First You Try Everything (15 page)

Evvie

J
ust after
Cedric moved out to live in a house of Russian professionals in Greenfield,
Evvie walked down Forbes Avenue one Saturday afternoon, eating a bagel, and ran
into a landlady whom she had rented from over fifteen years before. Tessie did
not appear to have aged much since then. She was still a tanklike woman in a
thin cotton dress and black tie shoes, still had the odd habit of talking out of
the side of her mouth, still accepted animals—even a big dog like Ruth was
OK—and still loved the great saint Padre Pio. In fact, when Evvie asked her, “Do
you still have a devotion to Padre Pio?” Tessie's bright eyes widened, as if it
were severely sacrilege to suggest that such devotion could ever fade. “You bet
I do!” And yes, she had a room available.

The room was right across from the old room she had
lived in the summer she'd met Ben. That old room had been small and white, with
a wooden floor, a single mattress, and a boom box. She'd owned almost nothing
then and was happy that way, making minimum wage in a record store that had long
since closed, waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant on the South Side, and
sometimes singing in a band—mostly punk bands that formed and broke apart every
few months. No matter where she worked, it had been good to come home to such an
exquisitely empty room, knowing there were other people in the other rooms, most
of them older and all of them friendly and strange. She bought a broom and liked
the daily habit of sweeping the wooden floor. She remembered thinking that
summer, this is who I was meant to be. Someone who lives in simplicity in a
boardinghouse with old people. Someone who sweeps the wooden floor in the
morning. She had not been aware then that her happiness was dependent on a sense
of infinite possibility, that the view from that room was a wide-open future, a
yellow-brick road with no end in sight.

Then she met Ben and her little empty room seemed
suddenly irrelevant, except that it was a container now, for all her longing,
and for what soon became a transfiguring love. Ben brought his cassettes of
Jimmy Cliff and Joan Armatrading and Leonard Cohen and the Smiths and the
Stranglers and a hundred others. Then he brought two guinea pigs, Lou and
Marlene, in a big cage.

And his guitar and the stories of his life. Summer
of endless revelation, childhood grief still fresh under their skin, they talked
through the nights and cried when they made love, and sometimes Rudy the
magician, who lived downstairs, woke them in the middle of the night to tell
them, “You think I'm just Rudy from Baltimore, when really I'm the Messiah!” And
Rudy's friend Mrs. May, a sixty-year-old woman on the third floor, kept
chinchillas and made whiskey Popsicles, and
agreed
that Rudy was the Messiah. It was that kind of place, that kind of beginning for
Ben and Evvie. Now it was strange to be back in the house, which in the new
century had a new spirit, filled up with college students, except for Diligence
Chung, who Tessie had said was “a little Chinese Jesus freak,” when really she
was a pale, thin Korean missionary who wore a purple wool hat and long skirt, no
matter the weather. She liked to sing God songs to Evvie.

“P
eople who work near me at the Frame Shop, including the real estate
people in the office next door, don't understand why I can't just get over it,”
Evvie told Tessie one hot August night. They sat on the front porch. “And one of
the lawyers across the street, this young woman in a suit, says to me, ‘You just
need to get laid. Then maybe you'll get your appetite back and cheer up. I mean,
I wouldn't want to get divorced,' she said, ‘but if it happened, I'd seriously
think about all the people I could suddenly sleep with. I mean, can't you look
at this as a little get-out-of-jail-free card?' ”

Evvie was drinking Tessie's brother's homemade
Italian wine and feeling pretty good tonight.

“People got no respect,” Tessie said. “They all
lost the compass.” She'd bent over to take her black tie shoes off, and now her
bare feet sat planted resolutely on the cement of the front porch. In her white
metal chair, she leaned forward toward the street, mildly wary of whoever passed
by, her eyes following them until they were out of sight.

