“Yes. And the baby.”
“I’ve seen a lot of worse things since, but we were very young and it was hell while we were going through it. Don’t judge Allie by Mimi or me. I gave her a very prejudiced picture before she ever met the guy, and Mimi’s the most loyal of friends and, where her friends are concerned, not very objective. Nor, I suppose, am I. Allie and Isobel made their peace years ago. He calls her for advice and, I may say, listens to her when he won’t listen to anyone else. Anyhow, my apologies, Madame—uh—Vigneras.”
“Katherine.”
“Thanks. That’s what Mimi calls you, so that’s how I think of you. I just wanted to—well—put in a good word for Allie. It was all too long ago for any of us to hold on to bitterness. It’s been nice to meet you. I’m glad you’re here for Mimi. She’s terribly generous, but she can be very lonely. Okay—I’m off to give that paper.”
After she had gone, Katherine boiled herself an egg and went to the piano. She was running scales when the phone rang, jarring her almost as much as it had at four in the morning.
It was Bishop Undercroft. “Madame Vigneras, I hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His accent was English, his tenor voice not like Lukas’s at all. “Felix tells me you’d like some time with our Bösendorfer. If you’d care to practice this afternoon, he’ll pick you up.”
“Thanks, I’ll be most grateful.”
“Will around two-thirty be convenient?”
“Fine, thank you. The acoustics will be very different from a concert hall.”
“Of course. You’ll have a number of adjustments to make. Then perhaps you’ll join Yolande and me for an early dinner?”
She was, she had to admit, more curious than ever about the young bishop and his present wife. “Thank you. I’d be delighted.”
“We’ve invited Felix, too, and the Davidsons mère and père. Of course, Merv is lying in state right now, and it’s possible that Felix or Dave or I may have to leave to take our turn at the coffin.”
“I’m so terribly sorry about his death—it seems so reasonless—”
“Reasonless indeed, and Merv was a man of reason. Asking you to come to the Cathedral today when normally we wouldn’t have anything going on is by way of being a tribute to Merv. Dave and I talked it over and agreed that it was what he would have wanted.”
—Yes, for life to continue. An affirmation of value. “I liked him very much at our one brief meeting.”
“And he, you. It was a great shock to us all. Violence grows worse daily, but we tend to get blunted unless it hits home. Now. We’ll get you back early tonight. Felix reminded me to promise you that.”
“Thank you. I’ll appreciate it.” She hung up and returned to the piano. She moved into the music for Felix’s benefit, so that she was within harmony, outside time and space. Mimi had to pound on the kitchen door before Katherine heard.
The doctor stood in the open doorway. “Sorry to disturb you.”
Katherine turned on the piano bench. “I was deep in music.”
Mimi came into the living room, carrying her briefcase and a small overnight bag. “I wanted to tell you that I’m taking the shuttle up to Boston with Iona. I’m just going to spend the night, and I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Have a good time. You look very nice today.”
Mimi looked down at her khaki traveling suit. “It’s always chilly on the plane.” She looked at Katherine’s half-empty cup of coffee. “I’ll hot up some milk for the coffee. I’ll even wash the pot. I have a while before time to leave, and I’d like a fresh cup myself.”
“I’d like some more, too. Thanks for sending Iona down.”
Mimi turned from the refrigerator, holding a carton of milk. “It was her idea, not mine.”
“Well, thanks, anyhow.”
“Iona is very fair-minded, and she knows that sometimes I’m not. I know I’m interrupting your piano time. Sorry. I’m feeling depressed.”
“You’re never an interruption. Why are you depressed?”
Instead of answering, Mimi said, “You fit my description of a contented person.”
“What’s that?”
“Being happy to snuggle down in bed at night and go to sleep. And being eager to wake up and get going with the new day in the morning.”
Katherine watched Mimi pouring coffee and hot milk. “It’s a good description, and very apt for you.”
“Not always.” Mimi handed her the steaming cup. “Sometimes I look at my life and think that on the surface I’ve accomplished a lot, but I’ll be alone at the end.”
“Most of us are.”
