Bastille Day, page 24
She laid her hand on mine. “But I wish you had, Cal.”
“A diamond the size of your head?”
“Well yes. But no.” She smiled sadly. “Asked me.”
“You’re a good girl, Kelly,” I told her. “And someone will ask you. Here.” I handed her the bag from Selfridge’s. “I bought you some lingerie. I can’t return it. So.”
She took it from me, peeked inside. “Oohh. Would you like to see it on?”
“No thanks,” I said. “It would be stunning. You are stunning. But—”
“So this really is the end,” she said. Her head dropped. Her hands worried the bag, yet she did not want to set it down.
Kelly McNair really liked nice lingerie.
“What are you doing for the rest of the week?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I missed Fashion Week,” she said. “But I suppose I’ll do some shopping. Hang out in cafés. Maybe meet some interesting man.”
“Try the Ritz Bar. Or the bar at the Four Seasons,” I told her. “Jay Z and Beyoncé are probably sitting there at this precise moment.”
“Cal,” came the voice above me, “darling,” and there was Allison, as if I’d pressed a silent alarm. She looked beautiful, gray dress, gray Jimmy Choo pumps, matching Louis Vuitton handbag. Kelly looked at her and nodded in grudging approval.
“Hello,” Allison said, holding a hand out. Kelly took it briefly, let it drop. “I’m Allison. You must be Kelly. Cal told me you were in Paris.”
“So you’re Cal’s rescue project? I have to say, I imagined something different. Something more obviously shattered.” Meow.
“I owe him a great deal,” Allison said, patting my shoulder. She turned to me. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, left a stack of euros on the table. “Don’t tip,” I told Kelly. “They won’t be impressed by it.”
“Nobody tips,” Allison said. “Except Americans.”
“Well. I guess this is goodbye,” Kelly said, and her voice was small, and even I felt the tiniest bit sad.
“Have a wonderful life, Kelly McNair,” I said. “Find that man who will give you a diamond as big as your head. Find that man who will bring you to Paris for Fashion Week.”
She snickered a little. Because those things so obviously did not resemble me. “Have a wonderful life, Calvin Smith. And if things don’t work out with your Allison—”
Who cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” Kelly said. “Sorry. Best of luck to you both.”
I shook her hand. Two pumps, clear release. Maybe I should have felt worse. I had spent years of my life with this woman. Seen her naked on multiple occasions. I had even, if you believed her report, proposed to her that time at a museum in Fort Worth.
But the fact was, I had never felt for her the kind of love that seriousness required. And I knew I never would.
Do not marry someone you do not love.
So it was best we walk away.
She would have a great story. He broke up with me at a little café in Paris …
And I—I would have this. My life.
Older. Wiser. Sadder.
Alone.
Allison took my arm and turned me up the street toward the Cathedral.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I breathed to her as we walked past the Chinese Embassy.
“Life is hard enough,” she said. “A little help from your friends, that’s what we all need.”
We entered the cathedral through the black wrought-iron gates, passed security into the cloister, and saw Father Cam, who was dressed in his robes. He took my hand, gave me a chaplain’s examining eye.
“How are you bearing up?” he asked, remembering I’m sure our recent talks about Nice and terrorism. “And where is Nadia?”
I could see my face reflected in his expression. “Oh.” He kept hold of my hand, shook it again. “Oh. I am so sorry, old man.”
“On her way back to Saudi Arabia,” I informed him. “I think she was married last night. Long story.”
“You can tell it all at lunch. If you can tell it.”
I nodded.
“And at least you’re here,” he said. “The church is full of people feeling broken and scared this morning. But something good is about to happen.”
Allison turned to go into the church, but I lagged for a moment. “Forgive me, Father Cameron—”
“Just Cam, please.”
My heart was pounding and I was feeling panicky, like the stone walls were closing in. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. My past experience with church does not suggest that I’m going to find any meaning in this present darkness.”
Cam looked around. He was being joined by a tall boy carrying a jeweled cross, two girls carrying candles, someone carrying a big bejeweled book. Time was running out. But still, he looked me in the eyes, saw my distress, and touched my arm.
“Listen to Clarice’s sermon,” he said. “I’ve read it. She went to the lessons for today and fought for good news.”
“Her sermon?” I asked. My memories of sermons did not correspond with good news.
“A good sermon is like a conversation,” he said.
“Every sermon I ever heard was just someone yelling at me,” I said.
“Listen, Cal,” he repeated. “And if you can, if you feel right about it, come up and take communion. It’s a powerful action. It’s an act of radical hope.”
Clarice had arrived, and here was Nkwele, waiting for her. He kissed her fingers, then stepped away as the church people formed into a circle to pray. Cam nodded to me as he stepped into the circle, and I went on into the nave, where I found Allison, who was seated next to Rob and Brigid.
I looked at the service guide and didn’t recognize much—it was just a multitude of words—but Allan was at the organ, and whatever he was playing, that Fauré, maybe, was beautiful, and the nave itself was beautiful, and it did feel like a gentle place to be at the end of a brutally hard week.
