The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

“Who is it?”

  She could hardly talk. “It’s Grandmother Prelutski, my mom’s mother. Don’t do that.”

  He put his chin on her shoulder, squinting. “She looks pretty fierce.”

  “Mom called her Mother Stalin. She raised Mom alone ‘cause her husband took off to shack up with some filthy whore from Hattiesburg, Virginia.’”

  “Yet Mother learned to be a good mother from her.”

  “Well, that’s debatable. Stop that.”

  His lips were in her hair and his left hand had reached her breast. She couldn’t think. But maybe this wasn’t the time for thinking. Shy of a wrench, shy of a convenient portable gas can and a match, she reached for the only thing she had, the photo album. She closed it with both hands and sighed as if remembering the crimes of her family background, and then she heaved it up backhand right against Pastor Huyck’s face. It wasn’t heavy enough to hurt much but it scraped his glasses off his face, and as he turned to grab them she ducked out under his left arm.

  Then she hit him with a better blow. “If I take Mom to church tomorrow night, we’re going to the Catholics. That’s where Mom seems to be drawn, and while she’s down and out I guess I’m the man of the family. And if you touch me again I’ll tell everyone you been hitting on me.”

  “You’re misunderstanding my ministry.”

  “Take a hike. Huyck.” By now she’d got across the room and had armed herself with a real fire poker they kept by the fake fireplace.

  He left in a righteous sulk at, she thought of it and laughed, a goodly pace.

  “Merry Christmas, by the way,” she called after him.

  Kirk peered out of the bathroom and whispered, “Is he gone yet?”

  “You could’ve come out. He was pestering me like a pervert.”

  “I was just about to. After I finished my nails.”

  “Hog would’ve cracked his honking skull. He’s the only real hero round here.”

  “I know.” Kirk sounded sad. “I’ve seen him in action.”

  Can’t be easy to be Kirk, she thought. She went in and sat on her mother’s bed. Mrs. Scales lay with open eyes facing the closet door. Her knees were drawn closer to her chin, but her breathing seemed calm. The skin on her face was slack and drooped bed-ward.

  She was starting to be smaller than Tabitha. She was curling herself together, knitting fingers together, tucking ankles toward her rear end, arching her neck to complete the circle toward her bent knees. A fossil of herself, but still breathing; fragile and helpless as a baby. How would Tabitha ever manage both her own new baby and this old one too?

  She wanted to kill it and she wanted to save it—this mother baby, not her own. How to do both things at once? Her desperate words to Pastor Huyck rang in her mind. Maybe I’ll get Kirk and Hogan to help. I’ll take Mom to the Catholic mass, wherever it’s going to be, and leave her there. A baby on the doorstep of the church. She won’t be my responsibility any more. It makes perfect sense. Look: Mom has been driven to lie in the basement of that Catholic church, entombed there; she’s scrabbled and bit her way there. I’ll give her what she wants. My Christmas present to her.

  She called the rectory of Our Lady’s. A recording announced where the midnight mass was being held. Concert starting at 11:15 p.m. Well, she’d get there earlier. She’d have to explain enough to get her brothers’ help. And since they were both looking jittery these days, she ought to be able to swing it.

  In fact, her brothers were oddly compliant. Maybe they had worked together to set fire to the church? That would be a kind of brotherly cooperation she hadn’t seen before. Or maybe it was merely clear that now they were all in this together, because if the police came and put one of them in juvenile court, it would be bad for them all. If she could only lift the burden of their mother off her shoulders, she could begin to take care of her brothers. It would be good practice for when her own baby became a satanic teenager.

  AT ABOUT 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve the Scales children went into their mother’s bedroom. First they propped her into a sitting position. Tabitha washed her mother and cleaned her up, top to bottom. Her mother offered no resistance. The boys looked the other way during the worst of it, and Tabitha wished she could too, but this was the last indignity, she hoped. She lifted her mother’s breasts and set them gently in place in the bra to avoid pinching, and latched the bra behind. Doing the panties and the slip was going to be, she feared, unforgettable. Then the boys turned around to help with the blouse and the skirt, elephantine red flowers with avaricious black interiors. “Boy, isn’t there such a thing as enough with Georgia O’Keeffe already?” said Kirk.

