CHAPTER 21
Thomas looked at the faces staring back at him. They were waiting for him to tell them something. Some of them fidgeted in their seats, scratching their heads or noses; others looked around the room, completely ignoring him. This, he knew from experience, was the toughest kind of audience for a minister. He was going to have to be good.
“Can anyone tell me why Mary and Joseph were going to Bethlehem?” he asked.
Several hands shot up. He picked one at random. “Yes, Alexa?”
“It was their vacation,” the little girl said confidently. “We go to visit my grandma at Christmas. Probably they were going to visit Jesus’s grandma.”
“That’s not why they were going,” a boy beside her said. “They went because of the centipede. Isn’t that right, Father Dunn?”
The boy, Hamish McTooney, looked at Thomas triumphantly. Thomas wasn’t sure what to tell him. The centipede? Where on earth had the child gotten such an idea? Thomas didn’t want to make him feel foolish, but he was at a loss for words.
“What’s a centipede?” someone else asked, sparing Thomas for the moment.
“It’s when people count you, stupid,” Hamish said knowingly.
Suddenly Thomas understood. “I think what Hamish means is a census,” he said, ignoring for a moment the fact that Hamish had insulted the asker.
“Right,” said Hamish. “That.”
“Hamish is correct that a census is a counting of people,” Thomas continued. “Mary and Joseph were going to Bethlehem because there was a census going on. They went there to be counted.”
“Why did they have to go to Bethlehem to get counted?” asked Lily Parsick. “Couldn’t they do it by telephone?”
“They didn’t have telephones back then,” Thomas explained.
The children all nodded, as if this made perfect sense to them. Thomas thanked God that there were some things five-year-olds took at face value.
“Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem to take part in the census,” he said. “And when they got there, they tried to find a room at an inn. But there weren’t any to be found.”
He waited for one of the kids to ask why they hadn’t made a reservation. Apparently, this small detail escaped them completely, however, because they remained quiet.
“Finally they found someone who would let them stay in his stable,” Thomas said.
“We have a stable,” Jeb Ritner said brightly. “We keep horses in it.”
“There were horses in this stable, too,” Thomas said quickly, sensing that some of the other children were about to discuss in detail the contents of their stables. “And cows, sheep, and donkeys. There were lots of animals. Mary and Joseph made a bed in the straw, and that’s where Mary gave birth to Jesus.”
The children stared at him. One yawned. He’d just come to the climax of his story, and they couldn’t have cared less.
“Did the donkeys lick him?” Alexa asked. “My grandma has a donkey and it licked me once.”
“Probably a donkey did lick Jesus,” Thomas assured her. “And later, the shepherds and the three wise men came to see him. Do you know how they knew he was there?”
The children shook their heads as one.
“An angel told them he was there. And the wise men followed a star.”
“And the wise men brought him presents,” Hamish said suddenly, as if he’d just remembered it. “Gold and something.”
At the mention of presents, the class perked up considerably. Thomas knew they were envisioning their own ideas of what constituted acceptable Christmas gifts, and he wasn’t about to divest them of their notions. It was easier this way.
“So that’s what our pageant is going to be about,” he said cheerfully. “And all of you are going to be in it. What do you think about that?”
“Can I be Mary?” Alexa asked immediately.
Thomas looked over at Mrs. Evelyn Siggs, their Sunday school teacher. She rolled her eyes and came to his rescue.
“You all are going to be shepherds, angels, and animals,” she said enthusiastically. “The older classes will be the other roles.”
“But I want to be Mary,” Alexa insisted.
“Maybe next year,” Mrs. Siggs said kindly.
Alexa mulled over this news. “Then can I be a pig?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Siggs said, beaming. “You can be a pig. And you all get to sing ‘Silent Night’ as part of the angel choir.”
Gladdened by this news, Alexa immediately began snorting. The other children followed her cue, making various animal noises. The room filled with bleating, mooing, oinking, and assorted other sounds, all of which sounded decidedly odd coming from a bunch of rosy-cheeked first graders.
