The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

  “I’m going to stay until I’m ready to go. A day, or two,” said Sean.

  “What if I stop by your house and chat with your folks,” said Jeremy. “Listen. I could just tell them you’re not feeling great and that’s all. At least it’ll be the beginning of telling them, Sean. Come on.”

  “You do that,” said Sean, “and I’ll back out of singing with you in New York.”

  As if, Jeremy thought, looking at the exhausted, yellow-skinned figure letting himself back down on the mattress, as if you’re ever going to be able to make it to Manhattan at this rate. But that was a fiction of survival, it was something Sean was aiming for, and Jeremy didn’t have the heart to contradict him. He just shook his head—trapped again by people he loved—and fiddled with the lid of the coffee, burning his fingers.

  25

  PASTOR JAKOB HUYCK wanted nothing other than to make a nuisance of himself. A good fundamentalist pastor should pester everyone with the fundamentals, he reasoned. You’re not a high school kid. So what are you doing creeping your car along Papermill Road like some sort of criminal casing the joint? Just park and march up to the house and ring the bell. You have as much right as anyone.

  Sadly, it was Kirk rather than Tabitha Scales who opened the door.

  “Oh, hi,” said Kirk. He was panting slightly and looking a little disheveled. Huyck couldn’t help wondering if the boy had been indulging in self-abuse, but then he saw a couple of bite-size barbells lying on top of the newspapers on the radiator. “I thought you were someone else,” said Kirk. “Do you need to come in? Nobody else is here.”

  Perhaps Jesus had led Huyck here to do some holy work or other. Or maybe he could find out more about Tabitha. “I’d love to, thanks,” he said, and shouldered his way in.

  The boy was ill-clad for the season—a family trait, Huyck was deciding—and when Kirk sprawled in a sort of disconsolate longueur on the sofa, legs akimbo out of those white moiré running shorts, Huyck was given to think of Tabitha in a gratifying if unsettling way. Unsettling because this was a lad, more or less, shaking his crop of ash brown hair like some kind of female film star of the Forties, and though Huyck was modern for his church and judged not lest he be judged, the idea of finding a boy sexy, even for a misbegotten brief moment of mistaken identity, was repugnant not to say disgusting. “Put something on, you’ll catch your death of cold,” said Huyck. In loco parentis when needed, and Lord knows the only parentis around here was certifiably loco.

  Kirk sneered and put on an oversized sweatshirt that, in its voluminous folds and low hem, made him look even more like an anorexic female posing for one of those ads for bisexual cologne, the point of which escaped Huyck except to drag the young to perdition. What a refreshing concept, perdition.

  “Tell me about Mother,” he said. “Might I hope that she’s off someplace being rehabilitated?”

  “She’s off someplace, is right.” Kirk’s was a mumbly, sideways voice. “A nun gave my sister Tabitha some advice about Mom needing to connect with the past, with her roots or something—don’t ask me.”

  “A nun?” Huyck smelled betrayal. He smelled conversion. He smelled the faint acrid undertone of male sweat emanating from the boy on the couch, and considered telling him to go wash under his armpits, but decided that was beyond the scope of his ministry. Besides, the boy would probably return shirtless. Please. “You must mean Sister Alice Coyne, I presume, of Our Lady’s.”

  “Yeah, her. She’s been talking to Tabitha and trying to help.”

  Huyck wondered if his reticence about not beleaguering the Scales family in general, and Tabitha particularly, was about to backfire in his face. “So where are your mother and Tabitha—I’m assuming they’re together.”

  “Tabitha took her out in the car for a drive. Tabitha said she couldn’t get anything done here, there were too many interruptions.”

  “She’s left you all alone in your exercises.”

  “I didn’t want to go. Besides, I’m expecting company.”

