Snow in August Read online

  “For you,” the rabbi said.

  “No, it was nothing, I don’t need it….”

  “Please.”

  Michael was anxious again, about the time now and the four blocks he still had to journey through the blizzard. He picked up the nickel and slipped it into the side pocket of his mackinaw.

  “Good-bye,” the man said. “And thanks you.”

  “You’re welcome, Rabbi.”

  The boy opened the door and rushed into the storm, feeling taller and stronger and braver.

  3

  Father Heaney looked as if he too wished he had stayed in bed. His halo of uncombed gray hair combined with his wild black eyebrows and unshaven chin to create a vision of distraction and carelessness. Only his eyes seemed to belong to the man whose war record made him a hero to Michael and some of the other altar boys. His slits of eyes were more hooded than ever, causing Michael to imagine him posing as a Japanese submarine commander spying for the OSS. This was not too absurd a possibility; they had heard from other priests that Father Heaney had been a chaplain in North Africa and Sicily and Anzio; he had gone into Germany with General Patton. He had not been in the Battle of the Bulge, although when Michael asked him about it, he said, in a tight-lipped way, that he’d known men who died there. In his sermons, or in the mornings in the sacristy, Father Heaney never talked about the war. But Michael was sure the war hung over him like a dark cloud; after all, less than two years ago, he was giving the last rites to dying soldiers.

  To be sure, Father Heaney’s silences were not confined to the war. He was silent about most things. In the mornings before mass, he seldom said anything to the altar boys, but on this morning he was more silent than ever. He grunted when he saw Michael arrive breathlessly at ten after eight. He grunted at Michael’s apologies. Then he grunted and motioned with his head for the boy to precede him out to the altar.

  The priest’s style was to say the mass very quickly, like a man announcing a horse race, and the other altar boys always joked that he was in a hurry to get back to his bottle. Michael had never seen him drinking, or even smelled whiskey seeping from his pores, but on this arctic morning, Father Heaney’s impatient, hurtling style hadn’t changed. He raced through the mass in the cold, empty church while Michael tried valiantly to keep pace. Usually there were two altar boys, but Michael’s partner had been defeated by the blizzard, and Michael made all the Latin responses himself. At one point, Father Heaney cut Michael off in midsentence; at another, he completely dropped a long piece of Latin. It was as if even the words of the ancient ritual were more than he wanted to say. Michael moved the heavy leather-bound missal from one side of the altar to the other. He did what he was supposed to do with wine and cruets. As the priest mumbled before the tabernacle, with a plaster statue of the bleeding Christ above him, Michael tried to pray for his father in his Belgian grave and the souls in Purgatory and the starving people in Europe and Japan. But only the impulse rose in his breast; the actual words of prayers did not follow. Father Heaney wouldn’t let them, driven as he was to cross the finish line. The priest blessed the great dark space of the church and skipped the sermon, while far above, the steeple of Sacred Heart of Jesus R.C. Church shuddered and creaked under the assault of the wind.

  Then Michael remembered the injured tone of the bearded man’s voice: that please. And he decided that the rabbi had been desperate. That he needed Michael to turn on those lights or he would suffer for the rest of the day. There was raw pain in his voice. Not pain that had to do with the light switch. Some other kind of pain. Coming from that man. That rabbi. That Jew.

  Then he heard a phrase: Domine non sum dignus…

  And a whisper from Father Heaney: “Pay attention, boy. We’ve got two customers.”

  They had reached the moment when the priest hands out Holy Communion, and somehow, from the vast wind-creaking darkness, two old women in black clothes had made their separate ways to the rail of the altar. Michael quickly lifted the gold dish called the paten and followed Father Heaney to the railing and the kneeling women, wondering: How did they get here? Did they walk through this blizzard that knocked me flat? Did someone drive them in a car? Maybe they live here. Mumbling Latin, his left hand holding the gold chalice known as the ciborium, Father Heaney deposited a host upon each outstretched tongue, while Michael held the paten under their chins. This was so that no fragment of the host, which had been transformed into the body of Jesus Christ during the Consecration, would fall upon the polished floor.

