Bear and His Daughter (3 page)

“It isn’t just the interments,” he told Mary. He ignored Camille. “It’s the whole thing. Our whole position.” He shuddered and began to pace up and down on the rug, his hands working nervously.

“Our position,” Mary repeated tonelessly. “Do you mean
your
position? Are you referring to the Church’s teaching?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked around as though for help, but as was the case so often with such things, it was not available. “I mean I think we may be wrong.”

She let the words reverberate in the rectory’s quiet. Then she asked, “Prodded by conscience, are you, Father?”

“I think we’re wrong on this,” he said with sudden force. “I think women have a right. I do. Sometimes I’m ashamed to wear my collar.”

She laughed her pleasant, cultivated laughter. “Ashamed to wear your collar? Poor Frank. Afraid people will think badly of you?”

He summoned anger. “Kindly spare me the ad hominem,” he said.

“But Frank,” she said, it seemed lightly, “there is only ad hominem.”

“I’m afraid I’m not theologian enough,” he said, “to follow you there.”

“Oh,” said Mary, “I’m sorry, Father. What I mean in my crude way is that what is expected of you is expected personally. Expected directly. Of
you,
Frank.”

He sulked. A childish resentful silence. Then he said, “I can’t believe God wants us to persecute these young women the way you people do. I mean you particularly, Mary, with your so-called counseling.”

He meant the lectures she gave the unwed mothers who were referred to her by pamphlet. Mary had attended anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrations with pride. The abortion clinic demonstrations she undertook as an offered humiliation, standing among the transparent cranks and crazies as a penance and a curb to pride. But surprisingly, when she was done with them in private, over coffee and cake, many pregnant women brought their pregnancies to term.

She watched Father Hooke. He was without gravitas, she thought. The hands, the ineffectual sputter.

“For God’s sake,” he went on, “look at the neighborhood where you work! Do you really think the world requires a few million more black, alienated, unwanted children?”

She leaned against one of his antique chests and folded her arms. She was tall and elegant, as much an athlete and a beauty at fifty as she had ever been. Camille sat open-mouthed.

“How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It’s respectability you’re after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you’re afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That’s man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That’s God’s image, don’t you know that? That’s what you’re scared of.”

He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.

“Your grief…” he began. A weakling, she thought, trying for the upper hand. Trying to appear concerned. In a moment he had lost his nerve. “It’s made you cruel … Maybe not
cruel,
but…”

Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief. Maybe I’m drunk again tonight, eh Father? Who knows?”

Thirteen years before on the lake outside Boston, on the second evening before Christmas, her husband had taken the children skating. First young Charley had wanted to go and Charles had demurred; he’d had a few drinks. Then he had agreed in his shaggy, teasing, slow-spoken way—he was rangy, wry, a Carolina Scot like Mary. It was almost Christmas and the kids were excited and how long would it stay cold enough to skate? Then Payton had demanded to go, and then finally little Emily, because Charles had taught them to snap the whip on ice the day before. And the lake, surrounded by woods, was well lighted and children always skated into the night although there was one end, as it turned out, where the light failed, a lonely bay bordered with dark blue German pine where even then maybe some junkie had come out from Roxbury or Southie or Lowell or God knew where and destroyed the light for the metal around it. And Emily still had her cold and should not have gone.

But they went and Mary waited late, and sometimes, listening to music, having a Wild Turkey, she thought she heard voices sounding strange. She could remember them perfectly now, and the point where she began to doubt, so faintly, that the cries were in fun.

The police said he had clung to the ice for hours, keeping himself alive and the children clinging to him, and many people had heard the calling out but taken it lightly.

She was there when the thing they had been was raised, a blue cluster wrapped in happy seasonal colors, woolly reindeer hats and scarves and mittens, all grasping and limbs intertwined, and it looked, she thought, like a rat king, the tangle of rats trapped together in their own naked tails and flushed from an abandoned hull to float drowned, a raft of solid rat on the swells of the lower Cape Fear River. The dead snarls on their faces, the wild eyes, a paradigm she had seen once as a child she saw again in the model of her family. And near Walden Pond, no less, the west wind slept on the lake, eyes glimmered in the silver dusk, a dusk at morning. She had lost all her pretty ones.

“Because,” she said to Father Hooke, “it would appear to me that you are a man—and I know men, I was married to a man—who is a little boy, a little boy-man. A tiny boy-man, afraid to touch the cross or look in God’s direction.”

He stared at her and swallowed. She smiled as though to reassure him.

“What you should do, Father is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. Your mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity you are.”

“You are a cruel bitch,” Hooke said, pale-faced. “You’re a sick and crazy woman.”

Camille in her chair began to gasp. Mary bent to attend her.

“Camille? Do you have your inhaler?”

Camille had it. Mary helped her adjust it and waited until her friend’s breathing was under control. When she stood up, she saw that Father Hooke was in a bad way.

“You dare,” Mary said to him, “you wretched tiny man, to speak of black unwanted children? Why, there is not a suffering black child—God bless them all—not a black child in this unhappy foolish country that I would not exalt and nourish on your goddamn watery blood. I would not risk the security of the most doomed, lost, deformed black child for your very life, you worthless pussy!”

Father Hooke had become truly upset. My Lord, she thought, now I’ve done it. Now I’ll see the creature cry. She looked away.