  Tabitha didn’t get it, didn’t try. “Jewelry?”

  “Skip it, why bother?” said Hogan.

  “The black jet beads, in a double loop,” Kirk declared without going over to the jewelry box to find out what was there. Guess he knew.

  “I was thinking something Christmas-y,” said Tabitha.

  “We can stick holly in her fucking ears,” said Hogan. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “All right then,” said Tabitha, “on the count of three.”

  They hoisted her up. With coaxing, her legs straightened out, which was something of a relief; Tabitha had been afraid they were going to be stuck in that pretzel position. Mrs. Scales was unsteady, though. Hogan and Tabitha kept on either side of her. Kirk darted ahead to kick the footstool out of the way, turn off the TV, and open the front door. It was a snowy night; a Bing Crosby white Christmas with Lake Ontario wind. They couldn’t even see the car until they were halfway down the walk. Snow had fallen in the smashed rear window.

  “Going to church, Mom,” said Tabitha. “Just where you like it.”

  They put her in the front seat and arranged the seat belt carefully. Suddenly, caution at every turn. Fold the skirt neatly under her; settle her hands together. Are you all right? Comfy? Odd how you could change, or was it just a Christmas mood? She couldn’t believe she’d considered hitting her mother with a wrench. What if she’d hurt her? The dear thing. The dear, knotted, gnarled, hateful thing.

  They’d be there in what, thirty minutes maybe, going slowly because of the blowing snow.

  Tabitha hadn’t figured on the choir. If the concert was going to start at 11:15, she guessed that getting there by 10:30 would allow plenty of time to set her mother down and disappear. Someone would find the old bat within forty-five minutes. But when Tabitha pulled the car up to the convent, old nuns in their witchy drag were propped up against the front doors, welcoming people.

  Bravely she got out and ducked inside to case the joint. The vestibule and front hall of the convent were busy with violins tuning and a flutist trilling like a demented parakeet. The doors to the chapel, across the corridor and opposite the front door, were flung open, so Tabitha peered inside. The choir was augmented by a trumpet and a clarinet and a set of snare drums that read “The Harmony Brothers” on its face, and Jeremy Carr was leading a bunch of giddily dressed choir members in warm-up vocal calisthenics. Shit. She should have come an hour earlier.

  Think, think. If the nuns were gathered in a black cotton flurry in the front, maybe the back of the convent was deserted. Mom didn’t actually have to be on the doorstep of the church, did she? She could be left at the kitchen entrance. New supplies. Jeremy had said that this was a place that old nuns went to die. Maybe Mom could become a nun in order to qualify for the retirement benefits. “Where are you going?” said Hogan irritably, but Tabitha started the engine again without answering. She pulled the car along the entrance drive until she saw a service road veer off. She threaded the car through overgrown hedges, which shook fistfuls of grainy snow onto the windshield.

  The first door she came to was propped ajar with a music stand. A couple of cigarette butts had been flicked in the boot-stamped ground. “Here, Hog. Smoking nuns left the door open. A Christmas miracle.”

  The lighted doorway revealed, inside, a landing and a set of steps. One flight led up to th
e chapel and a glorious misshapen noise of music. Another flight led down.

  “Near enough,” said Tabitha. “Let’s just spread out Mom’s coat and set her here on the landing. She can listen to the music and she’ll be perfectly happy.”

  “She’ll fall down the stairs,” said Kirk.

  “She can’t stand by herself, she’s not competent enough to fall.”

  But their mother made a motion with her chin—the first sign of expression in eight or ten days—toward the stairs leading down into the dark.

  “She’s looking for that refrigerator again,” said Kirk. “This is a different place, Mom.”

  “Unngh,” said their mother.

  “Oh, Lord,” said Tabitha. She didn’t want her mother to go suddenly vocal on her, not just when they were trying to tiptoe away. “Okay, come on, downstairs then. Just take it easy.”

  The light from the stairwell went only so far. Once they were at the bottom of the stairs, though, they could see the low space ahead, because a grate in the ceiling let down some light and music from the chapel upstairs. “Look, it’s a kind of shelf, right underneath,” said Tabitha. “Perfect. We can let Momster lie down right here.”

