Prince of Peace by James Carroll Page A

thought it was an original insight of mine when I understood that the church's main function is to be there to go back to.
    This feeling of poignancy at Good Shepherd was as unexpected as sharp, and it filled me with a sudden sense of loss, not for belief or religion or Catholicism but for the neighborhood, the parish. I regretted not so much my own move away from it, but my parents', because as long as this was theirs it would have been mine. How could they have abandoned Good Shepherd? And for what? Queen of Queens? I resented my parents' move for the first time. So what that at last they had a little bungalow now and their own patch of grass. So what that they finally had a car. Wasn't it their job to keep my past intact so that I could wander through it now and then, nostalgically? It came as a surprise that my parents' choices, their lives really, could still impinge on mine. In the Village we thought parents counted for nothing. The best people, the ones we emulated, had never had them.
    But at least the church of Good Shepherd was not like our apartment on Cooper Street. Those five rooms were someone else's now, with new wallpaper in the bathroom and pictures of different snow scenes on the walls. It was a relief that Good Shepherd, with its silence, odor, sheeny floors and hissing pipes was still mine. And if it was still mine after NYU, it always would be. Good Shepherd with its nuns, priests, old ladies, pamphlet racks, banks of red and blue votive lights, holy water fonts, pointed windows and mammoth electric lanterns under which I'd made a point since fourth grade never to sit was indelibly stamped on my soul, like grace. I did not realize until that moment how at sea I'd felt downtown, and how lonely. If I was at my desk too much or at the movies it was because no one I knew down there was an Inwood kid.
    Like Michael. No wonder I'd come to see him here. In a park, a tavern or an Automat downtown I'd have been reduced to imitating Edward R. Murrow interviewing him. But here ... I understood in a flash and for the first time that it was this place that had made us friends. That alone would have made it sacred.
    I entered, dipping my hand, blessed myself, genuflected—right knee to left heel—and slid automatically into the corner by the confessionals.
    "Msgr. Riordan," a lettered sign said over one, and I shuddered. He'd caught me smoking in the schoolyard and his mere stare had injected me with a terror I still felt five years later. I took up a place by Father Walsh's booth. He was a soft touch. The line of penitants waiting for him on Saturdays could run for an hour after the monsignor had returned to the rectory. You could confess to Father Walsh having been sinfully aroused and he wouldn't ask you if it was with yourself or with others.
    I looked from worshipper to worshipper for Michael but didn't see him. He was taller than I was from the age of twelve and so all through high school had sat behind me, so I might not have recognized the back of his head, but there were almost no men or boys in the church anyway. Why weren't they standing in the right rear corner where I was? Even when the pews were threefourths empty, my father and his cronies always heard Mass from there because at sermon time, but before the priest turned around to face the congregation, they could slip out the side door for a smoke. When my generation stood there it was to arrive late and leave early. But that morning in the last moments before Mass I was alone in the men's corner and it took me a moment to remember why. Holy Name Sunday was the one Sunday on which the male hangers-back joined the congregation. They would be wearing their funeral suits today and, having gathered in the choir room behind the sacristy, they would any minute now be entering the sanctuary in procession ahead of the priest. They would file out onto the laity's side of the communion rail and into the first dozen pews on both sides of the aisle. Even from