Absent Friends

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 4

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The Women in the Tent

October 31, 2001

Marian stepped to the reception desk. She smiled and greeted Elena, careful to ask after her family.

“Mama was supposed to go back to San Juan yesterday, but Aunt Pilar cried and cried,” Elena told her. “So she stayed.” Elena's cousin had been an electrician, working in the south tower.

“Tell your aunt she's in my prayers.”

“Thank you. She'll like that.”

Marian took the message slips Elena handed her and said nothing else. She'd given Elena the names of three grief counselors, two of them Spanish-speaking. She wished Elena's aunt would call someone and get some help: grief was an easier burden if not carried alone. But Marian knew better than to try to push people to do what was best for them. She tried to take lessons from life—how else to keep from despairing?—and she liked to think she had many years ago learned that one.

She walked down the short corridor to her own office thinking of Elena's aunt, Mrs. Padilla, whom she'd met half a dozen years before at Elena's wedding. She thought of all the prayers, her own and others', rising as the smoke rose, climbing toward Heaven on behalf of Elena's cousin, on behalf of so many people. Marian had indeed been praying for Elena's cousin, and for the sons and sisters of the small number of people she knew personally who had lost loved ones. And for all the people she did not know, and especially all the people who might not have anyone to pray for them.

And, yes, for Jimmy.

Marian went to church in Manhattan now, at Holy Innocents, and had for many years; not every week, but often. She had not been to St. Ann's back home since she'd left, except for a few weddings, a few funerals. Until last month, when she had crossed the choppy water back to Staten Island the first Sunday after the attacks to attend mass with her father because he'd asked her to.



In the echoing dimness of St. Ann's, where she had spent each Sunday morning of her childhood (Jimmy sometimes there, more often not, his devoutness being of a different nature), Marian had sat beside her father and waited for comfort: if not the comfort of God, at least the comfort of the familiar. Through the ponderous swells of organ music, through the homily, through the prayers spoken together and those whispered alone, she waited. She did not take communion, having not been to confession. Her father's face showed his disappointment. Watching the patient, shuffling communion line, Marian wondered why she had not been to confession since the attacks. She had, through the years, permitted herself confession and therefore communion: her doubts allowed it. Because she had never been certain that keeping her dark secret was wrong (had never been sure, she reminded herself strictly, that the secret was the truth), she had released herself from the obligation to confess it. But in these times, even to prepare for this morning's mass—even to prepare for coming back here—she had found confession impossible.

Nevertheless, she prayed from the heart, as was required. Faith was a compact, like anything else, and Marian was prepared to uphold her part of the bargain. She prayed and waited.

But the music remained just sound, the smoke clouding from the bronze censers mere fragrance. Father Connor's earnest sermon was nothing but words, and Marian found herself not listening to them, hearing instead the soft weeping of people at the first of what would now be a lifetime of Sunday masses without the husbands, wives, sons and daughters, fathers and friends they were accustomed to have beside them. She saw a tear on her father's cheek. Awkward, she patted his hand. “I miss your mother,” he whispered, though it was nearly four decades since Marian's mother had passed away.

So many crowded into St. Ann's that day, the faces and voices from her childhood. Marian knew why they had come, why her father had wanted her to come: just to be there, together.



A memory bloomed in Marian's mind: a windy autumn Sunday when Sister Hilda, the squeaky-voiced nun they had loved because she laughed and knew what was important, had ordered the whole Sunday school class into their jackets, marched them to the park, and taught them to make Indian tepees out of sticks and tablecloths. Each leaning stick would fall, she showed them, but for the others (and the kids all tried to make one stand alone, or two; Tom had three briefly motionless, but then they clattered down). But together, Sister Hilda told them, united (as we are united in faith) and supporting each other (as we do with our prayers and our service), they created shelter.



In St. Ann's five days after the world had changed, Marian tried to feel sheltered. So many steps along her path had been marked here, so much joy and sorrow shared, so much comfort offered, taken, given. She tried to feel that comfort now.

Though even then—long before Harry Randall began his relentless excavating of their days and nightmares—even then, Marian could not rid herself of the exhausting weight of what she had never shared.

And as her clear low voice rose to join the others, filling the church with safeguarding song, she felt it, this secret, not as she always had—as a burden she could never put down—but as empty space, a tear in the fabric of protection, leaving her open to the terrifying sky.