by Robert Stone
“Frank,” she said to the priest, “we have some children.”
He gave her silence in return.
“Hello, Frank,” she said again. “Did you hear me, Father? I said we have some children.”
“Yes,” said Hooke, in what Mary was coming to think of as his affected tone, “I certainly heard you the first time. Tonight is … difficult.”
“Yes, it surely is,” Mary said. “Difficult and then some. When will you expect us?”
“I’ve been meaning,” Hooke said, “to talk about this before now.”
He had quoted Dame Julian to her. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Those were lines he liked.
“Have you?” she inquired politely. “I see. We can talk after the interment.”
“You know, Mary,” Father Hooke said with a nervous laugh, “the bishop, that pillar of intellect, our spiritual prince, has been hearing things that trouble him.”
Mary Urquhart blushed to hear the priest’s lie.
“The bishop,” she told him, “is not a problem in any way. You are.”
“Me?” He laughed then, genuinely and bitterly. “I’m a problem? Oh, sorry. There are also a few laws…”
“What time, Father? Camille works for a living. So do I.”
“The thing is,” Father Hooke said, “you ought not to come tonight.”
“Oh, Frank,” Mary said. “Really, really. Don’t be a little boy on me. Take up your cross, guy.”
“I suppose,” Hooke said, “I can’t persuade you to pass on this one?”
“Shame on you, Frank Hooke,” she said.
The drive to the clean outer suburbs led through subdivisions and parklands, then to thick woods among which colonial houses stood, comfortably lighted against the winter night. Finally there were a few farms, or estates laid out to resemble working farms. The woods were full of frozen lakes and ponds.
The Buick wagon Mary drove was almost fifteen years old, the same one she had owned in the suburbs of Boston as a youngish mother driving all the motherly routes, taking Charles Junior to soccer practice and Payton to girls’ softball and little Emily to play school.
The fetuses were secured with blind cord in the back of the station wagon, between the tarp and the curtain in which Camille had wrapped them. It was a cargo that did not shift or rattle and they had not tried to put a crucifix on top. More and more, the dark countryside they rode through resembled the town where she had lived with Charles and her children.
“Could you say the poem?” Camille asked. When they went on an interment Camille liked to hear Mary recite poetry for her as they drove. Mary preferred poetry to memorized prayer, and the verse was always new to Camille. It made her cry, and crying herself out on the way to an interment, Mary had observed, best prepared Camille for the work at hand.
“But which poem, Camille?”
Sometimes Mary recited Crashaw’s “To the Infant Martyrs,” or from his hymn to Saint Teresa. Sometimes she recited Vaughan or Blake.
“The one with the star,” Camille said. “The one with the lake.”
“Oh,” Mary said cheerfully. “Funny, I was thinking about it earlier.”
Once, she could not imagine how, Mary had recited Blake’s “To the Evening Star” for Camille. It carried such a weight of pain for her that she dreaded its every line and trembled when it came to her unsummoned:
Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
It had almost killed her to recite it the first time, because that had been her and Charles’s secret poem, their prayer for the protection that was not forthcoming. The taste of it in her mouth was of rage unto madness and the lash of grief and above all of whiskey to drown it all, whiskey to die in and be with them. That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.
Camille wept at the sound of the words. Mary found herself unable to go on for a moment.
“There’s more,” Camille said.
“Yes,” said Mary. She drew upon her role as story lady.
Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.
Camille sobbed. “Oh Mary,” she said. “Yours weren’t protected.”
“Well, stars…” Mary Urquhart said, still cheerfully. “Thin influence. Thin ice.”
The parlor lights were lighted in the rectory of Our Lady of Fatima when they pulled off the genteel main street of the foothill town and into the church parking lot. Mary parked the station wagon close to the rectory door, and the two women got out and rang Father Hooke’s bell.
Hooke came to the door in a navy cardigan, navy-blue shirt and chinos. Camille murmured and fairly curtsied in deference. Mary looked the priest up and down. His casual getup seemed like recalcitrance, an unreadiness to officiate. Had he been working himself up to deny them?
“Hello, Frank,” said Mary. “Sorry to come so late.”
Hooke was alone in the rectory. There was no assistant and he did his own housekeeping, resident rectory biddies being a thing of the past.
“Can I give you coffee?” Father Hooke asked.
“I’ve had mine,” Mary said.
He had a slack, uneasy smile. “Mary,” the priest said. “And Miss … won’t you sit down?”
He had forgotten Camille’s name. He was a snob, she thought, a suburban snob. The ethnic, Mariolatrous name of his parish, Our Lady of Fatima, embarrassed him.
“Father,” she said, “why don’t we just do it?”
He stared at her helplessly. Ashamed for him, she avoided his eye.
“I think,” he said, dry-throated, “we should consider from now on.”
“Isn’t it strange?” she asked Camille. “I had an odd feeling we might have a problem here tonight.” She turned on Hooke. “What do you mean? Consider what?”
