Then Michael remembered the injured tone of the bearded man’s voice: that please. And he decided that the rabbi had been desperate. That he needed Michael to turn on those lights or he would suffer for the rest of the day. There was raw pain in his voice. Not pain that had to do with the light switch. Some other kind of pain. Coming from that man. That rabbi. That Jew.
Then he heard a phrase: Domine non sum dignus…
And a whisper from Father Heaney: “Pay attention, boy. We’ve got two customers.”
They had reached the moment when the priest hands out Holy Communion, and somehow, from the vast wind-creaking darkness, two old women in black clothes had made their separate ways to the rail of the altar. Michael quickly lifted the gold dish called the paten and followed Father Heaney to the railing and the kneeling women, wondering: How did they get here? Did they walk through this blizzard that knocked me flat? Did someone drive them in a car? Maybe they live here. Mumbling Latin, his left hand holding the gold chalice known as the ciborium, Father Heaney deposited a host upon each outstretched tongue, while Michael held the paten under their chins. This was so that no fragment of the host, which had been transformed into the body of Jesus Christ during the Consecration, would fall upon the polished floor.
The first woman’s eyes were wide and glassy, like the eyes of a zombie from a movie. The other closed her eyes tight, as if fearful of gazing too brazenly at the divine white wafer. The second one had a mole on her chin, with white hairs sprouting as if from the eye of a potato. They each took the host the same way: the lips closing over it, but the mouth stretched high and taut to form a closed little fleshy cave. To chew the host, after all, was to chew Jesus. Bowing in piety and gratitude, they rose and went back to the dark pews to pray until the host softened and they could swallow.
Then Michael knelt on the altar, and Father Heaney placed a host on his tongue too. Michael squinted but didn’t shut his eyes. He saw that the priest’s thick fingers were yellow from cigarettes. And he remembered the rabbi’s dirty fingernails. And thought: Maybe the pipes in the synagogue have frozen and burst, like the drains at the armory, and there isn’t any water. Maybe he’s not permitted to wash his hands. Like he wasn’t permitted to turn on the lights. But helping the man had to be what the catechism listed as a corporal work of mercy, right? Even if he was a rabbi. A Jew. That still must count. You were supposed to help the needy. The poor. The sick. The man looked poor, didn’t he? And he needed someone to turn on the lights. For some mysterious reason. Is not permitted…. The mystery of the brief moment in the synagogue grew larger as Michael swallowed his own softened host. The rabbi wasn’t Svengali. He wasn’t Fagin. But he was strange and mysterious, like someone from a book, a bearded guardian of secrets. And Michael thought: I want to find out those secrets.
Finally the mass ended. Father Heaney muttered Ite, missa est, and Michael answered Deo gratias, and the priest strode off the altar, with Michael behind him. In the sacristy, with its marble counter and ceramic sink, Father Heaney began removing his garments: the chasuble and stole, the maniple and cincture, the amice and alb. Under all of these, the priest was wearing a tan turtleneck sweater and black trousers. His black shoes were stained from dried rock salt. He sighed, took a pack of Camels from his trouser pocket, and struck a wooden match on the sole of his shoe to light up. He inhaled deeply. The smell of the cigarette filled the air.
“Thanks, young man,” he said, his eyes moving under the hooded lids. “And, hey: How in the hell did you make it here this morning anyway?”
“I walked, Father.”
The priest inhaled deeply, then made a perfect O with the exhaled smoke.
“You walked, huh? How many blocks?”
“Eight.”
“No wonder you were late,” he said, his black eyebrows rising. “Well, you can offer it up to the souls in Purgatory.”
“I did, Father. During the prayers.”
“I hope you included me,” the priest said, without smiling. And then grabbed his army overcoat and walked out to cross the snow-packed yard to the rectory.
Michael’s duties were not finished. This was the last mass of the day, and so he went back to the altar to extinguish the two candles with a long-handled device the altar boys had named the “holy snuffer.” The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian and Polish and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.
Quickly, Michael came down off the altar, genuflected, and returned to the empty sacristy. He pulled the surplice over his head, hung the cassock in the closet, and changed into his street clothes. Before leaving, he flipped the switches of the altar lights, peering out to be sure he had turned them all off. Then, from the dark upper reaches of the church, he could hear the moaning of the wind. And through the wind, a voice.
Please, it said.
Please to help.
4
That afternoon in the howling white world, while his mother worked her shift as a nurse’s aide at Wesleyan Hospital, Michael Devlin was alone in the living room of the flat, lying on the linoleum floor beside the kerosene heater. A pillow was folded under his head. His stack of Captain Marvels was beside him. After mass and the promised bacon and eggs and his mother’s departure, he had searched for the issue that told the story of Billy Batson’s first encounter with Shazam. Or rather, he’d found the retelling of the story, because he didn’t own the precious first issue of Whiz Comics, the one published long ago, near the beginning of the war. In the retelling, for a special issue of Captain Marvel’s own book, the man in the black suit was there with his hat pulled down to mask his face. But except for the black clothes, he didn’t resemble the rabbi from Kelly Street, and neither did the wizard Shazam. The wizard was much older, with a white beard instead of a dark one, dressed in a long, flowing robe. The rabbi was younger, heavier, and with his blue eyes and horn-rimmed glasses looked more like a schoolteacher from the Wild West than an Egyptian wizard. Somebody who could have taught Abraham Lincoln.
After a while, Michael put aside the Captain Marvels and started reading a comic book named Crime Does Not Pay, all about the terrible killer Alvin Karpis and his bloody career and bloodier end. This comic made Michael feel very different from the way he felt reading Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel was about magic words and mad scientists and tigers that talked, about bullets that bounced off chests and a hero with a gold-trimmed cape who could fly through the air. But the crime comic was full of real gangsters in real cities. No capes. No magic words. Just robbing and shooting and dying. Bullets didn’t bounce off chests, they went through them; and nobody went flying through the air, high above the skyscrapers. The crime comics were about men who were once good kids in places like Brooklyn and came to bad ends. Like the men from Murder Incorporated, Lepke something and Gurrah. Pretty Boy Floyd. Dillinger. They died in ambushes. They died outside movie houses. They even died in the snow, like Tommy Devlin died in Belgium, but without being heroes. They didn’t ever die for their country. They died for money. Or women.