A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  “She isn’t—”

  “But Mrs. Gomez could have been a threat. Could be a threat.”

  “It sounds horrid put like that, but I suppose it’s true. Mrs. Gomez does have a violent temper, and not everybody can control her. There’s one tale that she lost a job with a UN diplomat and his family by chasing the maid around the table with a carving knife during a sensitive diplomatic dinner party.”

  Katherine laughed. “I can believe it. How does Yolande manage to control her?”

  “Yolande is paying for the children’s education. That’s a sizable stick. Now I’ve told you everything. Are you satisfied?”

  “I wasn’t looking for satisfaction. It does make me understand a little better why Yolande doesn’t want the Gomez contingent living in her house. But those poor kids are always underfoot, and Topaze tends to follow me around, making cryptic remarks.”

  Felix leaned across the table toward her. “Don’t take Topaze lightly.”

  “Believe me, I don’t take Topaze lightly at all.”

  After lunch they were both too tired to go back to the crowded gallery, so Felix offered to get her a taxi. While they were standing at the curb, waiting, Felix asked, “Has that journalist from the Times—Jarwater, or whatever her name is—been in touch with you?”

  “No,” Katherine said. “Nobody has.”

  Felix fluttered his fingers. “I don’t understand. Yolande is usually quick to get after all the media. Perhaps she knows the name Vigneras is enough—heaven knows, we’re already getting as many calls for tickets as her secretary can handle. Even I didn’t realize quite what a drawing card you are. Still, it seems unlike Yolande … Oh, good, here’s an empty taxi.” He kissed her, saw her into the cab, and shut the door.

  2

  When Katherine returned to Tenth Street, Raissa had finished with the garden apartment and reported that it was habitable, though bare-looking.

  When the baby came, it would fill up.

  But, Raissa said, there are unfaded places on the wall where pictures were taken down.

  Katherine went to her big cupboard, out in the public hall and under the stairs, undid the padlock, and took out some pictures which would do until Dorcas found something of her own. Raissa took Dorcas’s having a baby without a husband compassionately but unsentimentally. In her world, these things happened all the time. Her chief concern was that Dorcas had no mother to help out. “Her parents are dead,” Katherine said, “and there’s only a sister living in California.” Raissa shook her head, then picked up the pictures and went back downstairs.

  Dorcas emerged just as Katherine was ready to wake her. “I slept all day.”

  “You needed to.”

  “I thought I’d never sleep again.”

  “You’ll sleep tonight. Emotion is physically exhausting, and you must rest for your baby’s sake. I’m being picked up in about an hour to go uptown for the evening—an early one. I’ll be home around nine if you need me.” A social day, indeed.

  “Thank you.” Dorcas held out both hands to Katherine. “You’ve been terrific, way above and beyond the call. But I won’t bother you. Not unless there’s some kind of dire emergency, like June’s coming after me with a hatchet.”

  Katherine laughed. “I doubt that she’ll find it necessary. Ultimately, it’s Terry I’m sorry for.”

  They both turned, startled, as the doorbell rang.

  Katherine went to the door, calling out, “Who is it?” She had a peephole but she found it easier to identify people by voice than by the distorted image.

  “Llew. Llew Owen.”

  She opened the door and he came in, his short-sleeved blue shirt rumpled from the heat. “I came down to return some music to Yorke—my friend at Ascension, and since it’s just around the corner, I thought I’d—” He stopped in confusion as he saw Dorcas. Dorcas, in her turn, blushed, and rose, steadying her overbalancing belly with a graceful movement of the arms.

  “You’ve met, I think,” Katherine said. “Dorcas Gibson and Llew Owen.”

  “Well, barely,” Dorcas said. “I think I was fleeing, just as Mr. Owen was coming for lunch. And I think I’d better flee now, too.”

  “Oh, don’t, not because of me,” Llew said, and his glance slid from Dorcas’s face to her body, and then to the floor.

  Dorcas said, “I’m very pregnant, and Madame Vigneras has been putting me back together, because I’m a married but husbandless mother.”

