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My father, Jacob Müller, had three siblings. Alexander the Monsignor, Felix who doubled as a clown and lion trainer for the Mills Brothers Circus, and sister Eva who sold her body until it shook too much.
 When it came time in Jacob's life to sum it all up, to prepare himself for what might or might not occur after death, he didn't knock on the sacristy door. Instead he sought out Eva and Felix who lived in run-down bungalows on the outskirts of our town.
As a boy I couldn't understand why.
I loved frequenting Uncle Alexander's cathedral with its flying buttresses, its west and east stone towers, one carrying the great bell, the other housing more than one thousand pipes for the electro-pneumatic organ in the baptistry. Monsignor ascended the grand circular staircase in his polychromatic chasuble at High Mass while racks of ruby-red, ink-blue, and clear votive jars bearing flame and melted wax illuminated wooden saints, and morning sunlight filtered through stained-glass clerestory windows. And there on the rood screen separating the choir from the nave, a crucifix larger than the statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on our village green -- Christ's gold-leafed body, mirroring the votive flames. Alive.
Parishioners rising and crossing themselves, kneeling, rising again. . . their solemn incantation echoing Uncle's Latin liturgy.
And Christ on fire.
Why a whore and a clown? I wondered, when Monsignor Alexander owned a golden ring with a giant ruby that his congregants kissed.
"I'm off to the whiskey bar," Father said. I'd clandestinely follow to see if the Monsignor would embrace him in an alleyway minus his surplice, and the two of them would stroll into the backdoor of the parish house.
Instead I watched Father walk wide of the large shadows that the basilica towers, Temperance and Perseverance, cast across Main Street like an ominous embrace.
Aunt Eva sat in the shadows of her porch on summer afternoons. A Kewpie doll with rouged cheeks, and hair dyed henna that haloed a china face. Her dress dropped inches above her bony knees. She wore spiked heels painted with fuchsia nail polish and dreamily stared onto the dirt street, her slight body jerking as if a motor oscillated under its bottom. Waiting. Waiting for a blanket of darkness to eclipse the bungalow.
I asked Father what Aunt Eva was selling, since so many men stopped by after dusk.
"She's a little store inside," he said.
Once as I was passing her house, she signaled me over.
"I'm your Aunt Eva," she said "You look exactly like Jacob."
"Pleased to meet you," I said.
"Your father chooses to ignore I'm his sister."
I nodded as if I understood.
"You must come by and visit me sometime. We'll get to know each other better." She grinned.
In time I learned what she'd been selling inside her bungalow.
That she took off her bedizened doll clothes for strange men.
Then I dreamed of paying her a call.
I envisioned her standing disrobed in her bedroom, arms outstretched to the door jambs, one foot touching the other, and the henna triangle burning like the bush in the Bible. A smoke of yearning curling out of Uncle Alexander's incense censer.
Her image provoking the ache I brooked for the gold-leafed crucifix.
But as Aunt Eva's tremors grew more conspicuous over time and the traffic upon her walkway diminished . . . so did my ardor and contrition.
Her house was no longer freshly painted a periwinkle blue. Its front steps fell into disrepair. Like a plaster of paris palmist inside a cloudy-glass arcade box, she sat staring out her window. You place a nickel into a slot, her wooden hand overturns a Queen of Spades, a cardboard fortune drops out a cupped opening -- somewhere, you imagine, below her skirts.
Except a housefly had died on its forehead. Chipped, flesh-tinted plaster exposed chalky stigmata. These women in arcade boxes are saints, too, I thought. Lesser saints than those mutely lining St. Margaret's side aisles. Or Christ pinioned against the rood screen -- He was the master saint, the biggest and best of all the arcade ones, and those who lived on dirt streets like Aunt Eva, waiting, waiting, for acolytes with jingle in their trousers.
~ ~ ~
Uncle Felix lived one street over from Eva's place. He kept a palomino in a shed behind his modest one-story house. On Independence Day he dressed like Tom Mix and headed a parade down Main street with paper American flags attached to his steed's halter. He'd painted stars on its hooves and braided its flaxen tail in red and blue ribbon. A large barrel-chested man with chiseled features, Uncle Felix favored an American Indian.
"He could whup lions!" a bystander exclaimed. "Make 'em lie down docile before him like house tabbies."
Felix Muller dramatically swept his Stetson against the sweaty flanks of his golden horse.
"I seen him standin' on the back of a galloping Arabian once," said another, "a pair a six-shooters blasting crockery out of the sky that clowns spiraled aloft like barn swallows."
"Was he a trapeze artist, too?"
"If one of those spangled dames dangled by her gams -- you bet! He didn't join the circus to get away from 'em."
As the parishioners glowed, minding Monsignor Alexander's vestments sweep the basilica's cobbled floor, the Eucharist chalice ascending to the giant rood, so, too, the town's women in Uncle Felix's wake. Always he'd spot a comely bystander, dismount, and like the gentleman I think he never was, boost her onto the horse's backside. The pair would clop up the pavers past Hutton's Hardware, the Episcopal Church, and Post Office, halting before the viewing stand where Uncle Alexander officiated alongside the Mayor and Chief of Police.