“It’s different. You’ve had Justin. I’ve only had lovers. And friends. A life-line of friends. But sometimes—” She set her cup on the table in front of the long sofa. “What kind of wedding did you have?”
Katherine moved from the piano to sit beside her. “Tiny. And yet enormous. Justin and Anne—his sister—had no family, and Aunt Manya was on tour with a play, and it was long before the days of jet planes and weekends in Europe, so my father cabled us some money for a honeymoon, which of course we never had a chance to take. Marcel—Anne’s husband—was an organist, and we were married in his church, and he played for us as though for a court wedding. All that music alone made me feel very married.”
“A nice memory,” Mimi said.
“Very nice.”
“What happened to them, Anne and Marcel?”
“Marcel went to Africa with de Gaulle. Both his arms were blown off, so we were grateful that he took only a few days to die. Anne was active with the maquis—she got away right after Justin and I were taken. Ultimately she got TB from overexposure and died a few years after the war.”
“Christ,” Mimi said, “I understand why you sounded so sharp when I thought your Justin was a Jew.”
“It’s all water under the bridge now. It doesn’t do to dwell on it.”
“You’ve hardly cheered me up.” Mimi smiled ruefully. “What I am glad about—and I am truly glad—is that you will be here when I get home tomorrow.”
“And I’m glad you’re coming home,” Katherine said.
“Anything I can get you before I go? Food? My fridge is full of salads and cold meats.”
“Thanks, but I’ve plenty in mine for lunch and I’m going up to the Cathedral to practice this afternoon, and have an early meal with the Undercrofts.”
“Good, good. As Iona warned you, I wasn’t very fair about Allie. I’m more shook about Merv than I realized, and I had to dump somewhere. Damn. Why Merv? Allie’s going to miss him terribly. Just remember, Katherine, that most people love Allie, and Iona and I are in the minority. Oh, damn. I thought I was trying not to give you unfair preconceptions of a man who is extraordinarily complicated. Felix has had occasion to remind me that Allie was going through his own hell when Ona was dying, even if he showed it in odd ways. His faith fell to ashes and he couldn’t get any kind of phoenix to rise from them. Not, at any rate, until it was too late for him and Isobel. Dave says he has a very deep faith now. And, according to Felix, he saved Yolande.”
“How did he meet her?”
“I suppose he saw her first when she was performing. Allie’s always loved the theatre.”
“Was she an actress?”
Mimi looked at Katherine in astonishment. “Katherine Vigneras, you don’t know who Yolande Xabo is?”
“Yolande Xabo? Yes, it does have a familiar ring,” Katherine said vaguely. “Was that her name before she was married?”
“Oy veh.” Mimi wiped her eyes. “I forget you’ve lived mostly in Europe. But even there, in the evening, on television—”
“We never had a television set.”
“And on tour, when you were staying in hotels, you never turned it on?”
“It never occurred to me.”
“Ah, me. You have been rather one-sided, haven’t you?”
“I read,” Katherine said, smiling. “Lots of things.”
“Yes, I know you read. And if
you’d inadvertently switched on TV and tuned in on Yolande, you’d probably have changed channels or turned her off. She was a singer—the singer for a good number of years.”
“Opera?” Katherine asked, still vague.
Again Mimi laughed. “Dear Katherine—not opera. Pop stuff. Post-rock. Not my cup of tea, either, but she was as much of an idol in her own day as—to turn back the clock—the Beatles were in mine. She married Allie when she was at the peak of her popularity, but she had the sense to know that her star was beginning to descend.”
“What did she sing?”
“Stuff written especially for her. Some of it good. And, to do her justice, she always transcended her material.”
“You heard her?”
“Yes, Quillon Yonge, your tenant below me who’s abroad most of the time, was a big fan of hers, and he took me to hear her several times. In a world daily more fearful of atomic destruction, Yolande Xabo sang of hope—hope that the planet would not be blown apart, that people could go on coupling and birthing.”
Katherine nodded. “And so we have, more and more precariously, somehow managing to hold the balance.”
