Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Read Free Page B

always wondered what went through her head at these times. He didn’t much understand how prayer worked, though of course he could recite variousstandards. What Susan did was more in the way of improvisation, Eddie imagined, and he’d never had much talent for that.
    As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him. Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage, and it might have been more than a matter of logistics that had led him to give up altar service just as he started acting in his first play. In the decade after he graduated from St. Albert’s—the years of his life with Martha and his acting career—he went to church no more than twice a year, at Christmas and Easter with his parents. If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.
    His teaching career had brought religion back to his life in a superficial way. School days opened in the chapel on the second floor, which had stained-glass windows, wooden pews, and a small pipe organ. The sessions began and ended with a hymn, but what passed in between was more assembly than religious ceremony. Each morning a different teacher gave a “chapel speech,” not a sermon or homily so much as a general didactic pep talk. Every faculty member was required to give at least two of these a year.
    Eddie did the minimum. He didn’t think he had much in the way of advice to give, having come back to St. Albert’s because he’d made such a mess of his life. The best he could offer were cautionary tales. But he found that the boys appreciated funny stories from his own student days, which hecould shape in a way that suggested some moral, usually not one the events had suggested at the time. He never brought up God or faith in these talks. He didn’t have anything to say on those subjects.
    He’d been dating Susan for a few months when she invited him to mass one Sunday, and he’d been going with her ever since. He wasn’t sure he believed the story the church was selling, but he liked about it the same thing he’d liked about acting: the understanding that someone was watching, that every action had a purpose and a meaning. Like Susan herself, it had come into his life at a time when he needed it. She had brought him back from a desperate place. What’s more, she had not even known she was doing so. She’d done it just by being herself. When things weren’t going well between them these days, he tried to remind himself of that.
    Susan rose from the kneeler and opened her eyes just as the organ in the back brought the crowd to attention. The fifty-three members of the graduating class processed up the center aisle, singing the school song. Eddie watched them take their seats in the front three pews. They had been in seventh grade—little boys really—when Eddie started teaching. They’d been completely altered since he’d first met them. As had he, Eddie thought.
    He remembered his own graduation, his mother’s pride at the idea that he would be the first in his family to go to college. Many more firsts were expected to follow. After he left NYU as a sophomore to act, his parents used the rest of the money they’d saved for tuition on a down payment for a house in Florida and took to expressing relief, when he called them there, that at least he hadn’t killed any girls in the park.
    The pastor, Father Seneviratne, gave a brief blessing before welcoming Luce to the lectern. Hungover as Eddie was, he found it mercifully easy to ignore the man’s drone while dancing on the fuzzy edge of