The Tale of the Purloined Mermaid

“Instead of a mid-semester examination for Introduction to Christian Theology, I want you to do a little field work and then write a report. Review the notes you took during our discussion about the nature and purpose of religious art and the way it has shaped Christian faith through the centuries. Then take a walk around the campus, noting the different kinds of artwork that have been installed over the last century. Find one that particularly engages you and sit with it a bit. Afterwards, write an essay describing the art and speculating on its power to influence the members of the GBU community. Don’t be afraid to include your own reaction to the piece; for this assignment, you can use the personal pronoun ‘I.’”

Travis O’Connor’s mood was as clouded as the late March sky. He was, by his own admission, probably a bit too serious for a nineteen year old, but this was different. He was in trouble.

Travis walked down Fourth Street checking the number over each door. This was not a part of Rensselaer he had ever seen before; he was, as his grandmother said, “a good boy,” and this was not a neighborhood where good boys wandered. Down by the river, the air was stale and unhealthy, and smelled of gas fumes and burning coal. The afternoon was dark, the sidewalks’ snow never shoveled; ice and soot now covered his shoes and much of the lower part of his jeans. He was cold and forlorn, Travis was, full of self-pity; he was right on the edge of crying, this good boy, something he couldn’t remember doing once since the fourth grade, or maybe when his grandfather had died junior year of high school, not even when his parents and his girlfriend left him on GBU’s campus last fall, completely alone for the first time, and hundreds of miles from their home in Maine.

He shivered and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. Get on with it, he thought. The address he was hunting for 108 Fourth Street.

He saw it from a block away, or at least he hoped it was 108, the stretch of immaculately shoveled sidewalk across the street. He spotted the sign over the door, “Love in Action,” painted in rough red strokes, and his gloom lifted a bit, but he was almost run down by a milk truck as he crossed the cobble-stoned street and then almost slid into a woman busy in front of the building. She was sweeping the icy sidewalk with a broom. She was short and she was old; with a gray wool blanket or shawl drawn tight around her shoulders, she looked like a peasant out of one of the Dostoevsky novels he had been reading since he had learned of the Russian novelist in freshman lit.

The two of them stepped back at the same time and she looked up at him in silence. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or drunk or simple; she just looked at him, no, she looked through him, and then he was scared and cold all over again. He looked over her head to the sign. “Love in Action.” He knew the reference; Father Jonah had told them in class. It was from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, quoting someone else (he couldn’t recall who): “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing.”

They stood there facing each other in silence, he and the woman. Her eyes were dark, her hair silver white and she had the look of . . . what? Was she an Indian? She had the heavily creased, leathered skin of an old Indian, the kind Travis knew from westerns on TV. But what would an Indian be doing in upstate New York sweeping sidewalk ice clean of grit?

She spoke first.

“You born in a barn?”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

She stared at him as though sizing him up.

“You ‘ma’am’ me fine,” she said. “But you gonna let an old woman sweep this sidewalk without even offering to help?”

He knew who she was. Father J had told him about her.

“You’re Louise, aren’t you?” he said.

Now she was really sizing him up.

“You’ve got the advantage, kid,” she said. “Who the fuck are you? Should I know you?”

Dirty Louise, Father had said. Swears like a coal miner but has a deep heart. He relaxed and decided to go along for the ride. He tried to take the broom from her, but she held it firm.

“Answer the question, asshole.”

“I’m a friend of Father Jonah’s, a student of his, really, at Greenbush University,” he said. “He told me about you one day after class.”

“That bastard talking about me again?” She shook her head in the direction of campus, up the hill and out of the valley a couple of miles. She did not look amused but, for the moment at least, Travis had found his center again, and he smiled and he reached for the broom. This time she relented.

“He’s inside,” she said as she turned to the door. “I’ll tell him he has a visitor. A rude visitor.”

Travis cracked the crooked grin that he knew could melt a heart in the right circumstance (which, of course, this was not) and shook the cold out of his hair and commenced to sweeping he knew not what off of the ice and into the slush of the gutter. The snow back up in Maine, a carpet of crisp white even at this time of year, was completely different from what collected and congealed on the streets of this part of Rensselaer; Maine might as well have been sited on the moon as far as he was concerned now.

When they found out, his parents would probably disown him.

He felt rather than saw a figure behind him and looked up. Jonah was standing in the doorway watching him, the good boy, a tall rail-thin college freshman with a glorious mop of brown curls, and a precocious talent for theology, brushing air along ice.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Jonah asked him. “I figured as much.” But he was smiling.

