There are no curtains on the kitchen window, and my mother has pulled the shade down most of the way so that Mrs. Gibson doesn’t look over the alleyway and see the size of the shirts that are being ironed. People could see that these shirts were way too big for me or Billy. It’s a secret that my mother does the ironing like this. And so it is pretty dark in the kitchen.
“Mom,” I say, “if there are no ghosts in the world, how come we have a Holy Ghost?”
“Don’t they teach you that at school?”
“No.”
“Sure they do. Don’t they teach you about the Holy Trinity?”
“Yes,” I say, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but they don’t tell us how come.”
My mother is laughing.
“Well,” she says, smiling, “maybe you just need to know that this is how it is, and believe that this is how it is.”
“What about angels?”
“Same thing,” she says. “There are angels. Everyone has a guardian angel, and there is an army of angels in heaven. It is just how it is.”
“Is Ann an angel now, do you think?” This ghost thing has got me very confused, and I guess angels are the same thing with a different name.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happens to little girls when they go to heaven.”
Mom’s pile of shirts is pretty high now, so she gets up to take the ironing board out from behind the door in my room.
“I hope,” I say, “Ann has become an angel, because maybe she’ll come down and rub off a little angel dust on my report card.”
“It is very sad for that family,” my mother says, “for that to happen to such a lovely little girl.”
My mother puts the legs in the slot beneath the ironing board and stands it up, saying, “Maybe Ann will come down and rub off a little on you.”
She pulls an old sheet over the ironing board and pins it at the bottom.
“I don’t need an angel,” I say, scraping my plate with the fork. “Just my report card.”
“Everybody needs an angel, Dennis.”
“So what’s the difference between an angel and the Holy Ghost?”
I am now licking the plate with the Karo syrup, and my mother grabs the plate out of my hand and puts it in the sink.
“An angel,” she says, “doesn’t lick his plate, that’s for sure. Not at your age.”
“So what’s the difference?”
My mother now sits down across from me and puts her chin in her hands.
“The way I learned it,” she says, “is the way Saint Patrick told it to the Irish after he changed back into a person from being a stag.”
“What’s a stag?”
“A big deer. Some evil king …”
“Most kings are evil,” I say. “You said that when you told us the story of Henry VIII.”
“This one was worse, and he wanted to kill Saint Patrick for lighting a fire, and then Saint Patrick turned into a stag so they couldn’t catch him. When he came back, he told all the Irish people that—”
“The snakes had to go?”
“No,” she said, “that the Holy Trinity would always nourish them the way the clover nourished him when he was a stag, and he picked up a shamrock, and he showed that there was just one stem and three leaves, all the same size, and that was the way God was, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, all in the one thing.”
“So the Holy Ghost is like God?”
“The Holy Ghost is God.”
“And Jesus?”
“The last of the three leaves, maybe the one on the end, maybe the one in the middle, it doesn’t matter except to know that this is what you believe.”
“What do I believe?”
“That there are no ghosts in the world, but that there is a Holy Ghost, who is part of God just like the shamrock has three leaves in one stem.”
“And a guardian angel.”
“Yes, and a guardian angel, and I guess other angels, too.”
“Oh.”
My mother gets up from her chair, and grabs the iron. She sticks a finger on her tongue, and then slaps it against the iron. She puts the iron down again, and smiles at me.
“What,” she says, “are you going to do?”
“I dunno. Go to Kips Club.”
“C’mere, I’ll give you a kiss.”
“Ahh, c’mon,” I say, squirming.
I’m eleven. I’m too old to be kissed like this.
Going down First Avenue, passing the church, I am thinking that I am still not sure about the Holy Ghost. But, I guess if you believe in God there is no great difference in believing in the Holy Ghost. And everyone believes in angels.
I
t’s just a little more than twenty blocks up to the Metropolitan Museum, and so I am walking it. Sister Urban took us to the museum last year when I was in the fifth grade, and we came by bus then, a bus no different from the Second Avenue bus. Sister told us the museum sent it in a special deal to get us to come to the museum, and she reminded us that we were to be certain to thank the bus driver, who probably had better things to do than have thirty kids from St. John’s cluttering up his bus.
Now I’m in the sixth grade, and I’m going back there today, because I remember this Monet guy and this certain picture. I was standing in front of it, very close to it, when Sister Urban came up behind me.
“You like this painting, Dennis?” Sister Urban asked me. She had been very nice to me since Mommy told her she was going to burn the bonnet right off her head.
“Yes,” I said to her, not being able to take my eyes from it.
“What is it you like about it?” she said.
I had to think for a minute because I didn’t really know what I liked. I just liked it.
“The colors and the shapes,” I said to her.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked, and I looked at the words at the bottom of the frame.
“It says a ruined cathedral,” I answered.
Sister chuckled, saying, “It says
Rouen Cathedral.
Monet painted many of them, and there’s one in Boston, and one in Paris, France. You could go all around the world looking at paintings Monet did of this cathedral.”
I then turned and looked at her, an old, skinny woman with a wrinkled face sticking out of the shadow of her black Sister of Charity hood. I remembered that she slapped me, and that my mother yelled at her good, but, somehow, that didn’t matter as she then stood behind me. It was the first time I ever heard her talk normally to me, and so I didn’t mind the correction. I thought it was French and I didn’t know French. I still don’t know French. I don’t know anyone who knows French except Mrs. Chappelle, whose apartment on 57th Street my mother cleans, and I don’t suppose I will ever know French.
“It looks kind of ruined,” I said, “and out of shape.”
“But, here,” she said, pulling me by the shirtsleeve, “step back. See how it becomes so much more alive when you step back.”
How can these nuns, I was thinking, be so nice sometimes, and so mean so many other times, slapping and yelling at us for the smallest things?