Other people apparently thought so as well. The Cathedral was full; by the time the procession began, every pew was packed, front to back, and they had to put out overflow seating in the rear. It was as though all of Paris thought it needed to be in church that morning. It put me in mind of the Sunday after 9/11. I did a story at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, packed to the rafters on that morning, and it felt as though this congregation had a similar need, a similar hope that something good could happen, and so they had assembled from across the city.
In the Baptist church of my youth, everything built toward the sermon, which seemed to take up most of the service, so I was more than a little surprised when not halfway through the service, Cam processed into the middle of the nave and read a Gospel lesson about this time that Jesus visited Mary and Martha, about how Martha was pissed at Mary for not helping her fix dinner for Jesus and their guests, and then he walked back to the altar as Allan played, and then Clarice stepped up into the pulpit.
“Bonjour,” she said. “Bienvenue à la Cathédrale Américaine. Je suis Clarice Washington.” She paused. Looked out at those gathered. Nodded. “Good morning. I am Clarice Washington, Dean of the Cathedral. It is my great privilege to serve here at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, and on behalf of the staff and members of the Cathedral, let me say to each and every one of you that you are most welcome this morning of all mornings, this national Day of Mourning, in this house of prayer for all people.
People murmured their thanks, their return welcome, settled into silence, and Clarice began to speak.
“’The world is too much with us.’
“That phrase by the British poet William Wordsworth has been ringing in my head of late, and perhaps this morning that phrase reflects some of your own feelings as well.
“Sometimes the world batters us and shatters us, breaks our hearts and shakes our hope.
“The world has lately felt to me like a dangerous and unsettled place. Terrorist attacks in Germany, Iraq, Pakistan. The Brexit vote, driven, so it seemed to me, by nativism, exclusion, and fear of the Other. The death of two Black men in America at the hands of police officers, captured on social media. The attack on White police officers at a Black Lives Rally in America by a Black veteran who said he wanted to kill them solely because of the color of their skin. And now, on Bastille Day, this horror in Nice.
“I have spent hours over the past few weeks walking, praying, hoping for some clarity as I walked alongside the Seine with the music of the Irish rock band U2 in my ears.”
I liked that image. And wondered why I hadn’t run into Clarice yet on my morning runs.
“We have gathered this morning hoping for understanding. In the Anglican tradition, we come together to worship, we read the Scriptures together, and we trust that the preacher will help us discern God speaking into the silence that is our heartbreak.
“And so, as we do, I came to the lectionary texts prepared to wrestle on all our behalves this morning, to seek some understanding, to find some good news in the midst of this present darkness.”
She looked down at her notes, then out at all of us. “Some of you know, I think,” she said, “that I grew up in Alpharetta, Georgia, a small town to the north and east of Atlanta. The divisions between Black and White, the divisions between male and female, were very clearly demarcated there. There were places you were welcome and others where you would never be welcome, decisions made before your birth because of the color of your skin and the arrangement of your chromosomes.
“One of those places where a woman was not welcome,” she went on, “was in the living room on Sunday afternoons. That’s when the men watched football while the women cleaned up and drank coffee and gossiped and waited impatiently to go home.” I remembered a similar arrangement in Texas. My folks used to have friends over to watch the Dallas Cowboys play on Sunday, the men in the living room drinking beer and hooting, the women sipping coffee and whispering in the kitchen.
“But there was something wrong with me,” Clarice said in her deep beautiful voice. She laughed, sadly. “Not only was I too tall, and too skinny, and too dark skinned, all things I was deeply conscious of, but I loved football too much. Our own Atlanta Falcons, of course, but also the Cowboys and the Packers and the Broncos. I could name the starting quarterback on every team. I could tell you why Roger Staubach was better than Craig Morton, why John Elway was the greatest quarterback ever. And yet, I wasn’t welcome in that room where football games were playing on our only television screen.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps this seems like a matter of little import. But in our Gospel lesson today, in which Mary transgresses the boundaries of her culture to sit and learn at the feet of her rabbi, something is happening. I despaired about how to take this lesson and preach from it on the Sunday after the Nice attack. I wondered where we might find comfort in what looks like a domestic story of woman’s work and woman’s spaces, of Jesus inviting one of these women to cross over into the space he occupied.
“And I will tell you,” she confessed, “I would have given anything to have back last week’s Gospel text of the Good Samaritan.” A little chuckle at that, for reasons I didn’t get. Some inside Jesus joke. “The Good Samaritan, people, is the great lesson in a time of suffering, fear, worry.” She shook her head. It was not to be. “I could have pulled in Augustine’s admonition that every human being is our neighbor. I could have quoted William Gladstone, who said, essentially, that the ground on which we stand is not White ground or Black ground, Christian ground or Muslim ground, gay or straight. It is human ground. I could have channeled the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., who retold that parable of the Good Samaritan on his last night on earth, who called on his listeners to respond to danger with dangerous unselfishness. I could have cited the great writer and priest Barbara Brown Taylor, who says that Jesus is calling us all to come near enough to recognize that our neighbor is, simply, anyone anywhere who needs our help.
