A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  “What was her theology?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. But if it was good enough for Mother Cat I suspect it’s something even I wouldn’t quarrel with. And what do I mean by that?” she asked out the window of the bus. The air-conditioning was broken down, and the passengers had wrestled the windows wide to catch the breeze. “Not afraid to ask questions, I suppose. Open to change, but skeptical enough to check out carefully whether or not the change is creative—i.e., the way I’ve done with new theories and practices in surgery. The less use of the knife, the better. I don’t operate unless there’s no alternative. As a result, I have no yachts or Park Avenue condominiums, but I do afford an extremely pleasant duplex on Tenth Street, and I don’t begrudge you one penny of the rent.”

  “I, too, have to earn my living,” Katherine murmured modestly.

  “You’re no fool,” Mimi said, “thank heaven. I’m not surprised Mother Cat called you. She can smell quality miles away. Even where one would least expect it—as with Fatima Gomez.”

  “Will she get the training?”

  “Unless Yolande loses interest, yes.”

  “Why would she lose interest?”

  “With Yolande, who knows? Has she told you anything about her early background?”

  “She indicated that it wasn’t easy.”

  “She’ll probably tell you all, sooner or later, and it won’t be the true version. Most of us distort our childhoods one way or another, rearrange the past to make it more bearable. Yolande is more blatant in that as in most things. But I suppose she has cause. She was born in Buenaventura, Colombia, a town ill-named. I got off there once, after a vacation with Quillon on a freighter—it was business for him, relaxation for me. Before we docked we were warned to take off our watches, our rings, so they wouldn’t be stolen from us as we walked down the gangplank. The area was steamy and filthy and god-awful poor. We drove from there across the Andes to Cali—Christ, it was beautiful—but as we left Buenaventura we saw tumbling-down huts with children of all shades playing in the filth. The natives are very black, but evidently many of the women are available to the sailors. Quill said the poverty is so desperate they have to get money any way they can—and the kids are a mixture of every nationality.”

  “How ghastly,” Katherine said. “No wonder she needs to make up stories.”

  “She had a squalid beginning, all right. She was discovered—if that is the correct word—by an American sailor with an ear for music and a flair for being an entrepreneur. He brought her to New York and sold her—for that’s what it was—to some smalltime Sol Hurok when she was an early adolescent.”

  “Her life sounds a horror.”

  “I daresay it was. But don’t make the mistake of being sorry for her. Many people have horrible lives, and most of them don’t have the good fortune to become pop stars, or end up marrying bishops. I do sound absolute, don’t I? It’s my training. In surgery I sometimes have to make absolute judgments, and once a choice is made I can’t go back on it.” She peered out the window to look at the street signs. “Perhaps I’ve done better with my choices surgically than … And you surely had choices to make. No choices, no life.”

  “Yes. I had choices.” Katherine lapsed into silence. The late-afternoon summer heat bore in on them, mingled with body odors, gas fumes, the smell of burned rubber, dust, debris.

  When she had called Wolfi, almost knocked out, as it were, by Justin’s suggestion that she bear him a child, all she could think of was getting on the train to Munich. Blindly, thoughtlessly, she had fled Justin and Paris and gone to Wolfgang, to the Great Grey One who would know what she should do. It was, perhaps, the last totally childish act of her life.

  5

  “Penny,” Mimi said.

  “Choices,” Katherine said. “All the strange choices we have to make during a lifetime. Without music I’d have gone into despair. But despair is—is death.”

  “We don’t always choose our choices.” Mimi looked down at her strong hands, already slightly soiled from the bus trip. “What about Emily Davidson? I’ll be most interested to have you hear her play—even just accompanying for the rest of the family tonight. I just want to make sure the piano is the right choice for her. She’s young enough—had your Justin ever composed before his hands were broken?”

  “Not seriously. And he wasn’t as young as Emily. Wolfi—Cardinal von Stromberg—encouraged him.”

  Mimi smiled. “It amuses me that you, too, got tangled with the Church.”

