The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

  A man sitting nearby, with an apologetic look at his neighbors, got up and stood on the pew. He reached up, trying to tap the Baby past the speed bump, but he was too short by a yard or so.

  One of the altar boys, apparently at Father Mike’s calm instruction, waffled in his crimson robes to the front of the chapel, and knelt down by the crib. He gently shook the guy wire, trying to jostle the Baby loose.

  “O holy night,” began the soprano again. “The stars are brightly shining.”

  Maybe they were, but between the stars and the Baby an awful lot of stormy wind was bringing snow onto the roof, and some of that snow melted down through the angel’s wings. The knot of black yarn fastening the Baby to his high wire was visibly dripping. The Baby was getting wet, too; drops splashed on His head and ran, with terrible accuracy, down His perfect stomach, where they collected in the folds of His plaster diaper and dripped off of His holy bottom. He looked like a Baby who badly needed a change.

  “Fall on your knees,” sang the soprano again, and the kneeling people took this as a sign they could get up and sit down now.

  The man nearest—it was Turk Schaeffer—was being helped to climb even higher. He balanced his feet on the backs of adjacent pews. This gave him another eighteen inches or so, which was still too low. Loyal parishioners leaned against his knees but propriety forbade them from shoving their hands against his behind. Without that tripod sort of support, he couldn’t swing with any assurance.

  “O night divine.” Then she hit the famous high note—“O night di-viiiiine”—and Tabitha thought the reverberations might be enough to spring that Baby free. Most of the old nuns had remained on their knees with their heads in the hands. Their shoulders shook.

  “O holy night,” began the Mueller again. The choir, out of boredom or maybe solidarity, began to ooh in the background. Lots of oohs oozed out. Jeremy Carr was looking frantic, gesturing to the two violinists, who began doing something with long drawn out notes. Someone else whipped out a harmonica and it was O Holy Night on the Range, where the deer and the antelope play with the syphilitic camels.

  Solange Lefebvre’s grandmother handed Turk Schaeffer a folding umbrella. Other parishioners were lifting up umbrellas and a couple of crook-handled aluminum canes. “A Jesus piñata!” whispered Kirk, delighted. “Is He stuffed with candy?”

  “This is a goddamned zoo,” muttered Hogan.

  “I hope they don’t break Him,” said Tabitha.

  “Fall on your knees,” pleaded the choir.

  The song was nearing that stratospheric note again. Tabitha wondered: Was the emotion of the moment going to inspire every member of the choir to try to reach that high note? It looked as if Jeremy was afraid of the same thing: he began to wheel his arms about like a teacher trying to keep a bunch of kindergartners from dashing across the street without looking. The altar boy, meanwhile, had reached Turk Schaeffer’s side, and whispered in his ear. Turk hoisted the kid onto his shoulders in a piggyback. Someone handed the kid an umbrella.

  The choir hit the high note with recklessness. The altar boy took aim, and let fly with a mighty wallop. His whack was heard all over the church. The congregation allowed itself a soccer goal cheer. But the Baby kept its sleeping eyes shut and barreled toward its destination. Tabitha thought, wow, isn’t that too fast? There’s no one at the end of the incline to slow it down. It’s going to smash to bits in the cradle.

  She wasn’t the only mother who stood, fearful for any baby, even a holy plaster one. She saw the crib shift an instant before the Baby made touchdown. It hopped, then tipped over, and the grille it was sitting on opened like a trapdoor. Mary and Joseph looked down devotedly to see what child is this. Up popped the head of Mrs. Leontina Scales, eyes blinking in the light, as if the choir’s exertions had woken her at last. Several people in the front pew screamed. The Baby caught Mrs. Scales in the forehead and smashed into a thousand holy pieces. Tabitha’s mother juddered backward, hitting her head on the floor-level iron housing of the grille behind her, but she didn’t lose her balance.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she said into the fading echo of the choir’s final, divine word.

  36

  “YOU’RE NOT WELL enough to go,” said Tabitha.

  “Don’t you take that tone to your mother,” said Mrs. Leontina Scales. “I may have been under the weather, but now I’m peppy as the first cup of Folgers. Do you think the green or the pink?” She held up a lime-colored spaghetti-strap straitjacket poxed with sequins. The pink was cut more matronly, a twin-set with shoulder pads.

