Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island is the slender landmass in the East River that becomes the physical setting for Thomas Pemberton's self-imposed exile after the deconsecration of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church. It is not merely a place of work for Pem but a symbolic threshold between his old life as a priest and his uncertain new existence as a layperson. The island's geography — its isolation in the river, its view of the Manhattan skyline, its institutional buildings — mirrors the spiritual and vocational displacement that defines this period of Pem's life. In the novel's structure, Roosevelt Island serves as a recurring site where the narrator encounters Pem at crucial moments of transformation, making it one of the key locations where the book's meditation on faith, loss, and identity is staged.

The Hospice and Pem's Self-Assignment

When St. Timothy's was deconsecrated, Pem was left unassigned while the See deliberated about what to do with him. His first response was to assign himself to a hospice on Roosevelt Island, a city-run facility for indigent terminal patients housed in a low yellowbrick building on the south end of the island. This self-assignment is characteristic of Pem's response to institutional abandonment: rather than wait for the church hierarchy to decide his fate, he takes charge of his own vocation, redirecting his pastoral instincts toward the dying and the poor. The hospice's location on Roosevelt Island is significant — it is physically removed from the Manhattan parishes where Pem had served, yet close enough that the city remains visible across the water, a constant reminder of the world he has left behind. The narrator learns of this arrangement when meeting Pem for a drink at Knickerbocker's, where Pem appears without his collar, "more or less permanently unassigned," and describes his work at the hospice.

The choice of a hospice for indigent terminals is telling. Pem, who had been a priest at St. Timothy's, now ministers to those at the very edge of life, people whom the city has effectively abandoned to die. The work is a form of lay ministry, a continuation of his pastoral calling outside the institutional church. The narrator's description of Pem at this meeting emphasizes both continuity and change: Pem has grown heavier, his face more lined, but still open, candid, floridly handsome, with light, wide-set eyes moving restlessly over the room "as if looking for someone to gladden his heart." This restlessness suggests that even in his new setting, Pem remains oriented toward others, still seeking connection and purpose.

The Island as Exile

The narrator's own visit to Roosevelt Island, made on a Sunday after Pem has left the priesthood, deepens the island's association with exile and liminality. Riding the Roosevelt Island Tramway from the cement dock, the narrator wears new lay vestments — a blue blazer, charcoal slacks, and a gray turtleneck — and notes that nobody in the crowded car notices that he is no longer a priest. The tramway ride itself is described as a high-wire act over the river, windy and rocking, a precarious passage that mirrors the narrator's own uncertain transition. The East River estuary below is heavily tidal, inviting, aglitter with sunlight, yet the surging currents look unswimmable, "suggestive of exile." This image of unswimmable water captures the island's function as a place of separation: one can see the city, but crossing back is not easy.

The view from the island confirms this sense of exile. Across the river rises the immense wall of Manhattan, with the FDR Drive traffic crawling along ant-file at its foot, and the Fifty-ninth Street underbridge throwing a broad shadow across the river as it soars past on its way to Queens. The island is thus positioned as a vantage point from which the city is observed but not inhabited — a place of spectatorship and withdrawal. The narrator's stated reason for the visit is to see "that one dying lunger, name of McIlvaine," a patient at the hospice, suggesting that the island's population includes not only Pem but those he serves. The narrator's admission that "Sunday is still subject to the old urges, the residual feelings" indicates that even after leaving the priesthood, the rhythms of religious life persist, and Roosevelt Island is where these residual feelings find their outlet.

The Island's Narrative Significance

Roosevelt Island functions in the novel as a space of transformation and encounter. It is where Pem, stripped of his clerical identity, redefines himself through service to the dying. It is also where the narrator, himself undergoing a crisis of faith and identity, comes to witness Pem's new life and to confront his own residual attachments to the forms of religious practice. The island's physical characteristics — its isolation, its institutional architecture, its views of the city — make it an ideal setting for these meditations on what remains when institutional structures fall away. The hospice, the tramway, the river, and the Manhattan skyline together form a landscape of exile that gives concrete form to the novel's exploration of faith, loss, and the possibility of new vocations. The island is thus not merely a location but a state of being — a place where characters are suspended between worlds, looking across the water at what they have left behind, and learning to live with the unswimmable currents that separate them from their former selves.