Broken Windows

Broken Windows

by Harry Buschman

Going to church on Sunday was the best part of the week. The dull, dreary life of the tenement couldn’t hold a candle to the grandeur of the Catholic Mass. The Latin incantations! The great belly rumbling organ, and the disembodied voices of the choir! I remember the pine scent of the censer, and the mysterious half understood snatches of liturgy. "Hail, Mary! Full of grace! Blessed be the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus!" "This is my body, this is my blood." What terrifying visions for a ten-year-old to hold in his head!

I was torn between wanting to be a Priest or a circus ringmaster.

Outside, in the dark hushed entryway, I remember the smell of varnish, of wet woolen overcoats and the unwashed ragged parishioners standing huddled together waiting for the next Mass to begin. There was a long blue banner between the entrance doors to the nave, one word above the other, "OPEN WIDE THE DOORS TO CHRIST!" ... I fully expected He would be waiting for me inside.

Once through the doors, I would turn to my right and see the brilliant church windows. Frightening scenes of Biblical history told in colored glass and lit by the sun. I thought of it as "God's light" – Saints! Angels! Agony and rapture! Miracles of resurrection and healing. "Pray for us, pray for us!" When I turned and looked behind me I saw the magnificent rose window, like something seen in a giant kaleidoscope. It framed the back of the organist's bald head and the strained faces of the ladies choir doing their utmost to sing God's songs.

But when I lowered my eyes, I saw the people – a congregation of the poor. The daydream turned sour. The Great Depression had beaten the worshipers of St. Theresa into a rabble of terrified men and women, wondering from whose blessing their next meal would come. Would their faith in the "fruit of the womb" feed them when the rent came round?

The women were dressed in black, it seemed they lived from mourning to mourning. They wore hats ... tired old feathered hats you might see on the head of the coal man's horse to keep the flies away. The men carried their hats – fedoras with stained sweatbands they fiddled with the way beggars do. They wore suits that didn’t fit and shirts with yellowed collars. Their eyes would shift nervously left and right while the eyes of the women were shut tight in prayer. There was the smell of musty closets, garlic and unwashed bodies. In quiet moments the sounds of their shuffling feet and the clearing of their throats could be heard. I cannot think back to the magic windows now without remembering the congregation of St. Theresa.

I stood flanked by my mother and father who took turns nudging me – insisting that I face forward and pay attention. Mother carried a Gideon Bible her father pinched from a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio, and she carried a set of enormous rosary beads that rattled like gamblers dice as she fingered them. Father, like all the other fathers, fiddled with his hat. He would mumble his way through the responses, but my mother would call them out loud and clear. I remember looking for the differences between my mother and father and all the other mothers and fathers in the congregation of St. Theresa, and not seeing any. I felt I could be the son of the couple behind us, or the brother of the little girl in the pew in front of us. I stood between my mother and father, an only son – they were all I had for a family.

If the church did nothing else, it made me see my mother and father as part of a larger family assembled under one roof. It accomplished little else. During the week each family hid from the other. The church offered us no miracles, no epiphanies. The blind remained blind, the hungry remained hungry and the poor stayed poor. But the magic of the windows invigorated me and carried me through the Great Depression.

Very few people today remember the “Great Depression.” I remember it as a child, and I remember the stain of debt it left on my mother and father. They feared buying anything they couldn't pay for in cash. All their life they mistrusted banks, the stock market, checks and credit cards. They doubted anyone's promise to pay tomorrow for something they needed today.

I remember the scraping of mold from hard cheese. Of making the milk stretch another day, I remember turnip greens and stew meat, and bones from the butcher for the dog we didn’t have. What I missed most was the lack of laughter in our house. My mother and father didn’t laugh any more – even after the Great Depression had passed, they didn’t laugh. A generation of people had forgotten how to laugh. Even when they grew old, they didn’t laugh.

Worst of all, they stopped going to church. Their "Hail Mary's" had fallen on deaf ears. I was profoundly disappointed. I missed the music, the invocations and the promise of miracles. Life to me from then on, lost much of the magic and color I remembered from "God's Light" in the stained glass windows of St. Theresa.

Then, the war came, and I remember the windows of the churches in Coventry, as empty as the eye sockets of skulls. Shards of colored glass in the crevices of the cobblestones outside. The promise of miracles and revelations lay shattered in the street.

How empty and fragile the windows were, how easily they all came down!