Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “Gemma?”

  Gemma had been staring at a little collection of Santa’s elves on the counter near Amanda’s elbow. Cara Hutchinson had always made her eyes glaze over, and this new obsession with Art, Artists and the Artist’s Wife just made the situation worse. Gemma straightened up. Since Cara obviously knew that Gemma and Jan-Mark had been having a relationship—since the whole town obviously knew—it ought to have occurred to her that Gemma had been in Jan-Mark’s house, and seen Tisha’s office, more times than Cara herself ever would, unless Jan-Mark decided to go all French and take up with his own underaged model. Cara was horse-faced and grating and less than half Jan-Mark’s age, but Gemma wouldn’t put anything at all past the stupid rutting fool. Whether that negated all the hours of deeply spiritual communion she and Jan-Mark had shared together, Gemma didn’t know.

  “Gemma?” Amanda said again.

  “Yes,” Gemma answered. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m very tired. I do want to see Peter. I have something I need to talk over with him.”

  “I’ll call him right down.”

  “Thank you.”

  Over on the other side of the office, Timmy Hall was leaning against a broom, contemplating the women set out before him. Gemma watched his gaze move from Amanda to herself to Cara and then pause, frowning furiously, as if what he saw angered him. Gemma sometimes argued in favor of women’s intuition—which she translated as “a natural biological affinity for extrasensory perception”—but she didn’t need women’s intuition or ESP or anything else to tell her what she was seeing now. The way Timmy Hall was looking at Cara Hutchinson made Gemma Bury’s blood run cold.

  2

  Candy George didn’t know exactly what change had come over her relationship with her husband Reggie, but she did know when the change had started to happen, and it intrigued her. Candy had rehearsed for the part of Mary in the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration play for months. Aside from giving her something else to think about besides her own misery—which was a relief—it hadn’t changed anything at all. What had was the experience of her first performance in public before real people. She had expected to be frightened, and she was. She had expected to be paralyzed, but she wasn’t. Candy George had indulged in a drug or two over the years, marijuana and beer, cocaine and animal tranquilizers. Sometimes the relentless pressing weight of her life got so bad, drugs were a form of medication, a temporary relief, like the morphine fed in small doses to men whose limbs had to be amputated on battlefields. Sometimes the night terrors got so bad she needed drugs simply to sleep. Night terrors were what she called the half-waking dreams she had, lying at Reggie’s side in the dark, neither in this place nor in any other, when her stepfather’s hand would come up out of the blackness and reach for the cleft between her legs, the tips of his fingers as rough as sandpaper, the warts on his knuckles hardened into razor-edged marbles made of pumice and steel. She would try to sit up and not be able to. She would try to call out and not be able to. She would tell herself it was a dream and find it made no difference. When it was over, she would get up and go into the kitchen and smoke a couple of joints. If Reggie caught her at it, he would beat her up. Like everything else in the house, the marijuana was supposed to belong to Reggie alone. He was allowed to dole it out but she was not allowed to take it without permission. That was true even of her own clothes. He told her what she could wear in the morning. He told her what to put on before she went to bed. He put his belt across her back if she tried to argue with him.

  What had changed on that stage that first night of the Celebration was Candy George’s assessment of her possibilities in life, and she didn’t think she would ever be the same again. She had heard of heroin highs and cocaine highs and crack euphoria. She had tried heroin and cocaine and crack without ever being able to figure out what everybody else was talking about. Either her body put up too much resistance, or her mind did. That was why she had never become addicted, although a couple of her friends had. That was why she had never become an alcoholic, either, although from everything she’d heard she ought to be one. Her mother was one and her father was one and her stepfather was one and Reggie was definitely on the way. She could easily become addicted to the way she felt on stage. It was like stepping out of her life and into another one, Mary’s life. It was like going from being one of those girls who was so little use to anyone she had no right to anything at all, to being the most important woman in the history of creation. That was what her Sunday School teachers had taught her. Candy hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she thought they must have been right. From this day all generations shall call me blessed, for God has done great things for me. Candy had to say that every night right after the angel came to announce the birth of Christ, and from the first night of the first performance she had believed it absolutely. It swelled up in her like a molten silver champagne. It changed the shape of her body and the contents of her mind. It rearranged the bones of her face, so that instead of the ugliness she saw every morning in her mirror, she looked like what Peter Callisher said she looked like. She wasn’t particularly religious and didn’t want to be. She didn’t know if the world was controlled by a benevolent Father, a swirling mass of auras or nothing at all. She didn’t much care. All she knew was that somebody somewhere was about to do great things for her, that she was no longer the person she used to be, and that it was only a matter of time. A matter of time for what, she hadn’t figured out yet.

