Aglow: A Christmas Fable

By Bruce Ashkenas

Aglow: A Christmas Fable takes place around the fictional St. Dominic's Catholic Church in the Tremont Avenue section of The Bronx. It is a Christmas fable told from a Jewish point of view.
First the characters of the tale. There is a 12-year-old Jewish boy, Adam Sands, and his mother. They leave Uncle Joel's house in Connecticut after Thanksgiving dinner, heading for The Bronx, where Adam was going to spend the long holiday weekend with his grandfather, Bernie Mandelbaum. Adam liked going to Gramps but, at the moment, he had a tummy full of turkey and wanted to take a nap.
Adam spent most weekends with Gramps, giving his single mother the time to have a social life. That was OK with Adam, he didn't miss his dad; didn’t really remember him. Adam had good friends in Gramps' neighborhood, chief among them Rafe Lopez, 12-years-old, also the son of a single mother. Adam was friends with Father Leroy Higgins, the parish priest of St. Dominic's Church, which was next to the little market that Grandpa Bernie owned.
Rafe, a devout Catholic, belonged to Father Higgins' flock. His ambition was to become a priest. This particular day after Thanksgiving, Rafe had a bee in his bonnet. Father Higgins had recently given a sermon about the purity of Mary and how he would like to clean the statue above the church. The speech put an idea into Rafe's head, which percolated while he greeted Adam.
Adam wanted to play a new videogame with groundhogs and butterflies and stuff. They cleaned the groundhog queen with hot oil and an idea came to Rafe--I can clean the statue of the Madonna myself. He asked Adam if the roof of the church was accessible from the roof of Grandpa Bernie's market? Adam's answer was, "let's go see," so the two boys trooped up the attic stairs to the roof, where Rafe saw they would need a ladder. He knew where to get a ladder and he knew where to get cleaning supplies. He and Adam would clean the statue of the Madonna and Child themselves and make Father Higgens and the church community happy.
Now the action. Rafe and Adam clean the statue--and it takes on a life of its own. The first people to notice are drivers going by on the elevated freeway next to the church. Their horn-honking wakes up the neighborhood to a miracle in their midst. Crowds soon gather to witness the glowing Mary and Jesus. Father Higgins wakes up to a dilemma, should he report the suddenly glowing statue to the hierarchy as a miracle of the Church. Bleeding statues, yes--glowing ones, he didn’t know. Then the New York news media descends on his church. Everyone wants a piece of the miracle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Ashkenas
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370704910

Bruce Ashkenas

Bruce Ashkenas had a full career at the National Archives where he worked describing records, including those of the German American Bund, which were seized as enemy records upon United States entrance to World War II. The background of Shadows of Shame lies in those years when he daily read the intensely anti-Semitic words of the Nazi Bund. Mr. Ashkenas has also written three young adult novels, Auntie's Ghost, Sick Street, and Aglow in The Bronx. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia with his wife, daughter, and dog.

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Aglow: A Christmas Fable, Second edition, Copyright _ 2017, Bruce Ashkenas.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from the author. This story is a work of fiction. References to real people and events are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters and dialog are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Published in the United States.

Cover by Damonza

This book is dedicated to my wife, Denise Cassens Ashkenas

Contents

Also by Bruce Ashkenas

One: Adam Sands

Two: St. Dominic’s

Three: Father Higgins

Four: The Lopez family

Five: The Groundhog Queen

Six: Cleaning the Queen

Seven: The Madonna Goes Public

Eight: Tears Out of Stone

Nine: Keep the Change

Ten: The Streak Grows

Eleven: Miracles Abound

Twelve: Joe on the Roof

Thirteen: The Long Knives Come Through

Fourteen: Holy Land Stone

Fifteen: The Cleaner

Acknowledgements

Also by Bruce Ashkenas

Auntie’s Ghost (2006)

Sick Street (2011)

Shadows of Shame (2016)

ONE

Adam Sands

You know how you get when you’ve had a big meal Ma, and then you’ve got to sit in the back seat for an hour? Do you know what I mean? Adam Sands said as he and his mother climbed in the ’85 Buick and fastened their seat belts around full bellies. They’d had a big Thanksgiving meal at Uncle Joel’s in Connecticut and stuffed themselves silly, with turkey and side dishes. The meal was great Ma, especially the pumpkin pie you made. Now I’m tired. Can I take a nap?

Okay, his mother mumbled.

Adam leaned the seat back, closed his blue eyes, and felt the engine rumble as his mother backed out of the drive and headed for the freeway.

