whispering the last two verses.
In this, her ultimate moment of crises, she had remembered.
That was when the local coroner, discretely, rang at the door and wound up telling them all what they already knew.
###
"This's where I want somebody to toss my ashes after I get cremated," Peter pointed as he and Fr. Félix got by car as close to the Wissahickon as was possible: that magical place that had been classified as "worthy of development" by Roosevelt's Make Work projects of the thirties. "It's called Devil's Pool."
The two of them were standing in the middle of a narrow, railed, wooden bridge spanning an abyss between massive rock formations separated from each other by about thirty yards. A scene from a child's catechism: a child on a threatening abyss. Rock formations on both sides. In front of them was a serrated rock escarpment with a thin stream of water flowing over it and landing fifteen feet below with a rising and falling bubbling of protest. The pool itself was no deeper than ten feet deep at most but the water was crystal clear and you could easily see its bottom even through the perpetually changing, magnifying and distorting bubbling on the surface.
"This's where I used to skinny dip," Peter whispered as though in a confessional box of his youth. "And it's where my dreaming began."
Fr. Félix heard Peter's words but with his eyes suddenly filling with warm tears, he turned and looked in the opposite direction. The priest's hands clutched at the railing and his knees seemed to buckle, something that seemed to be happening to him more and more as the two of them, him with a cane now, would stroll though Manayunk each evening. "And that?" the priest asked, pointing downstream while surreptitiously wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve.
"That's the Wissahickon," Peter explained. "What we're standing over right here is Cresham Creek. Pure and clear, as you can see, but right there (Peter was now pointing downstream, too) . . . but right there it dies in the Wissahickon. Ever hear such a strange name before?"
Fr. Félix, having been born and raised in Spain, didn't answer because he knew instinctively that just as every culture marks certain days on its calendar as so-and-so's birthday, or whatever, there are customs and traditions the world around as strange as the New World must have appeared to Columbus.
"It's an Indian name," Peter continued. "The Lenapis, I think. They also named Manayunk, meaning 'drinking place.' Wissahickon in their language means 'muddy waters.'"
"And the Wissahickon dies in the Schuylkill River . . . another strange word, eh?" Peter continued. "It means 'hidden' in Dutch. Hundreds of years ago before this country was even a country, a party of explorers sailed up the east bank of the Delaware as far as they could go, never noticing that on the west bank there was anything noteworthy at all. But on the way back . . . "
"And you went with the streams, the creeks and the rivers to the ocean," Fr. Félix mumbled because he had already heard most of the details from Shannon as she verbally introduced all of the future participants in her up-coming wedding.
"Been round and round the world time and time again," Peter mumbled. "Almost thirty years of my life going from place to place until . . . "
"Until . . . ?"
"Until after awhile they all started looking so much alike and I stopped going ashore anymore. All the ports, one after the other, got worse and worse, like the clear Cresham dying in the Wissahickon . . .
"And know what?" Peter continued as soon as he had swallowed the bad memories just as you sometimes choke on your favorite food for the very reason that you're trying to eat it too fast.
"And now it's just the ocean you've got left," Fr. Félix sighed in answer, and his brown eyes, like over-poured cups from the ethnic bars on every corner of Manayunk were on the verge of spilling over. "And you know why? You know why you'll never be happy again until you die? Why none of us will ever be happy until it's all over and done?"
Cresham Creek continued making its final plunge over the escarpment behind them and kept inching its way toward the muddy Wissahickon in the direction they were looking, and the priest's question hung unanswered in the air around them. Both of them knew the answer and you talk out loud--as Shannon had learned about the Inuit--only when confronted by the unusual. And in the barren and frozen expanses of Alaska almost never is there anything out of the ordinary.
Silently the two of them turned and began walking back to the car that was awaiting them at Valley Green. And both of them, for different reasons, limped along like versions of themselves twenty years older.
###
Violet Stone had her long-deceased husband Matt's Social Security and a pension from the Philadelphia Transportation Company, but when you are ninety-five, it isn't balm for blisters you need anymore. To the contrary, what you're looking for is completely free. But, ironically, you have to both name it and find it for yourself.
"She's dying," the Hospice Lady who would visit and administer morphine every other day whispered to Peter.
"How much longer?"
"It's time to call a priest," she answered. "And right after he leaves, I'll
do what I have to do."
###
Fr. Félix, this time, arrived on time.
"You're sinless," he told Mrs. Stone after hearing or pretending to hear her final confession. More than a month had gone by since she last put in her set of false teeth--"Because I don't need to chew baby food, do I?"--and without them only she was capable of knowing for sure what she was saying.
"I'm dying, aren't I?" spilled from her inward-turned lips with an accompaniment of bubbly saliva.