  Tabitha thought that with her new close-cropped haircut, dear Mother would resemble a walking bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “The pink looks sucky. I don’t even know why you’re invited.”

  “The pink it is, then. If you disapprove, that makes it respectable. Listen, honey. I work on the Republican voter registration committee with Caleb’s mother, Betty. And there was a time when their marriage wasn’t doing so well that I considered becoming Mrs. Leontina Prelutski Scales Hauenstein Garrison Briggs. So Caleb could almost have been your stepbrother. What do you think of that?”

  The notion made Tabitha feel sick, but everything made her feel sick these days. “You have some history, Momster. Is there any man in town you didn’t almost marry?”

  “I preferred the married life, actually. Father, mother, and babies. Like the holy family.”

  “So you divorce three husbands in a row?”

  “I’m a slow learner.” She pointed a finger. “Like you. I found out by going through them that none of those guys were competent to be father to you kids.”

  “I’d say they were competent. I mean, ta-da: here we are.”

  “No. They didn’t buy into it. They were too much of this world.”

  “So you walked away from them? It’s holier to raise your children without fathers than with them? What if Mary had said to Jesus, Come on, Jesus, we don’t need that schmuck Joseph. He’s not competent.”

  Her mother paused. “Of course, Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s real father. So I wouldn’t really have blamed Mary. She always had God the Father as backup. No walking way from Him.”

  “Bullshit. Who gave you the right to interpret the world?”

  “What else is a mother but the focal depth for her children?” She pursed her lips. “Betty Briggs is inviting me to her son’s wedding to point out her marriage was never threatened by me. Even though Eli Briggs, bless his triple-bypassed heart, is dead and gone. The least I can do is show up and prove her point. What are you wearing?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I accepted for the whole family.” Mrs. Scales hadn’t forgotten how to be firm, Tabitha noted. “I need you. I don’t want neighbors pointing at me and remembering that little flirtation with Eli Briggs. I need my children around me to prove my point: I got on with things. Understand?”

  “Don’t I ever get off the hook?”

  “Any hook you’re on, you put yourself there. Don’t I know that full well?”

  And, within reason, Leontina Scales felt she did. The world was solidifying every day, and the lost months of November and December, mothy enough while they were happening, were taking on a further quality of dream. Evaporating under inspection. The physical therapy seemed to be helping, though Nurse Marilee Gompers said there was a good deal yet to be accomplished. “It’s all up to you, Mrs. Scales, how fast you’re going to come back.” An unspoken implication signaled in the eyes of Nurse Gompers: You revolting couch potato. You disgust me.

  But Mrs. Leontina Prelutski Scales had already come back, she wanted to say. She had drifted into a place of masks and disguises, where no one had eyes, where voices were insistent but devoid of language. Everything unfamiliar. She remembered a sense of being with someone like her mother, someone who disapproved of her every tentative step—though her mother was long dead. But this mother entity, not Mrs. Ida Prelutski but some faint simulacrum—this maternal vapor had not interfered. Reticent, shadowy, cons
tant. As always dubious to claim a genuine religious reveal, Leontina Scales was hesitant to name it Friend Jesus. But its presence had been a big relief.

  She hadn’t yet told Tabitha—and perhaps she wouldn’t—how she had wakened up at last to the sound of angels in need of a tune-up. She’d become aware of mustiness, dankness, yet light fell from above. She’d wondered if she was entering the afterlife. Wouldn’t Jesus have sent her a guide? Someone who had gone before, a kind of Orientation Day Big Sister?

  She had sat up and found the photo in her lap. Old technology, but there was no gainsaying heaven. Her mentor, her welcomer. She couldn’t make it out until she’d stood on the bier. When she saw Mother Stalin, she’d screamed. In hell no one can hear you scream.

  Leontina had run away from Ida Prelutski once, when she was nineteen. Wasn’t once enough? If her own mother was waiting in the afterlife to take up the cudgel of motherhood again, then Leontina wasn’t going. Amen, end of story. And she’d tried to escape by the only route she saw, through the grille in the ceiling.

