Across from the brownstone where my family rented a duplex was a Catholic school for girls, St. Jean Baptiste, and although each day I witnessed the Catholic girls in their boxy oversized uniforms of white shirts and navy blue ties and long matching blue skirts entering, exiting and milling about on the stone steps, it not once occurred to me to speak to them or to enter the building.

    Schools were like families; you didn’t just crash into one. Instead, I entered the St. Jean Baptiste church around the corner, on busy Lexington Avenue: a high set building the length of the block, set upon wide and deep black granite steps that provided a buttress or elevation of the church itself. The steps were usually empty, apart from a homeless man with long wild hair to whom my father gave five dollar bills and burgers wrapped in foil from the Skyline diner; the homeless man, father reported back, had fought in Vietnam.

    Inside this church, in the off hours, the great space beneath the high domed ceiling was invariably empty yet heavy. Both impressed and afraid I would be ejected as an imposter, I crossed myself secretly and deliciously with the stained and tepid holy water at the fount, made my way around the stations of the cross, lit a wax candle near the altar (for which one dropped a coin in a slotted tin), and peeked into the confessionals which appeared to me as upended coffins in which one was buried alive with one’s sins.

    The silence and spaciousness of church was rare in the city, and gave me a chance to breathe and feel sane in my aloneness. I loved, and secreted away, the small white papered booklets stuffed in the pews — simple inked illustrations of plump stabbed hearts, crying angels, crucifixes besides latinate words of passion. Anima Christi, Meaculpa, Hoc est corpus meum — which was my favorite.* At home I cut pages out for my pinboard. There, they joined images of Patti Smith singing Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.

    And yet, I knew that Catholicism had filled my father with pain and rage, that his time as a boy at a New Zealand Catholic boarding school in the 1940s had been a dark spell from which he could not escape.

    And only a few blocks southwest on Madison Avenue with its luxury stores, was the St. James Episcopal Church. My mother had been raised Episcopal, though where we were from this church was called Anglican. As with the British people themselves, the church was reserved and modest, of quality and restraint. It had none of the melancholy blood of Catholic churches. Its colors — if it had colors — were white and green. I slipped into the narthex and then into the back pews on Sundays. But as I spoke to no one, nor anyone to me, Sunday services didn’t hold me for long, nor did the absence of lurid booklets, and soon I was peeling away to the journal store, or to a Baskin & Robbins 31 flavors ice cream store across from the Lycee Francais on 72d Street. The Lycee had been built as a mansion out of limestone at the turn of the 19th century. Its architecture was of the high French style, bearing scrolls, cartouches, high windows and rusticated stone. In my time, it schooled hundreds of children. In 2017 it would become one of many private homes of the former Emir of Qatar.

    My friend Oliver was also Christian and once at our mostly Jewish School, he and I and our friends Carter and Hannah, went through the yearbook and counted up eight Christians out of one hundred Jewish children in our class. Oliver lived in a brownstone on 92nd Street off Fifth Avenue — four stories, dark and cavernous with a fireplace that contained the ashes of a fire — the same fire, always.

    His parents were almost completely absent, being on their way to a divorce, and when Oliver forgot his keys, he had to sneak behind the Brick Church next door, climb its slatted fence, jump the gap to his fire escape and climb into his sister’s room via a window on the 4th floor. The next year his sister, who went mysteriously by her initials AC, most impressively ran away — as I then understood it — to play in a punk band.

    Soon, I too started sneaking into the Brick Church after school. It was a blocky red brick building in the federal style, with a white frieze, two Ionic columns and one white circular window. I was so quiet back then, and restrained, I cannot imagine a soul at the Brick Church remembering me. And yet, I became a choir girl. This was, surprisingly, a position of stealth and solitude. I made my way into a basement with linoleum floors and unvarnished wooden cabinets from which I wrestled, being not yet tall, a silky robe in what we now call “seafoam green” from a brass hook.

    Upstairs, the choir was in practice in the sanctuary and I moved without notice into position, opening the hymn book and struggling to keep up with arrangements utterly foreign to me. I might as well have been a hologram, how disembodied and surreal I felt. It was a Presbyterian church, which meant little to me except that it was a mild Christian faith. The Methodists, Episcopalians, (Anglicans) and Presbyterians were all to me on one level; more severe were the Catholics, Calvinists, Quakers and Mormons. Perhaps Oliver was the only one who knew I was slipping into the church and donning a green robe and singing with the quietest voice in the room. He, too, was unbaptized.

My last day at The Brick Church was Christmas Day, when the choir sang at eleven am. Perhaps I never went back because no one noticed I was gone.

 

On my baptism at 28, the age Jesus was said to be when he himself was baptized by his cousin John, it was a September day in autumn, bright, cool, sunny. It was 1993 and the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. At that time, I did not know what Pentecost was, and all I knew of baptism, or the ceremony, was that it involved water: the submerging in it, or the anointing by it. My search for baptism was not so much about looking for something, but acknowledging something that had recently occured: the awareness of some force in my life that was leading me at the same time as I struggled through that life as a series of seemingly random and difficult dramas. I wore a long loose white dress with intricate embroidery and tightly spaced fabric buttons, petite as on womens’ white dress gloves, as well as a pale green silk coat. It was my first church ceremony — apart from the stint as choir girl. It was held in alcove known as the Chantry Chapel, to the left of sanctuary with a stone baptismal font.

