10

Maddie had been raised in those wrinkled skirts, in among multitudinous folds that were an irregular system of hills and valleys—one that required curves and climbs to navigate. She knew nothing else. That the sun didn’t hit her living room until it had been up for some time did not register for her—not early on, anyway—as a disadvantage. She had always lived in a valley and many of her friends did the same; many others lived on hilltops and more still on the sides of hills, their homes planted improbably into the tilted landscape.

In the early morning she stood cold and slit-eyed at the bus stop, first hearing the bus and then watching its halting descent down the hill. The brakes screeched and the transmission churned, and Maddie boarded through the stiffly flapping doors, indifferently inhaling diesel fumes. She was accustomed to the bus’s grinding climb up the next hill, and to getting her first glimpse of the sun only when the bus had reached the top.

At most then, the landscape of the Bethel Hills of Pittsburgh was to her an arbiter of sunlight. But not even that, not really. She wasn’t aware of these things. Pittsburgh, with its winding and weary roads, was home to her.

The fact of its weariness, too, made little impression. To Maddie’s inexperienced eye, the suburbs of all cities were like this one: buckling, potholed roads; small businesses housed in tired buildings; pitted and gravelly parking lots. Renovation never would have occurred to her. Such things were reserved for places like downtown, which was, at the time, in the very process of remaking itself. But the world of the suburbs—Maddie’s world—was in the business of daily life, of doing what had to be done.

Which is admirable. And the people of Pittsburgh’s Bethel Hills were cheerful about it. Maddie was raised among cheerful people, by cheerful people. What is the relative weight, anyway, of a neglected pothole in the scheme of life? Pittsburghers seemed to keep these things in perspective.

Maddie’s life turned on three specific plots in that landscape: her home, which was in the aforementioned valley; her school, which was on a hill; and her church—the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness—which was about three-fourths of the way down an uncommonly gentle slope. In the early spring, the neighborhood’s melting snow ran to the church’s parking lot.

Like the rest of the neighborhood and that hill-ridden suburb, the church building was a tired one, but like Maddie’s house and neighborhood, it was somewhat newer than what was planted around it. Constructed sometime during the 1960’s, the architecture suggested that attention had been given to its design. But a low budget and persistent flaws in that design (the church basement flooded at least twice annually) relegated anything beyond basic maintenance to the realm of the inaccessible. As a result, the Bethel Hills Church matched the fatigued appearance of its neighbors—which likely helped it fit in.

But fatigue did not characterize the people—neither the suburban dwellers nor the congregants of Maddie’s church. The people of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness were, in fact, an energized congregation, having taken to heart long ago that which they claimed to believe: that God, in his mercy, took human form in the person of Jesus Christ and died to save his people from their sins. Moreover, they took seriously that this same Jesus had been raised from the dead, an impossibility that served to galvanize their faith: if God, because of his love, would do something like this, invading the world for its own salvation, forgiving people of their sins, and performing innumerable miracles besides, then his continuous acts of mercy were not to be doubted. They ardently believed that one could and should expect God to act at any moment: communicating to the faithful, hearing and answering prayer.

Such potential, if truly believed, was staggering, diminishing issues such as leaky basements. Belief such as this generated tremendous energy, reflected in myriad ways: multiple services held weekly, annual community outreach programs by the dozens, and an unrelenting willingness to consider and re-evaluate the church’s own tenets—not its fundamental doctrines, but those rules and bylaws which might, from time to time, be found to have been in error.

The advent of HBO, for example, had been problematic, as the church had historically held a hard and fast rule against its members seeing movies. Hollywood, said church founders, apparently held to moral boundaries far removed from those at Holiness. On seeing a movie, the faithful might readily be confronted with ideas and images offensive and potentially corrosive to their beliefs, tempting them away from moral purity. But the rule had been made long prior to the ubiquitous presence of HBO and, more recently, VCRs, and so had to be reevaluated.

The upshot was a reassessment of the film industry in general, which led to the acknowledgement that some movies were, in fact, good. This meant a new freedom for the church: see and enjoy movies, but use discretion when deciding which ones. Everyone felt good about this. It discouraged the view that Hollywood—or any amoral cultural entity—was the bad guy, and it allowed for more of what the church said it wanted in the first place, which was understanding from God—not simply rules—of what one should or shouldn’t do.

Other rules, too, had been revisited. There was, for instance, the rule about swimming: persons of the opposite sex were not to swim simultaneously in the same body of water. This was a rule that had been nearly impossible to enforce on the various shorelines of the continent, but which became a plain hassle in backyard swimming pools. Church leaders rethought the issue and decided that the temptations afforded by bathing suits in aquatic proximity would not irrevocably lead to sexual engagement. And so it was that, for Maddie, the rule about swimming was only a rumor of a long-dead law, and she and her friends enjoyed respite from the summer heat in any number of pools in any number of backyards—with both boys and girls, men and women in the water at the same time.