“Yup. And what Yolande did was to keep hope alive, and terror at bay.”
“No small thing,” Katherine said.
“No small thing indeed. She was almost like a mother soothing an entire audience of frightened children.”
“Did she make any recordings?”
“Oh, millions, I suppose, selling wildly, but you had to have seen her to understand her power. She fostered the illusion that she could see into the future, and there was a carefully publicized rumor that she was a daughter of the Incas. She’s still a beautiful woman, I have to concede that, but her life has taken its toll. She was staggeringly beautiful when she was young. It was all over the papers, of course, when she married an Episcopal bishop.”
“Felix says it’s a very happy marriage.”
Mimi shrugged. “As marriages go, it seems to be lasting.”
“So she was a singer,” Katherine mused. “That does explain her. I was rather baffled by her.”
Mimi made an apologetic gesture. “I don’t suppose it occurred to anybody that you didn’t know who she was. Their marriage was widely publicized—abroad, too.”
“When I was on tour, especially behind the Iron Curtain, I missed weeks of news at a time. Now I understand why she moves like a performer.”
“Katherine, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you the impression that life at the Cathedral is like Barchester Towers as written by Dostoevsky and heavily edited by John Updike. It’s basically a happy place, a loving, caring place. I’m sorry I took it all out on Allie last night. It was Iona, appearing out of the blue—”
“Why don’t you have anyone sharing your apartment now?” Carefully, Katherine changed the subject.
“I sometimes go years alone.” Mimi stood and stretched. “It’s only when I find someone who needs a place to live, someone interning at St. Vincent’s, which was how I met Suzy, someone I think unusually gifted, someone I think I’d enjoy, that I’m willing to give up my privacy. Especially now as I grow older. I like my own bathroom. Okay, I’m off. Have fun up at the Cathedral. See you tomorrow.”
4
A little after two, Felix rang her doorbell. He bent over her hand in a courteous obeisance. “Your chariot awaits.”
As he held the taxi door open for her, she asked, “Please get in first. It’s no courtesy to the lady for the gentleman to stand back and let her crawl across these drop-bottom taxis,” and then wondered, as she watched him struggle, if she weren’t, despite creaky knees, considerably more limber than the bishop.
He caught his breath and directed the driver to the Cathedral. “Allie thinks I’m selfish to insist on coming down for you instead of letting Jos bring you. But I have been good about not bothering you, and I thought this would give us time to talk. I hope you won’t mind a dead bishop at the high altar while you practice. You’ll be in the ambulatory, and you can’t see the high altar from there.”
“Felix,” she demurred, “I’m going to be practicing, not performing.”
“That’s all right. I just want to make sure the vigil won’t be disturbing to you.”
“I don’t see how it could be, unless he leaps out of the coffin.”
Felix sighed. “How I wish he could. I still find it so difficult to realize that he’s gone. It was so sudden—I do want to apologize for dashing off that way without even saying goodbye. I’m still in a state of shock. Merv was so young—and I keep going. I used to talk a lot to him. He was like you, that way—people talked to him. His death is another link with reality gone. But even Merv was too close to it all, and so is Chan.”
“To close to what?”
“Oh—the mishmash of human nature on the Close, the hates and loves and jealousies that all seem exaggerated when they’re contained within a few blocks.”
But then he was silent. It was not an easy silence, so she broke it. “Mimi tells me that Bishop Undercroft was married to Sister Isobel when they were very young.”
He made a sharp exclamation, looked at the taxi driver, then back to Katherine. “That’s true, but I’m sure Mimi gave you a biased version.”
“I think she tried to be fair.”
“What on earth possessed her to tell you, then?” he exploded.
“Iona Grady spent last night in Mimi’s apartment. She’s giving a lecture here today.”
“Oh.” He did not sound happy. “Iona tries to be fair, I grant you that. The way Mimi carries the flag, you’d think Iona had been married to Allie, not Isobel. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would say something, sooner or later. People won’t leave the past alone, and the longer ago it is, the more likely the facts are to be distorted. It was tragic. Tragic for them all. But it’s over, long over.”