“Divorce is so common people think it's no big
deal,” Evvie continued. “You know, all the
stars
are
doing it, all the neighbors are doing it, all the politicians are doing it—it's
like some kind of dance where you just change partners, and life goes on. But
really it's
death
. It rends the soul.” Evvie took a
swig of wine, then held it up to the sinking sun. “I feel like warning the whole
world. Not that they'd listen.”

“It's terrible, what you're going through. All you
young people. In my day, you got married, you stayed married, that was that. My
husband and I didn't expect life should be so fun. Now it's everybody has to
have their fun.” She sipped her own glass of wine, which was leaving a purple
mustache on her face. “And all the rush, rush, rush. Where do the people think
they're going?”

Evvie took another sip and sighed. “I don't
know.”

“Six feet under.”

Tessie never rushed around. She made tomato sauce
and ate dinner and collected rent and fed the dog and cats or rode around with
her brother Robert and his wife, Carla, in an old Cadillac, slowly, as if she
had all the time in the world. Around her neck Padre Pio's handsome, bearded
face was framed in a gold locket. Tessie had told Evvie that the saint had
stopped the Americans from bombing San Giovanni Rotondo during the Second World
War by appearing in his brown robes up in the sky before the enemy planes. This
was a documented miracle, and besides, her late husband had seen it with his own
eyes. Evvie dimly recalled learning about the saint in third grade, how he'd had
the stigmata, and how the nun had instructed them all to pray that the wounds of
Jesus showed up in their own bodies, and how one kid, Eddie McKeever, had
shouted
No!
from the back row.

“Mr. McKeever, you can step out into the hallway
now,” the nun said, horrified.

“Prayer is the oxygen of the heart,” Tessie said
now. “I would be dead without this man.” She held the medal up and closed her
eyes. Then opened them. Behind where Tessie sat, Diligence Chung stepped out of
the house in her long skirt and purple hat. She had a beautiful face, a quietly
certain expression. Evvie liked Diligence, though wished she didn't sing in such
high octaves. “Do you mind if I sing to Jesus the Christ?” she'd asked when they
first met. “Not at all.” And Diligence bent down to pet Ruth. “I love you, dog,”
she'd said.

“Where you headed tonight?” Tessie asked her
now.

“To services,” Diligence practically whispered,
then took a little bow and floated out toward the sidewalk. They watched her go
in silence.

Tessie invited Evvie to take a ride in the Cadillac
with her brother and sister-in-law. Going out for a ride was still a form of
entertainment for them. Tonight they were headed out to the airport to watch the
planes take off. “Come on, it lifts the spirit to watch those big jets getting
away like that,” Tessie said. Evvie declined, thanking Tessie for the wine, and
then walked into the evening.

Maybe it was the silky warmth of the air, or more
likely the wine, that made Evvie feel like something good was going to happen.
Some nights in summer are this way. Like the sky itself is holding its secret
breath in anticipation of something utterly surprising, and the moon looks wet
as ripe fruit, unusually present, and glad to be a part of things. She took
great big steps, willing herself to give the world a chance, because it was a
great, great world.

She began to sing, and found herself walking up the
steps of Saint Paul Cathedral. She slipped inside and sat in the very last dark
oak pew. The smell transported her straight back to childhood. Her eyes stung
with tears. She'd
believed
. In second grade she'd
even been in the May procession, walking right beside the girl who'd been chosen
to crown Mary—the girl tiny and stunned in a white gown, lifted up in the light
as two hundred children sang,
Hail, Holy Queen Enthroned
Above! Oh, Ma-ria! Hail Queen of Mercy and of Love, Oh, Ma-ria!
Always, every year, tears had come into Evvie's eyes—
Those are
Mary's
tears
, her grandmother had told her once. Tonight
the stained glass was possessed of a radiance she felt throbbing in her chest
like something about to shatter. She looked up at the altar, where Christ hung
on the cross. She still loved him. Her first love, born of sorrow and pity in
childhood, while saying the Stations of the Cross. No matter that she'd lost
faith, the love could not be shaken. At least not here, not now. Nor the sense
that she had greatly disappointed him. Failed with flying colors. And yes, there
was probably a God. But this God had to be held accountable for this world,
right? With its hideous suffering that could never be explained? Suffering she
couldn't even imagine? And so Evvie closed her eyes and crossed her arms and sat
in rigid silence, and then got up and left.

