Bear and His Daughter (2 page)

Camille Innaurato’s was like the other houses in that end of town. It was a brick, three-bedroom single-story with aluminum siding and a narrow awning of the same. It had a small lawn in front, surrounded by a metal fence, and a garden in the back where Camille grew tomatoes and peppers in season.

When Mary pulled into the driveway, she saw Camille’s pale, anxious face at the picture window. Camille was mouthing words, clasping her hands. In a moment she opened the door to the winter wind, as Mary emerged from her car and locked it.

“Oh, Mary. I’m thanking God Almighty you could come. Yeah, I’m thanking him.”

Camille was one of those women who had grown older in unquestioning service to her aged parents. She had helped raise her younger brother. Later she had shared with her father the care of her sick mother. Then, when he died, she had assumed it all—her mother the house, everything. Camille worked in a garment-sewing shop that had set itself up on two floors of a former silk mill; she oversaw the Chinese and Salvadoran women employed there.

Her younger brother August, was technically a policeman, though not an actively corrupt one. In fact, he had no particular constabulary duties. The family had had enough political connections to secure him a clerical job with the department. He was a timid, excitable man, married, with grown children, who lived with his domineering wife in an outer suburb. But as a police insider he knew the secrets of the city.

The Innauratos, brother and sister, had inherited nothing from their parents except the house Camille occupied and their sick mother’s tireless piety.

Mary Urquhart stepped inside and took Camille by the shoulders and looked at her.

“Now, Camille, dear, are you all right? Can you breathe?”

She inspected Camille and, satisfied with her friend’s condition, checked out the house. The living room was neat enough, although the television set was off, a sure sign of Camille’s preoccupation.

“I gotta show you, Mary. Oh I gotta show you. Yeah I gotta.” She sounded as though she were weeping, but the beautiful dark eyes she fixed on Mary were dry. Eyes out of Alexandrian portraiture, Mary thought, sparkling and shimmering with their infernal vision. For a moment it seemed she had returned from some transport. She gathered Mary to her large, soft, barren breast. “You wanna coffee, Mary honey? You wanna
biscote?
A little of wine?”

In her excitement, Camille always offered the wine when there were babies, forgetting Mary could not drink it.

“I’ll get you a glass of wine,” Mary suggested. “And I’ll get myself coffee.”

Camille looked after Mary anxiously as she swept past her toward the kitchen.

“Sit down, dear,” Mary called to her. “Sit down and I’ll bring it out.”

Slowly, Camille seated herself on the edge of the sofa and stared at the blank television screen.

In the immaculate kitchen, Mary found an open bottle of sangiovese, unsoured, drinkable. She poured out a glass, then served herself a demitasse of fresh-made espresso from Camille’s machine. In the cheerless, spotless living room, they drank side by side on the faded floral sofa, among the lace and the pictures of Camille’s family and the portrait photograph of the Pope.

“I used to love sangiovese,” Mary said, watching her friend sip. “The wine of the Romagna. Bologna. Urbino.”

“It’s good,” Camille said.

“My husband and I and the children once stayed in a villa outside Urbino. It rained. Yes, every day, but the mountains were grand. And the hill towns down in Umbria. We had great fun.”

“You saw the Holy Father?”

Mary laughed. “We were all good Protestants then.”

Camille looked at her in wonder though she had heard the story of Mary’s upbringing many times. Then her face clouded.

“You gotta see the babies, Mary.”

“Yes,” Mary sighed. “But do finish your wine.”

When the wine was done they both went back to look at the fetuses. There were four. Camille had laid them on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside. On top of the curtain she had rested one of her wall crucifixes.

Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. Its face looked like a Florida manatee’s, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear—a manatee, bovine, slope-browed. One was still enveloped in some kind of fibrous membrane that suggested bat wings.

“So sweet,” Camille sobbed. “So sad. Who could do such a thing? A murderer!” She bit her thumb. “A murderer the degenerate fuck, his eyes should be plucked out!” She made the sign of the cross, to ask forgiveness for her outburst.

“Little lamb, who made thee?” Mary Urquhart asked wearily. The things were so disgusting. “Well, to work then.”

Camille’s brother August had discovered that the scavenger company that handled the county’s medical waste also serviced its abortion clinics, which had no incinerators of their own. The fetuses were stored for disposal along with everything else. August had fixed it with the scavengers to report specimens and set them aside. He would pass on the discovery to Camille. Then Camille and a friend—most often Mary—would get to work.

Mary knew a priest named Father Hooke, the pastor of a parish in a wealthy community in the Ramapos. They had known each other for years. Hooke had been, in a somewhat superficial way, Mary’s spiritual counselor. He was much more cultivated than most priests and could be wickedly witty, too. Their conversations about contemporary absurdities, Scripture and the vagaries of the Canon, history and literature had helped her through the last stage of her regained abstinence. She knew of Julian of Norwich through his instruction. He had received her into the Catholic Church and she had been a friend to him. Lately, though, there had been tension between them. She used Camille’s telephone to alert him.

“Frank,” she said to the priest, “we have some children.”

He gave her silence in return.

“Hello, Frank,” she said again. “Did you hear me, Father? I said we have some children.”

“Yes,” said Hooke, in what Mary was coming to think of as his affected tone, “I certainly heard you the first time. Tonight is … difficult.”

“Yes, it surely is,” Mary said. “Difficult and then some. When will you expect us?”

“I’ve been meaning,” Hooke said, “to talk about this before now.”

He had quoted Dame Julian to her. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Those were lines he liked.

