The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

  They sat with the prospects of their own funerals in their laps. They would be back in church again before long for Sean’s funeral, and for Mother Clare du Plessix’s, and maybe some of them would be at the Cliffs of Zion Radical Radiant Pentecostal Church for the funeral of Mrs. Scales. Jeremy could see Tabitha Scales in the back of the chapel, squeezed in between her brother Kirk and Old Lady Scarcese. Tabitha looked pale, and Kirk was ruddy and bleary beneath his to-die perfect coif.

  They had hardly known Sister Alice at all.

  The procession to the graveyard was brief; a sanctified spot waited behind the chapel where other sisters were already at rest. The entire congregation squeezed out the side door of the chapel and stood amid the stones, and Father Mike led them in the final round of prayers. Some of the more infirm nuns did not come out, for the wind was high and the temperature dropping. More snow expected before the week was out. The sound of the wind in the arborvitae blocked out the few words that Mother Clare du Plessix was trying to say about Sister Alice; Jeremy had to move forward to hear. He didn’t catch much, though there was a moment when the wind rested, and he heard Mother Clare’s voice reach out, “It used to be said that when a nun died, God put another in her place, much as you replace a pane of glass—” Jeremy shifted to see how Mother Clare would update this thought, since Sister Alice had already been the last replacement pane. But suddenly Mother Clare had no more words, and bowed her head. Her veil wavered in the strengthening wind and hid her face.

  30

  TABITHA AND KIRK drove home from the funeral in silence. Tabitha was thinking about God’s plan: Number One, was there such a thing, and Number Two, who cares, if it’s so full of pitfalls and potholes?

  However thick God might have made her, was it possible that fate was infested with meaning whether or not she was clever enough to notice it?

  She had resented Sister Alice Coyne, but now that she was gone, Tabitha missed her. The last conversation they had had was about historical pregnancies, by which Tabitha had thought Sister Alice was referring to Mary the Mother of God until she realized she was misunderstanding and the pregnancies were hysterical. “Hardly hysterical,” said Tabitha, “I haven’t had a good laugh all month. Do you know what I feel like in the morning? I can’t keep anything down.” Sister Alice Coyne had talked about the cleverness of the womb and the secrets of the human heart, and the possibility of imagining symptoms of pregnancy. Tabitha had had to excuse herself to go imagine some morning sickness, even though it was already two p.m.

  And then Sister Alice had been creamed by a truck full of Christmas trees, so was Tabitha to take it that the notion of a hysterical pregnancy was thereby obliterated? Would God speak to her in such crude language? Perhaps He would need to, especially if she wasn’t listening closely enough. What was it exactly that He was trying to say? “Spit it out,” she mumbled out loud without realizing it, and it sounded in her own ears as if she were talking to her Goddamned earthly mother instead of her heavenly father.

  “I can’t stand all that Catholic crap,” said Kirk, apparently thinking that she’d been talking to him. As if.

  “What did you expect? Sister Alice was a nun. You didn’t have to come. You should have your seat belt on, by the way.”

  “And I hate that guy.”

  “Father Mike?”

  “No, the music leader.”

  “Jeremy Carr? Like hell you do.”

  “I do. He makes me sick.”

  Tabitha felt the baby kick. Or something. Did babies have feet by seven weeks? It made her feel mean. Kick me, will you, she thought. You too? Already? “Hog says you have a crush on Jeremy.”

  “I don’t have a crush on him or any other guy. You make me sick.”

  “Oh, grow up,” said Tabitha. “I’m not blind, you know. You’re not exactly watching reruns of Baywatch for the babes. You wouldn’t recognize a tit if it popped out of a bikini and bit you.”

  “What is wrong with you? Just what have I done in this family to make you and Hogan so contemptuous? You act like some martyr, as if Hogan isn’t doing what he can, as if I’m not. I help with Mom too, you know.”

  “Change the subject. It’s your favorite strategy. Okay by me. I don’t care if I have a faggot for a baby brother. You’re the one who brought up Jeremy Carr.”

  “I said he made me sick.”

