Pomegranate Soup

by Marsha Mehran

  A N OPPRESSIVE MELANCHOLY set in that lasted the rest of the afternoon.

  The Donnelly twins helped Marjan lift Estelle from her fainted slouch and carried her to the back of the green hippie van. Father Mahoney, who had stopped by for a lamb and cucumber sandwich to go, climbed in next to Estelle’s limp body and held her soft hands, praying hard as the van careened toward Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar. Soon, the rest of the diners also abandoned the café, scattering as if driven away by bad weather, leaving their half-eaten baklavas and sweet syrup drinks behind in a congealed mess.

  Bahar locked the café door and set about gathering the rose petals from underneath Estelle’s table. She would be the first to admit that the old widow’s collapse had shaken her to the core. It had reminded Bahar that not everything was as secure as Marjan would have them believe. Any accident could uproot them again, send whatever success this café had been experiencing into distant memory. What would all their regulars think now? Probably that their food was indigestible, unhealthy, cooked in a kitchen rampant with rats and other diseases. That perhaps it was something Estelle ate that made her fall into a deathlike trance.

  Marjan and Layla may have been too busy with their own fantasies to notice, Bahar told herself, but she wasn’t blind to the stares thrown her way whenever she stepped out of the café doors. How could she ignore the obvious cuts of silence, the breaks in street conversations whenever she walked by a cluster of townspeople? Why, it had happened in the butcher’s just the other day, as she was paying for the café’s weekly order of lamb and ground meat for shish kabobs. Three crotchety gossips, standing near the Galtee back bacon rashers display, had scanned her up and down with their myopic eyes when they thought she had her back turned. She should have returned their disapproving looks with a piercing stare of her own, thought Bahar. Put those old bags in their place. But all she had done was keep her head bowed as she hurried out of the shop, glad to have escaped the old women’s merciless scrutiny.

  Well, what else could she have expected from such a small-time town? And now who knew when all their regulars would feel comfortable enough to come back, or if they would at all. Bahar sighed as she swept a pile of food crumbs into a dustpan.

  Really, as long as they were able to survive, to plod along in this sleepy town, she didn’t care much about its size, its prejudices. So long as no one in the outside world, beyond the craggy boundaries of the western village, knew that they were there. That was all that mattered.

  ESTELLE DELMONICO AWOKE in her hospital bed, rehydrated and cool after the heatstroke and heartache that had caused her to faint. At least that was the doctor’s explanation for the old lady’s extraordinary coloring and bubbled breathing when Marjan and Father Mahoney admitted her to Mayo General. An hour later, after she had been thoroughly replenished with nutrients from a much-needed IV tube, the Italian woman shared the real reason behind her fainting spell.

  “Please! Heatstroke! There is no heat outside for a stroke!” She paused for a moment, her eyes traveling to the hospital room window and its view of green and brown hills that rolled under gray, fast-moving clouds. “I tell you the truth. Today my Luigi and I, we are married fifty years. I was just not feeling happy, you understand?”

  She stopped there, all of a sudden aware of Father Mahoney’s presence, of Marjan’s concerned nods, and reddened again. In all her forty-five years in Ballinacroagh, and especially since her husband’s death five years ago, Estelle had never shown her vulnerability, her raw need for company, to any of its townspeople. Not even in her weekly confessionals to Father Mahoney, where she would expound on the loving yet distant relationship she had with her niece, Gloria, would Estelle mention her isolation, her longing to connect to life-forms besides the achingly beautiful rosebush outside her little cottage. And now, on the day when as a young bride she had expected to receive the golden platitudes of loving grandchildren gathered at her knees, she had taken one look at the table of involved, comforted committee women, all in the bosoms of elderly friendships, then looked at the vacancy of her own table, and released the last hold on her privacy— only to find herself fainting, of all things.

  Luckily, Father Mahoney rescued the pained silence with his own mark of humility and comedic grace. “Sure, Estelle, we’ll be needing your fine expertise for play rehearsals. A modern Bacchae of sorts—all that lovemaking and wine drinking—it’s all Greek to me. It’ll be up your alley, now, I’d say.”

