by Jane Langton
They all heard the sound of a key in the front door. “Oh, Gawd,” said Tom. Harry threw a blanket over the case of beer.
But it was only another resident, Dora O’Doyle. “Hello, Harry,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”
Oates grinned at her. “Go right upstairs, dear. I’ll be right up.”
“Jesus,” said Dick, “the boss ain’t going to like that either.”
The house on Kansas Street was a shelter for homeless people. Actually it was more than a shelter, it was a permanent home for seven chosen lodgers under the ultimate control of the Shelter Resource Unit of the Housing Division of the Massachusetts Public Welfare Department, a tax-supported institution on Tremont Street.
There were many ribs in the vast umbrella of the Commonwealth’s concern with social welfare. Another was the Department of Social Services, in which Marilynne Barker held sway.
This afternoon she was once again holding the fort.
The phone call was from a certain Fortescue Biggs, who claimed to be an employee in another agency, the Office for Children, Region Six. “We’ve had a complaint about a foster family,” he said, “from a neighbor who witnessed the beating of a child.”
“Oh? What foster family was that?”
“That’s just it. The person hung up without giving the relevant information. All we know is the name of the child—”
“Don’t tell me, I know. It’s Charley Hall.”
“That’s right, that’s the name.” Fortescue Biggs’s voice faltered. “I—uh—how did you know?”
Mrs. Barker sighed and told him he was an imposter. “I’m going to call Region Six right now and tell them you’re making false inquiries in their name.”
“Oh, fuck you,” said Fortescue Biggs, and hung up.
CHAPTER 34
Everywhere I am hedged about with thorns.
Martin Luther
When the phone rang in Martin Kraeger’s study, Harold Oates lay sprawled on the Victorian sofa. He was snoring. Martin looked at him enviously as he picked up the receiver. Oates lived by instinct, like an animal.
“Is this the Reverend Kraeger?” The voice was strident and harsh. “This is Mrs. Drathmore. I’m calling from the office of Dr. Slot.”
“Dr. Slot?”
“Dental surgery. Dr. Slot has a patient who has referred his payments to you. Oates, his name is, Harold Oates.”
“Harold Oates? Oh, yes, Mrs. Drathmore. I know Mr. Oates. It’s true, I understand he needs a number of dental crowns.”
Oates snuffled and turned over on the sofa. The voice on the phone was hostile, as though Mrs. Drathmore suspected Martin of planning to default on his bills. “And you will be personally responsible for his dental work? It will be extremely costly, I’m afraid. We must have partial payment in advance before Dr. Slot can begin the first post and crown.”
Kraeger closed his eyes, remembering gloomily that Alan Starr had asked if the church would pay to have Oates’s teeth fixed. It was part of Alan’s campaign to rehabilitate the man. And Martin had said, Why not?
Since that day last month, Harold Oates had become a frequent visitor in Martin Kraeger’s office. In fact he had attached himself to Martin with sullen affection. Martin’s privacy was severely invaded, but he had begun to interest himself in the restoration of the man to his former status as a distinguished musician. Clearly it would require more than dental surgery, but the gaps in Oates’s yellow teeth were a good place to start. “Oh, well, all right, Mrs. Drathmore. I’ll have to get it from the church treasurer. You’ll have it in a few weeks.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kraeger.” The voice was cold. “I’m afraid we must have it at once before we can begin work on Mr. Oates. He has no health insurance, I believe.”
We have to hurry, Alan had said, we have to fix him up before the concert. Those dental crowns, they make a wax impression and turn it into gold and finish it in porcelain, and it takes a while.
And the concert was only two weeks away. “Oh, I see,” Kraeger told Mrs. Drathmore. “The trouble is, you see, as the minister of this church, I don’t sign checks. None of my staff signs checks. Only the accountant at the direction of the treasurer. I’ll get hold of the treasurer right away, Mrs. Drathmore.”
“Nine hundred and fifty dollars, Mr. Kraeger.”
“Nine hundred and fifty dollars!”
“Made out to Roderick Slot, 726 Hereford Street.” The line went dead.
Kraeger put down the phone and stared at Oates, who was sitting up on the sofa sleepily, rubbing his frowzy hair, yawning, showing all the ghastly spaces between his teeth. “Excuse me,” said Oates, getting up. “Got to take a leak.”