  The first woman’s eyes were wide and glassy, like the eyes of a zombie from a movie. The other closed her eyes tight, as if fearful of gazing too brazenly at the divine white wafer. The second one had a mole on her chin, with white hairs sprouting as if from the eye of a potato. They each took the host the same way: the lips closing over it, but the mouth stretched high and taut to form a closed little fleshy cave. To chew the host, after all, was to chew Jesus. Bowing in piety and gratitude, they rose and went back to the dark pews to pray until the host softened and they could swallow.

  Then Michael knelt on the altar, and Father Heaney placed a host on his tongue too. Michael squinted but didn’t shut his eyes. He saw that the priest’s thick fingers were yellow from cigarettes. And he remembered the rabbi’s dirty fingernails. And thought: Maybe the pipes in the synagogue have frozen and burst, like the drains at the armory, and there isn’t any water. Maybe he’s not permitted to wash his hands. Like he wasn’t permitted to turn on the lights. But helping the man had to be what the catechism listed as a corporal work of mercy, right? Even if he was a rabbi. A Jew. That still must count. You were supposed to help the needy. The poor. The sick. The man looked poor, didn’t he? And he needed someone to turn on the lights. For some mysterious reason. Is not permitted…. The mystery of the brief moment in the synagogue grew larger as Michael swallowed his own softened host. The rabbi wasn’t Svengali. He wasn’t Fagin. But he was strange and mysterious, like someone from a book, a bearded guardian of secrets. And Michael thought: I want to find out those secrets.

  Finally the mass ended. Father Heaney muttered Ite, missa est, and Michael answered Deo gratias, and the priest strode off the altar, with Michael behind him. In the sacristy, with its marble counter and ceramic sink, Father Heaney began removing his garments: the chasuble and stole, the maniple and cincture, the amice and alb. Under all of these, the priest was wearing a tan turtleneck sweater and black trousers. His black shoes were stained from dried rock salt. He sighed, took a pack of Camels from his trouser pocket, and struck a wooden match on the sole of his shoe to light up. He inhaled deeply. The smell of the cigarette filled the air.

  “Thanks, young man,” he said, his eyes moving under the hooded lids. “And, hey: How in the hell did you make it here this morning anyway?”

  “I walked, Father.”

  The priest inhaled deeply, then made a perfect O with the exhaled smoke.

  “You walked, huh? How many blocks?”

  “Eight.”

  “No wonder you were late,” he said, his black eyebrows rising. “Well, you can offer it up to the souls in Purgatory.”

  “I did, Father. During the prayers.”

  “I hope you included me,” the priest said, without smiling. And then grabbed his army overcoat and walked out to cross the snow-packed yard to the rectory.

  Michael’s duties were not finished. This was the last mass of the day, and so he went back to the altar to extinguish the two candles with a long-handled device the altar boys had named the “holy snuffer.” The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian and Polish and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.
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  Quickly, Michael came down off the altar, genuflected, and returned to the empty sacristy. He pulled the surplice over his head, hung the cassock in the closet, and changed into his street clothes. Before leaving, he flipped the switches of the altar lights, peering out to be sure he had turned them all off. Then, from the dark upper reaches of the church, he could hear the moaning of the wind. And through the wind, a voice.

  Please, it said.

  Please to help.

  4

  That afternoon in the howling white world, while his mother worked her shift as a nurse’s aide at Wesleyan Hospital, Michael Devlin was alone in the living room of the flat, lying on the linoleum floor beside the kerosene heater. A pillow was folded under his head. His stack of Captain Marvels was beside him. After mass and the promised bacon and eggs and his mother’s departure, he had searched for the issue that told the story of Billy Batson’s first encounter with Shazam. Or rather, he’d found the retelling of the story, because he didn’t own the precious first issue of Whiz Comics, the one published long ago, near the beginning of the war. In the retelling, for a special issue of Captain Marvel’s own book, the man in the black suit was there with his hat pulled down to mask his face. But except for the black clothes, he didn’t resemble the rabbi from Kelly Street, and neither did the wizard Shazam. The wizard was much older, with a white beard instead of a dark one, dressed in a long, flowing robe. The rabbi was younger, heavier, and with his blue eyes and horn-rimmed glasses looked more like a schoolteacher from the Wild West than an Egyptian wizard. Somebody who could have taught Abraham Lincoln.

