Fida takes the basket back and walks inside, then sets it on the dresser across from the door. She lifts the cloth reverently and stares at the contents for several seconds without saying anything, then backs away and looks at the priest. “Will you bless it now?” she asks.
Father Stane clears his throat. “Yes.” He takes his place in front of the dresser, bows his head and begins to pray, and Fida relaxes a little as the familiar words coat the air with promises of holiness.
“On the night he was betrayed, he took bread and gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said, take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.” Father Stane holds up one of the loaves and breaks it into two. She smiles and nods when he glances at her, then says in a soft voice, “I’ll be right back. I have to get my crucifix. Don’t stop.”
She feels his gaze as she slips out of the room, but when she leaves the door open, his voice resumes and she hears more confidence in it. Excellent.
“When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said, take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”
He has spoken only a few words by the time Fida gets to the end of the hallway and Manuella’s door. She bends and sweeps aside the soiled clothing that has kept the living dead clustered there all day, then walks quickly back to Patrick’s room. She knows just where to step so the floor doesn’t creak—along the edges of the baseboards where the nails are strong and the old oak boards haven’t sagged in the middle. As she silently reaches out, pulls the door shut and bolts it, she hears another part of the mass in her head—the words that are always said in preparation of the altar and the gifts. They are out of order, but there is nothing more appropriate.
May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all . . .
It takes only about thirty seconds for her boarders, her family, to lurch down to Patrick’s room, where the final door that separates them from Father Stane is not locked. A few seconds later, the priest begins to scream.
Fida sits on the hallway floor and stares at the crucifix she took off the wall down by Manuella’s room, discouragement leaving yet another bitter taste in her mouth. She was wrong about Father Stane—his faith had not been strong enough, he hadn’t been truly sacred and believing in the body and soul of Christ. If he had, he would have been spared, and her loved ones would have eaten the blessed bread and wine, and they would have been cured.
She’ll just have to try again. There is another Catholic church, Saint Benedictine, about five miles away, and she can drive Father Stane’s car there next Sunday.
After mass she will ask one of the priests to come to her home and speak to her in confidence. These days, the priests are always out in the community, ministering and spreading the word of God for the good of all.
No one thinks twice when they don’t come back.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
(1938–)
Born in Lockport, New York, Joyce Carol Oates received a BA from Syracuse University and an MA from the University of Wisconsin. As an undergraduate, she won the renowned Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest. For many decades, she has successfully combined her profession as a famous writer of fiction and poetry with her position as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. She is a recipient of the M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Book Award, a Bram Stoker Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Among over three dozen collections of her stories are By the North Gate (1963), The Seduction and Other Stories (1975), Last Days: Stories (1984), Haunted:Tales of the Grotesque (1994), Demon and Other Tales (1996), The Female of the Species:Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2006), and Dear Husband: Stories (2009). Her novels include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Do with Me What You Will (1973), Bellefleur (1980), Nemesis (1990), Zombie (1995), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007), and A Fair Maiden (2010).
Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly
(1994)
In life she’d been a modest girl, a sensible and sane young woman whose father was a poor country parson across the moors in Glyngden. How painful then to conceive of herself in this astonishing new guise, an object of horror, still less an object of disgust. Physical disgust if you saw her. Spiritual disgust at the thought of her. Condemned to the eternal motions of washing the mud-muck of the Sea of Azof off her body, in particular the private parts of her marmoreal body, with fanatic fastidiousness picking iridescentshelled beetles out of her still-lustrous black hair with the stubborn curl her lover had called her “Scots curl” to flatter her—for the truth, too, can be flattery, uttered with design. And not only he, her lover, Master’s valet, but Master himself had flattered her, so craftily: “I would trust you, ah! with any responsibility!”