“It’s like this every year,” Mrs. Siggs told Thomas. “Thanks for coming to talk to them. It makes them feel important.”
“I hope the next bunch is easier,” Thomas told her. “It’s the teen class.”
“They’ll just be surly,” Mrs. Siggs assured him. “And secretly all the girls will want to be Mary. They always do.”
Thomas left her with her charges and exited the room. The smaller children had their Sunday school sessions in the church’s basement, while the older ones were upstairs. He went up and walked into the room where they were meeting with Saint Peter’s music director and de facto pageant organizer, Gavin Bettelheim. In his sixties, Gavin was a portly, bearded man who favored music many in the congregation found slightly depressing. But his skill as an organist and his ability to draw moving performances from the choir were unchallenged, and he had been a fixture at the church for coming on three decades.
“Ah, Father Dunn,” Gavin said as the priest entered the room. “I was just telling these young people about my plans for this year’s pageant.”
The young people in question were a dozen teens ranging in age from eleven to seventeen. None of them looked particularly enthusiastic about the idea of being in a nativity pageant, and a few seemed to be on the verge of mutiny.
“He wants us to sing in German,” one of the girls wailed.
“It’s Brahms!” Bettelheim said, exasperation strangling his voice. “It’s supposed to be sung in German.”
“No one will even know what it means,” the girl argued.
“No one cares what it means,” said the director. “They’ll all be too busy looking at the shepherds wearing their fathers’ bathrobes.”
The group retreated into sullen silence, the girls folding their arms over their chests and the boys looking off into the distance. Looking at them, Thomas was thankful to be free of the years when acne and a fragile sense of self rendered every interaction with an adult a potential for disaster. He took the fuming music director aside.
“Gavin, how about if I talk to them alone for a while,” he suggested. “I’ll see if I can warm them up to the idea of the whole thing.”
“Thank you,” Bettelheim said. “Maybe they’ll listen to you. Do you know one of them dared to suggest that we perform ‘Winter Wonderland’?”
Thomas rewarded him with a look of shared disappointment in the musical tastes of the church’s youth. Gavin, casting a final, disapproving glance in the direction of his mutinous actors, walked off, muttering to himself.
“So,” Thomas said once the man was gone. “What seems to be the problem here?”
They all began talking at once, the air clotting with their competing complaints. Thomas held up his hands to silence them. “Why don’t we all sit down.”
They sat. He took a chair and placed it in front of them, so that he was the focal point for their attention. Once they were settled, he tried again.
“I know this pageant stuff isn’t exactly cool,” he said. “When I was your age, I had to do them, and every year I got stuck being a wise man because I was the tallest.”
This revelation earned him a reluctant laugh from the kids. He knew they were having a hard time imagining a priest who didn’t want to be in a Christmas pageant, but he was telling the truth.
“Mr. Bettelheim is right about parents coming to see their kids,” Thomas continued. “This is more about them than it is about you guys. And there are a bunch of little kids downstairs mooing and clucking their heads off. They can’t wait for Christmas Eve to get here. Do they care that this is supposed to be about the birth of Christ? No. They just want to be in a play. They look up to you guys, just like you probably looked up to whoever was in your shoes when you were five. So what do you say? Will you stop giving Mr. Bettelheim a hard time?”
“It’s just so dumb is all,” said a boy seated in the front. Tall and thin, with shaggy hair and a pimple-scarred chin, he reminded Thomas of himself at the same age.
“What do you mean, Rick?” he asked.
“The whole thing,” Rick said, pushing his hair away from his eyes. “Mary being a virgin. The wise men coming. Come on. It would have taken them months to get there. The whole thing is just a big story.”
The other kids looked at him with a mixture of respect and horror. Then, as if their minds were connected on a subconscious level, they turned to see what Father Dunn’s reaction was going to be. Thomas could tell they expected him to be angry at the young man’s attack on the nativity story.
