Atop the Cathedral Basilica, a group of celebrants enjoys a different kind of communion
By Katy Carl
It seems like an awfully insider thing to be doing, so much so that I almost feel guilty. Just because we happen to have a young, adventurous priest for a friend, we’re going to get the best seat in the city for Fourth of July fireworks. The cupola atop St. Louis’ Cathedral Basilica, Father says, can hold only those of us who’ve stuck around after the barbecue: “Six people around the base on the catwalk, and maybe three or four up under the roof.”
Perhaps to shrink the group, perhaps to shield us from disappointment, Father tries to downplay the view.
“I’ve watched from up there before,” he says. “It’s almost 20 miles away from all the action. We can just go down to the river, if you’d rather; the cathedral will be there next year.”
Of course, his nonchalance just makes us that much more eager. Finally—and under his blasé expression, he’s obviously excited, too—Father agrees: “OK, OK—I’ll take you up.”
We start in the darkened west hallway, where the guys always meet when they serve Mass. Father punches in the security code, lighting up the numbers with a blue toy flashlight with a pink pig’s head that oinks. He throws a switch and takes us down the center aisle, into the nave.
“Here is the spot we’ll be right above,” he says, pointing to the number 143 inlaid in green stone on the floor. “Look up.”
We crane our necks to see the inner roof of the main dome, closest to the altar.
“When we get far enough, we’ll look down on this spot through one of the holes in which those lights are set. If we were to drop our friend Richard through one of those ... ”Everyone laughs, including Richard, who’s brought water and beer in a backpack cooler. “Where we’re standing,” Father resumes, “is where he would go splat, 143 feet from the ceiling.”
Through a hidden door, upstairs and down the gallery that the choir files along every Sunday we pass to reach a second hidden door, a second set of stairs. We begin to notice, as we climb a shivering metal Slinky of steps, where people have signed the bare brown inner walls in chalk.
“You’ll see hundreds of them when we start to get really high,” Father says. “People like to prove they’ve done this. I brought some nuns up here once who drew chalk pictures of themselves in full habit.”
One of the girls gets scared on the wobbling spiral stairs. Father is gentle and apologetic as he leads her back to the ground, but when he meets us again, in a wide room at the top of the stairs, he admits that it’s probably better that she didn’t go on: “If that worried her, I don’t know how she’d have handled the wooden ladders that date back to 1912.”
The chalk signatures in this room teach a history lesson. The date 1950 has been scribbled after more than a few. Father promises that there are older ones, but we don’t see any. “Brother,” “Sister” and “Mother So-and-So” appear a few times, but not as often as you would think. Couples from the last four decades have signed: “Mary and Edward,” “Betty and Ronald,” “Jim and Christie.” I wonder whether they were married, college sweethearts, high schoolers? Who brought them here? What was the occasion? Are they people we know?
My husband, Brian, writes and dates his name on the wall. I follow suit.
“Come on, honey,” he says, “write thicker. This is for the ages.”
I do, then draw a heart and a cross next to us. Meanwhile, Father has unlocked the exit. We move out onto the roof.
Walker Percy once wrote, “If [a person] sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.” Seeing the neighborhood from a height—in miniature, as it were—has the same effect. Most of our group graduated from Saint Louis University; from here we could hold the campus in two cupped hands. There stands the Coronado, where so many people we know lived, just the size for a model-train layout. In the other direction, lamps and signs in the Central West End glimmer through the trees and the twilight.
All of midtown St. Louis appears transfigured: no longer a collection of disparate neighborhoods, an atmosphere that we swim in like a river, but a unified thing with a life of its own. We are out in the air; we can watch the surface glisten. Distance is a refresher course. It enables us to create a summary of all the reasons that we love what we love.
One after another, everyone tries to see the view. The wide balcony around the dome seems less sturdy than it is. We explore the roof and meet the cathedral’s three bells, each of which has been baptized with its own name.
Father leads us around to the east side of the roof and opens the gray door that leads to the final ascent.
“It’s going to get pretty stuffy,” he warns.
Seconds later, the stifling attic air envelops us. The odor is musty and thick. I can’t identify it until I sneeze and remember a Saturday morning spent volunteering at a turn-of-the-century house. The “new” cathedral, after all, is nearly 100 years old and can hardly help smelling that way in its secret passageways.
Dust—the grimy sort that you think can’t possibly exist except in horror movies about old houses—coats the walls, the floor; I see it clinging to the ceiling. I bump into a stained-glass window that is uninstalled, propped against the stairway on its edge. It’s a tall arch filled with bottle-green circles, like the windows on the transepts and the balconies.