  It had made Marjan blush to hear the word lovemaking from the old priest’s smiling lips, but Estelle Delmonico just giggled out loud. Father Mahoney’s generosity had broken the ice, giving the once lonely widow an invitation to the camaraderie and community she had longed for for four decades.

  “WHERE IS SHE, MARJAN? It’s nearly six o’clock! What if something happened to her on the way home?” Bahar looked like an asylum escapee, pacing up and down the empty café aisles as she wrung her hands. Five hours had passed since Layla left to check the audition results, an excursion that, in Bahar’s opinion, should have taken her an hour at the most to complete.

  “I already told you, Bahar. I called Fiona. She saw her last outside the school offices, with Malachy. They both got the lead roles in the play. She’s probably out celebrating with her friends,” Marjan replied quietly, trying to sound calm.

  “Malachy! Who is this Malachy, really? Yes, I know he’s polite and smart, but do we know anything about his family, about what kind of people his parents are? What if they’re crazy murderers?”

  “Bahar. Please.” Marjan shook her head. Her sister could be so dramatic sometimes. Any moment now she might crumple up in a ball of hysterical tears, right there in the middle of the café floor. At least she had stopped cleaning. Marjan had known something had gone awry as soon as she arrived home from the hospital. She found Bahar inside the kitchen with a copper scrubber and a bottle of bleach in hand, deep in a frenzied cleaning match with the oven door. Bahar resorted to such crazed cleaning only when she was too upset to complain; she would scour the floors and countertops until she had spent most of her nervous energy.

  “Okay, fine, maybe not murderers, but we still don’t know much about Malachy, and she’s out with him every day. She should be helping me wait tables instead of doing God knows what with that Irish boy. And you, Marjan—you’re not helping!” Bahar pointed her finger at her sister accusingly.

  “Me! What did I do?”

  “Letting her go off without a curfew. It’s almost ten past six now!”

  “All right,” Marjan acquiesced, not wanting to argue. “I’ll check the school. She’s probably still there. Just stay calm, okay?”

  Marjan hopped into the van and gunned anxiously out of the alleyway for the second time that day, working hard to silence the murky, fearful thoughts that rumbled through her mind. She might have acted composed with Bahar, but she too was extremely concerned. Layla had been gone for nearly five hours now, without so much as a phone call to let them know where she was. Of course, Marjan reasoned, Ballinacroagh was by no means the most dangerous town they’d ever lived in; Layla could be testing out her adolescent boundaries in far worse places. But still, one could never be completely sure.

  Saint Joseph’s Secondary sat on a low hill about a quarter mile from the high end of Main Mall, so Marjan pulled into its gravelly driveway within minutes of leaving the café. She felt her level of panic rise abruptly as her eyes scanned the school’s empty, rain-drenched front lawn. The main building’s front doors were stopped open, but its towering, Gothic windows were dark. The only sound she could hear was the clangor of Saint Barnabas’s rusty church bell tolling in the distance. It was Saturday after all, Marjan reminded herself, trying to regain her composure. She parked the van outside the front doors and hurried into the building’s shadowy corridors.

  Heavy wooden classroom doors lined either side of the hall, contrasting with walls painted in pistachio green. Every ten yards or so, muted light fixtures attached to dividing arch
ways cast eerie pools on the speckled moss tiles beneath her feet. The offices must be along this way, she told herself as she rushed down a long passageway. Layla might still be in there with Malachy and her friends, clustered around the audition notice, too excited to see the night falling quickly outside. Marjan was rounding a hallway corner when she bumped into the dark veils.

  They came upon her so swiftly that she shrieked in horror. She grabbed a nearby trophy case for support, her knees suddenly buckling under her.

  The veils, habits to be precise, belonged to two elderly nuns. Sisters Agatha and Bea were on their way back to the convent, having just finished a meeting of the Popular Canticle Club held in the school’s new gymnasium.

  Marjan recovered from her shock and found her voice.

  “Ah, excuse me. Is the school closed?”

  Sister Agatha, a woman who had renounced a life of Jazz-era partying for Christ, smiled at her kindly.

