60 for 60: Early Mass

By Zachary Erickson

View from Governors Island, 7/24/21

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” wrote T.S. Eliot (whose 133rd birthday is this Sunday). If art and education are both explorations, transitioning anew to in-person from online learning is proving to be quite the adventure. Columbia’s campus is now, for many of us, a familiar and unfamiliar place, a landscape that we are in the process of discovering.

The Journal’s very first issue (Fall ’77) happened to include a piece about a protagonist learning from a surprise: the surprise of seeing familiar people and places with new eyes. That piece is “Early Mass” by Mary O’Connor, the story of a girl who takes her little brother to church, only to find herself back where she started. O’Connor’s simple language admirably highlights her protagonist’s keen observations of a world that changes in an instant. We are proud to present it as the first fiction piece of our “60 for 60” archival celebration.

When her story was published in the Journal, Mary O’Connor was an alumna of Columbia’s MFA program and a Sister of Mercy teaching at the College of Notre Dame, Belmont, California.

EARLY MASS

Mary O’Connor

The hall door closed behind them with such force that the knocker went ANG-ga, and the children found themselves alone on the street. Francie looked back at the door, its maroon paint peeling in familiar spots, as if it could tell her something she wished to know. After a while, she turned to her younger brother. “Come on, Ant’ny. We’ll be late.”

Ant’ny reached out a small hand to be caught, but his sister was already four steps ahead of him down the street. He trotted along to catch up, jarring his knee-socks quickly down to ankle-high wedges inside the rubber wellingtons. The early morning wind blew a piece of paper against his leg and it stuck there for a moment, till he did a little dance, laughing and turning in the swirl of litter, to release it.

“You stop your antics and come on.” Francie grabbed his arm with an impatient jerk, and walked even faster to catch up to where she had been. A younger brother, even only a year younger, was a terrible responsibility, and this was his first year going to Mass on Sundays. He’d have to be taught right.

They walked together up the narrow street in the damp morning air. The sky between the grey slate roofs was dark and featureless, giving no hint of how the day would turn out. It was very quiet. Only the screeching and wheeling of crows among the slack wires that cobwebbed the chimneys, and the distant clink of a milkman putting bottles by the doors, accompanied the children’s footsteps. Francie had never been to such an early Mass, but the chapel was in the same place anyway, wasn’t it? and she proceeded independently and purposefully along the familiar row of houses in the direction of the church. Her brown plastic shoulder bag bounced off her hip on the side where she wasn’t holding on to Ant’ny, a rosary and prayerbook rattling off each other inside of it. The bag and her white wooly tam were Sunday dress, and made her feel satisfactorily important even in her mustard winter coat, which she wore every day, and which felt too small under the arms. Her brother looked as he always did: rumpled grey serge, short pants and tee shirt, brightened on top by his thatch of fair hair. This morning he looked very small and thin. She shivered a bit for him.

“Maybe you better run around. You’ll get cold. Go on!”

She pushed him ahead of her to kick stones and to chase crows, and broke the stillness that she felt without him by shouting out the names of the streets they turned into.

“This is Pierce Road!” The distance between the facing rows of houses was wider, but the houses themselves were the same: grey stone terraces, their upper and lower rows of windows stretching down the road in slightly crooked lines; only the paint on their doors making any difference between the individual homes. Francie could make out the brighter colors in the faint pearl light that was beginning to dim the street lamps. In a house near her, a hand twitched a sleepy bedroom window to life. Why hadn’t Mam given them their breakfast before they went out this morning?

“Marshall Hill!” She leaned into it, leading with her head up the steep slope. Ant’ny, fifty yards in front, ran backwards with short pigeon-toed steps, his hands outstretched to keep his balance. He grinned down at her in triumph before he stumbled and faced forward again to his usual meander. A man on a bike with one squeaky wheel came riding down against them, his big black mongrel loping along behind. The bike squeaked into the distance, a regular and comforting sound; there were very few people out: perhaps they were late after all.

“Ant’ny!” He had stopped to look down a grating. On Blackhail Lane they were knocking down the houses and turning one side into a parking lot for the church. The end wall of the last house caught Francie’s eye, as it always did. It doubled as the end wall of a row of newer houses, but nobody had got around to plastering over the four squares of different wallpaper hanging in £litters, the tiny. grate in the bedroom, the yellow weathered oblongs where pictures had hung and closets stood against the wall. The small boy came scrambling over the rubble to the footpath to join his sister, and they walked through the churchyard gates.

