The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  The first floor, behind the pulpit and the choir loft, was in shadow, dark browns and greens rising to a few slender palm trees. Above that was the sunset. Powerful orange, rich rose, deep mauve dimmed to delicate peach and cream and lavender far over the heads of the congregation. At about the third-floor level the windows changed imperceptibly from pastel-tinted to clear window glass. In the evenings the Denver sunset, rising above the smog, blended with the clouds of the window. Real stars came out behind the single inset star of beveled glass near the peak of the window.

  Esau was up among the beams. He swung arm over arm, one hand trailing a white dusting cloth. His long hairy arms moved surely among the crosspieces as he worked. They had tried ladders before Esau came, but they scratched the wood of the beams and come crashing down within inches of the Lazetti

  Reverend Hoyt decided to say nothing until he had made up his mind on the matter. To Natalie’s insistent questions, he gave the same patient answer. “I have not decided.” On Sunday he preached the sermon on humility he had already planned.

  Reading the final scripture, however, he suddenly caught sight of Esau huddled on one of the pine crosspieces, his arms wrapped around a buttress for support, watching him as he read. “‘But almost stumbled, my steps had well-nigh slipped. I was stupid and ignorant. I was like a beast toward thee.’”

  He looked out over his congregation. They looked satisfied with themselves, smug. He looked at Esau.

  “‘Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my hand. Afterward thou wilt receive me to glory. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” ‘He banged the Bible shut. “I have not said everything I intend to say on the subject of humility, a subject very few of you know anything about.” The congregation looked surprised. Natalie, in a bright red robe with a yellow silk chasuble over it, beamed.

  He made Natalie shout the benediction over the uproar afterwards and went out the organist’s door and back to the parsonage. He turned down the bell on the telephone to almost nothing. An hour later Natalie arrived with Esau in tow. She was excited. Her cheeks were as red as her robe. “Oh, I’m so glad you decided to say something after all. I was hoping you would. You’ll see, they’ll all think it’s a wonderful idea! I wish you’d baptized him, though. Just think how surprised everyone would have been! The first baptism ever, and in our church! Oh, Esau, aren’t you excited! You’re going to be baptized!”

  “I haven’t decided yet, Natalie. I told the congregation the matter had come up, that’s all.”

  “But you’ll see, they’ll think it’s a wonderful idea.”

  He sent her home, telling her not to accept any calls or talk to any reporters, an edict he knew she would ignore completely. He kept Esau with him, fixing a nice supper for them both and turning the television on to a baseball game. Esau picked up Reverend Hoyt’s cat, an old tom that allowed people in the parsonage only on sufferance, and carried him over to his chair in front of the TV. Reverend Hoyt expected an explosion of claws and hurt feelings, but tom settled down quite happily in Esau’s lap.

  When bedtime came, Esau set him down gently on the end of the guest bed and stroked him twice. Then he crawled into the bed forwards, which always embarrassed Natalie so. Reverend Hoyt tucked him in. It was a foolish thing to do. Esau was fully grown. He lived alone and took care of himself. Still, it seemed the thing to do.

  Esau lay there looking up at him. He raised up on one arm to see if the cat was still there, and turned over on his side, wrapping his arms around his neck. Reverend Hoyt turned off the light. He didn’t know the sign for “good night,” so he just waved, a tentative little wave, from the door. Esau waved back.

  Esau ate breakfast with the cat in his lap. Reverend Hoyt had turned the phone back up, and it rang insistently. He motioned to Esau that it was time to go over to the church. Esau signed something, pointing to the cat. He clearly wanted to take it with him. Reverend Hoyt signed one rather gentle “no” at him, pinching his first two fingers and thumb together, but smiling so Esau would not think he was angry.