  After a while, Michael put aside the Captain Marvels and started reading a comic book named Crime Does Not Pay, all about the terrible killer Alvin Karpis and his bloody career and bloodier end. This comic made Michael feel very different from the way he felt reading Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel was about magic words and mad scientists and tigers that talked, about bullets that bounced off chests and a hero with a gold-trimmed cape who could fly through the air. But the crime comic was full of real gangsters in real cities. No capes. No magic words. Just robbing and shooting and dying. Bullets didn’t bounce off chests, they went through them; and nobody went flying through the air, high above the skyscrapers. The crime comics were about men who were once good kids in places like Brooklyn and came to bad ends. Like the men from Murder Incorporated, Lepke something and Gurrah. Pretty Boy Floyd. Dillinger. They died in ambushes. They died outside movie houses. They even died in the snow, like Tommy Devlin died in Belgium, but without being heroes. They didn’t ever die for their country. They died for money. Or women.

  Partway through the story of Alvin Karpis, Michael realized that the wind had stopped. He listened hard, fearing some trick from the storm, and then heard shovels scraping against sidewalks and knew that it was over. He wanted to tell his mother the news, but she was working at the hospital. So he dressed, and grabbed his dry gloves, and dashed down the stairs to find his friends.

  Sonny Montemarano was already there, testing the snow with big mittened hands. His dark face was shiny, his eyes bright.

  “You ever seen anything like this?” he said.

  “Never,” Michael said. “They got icicles up at the armory that look like rocket ships.”

  “We couldn’t get out my door,” Sonny said. “It’s frozen shut. We hadda jump out the fucking window.”

  “This morning, the wind threw me across the street,” Michael said. “Like I was a goddamned feather.”

  “I never seen anything like it. What a fucking storm.”

  Sonny always said fuck. Michael loved hearing Sonny talk, but he still had trouble using the forbidden word, afraid it would become such a habit that he would say it in front of his mother. He used goddamned. None of them said the worst word of all: motherfucker. Sonny had tried it one time last summer, but Unbeatable Joe, who ran the saloon on the corner, heard him, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and said, “Don’t ever use that fucking word, you hear me? Only niggers use that fucking word.”

  Then Jimmy Kabinsky arrived, with a big wool hat pulled down to his brow. He was a DP, a displaced person, and a figure of much amazement in Sacred Heart School because he’d learned English in three months. Nobody was more amazed than Sonny Montemarano; his grandmother had come from Sicily forty-one years ago and still didn’t speak much more than Sonny, come uppan eat or Sonny, you shut up.

  “They got snow like this in Poland?” Sonny asked.

  “They got snow in Poland goes up three flights,” Jimmy said. They started walking together toward Collins Street.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” Sonny Montemarano said. “Three flights? You’d have nothing but dead Polacks, you had that much fucking snow.”

  “I swear,” Jimmy Kabinsky said. “My uncle told me.”

  “Oh,” Sonny said, rolling his eyes at Michael behind Jimmy’s back. “Your uncle. That makes sense.”

  Jimmy’s uncle was a junkman. He made a living picking up old newspapers, broken bicycle wheels, ruined radios, then piling them into a pushcart and taking them off to some warehouse on the waterfront. During the last year of the war, the kids rode him without mercy. For one thing, his arms were very long, his shoulders sloped, and his body was always pitched forward at an angle, even when the pushcart wasn’t dragging him down the hills of the parish. For another, he had no wife and no kids and never went to the bars with the other men. Finally, he was very ugly, or so everyone agreed: his eyes were buried under a clifflike brow, his wide, potatolike nose was always flared in anger, his ears were like a pair of ashtrays, and his teeth were yellow. The kids all called him Frankenstein, except when Jimmy was around. When Jimmy came to live with him, because DPs all needed sponsors, he became Uncle Frankenstein. The kids didn’t rag him when Jimmy was around, out of respect for Jimmy, whose parents died in the war.

  “How high you think the snow is in Ebbets Field?” Jimmy said.

  “Upper deck,” Sonny said, winking at Michael. “My grandmother heard it on the radio.”

  “Upper deck?” Jimmy said. “Come on, that’s like, what, six flights?”