“All right, all right,” he said. A surrender in the pursuit of least resistance. “Where is it?”
“They,” Mary said.
“The babies,” said Camille. “The poor babies are in Mary’s car outside.”
But he hung back. “Oh, Mary,” said Father Hooke. He seemed childishly afraid.
She burned with rage. Was there such a thing as an adult Catholic? And the race of priests, she thought, these self-indulgent, boneless men.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “What can be the matter now? Afraid of how they’re going to look?”
“Increasingly…” Father Hooke said, “I feel we’re doing something wrong.”
“Really?” Mary asked. “Is that a fact?” They stood on the edge of the nice red Bolivian rectory carpet, in the posture of setting out for the station wagon. Yet not setting out. There was Haitian art on the wall. No lace curtains here. “What a shame,” she said, “we haven’t time for an evening of theological discourse.”
“We may have to make time,” Father Hooke said. “Sit down, girls.”
Camille looked to Mary for reassurance and sat with absurd decorousness on the edge of a bare-boned Spanish chair. Mary stood where she was. The priest glanced at her in dread. Having giving them an order, he seemed afraid to take a seat himself.
“It isn’t just the interments,” he told Mary. He ignored Camille. “It’s the whole thing. Our whole position.” He shuddered and began to pace up and down on the rug, his hands working nervously.
“Our position,” Mary repeated tonelessly. “Do you mean your position? Are you referring to the Church’s teaching?”
“Yes,” he said. He
looked around as though for help, but as was the case so often with such things, it was not available. “I mean I think we may be wrong.”
She let the words reverberate in the rectory’s quiet. Then she asked, “Prodded by conscience, are you, Father?”
“I think we’re wrong on this,” he said with sudden force. “I think women have a right. I do. Sometimes I’m ashamed to wear my collar.”
She laughed her pleasant, cultivated laughter. “Ashamed to wear your collar? Poor Frank. Afraid people will think badly of you?”
He summoned anger. “Kindly spare me the ad hominem,” he said.
“But Frank,” she said, it seemed lightly, “there is only ad hominem.”
“I’m afraid I’m not theologian enough,” he said, “to follow you there.”
“Oh,” said Mary, “I’m sorry, Father. What I mean in my crude way is that what is expected of you is expected personally. Expected directly. Of you, Frank.”
He sulked. A childish resentful silence. Then he said, “I can’t believe God wants us to persecute these young women the way you people do. I mean you particularly, Mary, with your so-called counseling.”
He meant the lectures she gave the unwed mothers who were referred to her by pamphlet. Mary had attended anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrations with pride. The abortion clinic demonstrations she undertook as an offered humiliation, standing among the transparent cranks and crazies as a penance and a curb to pride. But surprisingly, when she was done with them in private, over coffee and cake, many pregnant women brought their pregnancies to term.
She watched Father Hooke. He was without gravitas, she thought. The hands, the ineffectual sputter.
“For God’s sake,” he went on, “look at the neighborhood where you work! Do you really think the world requires a few million more black, alienated, unwanted children?”
She leaned against one of his antique chests and folded her arms. She was tall and elegant, as much an athlete and a beauty at fifty as she had ever been. Camille sat open-mouthed.
“How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It’s respectability you’re after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you’re afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That’s man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That’s God’s image, don’t you know that? That’s what you’re scared of.”
He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.
“Your grief…” he began. A weakling, she thought, trying for the upper hand. Trying to appear concerned. In a moment he had lost his nerve. “It’s made you cruel … Maybe not cruel, but…”
Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief. Maybe I’m drunk again tonight, eh Father? Who knows?”
Thirteen years before on the lake outside Boston, on the second evening before Christmas, her husband had taken the children skating. First young Charley had wanted to go and Charles had demurred; he’d had a few drinks. Then he had agreed in his shaggy, teasing, slow-spoken way—he was rangy, wry, a Carolina Scot like Mary. It was almost Christmas and the kids were excited and how long would it stay cold enough to skate? Then Payton had demanded to go, and then finally little Emily, because Charles had taught them to snap the whip on ice the day before. And the lake, surrounded by woods, was well lighted and children always skated into the night although there was one end, as it turned out, where the light failed, a lonely bay bordered with dark blue German pine where even then maybe some junkie had come out from Roxbury or Southie or Lowell or God knew where and destroyed the light for the metal around it. And Emily still had her cold and should not have gone.
But they went and Mary waited late, and sometimes, listening to music, having a Wild Turkey, she thought she heard voices sounding strange. She could remember them perfectly now, and the point where she began to doubt, so faintly, that the cries were in fun.
The police said he had clung to the ice for hours, keeping himself alive and the children clinging to him, and many people had heard the calling out but taken it lightly.