    I had chosen the church — the St Thomas Church on 51st street and Fifth Avenue — for several reasons, one of which was its grandeur and simplicity — its reredo of an altarpiece like a cliff to God, a wall of white stone which felt to me unmatched in the city and spoke of the natural world, of an expanse such as the ocean is.

    Yet it was also a romantic attachment; I had been in love for some years with a man fourteen years my senior who was married, had two children and was deeply conservative; there had never been a divorce in his family and all of his male ancestors had been Episcopal ministers. Seven years earlier, the year we met, he had prevaricated and doubted and wrung his hands and briefly left his wife with a proposal to marry me, which I accepted.

    His name was Thomas, such as Saint Thomas the Church, itself named after Saint Thomas known in the New Testament as Doubting Thomas. To me, this church almost was Thomas: It manifested him, it was the establishment and utterly immovable and perfect — except not quite. It had been built in stone according to medieval principles and of Cathedral size — and yet fell short in its length.

    Shortly before my baptism, Thomas, with whom, seven years later, I was still friends gave me a piece of jewelry for my throat: a small gold cross shaped almost like a flower or sprig or whorl of gold. This cross would shine at the base of my throat as I was baptized in the church that I chose both in his honor and for his absence. We were, at the time of his giving of the cross, at lunch in a New York City brasserie named Les Halles, a few blocks south of my office on Park Avenue.

    One thing Thomas taught me was to mind where you spent time with a person as they would associate that place with you forever. It is for this reason that Chekhov set most of his love stories in flowering gardens. And Les Halles — like all places Thomas chose to meet me in — the Oak Room for dinner at the Plaza, the National Gallery of Washington — was a place of light and beauty. It had high ceilings and heavy white tablecloths and the gleam and ring of immaculate polished glassware. Its food was that of pleasure, prepared by a young chef who would go on to be a tv star and celebrity.

    At the ceremony, elation sparked through my body, warm points of light. It was the benevolence and the gift of baptism, the fact that I needed no study of nomenclature nor idols, no exchange of money nor proof of lineage, provenance or status to be celebrated and sanctified as I was. It startled me to be asked to renounce Satan, yet I did so, and accepted also a white baptismal candle, lit for me, and now, back in its slim blue box, one of the few objects I have kept with me over the subsequent 25 years, many of which were spent in traveling.

    At the end of the service, the organist poured the last movement of Esquisses Byzantine through the pipes of the church’s powerful organ. The Esquisses had been written over five years from 1914 to 1919 by French composer Henri Mulet and pressed forth in orgasmic organ waves of oceanic force — rolling and careening, exuberant then almost comically vampirically sinister. It was a toccata and a song of a life — a whole life.

    I looked up and around the near cathedral — surely this was not church music? — it had something wild and fantastic about it, as if all of us in white dresses would find ourselves rising into the air or dried black roses would float singularly past us or the sun would strike our skin the ruby and emerald green colors of the stained windows.

    Mulet believed that the organ and the stained glass in a church acted in concert, flooding the air both with their “embracing and imposing tones.”

    Those colors of stained glass, abundant in ruby and sapphire, reminded me of the waters of a mineral cave in New Zealand — Alladin’s cave it is called or “Pool of Mirrors,” a 120 foot drop to a pool of warm acidic water the colors of gems, and of such a composition it could clean jewelry. It might as well have been “Pool of Tears” as the waters — said a stranger who came upon my family bathing in them — were sacred, tapu. The geothermal fields were long home to the Maori people of New Zealand who both cooked and bathed in various areas of the hotsprings — and our lives thenceforward, this stranger said, now scolding and berating us, were now cursed, forever.

    To this we had no answer — naked and unaware as we were — and though eventually we would find this curse to play out — I personally rather think a human life is about standing up daily to life, and that no curse can defeat a man or woman or person who is entirely him or her or themself.

    Like most of the places that were wild when I was a child, this cave, now restored to its Maori name, Ruatapu, has since been de-wilded — as in, bounded by a fence and viewing platform that no one shall plummet into it, and the surrounding fields mapped out for tourists with 528 wooden steps.

    On the St. Thomas Church program for this day of my baptism, the 19th day of September, was written at the bottom of the page:

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tu es petra et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus te:

 

You are the rock, and nothing, not even the gates of hell, shall prevail upon you

 

And it was true. I would linger again at the gates of hell — but I would always have myself. I was the rock. I was the gold teardrop of fire burning atop the baptismal candle. 

    One New Year’s Eve, the German Crowd and I were on our way to a party and stopped into my parents’ place. With me were the German sisters, my  German boyfriend Klaus and Isabelle’s boyfriend Michael — and I pronounced their names in the German style, which I was studying: Isabelle, Dor-o-tay, Klaus, Mi-shy-il. We were all 16, except for Dorothée, who was just 17.

    We came down the stairs into the open living room where my parents and their friends were drinking. One of these friends was a New Zealander, an affable intelligent man, large, kind, father of some four or five with a neat beard and generous air. When I introduced Isabelle, Dor-o-tay, Klaus and Mi-shy-il, this decorous well read man, who worked in software design, shot up from his chair, gave a Nazi salute and called out “Heil Hitler.” 

    What followed was a long silence. And then the flurry of parental voices offering apologies. My friends and I had already turned to the stairs. We were up and out into the night, which was cool and brimming with moonlight and promised to us.

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*My body is mine