An Almost Perfect Moment (27 page)

W
ith one shopping day until Christmas remaining, the stores were bedlam; a melee of pushing, shoving, grabbing, snapping, poking, yanking, bitching all to the tune of “(I’m dreaming of a) White Christmas.” At this late date, perfume was a bestseller, as were handkerchiefs, because really,
who gives a shit?

The line at the Italian pork store tacked left, right, out the door, and around the block.

Pies were baking, gravy was simmering, and countless women said, “Oh, what the hell, it’s Christmas” as they popped yet another sugar cookie into their mouths.

At office parties the world over some doofus wearing a red hat with a white pom-pom was blocking the path of whatever woman happened by:
Hey, let’s do the bump.

“One small thing to be grateful for,” Judy Weinstein said, “is at least we don’t have the Christmas thing to deal with now too. On top of all this, could you imagine?”

While Judy and Sunny were imagining such a scenario, there was a knock at the Kesslers’ door. Edith got up to answer it, to find Angela Sabatini there holding out a baking tray the size of Staten Island. “I made a little extra manicotti. I figured you could use it here.”

Edith took the tray. “You’re a doll,” she said. “Come on in. We’re sitting down for coffee.”

“I can’t,” Angela declined. “Between now and tomorrow, I haven’t got a minute to myself.”

Presenting the manicotti to Judy and Sunny, Edith said, “From that Angela Sabatini next door. Is she a saint or is she a saint? I ask you? What a good heart that one has.”

On Christmas Eve, on his way to visit his mother at the hospital, John Wosileski remembered that he’d forgotten to buy her a Christmas gift. Luckily, he passed Walgreen’s drugstore, which was still open, and there he bought his mother a bottle of perfume. Some brand called Charlie.

In the hospital room that Mrs. Wosileski shared with two other women, neither of whom was conscious, on the television mounted on the wall, John and his mother watched the Yule log burn until visiting hours were over.

At home, John made himself a salami sandwich, and sometime around ten-thirty, he went to get ready for midnight mass. As he rooted around in his dresser drawer for a fresh pair of socks, John’s
hand brushed against the velveteen box he’d hidden there. At first, he pulled back as if the texture of it had burned him, but then he returned to it, took it out, and opened it. The very tiny diamond twinkled.

John Wosileski, it would seem, was incapable of retaining lessons learned. As if all pain were like the pain of childbirth, forgotten in a moment and worth it regardless. Then again, it was Christmas Eve, and if one couldn’t have hope on that night, of all nights, well then, there was no hope to be had.

With the ring in the box warming in his pocket, John took in the cold air, the black sky, and the hush which was a quiet all its own. A holy quiet,
all is calm, all is bright
. And, at least then, at that moment, he believed, he believed in it all, the poor dumb fuck.

John rang the bell that read
CLARKE
, and again his memory skipped a crucial line, having deleted recollections of how, just weeks ago, he was repulsed by the thought of kissing her. Rather, now his selective memory latched onto the time when he wasn’t alone, exaggerating its goodness because, really, the hours spent with Joanne Clarke weren’t anything to write home about.

Even through the static of the intercom, Joanne Clarke managed to sound crotchety. “Who is it?”

“United Parcel delivery.” John was delighted by his clever deception, which apparently worked because Joanne buzzed him in.

Apartment 5C was at the end of the hall, and Joanne stood in the open doorway, wearing a pair of black slacks and a white sweater. She was barefoot. “You,” she said to John. “What do you want?” It did not appear that she was pleased to see him.

John took the red velveteen box from his pocket and snapped open the lid. He held it out to her as if it were a piece of chewing gum he were offering her, and as if it were a piece of chewing gum,
she snatched it from him. “I’ve come to ask you to marry me,” John Wosileski said.

Joanne peered at the ring and then looked at John much the way her birds used to look at her, head cocked and quizzical. “You’re asking me to marry you?” she said, and when John responded in the affirmative, Joanne started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. She laughed so hard that from the sides of her eyes, big tears rolled out like a matched set of red carpets. She laughed so hard that her stomach cramped, and when she stopped laughing she said, “Me? Marry you? You think
I
would stoop so low? You think I’m as desperate as all that? Me? Marry some wormy little schoolteacher? Some pathetic excuse for a man? Everyone laughs at you behind your back,” she said, and with that, she closed the door on him.

John wondered if she realized that she still had the ring, that she hadn’t returned it to him. He wondered if he should knock on the door and ask for it back, but why? For what? It’s not as if he’d have use for the ring. And he really didn’t want to face her again either, so he let it go.

Here is a curious footnote to this incident: She wore it. Joanne wore the puny diamond engagement ring. On Christmas morning, she put the ring on her finger and never took it off.