When I ask about the window, Father says, “There are lots of those. They were originally going to be used, but they ended up not being, for some reason. We’ve tried several times to sell them or auction them off, but nobody wants them.”
He sweeps into a dim curved hallway where a ladder leads to a window.
“This is one of the 1912 wooden ladders,” he explains. “You don’t have to climb it, but if you don’t, you miss one of the best parts.”
Gingerly, with Brian holding the bottom rung for me, I ascend and peer dizzily down the 143-foot-high light hole, down to the spot where Father joked about dropping Richard. The green stone number is now about the size of a pencil eraser. The pews line up like Lincoln Logs; golden chinks gleam in the mosaic tiles. Air rushes toward my face, cool and still. I can read the inscriptions all around the ceiling: names of apostles, words of the Gospel on books held by doctors of the church.
“Richard, are you ready to go skydiving?” asks Father.
Richard grins and holds up his hands: “You can’t throw me. I’ve got the drinks.”
We laugh again. I find myself agreeing with the English writer G.K. Chesterton that the thing we should be most grateful for in the world is that the world, the cosmos, the myriad joys and terrors of the universe—none of these has been dropped. I agree, and I think I can go further. I think I can be grateful for the way in which the world, the cosmos, the joys and terrors of experience are dropped on us.
The last hallway and stairway are signed like a yearbook in chalk of all hues. A black metal post—maybe it’s a building support, maybe a piece of ventilation—teems with the names of confirmation classes. A few have left their sticker name tags behind them. Others have voiced opinions about the superiority of their schools. As promised, we see chalk nuns—rosaries, sandals, scapulars and all—smiling triumphantly alongside their names. Some writers used elegant script, others block letters. Workmen wrote to commemorate particular marks of progress: a piece of brickwork, a new window panel, a finished mosaic. I begin to understand that it is not one select group, one set of insiders who’ve been privileged with this experience, but a community. It’s a kind of communion.
While musing and climbing, I see that one student has written beneath the handrail: “I just like the roof.”
Then, with a wrench of the guts, I find myself agreeing. I’ve been made to look up—there being nowhere else to look, except at the drop to the lower rafters. The sight of a thin metal ladder, maybe 2 feet wide, with lots of air showing between each quarter-inch-deep rung, hits me like a blow to the chest. I’m already winded. The thought of climbing it makes my hands sweat.
“Uh-uh,” I say. “Not gonna happen.”
But when I exit again to the roof, I realize the extent of my cowardice. Already the colored auroras of flashes and flares wink from behind the dome. To the north and to the west, in every neighborhood, they’re going at it. Where did so many people get fireworks? Maybe it’s best not to ask too many questions. I’m disappointed by the poor placid chunk of horizon that excited me so few minutes ago. What must I be missing? I call Brian’s cellphone.
“Come up,” he says. “I’ll come down to you.”
But when I get halfway—running as fast as is safe in the dimness—there is Father, treading with a measured pace and a penitent expression.
“I try to create different reactions in people by the attitude I take to the last bit,” he said. “I don’t always succeed. It really is the scariest part, but just think: Everyone else has already done it. You’ll be fine.”
And I am. It’s a bit sketchy, actually, climbing out onto the roof from the second 1912 ladder—OK, I pretty much hyperventilate when there’s nothing between me and the open air. But Brian grabs my hand and pulls me through, and here is the Fourth of July in all its glory, an Independence Day achieved through the interdependence of thousands.
The fireworks leap from a hundred points along the steadily blackening horizon. On one side of the street it is raining; on the other side it’s dry. The drops cool our skin and steam our breath. We cling to the stone ledge we’re sitting on, look at one another and grin.
Richard, who has not been dropped, passes me a small half-empty bottle of sparkling lemon water. I grip it in my still-unsteady hands and drink, feeling the coolness and the tingling semisweetness and the rush. Slowly, softly, the group around the other side of the cupola begins to sing. I hear, between distance-delayed crackles and booms:
O beautiful for some-hmm skies
For purple waves of grain ... “I think they’re amber ...”
For purple “Yep, amber” mountains’ majesty
Across the hmm-mm plain ...
—mingled with
And the rockets’ red glare
the bombs bursting in air
gave proof through the night ...
I haven’t caught my breath, but I begin to sing, too. My lips mumble about America, then glide into the tune of the Gloria we sing on Sundays. It creates an odd harmony: wind, rain, distant artillery, twentysomethings mangling their national melodies but loving them all the same. I hum for a moment, then just stop and listen.