  “It looks like an autopsy table,” said Hogan, approvingly.

  “She’ll fall off it,” said Kirk.

  “Come on. She can’t even get her thumb into her mouth to suck it, she’s not going to start rolling around like some fourteen-year-old Russian gymnast at the fucking Olympics.”

  The time had come to leave her. They could go upstairs and listen to some music for a while, and Tabitha would find a pencil and a paper somewhere and drop a note in the collection basket. They were making an offering of their mother. Take her with all our best wishes, XXX OOO. She’s in the cellar on the stone table. Merry X-mas. Merry XXX-mas.

  They stood at the door and looked back. The light fell upon her face, which was facing the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Hogan had folded her hands in a religious way on her stomach. She looked like a stone carving of a knight in some old English church, except for the black jet beads. “Sorry there’s no refrigerator,” said Tabitha. Really, it was the only thing missing.

  “Wait,” said Kirk. He pulled something from his pocket. “I found this picture of Grandma Prelutski on the living room floor the other day. Remember how she was rooting through those boxes in the cellar? I think she was looking for photos; that’s why I brought the albums up. She might want to keep this with her.” He tucked it between her hands.

  This isn’t good-bye, Tabitha said to herself, as they hurried back to the car, to sneak into the chapel from the front without anyone seeing. This is something else.

  “You’re not expecting me to go into a Catholic voodoo cannibal service, are you?” said Hogan, when Tabitha had parked the car around front.

  “Hogan,” said Tabitha, “I’m going to say one thing to you.”

  “Promise? Only one?”

  “Turk Schaeffer is a Catholic, and he’s helping Jack Reeves. And it won’t hurt any of us to be seen together at a service. Especially if someone is prying for clues about the fire at Our Lady’s. And I’m taking the keys so you can’t drive away and abandon us here out in the woods with Mother.” It felt good to take Pastor Huyck’s word from him.

  Even Tabitha could see that there were lots of ways to argue against this, but Hogan sure as hell wasn’t going to sit in a cold car while Tabitha and Kirk went inside. The wind was strong and the snow stronger. “You are a regular Christmas bitch,” muttered Hogan, somewhat appreciatively, and he followed them into the chapel.

  The place was warm and dark. Something different here, as far as Tabitha could tell. It wasn’t the talk show self-i-ness that hovered like a faint stink in Catholic mass during the daylight. It was something older and more secret. Something kinder, richer, harsher. Something farther away. Darker, obscurer. The mistake that the Radical Radiants made, and the Catholics made during bright modern Sundays, was trying to get in your face so much. In the middle of the night, with the snow billowing outside, Tabitha could comprehend this more clearly. The candles and their thin, black-chiffon streams of smoke. The glints of gold and the slow-motion gestures in the paintings, the statues. Even the choir up there was sounding decent, wreathed with the tendrils of ancient melody. That nut-job Jeremy Carr was looking distinguished, not frazzled. The instruments were beginning to speak in concert.

  “It’s a puppet theater,” hissed Hogan. “Look at those idols in the front. What happened, somebody kidnap the Baby Jesus for ransom? He’s missing.”

  “Look at the angels in the ceiling,” Tabitha said to Hogan, since he hadn’t come to Sister Alice’s funeral. “So stinking gorgeous.”

  In this light the angels made a rack of wooden origami, rank upon rank of them, almost hidden in the high shadows. One of them looked darker than the others. Lucifer, maybe? No, Lucifer wouldn’t be attending a Catholic mass. Maybe a leak in the roof, and the snow was melting and staining the wood. Yes, that was it, must be, for the room was already filling up, but below that angel the lusty garrulous Catholics were avoiding the pew. Water must be dripping, perhaps into a bucket.

  Caleb Briggs would be here somewhere—maybe she’d remembered that deep down, or maybe not, but now she realized it up front and personal—because Polly Osterhaus bobbed perkily in the choir, looking in red and green like a tortured poinsettia. Tabitha could wish peace on earth and goodwill to all men and even all women except P.S. not Polly Osterhaus.

  Tabitha put her head down to avoid seeing Caleb—at least, not yet—and, since she appeared to be praying (“You phony,” muttered Hogan next to her) she thought, Oh, what the hell.

