After This by Alice McDermott Page B

difficult announcements with a
swallowed burp), there was an obstacle. Mr. Krause would not sell.
     
The architect’s design for the new gym and eighth-grade
classrooms was a marvel of symmetry. There was the simple brick
square of the old school building’s left side, updated by a wide glass
door, then the new entrance to the new gym, a single-story swoop of
steel and glass, then another, new brick square to balance the old.
A series of low white marble steps led from the gym’s modern
entrance to a green lawn (Saint Gabriel himself, in white stone, at the
center of it) that was bracketed by two curving white paths that led
directly to the sidewalk and the street. Mr. Krause’s property, which
consisted of a backyard, a small detached garage, and an eighty-yearold clapboard house out of which he had run a delicatessen for thirtyfive years, began at the gym’s modern entrance and ran to the edge of
the sidewalk. A year ago, when Father McShane first approached him,
Mr. Krause had agreed that he was more than ready to sell. His was
one of the last houses left along what had become a mostly
commercial boulevard, and the last bit of frontage on a block that was
equally divided between St. Gabriel’s Church and School on the one
end and a small strip of stores on the other. A descendant of the
Germans who had first farmed this land and established this village in
the wilds of Long Island just east of Queens, Mr. Krause knew that the
postwar sweep of homes and families had already obliterated most of
the old traces of the last century, and that his little farmhouse was one
of these. It was only a matter of time, he said.
     
He had been looking, as it happened, into moving the deli to a
storefront in a new mall in the next town.
     
But buried in Father McShane’s pitch to pay Mr. Krause a
handsome price for his house and his land was the bad seed of his
own destruction—or so the priest told them. (John Keane sought to
remember the parable.) “The parish is burgeoning,” Father McShane
had said. The school was bursting at its seams. Mr. Krause was a
Lutheran so he might not be fully aware, but Father McShane, in his
pride and boastfulness (through my fault, he told the men) had
assured him that eight Masses were offered every Sunday morning—
seven, eight thirty, ten, and one—in the church and simultaneously in
the auditorium, and still there were folks standing in the aisles. There
were double shifts of kindergarten in the school, morning
and afternoon, to accommodate all the children. Building the gym was
only the first step. Once it was up and Masses could be held there on
Sunday mornings, then the old church was coming down and a new,
larger one would take its place. Father McShane was thinking of
something “in the round” to suit the new liturgy.
     
But of course Mr. Krause knew the Mass schedule and the school
schedule at St. Gabriel’s. Also the hours of the Mothers Club meetings
and the Holy Name Society meetings, the basketball games, the first
communions and confirmations. Father McShane said three,
sometimes four Masses on Sunday mornings, but he had never once
edged his way into Mr. Krause’s little store after any of them, never
found himself pressed cheek to jowl with thirty other parishioners
vying to order cold cuts or potato salad or those marvelous doughnuts
from Mr. and Mrs. Krause, their two sons, and the daughter who
worked the counter. He’d never reached an arm through the crowd
outside to throw some coins into an open cigar box and grab a Sunday Daily News before they were all gone. Father McShane had forked
boiled ham and rolled pieces of Swiss cheese onto paper plates, added
a dab of good mustard and some coleslaw, snitched a green olive from
the tray, in living rooms after funeral Masses or at backyard graduation
parties, but he had never thought to note how these always came from
Krause’s store.
     
The parish is burgeoning, he’d said, and