  I never asked for much in the way of grace, she reminded herself, and I have not deserved much. I merely asked that my spiritual incompetence not be found out. To be spared having to walk out of a church service because of exposure and humiliation. And yet there I am, being ushered by my weeping children down the center aisle of some foreign chapel stiff with Catholic froufrou.

  At first, coming back from the dead hardly seemed worth it.

  She still hadn’t figured out why her children had brought her to a midnight mass in a Catholic chapel. It was like trying to Center Your Breathing in a pit of demons. But then, she reconsidered, maybe if you could do it here, you had passed the test at last and could hold your head up high. “Are you out of your minds?” she had said to them, coming up from the netherworld and shaking the shards of porcelain from her clothes and her hair. “What is this, the All-New Candid Camera?” She hadn’t known it was Christmas. She’d thought it was All Saints Day.

  “Wear your plaid skirt and the mock angora with cowl neck,” said Mrs. Scales. “That’s darling on you.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “How about the ivory with the blue piping? Memo to Daughter: While we’re here—while we’re here together in this life, Tabitha Scales, we’re sticking together. You are going and that’s the last of it.”

  “I was better off with a staple gun in my hand.”

  “What’s that?”

  Tabitha didn’t reply, and she did knuckle under, but she chose an old-fashioned full-skirted white dress she found in a garment bag in the crawlspace. Over a stain on the bodice she pinned a rusty pin from the promo campaign of one of the ancient Madonna recordings—it said Like a Virgin. “Really,” said Mrs. Scales. “Doubt it very highly.”

  “Call up the feds, we got a Truth in Advertising felony here,” said Hogan.

  “It doesn’t say A Virgin, it says Like a Virgin,” said Tabitha.

  “It’s a great dress.” Kirk held up the skirt and swished it around his own knees. “It’s got about nine yards of tulle underneath.”

  Mrs. Scales recognized it. The very dress she had worn to the Spring Fling mixer where she had met Wally Scales. She hadn’t remembered saving it. All Tabitha needed was a pointy little hat chugging along the swells of her heavily-sprayed hairdo. “You’re not allowed to wear white to a wedding unless you’re the bride.”

  “I can wear whatever the fuck I want.”

  Mrs. Scales conceded the point. So much lost time to make up for. “Well, at least your hair is divine.”

  “I can’t believe you’d attend a Catholic wedding, Mom,” said Kirk, as they headed toward the car. Tabitha itched to twist the key in the ignition, but Mrs. Scales drove. Tabitha was stuck in the backseat with Hogan. So much taken away from her. Why didn’t she feel more relieved?

  “It is troubling to me, you bet,” said their mother, “but at least the service isn’t in the Catholic Church. I’m so glad that Pastor Huyck permitted the families to use Cliffs of Zion. True Christian fellowship, wouldn’t you say?” She turned to beam at Kirk sitting in the passenger seat. “Pastor Huyck signed my release forms, I see. The dear man. He took some responsibility, which is more than I can say for some. When I was lost and a lamb astray. And I never knew. So I intend to stand by him.”

  “Watch the road, Mom,” said Kirk.

  Hogan picked his nose and flicked it at Kirk’s bouffant, where it stuck and hung like a little worm.

  Don’t bother watching the road, thought Tabitha. No one’s going anywhere.

  THAT LINDA PEARL is all talk and no action. Here comes Polly Osterhaus up the aisle in a warm front of white winds and the aroma of orange blossoms. When she threw back her veil, Tabitha saw Polly’s clear skin, her bumblebee nose, her perfect volumized updo, her carmine plastic lips. Caleb stood, rooted in shock, as if a truck packed with explosives was coming up the aisle at him 100 miles an hour and Timothy McVeigh at the wheel. Thank God the usual choir from Our Lady’s was on break or something, for the music was thinly provided by Jeremy Carr and a soloist. “Irene Menengest, alto.” She was okay. At least it wasn’t “O Holy Night.”