  “You hardly look dressed for company.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” said Kirk pointedly. Huyck wondered if that was a subtle message that he was to move on and leave Kirk alone, but he decided not to abandon the boy yet. “So what’s this roots business again? Sort of like that television show?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t make any sense to me. You know for a while Mom couldn’t say the beginnings of her words. It was kind of funny at first, as if there were other meanings behind everything she was trying to say. As if they’d been there all along, but she’d been too good and churchy to say them. The day we brought her home from the clinic, we passed our neighbor up the street—Ann Bletheroe. She was eating a piece of pizza at the curb while waiting for her ride to work. Mom looked at her and said, Ann does not live by bread alone. Well, she’s pleasingly plump, you know, and then Mom said, Oy, her cup is overflowing. I mean, it was almost cool at first. The Dark Side of Mom. But she’s seemed to get lost in it. Well, you’ve seen her. Sister Alice says that Mom losing the beginning of her words means that she’s lost the sense of the beginning of her life—where her life has meaning, or where meaning begins, or began, something like that—so Tabitha is taking Mom out for a drive to look at the places she lived when she was a little girl with her own mother, who is dead a long time now.”

  “And Sister Alice is trained in this sort of mumbo-jumbo medicine?”

  “She helps take care of a lot of old nuns somewhere, I think.”

  “Your mother and Tabitha both should beware the blandishments of the Catholics among us. Of course I like Father Mike Sheehy and it’s a great convenience to share a parking lot with the faithful of Our Lady’s, but one has to understand the difference between being neighborly and poaching on someone else’s territory.” He thought he had said that pretty well, and allowed himself a smile. “I haven’t seen you at Sunday services lately, Kirk.”

  “Mom is quite a handful, and you know she goes down in the basement of the Catholic church. Do you think it’s something like being Slain in the Spirit? I mean I’ve seen folks roll and tumble when you do a Call to the Lord. Do you think Mom is rolling and tumbling in answer to her own Call?”

  “Answering the Call of a Roman Catholic refrigerator? I think not. Don’t make fun of things you don’t understand, Kirk. You’re not fully formed in your attitudes.”

  “Mom used to say that to Tabitha when she wanted to see R-rated films at the age of twelve. We all thought she meant that Tabitha’s breasts weren’t fully formed yet.”

  The thought of Tabitha’s breasts was a bit overwhelming, and Huyck concentrated on the glossy reproduction of a painting of cows in a millstream that hung over the TV. At some point in the history of the print it had been set flat, and a cup of coffee placed on it, for a mug-sized brown ring hovered in the air around the head of the nearest cow. It looked something like a halo. Well, he thought. Holy cow.

  “Where did Mother grow up? Nearby? Perhaps I’ll run into Tabitha and Mother. I can’t abide the notion that they’re taking advice from Sister Alice when I’m available to help. I am your family’s spiritual adviser.”

  “Mom lived here and there, mostly on the mill slope,” said Kirk vaguely. “She used to point out the houses when we were little, but I never paid attention.”

  “I assume your brother is with them?”

  “No, he’s at work at the gas station.”

  The phone rang. Huyck prepared his closing remarks while Kirk scrambled across the sofa to grab the receiver. There was no point in Huyck’s trying to pretend he couldn’t hear Kirk’s remarks, nor see the sudden slump of his shoulders. The conversation was brief and Kirk spoke in a monotone after the initial flare-up of pleasure.

  “Nothing too too troubling, I hope,” said Huyck mildly.

  “Nah. This guy was going to come over and help me learn my vocal parts for the school holiday musicale, but he’s busy and can’t make it.”

  “I’m quite a singer myself, as you kn
ow. I’ve done Pirates and Mikado. Perhaps I can assist.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was it Jeremy Carr?”

  Kirk blushed. “I’m being a fool. I mean in the school play, the fool, the one who says and does all the dumb things, only they’re really the things that matter. We can’t do anything religious, of course; it’s a public school.”

  “Don’t get me started. Ah, but you can be a fool for God whether they know it or not. Saint Paul called himself one. Second Corinthians, Chapter Eleven—and he admonished the faithful to accept him: ‘For you suffer fools gladly, whereas you yourself are wise.’”

  “I’m not that kind of fool. More like a jester or a joker, I think.”

  “‘For you suffer if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour you,’” continued Huyck. “And so on.”

  “You want to see my costume? I was going to show it to Jeremy.” He looked dejected.