  Katherine sighed inwardly. It seemed to be a trend in this day and age for the young to feel they had to announce defiantly whatever was wrong, instead of, as she had been taught, keeping it decently private. “Sit down, Llew,” she said, “and I’ll pour us all some tea. I have the kettle simmering.”

  “Thanks. Just what I need.” He sat on the sofa across from Dorcas. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I never thought it would happen. But I’m not sorry to be having the baby.”

  Katherine put her hand lightly on Dorcas’s shoulder. “Llew lost his wife in childbirth, and the baby, too, a little over a year ago.”

  “Oh. God.” Dorcas covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry.” And then her frightened face peered through her fingers. “In childbirth?”

  “It doesn’t happen often,” Llew said. “Statistically. We just happened to be one of the statistics.”

  Dorcas spoke through her hands. “I’m a statistic, too. My husband just left me.”

  “Enough statistics, then,” Katherine said briskly. “Let me fix the tea.” She turned her back on them and went to the kitchen. Although she could easily have heard whatever was going on, she closed her ears and fixed the tea tray. Let them manage the conversation themselves. She turned her thoughts away from them until the tea was ready, then she pushed the tea cart into the living room, hearing Llew say, “How did you get into ballet? Don’t you have to start very young?”

  Dorcas replied, “I was what I suppose was a hyperactive child—nobody’d heard of such terms in Cedar Rapids—and my mother couldn’t stand me getting into everything all the time, and there was a small ballet school in town, and she put me there, and that’s how it all began.”

  As they saw Katherine coming in with the tea tray both Dorcas and Llew rose to help.

  “It’s light and moves easily,” Katherine said. “It’s one of my favorite things I brought with me from Paris. But I’ll put it in front of you, Dorcas, and you can pour.”

  Dorcas picked up the teapot and looked at Llew. “What do you have in it?”

  “Milk, please. No sugar.”

  She poured. “Madame Vigneras?”

  “Just as it comes today. I’m out of lemons. Thanks, dear.”

  “Madame Vigneras, you had two children, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, and I’m still here to tell the tale.”

  “Was it—was it all right?”

  “I had a bad time with Michou, my first. But he was such a charming child—the bad parts are quickly forgotten. As for Julie, she slipped out like a little fish.”

  “That easy?” Dorcas asked.

  “Oh, my dear, nothing worth anything is easy. Birthing a baby is hard work. When a woman grunts in childbirth, it’s a work noise, the same kind of noise sailors made in the old days when they were hauling on the ropes. It’s good work, but it is most definitely work. And it is the most excitingly creative thing a human being can do.” She smiled slightly as the memory of Julie’s tiny wet body lying between her breasts flicked across her mind, and then was replaced by the loneliness and anonymity of Michou’s birth. “Who is going with you when you start labor?”

  “To the hospital?” Dorcas asked. “Me, myself, and I.”

  “Nonsense,” Katherine replied. “Not in this day and age of understaffed hospitals where women on the obstetrical floors are expected to have someone with them. Can’t your sister come?”

  Dorcas closed her lips and shook her head.

  “Someone from the company?”

  Again
the shake of the head.

  Llew said, “I think I can understand that. A ballet company must be as intimate as a Cathedral Close, whether we like it or not. They’re all probably tied in with the breakup of the marriage, aren’t they?”

  Dorcas nodded in mute gratitude.

  Katherine tried to keep her sigh inaudible. “All right. If worst comes to worst, I will go with you. Your landlord isn’t the best person in the world at a time like this, but at least better than nothing.”

  “You’re far more than a landlord!” Dorcas cried. “You’re Katherine Vigneras! And I couldn’t ask that of you.”

  “You’re not asking. I’m announcing. Now, my children,” she started to dismiss them, and stopped as she heard Llew.

  “Dorcas, the real reason I came by this afternoon was that … well, a while ago Madame Vigneras suggested that you might be able to use the crib and things I have, and it’s taken me this long to … I don’t know if you already have everything—”

  “No. I should have done something, but—everything’s been so—so unexpected.”

