Cities of Refuge (26 page)

“You remember all of that?” Marian asked.

“For some reason you were full of silences yourself that night.”

“I don’t remember. But don’t get carried away about intuition, Kim. Women can make no more sense of men than they can of dogs or mooses. They’re hurt, they love us, a doubt is buzzing around, bothering them, they don’t know their own hearts. It’s all us, projecting. Which is why they think we’re trouble.” Marian had energy tonight. It had combined with the wine to make her voluble. “They think we’re full of enigmatic forces. The sins of Eve.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“And we scheme. Here we are scheming. It must be a man who set this off.”

“Now there’s
your
intuition at work. He’s someone who came to mind today from long ago. Second-year undergrad. A Chilean guy. He told me his father was killed before he was born. During the coup in ‘73.”

Kim measured the pause. She’d wondered if mention of Chile would expose Marian to something she’d rather not talk about. In trying to be considerate of her mother’s feelings, Kim was becoming sly – they had never before had slyness between them – but it turned out she couldn’t read Marian’s reaction. Her face had been slowly departing over the weeks. It had lost its set. Often there was a translucence, something resinous on the surface.

“Who was this man from Chile? And why think of him now?”

She said his name was Eduardo something and explained that she’d met him at an International Students Union party, an older guy she was half interested in.

“He worked at a music store. I used to go by with my friends.” Kim kept to herself the memory of Eduardo joining them in a soundproof booth. They went in with gorgeous instruments and wailed away terribly, with the exuberance of ignorant youth. As if sax and guitar and a little squeezebox could ever come together no matter how much they wanted it. She and her friends only ever wanted anything for ten minutes tops. Then she met someone else and forgot him.

They could just hear Donald’s voice from the study. He was on the phone.

“What does this Chilean man have to do with intuition?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Marian reached over to Donald’s half-full wineglass and placed it in front of her daughter, who now had two. The family always finished each other’s wine, and never poured glass to glass for fear of spilling, and so depending when each had had enough, or how the conversation was running, the glasses moved around like gaming pieces.

The tablecloth tonight was yellow with a blue-lined border. Marian had bought it in Cuba years ago. She had fabrics and pottery from every trip she’d taken with Harold, small quetzal bird paintings and decorative lizards and jointed snakes. Most were in storage but she kept them in rotation, as if to insist the experiences they commemorated were hers, uncompromised by what was to come between them. She’d
travelled with Donald, too, to Montreal, Chicago, London, Kim couldn’t recall where else, but she’d not collected so much by that time in her life. Or maybe she had but the objects were not for display. It had been years since Kim had seen this bright cloth. Last week there had appeared ceramic coasters with painted Cuban scenes, little wedges against the narrowing of Marian’s days. She had always claimed to love Havana above all cities.

“What do you think Harold was looking for in the garage that day?” Kim asked.

“This intuition of yours. Maybe you got it from your father. Except in him it’s more like superstition. He would never admit it – it runs counter to his self-image as a rationalist – but he’s prone to some pretty loopy thoughts.”

“Especially when drunk, I guess.”

“All his bad luck,” said Marian. “Harold thinks he brings it on himself. And because it’s usually true that he does, he sees it all linking back through the years to a kind of original sin. And we’ve all paid for it.”

“Has he said that?”

From the study, the sound of Donald braying delightedly into the phone, as if hearing news of some enemy undone.

“What if he’s right, Kim? What if the years of trouble begin in some distant mistake and how he came to regard it? A mistake with real consequences, one to the next. Of course you wouldn’t be free of them. Neither of us would.”

“You can’t let what happened to me get you thinking like this.”

“It’s my life that gets me thinking. My life and yours. I can’t blame him for all our troubles, but I can for a lot of them.”

She’d had too much to drink. Tomorrow she’d repudiate it all. Kim had learned to pay attention to anything that might come to be disavowed.

“I found a few of his old
CV
s.”