“I can’t vouch for Mary’s virginity,” Thomas said. “And you’re right that the elements of the Christmas story have been sort of pushed together for the sake of convenience. But the basic message holds true. Christmas celebrates the birth of the one who saved the world, the birth of hope. The rest of it is just, well, wrapping paper.”
The teenagers looked at him as if he’d just declared the Bible to have been written by Stephen King. Probably, he thought, they’d never heard anyone question the absolute truth portrayed in the gospel. He himself had always been taught that the birth of Christ happened exactly as it was depicted in nativity plays across the world. It wasn’t until he was in seminary that he had started to question things.
He remembered, suddenly, a Christmas Eve spent with Joseph. It was before Joseph’s diagnosis, before they knew that he was carrying death inside him. They were in seminary, halfway through their second year, and neither had the money to go home for the holidays. Instead, they decided to spend them together.
They’d taken the train from Boston to New York on the afternoon of December twenty-fourth, planning on attending the midnight service at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Both adored the towering church, with its cavernous central nave and its smaller side chapels, each dedicated to the memory of a different group of people: poets, freedom fighters, those claimed by AIDS.
It was snowing when they exited the subway that had taken them uptown. Running up the steps to the cathedral’s huge wooden front doors, they’d paused inside, entranced by the glow of hundreds of candles that had been lit by visitors to the church. Their light rose up, somehow filling the emptiness of the ceiling high above them. All around them, people shuffled in respectful silence.
Waiting for the service to begin, they had wandered through the various chapels, looking at the tokens left behind by earlier pilgrims. The AIDS chapel, in particular, was decorated with gifts in memory of those who had died: notes written with trembling hands, photographs of the dead, inexplicable talismans (impossibly large high-heel shoes, the sheet music for “In the Still of the Night,” a Barbie), and other mementos whose individual meanings were lost on Thomas and Joseph but whose accumulated effect was numbing.
Thomas, in particular, had been anxious to leave that particular chapel. Joseph, sensing his unease, had shepherded Thomas into the cathedral’s gift shop. There, among the gargoyle replicas, CDs of sacred music from around the world, and displays of soaps and (most perplexing) snow globes containing miniature plastic cathedrals, Thomas had discovered a Christmas tree decorated with a multitude of ornaments. He had been particularly drawn to the figure of an angel. Unlike its blond cousins, it had black hair streaming out over a dress of deepest purple dotted here and there with gold. Its wings were like those of a bird, and in its hands was a candle, as if it were lighting the way for its brethren.
Hearing the sounds of music heralding the start of the service, they had rushed back to the nave and taken their seats. Thomas, caught up in the service, barely noticed when Joseph excused himself to use the bathroom.
Only later, as they were sitting, exhausted and blissful, on the train back to Boston early on Christmas morning, did Joseph reach into the pocket of his coat and produce a small bundle, which he handed to Thomas with a “Merry Christmas.” Inside was the angel.
“I saw you looking at it,” Joseph said. “You had the most beautiful look on your face.”
He’d then leaned over and kissed Thomas, lightly, on the cheek. Thomas, holding the angel in his hands, had felt a moment of absolute hope and joy. At the time he’d thought it was a response to the holiness of the day and the lingering effects of his time spent in the cathedral. Only later, when it was too late, had he realized the true cause of his happiness.
“Father Dunn?”
Thomas looked up and saw the wondering faces looking at him. How long had he sat there, silent, in front of them? It felt as if he’d been lost in thought for hours, but surely it could only have been a minute.
“Right,” he said, trying to remember what they’d been talking about. “So, as you can see, it . . . it . . .” He had no idea what he was saying. The kids were looking at him with expressions of increasing puzzlement. Then he remembered. Christmas. The pageant. Jesus.
“It may be just a story,” he said quickly. “Who knows. But people like stories, and they’re expecting a pageant, so just do it, all right?”
The teens looked at one another. For a moment Thomas thought they might demand to know just what it was he thought he was doing being a priest. Instead, they nodded.
“Sure,” Rick said as the others murmured their assent. “It’s cool.”
After a moment a girl in the back raised her hand. “Can I be Mary?” she asked shyly.