  “The Catholics will let you down, and they will let you down. They can’t help it. Why are you doing this to yourself? Your whole family is wobbling in its faith. This is a very dangerous time for you all. Kirk,” said Huyck, “get down on your knees and pray with me for your faith to be revitalized.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The Lord is calling you.”

  Kirk just shook his head.

  Things were worse than Huyck had realized. He was beginning to lose his grip. “Well, I will keep you in my prayers,” he said. When he stood to take his leave, Kirk threw himself on the sofa and buried his face in a pillow. He didn’t give the Pastor a proper goodbye. “Peace be with you,” muttered Huyck, dubiously. He was glad to get back to his car, even if it did smell of spoiled milk.

  The hills were covered with snow, and the houses too. In the daylight the strings of Christmas lights looked like tassels on the lot of a used car showplace. People of Thebes who couldn’t afford pizza would spend ungodly amounts of money on colored lights in the winter. It was on the edge of blasphemy, somehow, and it always set Huyck off.

  Now where was Mrs. Scales amid all this Christmas garbage, where was Tabitha?

  26

  TABITHA HAD SPENT a half an hour that morning sitting alone behind the steering wheel, practicing pulling out the Object of Healing from behind the passenger’s seat and clunking the headrest with it. The headrest was nicely padded and so the instant of contact was blunted; the staple gun bounced in an easygoing way. It gave Tabitha courage.

  And who knew, maybe Sister Alice Coyne was right. Perhaps in revisiting her childhood haunts, Mrs. Scales would respond nicely to a tender clunk on the head, reclaim her origins or whatever it was that was supposed to happen, sit up firmly and chastise Tabitha for taking the car without permission, and go back to being the annoying, overbearing, sanctimonious mother that Tabitha needed to get away from.

  Or maybe her mother would just die. Tabitha was willing to be flexible.

  The habit of wailing had faded—thank heavens. Between Mrs. Scales doing the banshee routine and Kirk warbling “Hey Nonny Nonny” in the shower, the house had become intolerably musical. But Mrs. Scales had begun to shut down even more than before. Reading the Bible had been a solace that one afternoon, but after that Tabitha couldn’t seem to get her mother’s eyes to focus in any kind of comprehension. And Mrs. Scales was beginning to reek of hydrangeas past their pink, that old person’s odor of drying flowers.

  But she was proving as capable of thwarting Tabitha’s intentions as she ever had been. Tabitha settled her in the passenger seat and fastened the seat belt. She rotated the passenger door rearview mirror upward so that her mother wouldn’t notice Tabitha reaching to grab the staple gun from its hiding place behind the passenger seat. She pulled out of the driveway, growling, “We’re going to go look at where you grew up with Grandma. Isn’t this going to be fun.” Mrs. Scales responded by gripping the lever and tilting the seatback almost horizontal. It blocked the staple gun on the floor of the backseat. “Fun,” swore Tabitha.

  Mrs. Scales put her thumb in her mouth and curled away from her daughter. She stroked the ribbed cord of the upholstery, some kind of animal plea bargain.

  Tabitha began a glancing tour of Famous Sites in the Life of Leontina Eleanor Prelutski Scales Hauenstein Garrison, default to Scales. “There’s your old house from when you were a girl. Looking kinda white trash these days, isn’t it.”

  Mrs. Scales roused herself on an elbow to peer out the windshield. A maple tree was growing up through the front porch roof. Any former lawn or garden had given up. Only a snowy patch remained, in which locals were abandoning stripped automobiles. “No one owns it now, looks like. Though it was a mighty pretty house once upon a time,” said Tabitha. Her mother grunted noncommittally and went back to her thumb. Tabitha pulled up behind the garage.

  “Are you up for a little walking?” said Tabitha. “We could look around. Wasn’t there a doghouse out back? Your little Bowser, remember?”

  Leaving the car turned on in case she had to make a quick getaway, Tabitha had to go around to the passenger door and poke her mother to get her to budge. Her mom got herself up on her elbows and her feet swung out the door onto the unplowed driveway, but then she changed her mind and with an agility and strength she hadn’t yet shown today, she pulled herself back in the car, closed the door and locked it. Then she reached over and locked Tabitha’s side.

