“You shouldn’t say, but the answer is, in church.”

For the first time, Miss Pershing smiles at me.

I hail a cab outside our building. The cabbie, an old man with greasy white hair, stabs out his cigarette and flips down the flag on the meter. “Where to?”

“Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Ninth and Wolf.”

“Lawyers go to church?” A final puff of smoke bursts from his mouth.

“Only when they have to.”

He chuckles thickly, and it ends in a coughing spasm. We take off in silence, except for the crackling of the radio. The cab swings onto Broad Street, which bisects the city at City Hall and runs straight to South Philly. Broad Street is congested, as usual. We stop in the cool shadow cast by a skyscraper and then lurch into the bright light of the sun. I crank open the window, watching us pass through light and dark, listening to the old cabbie swear at the traffic, and trying to remember the last time I was in church.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 3,492,972 weeks since my last confession. The Jurassic Period. When I did everything the nuns told me to, so I wouldn’t get my knuckles rapped, and memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I made my First Holy Communion at age seven, during which the priest put a wafer onto my tongue that he said was the body of Jesus Christ. I didn’t swallow it until right before they took my picture, and my baby face is beatific in the photo. I’d swallowed my slice of Our Savior and was overjoyed that this cannibalistic act had not sent lightning zigzagging to my head.

“Shit!” The cabbie bangs on the steering wheel, foiled in his attempt to run a traffic light. Sunlight blazes into the old cab, illuminating its dusty interior and heating its duct-taped seat covers. “You think they’d time these goddamn lights, like on Chestnut Street. But no, that would make too much sense.”

I nod, half listening. As soon as the light changes, the cabbie guns the motor and we leap forward into the tall shadow cast by the Fidelity Building. Its darkness comes as a relief and seems to quiet even the irritable driver.

As a child, I used to look at my communion picture on top of our boxy television. I wanted to be as good as the little girl in my picture, she of the praying hands and the lacquered corkscrews. But I wasn’t her. I knew it inside. The church told me so. They taught me that Jesus Christ suffered on the cross and died because of me. All because of me. Blood dripped from his crown of thorns and flowed in rivulets from rough bolts hammered clear through his wrists and insteps. His agony was all my fault. I felt so sorry, as a little girl, and so ashamed. Of myself.

“Hey, asshole!” shouts the cabbie, hanging out the window. “Move that shitwagon! I’m tryin’ to make a living here!” The cab bucks violently in the shade. I grab for the yellowed hand strap just as we burst free of the snarled traffic into the light.

And in my religious life, what happened next was calamitous. I grew up. It was Luke who said that whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it, and I stopped being a child. I stopped accepting on faith and started to doubt. Then I started to question, which brought the heavens, in the form of school administration, crashing down upon my head. I took biological issue with the Resurrection and was suspended for three days.

Light and dark, light and dark.

That’s when it started, the split between me and the church. And me and my twin. For as I began to turn away from the light, Angie began to embrace it. I resented the church, for making me feel so terrible about myself as a child and for dividing Angie and me. In time, I stopped going to mass altogether, and my parents didn’t force the issue. The three of them went every Sunday, while I stayed home with the Eagles pregame show. They prayed for my soul. I prayed for the Eagles.

“Do you remember Roman Gabriel?” I say to the cabbie. We’re almost there.

He looks into the rearview mirror with rheumy eyes. “Sure. Quarterback for the Birds. We got him from the Rams.”

“Do you remember when?”

He squints, in thought. “’Seventy-three, I think. Yeah, in ’seventy-three.”

So long ago. I can’t do the math in my head.

“What a fruit he was,” says the cabbie. “We shoulda kept Liske.”

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I can’t remember a thing about my last confession.

And I can’t forget a thing about my abortion.

It was so long ago.

I never told anyone, not even Mike. I intended to tell him, but changed my mind when we found out he couldn’t have kids. It would have made it worse. I know it did for me.

“This it?” says the cabbie, pulling up in front of the red-brick fortress on the corner of Ninth and Wolf. He ducks down to see it better. “It don’t look like a church. What’d you say it was? Our Lady of Perpetual-”

“Motion.” I get out of the cab and throw him a ten-dollar bill, with no tip. “Here. This is from a fruit I know.”

“Crazy broad,” he mutters. The cab lurches off.

I glance around to see if I’ve been followed, but the street is quiet. I turn and confront my church. From the outside, there is no way to tell what type of building it is. The windows are bricked in and the heavy oak doors are squared off at the top. But for the black sign that says the times of the masses in tiny white numbers, you would think that OLPH is a Mafia front. Except that the Mafia front is across the street.

In contrast to the bleakness of the church is the grassy lot beside it, a sheltered grotto for the statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help herself. I remember thinking that the grotto was a miraculous place, a baby’s blanket of perfect green grass tucked away from the city sidewalks. Gazing benignly over the grass, high above the electric trolley cars, was the slim, robed figure of the Virgin, tall as a spire in white marble, with her hands out-stretched in welcome. I felt peaceful there as a child.

I have the same feeling today. The statue looks the same, and so does the grass. It’s verdant and thick; it looks newly mown and raked. Tulips dip their heavy heads at the statue’s pedestal. No one’s around, so I sit on the bench in front of it, completing my Catholic impersonation. I’m eye level with the pedestal’s inscription, but don’t have to look at the Roman-carved letters to know what they say. I remember:

VIRGIN MARY

MARIAN YEAR1954

GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. RAFAELLO D. SABATINI

Mr. and Mrs. Rafaello D. Sabatini owned the Mafia front across the street, but who cared? They were good Catholics, they supported the church and the school. That was all that mattered.

At the statue’s feet are plastic bouquets of red roses, Mary’s flower, and along her hem are the lipsticked kisses of the insanely faithful. Rosaries dangle from her inanimate fingers, and she wears a crown made of glitter pasted onto cardboard, as if by a child. A little girl, no doubt, for little girls love the Virgin. Was I a little girl like that once? I feel a stab of pain. What does Mary think of Mary now, since her abortion?

I squint up at Mary’s eyes, there at the top of the tall statue. She doesn’t answer me but gazes straight ahead. She’s innocent, the Eternal Virgin. Her conception, unlike mine, was Immaculate. She knows nothing of couplings that happen to Catholic girls who are on the third date of their life, with Bobby Mancuso from Latin Club. Who, despite his braces, is terribly cute and plays varsity basketball. Who takes her to McDonald’s and then, in his Corvair, kisses her hotly, ignoring her protestations. Who doesn’t rape her exactly, but who complains that he’s in intense pain from something called blue balls, which means either that his balls are turning blue because the blood to them is cut off, or there’s too much blood getting to them. She’s confused about the physiology of the blue balls but understands clearly that his pain is all because of her.