Kraeger put his head in his hands, imagining the dismay of treasurer Kenneth Possett at a request for nearly a thousand dollars for some organist’s dental work. And of course Ken wouldn’t okay a check of that size by himself. He’d submit it to the church council, because it would be a policy decision. It could take a month or two. Which would mean that Oates would appear before the congregation, bowing and smiling after his concert, showing his ghastly grin, hideous with holes.
Maybe Martin could speed things up with a personal appeal. He called the office in the State House where Ken was some kind of lofty servant of the Commonwealth.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Kraeger,” said a soft voice on the phone. “Mr. Possett is in Europe attending an international conference. He won’t be back till next month.”
“In Europe!” Martin said goodbye and put down the phone and reached for his own personal checkbook. But he had used the last check. He rummaged in his desk. In one of his drawers there was a Church of the Commonwealth checkbook. He found it at last on top of a file cabinet under a heap of orders of service left over from the Christmas season. Taking it to his desk, he uncapped his pen. The phone rang.
“Reverend Kraeger?” This time the voice was silky. “This is Dr. Slot’s office again. We wish to make a correction in the billing procedure. Mrs. Drathmore is new. She was unaware of our new policy. It is being handled out-of-office. Would you please make out the check, to Dora O’Doyle, and send it to 79 Kansas Street? Thank you, Reverend.”
Oates had returned. He grinned at Kraeger and lay down once again on the sofa.
“Well, all right.” Kraeger felt like a damn fool. Swiftly he wrote the check to Dora O’Doyle, addressed an envelope to Kansas Street, and took it out to Loretta, who was sitting at her desk, yawning and typing languidly with two fingers.
“Loretta, could you mail this for me? It’s got to go out right away.”
Loretta’s eyebrows shot up. “You want I should go out in the snow?”
“Well, no, of course not. I’ll just run over to the mailbox myself.”
Actually it felt good to be outdoors. Martin ran all the way to the mailbox on the corner of Exeter Street. The snowstorm was only a flurry, but it outlined the architectural features of the rows of houses. Every molding, every knobbed gable and projecting cornice was defined in white. The slanting lengths of sandstone railings made a pattern of white diagonals. In the narrow park the trees held white tracings along their lifted twigs. Snow lay on the bronze mackinaw and visored cap of Samuel Eliot Morison as he sat on his rock, gazing in the direction of the Public Garden.
Back in the church the freshness vanished. Kraeger was enveloped at once in the warm rush of air from the two furnaces in the basement, surrounding him with a fragrance of floor wax and candles, of copy machine ink and potato salad, of Brasso and hymnbooks and the indefinable perfume of billions of particles suspended in the air from the congregations of the past, from broadcloth trousers, boned bodices, dragging hems, from feathered hats and fringed shawls—the dust of the ages perpetually sifting down.
There was intellectual dust as well, drifting into the nose of the mind, pressing upon Martin as he pushed open the door to the church offices. How was he to minister to his wildly mixed congregation? Some people wanted Bible study, some were eager for holistic self-a
wareness. It was a perpetual jumble. The mind’s nose and the body’s nose sniffed all of it in at once, so that the problem about self-awareness had the distinct aroma of furniture polish, of pews thrice coated with white shellac, of a pulpit well dressed in lemon oil.
From the sanctuary came the bleating of the organ, bah and again bah. It was still being voiced. Martin ran up the stairs. He was late with his weekly piece for the parish bulletin. He had to finish it in a hurry so that the printer could run it off for the retired men who did the collating on Thursday morning.
His study was empty. Harold Oates was gone. The crushed cushion of the sofa retained the imprint of his body, but the man had taken himself elsewhere.
Kraeger was relieved. He took Alan’s word for it that Oates was a genius, a great master of the pipe organ, but there was no denying he was also something of a pain. His chummy familiarity meant a constant interference with Martin’s daily schedule, it meant listening to obscene stories without end.
Oates had paid him the compliment of saying that he wasn’t like other preachers. “You don’t usually make me puke. I come to hear the organ, and then I’m stuck with your sermons, but Christ, sometimes I think you’re a closet atheist. Congratulations.”
