A Severed Wasp

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Felix murmured, “Our local restaurants often take the place of confessionals,” and helped Katherine into a chair.

  “Pizza with everything,” Tory announced with enthusiasm. “Peppers and anchovies and mushrooms and sausage and onions and pepperoni—”

  “I’m glad there’s a doctor in the house,” Katherine said.

  “Halt!” Suzy cautioned. “I deal with hearts and I doubt if pizza will give you a coronary.”

  And Mimi put up a restraining hand. “And I try to mend bones. I haven’t pumped out a stomach since I was an intern. However, I don’t think one piece of pizza will do your innards any harm, and I’ll give you a settling tisane when we get home.”

  “For an orthopod,” Suzy said, “you do hold great stock in your home brews.”

  “It’s my French blood, and they haven’t failed me yet. I prescribe them for my patients; they help bones to knit.”

  Suzy began to involve Mimi in a discussion of some especially intricate heart surgery, and the young men were talking with Felix, so Katherine turned her ear toward the girls. Emily and Tory were evidently at the age of constant bickering.

  Tory’s voice was irritatingly smug as she said, “Mrs. Undercroft happens to prefer me to you.”

  Emily rose to the bait. “Mrs. Undercroft is a frivolous fart.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “You’re welcome to her.”

  “My theory about you,” Tory continued the attack, “is that you were an accident. Then they had to have me, to go along with you. So I was planned, and you weren’t.”

  Suzy turned from her conversation with Mimi. “Girls, if you’re going to fight, you can leave.”

  “We weren’t fighting,” Tory defended. “We were talking.”

  “It sounded unpleasant. Therefore, desist.”

  The pizza arrived and was, as promised, excellent. “I would have asked you up for dinner,” Suzy said, “but I know our stairs are too much for someone who is not used to them, and cooking is not one of my many talents. You’ll get a much better meal here than if I’d prepared it.”

  “You’re not that bad, Mom,” John defended. “And you always cook lots.”

  “Quantity, if not quality,” Suzy agreed.

  “A voracious vulva.” Emily’s voice rang out during a lull in the conversation.”

  “Emily!” Suzy snapped.

  Emily scowled. “It’s a perfect description of her.”

  “I don’t know who you’re describing and I don’t want to know. Do you know the meaning of your words?”

  “They’re alliterative.”

  “The next time you want to be alliterative, look your words up in the dictionary.”

  “Okay.” Emily’s odd, fair brows drew together. Somehow she looked frightened, rather than angry.

  Felix reached across the table for her hand. “You can use my dictionary.” A glance of the intimate love which occasionally exists between the very young and the very old passed between them.

  “Thank you,” Emily said softly, and then smiled at Katherine. “As you can guess, Madame, we’re all mad fans of yours.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Katherine said. “And I’m pleased. I don’t think you’re ‘mad fans’ indiscriminately.”

  “No, we aren’t. We’re frightfully discriminating.”

  “And you play the piano?”

  Emily spoke in a calm voice. “I had been preparing to be a ballet dancer, but that’s out, so I have to acquire a new passion. I’ve been thinking for the past year that it’s going to be the piano. If I could be like you, I’d be sure it was.”

  “It’s a lot of work,” Katherine said.

  “I’m not afraid of work. But my piano teacher—well, I don’t know whether or not I have the gift, the way John has.”

  To her own surprise, Katherine heard herself asking, “Would you like to play for me?”

  “Oh, yes, please! But not yet—I need a while to prepare some pieces for you.”

  “Just let me know when you’re ready, then.”

  “I will, and, oh, thanks.”

  The conversation continued generally, and amicably now.

  Once Katherine heard Emily asking softly, “Uncle Bishop, are you ever afraid in the night?”

  Felix replied, equally softly, “Yes, Em. I am.”

  Mimi, too, had heard, because her brusque voice joined in. “Good heavens, everybody is afraid sometimes. It’s part of the human condition.”

  “Even you?” Felix asked.

  “Christ, yes. Even I.”

  Suzy said, “I do hope Dave won’t be long. I worry when he gets involved in these internecine shootings.”

