Between Gods: A Memoir by Alison Pick

agreement.
    Dad places his cutlery, monogrammed with his mother’s initials, parallel on his plate and pushes his chair back. “Speaking of church,” he says, “who’s coming?”
    Dad’s maternal grandparents died in Auschwitz. His paternal grandmother, Ruzenka Bondy, of the yetzer tov , made it out. She came to Canada, where, as our family lore has it, she became a pillar of the United Church. She taught her grandson—Dad—that the particulars of faith matter less than having faith in general: a prayer practice, a community with whom to worship.
    Dad learned from Ruzenka that faith is in the doing.
    “Anyone?” he asks again. “Church?”
    Mum says she is too tired and has potatoes to mash for tomorrow’s Christmas dinner. Emily doesn’t want to go, either.
    “Degan?” Dad asks, appealing to the only other man in the family.
    “Sorry, Thomas. I’m beat.”
    Mum gets up to clear the plates.
    “Alison?” Dad asks.
    I pause. “Did Gumper ever go?”
    Dad scrutinizes my face. “Where?”
    “To church.”
    “He did. To the United Church, with his mother, Ruzenka.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “Why what ?” Dad looks mildly impatient.
    “Why did he go?”
    “Why do you think?”
    “I don’t honestly know.”
    “What’s your hunch?”
    “My hunch? He went so people would think that they were Christian.”
    It is ten o’clock on a snowy Christmas Eve. The dishes are cleared and coffee has been poured. The one or two cars passing by in the street make angel wings with their headlights.
    “Sure,” I say finally. “I’ll come with you.”
    Dad and I mount the newly shovelled stone stairs into St. John the Evangelist, the big Anglican church where I grew up, where I attended Sunday school and made crosses out of Popsicle sticks and glue. At the age of eleven, old enough to reason, to consciously make decisions, I studied for Confirmation here and committed myself to Christ’s teachings for life.
    At the entrance to the sanctuary, there’s a row of mailboxes for the members’ families. I locate the Ps , then the box marked Pick. I put my hand in, feel around. From the far back corner I fish out a name tag. Alison, it reads. How long has it been sitting there, waiting to be claimed?
    Although Anglican in denomination, St. John’s is Catholic in formality. The huge stained-glass windows show Christ suffering through his stations. The pews are cushioned with red velvet; the organ’s brass pipes shine. Growing up, I remember the church as a bastion of WASP pretention, but looking around I see that the congregation has changed. We find our place between a Chinese couple with a small son and two black women who look to be sisters.
    One of my fondest memories of Granny is being at church with her on Christmas Eve, when she would sing the carols in a selection of the various languages she could speak: “Silent Night” in German, “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in Latin. High above us in the balcony now, the choir opens with the English version, their voices clear, like birds calling out across water. In all my years of attending church on Christmas Eve, I have never not been overcome by this. The haunting melody has always brought me to my knees. Sure enough, shivers spread across my neck and down my arms as the words ring out: “Come and behold him, born the King of angels”—gathering us in, one and all.
    The Gospel is read from the centre of the aisle. The minister gives a sermon about going to Jerusalem and being greeted not by an innkeeper, but by guards with submachine guns and the wall of barbed wire. Dad crosses himself when the priest does. In the intercession, he takes his glasses off, kneels with his eyes closed. I notice, though, that he does not repeat “Lord, hear our prayer” along with the rest of the congregation.
    It’s been so long since I attended church that the words of the prayers take me by surprise: “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.” I