The sky on Christmas morning was overcast, and it was cold enough for snow, although a white Christmas wasn’t in the forecast. Little Christian children were tearing into their gifts, their mothers were in the kitchen preparing the big meal, which they started on at the crack of dawn, and Judy Weinstein went to the Kessler house to relieve Sunny Shapiro, who had spent the night. Both the baby and Miriam needed round-the-clock care, so what
choice did they have? If nothing else went right for her, Miriam Kessler was blessed with extraordinary friends. Like sisters, they were. Better than sisters.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Sunny took the bottle of formula heating in a pot of water on the stove and shook a drop onto her forearm, testing the temperature. “You know, I didn’t even get to the beauty parlor this week.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I’m ready to drop.” Judy took the bottle from Sunny and lifted baby Ronda from the bassinet. Ronda sucked hungrily on the nipple, and Judy said, “But what can we do? She needs us.”

The two women sat on the couch, the baby cradled in Judy’s arms. A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds and in through the window, and if you looked directly at the way it refracted off the diamond pendant Judy was wearing—a two-carat Hanukkah gift from her husband—it could have maybe caused you to go blind.

“So I guess it’s not going to snow,” Sunny said. “That’s too bad. It would’ve been nice for them,
the goyim
, if it snowed.”

Judy agreed, and then both women watched as the baby sucked on the bottle. They were adoring her, this precious baby, when their attention turned to the stairs, which, despite the pile carpet two inches thick, were creaking and groaning under Miriam’s weight. Miriam looked dreadful, but what could you expect what with no bathing or even running a comb though her hair in all this time. There were dark circles under her eyes, and frankly, she smelled. But she was up and out of bed, and that was something to be grateful for, at least Judy and Sunny hoped it would prove to be something for which to be grateful.

With bated breath, Judy and Sunny waited to see what would happen next, and Miriam held out her arms, as if she were about to
receive firewood or else had just discovered that her palms were bleeding. Her two friends exchanged an anxious glance, and then Judy stood up and carefully and gingerly passed the baby to Miriam.

The Christmas music traveled from the Sabatinis’ rooftop—
the angels did say
—to the Kesslers’ living room, and the love, the love that emanated from Miriam to the infant as she gazed down at Ronda, waves of love—invisible to the eye but invincible, like sound waves or an electromagnetic current—flowed between them as if gliding along a Möbius strip, seamlessly and without end.

There were sightings.

John Wosileski thought he saw her in a Kentucky Fried Chicken on Flatbush Avenue, but he wouldn’t have sworn to it.

Vincent Caputo, however, did swear that he saw her in a Times Square peep show.

Lucille Fiacco was sure that was her doing the high kick, the third Rockette from the left at Radio City Music Hall, where Lucille and her fiancé took his daughter for the Springtime Spectacular. Her fiancé! Love at first sight when a Parents Without Partners group met at the library.

Weighted down with two sacks of food, which included four pounds of her homemade ravioli and two loaves of sausage bread, Angela Sabatini made her way along Bedford Avenue with great trepidation because this was not exactly what you’d call a nice area. In fact, it was a
frigging slum
, but miracles do not come without a price, and a miracle was what Angela Sabatini was after.

At the corner of St. John’s Avenue, the monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was set in a block-long garden. No doubt it was once imposing; Italianate and three stories high, with a steeple and bell tower and a stained-glass dome, which was now cracked. The outer wall, made of stone, was covered with graffiti—none of it spiritual.

Angela Sabatini was buzzed in through the gate, then buzzed into a vestibule before being buzzed into a small sitting room, where she was face-to-face with what looked like a huge barrel cut vertically down the middle and set into a brick wall. Above was a handwritten sign which read:
IN THE HOUSE OF GOD
,
TALK OF HIM OR DO NOT TALK OF ANYTHING
.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel was a Carmelite nunnery. The sisters were cloistered; they never went out. No one saw them. No one even knew how many of them were in there. They’d shut themselves in, off from the world, and devoted their lives to prayer. Because they asked for nothing, they’d have starved to death if not for the faithful who brought them food; food left in the half barrel along with notes asking the nuns to pray for this one or that one.
Pray for my mother in heaven. Pray for the soul of the baby I aborted. Pray that my uncle Joe recovers from being brain-dead. Pray for me to get married. Pray for me to hit the trifecta. Pray for me. Pray for me. Pray for me.

Along with the ravioli and the sausage bread and a broccoli and three pounds of oranges and a package of dried figs and six cans of
tuna fish—all white meat—and a jar of olives and another jar of marinated artichoke hearts, Angela Sabitini left her note:
Please pray that this lump in my breast is nothing. Please don’t let God give me cancer.

The half barrel was really a medieval contraption called a turn, named because that’s what it did. It turned. Like the revolving bookcase in drawing-room mysteries.

Instead of leaving the food and the note and then departing immediately thereafter, Angela Sabatini waited as if she were expecting confirmation or a receipt or an answer. And when the barrel turned, she glimpsed a sliver of space and light on the other side, and Angela Sabatini could’ve sworn that she saw her there, on the other side of the turn. She was wearing the heavy brown wool habit of the Carmelites.

Angela Sabatini took this as a sign, but of what?

Here is the proof,
ecce signum
, all this happened,
nostra aetate,
in our time.