Marian looked down at her napkin and straightened it. “So you were digging around in there too.” In her next breath she seemed to draw them both to a single point of focus. “You know, the things that are precious to us, that we keep to ourselves, they’re not all consoling.” She was using her bitter-wisdom tone. “But still they’re ours and no one else’s.”

“Why does it sound like you’re protecting him?”

“Because you shouldn’t snoop.”

“Historians snoop. He does it.”

“You don’t snoop, Kim. You snoop and worlds fall.”

She only covered for Harold when he wasn’t around, but even then she seemed to allude to the broken marriage.

“He was in Chile during the coup. I think it’s odd he’s never mentioned that to me.”

The words took hold and Marian looked out at her from some endless space.

“Chile. I didn’t know that,” she said. “I guess I knew he’d been somewhere.”

“He was at a language school and –”

“I don’t want the details.”

The statement seemed addressed to herself. How many times had she uttered it?

“There was a list of names,” Marian said. “Spanish names. He had it when I first met him. I found it tucked into a book I’d just taken down from a shelf, and I asked him about it. He came up and plucked it from my hand and walked off. After that it
would turn up now and then, hidden away somewhere around one apartment or another.”

“What happened to it?”

“It stopped turning up. After a while, it just disappeared.”

Kim finished the night alone, on the porch.

She had snooped, yes. She’d done it at
GROUND
and in the garage. And she had found things. Marian must have decided long ago never to dig around in Harold’s pockets. And yet mysterious lists and women’s names had come to her anyway, by chance. It would have been better to have known, and known early. Learning another’s heart too late ends up knocking your own out of true.

But her intuition was still at work. She could feel it, the slight lifting in her thoughts. She looked out into the night. In the yard across the street a family of raccoons walked along a shed roof and dropped one by one over the back, and it came to her. It was her attacker who’d taken the sweater from the garage. At the time she’d talked herself out of the possibility. But it was him. His communication had now reached her, three days later.

She went back inside the house. Before bed she called Cosintino and left a message. She found herself arguing against what she knew, sounding calm. She made the case for the thief being a kid. And regardless there would be no evidence, no fingerprints - she’d been in and out of the garage for her bike several times since then, and anyway he wouldn’t have been so careless.

“I’m telling you just so you know,” she said. “Just for the sake of the record. But please, if my father calls you again, don’t mention it.”

T
he sources were ever harder to trace. Increasingly Father André found himself cribbing his new sermons from his old ones. This morning, rather than reread Athanasius, he’d employed the lines he knew by heart. Man bears the Likeness of Him Who Is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. But this man doubted that even constant contemplation would be enough. It was ever harder these days to find contemplative space, and when he did find it – walking, in his study with scripture, in the lull after service – he often felt no longer equal to it. Most of the things that were once true to him were still true, but he’d worn through his ways of thinking about them. When repeated endlessly in the same forms, revelations emptied, little by little. This was aging.

Athanasius. Doubts about him had crept into the histories. Could a church father have used violence and murder for political ends, a man who wrote of the need for the “active, arduous peace of poise and balance in a disordered world”? The words were thinning but true.

Outside the door to the parish hall, the homeless were gathering for the Thursday meal. There were maybe twenty today. He knew most by their first names. As he approached them, Leonard the Dubious waved to him with a dirty palm. Leonard, who was more or less his own age, had once expressed his life philosophy, which he clung to though it had not served him well: “Take what you want and then chow the fuck down.” The man was a compendium of useless aphorisms, many of them vaguely sexual, if one followed the mangled metaphors. The idea seemed to be that Leonard was fuller than André of experience in the world. It was no small ministerial project to lead him to
the realization that, mostly, he was just full of shit. Someday Leonard would understand, because he would need to, that the project had been mounted for him.

“Hey, Father. Looks like we all come running to the same dinner bell.”

“We do, Leonard.”

“A man needs what he needs.” He tossed up a canted grin. The others were watching their exchange. A young man named Jules looked at André sympathetically.

