Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘Not so loud.’

  ‘Second one you’ve broken.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Let’s have some more blood of the lamb, Brother Eustace.’

  ‘Let’s go pay Sister Anselm a call.’

  ‘One more drink.’

  ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in anything like that. He’s got a lot of friends now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for his friends. My friends are bigger than anybody’s friends.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn. I don’t give … I don’t give a whatever, not about anything.’

  ‘It might be true.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘I’m not saying it is, but you just tell me how you can explain it.’

  ‘It’s a rip-off, of course.’

  ‘What kind of a rip-off can do that?’

  ‘What I think is, we shouldn’t take it for granted.’

  ‘Take what for granted? What are you talking about now?’

  ‘Anything, anything. You should never take nothing for granted. Eyesight, now – a wonderful thing, a marvel. It can be lost in a second. That’s true, you know. I have a brother-in-law; but never mind. What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t count on it. Course, in the end we lose everything: sight, hearing, so on.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t get so gloomy. You’re spoiling the fun. How could we lose everything?’

  ‘Getting old.’

  ‘That isn’t so bad. I know a lot of pretty old people. Well, not a lot. Some.’

  ‘And then we die.’

  A different voice said, ‘But we live again in Christ.’

  ‘Well,’ the first man answered, ‘it’s a nice thought.’

  Anselm felt dizzy. He made his way to his room, lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He thought he’d like to pray lying down, since it was so uncomfortable getting on to his knees and having to bend forward.

  He put his hands together. ‘Holy Mary,’ he began, and stopped. He couldn’t think of anything more to say.

  Surely, he thought, William would understand. If he remained the way he was, a woman, they could stay together as a family. And if he changed back, they could split up, or even keep on going like that, too.

  He didn’t join the others for supper. Dominic brought him a bowl of soup, some bread and butter and an apple.

  ‘Aren’t you feeling well, Anselm?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. I’m all right. Just tired.’

  ‘You take care of yourself. We’ve all got bets riding on you.’

  ‘What’s the verdict?’

  ‘Oh, everybody thinks it’s going to be a boy. If it’s a girl, about three people are going to clean up. They’d be millionaires. Everybody else would be out in the cold. You want a boy too, of course, don’t you?’

  ‘Naturally. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.’ He drank his soup and felt better. Brother Ignatius and Brother Sebastian in the kitchen were working overtime now, making sure that nothing sat too heavily on his stomach.

  He started to feel still better late in the night when he thought about the birth. He was afraid of the pain but he was certain that the event was going to be of such cataclysmic importance and excitement that the pain would have to become secondary. And it would all be worth it, anyway. Now that he could feel the baby pushing and bumping, he was beginning to know it. It kept him company. He talked to it. He told it stories – things he made up, as well as the more traditional fairytales he remembered from his own childhood.

  Once upon a time, he said to himself, there were three bears: a mamma bear, a pappa bear and a baby bear. There was a king who had three daughters, a woodcutter with three sons. Once upon a time there were three little pigs and they all lived in the forest, where there was a big, bad wolf. Everything went in threes and everything was told as if it had happened only that week, or it could just as easily have been centuries ago. Once upon a time, he thought, there was the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

  *

  ‘Brother Adrian’, Francis said, ‘is in trouble. I think he’s going out of his mind, Frederick.’

  ‘No more than usual. And he’s always got emotional troubles. You know Adrian – that’s the way he is. He runs on it: it’s like a fuel. Francis, I want to ask you to help me with something.’

  ‘I don’t know how much good advice I’ve got left for today.’

  ‘I don’t need advice. What I’m going to need is your vote. I want to get William transferred.’

  ‘That would be hard on Anselm, just as his time is drawing so near.’

  ‘Francis, they’re planning to get married.’

  ‘Not yet. I think they’re going to wait till after the birth. To find out if Anselm reverts.’

  ‘Judas Priest, there’s no end to the ramifications. This whole thing has degenerated into a farce. It’s preposterous.’

  ‘It’s a mystery, Frederick. That’s what it was from the beginning, and that’s never changed. The rest is what we make out of it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We interpret and we explain. But the central fact is the only truth, and it’s inexplicable.’

  ‘It was a sign and I failed to act on it. I didn’t even see it till the business about William. Francis, I’ve missed the boat – I should have gone to a higher authority right at the beginning, and I didn’t. Now it’s too late. I didn’t recognize this as the great trial of my life – of all our lives. No, I don’t believe it’s a miracle, damn it. But I do believe it’s here to test us. And I’ve been found wanting.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘In my own eyes, first of all. But what are the others going to say?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have acted any differently.’

  ‘Who knows? You never know these things till they happen. You say to yourself, “If. If.” But that’s no guide. Brother William has got to go.’

  ‘If we sent Brother Adrian away instead –’

  ‘He’s only an outside irritation. Brother William is about to become intimately involved.’

  ‘Do you dislike Anselm?’

  ‘Of course not. I resent the confusion he’s caused, that’s all. He causes it, I have to deal with it. If you can’t help me with William, it’s Anselm who’ll have to go. Either way, they’ve got to be kept apart.’