She, twenty-year-old Miss Jessel, interviewed by Master in Harley Street, wearing her single really good dark cotton-serge dress, how hot her face, how brimming with moisture her eyes, how stricken with shyness at the rush of love, its impact scarcely less palpable than a slap in the buttocks would have been. And, later, in the House of Bly, so stricken-shy of love, or love’s antics, Master’s valet Peter Quint burst into laughter (not rude exactly, indeed affectionate, but indeed laughter) at the cringing nakedness of her, the shivers that rippled across her skin, the lovely smoky-dark eyes downcast, blind in maidenly shame. Oh, ridiculous! Now Jessel, as she bluntly calls herself, has to bite her lips to keep from howling with laughter like a beast at such memories; has to stop herself short imagining the sharp tug of a chain fixed to a collar tight around her neck, for otherwise she might drop to all fours to scramble after prey (terrified mice, judging from the sound of their tiny squeals and scurrying feet) here in the catacombs.
The catacombs!—as, bemusedly, bitterly, they call this damp, chill, lightless place with its smell of ancient stone and sweetly-sour decay to which crossing over has brought them: in fact, unromantically, their place of refuge is a corner, an abandoned storage area, in the cellar of the great ugly House of Bly.
By night, of course, they are free to roam. If compulsion overcomes them (she, passionate Jessel, being more susceptible than he, the coolly appalled Quint), they venture forth in stealthy forays even during the day. But nights, ah! nights! lawless, extravagant! by wind-ravaged moonlight Quint pursues Jessel naked across the very front lawn of Bly, lewd laughter issuing from his throat, he, too, near-naked, crouched like an ape. Jessel is likely to be in a blood-trance when at last he catches her on the shore of the marshy pond, he has to pry her delicate-boned but devilishly strong jaws open to extricate a limp, bloody, still-quivering furry creature (a baby rabbit?—Jessel dreads to know) caught between her teeth.
Are the children watching, from the house? Are their small, pale, eager faces pressed to the glass? What do little Flora and little Miles see, that the accursed lovers themselves cannot see?
In interludes of sanity Jessel considers: how is it possible that, as a girl, in the dour old stone parsonage on the Scots border, she’d been incapable of eating bread dipped in suet, gravy was repugnant to her as a thinly disguised form of blood, she’d eaten only vegetables, fruits, and grains with what might be called a healthy appetite; yet, now, scarcely a year later, in the catacombs of the House of Bly, she experiences an ecstatic shudder at the crunch of delicate bones, nothing tastes so sweet to her as the warm, rich, still-pulsing blood, her soul cries Yes! yes! like this! only let it never end! in a swoon of realization that her infinite hunger might be, if not satisfied, held at bay.
In life, a good pious scared-giggly Christian girl, virgin to t
he tips of her toes.
In death, for why mince words?—a ghoul.
Because, in a fury of self-disgust and abnegation, she’d dared to take her own life, is that the reason for the curse?—or is it that in taking her own life, in that marshymucky pond the children call the Sea of Azof, she’d taken also the life of the ghostly being in her womb?
Quint’s seed, planted hot and deep. Searing flame at the conception and sorrow, pain, rage, defiance, soul-nausea to follow.
Yet there had seemed to Jessel no other way. An unwed mother, a despoiled virgin, a figure of ignominy, pity, shame—no other way.
Indeed, in that decent Christian world of which the great ugly House of Bly was the emblem, there was no other way.
Little Flora, seven years old at the time of her governess’s death, was wild with grief, and mourns her still. Her Miss Jessel!
And I love you too, dear Flora, Jessel wills her words to fly, in silence, into the child’s sleep—please forgive me that there was no other way.
Do children forgive?—of course, always.
Being children, and innocent.
Orphaned children, like little Flora, and little Miles, above all.
More strangely altered than Jessel, in a sense, by the rude shock of crossing over, is Master’s flamey-haired and -whiskered valet Peter Quint—“That hound!” as Mrs. Grose calls him still, with a shiver of her righteous jowls.