  “Not really. Only with Wolfi. And he died.” She closed her eyes. She would not think about him. Not now, with Mimi, with her perspicacity, beside her. As the bus lumbered uptown she opened her eyes and said, “Did I tell you? I’m going to be a great-grandmother.” She had not told Mimi before, and it was a good way to change the subject.

  “How splendid!”

  “Kristen called me.”

  “Kristen is your special grand, isn’t she?”

  “They’re all special to me. But she’s the musician.”

  “And she has your black hair.”

  “So did Julie. That black hair, first in Julie, now in Kristen, is in startling contrast to the blondness of Eric and his family. Kristen’s eyes are dark, like mine. Julie’s eyes are pale, strikingly pale under her dark brows.”

  “Where does she get them?”

  She could not reply again, “From her father.” Mimi had seen Justin’s pictures, and Justin’s eyes were as dark as Katherine’s. So she simply continued, “The Olaffsens are a close family, and they’ve taken Julie into their lives, as one of them. Eric—her husband—Eric is big and kind, but I’ve never felt particularly close to him.” She visualized her son-in-law, always smiling benignly, his eyes squinting slightly as though to protect them from the brilliance of sun reflected against water, against snow, despite the paucity of the sunlight in Norway much of the year. Eric was a cipher to Katherine. There was something behind the eternal benevolent smile, but she did not know what it was. It revealed itself, perhaps, in Nils’s writing, strange, dense, Scandinavian novels; in Gudrun’s fierce determination to be a lawyer, to be involved in politics. She saw Eric more in those two children of his than she did in himself, though surely Gudrun’s shrewdness was inherited as much from her mother as from her father.

  “What about the other three grands?” Mimi was asking.

  “Gudrun is second, after Kristen, a blonde, a Valkyrie, a lawyer, and is probably going to be in Parliament one of these days. Nils is a novelist, beginning to be known in Norway. Juliana, the baby, is simply a darling, domestic, placid, very much the favorite of the Farmor.” And that was all she needed to say about Juliana.

  The Farmor had been the first to notice that Juliana lagged behind the others in development, had not been horrified by it, as Julie and Eric had been. Instead, she had been protective, nurturing, bringing out the child’s lovingness, her contentedness with herself and her life.

  Katherine was closer to Kristen, just as the Farmor was closer to Juliana. These invisible threads binding this person to that person, and not to the other, were nobody’s choice. They simply existed.

  What had happened to the thread between Katherine and Julie?

  Mimi nudged Katherine. “Christ, it’s hot. We get out at the next stop.” She had a gate key, given her by the dean, so they could enter the Close at 110th Street, at the West Gate. Mimi slammed it shut behind them. “Although anybody can climb over who wants to. Even I could, in a pinch, though it would hardly look dignified.”

  “I’m very glad you have a key,” Katherine said. “My legs are considerably shorter than yours.”

  One of the peacocks screamed at them, and then displayed its magnificent tail as they crossed the Close. A large group of people, many of them festooned with cameras, were trooping toward the exit.

  “Oy veh,” Mimi said. “The tour buses are lined up outside. We get more than usual on summer weekends, and sometimes it can be a nuisance. It’s hard for the David
son kids to realize that they live in a place that’s one of the sights of the city—it’s just home to them.”

  They climbed the iron steps to the No. 5 door, which Mimi pushed open, putting one finger to her lips. The service was in progress. Mimi shut the door silently behind them, and they slipped into seats.

  The Wooden Madonna

  1

  Bishop Chan was in the lectern, reading from the Bible, and when he concluded, Felix rose from the shadows of the choir stalls and stood at the head of the steps where there was a standing mike. He wore a soft grey cassock, and he looked small and frail, but when he spoke his voice was strong, and he had a quiet authority which Katherine liked.

  She was too busy looking at him, thinking that he did indeed look like a bishop, to hear his first words. She picked up as he was saying, “Job is one of the dark books of the Bible, and although it is shot through with light, it has never been one of my favorite books. I turn more often to Jonah, which says much of the same things—that God’s love for his Creation is boundless, and that all he wants from us is that we love him in return.