  Neither had Reggie, but he had figured out that something was different, and therefore wrong, and he had been worrying at it for the whole of the last two weeks. Today he had stayed home sick from work, which he never did, and Candy suspected the reason was the argument she had had yesterday with Cara Hutchinson. In the old days, Candy would never have had an argument of any kind with Cara Hutchinson. She would have let Cara push and push, and if Cara had pushed hard enough and long enough, Candy would have given her what she wanted. Then if Reggie hadn’t liked it, he would have had the argument with Cara. That was how it was all supposed to happen, but yesterday it hadn’t. Yesterday she had told Cara Hutchinson no—in a voice that wasn’t too strong and wasn’t too firm and wasn’t too sane, either, now that she thought about it—and in spite of everything, she felt good about it. The everything she had to feel good about it in spite of included the position she was in now, at three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, December 16th, and had been in since eight o’clock this morning. Eight o’clock was when Reggie decided she had ruined his breakfast, overcooked his eggs, undercooked his sausage, turned his coffee into goat’s piss. That was when he had leaped up from the table and grabbed the front of the dress he had told her to wear and ripped it right off. His nails had cut into the skin between her breasts and his fingers had caught on the underwire of her bra. Her bra had come off with the front of her dress. The snaps in the back had popped—which had made Reggie even more furious; he hated bras that snapped in back; he preferred the ones that fastened in the front, even though it was hard to get them in Candy’s size—and then the metal underwire had come loose and whipped across her nipples like an electric prod. By the time Candy had gotten her breath back, Reggie had gotten his belt off. He was standing over her like a robot sentinel, the belt pulsing through the air like a rattlesnake defying gravity. Reggie grabbed the collar tab on the back of the dress and ripped at that too, tearing what was left of blue cotton and elastic into shreds, bringing the belt down first on Candy’s back and then on the back of her legs. Candy knew what it was about. Even in her dizziness she couldn’t forget, and usually when she got dizzy enough she forgot everything. Reggie had come to hate having her in that damned Nativity play, but he was stuck. He cared so much about his public image. The police had been called to this house once because of their fighting. He didn’t dare do anything to make it obvious they might have been right to come. He was stuck with her in this play and with what being in this play was doing to her, and he hated it.

  When it was over, he had m
ade his usual request, demanded the thing he liked to demand above all else. Candy had welts on her back and calves and across her breasts. The dark areas around her nipples felt bitten and swollen and set on fire. Reggie had her put on a small white frilly apron that started at her waist and didn’t quite cover her abdomen. Then he had her put on the garter belt he had bought her and the silk stockings and the four-inch spike-heeled shoes. That was the way he had dressed her last year when he had taken the picture he had sent to the “Beaver Hunt” section of Hustler magazine. Before he’d set up the camera, he’d made her sit on the table and spread her legs. Candy had always thought of that picture as the very last word on her life, the thing that named her. You are not a woman, that picture said. You are a hole.

  Reggie was lying on the couch in the living room, watching Oprah Winfrey and pretending to have a fever. He wanted a bottle of Molson’s Golden Ale and a bowl of potato chips. Candy put them both on a tray and brought them out from the kitchen, moving carefully so she didn’t spill anything. Spilling something could get Reggie started all over again, and spilling something would be easy. She had never really learned to walk in these shoes.

