similar light. This was unquestionably me: beatific as I am not,
idealized, but me.
Since my experience in the hospital garage, every incident and object
seemed to have significance. No longer could I entertain the
possibility of coincidence. Everywhere I looked, the world oozed
uncanniness.
This was, of course, the route to madness: viewing all of life as one
elaborate conspiracy conducted by elite manipulators who see all and
know all. The sane understand that human beings are incapable of
sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most
defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency
to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. Cosmically
speaking, we are barely able to tie our shoes. If there is, indeed,
some secret order to the universe, it is not of our doing, and we are
probably not even capable of apprehending it.
The priest was a third of the way up the stairs.
Stupefied, I studied the angel.
Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled
along the street on which St. Bernadette’s stood. The creche had been
arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper
place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to
camels-and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn’t realized that it
was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was
too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow
angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from
it, squinted my eyes.
The priest was halfway up the stairs and climbing faster.
Then I remembered that Angela Ferryman had attended Mass at St.
Bernadette’s. Undoubtedly, considering her dollmaking, she had been
prevailed upon to lend her talent to the making of the creche.
End of mystery.
I still couldn’t understand why she would have assigned my face to an
angel. If my features belonged anywhere in the manger scene, they
should have been on the donkey. Clearly, her opinion of me had been
higher than I warranted.
Unwanted, an image of Angela rose in my mind’s eye: Angela as I had
last seen her on the bathroom floor, her eyes fixed on some last sight
farther away than Andromeda, head tilted backward into the toilet bowl,
throat slashed.
Suddenly I was certain that I had missed an important detail when I’d
found her poor torn body. Repulsed by the gouts of blood, gripped by
grief, in a state of shock and fear, I had avoided looking long at
her-just as, for years, I had avoided looking at the figures in the
brightly lighted creche outside the church. I had seen a vital clue,
but it had not registered consciously. Now my subconscious taunted me
with it.
As Father Tom reached the top of the steps, he broke into sobs.
He sat on the landing and wept inconsolably.
I could not hold fast to a mental image of Angela’s face. Later there
would be time to confront and, reluctantly, explore that Grand Guignol
memory.
From angel to camel to magi to Joseph to donkey to Holy Virgin to lamb
to Lamb, I wove silently through the creche, then past file cabinets
and boxes of supplies, into the shorter and narrower space where little
was stored, and onward toward the door of the utilities room.
The sounds of the priest’s anguish resonated off the concrete walls,
fading until they were like the cries of some haunting entity barely
able to make itself heard through the cold barrier between this world
and the next.
Grimly, I recalled my father’s wrenching grief in the coldholding room
at Mercy Hospital, on the night of my mother’s death.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I keep my own anguish
private.
When one of those wild cries threatens to arise, I bite hard ntil I
chew the energy out of it and swallow it unspoken.
In my sleep I grind my teeth-no surprise-until I wake some nights with
aching jaws. Perhaps I am fearful of giving voice in dreams to
sentiments I choose not to express when awake.
On the way out of the church basement, I expected the undertaker-waxy