15

You remember your childhood, the lower middle class Irish neighborhood in South Philadelphia, the comer tap rooms with their blackedout windows, Krause’s bakery each Sunday morning after eight o’clock

Mass. You remember polishing your shoes for Easter Sunday, the church the next morning filled with fresh white lilies, the pews and the side aisles, all along the stations of the cross, overflowing with parishioners there to perform their “Easter duty,” which is another way of saying that they didn’t go very often but neither did they wish their membership to lapse.

When you were eight years old you watchyd The Song of Bernadette , in rerun, on your grandmother’s black and white TV. You looked up at the dark place at the top of the stairs, hoping that the Blessed Virgin Maiy would suddenly appear to you. Wanting that to happen more than anything else in this world. Also not wanting that to happen more than anything else in this world.

You think sometimes of the candy store lady, whose response to everything was JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph.

One day a punk of the neighborhood came barreling into the store and knocked your pinball machine on tilt. You backed down, of course, the boy took your machine, and the old woman sent up a fervent chorus of JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph JesusMaryandJoseph.

Then there was the time with the little girl in the alleyway, exposing yourselves as little children do. You were both five: tiny Adam and miniature Eve. The girl, you’ve heard, has grown up to be a junkie, a prostitute, a queen of the do-it-yourself pom industiy. “Her name was Grace,” you say out loud. Her name is Grace, you correct yourself, though not out loud. But you don’t know if she is among the living or the dead.