A Severed Wasp

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Felix. I’m sorry.”

  “That makes two of us she’s hurt, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it? Yes—but I’d almost forgotten. I’m sorry, Felix, it must have hurt you abominably.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I learned a lot. And I’ve told it from my point of view. I’m sure Sarah’s version would be different. ‘Poor Felix, he just wasn’t cut out for the marriage bed. I tried to help him, but it was a losing battle—’”

  She winced at the pain in his voice. “Oh, Felix—”

  “It’s all right. I do believe that all things work together for good to them that love God. I wouldn’t have discovered that I had a vocation to the priesthood if I hadn’t had to learn to accept myself just as I am, without one plea, and to know that I do not have to earn God’s love. Sarah once said that people became priests only if they couldn’t do anything else. But you can give that two readings. I discovered that because I was called to be a priest I couldn’t, in fact, do or be anything else—although that wasn’t till long after the debacle with Sarah. And although I may not have been cut out to be a husband, I am a good friend.”

  “I’m glad. And Mimi says you were a good bishop, too.”

  “Does she! How amazing! But I am still useful.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I found Llew for Dave. I went off to do some preaching in the boondocks and heard Llew and then brought him East for Dave to hear. Dave is as much musician as priest, and he recognizes quality when he hears it. But I sometimes wonder—would Llew’s wife still be alive if they’d stayed in Idaho?”

  “You can’t hindsight, Felix. I learned that the hard way.”

  “You’re right. And I do bring good musicians to the Cathedral—such as you.”

  When she had hung up, she turned from this new and deeper Felix to the cherry music cabinet, to planning what she would play for his concert, surprised at her eagerness as she leafed through piles of music.—I’m like a race horse, she thought.—They’ll have to shoot me to stop me.

  And then,—But I can still run the race. I’m still good.

  Fleetingly she wondered if the benefit would be covered by the papers, and then assumed that of course it would. She was far from forgotten. None of the notices in the past few years had even hinted at any diminishment of her powers. She knew that she did not look her age. Her hair had been white since she was thirty. Justin, and then Nanette and Jean Paul, had seen to it that she used enough face lotions and creams so that her skin was scarcely wrinkled. They had not allowed her to sit overlong in the sun, ski overlong in the cold. She missed Nanette and wished momentarily that she had been able to afford to bring her to New York. But while Justin and Jean Paul had invested her money wisely, and she lacked for nothing essential, regularly increasing inflation meant that when she stopped giving concerts she stopped affording Nanette.

  She had asked Mimi about a massage parlor and had been nonplussed at the doctor’s spontaneous shout of laughter as she informed Katherine of the current meaning of the words. “Most of the people I know who give massages are specially trained physiotherapists, and you don’t need that. I’ll ask around. Sooner or later I’ll know somebody who knows somebody.”

  Tant pis. Never mind. Massages were a luxury, and she did not want to be a spoiled old woman.

  3

  It was mid-June before Katherine brought herself to invite Felix down for tea to discuss the benefit. As she set off for the patisserie, she met the young woman from the garden apartment and they exchanged greetings.

  “I live downstairs,” the young woman said shyly, looking down at her sandaled feet.

  “I know, and isn’t it amazing that this is the first time we’ve bumped into each other?”

  “That’s New York,” the young woman said, “and our hours just haven’t happened to coincide. I’ve seen you a couple of times, but I haven’t wanted to bother you.”

  “As your landlord, I should know your name,” Katherine said, “but I’ve forgotten.” A competent man at the bank took care of the rents and all the other business of owning a house in the city.

  “Dorcas. Dorcas Gibson.” She looked up, and Katherine noticed that her eyes were shadowed, as though she had not slept well. When she smiled, however, the shadows diminished. “I love to hear you practice. There’s one place in our living room where I can hear you quite well, and I often sit there—I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. But practicing is often one phrase repeated and repeated. I should think it would be intolerable to listen to.”

