City of God

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Authors: E.L. Doctorow
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our own places in the photographs, to stand with them, these strangers of our dreams, but less distinctly, with faces and figures difficult to make out, if not altogether invisible.

    â€”So I hear from Tom Pemberton and we meet for a drink at Knickerbocker’s, Ninth and University Place.
    He doesn’t wear the collar these days, he’s not defrocked but more or less permanently unassigned. Works at a cancer hospice on Roosevelt Island. He’s grown heavier, the big face is more lined than I remember, but still open, candid, floridly handsome, the light, wide-set eyes moving restlessly over the room as if looking for someone to gladden his heart.
    You write well enough, he says, but no writer can reproduce the actual texture of living life.
    Not even Joyce?
    I should look at him again. But now that I see the dissimilarity from the inside, so to speak, I think I’ll be wary of literature from here on.
    Good move.
    You’re offended. But I’m telling you you’re exemplary. It’s a compliment. After all, I might have chalked you off as just a lousy writer. It’s unsettling reading about me from inside my mind. Another shock to another faith.
    Well, maybe I should drop the whole thing.
    You don’t need my approval, for God’s sake. I agreed to this—that’s it, there are no strings. I wouldn’t even ask you to keep thatmention of my girls out of it. They’re older now, of course. Apartments of their own.
    Consider it done.
    Trish is remarried.. . . Why didn’t you say who her father is?
    That’s to come.
    I still hear from him. The usual smirk from on high, though I have to say he enjoyed having a peacenik priest in the family.
    Good for the image.
    I suppose. But now, listen, you’re using the real names. You told me—
    I know. I’ll change them. Just now they’re still the best names. On the other hand they used to be the only possible names. So that’s progress.
    And it wasn’t the
Times
that picked up the story of my stolen crucifix. It was only one of the free papers.
    Well, Father, when you compose something, that’s what you do, you make the composition. Bend time, change things, put things in, leave things out. You’re not sworn to include everything. Or to make something happen the way it did. Facts can be inhibiting. Actuality is beside the point. Irrelevant.
    Irrelevant actuality?
    You do what the clock needs to tick.
    Well there are some things just plain wrong.
    Oh boy. Like what, Pem?
    I’m not telling you what to write, you understand. It’s hands-off. But it wasn’t a sermon at St. Tim’s that got the bishop on my back. And what you have me saying is not really the cause. Really it was a bunch of things.
    You told me a particular sermon—
    Well yes and no—I’ve thought about this—and I think it could have been a guest stint I did over in Newark that he felt was the last straw. But I’m not sure. By the way, it’s different in that diocese, they are broad church over there. Bring in the women, the gays. . . the liberal side of the argument. My side. You don’t want to oversimplify. The Anglicans are all over the lot. There’s actually more leeway for people like me than you give the church credit for.
    What did you say?
    What?
    Your bishop’s last straw.
    Oh—it was simple enough. I merely asked the congregation what they thought the engineered slaughter of the Jews in Europe had done to Christianity. To our story of Christ Jesus. I mean, given the meager response of our guys, is the Holocaust a problem only for Jewish theologians? But beyond that I asked them—it was a big crowd that morning, and they were with me, I could feel it, after the empty pews of St. Tim’s it seemed to me like Radio City—I asked them to imagine. . . what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster.

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