“You were my only friend,” Father Hooke told her when he managed to speak again. “Did you know that?”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, Father. I suppose I have my ignorant cracker side and God help me I am sick and I am crazy and cruel. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Pray for me.”

Hooke would not be consoled. Kind-hearted Camille, holding her inhaler, took a step toward him as though she might help him somehow go on breathing.

“Get out,” he said to them. “Get out before I call the police.”

“You have to try to forgive me, Charles.” Had she called him Charles? How very strange. Poor old Charles would turn in his grave. “Frank, I mean. You have to try and forgive me, Frank. Ask God to forgive me. I’ll ask God to forgive you. We all need it, don’t we, Father.”

“The police!” he cried, his voice rising. “Because those things, those goddamn things in your car! Don’t you understand? People accuse us of violence!” he shouted. “And you are violence!” Then he more or less dissolved.

She went and put a hand on his shoulder as Camille watched in amazement.

“God forgive us, Frank.” But he leaned on the back of his leather easy chair and turned from her, weeping. “Oh Frank, you lamb,” she said, “what did your poor mama tell you? Did she say that a world with God was easier than one without him?”

She gave Father Hooke a last friendly pat and turned to Camille. “Because that would be mistaken, wouldn’t it, Camille?”

“Oh, you’re right,” Camille hastened to say. The tearful priest had moved her too. But still she was dry-eyed, staring, Alexandrian. “You’re so right, Mary.”

When they were on the road again it was plain Camille Innaurato was exhausted.

“So, Mary,” she asked. “So where’re we going now, honey?”

“Well,” Mary said, “as it happens, I have another fella up my sleeve.” She laughed. “Yes, another of these worthies Holy Mother Church provides for our direction. Another selfless man of the cloth.”

“I’ll miss Mass tomorrow.”

“This is Mass,” Mary said.

“Right. OK.”

This is Mass, she thought, this is the sacrifice nor are we out of it. She reached over and gave Camille a friendly touch.

“You don’t work tomorrow, do you, love?”

“Naw, I don’t,” Camille said. “I don’t, but…”

“I can take you home. I can get this done myself.”

“No,” said Camille, a little cranky with fatigue. “No way.”

“Well, we’ll get these children blessed, dear.”

The man Mary had up her sleeve was a priest from Central Europe called Monsignor Danilo. It was after ten when Mary telephoned him from a service station, but he hurriedly agreed to do what she required. He was smooth and obsequious and seemed always ready to accommodate her.

His parish, St. Macarius, was in an old port town on Newark Bay, and to get there they had to retrace their drive through the country and then travel south past several exits of the Garden State.

It took them nearly an hour, even with the sparse traffic. The church and its rectory were in a waterfront neighborhood of refineries and wooden tenements little better than the ones around Temple Street. The monsignor had arranged to meet them in the church.

The interior was an Irish-Jansenist nightmare of tarnished marble, white-steepled tabernacles and cream columns. Under a different patron, it had served the Irish dockers of a hundred years before. Its dimensions were too mean and narrow to support the mass of decoration, and Father Danilo’s bunch had piled the space with their icons, vaguely Byzantine Slavic saints and Desert Fathers and celebrity saints in their Slavic aspect.

Candles were flickering as the two women entered. The place smelled of wax, stale wine and the incense of past ceremony. Mary carried the babies under their purple cloth.

Monsignor Danilo waited before the altar, at the end of the main aisle. He wore his empurpled cassock with surplice and a silk stole. His spectacles reflected the candlelight.

Beside him stood a tall, very thin, expressionless young man in cassock and surplice. The young man, in need of a shave, held a paten on which cruets of holy water and chrism and a slice of lemon had been set.

Monsignor Danilo smiled his lupine smile, and when Mary had set the babies down before the altar, he took her hand in his. In the past he had sometimes kissed it; tonight he pressed it to his breast. The intrusion of his flabby body on her senses filled Mary with loathing. He paid no attention to Camille Innaurato and he did not introduce the server.

“Ah,” he said, bending to lift the curtain under which the creatures lay, “the little children, no?”

She watched him regard the things with cool compassion, as though he were moved by their beauty, their vestigial humanity, the likeness of their Creator. But perhaps, she thought, he had seen ghastly sights before and smiled on them. Innocent as he might be, she thought, he was the reeking model of every Jew-baiting, clerical fascist murderer who ever took orders east of the Danube. His merry countenance was crass hypocrisy. His hands were huge, thick-knuckled, the hands of a brute, as his face was the face of a smiling Cain.

“So beautiful,” he said. Then he said something in his native language to the slovenly young man, who looked at Mary with a smirk and shrugged and smiled in a vulgar manner. She did not let her gaze linger.

Afterward, she would have to hear about Danilo’s mother and her trip to behold the apparition of the Virgin in some Bessarabian or Balkan hamlet and the singular misfortunes, historically unique, of Danilo’s native land. And she would have to give him at least seventy-five dollars or there would be squeals and a disappointed face. And now something extra for the young man, no doubt an illegal alien, jumped-ship and saving his pennies.

Camille Innaurato breathed through her inhaler. Father Danilo took a cruet from the paten and with his thick fingers sprinkled a blessing on the lifeless things. Then they all faced the altar and the Eastern crucifix that hung suspended there. They prayed together in the Latin each knew:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
Miserere nobis.

Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she still stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest and the questionable young man and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor. Adoring, defiant, in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness, she offered It Its due, by old command.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
Have mercy on us.