  “But today’s reading from Job has one of the greatest cries of affirmation in the entire Bible. Out of the depths of his pain, loss, anger, Job cries out, I know that my Redeemer lives! and he adds the equally extraordinary words, that he himself will see him, face to face. Not now, not in the midst of this mortal journey, because we couldn’t bear it now. Moses asked to see God, and God put him in the cleft of a rock and protected him with his hand, and Moses saw God’s hindquarters as he passed by.

  “God’s hindquarters. That’s all we get, in this earthly part of our journey. But it’s the glimpses that keep us going.

  “The New Testament reading, too, is a promise, a promise that what God creates, he will not abandon, that ultimately we will be as we were meant to be.”

  For a moment Katherine had a glimpse of Juliana, successful at cross-breeding chickens, and yet unable to complete fifth-grade work.

  “… and then we, too, will see God face to face, as Adam and Eve did when God walked and talked with them in the cool of the evening—before the choices made then and throughout the centuries brought us to the world of pain and confusion in which …”

  Choices again. Katherine looked at Felix, but she was no longer listening, even though she was feeling grateful that she liked what he was saying, that his delivery was authoritative and vibrant. When he preached, the years seemed to drop from him. Odd: she had never heard Wolfi preach. Wolfi, she thought, would have liked Felix, despite the fact that the two men were totally unlike.

  Had anyone ever gone running to Felix as she had gone running to Wolfi?

  She had left Justin and Paris, fled blindly to the station and phoned Munich, leaving a message for the cardinal that she was on her way. She took a taxi and went directly to him, not thinking, simply running.

  He was waiting for her in the great library. He embraced her tenderly, then held her at arm’s length, looking down at her with his deep-set eyes. ‘Are you willing to do this for him?’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  He shook his head, smiling gently. ‘This is not in the realm of shoulds and oughts, my child. It is in the realm of love.’

  ‘You think I should, then.’

  Again he shook his head. ‘Katherine, you did not hear me.’

  She moved closer to him, and rested her cheek against his chest, receiving from the cardinal the kind of comfort which circumstances had kept her from receiving from her own father. ‘I would do anything to make him happy.’

  ‘Even this?’

  ‘He’s—oh, Wolfi, you know how proud he is. He said there’ve been rumors—someone else from Auschwitz—if I have a child, that will stop it all. Why should it be public knowledge? It would make everything all smutty.’

  ‘Do you want a child, Katherine?’

  ‘I never even thought about it. At least not for a long time, since it wasn’t possible.’

  ‘But before?’

  ‘Oh, I thought about it. I suppose everybody does—romantic pictures of a baby in an old-fashioned cradle.’

  ‘And now? Have you thought about it?’

  ‘No. Justin’s asking me—it was all so unexpected—I just—’

  ‘I want you to go to your hotel.’

  ‘I don’t have a hotel. I came to you straight from the train.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll have my secretary make a reservation for you.’ He crossed the room to one of the long library tables. ‘You’ve stayed at the Vier Jahreszeiten?’ She nodded, and he gave quick instructions on the phone. ‘The chauffeur will drive you. I want you to stop off in the cathedral—I know you and Justin are not churchgoers—but I want you to go there and hold your love for Justin, for what he has asked you to do, up to God. Then I want you to go to your hotel and have dinner and go early to bed. Come to me tomorrow.’

  She did what she was told.

  She knelt before a side altar with a statue of the Virgin and Child, simply knelt there, looking at the serene acceptance in the face carved in wood.

  She slept little. Again and again she saw in her mind’s eye the wooden Madonna cradling the baby in her arms, saw the half-smile on the young woman’s face as she looked down at the Child.

  In the morning she took the tram and went back to the cathedral to look at the statue again. The love in the wooden face was still there, simultaneously tender and stern.