  Esau put the cat down on the chair. Together they walked to the church. Reverend Hoyt wished there were some way he could tell him it was not necessary for him to walk upright all the time. At the door of Reverend Hoyt’s study Esau signed, “Work?” Reverend Hoyt nodded and tried to push his door open. Letters shoved under the door had wedged it shut. He knelt and pulled a handful free. The door swung open, and he picked up another handful from the floor and put them on his desk. Esau peeked in the door and waved at him. Reverend Hoyt waved back, and Esau shambled off to the sanctuary. Reverend Hoyt shut the door.

  Behind his desk was a little clutter of sharp-edged glass and a large rock. There was a star-shaped hole above them in the glass doors. He took the message off the rock. It read, “‘And I saw a beast coming up out of the earth, and upon his head the names of blasphemy.’”

  Reverend Hoyt cleaned up the broken glass and called the bishop. He read through his mail, keeping an eye out for her through the glass doors. She always came in the back way through the parking lot. His office was at the very end of the business wing of the church, the hardest thing to get to. It had been intended that way to give him as much privacy as possible. There had been a little courtyard with a crab apple tree in it outside the glass doors. Five years ago the courtyard and the crab apple tree had both been sacrificed to parking space, and now he had no privacy at all, but an excellent view of all comings and goings. It was the only way he knew what was going on in the church. From his office he couldn’t hear a thing.

  The bishop arrived on her bicycle. Her short curly gray hair had been swept back from her face by the wind. She was very tanned. She was wearing a light green pantsuit, but she had a black robe over her arm. He let her in through the glass doors.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was an official occasion or not. I decided I’d better bring something along in case you were going to drop another bombshell.”

  “I know,” he sighed, sitting down behind his littered desk. “It was a stupid thing to do. Thank you for coming, Moira.”

  “You could at least have warned me. The first call I got was some reporter raving that the End was coming, I thought the Charies had taken over again. Then some idiot called to ask what the church’s position on pigs’ souls was. It was another twenty minutes before I was able to find out exactly what you’d done. In the meantime, Will, I’m afraid I called you a number of highly uncharitable names.” She reached out and patted his hand. “All of which I take back. How are you doing, dear?”

  “I didn’t intend to say anything until I’d decided what to do,” he said thoughtfully. “I was going to call you this week about it. I told Natalie that when she brought Esau in.”

  “I knew it. This is Natalie Abreu’s brainchild, isn’t it? I thought I detected the hand of an assistant pastor in all this. Honestly, Will, they are all alike. Isn’t there some way to keep them in seminary another ten years until they calm down a little? Causes and ideas and reforms and more causes. It wears me out.

  “Mine is into choirs: youth choirs, boy choirs, madrigals, antiphonals, glees. We barely have time for the sermon there are so many choirs. My church doesn’t look like a church. It looks like a military parade. Battalions of colored robes trooping in and out, chanting responses.” She paused. “There are times when I’d like to throttle him. Right now I’d like to throttle Natalie. Whatever put it into her head?”

  Reverend Hoyt shook his head. “She’s very fond of him.”

  “So she’s been filling him with a lot of Bible stories and scripture. Has she been taking him to Sunday school?”

  “Yes. First grade, I think.”

  “Well, then, you can claim indoctrination, can’t you? Say it wasn’t his own idea but was forced on him?”

  “I can say that about three-fourths of the Sunday school class. Moira, that’s the problem. There isn’t any argument that I can use against him
that wouldn’t apply to half the congregation. He’s lonely. He needs a strong father figure. He likes the pretty robes and candles. Instinct. Conditioning. Sexual sublimation. Maybe those things are true of Esau, but they’re true of a lot of people I’ve baptized, too. And I never said to them, ‘Why do you really want to be baptized?’”

  “He’s doing it to please Natalie.”

  “Of course. And how many assistant pastors go to seminary to please their parents?” He paced the narrow space behind his desk. “I don’t suppose there’s anything in church law?”