  “Oh, no, I’m used to repeating and repeating. I’m a dancer, or was, till—”

  Katherine saw that the floating dress concealed a swollen abdomen.

  “And will be again, after the baby’s born.”

  “Oh, yes. Did it stop you? I mean, you did have children, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. It didn’t stop me for very long. But one can play the piano for quite a while after one has to stop dancing. Enjoy your baby. I enjoyed mine, but I didn’t take as much time for that enjoyment as I should have.”

  “Oh—thank you, Madame!”

  Katherine waved at her and walked off. The child was adoring her and she did not like to be adored. Appreciated, yes. But adoration turns one into an idol, and when the one who idolizes discovers flesh and blood instead of marble perfection, there is apt to be trouble, if not disaster.

  A young girl recently married and large with her first child should have no need to idolize. Were the shadows under the eyes entirely the result of pregnancy?

  At Dorcas’s age Katherine herself had not outgrown hero-worship—the kindest way of putting it. After adolescence, hero-worship becomes blindness; idols offer nothing but disillusionment, as she had found out to her cost. Idolatry and love are incompatible.

  Felix had offered to come to Katherine in order to spare her the trip uptown. Nevertheless, he was cutting into piano time. Her one brief experience with the Bösendorfer and the Cathedral acoustics had suggested nothing romantic or lush, no Scriabin or Fauré. She was going to risk ending with the Hammerklavier Sonata, but before Beethoven she would play Couperin, Scarlatti, Bach. The organ was an instrument that could afford to send wave after wave of sound lapping the length of the nave. From her short time in St. Ansgar’s chapel, she had decided that the Bösendorfer and her own style would collaborate best with music of clarity and precision.

  Felix arrived promptly at four. He had continued to keep his promise not to bother her. There had been no further unexpected ringing of the phone at one o’clock in the morning. But the night before, she had dreamed of him, dreamed that Emily had been in his apartment and had asked him tenderly, “Hast du Angst?”

  He was dressed, this afternoon, in a lightweight grey suit and clerical collar. He wore a panama hat, which he doffed as she opened the door, and he carried his cane.

  Katherine had the tea cart in readiness, and water on the boil. She, who had not cooked for herself in years, found pleasure in puttering about her small but well-planned kitchen. She had kept the tea simple; cucumber sandwiches and pastries. She vaguely remembered that Felix had a sweet tooth.

  He ate hungrily. “I skipped lunch so that I could enjoy tea. I adore cucumber sandwiches. Um—Rigo cakes?”

  “Yes.” She passed the plate to him.

  “Now, my dear, you know this concert is going to involve a certain amount of publicity.”

  “Oh, Felix, I had hoped—”

  “Katya, you’ll do no good raising money for us if you keep your light under a bushel.”

  She should, of course, have recognized that. But publicity had always been Justin’s and Jean Paul’s business, and so she had been free to concentrate on music. She sighed. “You do whatever is necessary.”

  “Doing publicity is not my thing. I get the artists. Yolande Undercroft has been working on the rest. There’s a bright young thing from the Times who’s coming to interview you. She’ll call to set up a date.” He fumbled for h
is glasses and consulted a piece of paper. “Her name’s Jarwater, if I read Yolande’s handwriting correctly. I think she may be West Indian. Anyhow, I’ve read her stuff and she knows music and she has a sense for people. When she calls, you’re not likely to forget the name Jarwater—or is it Farwater? All right? I told Yolande no late TV or radio talk shows. The young tend to forget that we need our rest. And our minds are not at their brightest at the end of the day. Do you remember, during the war, the Germans used to send for Pétain in the late afternoon when they knew his old brain would be fuddled? Dirty pool. Anyhow, I reminded Yolande that we are not her age.”

  Katherine thought that Yolande was at least pushing half a century and was probably several years older than her husband. Still, young enough to be able occasionally to burn the candle at both ends.