  Katherine turned her mind away, and then realized, when Felix asked her a question and had to repeat it, that the below-the-surface part of her mind was busy planning the recital she would give on the Bösendorfer for Felix, who held the hands of old women who were dying badly. And who had married the young woman who had replaced Katherine in Pete’s arms.

  Bishop Bodeway’s Past

  1

  When Katherine and Mimi were alone on Tenth Street, sipping a tisane, Mimi asked, “Would you like me to take mine upstairs? Have you had enough of me for one day?”

  Katherine knew that if she said, “Yes, go,” Mimi would go, and there would be no hard feelings. But she said, “I’m tired, and when I’ve unwound a bit, I’d like a bath and bed. Meanwhile, I enjoy relaxing over this delicious concoction of herbs you’ve put together to settle that pizza.”

  Mimi sat in her typical position, one foot tucked under her, posture and movements still clumsily adolescent in contrast to her incisive look and manner. “This will not only settle the stomach, it will help you do your unwinding. You liked the Davidsons?”

  “Enormously.”

  “Especially John.” So Mimi had noticed.

  Katherine nodded. “Emily reminds me of myself at that age, prickly and rather difficult. But John—John reminds me of my son.”

  Mimi glanced at the portrait of Katherine and the infant. “John is an artist, and like all artists he has fluctuating moods.”

  “Felix says he has the makings of a fine musician, and from the way he listened to my playing, I suspect that’s true.”

  “Dave is a superb horn player, so John inherits it legitimately.”

  “I’d like to hear him play.”

  “I’ll arrange it. He’ll melt your heart. Incredible technique for an adolescent, but there’s a quality of—love is the only word I can think of—that has depths far beyond his age.”

  “Does Felix still play?”

  “Occasionally on Sunday evenings when the Davidsons get together to make music. He’s not bad, by the way, but he’s probably a better bishop than musician. He plays adequately, but he doesn’t have that quality that all the technique in the world can’t buy.”

  Mimi, Katherine suspected, had it as a doctor. She sipped her tisane, which was indeed soothing.

  “Felix is full of surprises. I didn’t know till tonight that he’d been married.”

  “Married? Felix!” Mimi’s voice rose in astonishment.

  “Yes. We were on our way to the restaurant—I think you’d gone on ahead with Suzy—and I said I hadn’t had a pizza since I used to go out after the theatre with Pete, the actor I was briefly engaged to, and with Felix, and his friend Sarah. My engagement to Pete was broken off because of Sarah, and I thought they’d probably married, and Felix could have knocked me over with a feather when he said that it was he who had married Sarah.”

  “You could knock me over with a feather, too.” Mimi said. “My word! Felix married! Will wonders never—I wonder what happened?”

  Katherine regretted bringing up the subject. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I suspect it’s something he doesn’t want talked about.”

  “Don’t worry, love. A doctor learns to keep secrets as well as a priest. I won’t say anything. It’s just—I thought I knew old Bishop Bodeway pretty
well.”

  “I’m glad you told me that story about him.”

  “Which?”

  “Visiting hospitals, and not being afraid of old women who stank. It’s a side of Felix I’ve never known.”

  Mimi picked up the teapot and refilled their cups. “Christ, you’d think I’d be used to the complexities of human nature by now. From what Felix tells of his youth, I think he was early used to odd smells.”

  As vividly as in a dream Katherine saw in her mind’s eye a ‘favorite’ bar Felix and Sarah had taken her to. The stench still assailed her nostrils, spilled sour wine, sweat, vomit. It had been, she realized now, an early and surely one of the worst ‘gay’ bars, and there had been nothing gay about it. There had been nothing of love there, either. It was Sarah’s idea of slumming. Why Felix went along with Sarah in being amused by it, she could not guess.

  Mimi continued, “I don’t think Felix would mind your knowing, if you don’t already, but his father was a pig farmer somewhere in the Midwest.”

  “I didn’t know. I was preoccupied with the piano and Pete. Felix was—peripheral.”

