IT WAS COLD AND windy the morning of the pointless argument over the crocodiles. Finn walked down the cobbles of Avery Street and made a left at the Commons. He walked on, staring at nothing but his doggedly moving feet. Long gone were the days when he sought out his reflection in any glass.
It had rained and snowed and sleeted steadily since Thanksgiving, and the icy mist clung stubbornly to the Boston air. Finn’s face was freezing. But still, this would be the easiest part of his day. Asking for help.
He crossed under the elevated trains to North End and hurried up grimy and slushy Hanover Street to St. Stephen’s. The seven o’clock service was about to start. This wasn’t the Park Street Church Finn and his family used to attend on Sundays, on the tree-lined corner of Tremont and Park with its shops and restaurants and beautiful people alighting on the common square, long before Lionel started shouting on its steps about margarine.
There wasn’t a tree to be found in the entire North End, and the church was wedged deep in the ethnic neighborhood, a block from Union Wharf. St. Stephen’s was out of the way of everything but the prayer of supplication. When he needed to thank God, he went to Park Street. When he needed to beg God for help, he went to St. Stephen’s.
On the corner was a small coffee and smokes shop called Our Lady of Victories, behind which used to be a superb speakeasy named Our Lady of Vicetories, now tragically out of business. It was probably just as well. Seven in the morning was too early to long for a speakeasy. Frankly, it was too early for mass. But after receiving the holy wafer, a newly braced Finn could go out in search of work. If he found some, all the better. If he didn’t, he’d go back to the bank and open it for a few hours, hoping for a customer or two. The sign CLOSED FOR A BANK HOLIDAY was always up now just in case he got some actual work and couldn’t open.
He was a few minutes late; the service had already started. The pews were packed. He noticed that; lately, the benches had been getting fuller. He found a seat a few rows from the altar. The church was dark and always smelled of incense. The balcony choir, though a bit ragtag, still sang like angels. Stained-glass windows adorned both sides of the altar, in the center of which was a seventy-foot icon of Christ the Pantocrator. Finn never liked to look at it directly because the eyes on that icon were so deeply unsettling. Alive and profound, it seemed to Finn that at any second Christ’s eyes might blink. Keeping his own less profound, less divine, though just as alive eyes on the pew in front of him, he listened to Father Umberto recite the litany of supplication. But Finn had his own.
Please God, help me support my family. Please help me find something, anything, that will bring in some money. Please help me save Walter’s bank. Please turn something around for me, for us. It’s slipping out of my fingers, no matter what I do.
Please help me maintain a calm face, a soothing demeanor for my wife. She is so worried, and I don’t want her to know the desperate trouble we’re in. Please help me stay strong for her and the girls.
Please help me deal with Sully, with the problem I created. I can’t go to Vermont again, yet I need that money. Without it, there’s not enough to go around. There’s nothing.
Please keep my father healthy, my mother. Please let my father forgive me for costing him his lifelong job. He helped me at a true cost to himself. Please let me make it up to him.
It may be out of even Your power, but please keep Lucas sober. And help Lionel in his new life. I will miss my friend. Now that Lionel has pulled up anchor and skipped town, I’ve got no one to help me, and the crisis at the bank seems all the more final.
And after you help everyone else, please don’t forget about me. Help me with my life, in whatever way pleases You.
Oh, and one more thing. I beg You, please—help me shut my soulsick being to the presence in my house of a woman who is a threat to my entire existence. She can upend it all. Please make me strong and not weak, make me blind, make me deaf, to her and myself. Please make me not break. Send me a sign, O Lord, any sign that You hear me.
When Finn opened his damp eyes, Father was lamenting the loss of hope he had been witnessing in some of his parishioners. He said he wished that the lack of material things wouldn’t make people forget the other things they still had that no joblessness could take away. “Those are the things we must think of when the daily grind gets us down.”
But this was what Finn was most afraid of: that there had appeared something in his life which even the lack of everything else could not subdue.
“Ask yourselves,” the priest said, “is there something else in my life worth living for? Is there something else worth waking up for? Is there something I can still open my heart to, lift my eyes to?”
You’re not helping, Father, Finn thought, standing in the Communion line. Not helping at all.
After receiving the Eucharist, Finn hurried to the exit; it was nearly 7:40. He had to get in the job line at Faneuil Hall by 8:00 with the rest or he’d get no work today. Lost in the waters of his anxiety, Finn dipped his fingers inside the bowl of holy water, crossed himself, turned to rush out through the narthex, and barreled full steam into Isabelle.
His hat fell out of his hands.
He lifted his eyes to the ceiling of the church in silent rebuke. Is this a cosmic joke? I beg you for strength, for a sign, and you send her to me in the place I creep to hide?
“You do this lot, don’t you,” said Isabelle. “You really need to watch where you going.”
He let go of her as if scalded; he almost pushed her away. “Excuse me,” he said, grabbing his hat off the floor, dodging her and vaulting outdoors.
She raced after him. “Finn!”
What could he do? “I’m late,” he said, barely turning to her.
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I go to Catholic church like my mother,” she said. “Because I can’t find my Orthodox one. What about you?”
Not only could Finn not explain, he didn’t want to. And now other vital things were threatened. What if she said something to Vanessa, innocently enough, the way she pretended to say all things? How could Finn explain to Vanessa why he was receiving the Eucharist at a Catholic church? And how could he explain it to Isabelle? But to ask her to keep a secret was beneath him.
Finn wished to God he hadn’t run into her. With regret, he realized he wouldn’t be able to return to his favorite church, and this made him hostile toward her and resentful she wasn’t where she was supposed to be—at the house with his wife and children—instead of rambling around Boston’s houses of worship at daybreak.
He didn’t even say goodbye to her before hurrying away. She was making him forget his manners, him, the politest of men!
Why did she always make him feel so out of sorts? What was she accusing him of? He felt such anger at her and became even more upset because she had made him angry in church, of all places—and right after receiving Communion! That’s why you need God, Finn thought, buttoning his coat and pulling his hat low over his forehead. Because you can’t get away from sin, no matter where you turn, no matter how hard you try. Grace is the only thing that can get you through it.