The Saint in His Box
by Naomi Solomon
The saint—Saint Thomas Aquinas, I believe—is still there on the side of the building, hovering on a small concrete platform just above the third floor, looking out onto a dull strip of Fourth Avenue: a fenced-off lot under construction, a fast food Chinese restaurant, dirty snow, parked cars. Or would be looking out onto, if not for the box he has been in since the vacant St. Thomas Aquinas School became the new P.S. 124 in September.
The conversion seemed frantic after years of silence. (Granted, it took me a while to notice the silence: I work less than a block from the school, and walked by it at least twice a day for over a year before I realized that there were 
never any school buses, never any kids coming and going, that the giant area of scratched-away paint on the front door that sometimes looked to me like a hunched-over alien and sometimes like a baby with a balloon never grew more chipped. That the same brown-and-tan tweed couch cushion that someone had, at some point in time, tossed over the fence was always sitting there moldering in the same corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by weeds growing completely undisturbed between cracks in the pavement.)
At first I couldn’t tell if the school was being torn down or fixed up. Construction workers filled the yard with dumpsters, and filled the dumpsters with a rubble of plaster, scratched chalkboards, and rusty-looking electrical equipment. Open windows revealed mangled lighting fixtures and heaps of dirty classroom furniture. Then they set up a little booth for a security guard at the school gate, and the alien/baby-with-balloons disappeared under a fresh coat of paint—red this time—and one day I walked by and the yard was paved, and a man in an orange vest was tracing out a four-square court in chalk.
Lastly, just a week or two before Labor Day, bright plastic signs announcing the building as a public elementary school went up over St. Thomas’s name set in concrete over the doorways, and wooden panels painted brown went up around the statue of the saint himself. The transformation is strangely temporary, as if the Department of Education is prepared to hand the school back at any time, put uniforms on the kids and take evolution out of the textbooks. Tear down the signs, let the saint out of his box, and return to the way it must have been before the paint on the door chipped away.