  “I looked. The Ecumenical Church is just a baby, Will. We barely have the organizational bylaws written down, let alone all the odds and ends. And twenty years is not enough time to build a base of precedent. I’m sorry, Will. I even went back to pre-unification law, thinking we might be able to borrow something obscure. But no luck.”

  The liberal churches had flirted with the idea of unification for more than twenty-five years without getting more accomplished than a few statements of good will. Then the Charismatics had declared the Rapture, and the churches had dived for cover right into the arms of ecumenism.

  The fundamentalist Charismatic movement had gained strength all through the eighties. They had been committed to the imminent coming of the End, with its persecutions and Antichrist. On a sultry Tuesday in 1989 they had suddenly announced that the End was not only in sight but here, and that all true Christians must unite to do battle against the Beast. The Beast was never specifically named, but most true Christians concluded he resided somewhere among the liberal churches. There was fervent prayer on Methodist front lawns. Young men ranted up the aisles of Episcopal churches during mass. A great many stained glass windows, including all but one of the Lazettis, were broken. A few churches burned.

  The Rapture lost considerable momentum when two years later the skies still had not rolled back like a scroll and swallowed up the faithful, but the Charies were a force the newly born United Ecumenical Church refused to take lightly. She was a rather hodgepodgy church, it was true, but she stood like a bulwark against the Charies.

  “There wasn’t anything?” Reverend Hoyt asked. “But the bishops can at least make a ruling, can’t they?”

  “The bishops have no authority over you in this matter. The United Church of Christ insisted on self-determination in matters within an individual church, including election of officers, distribution of communion, and baptism. It was the only way we could get them in,” she finished apologetically.

  “I’ve never understood that. There they were all by themselves with the Charismatics moving in like wolves. They didn’t have any choice. They had to come in. So how did they get a plum like self-determination?”

  “It worked both ways, remember. We could hardly stand by and let the Charies get them. Besides, everyone else had fiddled away their compromise points on trespassers versus debtors and translations of the Bible. You Presbyterians, as I recall, were determined to stick in the magic word ‘predestination’ everywhere you could.”

  Reverend Hoyt had a feeling the purpose of this was to get him to smile. He smiled. “And what was it you Catholics nearly walked out over? Oh, yes, grape juice.”

  “Will, the point is I cannot give you bishop’s counsel on this. It’s your problem. You’re the one who’ll have to come to a fair and rational decision.”

  “Fair and rational?” He picked up a handful of mail. “With advice like this?”

  “You asked for it, remember? Ranting from the pulpit about humility?”

  “Listen to this: ‘You can’t baptize an ape. They don’t have souls. One time I was in San Diego in the zoo there. We went to the ape house and right there, in front of the visitors and everything, were these two orangitangs…’” He looked up from the letter. “Here she apparently had some trouble deciding what words were most appropriate. Her pen has blotted.” He continued to read “‘…two orangitangs doing it.’ That’s underlined. ‘The worst of it is that they were laying there just enjoying it. So you see, even if you think they are nice sometimes…’ etc. This, from a woman who’s had three husbands and who knows how many ‘little lapses,’ as she calls them. She says I can’t baptize him on the grounds that he likes sex.”

  He flipped through more papers. “The deacons think it would have what they call a negative effect on the total amount of pledges. The ushers don’t want tourists in here with cameras. Three men and nine women think baptizing him would somehow let loose his animal lusts and no one would be safe in the church alone.”

  He held up another letter triumphantly, this one written on pale pink rosebudded stationery. “‘You asked us Sunday what we thought about apes having souls. I think so. I like to sit in back because of my arthritis which is very bad. During the invocation there were three tots in front of me with their little hands folded in prayer and just inside the vestry door was your ape, with his head bowed and his hands folded too.’” He held up the paper. “My only ally. And she thinks it’s cute to watch a full-grown orangutan fold his little hannies. How am I supposed to come to any kind of decision with advice like this? Even Natalie’s determined to make him into something he isn’t. Clothes and good manners and standing up straight. And I’m supposed to decide!”