“Last week’s Gospel shatters walls and it breaks down preconceptions. It is truly radical. But please do not be misled by the seeming domesticity of our Gospel this week. In its own way, it is just as radical, just as clearly indicates the Kingdom Jesus came to inaugurate, just as powerfully speaks hope into a world demarcated by divisions.”
She paused to see how we were hearing this. I was, I will confess, a little surprised. Clarice said she had found a way to move from Martha being miffed at Mary to Bastille Day, to the horror in Nice, and so far I couldn’t see how she could possibly get there. It looked like trying to get from John Wilkes Booth to Kevin Bacon in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: impossible. Let alone how the NFL might ever fit into all of that. But I looked at Allison: she was listening raptly, and seemed to believe that something was about to happen, and so I looked up at Clarice, and I settled back in faith, trusting the messenger, if not the message.
“My older brother Tyrone, of blessed memory, was the Black male presence in my home growing up. Like many young Black men of my acquaintance, he came to a premature and violent end. As I tell you about him now, he has been dead for over twenty years. But I remember him still with love, with gratitude, and here is one of the reasons why:
“Although tradition dictated that the living room be reserved for Black men on Sunday afternoons, Tyrone invited me to come and sit on the floor in front of him and watch football.
“Now please understand, his friends did not want this. They felt it violated sacred boundaries. They pushed back, hard, told me to my face that they did not want me there. ‘Girl, this ain’t your place!’ Called me stupid or worse, begged Tyrone to change his mind.”
Clarice’s eyes were glistening now, although her voice was steady. “But my brother loved me more than he cared about following the rules. He was willing to give offense to his friends to make space for me.
“It’s so important for us, looking at the Mary and Martha story from these many centuries removed, to understand that Martha is not put out about the fact that Mary isn’t helping her fix dinner, although that is what she says. No: she is outraged by Mary’s brazen behavior. Mary is sitting in the part of the house where women in first-century Palestine were not supposed to be, behaving as though she is a man.
“More importantly, Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, like a student in those days. And this thing that Mary is doing, again, is taboo. Rabbis educated other men; women were separated and excluded. And yet, Jesus invites Mary, pushes back against the grumbling of the men, lets her sit at his feet and learn. Jesus loved her more than he cared about following rules.
“So, when I reflect on these disciples of Jesus, the first thing I see is those young Black men in my living room. It is hard not to imagine them muttering and murmuring, putting Mary down, calling her out. She does not belong there.”
She smiled thinly. “That is what I see at first, because that is my own history. So. Maybe the disciples agree with Martha that what they are seeing is shameful.
“And maybe they don’t.
“Because here’s the thing: Unlike those young men parked in front of our television set in Alpharetta, Georgia, those disciples of Jesus had been exposed to a larger world. Maybe by this point in their journey they had seen enough impossible things, listened to enough radical teachings, to recognize that this barrier, these rules, simply represented more of the lines that Jesus has come to cross. As in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which teaches that we are called to reach out a hand even to those who ought to be our enemies, as in the teaching of Paul that in Christ there is no distinction between male or female, Jew or Gentile, maybe the disciples—and we—are finally starting to see that this is exactly what Jesus is all about.
“Maybe on this evening in first-century Palestine, as Martha cooks and Mary listens, they are understanding what Jesus has been teaching, the same lesson, by the way, that Bono of U2 was singing over and over again into my ears as I walked this week, heart-torn, along the Seine:
There is no them.
There is no them.
There is only us.
“Only us.” She paused, looked out into a huge space full of people nodding, and I discovered to my surprise that I was one of them. I knew that U2 song, “California,” had run along the Seine to it, and some part of me wanted to live in a world where those words could actually be true.
“It is this Jesus,” Clarice said, raising her hands high in the air, “the Jesus who calls us to dangerous unselfishness, the Jesus who tells us that we love and serve God by coming near to those in distress, the Jesus who teaches that there are no parties or sides, that, beloved, we all stand on human ground—it is this Jesus we meet this morning in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
“And it is this Jesus who restores our hope, refuels our strength, and sends us out renewed to love and serve a world that desperately needs some good news this morning—and every morning.
“AMEN.”
Allison was sniffling beside me as Clarice climbed down from the pulpit and took her seat. She was not alone. There was a spirit of awareness in that space, a common connection. We had come hoping for something. And, in those minutes she had spoken, Clarice had somehow gathered that something for us. With us.
“Wow,” I whispered to her as Clarice sat down. “Is she going to go back up now and tell us we’re all doomed or something?”
Rob shook his head. “You are in the wrong place for that sermon,” he whispered back. “You’ll have to live with this one.”
“Wow,” I repeated. We got to our feet and started to recite a creed. I found it in the program, read along, said some of it out loud. I thought that maybe you had to believe all this stuff to say it. What did “one holy catholic and apostolic church” even mean?
But maybe saying it was how you came to believe it.
After prayers we greeted each other—“Peace be with you,” is what everyone said to me, and so I shook hands and said it back to them, peace being a very good thing—and then afterward, Father Cam and Clarice went up behind the big altar at the far end of the nave in front of that wondrous altarpiece.
“What happens now?” I whispered to Allison.
