Evensong

by Cynthia Zarin
Originally published in the New York Times, September 4, 2011

Cynthia Zarin is the author, most recently, of “The Ada Poems.” This essay is excerpted from her forthcoming book “An Enlarged Heart.” She teaches poetry at Yale and is artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City.

     The Thursday before, I received a telephone call from the children’s school. There was a new family coming to the school. Their elder child, a boy, would be in my children’s grade. That year they were 9. They were in fourth grade. The school they went to then was on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, a few blocks south from where we lived, in Morningside Heights.
    To get to school we cut through the north yard of the cathedral. At that time the back lot was a mess. Weeds grew helter-skelter through the broken asphalt. The blacktop was littered with stone carvings of angels and griffins; a stonecutter’s workshop opened onto the back lot. It was managed by a man called Simon, who wore his hair in gray corkscrew curls. He was continually covered with marble dust and had a fine face that verged on beauty and looked like an angel who had fallen to earth.
    Every morning we walked by the stone yard, then cut through the cathedral by the north transept door. Our neighbor also took her child to school. She had a little dog, and the dog crossed the apse with us. Later, that door was locked, and dogs were no longer allowed inside at 8 a.m., but then we had the freedom of the place. There were peacocks on the grounds and at that hour they were often screaming.
    That was the first year that the children sang in the cathedral choir. Three afternoons a week they practiced in a room with casement windows in the south wing of the cathedral, which had once been an orphan asylum. On Sundays they sang at 11 o’clock Mass. Sometimes they also sang at Evensong. They wore crimson robes and white collars, which were starched. Later, they would hate everything about choir — the long rehearsals, the too-hot robes — and they wrote us long letters arguing their position, which they read aloud to us at the kitchen table. But that was later.
    Then, it was the tail end of summer. The leaves on the trees were dry, and when even a slight breeze blew they rattled, as if a snake was moving through the branches. The sprinklers were always on in the pocket park across the street from our apartment. Water sizzled when it hit the blacktop. When I took the children to play in the sprinklers, it was too hot to go without shoes. The ice cream truck jangled on the corner. It was the summer that we discovered that the owner of the truck was selling crack out of the back.
As we did every summer, we had spent August in a small town toward the end of Cape Cod. As usual, when we returned to our building, with its cool black-and-white tiled lobby and our apartment with its long hall and its view of the sprinklers and the ice cream truck, it was for the children as if we had been away for only a day.
    On that Thursday we had been back four days. The telephone rang just as we were walking in the door, and when I picked up the phone I was admonishing the children. I did not want water in the hall. I had left a fan on in the kitchen and the mail had blown down onto the floor, and the children were stepping on it with their feet wet from the sprinklers. The voice on the other end of the telephone was known to me: it was the receptionist at the school, who was already at her desk. She told me about the new family between pauses while I tried to get the children to pick up the mail, and to get the wet jellies off the baby, who was 2. She gave me their telephone number, and said, “Promise you’ll call.” I promised. The idea was that before school opened those children would have met my children, and the mother, who the receptionist said seemed shy and whose husband worked long hours, would have met me.
    It was Thursday afternoon. On Friday my mother called and suggested that the older children visit her on Long Island. It was hot, she pointed out, and they could swim in the pool. We drove them out that evening through the weekend traffic and then drove back with the baby strapped into her car seat, and had drinks in the kitchen with a lot of ice. Then we put all the fans in the apartment in one room and the three of us slept fitfully.
    The next day we decided to go to Sandy Hook, N.J., where we had never been, and we piled the baby back in the car with juice and towels and sandwiches. I missed the beach. Whenever we returned I pined for weeks. That Saturday, the drive south into New Jersey took two hours, and the parking lots were almost full. The baby ran into the waves and we pulled her back. I didn’t think of the phone call I was meant to make, or even of the other children, who were with my mother and, I assumed, adequately taken care of. In the heat, the water was as warm as glass and after a while we piled back into the car and drove back into the city, which by now was so overheated it looked as though it was wreathed in smoke.
    When we got home we ordered Chinese food and the baby ate fried rice, and in the morning my husband drove out to fetch the children before the traffic got really bad. The next morning it was Monday, the last day of summer break, and I thought: I will just meet her at school, because I still hadn’t called the new family. The children tried on their old uniforms and, of course, they did not fit, but would have to do. Both they and I saw this as further proof, as if any were needed, of my inability to acquit myself as a bona fide mother, a mother who could make timely phone calls, who never broke promises, who would have ordered new uniforms in June.
    The next morning was school. We set the alarm and the children struggled into their too-small uniforms. Because it was the first day, the sitter, who took care of the baby, came early, so that I could walk the children to school and pay full attention to their new classrooms, where their names were written on construction paper, cut to look like bubbles and taped to the glass doors. The new boy was in Jack’s class. His uniform fit. He was shy, but friendly. On the way to school I had managed to remember his name, and to ask Jack to be especially nice to him. Think what it would be like to come to a new school, I said, and not know anyone.
    When the children were settled, I walked out of the school and toward Amsterdam Avenue, down the long path that had been embellished with late lilies, orange, with black throats. It was 9:05 in the morning. At that time I had an office in the triforium of the cathedral where I could sit by myself and write. It had been given to me by the dean, whom I loved.
    I crossed over to the wide flat steps of the cathedral, where a group of Chinese tourists stood fanning themselves, and as I walked past them my way was blocked by a woman whom I knew was crazy. She was dressed in a white djellaba and a gold turban and she wore no shoes. She often spoke in tongues, and I assumed that she was speaking in tongues now, although it did occur to me in those seconds that she had never touched me before, as she did now, holding on to my arm with clenched fingers. She let go only when I walked into the cathedral’s cavernous cool, its smell of mold and incense, and something else my children called “bat wing,” and there was Christopher, moving the chairs. The cathedral is huge and there are a lot of chairs, and it is his job to move them. He stopped and looked at me and said, “Oh, Miss,” and I said, “What’s happened?” And then I knew.
    In the days and weeks that followed in New York the heat did not let up. Because no one could bear to be apart, we had picnics with the children in the park, to which some people did not come because they thought the ash would cover us, and then as it got colder we sat in one another’s apartments and cooked elaborate meals, and fed the children pasta, and decided whether we would stay in the city or whether we would leave.
    For weeks there were memorial services at the cathedral or downtown almost every day, and along with their book bags and baseball mitts and science projects, the children carried their crimson robes and starched white collars to school, where they were excused from classes to sing. Though I tried to invite the little boy who was new to the school to come and play, he would not come because he would not leave his mother. We did not meet his father, who that morning had disappeared like so many others into — nothing. Because she refused to believe he was dead, the funeral was not held for some weeks, and then she insisted on an open empty coffin.
    That weekend in September we had gone to Sandy Hook because I was dissatisfied with my life, and angry at having to live it, and to have summer end. We drove down through the long cattails, and I was unhappy because the beach that I love doesn’t have cattails. I didn’t like the boardwalk, or that the water was warm. The baby didn’t care. She was thrilled to see the tiny crabs burrowing in the sand. She drank her red juice, and it made a red mark around her mouth, and I remember being tired of juice and juice boxes and the heat. The baby tracked sand over the towels with her wet feet, and I looked across the water to where we could see New York City gray with dust rising up in its stone caldron and I said, “The last thing I want to see when I go to the beach is the twin towers.” That is what I said.