  “I’ve got everything.” Llew was looking, not at Dorcas, but at the portrait of Katherine and Michou. “It certainly isn’t doing me any good, and, as Madame Vigneras said, it’s only making me hold on to—” He took a breath. “So if you could use it all, it’d be a favor to me.”

  “Oh! I would love to—to borrow—”

  “Fine, then. Yorke and Lib—he’s the organist, just up the street, they have a big old station wagon, so they could help me get the stuff down to you. There are—there are some clothes Dee made—”

  Dorcas’s eyes brimmed, but she did not refuse the offer. “You’re more than kind, and I … it would mean a great deal to me. I don’t deserve this, or Madame Vigneras, or—”

  “Great heavens, child, if it were a question of deserving, none of us would have much. That’s splendid, Llew, that you have friends to help. Now, my children,” she started again, “if you’ve finished your tea, I’m going to send you on your way. I’m being called for in a few minutes, and I have to change.”

  Llew leapt to his feet, picking up the cups and saucers and setting them on the tea cart, which he wheeled out to the kitchen. “I’ll wash these,” he called back. “It won’t take a minute.”

  3

  Mother Catherine of Siena came herself, tall and slender and, Katherine thought, serene, though no doubt the serenity was hard-won. They shook hands and went quickly to the car, which Mother Cat had left running, double-parked. “I drove around the block three times and couldn’t find a space, so gave up. I was certain you wouldn’t keep me waiting.”

  Katherine accepted this as a compliment and got into the car. “Thank you very much indeed for coming all this way for me.”

  “Our privilege.” Mother Cat eased the car into the traffic. “Our usual pattern on our special Sunday evenings is to have Vespers, followed by supper, and then we sit around and enjoy our guest. I hope you won’t find Vespers painful; some of the Sisters are getting old and a few of them tend to squeak, and we have one old dear who is deaf and doesn’t have the slightest idea how loudly she’s singing, because she lets the batteries in her hearing aid run down. I can’t speak to her about it too often, it shatters her so.”

  “I survived a musical evening at the Davidsons’,” Katherine said, “so I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble with Vespers. We used to sing a lot when the children were little, and we sang with great enthusiasm, but our musical talent was not vocal—except Michou’s. He had a pure, boy soprano’s voice.”

  “We have an excellent choir at the school,” the nun said. “I’d love to have you hear them sometime. Rather to everyone’s surprise, Fatima Gomez has a beautiful voice.”

  “I’ve heard her,” Katherine said. “Mrs. Undercroft had her sing for us the other night. It’s an amazing voice for an adolescent.”

  “It is, indeed. Poor Fatima. Her mother is trying to convince her—and us—that she has a vocation to the religious life. She’d love to get rid of Fatima and we are constantly having to remind her that the child is thirteen years old, and right now what she needs is enough education so that she’ll be able to earn her living. Fatima is very good with the pre-schoolers, and I’m letting her help out with the little ones in our play school this summer.”

  “So you run a summer school, too?”

  “There’s a great need for it here in the city.”

  “And you know all their names and all their problems?”

  “That’s a large part of my job. When the new ones come, in the autumn, it takes me a while. But I learn, slowly.”

  Katherine glanced at her in admiration. “I can’t conceive of it—knowing that much about that many people.”

  Mother Catherine laughed. “Not all of them have that many problems. Some of them, like the Davidson children, come from warm, supportive families. What I can’t conceive of is your being able to hold in your memory all the music that you know.”

  Now Katherine, too, laughed. “Different disciplines. We both need our memories in different ways.”

  “Yes, and I’d be glad if you’ll talk to the Sisters a little about that. The discipline of memory needed in their work, and the discipline of coming to terms with their own memories. For that is what you are doing now, isn’t it?” At Katherine’s surprise, she said, “I’ve watched it in the retired Sisters. I’m not far from it myself—all the things I haven’t had time to think about because I’ve been too happy and too busy. And I didn’t enter the religious life until I was nearly thirty, and there’s a good bit I need to sort out and come to terms with. In my youth I sometimes reminded myself of St. Augustine praying, ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’ But he got there.”