“Not an atheist, no, that’s wrong.” And then Martin found himself explaining the precise nature of his imprecise faith. It was a battle of wits. Oates jeered and sank his javelins. Martin plucked them out and hurled them back. The man was a clever advocate of the devil, chief counsel in the bowels of hell.
But there was a fascination about him, a dazzle, a repellent sort of brilliance. And Oates needed a patron. Martin was determined to back him up with the all the good offices of the Church of the Commonwealth.
CHAPTER 35
A fiery shield is God’s Word … this shield fears nothing, neither hell nor the devil.
Martin Luther
In the central office of the Department of Social Services on Causeway Street, Alan faced Mrs. Barker across her desk. He was not getting much of her attention.
“Oh, God,” she said into the phone, tipping back in her chair, “we’ll send somebody over right away.” She put the phone down and explained. “Mother on crack, she OD’d, she’s on her way to the emergency room, her kid’s been abandoned, the neighbors are outraged.” Mrs. Barker lifted up her voice in a shout to someone outside. A woman assistant looked in, got the message, disappeared.
Mrs. Barker looked at Alan. Her eyes were tired. He guessed it was a terminal tiredness, inflicted by the hopeless misery of the world in which she moved, a place of drug-addicted teenagers, babies with AIDS, women with black eyes and bruised bodies, desperate mothers who beat their children, suicidal mothers in apartments with backed-up toilets and trash-filled yards, homeless mothers with toddlers tagging after them in the cold. “What do you want?” said Mrs. Barker.
“I just wanted to say it wasn’t Debbie Buffington’s fault that you found me in her closet.”
Mrs. Barker emitted a short laugh. “Debbie Bufflington, oh, right, the girl with that strangely popular child in foster care.”
“Popular? What do you mean, popular?”
Mrs. Barker’s protective instincts rose up around her like a cloud. She looked at Alan and narrowed her eyes. The boy seemed sensible, and he certainly seemed dotty about the baby, but why? An unattached young man taking a shine to a stranger’s child? Was there something a little sick about it? “Nothing,” she said shrewdly. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” The phone rang, and she was once again waist-deep in someone else’s sorrow. When she hung up and turned back to Alan, she had lost her train of thought.
“Debbie Buffington and Charley Hall,” Alan reminded her.
“Oh, right. The trouble is, as a foster mother the girl was marginal in the first place. And we’ve just learned she abandoned a child of her own a few years back in Amherst. Fortunately the child was adopted by somebody else, but Debbie certainly isn’t your ideal earth mother. I’m going to bring it up at our next staff meeting.”
“But she’s trying, she really is. And she needs the money. If she weren’t a foster mother she’d be on welfare. And I’m helping with the baby a couple of times a week. You can depend on the two of us to provide good care for Charley.”
Mrs. Barker slapped the desk, having made up her mind. “Tell you what, I’ll look into it again myself. Now, if you don’t mind?” She picked up the phone to make another call, having lost interest in Alan Starr.
He left, and went back to Debbie’s apartment on Bowdoin Street. He found her reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette, while Charley dozed in the playpen and Wanda watched television, sucking her thumb.
“Hey, listen,” said Alan, “we’ve got to clean this place up. Mrs. Barker, the social worker, I think she’s going to come again. You know, without warning. Where’s your vacuum cleaner?”
“Oh, Christ.” Debbie flicked ashes into her coffee cup, “All I’ve got is an electric broom.”
They got to work. Charley woke up and looked at Alan eagerly. “Doggie,” he chirruped. “Doggie, doggie.”
“He wants me to take him to see the ducks,” said Alan. “Not now, Charley boy, later. Here, Wanda, you want to help? You can dust. See? Here’s how you dust.”
Debbie ran out of the house with a load of laundry, while Alan took charge of the electric broom. Then he rolled the TV set into a corner and sorted the toys, putting the educational ones front and center. By the time Debbie came back the apartment didn’t look so bad. Alan bundled up Charley and folded the stroller under his arm. “Try to keep the place picked up,” he said. “I’m positive she’ll be here soon.”
The next day, sure enough, Mrs. Barker fulfilled his prophecy. Alan found a message from Debbie on his telephone. Her voice sounded almost cheerful. “Like, hey! Call me!”