  “His job as a child was to clean out the pens and feed the pigs their swill. His parents fought continuously, and his home conditions were so appalling that ultimately he got sent to a foster home. He got away as soon as he could and came to New York and lived in the Village—but that you know.”

  “Yes. No wonder the seamier side of life didn’t bother him.”

  “He’s been fastidious as long as I’ve known him,” Mimi said. “My shrink friends say that his background makes it all the more remarkable that he can stand bad odors now. Well, evidently I know more about him than you do, and maybe that’s because I have no family, no brothers or sisters, no husband or children, no deep commitment to anyone, and so I’ve become insatiably curious. I don’t think I like that about myself.”

  Katherine looked over her cup at Mimi, thinking how quickly they had become friends. Setting the cup down, she asked, “Why does Emily Davidson limp?”

  “She has an artificial left leg. She was hit by a car two years ago on her way home from school. The car went out of control and up onto the sidewalk, and crushed Emily’s leg so that it had to be amputated just below the knee.”

  Katherine shuddered. “In likening myself to Emily, I remembered my own limping as a child, because of my bad hip. Isn’t there an Eastern proverb that talks about a man being sorry for himself because he had no shoes until he met a man with no feet?”

  “Don’t be sorry for Emily,” Mimi warned. “She’d hate that.”

  “Yes. I know. But how matter-of-factly she talked about not being a ballet dancer.”

  “Em’s not one to go in for self-pity. She was one of the child dancers at the City Ballet, but after the accident she never looked back.”

  “When she gets rid of all those childish angles she’s going to be extraordinarily beautiful.”

  “And she’ll be somewhere,” Mimi agreed. “She’s fiercely proud and determined to compete. She doesn’t have John’s sweetness, but she has intense vocational drive. Tory is like Suzy, pretty and sharp, and everything comes easy for her, though she has shown no particular aptitudes, and I think she’s jealous of Emily. Jos is going to end up a solid good citizen, a good if not brilliant doctor, but caring. John and Emily are the special ones. I’m glad Em is so close to Felix.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. It’s good for them both, I’m sure.”

  Mimi nodded. “I think Felix is Emily’s confessor. As a doctor, I think that confession, psychologically speaking, is probably a very good thing. And I know that one of the things Felix still does is hear confessions.”

  That, too, was a side of Felix Katherine had never encountered. The old Felix had been a talker, not a listener.

  “Despite the fact that he does tend to run off at the mouth,” Mimi went on, “Felix is also a good listener. And that’s probably the most important work of the confessor, to listen intently, so that whoever it is can see the problem spread out, and then see it objectively instead of subjectively. Do you ever go to confession or anything like that?”

  Katherine, smiling, shook her head. “Not anything like that. I’ve never been what you might call a real Catholic. It must be a heavy burden, to hear all the darker aspects of the human heart.”

  “Doctors get their share of it. I wouldn’t want to be a shrink.”

  “I suppose in a way I have been to confession, or an equivalent thereof,” Katherine mused. “Justin and I were very fond of a cardinal we met in Munich shortly after the war, Wolfgang von Stromberg, a great music lover. We certainly told Wolfi things we’d never have told anyone else. Have you heard of him? He wrote quite a few books which were translated into English. Felix knows them.”

  “Sure, he’s very well known,” Mimi said. “I recommend one called Curing and Healing to some of my patients. Was he as interesting as his writing?”

  “As interesting, and as complex. A great man. He was Vatican Secretary of State when he died.” But she was not ready to talk about Wolfi.

  “More tea?” Mimi asked.

  “No, thanks, I still have a bit, and it’s doing its work; I’m relaxing. But I can’t get Emily out of my mind. How horrible the person who hit her must have felt.”

  Mimi looked into her cup for a long time, as though trying to read the leaves. “The driver of the car got out and ran, and was never identified. The car turned out to have been stolen. So I doubt if whoever it was lost much sleep. Don’t worry too much about Emily; she’ll turn her talents in another direction; she’s still young enough. You were a dear to ask her to play for you. Finished?” She saw that Katherine’s cup was empty, and went to the kitchen and began washing up. “How did you and Justin happen to know Cardinal von Stromberg?”