The narrow path that wound between the gravestones to the main door of the church was lavishly paved with gravel, and the children’s feet crunched and wallowed through the thick bed of tiny stones. They stood at the foot of the steps, uncertain small creatures in front of the great wooden doors that opened up the dark, jagged limestone mass of the building. Only one stood ajar. There was nobody in sight, not even the pipe-smoking men that graced the porch at the later Masses, but behind the door, Francie knew, was old fat Jamesy Hartigan with the collection plate.

Her breathing suddenly had to be a conscious activity. She imagined his pale blue glassy eyes regarding her from their deep nest of veined flesh, the way they did every Sunday when she ducked and pulled Ant’ny past him behind cover of the shuffling, clinking Sunday crowd. This morning there would be nobody to duck behind, and they’d have to slinge over to the holy water font in full view of him, slouched over the table behind the stacks of pennies and three-pences he had begun to count. In her mind, she leaned all her weight on the brass panel of the heavy inner door, pushing it open to the dim, high interior and its peculiar musty smell of damp coats and beeswax. A sea of large backs loomed to the left and right of the middle aisle. The priest was reading a psalm at the lectern, and there was a low grumble of response from the anonymous backs. Ant’ny! He hadn’t a clue: he trotted up the chasm to the children’s rows, to sit with Phil and Joe. Francie got very hot and her legs sweated and felt weak. NO! everything in her screamed out at him, don’t have us showing ourselves off that we’re late. But the usher caught sight of her and beckoned her to follow her brother. All the people in the middle looked round to see who she was, and the priest stopped reading and stared at her down the tunnel of eyes. She shut her own eyes tight, and everything in her went tight and refused to move or think.

“Francie?”

A small cold hand scrabbled at her clenched fist, getting it to open, resting inside. They were still standing in front of the church steps. Francie breathed again and looked at her brother’s face; he didn’t know what was going on, nor could she have told him.

“It’s late, Ant’ny. We’re late. Everyone’s gone in.”

She looked up at the big doors again and wondered if she had enough courage in her stomach. Ant’ny waited quietly, his alert face turned to her.

“We’ll go home,” she said.

Going down Marshall Hill, the tears came, and she forced them back with her teeth and concentrated on the road ahead, which seemed longer this time. But the tears were as stubborn as she, and they squeezed out and ran down her chin and dripped with hot splashes on her mustard coat.

“What are you crying for, Francie?” “Nothing.”

She hoisted up the skirt of her coat and wiped her nose on the lining. But a fresh wave of grief destroyed her repaired composure.

“The nun said it’s a sin not to go to Mass on Sunday.” “Well, Mommy and Daddy don’t go.”

She turned on him.

“They do so, they go to Mass at a different time, that’s all.” She was as vehement as she was unsure.

“Then we can go too. Ay, Francie? We can go to a different Mass too. Ay?”

“Ah, what do you know?” See, we’re not supposed to be going home at all yet, you little eejit. The realization had come to her suddenly, though it had been in the back of her mind all morning, since they had been dressed hurriedly and pushed out the door almost as soon as they got their noses inside the kitchen. They weren’t supposed to be going home at all, and that was what was drawing her home, with the fascination of quicksand: the fear of what they would find there, a terrible curiosity to see what it would be.

Francie jumped to lift the doorknocker and let it fall. Twice. Then she stood behind Ant’ny and put her arms round him, over his shoulders, protecting him and holding up her own weak knees.

After a long wait, her father pulled open the door cautiously. He was as wild and bristly looking as when they had left him, and his braces still hung about his hips. His face took on a look of disgust and impatience when he saw them. There was trouble ahead, sure enough.

“We were late,” Francie said. “There was no one there.”

Her father turned his back, and they followed him into the kitchen, but he was speaking loudly all the time as if he hadn’t heard Francie.

“What are you doing home from the chapel? You didn’t go at all, I’d swear. Bringing up a couple of bloody atheists, I am.”

“You are?” Francie heard her mother whisper angrily. She came around the kitchen door, still holding Ant’ny in front of her. Her mother was sitting beside the little electric fire with Martin on her lap, feeding him his breakfast. The spoon in her thin hand shook against the side of the bowl. Their father had gone over to the stove and was noisily scraping the remains of last night’s supper off the frying pan. For a while the two children stood by the door and watched their parents. Then Ant’ny went over to his mother and stroked her cheek with his small red hand. The woman put down the bowl of mash and started to cry, painfully, not wanting to let go. Francie knew the feeling, though she couldn’t afford to cry herself, now. She had to observe.

“Oh, my poor children,” her mother said, holding Ant’ny’s hand against her flushed cheek. “Your poor hands are cold.”