She was there when the thing they had been was raised, a blue cluster wrapped in happy seasonal colors, woolly reindeer hats and scarves and mittens, all grasping and limbs intertwined, and it looked, she thought, like a rat king, the tangle of rats trapped together in their own naked tails and flushed from an abandoned hull to float drowned, a raft of solid rat on the swells of the lower Cape Fear River. The dead snarls on their faces, the wild eyes, a paradigm she had seen once as a child she saw again in the model of her family. And near Walden Pond, no less, the west wind slept on the lake, eyes glimmered in the silver dusk, a dusk at morning. She had lost all her pretty ones.
“Because,” she said to Father Hooke, “it would appear to me that you are a man—and I know men, I was married to a man—who is a little boy, a little boy-man. A tiny boy-man, afraid to touch the cross or look in God’s direction.”
He stared at her and swallowed. She smiled as though to reassure him.
“What you should do, Father is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. Your mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity you are.”
“You are a cruel bitch,” Hooke said, pale-faced. “You’re a sick and crazy woman.”
Camille in her chair began to gasp. Mary bent to attend her.
“Camille? Do you have your inhaler?”
Camille had it. Mary helped her adjust it and waited until her friend’s breathing was under control. When she stood up, she saw that Father Hooke was in a bad way.
“You dare,” Mary said to him, “you wretched tiny man, to speak of black unwanted children? Why, there is not a suffering black child—God bless them all—not a black child in this unhappy foolish country that I would not exalt and nourish on your goddamn watery blood. I would not risk the security of the most doomed, lost, deformed black child for your very life, you worthless pussy!”
Father Hooke had become truly upset. My Lord, she thought, now I’ve done it. Now I’ll see the creature cry. She looked away.
“You were my only friend,” Father Hooke told her when he managed to speak again. “Did you know that?”
She sighed. “I’m sorry, Father. I suppose I have my ignorant cracker side and God help me I am sick and I am crazy and cruel. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Pray for me.”
Hooke would not be consoled. Kind-hearted Camille, holding her inhaler, took a step toward him as though she might help him somehow go on breathing.
“Get out,” he said to them. “Get out before I call the police.”
“You have to try to forgive me, Charles.” Had she called him Charles? How very strange. Poor old Charles would turn in his grave. “Frank, I mean. You have to try and forgive me, Frank. Ask God to forgive me. I’ll ask God to forgive you. We all need it, don’t we, Father.”
“The police!” he cried, his voice rising. “Because those things, those goddamn things in your car! Don’t you understand? People accuse us of violence!” he shouted. “And you are violence!” Then he more or less dissolved.
She went and put a hand on his shoulder as Camille watched in amazement.
“God forgive us, Frank.” But he leaned on the back of his leather easy chair and turned from her, weeping. “Oh Frank, you lamb,” she said, “what did your poor mama tell you? Did she say that a world with God was easier than one without him?”
She gave Father Hooke a last friendly pat and turned to Camille. “Because that would be mistaken, wouldn’t it, Camille?”
“Oh, you’re right,” Camille hastened to say. The tearful priest had moved her too. But still she was dry-eyed, staring, Alexandrian. “You’re so right, Mary.”
When they were on the road again it was plain Camille Innaurato was exhau
sted.
“So, Mary,” she asked. “So where’re we going now, honey?”
“Well,” Mary said, “as it happens, I have another fella up my sleeve.” She laughed. “Yes, another of these worthies Holy Mother Church provides for our direction. Another selfless man of the cloth.”
“I’ll miss Mass tomorrow.”
“This is Mass,” Mary said.
“Right. OK.”
This is Mass, she thought, this is the sacrifice nor are we out of it. She reached over and gave Camille a friendly touch.
“You don’t work tomorrow, do you, love?”
“Naw, I don’t,” Camille said. “I don’t, but…”
“I can take you home. I can get this done myself.”
“No,” said Camille, a little cranky with fatigue. “No way.”
“Well, we’ll get these children blessed, dear.”
The man Mary had up her sleeve was a priest from Central Europe called Monsignor Danilo. It was after ten when Mary telephoned him from a service station, but he hurriedly agreed to do what she required. He was smooth and obsequious and seemed always ready to accommodate her.
His parish, St. Macarius, was in an old port town on Newark Bay, and to get there they had to retrace their drive through the country and then travel south past several exits of the Garden State.
It took them nearly an hour, even with the sparse traffic. The church and its rectory were in a waterfront neighborhood of refineries and wooden tenements little better than the ones around Temple Street. The monsignor had arranged to meet them in the church.
The interior was an Irish-Jansenist nightmare of tarnished marble, white-steepled tabernacles and cream columns. Under a different patron, it had served the Irish dockers of a hundred years before. Its dimensions were too mean and narrow to support the mass of decoration, and Father Danilo’s bunch had piled the space with their icons, vaguely Byzantine Slavic saints and Desert Fathers and celebrity saints in their Slavic aspect.
Candles were flickering as the two women entered. The place smelled of wax, stale wine and the incense of past ceremony. Mary carried the babies under their purple cloth.