  ‘I just don’t see why.’

  Frederick settled himself deeply into his chair. There were three ways he could appeal to Francis’s fears, hopes and sense of right. He prepared to use them all in the order of their power to tempt and persuade. He said, ‘Very well. We’ll go through it again till you do.’

  *

  ‘That’s right,’ Brother James told Anselm. ‘He wasn’t at supper and he wasn’t at breakfast. They drove him away in the early evening.’

  Elmo and Dominic corroborated the story. Elmo said he’d heard from Brother Anthony that the car had left from the kitchen entrance. Brother Ignatius had seen it.

  Anselm held tightly to the crumpled paper he’d been handed by Marcus when he’d come to do his hair that morning. The note was from William, who said that he was being moved to another place, that he would remain true and never forget him, that Anselm and the baby would be in his thoughts and prayers, and that William loved him.

  ‘It was Adrian,’ Elmo declared.

  Anselm said, ‘It was Frederick.’

  ‘Brother Adrian’s been bucking all month to get at least one of us out. But don’t worry. You’ve still got friends.’

  ‘Adrian wouldn’t have the authority. Somebody had to take the responsibility for this. The only one it could have been is the man at the top.’

  ‘It’s incredible how everything always ends up political,’ Dominic said.

  ‘It’s because the structure is political,’ Elmo told him. ‘Anything extra you put in it is going to assume that shape.’

  ‘He won’t see me,’ Anselm said. I’ve asked for an appointment and he won’t give me one. I can only talk to Francis.’

 
; ‘Are you coming to eat?’ James asked.

  ‘I’m banned. I’m lucky I haven’t been confined to my room.’

  ‘We’ll do something about it,’ James said. ‘This is beyond the limit.’

  Anselm nodded feebly. He held the letter to his heart and turned his head away.

  *

  When he woke, Brother Sebastian was bringing in a cup of soup and some crackers. ‘They’re having a big fight,’ he whispered. As soon as he’d put down the tray, he started to hop with impatience, gesturing towards the door. ‘Brother Eustace and Adrian against the others. When I left, they were all screaming like monkeys. I’ll be back later, Anselm. I want to see what happens.’

  Anselm waved his hand graciously. He started on the soup and flipped through a new magazine that had arrived in the morning mail. On the cover was a picture of a really darling baby, just the kind he wanted.

  *

  In the dining-room no single voice could be heard above the total uproar. All the brothers were yelling and pelting each other with food. A few of them were throwing bowls and bottles, too. Francis was socked hard in the side of the head while trying to make peace between one man holding a broken glass and another one brandishing a knife. He lost his hearing for a moment and had to sit down. He put his hands over his ears and let the tumult rage around him. Frederick, who had played right half-back at the seminary, fought his way to the door. He punched and jabbed a great many brothers on his way out and left the room feeling satisfied and invigorated.

  *

  Anselm read through the letters to the editor in his magazine. He liked finding out about how new mothers felt and what problems they had to contend with.

  The first letter was from a woman who wanted to know how she could overcome her fear that friends who came to the house were going to pass on their microbes and bacteria to her baby. The editor advised her to relax and stop worrying. Anselm thought she had a point: these things were, after all, invisible. The second writer asked why sanitary towels weren’t state-subsidized, as she was finding them increasingly expensive and it wasn’t her fault that she had to have them – all women of child-bearing age needed them; they couldn’t help it. The editor said that as a matter of fact, in poorer countries where people weren’t so well-nourished, the women didn’t wear any special clothing against menstruation and only ever saw a couple of drops of blood in a month; so, if you were healthy enough to menstruate heavily, that probably meant you were rich enough to afford the kotex and tampax.

  The third, and last, letter was from a woman who claimed that according to her experience, unmarried mothers in the hospital she’d been in were treated with a coldness, hostility and neglect that could be dangerous for the child and certainly contributed to the mother’s sense of loneliness and inferiority. Many of the nurses, she said, came from strongly religious backgrounds, and she thought it was a shame that people who were supposed to believe in peace and love-thy-neighbour should be so unfeeling, snobbish and narrow-minded.

  Of course, Anselm thought, it would be true. No matter what the woman herself thought, the doctors and nurses would regard the pregnancy as an unfortunate, unplanned and unwanted accident, maybe even thinking they would be doing the mother a favour to let the child die.

  He slapped the pages of the magazine together and threw it aside. He had always imagined that women enjoyed a special kind of freedom because nothing was ever going to be expected of them, but now he saw that they were just as trapped as men. He had to find a husband, and as soon as possible. It didn’t matter now whether it was someone he was genuinely fond of, like William, or a man he didn’t care about at all. Anybody would do, and for the baby’s sake any deception would be justified. He shouldn’t have second thoughts about explaining anything, or mentioning possible future transformations. Whatever the nurses were like in the hospital Duncan had chosen, he was certain their prejudices would be the same as those of other nurses. And even before he got that far, there was his life in the monastery to consider. Brother Adrian had forced Frederick to remove William: there was no telling what might happen next.

  Well, he thought, he was going to have to start being like other people – to set things up and make them come true, to hustle and manipulate. He’d have to try to get rid of his enemies. If he were alone, he wouldn’t care; but for the baby’s sake, he had to.

