Despite not being from Boston, he had one of those big slabby Boston faces, with kindly but piercing eyes, topped with a full head of white hair. Eventually, she was working with Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the archbishop of Boston, himself. The priests quickly noticed that my ma was good at her job and dependable, so they started giving her more responsibility, bigger tasks, and more complex, longer-term projects. It would feel massive to anyone at any age, but when you’re six and enveloped by the shadow of the enormous organ as you follow its countless pipes reaching up and up and up to a ceiling so far away it might as well be the sky, it was so deeply lonely and self-abnegating that it was almost transcendental. When you walk into the nave, everything opens up and the inside seems even bigger than the outside, somehow.
“Everybody in this neighborhood does.” I didn’t get the joke then, but now I do. “More likely they ran out of money,” she had answered, touching the back of my head as we walked up toward the gray stone castle. When I told my ma that, I remember her laughing, a certain low and gently rueful laugh she’s had her whole life, which I’m sure was appreciated by the Cathedral priests and anyone else who has ever needed to hear a laugh perfect for when things are so hopeless that they’re also a little bit funny. You can almost feel a strange sort of tension and possibility in the air above, as if at any moment a spire still might fall magically from the sky to fill the emptiness.
Instead, there is a big tower stretching up into the sky until it suddenly stops short and squares off, like a partially completed homework assignment. My ma had told me that the cathedral was supposed to have a grand spire.
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