  Moira had listened to his rantings with a patient expression. Now she stood up. “That’s right, Will. It is your decision, not Natalie’s, not your congregation’s, not the Charies’. You’re supposed to decide.”

  He watched her to her bicycle through the star of broken glass. “Damn the Congregationalists!” he said under his breath.

  He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket. He called in Natalie and Esau so he could give Esau the order to put up the protective plastic webbing over the big stained glass window. Natalie was alarmed. “What is it?” she asked when Esau had left with the storeroom key in his hand. “Have there been threats?”

  He showed her the message from the rock, but didn’t mention the letters. “I’ll take him home again with me tonight,” he said. “When does he have to go to Colorado Springs?”

  “Tomorrow.” She had fished a letter out of the wastebasket and was reading it. “We could cancel. They already know the situation,” she said and then blushed.

  “No. He’s probably safer there than here.” He let some of the tiredness creep into his voice.

  “You aren’t going to do it, are you?” Natalie said suddenly. “Because of a lot of creeps!” She slammed the letter down on his desk. “You’re going to listen to them, aren’t you? A lot of creeps who don’t even know what a soul is and you’re going to let them tell you Esau doesn’t have one!” She went to the door, the tails of the yellow stole flying. “Maybe I should just tell them to keep him tomorrow, since you don’t want him.”

  The door’s slamming dislodged another splinter of glass.

  Reverend Hoyt went to the South Denver Library and checked out books on apes and St. Augustine and sign language. He read them in his office until it was nearly dark outside. Then he went to get Esau. The protective webbing was up on the outside of the window. There was a ladder standing in the sanctuary. The window let in the dark blue evening light and the beginning stars.

  Esau was sitting in one of the back pews, his short legs straight out in front of him on the velvet cushions. His arms hung down, palms out. He was resting. The dustcloth lay beside him. His wide face held no expression except the limpness of fatigue. His eyes were sad beyond anything Reverend Hoyt had ever seen.

  When he saw Reverend Hoyt he climbed down off the pew quite readily. They walked to the parish house. Esau immediately went to find the cat.

  The people from Cheyenne Mountain came quite early the next morning. Reverend Hoyt noticed their van in the parking lot. He saw Natalie walk Esau to the van. The young man from the center opened the door and said something to Natalie. She nodded and smiled rather shyly at him. Esau got in the back sea
t of the van. Natalie leaned in and hugged him goodbye. When the van drove off he was sitting looking out the window, his face impassive. Natalie did not look in Reverend Hoyt’s direction.

  They brought him back about noon the next day. Reverend Hoyt saw the van again, and shortly afterward Natalie brought the young man to his office. She was dressed all in white, a childishly full surplice over a white robe. She looked like an angel in a Sunday school program. Pentecost must be over and Trinity begun. She was still subdued, more than the situation of having her friends argue for her would seem to merit. Reverend Hoyt wondered how often this same young man came for Esau.

  “I thought you would like to know how things are going down at the Center, sir,” the young man said briskly. “Esau passed his physical, though there is some question of whether he might need glasses. He has a slight case of astigmatism. Otherwise he is in excellent physical condition for a male of his age. His attitude toward the breeding program has also improved markedly in the past few months. Male orangs become rather solitary, neurotic beings as they mature, sometimes becoming very depressed. Esau was not, up until a few months ago, willing to breed at all. Now he participates regularly and has impregnated one female.

  “What I came to say, sir, is that we feel Esau’s job and the friends he has made here have made him a much happier and better adjusted ape than he was before. You are to be congratulated. We would hate to see anything interfere with the emotional well-being he has achieved so far.”

  This is the best argument of all, Reverend Hoyt thought. A happy ape is a breeding ape. A baptized ape is a happy ape. Therefore…

  “I understand,” he said, looking at the young man. “I have been reading about orangutans, but I have questions. If you could give me some time this afternoon, I would appreciate it.”