Felix's woman gripping his midriff, the horse perspiring under her thighs.
The two brothers locked into each others gaze.
A splinter of wistfulness marred the cleric's severe demeanor. The bouquet of incense is impotent to satisfy a man's need to scent a woman, he sighed. Felix feels the drumming of her heart, her hot breath against his neck. And for a single blasphemous second he envisioned her splayed against the basilica's apse, a thousand votive candle flames rising up to illuminate her. Alexander blinked, removed his steel-rimmed frames, and rubbed his eyes, praying the image that returned would be the worthy one.
But she mouthed his name, beckoning he veil her nakedness with his peacock robes.
His malicious brother, Felix, taunting him about women when really all he ever yearned for was salvation.
Felix flashed a sardonic grin, gesturing to the weighty crucifix that hung about his brother's neck.
"He suffered a big letdown, too, Alex."
~ ~ ~
Eva sat still as a reliquary on the opposite end of town.
At night when I'd pass her darkened house, I'd fancy her lying in her doll costume upon the bed, it trembling with her.
I wanted to place racks of the illuminated votive candles, the ones in the ruby vases, hundreds along her porch banisters.
In memory, Aunt Eva, of your early self.
How you gave of yourself God knows not for pleasure. Yours certainly.
The laborers, policemen, politicians, even a few wayward clergy -- perhaps they could visit you now on St. Eva's Day, and in a palanquin, parade you through our streets while the wives and children of your patrons pin dollar bills to your sanctum sanctorum dress -- a zipper down its backside that sang myriad times each day as you stood before us naked as the Word.
What a religious burg it would then be.
The Whore, the Monsignor, and the Horseman who carried six-shooters in leather holsters that hung to his sides like enshrined penes.
But there were no beginnings anymore.
Winter had breathed heavily into Father's ear.
I felt a dark river had coursed its way through our psyche, and I went to him in deep sadness to say that I loved him . . . and was he afraid as I?
The gold-plated crucifix I was convinced shivered like Aunt Eva on winter nights when the custodian turned off the gas boilers. That the Neshannock River ran through our town bearing ice.
"Goodbye, dear Father," I whispered in his ear . . .
"Don't be rash, Son. It's people's dreams we read on billboards and hear from the pulpits, be those of your sad Uncle's or the halls of commerce.
"I've watched you of late tease the railings of our bridges." Over a woman perhaps?
"Look at your Aunt Eva.
"What man would destroy himself over her? Men made of her body more than it could ever be. It's why she took money for it.
"We are simple beings who must create for ourselves grand dreams to compensate for what we don't own.
"Your Uncle Alex flagellates himself for being unworthy of partaking in the Body of Christ.
"Felix sticks his head into the mouth of a lion.
"Aunt Eva screws Mayor Delasandro.
"Who would find pleasure in your careening off the Jefferson Street Bridge?"
~ ~ ~
That evening I trailed him through the alleyways to Eva's shadowy house. The door opened before he stepped onto the porch stair as if she'd been expecting him.
After several minutes a flickering ruby votive lamp was placed in the window. Did he know I was watching for a sign? Had he told her about my dialogue with the river, the dark Neshannock?
I watched him and Uncle Felix meet on a street corner of a Sunday afternoon. Speaking solemnly to each other as visitors to a wake, the brothers soon embraced and stood motionless for several minutes, studying their shoes before turning their backs to each other.
These were goodbyes.
Then late one balmy night, I heard the sash in the hallway rattling. It alarmed me for I could hear no wind outside. I had my window open, hoping for a breeze to come off the open field behind our house, perhaps a cold draft to rise off its narrow creek, the runoff from the limestone quarry up our road.
I opened my door.
Father stood in the hallway dressed in a white shirt, black tie -- and dancing shoes, the black and white brogues, with no stockings.
His face squashed against the glass.
The vibrations of his deep voice, an incantation of sort, causing the window pane to buzz. But it sounded as if he'd begun crying.
"Kyrie eleison.
"Kyrie eleison.
"Christe eleison."
Fragments of the Mass.
"Father. What is it? What in God's name are you doing?"
"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis." *
"Praying for Felix, Eva, and Alexander. For you, for me, for all our sins."
"But why?" I cried.
"Uncle Alexander's censer breathes the foul odor of death. The lights in faces of the saints have been snuffed out -- and I can't get my breath."
He turned to me, his eyes as gray as the rood's in the chancel.
"Son, it's all dark out there."
He extended his fingers to stroke my face . . . but faltered.
"Who have these caressed? The scent of those who opened to me . . . their sweet breath gone. My hands have lost their mind.
The bell in the tower cries night.
"Oh Christ!" he cried.
"Give me the crucifix. Give me a clown. Give me a match."
* "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us."
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