Story of the Month: Crossing the River

I was a good Catholic girl.  And like many good Catholic girls, at 12, I was seriously considering becoming a nun.  The priests and nuns at Holy Trinity in Hackensack, New Jersey, were always admonishing us to look deep into our hearts in search of a vocation, as if the calling to a religious order were something so shy and so tangled with other ideas in our young minds that it had to be panned like gold flecks from a rocky stream bed. 

I started wearing an itchy scapular underneath my blouses, and I delved into my heart for signs.  I was drawn, for a while, to a missionary order — the idea of going to foreign lands appealed.  Even more appealing were their habits, sky blue and ankle-baring, with a soft scarf-like headpiece, very different from the many-layered, long, black habits of the Sisters of Charity of our parish, whose faces were boxed in by stiff white rectangles that appeared distinctly uncomfortable.  Eventually, I decided that vague notions of travel and the appraisal of a habit as pretty did not constitute a vocation.  But I kept on wearing the scapular.

In sixth grade, I decided that I would not go on to the public junior high, but would ask my parents to send me, instead, to Holy Trinity School, which went from first grade through eighth grade.  I thought that because my parents had been sending all their children to public school for years that they were going to go to Hell, and that if I went to a Catholic school, they’d be saved.  I didn’t tell them this.  They enrolled me in Holy Trinity.  And for good measure, they enrolled my sister and my brother, too.  I put in only two years at Holy Trinity.  Younger, my siblings had to put in more time.  Minus my messianic purpose.    

I had teachers I liked, one year a lay woman and the other year a lively young nun.  Nevertheless, Holy Trinity was not a happy place.  The nuns used corporal punishment liberally, mostly but not exclusively against boys — slaps in the face, rulers thwacked across knuckles — often for minor offenses like laughing or talking.  I was never hit, but I lived in fear of the possibility, and it sickened me whenever I had to witness a punishment, as if my silent presence made me complicit.  The nuns also made a point of announcing in class, weekly, whose parents still owed tuition or book bills.  My name was always called, and I had to walk up to the front of the room to be handed the statement to take home to my parents, who were fully aware of their tab and were paying in installments.  I felt the injustice of being pointed out as the offspring of suspiciously irresponsible parents, yet I remained a good Catholic girl.    

The seeds of my ultimate disaffection with the Catholic Church were planted during my two years at Holy Trinity School.  By the school’s miasma of unease and shame.  By the worries it implanted in me.  By the way its authoritarianism chipped away at my pleasure in the elegance of the Latin mass, the intoxication of incense, the exultation of the melodious hymn “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” and the beauty of the physical building with its towering, thick pillars of variously colored marble.  But all these injuries were accumulating within me unawares.  I remained steadfast in my faith.  Until one chilly, gray afternoon.  At the time, what happened registered as puzzlement bordering dangerously on disillusionment.  Now, I see that like a coin dropped irretrievably into a machine slot, it was the moment I took my first real step away from the Church. 

Holy Trinity was our parish, but it was in Hackensack, and we lived in Teaneck.  We walked a mile to school and a mile back.  Our route took us over a small bridge across the Hackensack River, the border between the two towns.  I used to stop in the middle of the bridge on the way home, when I could be more leisurely, and watch the sluggish brown current.  I would wait to move on until I saw a condom float by.  I rarely had to wait long, and I often spotted more than one.  I didn’t know what the pale, translucent, fish-like things were, nor why they were in the river.  I rather liked that they were so eerie and mysterious.  Woods lined the river in many areas, and now I know there must have been spots in those woods where lovers met in parked cars or on summer blankets.

Next to the bridge, on the Hackensack side of the river, was a park.  Holy Trinity boys on their way home often went to the river’s edge in that park to poke around in the mud, throw stones into the water, push at each other and rough-house.  I don’t remember precise instructions from parents or teachers not to go down to the river, but we all knew it would be frowned upon if not outright forbidden, so no boy ever mentioned their jaunts to any adult, and no girl ever told on them.  On the opposite side of the street from the park was a large automated car wash.  A female mannequin dressed in a raincoat was mounted in front of the car wash.  It was motorized, endlessly turning right and left, left and right, with a rag in its upraised hand, beckoning to drivers of dirty cars.  One day the mannequin was gone. 