  “He came backstage after one of my early concerts and invited us to supper. It was our first trip to Germany after the war, and we—or at least I was horribly shocked at the devastation done by American bombers. Wolfi was warm and open and accepting. I’ve learned a lot about acceptance from him, and there’s a vast amount of difference between accepting and being resigned. I’ve never been one for resignation.”

  Mimi grimaced, “Nor have I. So your friendship with von Stromberg was something like mine with Dave Davidson—proportion-making.”

  “Some of the time. As I said, he was complex.” She turned the subject. “Bishop Undercroft added his voice to Felix’s in asking me to do a benefit. He and Felix seem very fond of each other.”

  “I think they are. They’re old friends.”

  “What kind of bishop is he—Undercroft?” She tried to keep the question casual. She did not want the perspicacious doctor to guess that she was fascinated by the attractive young bishop.

  “I’m the wrong person to ask. Probably the best thing he’s done was to make Dave dean.”

  “Who made him bishop?”

  “That’s an elected office. There’s a huge Diocesan Convention in Synod Hall, and it’s sort of like electing a pope—without the white smoke. They just keep on balloting till someone wins by some kind of margin. Allie evidently got in by a landslide, and he’s still very popular. He knows how to gather good people about him. He’s not jealous of other people’s talent, I’ll have to say that. And he’s done a lot to continue the work Felix was doing in cleaning up the slums around the Cathedral, and in training and employing local kids.” Mimi paused. “He’s a nice guy, your Felix.”

  “More yours than mine, it seems.”

  “Ours, then. And I’m glad you like Dave. The work he did in the slums of Atlanta is largely why Allie called him here. It’s sort of full circle for Dave; he sang in the choir here when he was a kid, and was the foster son of the then dean.”

  2

  In the morning Felix called Katherine to discuss a date for the concert.

  “Sometime in August, I should think,” she said. “That will give me time to work up a program.”

  “I’m eter
nally grateful to you,” Felix said. “We get a lot of visitors to the city in August, and you’ll be a real draw. But most of our regulars are away and I’d hate them to miss you. Would you consider another concert, say, to begin Advent? You could use the same program.”

  “Don’t push me, Felix. One thing at a time.”

  “But you’ll think on it?”

  “I’ll think on it. Felix—did I hear you correctly last night when you said you married Sarah?”

  “You heard me correctly.” His voice was gritty. “It isn’t something I talk about, by the way. I don’t think anybody knows about it except you and Allie. I don’t know why I—” His voice trailed off.

  Mimi, Katherine knew, would say nothing. “Felix, dear—I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, I suppose I must have wanted you to know, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. And you are, in a way, involved. You were engaged to Pete, and Sarah deliberately set out to seduce him. And, after they broke up, she turned her wiles on me. It must seem very strange to you. You have a right to know what happened.”

  “I have no right at all, unless you want to tell me. If you don’t, we’ll forget it.”

  “No. If we’re going to be friends now, as we weren’t able to be back in those days when most of us were just playing at being artists—if we’re to be real friends, which is my deepest desire, I want you to know about it. I want you to know me, Katya, because I know that you will accept me.” There was a long pause. Katherine sat on the side of her bed, sipping coffee and waiting. Why not? With professional pressures gone, there was no need to rush.

  At last Felix spoke again. “You’ve always been an accepting person, Katya. That’s why so many people confided in you, even when we were very young. I suppose people still do—bare their hearts to you.”

  “Some.”

  “So please don’t mind if I do it, too. I took getting married seriously. Granted, Sarah’s money was attractive to me. I don’t discount that. I wanted everything her money could buy for me, and I don’t suppose I’ve ever had a completely pure motive in my life. But the money wasn’t all. I wanted the rest of it, children, and the whole family picture. But it wasn’t long before I realized that Sarah didn’t, and that she didn’t want me to change. She just wanted me as a—a pet poodle, someone to come home to if and when she felt like it, someone to see that dinner was on the table. We had servants, so it wasn’t a great demand. And mostly she wanted me as an excuse—‘Oh, I couldn’t, my husband, you know.’ Anyhow, the marriage was annulled.”