  Tabitha tuned out. A couple of weeks ago she had been jumpy, jittery, feeling everything, and now all that had vanished. Here, look, Mom standing next to me, beaming like an idiot, weeping from her nose, for Christ’s sake, and she doesn’t even know what this marriage is doing to her own daughter. How can people be so blind? What, am I going to accept blindness too, she thought, accept dullness, accept wrapping my fingertips and all my lips in layers of padding, like Pampers? Am I going to stick with being the resentful daughter, plodding in the wake of Mom’s pitiless climb toward grace? Or is my devotion to Caleb asserting itself once again, and am I shutting down to keep from breaking down?

  Linda Pearl Wasserman had told Tabitha that Catholics didn’t believe in saying “If there’s anyone here who knows why this marriage should not proceed, speak up or forever hold your peace.” What might Tabitha have offered as protest? That Caleb had gotten her pregnant? Without having gone to the formalities of taking the easy 1-2-3 test, she couldn’t prove it to anyone yet.

  Anyway, what had Caleb done with the news that Tabitha was pregnant? Flushed it farther away from himself than she had done. Acted as if she hadn’t even spoken.

  She didn’t have the stomach for that kind of scene, anymore.

  Or for any of this. But what kind of scene would she prefer?

  The bride blushed. The groom kissed the bride. The audience clapped as if this were Wheel of Fortune. Maybe it was.

  THE RECEPTION WAS in the assembly room underneath the worship space—the same room in which the annual Christmas sale was held. Polly’s friends had decorated it with trails of white and pink crepe paper. Caleb’s friends were making farting noises with their hands; Tabitha saw them passing a bottle around in a paper bag. Caleb’s brother was plastered. The punch, thick with soggy sherbet, resembled Lake Ontario in March, melting industrial runoff. The room overheated so Pastor Huyck, who was going out of his way to avoid Tabitha, smart man, opened the windows near the ceiling.

  “Look at that, cunning little sandwiches,” said Mrs. Scales loudly, as if she’d never seen anything like it before. On aluminum rounds sat treacherously arranged ziggurats of bread triangles: cucumber, tuna, some kind of paste that looked suitable for sizing particle board.

  “Cheapest excuse for refreshments I ever saw,” said Hogan.

  “Shhh, she’s probably paying for it herself. I don’t see anybody who looks like wealthy parents,” said Mrs. Scales. “Where’s Kirk gone off to?”

  “Over trying to locate the organ on the organist,” said Hogan, under his breath so Mrs. Scales couldn’t hear, or could pretend not to have heard.

  37

  DURING THE WEDDING Jeremy hadn’t looked once at Willem, who sat in the fifth row on the left with Francesca and their preternaturally clean and orderly children. What a relief to concentrate on org
an pedals, keyboards and stops, and, for one number, the neck of the guitar. He wouldn’t have wanted to try to sing. He had only sung before Willem once, that first night in the Adirondacks, when the melody seemed capable of swallowing them up whole as the warm black water had done.

  Jeremy’s car was packed; he was leaving tonight. He just wanted to say a good-bye to Willem—not a loud good-bye, not a demonstrative one, but one that would serve to launch Jeremy toward whatever this new year held. The only thing he was sure of was that he didn’t know what was coming next. They’d made it through Y2K without a hitch or a hassle. One thing at a time.

  Weddings are occasions of brutal separation as well as of union, he thought. The precious couple gets married and everyone else doesn’t. Last night at Bozo Joe’s, Jeremy had had a fight with Marty over his intention to show up at the reception. “Why do you abuse yourself like this?” snorted Marty. “Using someone else’s wedding for your refresher course in masochism.”

  “It’s called closure.”

  “It’s called sick.”

  “Let’s change the subject. Are you sure your brother’s okay with my staying with him for the first week or so?” Everyone so jittery in the nervous new millennium, thought Jeremy, watching Marty work for access to a civil tongue.

  “Ben’s an angel. You’re good for about a week, tops. He works four afternoons at one of those restaurants on the top of the World Trade Center. You know, the twin towers downtown. If you really think you can stick it out and you’re not going to fold on him, he told me he’d be willing to introduce you to Human Resources. Maybe you can get a job waiting tables, or kitchen work. Make ends meet until you find something else. Ben won’t be much company, though. He’ll be out most nights doing gigs. A good saxophonist gets a lot of work. At least the place will be free if you want to bring some subway saint home for an hour.”