Which, again, wasn’t to say that church leaders or congregants shifted their attitudes toward moral law. These beliefs were intact. One ought to be wise about what one read, listened to, watched—all of which had the power to influence. And one was responsible to avoid temptation, to keep one’s behaviors right and good. Which included sexual purity: fornication, promiscuity, any sexual behavior outside the bounds of marriage was sin. It was rarely preached on, but it went without saying.

Yes, the people of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness were striving after God, who could not and would not abide sin. If one desired to know this loving and gracious God, then one’s behavior ought to reflect that desire; one’s life ought to be transformed by that desire—and by the active, engaged God they sought.

It was in this context that Maddie spent a significant portion of her waking life. Her parents, her lifelong best friend Justine—this was their world, too. The church community was like Maddie’s extended family. It was hardly something that she could get away from.

But of course she did not think of getting away from it then, any more than she thought about climbing out of the folds of Pittsburgh’s skirt and living elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the Sunday evening altar-going experience—apparently a common way in which church members pursued God—eluded Maddie. She didn’t know why most people—people without ailments or evident struggles of some kind—knelt at the altar to pray; neither did she feel the need to pray there herself. Her questions to her parents about it (“What were you praying about?” “Why did you go to the altar?”) were met with a pleasant and confounding vagueness (“I’m just listening to God”); her questions to Justine (asked only a time or two) were met with a chariness (“That’s none of your business”) that seemed decidedly annoyed. She found both off-putting. Moreover, just as had been the case since she was very small, before she could even name why, the whole altar thing was not entirely to her taste. There was a showiness about it that made her hesitate. It was far too public.

The result was Maddie’s understandable sense of exclusion when it came to the expected interaction with God, but not—not yet, anyway—a sense of impossibility.

Maddie looked for him elsewhere. As a very young child, she imagined he could be anywhere. She had been told as much. Entering an otherwise empty room, Maddie was careful with doorknobs and silence: she thought she might come upon him visibly present, and swept the room for a glimpse of a retreating sandal or the edge of a departing robe. She thought she’d found Jesus one day when, age five, she took refuge during hide-and-seek in the D’Angelos’ rhododendron hedge next door. He was smaller, certainly, than she had expected, and Maddie was disappointed, coming around to his front, to find it was not Jesus but rather his mother. A statue of the placid and beautiful Mary, arms lowered, hands extended in blessing. Lovely—but not him.

She was certain that she’d found him a few days later, hiding in yet another corner of the D’Angelos’ garden. This statue was decidedly male, and why wouldn’t Jesus have a bird perched on one shoulder and another in his hand, a small fawn pressed against one knee? But his face was bare and his hair wasn’t quite right: she didn’t know until she was much older that it had been a statue of St. Francis.

Maybe these early interactions were what drew her to her family’s nativity set, that familiar Christmas-time decoration. The flaps of its box were soft from repeated folding and unfolding, and Maddie removed the tissue-wrapped figures slowly: shepherd, wise man, sheep. She palpated each in its wadding, identifying it before opening and saving for last the holy family themselves: the overlooked Joseph with his lantern; Mary and her impenetrable air of unassailable peace; the baby.

They were so like statues, this little set. Like the statues in the D’Angelos’ garden, they were pure white. They looked like they could have been exhumed from ancient Greece, except that they were so small. Jesus was her favorite: his swaddling clothes confined to his waist, knees bent, hair curly, hands open and reaching. Perfectly formed, but with his back forever adhered to his manger. She studied his face. What was that expression? It was more open than that of his mother, his chin raised. He looked up at her from her palm; up at the sky from the stable floor. What did he see, she wondered? There he lay, God incarnate—she had been taught to believe. What miraculous powers were lent him even here at the beginning? Did he see through the roof to the chorus of angels? Did he already long for home? Could he see Maddie, two thousand years later, her hand cradling him in the living room?

Year after year she gazed at him, making multiple visits over the course of the Christmas season, bringing her face close to his. Unlike the altar calls at church where people knelt before an invisible God, she held him here, in a way, enfleshed. She had got hold of the body—almost. And there is something, isn’t there, universally accessible in a baby, something fresh and unfiltered? If God were to interact with her at all, it seemed most likely he would do it through this unassuming infant. She craned her ear, listening: the world was almost magical at this time of year. Please, God. Surely, if she was still and quiet enough, she would find he had something to say to her.

But in the end—always and every time—the infant Jesus was as impenetrable as his mother. Figures and faces as of stone, mute and faintly smiling, in the otherwise empty room.