MY ROOMMATES AND I LIVED in the top two floors of a townhouse in the West Village across from a nursing home and just down the street from Abingdon Square Park, a so-called vest pocket park bound by Eighth Avenue, Hudson Street and west 12^th street, and mirroring the shape of Abingdon Square, which was really more of a triangle. The park wasn’t nearly as quaint-sounding as the name and was composed mainly of park benches with peeling paint, lining the perimeter of the fenced-in park.  All the benches faced some desultory monkey bars and sandbox, although I rarely saw children playing there.

Our building was however quite quaint.  One of a row of townhouses built in the 1830s, ours was owned by a dentist who practiced out of a ground floor office.  The parlor floor-through was rented by a middle-aged gay couple who led a quiet life with their elderly dog.  Our apartment comprised the third and fourth floors of the building, which had wide-plank pine floors, exposed brick and three fireplaces.  It was a little rundown, but for three twenty-somethings, as my roommates and I were at the time, it was like living in Buckingham Palace.

I had recently moved out of my mother’s apartment on the upper east side where I had lived for a couple of years after returning from the University of Chicago.  I shared the apartment with Brian, the business manager at the Off-Broadway theatre where I worked as the marketing director, and A.K., a college classmate of his who was about to start a training program at an investment bank.  They both graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and shared an interest in theatre.

It was through Brian and A.K. that I met Mary Elizabeth.  Because our apartment was a duplex with the living room, kitchen and dining room on the lower floor, it was a great venue for parties, which we threw often.  We each had separate circles of friends but we all had a good time together, and most weekends there was a crew of Penn graduates hanging out and very generously including me in their festivities.  My mother was dying most of the time I was living there and I suspect that they felt sorry for me and were being kind.

I remember the first time I saw Mary Elizabeth.  She came to our apartment for a party on a very rainy night and arrived soaked to the bone.  She alerted everybody with a characteristic self-deprecating charm that she really did have a normal amount of hair – it just seemed like less because it was wet.  I was struck by her easy outgoing friendliness – something which most of us lacked at the time and also that there seemed to be a soft radiance around her.

Mary Elizabeth of course remembers very little of me, and in fact got my last name and my roommate’s first name combined in her head which explains why it was so hard for her to find us in the phonebook listed under “Brian Brennan.”  At any rate, I didn’t really get to know her at our parties, since I was mainly involved with my own friends and she with hers. But I did see her on and off over the next few years at parties and other roommate-organized outings.

I appeared on her radar apparently when my mother died.  Mary Elizabeth grew up in the Lutheran Church. Actually, it was the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which if you’re familiar with the different flavors of Lutheranism is a big deal. They are the most conservative branch of the Lutherans, not ordaining women, not believing in evolution and other newfangled ideas.  While Mary Elizabeth wasn’t a practicing Lutheran, it was nonetheless a big part of her growing up.  My mother was a Lutheran as well, although she had switched to Episcopalianism when I was a child so that I could grow up in what was to her eyes a more socially appropriate church. But since she was born in Norway, where Lutheranism is the state religion, she grew up a Lutheran as well.

When she died, she wasn’t a member of any church, but for our relatives’ sake, I contacted a Lutheran minister, Pastor Larsen, to conduct the funeral service.  He was an enthusiastic Norwegian in his 50s, with a heavy accent and robust personality.  As a result, he made quite an impression on my friends and colleagues who stuffed the funeral home on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge Brooklyn.  The highlight of the service for many was when Pastor Larsen bounded up and exclaimed, “Vee vill now sing, ‘Vat a Friend vee Haf in Jaisus!’”

My roommate AK mentioned to Mary Elizabeth that my mother had died and that she had gone to the funeral.  Mary Elizabeth (to this day she doesn’t know why) asked what kind of funeral it was.  When AK answered that she thought it was Lutheran, Mary Elizabeth’s ears perked up.  “Lutheran?  There were actually people under 50 whom she knew that were Lutheran?” she must have been thinking.  So from that point she at least knew who I was, although I think she still thought my name was Brian Brennan.

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