“And he needs to know what he needs to know,” said André. “Beginning with who he is, and who he serves.”

“Well, if you just open these doors, I’ll serve myself, thanks.”

“Let me see if it’s ready.”

He nodded to the others and passed inside. As usual Maggie and Molly, the Keegan sisters, were present, and David Asodi, an old Trinidadian who wore sweater vests year-round. None of them had been at the morning service.

Maggie tossed him an apple, which he almost caught.

“You had that look on your face,” she said. “Lost in space again.”

“We can’t have that.” He picked up the bruised apple and set it in one of the fruit bowls. “How are you all?”

However they were warranted no complaint. Molly said they’d been discussing summer movies.

“Not your kind of thing, Father.”

“Not mine either,” said David. He had a wife who’d never come to the church.

“We used to show old black-and-whites in the basement,” André said. “They didn’t draw flies.” The table was ready. It was time to open the doors. “What holds more meaning, do you suppose? A year’s worth of movies, or this bowl of fruit?”

David laughed gently and nodded. André regarded the bowl and thought of the works, vividly representational, of the neighbourhood’s graffiti artists, the best of whom seemed limited only by their available colours. If he himself could paint, he’d depict this bowl of fruit, bruises and all. Most of the things he valued had a memorial aspect.

Molly opened the doors. In they came. André excused himself and went to his office. As was her habit, Rosemary was on his computer. She seemed to resent her time with it, and so didn’t have one in her home, but there were things she couldn’t call up during her work in the library. She said hello without looking away from the screen.

“Lunch is served,” he said.

“Soup and conversation.”

“Sorry?”

“You remember Mariela Cendes.”

“Of course.”

She looked at him now with that familiar fixed gaze of slight accusation, as if he’d misled her somewhere long ago. It had been seven years since she first showed up in his night class, six since she began coming to the church, and almost that long since she’d made herself central to its mission. Only in those first months was she capable of expressing joy at having been granted a certainty of direction so anomalous in her life. Eventually, working in the community, the joy left her. He used to be able to talk her back into her own capacities for calm devotion. But his words no longer reached her.

“I told your friend Harold about Mariela,” she said. “Then it came to me later that his obsession with what happened to his daughter, generating theories, getting tangled up in lives, lives
like mine, it’s completely the right response. Anything else is a lie. I think I felt something like his freefall back when Mariela disappeared. And I wonder what happened to me that now I seem able to eat soup and make conversation.”

“I see. What are you looking at there?”

She glanced at the screen.

“Obscenities. We live in an age when obscenity is the given.”

The best he could do now was to alter her course slightly, enough to bring her, in time, to a service that wasn’t haunted at the edges with the worst human actions, the heaviest mourning, suffering as a kind of lodestone she couldn’t help but turn to upon every waking.

“We do. But we don’t have to look.”

“Everyone looks, Father. If only to see what the others are looking at. The internet brings us beheadings, war deaths, celebrity autopsy reports. Traffic accidents, and sexual acts so bizarre they seem the result of traffic accidents. This isn’t a new democracy. This isn’t freedom. We’ve poisoned ourselves. How can we survive this?”

“Humour helps.” He forgave himself the comment, and only wished something funny had come to mind. She was once capable of easy laughter; now it was work all around. “And so do our disciplines. I have my daily orders. The internet is just another of our enemy’s weapons. It must be stunting to witness so much meaningless spectacle.” Was it truth or self-pity or pride that allowed him to see himself as belonging to a dying breed, the Retainers of Long Knowledge? “We need to bring people news from the un-uploadable worlds. The historical, the private, the spiritual.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t buying.” She was right. They’d lost the battle for the common man. Microelectronics could do anything with a standard-issue forty-watt brain. But then the brain was full of wonderful atavisms. As was the present. The Anglican Communion was fracturing and its leader was writing books on Dostoyevsky.