  “Yeah. Hog told me he caught him making a pass at you. He said you were not exactly resisting. He said he threatened to beat the shit out of him.”

  Kirk took in several deep breaths.

  “I think you’re scared of the whole business,” said Tabitha. “You’re having a hysterical reaction to the truth.” She watched him out of the corner of her eye, and wondered—briefly—if she was enjoying how he crumpled up against the door. “The truth shall set you free.” It was a quote from somewhere. Star Trek?

  “I know what’ll set me free. For one thing, you can drop me off at the corner.”

  “You have to go to school.”

  “The hell I do. Everybody else gets to be a juvenile offender. Let me try.”

  She was so surprised at his language that she did what he asked, and turned the car around to go home to relieve Hogan, who had to get ready for work. She guessed Kirk wasn’t about to hire out as a guy whore, but would only go to the library. Still, this was a start. She was almost proud of him.

  THE AFTERNOON WAS endless. Mrs. Scales was curled up like a baby on the braided rug. She had her thumb in her mouth and her dentures beside her, set upon a piece of toast. Tabitha sat down and watched One Life to Live over her, and during the commercials wondered if she would have a chance to try another nonk-nonk on her mother’s head after Hogan went to work. But someone called from the station and Hogan talked for a while, and when he hung up he told Tabitha that he had switched shifts and was going in later. So they watched Maury Povich for an hour while Mrs. Scales stared, unblinkingly, at the dust under the sofa. “Do you think we should call someone?” said Hogan.

  “About what?” Tabitha wondered if he was going to suggest electro-jolt antigay therapy for Kirk.

  “About Mom.” They checked to see if she was perking up at the sound of her name. She wasn’t. She showed no sign of apprehending their presence or, indeed, her own. “She said no fucking doctors. But at this point she can’t tell a doctor from a tow truck. I mean, how much does our promise mean if she’s going to die?”

  Tabitha had an uneasy feeling that Hogan knew that she had a padded wrench hidden between the sofa cushions. “She’s resting, she’s not dying.” She resisted an urge to prod her mother with the toe of her sneaker, like poking a fish on a dock to see if it could be goaded into flapping around some more.

  “I mean, is she still our mother if she’s dead?”

  Tabitha shrugged and made loopy-loopy circles in the air with her fingers. “Want a fluffernutter? I’m just hungry all the time.” She stepped around her mother and headed for the kitchen. She was there when the phone rang. “What,” she said, her mouth gluey with marshmallow.

  “Hi, is that Tabitha?” Caleb? Caleb! thought Tabitha, her heart leaping up.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Jeremy Carr.”

  “Oh. What?”

  “I just got back from the funeral and there was a message from your brother on my machine. Is he there?”

  “You don’t mean Hogan,” she guessed.

  “Right. I mean Kirk.”

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. She thought that guys being gay was a waste of good cock, but maybe they didn’t have good cocks and that was why they were gay. She didn’t care one way or the other. If everybody on TV was cool about it these days, she was, too. But Kirk was more than just some gay kid, he was her annoying baby brother and her responsibility, at least until Mom kicked the bucket and Family Services waded in. “What do you want him for?”

  “Nothing,” said the choir dude. “Absolutely nothing. But he called me and asked to meet me this evening. I can’
t. Would you tell him I can’t? I have a music rehearsal in the church tonight. For a wedding.”

  “Oh,” said Tabitha, licking the back of the spoon. “Whose wedding?”

  “Someone in our choir.”

  She said, “Polly?”

  “Yeah. Polly’s wedding. You know Polly?”

  “Nah. Well, I’ll tell him.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry,” said Jeremy, but he didn’t sound sorry.

  “Sorry for what?” said Tabitha, and hung up.

  She went back in the living room, the jar in one hand and the spoon in the other. “This is like marshmallow mucous,” she said.

  “Who was that?” said Hogan, eyes trained on the TV. It was a rerun of Gilligan’s Island.

  “It was Kirk’s boyfriend. Would you tell Kirk when he comes home that Jeremy has a wedding rehearsal tonight in the church and he can’t make their date?”