It doesn’t get much better than this, he thought, a half-hour into their drive to The Bronx, where Gramps waited. Ma is leaving me there for the weekend. She’s got a big date tomorrow, so she’s dumping me. It’s all right. She gets on my nerves too—always do this; always do that. And she gets easily distracted on the highway so I’ve got to be quiet. Yeah, I’ve got a bad case of parental abuse. It ain’t easy being an almost thirteen-year-old scrawny kid from Westchester. Only got Ma though, he considered sleepily. It could be worse. Dad could be at home, too. Adam dozed off to the thumpa-thumpa of the tires on the road.

Adam woke when his mother abruptly swerved the big car out of the slow lane. With plenty of rattles and a mottled paint job to go with its age, the 1985 sedan had ten years on it when Gramps gave it to Ma a few years back.

Yea Ma, Adam softly called out as she braked to avoid becoming a sandwich between two taxis. They were entering The Bronx where the New York Thruway narrowed from four lanes to three. The road’s name then changed and it widened back to a four-lane freeway. Horns honked, cars changed lanes without warning, and rain pounded on the roof. The boy was glad he wouldn’t be old enough to drive for at least three years.

Adam had traveled the Bruckner Expressway every weekend for years, and he had never figured out where that lane went. To top things off it was getting dark and fog was rolling in through the towers of Co-op City. Mom hunched forward, eyes squinting, her knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel. Adam peered out at the wiper-lashed freeway, sneaking a quick peak at Mom now and then, watching the cords on the back of her neck tighten or loosen with the driving conditions. He thought he could see her brown hair turning silver in the glow of the headlamps shooting through the rain. Nah, she’s not old enough to have grey hair. Then again, she’s had a hard life, with that awful dad-o-mine giving her so much trouble.

Cross-Bronx coming up, Ma, he said after a while. She moved right so as not to miss the ramp. Adam’s favorite part of the whole trip was here. To the left of them for maybe five seconds, before they veered onto the ramp, stood a larger-than life figure, no, two figures—mother and child.

They were soot covered, almost coal-black, yet he had no trouble seeing them as the car sped past. They had this inner glow, which made them unmistakable despite the mist and the gathering twilight. Maybe it was the stone they were carved out of, maybe it was backlighting from the buildings beyond. You couldn’t see the glow from street level, only from the elevated freeway, and only if you knew where to look. Adam knew where to look.

What he didn’t know yet, was how much he was going to help change that statue.

TWO

St. Dominic’s

At the intersection of the Bruckner, going north south, and the Cross-Bronx, going east west, rested an imposing red-brick building housing St. Dominic’s Parrish. The three-story church, with an equally tall steeple, had been a landmark on Tremont Avenue for ninety years. When they built the freeway back in the 50s it had to wind around the church because the city refused to tear down a house of worship.

Atop the house of God, under the shadow of the steeple, stood a large statue of Mary cradling the Baby Jesus. The once white Madonna looked out over miles of stop-and-go traffic, cars, trucks, and buses spewing noxious, smoky exhaust into the air. Mary’s soot-stained eyes saw the tenements of The Bronx, brick apartment buildings all the way to the Hudson River. Their chimneys emitted grey clouds of ash, from fuel burned to keep New Yorkers warm.

Bigger buildings could be seen, factories and some schools, stores and churches. Elevated train tracks snaked along the major avenues, visible between the buildings. Here and there little clumps of brown and green peeked through what a keen-eyed observer saw to be parks and bare-branched trees. The Baby Jesus’s eyes were closed, his eyelids streaked with grime. Maybe they were closed because of all the tears his mother shed on him, for she saw much suffering. Maybe they were closed against the dirty air.

The neighborhood of the church, what was left after the freeways were carved out, made itself home to the people living their small lives in big brick tenements or cramped houses on broken-down streets. The state and Federal governments provided smooth highways for rich people from Connecticut to get to Manhattan. These commuters brought money into New York, but the city couldn’t find the budget to fix potholes for poor people on Tremont Avenue. And the city certainly couldn’t fix the broken-down lives of residents near the church.

Some were gang-members, more were homeless, and many of them were addicted to drugs or alcohol. Others managed, without much money, to eke out a living on the squalid streets.

THREE

Father Higgins

Father Leroy Higgins, St. Dominic’s Parish’s young priest, stood in front of his red brick church on a dreary day at the tail end of November, staring up at the statue, while trying to avoid looking at the graffiti covered retaining wall across the street under the expressway. The Madonna is all people see of the church as they drive by on the freeway and they can’t even see her, he thought. Squinting his brown eyes up into the overcast sky, he tried to make out the dark statue from the slightly lighter clouds. He could see the brick steeple but beside it, where the statue stood, he could see nothing but the rainbow reflections of profanity spray-painted on the freeway overpass by graffiti artists.

Some people would say she’s just