A moment sped by and then another before there was any answer. "We're all dying from the moment we're born," Fr. Félix answered sadly. "It's just a matter of time for all of us."
"Is there anything left you want done?" he asked.
But for a long time there wasn't any answer. Nothing but more drooling from the mouth. "My son Peter. Your friend." Violet Stone finally whispered with her eyelids closed, and her voice the phantom she was soon to become. "He's been away too long. Please bring him back to the fold."
Mrs. Stone's voice and spirit froze for a moment as another organ began its shut-down phase but when you've lived and functioned well, except for a couple of "sick days" every now and then, it's hard to just quit and say "never more."
"Your mother wants you to pray with her," Fr. Félix told Peter moments later.
"Me? How?" Peter asked out loud and for the first time since standing in the pulpit at St. John's he had no idea of what he was going to do until he actually did it.
"This's your mother," Fr. Félix answered with no answer at all. "She loves you. Always wanted you to become a priest. Always has and always will."
"But if I don't believe, how can I be a hypocrite and pray to somebody or something that doesn't exist?"
"How can I be a priest who doesn't preach?" he was answered, staring deeply into Peter's eyes.
Moments staggered by with only the sound of feet dragging on the floor as the Hospice Lady impatiently paced back and forth in the upstairs hallway, giving all appearance of being alone with her thoughts and her soon-to-be-realized mission with that little "extra" dose of morphine always kept in reserve until the very end.
"Peter! Peter! Peter upon this Rock," Fr. Félix exhaled deeply, and with that he literally fell to the floor with his legs folding under him.
"What? Jesus, Father! What's the matter with you?"
When the priest managed to push himself to a sitting position, his voice still sounded rough and raspy as though it were still trying to make itself heard through an irregular arrangement of rocks. "It's ALS," he finally managed to say. "First it gets your mind and then your body. In this country I think you call it Lou Gehrig's disease. I've lived with it for close to six months . . . but now with you in charge . . . "
"But . . . ! But . . . !" Peter protested, understanding only about half of what he was hearing. "Should I call 9-1-1? Mary Elizabeth? Get you some help?"
"Your mother's waitin', Peter. Get on with it."
###
"Ma," Peter called at the door to his mother's bedroom. And there wasn't any answer.
A thin sheet covered Mrs. Stone's frail body with only her gray head exposed and there was almost no sign at all of respiration under it. The nurse from hospice had already "done her thing," making the end so painless as to be almost a non-event. And that was where Mrs. Violet Stone, mother of Peter and widow forever, seemed to be: outside the push and shove of the world, suspended on Jacob's ladder between this known life under the clouds and the unknown one on the other side.
"Ma," he called again and still no answer.
Peter sat on the edge of the bed and took his mother's hand in both of his. It was knobby at the joints and almost completely fleshless, completely devoid of the unconditional love and care that had once come soft and soothing, and seemingly forever.
"Ma, it's me your son Peter. Father Stone. I've come home from the world for good, Ma. A new kind of priest, Ma, and I'm here to help you now . . . to help all of us find the way back to The Beginning."
No answer. No sign of respiration at all.
"We're gonna pray the Apostle's Creed, Ma" he promised aloud, knowing all the time it was already too late. "Please join me the best you can."
I believe in God, the Father almighty, Peter began, and there was still no sign of life from his mother who, more than likely, was already going ashore in another and better Port. On and on he went until reaching the point where both his voice and Fr. Félix's would wane and then disappear. But not now. I believe, for you Ma, in the resurrection of the body, he continued with tears flowing from his eyes. And in life everlasting.
"Father" Stone was sobbing aloud at the end of the prayer and it was amazing, then, that he heard, or seemed to hear, his mother whisper.
Amen.
###
There were two funeral masses that week at St. John's.
And two cremations afterwards.
Mrs. Violet Stone's cremains were flown three-hundred miles into the Atlantic and mini-parachuted into the pure, placid and crystalline waters east of the Gulf Stream. Fr. Félix's took the slow route to the same destination. Peter slowly dropped his ashes into Cresham Creek's limpid Devil's Pool, knowing fully well they'll pass through the muddy Wissahickon, into the upstate mines' tailing-tarnished Schuylkill, through the slick and the slime of the Delaware, and finally to eternal purity and peace far at sea beyond the push and pull of all currents in the middle of the Atlantic. Where all the water and life itself just IS.
"And that's when we'll catch up again," Peter Stone promised as he turned back toward Manayunk with an unaccustomed spring in his legs.
There was work to do and for the first time in Peter's life, he knew what it was and how he was going to go about it.
Finally, he realized, he was home forever.
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