“Have you?” she inquired politely. “I see. We can talk after the interment.”

“You know, Mary,” Father Hooke said with a nervous laugh, “the bishop, that pillar of intellect, our spiritual prince, has been hearing things that trouble him.”

Mary Urquhart blushed to hear the priest’s lie.

“The bishop,” she told him, “is not a problem in any way. You are.”

“Me?” He laughed then, genuinely and bitterly. “I’m a problem? Oh, sorry. There are also a few laws…”

“What time, Father? Camille works for a living. So do I.”

“The thing is,” Father Hooke said, “you ought not to come tonight.”

“Oh, Frank,” Mary said. “Really, really. Don’t be a little boy on me. Take up your cross, guy.”

“I suppose,” Hooke said, “I can’t persuade you to pass on this one?”

“Shame on you, Frank Hooke,” she said.

The drive to the clean outer suburbs led through subdivisions and parklands, then to thick woods among which colonial houses stood, comfortably lighted against the winter night. Finally there were a few farms, or estates laid out to resemble working farms. The woods were full of frozen lakes and ponds.

The Buick wagon Mary drove was almost fifteen years old, the same one she had owned in the suburbs of Boston as a youngish mother driving all the motherly routes, taking Charles Junior to soccer practice and Payton to girls’ softball and little Emily to play school.

The fetuses were secured with blind cord in the back of the station wagon, between the tarp and the curtain in which Camille had wrapped them. It was a cargo that did not shift or rattle and they had not tried to put a crucifix on top. More and more, the dark countryside they rode through resembled the town where she had lived with Charles and her children.

“Could you say the poem?” Camille asked. When they went on an interment Camille liked to hear Mary recite poetry for her as they drove. Mary preferred poetry to memorized prayer, and the verse was always new to Camille. It made her cry, and crying herself out on the way to an interment, Mary had observed, best prepared Camille for the work at hand.

“But which poem, Camille?”

Sometimes Mary recited Crashaw’s “To the Infant Martyrs,” or from his hymn to Saint Teresa. Sometimes she recited Vaughan or Blake.

“The one with the star,” Camille said. “The one with the lake.”

“Oh,” Mary said cheerfully. “Funny, I was thinking about it earlier.”

Once, she could not imagine how, Mary had recited Blake’s “To the Evening Star” for Camille. It carried such a weight of pain for her that she dreaded its every line and trembled when it came to her unsummoned:

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!

It had almost killed her to recite it the first time, because that had been her and Charles’s secret poem, their prayer for the protection that was not forthcoming. The taste of it in her mouth was of rage unto madness and the lash of grief and above all of whiskey to drown it all, whiskey to die in and be with them. That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.

Camille wept at the sound of the words. Mary found herself unable to go on for a moment.

“There’s more,” Camille said.

“Yes,” said Mary. She drew upon her role as story lady.

Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:
The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with
Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.

Camille sobbed. “Oh Mary,” she said. “Yours weren’t protected.”

“Well, stars…” Mary Urquhart said, still cheerfully. “Thin influence. Thin ice.”

The parlor lights were lighted in the rectory of Our Lady of Fatima when they pulled off the genteel main street of the foothill town and into the church parking lot. Mary parked the station wagon close to the rectory door, and the two women got out and rang Father Hooke’s bell.

Hooke came to the door in a navy cardigan, navy-blue shirt and chinos. Camille murmured and fairly curtsied in deference. Mary looked the priest up and down. His casual getup seemed like recalcitrance, an unreadiness to officiate. Had he been working himself up to deny them?

“Hello, Frank,” said Mary. “Sorry to come so late.”

Hooke was alone in the rectory. There was no assistant and he did his own housekeeping, resident rectory biddies being a thing of the past.

“Can I give you coffee?” Father Hooke asked.

“I’ve had mine,” Mary said.

He had a slack, uneasy smile. “Mary,” the priest said. “And Miss … won’t you sit down?”

He had forgotten Camille’s name. He was a snob, she thought, a suburban snob. The ethnic, Mariolatrous name of his parish, Our Lady of Fatima, embarrassed him.

“Father,” she said, “why don’t we just do it?”

He stared at her helplessly. Ashamed for him, she avoided his eye.

“I think,” he said, dry-throated, “we should consider from now on.”

“Isn’t it strange?” she asked Camille. “I had an odd feeling we might have a problem here tonight.” She turned on Hooke. “What do you mean? Consider what?”

“All right, all right,” he said. A surrender in the pursuit of least resistance. “Where is it?”

“They,” Mary said.

“The babies,” said Camille. “The poor babies are in Mary’s car outside.”

But he hung back. “Oh, Mary,” said Father Hooke. He seemed childishly afraid.

She burned with rage. Was there such a thing as an adult Catholic? And the race of priests, she thought, these self-indulgent, boneless men.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “What can be the matter now? Afraid of how they’re going to look?”

“Increasingly…” Father Hooke said, “I feel we’re doing something wrong.”

“Really?” Mary asked. “Is that a fact?” They stood on the edge of the nice red Bolivian rectory carpet, in the posture of setting out for the station wagon. Yet not setting out. There was Haitian art on the wall. No lace curtains here. “What a shame,” she said, “we haven’t time for an evening of theological discourse.”

“We may have to make time,” Father Hooke said. “Sit down, girls.”

Camille looked to Mary for reassurance and sat with absurd decorousness on the edge of a bare-boned Spanish chair. Mary stood where she was. The priest glanced at her in dread. Having giving them an order, he seemed afraid to take a seat himself.