  “You’re the girl who’s taken over Estelle Delmonico’s place, aren’t you?” She poked Sister Bea with her elbow. “This is the one Father Mahoney was telling us about! Father Mahoney!” She yelled into the shorter nun’s ear. “She’s hard of hearing, Sister Bea is,” Sister Agatha explained.

  Sister Bea looked confused and stared at Marjan with vague, opaque eyes.

  “Oh. Yes. I’m actually looking for my younger sister. Layla Aminpour? She’s in third year?” Marjan’s heart slowed down its frantic beating.

  “Well, I can’t say I know any of the students nowadays. Sister Bea and I haven’t taught for quite a few years, you see.” Sister Agatha leaned into Sister Bea’s right ear. “Not taught here for a long time! Have we, Sister?”

  Sister Agatha’s croaky voice finally registered with the deaf nun. Sister Bea smiled broadly and nodded, showing her pearly dentures.

  “You won’t have much luck today, I’m afraid, it being Saturday and all. Though it’s a great thing Sister Bea and I finally have the chance to meet you. I was wondering now, can you tell me where to find some of that lovely saffron stuff Father Mahoney has been telling us about?”

  Because of the priest’s many praises, both nuns were well aware of Marjan’s potent abgusht. Even the half-deaf Sister Bea had heard about the stew’s divine ingredients, the recipe reverberating against the convent walls long after their last prayers were whispered. After answering the two nuns’ string of cooking questions as best she could, Marjan quickly retreated to the van. With her heart still hammering, she climbed into the driver’s seat and jammed the key into the ignition but stopped before she turned it. A strange clamminess had chilled her skin, causing her teeth to chatter uncontrollably. As comic as the nuns were, those navy habits were just too close to the choking chador for her liking. Had she not been in peaceful Ballinacroagh, Marjan would surely have taken them as a sign of impending doom.

  A STROKE OF AMBER, the last sigh of a darkening horizon, guided Bahar on her own search for her errant sister as she hastened up Main Mall. She had never been this far up the street on foot before. Her shopping errands kept her in close proximity to the café; the butcher’s and the mini-mart were only a couple of minutes away from the Babylon’s front door. Nevertheless, Bahar had decided to brave the unknown, sure that she would go mad if she waited in the café any longer. If Layla was out with friends (and Bahar hoped to God she was), she might be slurping milk shakes in the burger and chip place on Main Mall, or perhaps trying her luck with a more illicit brew in one of the town’s three pubs. Bahar was determined to find her, wherever she was. And when she did, she was going to give that sister of hers a mighty earful.

  Layla wasn’t in the Blue Thunder burger joint, nor was she in Paddy McGuire’s Pub next door. Thankfully, Bahar surmised this without having to step foot in either place; both establishments had large, street-front windows from which patrons could be seen downing pints and scoffing greasy curry chips. Perhaps she should try asking some of the shopkeepers along the Mall if they had seen a dark-haired girl with too much time on her hands, thought Bahar. She stopped abruptly in front of the first store that looked open, Corcoran’s Bake Shop. As good a place as any to start inquiring, Bahar decided, nodding silently to herself. Pushing through its yellow door, she stepped innocently inside, entirely unprepared for the chilly reception she was about to receive from Assumpta Corcoran.

  A lot had changed in the Corcoran household since Layla had crossed paths with Benny Corcoran and his bread-filled wheelbarrow, nearly seven weeks ago to the day. Layla’s youthful promise had thrown the reluctant baker into a kaleidoscope of regrets, prompting him to examine his choices in life.

  Benny’s loveless marriage and his particularly close friendship with Mr. Jack Daniel had turned his once athletic body into a pitiful lump of fat and freckles, the glorious head of red hair he had as a young man reduced now to a handful of unruly strands. Once inspired, though, Benny threw himself into a full exercise regime worthy of the harshest boot camps. He installed a pull-up bar over the bake shop’s back door, from which he pumped up and down at three in the morning, and began to experiment with comb-overs and hair volumizers, purchased from Athey’s Shear Delight (but only after swearing Fiona Athey to secrecy). Benny even dug out his wide-lapeled leather jacket from the bake shop’s cobwebbed attic, along with the Gaelic football trophies he had won as a teenager, awards he had forgotten in all these years of kneading the unsavory rolls of both his profession and the body of his cold wife, Assumpta.