  Frederick could hurt him officially. But Adrian was more dangerous: violent and unpredictable. And he made Frederick nervous enough to feel compelled to act.

  Anselm got up and went for a walk through the cloisters. He heard a commotion coming from the dining-room. The monks sounded like howling spectators at a football game. He kept going, down corridors and across courtyards.

  He came to his favourite tree. It was a different shape because it was in leaf now. It seemed also to look older. First it was in bud, then all blossom, then covered in leaves, then came the fruit. And next year, all over again; like the stages of a woman’s life.

  Soon after lunch Brother Adrian went berserk and had to be taken away in a straitjacket. Before the jacket, they had used a rope.

  Anselm had seen him rushing from the direction of the dining-room and coming towards him very fast, oblivious to everything around him until all at once he realized that Anselm was only a few yards away. He stopped dead, his pudgy, engorged face stiff with angers and grievances he’d been recalling.

  Anselm sauntered negligently towards him, smiling kindly. Brother Adrian didn’t know what to do. He looked wary, then embarrassed, and then almost afraid.

  Anselm came right up close, looking into Adrian’s face, and with one of his pretty, long-lashed dark eyes, winked.

  The reaction was beyond anything he’d have considered possible: Adrian shrieked obscenities and fell writhing to his knees. He tried to pull at Anselm’s robe, but Anselm swished decorously away. Adrian crawled after him, screaming that he was going to tear off the garment and show the stinking sin beneath; he scrabbled along the stone floor, he gibbered and finally laughed with fury. But Anselm walked ahead, whisking his skirts to the side in order to avoid the clawing hands. And when he came to the next turning, he scooted around the corner as fast as he could, and went back to his room.

  *

  ‘Did you provoke him, Anselm?’ Francis asked. They were standing outside Frederick’s office.

  Anselm looked tranquil and he was smiling. ‘Brother Adrian provokes himself,’ he answered. ‘That’s his misfortune. It appears to be an exaggerated sense of aggression against others, but actually the main conflict is within.’

  ‘He cracked completely.’

  ‘It may mean that when he comes out, he’ll have solved the original trouble.’

  ‘He might not ever come out of it.’

  Anselm would have liked to say: It was him or me. He asked, ‘Do you think he was a bad man?’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘We’re not sure what he is now. He’s just collapsed.’

  ‘Not bad, no.’

  ‘And me? Do you think I’m bad, or morally reprehensible, or something like that?’

  ‘Of course not. But I do think it’s bad that you haven’t been to confession or to Mass, or anything, in so long.’

  ‘I’ve told you: there’s no need. I’m in the care of a higher power.’

  ‘It’s been months.’

  ‘Since the Annunciation, yes.’

  ‘Was it a higher power that struck down Brother Adrian?’

  Anselm laughed. ‘I love these verbal tennis games,’ he said. ‘They’re just like theology. This is the way they decide how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and get the exact number, too. Disquisitions and inquisitions. Nobody’s interested in the truth. Look at me, Francis. This is the truth.’

  ‘Anselm, I think you’re going about things the wrong way.’

  ‘If you were in my place, would you be scared?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d be.’

  ‘You were always the understanding one.
You have a sense of humanity. But against Frederick’s ambitions and neuroses, you’re impotent.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like this.’

  ‘Francis, who was there to speak up for me against Adrian? I needed protection against him. Did you or Frederick give me that? No. You stand there and ask me if I provoked him.’

  Thudding and scraping sounds came from beyond the door. It sounded as if Frederick had begun to move the furniture.

  ‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ Anselm added. ‘I still like you, Francis. I just don’t like the situation.’

  The door opened suddenly. Frederick glared out at them. ‘All right, Anselm,’ he snapped. ‘Come on in.’

  ‘Should I –?’ Francis offered.

  ‘You go back to the chapel.’ Frederick held the door for Anselm and then swung it away fast so that it slammed. He hurled himself solidly into the best chair. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered.

  Anselm settled himself gingerly on the side of the sofa, with plenty of pillows behind him.

  ‘Anselm, you do realize we can’t keep you here?’

  ‘Oh? Isn’t the mother of God good enough for your order?’

  ‘It’s a question of morality.’

  ‘It always is.’

  ‘Men and women under the same roof. Besides, there’s no proof that there was divine intervention.’

  ‘You could say that every woman is the mother of God.’

  ‘You could. I wouldn’t. And in your case it isn’t even proven how far the womanhood extends.’

  ‘Was the divine aspect proven the first time? I thought they just took her word for it. She told her old husband and he believed it, or said he did.’

  ‘There’s a certain amount of reeling in the community that your story is put at a great disadvantage by the absence of, ah, a halo.’

  Anselm glanced up, looking at a reproduction of the madonna and child which hadn’t been on display the last time he’d been in the room, or at any other time he could remember. It was undoubtedly the cause of the noise he and Francis had heard from outside: it must have taken a long time to get it out from where it had been hidden. The heads of mother and child were each encircled by a band of light like the orbit of a moon around a planet.