  “And you got there, too.”

  “In my own way. I’ve been extraordinarily blessed in spending most of my life doing the work I love best. I think that’s why I can speak to you so easily. You, too, have spent your life doing what you were meant to be doing.”

  “There’s a price,” Katherine said slowly. “I couldn’t do anything except be a pianist—but I wasn’t as good a mother as I should have been. I’m not as close to my daughter as I would like to be, and I’m sure it’s because of my own lacks as a mother. I was on the road more often than I was at home when Julie was growing up.”

  “There’s always a price,” Mother Catherine said, “and it has to be paid. I don’t always see problems among children or Sisters until too late, when the damage has been done. Sometimes I see a problem and can’t fathom what causes it—again, until too late. Now. We’re nearly there. The convent is four brownstone houses. We added the fourth a few years ago, and what a difference it has made, especially in the chapel.” Mother Cat stopped on a steep hill above the Drive, pulled on the emergency brake, got out briskly, and walked around to help Katherine. From the convent Sister Isobel emerged to park the car, greeting them both with evident pleasure.

  Katherine was taken upstairs in a small elevator, and into the guest section of the chapel, behind the Sisters. The chapel was a long room, the length of the four houses, simple and yet warm, with a few icons and a fine ivory crucifix above the freestanding altar. Most of the stalls were filled with Sisters; some were kneeling, others sitting, hands in lap, quietly. Katherine was the only person in the guest section, and she relaxed, not trying to kneel on her arthritic knees, simply sitting and letting the quiet seep into her. In one corner of the chapel was a wooden Madonna and Child, and it startled her by its resemblance to the Madonna and Child in the cathedral in Munich. This young girl’s face was enigmatic; Katherine could read nothing. One hand was holding the Child, the other spread out as though in wonder, and Katherine spread out her own hands, once more marveling.

  A small bell was struck several times, and the Sisters crossed themselves and knelt.

  Katherine enjoyed Vespers. The age range of the Sisters was great, and there were far more young ones than old. It was not difficult to pick out th
e Sister who let the batteries of her hearing aid run down; every once in a while her voice, cracked and off-key, would rise above the others, but there was such an ineffable look of joy on her face as she sang that Katherine understood why Mother Cat could not speak to her too often. The younger Sisters had clear, light voices, and appeared to be throwing the verses of the psalms back and forth to each other, in a way that reminded Katherine of a ballet Justin had written music for, in which the dancers played battledore and shuttlecock.

  After Vespers she was taken downstairs in the elevator by the deaf Sister, who beamed at her until she felt bathed in sunlight. Not all the Sisters had that quality of total inner light, and it was, she suspected, the result of a lifetime of devotion.

  Supper was simple and delicious. The novices and postulants cleared up, and then returned to the living room and sat on the floor. One of the postulants, in her blue denim dress, leaned her head trustingly against the knee of one of the older nuns.

  After Mother Catherine’s brief introduction, Katherine spoke about her early training in music, the early acceptance of discipline, of the structure without which there is no freedom.

  “And I am,” she concluded, “a born worker. I really can’t take any credit for it. And I am stubborn, and that’s not always a good quality, though it can be helpful at times.” She talked to them about Justin, about their marriage, their love, once she had done enough growing up, and how they had worked together. “He was the perfect teacher for me, hard-driving, but he knew, always, just what I needed to learn. And he could make me laugh. I got some bad reviews after a concert in Japan, and my pride was sorely wounded, because I thought I had played well. I still think I did, but we’d chosen the wrong music for that audience. Justin could not reason me out of my hurt feelings, so he made me play scales, which I didn’t want to do—except that he always read to me when I played scales. This time he read P. G. Wodehouse and got me laughing so, I almost fell off the piano bench. Justin had a wonderful ear and was a great mimic, and could put on a perfect English accent—or any other, for that matter. He translated The Jabberwocky into French and read it with a Marseilles twang, and by the time he was done I was back in proportion.”