+++

Once inside, Travis was immediately put to work by Louise.

“We have seventy guests coming for dinner, kid,” she said, “and we’re short about three hands.”

She pointed to a bread knife and a bag of, well, they were baguettes, a bag of baguettes. “Cut ‘em into pieces about two inches long.”

He got to work. The crusts were hard; hell, this bread was almost stale and pieces of crust flew everywhere, no matter how carefully he tried to cut it. Father Jonah returned to salad prep, shredding lettuce and dicing vegetables into a large aluminum bowl. Before long, Louise and another man no one bothered to introduce had placed red checkered table clothes on the rows of tables that filled most of the room. A huge man carried an equally gigantic pot of what looked to be minestrone soup. The man was solid with bulging muscle and heaved the pot onto the serving table next to Father Jonah as though it were empty.

“Hey, sailor,” Louise shouted to the giant. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching your back?”

“For cops and evil doers, yeah,” he said, and then noticing Travis, he nodded his head in silent greeting and returned to the kitchen.

The guests who had lined up on the sidewalk were suddenly let in by the man Travis did not know and for the next half hour he was too busy serving them to even think about the weirdness of the experience.

The dinner was over, the guests departed. Windows had been heaved open in the kitchen and the night breeze off the river was doing what it could to replace the ripe stale air with what passed for fresh down here by the greasy Hudson. The dishes were cleaned and stacked away. Everyone had pitched in, and Travis knew that the giant was a man named Gruff (not a sailor exactly, he explained, but a member of the merchant marine who worked out of the Port of Albany across the river and volunteered for kitchen duty when he was in town) and the other, quiet man whom he did not really meet until taking a place next to him at the sink, was a poof named Jason Santini. Travis had never met a homosexual before, at least none that he knew of, but what with all of the strange experiences he was having tonight, that was just another one to throw onto the pile.

“I lost you for a while,” Travis said to his teacher, who was pouring himself a last cup of coffee from the urn before Gruff hauled it to the sink to be washed. “Did you leave?”

“I was here the whole time,” Jonah said. “I think you more likely lost yourself.” He sat down at a table nearby and signaled for Travis to join him. “Now, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

And Travis did. He found it surprisingly easy to tell the story, probably because he was pretty tired after working this dinner shift. And because he admired this wirey old man with the delicate hands folded around his coffee cup. Admired and trusted him completely.

“You already know what I did and why I did it, don’t you?”

“It was my lecture.”

The priest brushed a hand through his thatch of gray hair, and waited.

“It was.”

“When I told you about the crucifix up by the Big House,” he said. “The crucifix and the mermaid.”

Father J’s enthusiasm about the nature of sacred art had been almost contagious, the way he went on and on about its creation, placement, and how veneration of religious beauty built up the community’s sense of itself and even healed the soul. Travis had been transported for a moment, utterly convinced. But then Jonah’s tone changed and he reminded them of the garden next to the main administration building—the estate building around which the rest of the campus had grown. For decades the prayer garden and the grotto down by the back entrance of the college had been the two best places to pray, he said. And to neck, he added without any sense of judgment, reminding Travis why he was so attracted to this teacher. But the garden had been desecrated, and by a priest of all people, a recent president of the college who, at the conclusion of one of his frequent trips to parts unknown and far away had returned with a statue of a naked mermaid which, after minimal deliberation, he had installed in the midst of a fountain outside his office window. In the prayer garden.

Travis had walked through the garden hundreds of times on his way to the athletic center but had never noticed the desecration. Now, he could not get it out of his head. From his vantage point on the cross, Christ now looked down and in his last moments contemplated the fulsome breasts of a woman with the tail of a fish.

And so one moonless night, the mermaid disappeared from her fountain.

The campus police was alerted. The president was furious.

“You knew it was me,” Travis began, “because . . ..”

“Your essay was rather, how shall I say, declarative,” Jonah said. “And then you showed up here like a guilty puppy.”

“I’m doomed,” Travis said. “I’m here on scholarship. If they find out it was me . . . .”

Across the river a train whistled, heading south to New York or west to Chicago, either way slipping away into the cold, dark night.

“Let me see what I can do,” the priest said, getting up from the table.

And so it was that a naked mermaid was discovered undamaged a few days later contemplating a patch of ground in one of the back fields of campus and was quietly put into storage in the old milking barn nearby. And so it was that the Love in Action House of Hospitality acquired its newest worker.

[Up Next: The Patience of Vegetables and Saints]