  Impulsively she asked Felix, “You’re very fond of Bishop Undercroft, aren’t you?”

  “I love him,” Felix said simply. “One advantage of celibacy is that one does tend to acquire children one way and another, and I’ve known Allie since he was little more than a child. And then, of course, one tends to worry about one’s children.”

  “What worries you about Bishop Undercroft?” she asked gently.

  “Allie’s not had an easy life. Orphaned early—I’m as close to a father as he’s had. And right now—well, he’s worried about Yolande. I am, too. Sometimes she looks at me with eyes so full of—oh, I’m not sure—pain, fear, anxiety—that I want to put my arms around her and say, ‘There, there.’”

  “What do you think is wrong?” Mrs. Undercroft’s eyes had seemed to Katherine, too, to be those of someone in pain.

  The old bishop shook his head. “Yolande has never been a simple personality.” He knew more than he was saying, Katherine felt. “She loves Allie, that’s the main thing. They have a deep and happy marriage. And she’s generous with other people. Every afternoon a gaggle of little girls comes over to Ogilvie House to tea, and she gives some of them singing lessons. Not Tory. Tory gets tea, but she has a voice like the frog in the fairy tales.” He sighed.

  Katherine handed Felix the plate of sandwiches. She said, “If Allie’s like your son, he may be trying to spare you.”

  “Do yours?”

  “Of course.”

  He laughed, then. “How stupid we all are. I wonder if there’s ever been a civilization where people weren’t caught up in these conventional games? At least, circumstances have seen to it that you and I have never needed to spare each other. So let’s not begin now. Here I am, worrying in front of you like a dog with a bone.” He reached for the cake plate. “Katya, I am so grateful to you, for being my wise counselor, as well as for giving me the concert. One of the most difficult things about reaching our advanced age is that we have so few contemporaries. I feel out of context with the rest of the world. Memories which formed and shaped me have no relevance for people even twenty years younger.”

  “Such as?” She probed him gently, feeling an unexpected tenderness toward him. She guessed that Mimi was right and that he had indeed been a good bishop.

  “The war. Ours. The Second World War.”

  “Yes.” She refilled their cups. “It changed our lives irrevocably. What did you do, Felix?”

  “I was in graves registration. When I was called before the draft board I was sure they’d reject me. After my marriage broke up, I fell apart. I decided there was no such thing as faithful love, and I picked up partners in the shabbiest sorts of gay bars, in a kind of frantic and stupid rebellion. There is no love, no friendship, nothing beyond jerking off with someone in the john at the back of the bar.” He stopped abruptly. “I’ve offended you. My language—oh, God, Katya, I’m sorry, I’ve shocked you.”

  “It’s all right, Felix.” She knew that her expression had betrayed her. “Really.”

  He said, “I’m telling too much, as usual. But—oh, God, I can’t accept myself unless I know that you know the absolute worst of me, and still don’t—don’t—”

  “I don’t,” she replied firmly. “Go on, Felix, dear.”

  “I hated myself. I hated the world. I didn’t give a damn about the war. Forgive me, please, Katya—but the medieval scholastics believed that you could not love someone you didn’t know—really know, all the bad as well as the good. And I want you to love me.”

  She reached across the tea cart and touched his hand, but said nothing. There was much about herself that she would never tell Felix, or anybody else, but she would not stop him from revealing himself, if that was his need. She asked, “What about the war?”

  “I got called up, like everybody else, and I found that I could not do what a lot of people were doing—getting turned down by deliberately announcing their unacceptable sex preferences. We’ve changed a lot in that area, haven’t we? Anyhow, I didn’t want to get out of the war that way, I’m not sure why. I felt so inadequate as a human being, I was sure they’d give me a 4-F card. But they didn’t. I went overseas with graves registration. I still, after all these years, wake up screaming, rushing through the apartment crashing into furniture. I don’t think the nightmares will ever leave me completely.”