When he got back from an organ-tuning job in Allston, he called at once. “She came? Mrs. Barker came?”
“Right, and it was great. Like I was feeding Charley this hard-boiled egg, like you showed me, and Wanda was drawing with the crayons you bought, and it was only two o’clock, so the TV was off, and everything was, you know, nice and clean. And it’s okay. She’s not going to take him away.”
“Hey, wow, good for you.”
“Yeah, well, thanks.” She sounded almost human.
CHAPTER 36
I offer no excuse. Let who will blame me. Perhaps I still owe God and the world another folly.
Martin Luther
“Adiscrepancy in the books?” Martin Kraeger looked at his church treasurer in surprise.
“Nine hundred and fifty dollars,” said Ken Possett.
“That’s a lot. How could a thousand dollars go astray?”
“The fact is, it was your doing.”
“My doing?”
“The check. It wasn’t itemized anywhere, it wasn’t authorized, but there it was among the cancelled checks returned to us with our statement by the Boston Five Cent Savings Bank, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check signed by you.”
“Me? But I never sign church checks. Oh, wait a minute, yes, I did. I remember now.”
“Who is Dora O’Doyle?”
Martin heaved a sigh, and explained about Dr. Slot and Oates’s teeth. The story sounded fishy, even to himself.
Ken’s voice was quiet. “The check was not made out to Dr. Slot. Martin, I thought we agreed you were not to sign checks.”
“Well, the trouble was, I couldn’t reach you, I remember that.” Kraeger looked at Ken Possett with bravado, feeling trapped. “I do have the authority to sign church checks.”
Ken looked grave, and went away, and Martin tried to gather his wits. But almost at once Loretta Fawcett came into his office without knocking, leading his daughter Pansy by the hand.
Pansy looked doubtful, as always. She had become a wary little girl, living as she did in an uncertain world, subject as she was to the nervous unreliability of her sphincter muscles.
“Mrs. Kraeger had t
o go shopping,” said Loretta, “so she dropped her off. She said Pansy has to be home at four o’clock sharp for her ballet lesson.”
“Her ballet lesson?” Kraeger laughed, and gave Pansy a hug. He picked her up and whirled her around in a circle, then set her down. Pansy’s solemn little face opened up in a wide grin. It was a gap-toothed grin. Two of her baby teeth were missing. She looked like a childish version of Harold Oates.
He plopped her on the sofa and sat down beside her and read her Babar the Elephant and a Tom and Jerry comic book. Then he tried to work on a sermon while Pansy played with the copy machine, copying her mittens, a pair of scissors, her father’s necktie, and a sandwich from her lunchbox.
At three-thirty it was time to go. “Come on, Pansy, dear. Mama wants you home at four o’clock.”
“Kay,” said Pansy, correcting him. “Mama wants me to call her Kay.”
“Oh, fiddle.” Kraeger buttoned Pansy into her coat and carried her piggyback down the stairs, ducking hugely under doorways, to Pansy’s delight.
His ex-wife was waiting for them on the sidewalk outside the big house in Brookline, the one he had once known so intimately. He knew how to tease hot water out of the shower, he knew the corner of the kitchen where he had replaced the rotten floorboards, he was familiar with the willow tree that dropped branches into the gutter.
“Hi, Mama,” said Pansy, jumping out of the car.
“Kay,” said her mother. “I told you to call me Kay.”
“Okay, Kay.” Pansy giggled.
Kraeger laughed. “That’s a nice joke, Pansy.”
“It is not a nice joke,” snapped Kay. “You are never to say that again, Pansy.”
“Well, okay, Mama.” Pansy giggled again. Kraeger was pleased to observe a show of spunk in his little daughter. Driving away, he remembered what Martin Luther had said about marriage: If I should ever marry again, I would hew myself an obedient wife out of stone; otherwise in desperation I obey all women.
But Katharina von Bora had been a stalwart companion to Martin Luther, as well as a strong and independent woman. Kay Kraeger was merely—Martin said it to himself at last—a fool, and a dangerous one at that. She was bizarre and unpredictable, winding herself in crazy spirals like those bugs that whiz in wildly eccentric circles in the air.