Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon

floor, it rolled to the other side of the room.
    And, there were mice. It had wide-plank old pine floors with great gaps between them, all full of mouse dirt. We couldn’t have a cat because Norman’s allergic. We couldn’t put down poison for fear Bridey would eat it. We had to trap them. For all that happened to us while we were at Holy Innocents, my clearest association is walking into that cold kitchen in my bathrobe in the mornings, with the wind shaking the windowpanes, listening for the scrabbling sound behind the refrigerator that meant a mouse was in the trap and it wasn’t dead. If you think Norman was going to deal with that sort of thing, good luck to you.
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    Edith Faithful I liked Holy Innocents School pretty much. We had smaller classes. There was good art. All the other kids had known each other since they were three, so that was hard for me, and our play yards were tiny and I liked sports. One was a fenced-in lot beside the school and the other was up on the roof. That was for the little kids. It was a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school. After sixth, you went to public middle school, or changed to one of the private schools that went through twelfth. The gym wasn’t very big and it was also used for plays and assembly. I loved being able to go home for lunch. Dad would make me soup and Triscuits, or tomato sandwiches, and we both read at the table while we ate. We weren’t allowed to do that when Mom was there.
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    Ted Wineapple Norman hadn’t had a failure since he was five, that I could tell. Oh yes. I guess you could say his marriage to Rachel had failed. Though I’m not sure he saw it that way. When he got to New York, it happened that the senior warden, who’d been there forever, was recovering from surgery. He asked Norman to have the vestry meet at his apartment, instead of in the parish hall, and Norman said, “Of course.” Big mistake.
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    Monica Faithful Being in the faculty room, in on the gossip, I understood the parish better than I would have otherwise, and maybe better than Norman did. The parish and the school were at war with each other. Absolute war. The school was coining money. Downtown New York waschanging, there were people living in places like SoHo that had never been residential before and there suddenly weren’t enough schools for the downtown kids.
    Holy Innocents School could have been twice as big as it was, but it was bonsaied by the church. Some of the classrooms were actually in the church undercroft and the basement of the parish hall. They had to be completely cleaned up, all the displays and maps and so forth put away every Friday, so the rooms could be used for Sunday school over the weekend. Even when no one came to Sunday school, the vestry made us do that. The rest of the school buildings were this little jumble on church land that had grown up higgledy-piggledy. The school wanted to tear them down and build a suitable building, and take the meditation garden, which nobody used, for more play yards. The vestry was dead set against it.
    The vestry looked at the school as a cash cow, period. If there was a budget shortfall at the church, and there always was, they made the school cover it. It caused havoc with the school budget. And school fund-raising. People didn’t want to give toward a new theater curtain or piano for the music room if the church was just going to come and take the money.
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    Norman Faithful I was writing a book about the urban church. I joined a group of prominent clergy marching to protest the blight in the South Bronx. The dean of the cathedral allowed me to preach up there now and then, and I got several op-ed pieces published in the Times . You’d have thought all of that would draw parishioners to Holy Innocents, but it didn’t.
    Location was a problem. The unchurched in the neighborhood were old lefties with no interest in established religions, and the young families