The City When It Rains

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CORMAN’S EYES DRIFTED slowly over the enormous vault of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Even at night, the stained glass windows shone brightly with small glittering wings of electric blue, red and green. Up ahead, an old man was trying to pray, but a single fly kept distracting him, swooping at his ear. He swatted at it from time to time without lifting his head. It was an odd scene, and for an instant, Corman felt the impulse to reach for his camera and record it, then realized it would be the kind of photograph that only pretended to deal with the greater ironies by focusing on the little ones. A fake, he thought, and yet?

“Why’d we come here?” Lucy asked.

Corman drew his eyes from the old man and settled them on her. “The people who built Saint Patrick’s weren’t allowed to drink,” he told her. “Did you know that? The Archbishop made that rule.”

Lucy looked suspicious. “How do you know?”

“Mr. Lazar told me,” Corman said. The two of them had been walking silently through the deepening snow, and as they neared the cathedral, Lazar had stopped suddenly, nodded toward its gray facade, then gone into a detailed discussion of how the blue granite had been shipped from Maine, the marble from New York and Massachusetts. From the building itself, he’d moved to the travail of the men who’d built it, how they’d dug the immense foundation out of solid bedrock. As Lazar spoke, Corman had been able to see them working through twenty years of summer heat and winter cold, growing old in their long thirst, while a succession of robed Archbishops and red-capped Cardinals had patrolled the site, glancing suspiciously at their lunch pails.

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