  “When you called at one in the morning, the first night we’d had dinner, was that what was wrong?” She was concerned with his almost physical distress.

  “Of course.” He jumped at her suggestion so quickly that she knew it was not true. He continued, “When I’ve been asked to talk about my war experiences to groups—Rotary, and so forth—I’ve managed to give them things they could listen to. They couldn’t have stood what really happened. Katherine—we had to go out and find bodies, so they could be registered and identified and families notified. We—we came across aviators who’d fallen with their parachutes into trees and hung all stretched out and elongated over a branch like pieces of spaghetti. You can’t forget something like that. It’s printed indelibly on the retina.”

  “Felix, dear—”

  “I sometimes wonder if they did it deliberately, put someone like me in a job like that, spending the war identifying and piecing together the remains of bodies that had once been human beings. One time, three of us sat in front of a heap of bones that was all that was left of six aviators, and we had to try to sort out the bones so that each man could be buried. The bones didn’t sort out evenly, and the only way we could cope was to get drunk, good and drunk, and just play games, chanting ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,’ to the bones. We had a chaplain who used to give us his liquor ration so that we could get drunk on decent whiskey instead of rotgut. I’d always thought of religion as being irrelevant, having nothing to do with real life. I don’t even remember his name, but perhaps he was the beginning of my conversion.” He laughed. “Funny, I never made the connection till this minute.”

  Silently Katherine refilled his cup, adding a small lump of sugar and a thin wheel of lemon.

  “Once I took a helmet off a corpse, and the man’s whole scalp and face came off with it, just slipped off the bones. Another time I was going over a dead soldier looking for identification. I took off one jacket, then another. Then I took my knife and tried to cut off what looked like another jacket. It was the man’s skin.” He covered his eyes with his thin hands, dropped them to his lap. “So I dream. And I scream. And—” He straightened up abruptly, as though waking. “And then I do unpardonable things like calling you in the middle of the night.” The tone of his voice had changed completely. Again she did not believe him—not the horrors he had just been recounting; they were real enough—but that they had been the reason for his call. He smiled at her, a forced smile of courtesy. Then, “Why didn’t I wipe God out once and for all? There’s nothing abominable I didn’t see and hear. But war was so horrible that it was—oh, what the jargon would call a ‘conversion experience.’ Maybe it was because God had to be there, he had to come to us because we’d have gone raving mad otherwise. When things go well we don’t cry out for God as we did then, in anguish, in rage. I was closer to my God in my abysmal
nakedness of soul than I was when I was consecrated bishop. We get complacent and self-satisfied. Alas. But when you’re in the middle of hell you don’t have that choice.” He gulped down his tea. “Do we have to know hell before we’re fit for a vision of God?” He stood up, then sat down, looking around as though he did not know where he was. “Katya, I can talk to you because you’ve gone through hell, too. I can—I can tell you the worst about myself and you will not reject me.” His voice trembled. “Will you?”

  “No.” She would not reject him, but what did she have to offer him, to ease the pain that was still there after all these years?

  He told her. “Play for me.”

  4

  When she had finished, he sighed in a relaxed way. “Ah. St. Johann.”

  “Saint?”

  “Oh, I have my own saints. St. Johann Sebastian. St. Albert.”

  “Which Albert?”

  “Einstein. Sts. Ralph and Henry.”

  She raised her eyebrows in question. He was out of the pain of the past now.

  “Emerson and Thoreau. How surprised they would be to be canonized, even by me. I might add St. Ludwig—you know him—and St. Will.”

  “Shakespeare?”

  He nodded, back to himself again, old, frail, but no longer anguished. “Re those interviews—I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, my dear. And I will be eternally grateful to you for this. The Cathedral is—well, one cannot canonize a building, but it represents for me all that makes life something to be rejoiced in, despite all the desperation, which isn’t as quiet as it used to be. I don’t think you can know quite how much your willingness to play a benefit means to me. Katherine, if there’s ever anything I can do for you …”