  “Goddamn it.” Hogan threw the channel changer at the TV screen so hard the glass spit, but Gilligan didn’t notice. “That faggot’s gonna get his ass handed to him. Where are you going?”

  “Out. I need to see Linda Pearl about something very important to me.”

  “I’m leaving at seven. I got the evening shift, the seven to eleven tonight.”

  “Kirk’ll be home.”

  “What if he’s not?”

  “Just put a blanket on her and turn out the lights, how do I know? Really, Hogan, I’m only two years older than you, you expect me to figure out everything?”

  “Should I get her some food? That toast is two days old.”

  “She gets hungry enough, she eats it.”

  Tabitha didn’t really need to see Linda Pearl. She didn’t want to go to the House of Beauty. She didn’t know what she wanted. There was a sense of things hinging within her, swinging this way and that. She was broad as a barge, full, capable, monstrous, thunderous, generous, judgmental. She walked along the side of the road and felt the world sink back to make room for her. Physically she wasn’t any larger, she knew; she might even, with all that nausea, have lost a few pounds. (Never a bad thing.) It was inside herself that she was larger.

  Once, on the only family field trip they had ever taken, Mrs. Scales had bundled up Tabitha, Hogan, and Kirk, and brought them all the way to Boston. It was a celebration of some kind; maybe Hogan’s getting off of junior parole. They had stared with slack jaws at how large and specific the world was—all that green particularity between Thebes and Boston—almost six driving hours of it. TV served the world in very flat slices, like an animated placemat. Whereas in reality the world had a lot more chunk to it.

  In Boston they had gone to the top of some skyscraper and Hogan had done some projectile snot-blowing out of his nose. They had seen that place that Paul Lynde had lived in before he shouted “The British are coming! The British are coming.” Not Paul Lynde—Paul Revere. Kirk had stolen nine packages of oyster crackers at some fish chowder place and put them on the tracks of the trolley to make crumbs. Then their mother had brought them to the Mothership of the Christian Scientists. It was a modern all-concrete plaza that still looked like its architectural drawing; nothing in it had gotten spray-painted with graffiti yet. Inside one of the older buildings, after they had listened to some lecture about the total stultifying boringness of Christian Science, they had been kidnapped and forced to take a tour. Deep inside one building they had come to a place called the Mapparium.

  “It looks very Catholic,” said Mrs. Scales doubtfully, and at first she wouldn’t let her children go in.

  “That’s just the stained glass,” said the guide. “Don’t mention Catholics to us.” So Mrs. Scales had relented.

  The Mapparium was a stained glass globe, about two stories high and two rooms wide, too. A map of the world in some year like 1936 or something. Every country in the world and all the oceans and seas between were made of curved stained glass puzzle pieces and fitted into place, and things were marked so you could find them if you knew what to look for. All the states were there, except Alaska, Hawaii, and Mexico weren’t states yet. You walked in a bridge across the dead middle space right inside the globe, and the outer skin was the glass, framed in lead, and lit by bulbs on the other side of the glass. It was weird, like the world was kind of like church, or church was kind of like the world. And either way, you were inside it.

  Now Tabitha was walking along with the whole globe inside her, the whole brightly colored existence, all its impossible skins and layers and transparencies. It was hard to think about it. If she could only look in her own mouth she would see the universe and the stars, like the beginning of most movies, black night and white speckles; then zoom in to the galaxy, the solar system, the sun, the Milky Way, in some order or another, like nesting boxes, and the whole globe was in her, and in the globe was the eensy little baby with its little kicking feet, and the whole baby’s whole life was in there with it, and the whole world it would experience, it was all right there, all inside her. It made her feel a little queasy, to tell the truth, and as if the House of Beauty was really the place she should be going, if for the name alone. But she didn’t think that Linda Pearl Wasserman would make a very good godmother to a whole new galaxy cooking away inside her, even if Linda Pearl was first home with any new gossip and a fucking genius at feathering and layering.

  She walked past Pastor Jakob Huyck, who with his usual timing just happened to be driving by. He rolled down his window and said, “Going somewhere?”

  “Not going,” she called, “coming. I’m coming.” In an earlier month she would have said this sexily, but the sound in her own voice was more than sexy. It was godly.