“All right,” she said mildly.
“Allie’s finally forgiven himself. That was hardest of all. He accepted Isobel’s forgiveness, and God’s, long before he could forgive himself. Why are we so hard on ourselves, Katya?”
“Part of the human predicament, I suppose.”
“Lack of forgiveness—it’s one of the worst of all sins. I know this, and yet there are things for which I haven’t completely forgiven myself. It’s odd, Katya—at tea, yesterday, before Merv—I needed to tell you about myself, waits and all. I suppose I think of you as a sort of confessor extraordinary.” She made a murmur of negation, but he went on. “I’m not sure the human being has the capacity for self-acceptance without first being accepted. Perhaps it’s because we’re of an age, we’ve lived through a lot—not much shocks us.” They were crawling up Sixth Avenue, with cars behind and ahead of them honking impatiently.
Felix leaned back, saying, “You really do accept me, after all that I told you about myself and Sarah—and after?”
“Felix, dear, don’t brood over it. The past is past.”
“Is it? Never completely, I think. It intrudes on the present.”
“Then you have to look at it, just as it is, and accept it as part of you. If we were made up only of the parts of ourselves of which we approve, we’d be mighty dull.”
“You’re right.” He looked out the window at the traffic. “For once I’m grateful that we’re crawling. It gives us a little more time. Katherine, there’s something else I didn’t tell you about when I was in the army.”
Now their driver leaned on the horn.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Katherine said.
“I know I don’t. I need to tell you. I’m an old man, and in the nature of things I don’t have long to live.”
“Felix, I’m an old woman.”
“Yes, but you’re younger than I am, and you’re—you’re better about your memories than I am.”
She dropped her eyes to his hands, which were tightly clasped over the head of his cane, the raised veins blue.
“Katya, when I left the army I didn’t leave with
an honorable discharge.”
She waited until she knew that it was she who would have to break the silence. “What happened?”
The taxi inched its way up to Twenty-third Street. “It was, I suppose, the height of irony. We were all totally exhausted, and a couple of men had already fallen apart, gone totally bonkers and been taken away, screaming. God knows what happened to them. So we were sent to London—desk jobs, nice and safe. But during the first week I had the beginning of the nightmares. A corporal heard me screaming—one of our own graves registration men—one of our own group—so he had an inkling of what I was going through. He had his arms around me, trying to wake me enough to calm me down, when in walked a sergeant. Not one of us. A man who’d spent his entire war behind a desk.”
Again Katherine had to break the silence. “Felix, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”
“We were given dishonorable discharges for sodomy.”
“Oh, Felix, no, how stupid—”
“Keith, the corporal, was as straight as they come, wife, kids—he fought it, and eventually got an honorable discharge.”
“Why didn’t you fight it, too?”
“Because at that point I didn’t, as they say, give a damn. I testified for Keith. That was more important for me than clearing myself. And I didn’t have a wife and kids. Also, unlike Keith, I hadn’t led a blameless life. This was just one more proof that we live in a lousy world, and I wanted no part of it. Once Keith was cleared he urged me to clear myself, too, and said he’d get the chaplain to testify for me. But I had a fit of stubbornness and I wouldn’t. Let the world think whatever it wanted. Later, after I was priested, I was terrified that Sarah might open the whole thing up, just to get a good laugh. But she was too busy being a society wife on Long Island to want to bother. She did call one night and hold it over my head when she was drunk.”
“Why did you tell her about it?”
“Because, when I came back to New York after the war, we got together again for a few weeks. I was fool enough to think she was serious in wanting to put our marriage back together. We both got very amorous and very drunk one evening, and I was still young and foolish enough to think that there should be no secrets in a marriage. But she was already involved with this Long Island banker, and she was just using me as bait, to make him jealous, to make him come to heel. I never should have told anybody, much less Sarah. I was very young. I know better now. I’ve never told anybody else, except Allie, and now you. That makes a trinity. I’m still, on occasion, fearful. When I was Diocesan I had the feeling that someone might look up the records. But now—who would want to?”
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