In the old, rough, careless days, the bachelor days of a dissolute and protracted youth, Quint had cared not a tuppence for conscience; tall, supple-muscled, handsome in a redhead’s luminous pale-skinned way, irresistible to weakly female eyes in certain purloined vests, tweeds, riding breeches and gleaming leather boots of Master’s, he’d had his way, indeed his myriad-wallowing ways, with half the household staff at Bly. (Even Mrs. Grose, some believed. Yes, even Mrs. Grose, who now hates him with a fury hardly mitigated by the man’s death.) It was rumored, or crudely boasted, that babes born to one or another of the married women belowstairs at Bly were in fact Quint’s bastards, whether accursed by tell-tale red hair, or not; yes, and in the Village as well, and scattered through the county.
Hadn’t Master, himself livened by drink, been in the habit of regaling Quint, one fellow to another, “Quint, my man, you must do my living for me, eh?”—all but nudging his valet in the ribs.
At which times the shrewd Quint, knowing how aristocrats may play at forgetting their station in life, as if to tempt another to forget, fatally, his own, maintained a servile propriety, commensurate with his erect posture and high-held head, saying, quietly, “Yes, sir. If you will explain how. I am at your command, sir.”
But Master had only laughed, a sound as of wet gravel being roughly shoveled.
And now, how unexpected, in a way how perverse: Quint finds himself considerably sobered by his change of fortune. His death, unlike poor Jessel’s, was not deliberate; yet, a drunken misstep, a fall down a rocky slope midway between The Black Ox (a pub in the Village of Bly) and the House of Bly in the eerie pre-dawn of a morning shortly after Jessel’s funeral, it was perhaps not accidental, either.
In the catacombs, where time, seemingly, has stopped, the fact of Quint’s death is frequently discussed. Jessel muses, “You need not have done it, you know. No one would have expected it of you,” and Quint says, with a shrug of irritation, “I don’t do what is expected of me, only what I expect of myself.”
“Then you do love me?”—the question, though reiterated often, is quaveringly posed.
“We are both accursed by love, it seems,” Quint says, in a flat, hollow tone, stroking his bearded chin (and how unevenly trimmed his beard, once the pride of his manly bearing), “—for each other, and, you know, damn them—little Flora, and little Miles.”
“Oh! don’t speak so harshly. They are all we have.”
“But we don’t, you know, precisely ‘have’ them. They are still—”
Quint hesitates, with a fastidious frown, “—they have not yet crossed over.”
Jessel’s luminous, mad eyes glare up at him, out of the sepulchral gloom. “Yes, as you say—not yet.”
Little Flora, and little Miles!—the living children, not of the lovers’ union, but of their desire.
Quint would not wish to name it thus, but his attachment to them, as to Jessel, is that of a man blessed (some might say, accursed) by his love of his family.
Jessel, passionate and reckless now, as, in life, she’d been stricken by shyness as by a scarlet rash of the skin (a “nerve” rash, which had indeed afflicted her occasionally), spoke openly—“Flora is my soul, and I will not give her up. No, nor dear little Miles, either!”
Since crossing over, since the deaths, and alarms, and funerals, and hushed conversations from which the children were banned, Flora and Miles have grieved inwardly; forbidden to so much as speak of the “depraved, degenerate sinners”—as all in the vicinity of Bly call the dead couple— they have had to contemplate Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, if at all, only at distances, and in their dreams.
The unhappy children, now eight and ten years old, were, years ago, tragically orphaned when their parents died of mysterious tropical diseases in India. Their uncle-guardian, Master of the House of Bly, resident of sumptuous bachelor’s digs in Harley Street, London, always professes to be very, very fond of his niece and nephew, indeed devoted to them—their well-being, their educations, their “moral, Christian selves”; even as, when he speaks of them, his red-veined eyes glaze over.
Tremulous twenty-year-old Miss Jessel with the staring eyes, interviewed by the Master of Bly in his Harley Street townhouse, clasped her fingers so tightly in her cotton-serge lap, the bony knuckles glared white. She, a poor parson’s daughter, educated at a governess’s school in Norfolk, had never in her life been in such a presence!—gentlemanly, yet manly; of the landed aristocracy in bearing, if not in actual lineage, yet capable, a bit teasingly, of plain talk. It is a measure of the young governess’s trust in her social superiors that she did not think it strange that the Master glided swiftly, indeed cursorily, over her duties as a governess, and over the bereaved children themselves, but reiterated several times, with an inscrutable smile that left her breathless, that the “prime responsibility” of her employment would be that she must never, under any circumstances, trouble him with problems.