  “Deeper than fucking Poland!” Sonny said, shoving Jimmy into a pile of snow. “And they got the wind out there, blowin’ to left field. Swear to Christ.”

  Soon they were romping in the snow, falling facedown into its whiteness, hurling snowballs at each other and at strangers. Kids emerged from the tenements with sleds, heading for Prospect Park. A trolley car slowly pushed its way along Ellison Avenue. A few cars arrived from nowhere, their tires encased in chains. Then Unbeatable Joe, thick and burly with a fur hat and a heavy army coat, came to look at his saloon, gazing at the sign that was smashed on the sidewalk. He shook his head and kicked the sign. Then he unlocked the door and went inside. He was back in a minute, holding two shovels. He shouted across the street.

  “Hey, do you worthless, lazy bums wanna make some money?”

  They took turns, two of them shoveling while the other warmed his hands. Michael shoveled around the fallen sign, which was two feet high, three feet wide, about a foot deep. The neon lettering was smashed, the tin sides bent, the steel cables torn; that was some goddamned wind. Then he started cutting a path for pedestrians, pushing loose snow out toward where the gutter was. That was the easy part. But there was a layer of hard-packed icy snow beneath the fine snow that had fallen near the end of the storm. The packed snow wouldn’t move.

  “Lemme try,” Sonny said. He took the shovel from Michael, forced the blade under the packed snow, put a boot on the top of the blade, and shoved hard. The snow peeled back. “Ya see? Ya gotta get under it.”

  “I’ll finish it, Sonny,” Michael said.

  “No, no, I enjoy this.” He laughed. “Help Jimmy.”

  When the job was done, Unbeatable Joe came out again.

  “You bums oughtta sign up with Sanitation right now,” he said. He took a dollar from his pocket and handed it to Sonny. “Go get laid.”

  He turned and
kicked the sign one more time.

  They went past Slowacki’s candy store, which was too crowded, and walked another block to Mister G’s. In this smaller, darker candy store, Sonny bought a Clark bar, Jimmy chose a bag of peanuts, and Michael picked a box of Good and Plenty. Behind the counter, Mister G was reading the New York Post. He was an old man, short and dumpy, with very little hair and sad eyes behind rimless glasses. He was an oddity along Ellison Avenue; it was said, for example, that he was a Giants fan and that his kids had gone off to college. That was strange; Michael had never known anyone but Dodger fans and nobody at all who had gone to college. It was also strange that Mister G read the Post in a neighborhood where men swore by the Journal-American. And that he lived with his wife in a tiny apartment at the back of the store. It was said of her that she “went to business,” which meant she had a job in an office and rose early and went to the subway in a suit or a dress. It also meant that they could afford a regular apartment but were too cheap to move from the back rooms of the candy store.

  Mister G said nothing as he rang up the sale on a heavy gilded cash register on a shelf behind the counter. He gave Sonny change from the dollar while flipping a page of the newspaper in a distracted way. Mister G’s silence was not odd, for there was no need for chat. Kids were in and out of the store all day, buying penny candies from the boxes on the counter, or nickel candies from the three-tiered rack. And the store was not only for kids. Grown-ups used the pay phone in the back. Or bought newspapers. And in neat boxes on the right of the counter, Mister G had built displays of cigarettes and ten-cent cigars.

  “Man, I hope it snows s’more tonight,” Sonny said. “I hope it snows for a month. We’d be rich.”

  He was dividing the change when Frankie McCarthy walked in.

  Sonny shoved the change in his pocket and started examining the comics on the standing rack against the wall. The Spirit. Batman. Jungle Comics. Michael was suddenly nervous. Frankie McCarthy was one of the older guys, at least seventeen, and the leader of the gang called the Falcons. He scared Michael. He had dark red hair, wet now from the snow, freckles, slushy blue eyes with very small pupils. He kept his lips pulled tight over his mouth to hide a broken front tooth. The summer before, Michael saw him punch out a drunken man on the sidewalk in front of Unbeatable Joe’s, battering him until the man’s face was a smear of blood. The scene was terrible, but Frankie McCarthy seemed to enjoy it. So did his boys on the Falcons. They all cheered as Frankie walked away from the fallen older man like he was Joe Louis. And he enjoyed it. That’s what scared Michael.