At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page A

his hip.
    She gazed up over the uneven line of rooftops and toward the yellow moon and although it was both anger and humiliation that had drawn her out here it was fear that gripped her now. But a giddy kind of fear, a fear with some promise of joy in it. A fear that made her see herself for the first time since she’d entered the Church and taken the veil as a romantic, an enviable figure. Here in the colossal darkness, four floors above the ground, on just the other side of the rooms where she spent her life.
    Behind her she heard the children saying, “She’s not in there.” And then the boy repeating, somewhat indignantly, “Look for yourself. She’s not.”
    There was some murmuring and then some silence and then the good nights and farewells, the opening and the shutting of the front door.
    The roses were in the middle of the dining-room table. She lifted them carefully and returned them to their spot in the living room on her way to help Momma get ready for bed.

 
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    VEERING, their mother led them away from the subway and down a series of unfamiliar streets where the gray sidewalks were plastered with wet black leaves and the stone red and deep gray stairs that rose up to the apartment houses beside them seemed both steeper and narrower than those that led to Momma’s. A woman stood in a long window just above the sidewalk, framed from head to foot by thick velvet curtains, so that she appeared to be looking down on them from the edge of a stage. The trees here, placed evenly on the outer edge of the sidewalk, were all caged in narrow spokes of black wrought iron and the black street showed not only bits of yellow cobblestone in worn spots here and there but the occasional steely shine of old trolley tracks as well. Underneath their feet the sidewalk rose and fell in jagged rifts where, she had told them, the growing roots of the trees had risen up and cracked the concrete.
    The city, it sometimes seemed to the children, was full of ancient, buried things struggling to resurface.
    The church was on a narrow corner, behind a graying stone wall stained like the building itself with dirt black and mossy green. They followed her up the shallow steps and through a heavy wooden door she had only to pull open to
know that the Sanctuary beyond the narrow vestibule was empty. She seemed to slump a little. She had hoped for a noon Mass. The vestibule itself was lined with doors, the two through which they had come, the four that led into the church itself, and two more on either end that led no doubt to the hidden, holy places reserved for priests and nuns and souls in transit. There were brown racks of pamphlets and holy cards and Catholic newspapers scattered between them. She paused for a moment to open her purse, which still hung in the crook of her arm, and to extract from beneath her elbow a white chapel cap for herself and two lace handkerchiefs for her daughters, and these she placed on their heads with a delicate flourish, as if preparing to make them disappear.
    She held open the inner door and let them pass before her into the church, where they dipped their fingertips into the cold water in the cold stone font, touching bare forehead and woolen shoulders and chest, and following her to the first wooden pew, knelt and blessed themselves again. She stood for a moment before sliding in beside them, stood to survey the high ceiling and the stone walls. The stone here was a paler, cooler gray than that on the outside, a white gray that made the air itself seem bleached.
    Just beside the altar there was a huge, certainly life-sized, chalk-white carving of Christ on the cross, and seeing this the children realized that they had been to this church before. Perhaps a number of times before. And that this, then, was the church where their parents had been married.
    (It was part of all they knew that calla lilies had been placed on the altar then, to match the white satin lily Aunt Agnes