  The only thing she could think of was the Lord’s Prayer. But it came out funny. It came out slowly, as if each line needed to be thought about before she could go on. Maybe that was the baby inside; everyone said babies slowed you down and kept you in the present. Could it be happening already?

  Our Father, who art in heaven—how did it go?

  … Forgive us our trespasses

  As we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Ah. A tricky part. How to work it out? It was like algebra, at which she’d tanked. The equation was about God forgiving us the way we forgive others—like, say, if she forgave Caleb Briggs. Or Pastor Huyck if she could ever manage it. The equation didn’t say anything about being forgiven by other humans like, say, Mom. Maybe God’s forgiveness was supposed to supersede your own mother’s, so you didn’t need to wait around for her forgiveness. You could pick up and walk out without it.

  Wait’ll Mom gets a load of that.

  The choir was starting. A sprightly rhythm to it, as if goats and shepherd boys were going to do a folk dance across the altar. After a few verses Tabitha glanced sideways at Kirk. She had kind of forgotten about him. If he was really stuck on Jeremy Carr, this stuff must be hard for him to sit through.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.” A dour mood that sounded as if it was going to take about ten years to lift.

  “Cheer up. It’s Christmas.”

  “Christmas in hell.”

  “Well, I can understand. He is kind of cute.”

  Kirk slanted his eyes at her without moving his head. A cautious expression of surprise. But not, she thought sadly, surprise at her admitting Jeremy’s appealing manner and looks. Kirk was surprised that Tabbers could understand her baby brother. Or anything at all.

  Luckily, a greatest hits carol began—“The First Nowell”—that everyone in the chapel sang. Kirk went liltingly up at the end of each chorus, which caused Catholics to turn around and smile convertingly at him. He did have a nice voice, she had to admit it.

  She dozed on and off. Well, it was late, and she was always so tired these days. She managed to avoid peering around for Caleb. Jack Reeves and his wife entered; she hadn’t known he was Catholic too. Father Mike Sheehy flapped about in his costume, greeting people. Crippled old nuns hobbled up and down the ais
les passing out music sheets. A blond soprano with an expression like a Nazi stormtrooper began a glorious hymn, and the lights went down except for the candles in sconces along the wall. “Oh, holy night,” sang the lady, over-articulating as if she were singing on a language tape for immigrants. The program advertised her as Mrs. Leonard (Peggy Moynihan) Mueller.

  Everyone turned in their pews and looked at the choir loft, and so did the Scales kids. “Oh Jesus,” said Hogan. “Duck. It’s a little bundle from heaven.”

  “Long lay the world, in sin and error pining,” sang the Mueller.

  “Is this like New Year’s on TV?” whispered Hogan. “When the Baby hits the manger, it’s officially Christmas?”

  The hush was reverential. The Baby was suspended and some parishioner wearing black gloves gripped the Baby’s feet. For a second Tabitha thought it was a real baby and she had to fight an uprising of panic, but she took a chill pill. It’s only a Christmas pageant and you sat through a hell of a lot of those while Kirk was into it.

  “Till He appeared, and the soul had its birth,” sang the soprano.

  The black-clad midwife let go of the Baby’s feet, and the Infant began to sink, headfirst, through the gloom of the chapel. Everyone said “Oooooh!” softly, as if the Baby had just burst into cartwheels of sparkles, like the Fourth of July.

  “Fall on your knees,” the soprano commanded, and most of the congregation obeyed. “Oh hear the angels’ voices.”

  The Baby made a dignified approach toward the waiting plaster family below. His sacred parents weren’t looking up, but the cow seemed to be guiding Him in with a filmy, dyspeptic expression. The Baby wobbled head to toe in mid-air, rocking like a football as He descended. Then He got stuck, and stopped about twelve or fourteen feet up in the air.

  Stuck in a holding pattern just underneath the leaky angel. A murmur of dismay, the way people sound when a dog comes through the open doors during a summer service and parades with evil ignorance around the room. Tabitha whispered to Kirk, “Maybe the angel has dripped some roof tar or something sticky onto that wire. That Baby’s not going nowhere.” The soprano kept on but no one was listening to the words any more.