  Candy put the tray down on the coffee table at Reggie’s side. Usually, by this point in one of their bad days, she would be feeling totally washed out, nonexistent, invisible. She would at least be giving herself a mental lecture, telling herself she had to stop being so stupid, had to learn not to provoke him, had to get her act together so she wouldn’t do the things that made sessions like this necessary. Today, she wasn’t. Today, she was gliding along in total numbness, her body still, her mind silent.

  “Do you want anything else I can get you?” she asked Reggie. “We’ve got sour cream. I could make onion dip.”

  “Onion dip will give me gas,” Reggie said. “I told you I was sick, for Christ’s sake. What are you trying to do to me?”

  “If you don’t need anything else, I’d like permission to go back to the kitchen. The stove needs cleaning.”

  “You need cleaning,” Reggie said. “To hell with the stove.”

  “Do you want me to take a bath?”

  “You’re going to have to take a bath before you go pretend to be a movie star tonight. If you go looking like you are, they’ll probably fire you and find somebody else.”

  Candy shifted a little on her feet, redistributing the pain. These shoes always hurt. Listening to Reggie talk about the Nativity committee getting someone else for her part panicked her. Candy kept expecting it to happen. She was astounded that it hadn’t happened yet.

  Reggie stuffed a handful of potato chips in his mouth. “What’s that book you left out there in the kitchen? Since when do we have money for you to throw away on trashy paperbacks?”

  “We don’t,” Candy said virtuously. She was lying. She had seen the book in the window of the used-book place on Carrow for days, and finally she’d stolen enough change from Reggie’s pockets to buy it. “I borrowed it from the reading room over at the Congregational Church the time we went there to rehearse because they were putting on some children’s thing in the auditorium. It’s something to do when I’m waiting around backstage.”

  “Why do you need something to do?”

  “Because it’s boring. Just sitting there, I mean.”

  “Why don’t you talk to people? It’s just too damn bad this happened to you instead of me. You’re too stupid to make anything out of it. Practically everybody important in town is in that play or has something to do with it. If it was me, I’d get to know them. I’d get myself a few opportunities.”

  “You’re not supposed to talk backstage when the play is going on,” Candy said, “and all they ever talk about between acts is the shootings. I don’t have anything to say about the shootings.”

  “You don’t have anything to say about anything. It’s too damn bad. It really is. It’s just too damn bad. I wish I was the one who’d shot ’em, though. I wouldn’t have bothered old Dinah Ketchum. I’d have gone straight for those two dykes down the road.”

  “Everybody in the play says it was Jan-Mark Verek getting rid of his wife so he could marry that Gemma Bury who’s the priest now at the Episcopal Church. They’re supposed to be very much in love.”

  Reggie stuffed more potato chips into his mouth and followed them with a swig of beer. “Love crap. She’s an old bag. His wife was an old bag, too, but why kill one old bag for another?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know something,” Reggie said. He sat up and reached for his belt. He had left it draped over the back of the couch, in case he needed it, in case he could think of some other use for it. Candy felt her stomach turn over and her mind go blank.

  “You know what I know?” Reggie said. “I know how I like to see you best when you’re wearing that stuff.”

  “Yes,” Candy said.

  “Hands and knees,” Reggie said. “On the floor.”

  “Yes.”

  “When I get done with this, I’m going to take you just like a dog,” Reggie said, “just like a dog. That’s all you are anyway, you stupid bitch. Just a dog.”

  “Yes,” Candy said again, and thought: The carpet needs cleaning. It’s supposed to be green and now it looks like swamp.

  In the air above the back of her the belt was whistling and screaming, really screaming, as if it were alive. It was talking to her and she could hear every word it said. You asked for it. You always ask for it. You’re so stupid and so bad, if you didn’t have somebody like Reggie to do this for you you’d go straight to hell, just straight to hell, because you’re bad, you’re evil, you’re rotted right to the core and if a doctor had to cut you open all he’d find was pus and stink.

  That was what the belt was saying, but oddly enough, for once it wasn’t what Candy’s conscious mind was saying as well. Candy’s conscious mind was on a tangent of its own, and what it was telling her was this:

  It was a damned good thing that Reggie couldn’t read too well, because if he could, and if he read the back of that paperback book she had left sitting on the kitchen table, he would probably kill her, in self-defense.