  She waved him by and kept walking, loving herself almost for the first time. She walked all the way to the gas station, thinking about everything and nothing at once.

  31

  JEREMY STOPPED BY the clinic to see Sean again. The argument about whether to tell Sean about Sister Alice hadn’t been won or lost before one of the old nuns had spilled the beans. Sean had plunged into a gummier somnolence and the medics pumped into him an increased dosage of whatever it was. Tonight he lay groggily in his pillows, scarecrow’s limbs in place of his own. His eyes were closed.

  Jeremy sat by him and hummed quietly. His mind wandered to all the usual haunts. He lost track of the time, eyes on Sean’s eroding face. He may even have dozed off for a minute or two. When he looked again, Sean’s eyes were open but his attention unsteady.

  “You could read to him,” said a night nurse. “His folks brought by some paperbacks.”

  Jeremy didn’t want to touch them, but he had to do something since Sean was so unresponsive. A bunch of dog-eared children’s novels. These were the things that Sean’s parents knew of their son. No Honcho, no Blueboy, but The Wind in the Willows, and Charlotte’s Web, and Half Magic, and some of the Narnia books. Sean’s name claimed them in an endearingly round, uneven attempt at the Palmer Method. Sean Kevin Riley. S. K. Riley. Father Sean Riley.

  He opened a book and read aloud at random, but he couldn’t follow the words, and neither apparently could Sean, but at least it brought him around enough to croak, “Will you shut the fuck up?”

  “The power of literature. Works every time. You’re up just in time for a quick hello and goodnight. I have to dash out soon to do a rehearsal. The dread Irene Menengest. Again.”

  “Sing for me,” said Sean. So Jeremy obliged, lightly, faintly. Sean closed his eyes but when Jeremy stopped he said, “I’ll be out in time to make the New York trip, you know.”

  “Counting on it.” He hoped the huskiness in his voice didn’t betray him.

  “Don’t cancel because of me. Even if that’s the day they dust-to-dust me.”

  “You’re insane. You’re raving. You’re nowhere near that.”

  “It’s called dementia, sweetheart. Listen to me. We both know that Jeremy Carr can come up with a hundred and six reasons to cancel. That’s your special blessing. But don’t. I forbid it. I’ll come back and haun
t you. You know the only thing I regret is that we never slept together. It would have been so sweet.”

  “Dementia, got it.”

  “It’s all Willem, I know. Get yourself out of his poison shadow, will you? You’re sicker than I am but you could recover. I’d feel better going down the crapper if I knew you were going to do this.”

  “I’m going to New York,” said Jeremy. “I am. Do you want me to swear to you on a stack of Bibles?”

  “I don’t believe in the Bible. But you do. So yes.”

  “I don’t have a stack.”

  “You work in a church and consort with that coven of nuns. I’m holding you to it.”

  “He isn’t trouble, Sean. You always imagine I’m sneaking around behind everyone’s backs—”

  “No,” said Sean, “you always imagine it. Everyone can see it in your face. Including him. Either fuck with him good and hard one last time or get out of here. I mean it.”

  “I take your point.”

  “No you don’t. Mr. Fortitude, Piety and Fear of the Lord. Get out of here. Now. I don’t want to see that pity on your weak-ass face. Visiting time is over.”

  Jeremy stood. “You, umm, want this book to read?”

  Sean turned his face to the wall.

  “I’m counting on you to come with me to New York, you hear,” said Jeremy.

  “If I can’t make it, audition that high school kid Marty’s been telling me about.”

  “You’ll make it. You’re too stubborn to trust me to do it without you.” He hoped that would bring some sort of grizzled smile to Sean’s face, to end on a convivial note, but Sean didn’t turn his head back to reveal anything.

  Jeremy checked his watch, and cursed mildly. 7:40. He was supposed to meet Irene Menengest and her sister at 7:15. Irene insisted on a vocal run-through in the actual church building, and Francesca was coming to give feedback about enunciation, even though Jeremy had explained that the acoustics when the building was empty would be nothing like those on the day of the wedding. But Irene had bullied and Jeremy had given in.