Some days later, a group of boys, including my brother, were down at the river when they saw the car wash mannequin lying in the river close to shore.  They were excited by their find, but wise enough not to venture out too far onto the slippery, sucking mud of low tide.  Instead, they hunted under the trees for long sticks with the idea of using the sticks to pull the mannequin close enough that they could haul it onto land.  I was crossing the bridge, and noticing the unusual activity among the boys, I paused to watch them.  Suddenly, their commotion escalated.  My brother looked up and saw me on the bridge.  “It’s a woman!”  he called.  “It’s a dead body!”  Their prodding sticks had met not hard plastic but soft, yielding flesh.

It was an overcast day, if not deep winter, then wintry.  And it was late afternoon, slipping towards dusk.  I still had most of my walk ahead of me.  But I stayed transfixed on that bridge.  Not by the spectacle of the delirious boys, nor by the body, which from my vantage point was only an unidentifiable mound.  I was remembering a recent visit to our classroom by a priest who talked about the importance of a Catholic burial, and of being in a state of grace when you died.  The gist of his talk was on the sacrament of Last Rites, but one off-hand comment of his had struck me in the moment and came sharply back to me on the bridge.  He’d said that even an amputated limb of a Catholic should be buried in a Catholic cemetery because our bodies were temples of the Lord.  I’d immediately imagined a one-legged man on crutches in the bowels of a hospital searching for his discarded leg so that he could bury it properly.  But at the same time that I found the notion grisly, I was impressed by the thoroughness of the Church’s system of rules and duties.  It seemed they’d thought of everything. 

I also remembered being told that if you came across an accident where someone was dying, you should baptize that person.  In such an emergency, you didn’t need to be a priest, and you didn’t need to use holy water for the sacrament to be legitimate.  You could even use water from a puddle in the street.  So I knew what I should do.  I should walk back the four blocks to the rectory and bring a priest to baptize the woman in the river and spare her Purgatory, Limbo, or worse.  Wasn’t that my obligation, as a good Catholic?  Even if it meant my final stretch before home would be colder and darker?  I didn’t want to do it, I hoped someone else would take charge, but I turned around and headed to Holy Trinity.

I’d never been inside the rectory, and I was nervous when I knocked on the door.  A priest answered, which was a surprise.  The priests had a woman who cleaned and cooked for them, and I’d assumed she’d be the one to open the door.  I got the impression the priest was in the middle of dinner.  There was an aroma of cooked foods behind him.  Did he have a napkin in his hand?  An air of being interrupted and none too pleased about it?  I gave my report nonetheless. 

I expected him to rush inside to grab his coat and maybe a satchel something like a doctor’s black bag but with holy water and precious oils and a crucifix and rosary instead of medicines and syringes and a stethoscope.  I expected him to ask me to show him where, and I expected to lead him to the river like an Indian scout.  Of course he’d know the way himself, but I expected he’d let me lead because of the importance of my good deed, because I had thought of it and had done it.  I had kept my head while all about me were losing theirs, as the poem said.

Instead, disgruntled, he said it was a matter for the police.  He may have said he’d call the police, but he may not have offered even that.  He didn’t ask me in out of the cold.  He didn’t explain why I was mistaken in thinking he ought to go attend to the dead woman.  He didn’t thank me.  He closed the door and went back to his dinner.

By the time I got to the bridge again, the police were, indeed, at the park.  The boys were being interviewed.  A scattering of official-looking people were milling at the edge of the river, presumably looking for evidence or deciding how to retrieve the body.  I kept walking.  I needed to get home and tell my mother why my brother would be late.  The woman in the river had become a much sadder story than I wanted to be near.  I didn’t stop on the bridge.  It was too dark to see condoms anyway.