  At three she went to the cardinal.

  ‘I will do it for him,’ she said, and told him about the statue and the effect it had had on her.

  ‘She, too, was asked to bear a child in a strange way. She, too, said yes.’

  ‘But, Wolfi—it’s one thing to say I will have a child for Justin, and gladly, but—oh, this sounds so stupid—how do I find—how do I go about—h-how—’ She broke off, stammering.

  ‘Neither did I sleep last night. I would like to be the father of your child.’

  No. No!

  ‘If Justin could sit down and reason objectively, I think that he would choose me.’

  ‘But—you’re—you’re—’

  One arm still about her, he led her to a deep leather sofa, sat down beside her. ‘A priest? A celibate? Yes.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Katherine, I am still a man. There was no celibacy in the priesthood in the first centuries, it is not intrinsic in the vocation. I love you. I have loved you since I first heard you play.’

  Then Willie was right, the world was right—‘Then what they say …’

  ‘They? They? Who are they? No, Katherine, I am not what they say. I have known that there was slander. I am sorry that you had to hear it. That you believed it.’

  ‘But I didn’t! Not till—oh, Wolfi—Your vows—’

  ‘I take my vows seriously. But the Church has always been realistic about a man’s human needs. I do not, despite the gossip, make a practice of unchastity. If I did, how could I possibly offer myself to you now? Don’t you see that it would be something I could do for Justin and you, before God—’

  Shocked, she heard her own voice, ‘Wolfi, have you ever before—’ and bit off her words.

  He replied gravely, ‘I have told you that I do not make a habit of giving in to my weaknesses. This would not be a moment of weakness.’

  She looked down at her feet and noted that the toes of her shoes were scuffed.

  ‘Katherine, do not probe into what is better left untouched. I am by nature a passionate man, and yet I have, with God’s grace, managed to hold my passions to a minimum. This I do not consider a passion.’

  Why was she horrified? Was she a child about promises? Her promises to Justin? The cardinal’s promises to God?

  ‘Is this truly such a shock to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed, reached his hand toward her cheek, drew it back. He sat beside her silently, grey, grave, and she did not know who he was. There was a discreet knock on the door and his secretary came in, si
lent, inconspicuous, spoke a few words softly, and left.

  The cardinal said, ‘Go, then. Go back to the cathedral and to the Holy Mother and see what she has to say. I will call you at—seven o’clock.’ He kissed her on the forehead, gravely.

  She went back to the statue. But now: was it a difference in light? The young woman’s face had lost its look of serene acceptance and was stern and sad.

  There were no answers anywhere.

  2

  She shook her head and moved carefully from the past to the present, away from the cathedral in Munich, to the larger one in New York.

  She turned her attention to Felix, heard him saying, “The psalmist sings that he has never seen the good man forsaken, nor his children begging for bread. But good men and their children go hungry every day. And we come to the ancient question: If God is good, why do the wicked flourish, and the innocent suffer? They do; the wicked flourish, and children die of malnutrition or drugs; there is continuing war and disease and untimely death, and we cry out, Why!?

  “And God answers by coming to live with us, to limit himself willingly in the flesh of a human child—how can that be? The power that created the stars in their courses contained in an infant? an infant come to live with us, grow for us, die for us, and on the third day rise again from the dead for us.

  “And what did this incredible sacrifice accomplish? Nothing. On the surface, nothing at all. More than half the world is starving. The planet is torn apart by wars, half of them in the name of religion. We have surely done more harm throughout Christendom in the name of Christ than we have done good. Rape and murder and crimes of violence increase. We are still grieving over the tragic death of Bishop Juxon. So what is it all about? How can it possibly matter?

  “I don’t know how it matters; I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. He suffered with us during his sojourn as Jesus of Nazareth. And from the moment of Creation on, he suffers when any part of his creation suffers. Daily I add to his suffering and only occasionally to his gladness. But he will not give up on me, not now, not after my mortal death. He will not give up on any of us, until we have become what he meant us to be.