The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [34]
They gathered after dusk at a windy place between bridge approaches, seven or eight people drawn by the word of one or two, then thirty people drawn by the seven, then a tight silent crowd that grew bigger but no less respectful, two hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that industrial desolation that breaks your heart with its fretful Depression beauty—the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.
Wedged, they came and parked their cars if they had cars, six or seven to a car, parking tilted on a high shoulder or in the factory side streets, and they wedged themselves onto the concrete island between the expressway and the pocked boulevard, feeling the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of madcap traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom—an advertising sign scaffolded high above the riverbank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that ran incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut.
Edgar sat across from Gracie in the refectory. She ate her food without tasting it because she’d decided years ago that taste was not the point. The point was to clean the plate.
Gracie said, “No, please, you can’t.”
“Just to see.”
“No, no, no, no.”
“I want to see for myself.”
“This is tabloid. This is the worst kind of tabloid superstition. It’s horrible. A complete, what is it? A complete abdication, you know? Be sensible. Don’t abdicate your good sense.”
“It could be her they’re seeing.”
“You know what this is? It’s the nightly news. It’s the local news at eleven with all the grotesque items neatly spaced to keep you watching the whole half hour.”
“I think I have to go,” Edgar said.
“This is something for poor people to confront and judge and understand if they can and we have to see it in that framework. The poor need visions, okay?”
“I believe you are patronizing the people you love,” Edgar said softly.
“That’s not fair.”
“You say the poor. But who else would saints appear to? Do saints and angels appear to bank presidents? Eat your carrots.”
“It’s the nightly news. It’s gross exploitation of a child’s horrible murder.”
“But who is exploiting? No one’s exploiting,” Edgar said. “People go there to weep, to believe.”
“It’s how the news becomes so powerful it doesn’t need TV or newspapers. It exists in people’s perceptions. It becomes real or fake-real so people think they’re seeing reality when they’re seeing something they invent. It’s the news without the media.”
Edgar ate her bread.
“I’m older than the pope. I never thought I would live long enough to be older than a pope and I think I need to see this thing.”
“Pictures lie,” Gracie said.
“I think I need to see it.”
“Don’t pray to pictures, pray to saints.”
“I think I need to go.”
“But you can’t. It’s crazy. Don’t go, Sister.”
But Edgar went. She went with a shy quiet type named Janis Loudermilk, who wore a retainer for spacey teeth. They took the bus and subway and walked the last three blocks and Sister Jan carried a portable phone in case they needed aid.
A madder orange moon hung over the city.
People in the glare of passing cars, hundreds clustered on the island, their own cars parked cockeyed and biaswise, dangerously near the streaming traffic. The nuns dashed across the boulevard and squeezed onto the island and people made room for them, pressed bodies apart to let them stand at ease.
They followed the crowd’s stoked gaze. They stood and looked. The billboard was unevenly lighted, dim in spots, several