  The name of that book was The Burning Bed, and it was all about a woman whose husband had beat her up and beat her up and beat her up day after day and year after year until one night when he’d passed out dead drunk on the bed, she doused him with gasoline and lit a match.

  Seven

  1

  YEARS AGO, JUST AFTER the Second World War, when the money had first started really rolling in, the citizens of Bethlehem, Vermont, had had an argument about the seating for the Nativity play. From the beginning, the Nativity play had been staged in the town park with the gazebo as the stable. From the beginning, people coming to watch had stood along the park’s edges in the cold, their heads covered with thick woolen hats and their ears straining to hear whatever they could. It was a kind of theater in the round gigantus. Some of the people in Bethlehem wanted to leave this as it was. People had been coming and standing for over a dozen years and would probably come and stand for over a dozen more. One citizens’ committee had insisted on the construction of a bandshell with poured-concrete audience tiers. They envisioned busloads of tourists from Delaware and Ohio, all in search of the post-War definition of reasonable American comfort. They envisioned Bethlehem ringed by discreetly placed motels, Howard Johnsons taking up the slack when the inns in town couldn’t provide the New American with the New American idea of plumbing. A third group wanted to do something sensible, but not drastic. Obviously, the crowds were getting out of hand. They couldn’t just go on letting people crowd along the edges of the park. There were too many of them, and too many of them were from Away. People pushed. People shouted and got angry. People drank. The Nativity play needed an organizing principle, and what that organizing principle was was this: a set of collapsible bleachers with a canvas tent shield and portable space heaters, combined with a very sophisticated sound system that included spot mikes and strategically placed
speakers. It was elaborate, unwieldy, ridiculous and expensive as all hell, but it worked, and the town stuck with it. By the time Gregor Demarkian was making his way from the Green Mountain Inn to the center of town in the company of Bennis Hannaford and Father Tibor Kasparian, on his way to the first night of his first performance of the Bethlehem nativity play, it had become a town tradition. The original collapsible bleachers had been replaced with new ones that included cushioned benches. The original canvas tent shield had been replaced with one especially designed for the Celebration and including air vents and low-noise fans to blow the heat from the space heaters upward at the people who needed to be warmed. The new sound system had benefited from decades of experimentation by rock musicians and the CIA. That was frosting. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had always been the transformation of the center of a small New England town into the center of a small Palestinian one. It always would be.

  The collapsible bleachers were divided into six sections with natural aisles in between. Each section was split in the middle by a makeshift stair, so that older patrons didn’t have to climb the bleachers like monkeys or junior high school students. The natural aisle at the very northernmost part of the park, the one nearest Carrow Street, was triple the width of all the others. Coming into his own set of bleachers, just to the left, Gregor could see the dark shapes of animals shifting and shuddering at the far end of it. Tibor, who had been so interested in how and where the animals would come, now seemed not interested at all. He plodded along behind Bennis with an air of leaden pessimism, the black skirt of his cassock brushing against the snow. Leading them, Bennis kept referring to their tickets and muttering to herself. Gregor thought it was a good thing. He had gotten back to the Inn just after lunch, his pockets stuffed with notes and a crudely reproduced map of what he and Franklin Morrison had begun to call “the problem.” He had been trying ever since to talk it over with somebody. At first, he had been alone, deserted by Bennis and Tibor, who had gone off to listen to Christmas carols or check out the souvenir stores or something. Then he had been in the midst of too much activity, with Bennis and Tibor getting back late and scurrying to get ready to leave in time, with Tibor mumbling about everything Bennis had and hadn’t eaten, with Bennis panicking because she couldn’t remember where she’d put the tickets or the program or her reading glasses or her cigarettes or anything else. Now, of course, they were filing in to see the Nativity play, which would effectively cut off conversation for the next two hours. Gregor thought it was typical. When he didn’t want to talk about crime or cases or bloody murder, Tibor and Bennis were all over him like feathers, probing and prodding, driving him crazy. When he did want to talk about them, they had something else to do.