An old priest stood on the stone steps just outside
the heavy red doors. “Good evening, Father.” She liked his face. He was
good-looking in a shipwrecked way. He was a man who wore the heart of his
profound weariness on his sleeve, and yet his face was so kind she couldn't stop
looking at him. She asked him if he knew Saint Basil. She'd become enamored with
Basil when someone from Mercy For Animals had quoted him in a talk in
Cleveland.

“Never met him. He was a little before my
time.”

She laughed. “Did you know Saint Basil was a
vegetarian, loved and respected animals, and wrote a beautiful prayer?”

“Well, let's hear it,” the priest said, looking off
into the distance as if the ocean's horizon were at the end of the wide
street.

Evvie hoped she remembered. “God, enlarge within us
the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers and sisters the
animals to whom thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us.” She
paused. The priest turned from the traffic to look at her. She said the next
line of the prayer looking into his eyes, and those moments were more intimate
than any she'd had in a long time. The priest looked away. She took a breath and
finished. “We remember in shame that in the past we have exercised the high
dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of earth, which should
have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.”

The priest nodded. “Very nice. Really. By the way,
you don't smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“Good. Then I can't ask you for a cigarette. I'm
quitting at the age of seventy-one.” He smiled. His eyes lit up.

“You can do it,” she said.

“Maybe. So when did Saint Basil come out with that
prayer?”

“Third century.”

“That's right. So you like your animals,” the
priest said. “I bet you don't know about Saint Guinefort. The dog saint. I mean,
Saint Guinefort was a dog. Venerated in the Middle Ages for saving his master's
child from an attacking snake. A beautiful greyhound. All the people in France
were praying to Guinefort the greyhound.”

Evvie smiled. A dog saint! She'd never heard of it.
“Here's a picture of my dog,” she said, opening her cell phone. “She's pretty
saintly herself.”

Maybe she would come to Mass here just for old
times' sake, and to be close to the old priest.

“Did you know a dog saved Saint Rocco's life by
bringing him food when he was starving in the woods? You should go to the
procession they have over in Morningside this summer. They still carry Rocco
through the streets.”

“Maybe I will sometime.”

“I have to go in now.” He looked at her, then after
a long hesitation, stepped into the church.

S
he
walked to Forbes, thinking of the priest and the dog saint and Basil and
Tessie's Padre Pio devotion, and how it had felt to sit in the church. It was
somehow more of a home to her than anywhere else on earth, but could not be
home, not really, because she could not abide its bigotries. But could she find
a way in again if an old priest like that talked to her every day in the shade
of the cathedral? Did the priest even believe? What did he think of the scandal
of all those pedophile priests that were suddenly all over the news? Did he walk
around feeling guilt by association? She hoped not.

She was buying a slice of pizza she didn't want
when she spotted Cedric, in the passenger seat of a beat-up car, hanging out the
window calling her name. The car pulled over to the curb, and she ran to it,
pizza in hand.

“Get in.”

Cedric was in the backseat, a young couple was in
the front. The seats were brown velour and had the comfort of an old, sunken
couch. They were all going to the movies. Cedric almost never went to the movies
and rarely went anywhere with other people.

“How did you three end up together?” she had to
know.

Cedric shrugged. “They nabbed me at Mickey
D's.”

The girl in the front turned around. “Your
brother's a
doll
.” She had misty eyes at half-mast,
probably stoned out of her mind, and big 1980s Pittsburgh hair. Otherwise she
was tiny with bitten-down green nails. Her boyfriend at the wheel was a flabby
man in a Black Sabbath T-shirt and sunglasses. “We're going to see
Lord of the Rings
,” he said. “You can come if you like
a long-ass movie and you've got eight bucks.”