  “Oh, this is fun. This is really fun. Open up the door, Mom.”

  Mrs. Scales opened her mouth, and pulled on her thumb with satisfaction.

  “Mom, it’s cold out here.”

  Mrs. Scales closed her eyes and turned her head away from the car window.

  “I don’t know why I bother.” Tabitha’s voice was spiraling into a scream. “Why do you drag me through all this shit!”

  Mrs. Scales turned up the car radio as loud as it would go.

  Tabitha looked around for something to smash the window with. There was a stone wall a half mile away on the crossroad. She would cut across the field and get a boulder and come back and bash her way into the car. Then she would do the job on her mother and Lord save her if he would.

  She had only taken the first two or three steps with a boulder the size of a Mrs. Chanarinjee Pyrex casserole when a car pulled up alongside her. “Let me help you carry that wherever you’re going.”

  It was Pastor Jakob Huyck. Fuck.

  He leaned across the passenger’s seat and opened the door, and smiled up at her inanely. She had a notion to brain him instead, he was angled just right, but she controlled herself with that maturity she was beginning to cherish, and dropped the boulder on the floor of the passenger’s side. “I shouldn’t be carrying such heavy loads in my condition,” she heard herself say.

  “Where are you going with that thing?” said Pastor Huyck.

  “It’s a long story.”

  He looked as if he were ready for a long story. “Get in.”

  “What stinks in here? Go straight ahead, turn at the grange. What’re you doing out this way?”

  “A meditative drive. Thinking on the Advent season.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the rock?”

  “I wanted to brain my mother and put her out of her misery.”

  He laughed. “I like you, Tabitha, I like your style. If your son shall ask for bread, would you give him a stone?”

  “Depends on the size of it. You want to help?” She was sinking down in her seat. “Left. There she is.”

  “Oh my.” Of course there had to be a car involved; Tabitha wouldn’t have been out wandering alone. And there was Mrs. Scales, looking happily fetal, rocking her head back and forth to some satanic melody blaring through the car windows.

  “She’s locked inside. I was only kidding about braining her.” Tabitha tried to rouse herself. Maybe she could get the Pastor to break a window and think he had accidentally knocked her mother on the head. Maybe if a Pastor with holy intentions did the deed, it would be more likely to work? How could sh
e arrange this?

  “You haven’t got an extra set of keys,” said Pastor Huyck, getting out his car and staring down at Mrs. Scales through the front windshield.

  “No. Of course she might be being asphyxiated in there. Hog says that there’s a slow leak in the exhaust, and he usually doesn’t let us drive unless the windows are open. Mom was being stubborn.”

  “Is that so.”

  “So the boulder is for breaking her out of there.”

  “I see. Should I try to reason with her first?”

  “Oh, well, reason,” said Tabitha, shrugging. “If reason works, why not?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Scales.” Pastor Huyck wiggled his fingers as if talking to a deaf person. “It’s Pastor Huyck from the Radical Radiant Pentecostals. How are you today. I’m here with Tabitha,” he yelled. Well, duh, thought Tabitha. “I guess you could help us by opening the doors. Would you do that?”

  Mrs. Scales didn’t respond.

  “In the name of Jesus and the Blood of the Lamb, I encourage you to follow your conscience.”

  She was either ignoring him or her conscience was fucked.

  “Don’t be alarmed if you hear a loud noise, Mrs. Scales. I’m going to have to smash one of the back windows to get you out of there alive.”

  “You’re so good,” said Tabitha. “Here’s the boulder. Ready?”

  “I don’t know how much force it takes to break a car window.”

  “It’s hard to figure these things out. You have to do the best you can. You’re being a big help.”

  She smiled at him suddenly. He smashed the rear window on the driver’s side. Mrs. Scales hopped and scrabbled and shrieked a stream of falsetto vowels, but she calmed down when Tabitha reached in and plucked the keys from the steering column.

  “You are having a very hard time of this,” said Pastor Jakob Huyck.

  “You don’t know,” said Tabitha. Her head went down on the lapel of his camel-colored car coat.

  “I would like to be more help than I’ve been. I fear you are all slouching toward Rome to be born.”