  Though named in honor of the ascension of the Virgin Mary, Assumpta Corcoran considered her own soul eternally damned. Her weekly church confessions were filled with the guilt of bodily functions, of her husband’s carnal demands, and of the wifely responsibilities that she could never live up (or down) to. After each confession, Assumpta would rush home to cleanse herself with a scalding bath and a harsh loofah, hoping to scrub away her own confused soul in the process. When Assumpta noticed that Benny’s gut was no longer straining against the last hole of his belt buckle, and that his florid complexion had toned down to a pleasantly muted pink, she knew that all her praying had come to nothing—her husband had finally given in to his dirty ways and taken a mistress, just as so many in town believed he had for years. Frigid as she was, Assumpta had always assumed that the sanctity of her marriage was safe despite the gossip. But a new Benny who refused his drink and pored over diet cookbooks was by no means playing by the rules. Benny Corcoran was changing, and it wasn’t for her benefit, that was for sure. But who was the floozy who had caught her husband’s degenerate eye? The pieces of the puzzle did not fall into place for Assumpta until that very moment, when a flushed and worried-looking Bahar stepped timidly into the bake shop.

  “Hi, I’m Bahar Aminpour. My sisters and I own the café down the street.”

  Assumpta’s eyes narrowed. She had passed by the new lunch place several times since it had opened its doors, hoping to catch a sight of the foreigners who were running it. But other than the young girl with the black hair who walked past the bakery on her way to school, Assumpta had never spotted any of the darkie women Dervla Quigley yammered on about. Now she could see that the old gossip’s suspicions were well-founded. The brown-skinned woman in front of her was the embodiment of John’s warning in Revelation: the Harlot of Babylon had just made herself known. God be with them all.

  “What can I do for you?” Assumpta’s voice was icy.

  “I’m looking for my younger sister, Layla. She’s fifteen, long dark hair, about this tall?” Bahar’s hand measured a half foot above her own head before dropping listlessly to her side.

  “No. Haven’t seen anybody like that around here,” Assumpta replied, making the word that sound almost filthy.

  “Oh—thanks anyway.” Bahar turned sheepishly to leave, feeling another terrible headache coming along.

  Just then, Benny huffed and puffed into the shop from the back kitchen. He had finished an agonizing lap around the town center and was sporting velour head- and wristbands that were soaked i
n his middle-aged sweat. The baker immediately recognized Bahar as one of the three angels from the café, whom he had spotted on his daily bread runs up and down Main Mall.

  “Why, hello there. How can I be of service to you today?”

  Benny’s eyes glazed over, clear confirmation for Assumpta that she was staring at her husband’s mistress.

  “It’s all right. Sorry to bother you.” Bahar nodded a shy good-bye and quickly slipped out of the bakery. Overcome by a sudden exhaustion, she pressed her right hand to her thumping temple and continued rather wobbly up the street.

  Benny watched her walk off, then turned to his wife. He was taken aback by the look of smug satisfaction spread across Assumpta’s normally disappointed face.

  “What did ye say to her now, to have her running out the door like a wild banshee?”

  “Don’t you go telling me what’s right or wrong, Benny Corcoran. I know what your jogging and vegetarian diets are all about. Put me to shame, you have! The whole town’s talkin’! And don’t think I’m going to stick around to see you gallivanting with some foreign hussy!”

  Assumpta was close to tears as she grabbed her coat and ran to the door.

  “Assumpta!” Benny yelped. “Where are ye going?”

  “To Mass! To pray for our souls, dirty thing! And you better be at the pub when I get back!”

  MARJAN’S LIME GREEN van idled in the school parking lot, her thoughts floating across the gloomy windshield before her. The nuns’ dark habits had resurrected unexpected ghosts, memories she had hoped would lie dead and buried. Maybe some spirits are just not meant for the afterlife, she told herself, their season of haunting lasting forever.