“Do you see?” she asked as we moved backward.
And I did see, too. I was stunned by how the thing changed before my eyes from all these colors and shapes into a sharp picture of a church with a big carved doorway.
“It is like magic,” I said. I was gaping, and didn’t want to leave.
“It is art,” Sister said as she turned to the rest of the class, and led them away so fast that I had to run to catch up.
It was one of those days that I think I will always remember, seeing that picture turn from one thing to another.
I am hoping now as I walk up the twenty-eight wide, giant steps that they don’t charge any money to go to this museum. If they charge money, I won’t be able to go inside. Some museums do charge money for kids in school and I think it’s a rotten shame they do. Kids should just go in and out of museums the way they do libraries. I will be very disappointed if they don’t let me in, because this is the first stop of my trip around the world to see all these pictures of the cathedral that Sister Urban talked about.
I walk beneath these huge columns, so big I think I am going into the biggest church I’ve ever been in, bigger than St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Everything is so big here, and I remember I am still only twelve-years-old tall. But, no matter how small I am, I feel that I am important, that coming here is important. I’m not sure why.
Once in the front door I look around. Good, I think, there is nobody asking for any money. I’d feel bad if they asked me. The front room is enormous, and there are many big statues, so big that I have to back up to look at the tops of them, and each time I back up I bump into another one. They are all naked, except for a few that have curtainlike dresses wrapped around them, or silver armor. I guess each one is supposed to be someone, but I don’t know who. And there are no signs around. They must all be somebody who did something great and important. My mother says the only way to be great at something is to work hard. They should have a statue of her here, I am thinking, because she works as hard as anyone I know. Billy, too. They should have a statue of Billy doing his homework because some nights Billy does his homework for three or four hours.
I still hate homework, and I never spend more than ten minutes at it. I just take the punishment they give out at school.
There is another stairway before me, this one the biggest stairway I have ever seen, and I count the forty-six steps on the way up. There is a big list of names written into the stone at the sides of the stairs, and I stop to read the names. There is nobody from 56th Street on the list, and I wonder who they all are. Maybe the people who built the place, the construction workers who made it look so beautiful.
There are a hundred little statues of ballet dancers on the second floor, and I study them. They are made of a dark brown metal, and they look like they have been made by the same person, and maybe of the same dancer. It must have been a lot of work to make all these statues, but they are all too much the same. I wish they had some soldiers in this case to keep the dancers company. Maybe the soldiers and the ballet dancers could dance together.
The museum is such another world to me. Everywhere you look you see things that bring you to different places and different times, and there is nothing like it anywhere else.
I pass a huge painting, ten times taller than me, of people in a chariot, with hundreds of angels in the sky. I wish there was someone to tell me what it is all about.
My father could take me if he was out of the hospital. What’s he doing in that hospital, anyway, for so long, and no visitors allowed? I wonder if he ever went to a museum in his life? I could ask Mom, but she never talks about my father anymore. Daddy. I have never said a sentence with the word
Daddy
in it, or even
Dad.
It is always
my father
when I talk about him, but I haven’t talked about him to anyone for such a long time.
I could ask my mother, like I say, but I don’t want to be a bother to her, to remind her about it. She would get sad, I know.
Walking through the museum, I try to be as quiet as I can. I don’t want to bother anyone.
There is a guard who is looking at me funny, and I wonder if he wants to throw me out. I think you have to be older to come here alone. So I am standing close to this man and woman who are looking up at a big painting of a bunch of half-naked people. Their necks are cranked up like they were looking at the stars. I am guessing that the guard will think I am with them, and he will leave me alone. The woman sees me standing here, and she smiles.
“Do you like the Rubens?” she asks.
I just nod my head up and down, but I don’t smile back or say anything, because ever since that time with Mr. Dempsey I just make it a habit to never talk to people I don’t know pretty good.
I walk quickly away, in the other direction from the guard, and pass through a few more halls. If there is anything you should know about museums, it is that they have more halls than you know what to do with, and they are attached like dominoes so that you never know which way will bring you to the end or the beginning. Finally, I come to the little room I remember, and I go right up to the painting of the cathedral. I put my nose so close to it that the guard who is walking around in this room snaps his fingers. He motions for me to get back, and so I come away a little.
And now I can see why I wanted to come back to see this picture. Everything in it changes a little as I move away from it. It is so weird that the colors and shadows have no shape at all when you are close to it, but when you step back, there is this big wonderful church. And I wonder how he did this, or how he knew to do it. So I begin to go forward, and step back, and I do this about ten times, like I am practicing Irish dancing. Each time I do this I am more amazed, not so much that the church appears, but that when it appears, it is so beautiful.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything that has interested me as much as this.
Not even the Motorama.
T
he summer breeze is whipping my face, and it seems like we are going a hundred miles an hour. Billy has gone on a sleep-away trip with Kips Bay Boys Club to play a basketball game at some other boys’ club in Connecticut. His junior varsity basketball team has won the finals in New York City, and now they are playing other states for the championship. Billy is beginning to collect more trophies than Archie has in his whole office down at Kips Club.
My mother has a new friend. His name is Artie, and I am sitting in the back of his brand-new car, a 1952 Chevrolet. It is a hot day, and all the windows are open. This is the first new car I have ever been in, except for the car that time on the platform in the Waldorf, and we are going along some highway, just taking a drive in the new car, and I put my head out of the window. The force of the breeze is like being on some ride in Coney Island, where the wind takes the breath out of you. It is so cool, I like the feeling of flying through the air like this.
Suddenly, I hear the sound of a siren, and I turn to see a policeman riding beside us on a motorcycle. He has a funny look on his face, like he just drank sour milk.
“Shit,” Artie says.