In a sort of giddy daze Miss Jessel heard herself giggle, and inquire, almost inaudibly, “—any circumstances, sir?” and Master loftily and smilingly replied, “I would trust you, ah! with any responsibility!”
And so the interview, which required scarcely half an hour, came to an end.
Little Flora was Miss Jessel’s delight. Miss Jessel’s angel. Quite simply—so the ecstatic young woman wrote home, to Glyngden—the most beautiful, the most charming child she’d ever seen, with pale blond curls like silk, and thicklashed blue eyes clear as washed glass, and a sweet melodic voice. Shy, initially—ah, tragically shy!—as if seemingly abandoned by her parents, and only barely tolerated by her uncle, Flora had no sense of her human worth. When first Miss Jessel set eyes upon her, introduced to her by the housekeeper Mrs. Grose, the child visibly shrank from the young woman’s warm scrutiny. “Why, hello, Flora! I’m Miss Jessel: I am to be your friend,” Miss Jessel said. She, too, was afflicted by shyness, but in this case gazed upon the perfect child with such a look of rapture that Flora must have seen, yes, here was her lost young mother restored to her, at last!
Within the space of a few blissful days, Miss Jessel and little Flora became inseparable companions.
Together they picnicked on the grassy bank of the pond—the “Sea of Azof,” as Flora so charmingly called it. Together they walked white-gloved hand in hand to church a mile away. Together they ate every meal. Flora’s organdyruffled little bed was established in a corner of Miss Jessel’s room.
On bare Presbyterian knees, beside her own bed, in the dark, Miss Jessel fiercely prayed: Dear God, I vow to devote my life to this child!—I will do fa
r, far more than he has so much as hinted of my doing.
No need, between Miss Jessel and an omniscient God, to identify this Olympian he.
Days and weeks passed in an oblivion of happiness. For what is happiness, save oblivion? The young governess from Glyngden with the pale, rather narrow, plain-pretty face and intense dark eyes, who had long forbade herself fantasy as a heathen sort of indulgence, now gave herself up in daydreams of little Flora, and Master, and, yes, she herself. (For, at this time, little Miles was away at school.) A new family, the most natural of families, why not? Like every other young governess in England, Miss Jessel had avidly read her Jane Eyre.
These were the oblivious days before Peter Quint.
Little Miles, as comely and angelic a boy as his sister was perfection as a girl, was under the guidance, when at Bly, of Peter Quint, his uncle’s trusted valet. The more censorious among the servants, in particular Mrs. Grose, thought this an unfortunate situation: cunning Quint played the gentleman at Bly and environs, a dashing figure (if you liked the type) in purloined clothes belonging to the Master, but, born of coarse country folk in the Midlands, without education or breeding, he was a “base menial—a hound” as Mrs. Grose sniffed.
He had a certain reputation as a ladies’ man. Excepting of course, as the clumsy riposte went, Quint’s ladies were hardly ladies.
Infrequently, on unpredictable weekends, Master came by train to Bly—“To my country retreat”—with a flushed, sullen look of, indeed, a gentleman in retreat. (From amorous mishaps?—gambling debacles? Not even his valet knew.) He paid scant attention to the quivering Miss Jessel, whom, to her chagrin, he persisted in calling by the wrong name; he paid virtually no attention at all to poor little Flora, beaming with hope like an angel and dressed in her prettiest pink frock. He did make it a point to speak with Peter Quint in private, bringing up the unexpected subject of his little nephew Miles, enrolled at Eton—“I want, you know, Quint, this boy of my poor dear fool of a brother to be a boy; and not, you know,” here he paused, frowning, “—not a boy. D’you see?” Master’s face flushed brick-red with discomfort and a sort of choked anger.
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